“Someday” by Aaron Sprinkle ft. Matty Mullins, Thursday, November 18, 2021

Aaron Sprinkle is a musician's musician. And I've talked about him so much that any readers I have would be sick of reading about him. I talked about his solo career when I talked about Fair. Throughout this year, I've talked about how prolific Sprinkle has been as a producer, but I've rarely talked about his personal music. In his various podcast appearances, Sprinkle talks about how he came to realize that his musical career was about making other musicians sound incredible, as his bands and solo projects under performed in comparison to the records he produced. But when Sprinkle releases his own music, listeners get a look into the genius behind the hit records. Sprinkle's 2017 record Real Life is perhaps his most accessible work and has received the most critical love due to its keen sense of the contemporary music scene and its ability to link the new to the past.

WITHOUT A LIGHT TO SHINE OR A ROOM TO GRACE. Ugh. It's photo day at school. I'm cringing thinking about what I wore. What I thought was cool. But an '80s photo, presumably of Aaron Sprinkle with his natural or bleached blond pineapple, jean jacket, an single cross earring dangling from his left lobe sets a tone for Sprinkle's Real Life before you can even start track one, an electronic '80s/'90s-sounding track featuring Poema's Elle Puckett. Listening to the album as a whole, several themes stick out. First is nostalgia for the '80s and '90s. I've talked about how nostalgia isn't great for moving music forward. It's kind of like sugar. It's great to have from time to time, but a musical diet based on sugar can be dangerous. However, nostalgia by legacy acts is different. In 2017, Sprinkle is producing the music that he wanted to hear as a teenager, but by the time he became a producer, musical tastes were shifting away from that sound. However, Sprinkle's use of female singers on "Invincible," "Real Life," and "I Don't Know Who You Are" give him a contemporary sound, similar to The Chainsmokers or Alan Walker, so the album blends nostalgia with contemporary music. Which brings up another theme: collaboration. Perhaps why the album works so much better than other Sprinkle records is that listeners are excited to see whom he's recording with. Sprinkle has recorded with so many acts and on Real Life he calls for favors from Elle Puckett, Max Bemis (Say Anything, Hebrews), Sherri Dupree-Bemis (Eisley, Hebrews), singer-songwriter Stephanie Skipper Smith, and today's song with Memphis May Fire's lead singer, Matty Mullins. 

TEAR-STAINED EYES INSIDE OF YOUR HEAD. Lyrically, "Someday" isn't one of the strongest tracks on the record. It does fit into the lyrical themes of the record: feeling inadequate, longing for the past, and looking forward to the future as an escape from the present. Musically, though, the song plays with what sounds like midi-synthesizers and maybe an oboe giving the song the feeling of playing an old video or computer game. When Sprinkle produces, he works from feelings rather than analysis. On one of the episodes of his podcast Moontraveling with fellow musician Matthew Schwartz, Sprinkle talked about his ultimate goal in producing music is to recreate feeling he had when listening to music growing up. He talks about listening to the Beatles on the beach and being fascinated with The Cure. On the latest episode of the Labeled podcast, he said that food could also create some of those feelings. Perhaps that's why Sprinkle's productions were so meaningful to me when I was growing up and why those albums have created an imprint on my memories. While there are very few albums that he's produced that resemble a Beatle's record, somehow he can manufacture moments in a song, corners that we can explore through chords and cadences that remind him of when he first fell in love with music. Likewise, a Sprinkle record and place me in my teenage bedroom with my Sony stereo, or on a roadtrip cramped in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla, or behind the wheel of my first car. Today, when I listen to music, I measure production against Aaron Sprinkle, something I would have never done had I gone down the rabbit hole of listening to Tooth & Nail albums.  

Read “Someday*” by Aaron Sprinkle on Genius.