Worms and Faith: a Conversation with William Banks about Car World

I first came across William Banks––as I’m sure a lot of other people did––through a viral video. A phone camera pans to a young man with a distinctly receded hairline, canvassing about something, somewhere seemingly on the west side of Manhattan. Something catches his eye. “Hey,” he says. “Mr. Baldwin, would you like to learn more about Car World?” The camera pans over and Alec Baldwin is viewing this man with rapt curiosity from an open car window. His black SUV comes to a stop. The young man hands him a light blue pamphlet and continues: “It’s a planet in an alternate dimension where I lived. I had sex with Quuarux. And Quuarux is the leader of Car World.” 

Alec Baldwin looks up and down from pamphlet to young man, trying to determine what exactly he is being confronted with. He isn’t sure. He places the pamphlet in his lap and his car continues on. “You look exhausted,” he says. 

“Thank you,” the young man says, a smirk on his face. 

The initial excitement of the video is in its simple absurdity: Alec Baldwin being taken in by a fake canvasser, trying to spread awareness about another planet. But the excitement grows more complex at the end of the video: the smirk. The smirk at the end is our shared smirk as insiders. Those understanding that what was being offered in the pamphlet was truly nothing besides a desire to provoke frustrated curiosity by a generation not so well versed in post-everything internet culture. The fact that the more or less hieroglyph of this generational frustration––with his iconically furrowed brow and concern for the young man’s sleep patterns––is handed the object of provocation makes the joy only that much greater. It is too good to be true. It is perfect. 

But there is also another layer of joy to this video contained in that smirk, which was not completely clear to me until I sat down and actually spoke with William Banks. And that layer has to do with a central ambiguity around the “reality” of the project that William is deeply dedicated to guarding. On a certain level, we are all Alec Baldwin. And the more you look into Car World, and engage with it, this fact begins to grow in greater intensity. There is no in-joke for you to join in on––at least if you are speaking with William. You might get a smirk out of him, but you will not get him to break character about being from another planet and needing to get back to stop the enslavement of an alien species he’s grown attached to. 

There is a certain kind of contemporary humor that seems deeply resistant to being understood. And the only way to find yourself on the inside of this kind of joke is to accept this at the door. That there is nothing to get in any traditional sense. Perhaps this is the by-product of thirty plus years of heavy-handed satire being the “gold standard” of comedy, while, simultaneously, the world continued to plunge into an absurdity that could no longer be joked about so simply. Life started racing to catch up with comedy. And then it kept going and left comedy in its dust. 

What arrived in the wake of all this––at least at the independent level––has seemingly been two things: one, a new form of cultural satire that is much edgier but a great deal less witty; and, two, an absurdism that has grown less and less concerned with having any relevance to the world outside of it. But the enjoyment of either requires you to make the very same and very crucial transaction upon initially receiving them: you must accept, as a starting point, all the things you previously thought were meaningful and just are not so. And the deeper you can accept this fact, the deeper your pleasure can be. 

But this is a high of diminishing returns. Eventually your pleasure in edgy satire will transform into plain cynicism. Or your enjoyment in taking part in a never-ending maze of the unintelligible will spit you out and you will realize that you haven’t gotten any closer to knowing how to deal with the world you’ve been presented with. This, at first, was how I had come to understand Car World and William’s dedication to it.

But when I sat down with William I was struck by something very different. Namely the realization that he is someone who cares deeply about what he is making and who he is making it for. William is a performer first and foremost, and he is seemingly most interested in the gray area between performance and real life. This interest permeated through Quuarux: The Sex Ride––the impetus for this interview––in which participants, always by themselves, sit in a car and experience an interactive performance curated to their individual sentiments and energies, at the conclusion of which they are encouraged perform an orgasm and have their picture taken while doing so. And the interest was there during every moment of our conversation in which William refused to speak of Car World in terms of a project or piece or anything besides a real life experience. 

But this was not ambiguity or absurdity for their sake alone. I was not being shut out in my conversation nor were the people in the Sex Ride being made fun of. Rather, we were all being invited into William’s world and asked to take part in it despite our confusion by it––despite knowing there will always be a smirk reserved for William and William alone. This, I think, has to do with an idea of faith that he is trying to get across to people that might typically be skeptical or downright resistant about such a thing. But instead of the traditional presentation of faith––that of admitting your ignorance to the grand designs of the world and allowing the unknown to exist within the lacing of the universe and its construction––William has built it into the sense of illusion that pervades the entire thing. The act of faith is that of knowing that there is a crucial in-joke that only one person has the key to and that he will never share it with you. But his keeping of it is not because he wishes to make fun of you. It is because he wishes to make a place in which you might suspend your self-consciousness and worry just a little bit more than you typically would elsewhere. At least, if you choose to act in faith, this is how you might look at it.

I truly do not know if I find Car World to be personally enjoyable or insightful. But I think this is sort of the point. What I do know is that I admire William quite a lot for his dedication to creating a space in which such a confusion can arise, and I admire his dedication to not providing anyone any respite from it. 

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So tell me the story of Car World. How did we arrive here? 

So Car World refers to a planet in another universe that I went to and lived on for ten years. And now I’ve come back to earth and I tell people about this planet that I’ve lived on and they choose to believe me and follow me and listen to me. It’s been a fun opportunity to talk to a lot of people and share my story with a lot of different people. And for them to believe me so fully and to devote themselves to me. 

That’s sort of what we do on Earth World. But the goal of them devoting themselves to me is we want to help people become more entwined with their community. Car World Nation is like a Membership program where people can join Car World and be a Member and a part of it. So it’s not just me and my friends that are in it, but there are actually 530 Members worldwide. And they donate money to me. And they give me their phone number. And the idea is that they’re never allowed to leave. So they stay in contact with me through a communication infrastructure that I make in their branch––which is just the city that they live in. Some of these places only have one Member. Some have two or three. But then some have like twelve, or twenty-five, or thirty. 

It’s fun to put people into these communities. And sometimes they have meetings about Car World. And it feels good to give people the opportunity to come together like that. 

In terms of managing the lore of Car World, do you find your disciples messing the storyline as they break off into their branches and meetings? 

Not really. I’ve had some zoom calls with the different branches where I’ve done some questions and answers. And I’ve answered a lot of people’s questions so I think mostly everyone is on the same page. 

I wanted to ask you about a few of the seemingly key characters of the Car World mythology. The Mechanics and the Attendants. 

Right, so the Attendants are the native species of Car World. Instead of a head they have a third hand. And their heart has evolved to be a heart and a brain. Because they don’t have one in their heads. They’re like a subjugated species that’s indigenous to Car World. And they’re enslaved and abused by Quuarux and some of the worms that rule there. And part of my mission of trying to go back there is so that I can try to save this species and free them from this war. 

Online I saw a video that mentioned you were eating an Attendant? 

Yeah, I brought some back with me to Earth World. I used to eat them in Car World, and I continue to do so here. But it was a good relationship. It was humane. 

Could you explain how it was humane? 

In the sense that I gave them a good life before eating them. And it went to a good cause because I got to eat the attendant. And it wasn’t any sort of act of aggression. It was survival. So, I don’t think it was malicious to do that. It was just something that I did and wanted to do. 

Another big factor of Car World that’s important to note is that when I went to Car World, all the Mechanics wanted to have sex with me. Because Quuarux, the leader of Car World, told all of them that I was the most desirable being. 

And who are the Mechanics? 

The offspring of Humans and Worms. When Quuarux was sending their children to come find me on earth… so after the events of the Sex Ride, where Quuarux has sex with me, a year goes by where Quuarux is sending Mechanics––half Humans, half Worms––to come find me. And they kept bringing people that looked like me back to Car World. And Quuarux would have sex with them and realize that they weren’t me. And then they would banish them into the sex dungeon. 

There’s a sex dungeon? 

Yeah. So when I eventually went to Car World, because I broke up with the first Mechanic who I thought was my girlfriend but was actually my daughter, the next day she turned me over to a Mechanic in the area. I was kidnapped and taken to this planet and that’s how I lived there for ten years. 

I wanted to ask you about cultishness as it relates to media consumption. 

It’s definitely over-saturated in media, I feel. A lot of things include cults. That’s why people are quick to call what we’re doing a cult. Because it’s so common. There are so many documentaries about cults and so it’s always on people’s minds. But it’s not. Because it’s just a bunch of people. And we’re not doing anything bad. I would say it’s quite zeitgeist-y to call what we’re doing a cult. Because it’s not. 

What do you think is going on with that impulse? I think the way people consume things today often feels like a step further than fanhood. Or simply liking something. Especially with how niche and isolated the experience of finding something you like can feel. Like to wade through all this information and media to find something you connect with often gives it this texture of being special to you specifically. Do you think about this much? 

Yeah, I mean cult can also mean like cult classic. Like a movie that provokes people to be super fans. And it’s this feeling of being a part of the movie. I guess in that sense what Car World is doing could be considered similar because people can access it. It’s not just some TV show they watch and view as disconnected from them. Car World is something that has happened in reality. And people can join and become a Member. And I’ll talk to them and tell them that they’re important. The accessibility of that does feel different. 

Although when people say that Car World is a cult they mean that it’s a bunch of people brainlessly following some like malicious leader. But I’m not malicious and people aren’t brainlessly following me. I’m a good person and people are choosing to listen. 

Regarding the community groups that you’re organizing, you mentioned that the purpose was to improve the communities that the Members are within. Does that mean the community outside of the Car World community? 

Improve the community that is Car World nation in that area. So, they’re encouraged to help one another. But not necessarily for people outside of them. But they’re encouraged to help each other. And recruit more people. Ideally, they could recruit everyone and then we would be helping everyone. If everyone joined. 

Could you tell me about the Gas Wars? 

The Gas Wars were the initial wars that led to the Attendants being enslaved. It was an expansion from North Carmerica to South Carmerica lead by Quuarux in which they pretty much rounded up the Attendants that were free in South Carmerica and enslaving them. It was something that I objected to at the time and led me to leave and go to Gasia and Carupe where Terminus X was the ruler. And there we tried to stop it. But the wars were all based on resources and trying to get more gas. 

The first one successfully ended but then a second one started and then I left to come back to Earth World. And so now I’m trying to return to help end that one as well. But one moment in Earth World is worth three thousand moments in Car World so a lot of time has gone by in the four years that I’ve been back on earth.  

The moment that you first encountered Quuarux happened after you nearly died, right? 

Yeah, I was locked inside a walk-in freezer and almost died. I was working at this company called People’s Pops and it was the very end of a shift. And I got locked into their walk-in freezer and couldn’t get out. So I was calling 911 a bunch and eventually they came and got me out, but it was really traumatic. I accepted my death in there. I thought I was going to die. And then I encountered Quuarux that evening. 

So, let’s talk about this installation. Quuarux: The Sex Ride. What all is going on here? 

This is a culmination of the past four years of Car World since I’ve been back on Earth World. A lot of the art in here is images of me made by Members from different regions. There are also some outfits in here including a medallion made by an indigenous bead worker in Toronto and a sash that we took from the NXIVM headquarters which we took and tried to repurpose for good. 

What was the impetus to go into the NXIVM headquarters? 

The host in Albany where we were staying for the Miracles Tour said that the headquarters were near, so we went to check it out and a window was just cracked open. So, we went in and looked around. And on the way out I went into a closet and found the sashes.

I was talking to you a little bit before we started the interview about the energy this magazine was organized around. And how there were both positive and negative impulses that motivated its creation. As in there were things that we wanted to bring into this world, but there were also things we were experiencing which caused us a great deal of strife that we saw the magazine as a means of fighting against a little. A central grievance with publishing. I’m wondering if Car World is organized upon anything similar. Any kind of central gripe with the world it is existing within?

I don’t think there’s necessarily a central gripe. I feel like part of it is trying to give people faith. Help them believe in God. I think some people that might have a gripe with standardized religion would come to Car World and ask, “Oh, is this ironic? Is this ironically about God?” But then they meet me and learn the principles and then they see that it’s genuinely about God. And that we are trying to give people an alternative path toward faith when they would reject traditional religion. It gives people that route toward spirituality. 

Do you mind expanding on your concept of faith that you’re hoping to spread to others? 

I believe in God. And I’ve had some significant periods where I’ve felt really close to God, and I feel a spirit in my body. I’ve had a few near-death experiences as well. I had cancer when I was ten. I got locked inside of a walk-in freezer. I totaled my car when I was a teenager. I flipped it and survived. So, I just feel like I’m here for a reason and I’m trying to figure out what that reason is. And I feel like Car World is that reason but maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s something beyond it that I can do. 

Within your symbology, the car functions as a pretty central totem. 

Well, when I first went to Car World, I broke up with my girlfriend in a car. And I thought that I just had a bad perception of cars. So, I went to a hypnotist to try to get over it. And I was hypnotized and saw a worm being phased into a car. It was the first thing that I saw. And I was like “Oh it’s Car World. I’ve gone to this place.” And thought that I was just hypnotized but then I stayed there and found out that it was real. Then I came back, and the Mechanics continued to come for me. They haven’t come as much lately. These Mechanics that were sent by Quuarux. We had a lot of them showing up earlier in the movement but haven’t seen as many recently.

Why do you think that is? 

I don’t know. I think the Car World that I knew has died off. Because of the time difference. I think whatever is going on over there, I’ve become less of a priority to them. I haven’t been back. I’m going to go back when I have twelve Apostles. So far, I only have six. 

Why do you need twelve apostles? 

There’s a Bridgekeeper that guards the dimensions between Earth world and Car World and he demanded that I have twelve people with Tat Passes in order to come back. 

You have a Car World tattoo? 

I have one. Mines like the thirteenth though so it doesn’t really count in the Bridgekeeper’s eyes. All the apostles have to get one though. Director Russell Katz has one. 

I wanted to ask you about the use of alienation in connecting with others. When I think of things that I find appealing in the art world, I find myself attracted to things that alienate certain people. And part of the joy I get out of the thing in question is being someone who gets it, but the other part is there being people that do not get it at all. I was wondering what you thought about this dynamic? What do you think about entertaining and exciting insiders but provoking and alienating outsiders? 

I think that’s interesting. I think that dynamic definitely functions inside of Car World. Like the Supper we’re having tomorrow for example. Members get to eat but if you’re not a Member you don’t get to eat. And there’s about a 50/50 split of people coming. And there will be hors d'oeuvres being served from a five-course meal based on a story we’ll be telling, but if you’re not a Member you won’t get to have any of the food. So, we kind of use that experience to recruit people. Because if people are on the outside, they see the experience of the inside and get jealous and then decide to join. 

But it doesn’t work for everyone. Like I have friends who care about me who won’t join. And there are a bunch of people who are curious about Car World and who come to the shows but won’t join. But I do think there is something simply about being a Member that is attractive to some people. Like a lot of people will just join without thinking much about it. Like “Hell yeah, whatever!” And they’ll message in the chat like “Beep, beep, honk!” because they think it’s all about cars or something, which it isn’t. 

But there is a reward to being an insider versus being an outsider. And you can join any time and receive that reward. 

I wanted to return to faith. The faith that you’re hoping to spread through Car World, is it based off of any western religion? 

