Day Dreems has been around for a while, but for me they're new. And I’m glad I found out about them, very good music indeed. Those who are into power pop will get into this.

Day was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

Andrea Weiss: For those who don’t know you, could you give a short history of your music career?

Day Dreems: OK, sure. I’ve been recording music since the ‘90s, so this might take a minute. I started in Providence, RI with a two-songwriter band called The Hurricanes. That name was chosen in honor of Ringo’s pre-Beatles group, but our sound was really more indebted to Teenage Fanclub, R.E.M., and ‘90s indie rock like Pavement. We were young and played a lot of shows. I got to share stages with legends like The Velvet Crush, Chisel (Ted Leo), and Elliott Smith.

After the Hurricanes scattered to different cities, I formed DRB with Mason Lee, in which I once again shared songwriting duties, but also got to play a lot of drums! Mason and I both ended up migrating to Berkeley, CA, but we didn’t perform again for eight years. For most musicians, those are their prime productive years, but we spent them jamming in private with almost no recorded output. In 2006 DRB re-emerged for a couple of years, and I’ve been pretty active publicly ever since.

By 2008 I’d moved across the bay to San Francisco, and DRB had run its course. I had a new crop of songs that I wanted to perform, and an opportunity for a show, so I sent out email to a whole bunch of local musicians that I knew and invited them to join me for a whirlwind three weeks of getting a set together. Five people said yes, so we had maybe six rehearsals as a 6-piece band and did our first show as B And Not B. From 2008-2012 various lineups of B And Not B put out four releases, played a lot of local shows, and went on a West Coast tour. It would have kept going, but in 2012 I moved to Oregon, where my spouse had gotten a job.

I was desperate to continue making rock music, so I hit Craigslist right away looking for bandmates. After about 6 months of looking, I found Pete Schreiner, who had spent years playing with the Magnolia Electric Co. (an alt-country/Americana group), as well as his own more punk rock projects. My friend Stan Hall said he’d be interested in learning bass guitar, so I let him play mine, and the three of us jammed. We wanted a fourth member, so Stan recruited his friend Rachel Broach to play keyboard, and The Zags were born. We released four records between 2013 and 2019. The cast of characters shifted a bit over the years, but Stan and I were constant as the core songwriters.

The last Zags show was in early 2020, right before SARS-CoV-2 changed all of our lives. It took me a couple of years to regain my focus and energy enough to make music again. I started a monthly subscription service in 2022 under my new name, Day Dreems, and since then I’ve released 40-something demos, works-in-progress, and live tracks. The songs on this debut album were built one at a time in my basement, over the course of a year and a half. I hope you enjoy them!

AW: How did you get involved with Bradley Skaught?

DD: Bradley told me about your blog, so it’s only fair he gets a special feature in this interview, LOL. (Hi, Bradley!)

My first interaction with Bradley Skaught was actually when I responded to his classified ad (in a print weekly!) looking for bandmates for a group that would be called Belle da Gama. I had just moved to the Bay Area, and whatever he wrote in the ad made me think we’d be compatible. I think I was right about that, but he was very clear about wanting to be the sole creative director of the band, and I was more interested in finding another multi-songwriter project. So that path was not taken! Years later, when I finally returned to performing, my band’s first gig was an opening slot for the Bye Bye Blackbirds, which was Bradley’s newly formed group. My next band, B And Not B, also played shows with the BBBs, and at one point, I even joined the Blackbirds as a harmony singer for one show.

AW: Who are your influences?

DD: This is a tough question in some ways, because what constitutes an influence, really? Is it stuff that you like? Or that you heard a lot as a kid? I’m going to answer only with musicians whose work I can recall thinking about while writing my songs, or whose imprint I feel shows through pretty clearly in my musical style. There are plenty of artists I love (and that have surely influenced me in some way) that don’t fit these criteria, like Claude Debussy, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Dolly Parton, Stevie Wonder, etc. And there are lots of newer acts that are probably influencing me in this moment, but it’s too soon for me to assess their true impact on my work. With all that said, I’ll go ahead and list some clear influences:

I mean, The Beatles is a big one, but I know that’s a really basic thing to say. How can I not acknowledge it, though? Plus The Kinks, The Zombies, etc. Besides the British Invasion, there’s Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, Smokey Robinson, VU, Bowie, Harry Nilsson, T. Rex, Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Big Star, Blondie, Elvis Costello, Kirsty MacColl, The Go-Go’s, R.E.M., Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, Liz Phair, Blur, Guided By Voices, Frank Black, Elliott Smith, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, of Montreal, Belle & Sebastian, The Minders, Ted Leo, The Fiery Furnaces, and surely lots more stuff that I’m forgetting.

AW: How did you go about making this album, and is there an overall message you want people to take from your songs?

