Dayglow Spring Tour 2020 w/ Ritt Momney | Trees Be sure to sign up for
the Dayglow newsletter at www.dayglowband.com to receive your presale
code! On his full-length debut Fuzzybrain, Austin-based artist Dayglow
reveals his rare gift for illuminating emotional pain in a way that
not only resonates, but ultimately makes that pain feel lighter. With
its bright textures and effervescent melodies, glistening guitar tones
and radiant vocals, the album instantly invites a dreamy euphoria,
even as it gets incredibly candid about isolation and anxiety and
loss. “For as long as I’ve made music, it’s been my goal to use
it to help people feel better, and hopefully treat each other
better,” says the singer/songwriter otherwise known as Sloan
Struble. “I believe that all art can do something good for the
world, as long as artists can recognize its potential and embrace that
responsibility.” Gracefully threaded throughout the album, the
optimism of Fuzzybrain is both hard-won and palpably sincere.
Originally from Aledo, Texas—a Fort Worth suburb he refers to as a
“small, football-crazed town”—Struble felt irrevocably out of
place for most of his adolescence, eventually turning to music as a
purposeful escape from his surroundings. “I didn’t really feel
connected to what everyone else in my school was into, so making music
became an obsession for me, and sort of like therapy in a way,” says
Struble, now 20-years-old. “I’d just dream about it all day in
class, and then come home and work on songs instead of doing homework.
After a while I realized I’d made an album.” True to the intensely
personal nature of Fuzzybrain, Struble kept the project entirely to
himself all throughout its creation. “Usually artists will have
demos they’ll bounce off other people to get some feedback, but
nobody except for my parents down the hall really heard much of the
album until I put it out,” he says. Soon after self-releasing
Fuzzybrain in fall 2018, Struble began earning widespread attention
for the album, drawing an online following struck by the pure
positivity of Dayglow’s output. “People have been really kind
about getting in touch with me and telling me that the album makes
them happy, or that it’s helped them through a rough time,” he
says. “That was my greatest goal for it, so it’s amazing to hear
that people feel that way.” Working completely on his own with a
miniscule collection of gear—his guitar, computer, some secondhand
keyboards snagged at Goodwill—Struble created Fuzzybrain by
transforming his private outpouring into a batch of songs often
grandiose in scale. On the title track, for instance, he lets off a
barrage of lyrics likely to strike a chord with the
hyper-introspective (“Scattered mind, I call it a friend/I wish I
thought a bit less and spoke up instead”), simultaneously sweetening
the mood with swooning melodies and luminous synth. One of
Fuzzybrain’s most melancholy moments, “Dear Friend,” offers up a
tender serenade to an old pen pal, its sensitivity both heartcrushing
and beautifully refreshing (“I know the world is changing
quickly/And I couldn’t tell you why/It’s beyond my
understanding/But I’d love it if we tried”). And on “Hot Rod,”
Dayglow delights in a bit of good-natured insolence, spiking the track
with a tempestuous guitar solo and breezily delivered lyrical digs
(e.g., “I’m sorry for not wanting to be your décor”). Though
Struble describes Fuzzybrain as “DIY to the fullest extent,” the
album unfolds with an immaculately constructed sound design that owes
much to his uncompromising work ethic—an element illustrated in the
making of a disarmingly wistful track titled “Can I Call You
Tonight?” “I had the instrumental for that song fully produced for
months before I had a purpose to put to it, lyrically,” he says.
“I kept coming back to it every day, and then one day I got off the
phone with a friend and the power was out in my house, so I just
started writing down little phrases from our call and turned that into
the lyrics.” In finishing up “Can I Call You Tonight?”, Struble
cycled through nearly 30 separate final mixes before settling on the
version that best captured the track’s tone. “I kept running back
and forth from my room to my car, just listening to the mix over and
over and making sure it sounded the way it needed to,” he recalls.
Dayglow is now gearing up for a more fully realized version of
Fuzzybrain to be released, featuring two new tracks: “Nicknames”
(a bold and bouncy number he perceives as a counterpart to “Hot
Rod”) and “Listerine” (an undeniably potent track fueled by
Struble’s confident vocal flow and flashes of jagged guitar work).
“Both those songs were written around the same time as the rest of
the album and very much exist in the Fuzzybrain universe,” he says.
“Each is deeply intertwined into the conceptual universe and purpose
of Fuzzybrain, and it just wouldn’t feel right releasing them in a
separate body of work.” As his audience widens to include fans
around the world, Dayglow pushes forward with a mission of making
music that strengthens hope, promotes peace, and—in an especially
important turn for Struble—fosters a powerful sense of community.
“When people come to the shows, I obviously want them to have fun
and feel good—but more than that, I want them to make friends,” he
says. “The impact of a show only lasts so long, but if you end up
making a friend there, that impact can last quite a long time. I’d
really love for people to share this whole experience in a way that
goes beyond just the music.”
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03/04/2020 Last update