Born in Winnipeg, Trevor Davies is an independent musician who played in several different rock bands while growing up, before studying Jazz Performance at Vancouver Island University. This musical upbringing feels crucial in informing his songwriting style, which draws on a multitude of genres as well as the thematic influences of literature, nature and spirituality, particularly Eastern mysticism.
The latest Trevor Davies release is The Stream, a three song EP that weaves together many of these influences. Davies plays multiple guitars in layered arrangements (what he lists as “acoustic, delayed electric, distorted, and a solid modern-rock bass and drum sound”), and also calls on a cast of collaborators to further flesh out the sound. Tyler Lieb plays pedal steel, Anatol Mcginnis violin and cello, Phil Albert electric bass and double bass and Lucas McKinnon drums, while there are additional vocals by Zoe Lauckner, Billy Young and Gillian Stone (whose great album Spirit Photographs you can read more about here).
Davies says each song on the EP “touch[es] on the Buddhist concept of water ‘seeking the lowest level,'” and a sense of emotive and philosophical rumination pervades the record. Opener ‘What Else?’ is a folk-inflected pop song that unfurls in easy rhythm as Davies asks plainly, “What’s so bad about dying? / What’s so sad about crying?” The title track too has something gentle and considered amidst its layers of rich instrumentation, carried along in its own currents as it grows toward a soaring finale.
But perhaps the standout is closer ‘Glass Bead Game’, a track inspired by the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name in which intellectuals of the future play the titular game—the mastery of which requires comprehension of the sum of all human knowledge, from science and philosophy to music and art. Beginning as a writing exercise to bring the book’s themes into song, the track is an epic meditation on knowledge and aesthetics and the need for human connection.