Peel Dream Magazine is the now Los Angeles-based project led by Joseph Stephens, who hails from New York. Since launching the band in 2018 with Modern Meta Physic, Stephens has dabbled in and cycled through a wide range of styles and instrumental palettes, from the introspective shoegaze of 2020’s Agitprop Alterna to the orchestral baroque pop of 2022’s Pad. It’s no surprise that the band’s new album, Rose Main Reading Room, out today, is yet another musical departure, though one that can’t easily be traced back to a particular place and time. With help from vocalist Olivia Babuka Black and multi-instrumentalist Ian Gibbs, Stephens brings new colour and lushness to the ever-evolving Peel Dream Magazine sound, fusing archetypal indie pop, minimalist excursions, and dreamy psychedelia. The arrangements are strangely but beautifully aligned with the album’s conceptual journey: named after a hall at the New York Public Library, Rose Main Reading Room blurs the line between evolution and personal history, guiding us through Stephens’ childhood memories of New York City and beyond. The record is luminous and mesmerizing in its wide-eyed optimism and gentle nostalgia – hazy and fragmented as their expression may be – slipping into new revelations simply by driving itself forward.
We caught up with Peel Dream Magazine’s Joseph Stevens for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about his relationship with live performance, contextualizing the new Peel Dream Magazine album, the process behind it, and more.
In a recent conversation with Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum, you talked about how you see touring as album promotion, and that you don’t romanticize performing the way others tend to. I’m curious how your perspective on that changes from tour to tour, or even from show to show, now that you’re on the road.
I really like touring. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it can be exhausting sometimes, but the traveling part is super fun. I think what I was saying about the promotion thing is that I don’t always feel as invested in live performance – I don’t have this need to get in front of people and share live performance with them. I don’t get as much of a kick out of it as some people do, but I love the traveling part. I love the culture, showing up to venues, seeing all the people who are working, grabbing food, all these cool little excursions you get to do. It’s fun to tour the country, and it’s especially fun to do overseas touring. But I’m most interested in writing and recording albums than performing in front of people.
Every Peel Dream Magazine record so far has been pretty radically different. What has your approach been in terms of combining new and old material on this tour?
We’ve been playing a lot of new stuff from the new record, like maybe half the set. The rest of the set is actually a mixture of the first and second album. I got kind of tired of playing the songs from the third album, Pad, and I felt like the new record meshes better with the older stuff because it feels more like archetypal band music, as opposed to Pad, which is more of a concept-y, baroque-pop thing. I feel like the new stuff works well with the old stuff in a weird way. It’s been fun to revisit all that, and it definitely makes for a slightly shoegazier set.
Aside from the live set, is this something you also take into account when you’re making a new record? With Rose Main Reading Room, were you more or less conscious of how the songs might exist in the context of, or as a response to, your previous records?
Yeah, I think so. Whenever I’m working on a new batch of songs, I go through these extreme phases where I get really tired of whatever I just did, to the point where it just makes my skin crawl and I’m like, “I want to evolve beyond that.” So, Pad was a reaction to the shoegaze stuff of Agitprop Alterna, and with the new record, I got really tired of the mid-century orchestral pop sensibility of the previous album. Everything felt so quaint and jazzy and bossa-inspired, and I wanted to revisit a harmonic sensibility that was more ordinary or something, more natural to me, something coming out of the music I’ve always listened to, and not as much of a shtick. I was trying to move away from the bossa stuff, the clever chord progressions, and move more toward a simple, straightforward rock sound.
I feel like the first and second record have this minimalist, post-rock, droney kind of stuff, and I wanted to revisit some of that in the context of more symphonic instruments. I was listening to Philip Glass, Steve Reich, stuff like that, and all of that was going around in my head. I do always think of each record within the context of the ones that came before it, and I think about what would be fun and fresh for me. If I was a listener and had heard the previous records, what would I want to hear next? I try to think of it like I’m building a musical canon to a certain extent.
Do you ever seek the opposite mindset, where you try to think about what you’d like to listen to if you somehow weren’t aware of the previous material? To try and tap into whatever’s catching your ear at the moment?
I think I do that too, yeah. I like to try and get lost in whatever new thing I’m into as well. If you listen to the records in order, it’s almost like, in one way, the same person wrote the songs, but in another way, it’s like different people made them. I definitely change personally as each album cycle passes, but my musical taste changes too. I always want to kind of revel in whatever feels new and exciting to me. While I do think about the old records in the context of each new one, I don’t think of it like I’m following a blueprint from day one. I like to change it up a lot. With every record, I feel like I stumble onto a little trove in the dirt of stuff that is exciting to me, and once I’ve got all the good stuff – whether it’s an instrument palette or drum machine stuff or whatever – I feel like I’m ready to move on.
A song that comes to mind is ‘Machine Repeating’, which feels like it’s not just moving in one direction; there’s an interesting juxtaposition between gentle, acoustic, and orchestral elements with these squishy, ’80s-sounding synths. That feels like the result of that kind of approach.
