Working on the show Joe Pera Talks With You, Brooklyn composer Ryan Dann, AKA Holland Patent Public Library, spent much of the past five years living in a weekend house in the Hudson Valley owned by some of his friends. He’d spend the majority of each day writing music before driving into the city to practise with his band, then play whatever had emerged on the drive home. A pattern to his life which soon began to inform not only Dann’s headspace but the music itself.
“I did this drive often enough that it became a ritual, a movie I watched on repeat,” he explains. “It was the same every time, I always left in the afternoon and arrived in the evening. I knew exactly where to change lanes to avoid traffic. I knew where the deer liked to eat on the side of the road. I knew where the cops sat. I knew where people liked to speed, and where I would speed.” But within this monotony, something else stirred. As though uniformity in external experience allowed the interior space to flourish, the practical side of the brain so sure of its purpose it could hand the keys over entirely to the imagination. “The predictability of the drive meant my mind could just sprint around like a little dog in a dog park,” Dann continues. “It’s my kind of drive. Where you can just get really wrapped up in a conversation with your own personal Charlie Rose.”
Songs To Fall Asleep At The Wheel To, his new album out now on Dear Life Records, serves as the soundtrack to this dialogue or soliloquy. One able to capture both the odd tangents of a mind left to wander and the sweeping calm of routine, not to mention the peculiar paradox of solitude. An experience grounded in the textures of the real world yet prone to spiralling off to planes far grander or more strange than anyone might possibly expect. The two types of journey Holland Patent Public Library presents: occurring simultaneously and inexorably intertwined. This balance is captured immediately, opener ‘Oak Shadow Lane’ rising from meditative stillness into a poignant and surprisingly energetic piano-led track, and continues across the record between, and within, each song.
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Crafted around field recorded textures, songs like ‘Route 22’ play almost as slices of reality, the crepuscular stillness of an evening on the road punctuated only by the small movements inside the car and the slow wash of wheels, but others push beyond this physical moment. Take the transcendent, playful drama of ‘Goldens Bridge – Katonah’, its sound rising as though in excitement or suspense, or the reflective weight of ‘Mount Vernon’ and the sense of long history it holds. And yet after each such trip we return to the textures of the car, the real world suddenly apparent as though we’re snapping to from a daydream, only to find ourselves somewhere further down the road.
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It turns out the album’s title is somewhat misleading. Far from offering soporific qualities, Songs To Fall Asleep At The Wheel To is an enlivening record. About sleep only so much as sleep is giving over to an internal experience, one perhaps detached from quote-unquote reality, a dreamspace to which Dann returned day after day. But moreover one only possible due to the complete familiarity of the physical circumstances in which it arose. As though only by being fully within yourself can you detach and drift away.
Songs To Fall Asleep At The Wheel is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Holland Patent Public Library Bandcamp page.
Album art by Allison Conway