Bushek distills creativity, puts it on disc.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

In this Olympics season, there's no shortage of dramatic story lines that play so well on television. The media focus is on overcoming adversity and realizing dreams, usually accompanied by reflective sound bites and ambient acoustic guitar.

For athletes, dreams can crumble with one pulled muscle or come true behind the power of a hometown crowd.

Garrick Bushek wants to be in the latter group, but with a more inventive sound to tell his story. He has been ruminating on dreams for years and has harnessed all that thinking, planning and rapid eye movement into a concept album called "Dreamcatcher Juice," for which he will have two CD release shows Saturday.

The first performance will be at the Eugene 08 Fan Festival adjacent to Hayward Field, and the second will be a late-night gig at Latitude 21.

A marathon day of performing is an appropriate way to release an album that is the culmination of the Eugene native's more than 10 years of performing, writing, networking and developing as an artist.

"This is the first album where I recorded it like I was paid to make music," Bushek said. "I wanted to do that once at least in my life. I was able to be free more with my life and my happiness. I pushed myself to my extreme limits, but I still got to be free like a kid with my music."

Right now his motto is something most athletes, or anyone trying to achieve something extraordinary, can relate to, and it's also the name of the first track on the album: "The Grind to Paradise."

When reached for an interview, Bushek sounded weary but proud of all that went into his latest project. He worked on it for nine months and said in the past 3' months he drove 5,000 miles to create its 16 tracks.

He logged those miles mainly between Eugene and Portland, keeping up with gigs elsewhere while collaborating with "super producer" Justin Dodge in Eugene.

The driving is part of the grind. But Bushek prepared for this project, he said, with the delirious passion of a parent-to-be, not letting a detail go unconnected to his overall concept - from CD cover art to each written word.

Hung above the bed at night, in Native American lore, a dreamcatcher snags bad dreams before they enter your head. But Bushek thought, "What if it caught all dreams and you could squeeze out the psychic matter and filter it into creative endeavors?"

If it sounds like no-boundaries Burning Man thinking, it is. The emotional ride Bushek has been on in recent years that built up to this creative outpouring includes last year's sojourn to the Nevada desert. When he talks about how he reached the low covered in "All I See Is Up," the desert always enters the picture because he pushed himself to the limits there and during a subsequent few months in the woods working on Keegan Smith's "HYbrid." But after that he found himself in a slump.

"I really did make that song when I was at my lowest point," he said, noting he had been to the Burning Man desert city, the woods of Mount Hood to work on the project with Smith, and the valleys, sleeping in a basement with no place to live.

"I didn't have anywhere to go and I had no money," he said. "Sometimes you are so low that you can't get any worse. The only place to go is up."

Ready to release the newest project and re-release "Underwater Not Underground," Bushek said he hopes some folks from out of town see his fan festival show, complete with 10-piece band.

He's part of a hard-working core group of artists who want to push hip-hop stylings from the Northwest to a broader audience. Part of the challenge spreading the music is that it's difficult to define. You can't just give it a name like krunk and call it a day.

Bushek and Dodge produced beats and mixed samples for "Dreamcatcher Juice," which has some instrumentation but nothing to the degree of what Marv+Ellis pulls off live with his Imaginary Friends band.

Sprinkled with references to the Northwest and his friends and fellow artists, this is personal project, but its themes are universal. The biggest one is love, but self-doubt, loneliness and money struggles are big ones, too.

Bushek's vocal style comes from a hip-hop tradition (Dodge wears Bushek's first hip-hop group, Genus Pro, T-shirt in the album art), but leading up to working with Smith on "HYbrid," Bushek came into his own as a singer and "Juice" shows off that fact.

"Usually I don't make a new album unless I am emitting creativity," Bushek said. "It's a piece of art. It's not a bunch of hot club hip-hop tracks that I threw together."

The tone is heady and serious, but there are plenty of clever winks and smiles.

He takes the tune from the '80s science television show "3-2-1 Contact" for a collaboration with Smith about the initial chemistry and excitement of a relationship,

The melody made famous by the Oompa-Loompas of Willy Wonka fame serves as a backdrop on "Outside Looking in," featuring Lafa Taylor.

Here the two play with the poor grammar of a common hip-hop slang question, "What it do?" saying instead, "What doth it do young player?"

"I'll be a thespian if you are going to be a player," Bushek said in the interview, lounging in a backyard oasis under wind chimes and hanging crystals during a short break that week. "We try to warn the people, too ... to remind you of the feeling of getting a warning, in a playful way."

There are also subtle references there for Bushek's incarcerated brother to relate to, without elaborating about what landed him behind bars. The track is about changing your ways.

To carry out music with such creative and diverse production live is not an easy task, but Bushek and Dodge worked on charting the music so musicians could learn it.

"He's an actual composer," Bushek said of his longtime collaborator. "I took my beats to him. He tweaked them slightly to keep the feel of the songs."

Go to the blog to read backstory of how Dodge and Bushek managed to get the inside art for the album and other serendipitous moments that led to "Juice" coming together.

concert preview

Marv+Ellis and the Imaginary Friends

What: Hip-hop vocalists with live band; CD release for "Dreamcatcher Juice"

With: Unkle Nancy and the Family Jewels and DJ Jeff Ray will warm the crowd

Extra: Performance painting by Marlis, slide show by Bodhi Reeves, Raw Action Break Squad in the b-boy arena

Where: Latitude 21, 21 W. Sixth Ave.

When: 10 p.m. Saturday

Admission: $10

On the Web: The backstory for how the artists put together the album art at rgweb.registerguard.com/ticketfiles

Also: A free show at the Eugene 08 Fan Festival near Hayward Field starts at 5:30 p.m. Saturday