Teenage Headache Dreams

Album: R.Y.C. (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Teenage Headache Dreams" is a dreamy collaboration between Mura Masa and Ellie Rowsell from Wolf Alice. The song finds the pair looking back at a teenage romance, wondering if such escapism is healthy.

    Teenage headache dreams
    Come back to me at night
    And try as though I might to live for now
    I don't know how, I just feel down


    Masa said: "It's possible to feel happy even if it means relying on something that isn't necessarily true, or is half-imagined, or might not even have happened at all."
  • Masa's wrestling with the emotional crutch of nostalgia is a theme that runs throughout R.Y.C. "I think it must be some sort of reptile brain thing where it's like, 'Well, if I try and remember a good time, maybe that means there will be another one,'" the producer told The Guardian.
  • Mura Masa is best known for his electronic productions, but here he plays a spread of typical rock band instruments fueled by his childhood obsessions with bands such as Blur, Joy Division and Talking Heads. He told Zane Lowe on his Beats 1 radio show this was an attempt to "reflect this otherworldly idea I have about the music I grew up with."

    He added that he wrote the lyrics very quickly. "It felt like I was speaking from the heart about what it feels like to be caught up in the cycles of nostalgia, and how it feels to grow through that."
  • Masa had never met Rowsell before, but he reached out to her as he felt she was the perfect person for this track. He told Dazed Digital: "I had already written the first verse and the main bones of the song, and then she came in and wrote her verse as well. I think it slots in perfectly."

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