Rough Dreams’ track-by-track guide to Disappear. Reappear.

With their new album officially out there, we caught up with Rough Dreams to take us behind the lyrics of each song of the record.

Welcome to the Disappear. Reappear. track-by-track.

HD140283:

The intro is named HD140283 after the oldest-known Population II star in the universe and is over 13.5 billion years old. It is reported to be older than the cosmos itself. It’s even named Methuselah after the character in the Bible who apparently had the longest human lifespan of 969 years. 

Disappear:

This was the second to last song written for the album. Like most of the songs I write, I thought of the chorus melody while sitting at work one day as “In Bloom” by Nirvana was playing on the radio. By the end of my shift, I’d pretty much finished the lyrics and idea for the song structure in my head and headed straight to our rehearsal space after work to lay it down on my guitar. The lyrics are basically just about spacing out and wishing you were somewhere else. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it.

Cursed at the Sun:

This is the oldest song on the album. I wrote the verses and chorus almost 10 years ago and just never did anything with it. While we were writing songs for the album, I came up with the intro riff and the bridge while just jamming alone at the practice space one night. It’s basically, a fictional story about a woman who’s just had enough and makes her own rules. She walks into a bar, takes her pick of who she wants, rides home on a motorcycle with a stranger, then steals his bike the next morning and drives away. That’s it.

Bridge and Tunnel Fires:

This song is one of my favorites. It’s very much inspired by the Smashing Pumpkins “Chrub Rock” era and old emo bands like Sunny Day Real Estate. The lyrics are basically a combination or different experiences I’ve had with people and there’s no real story being told. It’s just a big explosion of feelings about several random situations.

Desert Ghosts:

This is a song that I never could’ve written alone. The lyrics were originally about a bad breakup, and the music had an almost double time feel. But when I brought it in and was first showing it to everyone, Jake pulled that lead from the void and started playing it over it, and right away, I knew everything had changed. The basic structure and chords stayed the same, but the song now had this otherworldly vibe and direction, and the lyrics shifted to address some of the struggles we had been going through, and how the adversity just made us stronger.

Challenger.86 – Scavengers.:

I wrote this song to simply express all the emotions felt after an amazing concert experience. You know, that feeling of coming down from one hell of a good time. I feel like this song will become the closer for a lot of our shows in the future. The chorus is just so big and the outro just makes you want to grab the person next to you and experience together the love and emotion that a killer show can give you. Scavengers is the song that pretty much encompasses the sound and vibe of the entire record. It’s a song that dives into everything that’s wrong with the world and puts it all into perspective. Nobody really knows what’s going on and we’re all just doing our best to coexist on this tiny rock while floating out in an endless ocean of space and time.

First Life Crisis:

I was reflecting on how my life was during my mid 20’s one day and I wrote this song after that. I was a total wreck back then, living in my car, couch surfing, drunk and high all the time, and barely scraping by. I had just finished college and I was just floating through life aimlessly and I wanted to sum up all the feelings that I experienced at that age. People always refer to that time as the quarter life crisis where you’re not happy where you are but you’re just a little too afraid to make the changes needed to get to a better place.

Falling Stars:

This is the heaviest song on the album both musically and lyrically. It’s about two friends of mine that died one month apart from each other due to an overdose on opiates. One of them was the entire reason I picked up a guitar as a teenager and was an incredible musician and a great friend. One month after his death, I got a call on Christmas Eve telling me that my first love from high school had passed away and I was devastated. This song is a tribute to both.

Past Lives:

Past Lives is about all the damage we can cause when all we want to do is forget. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves, and about ending up in places so much worse than what we were originally running from. The hardest thing is learning to watch it burn and live without it.

Reappear:

This was the last song written for the album. My girlfriend asked me if I’d ever write a love song for her and this is it. I told her, “You better like this one because it’s a total banger and I don’t think I can do much better than this”. She digs it.

J1818.0-1607:

The outro is named J1818.0-1607 after the youngest neutron star in the known universe. It’s only 240 years old. We thought beginning and ending the album after these two stars would be the perfect way to connect the contents within the rest of the album. It helps create a cyclical vibe to the album. Just as it ends, it’s already beginning again over and over and over again.

Listen to Disappear. Reappear. in it’s entirety!