Daily Discovery: Boom Forest, “Baby Teeth”

John Paul Roney is yet another product of the curiously strong Baraboo, WI scene that includes Songspace favorites PHOX, Foreign Fields, and Daniel and the Lion. Now in East Nashville, the veteran troubadour has been slowly cultivating the Boom Forest project for the past few years. ‘Baby Teeth’ is a truly brilliant display of song craftsmanship that couples the power and beauty of low-fi production with gut-wrenching introspection.

ARTIST: Boom Forest

SONG: Baby Teeth

HOMETOWN: Baraboo, WI

CURRENT LOCATION: Nashville, TN

TURN-OFFS: When someone writes a thoughtful pause of “well” into a script. It’s EVERYWHERE. “Looking for a way to make your daily commute a little more… well… FUN?!?!?”

TURN-ONS: People who have absolutely imploded and emerge ten times more celestial.

STARTED PLAYING MUSIC: I wanted to sing harmony with my family in our woodland church when I was really young and couldn’t read music (still can’t) so I focused all my energies on the relationships of harmonies to melodies until I could sing with them. Now I can’t hear music without also hearing stacks of imaginary harmonies and counter melodies in my head. Musical schizophrenia.

FAVORITE LYRIC: “Just carry yourself back to me unspoil’d, from across that lonesome ocean.” -Bob Dylan (it literally makes me light headed, even to type it)

CRAZIEST PERSON I KNOW: My mother. God bless her.

SONG I WISH I WROTE: Amsterdam by Coldplay

I WROTE THIS SONG: I used to think I was so clever for just being able to forget about all of the times I had been really hurt in my life, but I realized that’s just a tiny, lonely death. So I decided to write a song to give myself courage to face sorrow and to forgive the people who have brought it on me in my life.

MOST EXCITING THING I’VE EVER DONE: Phox, Daniel and the Lion, Sonntag and Boom Forest (all bands made of friends from the tiny circus city Baraboo) got to take a month long tour last summer, and near the very end of the tour we all achieved human perfection on stage. Death was just not a thing for a few minutes each night. It felt like floating toward heaven, and I swore I would keep growing toward that at all costs.