Inside Track: Open To The Dream
a prompt to soundtrack a supermarket tv spot turns into a meditation on time and place, and 3 great tracks
I wrote “Open To The Dream” while living in Lowell, Massachusetts with Cat for about 8 months in 2021 as she costume designed the “Resurrection” season of Dexter. The track was a collaboration, crazy enough, with the brilliant experimental sound artist, Masaya Ozaki, whom I met a few iterations of the world ago through the disquiet.com Junto collective.
One day that year in March, completely out of the blue, Masaya reached out from his then-base of Brooklyn to say he had gotten an assignment from the ad agency of juggernaut regional grocer Giant Supermarket. The company wanted original songs to use in tv spots that were about Spring and Summer. The only creative directives were that the tracks should sound like the bands Low, Tennis, and/or Vampire Weekend, evoke either season, and center around themes of “togetherness” and “family.” We were given 72 hours to turn around as many tracks as we wanted.
After Masaya and I brainstormed over FaceTime, I spent a couple hours writing while looking out my apartment window in the converted Hood’s Sarsaparilla Soda factory. In my view, the early spring landscape of Central Massachusetts sprawled out beyond Lowell’s Kennedy Transportation Center and the parking lot of a government tech contractor called MACOM.
If I craned my neck through the window, Jack Kerouac’s childhood home was to the northwest, over some hills in the near distance, towards the town of Dracut.
I had been in an extended creative dry spell, in the throes of writer’s block, so I welcomed this assignment as a means to smash some emergency glass and grab an ax to start chopping.
Perched 5 stories up in an old soda factory, I was 30 minutes west of Boston and 15 minutes east of some of the most glorious farmland you’ll ever stride, with a tennis court across the street to boot, and a bunch of new lifelong friends with whom I shared the moment the masks came off in Massachusetts (a much earlier moment than in New York, fwiw).
Up there, partly the result of the lockdown ending way earlier than in New York, Cat and I were loosed from our New York City Stockholm Syndrome in a similar way to our time spent in 2018 in Laurel Canyon. So much so that with much affection, Cat and I nicknamed our temporary Massachusetts home “Lowell Canyon.”
Much of what we loved to do was within walking distance or just a gallon or two of gas away. I was so comfortable there that I was surprised that I had such writer’s block. Comfort is sometimes a creativity killer, though, so I was somewhat forgiving of myself. I bought a couple pedals to salve the acidity.
And Luna was always there to make me laugh.
Cat and I lived in NYC for 30 years. We now live in Florida. Looking back, perhaps I enjoyed my adventures away from the City in part because they were so finite. That said, New York City has no monopoly on the good life. It’s everywhere, and anywhere you make it.
Still, when a place becomes a temporary home, you can take it on and off like a coat, and there’s a lot less pressure and a lot less bullshit on the day-to-day. And when you know the endpoint of an adventure, time management becomes easier. The roadmap through becomes clearer. You might not get everything you want done, but man, do you get a hell of a lot done.
You live a different form of clarity astride awareness of a clock ticking down. There’s a great paradox in how we count up birthdays, and thereby focus on time ascending, when in reality life moves straight through time, not up or down, just forward. What a strange and different experience birthdays would be if we didn’t assign numbers to them - if they marked not the passage of time, but just a zero-day reawakening.
Imagine a world where everyone saw every day as time zero, unburdened by the past (fwiw, that’s what Kamala was getting at with her misconstrued rhetorical flourish). Would it be anarchy or peace?
“Open To The Dream” poses parallel questions. What if summer never ended? What if clocks disappeared? What if time still existed, but we just stopped being aware of it? Again, would there be universal peace or anarchy?
Back in my Lowell writer’s aerie that June afternoon, after a few pondering hours, I wrote down, “What if summer never ended?” with all emphasis on the “if.” Everyone talks of “endless summer,” but, seriously, what if? What would that do to reality? To time? Nowhere on Earth does not have seasons.
“Open To The Dream” flowed out from that thought in about an hour, with very little friction, melody and all. I recorded a two-track acoustic demo to a click track and transferred it to Masaya to work some magic. I was happy (and comfortable) with my writing voice for the first time in a long time.
Regarding that magic, here’s the snippet Masaya sent to the agency…
Open To The Dream
20210621.1530
If Summer never ended
and Clocks disappeared
would you smile?
would you sleep,
open to the dream,
wide open to the dream?
if we never ever never
had to pretend
time was long,
would you sleep
in peace?
If Clocks disappear
and Time runs weird,
One thing’s still clear
We are still here
still here
still here.
it’s all still here
open to the dream,
wide open to the dream.Through an unlikely conduit, I had found my way to an unabashed positivity. Forcing optimism down your own throat is sometimes the best cure for the self-doubt that unproductive stretches can engender.
I get a kick out of thinking all this headiness could have been under visuals of sunset picnics and Sunday dinners in a supermarket ad touting a fleeting deli special. Alas, our humble track did not make the cut.
In fact, Giant’s agency used none of the tracks Masaya and I wrote that week. But that may have been a blessing, because they’re a few of the better songs in my catalog, and I still own them all, each too good for a supermarket ad (at least, that’s what I have to tell myself).
Throughout that year, I opened a few livestreams on a now defunct sorely-missed platform called Limelight with “Open To The Dream,” and added an extended intro over the main two chords of the song. A couple minutes of hypnotic meditative lilt served to calm myself and set a tone of cascading harmony (and positivity!) for the performances.
