Singled Out: Walcot's Dreamin' Away

Walcot recently released the song "Dreamin' Away" from their forthcoming "Songs For The Disenfranchised" EP and to celebrate we asked Asher George to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

"Dreamin' Away" is only the second song I ever finished writing and after hearing it, Matt Thompson, the producer and bass player on the song, told me it gave him "hope for the future of the music industry."

This is a song that I wrote on the back of a Comcast cable bill in my parents' basement in 2014 while noodling on my dad's 1993 Fender American Stratocaster, the guitar that I learned to play on.

The path from "Dreamin' Away" being born to finally being released has been something that I never could have foreseen and it's hard to trace even in hindsight - that's how arduous it's been.

Not long after the song was written, I was living in Chicago
and attending a general education-fulfilling recording class at DePaul University. The professor was Dan Steinman, who was an engineer at I.V. Labs Studios, and he had the class come to the studio to take a tour of all the equipment and mess with some of it. It was something that felt special because it looked like one of those big, fancy facilities that you had to have a record deal to be let into - something only "wanna-be's" like me could see via videos on YouTube of their favorite famous artists holing up inside for months on end to create their next grand musical statement. Kanye West, Fallout Boy, and the Plain White T's, just to name a few of the big artists I can remember off the top of my head, had recorded there. After the rest of the class left the studio, I asked Dan "can I do a demo?" not having any clue how he'd respond and he nonchalantly said "sure - send me something."

I sent him a guitar/vocal demo of the song that I threw together on Garageband, barely knowing how to use the software, and a week later he told me he sent it to Matt, his production partner, and said that they wanted to do an EP for me! I was floored. A few months later, after only performing at Chicago open mics a few times a week for the first time in my life, we gathered some session musicians and the arrangement you hear on the song and what's going to be on the rest of the upcoming 'Songs for the Disenfranchised' EP was created in the span of only one evening-long rehearsal the day before we recorded.

"Songs for the Disenfranchised," huh? "That's heavy. That resonates." It's a title that immediately struck a chord with the people I've told about it. It came to me a while after recording the EP and I thought it encapsulated everything that had suddenly unfolded in the world - from the political strife and cultural polarization and unrest - and that was even before the pandemic came into being and the civil rights protests along with it. I was just writing songs about what was going on in my head and my own disenchantment and alienation from conventional adult American life.

"Dreamin' Away" is simply about tuning out an indifferent world and living in a daydream of your own creation. Little did I know that the song would come to be about what was going on in everyone else's head. "Dreamin' Away" is just the start of this soundtrack- there's a lot more to come, and it gets a lot better.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below or stream via Spotify here

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