In late 2024, a couple singles and eventually an album dropped from a project called Dream Ghoul. The songs were dense, layered, atmospheric, and dark, and unlike anything heard around the Omaha area. Think late-era David Bowie, dream pop, shoegaze, and a dash of deeper-cut David Byrne and Talking Heads. The accompanying images on social media featured Max Holmquist painted in ghostly white with a dark swath of charcoal across his face.
It wasn’t the image area music fans were used to from the frontman of indie rock band Oquoa for the past decade. Videos would follow for the songs “Watcher on the Gateway, 1993” and “Qualitative Blue, 1991″, setting the tone for something unique and theatrical.
The first, and only, live show to date would happen at The Sydney prior to the album coming out. An album release show at Reverb Lounge was canceled due to a treacherous ice storm. A show is scheduled for March 22 as part of Lost Weekend at Duffy’s Tavern in Lincoln. The Sydney show had Holmquist as the Dream Ghoul character on stage playing with the full band and talking the audience through a time travel narrative that goes along with the concept of the album.
I met up with Holmquist to talk about the album, the Dream Ghoul, and how he sold the concept to his bandmates. Holmquist started out doing a “solo folk thing” under the name South of Lincoln at age 21.
“About a year after I started doing that, I got sober and quit drinking, and probably around that time is when I really leaned into it, started doing things like getting press photos and doing interviews and trying to think strategically about when I was going to be playing shows and who I was going to play with and recording music and releasing it,” he said.
In 2012 Holmquist moved to Omaha and rebranded as Great American Desert, and in 2013 he formed the band Oquoa, which lasted until a hiatus in 2022.
“Everybody was pretty busy with other bands,” he said, “and I wanted to move forward with stuff I’d been working on. I started kind of brainstorming and dreaming up this current project. It kind of all came together incrementally in little kinds of bits and pieces. I knew in the last year of Oquoa that I wanted to do something a little different with whatever I was going to be putting out next. I was really inspired by acts that had sort of leaned into writing, conceptually creating personas, and creating characters like Bowie. Psychic TV is another band that kind of inspired me on that front. And so I kind of set out while writing this new stuff to have this intention to create a narrative and a character and a persona and something that would kind of go beyond just ‘Here are some songs I wrote about my own life’ and ‘Here I am performing them.’”
Also inspired by pop culture, the occult and filmmakers such as David Lynch, Holmquist came up with Dream Ghoul.
“The Dream Ghoul kind of came to me,” he said, “almost like, you know, the idea itself is the entity, and it attached itself to me, and I became possessed by this idea. And once I had the idea, it was so clear and visceral, and I just felt like I needed to follow it.”
Holmquist wrote the album by demoing it straight into recording software at his home studio. Once he had twelve songs, he took them to area musician and engineer Jim Schroeder’s studio to record. Since he had no band, he brought into the studio Mike Overfield from Oquoa and his friends Claire Hannah and Dekota “Hop” Trogdon from Kansas City band Nightosphere.
I thought about bands that are kind of at this cross-section of, ‘I really like their music,’ but also, they’ve got that sort of je ne sais quoi,” he said of putting together the live band. “So I just kind of made a list of, like, okay, who are musicians that I’ve either known of for a long time or heard of for years? I really like people who are really plugged into the community, people who have this sort of creatively rich quality about them that is beyond just, ‘Oh, they make great music. What other types of things are they into?’
“One person in the band is a graphic designer, and we’ve spent a lot of time working together on some of the visual elements, like flyers. Lindsey (Yoneda), who’s going to be singing backing vocals, has helped me with photos and videos. She does the makeup for the Dream Ghoul for live shows. She’s from Vempire, and she’s also in Ghostlike with Dylan, who is playing bass in this band. So part of it was just kind of going into the recesses of my brain and going, ‘Who do I like personally, artistically, and who has, kind of like, an x factor to them?’”
I asked Holmquist how he sold the concept of the Dream Ghoul to the band. He said it all started with the music.
“With most of them, I led with the music, because if they liked the music, then I think I thought, you know, they won’t really care what nonsense I’m trying to get into online or at the shows,” he said. “And that, more or less, seemed to be true.”
The album contains a time travel element where each song is tied to a specific year.
“The idea is that I’ve been possessed by this entity, the Dream Ghoul, possessed by this idea, and that it is using me as a vehicle to harvest people’s theta waves,” Holmquist said. “They are dream waves. And it’s doing that by using my body to make music. Kind of put people in a trance. The time travel aspect of it comes in because it’s using my unconscious memories and my conscious memories to go back in time and collect cultural artifacts and cultural societal signifiers and kind of create this Gestalt work of art that will sort of intuitively and subconsciously plug into people’s interests. So that this entity can then, you know, become real, become actualized in the physical world. So that’s kind of loosely what’s going on in the narrative of the album and sort of the time travel element of it all.”
Holmquist added he enjoys performing on stage.
“It was fun for me to just kind of get theatrical and kind of lose myself,” he said. “As a person, because, on some level, I do feel as an artist, as a musician, I do get possessed by these ideas to the point that, you know, it drives me to stay up until 3 a.m., working on songs and videos and album art, and relentlessly pursuing people to get them to be a part of my band. It kind of drives you to do kind of wild things when you get the creative impulse to make something, and you get an idea, and it kind of just drives you and pushes you. So on some level, it doesn’t feel like it’s a narrative outside of me. In some ways, it feels like I really am possessed by this idea.
“But it is fun to just kind of let go and lean into it and do the time travel thing. Kind of get people thinking about what it means. The time travel element of it leans into this idea of nostalgia that gets weaponized and commodified. There’s these, like, nostalgia cycles that keep coming. The entire album is homage after homage to bands that I love and heroes that I love and social moments in history that I am fascinated by. So the album is kind of a commentary on that, on the weaponization and commodification of nostalgia. Critically, but also in a way that’s kind of just giving into it.”