Rayland sits beside me on the footsteps of his tour van. His yellow American Spirits pull together his neutral, monochrome color palette as he tells me when and how music changed the course of his life. In early 2000s, Rayland was just a college lacrosse player living in Baltimore, Maryland. “I played lacrosse for two years and then my dad gave me a guitar. I got kicked out of school for a year \[and\] came back after my junior year… \[I\] quit the lacrosse team half way through the season, started a cover band with my buddies that quit too and we played cover songs at friends house parties.” After college, Rayland moved to Colorado and began doing open mic nights until he had a chance to go on tour with his father, the prolific guitar player William "Bucky" Baxter, who has played behind and alongside musicians like Steve Earl, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Ryan Adams, Sheryl Crow and the Beastie Boys. This European tour lead to Rayland’s six-month stay in Israel. There, Rayland really started his journey as a songwriter. Developing his talent, he moved back to Nashville and has “been non-stop in the \[music\] world ever since”.
Rayland Baxter’s, _Wide Awake_ was conceived this past July. Post _Imaginary Man_ and _Feathers & Fishhooks, Wide Awake_ is his third full-length album. When I ask him what woke him up, he jokingly responds, “Adderall,” only to quickly correct himself, explaining how it was all about being true to himself. Rayland wrote most of the songs on the recent album after The _Imaginary Man_ tour. For a month and a half, he had been playing a thirty-minute set every night preceding The Lumineers and Borns. After the tour, he found himself in Kentucky, writing and living in an old rubber band factory turned music studio. With some old voice notes from years before, a guitar, a Wurlitzer and some large pieces of paper, Rayland wrote about fifty songs over the course of roughly three months. Imagine, being alone with “blanketed windows”, “one buzzing light in the corner” and “coyotes howling in the corn fields.” It was in this unusual environment out of which the blueprint for _Wide Awake_ was born. He proceeded to record the album right here in Santa Monica with a producer by the name of Butch Walker of Red Studios. The result was a unique vision comprised of lyrics and sound bites Rayland created over the past couple years.
Rayland’s priority is making beautiful music and playing meaningful shows; the kind of shows where the band and the crowd feed off each other’s collective energy. “You either go inside yourself and perform for yourself or you try to get their attention through captivation”, Rayland explains. Curiosity hit, I ask, “what captivates you?” and the unexpected, immediate answer being “killer whales” only made Rayland more perplexing.
Rayland has an ability to push people. Whether he is surrendering to the organizational chaos that this universe brings with lyrics like “the way that it goes is just the way that it is,” or posing contemporary questions, “is wonder? is it fame?/ or is it popularity that ruins everything?” Rayland pushes us to “let it all go” and to think. “A song should be a platform for dreaming”, he says, “For pondering, for understanding that someone else is thinking the same way that you are.” That is the magic that songwriters have. They grasp at feelings and phenomena and harness them through the power of words. And what is more relatable than love or lack there of? We talk of love and our congruent love for love. Rayland admits, “Of course. It has left me, multiple times.” Maybe the bodies leave, not the love itself. Once a “true feeling” exists, it doesn’t necessarily leave. It shifts and bodies go in different directions but, “you will always love… you are attached to that forever.”
As for singer-songwriters, I imagine that attachment glues itself to particular pieces of work. We talk about the difficulty of reliving moments through one’s lyrics. You can fall so far back into something, someone, or even yourself, with the words you pen. Moments like these are when Rayland “gets into singing the lyrics.” You can tell when a musician is gifting a portion of themselves to their performance and “that is what you want as an audience member”, says Rayland, “You want to go to that show and be like, holy shit I saw this show last night, Bruno Mars fucking killed it. It was amazing, I cried.” Neither of us have seen Bruno Mars in concert but you get the idea. Emotional auras drive audience members just as much as they drive musicians.
Rayland Baxter radiates an aura that is difficult to put into words. He is animated, taking on different voices and characters throughout our interview. I begin to realize the creativity it takes to write fables and tell stories through songwriting as he makes one up right before my eyes. Meet, Mr. Wicklefoot: An Omaha native, who wears a holy shirt and has tobacco on his nose. He walks around the block with a big stick and resides in a bush in of course, Bushwick. There is a certain level of imagination that Rayland has managed to maintain whilst others fail. Rayland is a modern day “Casanova”, walking the sidewalks of “Sandra Monica” with Sixto Rodriquez and “fire-Breathing Dragons.” His lyrics are a reminder of the nostalgia we have for creative thought. One of the staple concurrences with growing old, it seems, is growing away from imagination and creativity. I am unsure why we allow this to occur, but there are things that can help us find our way back and Rayland Baxter’s, _Wide Awake_ is certainly one of them.
* * *
Written and Photographed by Meagan Rafferty
Edited by: Tori Adams
.jpeg)
