With the tagline “Seven Songs About Seven That Might Put You To Sleep,” 7Sleepers isn’t here to mislead you. The Michigan based musician 7Sleepers, aka Robin Wylie, shares the album’s title track “Seven Sleepers” today, off his experimental self-titled debut 7Sleepers.
7Sleepers is inspired by the reoccurring number seven throughout many major religions and the Middle Eastern story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus – where seven Christians escaping persecution by the Romans hide in a cave and fall asleep for a century or more. The entire album’s lyrical content derives from various Biblical tales and ancient literary works, with “Salome” being inspired by the story of Salome and “Promised Land” by the Persian epic poem Conference of the Birds.
Completely self recorded and produced, Wylie calls the recording studio his best instrument. Not afraid of imperfection, he used lots of compression and reverb to create something abstract, dreamlike, and surreal. Wylie figured, “people would listen to it the same way I made it – alone, in a living room, with their headphones on!”
Wylie continued, “Honestly, I think the music has a more interesting biography than I do! But the typical musician bio might go something like this: I was in a couple of bands in the 1990’s, both sort of funk/rock/alternative/electronic, then I dropped out of the music scene so I could finally make a living. A few years later I felt like I needed to make music again.”
“But this time I didn’t want to join a band or do live shows, and I didn’t want to worry about any deadlines. I just wanted to work in my home studio, and have plenty of time to play around and get a feel for what sounded cool and what didn’t. I also wanted to make music that didn’t sound like what was already in the market. Why make music if it’s just going to sound like what somebody else is doing, and probably doing better? And I’m not a very good musician, so I needed to figure out how to sound good within my limitations. That wasn’t easy!”
“I also needed something to write about. Songwriting is storytelling, and I needed stories. In the past, lots of music came from religion and mythology, so I thought maybe I could get some stories from that. I came across the story of Salome, from the Gospels, and I thought it was really cool. It has all the elements of an Alfred Hitchcock movie — love, lust, politics, murder! Always good subjects for a song. So that was the first.”
“Then I started to notice that the number seven kept coming up over and over in the Bible. And it even shows up in other religions and traditions, pretty much all over the world. At some point I came across the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the most famous version is in the Qu’ran. That was it! I would write seven songs about the number seven. And they might put you to sleep!”
“Finding the stories was easy, they’re everywhere. Getting them to work as songs was tricky sometimes. Like “Promised Land” is from “Conference of the Birds”, an epic Persian poem from about a thousand years ago, written by Farid ud-Din Attar. Turning the whole poem into a four-minute pop song just wasn’t working. So I focused on just a few pages of the book, where a Nightingale falls in love with a Rose. I think it’s really cool, it’s probably my favorite lyric on the album.”
“And then how do I sing the songs? I wanted the song to dictate the style, but I also had to work within my limitations. I love R+B singers like Marvin Gaye and Al Green, but I could never sing like them. I can do a decent imitation of the old crooners, like Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. I’m not as good as them, of course, but I think I can imitate their style pretty well. And Peter Murphy from Bauhaus also has a crooning style that I like a lot. He sounds really dramatic, I thought that worked with some of the songs.”
“So writing and recording was lots of trial and error, mostly error. But mixing was lots more fun. I wanted the music to sound sleepy and dreamlike and surreal. Kind of like shoegaze or dreampop, but maybe a little more abstract. Eventually I figured out that leaving in a lot of the “rough edges” from the recordings, and even layering them and making them louder, had a slightly disorienting effect that you might have in a dream. So I took the mistakes and the random noises that would bleed into the microphone and added reverb and effects and mixed those into the song. It’s more obvious on some songs than others, but it’s there on all of them.”
7Sleepers is now playing on TMN Radio.