“Tear up the floorboards. Build me my gallows.“
Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. Ryan Couitt (guitars and backing vocals) and Justin Soares (bass) of Dreamwell took the time on a Friday evening to join Dobbin and Joe for a big chat about their new album In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You.
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Dobbin & Joe: We’re been listening to In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You a huge amount and we’re absolutely in love with it, certainly among our top of this year.
Justin: That’s a huge compliment, it’s been a great year for music, so hearing that means the world.
Dobbin: You signed to Prosthetic Records, we thought that was fantastic as we’re a big fan of that roster. How long has this record been in the works? A few tracks have been in the set-list for some time – “Body Fountain”, “Blighttown Type Beat”, and “All Towers Drawn in the Equatorial Room”.
Ryan: “Obelisk of Hands”, that main riff, I wrote back in 2019. I got a new amp, plugged it in, that was the very first thing I played. We finally recorded it about a year ago. Those tracks are probably the oldest on the album, that’s why they’ve been in the set-list for so long.
Justin: The longer we’ve had them around, the harder it’s been to not play them. At this point our last album is now two years old, so wanting to put that new material in, but not wanting to play stuff that people can’t hear – it’s a delicate balance. Tracks like “Obelisk of Hands” are two to three years old.
Dobbin: Those tracks are some of your heaviest, touching on your hardcore influence, which is a huge theme on In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You.
Ryan: “Towers” is basically a song of me teaching Anthony to play doom drums. If you hear his drumming, he plays a million notes everywhere. It’s fine to keep it below 200 BMP, we can do this, it’s gonna sound cool.
Dobbin: On this record you’ve spread out your style a lot more, compared to Modern Grotesque. You’ve got tracks that go just as emotive, if not more. You’ve also got heavier songs, much more variety, short tracks, songs that blur together, and longer songs… So you’re sort of in your prog era, is that fair to say?
Ryan: We certainly went heavier on this one. With Modern, we were massively influenced by Pianos Become The Teeth, Touche Amore, a ton of post rock. As Modern was being written, we started carving out our own little niche. We’re also the hardcore kids of the band, so we’ve always been pushing for heavier stuff. Aki plays straight up black and death metal, but she’s very atmospheric too, she does those parts on the album. KZ wasn’t our original vocalist, so half the songs on Modern were written with someone else in mind. Once he joined we realised we could do much heavier shit, because that’s what KZ does – originally I was in a doom band with him. As the band has grown, it’s getting darker, and more upset with life and the world, and it comes out in the music.
Dobbin: The bass is really up a notch on this one. The first song “Good Reasons to Freeze to Death” is really bass led, and the tappy bits on rue make for a completely different vibe.
Justin: I got better tone – we noticed the bass was lacking on Modern, we were unhappy with that. This time we made a change so you can hear what I’m doing. I’ve also been surrounded by amazing bassists. I’m good friends with Nick from Frail Body who’s a phenomenal bassist, and uses a lot of techniques including tapping. So I thought, if we’re going to be in the same scene as people like this, I’ve got to keep pace. Whether or not I do, I don’t think so… It’s not just him, there’s a lot of other phenomenal bassists out there. Sleve from The Holy Ghost Tabernacle Choir is an absolute shredder, absurd. Knows the theory.
Dobbin: The two tracks at the end of the record are a big change of pace from the start: “I Dream’t of a Room of Clouds” and “Rue de Noms (Could Have Been Better, Should Have Been More)”, both are nearly seven minutes. Were there any specific influences that had you building something bigger and slower, especially with “Room”?
Ryan: With “Room”, KZ originally wrote that song on a shitty acoustic guitar, and we converted it. He brought it to us and said, it’s probably a long shot, I’ve already got the lyrics down. We thought, why the fuck not. He sort of conducted that song – he would explain the amount of energy and how chaotic should be. Our friend Jess did the saxophone on that song, that was cool. Those are the last two songs we finished as well.
Justin: We always talk about making more space, more soundscapes, and we never do, so it was fun to do on these songs. “Rue” starts at nine, goes to five, it gets mathy, spacious, it gets hectic, then it ends with that weird bouncy beat.
