Jake Lane

Entertainment Editor

Dreams are a complicated matter. They are complex fantasies taken from daytime visions and the deepest desires of the mind. But they are also the goals many follow and raise on high in hopes of attainment.

For L.A.’s the Good Listeners, though, dreams are what they hope will pay the bills.

In their recent documentary “Don’t Quit Your Daydream,” Clark Stiles and Nathan Khyber show viewers that no matter how the odds are stacked against success, the best can always be made of the situation.

The premise: hit 12 towns on a 24-day tour of the United States, meeting a different collaborator in each town, with whom they write a song in one day and move on.

For Stiles, the spontaneity of these sessions embodied the trip. “I’ve heard a lot of great songwriters say that if you claim credit for writing your song, you’re sort of a plagiarist,” Stiles said. “It’s all about letting life happen, and you have to allow randomness.”

Over the course of the film, the viewer is treated to a menagerie of crooks and characters as the Good Listeners roll east in their RV. In Madrid, N.M., one of their contributors sort of materializes with a beer in each hand and a head full of songs. Shortly after the sessions, the man ran his car into a sign and went to jail, showing that the moments in the film, while recorded forever, are as transient as rolling film.

On the sporadic nature of collaboration of the film, Stiles said the idea was to have a plan to spring forth from, with three or four of the collaborators lined up and the others to be found on the road.

“We wanted it to be a trip about discovery,” Stiles said. “We winged a lot, and basically we knew that we needed to be in New York in 21 days to meet our production deadline. We had about a month of planning and a few collaborators lined up, and we found the rest on the fly.”

Over the course of the trip, the film explores the relationship Stiles and Khyber have shared in bands over the last two decades, starting with their ‘90s alternative rock band Absinthe. Following the band’s dissolution in 1998, the pair had little contact for about seven years, when a tragedy brought them together and set the wheels in motion for the Good Listeners.

When this is discussed in the film, correlated to the experience of one of their collaborators, the film hits a point where one can identify with the subject and feel sympathy but never dragged through an emotional quagmire.

“It was kind of great to have a day with a theme,” Stiles said. “Any narrative has an arc, and I guess ours does, but it never really falls. It’s great to have that moment in there as a bottom.”

While the trip only lasted about three weeks, the amount of material shot ended up being superfluous. Stiles said that much of the footage eventually cut from the film for the sake of a linear narrative adds to the emotional level of the film.

One example is, in one day, the band learns of a terrible crash on the highway in an area they passed and later encounters a young boy poking a dead cat with a stick in the street. Such moments also remind the viewer that there is always the potential for failure, which may explain why they were cut. The band did not fail.

Following the film’s completion, the production team raced to submit it to Sundance and many other festivals, but thus far has only made it to one, the Nashville Film Festival. The film is scheduled to run April 21.

While the film has not seen a hard copy release yet, it can be bought along with the corresponding album on iTunes.