I don’t always dream about music, and when I do, I don’t always remember it very well when I wake up. There have been a few cases where I’ve written a piece of music that largely originated from what I remember of a dream. There are a couple of notable ones that predate the start of this website, and maybe I’ll write about them another time.
But I’d like to get to last night’s dream.
I was driving a van transporting a band very much like Cheer-Accident to a show. They had a brand new album done, but I hadn’t heard it yet, and they were going to debut the music at this show. I picked them up somewhere with their gear and drove them to either the venue or a rehearsal space, where they set everything up. They gave me a copy of the new LP, and told me it was dedicated to a band member who had recently died quite suddenly.
They then ran through the entire album in order. It was only three tunes — one that took up the entirety of the LP’s side one, and two in the seven-to-eight-minute range that made up the second side. I don’t remember anything about the first two pieces, but the third was called “Thud,” and I read along on the lyric sheet as they ran through it.
Have you ever finished practice and looked at your friend and asked, “Are you alright”?
Have you ever heard your friend answer, “Not really, I think I need a doctor”?
Have you ever taken your friend to the ER and waiting in fear to find out what’s wrong?
Have you ever listened to a doctor tell you about a battery of tests?
Have you ever heard a doctor say, “We’ll know more when the results are back from the lab. For now, go home”?
Have you ever taken your friend home and joked about the scare?
Have you ever tried to relax, not knowing what’s happening?
Have you ever gone to the living room, and from the kitchen heard… a thud?— lyrics by Jon Davis (BMI)
The music stopped at the ellipsis, there was a pause, and the final word was accompanied only by a thump on a tom.
By the time they finished the song, I was crying uncontrollably. I asked them how they could get through it without breaking down. One of them said, “We don’t always.”
I woke up with my heart racing and found that my eyes were all teared up. I got out of bed and got a notepad from the dining room table, then went into the bathroom and wrote down what I remembered of the lyrics. It was 2:48 in the morning, and I didn’t sleep much after that.
What I remember of the music was that it was based around a very odd, dissonant chord on electric piano that played insistent eighth notes through much of the song. Each line of the melody started the same, but then varied to match the length and cadence of the words, and each of the lines had the vocal melody doubled on some instrument or other: guitar one time, trumpet another, and even the drums on one. There were instrumental sections in between each of the lines.
The album cover had a very detailed hand-drawn mandala, and if you looked closely, you could see that all the little bits of the design were actually the shapes of ordinary objects fit into the pattern: toasters, boots, hammers, chairs, and so on.
The music is very vivid in my mind, though very non-specific as far as notes and chords. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to actually replicate it in the real world.
With intense dreams, I often ask myself What does it mean? and in this case I think it’s a reflection of the fact that over the last few years, quite a few people who were important to me have died, and I have very much wanted to express my thoughts about that in songs but been unable to come up with anything that felt right. It actually started with David Bowie’s death — I’ve written some lyrics I like, but haven’t hit on the right music to do them justice. Since then, the passings have been more personal, among close family and friends both old and new.
