“Life itself is a thunderstorm,” says Trevor Powers, the Idaho-based songwriter and producer behind the Youth Lagoon moniker. “Life itself is brothers on walkie-talkies…  it’s your dog at the backdoor, or a speeding car off in the distance. It’s a gentle voice on the radio. Mom smoking on the porch. The color of sunlight. It’s always right under your nose and so easy to miss. Often, a simple treasure.”   In the fall of 2023, that treasure came in the form of a shoebox filled with home videos Powers found in his parents’ basement while he was looking for a pre-war harmonica that once belonged to his grandma. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is.” Powers spent the following week recording his favorite moments off the TV — Easter egg hunts, backyard baseball, bloody noses, birthday parties, road trips, and all the life in-between. “I was like a ghost in a lost memory,” says Powers.    The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies not only began shaping his songs, but infusing with them. He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography, fusing past with future. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” says Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”   Rooted in love and childhood memoir, Rarely Do I Dream is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore. Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.    “The more I rewind the tapes of my life, the more I can hear the voice of my soul,” Powers says. “This isn’t nostalgia. Life’s much more messy than that. It’s a dedication to all the parts of who I was, who I am, and who I’m going to be.”    With a bent toward rural noir, Powers has found a home in a world where his personal journals and poetic confessions are indistinguishable from the twisted mythologies of habitual sinners and devout barflies. “The summer taught me that life’s a baseball bat to the jaw,” Powers sings on “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” — painted with western tremolo guitars, proto-ambient recordings of dogs barking, family talking, and a distorted drumbeat circling it all. On “Neighborhood Scene,” the album’s opening track and one Powers describes as “a postcard to everyone I’ve ever loved,” he turns a remote Idaho cul-de-sac into a land both eternal and sacred, inverting the privacy of home into an open invitation to sit down for dinner. “Do I, do I belong in a country house? Every angel and devil out marchin’ on the lawn. / Do I, do I tell Tom that I saw his dad at the ‘No Romance’ bunny ranch? Cowgirl ain’t his mom,” he sings.    “Speed Freak,” a dark joyride that showcases Youth Lagoon’s glaring metamorphosis, unleashes a grungy beat while synth bass struts and splinters into a technicolor post-punk spectacle. “This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. The more I’ve learned to die to myself, the more I’ve learned there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”   After taking an eight-year hiatus away from Youth Lagoon, Powers returned to the alias with the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard in early 2023, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. Youth Lagoon’s first album in nearly a decade pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I had ended Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” Powers says. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.”    Delicate yet aggressive, innovative yet classic, Rarely Do I Dream is Youth Lagoon’s most comprehensive and audacious album to date. A treasure trove of home movies, twangy fuzz guitars, sun-bleached synths, classical pianos, blown-out drums, and Powers’ spellbinding melodies all feel like an old photograph that’s been reanimated in a strange and distant future. “This was the first time I’ve ever used guitar instead of piano as my main writing tool,” says Powers. “Anytime I’m horrified and on a knife-edge creatively I know I’m doing something right. I need that feeling of knowing I could either be making the greatest thing I’ve ever made or something so bad it could be career suicide. Anything short of that, I’ve failed myself. After the Heaven Is a Junkyard tour, I was fully in the moment and appreciated all of it… then I said to myself, ‘Ok, moving on.’ I have zero interest in repeating myself.”   Powers’ ability to relentlessly push and evolve the project forward has taken Youth Lagoon into a territory both fiercely original and strikingly expansive. Recorded with co-producer and mixer/engineer Rodaidh McDonald, Rarely Do I Dream marks a seismic transformation, a mammoth leap forward, and an instant, indelible landmark in Youth Lagoon’s revered discography. With a profound love and dedication to family, along with his own brand of genre-bending noir rock, Powers’ has achieved what he set out to do.  “I wanted to make an album that feels like life itself…” says Powers.  

