Running down a dream
When Caitlin Barker closes her eyes at night, she opens a door to a vivid dreamscape layered with subplots and storylines that could fuel another Duffer Brothers series. And there’s no escape.
She doesn’t call them nightmares. “My mind is very visual,” Barker said. “But I also have a very creative brain.”
The singer-songwriter for the Eddie Award-winning band Candy Ambulance is as transparent in life as she is in song. Her dreams resemble reality in that she recalls sensations vividly. She can taste it when she bites into something, and she feels the phone as she texts someone.
Barker shares a “tame” dream in which she is running a haunted orphanage. The children are possessed by a malevolent spirit, causing them to leap off a cliff. Everyone is perplexed until an infant is left on the foster home’s front steps. She discovers the baby can communicate with her telepathically and has a solution.
“It’s telling me that it has the only way to fix the orphanage and that the key is I need to take bolt cutters and cut off every finger on the baby at the first knuckle,” Barker said. “I don’t want to do this, but it said it’s the only way to save all the children.”
When she follows through with the instructions, she feels empowered until she’s hit with a bolt of disgust. “You’re insane,” she says. “Then I was like, is it, or am I actually saving the orphanage?
“Like what’s the truth here?”
It reads like a Stephen King novel, and there may be truth behind that. During the pandemic, Barker shared how she read through the novelist’s Dark Tower series. “The Gunslinger,” is one of the horror novelist’s first works which he started as a student at University of Maine. The series is intertwined with plots from his other books, with characters from “It” and “The Stand” making appearances throughout all nine books. She “blasted” through them all in eight months.
A professional might call it imposter syndrome, a crippling case of self-doubt in one’s status, abilities, or accomplishments. But, her truth, as she shares it, she’s an introvert performing as an extravert.
On stage, Barker is self-assured. She is an accomplished musician by anyone’s definition, realizing a teenager’s dream after jumping behind the wheel of her car with The Replacements playing on the radio. It’s her space. She has a space behind the bar, too, as she tends bar at two places. She’s also a nanny, another space where she feels defined.
But outside of these spaces, she’s anxious. She’s a writer but finds it hard to write a press release to promote a show. Not her show. “Who am I to ask people to attend my show? Who’s going to watch me perform?” she says.
Last summer, Barker performed under the canopy of trees during Nipperfest at Schenectady’s Music Haven. It was one of the first times she played solo under her middle name, Barbie. Roughly 1,500 people were in attendance, many of whom in front of her. Audiences are important to her; they provide her with the validation for her place as a musician, she says. The pandemic stripped that away from her, but she also hates crowds. She closed her eyes and started to play.
Barker’s first day of kindergarten was a disaster. As kids played on the carpet, she “Spiderman-ed” herself, bracing her body against the doorway, screaming. She remembers boys chanting “Shut her up” as they played undisturbed with building blocks. The teacher took her aside and soothed her by holding her for the first 15 minutes of the day.
A few years later, after her family moved from Fort Edward to Salem, she faced a new crowd of students. She had panic attacks and many meltdowns preceding the start of school. She remembers wearing a pink vest with teddy bears and a matching hair scrunchie. Even the pants were pink. “Bold choice,” she said. “Kind of like armor.” The teacher must have seen her shaking with anxiety like a nervous bulldog. That’s when she showed her the class hamster.
Barker sat down with the hamster in her hands, holding her own. She recalls kids peeking around the corner, laughing, and she thought, “They know I’m a loser.” A group of girls pointed and joked. The hamster defecated on Barker’s pink pants.
The two girls would wind up being her best friends. She’d talk through the nightmares and anxiety in therapy. The dreams abated to where she now sees them as a creative outlet. She doesn’t interpret their meanings.
“For me, it’s pointless because they’re rapid, they’re constant the whole night,” she said. “If I tried to put any sort of meaning into them, it would just be another exhausting thing to do.”
From her place on stage, she expresses confidence. She knows she’s good because she trusts the preparations she has made, from practicing to managing the sound. She admits to the “tinest” of mistakes, but speaks of practicing her timing to a metronome. Before Candy Ambulance shows, she, Jesse Bolduc and Jon Cantiello measure the sound so as not to blast the audience away. The devil is in the details, and she’s got a hold of it.
The dreams fuel her creativity. Last week, she debuted her new solo EP, titled “C,” which she digitally released on streaming services under Tummy Rub Records. As Barbie Barker, she is raw, authentic, and deeply emotional, delving into themes of substance abuse recovery, longing for motherhood, solitude, partnership, and self-identity.
The Nipperfest crowd did not make her anxious. She closed out her set, opened her eyes, and felt elated. “I killed that set,” she said. Her mother and aunt approached her front the crowd. Her aunt was in tears. Her mother said, “I would have been really nervous!” But, Barker said she could see the pride in her mother’s eyes. “I saw her being so, so proud.
“One person playing to 1,500 people,” she said. “The 15-year-old me would be very impressed—the kid clinging to the wall and being terrified of meeting 12 kids in kindergarten.”
