King Dream is an L.A.-based rock ‘n’ roll project helmed by Oakland native Jeremy Lyon, a lifelong songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, engineer and producer who crafts dive bar anthems with heart, brains and soul. Hard-rocking yet poignant, his music combines a love for American rock masters like Springsteen and Petty with ‘60s West Coast psychedelia and more contemporary torch-bearers like My Morning Jacket and The War on Drugs — all brought to life by a rotating cast of California’s most in-demand players.
Lyon has played in bands since his teens. He’s done Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, toured nationally and internationally, and also knows what it’s like to busk on the street. You can hear all of this in King Dream songs: Balancing hope and world-weariness, they seem wise beyond their years, and they also have a way of sneaking up on you. You know the giddy, ragged vulnerability that arrives when you’ve been awake for way too long on a road trip? Between the good times and the clinks of beer bottles, these songs inspire a wistfulness, deep in your bones, for a place you’ve never been.
Glory Daze is King Dream’s opus: Ambitious in scale and scope, it clocks in at 24 tracks, divided into three parts. Technically, these songs are a record of Lyon not only maturing as a lyricist and musician, but developing into a self-sufficient producer and engineer, a silver lining to the constraints of the pandemic. Over the last five years, he’s engineered more than a dozen records for some of his favorite artists in the Bay, including Rainbow Girls, SUZANIMAL, Hot Brother, Aviva Le Fey, Daniel Steinbock, Trevor Bahnson, and more.
Recorded at studios in San Francisco, Oakland, and at his home studio in Bodega, Glory Daze also traverses vast territory in Lyon’s life: a period in which he toured and recorded as a sideman with a slew of Bay Area artists (Whiskerman, the Stone Foxes, M. Lockwood Porter); dealt with the grief, anxiety and loss of community wrought by a pandemic and years of sociopolitical turmoil; and went from living in an Oakland bachelor pad with high school friends to marriage and a settled life in the country — to starting from scratch in 2025, renting a room in a house in East L.A. The result is an expansive, multifaceted album that invites the listener to climb in, lean back, feel the widest possible range of emotions — and trust that getting there’s at least half the fun.
“I make driving records,” says Lyon. “And this one’s about an hour-forty long, so I hope you’re going somewhere far.”
