We now have the second single from “Mystic Familiar,” the forthcoming album from Dan Deacon. In a lengthy quote, the local electronic musician says the songs on the album reflect a period when he was feeling “raw and vulnerable,” during which he started going to therapy and practicing meditation.
“Like many people who’ve been in a dark mindset for a long time, self-compassion and non-judgmental thinking were a real challenge for me, entirely new habits that needed to be learned basically from scratch,” Deacon says. “When I would try to embrace having positive thoughts, they didn’t feel like my own, but rather another entity’s thoughts trying to speak to me.”
He treated these thoughts as if they were being communicated by a supernatural companion, which he refers to as a “mystic familiar.”
On second single “Become a Mountain,” in one of his most tender and affecting vocal performances to date, Deacon sings about feeling old and tired but recognizing he’s lucky and still “hungry for the future.”
And in a perfect distillation of 21st century stasis, he ponders: “On this day before me/ will I seize it/ or scroll?”
Listen to “Become a Mountain” and watch the animated video below:
Deacon says the lyrics lay out the entire theme of the album, with the relationship between a narrator and a mystic familiar. On this track, the mystic familiar prods the narrator to “Open your eyes/ And become a mountain/ Become all around you/ Become the sky/ Become the seas.”
“Our Narrator, in the opening verse and choruses, is trying to learn how to be self-compassionate, to live a life in the present while being able to deal with self-doubt and anxiety in a lifetime of great flux and foundational transformations,” Deacon says. “Meanwhile, our Mystic Familiar, in verse two and the pre-choruses, tries to help guide the transformations of our narrator through mantras coaxing me to be present in the now, even while also being an element of chaos itself.”
The album “Mystic Familiar,” Deacon’s fifth, is due out Jan. 31 on Domino Records.
