B. D. Reeves - All The Worlds
When you’re first starting out, just getting your music recorded and into the world feels like a huge achievement. And then, if even one person discovers your track and listens to it and likes it, that’s a real buzz. A huge honour.
For me, it’s not about the numbers. It’s about appreciating every listener and the fact that they have found a space in their busy life for your creation. When you learn that some people have saved your track, that’s even more amazing!
Of course, over time, you want to grow your audience. But the definition of success can change for each song. When I was working on my latest single All The Worlds in the studio, I knew right from the start that I wanted this to be the kind of track that someone might listen to again and again. So I was delighted to read in my very first review: “Great buildup to this indie song. This is one of those songs that you will play over and over”!
I would say this song is a melding of dreampop and alternative rock, with a sprinkle of subtle shoegaze twinkling guitar. I’ve always loved the airy spaciousness of dreampop-influenced bands like Beach House, Slow Dive and, more recently, Loma. At the same time, the alternative rock influence gives the sense of the song building Sigur Ros style towards a kind of soaring ‘release’. Going back even further, the mellow dreamy vocals and nature-inspired lyrics might possibly reference The Stone Roses, or even early Ride.
I don’t think there was one single moment when I decided to become an artist. It’s more like a dreamy orientation that’s always been there and motions the action to create. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that, as a child, I needed glasses, but didn’t actually get them until first year university – I just thought everyone saw the world like an impressionistic painting!
I remember writing my first full song on a nylon-string guitar when I was 17. It was about an old quarry where a group of us would go at night and sit around a bonfire drinking and watching the rock walls flicker with light and shadow. I still remember the first few lines: ‘I know a place to go, that you will never know, it’s there inside of me, where you will never see.’ These lines capture the desire of art to communicate the invisible inside of us. I think the ‘decision’ comes later, when you start to feel confident enough to share your creations with the world.
I remember as a child, every Christmas we would drive for ten hours across a vast dry sweeping landscape from Melbourne to my grandparent’s place in Adelaide. Cramped in the back seat with my two sisters, the only privacy I had was a Walkman and my side of the window. I remember one summer grabbing a CD from my parents’ music cabinet before getting in the car – they had quite a big classical collection and this was the only music I had access to. It was Steve Reich’s ‘Violin Phase’.
I had no idea it was a seminal piece of his late 60’s sparse, melodious “psychoacoustic repetition”. All I knew was that as I listened to these repetitions of raw string-bowed, inter-toned violins cycling over and over, I was spellbound because everywhere I could see its patterns in the rushing landscape, the flickering trees, the wind-gusts in sun-lit paddocks of hay. In the mesmeric daze of the car window, vision and sound criss-crossed in a kind of synaesthesia where the grass was the music and the strings were the grass and beauty was everywhere. It was my first experience of the intoxication of music itself, enchanting and unveiling a sort of hidden poetry that is all around us and only waiting to be revealed.
I’m B. D. Reeves, a Melbourne-based songwriter and novelist. I could never choose between writing and music and so I do both, often at the same time! Last year was a big one, seeing the release of my first EP Contradictions and my first YA novel Jemma and the Raven. It was amazing to bring these labours of love into the world.
Music satisfies the side of me that craves poetry and the pure joy of creation. Writing is my daily act of imagination on the page, a solitary endeavour, which is why I love the more collaborative aspects of music production.
When I’m not reading, writing, dreaming, and playing or listening to music, I also teach philosophy and literature. I love spending time with my family and our gorgeous dog, Juno. I have a passion for nature – hiking and sailing in open waters – where inklings of ideas can live and breathe and take form.
My latest single All The Worlds gives expression to the feeling of reawakening and expansion after living through one of the longest ever city lockdowns in Melbourne, when we couldn’t even leave our houses or walk into nature. Airy dreampop tones widen to a vast mountainous terrain of open starry nights and replenishing rain – giving homage to my sense of the world, again, as full of wonder and possibility. I hope you like it!
