Brian Merrill, who goes by the stage name Zooey Celeste, has signed to ATO Records, which already manages the likes of artists like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Alabama Shakes.
Along with this, four years after his debut EP, he has announced that his new album, “Restless Thoughts,” will soon be coming out. This new piece is named after a previously released single, which came out earlier this year. The album is set to release on Nov. 10 and is already shaping up to be a great piece.
The album embraces a spacey, psychedelic and almost avant-garde style, making the listener feel as if they are hearing it in a dream. It acts as a story surrounding the artist’s alter ego of Zooey Celeste, which he dreamed up as a character for an equally avant-garde novel he wrote a few years prior.
Much of the album serves as a mix of these stories from his novel, with the title track in particular telling the story of the protagonist’s father. It is a dramatic scene, during which he leaves the protagonist after destroying his marriage to her mother. However, he leaves in a bad headspace and begins speeding towards his mistress.
Celeste then went on to explain that “He gets into a car accident, and two-thirds of the way into the song he’s floating above his body and watching as they’re trying to resuscitate him.”
However, not all of them are based on the novel. Some were written in a moment of improvisation, such as “Cosmic Being,” which he wrote in the midst of a fight with a former partner over the phone.
Despite the vast difference in sources of songwriting, the album still keeps that spacey, trippy feeling, using sparse drum machine beats and flowing, droning guitar strums as a backdrop. He then layers this under the sound of a deep baritone drenched in reverb.
It should come as no shock that the album is something all its own, as Celeste listed an eclectic array of influences, including J.D. Salinger, Iggy Pop, Tyler, The Creator and The Beatles.
It seems that The Beatles kick-started his musical process, though, as he began writing music after hearing them for the first time at eight years old. He began to pick up more instruments, such as the piano, the guitar and the harmonium. He also began to study poetry and creative writing.
After years of practice and study, Celeste moved to New York. While there, he connected with Nick Hakim, the producer of “Restless Thoughts,” and a fellow recording artist at ATO Records. He also began to play in several musical projects, mostly indie rock and pop. However, while there, he became disillusioned and felt that the music he was producing was not living up to what he wanted it to.
“We’d finish a show and it would be the best show we’d ever played, and I would feel physically sick afterward,” the artist said. “People liking it made me feel bad, which is probably because I knew I wasn’t being my most authentic self.”
Strangely enough, Celeste found that once he began to write from the perspective of a character like his alter ego of Zooey, he felt free. He went on to call it the “most authentic thing I’ve ever written in my life.”
Nevertheless, after seven years of these performances in New York, his wanderlust took him to Hawaii. He took up surfing, and quickly fell in love with the sport, making it a constant hobby.
He soon found his life nearly cut short because of it. While out on the waves one day, he accidentally surfed straight into a coral reef. This nearly sliced him up and would have infected any wounds inflicted on him with the high amounts of bacteria that are often found in coral. After his near-death experience, he found that his wanderlust had been completely satiated.
“(It) brought me closer to the things I’d been running away from,” the artist stated. He was no longer able to hide from the way he felt about himself and about music.
As a result of this, he was able to stop using music as an escape. Rather, the artist began to use it as a form of reflection. On top of this, it also began to become an outlet for his emotions, and he could use music as a way to avoid hiding from them.
Furthermore, it allowed the Southern California native to grow as an artist, shifting away from standard indie rock and pop and into a style that he calls “astral pop,” marked by its darkly ethereal sound and dreamlike soundscape, which is what Zooey Celeste is continuing to do in his music today.
