Make Believe

There is a particular kind of fantasy that does not merely entertain but colonizes. It is not the idle daydream of a Tuesday afternoon but the persistent, vivid, habitable interior space that a person can begin to prefer over ordinary life. Make Believe, the sixth track on Kero Kero Bonito's 2018 album Time 'n' Place, maps this territory with an unsettling precision. The song is warm, even blissful in its sound, but underneath its melodic brightness runs a genuine anxiety: what happens when the dream is so good that returning to waking life becomes impossible to want?

The band have spoken about the song's conceptual origin with unusual specificity. They were partly inspired by a real account they had read: a woman who had effectively retreated from conscious living because her dreaming life was so vivid, so physically and emotionally rich, that the waking world had become intolerable by comparison.^[1][2] That image, of a person who had found a life so complete in imagination that they refused to leave it, gives the song its emotional stakes. This is not a song about pleasant escapism. It is a song about the knife-edge between imaginative freedom and self-imposed captivity.

Grief in Motion

"Make Believe" was written in fragments across a touring itinerary, and its origins have a restless, almost desperate quality. The verse bassline was composed backstage at Oberlin College in Ohio in 2017; producer Gus Lobban recorded a demo that same night in a Red Roof Inn in nearby Elyria. The chorus came together the following day on a plane from Cleveland through Chicago to Seattle.^[1] There is something fitting about a song that explores the relationship between dream and reality being assembled in the no-man's-lands of transit: backstage, a budget motel, an airplane crossing the middle of a country.

The album it would eventually appear on was being shaped by grief. Vocalist Sarah Midori Perry received a photograph of her demolished childhood home in Japan, a house she had grown up in and fully expected to exist in the world indefinitely.^[3][8] The loss was not accompanied by any dramatic event she had witnessed but arrived instead as a single image, a gap where something once stood. Meanwhile, Lobban's father was hospitalized during the recording process.^[4][10] These were not background conditions for the music. They were the music's emotional architecture.

Perry has described the recurring dreams she was having during this period: composites of past places and present-day people, her subconscious refusing to honor the boundary between what still existed and what was already gone.^[3] The album's title, Time 'n' Place, points directly at this: the unsettling sensation of being displaced, of knowing that the specific time and place you loved most has passed without your consent.

The Shape of the Song

The band described the sound of "Make Believe" as somewhere between Prefab Sprout, Stereolab, and the wry country-pop of Stealers Wheel's "Stuck In The Middle With You."^[1][2] That is a remarkably specific trinity of references, and each brings something distinct. Prefab Sprout contributes a sophisticated melodicism, a pop sensibility that is both bright and slightly melancholy. Stereolab contributes its motorik pulse and the sense that a groove can carry philosophical weight. The Stealers Wheel track lends a quality of cheerful wrongness, a brightness that does not quite match the mood beneath it.

The song's central synth figure has its own unusual history. What Lobban had originally conceived as an electric guitar part, designed for a pop-punk arrangement, was redirected toward organic and acoustic textures: organ, acoustic guitar.^[1] Perry developed the distinctive synth riff during rehearsals in April 2018, playing it on a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland Alpha Juno, layering the two instruments to create the song's characteristic shimmer.^[1] The choice to record at Press Play Studio in Bermondsey, run by Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay, was not incidental. The room and its custodian brought a Stereolab sensibility directly into the physical space of the recording.^[8]

The result is a track that sounds, on first encounter, like uncomplicated pleasure. The melody is inviting, the production is warm and analog. Only on closer attention does the texture beneath the warmth begin to register.

The Phenomenology of Dreaming

"Make Believe" is ostensibly about lucid dreaming, but the band are quick to add a qualifying clause: it is also about self-inflicted anxiety, and about the specific danger of using fantasy as an escape from fear.^[2] These two things are not contradictory. Lucid dreaming, the practice of becoming conscious within a dream and exercising some degree of control over its events, is itself an ambiguous achievement. The ability to design one's inner world is not simple freedom. It carries its own obligations, its own pressures.

The song's narrator occupies this ambiguity with a kind of luxuriant unease. The dream state is not presented as a brief interlude but as a destination worth returning to repeatedly, a place that holds genuine appeal precisely because real life has become frightening or painful.^[1][5] This is the territory of maladaptive daydreaming, a pattern in which the inner imaginative life becomes so consuming that it begins to interfere with engagement in the external world. The band did not invent this concept for the song. They encountered it in a real account and recognized something in it.

