In the fall of 2021, a reaction to an over-the-counter medication put Trevor Powers in a non-stop state of severe acid reflux, rendering him unable to speak for months. For a time, the pain was so bad he considered taking his own life. Then, still uncertain if he’d sing again, he started writing music.

2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, written during those dark nights, was an emergency lifesaving measure. It was Powers’ first release as Youth Lagoon since he shuttered the project in 2016, and he didn’t plan on making another one anytime soon. But two years later, looking for a pre-war harmonica in his parents’ basement in Idaho, he stumbled on a shoebox full of home videos captured between 1989 and 1993. Watching these VHS tapes and eight-millimeter reels from the first four years of his life lit a spark inside of him. His new record, Rarely Do I Dream, was born, and the songs came flooding out — sports-themed piano ballads, grunge anthems for racing death, dance tracks for coming to terms with it. Songs about home. Clips from the tapes anchor the album at both ends and appear like friendly ghosts throughout.

In the wake of the turmoil that brought Heaven Is A Junkyard into being, Rarely Do I Dream is the product of the healthiest period of Powers’ life. Living in total silence, he says he was forced to learn to be comfortable with himself at the deepest level. He now meditates for an hour every day. “I could have everything taken away tomorrow — my voice, my legs, my vision — and I’d still be whole,” he tells me.

It’s midafternoon in Manhattan, hours before a Rarely Do I Dream release party at a swanky SoHo speaker store, and Powers is full of energy, but not the nervous kind. Perched on a low stool at one of the neighborhood’s last dive bars, his lanky frame’s perfect posture gives him the illusion of being very tall. He’s got a light-green buzz cut and tattoos that peak through his sleeves. One of them says “Be Still.”

As the early crowd shuffles in and the nu metal gets louder, we talk about Powers’ Idaho beginnings, his painful past, and the newfound serenity that laid the foundation for Rarely Do I Dream.

The FADER: Tell me about growing up in Idaho.

Youth Lagoon: I come from a fairly large family — four of us, all boys. We had just enough to get by, so I grew up on chili dogs and spaghetti from a can, but we never thought anything of it. Our world was so small that it all felt very special. I was homeschooled by my mom all the way up until high school, and such a remote environment made it all the more important to hone my inner world. Everything was surreal, down to the games my brothers and I made up. In our own minds, we made things as grandiose as possible.

It extends into my music to this day, that headspace, down to the album title, Rarely Do I Dream. When I meditate, I go to a frequency that’s scratched on the surface of my soul as home, so this reality is what feels like a dream, not the other way around.

There could be an easy misconception that this album is rooted in nostalgia because of the camcorders and eight-millimeter tapes [that appear on the album]. But anytime there’s, say, an argument between grandma and mom, the camcorder shuts off. Afterwards, the camcorder goes back on, and it’s back to the birthday party. So it [also] felt like my responsibility to tell the truth. The truth lies somewhere in between.

Do you think of the music you made during the first era of Youth Lagoon as more nostalgic?

Yeah, but even that is so much darker than people realize. There are so many demons people aren’t picking up on. It’s like a magic trick: If you make tones feel a certain way, dress them up in a way that’s inviting… I could be wrestling with the devil, but if I put that idea in the right packaging, people think I’m singing something sweet.

I’m obsessed with combining that darkness, that underbelly, with themes on the other side, marrying them so that if you’re in one mood, you might think, “This song is about my daughter,” but if you’re in another mood, you’ll pick up on another complex emotion and realize the song is saying something completely different. There’s no wrong answer, and that’s what I love so much about music. It’s a mirror to your own reality.

Tell me about the decision to end the Youth Lagoon project in 2016, and the one to bring it back in 2023.

I’d lost who I was as a person. I was a wandering soul without a purpose. And then life, as it does, completely destroyed and rebuilt me. I needed to kill Youth Lagoon in order to explore other parts of my brain. Bringing it back was done with very direct intention. I had started spending a lot more time in stillness. And the more time I spent in the quiet, I could see there were endless ways I could take the project. Now that the faucet’s on, I can’t turn it off.

During your health crisis, you went through a time when you couldn’t speak. What was your interior monologue like?

I had to escape my body in some way, and it pushed me to the point of being suicidal. Everything felt like torture, and I had no idea how to escape it. That moment pushed me off the cliff, but in the best way possible. If it wasn’t for that, life was cozy enough that I don’t think I ever would’ve put in the work to change my brain and my relationship with my body.

I’d seen therapists my whole life, and they inched me forward to a place that was definitely healthier than where I was, but I was still suffering so much until I found meditation, the portal that saved my life. Artistically, it revolutionized my entire process, which I never expected. I don’t have to dive down to find the ideas anymore. They bubble up to the surface, and I just gather them off the top.

When you first watched through the VHS tapes that became the core of Rarely Do I Dream, what emotions did it bring up?

It was a combination of sadness and beauty — sadness because a lot of the relatives in the tapes are now no longer with us, and I had movies of them in my own mind. There’s something irrefutable about your own personal memory bank, but it’s obviously faulty too. When you actually hear someone’s voice, it changes the way you perceive that person. It was an indescribable mix of powerful emotions. It completely wrecked me.

Playing with the themes in these songs was a tightrope walk between honoring this family archive and adding alternate versions of reality to the mix. I found that there were more ways to tell the truth when I expanded the ideas and the cast of characters I was working with.

I’ve fallen in love with combining fantasy with documentary — zooming in on my living room, listening to my mom and dad talk to me when I’m on an Easter egg hunt, and gluing it together with something imagined so it all functions as one cohesive truth.

“Football” is one of my favorite songs on this record. Why did you choose football as the central metaphor?

I grew up playing baseball, and my whole life centered around it for a while.. Football is much more of my dad’s thing; I never played football, but I was always around it. And because it wasn’t something I was actively participating in, there was mystery involved. It’s also so intertwined with the ethos and mythology of what it is to be an American.

To me, that chorus [“Maybe another person who caught the football”] is about how our participation in life doesn’t call for perfection. It’s not about always making the right decisions or knowing where we’re going. It’s about steering into the fear. That’s where the truth is. That’s how you grow. Without embracing discomfort, life becomes stale and everything collapses very quickly.

This album has its fair share of happy scenes, pulled from the tapes and in your lyrics, but you fill in the gaps with less positive themes like death and lost faith. Do both sides of these memories come out at once during the writing phase, or do you edit them together later?

It happens so naturally that I usually have no idea what I’m saying. Then, after the fact, I go through all these phrases and start figuring them out. With “Speed Freak,” I had no idea when I was writing it that it’s about someone trying to outrun death, down to the symbolism of bullfrogs and stray dogs being omens of death in multiple cultures. My writing is a stream of consciousness, but then I go through with hyper-consciousness to clean it up and piece it together.

If I don’t clean it up, it just feels like a dream, and I don’t want the communication element to be lost. At its core, effective art is communication. It’s me communicating what I’m going through as a human being and handing that baton off to you.