Badsleeper Life

With the production of ‘Earthquake’ winding down, my mind is racing to answer the question “what’s next?”. Part of what I have envisioned for Badsleeper is that while we will create songs with expansive, extravagant arrangements, we will also write songs that are for a single acoustic instrument and the voice. It’s remarkable how I have spent the past several weeks listening back to this dense behemoth of audio files that is ‘Earthquake’, only to listen to a Bob Dylan song at the end of the day, which forces me to sit in bewilderment…”He can say more with nothing but a guitar in his hand than I can with 100+ audio tracks and a 10-core GPU.”

It’s great to make crazy songs with apocalyptic synthesizers, but I don’t want to lose sight of what I think is such a noble pursuit as a musician: the ability to say a lot with so little. Bob Dylan feels like such a mythical figure for me lately. Strange, cryptic, eccentric. A man who can somehow emanate total artistic transparency and vulnerability, like you are listening to the mystic chords of his very soul. And yet, at the same time, a feeling that he is nothing more than a mere vessel…a wayfaring stranger, a faceless cowboy with a guitar. A bard who transmits folk tunes and musical lore from many lost generations of men and women. You see all of him, and nothing of him. A paradox.

I’ve always found the aesthetic presence of just a singer and his guitar alluring. I would have daydreams when I was younger of riding around on a Colorado railroad, plucking a guitar in a sleeper car, and looking out the window at marvelous landscapes. Being free to go anywhere and make music anywhere. The guitar has that nomadic energy. I want to transmit that energy and that fantasy into ‘Badsleeper’ somehow. Because in many ways sitting on a laptop making music at home is completely antithetical.

I’ve been playing a couple Bob Dylan tunes on my guitar to keep that inspiration up. I have my girlfriend to thank for that. She’s introduced me to a lot more of his songs and reignited that adoration I have for him. Just one of many ways she has fanned the flames of my creative efforts since I’ve known her.

I also have an original song in mind for an upcoming release. It’s called ‘Dying Roses’. It’s a simple song with just a guitar. It’s lyrics are deeply personal to me…which is scary to share. But I want to find that ‘in-between’. The vulnerable soul-bearer. The impartial storyteller. Co-existing.

“All I can be is me- whoever that is. ”
― Bob Dylan