When was the last time you heard an album showing what it is like to have an overactive brain? What about a brain zeroing in on the many red herrings barely making up your afterthoughts focusing more on the very things that activate your anxieties, which mess with your need to just live in the moment? Minneapolis’ aviator and music maker Eric Mayson’s first single, “I Just Wanna Go” off his latest album Rerun tackles the latter with ever-morphing and ascending musical arrangements that feel like you are taking lift-off anywhere with Mayson himself. It’s to the point where you almost forget such is a quite grandiose dream.
Rerun travels through multiple genres from jazz to baroque pop to Bowie-like glam rock all in one record, and not for nothing. The nature of a wandering mind is expressed through wandering genres. To go with this theme of back-to-back thoughts, Mayson gives up on the usual practice of “setting the tone”—no introduction, no overture, no musical lead-in—and places you squarely in the middle of the now as soon as he flatly says “Hey” on the upbeat “Nevermind.” After all, there is no curtain open, narrator, or anything in real time. It’s just “Hey!”
Thematically, “Nevermind” is about the desire to switch off the autopilot button and exist. Through the song, Mayson takes the meta route by asking “Are you really listening or are you just hearing / Are you really taking it in or are you just seeing?” He offers some wonderful advice on your mental state, “Tend to your mind / Make it real, make it real a little every day.” As heartening as the advice may be, “I Just Wanna Go” hints that the need to live today doesn’t hold back the torture of anticipation and the desire to move things forward. How do you make things real when all there is left is anticipation and not the drive or resource?
The songs’ structure and sequence help support the purposefully lackadaisical approach. Long tracks are fully formed, while others feel like one temporary afterthought after another. The fact some run together almost like one whole song is a feat in itself and a demonstration of an ever-running mind. That would explain why songs such as “Burnside Bridge” and “Potholes,” two idiosyncratic mathpop tracks are shorter than two minutes. “Potholes,” is a song about escapism and the effects of sleep delirium. Meanwhile, “Readymade Mind,” a grandiose glam-rock song, is a four-minute interrogation of fear, anxiety, and how to deal with it all. Also, “IMURME” is a sprawling sound of synth string euphoria where the highs are grand and the return to earth feels less like a crash and more like trying to race home a realization. All songs tackle grand questions and ideas with as much curiosity as there is trepidation.
For example, the one-minute “Tautology” blends baroque pop and avant-hop in confounding ways. (Think if Flying Lotus started doing style blends with John Williams.) On it, Mayson winds up questioning life and choices. “What does that make me, thinking that life is ours to choose? / And what does that make you, thinking that life is win or lose?” Mayson asks. Never has trivial thoughts on how life works sounded so adventurous. The more chill, breezy “Frozen Man” finds Mayson in a catatonic state where the spell of thinking about “all the things you never did” and “all the lives you never lived” only ever gets broken by an outside visit from a loved one. Except here, no one actually does.
Unfortunately, “Apogee,” which boasts, some of Mayson’s smoothest and most spirited R&B performance, reveals the deep mental dive doesn’t end. The act of truly going anywhere doesn’t happen. “Ten more seasons and nothing changed,” bemoans Mayson. “I just wanna see you take a leap and live the life you wanna lead”. And of course, the album doesn’t end with a bow. Why would it? The dissonance between working out the kinks within your mind and living in the moment hardly ever ends.
Mayson revealed Rerun originally started as “ten one-minute songs” stretched into an album alongside longer pieces. You can easily either float in the what-if nature of Mayson’s lyrics or ignore it while marveling at his on-a-dime music moves. Either way, Rerun isn’t a project without something that’ll get stuck in your mind as soon as the thirty minutes are finished.
