Okay Headspace by Company Vacation

In the years since releasing 2016's "Expectations", I wasn't sure it mattered if my songs had a listener.

Without a listener, songwriting was easy. Whatever was on my mind was worthy of a melody, and singing those melodies, and recording them, and listening back to those recordings, was plenty of fun without having to involve anybody else. And so, songwriting became an exercise of burrowing deeper inside, a tree falling in (my) forest. Over a couple years, out of this place a chunk of songs developed which felt cohesive, album-like simply because they were all speaking from the same voice (mine) to the same listener (also me).

But that’s not the whole truth. In that window of time, I started sharing an apartment with Emily. And, for Emily, announcing what she’s doing with a song is fundamental to the doing of anything. The chorus of “Here Comes The Weekend (There it Goes)”, which she wrote, is a small sample of her regular homey jingle-making. So, as the two of us would clunk around, hissing our little counter melodies, I knew I had something worth pursuing when my songs got some airtime on her voice.

Maybe I wasn't singing to the empty air after all! And a good thing because here we are, many hours and ill-suited guitar solos later.

Recorded music, unlike apartment mumbling, pre-supposes a listener. It’s a bet, a belief that the small musical ideas of the present can escape the home and live on the iPods of the future. And you’re here, as a listener (and a reader), making good on that hope. Thank you.

Company Vacation is songwriter Kyle Benson in Oakland, CA.