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.