By David T. Miller
Contributing Interview/Writer

For a city its size, Lexington boasts an unusually wide variety of music — Bluegrass, of course, but also blues, Americana, classical and reggae. But it’s never been known as a hotbed of progressive rock, despite birthing one of the most successfully eclectic groups in the region, the trio Dream The Electric Sleep. Their five albums (so far) have all been musically challenging, mixing heavy guitar and vertiginous shifts in key and tempo with canny lyrics and delicately stacked vocal harmonies. And in the grand tradition of progressive rock, each album is loosely organized around a concept and a social theme, from the fictional suffragette at the center of 2014’s “Heretics” to the stark “Beneath the Dark Wide Sky” from 2016, which was inspired by Dorothea Lange’s indelible photographs of poor families during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era.

The striking design of the band’s album covers and videos and their visual integration with the music is no accident — the band’s guitarist, singer and principal songwriter, Matt Page, is senior lecturer of digital media design at the University of Kentucky’s School of Visual Art and Visual Studies. Since the trio’s last album, he’s been busy writing and recording his first solo record “Apocalypse Garden,” on which he wrote, sang and played virtually every note. UnderMain caught up with Page in his home studio in Frankfort to talk about the band, the solo album and the new digital arts degree program he’s helping to design at UK. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

David: Lexington isn’t a hotbed of progressive rock, so talk a little about your band, Dream the Electric Sleep, and playing that kind of music in this area.

Matt: The things that I make, I don't know if they're going to have a home or not. They’re motivated by what I'm interested in, the things that I have to say, and that’s true of the other two members of the band as well. We didn't intend to write “progressive” music; whatever came out was just the way we gelled together. When it came time to release albums, we asked ourselves, well, who is this for? We played around central Kentucky early on, six or so shows a year, with varied success, but never got a huge response. We were fine with that. But then our music started picking up overseas, so you go where your audience is. That’s how we ended up signing with a German record label and touring Germany and the UK and Europe. After that more people locally began to pay more attention

David: Who do you listen to, or did you listen to growing up?

Matt: I listened to some progressive stuff like Genesis and Rush and am a huge Peter Gabriel fan. Tears for Fears, The Police, but also Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell and many others. In the band, I'm definitely the one who listens to less-heavy music. I like playing with all kinds of music and sound, just roll the dice and see what happens.

David: You’ve mentioned how much you love the “Pet Sounds” album by The Beach Boys, and I hear their influence in your complex, multitracked vocals on both the full-band albums and your solo record.

Matt: Most things just by listening I can pick out the chord progression without picking up an instrument but try that with “Pet Sounds” and you're just lost. The album is pretty but musically and emotionally complicated. You have to work at that album. When the band toured Europe, we started the show with a brief sample I pulled from [the Brian Wilson and Tony Asher song] “I Just Wasn't Made For These Times.” I edited it so that the stage is black and that song starts playing very loud, but it’s a quiet, beautiful song, and we slowly came on stage in the dark. Then feedback starts to come up and the song is just looping — “I just wasn't made for these times; I just wasn't made for these times.” And then we go into the opening track of our second album “Heretics,” which is about people who aren't made for their times. I love [“Pet Sounds”] for all the reasons that people love the album, but I also liked incorporating that into a genre that — let’s just say, that record is not making waves in the progressive rock community. [laugh]

David: You mentioned Joni Mitchell too.

Matt: If you listen to “Hejira” or something, you're like, I don't even know where to start with this. I like it when an artist fools me into thinking something is simple. Our band would try to do that, to be sneaky — how do we make this thing that's really complicated sound easier than it actually is? Which is funny because in progressive music, oftentimes it's showcasing how complicated something is. In the progressive rock community, we weren't progressive enough, but for people who weren't into progressive rock, we were too progressive.

David: The trio’s albums aren’t concept albums as such, but they all lean heavily into a particular social context.

Matt: I learned during my MFA work [at Vermont College of Fine Arts] that much of what artists do is try to figure out the conversations they’re interested in and look for ways to participate in them — what’s at stake at the moment, in terms of any political or social idea that’s motivating you. Not that you have to write concept albums to do that — great songwriters can probably do it in four or five minutes — but contemporary art practices informed my desire to use long-form narrative to explore my thoughts on issues, unpack my feelings about certain ideas that probably don't get talked about a lot in rock music. For example, the first trio record, “Lost and Gone Forever,” is about youth and love in a coal mining town and loosely based on the Appalachian Jack tales, and “Heretics” is about fighting for something you believe in from the perspective of first- and second-wave feminist ideology. “Beneath the Dark Wide Skies” was about environmental degradation and the social consequences of that.

David: You studied under Faith Wilding, a highly regarded feminist artist and social activist. How did she influence your songwriting and how you think about art?

Matt: I got to work with Faith in graduate school, as did my wife, and I invited Faith to come to UK to give a lecture. From my background as a middle-class white man, I started learning about social movements and, in particular, movements that were challenging the patriarchy, and it was like, oh, I don’t understand that and I need to learn about it. I think “Heretics” was an attempt to write an album that was about something as powerful as feminist theory and get it out in a different way to a different group of people. Faith and other teachers opened a door that had not been widely opened before. I end our “Heretics” album with a spoken word section from her “Waiting,” a piece I found incredibly moving.

