Riley Day is a Wichita-based composer and bassist who leads the band Daydream. The group’s 2016 release is titled Sit Still.
“The early stages of when I was in bands—high school and early college—I would try to communicate something to a band mate and they might be able to do it, they might forget it the next week. I wanted something that was a little more concreted. I realized that the only way to do that, out of necessity, was to learn how to academically approach music.
My curiosity was the driving factor behind writing the music and I wanted to be able to effectively communicate that with someone else to where I could have it performed that way 100 percent of the time.
A lot of my writing process is finding a germ that I can develop into a sentence or a statement of some sort. Then, within that statement is multiple germs that I can take and expand on throughout the rest of the piece. So, if this sentence has one word in it, I want to explore that word for maybe two-three minutes and see how far that word goes and see if I can connect that fully-developed idea that came from the first germ into the next germ and try to develop an overarching theme from that initial sentence.”