Joseph Stevens :: Peel Dream Magazine Interview
Where are you originally from? How did you initially begin connecting with music and was this something that was relevant in your household growing up during your more formative years? Who were some of your earliest influences, and when did you realize you wanted to pursue a career in music?
I grew up in White Plains, NY, which is a suburb of New York City, and I actually spent my entire life in the state of New York until 2020, when I moved to LA. I feel like I can’t remember a time I did not connect with music, but a lot of my early memories involve my brother who is 10 years older than me. We got a piano when I was 5 because he started taking lessons, and pretty soon after I asked if I could start as well, because I always wanted to do everything he did. The earliest music I connected with was stuff he liked as a teenager in the 90s - Nirvana, REM, Alice In Chains, and then, as he got a little older, classical and experimental stuff. Neither of my parents are super tapped into music, but my paternal grandfather was a Klezmer drummer in Philly, and my maternal grandfather was an opera radio DJ also in Philly. My dad played a lot of old school jazz and not much else, and while my mom didn’t really put on much music, she was pretty open to everything. I probably started writing little tidbits on the piano when I was around 10, but it’s all very hazy - I got much more serious about making songs when I became fascinated with the guitar, which my brother also played. My aunt Marsha had a Takamine in their family’s basement that I would play whenever we visited them. I finally got my own guitar for my 13th birthday and I think around then I had this weird certainty that I was a songwriter. I started lots of little neighborhood bands and had a particularly close bond with a kid named Andy around the corner. His dad was in a band in the 70s and their basement was full of vintage music gear, essentially a studio that we could mess around in. I’m not exactly sure when I realized I wanted to have a career in music - and I’m not really sure I have a “career in music” yet. But it’s something I aspire to do. Regardless, I’ve always just wanted to write tons of songs and have made the necessary space and time in my life to do that.
Photo: Samira Winter
Did you participate in any groups or projects prior to forming PDM? How did everyone initially meet each other, and what were some of the inspiring elements that helped to establish the band? Tell me about writing and recording the group’s wonderful debut “Modern Meta Physic” as well as 2020's follow-up “Agitprop Alterna” on Slumberland Records.
Photo: Derick Alexander
Well, Peel Dream Magazine is and has always been somewhere between a solo moniker and maybe a “music collective”, so I wouldn’t necessarily say the formation came from meeting such-and-such person the same way as a purely collaborative band might say so. But that being said, a few of the people I played with early on in New York were part of a small network of friends and fellow musicians in the DIY music scene. Shaun Durkan from Weekend/Crushed/Tamaryn - who I did not know at the time - saw a show I did at a DIY venue called Palisades in Bushwick in 2016 under the moniker “Cherry Coals” and he offered to produce a record for me at his apartment. Back then my music was very dream pop/goth, using drum machines and lots of chorus pedals, etc. Through the course of recording this “Cherry Coals” record with Shaun, I experimented a lot with what worked and what didn’t, and I eventually began stripping away the effects I was using, opting for something more cerebral and droney. Needless to say, I was listening to a lot of Stereolab at the time, but also Velvet Underground, Neu!, Nick Drake, and Belle and Sebastian. I started writing a new batch of songs with these references as the centerpiece, and I was also super inspired by a local band called Gingerlys. They had a very twee, angular indie pop sound with fast drum fills and heavy distortion that felt really fresh to me. As we kept working on this record, I decided I wanted to disband the project, under which I’d already released a few things, and make it this new thing that I was going to call Peel Dream Magazine.
This first batch of PDM songs was ok - I actually never released it, but it was a really cool blueprint for what I wanted to do moving forward, and for the first time since I’d moved to NY, I felt like I had something in my back pocket that was actually different from what other people were doing. I had this complex in my mind that all the art-school kids in the DIY scene never really accepted me, and after years of trying to befriend or collaborate with them, I decided that I could actually do something fresher than what they were doing on my own anyway. The prevailing sound of this time among small rock bands was somewhat tiring for me - “garage rock”, “art rock”, “noise rock”. . . By then it was 2017 - I took a trip to the Hudson Valley that summer and came back with this seed of an idea that I could make a record referencing the “NYC ExPat Hippy” phenomenon up there, and somehow a new thirteen-song record spilled out of me like I was possessed, over the course of a month or two. It was centered around very simple, muddy organ overdubs, which has been a calling card for me since. I recorded it entirely myself at home on a laptop using fake drum samples, but Shaun was still really interested in promoting my music and shared it with Michael Schulman from Slumberland Records, and miraculously, Mike actually wanted to put it out. I still thought of the record as demos that would eventually get re-recorded, but Mike insisted we release it as-is, and I was thrust into releasing my first album as PDM - “Modern Meta Physic” - without a plan, press shot, a live-show, or even a band. I got some friends and co-workers to flesh out the songs live with me (our first show was at Alphaville in January 2018) and we started touring with the assistance of a DIY booking agent and regional guru named Joe Trainor from Baltimore. Slowly, the band sort of became a “thing” although obviously it was tiny back then, and honestly still is.
