The debut record from Keen Dreams takes both its title and “structure of feeling” from Daisy Hildyard’s 2017 book-length essay The Second Body. In it, the historian of science posits a diffuse 'Second Body' for each of us. While we wait, scroll, drive, and sleep our Second Bodies crawl the globe, render e-waste, dwell in shipping containers, warm themselves on refinery flare stacks in the atramental night of coastal Louisiana. When the book found Keen Dreams band leader James Weber Jr., Hildyard’s fluent diagnosis of our post-global moment stuck. “In 2018 I had just walked away from Euclid Records in New Orleans, the music store I built and operated for the better part of a decade,” Weber says,"and enrolled in graduate school for history. Broke and studying world history full time, it sounds like a million miles away from the record store, but trust me: music shops cultivate plenty of very devoted, very broke historians.” The new lifestyle also offered Weber time and headspace for neglected creative pursuits, and he tended to moonlit “ballads with a beat” late into the school nights. Soon Euclid Records regular Eric Martinez and Shana Applewhite were adding drums and bass guitar, the Gulf Coast natives filling out Weber’s songs with a coarse-grained candor. The trio took the name of a cherished PC game, and Keen Dreams performed around the city. Bashed out live for friends and friendly rivals in downtown bars and neighborhood haunts, the music of Keen Dreams found affinities in the rushing sturm-und-jangle guitars of college rock, the 1980s AOR turn on FM radio, and dreamy shoegaze. Their demos recorded in New Orleans were loud with the spirit, but Weber confesses they "lacked the big music landscapes" he'd dreamed out alone in his apartment above the contradictive New Orleans main drag St. Claude Ave. "Half a mile down from my apartment the street could be read as pretty anarchic, boozin'-and-prankin', good times and a little crime. But the traffic I watched from my stoop at St. Claude and Desire just a few blocks away looked more like the secret 'Second Bodies' of the party: an endless flow of belching tractor-trailers carrying the loot of our lives to and from the river, ragers rolling by en route to any party anywhere else, humans sheltering through the night up against the unused movie theater across the street." To build a bigger sound the band sought out producer Shannon Fields, attracted by both the richly textured pop of his band Leverage Models and Fields's experience in the more liminal spaces of collective improvisation. Recording sessions at The Isokon studio in Woodstock, NY yielded a grip of lush rock tunes which Fields and the band framed with detourned pianos and soundtrack synths, harmonica ghosts, saxophones, slurred trumpets and shrieks of bass clarinet. The resulting album drifts along an x/y of cathedral composure and howl; sentiment and squall. Like Hildyard’s The Second Body the Keen Dreams debut meditates on uncertain but real affective connections. Pronouns in the songs are necessarily plural, as in “Pasted” where friends split ambiguous profits then wonder what's next, grasp past each other in the cinematic “Big Gulps,” and indwell public place in "Pinks & Reds." When they share a password beneath the sleepless gaze of "Pressing Eyes," the you becomes a desperate us. A first body grounded in the songs; a Second Body pushing through darker canyons. Recorded by D. James Goodwin at The Isokon, Woodstock, NY. Additional recording by Andrew Barker in Brooklyn, NY; Shannon Fields at The Run-In, Jordanville, NY; Mario Viele at Cowboy Technical Services, Brooklyn, NY. Mixed by Matt Estep at Tarbox Road Studios, Fredonia, NY. Mastered by Mario Viele. Produced by Shannon Fields. All Songs performed by James Weber Jr. (guitars and voice) Shana Applewhite (bass, baritone guitars, and voice) Eric Martinez (drums) with Shannon Fields (additional instruments) Karl Francke (harmonica 1, 2, 3, 4) D. James Goodwin (pedal steel guitar 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and percussion 1, 2, 5) Michael Hanf (vibraphone 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8) Matt Lavelle (bass clarinet 6, 9 and trumpet 1, 2, 5, 8) Jon Natchez (tenor and baritone saxophone 9) Jonah Parzen-Johnson (baritone saxophone 2, 3, 5) Alena Spanger (voice 3, 6, 7, 9) Mario Viele (voice 6) Origami photographs and eroded flower by Keen Dreams. Bessa, Pancrace (Paris 1772–1846 Écouen). “Study of a Poppy.” Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. Layout by Patrick Bailey.