After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Trevor Powers stumbled upon a shoebox of home videos from his childhood in his parents’ basement. It’s no surprise, given his textured, self-reflective approach to songwriting, that audio samples from the tapes would end up on his next album as Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream. Powers’ most powerful tool, however, isn’t nostalgia but juxtaposition, which he employs to harden the line between the innocence of childhood and the violent currents of today, between juvenile dreams and intoxicated fantasies, obliviousness and imagination; and to diffuse it, too. The record also finds Powers making some of his most dynamic – and dynamically sequenced – songs to date, which only underlines the thematic contrasts. For every pillowy melody and irresistible chorus, there is a tragic story that’s hard to chew, characters with murky backgrounds, memories that can’t be erased. It’s relentless and revitalizing – proof that whatever Powers does next might look to the past, but will hardly look like the thing that came before.
1. Neighborhood Scene
The scene is hazy yet inviting; the piano delicate, the drums smoothly snapping into place. There’s not much distance drawn between the sampled audio and the innocence of Powers’ hushed voice and poetry, not until the disarming line, “Elvis lit the bomb.” The refrain of “Light it up” sounds like “la-de-da,” brilliantly introducing Powers’ knack for blurring the line between what he knows now and how he remembers his mind wandering. The guitars get grungier, the synths fuzzier, painting over celebratory memories with a tinge of horror.
2. Speed Freak
I don’t know if Powers had the idea for ‘Speed Freak’ written down before finding the right synth lead, but its restless, jittery tone instantly captures the vibe of the song’s protagonist. It “came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” according Powers, though, of course, a dream is a lot more what it sounds like. (One of those rare ones, I guess.) You can’t really tell who the speed freak is, or why they’re the one apologizing – though you have to be struck be a line like, “The engine thundering/ through every mountain I can steer.” More than just waxing poetic, Powers revs up the music, too.
3. Football
A certain weariness seeps into Powers’ voice on ‘Football’, which hews closer to the dreamlike atmosphere of Heaven Is a Junkyard after the buzzing pulse of ‘Speed Freak’. “And you told me I was stayin’ strong/ When all I’ve done is play along ,” he sings, presenting the theme of resilience as sport, and then, sport as religion. Powers’ gift for framing songs as short stories shines through here, particularly in the second, for lack of a better word, verse. But it also feels startlingly personal – Powers repurposing the familiar language of his youth to commune back with the characters in his home videos.
4. Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)
At the end of the song, a voice mutters something about this being what life is really like; or, as Powers sings more poetically, “life’s a baseball bat to the jaw.” (Again, a sports metaphor does the heavy lifting.) The song is about the summer that taught him that, and he lays out the scenes he wishes he never saw, for the real first time on the record, in morbid detail. At the same time, a weight is lifted off him, and his heavenly voice rises above the main vocal, which keeps quivering at the memories. A fondness persists despite the mad devils that surrounded him. And even, he admits, a real freedom.
5. Seersucker
When we grieve as children, fairytale villains can show up anywhere: “A wolf is in the shepherd’s pie,” Powers sings. He informs us of the year he – the person in the audio sample, we can only assume – passed, the refrain of “We’re doing alright” reverberating in the years that follow. The piano, by now a trademark of Youth Lagoon’s sound, has perhaps never played a more vital role in his music. “Every song that Momma wrote/ Pop learned to play/ When the old piano broke/ The music went away.” You can hear it hanging there like a knot in his throat.
6. Lucy Takes a Picture
Like snapping a picture, the pizzicato strings threaded through this early album single has the effect of suspending a moment in time. Powers doesn’t fully articulate it until the final verse, which finds him softly intoning words it sounds like he’s been looking for his whole life: “And we catch a little breeze/ When I catch you in the dirt/ And I feel the autumn die/ And the winter hold its keep/ I can see it in your breath/ I can taste it on your cheek.” You can hear it in the song, one of the most resplendent he’s ever laid to tape.
7. Perfect World
The album switches gears once again, but don’t let the title fool you: ‘Perfect World’ is not only the most eruptive song on here, but also one of the least idyllic. It’s a deep cut that makes you pay close attention: still piercingly melodic and narratively rich, but also wreathed in distortion.
8. My Beautiful Girl
From the knottiest, loudest song on the album to its simplest, sweetest piano ballad: in the world of Rarely Do I Dream, it makes total sense. ‘My Beautiful Girl’ begins with the narrator’s sole action: “I hold your hand…” Everything that follows is observation, understanding, and pure admiration. Unlike other girls mentioned on the album, this one remains nameless, but he notices the ways her family is in disarray, too – the loudness of broken homes that beg the song to be quiet. And beautiful, of course.
9. Canary
After the emotional directness of ‘My Beautiful Girl’, ‘Canary’ is harder to sink into, darkly enigmatic yet entrancing. Darkness materializes in playful ways, too, Powers remind us, but that doesn’t make the atmosphere any less foreboding. “Halloween and homemade alchohol,” he sings, which could serve as the song’s subtitle.
10. Parking Lot
Here, the audio sample is placed not at the beginning but right as the song’s groove flips from a twinkle to a shuffle, a bold move that’s enough to justify its inclusion on the album, though it bears less weight than the ones that come before.
11. Saturday Cowboy Matinee
The protagonist of ‘Speed Freak’ steers mountains; the one in ‘Saturday Cowboy Matinee’ wants to be one. It comes from a place of delirium that, by this point on the album, is familiar but all the more pronounced; the drugs less and less part of the subtext, more violently foregrounded. It’s almost like the mere mention of them is enough to trigger another audio sample, a powerful yet futile invocation of blissful ignorance. With its trip-hop influence, the song is a bit of a sonic outlier, but also another welcome change of pace.
12. Home Movies (1989 – 1993)
In this collage of voice recordings, one ultimately rings out: “Say, ‘This is Trevor’s story.'” It’s true, but it’s also, at the end of the day, an instruction: a framing device passed down from generations so our lives make more sense, so we can look back and cross-reference with ease. We can spend every waking day documenting our lives; we can dig into the archives; we can pick out the easter eggs, laying them out for others to unpack. We can even weave some fiction in for the hell of it. But that doesn’t stop us being hunters of our stories, not tellers. If Rarely Do I Dream clings to any form of truth, it’s that there’s still peace to be found in the rubble. And like any piece of us that remains, words can hardly do it justice.
