The other day, Ryan Traster made a comment that his session would sound good this time of the year. We know what he means. He's right. It's right about now, as the snows melt away in Minnesota and Wisconsin for the last time until the next winter, where we're all starting to realize all that we've been missing for however many months we've been missing it all.
The songwriter from Portland, Oregon, writes songs that are looking to fill the voids that are seen and unseen. They are the voids that we sew into ourselves, as well as the ones that get picked up like lint and static electricity wherever we go and with whatever we touch. Traster brings us to these places of renewal, where it might not be a full rebirth that we're getting, but it's the next best thing. We can get the feeling of being that flowerbed that was neglected as the snows fell and the ground hardened, but now the layer of dead leaves and clutter has been collected up and taken away and there's something more like direct sunlight beating down on us again. We're suddenly and miraculously - it seems - in a position again where we'll be able to receive the rains immediately as they strike. We will now be able to feel a cool night breeze skimming across our surfaces.
Traster's songs are what springs are made of and what springs do to people. After months of avoiding what's happening outside windows and walls, we're able to roll the handles and prop open the windows to let the fresh air in. We know that it will all feel the same as what we've got here anyway. The temperatures will match, but we're now greeted with more room to roam with our thoughts. We're not cooped up with them, letting them distill us and turn us crazier than we should rightly be. We're stirred from our messes and allowed to travel the open roads with the crunch of tires on gravel below us, with the birds spoiling all the formerly muffled silences.