Dream Jacuzzi‘s debut full-length record Lemon Hazy Nights drops on December 4th, so I wanted to catch up with the guys on their latest masterpiece. Hailing from Alabama, brothers Lucas and Rhett Jackson and long-time friend Josh Pastor make up this soon-to-be four-piece band. I had a call with Lucas and Josh to discuss the new LP and allow them to introduce themselves a bit more.
Alt Columnist: How did Dream Jacuzzi come about?
Dream Jacuzzi: It started out as just Josh and me (Lucas). We knew we wanted to play music together after about our first year in college, but we didn’t really know anyone else that would be good to play with. We made our first EP Out With The Moon kinda on a whim; we made it in about a week. We pretty much started the band over FaceTime. We actually got really, really good at playing together over FaceTime, even though there’s latency. We got pretty good at it, and we basically wrote all the songs over FaceTime. We met up one weekend, went over everything, and wrote all the parts, and then we went to the studio and just recorded it. That was like the start of the band. I really liked the name Dream Jacuzzi. I knew I wanted it to be Dream something and I thought Dream Jacuzzi was cool, it kinda just rolls off the tongue well. It’s sorta ridiculous but people don’t forget it. It essentially means nothing, it just sounds cool.
AC: So the band started out as just you and Josh, but now Rhett’s in the band too, right? When did he get added in?
DJ: He officially got added in pretty much when we started the album. But he’s been laying down the piano tracks in the studio with us from the beginning. He has always been there, but he didn’t actually start helping us write the songs or anything until we started making the album. But yeah, he’s always been in the studio doing back-up vocals and any keys parts we had on the first EP. He’s been writing music longer than Josh and I have; he has his own solo project that he’s going to come out with pretty soon after the album.
AC: Evan plays drums for y’all live, and you said he wasn’t on the album at all, but will he be on the next few releases or anything?
DJ: Yeah, from now on out, he’ll be playing drums on every recording, anything new that we put out. We just added him to the band after we had already completed the album. We needed to have a drummer, and Evan had always been a fan of our music, plus we get along with him really well. So Rhett and Evan are moving up to the house with Josh and me when they graduate, so we’ll all be living here.
AC: Yeah, so then y’all will be a proper four-piece band since it used to just be you and Josh.
DJ: Yeah, we can’t possibly replicate our music live without a drummer, without keys. On some of our newer stuff, a lot of the recordings have prominent keys parts.
AC: I know you and Josh are both multi-instrumentalists. But who plays bass in the band? You two play lead and rhythm guitar, yes?
DJ: So I play rhythm and Josh plays lead, and on the studio recordings, I play all the bass parts as well. We’re still trying to find a bass player, we’ll get there, but I like writing the bass parts anyway.
AC: Who are like the head songwriters in the group? Do y’all both write collaboratively or what?
DJ: Yeah, most of the time it’s just me (Josh) and Lucas. A lot of our songs start out with me coming to Lucas with an idea or he’ll come to me with an idea. Or we’ll sit down and develop an idea together. And then we’ll bring in Rhett to help kinda get it where it needs to be. All the songs are just me and Lucas’ ideas and we develop them together into what they are.
AC: So before heavily committing to being a musician in a band and such, did you first view yourself as a writer at all? Like a poet of sorts or a creative writer or anything like that?
Josh: No, I didn’t. I’ve always written, you know, but never with the intention of putting anything out.
Lucas: I would say Josh is a very good lyricist, he’s really good with, uh…
Josh: Words.
Lucas: Words! Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s no other way to say it, Josh is a very good lyricist for sure. I’m okay, I’m alright, you know, here and there I can write some lyrics.
AC: Who are some of your biggest inspirations influences, whether it be lyrically or stylistically?
Lucas: Well, in high school, Josh and I really got into The 1975, so they were a big one for us, as well as Arctic Monkeys.
Josh: I think, lyrically, Alex Turner is like the number one for me. I really like his style of using imagery, like, telling a story by painting small pictures and putting them together.
DJ: Yeah, and Tame Impala for sure. On the production end of things, we’ve really been in love with Tame Impala’s sound. So with all that being said, you can definitely hear—well, at least we think we can hear—the influence. Mac Demarco is also good. Cage the Elephant is a big one, too. We also like a lot of older bands, like The Beatles. We love their writing style. With the guitar parts, we really try to be like David Gilmour from Pink Floyd. He’s my favorite guitar player. We’re also big Deadheads, but I don’t think that one comes through as much.
AC: Yeah, I definitely picked up on Arctic Monkeys in some of the songs on the new album. There were a few moments that reminded me of AM a little bit.
DJ: Yep, we really love AM. It’s a good one.
AC: How did you know you wanted to release an album this early in your career?
DJ: We pretty much did it on a whim. Our first EP was made with a different producer, and our two singles “Blue Dream” and “Stuck In A Daze” were with another producer. Then John Pagonis, our producer now, hit us up. Well, I (Josh) was in my freshman year, taking a chemistry class, and this guy just started talking to me while I was walking to class since he was going there too. And, you know, when you write music, you get really excited about it and you feel the need to tell people, even if they don’t care. But he actually did care! His brother had a small record label and was trying to get a studio in the works. Eventually, he ended up contacting us, and we met with him back in about February of 2019. We didn’t hear from him until August, and he said, “Hey, the studio’s ready, I need a guinea pig to test it out. Free studio time if you come up to Nashville and record.” So we did that and it’s been awesome. He lets us stay at his house and we stay up all night recording tracks. It’s so much fun, honestly. He’s probably one of the best people we’ve met, he’s like our best friend at this point, and we’ve only known him for a little over a year now. We were kinda skeptical, like, this guy is just hitting us up for free studio time? Probably not going to be any good, production might suck, but it’s free and we might as well try it. So we recorded “Redbird” and when he sent us the mix, we were blown away. We really liked it a lot and thought, “You wanna just do an album?” Seemed like the next logical step, of course! Later on, we realized that’s not how most bands normally do things. Most of the time they have a lot of stuff prepared, but we didn’t have anything prepared. We were just, you know, going to do an album. We wrote it as we went on, we didn’t plan it. We didn’t have all the songs written and then go in. We just wrote “Redbird” then the next one and then the next one. Almost the entire album from start to finish was written chronologically. There are a few tracks that were mixed around, but basically from the first track to the twelfth track, that’s almost the order we recorded the songs in. It kinda worked out good, I really like the order that it’s in.
AC: Yeah, Lemon Hazy Nights is a really well-rounded album, and it’s kinda funny to learn that y’all almost just winged it all.
DJ: Yeah, we came up with the line “lemon hazy nights” in the song “Redbird.” It just kinda, well, what should “lemon hazy nights” be? It’s up to the listener’s interpretation. It literally just sounded cool, that’s basically it. It really just means nothing, but I feel like people will find a meaning for it. I think I have to some extent, just based off of context any time we say it. And it just sounds cool. It kinda makes you feel something, and that feeling is something important.
AC: Kinda like the band name. It sounds cool, it’s kinda funny and doesn’t mean much, but it still makes sense.
DJ: Yeah! It kinda represents us, too, because we’re not super serious or trying to be. But it sounds cool and it’s kinda funny at the same time.
AC: How has it been working on an album in 2020 with all the Covid restrictions and such?
DJ: Well, it wasn’t too bad, honestly. This year has given us a lot of time to focus on the music for the most part. John’s studio is at his house, and The Cadishack is the studio. He made The Cadishack for bands during Covid because they couldn’t get live shows, so they would just do livestreams with him at The Cadishack.
AC: Do y’all do any of the production yourselves or do you just leave that up to John?
DJ: I mean, we kinda guide him, you know? We’ll go there to mix it, but it’s not like we’re actually on the computer doing it. Sometimes we’ll pick out sounds we like and send him those parts, but most of the time it’s just him. We’re technically involved in it, but it’s not like we’re doing it on our own.
AC: So on Lemon Hazy Nights, how much of the writing is fictional and how much is from real-life experience? There are some tracks that feel really vulnerable and there are some that feel a bit more vague, I suppose. So how much is based off of actual experiences you’ve had?
DJ: Hm, I don’t know about actual experiences, but I guess it starts with a real experience that creates a real feeling. So we try to write to fit that feeling. It sometimes starts with something that may have happened, but we want our songs to be relatable to everyone else. We want people to relate to some of what we’ve experienced, so some of it is true, some of it is a real experience. But, you know, it just kinda goes back to the feeling. You have that real experience that creates that real emotion, that real feeling, so then you might write about something else that you can see creating that same feeling, it fits the song. So there are things in the album where it’s like it’s true because it felt that way, but then there’s a lot of added stuff and it gets blurry to where you can’t say any song is completely true or completely made up. Some might say it gets a little … hazy.
AC: I’m really interested in the track “Black Walnut” because it’s so, well, interesting. It’s like a little interlude but there’s all this deep dialogue in it.
DJ: Yeah, so we have a tree outside our house that’s a black walnut tree. Last fall, we would go out pretty much every day and throw black walnuts at the black walnut tree to knock over other black walnuts. And around the same time, we had a little instrumental guitar piece that we were working on and it just kinda became that. We wanted to keep it interesting for the album, so we wanted to add some dialogue to glue the album together. That was one of the last songs we did. It’s like the end of Side A, leading right into “Till I Fall Asleep” with the last line of “Black Walnut” being “Till I fall asleep.” I don’t know, it kinda makes you think a little bit, makes you think about the whole concept of dreams, which is our thing at this point. It’s in our name, and we’ve got a lot of tracks about sleeping and dreaming and nighttime. It’s a mysterious thing, like, we just fall asleep and it’s this different form of consciousness. It’s an interesting thing to think about. I mean, you could say this album is a concept album, but it wasn’t intended like that at all because we didn’t have the concept at the beginning. But at this point, you know, it could be.
