Queens kid who fell into the Lower Manhattan anti folk scene in the early nineties. Bass player and studio guy. Bandleader who put out four records as Seth Davis between 2001 and 2015, records with plenty of hands on them, some names you’d recognize if he listed them, which he mostly doesn’t. Then a long stretch where the music stopped and something else took over.
That something else was ten years of getting sick, then hurt, then sick again. Cancer. A broken back. Branitz doesn’t dress it up and neither should anyone writing about him. He came out the other side and picked his own name back up, the one his parents gave him, and used it first for a memoir. Then, in 2024, for a record called Songs For Cats And Other People, made mostly at home. Now there’s a new single, Nitelite, a melodic soft rock cut that leans hard into Bowie. Not a cover, not a pastiche. Just that same instinct for a vocal melody that turns a corner you didn’t see coming, dressed up in a production that sounds like someone actually cared about every inch of it.
From Seth Davis to himself
There’s a version of this story where the name change is just branding. It isn’t. Branitz spent years, by his own account, driven by an urgency to prove something, to get somewhere else before it was too late. Before he got old. Before life closed in. That kind of pressure makes for a certain type of songwriter, the kind always reaching past the song for the career it’s supposed to build. He’s said as much himself.
What changed wasn’t the talent. It was the reason for using it. Somewhere between the diagnosis and the recovery and the years of physical therapy that don’t make it into anyone’s bio, the “get somewhere else” plan stopped making sense. So he dropped it.
A song built like a small steady light
The Bowie comparison isn’t just about the voice, though there’s plenty of that too, that same theatrical lean where a lyric turns and reveals itself as something else. It’s in the writing itself. The willingness to let a soft rock structure carry something stranger underneath it. That’s a hard trick, actually pulling it off is where most writers who reach for Bowie fall flat. Branitz apparently doesn’t.
He paints now too, mostly cats, birds, portraits, things he started sketching as a kid and came back to during a stretch stuck at home healing up. He tells stories at Moth slams. None of it reads like a pivot away from music so much as one guy doing all the things he’s always wanted to do, at the same time, because he can. Nitelite fits right into that. A small steady thing, the kind of light you leave on so you’re not in the dark, coming from someone who’s said his body and his head are healing up beautifully and that every cell of him knows it.
Give Nitelite a spin and see where that lands with you.
In collaboration with One Submit: Find Out Your Song’s Music Genre
