“Somebody told me this David Bowie quote, ‘Walk on the beach toward the ocean ‘til your feet can barely hit the ground and that’s where you have to live as an artist,’” he says.
A sonic love letter to the warmth of 60s pop - and especially 1966’s Beach Boys opus Pet Sounds - Big Sky Pipe Dream finds Freeze shedding some of the “outer space” sounds from Haus that led Nashville Scene to label him the “cosmic Tom Petty.” These are traded in favor of sun-drenched harmonies and perfect pop nuggets of tracks like “First Time,” a song NPR called “an unseasonably pleasant spring Saturday in song form.”Īn artist who always seeks to keep experimentation and agility at the forefront, Freeze wrote Big Sky Pipe Dream seeking to make a departure from the “heavy and conceptual” sound of his previous offering. The new album is also a departure from the sound on Freeze’s previous outing, Cosmic Haus. Citing David Bryne’s influential book How Music Works and how music is sculpted to fill the space one resides in, Freeze intentionally crafted the album to “represent the sound of playing in dive bars and DIY venues.” So it’s fitting that on his latest full-length, Big Sky Pipe Dream, Freeze comes as close as he ever has to capturing his live sound on tape - literally.īig Sky Pipe Dream is a collection of songs Freeze and his band had long kept in rotation on the road, recorded live in the studio and tracked to tape between stints on tour starting in 2018, almost a documentation of life on the road circa 2018-2021. In fact, the Nashville psych-pop artist is such a prolific performer that, as of the beginning of May 2021, he boasted 516 live shows since 2016 - a rate of one every three nights for almost five years. The term “road warrior” was made for Nordista Freeze.