Artist Profile: Davis Baer

Charlie Sosnick
Website Editor

When Junior Davis Baer and his band walked up to the mic at Ramstock, the audience buzzed with excitement. He played a few covers, but the crowd really started paying attention when Davis followed up with “Painted Skies” and “Maybe Love’s Not For Me”, two of the original songs that Davis has come to be known for.

These songs and others, uploaded to Soundcloud one-by-one over the last few months, have built a large following for Davis around the school, and students jumped at the chance to see him perform live. However, few audience members were aware of the artistry and musicianship behind Davis’s original music.

According to Davis, he began playing guitar in eighth grade to impress a girl. But his love for writing music quickly emerged after that. “My main goal when I started playing was to write,” he said. “I never wanted to just play other people’s music.”

The instrumental portion of Davis’s songwriting process comes first. “I just sit down and every time I play, I think something new up,” he said. “Sometimes when you make music, you don’t feel like you’re making it. You just tune to a frequency and it comes naturally.”

Oftentimes, Davis will record and engineer his songs on his own in his home studio to further enhance his playing. “Instead of a painter who works with brushes, I listen to stuff and paint sonically. I manipulate sounds.”

The inspiration for his lyrics comes from a wide variety of sources, including his own life experiences. “You have to not fabricate emotion [when writing songs], but embellish it,” Davis said. “Not that it makes it mean any less to me, because I mainly focus on the music first. I try to find an emotion in the music and then write lyrics about it.”

From there, Davis talks to his friends to get feedback on the music. “I work with them because they’re not musicians,” he said. “If you give a song to a non-musician, they’re going to give you an honest answer. They’re going to focus more on the song than the technical things.”

According to Davis, seeking the opinion of others helps him stay objective. “I like letting others critique it to make it as good as it can be. I am my biggest critic, but I still like I should have one more level of critique, so there’s no bias on my part.”

Over the last five months, Davis has been working on a demo album which he calls “Oso”. The album grew as a collection of original songs he wrote after leaving his previous project, a collaboration with a “kid from another town” who did not offer Davis the freedom to work on his own and make the music he wanted to make. “I like working on my own,” he said. “I’m very stubborn in that sense.”

As Davis finished the tracks for “Oso”, he uploaded them to the music streaming website Soundcloud.com for all to hear. “I used to be extraordinarily nervous,” he said. “I would put up [the song]and then turn off Facebook. I distance myself from it for a while.”

Though Davis sometimes worries about posting his songs, his music has been praised by members of the school community and beyond. “I’d say the reactions have been positive, but I don’t believe it. It’s a good thing to be objective and ignore the love. The worst thing an artist can have is an ego.”

Recently, Davis has put “Oso” aside for a while to prepare his live set for Ramstock, the school’s annual band night on Wednesday, May 22. He performed a few solo numbers there on guitar and vocals, as well as several song with a band made up of Juniors Brandon Pak on drums, Kenny Philipson on bass, and Will Cuoco on guitar.

In the future, Davis has big plans for himself, turning “Oso” from a demo into a studio album. “I’m re-recording most of it in a studio with real equipment,” he said. “But just because it’s a demo album doesn’t mean it means any less to me, because it basically is the blueprint for the real one. I’m going to be doing mainly the same things just with better recordings.”

Beyond that, Davis has career aspirations in the music industry as well. “People say you don’t want your job to be just a paycheck, and I definitely want to do something with composing music.”