David: One thing that strikes me about all the albums and videos is how much control your background in art gives you over their visual aspects. For two albums you worked with collage artist Nils Karsten to design images not just for the album cover, but for each song.

Matt: I find the visual side to be harder than the music side. My background is in digital media, a lot of video work, performance work, site-specific installation work, some sculptural work. I got into graphic design because of the music, by necessity. I understood the power of it and how to do it. I do all the layouts, but Chris Tackett, the bass player, is also a graphic designer and he and I would tag team it. He would do the typography, and I would do the layout design.

David: You're a lecturer in digital arts at UK. Talk about that, and the new sonic art track you’re designing there.

Matt: I taught at UK part-time before getting the lecturer position fifteen years ago. I was hired to teach an introduction to digital art as a lecturer, basically Photoshop, moving images, some sound works, and I oversaw that course for a few years. It was the biggest course the school of art had ever had, and was wildly popular on campus, which led me and a group of other faculty to say, why don't we create a new major in digital media and design? We liked to call it a “choose your own adventure” degree — you could take the right courses to help you toward graphic design or film. Basically, there was no graphic design focus here at UK until I started it to help build out that degree, and now we have five graphic designers, so I've been able to step away from graphic design some, and I'm also director of undergraduate studies now.

David: How did that lead to the new degree program?

Matt: The film side of things is broken up among different schools, and there’s the music school of course, but there isn't an easy way to focus on audio expression. And so this new path is an attempt to pull together people in music who were working in sound design, electroacoustic design, songwriting and then what we do in the School of Art focuses on sonic studies and filmmaking and film studies. There’s a huge group of faculty that can come together from different areas. Transdisciplinary education is important to UK’s interest in the future of higher education, so this new sonic studies degree de-silos and de-territorializes a lot of what happens in academia, which is very territorial.

David: When will the new program be rolled out?

Matt: Probably fall of 2025 at the earliest, but there's a huge push to get it through. Everybody wants it to happen.

David: You’ve talked about how graphic designers historically saw themselves as vehicles of social change, but it’s now thought of as more utilitarian.

Matt: I think students come in thinking about graphic design in terms of corporate design, as attached to economic outcomes. And my interest in graphic design was always from that interim period where graphic design post-World War II saw that things had fallen apart and said, let's put it back together. Let's design a modern world. Only later, because it was so powerful, did corporations see it as a way to reach an audience and make more money. I think in schools of art or graphic design there's still very much the love of design in itself, the way we signify a moment through typefaces, logos, color palettes. I like the psychology of it and the sociological aspect of design. I'm not a graphic designer, so it's weird for me to be the one that started that here at UK, but I was happy to turn it over to those who did have such backgrounds because we needed it and because I thought it still had the potential to be a powerful pedagogical tool, to teach students about the psychology and the sociology of the world that they live in.

David: Visual literacy?

Matt: Exactly. I always say that the School of Art is like the English department of the future, because for kids, everything is visual now and they're already tuned into it. To have them analyze it and use it as a means of authorship is not just making art, it's composing the world.

David: To switch gears to music again, why did you decide it was time to make a solo record?

Matt: I never intended to make a solo album. I like building things collaboratively, but I didn't have a choice. The pandemic years were dark. I was a new first-time parent, and we were on the most cautious side of things, because we had an infant and my wife's mother had cancer, so we weren't going to take any chances. And staying home with a kid all day is much harder than going to a job. [laugh] During the pandemic I certainly got an appreciation for stay-at-home parents and moms, in particular. We were on a farm, very isolated, and those two winters were especially hard, the darkest years of my life for sure. Nine or ten months went by, and I hadn't done any music at all, wasn't writing anything, but that period, hard as it was, taught me that I was ready to write about my life for the first time.
David: “Apocalypse Garden” does seem very personal.

Matt: There's something that happens when you have a kid, where you're just like, oh, the hell with it, ain’t nothing going to hurt me now, I can say whatever I want. And if somebody thinks I'm an idiot, I don't care anymore. I was just like, I can do it now, I have enough to say. I know who I am in the world.
David: Was there a particular turning point?

Matt: One night I was just clicking around before bed on my laptop, headphones on, and I think I had just started reading Joni Mitchell's memoir. It had lyrics for her song “Woodstock” and I couldn’t remember how that song goes. So I searched for it and it was a live performance of Mitchell when she was much younger, just her and a piano, and I listened to it that night and I remember thinking, that song just changed me, just now. So I listened to it again. And it was the line at the very end where she says, “caught in the devil's bargain.” That was like a shattered frame of glass for me, one final little touch and all the glass falls out. I wept for hours that night in bed, which had never happened to me. I couldn't listen to the song for a long time afterward. It's an amazing song, but it was just the confluence of — I needed it at that moment. You need something to make your ship go in the next direction. And that song was it for me.

David: The student was ready, and the teacher appeared.

