“I’ll tell you what I felt and learned today:
Love’s the only natural painkiller”
We need music that speaks truthfully about pain and tumultuous times, but we also need feel-good music to help us dream of the other side. A year after the release of Can I Communicate With the Unknown?, an album that “wrestled with themes of addiction and existentialism,” Go By Ocean (aka Ryan McCaffrey) returns to Royal Oakie Records with an EP of outtakes, remixes, and acoustic versions on Communications With the Unknown.
The Novato-based singer-songwriter worked with the same producers as the first album—Tim Bluhm (The Mother Hips) and David Glasebrook (Sugar Candy Mountain, Sandy’s, Iain Mann)—to craft this six-track suite, stripping down each composition to its shining spirit. There’s no filler here, but highlights are the acoustic renditions as well as the instrumental, carefree plucking of “Ascending Ghosts” featuring Michael Nau on modular synthesizers.
