Tamara & the Dreams
Melbourne-based indie-pop gem Tamara & the Dreams has returned with her new single, ‘Successful Bisexual’. Written while backpacking across the Greek Islands, the long-awaited track, the band’s first since 2022, is a frantic, heart-on-sleeve anthem about chasing experience, embracing desire, and living every moment to the fullest.
With Tamara’s signature blend of wit and sincerity, the single captures the magic of self-discovery: the exhilarating journey of becoming who you truly are. “I wrote the song ‘Successful Bisexual’ into my voice memo app on a ferry while backpacking in the Greek Islands,” Tamara explains. “After so many years of not feeling comfortable in my skin I finally felt ‘me’ — I finally felt confident, hot, independent — like I had ‘come of age’.”
While much of the track soars with freedom and possibility, a thread of relentless anxiety weaves through its lyrics, capturing the universal fear that life may slip away before you’ve achieved everything you intended to do. “I wanted to capture that feeling of running out of time, being afraid of the end of youth, and this imagined age when you have to ‘grow up’ and stop living life to the fullest,” says Tamara. “The lyrics ‘age another year’ are repeated, and I tried to capture the urgency and finiteness of life, how scary growing up is, but also how time is our greatest gift.”
The fleeting nature of time became painfully real for Tamara, when her life was upended just before the single’s original release in 2024. While hitchhiking through Europe, she received the devastating news that her mum had died. “Just as I was about to release the song, I got the call that my mum, my best friend in the world, suddenly died out of nowhere from a brain aneurysm,” she recalls.
After such a profound loss, the song’s central theme has taken on a new significance: “Now I have this song about being scared of aging and wanting to live life to the fullest, that’s taken on new meaning because you truly never know what’s around the corner”, Tamara explains. “I’m no longer scared of aging, now I understand getting old is a privilege that not everyone gets, and I want to make the most out of every day I get to spend living.
Delivered with unwavering honesty, an entire life philosophy is distilled into ‘Successful Bisexual’. It’s a postcard from a world where reckless abandon, freedom, and joy collide with the ever-present passage of time. As Tamara says — and lives by: “The antidote to grief is a lust for life.”