Ryan: We booked studio time in the last month, so we were on a hard crunch deadline to finish writing this thing by the end of the summer. “Rue de Noms” was the last week, and I think it feels indecisive in itself, goes through every stage of grief.
Dobbin: The bass tapping riff is really ambiguous in mood, especially coming off of “Room”, it’s quite exciting to end up there. It really goes all places until the very last moment – spoiler alert – we get the title drop, then the nastiest breakdown on the album. It absolutely feels like you’re gonna do one last chorus, but…
Ryan: I had that riff sitting there, the most nonsense riff, from the start. We got to the end of the song, knew it would be the last one, and thought, well fuck, however we end this song is how the album ends. So let’s just put this stupid fucking riff at the end.
Justin: More often than not, we play a riff, we don’t use it for a long time, then it later becomes the perfect addition to a song.
Dobbin: There’s a lot of atmospherics on “Room” and on the rest of the album to balance out the heaviness, such as “Reverberations of a Sickly Wound”.
Ryan: That’s something that Aki wrote one day. We did a sound-clip interlude on the last album, so we thought we’d go with the trend. I have three looping guitar parts that are happening, if I ever had to do that live, I’d have to step at exactly the right time, which I’m not too good at.
Justin: It was cool to use the Plus pedal. The two of us are huge pedal nerds. The Plus pedal essentially acts like a piano sustain: you can pluck your note, step on it, it’ll hold that, step off and pluck another, step again and it will bleed it into a chord. So when Aki came up with the idea, I knew exactly what we wanted to use. With lots of guitar pedals, you drop so much money on something you use for just 30 seconds…
Dobbin: That comes after my favourite on the record, “It Will Hurt, and You Won’t Get to Be Suprised”. I’d love to see that on the setlist.
Ryan: That one is fun to play, but as you say it’s hard, it’s intricate. And yeah, it’s on the setlist… come see us in November.
Justin: I was sent that when I was in Iowa, and I did not know what to write for it. I thought, what is even going on? Then it gets heavy, then there’s a weird ambient part… so I went with a weird Glassjaw–Deftones-y thing.
Dobbin: There’s a bunch of tracks, more than once on the record, that flow together very naturally. That’s not something you’d done on previous records. When did you know you wanted to do that, and how did you make that work?
Ryan: I think at the end of the day we always see ourselves as an “album” band. We pre “[Guitar] Pro” up all the songs before we get to the studio, so we have all the tempos and so we’re not wasting money when we get there. So we get to sit with the songs and puzzle-piece which ones fit together, then we make the final links when we’re at the studio to make them seamlessly tie together.
Justin: In terms of the first track “Good Reasons To Freeze To Death”, we initially envisioned the first two as being just one song, but lyrically and thematically it just didn’t make sense to do another really long song when we have two like that at the end. They clearly evolved into two different things. We always wanted to bleed tracks together. Aki’s really keen on this, and we’re big fans of bands like The World Is, who are great at it.
Joe: I guess my main question is the feature. I like Anklebiter quite a lot. Their recent EP was one of my top ten of the year. I’m curious to know, given that Logan is not the main vocalist of the band, how did you know they could sing so well, and how did that connection come about?
Ryan: We met Logan a long time ago when they were in a band called Lilac Queen. They did half-and-half vocals in that band, so we knew they were good. It’s often the situation that you want to work with someone but nobody has the time, so it was cool to actually collaborate for once.
Justin: The New England music scene is pretty small. The Lilac Queen folks are stalwarts of the scene, so it was really cool to finally bring them to the fold, we’ve been talking about doing a track since Modern Grotesque and finally got that to happen. I just snagged a test press…
Joe: They don’t ship their vinyls to the UK… So if you come to the UK, please bring along a record for me…
Check out the full interview to find the secrets of the Dark Souls references, their comments on the bands they’ve played with, tour travel horror stories, our begging requests for a UK visit, and brief discussions of the Premier League.