On The Hiker, bassea crafts a world of quiet reflection, sprawling landscapes, and deeply personal storytelling. Written in the wake of leaving their childhood home in California and starting a new life in France, the album captures the tension between longing and growth, isolation and connection.
Across gentle acoustic arrangements, layered field recordings, and subtle experimental flourishes, bassea transforms moments of uncertainty into songs that feel both intimate and expansive.
We caught up with bassea to talk about the making of The Hiker, their approach to songwriting, and the memories that shaped this deeply personal record.
The Hiker feels deeply personal and reflective. What inspired you to explore these themes of love, distance, and fleeting time? Were there specific moments in your life that shaped the stories you tell on this album?
the hiker is, in its entirety, the story of leaving my childhood home in California and moving to France, where I currently live. Whenever I start to write an album I try to figure out exactly what kind of story I want to tell, and while I was brainstorming I realized this would be the perfect opportunity for me to explore how I felt during that time in my life. Through this, I found that I had pushed down a lot of feelings that ultimately shouldn’t be pushed down. It was 2021: It was the middle of Covid and I had just graduated high school.
I was in a pretty bad relationship that made me want to stay in California, which ended up causing a lot of arguments with my family and a lot of overall tension. When we moved in July I had no idea what my life was going to look like, and those feelings of anxiety and dread took me over for around 6 months.
As my life in France went on though, things started to look up. I had started making music that year and I was only improving, I found a community to share my music in (shoutout Niztopia for that), I got out of the relationship I was in (a very good decision), and I started dating my current girlfriend.
All of those things are what I tried to outline in The Hiker without being too obvious about exactly what was happening.
There’s a real warmth to the way this album is crafted. How did you approach the sound and production to match the emotions in your lyrics? Did you have a particular sonic vision from the start, or did it evolve naturally?
When I write music, the instrumentation is usually the first thing I make.
There’s really only two things that I actually decided I wanted sonically from the songs in the hiker, and those were acoustic guitar and field recordings. I found that recording my guitar with the same field recorder (the Zoom H4n Pro) that I use to record atmospheric and nature sounds made a very specific and cohesive sound that I knew would work well for what I wanted.
I have accumulated a library of field recordings from outside spaces I find interesting (like a forest or the ocean) that I used on basically every song on the hiker. I’m also not a great guitar player, so I tried to find chord progressions and riffs that were easy to play but still evoked the feelings I wanted. I also didn’t want the songs to just be purely acoustic, so I usually put in some sort of weird glitchy sound design in the background of songs using granular synthesis or other things like that.
I’ve found that it’s easy to create a cohesive sound when I’m the one doing everything. That being said, it took over a year to finish the album so maybe I ought to branch out a little bit.
The album title, The Hiker, carries a sense of both solitude and movement. What does that name mean to you in the context of this music? Does it reflect where you are personally and creatively at this stage in your journey?
The name “the hiker” actually comes from the original idea of the album that I eventually scrapped. I was going to use the same story, but have 4 extra songs, each called “the hiker” parts 1,2, 3, and all of them together. They were all made up stories that paralleled what was happening at that point in the album. The lyrics focused on a ‘hiker’ lost in a forest who eventually finds his way out (the hiker being me.)
I eventually scrapped that idea and those songs, but they do exist! They just sounded a little too campfire song-y for the album. I decided to keep the name because I liked the nature-centric feel it gave to the album, and because one of the songs’ original stories comes from a hike.
Love and time are universal yet deeply personal themes. How do you balance writing something so intimate while still making it feel relatable to listeners?
When I write lyrics I always have my own personal feelings that I put into the words, but I try to keep the actual words relatively vague and non-specific while still being meaningful.
For example, I have focused a lot on talking about distance and love together because I am in a long-distance relationship at the moment. I’ve seen a lot of content online about people being in a similar situation, and I find it really easy to put my feelings into words when I know that I’m not the only one who feels that way, and I hope that when people listen to my lyrics they can also relate.
In “true north” I specifically focus on the separation between me and my girlfriend by highlighting specific moments we’ve spent together in our respective places and showing the differences between us in a positive light.
If you could freeze one memory forever—the kind of moment you sing about on this album—what would it be? And did that memory influence any specific track on The Hiker?
