Youth Lagoon Opens the Portal

Trevor Powers is happy to be exhausted today, after working his ass off on the best album of his career, Rarely Do I Dream. He’s just returned home to Boise after spending five days in New York City doing promo work. “If the trip had gone one more day, I think it would have killed me,” he says. There’s a tiredness in his bones, but there’s also a stillness, even in the tornadoing demands of artistry. Remember that word, stillness. It lingers, cooperatively, with curiosity, and it’s selfish—yet what that stillness yields is a transformative music endangered by the truth of living yet spectacularly colored by recovery and change.

Two years ago, Powers brought his Youth Lagoon project back to life after killing it in 2016. There’s a tattoo stretching across his shaved temple now, but in 2023, it was covered by a pink mohawk, a token of transformation preceding his comeback album, Heaven Is a Junkyard. He’d written and demoed those songs while recovering from a freak illness from a near-fatal allergic reaction and combating the death of a dear friend, Cormac Roth. And that record, it captured a capacity of grief and self-continuity told through a survival marked by life’s forgotten undertows—American cruelty ruptured by higher-beings, and nonsensical bodies becoming sensical in the context of one another. Drugs, God, brothers and landscapes barren yet ripe with color—that is Heaven Is a Junkyard, and that is the wonder moored by the blood and the guts of Youth Lagoon.

When Powers got back to Boise from the Heaven Is a Junkyard Tour in late 2023, he went to his parents’ house in search of his grandmother’s pre-wartime harmonica. There, he found boxes filled with old videotapes and took them home, not thinking anything of it—at least not at the time. “I hadn’t watched any of these home movies ever,” he says. “I don’t think anyone in my family had.” Powers reveals that his mom always had her camcorder out, recording everything. “It was always rolling—every road trip, Christmas, birthday party.” When he began combing through the tapes, Powers fell in love with them. He fell in love with seeing what was, because it taught him so much “about what is.”

Those 8mm tapes stirred a compulsion in Powers. He began recording clips of the scenes he’d plugged into his CRT-TV and uploading them onto his computer—digitizing and manipulating them so that he could sample the audio later on. It became a wormhole, and Powers fell into it. “I couldn’t stop working and, next thing I know, I’m like, ‘Holy shit, not only am I working on another album, but it’s become this thing where I’ve never been so excited about music in my life.’ There’s this faucet now, in me, creatively, that I just can’t turn off. And I have no desire to turn it off, because it keeps showing me new life.” Rarely Do I Dream was not an immediate product of Powers watching those home videos. Rather, it became just one thread pulled out of the sketches of many. While in his studio working on music and watching a tape simultaneously, he noticed that the audio of the movie was playing directly off of the song he was making. “It felt like there was an automatic cohesion between the two,” Powers says. “That was the moment that completely woke me up to what had been in front of my face the whole time.”

Because of the interstitial home video clips, it’d be easy to confuse Rarely Do I Dream with nostalgia, but it’s not sentimental—at least not in Powers’ eyes. He’s quite against the concept, believing that “living in the past is a prison.” He argues that “anything that’s keeping you away from the present is not where you need to be.” But those tapes became a tool, a color on the paintbrush, if you will, that allowed Powers to play with time in such a way that is so vital to the current moment. “It was in these pieces of who I was that showed me where it is, then, that I need to go,” he continues. “They taught me all these things about my family history and the awakening of my spirit.”

On Rarely Do I Dream, Powers is an anthropologist looking through the fortunes of a time already spent. He’s also an architect, meticulously building out each element of the record all the way to the synth pads, finding correct guitar parts separate from the family archive that was present. “I wanted tones that felt like they were out of time, where it’s playing with the past through textures of the way it’s recorded,” he explains. “If I was running something through a baby monitor, it was all guided by a raw, emotional state.” Even sonically, there were memories attached to how Powers manipulated sounds—like how a smell can vault you back to a certain time in your life. It’s transportive and oft-uncategorical, dawning an exciting chapter of prolific creation under the Youth Lagoon banner after nearly a decade of stagnation.

