When we last heard from Peel Dream Magazine, Joe Stevens had basically soft rebooted the project. During the group’s New York years, Peel Dream had been Stevens’ vehicle for exploring a host of moodier psychedelic traditions, from krautrock to shoegaze. During the pandemic, he decamped to Los Angeles, and in 2022 he re-emerged with Pad — a concept album about him getting kicked out of his own band, now set to jazz- and country-tinged baroque-pop fixated on ’60s harmonies and Beach Boys melodies. Now, another two years down the road, Stevens is set to return with Rose Main Reading Room. It’s his first release for Topshelf Records, and, once more, it’s a whole new Peel Dream Magazine.

In some ways, Rose Main Reading Room will feel more of a piece with Pad to some listeners. It still favors more acoustic and symphonic instrumentation than the scuzzy layers of sound that were once Peel Dream’s calling card. Stevens began Rose Main Reading Room like every other Peel Dream album — alone at home, in the waning days of 2022, chasing new ideas. After writing through early 2023 and tweaking mixes until a few months ago, he’s arrived at an album he drily terms “medium-fi.” Which is to say: Compared to the primarily virtual instruments of Pad, here Stevens took his home recordings and went around to various studios, where he had various other humans play. It results in a fuller, lusher sound that, in the end, makes Rose Main Reading Room feel more like a new destination built on a synthesis of everywhere Peel Dream has been.

Taking its name from a gorgeous hall at the New York Public Library, Rose Main Reading Room also finds Stevens traversing different spaces emotionally and spiritually. The album stemmed from a period of time where he was reflecting on his childhood memories of New York City, and how they felt lost during the time he lived there as an adult.

To exhume the past, Stevens partially turned to a certain strain of music of ’00s New York — the stuff that blended rock and orchestration in idiosyncratic ways. But, this being Peel Dream, that mixture is pulled out of any specific timeline and rendered as their own specific dreamscape. Fragments of the past are conveyed in cooed vocals and earworm refrains over floating vibraphones and woodwinds. The album’s various ideas and influences blur together. “I wanted it to exist in between so many different things that it’s nothing,” Stevens explained.

Today, along with the announcement of their new album, Peel Dream have shared the album’s lead single “Lie In The Gutter.” Ahead of the news, we caught up with Stevens, calling over Zoom from his home in LA, to hear about how he constructed the gorgeous Rose Main Reading Room.

When you were releasing Pad, part of the story was you had left NYC for LA during the pandemic. Was there anything new happening in your life that influenced Rose Main Reading Room?

JOE STEVENS: The record is not a confessional record about something going on right now. There are individual songs about little things that are pertinent to my life in the moment when I’m writing them, but in general it was a retrospective record.

The seed of the record had started when I was doing some therapy and thinking more about my childhood. It was this simple myopic idea for a record, where I wanted to think about my upbringing and memories I had. I got to thinking about this whole thing about my history, how I’ve evolved as a person, and evolution as a concept. I like to tinker. I’ll think of one small thing and how I can make it more interesting.

Along the way there are childhood memories mixed in with imagery of New York and animal kingdom themes. Pad also had a lot of conceptual background, and a fictional story threaded through it. Does this have an arc as well, or is more like snapshots?

STEVENS: More the latter. There’s no story for people to follow. There are themes as opposed to concepts.

The idea of this being your “childhood” New York resonated with me, the way I remember going into the city and it’s Central Park, it’s the museums. This grand old New York. I was thinking about this dreamlike depiction of the Upper West Side and the Museum Of Natural History in “Central Park West,” and wondering how your move to LA might’ve spurred you to start rifling through all these New York memories.

STEVENS: I’ve been there very little [since I moved], only when I’m touring. I don’t know where the New York thing came from other than that I was having a nostalgia for New York. The New York I loved as a kid, the one I had a huge imaginative connection with, that didn’t exist at all when I lived there. I was living my day-to-day life in Brooklyn. Sometimes I went to Manhattan and walked around.

