Ex-expat singer-songwriter Bryyn released his new album ‘In Shapes’ on October 16. It’s a col­lec­tion of ten orig­i­nal, some­what unusual songs that piqued my inter­est, because I sus­pected an intrigu­ing and thought­ful per­son behind them. So, I asked Bryyn a few ques­tions, and he didn’t dis­ap­point me with his answers.

Most of the songs on ‘In Shapes’ were already fea­tured on ‘House Plants’, that was pub­lished by Aaahh Records. What’s the rea­son for mak­ing a new album out of old songs that were already released under cc license?

It’s an exper­i­ment. Part of it is that you don’t know the answer until it is done. The songs were “remas­tered” from ‘House Plants’ and also from some other pre­vi­ous record­ings. Remastering is a pretty ambigu­ous term! Basically I gave the orig­i­nal stem files to Gar Ragland (of NewSong Recordings) and Richard Dodd. They sent these stems through their fancy ana­log sum­ming mixer. This makes the final sound qual­ity bet­ter than doing it all inside the com­puter as I did orig­i­nally on my own. Overall, you will not hear much of a dif­fer­ence in sound on a cheap pair of head­phones, but you will def­i­nitely hear a dif­fer­ence with a good pair of home audio speak­ers or headphones!

You orig­i­nally planned to release ‘In Shapes’ in July. Why the delay?

July was a dry month. and the corn was slow grow­ing. This impacted the farm­ers cal­en­dar and set me back. We moved from Switzerland to Ohio and then I thought, it’s high time to do some shrub­bery cut­ting. So this took a long time and by the time I was done it was October!

Did liv­ing in Europe have an effect on your music, espe­cially on this album?

It def­i­nitely had an impact on my music, but not so much on this album because these songs were mostly recorded before I lived in Switzerland! And also I learned that Switzerland isn’t really Europe, it’s a weird tiny place. Generally, it was quite iso­lat­ing musi­cally, but with the inter­net and all I met some good friends like Uniform Motion and Entertainment for the Braindead in Europe! We didn’t make a lot of songs, but we did make some nice ones. I think Europe is amaz­ing, in all its parts, and will be impact­ing my music for the rest of my life.

Have you moved back to the US permanently?

I’m not sure what per­ma­nent means! I am hop­ing to move for a time to New Zealand and some­where in South America, like Bolivia.

It seems to me that most of the songs are about God. Would you call it a con­cept album themed around your faith or religion?

The songs on the album are a bit of a mys­tery to me. You see, I only par­tially picked them. For me, I need to make all my songs! They are all spe­cial to me, lit­tle time cap­sules. The label actu­ally picked out songs that they liked for the record. So it was not really my deci­sion which songs showed up on the album. Interestingly, I would agree that many of them have a lot of con­cepts related to my per­sonal reli­gious expe­ri­ence. It even might sound like a con­cept album! This is pretty inter­est­ing. Thanks for cap­i­tal­iz­ing God.

“the world is rounder than an orange peel / the sun is fur­ther than the atmos­phere” What do these lines mean? They are obvi­ously true but silly at the same time like a nurs­ery rhyme, but they seem to be unre­lated to the rest of the song, and it kind of baf­fles me.

Sometimes I sing words that only cer­tain peo­ple can really decode. I can assure you that some­one out there knows exactly what this means (in its full con­text). In the basic sense, I once heard this story on National Public Radio in the USA. It was about a geol­o­gist who heard that kansas was “flat­ter than a pan­cake”. So he decided to test it!

He mea­sured the sur­face rough­ness of the pan­cake, and then got some ele­va­tion maps of Kansas and com­pared them. It was amaz­ing what he found! In fact, Kansas is exceed­ingly flat­ter than a pan­cake! He found that if you shrink the entire world down to the size of a bil­liard ball, it is actu­ally far smoother than that! Even with the Himalaya moun­tains. They don’t even show up. After hear­ing this story from this sci­en­tist… I think we can really know that we are small, and even our biggest per­ceived prob­lems are pretty small.

Your way of singing your songs has a cer­tain kind of inno­cence to it, you sound so light­hearted even when talk­ing about the heav­ier stuff. Is this a con­scious deci­sion to make Bryyn sound like that, or that’s how you inter­pret things nat­u­rally? How do you relate to your own lyrics emotionally?

This might be how I inter­pret things nat­u­rally, because I never really thought about how I sing when I sing. As I work on a song I think there is a lot sub­lim­i­nal going on. I try to go quickly as I write/record a song and not take more than one or two tries at a sin­gle part. Going back on things often makes them more “per­fect” but also less true and trans­par­ent. As I write words I like to mut­ter to myself and sortof unlock words that I didn’t know where there. It can be ter­ri­fy­ing and very emo­tional to real­ize what they mean.

What do you expect from the release of this album? As a musi­cian, what are your wildest hopes for the near future?

I expect that this release will help my grand­kids remem­ber me even if my house burns down! I hope my house doesn’t burn down. My wildest hopes are to have more time to make music and start hav­ing a few more vari­eties of birds come to my birdfeeder.

I should also say that i have com­pleted another Bryyn album called ‘In Hiding’. This is a com­pan­ion album to ‘In Shapes’. It has all new songs that I recorded in Switzerland in the last year, and will be released in early 2013. I’m really excited about these songs! Also, I’m work­ing on another album now called ‘Tend My Sheep’ (ten­ta­tive name).

Would you ever give up your career in sci­ence for music?

Hm. It is nice to say that I’m a sci­en­tist around musi­cians and a musi­cian around sci­en­tists! You don’t have to be very good at anything.

Thank you, Bryyn!

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