Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers on Nostalgia, Meditation, AI, and Musical World-Building

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

Youth Lagoon's latest record Rarely Do I Dream might be, to my ears, Trevor Powers' best record yet under the guise; it's purely dazzling in working with texture and melody, another bold step from the eerie and haunting vibes of 2023's excellent Heaven Is a Junkyard. I've been wanting to talk to Trevor in this capacity for a long time—at least since one random day in the late 2010s, when I was walking across the Williamsburg Bridge and felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Trevor himself. It was great to reunite in more official capacity for the newsletter, and he's such an interesting artistic mind that I found the conversation to be energizing and thought-provoking. Check it out:

I saw online that you did a few events recently around this new record. What energy level does that require from you these days?
A lot. At this point, I know so well how my internal battery works and how much time I need to recharge, so usually there's enough time to fully recharge and show up in the way that's required to be fully present—and I was for this whole trip. But when there's a string of events and I don't really have the time to come up for air, it definitely gets me to that point. If I had one more day of that, then it would've been too much.

What's your coping mechanisms when it comes to feeling overextended and burned out?
It all comes back to meditation. The act of being still has been the biggest shift for me. I got into meditation a few years back, and I was talking to a friend recently about how I don't even know what I did before that. At this point, it's such a requirement for me to be able to to fully reset and have that stillness—to find that internal frequency that is going home and finding that peace. Without that, I don't know how I ever got by. Now, that's my everything. Even when I was just in New York, when everything was way more back-to-back, as long as I had a little bit of time in between...

It's changed my life in such a dramatic way when it comes to my relationship with myself and others. The creative portal opened up in a way that I never thought was possible. That's why Youth Lagoon as an entity is, for all intents and purposes, such a brand new project now. When I killed it off in 2016, there was no clarity in my life. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to take it. When I had that spiritual reset, it fine-tuned my my eyes and that deep part of my soul, in a way where it showed me exactly what to do with music and and where I'm going.

I love this new record. It feels very much like what you did with Wondrous Bughouse, not in a sonic sense but where you're building upon the sound of the previous album and really blowing it up in widescreen fashion.
The second that I do something and I check a box, I don't ever want to do that thing again, because at the core of it is diminishing returns, which is super fucking boring. I find a corner of my brain where there's a lot to say, and once I say that thing, I move on to the next corner of my brain. I'm always trying to push myself and feel as uncomfortable as possible—as much in a place that it feels like a tightrope walk where I might make it, or I might fall off. It's the only way that I can find these new things to say and learn so much about myself in the process.

With Heaven Is a Junkyard, that was brand new territory for me, because it was the first time I ever really wrote from the place of home, Before, especially growing up somewhere like Idaho, it's so foreign to so many people. There was almost an embarrassment that came along with when I'd go to London, or L.A., or New York where there was this expectation from people that everyone from a small town wants out. For me, it's the opposite, because what home is supposed to serve in my life is a place that you're surrounded by people that you love—people that you have deep-rooted history with, and a place where it's attainable to find a frequency of peace. That's so important to me. With more metropolitan areas, I love dipping my toe in that water, but I couldn't call a place that has that much constant busyness home, because it would be really hard for the way my brain works to fully reset.

That being said, Heaven Is a Junkyard being the first time that I really explored home showed me that, not only was there an album's worth of material there, there's an eternity's worth of material. In the past, reinvention always meant I'd build a structure, then I'd burn it down and build a new structure. Now, it's so much more interesting and more of a personal exploration to be able to build a structure and, rather than burning it down, having it be something that I'm continually adding to or manipulating. Heaven Is a Junkyard was a portal into the exploration of home, and now I have no desire to burn that building down. My only desire is, "How do I keep pushing and evolving the way I see my inner world and beyond?"

With this record, I hear a self-interrogation of your entire personal history. A lot of times, with records like this it could be construed as complicated or engaging in some sort of reckoning—but this record has almost an even-handed positivity to its sound. Talk to me about engaging with your past like that.
Every family has issues and things that you have to be able to transcend—points in relationships where things get hard, and you're not sure if you're going to be able to get over it. Then, there's maturity, or ways to reconcile, and sometimes when you come back to being able to heal a relationship, it can be stronger than it ever was. With my family, there's such a deep love there—especially with my parents. We don't see eye-to-eye, we're very different people on opposite sides of the political spectrum. There's a lot of major social issues we disagree on.

