“Sleepy Baby” is a track off of Buster Baer‘s upcoming EP, Mock Twang. The song is an upbeat ode to sleepy lovers with gentle lyrics sung in Baer’s vintage style and a melody featuring various instruments. Buster Baer wrote the track after noticing a pattern among his romantic partners who felt guilty for falling asleep while spending time with him.
“Almost every single romantic partner I’ve had seems to have picked up some weird guilt about falling asleep while we’re hanging out. I don’t know who made them feel like they had to be a performing monkey, but having a person feel comfortable enough to sleep around you is an extremely intimate and beautiful thing. I just wanted to provide some evidence to the collective unconscious that there are lovers who won’t expect you to deny your biological necessities for their egos” – Buster Baer
What’s your story as an artist?
My parents are both comedy writers. My teenage act of rebellion was to take words seriously, so I became a beat poet. I moved to New York for college and discovered that I was never going to make a dime as a poet, but I knew of a great poet who stuck a few chords under his poetry and was able to change the world. I picked up the guitar just as a vessel, but I needed practice, so I started these jam sessions at rehearsal studios in the city. We invited the whole college and told the rehearsal space people we had a choir. At one of these jam sessions somebody handed me some LSD and a bass, and I really touched something beautiful. I dropped out of college and rocked around the country a little bit, New Orleans and San Francisco and eventually back to LA, playing in little pub bands and trying to figure out why nothing was really working. It wasn’t until I got sober that I really started learning enough about music to focus on the actual production of it. Now I’m a one-man music factory.
What inspired your latest single “Sleepy Baby”?
I wrote “Sleepy Baby” for my girlfriend at the time. We were both working like dogs to stay afloat during the pandemic and many nights she’d come over and fall right asleep, but she’d have this terrible guilt about it. Some ex of hers had made her feel terrible if she fell asleep without, I don’t know, entertaining him or something. Which is absurd of course, if you love somebody you don’t stop loving them because they’re asleep it should feel just as good. I would tell her that, but it wasn’t going through, and I love music’s power to cast spells and manifest things so I wrote it in the hopes that it would break her guilty sleep feelings. That’s why it’s so big and lush, I was thinking, “I’ve really got to get this across to her!”
Do you get inspired by other art forms?
Yes! Comedy is the family business, so I’m extremely inspired by that, especially clowning. I’m named after Buster Keaton. I also love paintings, even though I’m an atrocious visual artist. I think film is really important, it seems to me to be a place where all the mediums meet and I’ll hope to make some films later on. Obviously, poetry is a major part in what I do so I do a lot of poetry reading. I love philosophy which I also feel is an art.
What’s your favorite place or environment to write?
I had this really amazing apartment where I recorded this song. It was a warehouse surrounded by 3 scrapyards that all fired up every morning at 5am and shook the entire building. I didn’t care because they let me play drums at any hour, but near the end of my lease there I had a neighbor in the unit next to mine and the walls were PAPER thin. He was really just trying to do his best to run a good tattoo shop, but it made it very difficult to get clean recordings and eventually I had to just give up and accept it. So, if you listen real closely to some of the silences you can hear him burp or talk about his friend group’s drama. We doin’ it DIY out here, baby.
What’s a record that shaped your creativity?
Oh God, hard to say! One of the first records that really woke me up to what music was capable of is M83’s “Hurry Up We’re Dreaming.” That really lit a fire inside of me, though I don’t try to emulate much like that. Maybe someday. This record was probably most inspired by “With The Beatles.”
Who is an artist or band you look up to today?
I love Khruangbin. I love Phoebe Bridgers. I owe a lot to Kevin Parker and Mac Demarco. Kevin Morby and Courtney Barnett are really cool.
What excites you the most about what you do?
I get a spiritual kick out of it for sure. I’ve always been a guy whose more concerned with like… ThE OtHeR WoRlD. There’s something really invigorating about feeling the muse speak through you. I like world building too, sitting back after a song is almost done and watching it transform the room you’re in.
What is your view on genres and music styles since you mix a lot of them in your music?
Cool question! I personally use genres as notes. I might play a whole scale of them in one phrase. Everybody has grown so accustomed to niches that genres almost become memes, communicating a certain metalinguistic feeling rather than representing a particular crowd or scene or time or place. If I’m expressing a feeling that exists in a space between slick and innocent, I might bounce back and forth between a gritty blues verse and an early Jamaican ska chorus. Or even try to mix them. There’s a whole treasure trove of cultural vocabulary from the last 500 years at our fingertips, and by referencing different ones I can take us on a journey through the whole human experience.
What does music and art mean to you?
Damn that’s broad. Gosh, it’s so massive. On the one hand, it’s a safe place to express literally any feeling so that it doesn’t put a strain on society. Instead of hurting yourself or others, you know, try painting a picture. But then there’s also its ability to point out truths that are unspeakable. There’s so much unnamable beauty and art can’t BE it necessarily but it can really specifically point it out. That’s really valuable. So now, what started as a feeling that might drag the world around you down is now actually pointing other people out of darkness. Then there’s that metaphysical thing. I believe in a certain kind of Good Vs. Evil. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that, but there seems to be a battle of some sorts going on, even if it’s “The Battle to Love Everything Unconditionally vs The Fear of Doing That.” I think music and art are capable of being used in that battle as everything from bandages to bombs.
How would you describe your act in one word?
How, indeed.
