After finding major success in 2016 with their debut LP This Album Does Not Exist, alt-rock band DREAMERS have been touring non-stop and slowly sharing new music with the world in the form of EPs. Fast forward to April 2019, and they have finally shared their sophomore album, Launch Fly Land. LFL features 10 tracks (including the popular single “Die Happy”) and none of them disappoint.
Last week we got to chat with Nick Wold, singer of DREAMERS, about the band’s new album, their songwriting process, and their surreal and funky website:
MELODIC MAG: First of all, congrats on the new album! It’s been out for about a week now – how’s it feeling?
NICK: It feels amazing. The response has been so great and encouraging, plus it’s just been a crazy labour of love, so I’m really stoked that it’s out in the world at last.
MM: So leading up to the album, you guys released two EPs, and then the original plan was to have a third EP, right?
NICK: Yeah, so it started out as kind of a trilogy of EPs that was going to be the record LAUNCH FLY LAND, but we ended up just writing so many more songs that we just did the third episode as a full album, all its own.
MM: How did you decide which songs went on the EPs and which songs went on the album?
NICK: We wrote them all kind of as we went; we wrote the first one, released it, wrote the second one, etcetera. We were going to include songs from the first two [EPs] on the full album, but we had enough songs that we wanted to get out that we’re like ‘hey, why don’t we just make it all new stuff’.
MM: Which song on the album took the longest to come together, and which one was the quickest?
NICK: That’s a great question. We’ve been touring like crazy the last two years, and we’d be home for five days and try to write five songs. So we kind of, like, power through, and a quick song takes a day, a long one takes three, you know? I can remember Die Happy being tough for me to find the exact right words. I would stay up all night by myself just writing those words. It’s kind of a simple lyric, but I felt like it had to be just right.
MM: Do you guys write on the road at all? I know for some bands writing comes naturally on the road and some hate it.
NICK: Yeah, I’ve tried writing on the road and so far it’s not been my favorite way to do it; it never really works. What I like to do is just focus on a show or doing the tour, and come home for a few days and write a few songs.
MM: Is the songwriting process for you guys more collaborative, or do each of you bring your own song ideas to the table?
NICK: So the first record was mostly me as the band was just forming, and for this record we’re all ‘brothers of the road’ and we wrote together a lot more. I’d say I wrote the majority, but there are a bunch of songs that we all wrote together as a band and it’s been going super well. Like as an example, Insomniac – I think that was Jacob’s song – it came out of an idea he had and we wrote it all together as a band. Wanna Stay is another song we all wrote together about living the ‘transient, travel life’ and Screws we also wrote all together.
MM: Do you think touring has had a major impact on your sound and how you write?
NICK: I’m sure it has! This idea of Launch Fly Land is more about just personal journeys that we go through, and touring is a big part of it. Also we all went through, you know, breakups, personal triumphs, and lost loved ones, and it’s just about what it’s like to go through things, embark on something and be in the thick of it, and then come out of it. For me the EP songs were kind of the breakup album with a lot of tortured love songs, and by the time we get to Land, it about coming out of it and falling in love with the love song again, and being a better person having gone through that stuff. I think you can kind of hear that in the album tracks; it’s a bit more of a celebration.
MM: I noticed on the ‘Manifesto’ page of your website the quote that you have that goes “We are impractical. We do not listen to those that doubt us. We push the boundaries…” and so on, and then you used it again in a video on Instagram last week; I was just wondering what does this quote mean to you and where did it come from?
NICK: Well we figure with a name like DREAMERS, we really wanted to explain what we mean and what that means to us. We’re obsessed with sleep and dreams – the crazy trip that you have every night – and also the double meaning is that it’s also your goals and your aspirations. To me, rock ‘n roll is all about philosophy; it has a spiritual purpose. You can philosophize about how should we live? What should we be? And by calling ourselves DREAMERS we want to be the thinkers, the imaginers, the dreamers, and I think that’s what an artist should be. The manifesto is just our distillation of that idea.
MM: I also noticed there’s another quote on your site that you get to if you click certain images, and I believe it’s called ‘The Journey’? Is that along the same lines as the manifesto in that it explains who you are?
NICK: Yeah that website is kind of our own surrealist art piece. We made that right when we started the band and it was super low budget. We’re inspired by a lot of surrealist art like Dali and David Lynch. It’s part philosophy, part art, and we wanted to make it feel like it was some lost corner of the internet from, like, 1995 or something.
MM: Thank you so much for your time and good luck with your tours and festivals this summer!
NICK: My pleasure! It’s gonna be a crazy year.
You can listen to DREAMERS’ new album Launch Fly Land here:
Catch them out on tour with 311 and Dirty Heads this summer, and at Lollapalooza, Gov Ball, and Reading & Leeds.