The trick to making Rarely Do I Dream succeed then became clear to Powers: “How do I take that and fuse it or intertwine it with the music, in a way that felt like it would do it justice? How do I take these unexplainable moments and find a new way to make them tangible or digestible enough to communicate those parts of my soul that they were affecting?” You can hear those questions find answers on a song like “Neighborhood Scene,” where Powers and his brother Bobby are together, in frame, between the swirling melodies and counter-melodies. 14 years ago, there was a Youth Lagoon song named “Bobby” on the bonus-track edition of The Year of Hibernation. Now, Powers and his brother are alive in the music like instruments. On “Home Movies (1989-1993),” Bobby is talking about going to see The Sandlot and he’s yelling. There’s an intensity to it. “When I sent Bobby some of the clips of him talking, he was like, ‘Why the fuck do I sound like a used car salesman?’” Powers remembers. “It’s hilarious, because Bobby now is such a thoughtful, quiet, brilliant person. I don’t remember Bobby talking like that, and Bobby clearly didn’t, either.”

What was especially vital to the way Powers approached Rarely Do I Dream, though, wasn’t just what we can hear in the tapes. In fact, it’s what we don’t hear. “We do this today, constantly, with social media, where what you’re presenting is only all of the loving,” he says. “But, the second that someone gets into an argument—Grandma says something rude to Mom—the camcorder goes down and gets shut off, all the more back then, because of the expense of 8mm tapes. Everything was so tactile: ‘Don’t waste this re-telling of a moment on something negative, turn it back on when the argument is over.’” Powers had to navigate his lyrics to reflect the other side of the story, even when everything is saturated in love and you can feel the warmth of a family in a near-angelic sense.

One of the best parts of being alive is getting to remember everything in my own way. Nobody else is going to remember anything identically. It can be frustrating, but it’s mostly nice. Some writers bend the truth of their own history, while some writers are diaristic to a strict and painful default. Powers’ music exists somewhere in the middle of all of that, as he splices a lineage into a mythology, blending worlds together in their own unique totalities. “It’s easier for me to tell the truth through combining fact with folktale,” he says. “There’s something about that weaving of imagination into something hyper-autobiographical—it’s the most live-giving thing that I’ve found in music. How do I take something that is so autobiographical and zoom in on it to the highest degree while, at the same time, taking something that exists in some weirdo, supernatural, surrealistic vampire realm and make the two feel like they can co-exist and feel true?”

That’s happening on a visceral level during Rarely Do I Dream. It’s an album created on impulse that captures a oneness Powers can remain true to. It was never about making a record better than Heaven Is a Junkyard. It was about opening the magic of his inner-sanctum up to everyone else without risking authenticity. Youth Lagoon songs build new histories out of old ones on Rarely Do I Dream, anchored by an image of comfort: a fair. In Powers’ life in Idaho, the county fair comes around every August but nothing about it has changed since at least 1995. “It’s the same rides, the same carnies. I love that so much, because there is so much surrealism within that ultimate reality,” he says. “The spiritual or the sub-human realm is so interesting, but it’s the wildest when you can find that in daily life, where you can talk about exactly what you’re seeing and it feels like a fever dream.” The fair is a Twilight Zone in that way, in the sense of innocence it harbors even when you’re well into adulthood. You’re in a vacuum, surrounded by people you know—or, at the very least, a kind of person you recognize—and strapped into a strange, cosmopolitan sense of living.

Rarely Do I Dream is colored by simple treasures. “What is a simple treasure?” I ask Powers. He returns to stillness. “If you can find that in your life, if you can find that frequency of home, no matter how much chaos is swirling around you, that is treasure,” he says. “All treasure comes from that state of being in a world that is so obsessed with achieving and quantifying success. It’s so opposite of what is really going to revolutionize our personal lives and how we interact with others, which is a state of being. If you find that, or even have the awareness to take a breath and realize that you’re taking a breath, everything stemming from that is gold.”

