Glass Animals: Life in limbo leads to album No 3, Dreamland
After a life-threatening injury to its drummer, British indie pop band Glass Animals was forced to search inside itself while writing a reflective third album.
Follow-up albums are almost always hard to write, especially so for artists whose debut release immediately finds a wide international audience. As Elvis Costello wryly observed in a 1981 interview, you have 20 years to write your first album and then six months to write your second. The influences of a travelling pop songwriter’s surroundings — airports, vehicles, hotel rooms, music venues — can inevitably begin to work their way into the art itself when a life in constant motion becomes the new norm.
Wary of falling into the trap of writing a cliched road album, Dave Bayley unintentionally devised an alternative approach that kept the lens focused outward. While touring the world as singer, songwriter and producer in British indie pop band Glass Animals, following its 2014 debut Zaba, he became a journalist of sorts: when meeting people during the 23 hours a day spent not performing, he would occasionally feel compelled to pull out his phone and record them.
“I was never subtle about it,” Bayley tells Review via Zoom in late June. “My phone would go ‘Ding!’ and that would be the recording noise; sometimes it would just be because I liked their voice and I’d ask to record it.”
This is not how it usually goes for globally famous pop stars, who can sometimes feel like captive animals when faced with a battery of phone-wielding fans desperate for a selfie and resultant Instagram glory.
But while Glass Animals was well-known among indie music fans — in the band’s hometown of Oxford and here in Australia, where Zaba reached No 12 on the ARIA chart and lead single Gooey ranked No 12 in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2014 — in the wider US, for instance, Bayley probably just came across as a particularly curious young British man, albeit one who had spent his first 13 years growing up there. This sense of relative anonymity worked in his favour, too.
“One day, I was sitting back listening to some of these recordings, trying to find a really specific one to show somebody, and then it just clicked,” Bayley, 31, recalls. “I’ve got all these incredible stories, and I started to see themes and trends in what people talk about, and how they talk about things, and how they talked about things to me that they probably wouldn’t tell to their friends because I’m a stranger.
“And it just dawned on me; as soon as I started seeing those threads, I thought, ‘There’s a bigger project in this.’”
How To Be a Human Being, the second Glass Animals album, was released in 2016. Each of its 11 tracks was inspired by people Bayley met on his travels, from a sci-fi obsessed guy who spends too much time online (opening track Life Itself) to a regretful mother who wished her estranged son to fly high in her absence (Youth), as well as a former long-haul delivery driver who once consumed so much crystal methamphetamine while working that she lost a month of her memory, and worries that she might have killed someone while blackout intoxicated (Mama’s Gun).
With its concoction of hip-hop-influenced drum beats, video-game samples and a battery of synthesiser effects layered as a bed for Bayley’s remarkably wide vocal range, the quartet — completed by drummer Joe Seaward, guitarist and keyboardist Drew Macfarlane and bassist Ed Irwin-Singer — has developed a unique sound and wide following since forming in 2010.
Yet only once in the next couple of years touring that album did Bayley hear back from one of the people whose story he captured and reconfigured: the woman who inspired the title of track four, Pork Soda, whose memorable chorus refrain — “Pineapples are in my head / Got nobody ’cause I’m brain dead” — has also become one of the band’s most popular songs.
“She was a lady we met in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, and she had a tattoo of a pig that said ‘pork soda’ inside of it,” he says. “The first time I met her, I took a photograph of the tattoo because I thought it was amazing. But she clocked it right away, and when we went back for a show on that album cycle, she hunted us down and was like, ‘Remember me?’ [I replied] ‘Of course we do!’ She brought us a huge tub of glass animals wrapped nicely in tissue paper, and it was very sweet.”
None of the background to the songs on How To Be a Human Being is required reading; plenty of fans probably have no idea that Bayley ripped the ideas from the pages of other peoples’ lives, or would necessarily care, for the band’s catalogue to date is largely composed of upbeat songs that are perfect festival dancefloor fodder.
At the end of that album, though, is an outlier of a track named Agnes. It wasn’t inspired by someone the singer-songwriter met while on the road, but by his best friend, who died as a result of drug and alcohol addiction. Across 4½ minutes of hypnotic, looped instrumentation, Bayley reflects on the changes he observed — “Where went that cheeky friend of mine? / Where went that billion-dollar smile?” — and when its aching chorus arrives late, the rhyming couplet is repeated eight times. In a high, keening voice, Bayley sings, “You’re gone but you’re on my mind / I’m lost but I don’t know why.”