I guess it’s a blend of things. I grew up Christian, but Director Russell Katz grew up Jewish. I would say Christianity is definitely like my home religion. My home God. But I think all God is the same concept, though I don’t know much about eastern religions. Though I like what I’ve read. 

I took a Jewish studies and Islamic studies class in college and that was the extent of my knowledge in those realms. 

Tell me about the dinners a little. It seems like an act of consumption is sort central to the rituals of Car World. 

The dinners are fun. We’ve done two so far and tonight will be our third. It’s based off the ten different beasts that sucked me off ten different ways in Car World. Which is heavily influenced by the Seder in Judaism. We pass around a plate and take turns telling stories of these different beasts from this day that I woke up in Car World and decided that I wanted to get sucked off ten different ways by different beasts. So, people read the stories and eat the meals and there are a few activities. 

I wanted to ask about sexuality and sexual pleasure as it ties to the ideas of faith and the general teachings of Car World. It appears to be a very sex positive group and much of the lore is tied up in sex. 

Right, like this is a sex ride that’s occurring here. I would say that there is an element of sexuality to Car World because the desire of Quuarux and how the Mechanics were sent for me. But overall, it’s just something that’s part of human nature so it just comes out in Car World and in the group. 

So it’s not really thought about too much? 

I mean pleasure is at the forefront of anything we do. Sexuality, eating, whatever. Devotion and love too. But it’s not the number one thing about Car World. It’s just a thing about Car World. And our focus changes often. Each event is different from the last. It’s a lot of fun to constantly reinvent what the experience is. 

Tell me a little more about Quuarux: The Sex Ride. 

So Quuarux: The Sex Ride gives riders the experience of me on October 14th, 2018. So they get locked in the freezer in the morning and then wake up in a car. And they begin driving the car and then a giant worm emerges and begins wrapping around the car. And they see that it’s this giant Quuarux alien. Then the worm goes around the corner and Actor Caroline Yost appears and talks to the driver, while people in black morph suits are in and outside of the car, moving it around. And I’m in the back seat with another person, also in black morph suits, and we’re using fans or smells or throwing inflatable things in their laps when Quuarux phases into the car. And then I begin touching them as they touch Quuarux. And there’s a vibrating seat and I have a vibrator in my morph suit that I use depending on if they sign up for The Love Ride or The Sex Ride. 

What’s the difference between the love ride and the sex ride? 

The Love Ride is no genitals and The Sex Ride includes genitals. 

As in you’re touching their genitals? 

Yeah, but over the clothes. 

And how far is that going? 

I mean pretty much all the way. Some people are really into it. People are acting like they’re cumming though no one has actually. But people are really feeling the magic of it. It’s been a lot of fun and we’re only halfway done. There’s twenty-four more people and we’ll see what their experience is. 

Anything else that has you excited right now? 

The biggest thing I’m excited about with Car World is the movement and people becoming Members. Once you join you are making an agreement that you are going to know me for the rest of my life and your life. Becoming a Member is a lifelong commitment to each other and our organization. Which I think is quite unique. I don’t think much else offers that kind of permanence. 

What happens if someone wants to leave after joining? 

We don’t let them. Or I’ve introduced a new thing where you can pay $300 as a processing fee to leave but no one will pay it. So people just leave the chat and I put them back in. And then they leave again and I put them back in. Then start complaining saying fuck Car World or something. And then the other Members will start to chime in and tell them not to say that. And they’ll begin supporting me in charging them $300. And then they’ll go “I donated $1 a year ago. Why am I in this fucking group chat?” And I just have to tell them that they chose Car World. Why would they want to leave? 

Since we’re not turning a profit, and are running really low on money, I thought that having people leave for $300 would ultimately be good for us. But no one’s paid that amount as of yet. 

Is impermanence something that you fear? 

Yes. I definitely like security and permanence gives me comfort. So, in that sense, Car World is something that can give me comfort. Because I have all these people that I know to varying degrees. Some I don’t know well but some I’ve developed a kind of friendship with because I’ve met some of them in real life. 

But often there is this issue of intimacy even with those people. Do they love me or do they love Car World? 

Is there a difference? 

They’re synonymous but also different. What I’m asking is do they love me for me? Or for Car World? And even though I am Car World, I want them to love me for me. Beyond it. 

Photos by Malik Chatman

Mowing: a Conversation with Neil Perry about his Upcoming Book Joy (or Something Darker, but Like It)

When asked how we came to write––or do any of the things that we do habitually for that matter––we typically have a well prepared story in mind. One that likely consists of two or three key moments, discoveries, or interactions that brought us out of our blank state of not doing a thing, and into a sculpted, defined being that does a thing.  

We tell these stories in this fashion to those who ask for a couple reasons: one, you simply need something to say. You can’t just stand there drooling from your open mouth. You need some way to account for how you have arrived at this moment as a person that does one thing and not another. And, two, more importantly, it is the only way that we can typically articulate the past. Maybe we can feel the past in a more genuine fashion––in its fluidity and messiness and its at times schizoid-associativeness––but we typically do not have the capacity to articulate it in a fashion that resembles this unless we are speaking to the most patient of audiences, which is very often not the case when the question, How did you come to do what you do arrives to us. 

But for all the past’s ambiguity there do exist moments of undeniable, near-objective importance within in our how-did-you-get-here stories. Neil Perry, the subject of this interview, exists for me as one of these moments. He was my first writing teacher in college, the first person to show interest in me as an artist, and the first person to suggest that I give writing some serious thought as a life choice. When I displayed insecurity in my work and reluctance to take it on as a serious endeavor (as a lot of young people will, and probably should, when faced with the possibility of art as a career path) he went so far to force my hand and publish a poem of mine without my permission in the student art’s journal to prove a point to me: it was good enough to give a shot. When I graduated he more or less held my hand through the process of applying and getting admitted into MFA programs and ever since has remained an invaluable guide in continuing on in writing and publishing. Sometimes the past is a collection of ghost stories––justifications for our actions by pointing at empty chairs and hallways. Other times something flesh-and-blood real will come along and direct us. 

The reception of art and literature can also feel like this. There are many books and films and art pieces I can recall and say that I began to act a certain way because the piece, the thing, influenced me to do so. Something was not known before the reception of the work in question, that once received and understood, life could not go on in the same fashion it had prior. But other times, perhaps more often, it is not like this. A piece’s effect on us will be confusing, mysterious, but haunting all the same. Our actions may change, but it will be gradual and unconscious, a slow shifting of behavior until we are forced to recognize by some accidental gaze into the mirror that something in us has changed. 

The way we connect with the art we are presented with is very much the same way in which we connect to the people that come in and out of our lives. We relate to it, we seek commonalities, we project ourselves into it. And we allow it to shape us either by conscious acceptance or unconscious filtration. Yet the way we talk about this process––this process of being shaped by art––can often feel stilted, untrue, and overly scientific. We begin to speak of the qualities of the piece. Or the overall achievement of the thing within the greater context of other pieces. These things, of course, are important, and maybe help explain why a great number of people have been moved and shaped by a given piece, but they do not help us account for, in a truthful fashion, why we, as individuals, were moved. Because that accounting requires more than a simple description of technical qualities and achievements. That accounting requires an accounting of the self as well. 

In his upcoming book Joy (or Something Darker, but Like It) Neil attempts to provide such an accounting. It is a book about parenting and being a person as much as it is a book about poetry. Each essay is crafted not simply as a literary analysis, but rather as an attempt to find one’s life within poetry and poems and to use these works as guides. There are very few people I know that have been able to meld their writing life so seamlessly with their actual life, and these essays are a testament to that. And over the summer I was lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with Neil at his bustling nine acres in Farmville, Virginia––a home full of chickens, dogs, kids taking Spanish classes, and many, many books of poetry––and talk about some of these things. 

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A big part of the first few essays of the book is the idea of wrestling with the poles of experience: the subjective, imagined world bumping up against the agreed upon objective world. And you consider this through the role of parenting, and the tension of allowing your kids to entertain the subjective versus informing them of the greater reality surrounding them. Where discovery can lead you and where it maybe needs to be confronted or railed in. The opening essay uses Edward Thomas as a reference point to this idea in relation to creative curiosity. You use the word interest, and explain it as a pure creative speculation of one’s world for no greater reason than to be dumbfounded. And being dumbfounded for no reason beyond the act opens you up to a kind of self preservation. Maybe you could talk about this idea of interest and its relation to personal sustainability. 

I think in the essay I was pulling that word interest out the first poem I was talking about in the piece, which is the poem “Blenheim Oranges”––one of my very favorite poems written by anybody ever––which has the line toward the end of it, when the writer is looking in at empty houses, “I am something like that, / only I am not dead,/ Still breathing and interested / In the house that is not dark” and that rhyme, still, gives me chills on the back of my neck. It just did. The dead and the interested is such an incredible rhyme. But the line made me think why, in that moment, when Thomas is mourning the loss of so much of his world in WWI, and he himself is about to go to war, why would he pull that word out? That word that is so detached and scientific. That he’s interested in the house that is not dark. So, you know, he’s saying he’s interested in life. 

And this was one of the earliest essays that I wrote for the collection so I didn’t have the structural way I was going to build all of them out, but they all ended up being centered around an abstract concept like that anyway––like interest, or faith, or doubt, or imperfection––but so I was thinking about how that idea of being interested is like a lifeline. That if you’re not interested, what the hell are you doing here? Like when my students are just sitting in class like bumps on a log with no interest or preparation for class and I feel myself getting bothered. But it’s not because I care what grade they get. That’s not important to me. I just want them to be interested. Like plugged in.

And in the context of parenting your job is to try to model behavior as much as it is to teach it. So I began thinking on how much of that interest is native to us. I think quite a bit. And how much is sort of beaten out of people over the course of their lives? And how much can I model as a father? And I guess the answer is I don’t know. None of the essays, I hope, come with some obvious conclusion on how to parent. Because obviously you make tons of mistakes. Just like you do when writing poems. Because every poem you write, to some extent, is a failure. And so is every move you make as a parent. And so I was trying to think of that interest as an active awareness of the world. But also how do you make sure your kids are plugged into the world and themselves in that vital way? That way that Thomas sees as his last sort of life raft.

A major thrust of the book seems to be an idea of play for play’s sake. Or interest for interest’s sake. And avoiding the pitfalls of over-valuing things like accomplishment and achievement. And this opening essay does a great job of keying readers into this idea of pure activity. Allowing yourself to be profoundly interested in your work or in the world for no reason beyond it is important to do so.

Well I hope it keeps me humble also. I was thinking a lot about the advice you get when you start parenting when I was writing these early essays because the kids were very young at that point and we were reading a lot of parenting books. And the vibe of those parenting books is basically I have this advice that I understand and I am giving it to you so that you can understand it and do things the correct way. And I always felt from the start that just wasn’t really possible. There’s no real correct way to parent. Sure don’t leave them in a house alone when they’re four, but it’s a fallacy to tell someone who’s raising an individual, raising a human, that there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. So I wanted to investigate this idea of just being interested in the process. Understanding just being plugged into the world as, like, pretty good parenting. Or as good enough. Because that’s all you can do. Just see if you can keep them plugged in. And stay plugged in yourself.

I want success for my kids, sure. But more than anything I just want them to grow up and be decent, happy people. That’s really the ultimate goal. That’s how you win. Material stuff, what colleges they go to, all of that is of course important, but it’s not the important thing about being a parent.

The other thing behind all of this, one of the overarching goals of writing these essays was being interested––and maybe that’s why I put that essay first ––because that’s how I think about my relationship to poetry. On some level I’m just fascinated with poetry. I don’t think it’s gonna send me into a transportive ecstasy. I don’t think poetry is my religion. I am just really interested in the mystery of what language can do. So in that, I was just wondering what it would be like if I wrote essays where I read poems and pulled something out of them that allowed me to think about my own life. So not doing a reading of the poem where I’m just trying to analyze them from a purely literary perspective, but seeing if there is any way that this poem can teach me anything about being a person. Or about being a parent. I think I said in the copy materials for the book that I’m looking for advice in the poems. Which is maybe hilarious because you probably don’t want to look to poets for advice on a lot of life’s problems, but that’s what I wanted to do because that’s how I read poems. And to some extent I think that’s how everyone reads. Like when I ask a group of students who are completely new to poetry about a poem, almost always someone will say Well, I like this poem because I can really relate to this part of it. And sometimes we dismiss that reaction as immature or ground level but really that’s how we understand most things no matter how much we know. We relate to them.

It’s interesting you bring up this idea of looking at poems with less of a literary perspective when trying to understand them. There is this discussion in the book toward the end about meter that gets at this. Meter and form can be very alienating if you’re approaching them for the first time and you’re confronted with the idea that there might be a right way to read a poem. But the way you discuss them makes them seem much more approachable. And I think you do that by reframing the poem as an artifact of life rather than an artifact of literature. And thus these technical aspects are sort of reframed not as things you need to know to get the right answer, but as things that might just allow you to get a little closer to a piece of life, which, if it is a piece of life, you accept from the outset that you can never harness the wholeness of ever anyway. 

In the 90s and early 2000s the word accessibility was thrown around the poetry world a lot usually as a kind of epithet. Like this poem is an accessible poem. And they would be describing someone like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver. And I’m not speaking to their literary quality but to me all poems are accessible. You just read them! It just is there. No one would say a piece of music is more or less accessible than any other piece of music. You just sit there and listen to it. And take away from it what you will. And so I’ve always thought of poetry that way. And probably the main reason that I think people don’t read poetry is that they seem to understand it another way. They think they have to be able to understand some certain thing about it before they’re allowed to access it. And in these readings I just wanted to approach these poems and see if they could help me deal with some things I was dealing with in my life. Notably worrying about screwing up raising my kids. 

And it’s not like there are not more complicated things to learn about poetry. You can understand meter or you cannot. And that’s fine. But if you understand the technical things for instance it opens another avenue for experiencing the poem. But it’s not necessarily a greater or better avenue. It’s just another avenue. 

There’s an essay in the collection concerned with the idea of craft. You define it in the following way: “If it means merely a prescribed set of skills being used in historically set patterns, like say a weaver’s first true go at a basket, or a carpenter's well lathed rail, maybe not. But if we mean by craft an attention to something other than the self, or maybe an attention to the self as part of a larger process, not as the full progenitor of the process, then we might be onto something.” I think this is an idea on craft––learning the technical aspects of your trade in order to take part in the larger tradition––seems to either get missed by a lot by people or met with a lot of resistance. It really can be a difficult thing to convince someone of, but I think the way you articulate it does a great job of making sense of the reasoning on why you should give it a shot.

I think the primary complaint about form is that it’s an obstacle to saying what you want to say. But I want the obstacle. I’m afraid of what I have to say. I’m afraid if I just say it, it won’t be right. So for me the obstacle offers the opportunity to say it but in a mediated way. For me it’s about removing as much of the self from the poem as possible. And I’m not saying that in some modernist way. Like there’s no such thing as a self. My poems are full of me. But I want to remove the self-importance. I don’t want my poems to just be an expression of me. I want them to be an expression of poetry. And meter lets me mediate that space. But also speak to a larger tradition. 

