1st Base Runner – Queen City Sounds and Art

1st Base Runner’s Darkly Urgent “Night Stalker” Resonates With a Cinematic Menace

1st Base Runner, photo courtesy the artist

The title track of 1st Base Runner’s Night Stalker EP is a little like getting into the head of an obsessive in a focused episode. The nearly whispered only words in the song “I will follow if you leave me” are like a mantra that establishes a constant emotional image, like a rhythmic element in itself. This over percussion like a drum stick hitting an oil drums with the reverberation processed out. Later a tonally sharp, ascending arpeggio suggests urgency and in the last third of the song, full-fledged, bright drones convey a sense of pursuit like the person whose words we hear is closing in on his prey whether a person who has wronged him, or who holds the promise of some kind of psychological fulfillment or a goal, a dream that is slipping away if life is allowed to pass by. There is a sense of low key desperation underlying this industrial and synth driven track and one that implies it’s a section of a larger narrative and just like on the EP this is the penultimate chapter with the climax of the story on the horizon. Listen to “Night Stalker” on Spotify and connect with 1st Base Runner at the links provided.

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1st Base Runner’s Video for “Dark Drive Through The Canyon” is Like a Deep Mood Michael Mann Film in Miniature

1st Base Runner’s “Dark Drive Through The Canyon” is perhaps best experienced by watching the music video directed by Dilly Gent. In the video Tim Husmann from the project sits high on a box inside a convertible while driving around Long Beach told to remain absolutely still despite the cold and having just filmed the underwater music video for “Man Overboard” earlier the same day. It suits the lush and dramatic ambiance of the song and we see Husmann in focus as a nightscape and evening lights and daytime views stream by behind him out of focus and mixing up our own sense of time. Like a short Michael Mann film with the industrial part of Long Beach and its harbor and highways as the backdrop. The cascading, bright tones fading out in sequence swimming in a breeze of dim light drone are cinematic in quality themselves but in context of the video it creates a meaning and a mood we recognize in taking a moment to contemplate a peaceful core of our mind even as events and a dystopian state of the world streams by that we can and will have to engage with at some point but from which we can take a break now and then for moments of Zen. Watch the video on YouTube and follow 1st Base Runner at the links below.

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1st Base Runner’s “Near Me” and Its Brooding Music Video Contains a Subtle and Unexpected Catharsis

Longtime Radiohead creative director Dilly Ghent commissioned Ellis Chai Bahl and Johnny Chew to do a video treatment for 1st Base Runner’s busy yet brooding single “Near Me.” Songwriter Tim Husmann is seen sitting in the dark contemplating his insecurities and late night fears amid the trappings of the neighborhood bar: pool table, dart board, headlights shining through blinds off mirrored sections of wall, a tiny ballerina figure spinning in front of him, a cigarette sitting in an ashtray with a spindly plume of smoke. Chairs disassemble and then reassemble. He sings “Will you come near me, would you come for me, would you come?” like a mantra holding himself together while ghostly guitar work rings out in a reverberating arpeggio and staccato riffs over shuffling rhythms. These simple elements suggest hazy and dreamlike experiences that comfort you while you’re stuck in your own thoughts before sleep takes over. The whole thing feels like nothing happened yet emotionally it conveys an undeniable feeling of release. It’s rare that a songwriter can lay out his anxieties and insecurities so vividly yet effect a subtle catharsis. Watch the video for “Near Me” on YouTube and connect with 1st Base Runner at the links below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MtHIXf8gHU

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1st Base Runner Distills the Essence of Emotional Stasis After Heartbreak on “Flux”

“Flux” drifts in with a synth bass pulse and then steady percussion before bright, expansive synths bring in hanging melodic progressions. 1st Base Runner singer and songwriter Tim Husmann comes in like a bright ghost of himself offering simple yet wise observations on the experience of and living in regret and how it’s tangled up in our romantic relationships and the illusions and delusions we craft that are too often the glue that keeps people together for awhile before those same evasions of personal and mutual truth are the ingredients for the dissolution of the band even when the lingering feelings and the aftermath of the break-up still haunts us. Husmann offers different views of a relationship now in shambles from a first person perspective yet illuminates in poetic detail where people come to a profound misunderstanding of each other partly built on the lack of honesty at the outset and an unwillingness to be vulnerable and honest in the name of love. All the while Husmann articulates lingering feelings of hurt and being stuck in a place of wounded feelings while the other person has moved on. Most of us have been there and this dramatic mini-epic illustrates that ordeal in a way that sounds like he’s transcended it already. Husmann took seven years off of putting out music to rest and recuperate his creative instincts before forming 1st Base Runner but a quick listen to his new EP Ellis, the follow-up to the album Seven Years of Silence out in June 2021, showcases that the fallow time was well spent. Listen to “Flux” on Spotify and connect with 1st Base Runner at the links provided.