the year. Gabe Saporta of Midtown became the group's manager; Saporta viewed Jorgensen as a younger brother-type of figure and wanted to help him avoid issues in the music industry that he experienced with Midtown. After the producer the band enlisted for their debut went missing, Saporta put them in contact with Ariel Rechtshaid. They recorded over five weeks from August 2002 at El Barrio in Van Nuys, California and Standard Electrical Recorders in Venice Beach, California. Rechtshaid acted as the producer and handled engineering, with additional engineering from Chris Fudurich. Chris Knight served as the assistant at Standard Electrical. Rechtshaid mixed the recordings, before they were mastered by Brian Gardner at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood, California. Jorgensen later said that they made the album "little too early [into their career] and rushed into the process". Composition Musically, the sound of Dream to Make Believe mixed space rock in the vein of Hum with emo pop in the style of the Get Up Kids. Comparisons were drawn musically and lyrically to Jimmy Eat World and Further Seems Forever, while Jorgensen's vocals were compared to Legends of Rodeo frontman John Ralston. Jorgensen wrote the majority of the material "in my room with the walls of my own skull as pretty much the only things to bounce ideas off of". DeCicco said they were attempting to differ themselves from their contemporaries with the space rock sound, they "wanted to almost bring like Thursday meets Radiohead and put it somewhere in between, and just kind of give it a little more." The album is based on one theme, which evolved out of a poetry class Jorgensen took while in college. Though he disliked the class, he realized "since you're forced to write in one specific way your originality can come through." Jorgensen's lyrics were centered around inspection, with elements of darkness and melancholy, and tackling the topics of dreaming, space and time-travel. Rechtshaid contributed synthesizers to the recordings. The opening track is an instrumental titled "Armor for Sleep", which lasts for 45 seconds. Release In the midst of recording the band went through membership changes, with drummer Nash Breen and guitarist PJ DeCicco, both of whom were cousins of Jorgensen and members of Prevent Falls, joining shortly at the end of August 2002. They then supported Midtown on their US tour in September 2002. Demos of songs that would feature on the