The critic Gillian White wrote a book called Lyric Shame where she talks about this––about the fear of the self in poetry. There is basically a throughline of poets being embarrassed about poetry she suggests. Elizabeth Bishop has that quote where she says “There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.” And Goeffry Hill says, and this is one of my favorite quotes, “The goal of the poet should be expressiveness, not self expression.” And that distinction I have always just loved. So that’s what I’m always going for. And the contemporary poetry that I don’t find satisfying seems to be just a kind of self on the page. Without thinking about how the self is engaging with larger traditions. Both of craft or other things. And I’m not saying metered poetry is better than free verse. That’s not true. There are plenty of free verse poets who engage with these larger ideas and traditions in their own way but for me meter and rhyme specifically have become ways to create that mediation. To aim for expressiveness, as opposed to self-expression. Kind of like the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. You’d much rather be righteous. 

The Geoffrey Hill essay is something worth talking about as it relates to the idea of completeness within your work. And the idea of achievement. Moving out of the state of creative excitement and making an artistic object. I’m interested in this in relation to seeking satisfaction through achievement. In the Geoffrey Hill essay you talk about this a little. You say, “The true solitude I alluded to earlier, which you might equate with a sort of true faith which often eludes Hill’s speakers cannot be involved with the god of self love.” Maybe you could walk through the development of that essay and the god of self-love that gets proposed and how that relates to the idea of pursuing achievement. 

Well I think I pulled that from a Hill poem. From his book Tenebrae. Hill has always been really important to me. He’s the only author besides George Scarbrough that I’ve actually done, like, book collecting for. I think I have all of his books in both hardback and paperback and from both England and the U.S. Besides maybe the first books. Was that me fetishizing an author? Absolutely. But also there is something about his work that really moves me. Part of it is I’m really intrigued by how his work sits in the twentieth-century canon. He’s often accused of being too difficult. And his response to that was that difficulty is democratic. If your poems are purposefully simple, they’re just propaganda, he would say. His poems are difficult, but he would say that anyone can still understand them because anyone is still a human with a brain. That’s his attitude. And I always found that both pompous and fascinating all at the same time. My work doesn’t really resemble Hill’s work because he was just so, so, so much smarter than I’ll ever be, but that attitude and outlook I’ve always found very interesting. 

But I also love his approach to belief and to religion. He was married to an Anglican minister but he himself was never a professed Christain. He was a professed unbeliever. But he knew more about Christianity than any other contemporary poet. He’s often referred to as a religious poet even though he was not, by his own admission, religious. But so he was someone who thought deeply about what it means to believe and what it means to not believe. And how doubt can be both generative and also sad. He would often say that he wanted to believe. That it would be very comforting. But he could never intellectually bring himself there. And I think that’s maybe a loose sort of characterization of my own spirituality. I’m fascinated by the idea of mystery and believing in things but I am certainly not a professed Christian. I have gone to church. I’ve gone regularly and even taught Sunday school. But I’m more interested in the mystery that sits in the middle of the Bible than I am in saying all of it is true. Or any other religion for that matter. I find that mystery in a lot of spaces. And Hill probes that uniquely for me. And religion for him I think is a lot like what we were talking about with form. It offered him an opportunity to get beyond the self. And that’s one reason why the doubt is hurtful for him. Because on one level he believes that the doubt means he just can’t get out of his own ego. Maybe that’s where I am too. But with that god of self-love, I think he is saying that some people replace even the generative doubt with just a full belief in themselves. And for him that is destructive. 

Because that same book, Tenebrae, is also about Englishness. And about looking back on the imperial history of England and thinking about how that also comes out of a sort of national self-love. And a very, very destructive one.

This idea of faith that’s being brought up through the Geoffrey Hill essay is one that’s not ideal or maybe one that might be difficult to accept for a lot of people. It’s a faith that both understands wholeness is not possible in the pursuit of whatever you’re engaged in, but understands the pursuit or desire itself is undeniable and must go on. Learning to cherish the fact that you’ll never have a whole grasp of the thing but you cannot help yourself from trying to obtain it.

Yeah, and a second ago you were talking about ambition, right? Or wholeness as far as creating work is concerned. And to me that’s how you have to think about it. You have to recognize to some extent all poems are not going to be completed. And if that’s where you put your faith into––if your goal is your own ambition then you’ll never be satisfied. And I know that. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t feel petty. And wish for more success. But you are in the end here for that craft part.

I think specifically with you that question is really interesting. The ambition question. I remember talking to you maybe five or so years ago when I was really just getting going on my own writing life, and I was younger and very hungry and ambitious and was understanding getting better at writing in sort of an athletic fashion. Like putting in reps. Getting to the desk and putting in the hours. And I remember you telling me that you had this house full of kids, a bunch of dogs, a demanding teaching job, and you said basically you weren’t getting to the desk to write as often as you used to.

I don’t even have a desk.

Well it made me think of this story that Steve Yarbrough told me a few years ago about Tim O’Brien who is a friend of his. It was about twenty-five years after The Things They Carried came out and Tim had, at that point, pretty well established himself as a very important figure in the American fiction world. But at that point he was in the midst of a pretty famous hiatus from writing. The last book he’d put out was in 2002. The two of them were at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and having a drink and Tim simply asked Steve if he ever took breaks from writing. To which Steve said something along the lines of, Yeah, little ones sometimes. And Tim apparently said, Yeah, well I’m in the middle of a big one right now. And when Steve got around to asking why Tim had taken so much time off all Tim said to him was that his dad hadn’t been there for him growing up and that he would like to be there for his kids while they grew up. And they left it at that. 

I thought that was so interesting in relation to you because it’s basically the complete opposite of your thinking. Tim O’Brien saw art as this thing that was butting up against his life. Something that he couldn’t have while also living a full life. Or that it wasn’t compatible with family life and everything else. And sometimes I feel that way too: that I’m clutching to the work and pushing everything and everyone else out because of it. And it becomes this very morbid, isolated thing sometimes. Like an addiction of sorts. But this book, and the way you’ve been talking to me about writing for however many years, is much different from that. And I think these things we’re talking about, resisting the allure of achievement and the god of self-love are tied into that. 

But it comes with costs, right? Like right now in the poetry world to get a lot of a certain kind of success you have to be pretty dedicated to hustling. Doing social media, book tours that you’ve either paid for and booked yourself or you’ve paid a publicist to put together for you. And some of that is completely incompatible with having a family. And so, as there have always been, there are structural inequalities for who gets to be a writer. For instance a middle-aged mother of school-aged kids has perhaps a smaller chance of succeeding in the poetry world. But a young childless person has a better shot at it if they’re willing to put the energy into that hustle. But for me that hustle was never feasible. You could call it laziness, or we could pretend it was some higher devotion to art, but I just can’t hustle like that.

During my time being a writer I’ve always wanted to push back about that division you were talking about. Between life and being a writer. I think there’s a lot of fetishization of writing time. And I will admit that fiction takes a little bit more work. Poets don’t want to hear that but it is true. Writing fiction simply requires more butt hours in the seat. I mean writing these essays took a lot more butt hours than writing poems. But I still don’t think those hours are incompatible with living a full life. And a lot of times people will fetishize their writing time, they’ll send their kids to camps in the summer so they can focus, or they’ll have an office in town so they can focus, but I’ve always just much preferred that my life be enmeshed fully with my writing. And if that means I write less then I write less.

And what Tim O’Brien said is, in ways, also absolutely true. One thing you learn when you have kids is that they’re born and it seems like their little-kid-hood stretches forever into the horizon and you can’t imagine how you’ll make it through this time when they’re babies in diapers and then they turn six and you say, Oh shit, I only have twelve years left. And you see them growing into people before your eyes and it all goes into fast forward and all of a sudden they’re fifteen, thirteen, and eleven and you’re thinking in ten years they’ll all be gone. Out of the house. And so maybe it’s not that Tim O’Brien just wanted to be there for his kids, it’s probably that he realized that moment, when your family is in the house, is incredibly fleeting. And if you want to have that moment, you’d better be there for it. Do you really want to look back and say, I wrote a book instead of being at dinner every night?

During Covid we started having cocktail time as an official, like, family thing. So five o’clock would come around and we’d all sit in here and Kate and I would have a drink and the kids would have a soda or whatever and at first they were really resistant to it but now it’s like they remind me. They’ll come up and be like, It’s cocktail time. Aren’t we going to sit? And it’s a really good reminder of what really matters when you’re doing the family thing. You gotta be there. And these essays grew out of those experiences. I mean most of these essays are about things I did with my kids. You’ll find the time to write if you keep that part of your brain lit. Which is probably how I explained it however many years ago; like a pilot light in your head. If it’s on, you’re good. And a whole year can go by so long as the light stays on.

Some people think of it differently of course. They think if they don’t write every day they’ll lose some ability. Or lose some focus. And it would be great if I could write every day but I just can’t. And I would wager that most people can’t. Most people should attend to their friends, their families, their pets, whatever. All those things are just as important as writing. That god of self-love too often appears in your writing as this though. As this necessity to push things away and write.

And that desire, that allure of self-love, will alway morph into the next thing, right? Like when I first started writing stories I kept thinking to myself, if I could just write one good and full story I’ll be good. I’ll have done it. Then I finished one and was like fuck, well I need a collection. If I can finish a collection then I’ll be good. I finished that. Then I was like well it needs to get published. And I need to write a novel too. And I need awards and grants too. And on and on.

And it never stops. Your career goes on and at some point you’ll be like well why didn’t I win the Pulitzer Prize? I know Robert Pinsky, who was my teacher at BU, he was always a little miffed that he hadn’t won it. He’d won everything but was still quietly pissed about that. But it was a good reminder about the nature of ambition.

And maybe that’s a good thing about it too right? Like what good would ambition be if you were all of a sudden satisfied after finishing something? It’s like Hill’s version of belief. Once you do believe, is there not the concern that you’d be ossified in that belief? So in the end, though Hill never put it this way, in some ways you’re better off doubting. You have more to learn if you doubt and don’t believe. Because some of the least curious people I’ve ever met are the people who are sure of what they believe in. And I don’t ever want that. So maybe I can be nicer about Robert (who, himself, is deeply kind). Maybe he was just never sure he was writing what he wanted to write. And maybe that’s how all poets and writers really are.

I think there’s an essay specifically about this idea in the book. The George Scarbrough essay. This idea of accepting what is in front of you as everything and restaining your need to be recognized or celebrated. Maybe you could talk about that and your relation to Scarbrough a little.

Yeah so I mean Scarbrough is definitely an ideal in that way. Not that it’s a life I could have lived. By myself in my mother’s house writing poems every day. He had a kind of secular monastic existence, especially toward the end of it. And in fact even his whole life, after his childhood where he was one of seven kids in a sharecropping family, was very isolated. He was gay and never had a lover for any extended time (that we know of) and really just had a lifelong relationship with poetry. And so what were his ambitions? As a writer, it’s really hard to pin down. He published three books with a good publisher in the late 40s and early 50s but something about that wasn’t satisfying. It was the wrong kind of ambition. So instead his ambitions were to have that different life. A different, more intimate relationship with poetry. Now did he still have ambitions to be well known? Absolutely. He published poems in Poetry his whole career. He published more books with Iris Press. But he remained isolated. He never left his part of Tennessee. He never left his mother’s house.

 That section over there (referring to a part of the bookshelf where Scarbrough’s collected works are in every edition imaginable) is all the Scarbrough. I probably have the largest private collection of George Scarbrough in the world. Reinhardt University has all his papers. But after that archive I feel strongly that I have the most. There was a period where I was buying everything of his that would come up on ABE books because I was scared that one day they would all just be gone. Like destroyed. So for me Scarbrough sits like a personal myth. I know he was a real person, but for me he sits as a kind of ideal that I would never actually want to be, but because he existed it makes me happy. It makes me happy that there was this person that was devoted to language for no other real reason than the devotion itself. In the way that monks are supposed to be that for religious people. 

My second collection of poems is mainly about monks and solitude and thinking about some of these same things. Monks are supposed to be doing the hard work of one-minded devotion to god for all the other Christains who are busy doing other things. But then of course monks are the most intellectual and the most likely to be thinking about the mystery of doubt and belief. The mystical tradition comes out of monks. So in ways, though they are supposed to be the most secure in their faith, monks are often the least secure. And that’s what makes them so smart, right? So for me Scarbrough is like that. His relationship with poetry is like that of a monk with belief. He exists as an almost impossible thing: a gay man in the 1940s in rural east Tennessee, living alone in his mother’s house, writing these poems that I think are some of the best American poems written in the middle of the 20th century, and no one still really knows who he was. Me and Forrest Gander and a handful of others. And that’s pretty much it. But I guess it gives me hope. That if you don’t meet those earthily, boring, petty ambitions that your work can still last. 

And on a literary level I just find that his poems are amazing. Incredible. His devotion to art in such a weird way made his poems beholden to no one tradition. At one moment he can sound like Robert Frost. In another he can sound like Ezra Pound. At another he’s Seamus Heany and then he might sound like classical Chinese poets. He’s all over the map. I can’t think of another poet from his time period that so clearly had no singular devotion to a style. He’s just everywhere. And it’s all good. And I want that. Too often I find my writing falling into familiar patterns. Like writing about vegetables. Or writing predictable, metrical patterns that have become the norm for me. And poets like him remind me that it’s okay to break out of that. Like my weird little psalms that you published in the most recent edition of Cult, that’s me trying to do something a little different. Trying to do something that gets me a little outside of my own experience and bring in some less predictable things into the poems. 

There’s a really striking line in the Scarbrough essay. And it’s not even really a big focal point. It sort of just appears and leaves very quickly. But the line is “He was dedicated to melding himself with the land, and he almost did.”

I think I was quoting James Galvin in his book The Meadow, where he’s talking about his neighbor Lyle, where he says something along the lines of “He lived a life in which the landscape almost let him in.” That idea that you could become part of a place.

Well it reminds me of another writer who said something somewhat similar. Breece D’J Pancake. There’s this quote from a letter he wrote to his mother back in West Virginia when he was in school at UVA about both the pull he felt to return home and his reluctance to go back. He said “I have left my ghost up in one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave.” I think this ties into this idea of being in the land and it functioning in both these writer’s cases as an artistic obsession. It’s trying to be at home in the land. And it’s the same artistic obsession to create something great or something that creates the wholeness of your experience––

Lois, do you have a class? Okay maybe we should go on the porch. Okay Kate we’re gonna go on the porch because the kids have Spanish.

…

Alright wait, don’t sit there because that chair’s broken. Sit there because the internet might be better. Yeah.

…

But yeah this idea of retreating into the land as being tied up in the same sort of ambition we’re talking about. Like a form of self-love somewhat.

Hmm, like being connected to the land is a form of self-love? To me it would maybe be the opposite. Like being disconnected from the land would be the result of too much self love. 