Part of the reason I loved living in California was the easily accessible nature of the Bay Area that me and my family would drive to every so often, this fact made it that much harder to leave. A specific memory that I focused on for “mountain lions” is a hike that my family went on when I was younger on the Dunn Trail in the Oakland hills, one that we frequented a lot during my time there. I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and as we were walking the path my dad pointed to a water pipe off the trail and told me “That’s where we found you when you were a baby.” He told me the reason I was found there in the first place was because I was raised by mountain lions and they had forgotten me there, so my parents took me home with them.
I, being the smartest 4-year-old in the world, believed him. Every time we walked that trail I would howl at the hills (because apparently that’s what I thought mountain lions did) to see if my mountain lion family would take me back to where I came from (hence the lyrics “calling mountain lions - won’t you take me home?”) I eventually figured out that I was not in fact raised by mountain lions. Still, that story stuck with me far enough that I decided to write a song about it!
Was there a particular song on The Hiker that was especially emotional or challenging for you to create? Whether lyrically, vocally, or in production, was there a track that pushed you outside your comfort zone?
“stick n poke” is probably the most vulnerable I’ve been writing a song, which was difficult to do in the moment but incredibly satisfying when it was finished. I wrote about my recent dealings with a condition I developed in 2023 called a Mixed Connective Tissue disease, along with Raynaud’s syndrome (essentially chronic joint pain and circulation issues when my hands or feet are cold.)
I wanted to have a point in the album where instead of focusing on my mental state I focused more on my physical state, and the result of that was “stick n poke.” I have a habit of being unspecific in my sadder songs, and working on this song made me want to be more honest and direct about exactly how I feel.
Looking beyond this album, what excites you most about 2025? Are there any creative risks, collaborations, or new directions you’re hoping to explore this year?
Even since I released the album last year I’ve been getting better and better at everything musically.
My production has leveled up a pretty significant amount, as well as my guitar playing and singing, so I’m really excited to show off my growth with my next couple of releases. I also have a few collaborations that I’ve done with some of my friends (some who are in the scene and some other irls) that I’m really excited about.
I’m also going to be moving back to the US (Upstate New York, specifically) later this year so I’m sure that will be a source of inspiration and more collaboration with people in the scene that I haven’t had the chance to meet in person yet. 2025 has a lot of unpredictable things, so I’ve decided to just go with the flow and let whatever happens happen!
Your music has such an endearing, timeless quality. Who are some of your biggest inspirations—whether musically, personally, or even in other forms of art?
I honestly don’t listen to as much music as I probably should, but some artists I’ve been listening to lately are Role Model (his album Kansas Anymore has been very inspiring), Still Woozy, Mac Miller (Hand Me Downs is my favorite song of all time), Lizzy McAlpine, and Ryan Beatty. Very acoustic guitar-centric soft folk-pop/country-ish stuff is right up my alley. Some things that I do when I’m lacking inspiration is watch people produce music on YouTube; the two main channels that I gravitate towards are David Hilowitz Music (he does reviews of old synths and fun little instruments and makes songs with them and it’s very fun) and Trev Barnes (he does full music production videos and the music kinda sounds like something I’d make).
Performing live is such an important part of sharing music. What kind of spaces do you see yourself performing in this year? Are there any dream venues or festivals you’d love to be part of?
I’ve always had this weird fear of performing live, which is weird because I did musical theater for a good portion of my life. I’ve been trying to get over this fear by getting better at playing my own songs on guitar and singing at the same time. Since I’m moving to New York this year, I’m hoping that there are some of my artist friends that will want to bring me on as maybe an opener or something like that, or maybe I’ll toughen up and book a show myself. It’ll be easier to rouse myself to do that because a lot of my audience is in the US. I hope one day I can perform in the Bay Area in California. It'll feel like a full circle moment for me– maybe performing at a California festival could be fun too.
At the end of 2025, if you could look back and say, ‘This was the year I finally accomplished _______,’ what would that be?
I hope that I end up releasing a lot more music and hopefully start to work on another album when I live in the US. I just released a song called “rose” and I have two more upcoming releases that I haven’t announced yet that I am very proud of. I also hope to keep bringing my friends into my studio and make more very fun collaborations.
I have no idea what my audience number is gonna look like at the end of the year, and I’m not going to speculate much about it but I hope people start to find me more!
Listen to “the hiker” and the rest of bassea’s incredible discography here
