DAZY

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“I guess maybe I get a little frustrated at the idea that music only counts if it’s coming out in like 10 to 12-song, 30 to 45-minute chunks, every two to three years,” laughs Dazy mastermind James Goodson. “It’s not that I don’t like albums, but I just also think it’s okay to write and release music at a different pace.” This is perhaps an understatement considering Dazy has released 71 songs since the project started in 2020, and only 12 of those were on his only full-length to date, 2022’s acclaimed OUTOFBODY. Since then Goodson has been on a run of singles and EPs that are now being compiled for his second collection record, MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol. 2: 24 Songs From 2023-2026. Assembled together–along with a whopping seven more new songs–it becomes clear that all of these releases weren’t just sporadic transmissions: they’re part of a bigger picture of personal and musical progression from a songwriter that’s steadfastly following his own path.

Dazy released his first collection, MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs, in 2021 and charted a prolific year of scrappy, drum machine-driven fuzz pop singles and EPs that were made as a simple home-recording exercise. But in early 2022 Dazy and Militarie Gun released their collaborative hit song “Pressure Cooker,” and Goodson found himself doing more with the project than he’d ever anticipated–including releasing a debut full-length and touring heavily. “By the time OUTOFBODY came out I’d already way exceeded all the goals I had when I started,” he says. “But the initial idea was just to have a consistent outlet for releasing music at a cadence that suited me, and after the album came out I started to get itchy pretty fast about wanting to put songs out in a more agile way again.”

The next three years saw a cascade of standalone singles (“BIG Problem” b/w “Gravity”, “Pay No Mind (To The Signs),” “Forced Perspective”) and EPs (Bad Penny, I GET LOST (when i try to get found), IT’S ONLY A SECRET (if you repeat it)), usually released with no warning, each one growing sonically bolder. “I guess even though Dazy doesn’t sound like typical lone singer-songwriter stuff, I started to accept that it’s a solo project and understand what that actually means to me,” Goodson explains. “Writing songs is how I process my life in real time, it’s not something that I only tap into in the context of an album cycle. I like the way short releases are sort of like snapshots, but they’re all part of a bigger body of work to me.” It might be a bit of an unconventional route, but for Goodson it was a more authentic way of channeling experiences into the songs. “A lot happened in the past few years–my kid was born, people I love passed away or got sick–just lots of real life,” he says. “When I listen to these songs I can really hear myself trying to figure it all out.”

In gathering all of these songs together, the sonic leap from the first MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD to this second volume becomes crystal clear. The primitive drum machine programming of Dazy’s early work has evolved into a tangle of head-bobbing loops and intricate production; the guitars are still there, but instead of a wash of fuzz they’re now powerful elements in a collage of samples, mellotron strings, and creatively manipulated found sounds. And above it all there’s Goodson’s affable voice–no longer buried in the noise, grounding every song with undeniable hooks and layered harmonies. “I think knowing I wasn’t making an album helped me push myself,” he explains, “but also the circumstances of your life can contribute a ton to the way your music actually sounds, and writing songs isn’t the same as when I was younger, I have a whole adult life that I balance it with–so there’s choices I made with these songs that I really love, that I wouldn’t have made if I just had infinite time in some ultra pro studio. I like when the music has just as much of a personal element as the lyrics.”

Circumstance being met with creativity can be heard in the inventive production choices that started with experimenting quietly on Garageband while a newborn slept, or in the overloaded pre-amp DI guitar tones that cut through the mixes, or the samples of his son’s toys warped into a melody, or even in the performances themselves. “I like to not really know what I’m doing, so it was just fun to stumble around with sampling, or sometimes I needed to make guitars sound loud without actually being loud and I’d end up with something really out-there sounding, or I’d go to the practice space super late at night so I could sing or turn up an amp, and I’d be exhausted but that would lead to some cool sounding accident. I definitely drive myself crazy a lot of the time but I do think the songs landed somewhere unique to me and I started to learn to lean into those idiosyncrasies instead of fighting them.”

Goodson has never been shy about his love of classic alternative music–especially the intersections between rock and electronic that were prominent in the ‘80s and ‘90s–but the songs on MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol. 2 feel like all of those influences are being transmuted into something that really just sounds like Dazy. Leading off the reverse-chronologically sequenced collection, the seven previously unreleased songs particularly capture what’s special about Goodson’s songwriting. Colossal opener “Beat Change” collides boom bap drums into a wall of guitars, far more patient and sprawling than almost anything Goodson would have previously dared; or on the opposite end of the spectrum there’s the dubbed-out, guitar-less indie pop of “Bad Actors.” Tracks like “Something Goes” and “Ricochet” filter grungy quiet/loud dynamics through Dust Brothers-style hijinks, while “Ugly,” “Hit The Wall,” and “Unreasonable Person” tap into an equal parts soaring melodies and anything-goes production that bridges the gap from Goodson’s favorite decades to now.

Maybe there’s a case to be made that any combination of these 24 songs could have been Dazy LP2 (and LP3…), but that’s just not how Goodson saw them. “A lot of creative people tend to struggle with articulating why they do their thing and why that helps them express themselves vs like… just saying the thing on your mind,” he says. “But I think that intangibility is probably where the magic is and that doesn’t really have much to do with release formats or schedules or whatever. At the end of the day I'm trying to do whatever it takes to get the songs out of my head and out into the world, because I really just want to think about what’s next.”