A detailed look at the new single “Mushroom Trip,” how a real redwood misadventure becomes a communal indie folk song, and what the arrangement and lyrics reveal about friendship and memory.
“Mushroom Trip” turns a February 2019 psilocybin experience in California’s redwoods into a song that prizes precise, absurd detail as proof of friendship.
Elodia shares lead vocal duties with Elora and Hudson Freeman so the recording reads like three friends reconstructing a shared memory, not a single narrator’s retelling.
The chorus frames the song’s argument plainly: the friends who stick around through embarrassing, banal, or surreal moments are “the real ones.”
# What the song is
"Mushroom Trip" is a lush, dreamy indie folk single by Brooklyn drummer, composer, and writer Chase Elodia. The recording features Elora and Hudson Freeman on shared vocals and is presented as a vivid, affectionate retelling of a group psilocybin experience in the California redwoods. Atwood Magazine premiered the track ahead of Elodia's debut vocal album Real Ones, due October 23, 2026 on Long Echo Records.
# Lyrics and musical approach
The lyrics favor concrete, oddly specific images—"Cryin' 'bout the color green while you're stuck in the redwood forest"—and trace the experience as an escalating comedy. A mysterious chocolate-covered dose, fasting to accelerate the medicine, and increasingly unmoored moments appear as short, cinematic lines. The arrangement supports those images with dreamy indie folk textures and communal vocal moments where singers pass fragments back and forth until they converge on the chorus.
# Vocal arrangement and storytelling
Elodia intentionally split the vocal duties with Elora and Hudson Freeman to recreate the experience of friends remembering a shared event together. Each singer takes a piece of the story—individual fragments about who was spinning, drooling, or crying—then the three voices converge. Elodia describes the choice as a way to capture how a single episode sits inside years of friendship: the track doesn't feel like solitary recollection but like friends rebuilding a memory in real time.
# Theme: friendship at its most ridiculous
The song's thesis is direct: fidelity in friendship shows up during the smallest, dumbest, and most embarrassing moments. The humor and absurdity—crying over a color, thinking you are a tree—are treated as the exact details that make the memory worth keeping. Elodia calls the experience "miraculously awe-inspiring and mind-altering, utterly cliché and cringe," and frames the people who stay through that as the "real ones."
# Context in Elodia's work
"Mushroom Trip" follows the earlier single "Baggu Bag Baby" and sets the stage for Real Ones, an eight-song record that marks Elodia's debut as a vocalist. The album centers his own life experiences—friendships, encounters, and memories—bringing humor and playfulness to the foreground of his songwriting.
# Practical listening notes
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