Hi, everyone! I recently got to sit down and chat with Bennett Blumberg, the vocalist and bandleader of the Minneapolis dream pop band Dreams We've Had. Blumberg, who is a student at the University of Minnesota, has had an incredible journey as a musician. From a turning a failed suicide attempt into crafting a beautiful, honest look at his struggles on his most recent project, Everything and You, I am very glad that I was able to discover his music on my Discover Weekly a month or two ago.
*THIS INTERVIEW IS NOT TYPED IN ITS ENTIRETY. SOME QUESTIONS WERE TRANSCRIBED AND PARAPHRASED*
bazzreviews: Which albums or artists inspired you to start a music career?
Bennett Blumberg: I wasn’t really exposed to a lot of different music as a child. I grew up in a religious home, so we listened to a lot of gospel and Christian music. I remember my dad was a big U2 fan and would always play their records in the car. I think I was about twleve or thirteen when he
turned me on to Led Zeppelin. I instantly fell in love with their music, and I put all their music on my iPod. After that, I was listening to an iTunes radio station for Led Zeppelin, and I heard a song from Lonerism by Tame Impala. Hearing that album also changed my life. I loved it so much that I impulsively bought it on the spot. I had already been writing music for a bit of time at that point, but then other projects like Depression Cherry by Beach House, some of Foxygen’s middle discography, and records from Father John Misty came into my life. The rest is history.
br: What’s the significance behind your stage name “Dreams We’ve Had?”
B.B.: The name “Dreams We’ve Had” came long before we actually released our first EP. For anyone that doesn’t know, that record has five or six different vocalists on it. When I first started writing music, I wasn’t comfortable with singing. I was with this girl named Adaline, who was also in Dreams We’ve Had at the time, and we were brainstorming different names. We came up with it, and I guess it was sort of relating to my own life at the time. I was struggling with very heavy depression in that timeframe, and Dreams We’ve had symbolized that past happiness we all have and how it’s a dream you long to live for again. Nowadays, I don’t really think about the name and its significance all that much. It’s been so detached from the actual meaning where it’s difficult to really explain why it’s the name we chose. As we just talked about, look at bands like Beach House. Our first instinct is to say that it’s named for a house on a beach. And you’d be right. But as you dig deeper into their discography and become a bigger fan, the original significance of the name starts to go away. I think it’s because you think more at the band and the art they make, and I feel like that’s the kind of the same with my music.
br: How has your battle with depression and attempted suicide changed the way you write your and look at music in general?
B.B.: My first album, Dear Friend, was a project where I tried to find my sound and what I wanted to write about. It’s not something I think is my best work, but it’s still a fine effort. I began writing about my depression, but it was purely metaphorical at that point. You look at a song like “Cocaine.” I’ve never done that drug, but I used it as a metaphor for escaping something. Fast-forward to late 2018 when I started writing “Perfectly Out Of Place,” that was the first time that I ditched the metaphors and say everything straight. In the outro to that song, the lyrics are “And I'll just say it outright/ I won't try to be poetic or silly.” That was sort of a jab at myself masking all of my feelings and using metaphors instead. You can call it “artistic merit” or whatever, but it was really a time in my life when I just wanted to be honest about what was happening. I had no idea that it would be the song everyone came to love when I was making it. Looking back at it, I guess I’m glad they did, because it was the point where I finally began to embody who I really was. People have been reaching out to me from all across the world and telling me how much my music has impacted them. I’m now at a point where I’m okay with being vulnerable and allowing myself to share my stories with others. It allows for deeper emotional bonds with people. I would definitely say since “Perfectly Out of Place,” that forthright style has been an important part of the way I make music.
br: How did you meet the other members that form the band? B.B.: I mentioned that Dreams We’ve Had was once a band, but it’s now my own project. For the longest time, I was always changing up the live iteration until I met my drummer, Gunnar Lindquist and my bassist, Cale Moore. I met both of these guys in the Minneapolis music scene. It’s been tough with this global pandemic we’re having, because we haven’t been able to do any live stuff for quite a bit of time now.
br: The live show seems to be an important part of you and your band, would you say that you prefer playing live or working on new songs in the studio?
B.B.: It’s hard to answer that question. Live shows are huge part of my expression because I can be a lot more free and experimental. I also get a lot of emotional release from playing, which is good for my mental health. Another thing about the live shows is that I’m free to make mistakes. In the studio, it’s much more calculated. If you release something that’s not mixed or produced in a certain way, it’s out there forever. Conversely, if you mess up in a live show, it’s in the moment. You say “Oh, well” and look to fix it next time. Writing can be just as cathartic, but at a certain point, that healing can get overshadowed by all the rinse-and-repeat process of mixing and editing. It can be stressful to have to be so perfect in the studio, and sometimes the connection you have with a song can get lost in that process.
br: Can you describe your process for making songs?
