alt-J Flies Like a Jet Engine on New LP ‘The Dream’

If you ask Joe Newman, vocalist, and co-founder of the popular band alt-J, about the genesis of the band’s new record, The Dream, which is out Friday (February 11), he’ll tell you it all began, essentially, the day he got his first guitar. While, to some, that answer may seem cheeky or even flip, for Newman, it’s completely true. For him, the process of writing songs isn’t something that begins in the morning on a given day and concludes that night. Instead, for the artist, a song may begin 20 years or more before it’s set to record. Or a bit of it may start one year, another bit on another, and even a third chunk some years later. In this way, songwriting, like healing, is not linear. It’s more like assembling a bouquet.