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SPIRIT RESEARCH
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A.L. West is a musical project based in Austin, Texas, led by songwriter
Daniel Bryson. They meld thoughtful, pensive songwriting with guitar-forward arrangements inspired by a number of pop and indie rock acts of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Bryson conceived of the project in late 2019 as a way to practice home recording and simplify their songwriting process. During 2020, he spent the unemployed haze of the early pandemic fleshing out the writing and demoing of songs that had been kicking around for a while as voice memos on his phone or cast-off riffs with a line or two of lyrics for weeks, months, or years. A few of these songs ended up as low-key singles (2020’s “Earth and Earth 2” and 2022’s “The Future and Under the Table”), but a perfectionist tendency kept a number of them in demo format for a time. As the isolating months of the early pandemic began to wane, he enlisted the help of
Connor Schwanke (
Glaze,
Spirit Ghost) to engineer and mix a collection of songs that became
The Store. Shortly thereafter he formed a live group that now consists of guitarist
Trent Bownds, drummer
Dylan Moore, and bassist
Benton Kaufman. Bryson continues to write the songs, but, while initially conceived of as a solo endeavor, the project now looks and feels a bit more like a band, playing shows in Austin and collaboratively editing songs in practice with current and past members of the live group beginning to crop up on recordings of songs from
The Store and beyond.