This references some of those experiences — “Central Park West” is literally about me going and wandering around the museum. When I was in my mid-twenties on a day off sometimes I’d just go and fuck around and listen to music. It’s kind of a kitschy weird dumb thing but it’s also a religious experience in a way. It held so much power over me. The darkness of the spaces, the grandiosity of the buildings, the anonymity you experience when you’re there.

Was there a reason you decided to name the album after the Rose Main Reading Room at the Public Library?

STEVENS: I would just go there and hang out and read. I wanted to appeal to this thing in my mind, this intersection of contemporary classical and pop and indie that feels, as an outsider, like a very smart, fun, hip, colorful world. This intersection of symphonic instruments and gushy pop and folk. I felt like for some reason those Manhattan spaces evoke a similar meeting ground, high concept and high society and fun adventure.

You wanted Rose Main Reading Room to have less ties to any specific era or aesthetic as previous Peel Dream albums. But you also cited some ’00s indie influences, and I think that meeting point of more symphonic influence and arty pop songwriting is very of a certain New York era.

STEVENS: I think so, for sure. I wanted to play around with that palette in a purposeful way.

You and I are both in our thirties — the sound you’re talking about also happens to be from our coming-of-age years. I was wondering if that dovetailed with the romance and nostalgia you were feeling for these New York memories otherwise.

STEVENS: Absolutely. I also feel like it’s about time for that stuff to come back. I’m enjoying writing stuff like that. Even now, new stuff I’m working on — maybe a next record — it’s still in that zone.

I want to go back to the idea of your own evolution and then the setting of the museum. How did you decide to work in these details or interstitials about animals and nature into the album?

STEVENS: I thought it was interesting to touch on the ways instinct plays a role in our lives. To look at nature and nurture working in tandem together. In the song “Recital,” I’m remembering being at a piano recital as a kid. I wanted it to feel like the sort of song you’d play at a recital — the chord progression is mimicking baroque basic piano. Lyrically, I’m talking about how I’m shy to perform. But I’m also fixating on this girl. I had memories of thinking about the girls who were also performing. I’d never see them. We did individual lessons but at the recital it was like “Oh my god I’ll see them.” We’d sit behind each other for like three hours. It was kind of erotic for me.

A recital is a very human experience, like a higher society thing. But in my mind all I’m thinking about in the moment is this thing I’ve been hard-wired as an animal to think and feel. It gets into some sexual stuff. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the Museum Of Natural History is on one hand it’s intellectual but on the other hand you’re just learning about how animals eat other animals and fuck and sleep. You’re seeing how things actually work in you and in other things, and how you’re connected in all of this.

Let’s talk about the single that came out today, “Lie In The Gutter.”

STEVENS: That song is derived from the Oscar Wilde quote about the human condition — that we’re all mired in day-to-day bullshit, but at times you can look up and appreciate the bigger picture and revel in the positive things in life. I’d say that’s what the song is about. Inviting your partner to see the world through this fleeting optimistic lens you get.

Another one of the singles is “Wish You Well.”

STEVENS: “Wish You Well” touches on more of that animal instinct kinda stuff. It’s a juxtaposition. Talking about people who are social ladder climbers in the music world and about how much elbow pushing there is in that world and how much it drives me crazy despite the fact that everybody claims they’re not a part of it or hate it or whatever — then tying that in with the animal within all of us. That we’re all trying to move up on some kind of perceived ladder. We’re doomed in some way to be these animal competitors.

One of my favorite tracks is the opener, “Dawn.”

STEVENS: I did not write that for this record. I do some composing stuff on the side and I’m trying to write more for ads. I was writing something for a production library, a bunch of woodwind music with repeating phrases in the vein of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. I fell in love with it. I revisited it at some point and had this idea I could add in some lyrics and some more meat and turn it into a song. It’s a very optimistic song. It’s basically an ode to the beginning of the day. Waking up physically but also your spirit and your humanness and getting excited for the day.

Sometimes you speak about things on a pretty technical level. Did you go to music school?