In 2016, Bayley described it as both his favourite song on the album and “the saddest song I will ever write, probably”. For its music video, he was strapped inside a human centrifuge that ran 18 times while he spun and tried to sing along. Given the song’s highly personal nature, Bayley was reluctant to put it out into the world. His bandmates convinced him otherwise, and their reaction — as well as the reaction from people close to him who knew the deceased, and other people who had been affected by drug addiction or suicide — eventually validated the decision to release Agnes, tough though that decision was.
“When I finally felt like it was the right thing to do, we started getting letters from fans, and I got a particular letter from someone,” Bayley says. “I read it and I was like, ‘That’s it: me being personal and vulnerable and speaking about something like that made them feel less alone, when they felt like that.’ Where I grew up in Texas, people don’t talk about that. You’re meant to be a football player and hide your feelings, as if you’re some kind of heroic macho figure.”
While touring How To Be a Human Being, drummer Joe Seaward was hit by a truck while cycling in Dublin, and in a moment their shared lives together were put on pause while the band and their team grappled with his injuries, which included a complex fracture to his skull and a broken femur. As before, Bayley had been toying with a few big ideas that might work as a thematic scaffolding for album No 3, but suddenly those potential concepts were subsumed by the enormity of what lay before him, not least of which was his friend and bandmate nearly dying.
To announce the cancellation of all remaining shows from July 2018 onwards, Bayley wrote on Facebook, “I wish more than anything that this accident hadn’t happened and that Joe was OK and that we would still be coming to hang with you all, but life has thrown something horribly sad and unexpected at us, and we need to do everything in our power to conquer it and get Joe back on his feet. I sincerely hope you understand. We will be back as soon as we can, and stronger than ever.”
During this time, the singer felt himself caught between his past and future, while the present seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Hotel rooms were replaced by hospital waiting rooms, and for a young man who had grown accustomed to constant motion while playing music with his friends across the world, the snapback was pronounced.
“I felt really stuck in limbo,” Bayley recalls. “It’s a strange place; there’s a lot of adrenaline and those very clinical lights that keep you awake the whole time. The atmosphere in the hospital doesn’t really change. It’s quite stagnant, bright and tense, always. And I didn’t leave; I didn’t want to leave, because I wanted to be the first to hear news. Or if he was going to wake up, I wanted to be the first to be there, and I didn’t want him to wake up alone.
“So I literally was spending all my time there, sleeping on a little sofa in the waiting room if they let me. Otherwise I’d go back to sleep in his house, actually, with one of his friends and his dad and mum. We’d do shifts, just rolling, but it really did feel like total limbo, and weird stuff starts coming out your brain in that state.”
In time, the songwriter ended up building an entirely new scaffolding by paging back through his memories and reliving old experiences. This is at the heart of Dreamland, a deeply personal and reflective album that contains echoes of Bayley’s past all the way back to his upbringing in Texas. The opening title track functions like a table of contents for what’s to come, with its final lines getting particularly self-referential when the singer mentions its year of release and his own intent: “So you go make an album and call it Dreamland.”
As with its preceding release, there is a strong diversity of sounds, from the meditative and expansive opener through to the hard-hitting, trap-influenced beats of earlier single Tokyo Drifting, whereby Bayley imagines a swaggering hip-hop alter ego for himself named “Wavey Davey”, before allowing himself to be completely upstaged by an actual rapper in US artist Denzel Curry. Between songs are snippets of dialogue taken from home recordings of his own childhood, including his mother’s voice.
It’s fitting that Bayley has tapped into a rich vein of creativity by sifting through his memories. Like Agnes before it, the work only came about because something terribly painful happened. This time, though, there is a happy ending: Seaward recovered from his injuries and is fully rehabilitated, and if not for a pesky pandemic, the drummer would be back on stage playing these new songs, while his watchful friend seeks out the next source of inspiration by keeping his eyes and ears open.
Dreamland is released on Friday, August 7 via Wolf Tone/Universal.
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