Night Hikes (Noah)

Wish I could say I knew more about Night Hikes. Wish I could say I hadn’t just stumbled in to a comic book shop on the south side of Berkeley and seen some skinny kid standing in front of a wall of graphic novels, playing a sad, quirky song to a bunch of half-drunk forty-somethings. I can’t thought, as that’s the way it happened. The song, Dream Canyon is of the kind to lock itself in to some off-to-the-side part of your brain, to appear once in a while when everything’s quiet and the lights are down, and maybe someone left a door open in the back of the house and there’s a nice cool breeze cutting through the heat.

Dream Canyons is just that sort of song. It’s simple and pretty and clearly recorded by one person in a badly lit bedroom, fiddling with knobs and tracks and maybe writing a couple errant notes down on a piece of paper and humming to themselves. And somewhere in the process, the whole thing snaps together and you get this strange combination of ethereal independence and truly room-filling singer-songwriter magic. Even for me, who saw a skinny kid and a guitar in a comic book store, I can fool myself in to believing that this is the work of more than just one person.

To say the least, there’s something about Dream Canyons and Night Hikes that just stuck with me. I don’t know if it’s the gentle hint of melancholy or the wavering timber of the vocals or what, but this is a song that’s buried deep.

:Night Hikes – Dream Canyon: