Dayglow on Art in Marfa, Texas, Creating Music People Can Dance To, and His New Album, People In Motion
[UNPUBLISHED:] How does it feel to be playing Outside Lands?
[DAYGLOW:] It’s cool - I’ve heard really good things about this festival. It seems like there's a lot of really great history to it so it’s an honor.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a song you’re most excited to perform?
[DAYGLOW:] It’s usually really fun to play “Close To You” because it’s a good dancing moment.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You’re going on tour this fall, do you have any spots you’re particularly excited about?
[DAYGLOW:] Right now we are doing a lot of festivals which is awesome but logistically it’s really stressful. We are constantly flying back and forth from home but when you tour, you are in a bus. Honestly, I’m most excited about being in a bus. It’s really fun but it’s great to be in San Francisco right now.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a favorite festival you’ve played so far?
[DAYGLOW:] I would say Outside Lands - it’s really great here!
[UNPUBLISHED:] What makes you feel close to home when you’re on tour? Any items you can’t go on the road without?
[DAYGLOW:] That’s a good question. My wife comes almost everywhere I go and my bandmates are my best friends so that’s home to me in the deepest sense. I like candles and the same one in consistent places is nice.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any items you can’t live without from home?
[DAYGLOW:] This is so basic and obvious but you have to remember to stay hydrated. You have to drink lots of water, so it would be a water bottle.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You recently released your song “Then It All Goes Away” - what was the inspiration behind that song?
[DAYGLOW:] I just came back from my fall tour and I just felt there was a song missing in the set that felt like this high energy-fun song. The song came from the void in my mind where I wanted it to be played in a live setting. I wanted to make a really good live song and that fueled it. My goal was to make a good and fun indie pop song.
[UNPUBLISHED:] That single sounds like it should be in a coming-of-age movie, do you get any inspiration from movies or art that you loved when you were younger?
[DAYGLOW:] I love the idea of making soundtrack-situated things. I don’t watch that many movies or shows and I wish I did. I watch a lot of Youtube and I would watch clips of things and that’s usually enough for me to get inspired.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Congrats on announcing your new album People In Motion - what are you most excited about this new project and how do you want your fans to feel when they first listen to it?
[DAYGLOW:] I’m really excited that it’s a proper release and I will be out in the world while it's happening. I’ll be touring and talking to people about it. With Harmony House, I was really proud of it but I got robbed of the experience for it. We’re really touring and playing a lot of shows so I’m really curious to see what that looks like. We’ve been playing unreleased songs once in a while and it’s really fun to see how people react and letting the music live.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you want your listeners to feel when they first listen to People In Motion?
[DAYGLOW:] I think it feels mature in a really strange way. It’s not mature in like a dark way like when people think of a mature album, it’s a sad album but it’s not that at all. I think people will recognize that I grew up a little bit and wanted to make a pop album. I feel like I’m a lot more confident than I was in the past couple of years and understanding that I’m an artist is my job. I think you can sense that responsibility in the album but I can’t decide what people will think when they listen to it. Hopefully, people will like it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] The album art is so cool, what was the inspiration behind it?
[DAYGLOW:] It usually just comes to me in a vision. For this album, I wanted to shoot a landscape in West Texas because I made the album in Texas and I’m from Texas. The landscape is in this place called Marfa, it’s a really weird town in the desert. It’s this really weird pop culture place. If you’ve seen the famous Prada store, that’s there and so there’s a lot of interesting art in that side of Texas that people don’t really think about. I wanted to channel that a little bit and shoot something there with a gradient cube in the middle of it. The last two album covers have been pictures or depictions of me and with this album, it feels like Dayglow is a thing that everyone is included in so I wanted the center of the photo to be something that’s not even human.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Whose set are you most excited to see at Outside Lands?
[DAYGLOW:] I love this band called Washed Out but they’re playing at the same time as me which sucks but Phoebe Bridgers is headlining our stage and hopefully, we can watch her set.
