Rose Main Reading Room, the latest album by Joe Stevens, aka Peel Dream Magazine, is a meditation on the natural world featuring 15 cinematic tracks that touch on animality, competition, instinct, and survival with memories of growing up in New York threaded throughout.

Stevens grew up in a suburb a 30-minute train ride north of New York City. After spending some years living down in the metropolis, he relocated to Los Angeles in August 2020. At some point, he began reflecting on his childhood memories – and realizing they were becoming hazier.

“I am getting older,” he tells Northern Transmissions by Zoom. As for why he began thinking more about that period in his life, “I guess I had been doing some therapy,” he speculates. “I’m also just at this point where I’m no longer new to L.A. The buzz had kind of worn off.” Stevens found himself standing back and looking at the bigger picture of his life, his arc, connecting the dots and wondering, “How did I end up here?”

“I think about the past, present, and future all the time. When you make art, it’s this conversation you’re having with your old self, current self, and future self, processing your thoughts and feelings as a human.”

At the same time, though, when Stevens writes music, “It feels like a visitation,” he says. Without a preconceived concept in mind, he began writing about his life, “not a straight-up confessional way, but I didn’t want to hide behind a veneer of a schtick like on my previous record Pad where it was like a tongue-in-cheek story concept album. I wanted to write a record that was very rooted in the here and now and my life. Some of the things that were here and now in my brain were these memories, so I was writing about stuff like that.”

Stevens’ memories of New York lean more towards fun, touristic experiences. “My dad would take me to the Lower East Side to get bialys and bagels. My mom would take me to the Museum of Natural History. We’d walk around Central Park and visit the Alice in Wonderland statue.” Despite that, Rose Main Reading Room isn’t so much about his experiences in New York. Rather, “There’s this theme of New York, a theme of my childhood; there’s a theme of animality.”

Any time Stevens goes back to New York City, he still visits his favourite spots. Some places are in constant flux. “You say Bushwick to one person 20 years ago, 10 years ago, now, you’re talking about three completely different neighbourhoods,” he points out. But as for the more classic places, like Manhattan, “It really is almost like frozen in time. Central Park, I have such a great experience there. it’s joy. It’s a happy place for me.”

And Rose Main Reading Room captures that joy. Despite the endless discoveries and wonders contained in the natural world and New York City – both vibrant, complexecosystems – Rose Main Reading Room communicates its ideas and feelings through relatively straightforward compositions.

“The last record was leaning into this mid-century, orchestral, and bossa nova pop, harmonic sensibility, that’s very almost jazz-influenced,” Stevens says of Pad, “and I got really tired of it, of living in that world and playing that music live.” So he wanted to return to a more direct harmonic sensibility rooted in guitar pop. “I was also drawn to the repetitive drone-y nature of some of my earlier songs. I was re-listening to some of that stuff and thinking there’s something good there I can bring back.”

Rose Main Reading Room’s musical sensibility is much more grounded on planet Earth than Stevens’ past work. “It’s much more who I actually am. It’s not me playing a character. It’s not a shoegaze record at all, like Agitprop Alterna was. It might have most in common with the first album, actually, Modern Meta Physic. But at the same time, there is this contemporary classical element to it, this repeating woodwinds thing that even though it’s not complicated musically, it’s a little symphonic element for the music heads who appreciate Steve Reich and Philip Glass and stuff like that.”

Rose Main Reading Room is dotted with songs that reference looking up or out, like “Ocean Life”, “Lie in the Gutter”, and “R.I.P. (Running in Place).” “I think those three songs are all connected a little bit. ‘Lie in the Gutter’ is so optimistic, about staring into space and seeing the grandiosity of the world we live in. ‘Running in Place’ is like a disaster: you’re stuck in quicksand, and you’re trapped.”

With lyrics like “I move my legs, but the background, it just stays the same” and “Can’t keep my feet on the ground when I’m floating in space / Oh, what a disgrace,” “R.I.P. (Running in Place)” presents the idea that it can be hard to find your footing when you leave the familiar, your comfort zone; whether you stay or go, things might not work out. “I’m just like everybody else. I have some days where I feel so hopeful and excited about everything and then other days where I’m like, ‘Fuck everything.’ ‘Ocean Life’ is more of a reflective, melancholic tune, but it’s not a negative tune, necessarily. But yeah, that is kind of interesting, thinking about space. Maybe that’s like a songwriting tool I use without thinking about it.”

On the drifting album closer “Counting Sheep,” Stevens tries to stay afloat with optimism. “Certain things are keeping me up at night, things that I regret or wish never happened,” he explains. “It’s as if I can’t hold it together because I’m holding it all in.” The song finds Stevens telling himself to relax and move on. “It happened. It’s over. There’s good, there’s bad. It’s fine. You’re here. It’s all good. Just go to sleep. You’ll figure it all out tomorrow.”

Though Stevens’ songwriting approach has remained the same, he is more intentional about other aspects of his artistry. He’s striving to make his live shows look better and his records sound better. And his dedication’s paying off. “The band gets a lot more attention than it did at the very beginning. It’s exciting to put things out in the world and know that some people are actually going to pay attention to it. The band’s played a bigger role in my life that way.”

Even though Peel Dream Magazine plays a larger role in Stevens’ life now, “I’ve always been very serious about it,” he says. “Even before Peel Dream Magazine, writing songs was my life.” And he’s only gotten more serious about it, now working with a booking agent and manager. “But at the end of the day, I’m pretty much the same person, working on music. I love it. I love doing it, and I just want to keep doing it.”

Pre-order Rose Main Reading Room HERE