Turning on Bleachers' 2017 album Gone Now feels like waking up slowly. "Woke up / I'm in the in-between honey" echoes itself on a bed of warm synth chords , invitingly, like your covers, or your lover's body, as you drift out of sleep and into that drowsy state before you're truly awake. A few minutes earlier, you'd been asleep, lost in your dreams, and in a few minutes, you'll be awake: clear and oriented to reality. But for a few minutes, you're "in the in-between," a place where your dreams rumble through your mind like "rolling thunder", a place where phrases and feelings swirl unbidden in the soup of your slowly untangling consciousness.

Gone Now takes place in this liminal space. Ambiguous phrases ("Don't take the money," "rolling thunder," "upstairs neighbor," "kids downstairs," "lend me a favor," and many others) echo with songs and throughout the album along with their associated musical motifs, shifting and changing with each iteration. Other voices of unknown provenance, some human, some digitized, some foreign, almost all female, float in and out of the songs like subconscious voices bubbling from the depths of your mind. They don't obviously follow the rules of the melody or rhythm or even the content of the songs, and yet they feel harmonious, intentional, as though placed with the self-justifying, improvisational logic of dreams. The sounds of the album are almost entirely warm and inviting, and the heavy and nearly constant stereo panning all add to a feeling of warm confusion, of drowsiness, of emotional openness.

The "in-between" is a metaphor, of course. In this album, dreams deal with youth. Some are nightmares, or at least represent the trauma of his youth. "Goodmorning," for example, deals with the trauma and guilt of losing his younger sister to brain cancer and a cousin to the Iraq War when Antonoff was 18. He's "always one dream away from the ones above," watching "all of the nights turn blue," as he yearns for help ("somebody lend me a favor") with his trauma. Similarly, in "Everybody Lost Somebody," he describes a dream of begging on a corner, feeling the "pain of waiting alone" and the repeated desire to "get myself back home soon" - perhaps suggesting the desire to return to his intact childhood home in a time before the shattering deaths that marked the end of his adolescence. In "Hate That You Know Me So Well," these dreams of loss become recurring nightmares: "So I keep talking about eighteen / Cause I can't let go of the same dream...and you know what? / I hate it!". And again, in "I'm Ready to Move On," "I've got one dream, been hurting me forever".

Other dreams are more positive but still imbued with the emotional intensity and confusion of youth: "Days on his sister's rooftop / Watching our city burn into the night," or (also from "I Miss Those Days") driving himself to Florida at 16 - who doesn't remember, or dream about, the incredible freedom of your first solo road trip? Indeed, "part of me never left that seat" because he can return to those times in the "nights that we could stand up before a dream". "But it's all coming back, yeah / Like the feeling isn't over" - dreams bring back the feelings of youth, and just as a waking person may desire to return to the confusion of dream, Antonoff yearns for the emotional intensity of youth: "Hey, I know I was lost, but I miss those days".

A drowsy person can just go back to sleep, but - and this is the source of Antonoff's wistfulness - the person who is waking up from their youth can't. Those days are Gone Now, and the album presents the challenges of adulthood with the clarity of day. "Hate That you Know Me So Well" depicts the "pressure points" of adult relationships - they "pressure you right back". As anyone who has been in an adult relationship knows (or should know), being close to another person is just difficult. They keep you "up all night," their love is sometimes as malicious as a "heart attack." Your lover, if you're truly together, knows you well, too well, and "sometimes" that be an awful thing: "I wish that I wasn't myself / No luck / And I hate that you know me so well". "Don't Take the Money" is similar. Proximity breeds conflict, and conflict between partners is intimate, intense, and difficult to escape. As Antonoff sings about fighting and staying up late, "Different sides of the bed / Roll your eyes, shake my head / Now we're stuck in the storm". The risk is that we "ignore" these conflicts, or take easy ways out - in Antonoff's phrase (one that, according to the email he wrote to announce DTTM's release, he uses to represent any shortcut through difficulties, especially emotional), we "take the money," rather than commit to the difficult work of sorting out our problems together. The temptation is real, and Antonoff exhorts his partner again and again: "Don't take the money," and then, perhaps, they can wake up together in the "safe house" of "Let's Get Married".

I'm 27 years old. I have adult responsibilities: no kids or a house (yet), but a job, two cats, money, and a partner with whom I share the past 6 years, my home, my life, and my cats. And yet, for 6 weeks this summer, I moved into a dorm on a mountain, where I spend my days reading books and writing papers that have nothing to do with any of the realities of adulthood. I spend hours taking pictures of a creek, or writing reviews of albums, or writing mystery novels, or going to Pond Readings, or Barn East parties, or Literary Pairs themed dances. I write intense journal entries that sound exactly like my journal entries when I was 16 - I'm actually embarrassed as I write them, and yet the words keep tumbling out onto the page. Temporarily abdicating my adulthood for English teacher summer camp has brought back much of the emotional intensity of youth - I mean, when was the last time an album hit you hard enough that you listened to it straight through multiple times (let alone take several hours to write a detailed review)? No music has meant this much to me since high school - this is like Justice in 2007, or the Shins in 2004, or Neutral Milk Hotel, also in 2004, though the album actually came out in 1998. Or the Avett Brothers in 2006, or....I could keep going.

The point is that this summer is my "in-between". I thought I'd grown up, but here - especially listening to this album - I feel my youth lingering on just a bit longer. I will not romanticize the feeling, and indeed, it's not really all that pleasant of an experience - which I think is something we forget about being young. Like Antonoff suggests in "I'm Ready to Move On," the drowsy warmth of the "in-between" can be cloying, or painful, or too open and intense. A lot of insecurities that I thought I'd escaped have returned, including (embarrassingly) whom to sit with in the dining hall. And beyond that - it's not real. Youth is a dream, and as real as dreams seem, they're not. I am ready to move on, to wake up to the clarity of my adult life again, to continue to work through the mundane difficulties of having to go to work every day, and feed the cats and clean their litter box, and share my life with another human being.

But, for another couple weeks, I'll let Gone Now swirl through my head like a fading dream.