CD – Day One

Description

Like the collaborative world Meyer embraces, Day One contains a rich, diverse and dynamic landscape so vast it’s impossible to take it all in at once. Clocking in just shy of two hours, the album is a cornucopia of sounds and styles. Arena-sized alt-rock anthems, bruised post-grunge rockers, brooding nu-metal ballads, pounding Sunset Strip glam-slam, energized electro-rock excursions, lush synthesizer ballads, even dashes of reggae-pop, funk and disco — they’re all here, meticulously crafted and rendered with an arsenal of blazing guitars, thundering drums, grinding basses, and keyboards of all shapes, sizes and stripes. “I didn’t want to limit myself,” Meyer understates. “Some songs has a lot of synths — one song is all synths, actually — and then others are completely traditional rock instruments, guitar and drums. Every song is different.”

Yet somehow, it all hangs together, united by Meyer’s soaring vocals and emotionally devastating lyrics culled from life’s harshest realities. Look no further than the single Kneeling Scars, a hauntingly intense tale with a harrowing backstory. “Kneeling Scars is a song that a classmate helped me with — his brother committed suicide quite a few years ago,” Meyer confides. “He got kind of messed up and took a really bad path in life. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know how. We were talking on Facebook and I said, ‘Let’s do a song.’ I like to help people and give back. But it really got to me. It was so intense that I started to cry while singing the vocals. I actually had to stop. I could have done the vocals better, but they were so emotional that I knew I had to keep them.”

There’s more where that came from. Other tracks on Day One deal unflinchingly with death, depression, the pandemic, greed, lies and betrayal — though the disc also has its share of light-hearted rockers, tender mercies and tales of hope and optimism. Whatever the topic and the approach, Meyer says the goal is the same, and simple:  “I just want people to listen. I just want them to think. If I can achieve that, I think I’ve won.”