Totally. Once I get all the ingredients on the table, they become customized tools for each record. I’m like, “I know this thing is fun,” and if I get stuck, I’m like, “Well, I’ll try something else.” If there’s space missing in a mix, I might use a cool, warbly sound from another song and see if it works. Mixing symphonic and electronic stuff is definitely part of the toolkit for this record. I remember wrestling with that song a lot, but it was more about mixing stuff, not so much the instrument palette. I think I wrote that song really quickly and it was essentially a glorified demo. I was just having a lot of fun with the acoustic guitars and clarinets. I wish I had better stories like that – it’s not like I was in the studio and someone accidentally started playing the clarinet, and I was like, “What if you did that?” But it’s not like that. [laughs] It’s very boring.
Do you have a specific philosophy when it comes to translating the new songs to a live setting? Was that something you concretely laid out before putting the show together?
It’s interesting, that’s something I’m wrestling with right now. It’s pretty hard to translate the record live, I think. On one hand, I try to lean into making things sound more like a band is playing them, stripping back some of the more grandiose parts of the mixes. But on the other hand, I’m always like, “Oh, that one part is really cool, I don’t want to lose that.” So there’s stuff we throw into the backing track. I don’t really have any kind of philosophy when it comes to playing live. I’ve seen people do shows where they just play an instrumental from their iPhone and sing over it. But it would be really cool to have a bigger band, but you have to keep the band somewhat small and think about the logistics. That’s a kind of wrestling match I have with myself. We don’t have the luxury of having the most grandiose live performance ever, just because we don’t really have much of a budget for touring. Things are a bit leaner, and we go for a more archetypal rock band arrangement.
How has your own relationship with being onstage developed over time?
Sometimes I really like performing. If I feel like we sound really good and it’s matching what I’m aspiring to do, I really like it. I like the idea of standing in front of people, sharing my heart, you know? But a lot of the time, I don’t. Maybe the stage sound isn’t good, or the venue is weird, or the sound person is weird, or the crowd is weird. When the crowd is really quiet or something, I’ll get shy and not feel excited about performing. It’s a roller coaster ride, actually. Sometimes it’s the best thing ever, and other times it just feels kind of weird.
I wish I was more of a showman sometimes. I don’t really like to talk – I don’t do any kind of banter or anything like that. There’s a lot of tuning that takes place, and we have transition music playing, and I’m just staring at the ground, tuning. I think some people find it kind of stark because there’s no talking. We’re not trying to do the storyteller thing or be charming in that way – it’s really just about playing the songs. Some people like that, but some people expect more of a classic showman thing. But I really don’t like to talk at shows. I also don’t like to see people talking at shows – I like to just go to a show where someone is just going to play the songs and that’s it, because I’m most interested in the songwriting.
One of my favorite tracks on the album is ‘Recital’, which is about a piano recital you were in as a kid, and you’re kind of tracing back this anxiety around performance.
That song is really abstract. On the one hand, it’s just about being nervous at a piano recital when you’re about to perform – but then, sort of left of center, I’m fantasizing about a student that’s sitting in front of me, and I’m not even paying attention to the recital anymore. It’s kind of talking about this duality – underneath this civilized event, there’s this ancient thing that’s irrelevant to the event going on.
It’s interesting that Olivia’s voice is so prominent on the song, which switches things up as far as perspective goes. What was the thinking behind that?
I wouldn’t say it was the idea from the beginning, but that became obvious to me as well. Once that clicked in my head, I was like, “Whoa, that kind of obscures things in a cool way.” It makes it less autobiographical and more universal.
More broadly, how do you feel your collaborators added their own voice, both literally and aesthetically, to the record? How do you feel their presence shaped Rose Main Reading Room?
I felt like Pad was a little too much myself. Even beyond the decision-making, the actual performances of all the instruments, it felt like a million “me”s playing everything. After a while, it felt like everything was the same every time I listened to it. So I thought it would be cool to involve more people in this record, if for no other reason than to give it a bit more spontaneity and have some musical decision-making that was different from my own. It’s kind of funny because I’m actually a bit of a control freak, especially when it comes to mixing and stuff. But I thought it would be cool to short-circuit myself there and just have things that I couldn’t even change, just performances by other people.
Ian Gibbs played drums on the record, and he was in charge of tracking those drums. We did that stuff in his parents’ garage. It was just fun to hand it over to somebody for a bit and not be the judge, jury, and executioner all by myself. There were little things Ian did that I never would have done. For example, in the song ‘Wish You Well’, the middle chorus, it kicks into this groovy drum beat. Originally, I didn’t want there to be drums there; it was supposed to be just a snare fill. But Ian, hearing it for the first time, did that classic thing where he was like, “What if we just threw a beat on it?” In my mind, I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” But we tracked it, and later on, I listened to it and was like, “Actually, that’s a cool development that I wouldn’t have done myself.”
