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Lesser Tragedies by Brian J. N. Davis "The Balloonist" was written in the latter days of 2012. This would have been right around the time I was discovering Mark Knopfler. Knopfler, in particular his post-Dire Straits work, is incredibly adept at building quiet stories around quiet characters and making them land in fun, meaningful, and unexpected ways. A song like "Secondary Waltz" tells the story…
Who even knows, you know? An opening line like that portends an existential rambling, or perhaps a commentary on the certitude of this culture, where everyone is yelling over their own insecurities to make sure you know one thing and one thing only: They know . But the fact that we don't know has some varying impacts. Some people double down on what they think they know, clinging to it like a life…
Back in the early days of my songs (2009-2011), I recorded and performed under my own name --Brian Davis. I released two EPs (three if you count the terrible EP of covers prior) before moving into band life for a couple of years. When the band disbanded and my next batch of songs came around, I felt a pull to come up with a stage name; a name that might help me stand out from the other ten million…
Making music used to be accompanied by so much beyond it. Writing music always was part of a larger whole from the first day I picked up the guitar: I'm going to write songs, put them out, play live shows in support of them, have budding social media pages, and then cycle the process with the next batch of songs. In those years, music was going to be something significant. And then without even…
Is a song in its infancy when it just begins to be written, or is it when it has just been completed? Maybe the former is like conception and the latter is like birth? My newest song I'm working on, "Rivers Rise," has at least achieved conception --beaming with the excitement that so often sits alongside the dawn of any new creation. It is the moment when the first few brush strokes land…
I hope the 2026 Chicago Cubs win the World Series. This probably isn't very important seeing as I also wanted the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series in 2025, 2024, and every year before that until you reach 1998 --the first year I became aware of baseball in any kind of substantial way. But once I did, I retroactively wished that they had won the World Series in every year before that...all the…
It wasn't so long ago that to be a Chicago Cubs fan was to suffer greatly. Fans will still act as if that same suffering continues as they bemoan how cheap and stupid and worthless the Cubs are, but there was, for so many years, a unique cruelty in rooting for the Northsiders --a cruelty that evidently even many Cubs fans have forgotten in the wake of the 2016 World Series. They have forgotten how…
When I started writing the opening scenes of The Grand Revolution of Lakeside I had already decided that it was going to be a work of magical realism. If you don't know that term, it's a story where the rules of the real world apply with perhaps one or two exceptions. If the author moves beyond one or two things, the work is rapidly moving into the fantasy genre. In Lakeside , haunted lamps grace…
Since I started this songwriting journal back in 2022, I have wanted to include (but forget to in real time) a sort of "as it happens" angle about new songs or albums. Once a new album reaches your ears, so much thought has already gone in to almost every element, including the top-level thoughts of whether or not what is being released is any good. I more or less believe in an album once it's…
I wrote my first song in 2009 --"Untitled", a rough, cringey affair concerning angsty teenage relationship fodder. Earlier this year, I put the finishing touches on "Crickets" as it became the 100th entry in my songwriting catalog. If I extrapolate those numbers out, I have been writing about six songs per year. I admit that feels a bit disappointing, but then it's also kind of difficult to look…