A Soundrack to Wanderlust
Freakfolk artist brings new level of productivity to vagabond lifestyle
Boy gets girl. Boy becomes disillusioned. Boy loses girl and embarks on a cross-country journey, not really sure what answer he is looking for. (Run Forrest, run)
But this isn’t a Tom Hanks movie—it isn’t even a teen summer romance: it is the story of Paleo, aka David Strackany, a singer-songwriter who has been inconspicuously traveling the country for the past year.
And unlike Forrest, he actually did set out with a solid goal—to write one song a day for an entire year. What began as a simple concept quickly developed into an intoxicating project, as he and his fans became addicted to the music posted daily on his Web site.
Listening to his songs for the first time, one notices two things: eloquent poetry and an extraordinary range of both stylistic and emotional content on a daily basis, especially considering his limited access to instruments and studio space. Something about this haphazard environment allows for his creativity to fully develop. The simple songs and Web layout make his site truly about the music.
While the words are standouts both on his Web site and within the songs themselves, Strackany isn’t an ardent lyricist. Instead the focus on lyrics comes as a result of writing in cramped and often inconvenient places. When he made the commitment to write a song a day no matter what, his musical style “became more about the words out of necessity”—not to mention that having friends lying next to you in a dark basement trying to sleep off their respective hangovers isn’t exactly conducive to subwoofers.
Nudged toward music from a young age by his father and two older brothers, Strackany has nonetheless spent most of his own musical career searching for a style of his own.
“I’m not sure of the whole musical influence thing,” he says. “Growing up, all my friends kind of listened to the same thing—Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins. MTV was picking the music for me and I guess, being an American in the ’90s, shaping my aesthetic a lot. I tried to dig through all that stuff in order to shape my own style.”
Also implicit in this particular mode of recording and distribution is its connection to recent technologies, especially those of the last few years. Strackany sees his project as one that is not necessarily original and could have been done 10, 20, even 40 years ago.
“Technology has been a big aspect in terms of distributing the music in a timely fashion, but older technologies were available,” he says. “A similar project could have been done in a different way 15 years ago, and similar projects were in fact done with the same idea behind them.” However, the artist’s ability to produce is predicated on his constant dependence on a microphone, a computer and the Internet, even while driving across the country. The tone quality and relative ease of transport have made it much easier to get his music out there and “digested.”
Rather than tiring of the project, recording a song each day has become a habit that has been grafted onto his identity. When the rest of us wake up craving a bowl of Frosted Flakes, David is ready to write.
“I wake up in the morning and it’s the first thing I think about,” he says. “After a while you just stop questioning it.” Inspiration can come from anything—past loves, shows he books en route, people he meets along the way.
In a world saturated with blogs, rapid-fire newscasts, and reality shows which could in fact not be further from reality, Paleo’s site and music are a much needed respite. After a time, the project became even more than therapeutic. “I started to think of this as a novel more than a journal,” Strackany says. It is in this way that his music does what pop music is intended to do—it’s accessible and descriptive but also open enough for us to attach our own meaning to the songs.
While Strackany reads the occasional review when handed to him, it does little to affect his project. While on the road, he has become so focused and driven that it is hard to think about anything but writing, booking shows, and when he’ll come upon the next gas station. In fact, he is still unsure as to the legitimacy of even having critics. “I find more and more I know less and less about what is good music,” Strackany says, and “that taste is all relative and that really all that matters is how a song affects an individual.”
Every day he gets e-mails from new people telling him how profoundly the newly uploaded song affected them. As for Strackany himself, he doesn’t pick sides, and denounces the idea of a favorite altogether. “I love all the songs, they’re like little children ... some are really gifted, but I love them all the same.”
While the average person would probably feel a sense of imbalance and detachment as a result of such a journey, it in fact led Strackany to a new kind of structure. In some ways the typical musician, Paleo has for years depended on friends’ couches as lodging and has no definite roots in any one place. Dedication to a project like this is stable ground in the life of a musician, which is often without any type of structure or organization. Making such a commitment allowed music to become, according to Strackany, “a type of home without a home, a type of job without a job.”
As a natural by-product of such an all-encompassing endeavor, it will be a rather shocking adjustment to end such a project. Though he plans to settle down in Brooklyn after his final show on April 15, it won’t be settling in the traditional sense. He will continue his nomadic lifestyle, most certainly free of such conventions as a job and rent. And of course, there will still be songs to write. “This business is incredibly unpredictable. I don’t really know what the future has in store. But I think it will work out.” Life really is just a box of chocolates, after all.