The melody and lyrics for this song were originally written over completely different music. At some point I realized it was nearly in the same key as another beat I was working on that had a kind of T. Rex vibe to it. I put them together, and the song came out of marrying those two things. Though I played piano and electric guitar for the song, I used my playing to create measures of music that I could loop and layer with the sound of vinyl crackling. The idea was to reverse engineer the sound you get from sampling an old recording and building new music out of that.
“Bike Dream” is the only song on this album that was mixed by Dave Fridmann. He was someone I reached out to half a decade ago and had a back-and-forth with. At the very last stage of making this record I reached out to him again, kind of like, ‘Hey Dave, remember me? I’ve got this song I think you should mix,’ and he was like, ‘I remember.’ And then the mix happened within a matter of days.
I don’t want to explain too much about this song lyrically, but I will say it’s about wanting the person you’re with to be two different people, maybe two different kinds of people.
– Rostam on NPR