We always think we have a plan. We will walk into a situation with a purpose and an
idea, only to find that life has other things in store for us. Goon frontman and creative
mastermind, Kenny Becker, had a record’s worth of new songs ready to record, studio time
booked, and a vision for how it would all play out. But weeks into the recording, life hit him like
a lightning bolt in the form of the sudden dissolution of his marriage and his subsequent psychic
spiral. Blindsided by heartbreak, the music Becker had written for the record began to take on
new meaning. What had come from joy was now something closer to agony. In the friction of
that moment, Becker pushed his band—and his songwriting—into stranger territory. Facing
down the pain and disappointment of life, the band created a masterpiece with their new album,
Dream 3.
Goon began in 2015 as singer and multi-instrumentalist, Kenny Becker’s, solo project,
releasing a compilation of his best home recordings, the 2016 EP Dusk of Punk. With a full band
in tow, Goon released the band’s first full-length, 2019’s Heaven is Humming on Partisan
Records. Becker recruited a new band—Andy Polito on drums, Dillon Peralta on guitar, and
Tamara Simons on bass—and recorded the self-released Paint By Numbers 1. A second LP, Hour
of Green Evening, soon followed, as well as another EP, Red Ladder, in 2022.
To support Hour of Green Evening, Goon hit the road hard, touring and playing shows
with Built to Spill, Jadu Heart, Slow Pulp, Teethe, Squirrel Flower, and many others. In the
midst of all this, the band signed with Philadelphia label Born Losers and began recording their
next LP with Claire Morison at Wild Horizon Sound in Los Angeles. Dream 3 melds the
intimate, lo-fi stylings of Goon with the live-band sound of Hour of Green Evening; a veteran
band exploring every aspect of their sound, pushing themselves into new musical and emotional
realms.
“I began this record so excited,” says Becker. “The songwriting was less scripted, letting
me loosen up the reins a little and follow whatever idea seemed most interesting. It started off as
a really joyful recording process. Then came the most devastating time of my life.”
The result is an often darker, more introspective album, built on personal loss and the
chaotic crumbling of the outside world, without losing Goon’s signature sense of strangeness and
wonder. Weaving lyrics about personal and ecological collapse with references to baseball,
aliens, and Tony Soprano, the record expands Goon’s sound while holding close to the core
identity of the band. Dream 3 offers an exquisitely crafted sonic world, one full of heartbreak and
pain, but also brimming with color and life, the hope of better days to come.
“Begin Here” is the gateway into the record. The song emerges in a dreamy,
reverse-guitar haze, Becker’s voice hovering over Braden Lawrence’s drums like a bird in flight,
surveying the green wreckage of his world. “With ligaments split at sunrise/Bubbling dirt from
my mouth,” Becker sings, “I’m open and scraped and doe-eyed.” It’s the sound of a band
discovering new life after torment, the way cataclysm brings its sufferers closer. Becker drops
the surreal imagery for something more direct, referencing his bandmate as he sings, “Let me cry
to Tamara.”
“The song started as a little reversed guitar progression that I had kicking around for a
while,” says Becker. “I showed it to our bass player, Tamara, who had a strong reaction to it and
insisted we flesh it out. When I sing, ‘Let me cry to Tamara’ at the end, that’s because it’s what I
was doing all the time we were recording it. To me, that song has this sunny, upbeat melody, but
it’s coming from a place of total despair. I like that tension.”
“Closer to” dives right into the muck, with Andy Polito’s drums driving the song
forward over Dillon Peralta’s meandering guitars. Becker sings, “Right now in the
sunshine/Form a vowel/Then bite/Feel around/And pick up something off the ground.” The song
rises into a kind of frenzy, the chaos peaking, before crashing down into a kind of psychedelic
haze, without ever losing its sense of melody. Becker sings in a kind of surreal, resigned
persistence: “Let’s try/Linger on/With the scum atop the pond,” with a “ghost mouse running all
around/And now dead in the ground.”
“The lyrics almost sound like a list of commands or directions for a sacred ritual,” says
Becker, “like seeking the divine through the mundane. I was going through heartbreak, preaching
to myself a little bit. I didn’t want to hold onto anything too aggressively. I just imagined myself
as pond scum, this thing that sits there, floating. Not going anywhere particularly but not
disappearing either.”
The lilting “For Cutting the Grass” feels deceptively light, as Becker describes an
evening baseball game: “In half light/Near the weekend/Some throwing/Some were
swinging/Unmake the ruddy ground.” But in this pleasantness a simmering darkness always
intrudes, with “new nightmares coming down.” The song is full of nervous energy and wonder,
with a trace of fear lingering just on the fringes.
“This was the first song we brought to Claire’s studio,” says Becker. “At the time, things
felt light and exciting. I decided to frame the disruption of all this as aliens visiting earth in the
middle of a baseball game.” But what begins as a nightmare becomes something different, as
these celestial visitors aren’t coming with destruction, but with a stranger vision. “Soon it will
hover above/Reaching out.” Even the aliens in Becker’s world are longing for connection.
“Patsy’s Twin” is the mysterious, conflicted heart of the record. Becker sings about
“cicadas in the yard/With Katie and Olivia” and “summer undone” over a delicate guitar in the
kind of winsome blissfulness Goon are known for. The song is soon catapulted into darkness,
with serrated guitars and Becker’s fuzzed-out shriek. The song brings together all of Becker’s
interests—nature, heartbreak, death, aliens, baseball, The Sopranos, and particular qualities of
light—leaping across moods and genres, lacing it all together like stitches over a wound.
