Extra Life’s first record for Northern Spy, Dream Seeds marks a dramatically new creative direction in the band’s still-young but prolific career. It is perhaps Extra Life’s most clearly-defined concept album : seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children. In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of Made Flesh, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning. According to principal songwriter and elementary school teacher Charlie Looker, the lyrics began with a consecutive series of harrowing dreams involving children, all interconnected by recurring symbols. Claiming to be in some way spiritually reborn, Looker penned the songs while mining these dreams’ buried pasts and even watching in awe as some of their prophesies unfolded in all-too-real life. Alternately brutal and tender, haunted by ghosts of both the dead and the unborn, the songs of Dream Seeds express the violent yet redemptive collision of the Real and Psychic Worlds and an archaic belief in the divine truth of dreams.