“Dark Angel,” “Dreamstate”
I always like the idea of a club in nature. I guess that’s a music festival? I mean, not a music festival, that’s always a total nightmare. I mean more like a pop up rave. Someone just pulls up to a particularly beautiful intersection, somewhere deserted, and opens up the trunk, and they’ve got a couple of speakers and they invite all of their friends. I’m thinking something extremely pastoral. I know you’d have to get permits and all that, but instead, what if you just kind of willed it? You know, like everyone just planned to ignore what was going on, unless they were joining in. I’m imagining some sheep in a nearby field, for some reason, and they’re just ignoring all of these mad youths cavorting in an intersection wearing black leather. Maybe the sheep have something to do with the dreamstate of it all…or maybe they’re just there because I’m from Wales, and we’ve got a lot of sheep.
“Love You Got”
I want something extremely tender. That can be a difficult thing in electronic music. I made sure to back off of anything too sibilant in my voice or in the lyrics, and we kept the kick drum really soft, too. It was a balance, communicating this idea of desiring someone and also communicating this openness, too. I’ve got this whispered sort of bridge section that I repeat twice, “wanting pure euphoria,” and maybe that gets it across. I want something clean and smooth, but also soft. It maybe gets to that other line in this last sort of pre-bridge section, “we are resonant.” Could our desire somehow become a part of the sound? There’s a way that a lot of electronic music is supposed to provoke a reaction: in the most basic sense, dancing. But I’m not really looking for that here, or it’s not the only thing I want. I want to slide into, I want to become.
“Higher”
There was this quote from Brian Wilson once about how he made music. He said something like his melodies were always ascending because they were symphonies to God. I’m not really into the God stuff, but I liked the idea of making a song with an ascending melody. It’s kind of difficult to do in pop music. Most songs have descending melodies. Anyway, once I figured out that I wanted this song to be ascending, the words came pretty easily, and it fit in next to the sentiments on the previous track well.
“Rise”
I’m a believer in intermissions. In a ten-song album, there’s not an exact spot to rest, but with this and the next track, there’s a sense that it’s time to rest after the first four songs. We’ve been communing with nature for three songs, melding into one another, spending our life force energy, and we can’t use it all up at once. The sun is rising, we’ve got to just let these synths bubble over us. We shifted the rhythm tracks back in the mix and the ambient sounds up to the front, especially those, um, “wind” sounds. They’re not very cool! They’re like what you might hear in a yoga studio. But I’m not afraid of uncool sounds. If they’re what the song requires, I’m good with it.
“Ballad (In the End)”
So I had Tom Scully, from the Chemical Brothers, in on this one. Which is kind of funny, because this is maybe the least Chemical Brothers song on the album. I mean, the whole album isn’t very acid or big beat, but this is a ballad, it’s in the title. The reason I had Tom in though was just feeling like, if I’m going to have this one song when my voice is so front and center, I’ve got to get it recorded perfectly, and they are so good at getting one strong voice to emerge from the mix of a bunch of louder, more abrasive sounds.
With this one and the last one, I wanted to bring in just that edge of pain here. Just a small taste. This isn’t a bittersweet album, it’s not a pop album in that way where you have the sad lyrics and the brash, loud music. These lyrics are always hopeful, always focused on creating that world from the beginning of the album, this space where we can all dance or resonate with each other. If the title track and “Love You Got” are the thesis statement of the album, this is as much of an elaboration on that thesis as I’m going to give you. Otherwise I just want you to feel it.
“Sunshine,” “Air”
I said I just wanted you to feel it, right? [Laughs]. This is what I mean. Any questions? They are different sorts of tracks, for the record. It’s not just a seven-minute slab of sound with minimal lyrics. “Sunshine” is similar to “Higher,” it’s got that rising action, while “Air” is similar to “Rise,” it’s got more of a holding state, a resting state. The energy ebbs and flows in here, but the overall point here is to stop worrying about what the music means and start experiencing it. If you haven’t been doing that yet, there’s not much time left!
“Time To”
That awkward, hanging preposition, that’s kind of how this one is. It’s trying to get across that feeling of not knowing what you need, and being ok with it. I wanted to blend a few different styles in here, too. It’s got that airy ballad section, it’s got the mid-tempo section, it’s drops all the way off, and then it returns with probably the hardest house beat since the first three tracks. “Constant state of disarray:” you have to accept me as I am, I have to accept myself as I am.
“Trust and Desire”
I’ve covered Radiohead on Inner Song so you know I’m a sucker for that dramatic ending track, that “True Love Waits,” that “Videotape,” that “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” What feels right about ending it this way is how vulnerable those songs are, how there’s almost no irony there compared to a lot of their other songs. That’s the whole In Rainbows thing, that’s why it’s probably one of the most important albums for most of the artists in my generation. It shows you that these sentiments that Radiohead would have rejected earlier in their career are actually the ones they should have embraced. Not to take anything away from them, they’ve been brilliant all along. But I wonder if they could have been as open all along. That’s what I plan to do. Stay open all the way.
Last year I felt like I didn’t listen to music carefully enough and didn’t write enough, so I’m trying to change that. These are exercises to listen to an album 4 or 5 or 10 times and imagine what's it’s really about, with inspiration from something the artist said about their album, but without any fidelity to what they may or may not have meant.
I felt so backlogged with albums last fall that there was not going to be anyway I was going to check out an electronic album released in October. It turns out that Dreamstate probably would have been a helpful album for me as I was feeling stressed about kids, work, and um…politics? and I wish I’d checked it out then.
It’s funny that I ended up listening to it during the same week in January 2025 that I was checking out FKA Twigs’ Eusexua, though I’d call Twigs more of a visitor (tourist?) in the electronic world while Owens, as best as I can tell (I haven’t dug extremely deep) is more of a visitor in the pop world and was more based in the electronic world before. Both Eusexua and Dreamstate would sound great in the club, but Dreamstate probably more specifically made for headphones, or for my morning commute, as the sun’s rising over the desiccated landscape of highways and light industrial smog and I eagerly await my first cup of coffee while dodging semitrucks. It's healing music, is what I’m saying!