The Music of Gavin Castleton

The older I get, the more tenuous my connection to music seems to grow. In high school and college, the music I listened to and performed were part of how I defined myself, but now I’ll go for weeks without sitting down to listen to an album, or even a single song. When I drive somewhere, more often than not, I’ll turn off the radio and just sit in silence.

Losing that connection, however, makes it that much more exciting to find an artist  that makes me want to listen to music as obsessively as I used to. Gavin Castleton, a musician from Providence, Rhode Island, has done just that. I’ve been a fan of his band, Gruvis Malt, for a few years, but his most recent solo material is what has grabbed me and won’t let go.

Castleton’s music is stylistically diverse, and his subject matter is varied: an EP of falsetto pop songs based on hymn structures, another of progressive hip hop describing his life in reverse from his suicide in 2054, and an album about a relationship told through the metaphor of a zombie apocalypse are just a few examples.

I don’t know enough about music to confidently describe why Castleton’s interests me. It’s consistently surprising and reveals itself through repeated listens, but the common thread that runs through “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home, the two EP’s and an album described above, is the use of narrative. All three tell stories with well-developed characters and conflict, and though they could have been written traditionally, they are enriched by their realization in a form not known for strong narrative.

So what does this have to do with video games? Nothing really; but examining how other forms of art incorporate narrative successfully without sacrificing quality is a worthwhile exercise for both writers and game designers.

I’ve learned a lot as a writer while listening to Castleton’s music by recognizing the methods of storytelling I know in a new context, such as establishing the speaker in dialogue through movement and voice instead of “he said, she said” tags, describing scenes and conflict using concrete details instead of abstractions, developing characters through word choice and sentence structure, and the list goes on.

In my next three posts, I plan to examine “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home separately and in detail, not only because I listen to them obsessively and want to share them with others, but also because I think there’s something to learn from my attachment to this specific music. Gavin Castleton tells stories effectively in his medium and I want to know how he does it.

For anyone interested in listening to the music before I pick it apart, a track or two from each of the EP’s are available for free on Integers Only, Castleton’s independent label, and buying both in digital format is only 10 bucks. The album, Home, is freely available in its entirety as a stream on Castleton’s website, but I recommend the physical disc because it comes with a lyrics booklet.