Heaven Is a Junkyard was, musically, as stripped-away as the survival that nourished it. The songs were arranged minimally, but Powers has now turned himself further outward—filling Rarely Do I Dream with bombast and sonic etcetera. But there are still balms here, like “My Beautiful Girl,” which mirrors the delicacy of something like “Mercury” or “Helicopter Toy” from two years ago. Powers built most of this new album out on the guitar rather than the piano, and leaning into the dense, orchestral stylishness felt instinctual. “I hadn’t done that since I was a teenager, because it felt so scary,” he says. “There was such an unpredictability that came with the guitar, whereas the piano is something I’ve played my whole life and have written on my whole life. Obviously it helps to have that relationship with an instrument, where it feels like it’s a part of your spirit. But, with guitar, the music became this creature that was something so fresh. What’s shocking to me is how quick it came out and how all of the ideas came out so fully-formed and so dramatically different than anything I had pursued with Heaven Is a Junkyard.”

The process became a symphony of gestures, of “being perfectly disoriented.” He says, “I keep going to that headspace of—and I’ve done this my whole life, ever since I started writing music as a teenager—‘How do I make myself feel so uncomfortable that I’m walking on a tightrope?’ I might completely fall off, or I can make it across and make the greatest thing I’ve ever made, or make the thing that’s the most-effective telling of my inner-world that I’ve ever made.” Finding that place forces evolution, and it’s sown from practiced mindfulness and intuition. After killing Youth Lagoon almost nine years ago, Powers found himself without clarity or creative direction. “Everything felt like a blur,” he admits. Renewal soon became the keeper that beckoned the Youth Lagoon project back into a living, breathing achievement; Heaven Is a Junkyard became Powers’ spiritual honoring of the foundations of Youth Lagoon while stretching the music further into a vast, unexplainable brightness. “My relationship with music has changed in such a beautiful way,” he says. “I started meditating out of necessity for my health, and I never expected it to have such an impact on my songwriting.”

Now, with the release of Rarely Do I Dream just days away, the doorway of Powers’ songwriting is more open than ever. “These ideas now find me and I have to listen to them, and there’s excitement in that when they find me,” he says. “I don’t have to go out of my way and dig anymore, because I’m spending so much time every day in stillness. And in that stillness, it’s teaching me so much and it’s giving me so much.” Powers has always wanted to write a book, and a song like “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” fuses that desire with the cinema of music, as its sound design pairs country-fried guitars with field recordings of barking dogs and people talking to loved ones.

And then there is “Lucy Takes a Picture,” the gentle dream-pop ballad scarred by abuse yet bandaged by Powers’ escapist melodies, alien falsetto and healing portrait of love collapsing into a ricochet of hope you can taste. There’s a line on “My Beautiful Girl” that I come back to often: “For the world, you’ve come this far, deep into the dark we go, Hell was painted on your arms. People live with scars, I know.” There are familiar themes present in the music—the American West, drug addiction, off-the-beaten-path people you remember from everywhere. Fast cars, smoke breaks, train tracks—places and souls you’ve met and said goodbye to. It’s a litany of rusted-out, primal hallelujahs.

A dollar-store rubber Jesus sits on the mantle; there are pills tucked away in his sandals even though the feet are eroding. “Your mama screamed when you thought she couldn’t scream more,” the story goes. “Your daddy’s deaf, so he never heard the screen door. You walk the old desert road.” There’s a “celebration of failure” on “Football,” as Donnie and Mary tumble through life relishing in their own discomforts and non-existent triumphs. Mary is a sex worker; Donnie is burying his mother. An even-tempered piano chord powers the lexicon; Youth Lagoon gives us everything we need, in quiet gestures of language we can make a loud mess in. The portal of Rarely Do I Dream is wide open for Trevor Powers. How lucky the rest of us are that we get to step through it with him.

Read: “Youth Lagoon Claws Back”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.