Can I Communicate With the Unknown?” is the new album from Go By Ocean, moniker of Northern California based singer, songwriter, producer Ryan McCaffrey. Co-produced alongside Tim Bluhm (The Mother Hips) and David Glasebrook, the album features contributions from a wide cast of characters, ranging from the tight knit community of Phil Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads to the wider West Coast indie-rock scene, including members of The Mother Hips, Sugar Candy Mountain, ALO, Tea Leaf Green, and more.
The story begins back in March 2020, just before the streets emptied out and the world shut down. McCaffrey and Bluhm convened at the latter’s Forrest Power studio in Fairfax, CA and over the course of a few days recorded the basic tracks for about 12 songs. The initial plan was to make a stripped down record that focused on acoustic guitar and vocals, with a little Mellotron or piano here and there. However, McCaffrey soon found himself at home with a lot of time on his hands at his newly built Sun Machine studio in Novato, CA, and decided to invite collaborators new and old to contribute to the tracks and see what they could bring to the burgeoning arrangements. Pretty soon co-producer David Glasebrook was brought into the fold and the two set about bringing the songs to life.
From opener “Say Man” all the way through to closer “Right Moon”, the songs trace a hero’s journey as the narrator struggles with addiction; eventually finding peace and freedom in a tumultuous world, wrestling with all kinds of metaphysical and spiritual ideas along the way. Fittingly, the album title appeared out of thin air - McCaffrey and Glasebrook were going through old files on a hard drive and discovered his computer had auto-named a session Can I Communicate With the Unknown? Somehow it all made perfect sense, and it stuck as the title of the album.
Building upon McCaffrey’s catalog of songs, the new album finds inspiration in the down-to-earth music of 1970’s Marin County, when songwriters like Michael Hurley, Norman Greenbaum, and Jesse Colin Young lived out in Olema and Point Reyes, the kind of places where there’s songs just blowing in on the breeze from the Pacific Ocean. McCaffrey’s studio sits on the edge of a nature preserve nearby and it’s not hard to imagine some of these songs floating in on the coastal fog, ascending ghosts indeed.
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