With one foot in the real world and the other in a charmed dimension of his own making, Amos Lee creates music that’s emotionally raw yet touched with a certain magical quality. On his eighth album, Dreamland, the Philadelphia-born singer/songwriter intimately documents his real-world struggles, an outpouring born from deliberate and often painful self-examination. “For most of my life I’ve walked into rooms thinking, ‘I don’t belong here,’” he says. “I’ve come to the realization that I’m too comfortable as an isolated person, and I want to reach out more. This record came from questioning my connections to other people, to myself, to my past, and to the future.”
Mr. Lee made Dreamland in close collaboration with L.A.-based producer Christian “Leggy” Langdon. The very first song they created together, “Hold You,” set the standard for Dreamland’s open-hearted confession. On “Worry No More”—the mantra-like lead single to Dreamland—he shares his hard-won insight into riding out anxiety. It gently exalts music’s power to brighten our perspective, with the song’s narrator slipping into a headphone-induced reverie as they wander a broken world. On “Into the Clearing,” the album takes on a moody intensity as he speaks to a desire for obliteration. A powerfully uplifting track with a gospel-like energy, “See the Light” evokes a fierce resolve to hold tight to hope. With its soulful piano work and soaring string arrangement, “Seeing Ghosts” reflects on anxiety’s insidious ability to warp our perception. In a striking tonal shift, he then delivers one of Dreamland’s most euphoric moments on “Shoulda Known Better,” a radiant piece of R&B-pop fueled by his dreamy falsetto.
In the making of Dreamland, Mr. Lee found his songwriting indelibly informed by his reading of Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections. “It’s about depression, which I have a pretty deep history with, and how our society and our generation looks at mental health and healing in terms of medication rather than thinking about our personal relationship to the people and the world around us,” he says. And with the release of Dreamland, he hopes that his songs might inspire others to live more fully and free of fear.