‘SYML’

– Track by Track review

of new album by

SYML

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Clean Eyes:
When I think about the majority of the songs I’ve written, they tend to be a bit sad and dark. So I thought, “What better way to start off my debut album than with a song about happiness and hope.” “Clean Eyes” is inspired by my wife, who wakes up everyday and chooses to see the good and the beauty in people first. I struggle with things like negativity and cynicism, so this song serves as a reminder to see the world like she does.

Wildfire:
There’s a season where I live where all the forests burn. It’s becoming more and more normal and whether it’s caused by us humans or by nature, it’s a season that leaves a lot of people feeling hopeless. I wrote “Wildfire” during one of those seasons when it occurred to me that there are people that wake up everyday with that same feeling. The feeling of something being taken away from you, or that it might be too hard to continue on. As artists, I think we have the luxury of being ambiguous when we write songs. And in this song, I want to say directly to somebody, I think it’s worth it that you’re still here and that you have people that love you and won’t let you stay in that place for long.  

Bed:
“Bed” is an intimate song. It’s about the words we tell each other when we’re alone as partners. Sometimes those words can be veiled in love or fear or infatuation but, intimacy can really only occur when we’re being honest. That honesty starts with ourselves, if we can’t be honest with ourselves, there’s no way that we’ll be able to communicate accurately to our other. This song is about the challenge that that presents, but also, about the beauty that occurs in that journey.

Where’s My Love:
I think it’s hard to listen to a song like “Where’s My Love” and not come away feeling sad. Believe it or not, that was not my intention when I wrote it. I wrote it because I wanted to feel something musically and emotionally. But if feels overly simple to call that feeling sad. Like many songs before this one, there’s beauty in letting go and realizing that we don’t have control over anything or anybody but ourselves. I think it’s totally fair and normal to feel sad or helpless when something we love leaves us. And as trite as it sounds, I think the ultimate goal should be to find peace within ourselves, even if that means not knowing all the answers. I think there’s peace in knowing that we all experience the same range of human emotions at some point in our lives.

Break Free:
I was having a conversation with somebody that I work with fairly closely in the music industry when that conversation turned misogynistic. I left the conversation feeling sick to my stomach not only because I didn’t say anything, but because it is still so sadly normal to talk about women in this way. I have a baby daughter and I couldn’t find the words to say, “Stop! This is wrong. Shame on you, shame on me.” “Break Free” is about this diseased way of thinking, about this sickness that we’re allowing to hold onto us in our culture and society and about how I need to work to change it.

Animal:
“Animal” turned out to be way more of a fun song than I had anticipated. The lyric is pretty metaphoric and loose at times, and also dramatic. The chorus is, “If you won’t be mine, I am through.” Which is so prom-teenager it’s ridiculous. I think I got over myself a bit with this song and didn’t take myself too seriously. Like in the bridge, instead of having a traditional bridge, I ended up writing a poem in about three minutes and putting the words into google translate because I thought it would be funny/interesting if like a female voice read it in French. But thankfully, and it was actually in the demo, but thankfully we found a real life woman to read it in French for the album.

The Bird:
“The Bird” might be my proudest moment musically speaking on this album. I got to push myself from a songwriting standpoint, production, beat making, programming, synths, textures, kind of the whole thing. And I got to do that with a friend of mine, James McAlister, and it was so much fun to do together. I couldn’t be more proud of the end result. Lyrically, it’s about how difficult it can be to hold something we care about. If we hold it too tightly, we choke it. If not, it might get away and all the anxiety and fear and awfulness that comes with that. But really, what we should be focused on, is the wonder and awe that can come by just letting that thing be itself as it’s meant to be without us imposing ourselves on it.

