I dream a dream for you
Ty Segall's "Sleeper" can lull us to rest or it can rock like hell. What's your mood?
I barely endured Probability and Statistics class in high school. And so I don’t have a feel for the likelihood that an artist who’s released thirty-two albums and a combination of forty singles and EPs in fewer than twenty years could have a signature song. Is it more or less likely given such a prolific output?
Whatever the odds, Ty Segall’s “Sleeper,” the title track of his 2013 release, has become to my ears his standard bearer, a song that captures his high-haunt acoustic mood and knack for writing arresting melodies. Sleeper was written in the wake of Segall’s stepfather’s death, and gets its hands around not only grief, but rage, nightmares, family dysfunction—dark stuff that its largely acoustic songs explore with a striking blend of delicacy and emotional nakedness. In “Crazy,” Segall, as he’s acknowledged in interviews, pointedly calls out his mother’s psychological instability; his songs often tread in abstractions and evocative yet cryptic imagery, and when he names something explicitly, it rings in the air.
Since childhood, I’ve been enthralled by pop songs with melodies so pure and eternal that the songs themselves already felt ancient when I first listened. Sonic breezes blowing across epochs: a handful of hymns from the then-trending folk masses I attended as a kid at Saint Andrew the Apostle (so far have I “fallen away” that I can’t recall the names of the songs, only their prettiness and sway); “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”; the Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me”; Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to be With You”; Peter and Gordon’s “I Go to Pieces”; John Denver’s “Annie’s Song”; the opening minute or so of Richard Barone and James Mastro’s “Lost Like Me.” The only surprises in this list of songs is that these songs keep surprising me. The melodies undo me, strip me momentarily of my lousy details, render me a silhouette, free of personality, nodding across time to others knocked out by a sequence of musical notes and the performance. That the heady effect of the trick dissipates only adds to the magic.
“Sleeper” is the opening track. And it’s difficult to really hear anything that follows it. (In fact, the second song, “The Keepers,” feels a bit stunned still, and can’t shake off some of “Sleepers”’s chord sequences.) “I’ve always been really interested in dreams,” Segall remarked to Robin Hilton on NPR. “It’s something me and my dad talked about a lot. I was actually having a lot of nightmares [during the making of Sleeper] about stuff. I mean, who doesn’t have nightmares. It’s not anything special.” He added:
The song “Sleeper” was actually kind of about my girlfriend sleeping. Initially I started playing guitar and I started playing that. And it took on more of a meaning to kind of the whole idea of the record, so I thought it’d be appropriate to call it that.
“Sleeper” begins with tuneless whistling that sounds as if it’s traveling at light speed through the universe—unusually eerie for a lullaby or an ode to sleep—before softly strummed acoustic guitars, left and right, rise to the surface. “Oh, sleeper, my dreamer,” Segall sings, “I dream a dream for you,” his melody garlanded atop a sequence of evocative chords (D minor, F, C, G, B minor), his voice both soothing and, in its reverb, so stark against the simple arrangement, suggestive of something dark or troubled underneath it. We’re in Segall’s wheelhouse: a preoccupied singer; a touch of weirdness or oddness; minor notes complicating beauty; a melody that both caresses and haunts. The effect is riveting and hypnotic. In the lovely, charged haze I don’t know if the melody’s soothing the sleeper, or if the sleeper’s inspiring the melody.
In the bridge, the words—
Oh, deeper, fall deeper into sleep, my sleeper, too
I will be there with my sleeping, sleeping beneath a moon
—evoke something vaguely sinister, gothic, but the chord changes and the melody smiling at them are so pretty that you’re lulled right along.
“When I sit down and try to write lyrics first—I’ve definitely done that in the past—but most of the time, they come off as a put-on, or less genuine than you would think,” Segall remarked to Matt Grosiner at Nerdist. “It has to be more of a flowing thing, for sure, for me, so doing it that way is really natural.” In “Sleeper,” the lyrics are unadorned, nearly fairy tale-like in their simplicity; there aren’t any words that couldn’t have been uttered, in any language, a thousand or more years ago. This can be said about any number of love songs, of course, yet “Sleeper” is in touch with the eternal in an especially moving way. Some days I listen and wonder if Segall isn’t pulling my leg—isn’t this a cover of an eighteenth century English folk ballad? Or, anyway, an arrangement of one?
(Coincidentally, I’m reading Joel Gion’s In the Jingle Jangle Jungle: Keeping Time with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and in it the tambourine player extraordinaire remembers performing a song with Anton Newcombe at an outdoor show, the number completely new to Gion before it started. “It’s a bouncing tune floating on a romance cloud no one is enjoying more than I under the hot sun,” Gion writes. “As I beat the tambourine against my upper thigh, I feel the rare immediacy of hearing an unheard song that is familiar, like it had always existed but no one had opened its portal into this world yet.”)
Segall said that he was working through dreams and nightmares while writing Sleeper, and the title track vibes with that, how when we sleep we join the countless others who’ve slept and dreamed before us. K. Dylan Edrich’s poignant viola playing contributes to the bucolic, other-century feel. What we’re listening to feels like part of a cycle.
