Dana Buoy

Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I is latest release from Dana Janssen, longtime Akron/Family drummer, who has been making kaleidoscopic pop as Dana Buoy for a decade. Janssen’s exuberant and strangely assuring synthesis of those previously parallel domestic lanes, houseplants and a home drum kit. Inspired by the flora that reign on the ground floor and Mort Garson’s endlessly pleasing Plantasia, and conceived in the basement beneath, these 12 pieces of luxuriant pop — rooted in Steely Dan and synthesizer strata, Afrobeat energy and astral harmonies, Robert Hunter koans and righteous horns — offer new mantras for and prospective maps of our complicated lives. “From nest we fall in no time at all,” Janssen coos at one point over incisive funk. “Know that I got you, I got you.” If you worry about any New Age tedium to a record inspired by photosynthesis, don’t: Janssen wants you to sing along with what he’s learned.

Janssen’s two previous albums as Dana Buoy have charted that very territory — unapologetic pop songs informed by R&B and electronica — without the compromise that band life entailed. But remember: He had no drums before. These songs are different not only because of their botanical genesis but because actual drums prompted Janssen to play outside of a strict rhythmic grid and to recruit outside collaborators. A longtime acquaintance who became a close friend, Kelly Pratt, arranged and played the cataracts and cascades of horns here, adding Dana Buoy to a résumé that includes relationships with Beirut, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs. Justin Miller, meanwhile, handled the bass, his bulbous tone a perfect counterpart for Janssen’s angular approach. (John McEntire, of Tortoise and something of a hero for Janssen, offered a crucial assist in mixing it.) After Akron/Family, these are Janssen’s deepest musical relationships.

Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I arrives at a fraught time for Janssen. Miles Seaton — Janssen’s rhythmic and spiritual counterpart in Akron/Family for so long — recently died in a car crash near the other end of Oregon, a tragedy amplified by the recent revival of their collaboration. (Seaton sings on a track here, while Akron/Family’s Seth Olinsky takes a guitar solo.) And Janssen has contended with many of the same existential challenges so many folks face as they stare down 40, from health woes and novel hobbies to confronting the future after something that defined you for so long has ended.

In a very real sense, then, the plants helped Janssen find meaning and metaphors for what has been and what may be next. In these songs, it sounds like measured hope. “Naked root, growing in the air,” he sings at the center of “Eventually, Good Comes to Pass,” a hymn that mixes stacks of word games, sheets of acid jazz, and winks of Steve Reich pointillism. The last word hangs there in the cacophony of space, like an unheard and anxious plea, before Janssen returns to the stable bassline and the title’s mantra. “Good,” he finally sings, tentatively but with a welcome modicum of trust. “Come to stay.”