I guess what I’m thinking about is what is so appealing about art and writing is how much of yourself you can give over to it. How much it can feel like a holistic or religious experience where all of you is there and seen and known. But, of course, eventually you run into moments where you work really hard on something big and you finish it and realize that it’s just a stack of paper sitting there. And nothing more. It rejects you after you finish it. And you’re just there. By yourself. And the land is like that too, right? No matter how much we try to join it. You can be in awe of it, and you can respect it and you can till it, and garden it, and care for it and its creatures but one day for no reason your dog will fucking bite you or a branch will come crashing down on your car. Because the land doesn’t care. Because it’s other.

Well that’s one thing that I admire about Scarborough. And in that way he’s borrowing from Robert Frost, who is the ultimate anti-romantic in that way. Not that Frost didn’t love the Romantics probably as influences but for Frost the natural world was simultaneously compelling and terrifying. For Scarborough, who knows this about the land, the natural world still became the place of his only possible refuge. As I said, he was gay in rural Tennessee and he was ostracized for that. He himself never used the term gay. He would use the word feminine. Or effeminate. Or he would say how his interests lie in books and music and not farming and cars. But he would constantly talk about the ways he did not fit into his family or the world or rural east Tennessee. So to some extent the land was his only possible refuge even though it too was terrifying.

There’s a poem in his first book called ‘Lost’ and it starts, “Ever been lost? Well I have.” And then it goes to tell this story of being lost in this terrifying, scary woods with the trees reaching out with gnarled fingers for him and then at the end he hears someone cutting timber and all of a sudden he feels like he’s been saved. Because he knows there’s another person there. So in that poem the natural world wasn’t a refuge. So he shows its complexity like Frost does.

But I agree with you, living in the country, I never thought I would bury so many things. These chickens, who have become like pets, they die a lot. And it’s very sad. The kids get very attached to them. And I guess it’s a good lesson in mortality, but it’s a hard one to have to learn over and over and over again. So yeah, when you live out here you see a lot of death. And nature is also constantly encroaching. Like if I don’t mow the lawn the woods will take over. So you’re constantly pushing back at the natural world, in order to live within it. If that makes sense.

Do you feel that in writing too? When I think about writing fiction, and I think about the consistency required by it––getting to the desk and putting words down every day and all that––it does have this feeling of mowing. Mowing the growth of your own mind. And if you mow too much it’ll be bald, so you have to let it go sometimes. But if you let it go for too long it’ll get out of control. Do you see your writing like this too?

I mean Frost has a poem about mowing. Two of them actually. And Andrew Marvell of course has a sequence of mower poems so I guess it’s an apt metaphor. And the Frost poem, “The Tuft of Flowers”, he’s talking about scything a field for hay (this is pre-tractor). A mower has cut the grass around some butterfly weed and leaves the flowers so the next guy that comes to the field can see them. So the idea is that he’s cutting, but he’s not cutting everything. Leaving some random beauty to just exist. And that connects him to the other workers. And maybe for me that’s part of my attraction to form. It’s a merciless mower. It takes my thoughts and forces me to cut the loose ends off. But I also use a pretty loose approach to meter. So maybe that’s me leaving the stand of flowers.

For me writing free verse would be terrifying. It would be like just letting the grass grow and never cutting it. Great idea in theory perhaps, but eventually you get snakes and ticks. So, for me, the meter creates a way to tame, if not control. To keep things at bay. To keep myself, to keep that self-love, at bay.

Talking about meter is interesting in this context. What is poetry at its most basic level? Making organized sounds, right? Just a collection of sounds being pieced together. The big thing I took away from your form essay is this idea of words as non-meaning units. As just sounds. As just variable markers of stress. And there’s a certain manicuring of wildness inherent to that idea as well, right?

Or just thinking of words as units of meaning in and of themselves from just the way they sound. Lisa Jarnot is probably one of my favorite contemporary poets. And a lot of her writing works like this. Some of the poems will seem just like nonsense. But what she’s really doing is including words for their sound for just as much as their meaning. So she’ll have a prose poem that for a while will be about a man standing on a corner in San Francisco and then all the sudden there are avocados and opossums in it. But I think it’s because she loves the way that avocado and opossum sound. And so they belong in the poem. And for me that always seemed like a kind of freedom. And meter lets you do that too: it lets you realize just how fun words can be.

I say this to my students all the time: everyone writes in meter. You can’t not if you’re writing in English. Everyone uses metrical effects whether they know it or not. A poet who is a “formalist”, and I don’t like to call myself that by the way, but a poet who is considered a “formalist” just pays attention to those things and crafts lines around them. But every free verse poem is full of meter. And full of good metrical effects. Because all of us speak like that. So I always try to tell my students it’s not just technical jargon they’re learning. They’re just learning a way to talk about something that is already inherent in speech. And so for me it’s just a way to get into language in a different way. I find it ridiculously fun.

So let’s talk about Farmville a little bit.

Oh boy. 

There’s a lot of talk about responsibility in the book. And where the concept of responsibility comes from. In your Robert Hayden essay you write about an uncomfortable encounter concerning race. You got into it with someone from your community band about a Black Lives Matter shirt you were wearing. And you use a really distinct image to describe why you decided to take part in the conflict in the way that you did. You describe the necessity to confront the situation as feeling the presence of a “detached eye” watching your behavior. And you relate this to a religious feeling. You call it “god’s eye” hovering over you.

It’s an interesting time to be living in America with regard to this idea of “taking responsibility” for one’s actions. On the one hand, this is probably the most godless we have ever been as a culture. But it’s also the most anyone has ever talked about accountability and personal responsibility. To the point that it feels almost meaningless to say sometimes. But how do you understand that? Does the concept of responsibility really need to stem from a more divine and detached party than it does the simple relationships that you have on earth?

Yeah, well it’s funny, or not funny, but since I wrote that essay we’ve had this cultural swing––totally predictable but still unimaginably horrifying––away from recognizing the necessity of something like Black Lives Matter. Now you have schools and businesses cutting their DEI programs. And many of the people behind this, the counter-push against the recognition of responsibility, are people who claim to believe in God and have morals founded on religious faith. Yet here they are telling kids that they can’t learn simple facts about slavery in school.

But what you’re talking about, that phrase “God’s eye”, I took from the Robert Hayden poem I’m referencing in the essay. And I was thinking about when you’re assessing your own responsibility you have to get out of the self. I guess that’s a theme here. But for me that means two things: both I try to get out of the self so that I don’t overreact and so I don’t react in the wrong way. When you have kids you’ll find that sometimes you’ll viscerally react to situations and yell at your kids, when if you would have just slowed down, and looked at the situation from a slight distance, you might have reacted a little bit better. My wife is alway telling me that. So in that situation I was thinking about the different ways that we distance ourselves from ourselves in big moments like that. Like when your personal responsibility is being called into action. And I hope that’s how it came across.

And part of it too is, you know when those big moments happen in your life––like a car accident or a child is born or you find out someone died––things that are either major moments or have sudden importance beyond the quotidian. For me when they happen I can’t quite believe that they’re happening. And part of my brain is looking at it with disbelief: like this thing is happening and I have to do this thing. And this is all in the context of a normal day. I remember when my son was born, right when he first arrived I was thinking this is crazy. This is one of the biggest moments of my life but outside I can hear cars honking and people going to the bathroom and walking down the hallway. For everyone else it was just a normal day but for me I was having this life altering moment. So that moment that essay centers around––where I’m in my community band room and a band member is disagreeing with the legitimacy of the statement that black lives matter––this was one of those moments (smaller, admittedly, than childbirth, but still) that my personal accountability was needed. I had to be accountable to that situation based on my own sense of morality. I couldn’t just let it go. And when you’re a white person in those situations, it can be so easy to just let it go. Because it doesn’t affect you. You can just bank back on your white privilege.

And the thing that I liked about wearing that shirt back then, whenever that essay was written, is that it made me uncomfortable. It made me very visible. And I realized just to a small extent what it’s like to be non-white every day. Especially in a place like Farmville which is not very multicultural, like New York.

One thing I’m worried about in that essay, that’ll I’ll probably get raked over the coals for anyway, is that it might come across as me as a white person talking about my successful way for “atoning for my whiteness”. That’s hard to pull off. And not what I’m after. I’m not looking for a pat on the back. Or someone to be like, “You fixed racism by wearing a t-shirt!” But I found it to be, in that moment especially, a way I could do a very small thing which was bring that shirt to Farmville. In that time, like 2019, during those discussions about race, it felt like a very small thing I could do not to lessen my white privilege, but to in some way ameliorate it or lay it bare. So I hope that’s what the essay ended up being about.

But I was also struck in that encounter by realizing that there is just this huge gulf between people right now. Like the distance between the moon and the earth. I don’t know how I could have ever breached that gulf with that guy. You know that feeling? When you talk to someone and they’re just so entrenched. And maybe I’m entrenched too.

Sort of impossible to breach, yeah. Running into someone who is so conceptually divergent from you like that. Because there’s no common ground. Your starting point is just completely different so you’re really not arguing over whatever point, but really you’re talking about a lifetime of thinking about things differently. And that’s a lot to ask of someone to reconsider just in a brief conversation or argument.

And Hayden is such a brilliant poet and gets at race in such subtle ways. Maybe subtlety is how you get across the gap. And subtlety is not exactly prized in poetry right now I would say, so I really am attracted to his poems for how they do this. So that poem, “Astronauts” which on its surface is just about the moonwalk, ends up being about so much more for me. And it made me think of the ways we disappear onto our own moons and hide from our responsibility. It’s like what Robert Frost says in his beautiful poem “Desert Places” where he says basically I don’t need to worry about space, because I got enough terrifying space inside. We have our own responsibilities here. And so that Hayden poem really navigates that for me in a truly amazing way. I love that poem.

The ideas of racism, accepting imperfection in craft and in life, and the idea of maintaining life not as some linear journey but rather a kind of encampment that you’re just trying to keep nice enough for your time here, all culminate really nicely in your Primus St. John essay. You quote him and it echoes something you wrote earlier in the book concerning activating your belief systems in the face of irrationality. Of entertaining the idea of magic while knowing magic isn’t real. The line is “Slavery is the story / Of procreation,/ Of magical religious thinking,/ The androgynous divinity/ Within us.” Maybe you could speak about this connection a bit. Magical thinking and coping with the imperfections of life while also understanding racism not as some curable disease but rather a chronic ailment of human thinking rooted in this same cognitive leap. Something that can probably can’t be eradicated but maybe just be mowed and kept at bay.

I mean in the world around us right now I don’t see any way to fully atone for the things at the root of racism in America. The country was founded on two genocides. How do you make up for that? And to circle back to Geoffrey Hill, a lot of his writing is about trying to figure out how does one be English and also account for imperialism? How does one love or simply inhabit Englishness while still accounting for the crimes of Englishness? And Hill was actually borrowing from Southern American writers like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom who in their better moments are thinking something similar. How does one be southern and account for the history of the south? And we as Americans all have that same question to answer. You see it all around. The refusal to do that hard work. Like the textbook banning in Florida. Instead of accounting for our past they’re just pretending that it was different. So back to your question, back to St. John, the poem suggests that imperfection is our only option. That to shoot for perfection is to lie or to start repackaging the past. That section is quoted from his long poem “Dreamer” which is about John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace” and who started his career as a slaver, someone who bought and sold slaves, and then had a religious change of heart and became an abolitionist. And in the poem St. John is basically saying that, that profound religious awakening, is not enough. You still have to account for the past. And in that accounting is imperfection. Did Newton become an abolitionist? Yes. Did “Amazing Grace” itself become a crucial anthem for both enslaved people and black people in the civil rights era? It did. And yet this anthem has an imperfect history. Because no histories are perfect. I take that from St. John.

So does that give us a pass? No. But I think too often the idea of perfection keeps us from doing anything. For instance the discussion of reparations. Most people shoot down the idea of any kind of reparations because they say we could never do it. How could we give the right people the right amount of money? And no one is ever going to be willing to pay for that so we just shoot the idea down. But could you imagine an imperfect version of reparations that would make a lot of sense? Yeah, you could. But the ideal of perfection, which is baked into the way that America views itself, keeps us from doing things like that. So that’s what I take from St. John: a subtle kind of chiding. That we’re human. What else could we be but imperfect? And that applies to how we understand race as well.

There’s something sort of Pynchon-like to our inability to act on these things, right? Like legitimate progressivism, or cultural revolutionary energy being undercut by our own narcissism. Undercut perhaps even more than what simple tyranny is capable of.

I love Pynchon. Thomas Merton writes about this too. He was a catholic monk from Kentucky who became famous for his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain when he was a young monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, but his essay “Letters to a White Liberal” from the late sixties is something worth reading as well. Where he not only calls the police out as being a fascist organization––which, of course, it was, because it was rooted in supporting Jim Crow––but he was writing about the problem of well-meaning white liberals making race issues about themselves. Instead of being about the actual problem. So it’s this really beautiful essay on why white people need to not go to things like the march on Washington. Because it dilutes the message and makes it more about a kind of white self-love and removes the immediacy of the crisis at hand. Like look at me. And we still haven’t fixed that problem.

So you could argue: was I doing that by wearing the Black Lives Matter shirt? Maybe? But I did feel like in this particular instance it was different. Like if I wore it around New York it would be a lot different than wearing it in Farmville, more performative. And so that’s the weird line you have to figure out how to walk as someone who wants to do good or at least be good.

I want to return to the idea of permanence. Returning to your hole in the mountain or place in the land. This whole book centers around trying to reconcile the impossibility of permanence with the pretty unrelenting human desire for it. So I wanted to ask you about the act of self-narrativization that occurs throughout the book. Of yourself and of your family. You all function as pretty important binding agents to the book and as the essays develop everyone really does take on character traits that can be expected. Like if there is an instance involving your son, Horatio, you can expect some level of crassness. Or if it is your wife Kate, there is some duality of wisdom and whimsy to be expected––both telling you it’s gross and that you’re crazy for considering touching a dead squirrel because you were convinced, for whatever reason, your touch would revive it, but also sticking her head out of the shower and asking, Well, did you do it? And you even make yourself into a kind of a character in this book. But in this way everyone is fixed in a certain fashion. As characters. As pieces of art. And I’m wondering if you were conscious of that while writing this book, which is so greatly concerned with the idea of human impermanence and imperfection.

When I was in grad school I was taking a class taught by the writer Scott Russell Sanders who had recently published his own memoir. And I remember him saying that after he wrote the memoir he could no longer remember some of the things he wrote in any way other than the way that he wrote about them. Whereas before he had the imperfect, flashbulb memories that you have of your own childhood, but once he wrote them down he could only recall them in the way he had come to fashion them in his work. And that really struck me in the ways in which writing nonfiction is really just writing fiction. There’s really not an appreciable difference. And poetry is maybe the same. When I write about my family I’ll feel it the minute that I’m done writing: that what I’ve made is in the past and is not actually that representative of them or who they are. It’s instead just some weird fixed portrait.

