King Dream is an L.A.-based rock ‘n’ roll project helmed by Oakland native Jeremy Lyon, a lifelong songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, engineer and producer who crafts dive bar anthems with heart, brains and soul. Hard-rocking yet poignant, his music combines a love for American rock masters like Springsteen and Petty with ‘60s West Coast psychedelia and more contemporary torch-bearers like My Morning Jacket and The War on Drugs — all brought to life by a rotating cast of California’s most in-demand players. 

Lyon has played in bands since his teens. He’s done Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, toured nationally and internationally, and also knows what it’s like to busk on the street. You can hear all of this in King Dream songs: Balancing hope and world-weariness, they seem wise beyond their years, and they also have a way of sneaking up on you. You know the giddy, ragged vulnerability that arrives when you’ve been awake for way too long on a road trip? Between the good times and the clinks of beer bottles, these songs inspire a wistfulness, deep in your bones, for a place you’ve never been. 

Glory Daze is King Dream’s opus: Ambitious in scale and scope, it clocks in at 24 tracks, divided into three parts. Technically, these songs are a record of Lyon not only maturing as a lyricist and musician, but developing into a self-sufficient producer and engineer, a silver lining to the constraints of the pandemic. Over the last five years, he’s engineered more than a dozen records for some of his favorite artists in the Bay, including Rainbow Girls, SUZANIMAL, Hot Brother, Aviva Le Fey, Daniel Steinbock, Trevor Bahnson, and more. 

Recorded at studios in San Francisco, Oakland, and at his home studio in Bodega, Glory Daze also traverses vast territory in Lyon’s life: a period in which he toured and recorded as a sideman with a slew of Bay Area artists (Whiskerman, the Stone Foxes, M. Lockwood Porter); dealt with the grief, anxiety and loss of community wrought by a pandemic and years of sociopolitical turmoil; and went from living in an Oakland bachelor pad with high school friends to marriage and a settled life in the country to starting from scratch in 2025, renting a room in East L.A. The result is an expansive, multifaceted album that invites the listener to climb in, lean back, feel the widest possible range of emotions — and trust that getting there’s at least half the fun.  

“I make driving records,” says Lyon. “And this one’s about an hour-forty long, so I hope you’re going somewhere far.”

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… more about “Glory Daze Vol: VI”

Jeremy Lyon, frontman of the L.A. rock ‘n’ roll band King Dream, has been thinking about bookends. About beginnings and endings, and the way they arrive right on time, even when it doesn’t feel like it in the moment. Life will show you when a chapter is supposed to end and where to go next, he’s decided, if you’re really paying attention. 

These themes come across in unvarnished splendor on Glory Daze Vol VI, the final installment in a three-album opus that King Dream first kicked off back in 2023. Sonically, it finds Lyon at his most vulnerable and rootsy, not afraid to peel back the layers, indulging his indie Americana singer-songwriter sensibilities with a couple of live acoustic tracks. Narratively, it’s a conclusion to a time that Lyon now views with deep gratitude and melancholy: He wrote some of these songs nearly a decade ago, during a tumultuous time with his frequent collaborator and now ex-wife, who features as a vocalist on roughly half the album. But it took fresh heartbreak, divorce, serious family medical issues, and a complete life upheaval for these tracks to come into their own. 

“It feels oddly poetic to finish with a new album of my oldest songs. In some ways it’s a breakup album I wrote eight years ago that’s eerily more relevant to me now,” says Lyon, who moved from his native Bay Area to Los Angeles in the winter of 2024. “It’s as if these songs were waiting for me to grow into the person that had lived enough to sing them.”

Delivering cinematic moments reminiscent of Beck’s Sea Change with the wistful soul that powers Father John Misty’s I Love You Honeybear, Lyon dances with life’s duality throughout the record. “When all is said and done, you gotta go through Vegas to get to Zion,” he sings on the album’s second single, featuring Graham and Lewis Patzner on strings, Alexander Karvelas on trumpet, and Adam Nash on pedal steel. By the time the record ends, with a heartrending live acoustic version of “I Wish I Could Call You Now,” you can hear Lyon closing the door on this chapter with clear affection and acceptance. “Darling, I will love you ‘til I die,” he sings, “however or whether you are in my life.” 

Heading into the second half of 2025, Lyon is looking forward to touring Europe, then returning to start fresh in his new home — and to make the kind of music that comes with a clean slate.

“Being out of my ‘Glory Daze’ and back down to earth is actually, in a way, liberating,” he says. “I’ve sat with, and felt, all of the emotions, all the time, all at once. I’m open to anything.”

-Emma Silvers