In most musical contexts these days, it’s a challenge to sustain a track for 7-1/2 minutes without testing the patience of everyone in the room. At least, that’s how it is for me. So if a track speaks its desires by refusing to end, I pay attention. “Open To The Dream” told me to push it somewhere unexpected. It was clearly never destined to run under a :60 spot for a regional supermarket.
After playing around with extended outros and middle sections, the song said to me in a calm fraternal tone, “Think a little bit before you start talking,” or in this case, singing. Every time I perform it now, even practicing, if I’m plugged in, it gets a meditative intro.
And every time it’s different. The layers don’t save, the loops disappear. Live, it’s never the same song twice. But that’s the point. The only constant over time is us - you and me. We are still here. We will always be here. We are the loop.
Lol should I start minting NFTs for every live version I record?
At some point, the intro made its own demands, too. “I’m my own universe,” it said. “I want a name.” I agreed, and dubbed it “Still Here.”
“Still,” in both the lyrics and title, holds any meaning of “still” you wish. For me, the “still” is stillness - my holy grail state of mind. More the quietude-side of stillness, though, than the physical motionless-side. In another reading, “still” is also about unwavering continuance. Despite all odds, we’re “still here.”
And then there’s how moonshine comes from a still, too. So, like I said, just take your mind wherever. There’s no right or wrong way to listen.
Those intro chords, fwiw, are Aadd9 and Dmaj7, two of the best chords. My guitars are tuned 1/2 step down (always) in any tuning, so in “standard tuning,” I capo on 3 and use the G-form for the key of A. My vocal range has slipped down from B to A through the years, so this is now my default.
I go through a Boss VE-8 acoustic performance pedal for live acoustic work. It has wonderful vocal reverb subtleties, runs on batteries if needed, and even generates vocal harmonies at the flick of a foot switch. It also has a very basic layered looper that I make full use of on the guitar input in the intro to “Open To The Dream.”
These days, my setup feeding the VE-8 comprises an Earthquaker Devices (EQD) Warden compressor, a tc electronic Flashback delay, an EQD Afterneath “reflection machine,” an EQD Grand Orbiter phaser/vibrato, a Strymon Cloudburst reverb, and an ElectroHarmonix Freeze “sustain engine” between the Orbiter and the Cloudburst. Fwiw, I didn’t use the Freeze or Afterneath this time, but they look nice.
In any event, I dig “Still Here / Open To The Dream” for its meandering fancy. There are innumerable disparate, discrete, and unexplored parts of you that all call out in the hopes you tune in to your self (two words) beyond your habits.
In a way, that’s dreams, yes?
Where “Open To The Dream” was a tad eclectic in theme and structure, however, one of the other tracks Masaya and I developed that week, “Vampires In Love,” is for sure a top-20 hit in a parallel dimension.
Here, two vampires in love, resigned to their fate of never tanning on a beach, realize they don't need any more than each other to make it to eternity. All they need is always now. This is a summer song for them, and anyone, really, who has to live in endless darkness. That said, it’s a summer song through the season-less looking glass vis-a-vis “Open To The Dream.” What if, instead of summer never ends, summer never starts?
It’s up there as one of my most accessible and fun tracks. Here’s the first take from the soda factory that summer. Once again, unabashed positive me. Smile, you’re worth it.
As with “Open To The Dream,” here’s how Masaya transformed “Vampires In Love” for the submission. Adore the Hammond B3 he put under it.
Vampires In Love
20210622.2220
sometimes words don’t mean anything
with you i don’t need to speak
our future lies
across the great divide
and there’s nowhere i’d rather be
you’re my queen
you can lean on me
you’re my dream
nothing comes between
all the world can melt away
all the colors turn to gray
there’d still be nothing left to say but
you and me
baby can you see love is in reach
where sunshine’s never in view
and in a thousand years
love never disappears
it’ll always feel something newDespite all the rejections that March, the agency was piqued enough to solicit another round of songs from us that June. This time, the assignment revolved around Fall. Just so happened I had challenged myself to go even further down the positivity rabbit hole, and had been working on a track for a couple weeks prior that attempted to roll up all I had learned and felt about myself and the world in my Lowell adventure. Masaya’s latest call was the perfect excuse to finish writing this track, which became “Walk This Crazy Life.”
Once again, we didn’t make the cut. I wasn’t too keen on the version we sent to the agency, though. I had written a difficult (for me) song to sing, and my vocals in the submission were atrocious. I returned to the track in July, however, after performing it a few times on streams, and got as far as recording a GarageBand demo. Even over stock loops and a steady-state BPM, I think the beauty (and naked joy) of this track comes through pretty clear. I swear this is another big hit in another dimension.
Walk This Crazy Life
20210614.1630, 20210615.1111
colors dance against a blue clear sky
seasons changed today
sunlight cascades through falling leaves
to show us the way
to feel new
to feel together
to make time
to see the future
untethered
to this crazy life
family's anywhere you find
love with power over time
where the past is forgiven
and the only true mirror is the one we see in each other’s eyes
as we walk this crazy life
like a circle strong and timeless
our spirits free & boundless
we’re connected in the best of ways
so much love not a thing to sayMasaya reached out when I returned to New York that Fall to finish recording “Vampires” in his Brooklyn studio. But then I got shingles and covid (hmm…), my voice took almost a year to recover, Luna developed full-blown epilepsy that blew a hole in my productivity for a while, and I kinda went dark. By the time I came up for air in Q2 2023, the world really had turned over a few times. Masaya’s in Iceland now, on an incredible sonic journey, but I continue to hope we’ll record a couple of these tracks for real one day.
peace,
dw 20250130