I started writing these essays in 2017 and wrote them through 2022. So it was like five or six years. And the first ones even looked back further to episodes that occurred two or three years before then. So the kids are quite small in the early essays but now here I am editing them to come out as a book and those little children are long gone. So it almost feels like something that happened to someone else. I barely think of those things as happening in my life. Because my life is occurring now. And it’s full of math lessons and barking dogs and grass that needs to be cut. And I just don’t remember what it was like to have a three year old beyond that it was really fucking hard. So the essays are fixed in time, yeah, but they also have become anecdotes that have become even strange to me. In the way that Scott was suggesting. That they had become this crafted thing that I also read with curiosity. Like, Is that how that happened? Or I’ll notice that I’ve fixed someone’s personality in a certain way. My daughter Jane Bell as a three year old I depicted as this small, quiet, innocent kid who’s watching birds and running about, but in reality as a three year old––and she’ll kill me for this––but she was a terror! She was a classic three year old. Throwing things, stomping, yelling, all the time. And so I’ve fixed her both in that moment and as a thing that doesn’t reflect the dynamism of what a small child is.

So have I created a fiction of my life? Probably. But I think those imperfections––I think as St. John would say––are in the service of a larger truth. That’s at least what I would tell myself. That there were little bits picked out of things I remember of my life in order to create something that would aid in a reading of a poem that has nothing to do with my life, in order to tell me something deeper about that life. If that makes any sense. So in a way I’m reading those moments in just the same way I’m reading the poems. And maybe they exist for me just as detached as the poems do.

And maybe I just have a funny relationship with the past. My father in law, it seems, can recall his entire childhood as if it were a novel from start to finish. He can tell you details from every part of his life. Birthdays. Names of people he knew. Everything. It’s like he has a movie of his childhood that he can access at any time. But I’m not like that. I barely remember anything. And my childhood wasn’t traumatic or anything. It was great. I had great, kind parents that did everything for me. But I only recall snippets here and there. Those memories just don’t have a big impact on my mind. So maybe I just file things away and then they’re sort of gone. That’s how my mind works. And maybe this book of essays was a way of fixing some of those things, or bringing them back out, even if improperly preserved. Like bad pickles.

Interview and Photos by Jake Hargrove

Why Give the Game Away? – an Interview with Foley

Collaborating as an artist isn’t easy: the energy we often bring to a project often relies on the maintaining of a personal fantasy or vision. Of seeing a thing, however dimly or brightly, in your mind’s eye and using its variable radiance as a guide in your construction. When the light brightens, we feel alive and energized, willing to pour more and more of ourselves into the thing we are making. When it dims, we feel lost, unsure of what we are doing, shameful in the prior optimism we once expressed. And on the cycle goes until we reach some point of exhaustion or completion and decide the thing is done.

This is all standard to the creation of anything but it also gets much more complicated when there begin to be multiple lights flickering around a project. We can feel our vision is being overpowered and overshadowed, and this might make us respond in any number of ways depending on how mature and calm we’re feeling that day. And these responses will create other responses; things will ripple and reverberate and soon the whole enterprise and expression might be in jeopardy. 

I sat down with the Brooklyn-based band Foley to talk about their newest album The Joke Turns Sad, song writing, as well as idea of collaborating in general. Talking with them has the feeling of being at a dinner table with a family you are visiting from out of town: they often interrupt each other, disagree, and retell the same stories differently. At first it felt like a great clashing of energies but the longer I spoke with them I realized this all a part of what made their music sound the way it did: by wasting very little energy on worrying about overstepping and focusing as much as possible on bringing forth each of their individual visions. 

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Good place to start, how long’s the band been together? How’d it start? What’s the origin story? 

Eddie: We formed in 2017. Joe, Tom and I were at the same University (Hofstra) and it was just that freshman year of college energy where you’re kind of clinging onto each other. And we had a dorm room packed with guitarists and musicians all the time, singing Strokes covers and stuff, but the three of us would always be the last standing and songs sort of started emerging out of that. 

From there the three of us started writing a bunch of music. It’s hard to call it a band really; it was more of a song-writing troupe. We would produce our own records and play whatever instrument. But in the past two years things have come together more. In 2021, Collin and Danny were added and that felt like a new starting point really. That’s when we started gigging and feeling more like a proper band. 

Joe: And at the beginning we had this weird thing where I play guitar, Eddie plays guitar, and Tom plays bass, and we didn’t have a drummer. And it was like that for years. So one of us would sometimes be like, Well, I can play drums, and it would just sound like shit. Or we’d use a drum machine, or just not have a drummer and it was basically our Achilles heel. I knew Collin because we went to high school together and played in other bands together, so when we all finally converged in New York in 2021 it was this feeling of, finally, a chance to make the band into a real band.

Eddie: Although we recently found out Collin didn’t know he was actually in the band until very recently. I think he thought he was like a hired gun and no one actually asked him, Hey, do you want to join the band? 

Collin: Yeah, I remember I was super tentative when talking about things like, This is the structure of this song, or, Why don’t we take this in that direction? because I thought I was basically just a member of the live act and that was only going to last however long. Then we had this whole hash-out conversation where they said, No, you’ve actually been in the band this whole time. 

Collin mentioned before we started that a lot of the vision of the band circles back to you, Eddie. As in you’re the frontman and write a lot of the songs and maybe play captain for how things move forward. There are so many different elements at play in each song that I’d be interested to hear what the dynamic is like in terms of bringing forth a vision and trying to shape it with the group?

Eddie: It’s funny, when people are talking about musicianship and being in a band, you hear this idea of serving the song. I think maybe song is the wrong word there. I think it’s more accurate to say you’re trying to serve the whole musical expression. As a songwriter of the band I really think about that. How am I shaping the overall musical expression? 

I write hundreds of songs. I’m writing songs constantly. And there’s this thing I’ll feel on certain songs where I’ll just know that it feels like a Foley song. A lot of that has to do with the taste of everyone else in the band. Their tastes filter out a lot of stuff that isn’t necessarily bad but isn’t necessarily us. So, it feels weird to take ownership of anything because without their taste as buffers or reflections of ideas, those songs wouldn’t exist. There’s just something mysterious that happens when you’re working alongside other people’s preferences. You’ll show something and sometimes you’ll have to be like, Alright, next idea I guess. And after a couple cycles of that you start to figure out what’ll perk people’s ears up. 

Also important to note is that Tom and Joe both write for the band as well. So it’s not all me. 

Less introspective question: Where does the name Foley come from? 

Eddie: It’s a terrible name. 

Danny: We were like, What if we had the least searchable band name possible?  

Joe: Or, What if we took the last name of a more famous singer? 

Tom: So it was something we thought about for awhile. We formed pretty organically in college and there were a few other people we’d been playing with for a few months and it just took us renting out a foley studio––we were all film students at the time, and I guess none of us really followed through with that––but we rented out a foley studio at school, and were just like, why not Foley? 

Nice. Wait, what’s a foley studio? 

Joe: Foley art is like in movies where you add a sound afterward. Like if you had footsteps in a movie but you didn’t record footsteps you’d record it later in a foley studio. And the person who does that whole process is called a foley artist. 

Eddie: So, we would lie to get the space rented and say we were doing foley art and we were just recording our early demos. 

Tom: Yeah the best mic we could find to record–– 

Eddie: It was a good film mic. It could capture sound really objectively but without any warmth or character. So our early demos have this sound of, say, a Tiny Desk concert or something where sound just doesn’t have much texture to it, which is because we were using film mics. 

So everyone was a film student? 

Eddie: Everyone but Collin. 

Collin: Yeah I was a political science guy. 

Eddie: Collin was gonna be a lawyer. 

Collin: Yeah. 

Let’s talk about the album that just came out: The Joke Turns Sad. Another interesting title. Where’s that come from? Any kind of driving force behind the album? 

Joe: The Joke Turns Sad can ultimately be credited to Collin. Maybe it was just me that was thinking this, but I could have sworn the album was going to be called Songs of Foley. Because our last album was called Songs of the Lyrebird. We were trying to make an album that sounded more like we thought we sounded. Because we’d made two albums that weren’t necessarily folk rocky-y, and we thought what if we made an album that actually sounds like the way we think we sound. And I think it does do that. It does sound the way we think we sound. 

And so I was like, well what about Songs of Foley? And Collin was like, that is a horrible title for the album. So we may have had two or three sessions when we were spitting out random phrases and eventually we arrived at The Joke Turns Sad. 

Eddie: It was really frustrating because once you land on a name the album will really crystallize around it, and that’s a very exciting experience. Historically it had been pretty easy to come up with titles. It would be so obvious, you just say some phrase and it’s like yeah, that’s the title. 

But that never happened. We sat around for hours just trying to come up with an album name and it never came. I’ve never done that. And so we were rehearsing for the album release pretty religiously, still no album name, and we were so beat, and I was like alright, let’s just take a day to refresh. Then we came back a day later and Joe was like, I think I got it: The Joke Turns Sad. And we’re all like, tentative, but yeah I think that’s it. 

And ultimately I really love the name. Especially with the cover image of the lamb next to it. I couldn’t even really say what I like about it. It’s really mysterious but I just think it sounds great. 

Throughout the album there is this dichotomy the name seems to allude to or express pretty well, I think. There’s often a rather upbeat and warm or frankly cheerful sound but a lot of the writing in the song feels quite sad. Like the song “Richard” does this pretty well. The surrounding sound is this joyful, playful thing but the lyrics are very much about longing or some kind of loss. Is that something you all think about, pairing these two contrasting elements? 

Eddie: I don’t think it’s that calculated, but there are certainly techniques and tricks you can do to really layer sadness into songs. A lot of minor chords or certain words. Words like bones or lungs and strings and stuff like that. There are just a lot of ways to trigger the audience to think, Hey, this is gonna be a sad one. 

But I think if you allow emotional complexity to come through sort of organically, so the music can sound however it is, then how you feel about it can be more up to you as a listener. I wanted these songs to be really open. So you could lean into them in whatever fashion you wanted to. 

I was thinking about this as a writer. When you’re putting together a project, sometimes a scene, or a moment, or a chapter will arise, that you eventually realize is this type of key moment within the project. Like without that moment, whatever it is, the piece doesn’t really feel the same or complete. I was wondering if there was a song on the album that felt similar to you? And, as a group, if there was any kind of consensus? 

Danny: There’s this moment that happens twice in “Pastor’s Daughter” where it goes from this really tense dissonance that begins with the lyrics “It’s way too easy,” and there’s this great unsureness that eventually breaks free into the “loving you” where it’s very pretty and we’re all together again. Like everything is broken up for a moment and then comes back into being aligned. 

That, to me, as a band I feel like we tapped into exactly this sort of form to function. Like what Eddie was writing about, we all made that seen. 

Collin: I was gonna say “Pastor’s Daughter” as well. Not to dwell on the album name, but I feel “Pastors Daughter,” lyrically and sonically walks this razor’s edge between things. Like it’s about someone who has a budding relationship with someone who has a terrible home life. And how can you look at the positive elements of an all-encompassing bad situation? And I feel like the music does a really good job of embodying this push and pull between despair and hope and happiness and grief. And I feel like The Joke Turns Sad, and the reason that name stood out to me when it was brought up––and why I had batted down so many album names prior; like Songs of Foley sounded like an aftermarket compilation album that you’d find in a record bin somewhere––

Joe: Alright man. 

Collin: Sorry.  

Eddie: Foley: All the Best 

Collin: But it was like evocative––

Eddie: Foley Sings Foley. 

Collin: But so the title we went with has this thing that sort of misses the mark. Or, doesn’t even miss the mark––hits the mark––but in a way that wasn’t intended. Like you tell a joke, and you’re trying to bring levity into a situation, but maybe you’re too prescient and actually land on something that is depressing or mournful. And I feel like “Pastor’s Daughter” embodies that really well. 

Eddie: And not to belabor the point about the album name, but I think what Collin and Danny are both bringing up is this idea of tension into release, or release back into tension, and the sort of cycle of that. And I’ve noticed in prior albums, where usually I’ll be in charge of putting the song list in order which will create the narrative thrust of the album, and in writing everyone talks about the hero’s journey, or the Aristototillian rise and fall, and I’ve noticed that our past albums have kind of followed that, and something about that just felt so fucking phony. Because every story kind of follows that arc but I’ve just never experienced that kind of resolution of emotion, where everything is all figured out or tied up. 

And what I really liked about this album was that it sort of starts out resolved and then complexifies as it goes on and becomes very unresolved by the end of the album. Like lyrically and musically there’s more tension and more dissonance. Especially lyrically. The resolution happens very early. Like the joke. And then it turns sad. 

I wanted to talk about influence a little bit. You’re a chamber rock band right? How did you arrive at the sound you’re at right now? The really striking thing about this album I found is how grounded it is both sonically and conceptually. There’s a certain confidence to it and it feels like something that has been developed and tweaked a lot over time. Were there any guides in that development? Like a sound you’ve been aiming for? 

Tom: From very early on I think we did a bad job of categorizing ourselves. When it was just the three of us at college we didn’t even know what we were. It wasn’t until there was this other student at Hofstra who was trying to be a music journalist and wanted to interview us. The interview never happened but in the process of trying to get it set up he asked us what genre we were, and Joe said Jazz band. And I was like what the fuck are you talking about? 

Joe: It was sort of just top of the head. Like, yeah, um, Jazz. 

Tom: But since then we’ve been calling ourselves a folk group but that doesn’t really sound right either. 

Eddie: That’s why I like chamber rock. It’s descriptive in a way but also very undescriptive. It’s barely a box at all. Which is great. 

Tom: But from very early on, and even now some, I felt like we really stuck out. Like in the Long Island DIY scene we didn’t really sound like the other people around. And our early recordings––Eddie how’d you describe them? Like what? 

Eddie: Like not so good. 

Tom: No but really there was this thing that stood out. Like an optimism. And they were all deeply personal stories. And that all contrasted with all the other artists we were doing gigs with. 

Eddie: And that was kind of nice. It really set us apart. The scene in Long Island at that time was very confessional, and a little over-emotional. Sort of sing your deepest traumas into a microphone type of thing. And here we were, singing these very naive, bubblegum, folky pop songs that were sort of child-like in a way. It was good for us because we are able to feel  different and I think the people listening appreciated it as a palette cleanser from these super intense acts. So we were really welcomed while also standing out a bit. 

Joe: Going back to influences, I was thinking about it: it’s hard to describe because I don’t think we all have one source of influence. We all diverge at a certain level and go into our own things. And each one of our individual influences doesn’t take precedence but we are definitely all trying to make them present within the sound. And I think everyone is aware of that process and so maybe a little tentative to speak on what our influences are. 

But there are some unifying ones. An early one is Leonard Cohen. That’s the first artist we all bonded over in college. 

Eddie: And we bonded over the act of discovering him too which was cool. All three of us encountered him together. People refer to his song-writing as being like pistachio ice cream: like an acquired taste. And we were all interested in acquiring that taste. So the first few times we were listening we were all like wait, what’s going on here? He’s singing about monkeys and it’s all very confusing. What song is that? 

Joe: “First We Take Manhattan.” Micheal Nau is another big influence.

Eddie: But Leonard Cohen is a good one because of the presentation of his music as well. Like how much dignity his songs have. He was in this pop world that was very youth-oriented but he was doing something that has as much poetic integrity as great poets or novelists. Bringing that dignity to such a youthful scene we found impressive. Like he would follow Jimi Hendrix at folk festivals and would win over the crowd and that’s sort of insane. 

