With his wistful and contemplative song “Hooked on a Dream,” Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sanford: captures the hard but necessary act of making peace with the past and pressing forward.

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There’s something magical about life in the city – the feeling that you can be anyone, become anything, and start over as many times as you need.

For singer/songwriter Jay Sanford, that was New York’s East Village. For years, the spaces below 14th Street carried a feeling that still lingers today, difficult to shake. Coming to terms with the fact that even the most defining chapters eventually end is no easy task. We often romanticize the past, yearning for a time that once seemed to glow so brightly. On his stirring alt-rock song “Hooked on a Dream,” Sanford: turns that realization into song – a stirring reckoning with a past that has slipped out of reach. When he sings, his voice carries a deep ache of mourning, yet also a strength born from no longer looking back. It’s a powerful moment of reflection that feels both deeply personal and universally understood.

Made you feel right at home
Even when you were alone
And when you didn’t see eye to eye
She made it hurt but she never did lie

Featured on his recently released album Big Tent Revival (independent, Jan. 30), “Hooked on a Dream” finds Sanford: turning memory into motion, channeling the restless energy of a past that still lingers . Sanford:, the mixed-genre project of songwriter and musician Jay Sanford, has been years in the making. He first introduced his sound on 2023’s The View Changes, which featured “Gone to Hell,” a standout track that drew early attention and amassed over 100K streams. Now, with Big Tent Revival, he builds on that foundation – harnessing the raw energy of the Lower East Side to deliver songs that feel earnest, immediate, and emotionally charged.

You want and you need her
Made you feel like you were the only one
She hit you and you loved it
Used you up, good, so you wrote the song
Hooked on a dream you know that’s gone

 “Hooked on a Dream” captures the pain of being haunted by memories of what once was, while also reckoning with the realization that you were taken for granted and must find the strength to let go. In that space between longing and release, there’s a bittersweet clarity. It becomes clear you’re chasing a dream that’s already gone. You’re clutching at the past like sand through your fingers, something you’ll never reclaim. Yet within that realization comes a quiet resolve – a willingness to finally loosen your clutch on the past. What remains is not just loss, but the hard-earned freedom that comes with accepting the truth and moving on. Static guitar strums beneath rich, raspy vocals, heightening the song’s emotional pull.

Built to last is a thing of the past
You ain’t as good and you ain’t as fast
Thinking ’bout the times you wound up trashed
You played your part but you’ve been recast

Evoking the raw, gritty soft-rock vibes reminiscent of the Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox Twenty, “Hooked on a Dream” delivers a gripping dose of nostalgia.

Anchored by earnest vocals and a driving guitar backbone, the track captures that familiar early-2000s alt-rock spirit while still feeling renewed. An emotional urgency runs throughout, each lyric reaching back toward something just out of grasp. The production powerfully balances polish with a lived-in roughness. The album follows suit, with each song on Big Tent Revival carrying that same sense of yearning and intensity.

“It’s a college alt-rock tune about a past that is no longer there,” Sanford: tells Atwood Magazine. “It takes the mid-late 2000s East Village, where I spent a lot of time after moving into the city, and uses it as a setting, or person, or time, nostalgia, all up for interpretation to the listener.”

It’s a reflection steeped in longing, using music as a lens to revisit a time and place that no longer exists in the same way. Sanford: closes the distance between memory and reality, leaving listeners to wander through the echoes of a chapter now evaporated.

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 © Megan Rainwater

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