If you’ve been looking for Jeremy Lyon — better known by his stage name, King Dream — he’s in the North Bay.
In his latest video, it shows: Not only is the song performed with Bodega Bay’s Rainbow Girls, the video is directed by Santa Rosa’s Schlee, and features the kind of rolling hills and wide-open pastures familiar to denizens of Sonoma County — which are distinct, in character (and redolence) from hills overlooking Oakland, Lyon’s former home of many years.
With this move, he seems to have shifted the sounds of his King Dream project from a mostly psychedelic enterprise back to his rock and roll roots.
“Living Like a Teenager” takes its cues from Lyon’s earliest influences, such as Tom Petty and Jackson Browne, and you’ll hear it. Lyon has always — musically speaking — lived in the past, from his days in retro-rock outfit Tumbleweed Wanderers to the Summer of Love-tinged sounds of previous releases as King Dream. “Living Like a Teenager” is a rollicking country rock number that is just a damn good time.
We’ve been covering a lot of music written as a reaction to the pandemic lately, but this one came before — recorded in February 2020. However, it’s hard not to read parts of it as a portent of the common COVID experience: Those of us not in essential roles were forced into a stasis that echoes that hurry-up-and-wait period as you’re inching closer to graduation. Suddenly, we weren’t allowed to go many places other than our own home, outdoor public spaces, and the 24-hour Safeway.
However, in a press release, Lyon says “Living Like a Teenager” was born out of a want to start over, not stay in place. As much as “Living Like a Teenager” calls to mind quarantine, maybe the spirit of having the rest of your life ahead of you will provide some inspiration to those of us that haven’t used the last 18 months to chase our dreams, when and if we all make it off the couch.