Dream 3 is a startling progression for Goon, a record filled with pain and heartbreak, yes,
but healing as well. For all the imagery of death and decay, it’s also suffused with light—“lace
light,” “half light,” “light through an orb weaver,” “morning light,” “microwave light,
“flashlight,” “sunlight.” It’s the light that makes things happen, causes plants to grow, sets the
world alive. And it’s in the light we find ourselves changing, in our fiercest struggles and in our
quiet moments, always on the verge of becoming something new again. Dream 3, with its pain
and troubled beginning, is a testament to the slow work of the light cutting through even the
darkest places.
Beaming
Are we having fun yet? After years building their respective legacies in the independent music scene, Derek Ted and Braden Lawrence let this question guide the creation of their latest project: beaming, a playful indie pop venture built around an ethos of curiosity, collaboration, and levity.
The duo’s self-titled EP introduces the project with four infectious songs at the intersection of pop, rock, and folk. This comes as no surprise given the band’s pedigree: Braden spent over a decade playing in Philadelphia-based indie darling The Districts, while Derek is a solo artist and prolific producer who has lent his talents to rising stars like Odie Leigh, Runnner, and Field Medic.
“In the industry today, it feels like everyone has to be really efficient in order to make the machine run,” explains Derek. “But back in the day, timeless music was created by a bunch of people. Collaboration is actually hella goated, and I feel like people forget that nowadays.”
If hella goated is any indication, Derek Ted cut his teeth in the DIY music scene of the San Francisco Bay Area, busking around the East Bay while studying audio engineering and eventually working at SF’s Tiny Telephone Studios. By the time he moved south to Los Angeles, he’d found a robust community of fellow musicians and a strong desire to take full ownership over his production work.
“I turned my garage in Burbank into a studio, but I didn’t really realize I was a producer until I’d already produced a lot of stuff,” he explains. “I feel like producing took the pressure off me having to make my art the thing that pays the bills, which was always the part that took all the fun out of it for me. Once I started producing and mixing for other people, I realized I could have fun making music without having to beg people to listen to it.”
As his production work took off, Derek relished the experimentation and creative chemistry of helping artists bring their visions to life. In addition to producing for his frequent collaborator Field Medic, Derek lent his talents to a wide array of projects including Dora Jar’s “Look Back,” Hunny’s album new planet heaven, and several tracks on Jesse Rutherford’s album Wanted?.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country in Pennsylvania, Braden Lawrence was living in a very different kind of artistic ecosystem. Braden and his friends started their band The Districts when they were still in middle school and signed to Fat Possum Records right after high school graduation. “It was go to college or see what happens with the band, and we chose to do the band stuff,” Braden laughs.
Over the next 13 years, Braden wore a variety of different hats for his band as they played all over the world, touring with the likes of Modest Mouse, Hippo Campus, and Dr. Dog. He credits this experience with building his confidence on a wide array of instruments, a versatility he now applies to his work with beaming.
“Most of the instruments you hear on beaming are Braden playing, and then I’ll spend like a month mixing and hashing out the production details,” says Derek of his and Braden’s artistic process on beaming. I’m on that Rick Rubin mindset where I don’t like to play as much as I like to oversee the energy and the bigger picture and the songwriting.”
Braden adds, “I love just running around and playing different instruments. It’s a fluid working relationship where we kind of naturally let each other shine in our own ways.”
The project came together organically after a series of serendipitous encounters in Los Angeles, where both Derek and Braden had relocated. Braden was already frequenting Derek’s studio as a drummer for his production projects, and he eventually started playing drums in the live band for Derek’s artist project. After spending enough time in the studio, they began working together to produce for local artists — and, eventually, for their own project.
“We didn’t really plan to make a band until ‘first song,’” says Braden. “I had some chords but could never think of lyrics or melodies over them. When I played the chords for Derek, he started singing over them, and from there we were like, ‘Huh, maybe we should write a song.’”
This casual collaboration was the genesis of beaming, and the pair didn’t want the party to stop there. Field Medic lends a verse to “slow sinkin,” a wistful folk-pop earworm reminiscent of Hovvdy or early Alex G, and Braden’s Districts bandmate Pat Cassidy features on the slide guitar. Kississippi’s Zoe Reynolds sings background vocals on “colors,” and songwriter/producer Ben Burney provided backing vocals and additional production on several tracks.
This creative synergy is evident on the EP, which floats effortlessly between indie pop and folk over four foot-tapping, hum-worthy tracks. Lyrically, the music leans introspective, seeking to capture universal feelings through personal anecdotes about love, loss, and the passage of time. In “slow sinkin,” the band reflects on the bittersweet clarity of hindsight, singing “Wasting time thinking life is just slow sinking / Watch it wash away / Now that I know how the story turns out / Was it worth the wait?”
“colors” takes a brighter turn, cloaking its vulnerability in driving, dance-floor jubilation as it asks the timeless question of how to reanimate a life stuck on autopilot. “It’s about making a change in your life, stepping back, and finding what really makes you happy,” says Derek.
As they look toward the future, Braden and Derek only really have one firm plan: keep bringing people together to create art and make memories. The music industry may be more intimidating and isolating than ever, but the music community remains full of the joy and camaraderie that keep artists coming back time and time again. “There’s something special that happens when a room full of people all make something together,” says Derek. “The right people.”
