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thepermanentrainpress · 7 years

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TRACK BY TRACK FEATURE: SAM TUDOR - “QUOTIDIAN DREAM”

Nearly three years following the release of his last record, Sam Tudor is back with Quotidian Dream.

Tudor was born and raised in Williams Lake, BC; his move to Vancouver in the latter teen years greatly influenced the sounds and synergy behind 2014′s The Modern New Year—contemporary campfire melodies with flickers of trumpet, banjo, and keys. On Quotidian Dream, Tudor struggles less with growing into a new city and more with the immediate space around him.

Experimental folk is layered with elements of new wave (“Quotidian Boy”) to jazz (“Chlorine”). Tudor’s vocals bring a soft-spoken intensity to “Truthful,” with the thumping backbeat and whirring of strings coming to a beautiful, unsettling head at its close. “Joseph in the Bathroom” is a remorseful take on his high school days, while “Holiday” presents a warm, folk rock hook. A little grit and power would carry the tune into Mumford & Sons’ Babel territory—but it is his tender nature and jaded lyricism (“Oh it’s the cost of a frozen place, paying for the colour when it’s all gone grey”) which make the closet anthem. Tudor often sings of disconnect with his surroundings—a vacancy marred by routine and expectation and TV screens. But his compositions reflect the opposite; a discerning self-awareness held by the notion that, even as the flames run out of him, he is able to find them again.

Tudor was kind enough to write us a track-by-track on the release, which you can delve into below.

Words below by Sam Tudor:

1. “New Apartment”

I’ve heard people talk about their apartments as safe sanctuaries and I’ve also heard people talk about them as lonely, even threatening spaces. In my experience, a Vancouver apartment can be both of those things simultaneously. When I first moved to Vancouver I would go home with a combination of urgency and anxiety. It’s a bit cliché, but in the last couple of years I’ve been noticing physical space a lot. Most of the photography and paintings that I like these days document empty spaces – human creations that seem alien. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about for this song. I think when I wrote it I had a specific moment in my head, that moment when you first move in somewhere and you are alone, and you haven’t unpacked your things yet.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

2. “Quotidian Boy”

Writing and performing songs is cool, but it’s also a pretty weird thing. There’s a lot that I find funny about it. I used to write a lot of incredibly broad metaphors that could mean anything and I look back on that and find it funny. The construction of the ‘suffering artist’ image is pretty funny too and I am definitely guilty of it. My good friend Brodie told me that it’s important to always ‘balance the sacred and profane’ in your life. I’m trying to embrace that as much as I can these days, and I think this song says some things that are important to me while laughing at it all as well. The chorus “I’ve got unlimited strikes but I don’t want to play” sums up how I often feel – lots of opportunity, still feeling the urge to bail.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

3. “Truthful”

At some point in the last couple years I became very frustrated with myself. I was in university, and it seemed like I had become more articulate then ever, but wasn’t sure if I was actually saying or understanding anything important. You can congratulate yourself for being complicated and having lots of layers and nuance, but sometimes all that starts to feel like a weight you don’t need. I tend to overthink things a lot, and I often get stuck in these feedback loops. I got in a pretty bad one at that time, sort of like a ferris wheel you can’t get off. This song is a grasp towards something outside that loop. The chorus originally had much more words but I thought that would miss the point, so I just made it the simplest thing ever. I spend a lot of time on lyrics but this time the vibe was way more important than the words. I wanted to just cut through the bullshit and feel real and that was mostly it.

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4. “Brain Stealers”

I think this song is mostly just about feeling creatively empty. When I felt as though I couldn’t write any good songs, I wrote this song instead as a sort of ‘exasperated throwing up of the hands’ type thing. It’s funny that it ended up on the album. It features the return of my trusty organ auto-drum: an old, no-name brand organ with a beat setting that I’ve come to really love. It can’t keep tempo anymore and it currently sits in my childhood home at Gavin Lake Camp. My parents keep trying to throw it away, and every time I visit home I fear it will have disappeared forever. Hang in there, organ. A little longer.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

5. “Joseph In The Bathroom”

This song is the one that is most important to me. My hometown and my experience growing up there take up a significant amount of space in my mind. Strange as it is to admit, I was ‘popular’ in highschool in the sense that I had friends and managed to navigate all the high-school cliques (I think being friends with everyone can sometimes mean you are friends with no-one, but that’s a different write-up). I was a survivalist though; and I avoided those people I might otherwise have been friends with if they weren’t generally deemed unpopular. I regret that I acted that way and I regret that highschool channels people in ways like that. Weirdly, the older I get the more I remember and think about those kids in the corners – the ones who weren’t as lucky as me and weren’t able to navigate highschool in such a way. I still feel guilty and angry about it all today. I think the song is about more than just that, but in a sense it’s an apology song.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

6. “Blue Flower”

This is an unlucky song! This song is cursed! I know a girl who was listening to this song and when the line “as the camper van floats off the road” was sung she literally drove off the road and crashed her car! This is a true story! She’s fine, but I have since become very wary of this song. Drive safely, everyone.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

7. “Chlorine”

Do you know that feeling you get when you stay up really late on social media and your eyes start to feel weird and you are tired but also the computer screen has inhibited all your melatonin so you have insomnia and are also a bit stressed and it’s an uncomfortable dream-like state? For me, that’s part of what Quotidian Dream is. I kind of wanted the album to sound like what that felt like. I think this might be the song that taps into the feeling the best. A big part of this song’s tone is created by the use of the trusty fish guitar. Shaped like a fish, and not a very good guitar, but it has a unique, slightly out of tune tone that I love. So I played that a lot in this song, and we had saxophones and strings and recorded it late at night.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

8. “Clinical Names”

We made so many different versions of this song. I’m not really sure why this is the one that ended up on the record. It could genuinely have been an accident.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

9. “Holiday”

I like pop music and big anthemic choruses, but I also tend to write about sad things. So I always end up with weird songs like this one. My brother Harry played the drumbeat first and we wrote the song around it.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

10. “Silver Lining Skies”

I realize after listening to this record as one entity that a lot of it references being in my room, or being in a room, or being in a house, or something like that. This makes sense, considering how much time I do spend in my room. Most of the album was recorded entirely in my room. At the end of this particular song there is an audio file of me walking up the stairs and opening the door to my room. Or… am I exiting my room? Is this me going out in the world happily or retreating further into my own head? Who knows!? Wow, I am such an artist. I am so deep. Holy fuck. Ho-ly Smokes. In all seriousness, I just thought it was an important way to end the album considering how much I’ve been thinking about insides and outsides.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

If you’re still here, thanks for reading this! I hope you enjoy the album.

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Much thanks to Sam for giving us further insight into his new album! Quotidian Dream is available for purchase on Bandcamp. He will be playing a free set as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival on Saturday, Sept. 16 at the Big Rock Brewery Fringe Bar (1531 Johnston St), alongside Rae Spoon. For more on Sam Tudor:

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE

Posted by: Natalie Hoy

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