What makes the song poignant rather than simply clinical is the acknowledgment that the make-believe cannot hold indefinitely. One reviewer noted that the song introduces a new darkness through its lyricism: the make-believe can only last so long, because real life will inevitably get in the way.^[5] The fantasy is not stable. The dreamer cannot stay. This is where the self-inflicted anxiety enters: the dread that arises not from being unable to dream, but from knowing the dream is temporary and that return is inevitable.

A Band Reconfiguring Itself

"Make Believe" was the single through which Kero Kero Bonito announced their signing to Polyvinyl Records, released on September 17, 2018, the same day the news broke.^[9] The timing was deliberate. This was not merely a new label deal but a statement of creative identity, a declaration that the band making Time 'n' Place was a different proposition from the one that had recorded Bonito Generation two years earlier.

The band that made Time 'n' Place was substantially different from the one that had made their 2016 debut. A tour through Jakarta in 2017 had given Lobban in particular a new sense of creative license: the band had played outside their expected context and found themselves liberated by the distance from their established audience.^[7] The surprise EP TOTEP, released early in 2018, had already signaled a harder, more experimental sensibility, absorbing influences from My Bloody Valentine and Mount Eerie into the band's previously candy-bright sound.^[4]

The band's first full live shows, with real amplification, a live drummer, and a guitarist, happened in April 2018, during the same rehearsal period in which Perry developed the "Make Believe" synth riff.^[1] There is something significant about that overlap. The song about retreating into an inner world was taking its final shape at precisely the moment the band was learning to inhabit a fully physical, fully amplified live sound. The internal and the external were in simultaneous transformation.

Stereogum called it one of the most delightful KKB tracks to date.^[6] That is accurate, but it is a particular kind of delight: the kind that has been stress-tested, that knows what it costs.

The Album's Larger Argument

Within Time 'n' Place, "Make Believe" sits at the center of a broader argument about time, memory, and the impossibility of return. The album is full of places that no longer exist, people glimpsed in the wrong decade, feelings that have no stable address. One critic identified the track as representative of the album's core preoccupations: the fluidity of one's personality, the passage of time, growing older, and escapism.^[11] It is the song that most nakedly names what the rest of the record enacts.

Perry's recurring dreams, mixing past locations with present-day friends, are one version of this displacement. The demolished childhood home is another. The album's consistent emotional question is: what do you do with love for something that no longer exists? One answer is grief. Another is memory. A third, the one "Make Believe" examines most directly, is imagination. You build the thing again inside your head. You inhabit it there. And you develop an anxiety proportional to how much you need it.

That architecture, genuine loss generating genuine fantasy generating genuine fear, gives the song a depth that its melodic pleasantness might initially obscure. The brightness is not a mask for the darkness. Both are present simultaneously, as they tend to be in actual human experience.

Why the Song Lands

In 2018, escapism was not a fringe concern. It was a near-universal cultural mood, a reaching for comfort, for softness, for the controllable interior space of fantasy at a time when the external world felt both accelerated and hostile. Kero Kero Bonito did not make an explicitly political record, but Time 'n' Place drew on exactly this atmosphere without naming it. The FADER's October 2018 profile captured Lobban's state of mind: the feeling was not simply personal despair but a collective condition, a shared sense of being in trouble alongside a stubborn hope that the good times might come again.^[4]

That formulation, collective difficulty held in tension with genuine hope, is exactly what "Make Believe" enacts. The song does not tell you to stop dreaming. It does not moralize about the dangers of escapism. It describes the experience from inside, with empathy and precision, and it lets you decide what it means for your own life.

The music video, directed by James Hankins and filmed above a vintage emporium in Bristol, renders the song's tension visually. Shot across a range of formats including 16mm film, VHS, DV, a drone, and old webcams, it presents Perry waking from a distorted nightmare into an ecstatic, physical release in a vast empty warehouse.^[1] The aesthetic is deliberately anachronistic, like the music itself: a collection of past technologies pressed into the service of something emotionally immediate.

"Make Believe" is not the most sonically adventurous track on Time 'n' Place, but it may be the most emotionally precise. It holds a genuine tension without resolving it: imagination is both sanctuary and trap, dreaming is both freedom and withdrawal, and the desire to retreat into make-believe is both understandable and ultimately costly.

What Kero Kero Bonito accomplish here is rare. They take a subject that could easily become an inspirational affirmation of fantasy, or alternatively a cautionary tale about dissociation, and refuse either framing. The song stays inside the experience, fully and honestly, for its three and a half minutes.

That is its real achievement: it makes you feel exactly what it is to be suspended between the world you live in and the one you would rather inhabit, and it leaves you there, in the good and the difficult of it, without a neat resolution.