Sub Pop Records

DUM DUM GIRLS

Write about what you know. That’s what they say. But that’s a lot easier said than done when what you know is very, very difficult to bear. That was the challenge Dum Dum Girls’ leader Dee Dee faced when writing the songs for the band’s moving second album Only in Dreams. “The first record was basically the first songs I’d ever written,” says Dee Dee, “and I was thinking nostalgically about being a teenager. This record, it was pretty much impossible not to write about very recent, very real things.”

Very real things indeed: Dee Dee wrote “Hold Your Hand” immediately after her mother (the pretty lady on the cover of both the Dum Dum Girls’ self-titled 2009 debut EP and their 2010 debut album I Will Be) was diagnosed with what turned out to be a fatal illness, and it’s one of several songs on Only in Dreams that unsparingly trace her mom’s passing. Other songs spell out the emotional toll of separation from one’s lover, something Dee Dee had to deal with while she and her husband (Brandon Welchez of the acclaimed noise-pop band Crocodiles) pursued their own tour schedules.

“Just about all the songs reflect the fact that I’d been on the road for about a year, pretty much separate from everything real in my life except the band,” says Dee Dee. “A lot of it is about distance and detachment.”

On several levels, Only in Dreams is a great leap forward for a gifted songwriter and an equally gifted band—it’s heavy, deeply personal stuff and surely unprecedented for this style of music, and that’s what gives Only in Dreams both its uniqueness and its gut-punch emotional…