The Atlanta Trio Bring Dream Pop Into the Laundry Room
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Strickland wrote a song you could dance to about the moment you stop expecting a relationship to last. Dandelion
holds on to the small optimism of the beginning, when picking a flower can seem like a way of keeping something good. Then the seeds go. The Atlanta trio describe the single as upbeat, even as it follows a feeling closer to hopelessness. That brightness makes room for the impulse to carry on before you know how.
Before becoming Strickland, Avery, Cole and Zach were part of the nine-member hip-hop group Sleeper Cell. When it dissolved, the three kept working together and gravitated toward dream pop. They moved to Atlanta together and each brought experience as a songwriter and producer. In describing how Strickland came together, they give the writing and the vocal delivery equal weight. Three people contribute their own habits of phrase and voice to a song about an experience often lived in private.
The trio count The 1975 and Gorillaz among their influences and describe the feeling they look for in their own music as bitter sweetness
. On Dandelion
, the sweetness belongs in part to the memory of having wanted something. The picture of the flower is plain and small enough to let that early hope stand on its own. The wind does the rest without giving anyone a clear moment when they could have changed the outcome.
They recorded Dandelion
in their laundry room and mixed it twenty feet away in the living room. That short distance gives some shape to the word self-produced. The people who made the recording were also the people deciding what should come forward when they listened back. The trio’s description of what they make as music from your dreams has a very ordinary address.
We encourage everyone to smile and even dance through it all
, the trio say. There’s a practical edge to that invitation. You can get up and dance while the reasons to feel better are still catching up. The group talks about faking it until you make it, which makes their decision to keep the song upbeat feel less like cheerfulness for its own sake. A hopeful mood can be something you try on before it comes naturally.
The flower in the title is already at the mercy of the wind. Dancing gives the person holding it one thing they can still choose. That difference between what leaves and what you can do with the rest of the night is where the song finds its lift.
Photo credit: @atlcalvin
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