In 2018, I met this other guy, Kelly Winrich, who is in an Americana group called Delta Spirit and runs a really cool studio in Greenpoint, NY, because he was dating a co-worker of mine, and he offered to produce a second PDM album. That became “Agitprop Alterna”, and I recruited the drummer from Gingerlys - Brian Alvarez - and a female vocalist, Jo-Anne Hyun, to both play on the record and help flesh out the sound into this bigger, more “MBV-inspired” thing. We really started to get our attention after that second album came out, but obviously that was right when Covid hit and things became quiet for a sec after that. Regarding older bands, yes - I formed a band a few years into living in NY, maybe 2012, called Honey Wild, that I find corny in retrospect, but there is some redeeming stuff, maybe. I would say it was, like, “poppy art rock” maybe, but it was quite straight-forward. I hadn’t found my own true artistry at that point, and I wasn’t clued into the music scene in NY back then. We were also a very collaborative four-piece as opposed to everything else I’ve done since then, and my difficulties with that experience led me to the realization that with future stuff, I really wanted to follow my artistic vision more purely. I spent most of my time in those early days working in restaurants (I still work in one here in LA to this day) and trying to figure out how to be a functioning human in the real world. It’s pretty hard to just snap your fingers and do something cool right from the get-go, and I would say I wallowed in an unfortunate mix of obscurity, lack of artistic curiosity, and distraction, but in retrospect, all of that stuff led to deep changes within me as a person. I hated failing at music, and I wanted to take all of my mistakes and turn them into new points of view. Toward the end of that band, I became hip to a lot of new and exciting ideas about music and formed this other project I already mentioned, Cherry Coals. I played with a bunch of different people in that band, including John Ross from Wild Pink, interestingly. It was roughly 2015 -2017 and essentially a dream pop/goth kind of thing - very influenced by the Cocteaus, who were obviously having a huge resurgence in popularity at that time.
Photo: Vice Cooler
Jumping ahead a bit to the band’s incredible and highly anticipated follow up to “Pad”, “Rose Main Reading Room”. What was the overall process and approach to bringing this album to life, and would you mind giving some backstory to tracks like “Wish You Well”, “Gems and Minerals”, “Ocean Life” and the album’s serene opener “Dawn”? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
I first started writing the songs for “Rose Main Reading Room” around Christmas of 2022, a few months after “Pad” came out, and continued writing during this artist residency I did in London at the beginning of 2023 before a European tour that PDM did. I wanted to make a very sharp turn from the mid-century harmony of that album and pivot back to a more archetypal rock vibe like the first two PDM records, but I was also very inspired by contemporary classical and folk music, which would be newer elements to the PDM universe. Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Sufjan Stevens. Another thing that made me feel kind of burned out on “Pad” was the over-use of virtual instruments (which I relied on because I had no budget, but had in my possession because of scoring work I’ve done) as well as the lack of female vocals, which I really think is an important part of the PDM sound. So I vowed to record almost entirely real instruments ranging from drums to piano, flute, clarinet, and violin, and I invited my friend Olivia Babuka Black to join the band as a vocalist. I had also formed a really fantastic LA-based touring band with two awesome multi-instrumentalists, Ian Gibbs and Ian Lipson from the “Pad” touring cycle, and had been playing with them for the better part of a year by the time I began recording “Rose Main Reading Room”. Between both Ians and Olivia, I felt like I had amassed this really musical new group of people who I could rely on to flesh out new ideas and take the project into new territory that was very post-shoegaze but also post-baroque pop. What would that look and feel like? Ian Gibbs offered to record and perform drums at his parent’s house in the San Fernando Valley, and he also contributed some guitar, bass, and synth stuff. I went to a few studios around town in LA over the course of 2023 to track odds and ends, but by and large, I still recorded most of the records at home, which is how most of the PDM records get made. Through practice and a bunch of freelance production/composing stuff I'd started to do, I had arrived at a place where I could make something slightly more hi-fi and dial in mix-wise. I actually had a friend and excellent mixer, Omar Yakar, mix the entire record at first, but I ended up taking everything back home and remixing it myself because it lacked a certain sound that I'd honed in for PDM records. It maybe sounded too good, and I wanted to bring it back to this weird middle ground between hi-fi and lo-fi that PDM records tend to exist in.
“I wanted it to feel like the earth crunching, and like forces of time and pressure transforming things underground.”
Concept-wise, I had this idea that I wanted to make a record that embodied the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, so that each song was a different “Hall” of the building. Listeners would be guided through each room as if it was an exploration of my own personal history as well as human history and animality. As I kept working on it, the concept kind of fell apart, to be honest, partly because I was burned out on making a concept record with “Pad” (which is about me fictitiously being kicked out of Peel Dream Magazine). But nonetheless, this theme of “natural history” / “personal history” / “instinct” / animality prevails, as well as this theme of “New York City”, which is pretty essential to my life. I originally wanted to call the record “Roosevelt Rotunda” after the entrance hall of the museum, but it felt kind of stale to me, so I went with another iconic New York landmark for the title, the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library. I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years, and it felt like a magical title. The song “Wish You Well” is about competition and social hierarchy in the animal kingdom, and how that plays out in everyday human life. I’m also calling out people in the music industry who tend to have sharp elbows and “play the game” in a nasty way, creating a parallel there with the animal world. “Gems and Minerals” is a weird instrumental track that I actually had sitting around before I started on the album, and it references the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the museum. I wanted it to feel like the earth crunching, and like forces of time and pressure transforming things underground. “Ocean Life” stemmed from a simple folk song I wrote, and I wanted to flesh it out with some repetitive symphonic instruments. It references the museum - The Hall of Ocean Life, which I call in the song “Central Park” as well. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the museum. . . it's chillingly dark, and there is a huge diorama of a whale suspended from the ceiling as if you are actually at the bottom of the ocean. That room famously has a diorama of a sperm whale attacking a giant squid. Very nostalgic. That song is about grandiosity. “Dawn” is essentially a contemporary classical song with these repeating woodwind phrases. I love it as an opener, and it makes me feel like I’m in the midst of a forest. The lyrics are really straightforward, about greeting the day as it begins.