I also wanted to vocally expand the literal vocal range of the melodies and bring in another human, another identity to the mix. Olivia is an absolutely incredible singer, and I was really fortunate that she was down to sing on the record. Hearing her take on the vocals was also surprising and really helpful. While we were recording, it was fun to orchestrate ideas in real time with her while she was tracking vocals. We would do background stuff and harmonies, reacting to how they sounded with the instrumental music. I feel like if I was left to my own devices, I would just do the same bag of tricks that I do myself. I kind of write based on that. I know my voice so well that there’s no surprises left – that’s not true, but in general, it gets kind of boring.
A lot of the memories you lay out on the record come from childhood, which is a theme that the voice recording in ‘Wood Paneling, Pt. 3’ really puts into focus. How do you personally reflect on not just the role of family in childhood, but how it extends into adulthood, even in ways that aren’t necessarily explored on the record?
There’s this whole theme of human evolution, animal evolution, and geological time. There’s an allegory there for your own personal evolution. So, if you think of your life as a history – your upbringing as, like, your ancient history, and then your adulthood as the current day you – your family is obviously a big part of that. I was reflecting and juxtaposing different little memories I had. There’s not a whole grand statement as opposed to different snapshots from different ages in my life, contextualized as if it’s animal history or something, like you’re gawking at different exhibits in a museum.
That recording was really fascinating to me because, on one hand, it’s really nostalgic and kind of sweet. He’s talking about family and the way it plays this crucial role in raising you, how they’re so important to you, they love you so much. But it’s also kind of sardonic and fucked up. At the end, you hear these ape screams, and it’s quite dark. Without saying a lot, I wanted to juxtapose those two things.
I wasn’t sure if that was part of the original recording or if you added that in to create contrast.
No, that’s literally part of the recording. It’s from the forties or something, and they just didn’t know that that was kind of awkward and abrasive. They end the video with these apes screaming, it’s super weird. If that video was made noawadays, I feel like it would probably end with something more canned and sentimental.
I feel like the instrumentals on the album take us into the natural world in a more direct way. What did you get out of playing with those patterns or images purely through music?
It was cool. I mean, that song ‘Migratory Patterns’, for example, it’s not like I was reading about birds and matching the BPM of the song to this thing some scientists discovered is actually – it’s not that deep. It was more just, I wrote this thing, and after the fact, I realized it kind of evoked this forward momentum, like a flock of birds or something. I don’t even know if I set out to compose anything that specifically sounded like the natural world from the beginning. It was more, as I was working on stuff, I was thinking of ways to tie it all together. I almost feel like if the album had another theme, I could have named all those things differently and given them an entirely different context. Sometimes it’s fun to just take a title and be like, “Oh, now it’s about birds,” but it wasn’t necessarily about that to begin with.
I know that’s not as interesting to say, but for some reason, I was fixating on a woodland sound palette and churned out all these different things that took me to that place. The song ‘Central Park West’, actually, that was originally an instrumental – in my mind, it was an instrumental of a bear lumbering through the forest. I think at one point, it was even ‘Grizzly Bear Song’ or something. I fixate on a few themes and then try them out – it’s like a wardrobe. “What if this was about a bear? What if this was about birds?”
Starting with ‘Lie in the Gutter’, the gaze of the record seems to open up and become more cosmic and existential. Why was it important for the record to land in that place with the last three songs? Do you see them representing a similar kind of optimism that’s hinted at throughout the record?
That’s a good question. I definitely wrestled with the track sequence a lot and tried all kinds of things. At one point, we even tried having ‘Lie in the Gutter’ as the first song. The short answer is that those songs aren’t there because they needed to be, like a particular vibe or perspective. And I don’t know if there’s necessarily a whole message that the record lands on with those last three songs, although I do like the sequence and how it gets more optimistic and existential toward the end. ‘Counting Sheep’ always felt to me kind of like a lullaby, going to sleep, all is okay, comforting song. So I wanted that to be the last track. But beyond that, I’m not really sure. It’s funny, at one point I really didn’t like how the song ‘Lie in the Gutter’ came out, and I didn’t even want it to be on the album. I think that’s why I placed it late in the sequence, because I didn’t want people to hear it or something.
But it became the lead single.
Yeah, the record label at the end said they wanted it to be the first single. And I was like, “God damn it!” But I think it’s a really nice moment as a palate cleanser where it occurs on the record. It was literally like horse trading; I was polling different people every day about what the album sequence should be. I wasn’t sure if all 15 songs could live together under one roof, but every time I tried to take something away or change it, it felt like something was missing.
I like that term, “cosmic relief,” that you use in ‘Lie in the Gutter’, and I feel like it’s part of what spins everything that follows in this revelatory, positive light. Even if it wasn’t intentional, do you feel like that’s a perspective you tried to hold on to in general?
Yeah, I think so. I think I’m kind of a romantic and an optimist at heart. I’m also pessimistic, too – there’s stuff like ‘Running in Place’ and ‘Machine Repeating’, which are kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s all authentic to my personality. But at the end of the day, once I’ve processed something and been upset about something, I generally want to move on, get on with my life, and find happiness. That’s definitely how I wanted the ending to feel.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Peel Dream Magazine’s Rose Main Reading Room is out now via Topshelf Records.
