Category: Free music downloads
The stars above him
I can’t really pinpoint the inspiration for this song. The lyrics seemed to come almost fully-formed to me once I’d written the main verse melody. It’s not autobiographical, or even biographical; rather, it’s an exploration of my own understanding of how people can be driven to take extreme actions.
Intertwined
Fourteen years ago, I married the most wonderful woman in the world. And fourteen years later, I have finally (finally!) written a love song for her — and published it! 😍
Tribulation
A lot of my songs recently have been about mental health, anxiety, and depression. This song explores what it feels like to be “trapped by your own mind” — when you feel as though you’re your own enemy, and have to fight against yourself to just get through the day.
Autumn Heart
This is really my first track with actual singing. 😱 (Yes, that’s what I look like when I sing…)
I wrote this song to explore depression and anxiety. When you have a depressive episode, it feels like a pit you’ll never be able to climb out of — even though you know from past experience that it will pass. It helps to have someone who’s always on your side, no matter what.
For more places to listen, try your favourite streaming service, or check out https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/barryvan/autumn-heart.
Light comes down
This was a fun little piece to write! It started out as I was playing with building out a drum rhythm, and then grew from there into a semi-breakbeat type of hybrid piece. I mixed to mono and applied a pretty aggressive bandpass filter at the start so that when it opens up, it opens all the way up.
Let me know what you think!
More music on Bandcamp!
I haven’t updated my Bandcamp page in several years… But that’s just changed! I’ve uploaded music from the last year or so there. So now you can download it in super-high fidelity, store it on your hard drive, record it to tape for your Walkman sessions… The sky’s the limit!
Deep River dreaming
I’ve written a few times about heading down to Western Australia’s “Great Southern” region. There’s a small bush-shack we stay at. It’s on a property surrounded by national parks, and is far from the highway. It has such a beautiful diversity of ecosystems — coastal scrub, rainforest, majestic karri forests, peppermint tree groves… It’s an incredibly calming place.
The pieces in this album all capture something about that place. Most were written there, in fact! There’s something about being in nature that just gives me a chance to pause, and to actually process things. There’s more space, and there’s less pressure to run from doing this to doing that to doing something else.
I’d describe this album as “ambient”, but there are really multiple styles together. Several of the pieces combine sounds taken from the forests with acoustic and digital sounds. My hope is that these pieces will give you the chance to feel the chaos of life slow down, if only for a moment.
As always, you can listen wherever you stream your music.
