Exclusive: Listen to Maia Friedman’s New Single “In A Dream It Could Happen”

Today, New York-based singer-songwriter Maia Friedman (of Dirty Projectors and Coco) has unveiled the fourth single to her forthcoming album Goodbye Long Winter Shadow, out May 9 via Last Gang Records. The baroque ode “In A Dream It Could Happen” clocks in at less than two minutes, but every second of the lush arrangement insists upon luxuriation. While writing the song’s lyrics, Friedman intended for the imagery “to sweep you away into an otherworldly voyage.”

She certainly succeeds at that, capturing the magic of a romantic escapade with a cosmic eye: “No weight to burden our minds / We float away with our limbs entwined,” she sings, her sublime self-harmonies uplifted by fluttering woodwinds and delicate strings. “Our car is pulled like on a conveyor / The highway flows toward rings of Saturn.” It’s nearly impossible not to float away with Friedman as she delivers the twilit serenade—an enchanting chanteuse, her croon is timeless and time-stopping.

Friedman elaborates on the song’s lyrical imagery and music: “Vines growing at unusual speed by candlelight (think Buffy The Vampire Slayer season 4, episode 18). Riverside (earth) to Iapetus Crater (moon of Saturn). Car pulled along on a conveyor belt up through the atmosphere into the rings of Saturn (think Coco, bridge to the spirit world). The sun rises, falls, rises and falls again without much notice, and in the end it’s all a dream. All instrumentation was written with this in mind; chromatic winds, harmonies and reharmonizations galore.”