Today we’d like to introduce you to Simeon Williams.
Simeon, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’ve always had a love for music as long as I can remember, but I suppose my journey really started around 3rd grade when my second cousin, Amy, bought me a Beach Boys greatest hits album. It was truly something magical: something excitingly new yet very familiar… sort of like deja vu times ten. After that, I was hooked and started digging around my mom’s cassette collection. Lucky for me, her taste in music is on-point, and I found myself in the good company of Elvis Presley, The Cure, U2, Newsboys, Enya, the list goes on. In 7th grade, I learned my first instrument with my mom’s clarinet. By the time high school rolled around, I had found myself playing a lot of saxophone in the jazz band. From there, I went to UNT, working on a jazz studies degree. Now UNT’s a school full of virtuoso musicians, and that just wasn’t the kind of player I was or wanted to be; I found myself lost for a couple of years, just trying to make any of the nine lab bands.
This proved incredibly difficult, and I retreated to my dorm room, where I started to record and layer little song ideas. This got me interested in both songwriting and audio engineering. After not making a lab band until my 4th semester, I decided I wasn’t cut out for the freelance jazz musician life. So naturally, I started a folk band with a couple of friends, and we called ourselves The Black Hills. It was very freeing to be able to write and perform music without the expectation of perfection; music has never been that for me, just an outlet for expression. After a couple of years of writing material and playing shows, the band went there separate ways to work and/or go to school. I found myself back home in Arlington at UTA, working on a Film/Video degree with a concentration in sound mixing and scoring. From there, I started a solo project called Wild Daydream, where I write and record songs that are inspired by my original love for older music. Full circle, I guess you could say.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely has been a rough road. Self-exploration in the arts takes time, and I have a tendency to be impatient about my growth. But when I remember to have fun on this musical journey and not sweat too much about the destination, I find myself growing the most.
Can you give our readers some background on your music?
My business is my band, Wild Daydream. I specialize in writing and recording retro indie rock tracks. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, and Bob Marley are just a slice of my never-ending influences. I have this idea of where pop music could’ve gone: What if the genre never strayed from its acoustic or electric guitars like in The Beatles’ ’69 classic, ‘Here Comes the Sun’? Or its raw rhythm and bass just like in Led Zeppelin’s ‘Dazed and Confused’? Or its thoughtful and layered lyrics in Bob Dylan’s quintessential, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’? With Wild Daydream, I aspire to revive what people loved about old pop music and re-contextualize it for the music-lover listening in 2020. Besides some collaborations, I write and record all the music myself. In the project, I play the vocal cords, guitar, piano, bass, sax, and drums, as well as a few odds and ends here and there. (If it makes a sound, I’ll make music with it!) But I’m most proud of the songs I write with or for others. It forces me to understand different perspectives and capture it in a moment. Communicating that moment effectively to a listener are the moments that I feel the most proud.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
My proudest moment so far in my career has got to be the last single I released with my good buddy, Cowboy Grizzly (Grant Mcmahan). We called the song “ARRIV3” and released it on July 4th. Our hopes were to encourage a currently discouraged America by reminding them that one day with a lot of patience, we will ‘arrive’ to the place that we want to be. I’ve gotten the warmest reception I’ve ever gotten for a released song, and I have to credit Grant’s fantastic musical sensibilities and songwriting for that. I’ve been playing music with the dude for a while now, and it’s been nothing but a fun and stimulating friendship! Go check out his music!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wilddaydream.bandcamp.com/music
- Email: info@wilddaydreammusik.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wild_daydream_music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wilddaydreammusic/
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5DIjEo9mglSkfa3RBr4Bgf?si=aD9uXP3OQjO8JxRCs_DVjQ
Image Credit:
Dylan Olmstead, Joseph Tesfaye
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