But yeah, Micheal Nau has really good sounding records. Sonically that’s our great white whale. 

Joe: We reached out to the guy that mixed Micheal Nau and the Mighty Thread. We didn’t get to work with him because he was too expensive, but, like, one day. 

Maybe you can get him For The Joke Turns Sadder.

Eddie: Or The Sad Turns Joker. 

So how has this type of music been received in the New York scene? I feel like the stuff I hear a lot right now is very punk-y and a bit more abrasive. There feels like there is a trend toward distortion and complication, and to make something that is both lyrically clear and sonically clean and at times bright feels like it has to stand out a bit. 

Eddie: Yeah it does feel that way. Like what Tom mentioned about us in the Long Island scene. How we were doing something very different. It feels that way still. But we’re used to it and I kind of like it. I like feeling apart from the scene a bit. 

I had a conversation with someone after a show the other day and they were like no one in New York is making music like this right now, and I sort of thought it was a dig. Like, What are you doing? No one is doing that. And so I was sort of embarrassedly like yeah we’re fighting an uphill battle. 

And he was like, I think you are, but I think you’re winning. And that felt really good obviously. 

But the question is interesting given that we’ve been playing a lot more live since releasing the album. Our albums are a little quieter and calmer but our live shows are taking on this Vaudevillian sideshow aspect to them that no one has really expected. But, you’re right, when you’re in the live setting, at New York city clubs, it becomes really hard to resist putting on a crazier show. We’ve become, what’s the word? 

Danny: We’ve become more theatrical. 

Eddie: We’ve become more theatrical for sure. 

The relation between recording and performing is always interesting to hear about. And how different those worlds can be. How they can clash: how you need to prioritize one at the cost of the other at times. It seems like you’re a band that takes a lot of pride in their recorded work; is performing taxing? Do you see catering to a live audience and the liveliness it requires coming back to influence your recorded stuff in any fashion? Are you all making some discoveries performing right now? 

Collin: I can’t really speak to the era before I joined too much, but I feel like when Danny and I joined this past album was nearly half-done. The concepts were there, the artistic direction was clear, so I feel like for that period I didn’t feel like I was pulling the band in any particular direction. Going from a band with no drums to a band with drums and then Danny on the keyboard, it felt just sort of supplementary to the sound at that moment. But I feel like now that the album is out and we’re starting to strike new ground and trying to come up with new ideas, the drums are pulling the band a little. Toward something, I don’t know, maybe loud isn’t the word. 

Danny: Ehh. 

Collin: Okay, yeah, maybe loud actually just is the word. 

Eddie: We’re rocking more. 

Joe: Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Collin, you bring your influence in through the drums, which, not to generalize, gives a rock feeling. That’s on the album too. Like we could have found just some dude in a beanie, and he could have played all the songs, and it would have just sounded like a folk rock record. Not that it doesn’t sound like a folk rock record–– 

Eddie: Guys in beanies. You go to a coffee shop, they’re a dime a dozen. Pull ‘em out like a dixie cup and another one just comes right out. 

Joe: But people have said that before about Collin. To his credit he can’t just leave well enough alone. So there’s a lot of influence on the album as well. Whatever part he’s given he’ll have to try to innovate. He’ll try to find a beat that not everyone is using. 

Collin: Sometimes to a fault maybe. 

There seems like there’s a desire at the core of the band that’s become clear both through your music and talking with you all. And I think the best way to describe it is trying to find cohesion through disparate elements without sacrificing the value of each individual element. Eddie, as the front man, how have you managed to accomplish that? 

Eddie: There’s very little encouragement that I have to do. If you’re a solo musician and you’re directing the experience with a very precise point of view that’s great but as a solo musician I don’t. I think the band has a very clear point of view that’s carved over our relationships. 

I’ve tried to make solo projects and I really can’t. All the energy ends up getting diffused. As a writer I need an assignment. And writing for this band is work that provides a narrowing lens that I think allows me to be productive. So it feels like that’s my only responsibility really: writing and focusing on writing. 

Tom: I can attest to that too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a moment of panic in your eyes when the band starts to move in a direction that might be opposed to your original direction. Every song and project that has come out of your head and we’ve worked on as a group has always felt like a very collaborative process in building that sound. And I think that’s why our sound works and why we enjoy playing together. 

Eddie: That’s not to say that friction doesn’t happen. It does and we get into arguments about stupid things but it’s like throwing a bunch of rocks into a tumbler and letting them collide until they all come out very smooth. It’s never about ego when we argue––someone asserting dominance over everyone––but still in conflict the person with the right idea ends up being the loudest. We’re all very serious about making this the best it can be, and conflict comes out of that, but it’s always conflict for the greater good I think. 

Danny: I think it’s actually a great amount of conflict. But it’s productive. And it shows in the music: if we ever find ourselves stuck between multiple ideas we end up just trying all of them and the best one typically wins out. But that requires everyone to stand up for their ideas. 

I’m interested in the shared film background you guys have in relation to this idea of collaboration. Film being probably one of the most collaborative art forms there is, in which you have to wrangle a thousand different elements and people in order to create a singular vision or even just a small little moment within a film. Do you think about that relationship at all? 

Danny: I wouldn’t say I think about it too terribly much. But in the sense that filmmaking is storytelling and Eddie, Tom, and Joe are all great storytellers I see the relationship. Like every little thing or image is sacred within their songs. And I know that’s just what imagery is, but the care they put into it reminds me of filmmaking. 

Eddie: I like the attitude I’ve found on film sets I’ve been on, though I’m not that involved in film anymore. But you’re right: you’re working on a sort of moving ship with a bunch of timelines and restraints and if you’re not in sync the whole thing falls apart. 

Danny: The film set is typically a bit more top-down though. The famous thing that everyone always says about film sets is that they’re little dictatorships. Where I think we’re a little more collaborative than that. Equals. 

Collin: I feel like working on a collaborative music project has been a lot more enjoyable than working on films was. I just remember feeling really bogged down when working on student films and writing music for Foley became this great relief because the outcome was just so much faster. That was one of the reasons I didn’t really follow through on a career in film: because every little idea you wanted to move forward with had to be so meticulously planned and music is just so much more instantaneous. There’s so much more spontaneity. So much more accidental discoveries.  

Danny: And not that these things can’t happen in film but I think they happen much more often in music. Those happy accidents. Like the song is already written when we get to the stage but the way we decide to play it is gonna be different every night. And oftentimes we even go out of our way to make that happen. 

Eddie: In terms of the visual relationship, I think a lot of bands leave a lot on the table when it comes to the visual elements of their work. It’s obviously an audio medium but there are so many visual cues you can give both on stage and in your album. But nowadays with social media and all that it’s hard to tell a band they should be focusing on their visuals because what they think you’re talking about is getting like a brand consultant or something, but that’s not what I’m saying. So maybe it’s just helpful that a lot of us have a film backgrounds because we’re all just thinking about the visual presentation of the music and the group to begin with. 

Eddie, do you think lyrically you find yourself to be a visual writer? I can think of a few lyrics off the top of my head that are almost like William Carlos Williams in their intimacy and precision. Do you think you stand apart from other songwriters you’ve heard in this regard? 

Eddie: I’d almost want to field that to someone else honestly. Everything lyrically that I do I feel like I’m the last to find out. I mean it’s all very intentional but it has so much to do with preoccupations that are just in there. There’s a lot of imagery on the album for sure. But I think the art of lyricism is all images. I don’t think I’m aberrant in that way. Like if you’re not singing about images, what’s left? 

Collin: I don’t know if I totally agree with you, Eddie. I think you can give yourself some flowers here. Because even before I was a member of the band the biting lyrics of some of the earlier tracks were something I found incredibly evocative. Invocation and evocation in music is important for me––it makes me feel like I’m experiencing something. And I don’t know if all lyrics are visual. Some of them are. But some are just human emotions. Raw emotions. And that can be cool and very direct but there is a certain inimitable quality to your lyricism that is built upon crafting a story in a certain way.

Eddie: I think what people think about when they describe imagery is specificity. Like a very specific detail is very important in storytelling. There’s this moment in Anna Karenina where the line is like “She played the piano, and she played it so loud and so good, that across the village the man in slippers carrying a loaf of bread turned his head.” Just giving the man slippers and letting him carry a loaf of bread paints the whole village for you. You only need those two details and then you have the whole place. Specificity is the most important element to the image I think. I’ve been trying to write short stories even and the first impulse is to provide a lot of details when describing a place, but you just never need that. Two or three specific ones do everything you need. And I guess I’ve begun to do that in my songwriting as well. 

I think this specificity we’re talking about is very interesting in relation to the bigger ideas within the album. I feel like there’s this pursuit of a realness that’s very distinct. A reality of experience. Like I can’t tell you in a sentence what my childhood was like but if I describe what the cast I had to wear on my arm in the third grade smelled like, that’ll somehow get you closer to knowing my childhood more than anything I could ever explain. And I also think that can be at the heart of great lyric writing. Presenting the whole through the partial and incredibly specific. 

Eddie: And that’s kind of how memory works, right? Like you remember one or two memories that contain the whole thing. Like a cup upside down, that had a couple drops in it that spilled onto the coffee table. And for whatever reason that was summer of third grade for you. And if you saw it again it would bring it all back. 

Maybe that’s just how brains work. You save energy by just containing everything within a few specific capsules. 

Danny: That’s what I was gonna say. Not to take it too far but our everyday perception is built like this. Like our sight, that is our mind filling in so many blanks. You can only take in so much at a time and you have to focus on a few key things around you to make sense of the whole. 

Collin: I think that I kind of come to that when I talk to Ed about what his songs mean. Almost to the point where it’s been frustrating in the past. I’ll explain my interpretation of a song to him and instead of being like no, this is what I meant, he’ll go, hmm, yeah I guess it is that way. And that openness is one of my favorite things about your writing. Even from the first moment he’ll show us a song it just feels like he’s putting down a piece of paper down on the table and all the rest, the arrangement and production, everything else that goes into creating what the song means are to be determined after the lyrics have been written. So that openness remains throughout the process. 

Eddie: I just think you do a real disservice to people if you just walk them through the whole thing. It’s insulting. But songs that will let you inhabit them, those are songs you can actually have a connection with. 

But I learned a lot of this through trial and error and I also learned it from Joe and Tom who write songs that are hauntingly impressionistic. Like I remember when we first started making music together I would feel like such a chump. After classes we’d always be playing and all their lyrics would be so mysterious and have all this room for duplicity and mine did not. Mine would just be like a series of events. And I like that stuff, and we have some songs like that, but learning how to give more breadth and space in the song is stuff I picked up from Joe and Tom. 

I think that’s a huge point that took me some time to learn as a writer: trusting your audience and the idea of insulting them by giving them too much. And it’s very refreshing to hear lyrics that allow enough space for you to step inside them. 

Collin: Maybe that’s the biggest similarity we have to film. Of course Eddie’s lyrics are visual, but you never want to give the game away. You don’t want to just outright say what you’re singing about because that loses its allure. And everyone wants to feel like they can navigate a movie. Or a song. That they can ascribe their own idiosyncrasies within their own interpretation.  

Tom: Maybe you can relate to that as an interviewer. Like the worst question you can ask someone is where do they get their ideas from. 

Eddie: You should probably cross that one out. 

Tom: But yeah just to echo what they were saying, why give the game away? 

Eddie: Show don’t tell. Which is a film axiom as well. 

So album out. How’s it feeling? Sometimes when I finish something major I go through a bit of a depression. Like maybe the things I was making art out of I wasn’t actually allowing myself to feel until the process is all the way over. How’s it feel to have this thing out there finally? 

Eddie: So much of what we like about the creative process is that it’s sustaining. It really is sustaining to have something to work on. And I have friends that have been working on albums for years and years that might not ever come out because of that personal need to be sustained. And I have that pathology too, I think. I need something to be working on. Painting the walls on the dollhouse forever. And with music, where all the deadlines are self imposed, the good news is you can work on it forever, and the bad news is that you can work on it forever. But for that reason putting something out can feel terrible. 

It’s funny, when people think of someone writing like a very sad song, they imagine someone sitting at their desk weeping or whatever. But honestly when I’m writing stuff like that there’s this great excitement to it. There’s this pursuit. You’re onto something good. Like the song “The Brightest Hideaway” had that feeling. When I was writing it I was just so excited and felt like the fox was in the bush and I was trying to catch it. And I was tweaking it and making it open enough to the point that it felt impersonal, but when I was going to record it, the song is in second person speaking to someone who passed away and I just had this moment where I was like, “Oh shit, I mean this.” And I had to take another month to finish it. 

So you’re right, in a way you’re making a commodity: something that others can take away and use as their own. But there’s a tremendous amount of vulnerability involved which you can lose sight of once in a while. 

And so with the album out maybe there’s not really an elation of, “Thank god it’s done.” But rather a relief to be shutting the door on some of that stuff. Not having to work on something that’s a manifestation of your grief or pain or whatever. That’s not an immediate feeling. There’s the initial pride in just being able to show people this thing that we made. But later is the feeling of being able to shut the door on that stuff.  

Photography by Jack Pompe. More of his work can be found at jackpompe.com

The Body Itself – A review of One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan

I am sitting at my desk. There is a buzzing sensation occurring within my left big toe, right underneath the toenail. It has been occurring for the last five days. Perhaps longer. If I had to make an estimate, the buzzing––which is not painful but rather just feels like the faintest ongoing electric current––occupies somewhere between 1% and 3% of my mind depending on what is going on and what I am doing. I do not know why this buzzing is happening and am too embarrassed to ask others about it. I hope it will end soon.

Other things occurring: a cat in the living room that meowed a moment ago, most likely out of boredom or longing for its owner, my roommate. He looks like another cat I shared a home with a few years ago as I watched a friend slip into a depression. There is a sink that has a mess of materials covering the strainer. The mass of wet things––coffee grounds, bits of chopped onion, watermelon juice, globs of greek yogurt, cat food, and much, much more I could never know––has a flesh color to it. Like a pile of pink and shredded skin. When I look at it I think of the time I gashed open my knee on the side of an old refrigerator playing hide and seek in a friend’s basement; how a flap of skin spread like a gill and leaked and leaked until my leg was covered red and the game was very much over. Gill, blood, childhood: I am fishing off the coast of Wrightsville Beach, pulling Spanish Mackerel into a boat that is rocking and uncomfortable and stark white. Later my father teaches me how to filet and clean the fish with a curved and thin knife, tossing head and guts into a nearby bucket. Bucket, guts, depression, cat: my friend’s shirt has been cut open and there are needles in his arm and an airmask on his face. There are paramedics in his bedroom asking many questions. The cat has run out the front door and is somewhere in the night-covered neighborhood. 

The mind is bound by the walls of sense, memory, and imagination: that which it is experiencing currently, that which it has experienced, and that which it can reasonably or unreasonably hypothesize about experiencing. The mixture of these elements add up to what we call perception. What it is like to walk about or lay down for sleep or exist somewhere in between. How it is to drink a glass of wine with a date you wish to impress and have the smell of sulfur drag you back to your morning’s shit, and how there was blood when you wiped, and how your grandfather died of prostate cancer a few years ago and it was most likely that you had just rubbed your anus too hard and too much, but you cannot shake the worry and No, so actually I was born in Albuquerque but moved to Los Angeles when I was very young. 

