PREMIERE: ZEALYN’S “LANA IN MY DREAMS” WILL WAKEN YOU OUT OF YOUR SLUMBER

Well, truthfully there aren’t a ton, but some artists that I love pretty much everything that they release are Hayley Williams (Paramore), Pinegrove, Haim, and The 1975. I think if you were to pull my most listened to on Spotify it’d just be a playlist of those four bands.

My favorite part of making music is actually releasing the music and touring. I mean of course I do also love writing and making records but nothing really scratches the itch for me like performing the songs live in front of people. I never feel more present, alive, and confident than when I am on stage.

I typically only dream if I am stressed out, and then the dream is just a loop of me failing to perform a routine task. It’s awful. I think that’s why I was so struck by the peaceful dream I had that inspired this song. It really stuck out to me.

There wasn’t one, haha. For about 6 months I just didn’t listen to any music while writing this EP because I didn’t want there to be any present influence and I didn’t want to have the thought of “I want this song to sound like this artist” or whatever. I just posted up in my living room and wrote these songs with just one other person, David James Williams. We wanted to write exactly what we felt like writing, regardless of genre or style. It was a very freeing process and felt like there were no restraints. Kind of like a “fuck the rules” environment. But if I had to give a definite answer, I guess lyrically, I was my own muse. This EP is the first time I’ve ever written in a conversational style with complete honesty. A lot of the lines on this EP are word-for-word from conversations I’ve had throughout the last year and some of the lyrics are so personal it hurts to sing.

Well, like I said earlier, I kind of went on a hiatus from listening to music when I was writing my EP so I feel a little out of the loop on current releases. But, Pinegrove put out a record in January and I pretty much haven’t stopped listening to that. I’m also really into Willow, Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, I think they’re killing it.

I definitely have some mixed feelings. I mean I am grateful to have a platform to get my music out there but it is getting harder and harder to “hit the algorithm” and I hate that that’s even a part of the conversation. I Just want to make quality art over quantity. But, It feels impossible to reach anyone these days. So, I have been putting in a lot more effort, time, and money than I ever have before in hopes people will spend more than two seconds looking at it but sadly it often feels like no one cares.

That’s a great description, thank you. I’ve never written a song based off of a title before but that’s sort of what happened here. It’s kind of backwards for me, I guess. A couple years ago I had this dream that felt like an extended meditation and during it, all I could hear was Lana Del Ray. So, when I woke up I already had the words “I hear Lana in my dreams” in my head and I knew one day I’d make a song with that as the title. This song is really about finding yourself so overwhelmed with the current state of your world that you feel the only way to cope is to disconnect from it entirely. While writing, I knew that when the chorus arrived I wanted it to feel like a victory, or a sense of relief. So to contrast that, I wanted the verses to be sort of intense (lyrically) by singing about addiction and desperation. On top of all of that, I wanted the groove throughout to be so gripping that maybe you miss those nuances all together. It’s meant to be a song that after each listen, it sort of reveals another layer to you. The whole thing is in 4/4 up until the bridge, where it almost seamlessly transitions into 6/8, and we introduce a killer saxophone solo (shout to Hailey Niswinger). While writing I knew at some point I wanted there to be a time signature change, and almost sort of a genre change, to really pull you out of the world we built and make you feel like you were floating into a dream-like sequence.