Bear Factory

Alright, it’s here. The song I’ve talked about since the beginning. I looked up the first demo of this song, and I was shocked… 2017. I’ve been sitting on it for 7 years. The main reason is being completely intimidated by the thought of making a nearly 13 minute video. At one point 5ish years ago I bought an Oculus Rift with the intent of building a virtual 3D world for the video. The weight of that idea collapsed, however, the sign on the Bear Factory cover art, created by Tarah, was originally made in this 3D virtual world.

This song, if I can even call it that, was an anomaly in terms of how it was was written. I wrote all the lyrics in one sitting. The next day, I had a recording session scheduled that I was engineering out of my home studio, and the client was set to arrive in 30 minutes. I thought, I really need to make some kind of demo for these lyrics I just wrote. I hadn’t written any music at all. Zero. So I plugged in my guitar, grabbed a mic, and proceeded to write the song in a single improvised take. The rhythm guitar track on the song today is the same track from that first demo.

It’s easy to look at something like Bear Factory and think it’s some goofy joke about an imaginary bear, though it’s not. The lyrics were stream of consciousness, and they came from a place that reflected exactly what was going on in my life at the time. All my dreams had essentially crumbled. The things I thought I would do, the bands I thought would go somewhere, the people I thought I would stick with, all vanished. That’s the baseball part of the song. Answering the remaining questions, releasing societal expectations, and reconnecting with why I make music, or more broadly why any of us actually do the things we do, that’s what it means to go into the Bear Factory. I didn’t know any of this at the time of course. I didn’t sit down and say “I’m gonna make a song about xyz…” It just poured out.

I don’t want to say too much more. As always, thank you. Thank you for being here, for checking out the song early, for listening, watching, sending messages. All of it. I am so grateful.