When the pandemic hit, Max Levy was sharing a cottage with his partner in the Yorkshire countryside, in a small town called Todmorden. And then they broke up. “We were stuck together in the house in a strange, very unique situation,” he tells Apple Music. “I had a lot of time with the dog, just walking around, and I had a lot of time to think about how I spent a lot of my time living vicariously through mediums that weren’t connected to my own body and brain. So, I figured I would write an album about vicarious living and how experiencing things through a number of tangents and membranes influences everything.” That album is Searching for a Stream, Levy’s second as ringleader for Garden Centre, a Brighton art-pop project that includes members of Porridge Radio, Joanna Gruesome and The Tubs. “I wanted it to be an indie-rock album of the kind that I loved growing up,” he says, marked by the “kind of slightly pastiche, tongue-in-cheek” sensibility of bands like The Magnetic Fields, his favourite of all time. “I knew what the other Garden Centre records sounded like, and I just felt like I wanted to take it a bit further, hone in on the things I liked about them. I didn’t want to get too pretentious or arty.” Here, Levy tells us the story behind a few of the album’s songs. “Hall of Fame” “It’s probably the most cartoonish of the songs. It just feels like a sort of caricature of what the album’s about. It’s someone who’s sleeping on their desk, and they’ve invented their own sort of fictional hall of fame, and they’re running through it in their head.” “Shock Site” “The lyrics are inspired by how bittersweet it is to grow up and how a lot of your formative memories are of things you saw online. I wanted to write about how formative shock sites were in growing up. For a lot of people my age, growing up in the Wild West of the internet really formed some of our memories and our points in life that might have been filled by actual experiences.” “Sitting on My Chest” “I remember writing the song whilst I was standing in a stream, feeling pretty weird, like I couldn’t connect with the world. And I just had this great memory of my cat, when I was a child, sitting on my chest and feeling very real. And I guess it’s a memory coloured by nostalgia, but it got me thinking about how being compressed by someone or something can make you feel subdued, or it feel like the most exciting, grounding thing.” “Thin” “It’s kind of about living vicariously through the pain of others. During lockdown, I was very into watching boxing. I think it had a weird appeal because it was so physical, just as a spectator. And the song is about a person feeling drawn towards the pain and kinetic energy of two boxers.” “Tannoy” “Musically, it came to me because it’s the only pattern I can play on the drums. So, I wrote it playing the drums at a practice studio that I just had some extra time in after a band practice. In the UK, there’s a sort of tradition of train drivers—especially on the London Underground or commuter trains—telling acidic, misanthropic jokes over the intercom. It’s this nice understanding, where everyone’s pissed off and the train driver’s pissed off as well. There’s a sort of dark humour to everyone sharing in that moment.” “Perfect Stranger” “I wanted to write a big indie-rock tune about accidentally breaking into someone’s house. It isn’t a true story, but it’s kind of inspired by going back to the village where I grew up and seeing my old friend’s house, who I used to spend every day with, and seeing little clues about our time together in their yard area: the patch of dead grass where there was once a trampoline, or some old, empty beer cans that still hadn’t been cleared out of the back of someone’s truck. And it got me thinking about the power of these little funny signs that you get when you visit somewhere, where you are forcing yourself into—and kind of being poisoned by—nostalgia.” “Searching for a Stream” “The title track is probably the song I felt the most emotionally involved with writing. It’s just about feeling like you are only experiencing things secondhand, not touching upon anything that’s physically related or relatable to your life, not even the people you really love. Instead, you’re just sort of closing pop-ups on an illegal boxing stream, trying to make meaning out of things that are kind of meaningless. And I guess it’s the idea of really spending effort searching for an illegal stream for some reason that made me feel despairing about the world.” “Valley” “When I write songs, I tend to mostly fiddle around with things and make them sound a bit more like ‘Valley’ than Garden Centre. But I ended up putting ‘Valley’ on the album because I felt like, thematically, it really went with the rest of it. It’s about feeling a little unconnected with the world and then seeing a bright light across this valley in the Yorkshire countryside where I lived. And then being incredibly fascinated by what this light could be because it seems so impossible to get to and so impossible to define. The idea of that gave me a great deal of pleasure—anticipating finding the meaning behind something that seemed so abstract and then getting there, and it's nothing but the idea. I was so into finding out what it was that it gave me a little burst of life. And I think that’s a nice way of thinking about being connected to the world: There’s often nothing that interesting about it, but it’s just being forced to be fascinated by it that’s the most satisfying bit.”