DD: I’m not sure there’s an overall message embedded in this album, but maybe, in some ways, it’s a portrait of me. I made it all alone — songwriting, performance, recording, mixing… even album artwork (which, fittingly, includes a cartoon image of me). The songs deal with lots of different topics, but they nearly all relate to me personally, which is not my usual approach to writing songs. I think it might have worked well, though, so perhaps I’ll try it again for the next record?

AW: I like your melodies. Do they just appear, or is it a struggle to make them come alive?

DD: This is probably a deeply unsatisfying answer, but melodies are almost effortless for me. Once I’ve come up with chord changes, which is also pretty painless, the melodies just flow out of me. Lyrics are another story entirely, and it might take me weeks or even months to complete the words for a single song. Sometimes I get lucky/inspired and the words are done in an hour, but that’s definitely a rare exception.

AW: “The Bad Old Days” is both anti-nostalgia and telling the Right to go to hell, since they don’t like anyone who isn’t like them. It’s great, but is it accurate?

DD: “The Bad Old Days” is a song about fascism, which is an ideology that, among other things, promises a return to some imagined past greatness. “The Right” is a very broad label — one that I’ve heard some Europeans apply even to “moderates” in the U.S.A.’s Democratic Party! Some people who consider themselves to be on the right might still value living in a democratic, pluralist society, but there is an increasingly shameless fascist movement in the U.S.A., and those extremists have been steering the American right for at least a decade. Belief in the inherent supremacy of its favored group(s) is a core aspect of fascist ideology. Of course not all American fascists agree on the exact borders of their bigotry, but there is quite a bit of consensus among them. They have a pretty consistent commitment to white supremacy, patriarchy, Christian supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Any and all of those values can also be held, usually more quietly, by non-fascists, but fascists don’t bother rationalizing or hiding their ugly beliefs. Instead, those supremacist values are centered and celebrated as self-evidently virtuous, while aggression and ruthless domination are glorified as the correct paths to power. They see no problem with hypocrisy and DARVO tactics, when used in the service of fascist goals. The cruelty is the point, in a way, as it helps reinforce a social hierarchy that they want to portray as correct and natural.

AW: “F Natural” is a great push back against the hippie notion that everything is natural. What would you add to that?

DD: If you’ve ever watched a David Attenborough documentary, you know that nature can be brutal. Personally, I’m unwilling to accept avoidable pain and hardship when humans have an “unnatural” solution figured out. Medicine saves lives, and that includes things like antidepressants, reproductive interventions, and trans health care. Your body’s there for you, not anyone else, and only you can define what outcomes are best and what risks are acceptable to you. Leaving things up to “nature” is certainly a choice you can make, but there’s nothing inherently better about that choice.

I would also add that it’s not just hippies who fall for the appeal-to-nature fallacy. It’s a widespread bias, beloved by many socially conservative Christians and other non-hippies!

AW: What are your plans for the future? Is another album in the works?

DD: I’m going to keep making music for as long as I have the energy and ability. It may be another year or two until the next album, but monthly subscribers on Bandcamp (https://daydreems.bandcamp.com/fan-club) and Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/daydreems) will get to hear things as they develop!

AW: Any plans to tour?

DD: No. I am constitutionally unable to undertake a tour, but I would like to get together a local outdoor show this summer. We shall see.

AW: I’m out. You’re non-binary. What would you tell someone who is also non-binary or out and just starting out in music?

DD: When I was a kid, homophobia was rampant even in many “liberal” contexts, and transphobia was so standard that it wasn’t even legible as bigotry to most people. Kids would habitually label anything or anybody they didn’t like as “gay.” For many (most?) of today’s youth, that’s just not the way it is! In the 2020s, Americans’ acceptance of lesbian and gay people, while still not nearly universal, has never been broader. Bisexuality (the most common LGBTQ+ identity, by far) is still widely misunderstood or even disbelieved, but it’s usually invisible, since bi+ people end up being perceived as gay or straight depending on who they’re partnered with. Trans people really did reach a tipping point of acceptance in the mid-2010s, and since then have been increasingly embraced in some circles while being actively vilified in other circles. It might be simultaneously the best and worst time in American history to be trans! Nonbinary identities are still confusing to most people, even to those who see themselves as allies, but the young people tend to get it a lot better than the oldsters.

Humanity’s collective future on this planet is scary, and I don’t envy the youth in many ways, but I do wish that when I was young there had been half as much sociocultural freedom to show your whole self as there is now. The kids are here, they’re queer, and they just don’t think it’s a big deal unless you make it one. I do definitely worry about what will happen to trans people in the U.S.A. (and subsequently to other LGBTQ+ people) if the neo-fascists eventually succeed in replacing our pluralist democracy with an explicitly supremacist, nationalist, and quite possibly theocratic regime. But I think all we can do as musicians is live our best lives, speak out when we’re moved to and feel safe enough to, and maybe inspire some people to positive action along the way.