Youth Lagoon - Whispers of Childhood

In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin talks of a “whisper out of time.” He walks his readers through the misconception that brilliant creative ideas always hit the artist like a thunderbolt. Instead, he presents them as oftentimes “little seeds:” an echo of a memory, an unexpected thought, a seemingly trivial insight that are cultivated and eventually bloom into a great creative project. 

This process can be seen in Youth Lagoon (real name Trevor Powers) album Rarely Do I Dream.

Born March 18, 1983, Trevor Powers is an American musician from Boise, Idaho. He began releasing under the name Youth Lagoon in 2010 and continued through 2016, creating 3 albums. Then he began using his own name before returning as Youth Lagoon in 2022. This year, he released Rarely Do I Dream, his 5th record total. What is so fascinating about this album in particular is the circumstances and “seeds” it was born from.

In a PNC live studio interview, Powers describes how this album came to be: he was visiting his childhood home after his latest tour for Heaven is a Junkyard, and while there, he found old family videos from when he was a kid. Powers explains that initially, he took the videos home just to watch them; because he had just came off of tour and was exhausted, he had no intent to do anything with them creatively. But, as Rick Rubin would point out, artists are not always (and often not at all) in control of how and when seeds of inspiration will root themselves and begin to grow. These family videos inspired Powers to create sounds and music that sounded like what it felt like to grow up for him in 1980-90s Boise. 

Powers does this in a multitude of ways on the record, some more surprising than others. 

One very noticeable and direct way he brings the listener in is by including audio clips from the original family videos and includes it in the music. The low quality, conversational snippets fill the music with a nostalgic quality that takes the listener back to simpler times.
Still, Powers includes unexpected elements that have the same purpose. He describes the stories he tells in this record as full of fairytales: there are devils and detectives. These are fantastical elements that are not an accurate depiction of his childhood, but he explains that it “weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.” 

All of these elements get at what Powers considers to be one of the most important parts of creativity: specificity and personal connection. In the same interview, he explains how many artists are concerned that the more personal they get with their music, the less people will be able to relate and want to listen. His take is that the opposite is true, and his proof is in the fact that more people have connected with Rarely Do I Dream, the most personal and specific album he has created, than the ones he has released in the past. 

“It can be easy to think that the more you zoom in on your life, the more alienating your creations may be, but it’s actually the exact opposite because the more that you make something truly about you–and that’s all you can do is tell the story of your own inner world–the more you honor that and stay true to that vision, the more it actually feels to everyone on the outside looking in [that] it’s about them because they can sense that personal depth.”

- Trevor Powers, PNC Live Studio Interview

I think Trevor Powers has a truly (mind the pun) powerful approach to music that is freeing for both the artist and the listener. He does not create based on what he believes his audience will enjoy or out of anxiety to release. Instead, he listens to the little seeds and whispers of inspiration even when it doesn’t seem like a good time, and he creates something that is starkly personal that appeals to each listener’s sense of self.