While the Pop band “psyche” is ready to unleash their third album “Dreamland” a combo of their precious memories. This post highlights the talk between Roisin O’Connor and Bayley about their childhood life. They discussed the damage caused by gender stereotypes and the health conditions of Joe Seaward after a fatal accident.
Watch this amazing video of the upcoming “Dreamland”:
Joe met a fatal accident while cycling in Dublin two years ago due to which he has to undergo neurosurgery. Although his condition keeps improving day by day. But it leaves his friend Dave Bayley much frustrated as compared to his other friends and family members regarding his fatal injuries. Yet, he is trying hard to be optimistic.
“I was stuck in this mentality where the future looked s***,” the 31-year-old says. He and Seaward were childhood pals, who’d formed the psych-pop band in Oxford with their friends Ed Irwin-Singer and Drew McFarlane.
It is a painful thing to see your best friend in a bad state and the only thing that makes us optimistic is the memory we spent together. By putting all those precious things in a single place boys created their next album “Dreamland”.
“I didn’t know if Joe was going to survive, or recover,” he continues. “In a time like that, all you can seem to do is start thinking about the past.” He compares it to peeling off a band-aid – once he’d taken one-off, more followed.
Talk between the friends:
During this pandemic when all of them are packed inside their home the boys shared their talk. Hoping for all this to end soon and they set sail for their upcoming project. Their talk went like this:
I’m talking to Bayley over Zoom from his home studio in Hackney, east London. He moves the camera around to show me the pink walls, lush green plants, and an array of instruments, including the Spanish guitar he bought for £5 at a flea market when he was 17 and still uses.
Compared to its predecessor, the Mercury Prize-shortlisted How to Be a Human Being, Dreamland is autobiographical. Shot through with memories of early childhood growing up in the small city of College Station, Texas. It tackles everything from formative relationships to masculinity, in particular the toxic expectations of young boys that Bayley – who is sensitive, emotionally intelligent, and occasionally quite shy – was confronted with.
There are glimmering synths that rocket overhead like shooting stars, trippy hip-hop beats, bossa nova rhythms, warped electric guitar lines, the brassy horns of their 2019 track “Tokyo Drifting”, and a fantastic sample of “Deep Shadows” by Sixties Michigan soul singer Little Ann. All of this is interspersed with audio from home movies of Bayley’s youth. Augmenting the album’s bittersweet theme of lost innocence.
Pretty talks:
“You don’t realize until later how dark it all is,” he says, of childhood gender stereotyping. “It’s so ingrained – being told to play American football and basketball and hide your feelings, and be this kind of macho superhero. That’s not what I was, and I felt s****y for not being that.” He addresses this on Dreamland song “Space Ghost Coast to Coast”, about one of his childhood best friends.
“We discovered everything together,” he says. “Dr. Dre, Eminem… we used to pull up the aerial on our boombox to catch different radio stations”. When Bayley moved to England, aged 13, he and his friend drifted apart. Later, he heard the news that the friend was caught trying to bring a gun into a local school.
“The world can change people in ways you never thought were possible,” he says. “We need to start challenging that. It’s f***ing dangerous”. In the song, you hear Bayley grasping for ideas as to what would cause the person he once knew (“We were just two Texas toddlers/ Pokémon, bottle rockets”) to do something like that. “Were you bored of gender norms? Of being alone, no mama home, A bad divorce, or sad we can’t, Afford the clothes our heroes own?” In his breathy, trilling vocal delivery is a fit of simmering anger, born from intrinsic need to fathom the unfathomable.
