Dana Buoy (of Akron/Family) Releases New Single 'When It's You I See'

Portland's Dana Buoy is excited to share "When It's You I See" the latest single to be lifted from the his new LP, Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I out May 13 via Everloving Records (pre-order). The song debuted today at Under The Radar and will be available on all streaming services this Friday for any playlist shares.

On the song Under The Radar says, "Luxuriant splashes of synths and watery melodies introduce the song in a floating reverie, only for Jannsen to then veer into a bouncing pop chorus and a kaleidoscopic synth interlude. Later, the track reaches its climax with a sunny trumpet solo courtesy of Kelly Pratt (Beirut, Father John Misty, The War on Drugs) bringing the track to an end on a note of indelible joy. Jannsen's truest talent is finding the right setting to knit these elements together. Each part feels like a different limb on a tree, branching in different directions yet sharing common roots."

Dana Buoy adds, "This is a song for Henry. A young one whom I adore, and will always be there for as he continues to grow and discover the wonders of nature."

"When It's You I See" follows the album's lead single "Maidenhair" which is inspired by 1970s composer Mort Garson who spun his mellow mood for the maidenhair fern, his keyboards seeming to trace its infinitely spooling fronds. Dana Bouy follows through with "Maidenhair," an irrepressible love song laced with cascading flutes and built with his own world of kaleidoscopic keys. By the time the horn finale arrives, you'll need to know exactly what's so enchanting about this plant.

"Maidenhair" debuted at Brooklyn Vegan and is available on all streaming platforms.
Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I is latest release from Dana Janssen, longtime Akron/Family drummer, who has been making kaleidoscopic pop as Dana Buoy for a decade.

Janssen's exuberant and strangely assuring synthesis of those previously parallel domestic lanes, houseplants and a home drum kit. Inspired by the flora that reign on the ground floor and Mort Garson's endlessly pleasing Plantasia, and conceived in the basement beneath, these 12 pieces of luxuriant pop - rooted in Steely Dan and synthesizer strata, Afrobeat energy and astral harmonies, Robert Hunter koans and righteous horns - offer new mantras for and prospective maps of our complicated lives. "From nest we fall in no time at all," Janssen coos at one point over incisive funk. "Know that I got you, I got you." If you worry about any New Age tedium to a record inspired by photosynthesis, don't: Janssen wants you to sing along with what he's learned.

Accessibility has almost always been paramount to Janssen, despite his enduring association with "New Weird America" through Akron/Family, arguably the most boundless Pied Pipers of that systemically nebulous scene. But before Akron/Family took listeners somewhere strange, they unfailingly started with a song, some hummable artifact that remained even as they spiraled. Singing from behind the drums, Janssen often offered a sense of melodic ballast, rooting Akron/Family against the unknown.

Janssen's two previous albums as Dana Buoy have charted that very territory - unapologetic pop songs informed by R&B and electronica - without the compromise that band life entailed. But remember: He had no drums before. These songs are different not only because of their botanical genesis but because actual drums prompted Janssen to play outside of a strict rhythmic grid and to recruit outside collaborators. A longtime acquaintance who became a close friend, Kelly Pratt, arranged and played the cataracts and cascades of horns here, adding Dana Buoy to a résumé that includes relationships with Beirut, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs. Justin Miller, meanwhile, handled the bass, his bulbous tone a perfect counterpart for Janssen's angular approach. (John McEntire, of Tortoise and something of a hero for Janssen, offered a crucial assist in mixing it.) After Akron/Family, these are Janssen's deepest musical relationships.

These songs swing and sway and bend, their huge choruses animated by a band that perfectly balances the hard and the soft, the aggressive and the lambent. Lead single "Maidenhair," boasts a winning cheer, with Janssen using the love lives of ferns to celebrate the safe relationships we all hope to find over splashy keys and lilting horns. The trio dips into the headspace of Electric Miles again and again, always latching back onto an indelible hook.

Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I arrives at a fraught time for Janssen. Only a year ago, Miles Seaton - Janssen's rhythmic and spiritual counterpart in Akron/Family for so long - died in a car crash near the other end of Oregon, a tragedy amplified by the recent revival of their collaboration. (Seaton sings on a track here, while Akron/Family's Seth Olinsky takes a guitar solo.) And Janssen has contended with many of the same existential challenges so many folks face as they stare down 40, from health woes and novel hobbies to confronting the future after something that defined you for so long has ended.

In a very real sense, then, the plants helped Janssen find meaning and metaphors for what has been and what may be next. In these songs, it sounds like measured hope. "Naked root, growing in the air," he sings at the center of "Eventually, Good Comes to Pass," a hymn that mixes stacks of word games, sheets of acid jazz, and winks of Steve Reich pointillism. The last word hangs there in the cacophony of space, like an unheard and anxious plea, before Janssen returns to the stable bassline and the title's mantra. "Good," he finally sings, tentatively but with a welcome modicum of trust. "Come to stay."

Listen to the new single here:

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