[Cover photo credit to Doug Moore]
Industrious LA-based, Oregon-bred Indie artist Bee Appleseed is also a music producer, multi-instrumentalist, poet, comedian, and “seasoned vagabond”. One of his recent LPs has been Starflower’s Cosmic Soul, that was released in 2020, but since then some live collections, both electric and acoustic, have appeared.
Today, we’re very pleased to premier his video for the song “I Was Dreaming”, which was directed by Chris Soohoo. The song originally hails from Starflower’s Cosmic Soul, and Bee Appleseed has shared an exclusive discussion of the making of the song and video below.
Sadly, the writing of the song was impacted by gentrification and eviction in contrast to its hopeful vision of a kind of utopia. However, the making of the video happily also ties into and marks the return of a beloved live event, “Unusual Tuesdays”, today, August 2nd, 2022, in LA.
Bee Appleseed writes:
“You know how it is being an artist – you’re poor because society requires a thriving starving artist archetype to live together in poorer parts of town that the real estate industry can then evict as soon as the community starts to thrive. My friends were living at this cool art house in the mountains outside Los Angeles that was perfectly isolated from distraction where they were constantly creatively collaborating and this video was one of the final things to be created there before they got evicted too at the beginning of the pandemic.
In a way, this song “I Was Dreaming” which I wrote in Portland back in Summer 2016 while kinda floating around the edges of society came to take on a whole new meaning with my journey just to get it out into the world, first being homeless in my car for over a year before I could afford to pay to do the finishing touches on the record. Then, when I finally released the album just after my 30th birthday in February 2020, the pandemic kicks in and the label that released the album, Baby Robot had to understandably shift focus away from my release in order to stay afloat. In a way, making this music video was a bit of like creating our own utopia we’d been dreaming of all along.
Chris SooHoo is the real genius behind the thing and I just sorta flopped around in front of a green screen. The whole reason we know each other is because of this weekly live absurdist magical performance show in Los Angeles called Unusual Tuesdays, which is the best live show I’ve ever seen in all my wanderings. When that shut down because of the pandemic, there was a brief window when they went to livestreaming the events to all of us at home (who would prank call them on the livestream) before they could no longer keep their venue Sun Space, and Chris was there behind the scenes helping make that livestream so amazing, better than anything I’ve ever seen on television.
I never laugh at anything as much as when watching Unusual Tuesdays and with its return on August 2nd at The Oracle Tavern in Los Angeles, this feels like the perfect time to get this video out there. Maybe I was dreaming when I originally wrote the song, when I released it, or when I made this music video, but perhaps just maybe that vision of utopia lives on if we keep the dream alive. Anyway, here’s to maintaining that optimism.”
