Blast Off Into the Silence of Space With Breanna Barbara's "Big Bang Blues"
Back in 2016, I was writing music reviews for Indie Band Guru and collided with the brilliant likes of Breanna Barbara. Her debut album, Mirage Dreams, had just been released and I had the privilege to capture it on the virtual page. A few weeks ago, I had the flattery of Barbara sending me her new single, and so here I am, and here you are, looping through the orbit once more.
While her entrance burst down the doors with a steel-boot kick in Mirage Dreams, Barbara withdraws into a softer more subdue tone, drawing the curtains closer in “Big Bang Blues.” With Breanna Barbara as captain, we dissolve into a warped illusional dimension, shimmering with drawling sounds, shape-shifting rhythms, melting mixtures of blue hues.
Barbara’s voice emerges over a cascading clash of classical guitar and bass, her voice steady—like a rocketship coursing through the atmosphere and soaring through the uproar of space—as the instrumentals trail away into streams of separate thoughts and paths, as shards of ourselves break away on a self-search.
With a whispery sultry voice, Barbara is a gaseous star in our solar system, flickering with an on-top-of-the-earth style pleading. And this voice mirrors the insightful introspection of her lyrics, which “[float] around me and you.” Her humming vocals ride like a current over the crashing soundwaves of the drums and strings behind her—a melodic howl, a minor wailing—that lingers far away in the distance, like answers to the universe.
In the instrumentals, there is this eeriness that sits in your stomach like a pit—a black hole inside you that you dive into the center to cure the core—which shatters planets and moons with squealing guitar slides. But these tones are reminiscent of the “running around like time/minds running around” and break open the inner chasm of the mind’s most vulnerable timetable: existential thought.
“Big Bang Blues” may have burst through an episode of “In The Dark”—now streaming on Netflix—but the irony is not lost as Barbara searches for the meaning of life and light. The song descends into a shrouded overcast of discordant strings that have an underscore of a brassy belt, but as Barbara’s voice echoes, “Do you believe,” the senses inside you connect, like all chakras aligning to chi.
Barbara’s chants of “Do you believe” recede into the relapse of time and space, as well as the scattered remnants of the strings, while underneath, a marching drum beats the realization that we are all connected by “floating” through the unknown. Since we are all on the same spaceship in the limbo of self-reflection and isolation, it makes you question if it is such a “waste of time” wondering about the distance between the dust of ourselves and the particles of the cosmos.
As I have asked myself many times, in the silence of my own thoughts, if we are all shaken by the same dread of loneliness, then why on earth do we not feel more unity and togetherness? Once we discover that we are multilayered people in a single organism and frame, just as the mind is made up of colliding parts of comets and asteroids, then we can settle as “dust,” like billions of stars glittering across “the midnight sky.” The answers always lie within the solace we feel inside ourselves and with one another, even through our inner solitude.
It is a poignant time to have released this song, which was buried in Barbara’s inner attic for so long. Not only because the world is waking up to the stigma that is mental health awareness, but because I too am in a different stage of my mental health journey, which I have been tracking for decades now. It is artists like Breanna Barbara and songs like “Big Bang Blues” that invite us to not feel alone and are vital to us believing we aren’t. It all begins with the belief, so give your brain space to breathe and ask yourself, “Do you believe?”
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