Wanderingted’s Debut Album “I Could Be You” Is A Musical Pop-Up Picture Book
lou flesh
Posted On December 12, 2018
A perfect companion for the chilly winter season, Wanderingted’s debut album I Could Be You is a musical pop-up picture book that illustrates itself before your ears with the turning of every track. It’ll warm you up, bliss you out, make you take pause, and remind you to breathe. Each and every song makes you question if you should laugh or drift into a daydream.
An American in Germany, Wanderingted’s first full-length I Could Be You captures the yearning of hearts and the day-dreaming of heads, making them collide with everyday detail yet escapist results. Each song flows with the whimsical unique lyricism of artists like Tom Waits or Les Claypool spilling out into sudden symphonic indie-folk stylings of Andrew Bird or The Dodos.
Wanderingted is brought to life by Ted Schmitz, a Saint Paul, Minnesotan who turned to Berlin to live and create – carrying with him his hometown’s dark icy breeze which you can somehow hear in the album. The Broadway musical thread that ties together the sequence is no coincidence either: Schmitz spends his ‘day job’ as a traveling opera singer.
The songs are made up of mostly guitar and vocal riffs that are sometimes accompanied by an unassuming drum track, or a soft piano. These songs sound like they’re made to be sampled into one of those lo-fi hip-hop radio streams. The symphony of vocals and guitar riffs on “Nevertheless” especially dance around allowing for the mind to drift and take the listener on whatever peaceful journey they need to make. Before you fall off the edge, the quirky “Just a Dude” creates a new verisimiltude. The elegiac epilogue “Carfrost” has a simple talking-blues way of storytelling that could sneak itself onto a concept album like Sgt. Pepper’s behind something like “A Day in the Life” (minus the expletives, of course).
I Could Be You is an adult album of edifying entertainment, through the thought and pure joy of experimenting with music as a one-man Broadway circus act.