But this is one of the things I love so much about living in Idaho: You're constantly forced to to talk to and have close relationships with people that you don't see eye-to-eye with, whereas in a lot of other cities throughout the world it's much easier to have a bubble of, "These are the only people I agree with, and these are the only people I talk to on a day-to-day basis." There's never any growth or there's never any personal challenge. With my parents, it's always pushed me to be able to see that, "Okay, these are two people I love so much and have so much admiration for, and that can coexist with intense disagreements." One doesn't cancel out the other. That stems from so many families across the world. The way that I was brought love and wonder is that it's such a giant piece of my actual family history. It's rooted in love.

What's your relationship with nostalgia amidst all this?
I actually hate nostalgia. Nostalgia is that place of looking at the past to the point that you end up being stuck there, and it becomes a prison. As I started exploring more of the concepts of calm and memory, it's easy to fall into that misconception with people who are engaging with that through a lens of nostalgia. There's definitely tools that I'm using, because there's a lot of themes of the past. But it's the same reason why I love textures. There's certain textures that make people feel or think like it's a time machine—it takes them to a place that they were previously in life. But I'm only concerned with the present moment. If I'm examining the past, it's only so that I can take it to the present moment and have it be something that's that's showing new life to something now, or where it is that I'm going.

This is definitely not a nostalgic record for multiple reasons. Nostalgia has such a perfect golden hue to it, which isn't indicative at all of what life really is. Working with all of these home movies and sampling them, manipulating them, it's so easy to, if you're only hearing that side of things, fall into the lie of, "Oh, this feels like a perfect childhood." So much of it feels very crystalline in its presentation, and that's why I i felt the way that the actual songwriting was approached was so important—to show the other side of the story, which is so much light and love but also darkness. How do I reconcile and weave all of that together in a way that it tells one truth?

Walk me through the technical process of working in so many audio clips from family videos into this album.
I was working with material from 1989 to 1993, because those were the only tapes that I could find. I was dealt this hand that, at first, was frustrating—I was almost mad, because there were so many great moments and my my parents always had the camcorder out. I had no idea where the other years had gone. But it ended up doing me a lot of favors, because I was able to really fine-tune what it was. More limitations is always beneficial.

A lot of this stuff was recorded off of a CRT TV. I found that if I was running something digitally into the CRT, I also had a way to put it directly onto my computer, which it lost a lot of that the quality of what made it feel like a time travel device to begin with. So I started doing all of the sampling off of the actual TV.

Tell me about working with Rodaigh McDonald, who I've found is frequently involved in interesting-sounding records like this one.
Working with him is the absolute best—we hit it off right away. For Heaven Is a Junkyard, I'd flown out after my manager had sent his manager some demos, and I'd assumed that he'd heard the demos. But when I had flown out, he asked me, "Okay, what is it that we're working with?" So we had to listen to all the demos together, and by the time we got to "Idaho Alien," we were like, "Okay, let's do this." We ended up having a lot of the same inspirations and influences.

One thing I love so much about Rod is, not only does he have a very gentle spirit and amazing intuition, but he's also not trying to change something that doesn't need to be changed. My demos, everything that I make at home, there's such a specific blueprint to it. He's not trying to get under the hood and change the blueprint—it's more, "Okay, this blueprint is fully functional and everything is very clear, so how do we make it even more effective?" He has an obsession with tones and even how playing the piano should feel like a living, breathing thing. You can have something that's recorded one way and it feels too scary, dark, or mournful, and then you record it a different way and it captures the other emotionally complex side. Rod is so great at helping find what it is that the music is trying to say.

Talk to me about your musical influences at this point. I've heard a few people compare what you to do to Mercury Rev over the years, which I think is accurate.
I've never actually listened to Mercury Rev.

That's fascinating.
Where would I begin?

Many would say Deserter's Songs, but since you're a musician I'd honestly say to just start at the beginning with them. They're a very strange band—they started out as a noisy psychedelic band, eventually got more acceptable, and are now doing spoken-word. It's more about the journey with them.
I grew up homeschooled, so my world was very small and controlled. The word "control" tends to have a negative context to it—my parents meant well, but the view that the world was the big bad world increased my capacity for imagination. Because it was such a religious household, there was so much Christian music and things like John Denver, The Carpenters, Elvis, and the Beach Boys. When I was a kid, all of those artists—even though that music happened decades prior, I thought it was current and grew up thinking all of that was happening now. It was actually kind of sick, because I was listening to music in such a different way than the other kids down the street from me. It gave me an appreciation and a deep palate for songwriting that's really rooted in stories and minimalist structures.

As I started getting older, finding things like Cocteau Twins...I'm obsessed with those dreamscapes and textures, and how texture itself is inseparable from music. There's something that's happening on an emotional level with the way something's recorded—that feeling of being able to reach out and touch a sound. The Durutti Column's Sex and Death is quite possibly my favorite album of all time. "Anthony" is, in my opinion, the most beautiful song ever made.

