It’s been four long, dark, miserable years since Ian Olvera has graced the universe with a new song from his Daydream Retrievers project. Not that the former Sleepwalker has been laying low—one glance at the credits of any number of recent Milwaukee albums and you’ll find Olvera listed as a producer, mixer, engineer, or more. (Hey, isn’t that him running sound at Vivarium?) Olvera’s behind-the-scenes talents make the city’s music scene sing. When he sings, however, it’s just as vital.
Take “Joke For A Light,” the first new Daydream Retrievers track since 2022’s instant-classic “Living Hell.” It’s the kind of perfectly lovely and perfectly constructed pop song that effortlessly nuzzles its way into your brain, a song that’s instantly familiar yet entirely new. Sure, it’s more than a bit melancholy—”How will you try to see in the dark with a joke for a light?” Olvera asks at one point—but that’s what makes it a Daydream Retrievers song, isn’t it? We wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Joke For A Light” was written and recorded in the summer of 2024. Olvera says that while he was on tour “somewhere in North Dakota,” a producer/engineer friend, Jon Gilbert, offered some free time to record a song in his Pasadena, California studio. The only problem? Olvera didn’t have a song.
“A few weeks later I was back home preparing for an in-the-round style show with Nathan Honoré (Next Paperback Hero) and Cassie Boettcher, and decided to see if I could come up with anything that afternoon,” Olvera explains. “About 10 minutes later I had 85 percent of ‘Joke For A Light’ and gave it its first go that evening.”
Impressive! And hey…we were at that show! We knew this song sounded familiar.
“Joke For A Light” was recorded at Gilbert’s Wildflower Sound studio in Pasadena, and mixed at his Wildflower Sound Baja studio in San José del Cabo, Mexico. It was mastered at Mystery Room Mastering by Milwaukee’s own Justin Perkins.
Oh, and the artwork for the single? “That’s Al Kraemer [Astral Hand] dressed up as a clown with the cigarette and hat,” Olvera says. “It’s photographed by Samer Ghani and painted by Hayward Williams.”
It doesn’t get much more Milwaukee than that, folks. (Also: that’s totally Foundation, isn’t it?)
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