B.B.: I want to preface my answer by talking about the two types of creative people out there. I think that there exists an orderly creative person that is well-prepared and has a plan for every step of the way, and a chaoticly creative person that is rather disorganized and throws something together on a whim. Thom Yorke from Radiohead is an incredible example of someone who is chaotic creative. He always has a million different ideas for a certain song. In an interview with his producer, Nigel Godrich, Nigel says he has to finish almost all of his songs for him because there’s so many things being thrown around at once. While it seems foolish, both of these styles have merit. Thom Yorke, in my opinion, is one of the greatest minds in music of the late-twentieth and twenty-first century, if not the greatest. Now, back to my original point. I’d say I’m more of an orderly creative person. As I answered in your last question, the studio process for me is very methodical. I like to take my time with how I craft my music. I can usually spend hours upon hours finding those first few chords and how I want them to be voiced. Once I have that, I may or may not have a vocal melody ready to go. Sometimes, I’ll just be writing out something in my head wherever I am, so that I’m fully prepared to record that when I get to my studio. From then, I’ll create a template of how I want the song to go. Whether I want to go verse, chorus, verse, bridge, intro, outro, whatever, I believe it’s important to have everything worked out ahead of time. If I’m recording a verse, and I don’t know what the chorus is going to sound like, there’s a level of uncertainty that I don’t like having in my creative process. It’s not what a lot of musicians do, but it’s worked for me a lot. I don’t have a set pattern of instruments that I’ll record, but I know that I want to start with something that’s present throughout the song. That might usually be a synth line or something. From then, I’ll add another element like guitar or drums. Like I said, I’m very methodical, so I might listen to that track so many times before I deem it “good enough” to be put in the final product. I do this, because in the moment, it might sound really good. The reality of the situaton is that if you revisit that thing you believe to be “the best,” it might not actually be. It’s like writing a paper for a class. It might look great when you’re first writing it, but if you read it out loud to yourself, you might catch things that you didn’t think about before. Again, I bring up Beach House, because I watched an interview with them. They said they do almost the exact same thing, listening to almost everything they make an obscene amount of times before they believe it clicks. If that feeling of goodness doesn’t wear off, then you’re on to something good. I’ll then add some vocals and stuff, send it off to my brother to be mixed, and then it’s a finished product.
br: What’s more important to you- lyricism or production value?
B.B.: If this was asked, say, two years ago, I would have said production. Nowadays, I’ll say the lyrics are more important than they once were. At the same time, I don’t really value one part more than the other. I sort of view each piece of a song as a phase. What I mean by this is that the production phase will be the most important for a certain period time. I’m devoting all of my energy to each aspect of the song and not really thinking about lyrics. When I finish that stage, I’ll move on to writing lyrics. The same energy and mindset is applied to this stage.
br: What was the process and symbolism of lighting yourself on fire for the cover of your latest LP, Everything and You? B.B.: I’m super glad you asked that question! To all those people who thought it was Photoshopped, I actually lit myself on fire for that shot. That photo is one of the things I’m most proud of. To answer part of your question, there’s a lot of symbolic meaning behind the photo and the album itself. It’s no secret that it’s a breakup album, based on a relationship I had experienced a while back. If you look very closely in that photo, you’ll see that my left foot is touching the water ever so slightly. That idea of being in flames emotionally and going through a bunch of s--t, so you’re jumping towards the water to quench it all out. But, you’re not quite there yet; so it’s all just a snapshot of where I was at that time. The cover being black-and-white is also symbolic, too. Each cover photo had been in color before that, but now, everything just felt so black-and-white. Now, the process. I told my photographer, Keegan Burckhard, that I wanted to light myself on fire to make it more intense. We bought fire retardant spray, and created a soapy mix with butane bubbles so that I could be protected but actually catch fire. I said, f--k it, let’s put this all over my body, too. We practiced this jump hundreds of times so that we could get it just right. The pose, quite literally, had to be perfect. We didn’t want to have to risk doing this shot twice. We actually ended up having to do this four times because the photo was not ideal. Keegan had his camera in one hand, the torch in the other, counted down from three, and he lit me on fire. I ran and jumped towards the water, which was probably the most adrenaline I ever had running through my body at once. Keep in mind, this was shot in April, so the water was still very cold. It got very hot and bright for a moment, but I couldn’t feel anything in that moment. I was super lucky that I didn’t get burned too badly, either. Mostly minor burns on my neck and back that were the equivalence of a common sunburn.
br: I know you recently released Everything and You late last year, but is there anything else in the works for Dreams We’ve Had? B.B.: We’re working on a couple new songs right now, one of the songs is tentatively set to release in May. That’s all I can really say about it, but there’s definitely some great stuff coming your way soon.
br: What music goals would you say that you have for the future?
B.B.: I guess my biggest goal is to be able to live off of music full time. With the success of “Perfectly Out of Place” and the latest record, I’m so nearly at that stage where I don’t need any supplemental income. Another thing I’m considering doing, which I did during the writing process of Everything and You, was living out in a cabin in the woods again. I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but I spent a month in complete out in the woods with no internet, cell phone, anything. It was very weird coming back home, because I could barely form sentences with my family. I had only really been talking to store clerks and that was about it. I’d want to do that same thing for a year, find a place, live without anything nonessential, and write an entire new record. It’s definitely a maybe right now, but it all ties in with my full-time music dream.
I want to thank Bennett again for sitting down and talking with me. He is one of the most daring musicians I have spoken to, so props to him for that. I cannot recommend his music enough, especially if you're in the feels. Thanks so much to all the readers of this, and I'll see you again soon with some more bazzreviews content!
If you want to hear more of Bennett's music, log on to https://open.spotify.com/artist/5LkgVE79AHNZN7kMukfJFv
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