Youth Lagoon-the prized moniker of Idaho-based songwriter Trevor Powers- returns with a new single/video, “Lucy Takes a Picture.” A portrait of “salvation hiding in our wounds,” the song is a soul-stirring chronicle of love and narcotics…a triumph of American gothic imagination. “Once in a while there’s a song that feels like I’ve been trying to write it my whole life,” says Powers. “Lucy is one of those.” With a bent toward rural noir, Powers has found a home in a world where his personal journals and poetic confessions are indistinguishable from the twisted mythologies of habitual sinners and devout barflies. “My only concern now with music is bringing the inner world to life,” says Powers. “It’s not about making something better—it’s about making something true. Songs were a lot harder to write why I hated myself. When my soul changed, my music did too.”
“Lucy Takes a Picture” takes Powers’ devoted articulations of struggle and redemption to a new frontier.Written at Powers’ home in Idaho and recorded in Los Angeles with co-producer Rodaidh McDonald(Weyes Blood, The xx, Gil Scott-Heron), the song is guided by a choir of pizzicato strings, a bed of synthpads played through a shoebox tape recorder, and Powers front and center singing about darkness,deliverance, and love with the ghoulish timbre of an apocalyptic lounge singer.
In Powers’ own words “In February, I walked past a bus stop and noticed a small piece of paper tucked into the bars of a metal bench. In shaky handwriting that looked both deranged and Biblical, the note said, ‘This is the tale of resurrection. I died so I could live again.’ l found the nearest patch of grass and lay down like a dummy.This note was either a message from an angel or the ravings of a pharmaceutical junkie—maybe both.Either way it was just for me. I don’t think it’s possible to have true character without first catching a glimpse of hell. Maybe that’s what it meant? In the words of W.H. Auden, ‘Don’t get rid of my devils,because my angels will go too.’Whatever this poetic rascal, angel or imp was getting at, these words rang the bell of my soul. I went home and wrote ‘Lucy Takes a Picture.’”
In 2023, Powers released the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. “I realized everything worth writing about is happening inside my house or right next door,” he says. “There’s an eternity of secrets in the American suburbs.” With Pitchfork Awarding it “Best New Music” as well as landing in their top 50 albums of the year and The Guardian Dubbing it a “masterpiece,” Youth Lagoon’s first album in 8 years pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I killed off Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” says Powers. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.”
When asked how his soul has changed, Powers looked out the window for a while before responding.
“I still have demons. I’m just friends with them now.”