Matt: Yes, exactly. After that, it was oh, I knew that I wanted to pick the guitar up again. It was time to write what I wanted to write. The very first thing I wrote was “I Got My Guns.” Once I had the opening riff I was walking around my house and I had a melody and just started saying, “I got my guns. I got my guns. I got lots of guns, I got a bunker.” I would never write something like that for the band.

David: The lyrics are a little funny, but dark, like a Coen brothers movie. “I've got a lifeboat ready to sail/but nobody wants to go with me.”

Matt: Exactly. After that, boom, they just started coming. I think I wrote the whole album in two or three months and it was just a matter of how the heck to record it. It’s the pandemic, so what am I going to do? Well, you're going to learn how to record. So, I called my recording engineer buddy who did “Beneath the Dark Wide Sky” [and I] said, “I'm going to record it. Can you tell me how to do it over the phone? And then will you mix it for me?” And that's what we did.

David: You built a studio in your house.

Matt: Yeah, it started with just a couple pieces of good gear in my studio and a good vocal mic. I talked to my engineer about it, but didn't know what I was doing, what a compressor did, for example, until I got one and started twisting the knobs and thinking, oh, that's what it's doing. 

David: About the title, “Apocalypse Garden”?

Matt: During the pandemic we built an apocalypse garden. I didn't call it that at the time and I don’t know the origin of the phrase. In the nine months before I started writing, we were gardening, I built a hoop house, a greenhouse and we have a big garden out there. And as I was writing the album I looked out at the garden, and I thought of the Joni Mitchell song — “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Of course, in times of fear and panic, we want to get back to the garden of plenty and safety and of nourishment and all of these things.

David: But metaphorically, you were also writing about being a father. The title song isn’t apocalyptic at all. “Hey little garden you’ve grown on me/Shown me that time slows down in a seed/Digging through you helps me find part of me/Hey little garden you’ve grown.”

Matt: Yeah, it's basically an album about my daughter, you know, my wife and that moment in life.

David: And aging? “Feet of Crows.”

Matt: Looking in the mirror and going, oh my gosh, look, look at those. Where'd those come from?

David: What do you miss from being in a full band, from international tours and having a record label promote your work?

Matt: The other thing that the Joni Mitchell tune reminded me is that what I love about music is that it is a spiritual act. I have much more in common with a gospel singer than I do with, say, Jimmy Page or Robert Plant. I have to make music because it's the way I commune. I don't want to write pop songs about going to the club or the rock and roll life or whatever. I remember watching the documentary “Summer of Soul” and seeing those gospel singers sing. I wanted to cry because they weren't interested in the music industry, they were interested in getting in touch with the Lord. But I had been pushing so hard with the band, and we were in the industry, we were on labels, we were with managers, we were on tour in other countries. I got a look behind the curtain of the industry, and I was like, oh, this is terrible. This is not the thing that I want to do. But it's hard to walk away from something you build like that.

David: You haven't totally walked away from the band.

Matt: No, just walking away from the industry, so to speak. We're not being held to it.

David: You were signed to a German label and the band also self-released several albums, but both the 2023 album “American Mystic” and your solo record you've made available through Bandcamp, an online platform that pays musicians directly for their album sales.

Matt: What I learned from working with the German label — and they were great, they organized the tours, they did all sorts of things — but you're paying them to do that. The truth is I have a good relationship with a good distributor in addition to Bandcamp. Bandcamp is you selling to an audience. A distributor is a little different, somebody who distributes your music and manages the income and then pays you a large portion of it. Normally, a distributor would do that for a label, take all the label’s work, distribute it, collect the money, give it to the label and the label takes their part and gives a small percentage to the artist. Really, today, distributors are more important than labels. The distributor makes sure that your music is where it needs to be. I remember getting a notification that “Apocalypse Garden” was on Target's website. I don't know if it is still, but you can order it through all that stuff because of the distributor, and it's on all the streaming platforms and can be bought wholesale by record stores via the distributor. And I still have my personal social media and web pages, those plus Bandcamp and [artist direct sale site] Hellomerch.com, and it's really easy to find and buy our work.

David: Most artists make a good chunk of their money from live performances and from merchandise, but live performances are difficult unless you're doing a whole string of them over a long period of time.

Matt: A label will help you have as many shows as you're willing to do. And they will take part of ticket sales and part of merchandise sales and album sales. It didn't used to be that way; it used to be that the label took album sales, but the performer got ticket sales, merch sales, et cetera. So you’ve got to play all the time, and you're not going to have a family or another job and basically won’t need a house, and you're still broke. There are some big artists selling out shows in huge arenas and they're just breaking even.

David: Will you and the band return to live performances?

Matt: There were years when live shows were not as hot. They're much hotter now. When the internet started it was all about how you could reach everybody, and now it's back to, like, craft breweries or something. You're much better off cultivating a really great local regional circuit and fan base than you are global.

David: What’s next for you musically?

Matt: I’ve started producing albums. I have an album coming out by an artist named Greg Lynd. And he's got a beautiful voice. I played all the instruments on it and sang the backups. It will actually be called “Lynd/Page” because I did so much on it, but it's his songs. And I've started a studio. For “Apocalypse Garden,” I only had a couple pieces of gear, but now I have a whole producer’s studio.