Identity is created out of perception. Out of the continual state of experiencing we recognize patterns in ourselves and begin to construct a vision of ourselves as someone who experiences life in a particular way. Someone who’s state of perception has a number of consistent traits and quirks to it. Faulty and abstract and created from the raw sense data of uncaring, objective phenomena, the elusiveness of memories, and the imaginary-ness of dreams, identity remains the most important thing we have. It is how we both arrive at and fight off despair. It is, very obviously, us. 

Thus it is often when this state of being is expressed to us, examined or abstracted through art, our initial reaction can often be one of revilement, of rage, or embarrassment. Perhaps this is how one might feel when reading the first few poems of David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence, in which we are confronted with cuts of flesh being likened butterfat, plucked out eyebrows, requests for someone to “spit in & around my mouth”, and a mouth as “empty as Wyoming.” One might feel that the self, and one’s comfort with the self is under a deconstructivist attack by an angry and vulgar poet who very much doesn’t like punctuation.

And this reaction is fair to some degree: it is not fun to recognize that the most dignified thing––what we are––is truly just a collection of very undignified things. But out of this initial reaction we will, hopefully, ask ourselves, how did this collection of words, this object created by a stranger in some very far away place make me feel that? And then we begin to understand it as crucial in showing us the actual slime and goo with which we are made and how this basicness of construction being afforded the highest of dignity through the faulty process of identification permeates up and up and up until you see that whole worlds, cultures, and histories are based off the same strange leap from perception and this is both the most alienating and most comforting thing that you can really have someone show you. And then you grow very thankful for this object for showing you this and very much wish to share it with others. David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence is such an object. 

Published last March by Driftwood Press, David Greenspan’s debut poetry collection seeks to find reason between the body and the world it occupies. It searches through the mess of sensory data, bodily functions, road signs, pill bottles, old dreams, old lovers, fragmented memories, and attempts to piece together a cohesion of the self. Kaleidoscopic in approach, images and ideas seem to ring out as they do in real life: familiar enough to warrant your attention, but mysterious enough to captivate awe and activate a spiritual yearning you might only be comfortable articulating around your closest friend or psychiatrist: 

We are a collective of loosely associated ventures. An arrangement / of worships. We are a brand but only in the sensing of emotion. / You might say we are a rhizome of commodity forms, though / we discourage you from expressing in this manner

– “Two: The Years, Sometimes Many and Sometimes Few, Between”

Seeking worldly connection, Greenspan extends this deconstructivist gaze to the objects around him as well. One of the more striking poems from the collection appears almost exactly in the middle through “An incomplete history of”, in which we are treated to a linear splattering of images and ideas and people associated with the “history” of airports. Perhaps with the absurdity of the way in which we construct identity in mind––the way our self-concept is not much more than an amalgamation of vivid moments and interactions––Greenspan illustrates how the history of human progress is created in the same fashion. Written with no capitalization or punctuation and substituting ampersands for all conjunctions, Greenspan renders the fluidity of inner cognition and applies it to a place full of people roaming around, caught within their dancing minds. No one, for the most part, thinks of the history of liminal places: they are simply, by their very nature, locations that serve only to get you to the more meaningful parts of life. But in Greenspan’s eyes and through his writing these places are shown to be the collective unconscious spiritual centers which they truly are: ones in which the impossible was once pondered, accomplished, and then completely forgotten about until all that was left were the neon lights designating ampersand-ed corporate entities and the ghost of something spiritually vital no one can ever quite put a finger on. 

People / talked  ate  slept  left / on the nine forty-five nonstop / to Dulles  with reasonably priced / tickets    time passed / as it does   onion smell / piled up   standing in / line became a worship / remove shoes for moveable / altar    bathrooms / stayed bathroom   remember / the awful prick & pressure of cabin air  as we pluck today’s long-sleeved marrow 

– “An incomplete history of” 

There is something Howl-like about the culminating third part of the book, which takes the form of a single, extended poem, “A Poem to Pass the Time.” Yet, unlike the rage that sits at the heart of Howl, in which Ginsberg illustrates the effects of American moral decay and institutional tyranny in weaving fashion, from coast to coast, city to city, mind to memory to myth, Greenspan presents us something slightly more hushed and personal, embodied by the rather anti-epic title. 

And perhaps this is indicative of what a perspective such as Greenspan’s affords one in the contemporary era: now sixty-seven years after the original publishing of Howl, we, as a population, have experienced very little substantive changes to the things in which Ginsberg located as maddening so many years ago. Perhaps the only really noticeable change is the social acceptability of this tyranny and moral rot once at least viewed as strange. Thus Greenspan seeks a cure for the madness inward. Through a deconstruction of his own self and his markers of identity, which have been composed by the unconscious act of sensing the world around him; by taking in the world and his time which has become so saturated with normalized madness that with each breath we can never be so sure we did not just take in our ultimate demise. 

if writing is dispossessed thinking / what is writing freed from thought / a perverse inventory    the kindness of questions   the poem isn’t very kind / my penmanship makes the whole world / nervous as a junkie on the third day of withdrawal 

– “A Poem to Pass the Time” 

There is seemingly a lot of David Greenspan on display in this book. There are specific images like yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, kidneys gorged with apple slices, rotten fly-covered apple slices, many, many different pills, and a few proper nouns, whose utterance and occasional recurrence give you a feeling of the ultra-intimate. But it is not the hyper-constructed intimate which we are so used to seeing in the literary arts today––it is not the cheeky meta-narration of one’s own life, nor is it the overly confessional and emotionally overwrought diary entry staining so much of contemporary writing. The self Greenspan presents to his readers is unguarded and unarticulated, allowing for judgment; a collection of strong feelings and memories with just enough of a stylistic collective fabric to hold together as a product of unified consciousness. Much like the cover image, and the images appearing at the section breaks, Greenspan peels off his skin, sits down in front of us, points at a bleeding limb, and asks, Does this make me, me? 

One Person Holds So Much Silence is available for purchase at Driftwood Press’s site: https://www.driftwoodpress.com/product-page/one-person-holds-so-much-silence

Interview by Jake Hargrove

Boogeymen, Weightlifting, and DIY with Drew Stier

Making music in New York comes with a lot of baggage no matter who you are. From finding a suitable living situation to figuring out how to get gear across town, the city can be difficult for anyone. It’s the kind of setting that can leave an artist desperate for any kind of institutional assistance, and––as desperation almost always invites exploitation––all too vulnerable to losing control of their work and vision.

I sat down with Drew Stier, who records and performs under the alias Golder, and spoke about the difficulties of being a DIY musician in New York, growing up, and interacting with the New York indie scene, all of which, in some fashion, are at the heart of his new album Weightlifting. Speaking with him, you slowly become aware of a mind that both prospers and suffers from the necessity to seek out the inverse of every thought or feeling in pursuit of developing a singular understanding. He struggles with this, but, as he explained to me, struggling is the only thing he really finds meaningful.

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How long has Golder been going? How did it start? 

It started in 2020. Or that’s around the time that I adopted the moniker. I had made a lot of music I never released before adopting Golder, but I think when you pick a name it sort of makes things come together, and you start settling into a lane. So in September 2020 I started releasing stuff onto SoundCloud and this student-run-doomed-to-fail-start-up-thing streaming and discovery site called Quadio that was basically like an early-days Facebook, when you could only join with a student email address. Nowadays, especially at places like NYU, I feel like everyone has some form of a “music streaming and discovery start-up” going. Like people that have never actually been to a DIY show that are trying to basically fake their way in and have something to put on their resumes, but the thing about Quadio was that is was run by the grandchildren of this wildly rich CEO, so, without much more development than the average college music stream and discovery start-up they had just so much more funding and outreach. Campus outposts all across America with student representatives from various music business programs––which, nowadays, are essentially free-labor factories given the internships required of you to graduate. 

But basically any idiot could look at their business model and figure out it was doomed and never going to be profitable and that you were never going to make any money off it, but what I figured out was that it didn’t take that much effort to game the system. You could get to the top of the charts on the site pretty consistently if you knew how to do it. So it became kind of fun to drop music and have eight people like it and then do whatever algorithmically was necessary to hit the top of the streaming list. And I just kept doing that. And honestly I was at the top of that site’s discovery page for like two months with just like twenty listeners. And that’s basically how Golder started, which is sort of fitting in retrospect given how fucking stupid and funny it was. Like the absurd amount of money going into this thing everyone knew wasn’t going to work, and then finding some way to game it, that was just appealing to me for whatever reason. 

So would you say that type of humor is at the core of Golder? 

I think it’s just the absurdity that I’m drawn to. Even the broader New York scene right now seems to be trending in that direction. Like why could I rule this music platform funded by one of the vastest American fortunes ever amassed, that’s now supporting their rich grandkids’ ‘music dreams’ and I can just win it over and over again by gaming the system. Of course it didn’t amount to any type of real victory, and of course the company doesn’t even exist anymore, but in that moment it was very funny to me. And maybe even funnier was that there were tracks that I put tons of effort and time into and just refused to put out on any standard streaming platform and instead put out on this stupid, niche thing that I knew was going to fail.

I mean it probably also functioned as a stepping stone in my own way as well. It’s scary to put stuff out on streaming. Or like it used to be; today people just treat it like posting on instagram, and post stuff and take it down, or constantly change their name. But even just three years ago, it felt a little more significant to put things out on Spotify and maybe that’s how we got over that fear––by going through the motions of dropping music on a different, more obscure platform.

In relation to Quadio, a music discovery site that was funded by one of the largest fortunes in American history that happened to have grandkids going to NYU, do you think the New York DIY scene is influenced by these large pockets of private wealth? Are there a lot of kids in the scene that come from money like that?

I think an element that is not as well understood is that there are a lot of kids that just still live with their parents. So if you’re a trust-fund kid who gets an allowance from their parents to live in some apartment, it’s not that entirely different from kids from less wealth just living at their parent’s house. Like the advantage is pretty similar. A lot of kids, especially in the Brooklyn scene, are New York natives, and having access to their parent’s home puts them in a pretty similar position to say a trust-fund kid if we’re talking about time allotted to work on music versus time spent having to worry about making enough money for rent. I don’t really know how I feel about it. I’m personally just a bit of a masochist so working and not getting money from my parents and, like, actually struggling, is in some ways a little more satisfying and freeing to me, but it’s also hard not to envy the time and ease of people that have more resources, financial or otherwise.

In terms of how having a wealthy family might impact your success beyond just allowing you time to practice and gig more, something I didn’t fully understand until maybe last year is that Brooklyn and Manhattan are separate scenes. So thus far we’ve been growing mostly in the Brooklyn scene which is much less transplant-y, and also, I think, a lot less unique in a lot of ways. The sound of the Brooklyn scene and the ethos and the general success of people is not that different from what you would find in a place like Allston, or Philly, or D.C. I think Brooklyn, just because of the amount of people here, produces a lot of music and bands, but I think it’s a lot less unique than the Manhattan scene which is a completely different ball game, and, given the real estate, influenced way more by money and spending money. Like the biggest DIY band in Brooklyn, for the most part, is still broke as fuck. Whereas in Manhattan it costs way more to play but the possibility of profit is way higher and the possibility that you might get connected with someone who can help you financially is also higher. And I think that’s more where you start to run into the nepo-baby crowd or whatever. The Dimes Square people that want to be in Vogue and Perfectly Imperfect. People who want to be like globally cool and who, more than likely, have immensely wealthy parents and who can afford to be out all the time in Manhattan, which, as everyone knows, is fucking expensive. And the only way you gain traction as a performer is by being out in the scene as much as possible. So the people most capable of doing that in Manhattan are, of course, the wealthy.

So it’s confusing. The sound of Manhattan is, in my opinion, a bit more unique right now, and the opportunities available to a band that succeeds there in comparison to Brooklyn are just so much more, but it’s so hard to do it if you’re broke. And the scene in Brooklyn is more fulfilling and organic feeling, but the sound feels very homogenous right now and there just aren’t the same paths for musicians available.

Regarding the necessity of going out and taking part in a scene in order to grow and succeed as a performer and band, what is your perspective on that kind of dependence on being out and partying in relation to maintaining your own mental and financial health?

It’s definitely something I’m struggling with right now and something I don’t think I’ve gotten very close to figuring out. I think something that has been helping out, at least on the financial front, is I do have friends that are a bit wealthier than me, or friends that are helped out by their parents, who can go out more consistently than me, so they’ve been making a lot of connections sort of on my behalf. And so the last time I went out in Manhattan I think I only paid like eight bucks for the whole night because we were getting listed, or someone knew a DJ, or a bouncer. And that’s kind of the only way I can go out in Manhattan.

In Brooklyn it’s different obviously. Like when I go to those DIY shows I could maybe get on those lists but I would feel bad about doing it. These are your friends and you want to support them so they can support you, and the money is going to the bar that is essentially making no money, but you want the bar to keep hosting shows so you basically just gotta put a little money into the scene there.

In regards to my mental health, I’m doing alright I think. At least in regard to going out. I mean I’m having a lot of fun. I think the thing that’s really falling apart right now is my body. Working long shifts at the coffee shop and then carrying gear, standing up for practice, commuting wherever, it’s all adding up. So if I’m not going out, and I’m missing shows, it’s just because I’m laying in bed sore and aching. Which is hard to explain to twenty-two-year-olds who are always just like ‘Get the fuck up. Let’s go!” I feel like being like ‘I’m tired’ is just not a valid excuse here. Which is awesome but also obviously hard if you’re working a job and your body is breaking down on you.

Beyond helping out the scene, and encouraging others to come and see you play, how necessary is it for your own art for you to be out hearing other people and speaking with other people? Do you find that it improves your creativity and the music you make? Or does it sometimes work against you? At the end of the day, in my eyes, a certain level of rest is necessary for good creative work to be possible. Does going out get in the way of that ever?

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve taken on any serious creative work since I finished Weightlifting over a year ago. It just didn’t feel as important if that makes sense. And that has actually been terrible for my mental health. I mean everyone knows that you only endure the suffering of being an artist because you have to. That you need to create things in order to feel okay, so you take on whatever discomfort is necessary in order to be able to prioritize creating. I definitely have to be actively creating in order to feel okay about myself and be able to negotiate my place in this whole thing, and after putting out that album I had to do a lot of things like performing, which isn’t exactly creative, but it’s also incredibly important to getting your stuff out there.

I think, on the whole, it’s probably hurt to be out so much. I feel like I’ve already taken so much in. So much input, you know, from just daily life here. And that’s certainly enough to be making shit. You don’t really need more input. And the only way to get better at making stuff is simply by making stuff. When I’m out, I feel like it’s sort of obligatory sometimes. I probably only need to go out once a month to get any kind of creative stimulation. And the rest of the time I should just be at my place recording.

I’m finally getting back into that place though. I’m prioritizing making things over performing and going out a bit more. And that feels good. And when I go back to listen to some of the things I’ve been making I can definitely hear the influence of all the people I’ve been hanging around. All the bands and DJ sets. It definitely sounds more Brooklyn-y than the last record which I recorded while I was still in Manhattan.

