One of my best friends through college, Wes Bryant, passed away suddenly. He was a dedicated musician, engineer, band-member and friend. When I met him, I frankly wouldn't have thought we'd eventually be friends. He was clearly a metal-head...had a nose ring, long hair, wore metal-band shirts. But eventually I found out how humble he was and how accepting he was of all kinds of music. I remember talking with him in the studio around 2009 about crappy college food. After I mentioned how much soup and Easy Mac I'd eaten, his eyes lit up and he said "Oh yeah dude, I LIVE off some ravioli".
Skip ahead to spring of 2011, when I hung out at the studio until around 3 am. Wes was writing a song for a recording project and I just sat in. Soon we were bouncing ideas off each other, coming up with phrases that were more brutal than before. It was stream of consciousness stuff that was about power and overthrowing it. I'd never written a metal song and he made it seem easy.
At one point, we went to the Tapp Room every Wednesday for the taco special. He paid for my meal for my birthday. One time he talked about guilty-pleasure pop listening at Taco Bell. He played a silly-simple bass part for a cover of "Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head". I saw As Oceans do a show in a friend's basement and Wes kicked a guy while playing guitar--and it was soooo metal. He'd talk about how hard it was to promote his band in today's media--you have to constantly give little nuggets of content and make personal connections. His occasional nickname on the studio schedule was "Big Daddy Dubbya". The last time I spoke with him, he had called me for advice on drum editing. He was handed a big project for the studio he was working for and needed to use beat-detective.
I hope he's remembered for his dedication as a musician, engineer, dependable friend, and the countless hours he'd spend trying to get everything just right. He was a big guy with a bigger heart, and was a massive metalhead. But more than a metalhead. To Wes, metal was high art. Complex rhythms, pristine production, atonal parts, clean tones, and lyrics about conspiracies and subcultures--questioning everything and defiant of being different. Wes was a metalhead who, on Facebook, had just joined "National Jim Henson Day", changed his religious views to "Theism", his political views to "People over everything".
Music:
solo project
Procrasturbation Take 2
Dorito Breath Remix
ECU Pump Up Song