Girl:
“Girl” is for my daughter Josephine. She’s two years old, she just turned two, but within the last year we found out she was diagnosed with a disorder that caused her skull to close too soon and restricted her brain’s development. Luckily, we caught it at a good time. Meaning that, her development was on track up to that point and because we did this surgery, it will allow her to have a healthy, full normal life. But that build up leading up to that surgery was the most intense thing that my wife and I and our family had ever been through. Josie will not remember it, she’s too little. I wrote this song kind of with two purposes. One was therapeutic in a way for me and my family as we went through this. But also, it serves as a bit of a letter to her for her to have when she grows up to better understand what she went through and to know that this is an important part of who she is and how much of a badass she is for enduring this. There are people young and old who will go through life changing experiences. Some painful some not, some big some small, and it almost seems supernatural that we as humans are capable of going through that. And on the other hand, it just seems totally natural and we put our heads down and we do it, it’s just the wildest thing. One of my favorite lines in the song is, “sometimes our bodies will hurt for some time and the beauty in that can be hard to find but I want you to find it.” That is so hard to say and believe, but I do believe it.

Connor:
“Connor” is one of those songs that goes through a number of different iterations before it ends up how it’s going to live on the album. When it started, it was this really like lowkey low energy down tempo kind of almost broken down song and then it went to the other end of the spectrum where it had almost had too much energy. Then it finally came to rest where it is now and I feel good about it. Connor was actually what I was meant to be called before my parents got me, before they adopted me. They had picked out the name before they got the baby and they got me and they were like, “Ah shit it’s a Brian.” But I grew up knowing that my name was almost Connor and I liked it more than Brian. Some of my friends tried to convince me that Brian is a cool name, I’m still not actually convinced of it. In all seriousness, this song is about becoming a father. It made me think about my father specifically, and how scared he must’ve been as a young dad. It’s about how none of us are really ready to be parents when it happens, if it happens, in our lives and how beautiful that is. There’s really no other experience I can think of like fostering a new life into the world. Whether it came literally from you or it landed on your doorstep and now you’re responsible for it to some degree. There’s beauty in that.

WDWGILY:
The long name for this song is, “Where Did We Go I Love You.” It took about eight months start to finish. I did the first few lines and the beat and stuff in my studio at home and then I finished the last verse and all the weird funky noises in a hotel room in Hawaii and somehow at the end of it all, it feels very cohesive. I set out to write a song that was nontraditional in terms of, “verse chorus verse chorus blah blah blah.” I think there’s a bit of discomfort in that from the writer standpoint but also from the listener standpoint. I think we’re really accustomed to listening to this really standard format song. With “Where Did We Go I Love You,” it started with just that. That chunk, it’s almost like a mantra repeated throughout the whole song. You might be able to be with somebody everyday, morning and night, but you mourn what you once were together. The song talks about the overconfidence we might have in our heads and then the complete insecurity we might have in the next breath. It’s a bit of a schitzophrentic state to live in when you’re in love with somebody. And we can be a lot to deal with just as much as our other can be a lot to deal with for us.

Everything All At Once:
“Everything All At Once” is one of the earlier songs I wrote for SYML. There’s a lot in this song, I feel a lot of things about this song. It deals with some pretty intense themes. Some of the more obvious ones like love and loss, but also, how my faith in certain things has changed over the years and about how that has affected me and my relationships. Sometimes it literally feels like everything all at once and it’s too much to deal with and would be easier to turn it off and to turn away and leave. Luckily, I am surrounded by family and people who continuously challenge that, challenge me to stand up time and time again to embrace the difficult as much as I embrace the good. Whatever you believe comes after this life should not impact how deeply you love the people in this world in your life now. It sounds like it shouldn’t be challenging, but it is a lot of the time. And we need to do it because it’s everything.

Before You Knew It Was Me:
“Before You Knew It Was Me” didn’t actually start out as an instrumental. I had the music and I turned the mic on in the studio and I challenged myself to sort of freestyle-talk about what it was like to first meet my wife. And what it must’ve been like for her to meet me. When you meet somebody who you go on to fall in love with or spend a majority of your life with, something surreal happens. There are people who like to talk about soulmates and, “Oh I knew the moment I laid eyes on that person that was it.” There are people who like to talk about open relationships and about how love is defined in totally different ways than you might be comfortable with. Needless to say, not far down that rabbit hole, I decided that the challenge should not be lyrics. The challenge should be music. How do I convey that surreal moment of meeting that person in a song? And that’s how it was born.

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AMNPLIFY – DB