The Los Angeles musician Steven Fleet launches Dream Bodies through a debut track which extends beyond standard musical classifications. The musical release “Dream Hangover” establishes its presence as a post-punk and dream-pop creation which unites ethereal synthesizers with guitars that employ heavy reverb effects.
During his time in isolation on the Oregon Coast he wrote this song to investigate his feelings from a destructive romantic involvement. Steven Fleet constructs music through a nostalgic and deeply personal tone which derives from his musical heroes The Chameleons and Cocteau Twins and Joy Division.
The musical arrangement of the song combines shimmering guitars and pulsing bass with tribal-like rhythmic patterns. Fleet sings with a poetic weight that resembles Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch while delivering his vocals. The song uses lyrical metaphors alongside raw emotional notes to recreate the feelings of heartache and personal change that every listener has experienced.
The sonic expertise of Josh Achziger in his mixing and mastering work creates the atmosphere of driving through desert night under stars with “Dream Hangover.” Through its production techniques the track develops a dreamlike ambiance which extends its impact through listeners after the song ends.
The debut release from Dream Bodies sets the artist as a promising musical figure by uniting darkwave coldness with deep emotional intensity.
Listen to Dream Hangover
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“Dream Hangover” is such an evocative title. What’s the story behind it and how does it reflect the themes of the song?
Dream hangover is literally just that it’s like when you have a dream and then you wake up and it stays with you afterwards and lingers over your day and you wish you could’ve just gone back to sleep and stayed in that dream. So in that sense it’s related to the breakup that I went through that inspired the song and in the aftermath finding myself and my identity again
Your sound has been described in various ways by critics and fans. How would you personally characterize the sonic landscape of “Dream Hangover”?
The sonic landscape is actually a style that’s in some other of my songs: where I have a chugging drum beat and driving bassline and the guitars and the synths just float and shimmer on top of it. I’ve described it sensually as driving through the desert at night under the stars with the top down and the wind blowing through your hair. Pushing into the mysteries driving onward towards that unseen horizon.
What was your creative process like for this single? Did it come together quickly or was it something that evolved over time?
This is a song that actually came together very quickly. The emotion and inspiration was so immediate and raw, and it was a riff that I had been playing around with for a long time, and it just matched the cadence of the lyrics that I came up with. And the lyrics came out of me very quickly
The lyrics in “Dream Hangover” seem to balance between clarity and ambiguity. How intentional is this approach to your songwriting?
That’s an interesting observation and pretty accurate and one in which I’m not even aware that I’m doing usually. But I feel like it’s good to balance the metaphorical with the personal, the universal with the particular. To get that “as above, so below” balance going on if you know what I mean
Are there specific musical influences that shaped this particular track, perhaps ones that might surprise your listeners?
Well, the immediate influences for this song are the ones that are most apparent. The chameleons, Sad Lovers and Giants, the cure, New Order, Cocteau Twins, stuff like that. A little bit of Vinny Reilly and Manuel Gottsching sprinkled in for good measure: A combo of the ethereal elements of Dream pop and the more gritty immediate elements of postpunk with a smidge of krautrock.
How does “Dream Hangover” connect to or depart from your previous work? Does it represent a new direction for Dream Bodies?
I’d say for the most part dream hangover is a pretty good encapsulation of my tendencies and my affinities with certain sonic textures. As what I described above. But also, as you will see with the songs that I will be releasing in the coming months, within those tendencies , there is also a diverse in which I deploy these sensibilities.
Can you share a memorable moment from the recording sessions for this single?
Well, I did record it in an isolated house on the Oregon coast during four months of pretty much interminable rain, and given that I’d been dealing with a breakup that I mentioned, the music just came out of me. And the lyrics were almost channeled: the way the rhyme schemes, the cadences arose. It’s just one of those fortitude times as an artist things where it just flows out of you in essentially one shot, a completed form
The production on this track has some distinctive elements. What were you aiming to achieve sonically, and who helped bring that vision to life?
Well, those sonic elements are elements that I’ve been honing over years of making music and coming up with my own sound; the fluttery dotted eighth rhythmic delays are something that I really like doing, and that appears on several of my upcoming songs.
I also like running multiple keyboards through affect pedals, which obviously isn’t very unique, but it helps to achieve a more smeary ethereal soaring effect on the high notes, which I really like. As far as who helped bring my sonic vision to life, well after the fact that I did all of the recording of all the instrumentation myself, an old friend of mine, Josh Achziger from the band Shadow Mirrors mixed and mastered everything.
It really helps when you share the same sensibilities and influences when it comes to that process because you almost don’t even have to explain what you want. They already get it.
Many artists describe a feeling when they know a song is finally “done.” When did you reach that moment with “Dream Hangover”?
That’s another good question. And it’s I think a common occurrence across all art forms. Poetry, painting, film, music, it’s like when is it done or when do you have to keep tinkering with it or just put it down and walk away and say that’s it this is good. It’s definitely ambiguous and there’s no hard and fast rule to any of it. It’s just it’s just a feeling that you get.
What would you like listeners to take away from “Dream Hangover” on first listen, and what might they discover with repeated listens?
I mean, people can take away whatever they want. That’s the beauty of art, people can find their own reflection and project their own meaning into everything, but I would say that the theme in the song is fairly universal and I feel like most people can relate to what I’m describing, even if it times it can be sort of metaphorical and related to that I’d say what people may discover the more they listen to the song would be within the lyrics.
I’m a poet and I spend a lot of time composing lyrics that are metaphorical and very imagistic and so in that sense, maybe there’s some fruits or little gems, some nuggets of wordplay that someone might pick up on upon repeated listens. Because I know that I certainly do with songs that I like from other bands that resonate with me in that way.
What’s next for Dream Bodies following this release?
This will be the first of several songs to be released in the coming months, either as singles or as parts of EP’s. That’s to be determined, but there’s definitely a slew of tracks from that recording session coming down the pipeline.
