“Dean’s 7th Dream” by My Favorite

One of my favorite indie-pop bands, New York’s own My Favorite, is back with their first new music in six years. “Dean’s 7th Dream” is the first single from the upcoming Tender Is the Nightshift: Part One EP, and it’s a slinky, eight-minute-long array of glittering guitars, elegiac synths, saxophone, and of course, Michael Grace’s disaffected vocals and angst-ridden lyrics (e.g, “If I could surf the black tide/That’s drowning me from the inside/I’d stagger away, with a streetwalker’s pride”).

As for the song’s inspiration, Grace says:

Some songs you write just mean more to you, signal a kind of change. I wrote “Burning Hearts” after 9/11 as a way of saying goodbye to my partner, to the 20th century, and to a certain kind of innocence about being in a band. “Dean’s 7th Dream” is another of those songs. I knew it was time to write (in a more direct way) about some of the rough stuff I experienced as a kid. But how do you make that compelling, and not just bleak or in a way — pornographic? I thought about Lou Reed and songs like “Street Hassle” and “Coney Island Baby.” I think the answer is to tell it true, and include both the terror and the beauty. Things are complicated, it’s that simple.

BrooklynVegan has more details. For example, that’s Captain Kirk Douglas from The Roots you hear slinging out those blazing riffs on the song’s bridge. (Douglas played in an earlier incarnation of My Favorite.)

Tender Is the Nightshift: Part One will be released by HHBTM Records on August 5, and as its title suggests, two more EPs will follow.