It’s not often that a local album sounds so out-of-the-box accomplished and enchanting that it stops me in my tracks. Or rather, encourages me to step away from my keyboard and float around the park for a few hours, replaying its perfection in my headphones over and over.
Have Good Dreams by Animal Prince, out Fri/13, grabbed me right away with its uncanny melding of ’80s sophisti-pop flair with ’60s Bacharach emotional complexity—jazzy and breezy but also fascinatingly opaque. The Oakland retro-pop duo deploys a hip execution that slots them next to hometown faves like Brijean and Toro Y Moi, but Have Good Dreams is fabulously analogue and expansive, with sweeping orchestration that encompasses flute, harp, sax, flute, keys, clarinet, bird song. Doo-wop harmonies and Bossa beats accentuate dream-like imagery and AM Gold shimmer.
Lead single “Impossible,” with its soaring Swing Out Sister chorus and cafe-pop instrumental digressions, leapt to the top of my list of favorite songs of the summer. (Its seafaring, chromaticized video—set on Forbes Island—could be a dream-inversion of “yacht rock,” while charismatic singer-violinist Fae Nageon de Lestang’s bright orange, early Lush-era Miki Berenyi locks conjure a different kind of laidback cool.)
Other gems from the album: “Who You Are” is a strutting anthem of LGBTQ+ empowerment that will have anyone tapping their kitten heels; “Back Home in My Head” is a surreal, introspective gloss on “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”; “Any Day” and “Didn’t You Notice” are swoony pop stunners that bridge Laurel Canyon and The Beach Boys (dropping lyrics like “when you realize the choice was yours all along/ the hands around your neck have been your own/don’t you think it’s time to finally let go?”). My only criticism of the album is that at just over 30 or so minutes, darn it, it’s not nearly long enough.
But considering that Nageon de Lestang and her partner Grant McLeod wrote, arranged, recorded, and produced the entire thing themselves, I’m grateful for what we have, and can’t wait to see what lies in store. The duo met in college at a dive bar jazz night in Gainesville, FL. and moved here in 2017, after the random acquisition of a free white baby grand piano led them to study writing and arranging with Roberta Swedien, whose father Bruce Swedien was a recording engineer for Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson.
Have Good Dreams was written and recorded in the duo’s Oakland geodesic dome home from 2020 to 2023, a dark and surreal time in the Bay Area, during which Animal Prince discovered that, “The outside world is more than happy to project its chaos onto you,” according to Nageon de Lestang. “But you’re entirely responsible for your own experience of this life, and you deserve to have a good one. It’s kind of a radical concept given the state of the world, but we have to create and protect our joy.”
On the eve of the record’s release, I spoke with Nageon de Lestang about domes, dreams, and inspiration David Axelrod.
48 HILLS Congratulations on the wonderful album. I’m fascinated that you wrote and recorded it in your geodesic dome home. Can you tell me more about this?
ANIMAL PRINCE Thank you so much! We’re really happy with how it came together. Writing in the dome was amazing. It was such an inspiring space, filled with windows and surrounded by trees and birds. But recording there… turned out to be rather tricky. The sound in a space like that swirls around and never deadens naturally. So we had to go into a smaller room downstairs and cover the walls with comforters, etc. We kind of just made a bunch of forts within our house using soft things that would absorb sound and played in them.
48 HILLS There’s obviously some heavy yacht rock inspiration in the sound of Have Good Dreams, but it also hits this sweet spot between classic Bacharach and ’80s sophisti-pop, Karen Carpenter and Swing out Sister. With the lush sound of full instrumentation, there’s jazz in there as well. What were some of your inspirations while you were conceptualizing these songs? Was there any one song, singer, writer, or producer you consider your spiritual guide for the album?
ANIMAL PRINCE Grant basically learned how to play piano while we were writing this record—he’s been a drummer his whole life, so the concept of harmony to him was still kind of this mysterious thing. We were studying theory and both very new to the idea of arranging and writing for multiple voices. So these songs went through many iterations before we landed on the final versions.
There were a few artists that were huge inspirations to us during this time—Brian Wilson, Arthur Verocai, and especially David Axelrod. Really, any kind of library music from the ’70s (catalog soundtrack music for films, etc). We would drive around and listen to the Axelrod record “Songs of Innocence” and just wonder how he made it so epic. We really wanted to give our songs larger than life acoustic arrangements like so many records from that time period, which was a kind of north star for us.
48 HILLS You produced this album as well as writing and performing it—did you have experience in that department, and how did you go about creating this full, organic ensemble sound?
ANIMAL PRINCE We both grew up playing in orchestras and ensembles, so we love that full, more orchestral sound. But as far as producing/recording… not really! This record was largely us trying to figure out how to create the ideas we were hearing in our heads. When we started, we were pretty new to recording, and we definitely did not have a lot of the technical skills or vocabulary to figure out what we were going for.
But this project has always been an outlet for us to try out new things and have permission to experiment. It was a lot of trial and error. For instance, we had never written a string arrangement before. String arrangements are kind of like picking out a rug for your house. It’s really hard to know if they’re too busy or if they’ll feel right before you put them in your living room. And sometimes, you decide that the rug you loved so much is the tackiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen when it’s in your house. So for several of the songs, we wrote and recorded like 16-24 violin tracks, one by one, only to decide later that we hated them. It was a tedious process, but it was a labor of love. But in the end, we just feel grateful for how much the process taught us.
48 HILLS Several images recur throughout the album—high heels, driving, primary and secondary colors—almost like a dream language. Was that deliberate for the concept of the album? What were your poetic intentions as a whole for Have Good Dreams?
So much of these songs is just a running internal dialogue, so in that way, there’s a lot of subconscious references in it. Our goal is always to make songs that bring people into a visual space, so colors and images are helpful tools to accomplish that. The record is the journey of realizing that our internal experience is the only thing we can control. The outside world is more than happy to project chaos onto you, but you’re entirely responsible for your own experience of this life, and you deserve to have a good one. We have to create and protect our joy, and build the courage to have good dreams even in chaos.
48 HILLS The song “Red Mansion” begins with a semi-incantation, “There’s a red mansion on the side of the road/On a two lane highway out on Benton County Road.” Where is Benton Country Road? The only reference I could readily find was in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
ANIMAL PRINCE We were driving back to the Bay from Washington in 2020 when that firestorm hit the West Coast. We took small county roads down the coast because we thought they’d have better weather, but everywhere was impacted. We didn’t see the sun for three days. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling. We were somewhere along the California-Oregon border out in the middle of nowhere, and there was this old red mansion falling into disrepair off the highway. I looked it up later, and it was in Benton County.
48 HILLS Closer “Who You Are,” which I adore, tells the story of a closeted drag queen breaking free of convention and finding themself. Was there a particular person or inspiration behind this? It’s just such a spot-on song.
ANIMAL PRINCE The person in the song is fictional, but I feel their spirit very strongly 🙂 I know they’re out there somewhere! Being a part of the queer community in the Bay has been such a heartwarming space for self discovery for us, and so this song is a tribute to them. They have taught us so much about love, growth, and really doing the work to uncover your true self.
48 HILLS Where can we see you next to hear these songs live?
We’re still working on our next tour announcement, but we’ll get out there sometime soon! We have some really special plans coming together for winter 2025 right now. Our newsletter is the best place to keep up to date on that at www.animalprince.com.
You can pre-order Animal Prince’s Have Good Dreams here.
