Allan Jamisen’s new single, “Living the Dream,” settles in not with a shout, but with the unsettling quiet of finding oneself utterly lost in familiar territory. It’s pop-rock, sure, the label fits loosely enough, but the air hangs thick with something else. Jamisen’s vocals, subterranean and strangely calm, anchor the track. They don’t soar; they resonate, like the hum you feel through the floorboards when a cello is played downstairs.
The song unpacks that feeling of hitting the wall, that precipice where everything you thought you knew looks flimsy and ridiculous. It’s the “do or die” crossroads, starkly painted. But that title – “Living the Dream” – flickers constantly. Is it sarcastic? A desperate mantra? Or does it point to some private, internal reality being fiercely guarded while the external world crumbles? The track pulses with this ambiguity. The organic production helps; it feels less manufactured, more dug up, like finding surprisingly sturdy roots beneath cracked pavement.
There’s a moment, a particular swell in the arrangement, that unexpectedly brought to mind the slightly metallic scent of old library ladders – that blend of aged wood, paper dust, and sheer vertical potential. Strange, I know, but it felt linked to this song’s peculiar climb out of a pit, the search for solid footing, the tentative reach for something genuinely exciting.
Jamisen doesn’t offer easy answers here. The track presents the crisis, the need for action, the stark choice between succumbing or somehow reconfiguring reality. It lingers, this sense of navigating profound darkness with only the faintest, maybe even self-deceiving, light called a ‘dream’. It leaves you wondering: when we’re fighting through our worst, what exactly is the dream we claim to be living?
