American singer-songwriter, queer outlaw poet, producer, and originator of Moonshine Disco. Published in Halfway Down the Stairs & Recours au Poeme. Songs of survival, freedom, and becoming. We sang anyway.
Based in Philadelphia, Neo Brightwell creates work at the intersection of music, poetry, and performance. His songs blend Americana grit, outlaw gospel, queer storytelling, and dance-floor rhythm into what he calls Moonshine Disco.
Across albums, poems, and essays, Brightwell returns to questions of memory, identity, belonging, resilience, and what becomes possible after survival. His work is less interested in escape than return-returning to the body, to one's voice, to one's history, and to the parts of ourselves that refuse to disappear. Not simply surviving, but learning how to inhabit freedom.
Whether writing about freedom, grief, recovery, love, or transformation, he approaches each song as an act of witness and each record as part of a larger conversation.
Remember yourself. Carry the fire forward.
