Bryan Free was raised on a strict diet of classical music,
and was never encouraged to listen to pop. “It wasn’t frowned upon,
but… I remember I got this Billy Joel songbook when I was 15 or 16,
as a gift,” he says. “And I went in the other room and I played it. And
my grandma left. She stood up and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to
sit around and listen to this.'”
Grandma Free may have had a point about Billy Joel, but Bryan began
writing his own pop songs a few years later, and his latest album,
Each Other, is an extraordinarily diverse collection that
contains piano pop, operatic heavy rock, trance-y dance music, and
layered chorales. “There was a huge pile of songs to pull from,” Free
says, “and I picked the ones I felt best represented the community of
my friends. Because my first album [Poison I Drank From] was
just myself. And my EP [Lust] was a small group of friends. So,
this time I just wanted to get that diverse feel to it. That’s why I
called it Each Other. It’s individual personalities, individual
things making up this sort of mosaic.”
The album opens with the gorgeous “Rally,” a spare, accordion-led
hymn with a mass chorus of friends, and closes with “Run,” a huge piano
ballad where the choir becomes a gospel revival. “Those songs bookend
the CD for a reason. Just because it meant a lot to me to listen to my
friends singing them. I just feel outside myself when a lot of other
people are participating in something that was originally a very
individual vision.”
Free plays keyboards for pop-rockers Crosstide, but has been writing
and performing his own material for years, becoming fully ensconced in
a close-knit community of Portland songwriters and musicians. “We did
these songwriter nights at various places,” he says. “We called it
‘Shock and Awe.’ Once a month we’d get together and you’d have to only
bring new songs. We’d find a safe place to do it, like a coffee shop or
someone’s house or something like that. We’d invite a bunch of
different people. It was really cool and really fearless and all the
songs were really raw.”
Each Other is remarkably universal—its experimental
qualities are balanced by more traditional fare, like the
heartbreaking, incredible “One Hundred.” Free is still inspired by the
ambition of composers like Wagner and Tchaikovsky, which you can hear
in his melodies and arrangements, and his soaring vocals deserve
comparisons to both Thom Yorke and Freddie Mercury. Yet he’s looking to
do more.
“I’m gonna write a musical in the next year,” he reveals shyly.
“What sucks is my car was broken into and they took my backpack and
these 11 x 17 sheets, on which I had it all storyboarded out. But it’s
the musical of the robot messiah, ‘Steelmmanu’el’…. If I don’t write
a musical, then my life is a sham. Everything points that way. It would
be a shame to not pursue the melodrama. I’m a really big fan of
metaphor and archetype, and you can do that with theater. You can make
somebody who embodies love or hate and people are fine with that, and
you can move on with the story with these giant idealistic metaphors in
place. And that’s what I like talking about in general. There’s no way
I can efficiently or effectively incorporate that into my pop
music.”