The thing that’s most important, in regards to influence, is just being around people that are doing the thing that you want to do. So like if you want to be playing live, you gotta be going to tons of shows. If you want to be at home recording, you gotta be around people who are also recording. We’re just herd animals so you just have to pick who you hang around wisely.

Alright, so let’s talk about Weightlifting a bit. That album came out in December. Could you tell me about the process of making it? What was the idea behind it? Why is it called Weightlifting?

I think during that point in time, I was very much trying to understand my place in all of this. Like when I was at NYU it was very easy to get caught up in all the systemic problems of the world. That’s all I feel anybody wanted to talk about. And as a white guy at a place like that you sort of end up becoming a kind of straw-man. And that never really bothered me that much but it definitely led me to think very critically about my relation to all these systemic problems as someone of privilege. Like I just started putting all this shit onto myself. And it got basically to this breaking point where I was just caught up thinking about these issues all day and I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t creating and I wasn’t doing anything about the issues either. And it became this question of how much of this is my fault and what can I even do about it? Because I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it, really. So that was part of the Weightlifting idea. Trying to make sense of all that.

And then another part was the simple decision to be an artist. To leave college and say I’m going to make art. That’s a heavy thing to do because, on some level, you know it’s not a great decision. But you do it because you have to. It’s not a good career move to make but you have to. And that was definitely a weight on me. Making that decision.

The last thing was sort of related to Camus. His writing on the Myth of Sisyphus. How there’s this weight that you put on yourself that you must push off for no real reason. Like weightlifters. Why are you actually pushing all that weight that’s going to cause you pain? Why push the boulder if you know it’s not going to actually do anything? That it’s going to roll down on you again. I think it’s because struggling itself is just the most fulfilling thing you can do. Not the payoff, but actually just the struggle. The weightlifting.

I think the album is actually pretty optimistic. A lot more than the record we made before it. It’s coming to terms with coming out of college and realizing that I’ll probably be pushing the same boulder around for the rest of my life. And I think I’m okay with that. I think I actually enjoy it.

Regarding your first point, grappling with your relation to systemic issues in the world and still finding the mental freedom to create, I think that’s something that a lot of people struggle with. The thought that your privilege and complacency has added up to systemic problems, and that people might be viewing you through this lens, I think that can lead to both artists feeling unable to create as well as spaces feeling somewhat closed off. Have you experienced this?

I mean you enter these niche spaces, like on college campuses, where it can be very difficult to make yourself heard or feel valid as a human being if you come from a certain level of privilege. And I think because of the internet people get very mixed about societal spaces and structures, and you find people curating their entire world in somewhat closed-off fashions. Like if you bounce from one NYU class to another as a white guy, you might find yourself at some sort of disadvantage. Obviously nothing like that affects your role in the world but there will definitely be people who will be like “Fuck you,” off rip, which can be very disheartening. But in the end those niche spaces are just not the whole world. And when you enter into the larger world and market you realize that there are massive biases against these people protecting these niche spaces, and that your privilege and opportunities are most definitely related to perpetuation of these biases. And that distaste directed toward you might not be related to you as a person, someone who was just born to a particular set of circumstances, but the privilege and opportunity afforded by those circumstances is most definitely a product of something that disadvantages other people.

Do you think this thing we’re talking about, this issue of privilege and the reactions it creates within people, both of and not of it, can be destructive within the DIY space? DIY, like a college campus, can often be a pretty niche and selective environment. Do you see a similarity there at all?

I mean it’s hard to say because DIY is still a very white male-dominated space. It’s kind of a huge problem. It’s crazy to see the stars that have come out of DIY compared to the faces that you might see at an actual show. Like the market is doing a better job of diversifying. If you think of who are the biggest DIY stars of the past ten years the first one that comes to mind is someone like Mitski, but when you go to a DIY basement show you’re just not going to see too many people who look like Mitski. It’s pretty messed up to experience that difference and it’s a testament to the reality we’re presented with. How these places get portrayed by various media outlets versus what they actually look like are so different.

I think it’s destructive for DIY spaces to be that homogenous. I don’t think things like wokeness are even that present in the conversation. Look at Midwestern emo or any other regional scene and it’s all pretty much the same. That’s not to say there aren’t prominent LGBTQ queer and trans spaces that are really blossoming and making vibrant communities around things like punk music, but I think when we’re talking about something like indie rock, which is the scene I would say we’re most the part of, it’s still horrifyingly homogenous. Which sucks given its music that appeals to a very large group of people. And if you just look at the stars that end up coming out, it’s pretty clear that white guys aren’t better at making this music than any other type of person.

I do feel fortunate though. Even though our crowds are still quite homogenous, the very specific scene we’ve been playing with, and the bands we’ve been trying to associate with are a lot more diverse than the scene overall. And that makes me a lot happier and more comfortable. And the more diverse the bands are the more diverse the crowds are going to be. You can’t really control who ends up coming to your show, but to the extent that we’ve been able to put fem-fronted acts on the bills, and play with diverse bands, we have been able to diversify our shows a bit more. And that’s something we all strive for. I mean Golder, the group of kids I play with, are a pretty diverse group in themselves. It’s kind of insane, when you walk around New York City, that anyone would have a band of just white guys honestly. It’s just not what the city looks like. No hate for groups of white guys that grew up together or whatever, but if you’re putting a New York band together from scratch it just seems unlikely it would end up looking like that.

I think the idea of diversity is interesting in the indie world when thinking about authenticity given how white male dominated the genre has been. Like what if your influences are simply a bunch of white guy indie rock bands, and that’s the sound you feel most like yourself when creating? Is that an authentic expression or is that a reluctance to broaden one’s perspective? Do you think that’s a potential shortcoming of the genre?

I think things are improving in the indie world. I think we’re legitimately on a better trajectory, so maybe the possibility of that happening is getting lower and lower.

But I think if you make music that’s true to yourself––like truly, truly, true to yourself––it’s going to appeal to a very broad audience of people anyway. People are people across the board. In different communities and places. If you make music it’s going to correspond with your place within the social structure and your archetype, and that type of thing will resonate across generations and continents and everything else. Unless you’re like fucking Pat Boone and the reason you’re making music is to make it palatable to a different social class, it’ll come out in an authentic fashion and relate to people of different walks of life.

I wanted to ask you about the idea of persona. I approach art as a fiction writer for the most part, which means, at least in my own head, I’m afforded a pretty wide distance between creation and creator. I can write a character who does disgusting things or has awful thoughts, and because of the aesthetic agreement necessary to make fiction work, people will not conflate the character’s mind with my own––hopefully. And this allows me to explore a very wide range of ideas and people, and seek out humanity and empathy in unlikely places as well as express things that would be difficult to articulate if limited to my own life and experience. But making music seems different to me in this respect. At the end of the day it’s you that ends up on the stage and at the mic and unless you’ve conducted some very extensive and creative personifying, I feel like it would be very difficult not to conflate the things you create with you as a person. I’m curious if you feel this safety to explore these strange, disparate, and extreme crevices of experience with your music? Do you ever fear being unfairly judged for something you’ve created in this respect?

I think you’re always going to worry about being judged to some extent. But I have maybe counterintuitively noticed that performing is helping me a lot with that thought. When you’re alone in your room writing music, who are you kidding, you’re the only one hearing it and you’re the only one who has to live with those thoughts and emotions. Whereas on stage, over time, you realize that people want something that’s authentic but the act of performance itself is an exaggeration. People want to see you more into it than maybe you’re feeling. Like if you’re feeling like shit, you can’t go on stage and be a downer. You still have to go on stage and get the energy up. You can’t let being down impact your performance. And I think, because of that, the act of performance is an act of falsehood. And it’s really that that has been difficult for me to deal with in regards to the issue of persona, in comparison to maybe being judged for writing something too extreme.

For the most part the music I have written thus far has been a pretty close POV to my own life. But since I’ve started performing more I think I’m getting more comfortable with writing from other people’s perspectives. Or at least allowing that filter process to occur of like, yeah, I do feel these things, but maybe I don’t feel them in a way I could personally articulate so I’m going to write from someone else's viewpoint. Because the more I get better on stage, the more I understand that the person up there is me but it is also not me at all. And I’m starting to develop more of a separation between this is Golder and this is Drew. Which has allowed me to think, okay well what if it’s not Golder either? What if it’s someone else instead? I’ve always admired songwriters who can write from the perspective of other people. Because in the end you know it’s all yourself, but it’s a mark of a good songwriter to channel your feelings through others.

In regards to exploring something strange or extreme, I think people truthfully prefer extremes. For a while one of our most popular songs both live and on streaming was “Buy You Something Nice,” which is a pretty extreme song. The last lyric is something like “I’ll tie you to the floor,” which is essentially a violent act against a woman and a pretty insane thing to say. Like yeah I didn’t want her to leave me so I tied her to the floor. That’s not an okay thing to feel or say in real life, but I think when you do dare to go there in music people respond to it because it connects to something. And I think it’s the job of the artist to excavate all these emotions that people have, even the ones that are confusing.

But there is a fear of doing stuff like that. Like as a white guy, you have this boogeyman woke person in your head that’s like “You can’t say that! Leave that to people who are allowed to say stuff like that!” But I think that boogeyman is really just in your head and like maybe on Twitter a bit. But they have no real influence. The people that are like “Oh man these old writers are so problematic, and their books and songs are so bad,” are really just this tiny minority. Because people aren’t stupid. And they understand that art is different from your own personal views in the end. I just don’t think people like that influence art in the same way we’re often led to believe. For the most part people don’t even talk to me about stuff like that lyric I was talking about. People just accept that that’s what the song is.

But maybe people who want to judge––because perhaps there are some real boogeymen out there––don’t even understand the process. Like people that don’t make shit. They probably just don’t understand the process of writing. Shit just pops into your head and you don’t always know where it comes from. And you could go back later and be like, I thought that because this happened in my life. Or maybe this. But in that moment, when you’re holding the pen, I feel like it’s not that related. And more creative people are more understanding of how things arrive during that process and know that there’s that disconnect. Or like the thing said in order to truthfully explore a feeling will not be in tightest accordance with what the feeling is actually made out of.

I think that concept of the boogeyman is something many young artists end up getting fixated on. You spoke about experiencing this in relation to the concept behind Weightlifting. What do you think that fixation is all about?

I think it’s just a manifestation of the inbuilt resistance to creation that everyone has. Like the more that you’re someone that has to make stuff, the stronger the force against making stuff in you is going to be. And the harder it is to overcome that. And I think people are just going to latch onto any excuse. No matter what. Like this is the reason I can’t create stuff. And it’s an incredibly powerful force. I’ve definitely been a victim of that and I think everyone I know that creates stuff has been a victim of it in some fashion. I don’t think it’s a unique feeling to like white guys either. Like you might have the woke SJW boogeyman in the back of your head but I think a person of color is going to have the racism they’ve experienced similarly on their shoulder saying, “You’re not allowed to make that. Nobody cares.” So maybe I feel like it can be a false othering sometimes. And because it seems like it’s coming from a different perspective doesn’t mean it’s not a manifestation of the same force. Sometimes I think being at the pinnacle of privilege, spaces will make you feel like you’re the boogeyman, but truthfully I feel like we experience life the exact same way. I mean it’s a lot easier if you’re from privilege of course.

Your point about the clashing forces of creative desire––the need to create and the impulse to stop yourself from creating––I think is a very important one. The longer I continue to write, the more I see people who were once very convicted and talented fall off for various reasons. And it’s always difficult to see, but, I think as I get older, it’s becoming less difficult to understand. Sometimes writing and artmaking can very much feel like a mental illness: a compulsion to sacrifice wellbeing in order to create space and time to make things. Simply, as you’ve already said, it is not a good career choice to become an artist but it’s something you do because you have to. That’s a very similar outlook on the world to like an alcoholic when you think about it. And being a good artist, or one who achieves some level of longevity, I feel, is a matter of learning to cope with this. Personally, I believe it’s easier to cope with life being a little bit harder, and being a little bit poorer but still being able to create, than it is to cope with a compulsion to make things but, for whatever reason, a decision not to do so. But it’s not an easy decision to make by any means.

Without a doubt. If you have to do it you have to do it. It’s weird. Like last year was the first time I think people really acknowledged what I was doing. You know they were like “You’re doing it. You’re making music.” But I’ve been telling people all my life that’s who I am. That I have to create and make music. And last year was this complete shit storm for me where I very much did not feel like a musician. Like problem after problem after problem. So many good excuses for myself not to create. And also performing became this massive thing. And also I’m a self recording and producing artist so it takes so much fucking time for me to make music and I don’t even really have the space to do it. But so there were points where I was like this is the best year of life because I was finally starting to get some kind of recognition, but at the same time it was probably one of the worst years of my life. At least since I’ve really dived into music. I wasn’t making shit. I probably wrote twenty to thirty songs over the course of a year, which is very low for me. Like if I get kicking I’ll be writing multiple songs a day and producing a bunch. So it was kind of this miserable stand-still time for me. Like when an album comes out, and you’re a bandleader, your time just gets sucked up by so much bullshit. Booking, playing, constantly doing stuff. It can make it really hard to prioritize making a song that you know you’re going to throw away.

I think that period has ended, thankfully, and I’m a little more settled in with a better income and schedule and all that. But it was difficult. I felt like I’d roped so many people into this thing and so I was responsible for it going well. So I had to put aside the things that made me happiest, which is just making songs.

I don’t know, I guess that’s just part of being a musician. Or being a DIY musician. I’m sure people know, but it’s just so much harder to stand even the slightest bit against the dominant power structure in music. Even making music that’s just slightly different than the exact music currently playing on the radio, it’s going to be double the work and get a shit ton of doubt from people. I’m saying if you’re more or less being cooperative with what is popular, and you look like the right type of person and all that, even the slightest deviation will still be severely punished. And DIY is just so far beyond that. We like to think that we create this other system, but, I don’t know, it’s just exponentially more difficult. You’re lugging your own shit around and trying and trying to get people to come to shows in shitty places with no toilet paper or whatever. Payout is awful. No one has a manager. It’s just way more effort. And it’s all to justify making the kind of music that you want to make.

Because as an artist there’s no I’m going to sort of make what I like. I know what the music I like sounds like and I’ve spent years and years honing in on a sound tuned exactly to my taste. And it has essentially nothing to do with the market at all. So you’re just left with this hope that maybe things will swing your way, or you’ll amass enough people together that the market will be like, “Oh, you have an audience.” And maybe they’ll give you money. But, still, they’re not going to invest into it unless they can determine that your sound can be replicated and sold by much better looking, more easily digestible people.

It’s just something you accept going into it. Or it’s not, and you get blindsided. That happens a lot too. Like someone making a good album and then it’s like, alright man, time to start performing. You gotta promote it too. You gotta go to shows that aren’t yours either to meet people. All that for essentially a tenth of the success that would be afforded to someone almost immediately for making a playlistable song that slots in well with what’s popular.

But you would never want to make music like that. I mean, what’s the point? It’s just shit anyone else could make.

Photography by Argil Tool

Interview by Jake Hargrove