PREMIERE | Monte Lately, "Fever Dreams"
Introducing San Francisco’s new rising star — Monte Lately; press photo courtesy of the artist.
It is no secret that the Bay Area creative art scenes are experience a resurgence of proliferation and prestige. Certainly scenes are everywhere, and yes there is something to the age old wisdom about how some of the best art is created during times of duress and instability. And yet with the nonstop slew of releases that highlight the Bay’s dominance of unstoppable momentum, new lights continue to shine from the throngs of
Folks who sing and speak their truth through the advent of new channels, those who dare to dream of new heights of wellness, a pursuit of the peace that surpasses the apathy that is often supplanted as the alternative to the mayhem and madness that is served up daily. The dreamers of today and tomorrow accept no substitute, they offer new approaches to reality that are regenerative for the fallow lands and faded friends who have all but given up on anything better than this. Better ways are possible. A better society is something we can all obtain.
Although the world is scary, the road is rocky and the path forward feels obfuscated by roadblocks barring access toward those pinnacles of a more inclusive prosperity; we have one another. We have our collective voices. We have the spirit of determination. Sure the bastards have a rabid determination to impose their callous and roughshod executive orders, but together we have something greater: solidarity in the power of people in numbers that can reject and refuse the overreach of oligarchs and wannabe autocrats that have no one’s best interests in mind (save for for their sad selves).
In pushes for those elusive better days, we find inspiration in the voices and arts that emerge from the deafening clamor of the crowds. A newfound source of inspiration is SF’s Monte Lately who caused a ripple with the vulnerable beauty and pop bravado of “Pity the Fool”. A new arrival to the Bay scenes, “Pity” is a lavish and loud anthem that exists in the languid spaces of breathy bedroom bop to big stage sensuality. The sleepy, and sinewy lo-fi lyrical lattice textures climb upward to tree tops that find new degrees of clarity and confidence that shines like a well-lit sky path to celestial places.
On the debut of “Fever Dreams”, Monte Lately excavates the resounding effects of loss through all of the eras and exploring the impacts across the catacombs of consciousness. When the everything doesn’t make sense, the tendency is to venture into the recesses of ourselves and learned schools of logic to rediscover and reconnect to the grounding foundations of reason. Sometimes, often times this is a task better posited than accomplished.
“Fever Dreams” is the pop space opera that moves between the perceived realities, the way we most intimately interact between the stories that play out on the material world’s stage, opposite the alternate anarchy and extremity art house faire of the unconscious. Through an economic electro pop symphony, Monte floats through a hall of mirrors chronicling the processes of change, observing change, the people who help shape us, those people that leave, the continuum lines of mortality, and all those peculiar places where mind, body, spirit, reality, realization, emotion and more meet in a Grand Central Station connection point of overlapping timelines.
Sidewalk meditations with Monte Lately in the liminal spaces that stand between the dimensions of night and day; press photo appears courtesy of the artist.
Montey Lately provided some candid thoughts on the processes behind the new single:
I started writing “Fever Dreams” over 6 years ago, after a dream I had where I was in the living room of the house I grew up in, sittin and talking with my family. Such a simple thing. But that house burned up. And some of those people are dead now.
Dreamworld drawings by Monte Lately; press photo courtesy of the artist.
At some point in the dream, my brain caught on to that dissonance: wait, aren't they dead? Of course, the dream began to unravel then. But in those last brief moments, I felt the loss of what was, knowing that I would wake up to find it gone.
It took me years to piece together the rest of the song, drawing on those liminal moments — when your heart hasn't fully integrated a loss, and you catch yourself living like nothing's changed. Only to suddenly remember that absence, and stutter as you adjust to the weight of emptiness.
Blinding by the light; in dreams with Monte Lately (press photo courtesy of the artist).
We all have bad dreams. What a relief to wake up! But sometimes, you wake up wishing for nothing more than to go back. Send me back to the dream where he still loves me. Where she's not dead. Where I still care. What a sickness to dream of a better world, and wake up to remember it is lost.
Bedroom, bedrock, journal pop by Monte Lately; press photo courtesy of the artist.
So yeah, it's about processing loss. The loss of a family. The loss of a friend. The changes those losses created in the ones who survived, and how those changes are, in and of themselves losses of the people we used to be to each other.
I wanted the song to feel a bit disorienting at first, then familiar, nostalgic, and finally bittersweet. Just like the dream.
Discover more from Monte Lately here.