“I enjoy songwriting. It’s slow-motion improvising,” Julian Casablancas once remarked. I like to think of Segall’s songs this way, the musician biding his time as surprising elements arrive from another time and place. There’s something in the air for the songwriter to wave their hands at, maybe grab on to. For the past several years, my friends Molly and Dan have hosted a modest music festival on their many-acred farm in Oregon, Illinois. Friends, kegs of beer, dishes to share, tolerant cows across the road. A great way to spend a few hours, hanging and laughing and enjoying live music as it plays across hills and farmland, out to and over the nearby Rock River.
One of the musicians who plays is Alex Sitze, an Oregon native in his early twenties who, like Segall often does, performs as a one-man band. At the farm, framed by an enormous outbuilding, its doors opened to the afternoon, Sitze plays electric or acoustic, each guitar laid down upon a simple but rhythmic drum loop a riff or a melodic passage that Sitze then samples and loops on top as he plays, building an almost visible structure over the many minutes of the song, pedal by pedal, measure by measure, floor by floor.
His sings on many tracks, the vocals in service to the jam-like vibe of his songs, his voice simply another instrument. Especially when experienced outdoors, surrounded by farmland beneath a enormous sky, the effect psychedelicizes the space he plays in and the spaces he creates. A drone runs through some of Sitze’s compositions (which you can dig here), on top and beneath of which glint tiny flashes of rich melody and sparking hooks, creating a trippy, ripply sound, trance-inducing if you want it, regardless of what drugs aren’t or are in your body.
In a post on his website, Sitze recounts how in his tiny apartment once, after digging some Hendrix feedback-squall brilliance, he picked up his acoustic and, through his pickup, compressor/sustainer pedal, and “the usual feedback” on his headphones from the PA, began to hear music of a sorts, miraculously, “like, fully-produced HQ DJ beats coming out of my guitar…but I’m not playing it!” Discounting having had his breakfast spiked that morning, he recognizes that his amp had picked up radio waves from a local FM station, all of this happening in front of him, by accident. “While the technical science is beyond me at the moment,” he writes, “I consider my curiosity piqued and remain somewhat baffled by the physical reality of our environment. How long have I been in this room, not knowing the inaudible contact I’m making with airborne waves scattering about this musique?” He adds:
As for the musician and his discovery—can we entertain the possibility of a revolution in what Hendrix ushered in when capitalizing on amp feedback? What would it take for a guitarist skilled in the art of finessing FM radio waves via guitar pickup to achieve musical brilliance? Don’t ask me, I’ve only just arrived.
In his song “Equinox,” Sitze sings, “I’m in limbo / between the last chapter and the epilogue,” a nice take on the amoeba-like spaces where his songs dwell. I hope that you can catch Sitze somewhere, and let him take you somewhere else.
Meanwhile, a funny thing happened to “Sleeper.” In 2018, Segall released Freedom's Goblin, the second album recorded with his eminently rocking outfit the Freedom Band (Emmet Kelly on guitar, Mikal Cronin on bass, Charles Moothart on drums, Ben Boye on keys). The album closes with “And, Goodnight,” a twelve-minute guitar jam in the midst of lurks a stunning version of “Sleeper.”
“That song has been part of the setlist for a while,” Segall explained at the time to Robert Duguay at New Noise. “I hadn’t played that song since the Sleeper album came out, and about a year ago, I had the idea to electrify it. Over the course of a couple tours, it turned into that version.” He added, “It’s cool, because it’s kind of a safe route of ‘Sleeper.’ Watching the crowd sometimes is really great, because you can see someone getting really surprised when they realize that it’s a different version of the song.” While finishing up Freedom’s Goblin, Segall thought, “‘OK, I gotta have that on there at the end for the surprise ending.’ It was definitely an experiment, but I thought it was really fun to make.”
We’re no longer hearing a lullaby; we’re hearing an anthem. What do decibels do? The chords are familiar, but the arrangement stomps now. Segall enters with the first line (“Oh, sleeper, my dreamer”) nearly three minutes into “And, Goodnight,” after his and Kelly’s duel have brought us into the dream, or nightmare. Edrich’s viola has been replaced by deafening guitars. (“And, Goodnight’ is one of those recordings that sounds loud even when you play it low.) Many hear a Neil Young and Crazy Horse kind of noise, and I concur, though I also hear faint traces of Mick Taylor and Keith Richards’s sword fighting on “Midnight Rambler,” which only adds to the sense of foreboding in this darker take. Segall and his band are more or less respectful of the murmured changes in the original “Sleeper”—and Moothart’s gentle drum fills fluff the sonic pillow in the solo passages—but they go much harder in the second verse (“I dream sweet love, a dream for you”), the whole thing a push/pull between restful and troubled sleep. An ordinary night in the dark, I guess.
I caught Segall and the Freedom Band in Chicago a couple of months after Freedom Goblin came out. Something very cool happened as I listened to the album during my drive into the city :
…as I headed down into Lower Wacker Drive, the guitars reached a crescendo as I made a hard right turn down and onto the city’s floor. “And, Goodnight” is the perfect song to listen to in the shadows and gentle turns of dimly-lit Lower Wacker, a favorite drive of mine, as I emerge at the end with glistening Lake Michigan at my feet. The song ended just as I turned onto Lake Shore Drive, and it’s not an overstatement to say that I was altered a bit after the grandeur of that song, a vibe I managed to keep alive while on the freezing streets in an a bar or two preceding the show, a warmth Segall and his band stoked over the course of a wonderful night.
Six years later, I feel as if I haven’t fully awakened.
All photos © Joe Bonomo (top image blurred via Cutout.Pro; bottom image edited via Picscart)