I'm into anything that feels like its own inner world, because when I'm listening to music, I don't ever want it to remind me of something else. If I'm listening to someone like Kate Bush, I love Kate Bush because Kate Bush sounds like fucking Kate Bush, and there's nothing else that is or can compete with Kate Bush. If, as an artist, all you're doing is building out your inner world it's untouchable. That inner world might not be for everyone, and that's fine—but it's not something that you can say is better than some other inner world, because it's the inherent truth to who that person is. That's the place I always try to write from and am inspired from. How do I tell the truth of who I am today?

Let's talk about making money as a musician. What's that been like for you over the years, and recently?
Music has been my full-time job since I started Youth Lagoon—and I hate the word "job," because it really isn't a job, but it is work. Work is something that you can show up and have passion for and give breath to to life itself—but it can still exhaust you in the best way possible.

But since 2011, Youth Lagoon has been my full-time thing. That's another reason why living in Idaho and never moving from my hometown has been so vital. I see a lot of people from smaller places that get out and find themselves in these scenarios where the reason they were trying to get out—acting, pursuing music, whatever—is something they don't even have time to do anymore because everything becomes such a grind to pay your bills.

I started Youth Lagoon when I was 20 or 22, and when touring started, my life started having so much chaos. I realized that I needed that balance of home being the opposite of chaos. From a financial standpoint, the thing I love most about life is expression and telling my stories through music. I didn't want anything to ever affect that. I didn't want to move to L.A. to have three part-time jobs and barely be able to do the thing that I care most about.

Honestly, I'm always shocked when I talk to younger musicians who are like, "I just moved to New York." I'm like, "Why? You don't need to be here to do what you do."
Totally. And that's also the beauty of the internet, which obviously comes with so many issues—but it's expanded that ability to connect and share. You can be like, "Hey, this is something that I'm working on and here it is," and someone in Paris can hear that track that same night. It's so immediate. It's always boggled me—if you have a system that's working and you're somewhere affordable, I don't understand why you would change the system unless it's something that your soul is genuinely craving. It's a guaranteed way to throw everything into question.

I was really impressed that you spoke out against the Washed Out AI music video. It's been a little shocking to see musicians respond to AI like, "Well, maybe this could be good for us." It's almost like the way people react to Trump.
That's such a good way to put it.

It's crazy—you don't want this in your life!
No!

It feels rare to me these days that a musician will be like, "I'm going to reject this technology."
My thing is never about tearing anyone down. That was such an individual circumstance. It wasn't about me tearing an individual down—it was me tearing down that entire approach and headspace. This is something that is so rooted in everything that I'm against that I had to say something. At first, I kept waiting for other people to say something.

I was too.
I wasn't seeing it, and I was like, "Why aren't people talking about this?" I talked to my older brother Bobby, who's also one of my best friends, and I was like, "No one's even saying anything online." Bobby was like, "Have you thought about being the one? And I'm like, "Damn, I think it's me." It was one of those things where I had no other way around it but to just fucking call it out.

I have so many thoughts about AI, but my main thing is about what art itself is, what that true expression of the soul is, and why it means something. You're experiencing something made by a human being that transcended every issue that a human being goes through, and that's what imbues it with meaning. Without that transcendence, there's no awe, no inspiration. If there's an image that was made by AI, the second that you find out that it's AI, it strips all awe and inspiration from the thing. It's like, "Oh, of course the computer did this."

Without awe, there is no art. It's the same reason why, if you walk into a museum and see a beautiful painting on the wall, you also crave context. You read that this person went through these issues, took all of that trauma, and turned it into this thing—and the historical context shows you that this person who's a living, breathing, suffering, joy-filled person transcended their humanity to make this impressive thing. Without that, it fucking means nothing.

That's extremely real. When you find out something is AI, you do feel like you've been profoundly cheated. Did you listen to the latest Caribou record?
I did.

I think it's probably his best record in, like, a decade. And then you find out about the AI vocals on it...electronic music and AI is a completely different thing though, because they've been using it for a while, the way Auto-Tune is used. But I was still like, "Jesus Christ, man, you could've also made this album without it."
For me, it goes back to the whole mindset of building out an inner world. If I'm wrestling with these things that are a part of my soul, there's never going to be a situation where a computer would do that better than me. That's not to say that there aren't tools out there to use as paintbrushes—but it's such a slippery slope.

The phrase "AI" is also something that's slapped on so many things that you really have to understand how things, exactly, are functioning. Some people say Auto-Tune is AI, and at that point I kind of check out. If you're labeling a calculator AI, then we have to back up a little bit and start defining what exactly you're talking about. But when something is generative and it's pushing ideas for you to the point where you're no longer the one holding the pen, that's when it's a different story.