Mind Lines by Silver Scrolls

In my experience, some albums simply wind up as a pair of psychic bookends. "Music for Walks", the first Silver Scrolls album, began when I was taking classes in an analytic institute and would walk to class from my therapy office. I had the idea for an album that was simultaneously about the action of taking a walk and also made explicitly to listen to while on a walk. Around this same time I was introduced to the psychoanalytic work of Christopher Bollas and gravitated to his thoughts on the ‘receptive unconscious’ (which is in addition to repressed unconscious functions). In one chapter he wrote about how during leisure walks, the mind can float in and out of conscious awareness creating a reverie which receives generative associations fueling the receptive unconscious, the genesis of dreamwork and creativity. The daydreaming we do on leisure walks. This coalesced the whole project. While this conceptual thinking was integral, I didn’t forget that I was really ‘just’ making a rock record; riffs are king. That first Scrolls album was written and recorded in that (fill in the blank) time right before Covid with Brian Quast (more on him in a sec) and released into the void of that first Covid summer.

Fast-forward a few years to 2023. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about a bookend at that point in time, but as the tentative post-Covid re-entry progressed I found myself doing what I have done for years - sitting on the edge of my bed plunking out riffs and then trading them with Brian “BQ” Quast. I have been playing with BQ off and on for over a decade, a process that started with Polvo’s "In Prism". He is formidable, versatile and can seemingly do everything - he is the glue and the real musician in the group. Both Scrolls albums were recorded after one real ‘together’ practice and he was a lot of the reason why this was possible. Our styles just fit together, (including the one we like to call ‘Bread Zeppelin’). The easy and generative elements of our collaboration re-emerged as we started recording again.

Back to bookends, that brings us to the second Silver Scrolls record, "Mind Lines". BQ and I once again joined forces to make an album that plants you firmly in your most rock feelings. All the rocks: Classic rock, psych-rock, indie rock, folk-rock, post rock, pre-rock. Rock and Roll High School all through Post-Graduate. Harkening back to Polvo-times, I enjoy when albums echo the experience of listening to the radio and hopefully "Mind Lines" can take the listener there as well. We recorded "Mind Lines" in a few places but the most *together* time was spent with our friend Greg Elkins in Raleigh. Greg is someone who in the olden days would likely be classified as a “producer”, but we feel he is effectively the third Scroll handling a lot of the segue-magic and what we call ‘interstitials’ (small connective pieces between songs).

I hope "Mind Lines" does what a band’s second record sets out to do: maintain continuity and demonstrate new thoughts. To that end - and in the same cosmic vein as Polvo’s bookends "In Prism" and "Siberia" - I think "Mind Lines" makes a good bookend to this chapter of the Silver Scrolls experience. To keep the bookend ties consistent, the album’s title is a nod to Bollas’ concept of ‘ramifying lines’ of thought (likened to train tracks coming together at junctions) in the unconscious mind where associations are born and raised.

-Dave Brylawski, June 2024-