By Bryce Horowitz
If you haven’t heard of the band “Glass Animals”, then get on it!
I hadn’t heard of them till this past weekend in Chicago. I was just chilling on a boat with my boy Matt Robinson when this song came on and I knew from the beginning that there was something special about them.
Glass Animals is carried by the main guy Dave Bayley, who writes and produces all of their music. Dave Bayley was born in Massachusets, Lived in Texas till the age of 13, and has lived in Oxford, UK since. Bayley considers himself as “A little blonde Jewish boy from Texas. That’s it”
The group has been friends since 13, but formed when he was in Med school for Neuroscience at Oxford, pretty smart guy ehhh?
In 2016, the band released an album called “How to Be a Human Being”, Which I consider to be one of the greatest albums of all time. In preparation for this album, Bayley met hundreds of strangers, some of whom would tell him their darkest secrets. Although each song on the album originated from some of these stories, Bayley wants the lyrics to be open to psychological interpretation.
Trust me, there are some NUTS stories on this album. “Mama’s Gun” is a song that focuses on mainly mental health (Schizophrenia) and samples “Mr. Guder” by The Carpenters.
“Mama’s Gun” is developed from a story they were told by a Taxi Driver and goes like this: “So I was in a taxi driving through Atlanta. We drove past a strip club and the taxi driver turns and says, âIâve got a good story about a strip clubâ. She explained she used to be a long haul truck driver, and, to get her jobs done faster, used to take crystal meth to keep her awake. She wouldnât have to stop once for a week. One day she took too much meth and blacked out, and woke up in a strip club having no idea where she was, she even had to ask the stripper what state she was in. Basically this poor lady, the taxi driver, sheâd blacked out for a month. She didnât what state she was in, she didnât know she had blacked out for a month, didnât know where the truck as she was driving. And she woke up knowing sheâd done something really truly awful. She thinks she murdered someone. And she will always think she murdered someone and feels incredibly guilty, but thereâs no way of knowing, sheâll never know. That weird feeling of not knowing and never being able to know something I wrote about in a track called âMamaâs Gunâ.â
Glass Animals has now released 3 albums, most recently “Dreamland” on August, 7th. Dreamland is an autobiographical record containing some of Bayley’s most personal stories. “Dreamland” developed after the drummer Joe Seaward got into a horrific biking accident in Dublin a few years ago. Seaward had to relearn all of his motor skills, during this time it forced Bayley to reminisce on the past instead of the future. Bayley said, “I can’t really imagine going back to medicine, I would love to keep doing music.”