Future Nostalgia and Remembering Earth - Artist Spotlight, Bear Music Fest
“I wasn’t actively writing a post-apocalyptic narrative, but the songs came together and illustrated that. They’re swimming in a feeling of trying to find a home, like being kind of lost in space. The music came from my heart, they’re stories that came without this kind of umbrella concept at all, but as the songs started coalescing into a larger work, it was weird…I was having dreams and ideas about these characters. But that was helping me write some of the music; the songwriting was still coming from this kind of mysterious place, but it was telling the story on its own.”
- Andy Barr
Every September, the people that make Bear Music Fest what it is slowly assemble from all points of the globe, with guests, staff and artists from as nearby as Mi-Wuk and as far away as Peru and Australia. So maybe this year’s appearance of Formerly Alien - entertainment directors from an intergalactic cruise ship stranded on the edge of the galaxy - shouldn’t surprise us too much.
Reader, we are still surprised.
Andy Barr and Amy Merrill (formerly a Lair of the Bear music director!) explain why aging boomers are especially good at time travel, talk about leveraging freak rollerblading accidents into rock stardom, and try to squeeze a 20-minute conversation into a 19-minute call…
Hi! So great to talk to you two today - I’ve got a ton of questions, and - wow, there’s a lot of road noise in the background! Where are you?
[Amy] We’re actually headed up to Burning Man right now! We’re playing our buddy’s wedding tomorrow night with a bunch of friends from New York. And then we’re playing in the Head Maze sculpture, which is a massive head out on the playa filled with synthesizers and fun toys. Then we play the Dog Bar, the oldest bar at burning man. That might be a total shit show. We have no idea what the lay of the land will be there. And then we play noon on Friday at center camp.
Whoa. That’s a pretty full plate. So right now you’re?….
Somewhere between Reno and Gerlach, NV. So I’m actually not sure how much longer we’ll have cell reception…
OK, I’m just gonna dive into this, then. So when most people think of the band America - “Ventura Highway”, “Sister Golden Hair”, you know - I’m not sure they think of “intergalactic starship lounge band” as a natural opening act. How did you guys end up opening for America?
[Andy] Like anything, it’s really about who you know. I’ll answer this in two parts. My brother’s college roommate was the son of Gerry Beckley, who’s a singer in America and one of the songwriters. We used to play in bands together for years. So America’s guitar player was in a freak rollerblading accident and broke his wrist, and they needed a fill-in, in a couple of days. So I hopped on and learned all the classic tunes in a couple days and did a summer with them, which was a dream - I love that music. And their guitar player eventually moved on and I took over full time for a few years. And I learned so much about time ultimately in that gig.
How do you mean?
So the relationship between America and Formerly Alien is all about how music plays with people over time, and that it creates a bed for, like, time travel. The America show is like a nostalgia show. You know, people come, they’re carried through their lives through songs that they remember from when they were small and then they expand how those songs have changed meaning for them over the course of their lives. It’s like watching people’s memories wake up and bodies and spirits come alive. And getting to watch that night after night was such an intimate experience to have with so many people’s entire lives. You know, just through this one lens of a single band that meant a lot to them.
So for Formerly Alien, my idea was, in the throes of seeing how powerful nostalgia is as a force, can we create a sense of nostalgia for the present? If we tell this story through music from the future, after the planet has been destroyed, can we foster a cherished sense of our planet through manufactured nostalgia for where we’re at now?
So that’s where the framework for the show came from, really just seeing if it works in this direction, why can’t it work in the other direction? And we’ve been able to open for America a few times with this band and their audience gets it. They’re like, okay, we’re on this trip already. We’re doing this time travel with you. We lived through the sixties when these ideas were here the first time around, so we’re onboard to go with you to space and participate in this sort of second revolution.
The songs that make up the Formerly Alien catalog for now were originally written by Andy, right? So Amy, where did you come into the picture?
[Amy] Yeah, my side of it was that I heard his album of demos and I thought they were the best songs that I’d ever heard. And we were friends, he started helping me with some of my music and then we started trying some of those songs and they sounded really good just as a duo. And the concept band made a lot of sense to me, ‘cause I had spent a lot of years playing music but, in indie rock bands or in ways that were very much about me and my songs. You know - “Hey everyone, my name’s Amy and I’m going to play you a song of mine”, that sort of sentiment.
And then we started with a lot bigger picture conversations about the state of the world, and that there are no answers and we’re all just, you know, guessing. I started to realize how the band could be a vehicle for conversations about things that have no answer. And as I had been coming out of a long time in nonprofit work, chipping away on social issues that often seem to have no answer, no certainty, it felt right to turn back to art, less literal and more abstract.
It was like a wake-up moment for me to go, “Oh, right. I don’t have to just bang my head against the wall telling people to care. I can help them care about the state of our world or the way that we relate to each other. So we came together almost two years ago to figure this thing out.
OK, so I know we might be cut off at any moment, but I want to try to squeeze one more question in. So, having such a clearly defined concept kind of draws some limits around what you do or what you can do, but does it also set you free creatively in any way?
[Andy] Yeah, I mean, Amy touched on it that there’s, there’s kind of a standard theater for the experience of music these days and, you know, great artists are breaking that theater. But I found as a lover of music, I was getting a little bit trapped in the relationship between audience and performer and the standard role that everyone pl-
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