Some musicians create albums that are not just a series of songs, but a sonic universe for listeners to immerse themselves in. That’s what Christopher Ardra built on “Saw It In A Dream,” his second album, which will be released on June 5.
“I usually come to my instrument with the song written. They just pop into my head,” says Ardra, a guitarist and singer from Long Island. “The production, though, is what I experiment with. I get to the point where I have a collection of songs that I feel are complementary to each other for some reason, and then I start thinking about what I want the overall sound of this collection to be. Very rarely do I work on a song one at a time, not knowing what the other songs will be.”
While the album has a contemporary feel, its cohesive nature is a throwback to ’70s progressive and classic rock groups, with Ardra citing Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and Led Zeppelin as bands who made albums “you can just get lost in.”
“You put it on, you close your eyes and you feel like you’re consistently in that world from start to finish, right? From a production standpoint, I like it when it feels like it’s filling in the air around you,” he says. “It’s really just for the listener to be able to get lost in and hopefully come out the other side with whatever they kind of take away from it.”
The lyrical theme of the album, Ardra says, is “the general awareness of the self. It’s whether or not you’re living for who you actually are, what actually means something to you. And a lot of the songs weave in and out of this concept of self-discovery.”
Ardra, who played saxophone in his high school band and studied music business at NYU, began writing the songs on “Saw It In A Dream” in 2022 near the end of the COVID pandemic.
“I think it was a little bit more reflection of, OK, obviously there was this terrible traumatic thing that was going on and had happened. You kind of take stock of what’s actually important. And I think that’s kind of what pushed me in that direction.”
The newest single from the album is “Reasons,” which is the first song he wrote outside of his former band.
“It came about at a time when even just musically, I was making a change, because I come from a rock band background and my rock band spent many years on the road doing the kind of traditional thing,” he says. “When COVID came, it kind of took everything away. So when I wrote that song, it was kind of the first time that I wrote something that I could hear my rock band play, but then I was like, I can do something to it too that’s not that. So in itself, it was a representation of the change that I was going through.
“And pretty much from there I wrote a couple of songs, ‘Colors’ being one of them inspired by a sign on the Long Island Rail Road about suicide prevention and things like that. You could see, well, this is pushing me in this direction. After a couple of songs, I realized what kind of mood I was in, and I was like, OK, this seems to be a recurring theme of where I’m at, you know?”
Ardra recorded at home, save for Leo Freire’s drums and Danielle Cardona’s backing vocals, both of which were tracked at Chiller Sound in Westchester County.
On Thursday, March 26, he will perform at Drom (85 Avenue A, New York City) as part of an eight-piece: himself, a second guitarist, bassist, drummer, keyboardist, percussionist and three backing vocals. He said roughly half of the setlist will be drawn from “Saw It In A Dream.”
Before the June release of the album, he’ll put out another single and “different types of media around different songs on the record.”
Long Island has a reputation as a haven for classic rock, with prominent radio stations and countless tribute bands coming from the region. This influenced Ardra, but he was fortunate not to fall prey to the repetitive, hit-driven playlists that dominate many classic stations across the US.
“I mean, for a long time, I wasn’t sure if there were any other bands other than Zeppelin, Rush and The Beatles,” Ardra says of his early listening. “Like any place, you hear a lot of the same kind of classics. But the thing that I always appreciate about Long Island was people are really into classic rock, so you also heard the B-sides, you also heard the deeper album cuts, and had I not been exposed to that, I probably would have different musical tastes.”
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