What is the song "Highway Patrol Stun Gun" about?

TREVOR POWERS: With all the police brutality in the media, it seemed like every single day there was some element of chaos—but in different forms. It just got so bad. I feel like we live in this shitstorm now where there’s so many corrupt people in high places, people getting away with all this shit. So, I sat down and I decided to just write whatever came to my mind. Living in Idaho, it’s easy to feel isolated from all of these events, and that was sort of my way of dealing with it. There’s also elements of loss tied to [the song] as well. I lost one of my closest friends a couple years back, and that bled into everything. It was all these ideas put into a blender.

How did the music video come together?

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I ended up stumbling on [Kendy Ty's] work on Vimeo about two years ago, and I reached out to him. We stayed in contact, and I knew that when the right project came along, I wanted to do it with Kendy. We had never met in person until we actually started filming the video for “Highway Patrol Stun Gun.” We flew out to New York and shot it over a period of four or five days. It was amazing getting to know someone at the same time as working with them. It was phenomenal working together; we shared a very similar vision for everything.

For me [the concept of the video] was this idea of having this extension of yourself. We go down these life paths and we feel like we’re always alone, but we have those different aspects of our personality that are essentially grounding us; we're not quite alone, because we have our spirit. It was that idea, combined with the idea of losing someone and having them still be alive throughout your day to day—because I think that’s a very real thing. Anyone who’s experienced any sort of loss, you know you go out on a windy day you feel the wind on your skin and you feel like they’re still there.

In another interview, you said that losing your friend changed how you viewed Youth Lagoon in general. What does the project mean to you now?

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I think it was more of a re-focus. Going into [my last album] Wondrous Bughouse was this amazing thing for me, because before that I approached music in an elementary sort of way. I really got into the experimentation and just making all sorts of sounds that I had never really messed around with: synthesizers, percussion, all sorts of stuff. I always see myself as someone who experiments with sounds first, all sorts of sounds, and then I’ll try to incorporate it into a song and have those songs make sense. After my close friend passed away, it brought me down to earth a little bit. I made this album very purposeful and intentional because there was so much stuff that was on my mind and that I felt like I had to say.

Listening to this album, I felt like it was kind of like waking up from a dream and facing a sense of reality.

That is a good way to put it, I do think that this record deals a lot more with reality. But at the same time, even when I’m dealing with these issues that are very heavy—a lot of the subject matter is pretty heavy—I still deal with it from the vantage point of taking ten steps back and then evaluating things. I’ve always said music is not only my way of communicating, but also my way of viewing the world and trying to understand difficult things.