Bruce Sudano Teams up With Valerie Simpson For “Two Bleeding Hearts”

They say life in not a dress rehearsal, so is every second of Bruce Sudano’s latest Single/Video “Two Bleeding Hearts” feat. vocal legend Valerie Simpson. Encased in a vibrant melding of string play organized into perfect harmony, we find the lead vocal of Bruce Sudano ready to seduce anyone it comes into contact with in “Two Bleeding Hearts,” his latest single and music video out this month. Like its sister content in his recent discography, “Two Bleeding Hearts” is a product of surrealism without question, but at the same time, it also provides us ample evidence of the complex compositional wit that Bruce Sudano and his collaborator in Valerie Simpson possess when he’s in the studio.

This veteran music powerhouse has been creating a lot of buzz across the underground and mainstream the same in the last few years, and if you want to know why, I would probably point you to the video for this track before anything else. Despite its grandest feature being the potently emotional soundtrack, the video for this song provokes a reaction made all the more intense by the intimate visual landscape it presents us with, which is perfectly synched with the lyrical narrative of this composition. Sudano may not have set out to craft his best duet yet when he recorded this single, but I think that’s exactly what he’s done here. 

The equalization of both vocals in this track is very streamlined, but I don’t think I would describe it as being pop-influenced outside of its smooth cosmetic front. The instrumental side of “Two Bleeding Hearts” is debatably just as charming, apart from the raised textures on the rustic string parts shaping the rhythm of the song from the background, but whether it’s the content of the verses or the substance of the harmony that Sudano is leading here, there’s something about the lyrics in this single that feels just a bit more captivating than anything else in the track does. I love the way that the strings were arranged to reduce the tension created by Simpson’s melodic ascent, and to some extent, I think that the relationship between these elements in “Two Bleeding Hearts” actually tells us a vivid story all by itself. There’s no hiding how much talent these two are working with in this track, and in my opinion, its seamless construction alone makes both of them worth keeping an eye on in the future. 

If you haven’t seen the music video for “Two Bleeding Hearts” or browsed through the catalog of the artist who offers it, now is the time to get yourself introduced to the latest works of Bruce Sudano, who by all accounts is again taking the world by storm this year. Sudano is facing some of the toughest competition that we’ve seen among indie artists in well over a generation, but if he keeps the attitude that he’s brought to this most recent release, I think he’s going to see his momentum continue to grow both at home and abroad throughout 2023. As I previously noted, I believe this to be his best work yet, and according to the critical consensus I’m hearing on the international circuit, I’m far from alone. 

Zachary Rush