If you’re going to tackle issues that echo through generations, you’d better have a sound an story that do the same – and Valley James is just such an artist. After pawning her wedding ring for a guitar, the singer-songwriter has spent the last few year crafting a uniquely dark, ethereal take on Americana, aiming to inspire through the simple, transformative act of being brave enough to take her shot. Veiled in the mystique of her Western roots, and wielding the crystalline vocal of a modern Patsy Cline, a lifetime of soul searching has now led to the cinematic debut album Star – her soundtrack of hope and redemption. Hailing from the “beautiful high-desert” town Star, Idaho, James’ interest in both music and it connection to the human soul grows from within. Surrounded by hundreds of square miles of open space, she was a horse-riding farm kid who loved Shania Twain and spent her weekends at rodeos barrel racing and pole bending, while her father kept the traditional skills of roping alive. On the other side of the family, music was passed down through many generations- her grandfather was a performer across Idaho and Oregon, but never had the chance to see how far his talent could take him. He passed away without sharing the dream with his granddaughter, and even so, James would one day take it up, feeling a powerful call to explore the wild edges of her home and circumstance. “A lot of my childhood was riding my horse in the foothills, escaping whatever I felt the need to escape from at the time – although I didn’t really understand what that was,” she explains. “I definitely think my roots will always be attached to growing up that way, and singers have been in my family for a long time. For many reasons, they just didn’t have the means to pursue it fully.” But despite her craving for adventure (and the family tradition), James chose a different path at first. By 22 she was married to her high school sweetheart, yet the sudden passing of a friend made the world look wildly different. Questioning everything, her marriage dissolved and James would divorce at 23, then drift to New York City, grieving, broken, and no closer to the peace she sought. Eventually, she returned to Idaho, ready for a fresh start. And after learning a few guitar chords, something awakened. “I must have been 26 at the time, and I still had my wedding ring,” James recalls. “So, I pawnedit for a black Fender Telecaster. It’s funny because I was joking to friends like, ‘I’m going to pawn my wedding ring and be a country star.’ But I didn’t really think I was going to pursue music. In some ways, music pursued her. Living out the lines to a classic country song, James  learned to play and sing with authentic authority, pouring her past into raw-but-revealing early compositions. A short time in Los Angeles led to a chance meeting with Beach Boys member Bruce Johnston, and after he encouraged the young talent to try Nashville, her songwriting education began. Indie-rock star Blake Sennet (Rilo Kiley, The Elected) and fellow friend and artist Jillian Jacqueline helped James find her voice- after years of writing, her debut album connects an old soul with the modern moment. Gifted with an evocative, haunting vocal, James spread her spacious sound over 10 defiant songs (produced by Bryan Brown), pairing the rugged beauty of the West with James’ story of perseverance. Pulling inspiration from Ennio Morricone, Gillian Welch, Chris Isaak and beyond, studio aces like Aaron Sterling (drums) and Russ Pahl (steel guitar) helped give the set a sense of cinematic texture, as orchestral Americana soundscapes and plenty of atmosphere evoke the wind-blown aura of her high-desert home – and the presence of something larger than ourselves. With themes that range from grief and loss to the ultimate discovery of who you are, a determined sense of inner hope slowly emerged. “I really wanted to make a record that was inspired by how I grew up – to evoke the feeling of liminal space and vastness, which the West does so well,” James explains. “In storytelling, liminal spaces are painful, they’re confusing, a place of self discovery, and so much of my storytelling has to do with facing trans-generational trauma, and alchemizing pain and truth. “It’s a record about hope,” she continues. “I wanted a record that would speak to me as a 20- year-old who really didn’t understand what I’ve been through or what my family had been through. It can be playful and dark, but when you listen to the lyrics, there’s a deeper story. A story of redemption.” “It’s a record about hope,” she continues. “I wanted a record that would speak to me as a 20- year-old who really didn’t understand what I’ve been through or what my family had been through. It can be playful and dark, but when you listen to the lyrics, there’s a deeper story. A story of redemption.” Elsewhere, the woozy sway behind “Any Fool Will Do” captures a compulsive need to shake off the past and make a bold decision, and the gorgeous spaghetti-Western shimmer of “Lucky Strike” tells James’ tale in blunt-but-poetic detail – the autobiography of dreamer who burns like a phoenix, not a cigarette. The somber stillness of “Playing Dead” reveals the impact of letting inner truth fester – a girl exploring what it means to face a long-ignored pain, passed down over decades like a haunted family heirloom. And with the hardened heart track “Crushed Velvet,” James adds rhythm to a sense of righteous inner rage, like a heroine with a vengeance. “Kill For You” and “Black Lacquer,” are songs to fall down the rabbit hole in desperation to be loved, only to later find out it was all an illusion.  But in music as in life, James ultimately proves hope springs eternal. With gentle ballads like “Voices At the End of the Line” and “Drive On,” she reminds those feeling caged like she once did, that beginning to heal looks a lot like leaving the past behind. “Being an artist means being truth teller and writing about things that are painful, it’s about standing in the face of it,” she says. “No matter what phase of self discovery or healing you’re in, you’re not alone. There is hope, and there is redemption.”