Ian Olvera can’t say he didn’t give it his all with his last band, The Sleepwalkers. After years of building buzz around the Fox Valley and Milwaukee music scene, the group pulled out all the stops with their 2014 album, Lost My Mind in Stereo, a lovable blast of Big Star-indebted power-pop, hiring a PR firm and touring the Midwest and East Coast. It wasn’t enough to keep the group from fizzling out, though.
By 2015, they were operating without a permanent drummer. Neither of their backup drummers lived in Milwaukee, complicating any plans to record new material. And after six years with the group, and a fair amount of touring, Olvera was feeling burned out. “I had spent my whole life doing this, pretty much since I was 16, and I hadn’t really had a chunk of time off,” Olvera recalls. “We were all so busy. I had been playing in two or three other bands that were recording or playing shows around the clock. At the time, it just felt good to take a break.”
Olvera spent the next couple of years mostly away from music, occasionally tinkering on some new songs here and there, but feeling no particular rush to share or record them. It took him a year and a half to track the nine songs that make up the new self-titled Daydream Retrievers album, which he recorded over multiple trips to Appleton with Tenement’s Amos Pitsch on drums. And even though the album is out now, Olvera still can’t define exactly whether Daydream Retrievers is a band or a solo project, or predict what direction the project might go next.
“I played everything except for drums on the record, and I recorded it and mixed it, so in that regard it’s a solo project,” Olvera says. “But I’ve got some buddies who are playing these gigs with me, and that’s feeling pretty good. But it’s pretty early yet. We’ve only done two shows.
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This is the first time where I made the album first and built a band around it, so this is new to me.”
The songs themselves aren’t far removed from the ones Olvera recorded with The Sleepwalkers. They’re bright, buzzy and tuneful and, at times, downright hopeful. They certainly don’t sound like the work of somebody who’d burned out on music for a time. That’s in part because he wrote them before his sabbatical.
“It’s such a grab bag of songs,” Olvera says. “The newest song on there I wrote right when The Sleepwalkers split up. So everything is from 2014-2015—just leftover songs that sort of gelled well together. There’s one I think I wrote when I was living in Nashville and one from when I was still living in Oshkosh years ago.” Olvera says his next album, whatever shape it takes, should have some more recent songs on it. He’s been writing them at a steady clip again.
“I probably have about 25 of them now,” he says. “So I might try to record another album sometime this year, maybe in a similar way. But this time, I won’t restrict it to me playing everything. For me that was only going to work one time. This album was just an exercise in trying to keep it simple and doing everything at my leisure. Next time, it’ll be fun to have a band playing again.”
Daydream Retrievers’ self-titled album is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and other services. They headline the Cactus Club on Saturday, Jan. 13, with Quinn Scharber, Marielle Allschwang and Graham Hunt at 9 p.m.
