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In 2016, Trevor Powers shut the door on Youth Lagoon. “I felt like I was in a chokehold,” he says. “Even though it was my music, I lost my way. In a lot of ways, I lost myself.”

Stepping back from the alias, Powers found personal transformation at his home in Idaho and released experimental tapes under his own name (2018’s Mulberry Violence and 2020’s Capricorn).

In October 2021, something changed the channel.

After taking an over-the-counter medication, Powers had a drug reaction so severe it turned his stomach into a “non-stop geyser of acid,” coating his larynx and vocal cords for eight months. “I saw seven doctors and multiple specialists. I lost over thirty pounds. No one could help me,” says Powers. By Christmas, he could no longer speak, turning to text messages and a pen and paper as his only ways to communicate. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to speak again, yet alone sing,” he says.

The growth that followed that nightmare narrowed Powers’ focus. Rather than writing about the world at large, he started writing about home. “Family, neighbors, and grim reapers,” laughs Powers. “I’ve always written about far away things. That was my way of running from home. But the best material has been right in front of me this whole time in Idaho.”

Recorded in six weeks with co-producer Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Adele, Gil Scott-Heron), Heaven Is a Junkyard is a work of absolute devotion.

“Youth Lagoon was never the chokehold,” he pauses.

“I was.”

This Must Be the Place is a podcast-in-the-offing with occasional installments, hosted by David Nichols (University of Melbourne) and Elizabeth Taylor (Monash University). It’s a podcast about space, place, culture and society. It’s kind of like the Urbanists (a community radio show on RRR, about urban planning type issues in Melbourne) but it’s a podcast.

Formerly Sunny | Braves | Kid XL 

Sean of Good Try and T.hanks

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