Every song has a story. The 9 songs on Looking Glass are no exception. This is the first installment of a blog series to talk about how each of them came about.
Future Dream was a highly experimental song for me. The music sort of came rushing out one day as a complete verse/chorus construct, but I had no idea what it was going to be about. Most songwriters will tell you that they often sing meaningless lyrics, sometimes just gibberish, in order to pin down a melody, and then go back and work on it later. (Not all songs begin this way for me, but it is pretty common.) I recorded the first demo with some humming and mutterings like this just to capture it, and then kind of forgot about it.
Then one morning I woke up from the most incredible dream I've ever had. Not to sound weird, but I've had an enormous amount of what I consider to be incredible dreams, so this is no trivial statement from me. This dream honestly seemed more like a vision - it was so lucent and otherworldly, so important somehow. I can't possibly describe it in proper detail; suffice it to say that I seemed to visit a future in which we had advanced well beyond our current physical and mental capabilities, and were able to tap into energy that allowed us to fly, read other people's minds, and indulge in shared power with each to do the "proper" thing. And if it wasn't "proper", you failed. But you weren't judged for the failure - you just wanted to get better, sort of like an athlete who wants to improve his talent. And there was no shield, no pretending - everyone knew the game and our place within it.
When I woke up from this dream, I stumbled downstairs half awake, booted up the computer, and did my best to write down every single detail to the best of my ability. I'm not a morning person, don't generally do *anything* until I've got some coffee flowing through my veins, but this was just way too important to lose. I felt compelled to capture it before it slipped out of my conscious recall, because I honestly thought I had traveled somewhere and seen something that I really needed to remember. It was hard, because it didn't fit very well with how you describe normal thoughts or events, but I did my best.
After some time had passed, I rediscovered the demo of that song with no concept and decided to try something I had never done - create a song poem out of a dream and fit it into the melody I had written. This presented a pretty big challenge - I had a hard enough time describing it in plain language, much less within the constraints of melody and rhyme, but I gave it a shot. Each "scene" within the dream got interpreted into a verse/chorus construct, and it all eventually worked out. (And for once, I didn't feel the need to add a bridge!)
So there's the story. I do have the original description of the dream in a document, but it really doesn't do justice to the actual experience of the dream. Neither does the song. But songs are meant to take the listener to whatever space they want, so my own vision about it really doesn't matter.