STEVENS: I took piano lessons growing up. My brother was a composer for a long time; he’s currently a math teacher. He indoctrinated me to a lot of music beyond the scope of, like, Nirvana, which was basically all I was into when I was a kid. I listen to all kinds of music and I’m in love with the acoustic piano. A lot of people think of me as a guitar player but that’s my main thing.

I’m not self-taught. We talk about music theory and I played classical music for a long time, but I don’t have a conservatory background. I’m very much an outsider in this LA composition world I’m trying to navigate. I get little things here and there through emailing and little connections. I really love it and I want to do more of it and that’s where a big part of my heart is musically. I’m also interested in… I don’t want to just be a rock band. That’s part of why I make these records these ways. I’m trying to figure out how to add musical elements to these beyond “I’m a guy, I wrote a song. It is what it is.”

Each Peel Dream Magazine album really ends up feeling like its own thing, given the amount of theoretical and musical touchstones you’re drawing on. Do you go into a record knowing what your set of concerns are right now or does that unfold organically?

STEVENS: I think it’s a little bit of both. Even though it’s presented to you in this neat and clean way, making music is very mysterious to me. I don’t know how or why I write songs. Usually I write a song or two and I get hooked on some idea musically, an aesthetic, and a theme enters lyrically and it snowballs from there. The short answer is probably no. It’s taking advantage of happy accidents and making a turn here and a turn there.

I think I usually have an idea I want to make a record that’s a reaction to something I just made. When I made Agitprop Alterna I felt I veered too closely to this shoegaze thing that was at risk for being too pat, so I wanted to make something shockingly different. So I did with Pad. And then after that I felt I had veered too far in the direction of Beach Boys worship and cutesy baroque-pop stuff. I wanted to correct it by doing something that felt more harmonically and compositionally straightforward.

I think people could end up perceiving those swings as rejections of, not just reactions to. Like, is this a different band, are they disowning their past work.

STEVENS: I don’t have an answer for those people. I just do what I do. To me it’s all my music and it’s all Peel Dream Magazine. I think that’s the fun of it.

Do you still like those records though?

STEVENS: I do. I tend to not want to listen to the thing I made recently for a long time. But I love all my records. I think lots of musicians have made extreme departures. As people who make music, you have to invite the insanity of your free will and get weird and have fun. If you’re not doing that, there’s something canned about it.

I think the live show, that’s been a struggle to figure out how to blend everything. When we did Pad, we tended to play all Pad because it’s such a specific sound. As we’ve been playing new songs, we play songs from the first and second record now. It feels pretty cohesive to me, and gratifying as a band, to be playing different records all in one set. I would say I think of this record as being much more in line with the first two than with Pad.

That’s interesting, because I still hear it as more stylistically related to Pad, but some of the lushness did bring me back to the older albums. A new thing by way of synthesis, maybe.

STEVENS: It’s definitely a synthesis of everything. It feels like one in the same with the first two in the sense that there are more rock songs. More songs driven by a guitar progression.

Once you arrive at that concept, how much curating and editing do you have to do along the way to figure out, “OK, this is the next Peel Dream Magazine album, Rose Main Reading Room“?

STEVENS: It can be pretty painful and painstaking. I have all these fun ideas but a lot of them just don’t work. It’s a lot of taking a step back and seeing what I can shave off to make this thing a bit more impactful. I’m a disaster. All I do is tinker and change and play. I know it’s irresponsible but I try to reserve some sympathy and tolerance for it. Because it’s also where everything comes from.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Dawn”
02 “Central Park West”
03 “Oblast”
04 “Wish You Well”
05 “Wood Paneling, Pt. 3”
06 “R.I.P. (Running In Place)”
07 “I Wasn’t Made For War”
08 “Gems and Minerals”
09 “Machine Repeating”
10 “Recital”
11 “Migratory Patterns”
12 “Four Leaf Clover”
13 “Lie In The Gutter”
14 “Ocean Life”
15 “Counting Sheep”

Rose Main Reading Room is out 8/21 on Topshelf. Pre-order it here.