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Ask him about his second solo album Psychic Lessons, and Anand Wilder responds: “I just want to keep making records in a reeling music industry. This one’s about drawing inspiration anywhere I find it—myth, history, anthropology, satire, life’s little indignities, or a pink keyboard my wife found on the street.” If Wilder gleans these stimuli anywhere and everywhere, Psychic Lessons also charts his desire to return his own transfigured sounds and glimmers of poetry to the cultural record in its large sense, to pay homage to artists of the near and distant past while forging musical community with friends who share his impulse. 

On his 2022 debut I Don’t Know My Words, Wilder took seriously the exercise of going solo, playing every note himself in his Brooklyn home studio. But Psychic Lessons is a love letter to collaboration, highlighting the inventive reeds and synths of Walter Fancourt and the bass and synths of co-producer Jachary (Zachary Levine-Caleb). “Everyone plays the synths,” Wilder emphasizes of the trio. In twelve songs that drift from chillwave and psych-pop to reggae and country, Psychic Lessons paints with the lush analog palette of the 1980s. “We created a DIY Compass Point Studios vibe,” says Wilder, as a point of reference for the album’s sonic texture of abundance. As a result, gold-feathered synths chirp over drum machines reminiscent of Grace Jones, and on “Social Exile,” marimbas echo the Bill Withers of “We Could Be Sweet Lovers.” Fire-fangled anthems of musical luxury flood the markets of song with electro-pop promises of a better plane of existence.  

 Across five studio albums from 2007–2019, Wilder’s former band Yeasayer also celebrated its links to 1980s worldbeat, but Psychic Lessons transforms the impulse, putting front and center the question of how an artist can stay ahead of himself. Wilder names the lead off tune “Appointment in Samarra” after a Mesopotamian death parable of a horseback escape from a market, which he heard in Boris Karloff’s telling in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. While the lyrics reframe the parable in terms of music biz dynamics (“hanging on for dear life” amidst a careening career), the songcraft layers the call and response of Fancourt’s harmonium and flute to Jachary’s percussive bass, which bobs to a beat that recalls Australian composer Peter Best’s outback film scores.  

 As Psychic Lessons settles into this ride, the songwriting puts on different voices and masks, veering between tunes of personal disclosure, jags of mythic exploration, and character-driven satires of contemporary life.   

Some of the album’s tone-setting tracks sing poignantly of the small troubles of personal life. In “Molly’s Song,” whose chorus gives the album its title, phrases from a marriage quarrel loop in irregular time, only to resolve into Fancourt’s ecstatic waterfalls of Emerald Forest-style digital pan flutes. “You want me to read from some magic script, but I never do,” sings the despairing husband of “Molly’s Song,” but the album’s opulent sound pools offer their own enchantments. “Darling Please” reports on a medical billing cycle following a reproductive decision, but Wilder dresses it up as a chillwave love song. “Living Beside You” could be mistaken for a breakup song, but underneath the shuffling synth ostinato, it immortalizes bad neighbors building ugly things (“They’re cutting down both the ancient redwoods in the yard”).   

Some songs turn up the volume on social satire, speaking in voices ranging from failed rockstars to libertarian investors finding their conscience. “Broken Beyond Repair” wryly imagines the complaint of Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, as if even the biggest names in rock could be doomed to backbencher status. The reggae song “He Believed in It” satirizes an activist stockbroker ruinously convincing a painter to sign an antiwar petition and invest in the environment, scrambling the conventional roles of artists and fiduciaries. “Tech Job” envisions a Beatles-style “Paperback Writer job application song,” taking aim at the amoral hypocrisy of Silicon Valley grifters manipulating corporate fads. In “Give Us a Wink,” Wilder wonders if Tom Petty were a deep ecologist, thrashing about amidst shallow consumer politics: “You’re from the earth and you’re fed by the sun / but aside from what you buy you can’t help no one.” 

Elsewhere, Wilder refracts his social vision through the broken mirrors of myth and ancient history. The huge beats and hooks of “Bog People” were inspired by a visit to the remains of the Lindow Man “Pete Marsh” at the British Museum. The lyrics plummet into Iron Age questions of human agency, sacrifice, and what we can and can’t see in the muck of time. “Selkie Bride” crescendos from spare, lo-fi strums to lavish technicolor, casting back to Orcadian and Celtic mythologies inspired by John Sayles’s 1994 fantasy film The Secret of Roan Inish, a drama of return to a remote and ancestral island where selkies (seals who shed their skin to become human) harbor family secrets.  

Selkie-like, Wilder’s songs often transform midstream. One of the psychic lessons is staying alert to these changes, where a complaint can sound like love, a sax riff can change the mood, a hook can outgrow its skin, and an album can speak in many voices at once. The design studio Crayonette’s kaleidoscopic cover art gestures toward these perceptual phase changes. But Psychic Lessons also tells it straight: “The best song I’ve ever written,” he laughs, “is ‘Get a Dog,’” a two-minute, gravelly honky-tonk waltz that takes a contrarian view of the companion species. “People seem to really like these breathing stuffed animals,” he remarks in estranged wonder. Wilder’s slowed-down, sarcastic vocals wrestle with his reluctance to take on the loving duties of dog ownership, recasting them as chores impinging on his creative freedom: “It’s a gift for your forties / it’s way better than recording.” 

Across Psychic Lessons, Wilder often stages such satiric moments of artistic doubt, but he and his trio remain intent on discovering clear new springs of sonic luxury, carving the incomparable pleasures of recording from troubled times.