AC: Yeah, the first couple of times I listened through the album, I picked up on that recurring theme of sleeping and dreaming and I thought that was really interesting. There are also a few other recurring themes, you know? In “Redbird,” there are bird noises, and they come up again in “Black Walnut.” It feels like such a cohesive album, and that’s why I was surprised that y’all kinda made this album so quickly and came up with it off the bat in a way. The other interlude track “Purple Skies” is completely instrumental, but I love it, it’s so unique. The guitar tones and the keys in that song are very, I don’t know, delectable. It’s pleasant to the ears.
DJ: Yeah, the only thing we intended on that one was that we wanted it to lead into “Rollercoaster.” We didn’t know how we were going to do it, but we thought, “Okay, let’s just change the key to E major, same key as ‘Rollercoaster,’ and see how that could piece together.” It kinda worked, you know? We slowed down the tempo, put a filter on it. It gives you this feeling like you’re tripping on acid, I guess. It’s one of our most psychedelic tracks on the album. I love it.
AC: The more I listened to the album, the more stuff that I picked up on, the more I felt immersed in the album. I really like that.
DJ: We were hoping people would pick up on some of the references that we were drawing back to. We thought, It all pieces together, but I feel like no one’s going to realize that. If not, that’s okay. If they do, awesome. We did put a lot of little Easter eggs and details in there, and it’s very cool to see someone pick up on them. But I think it really worked out for us. Consciously, we didn’t realize what we were doing at the time, but subconsciously, we were making something that was fairly cohesive. And while we do feel like it’s cohesive, we think there’s something there for everyone. “Redbird” is way different than “Till I Fall Asleep” stylistically. Those are two completely different songs in our opinion. Some of the songs on the album are really psychedelic and some of them just aren’t at all. There’s something for everyone there.
AC: Yeah, it reminds me a bit of The 1975’s self-titled debut, how a song like “Sex” is totally different than a song like “Menswear” or “Pressure” because the style is just so dissimilar. That’s kinda how “Till I Fall Asleep” came off, you know?
DJ: We weren’t even going to release that one as a single, but I’m glad we did because it’s just very different than any of the other ones simply because it’s really raw, there’s not much to it other than guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. That’s about it.
AC: There’s so much detail put into some of these songs that I really appreciate. Like I wrote in my track review on “Rollercoaster,” you have that guitar line in the background that’s going up and down, like a rollercoaster. And I just remember thinking, How many people are going to pick up on that?! It’s so smart but so effortless in the background.
DJ: Yeah, that’s one of the subconscious kind of things, like, we didn’t realize we were doing that until you said it. That was not planned, that was not intentional. We just wanted to add a slide guitar in, you know, ascending and descending. It was that simple, but it worked out well. Lyrically, there were things that were intentional, and there were things that were unintentional. Looking back on it, it’s really cool to see how it all pieced together just off a whim. We’re really proud of it though.
AC: And you should be because this album is really incredible.
DJ: Thank you. That means a lot, it really does.
AC: What direction do you think you’ll be heading in after this release? Are there any new styles y’all want to explore?
DJ: Yeah, we like to change it up a lot because we’re into so many different things. It kinda gets boring just staying with one sound. There’s only so much you can explore in a certain genre. There’s no telling, really. We’ve had ideas. Let’s make things a little more funky, or let’s just go hard rock, really put on a distortion pedal. We’ve had both of those thoughts. Or let’s just fuck the guitars and do a synth track. I don’t know, there’s really no telling.
AC: I think it’d be interesting if on another EP or album, you just do all of that, you know?
DJ: That’s something we’d be prone to do. Do a really heavy rock song and then do a bubblegum pop kind of song, you know. There’s some charm to that “bubblegum pop” stuff, I think it’s cool. I like pop, but I also like stuff that no one’s ever heard of before. But yeah, there’s no telling where we’ll go.
AC: So since you’re about to release this album, do you have any plans in 2021 in terms of releasing music? Or do you think you’re just going to take a break for a while now?
DJ: We have no plans; we have our sights set on gigging. We’re going to gig a bit, but I think we’ll have something out in 2021. We’re always writing new stuff, we’ve got at least 20 different ideas on our computer right now that we can do something with. We might release some singles here and there, but no definitive plans just yet.
Lemon Hazy Nights is out via Red Knuckle Records on December 4th, 2020.
Read our track review of “Rollercoaster” here.
Listen to Dream Jacuzzi here:
Rachel Wurstner, Alt Col administrator, graduated from the University of Chicago with a master’s degree in creative writing and currently works as a small-town journalist.
