Baas player Bryan Beller is finally finding the time to work on a new solo album. It will be ""A Modern Progressive Musical Concept" album,. There will 18 tracks in all and he has recorded demos for about half of them so far. From his website:
It's been ten years since I wrote the material that became 2008's Thanks In Advance, my last studio solo album. Many, many things have happened since then, and while I was fortunate to be busy with lots of fulfilling work, a noise was building in the back of my head for years about what my next solo album would look, feel and sound like. That noise became a roar last year, as I realized I was walking around with enough material in my head for not just a new album, but a new double album. And when I refer to what was "in my head", I mean pretty close to the whole thing: The album title, the song titles, the melodies, the sonic textures, the grooves, the album narrative, the sequence, the transitions…everything. It's been a bit odd, as you can imagine.
The good news I've finally started the process of getting all of this out of my head and into reality. I now have completed demos for nine of the album's projected eighteen songs. So far, while it's obviously still me writing this stuff, I think it's a pretty radical departure from what I've done before. Right now the best phrase I can conjure up is "A Modern Progressive Musical Concept". The word concept is deliberate: This is a concept album. It's also definitely less fusion-y, less note-y, and more focused on soundscapes and melodies as you would imagine them through a modern progressive conceptual lens. I mean, sure, they're not pop songs, there's intricate bits, but that's not the focus. If I manage to do it right, it will tell a story, but hopefully not a story limited to and by my own experiences. I'd like it to land as something broader than that.
That all sounds pretty ambitious and high-minded, right? It is, and making it happen will require a healthy chunk of my creative and musical energy for the foreseeable near future. It's been very rewarding to have the time and space to work on this, and I look forward to sharing more with you when the moment is right. For now, there's still plenty of road ahead on making this all a reality, starting with finishing the demos for the second half of the album.