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“Life itself is a thunderstorm,” says Trevor Powers, the Idaho-based songwriter and producer behind the Youth Lagoon moniker. “Life itself is brothers on walkie-talkies… it’s your dog at the backdoor, or a speeding car off in the distance. It’s a gentle voice on the radio. Mom smoking on the porch. The color of sunlight. It’s always right under your nose and so easy to miss. Often, a simple treasure.”
In the fall of 2023, that treasure came in the form of a shoebox filled with home videos Powers found in his parents’ basement while he was looking for a pre-war harmonica that once belonged to his grandma. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is.” Powers spent the following week recording his favorite moments off the TV — Easter egg hunts, backyard baseball, bloody noses, birthday parties, road trips, and all the life in-between. “I was like a ghost in a lost memory,” says Powers.
The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies not only began shaping his songs, but infusing with them. He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography, fusing past with future. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” says Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”
Rooted in love and childhood memoir, Rarely Do I Dream is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore. Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.
“The more I rewind the tapes of my life, the more I can hear the voice of my soul,” Powers says. “This isn’t nostalgia. Life’s much more messy than that. It’s a dedication to all the parts of who I was, who I am, and who I’m going to be.”
With a bent toward rural noir, Powers has found a home in a world where his personal journals and poetic confessions are indistinguishable from the twisted mythologies of habitual sinners and devout barflies. “The summer taught me that life’s a baseball bat to the jaw,” Powers sings on “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” — painted with western tremolo guitars, proto-ambient recordings of dogs barking, family talking, and a distorted drumbeat circling it all. On “Neighborhood Scene,” the album’s opening track and one Powers describes as “a postcard to everyone I’ve ever loved,” he turns a remote Idaho cul-de-sac into a land both eternal and sacred, inverting the privacy of home into an open invitation to sit down for dinner. “Do I, do I belong in a country house? Every angel and devil out marchin’ on the lawn. / Do I, do I tell Tom that I saw his dad at the ‘No Romance’ bunny ranch? Cowgirl ain’t his mom,” he sings.
“Speed Freak,” a dark joyride that showcases Youth Lagoon’s glaring metamorphosis, unleashes a grungy beat while synth bass struts and splinters into a technicolor post-punk spectacle. “This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. The more I’ve learned to die to myself, the more I’ve learned there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”
After taking an eight-year hiatus away from Youth Lagoon, Powers returned to the alias with the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard in early 2023, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. Youth Lagoon’s first album in nearly a decade pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I had ended Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” Powers says. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.”
Delicate yet aggressive, innovative yet classic, Rarely Do I Dream is Youth Lagoon’s most comprehensive and audacious album to date. A treasure trove of home movies, twangy fuzz guitars, sun-bleached synths, classical pianos, blown-out drums, and Powers’ spellbinding melodies all feel like an old photograph that’s been reanimated in a strange and distant future. “This was the first time I’ve ever used guitar instead of piano as my main writing tool,” says Powers. “Anytime I’m horrified and on a knife-edge creatively I know I’m doing something right. I need that feeling of knowing I could either be making the greatest thing I’ve ever made or something so bad it could be career suicide. Anything short of that, I’ve failed myself. After the Heaven Is a Junkyard tour, I was fully in the moment and appreciated all of it… then I said to myself, ‘Ok, moving on.’ I have zero interest in repeating myself.”
Powers’ ability to relentlessly push and evolve the project forward has taken Youth Lagoon into a territory both fiercely original and strikingly expansive. Recorded with co-producer and mixer/engineer Rodaidh McDonald, Rarely Do I Dream marks a seismic transformation, a mammoth leap forward, and an instant, indelible landmark in Youth Lagoon’s revered discography. With a profound love and dedication to family, along with his own brand of genre-bending noir rock, Powers’ has achieved what he set out to do.
“I wanted to make an album that feels like life itself…” says Powers.
