The Creative Independent

Musicians MUNA on leaning into specificity

2026-04-16T03:00:00-04:00

When you write, are you ever worried about anchoring your lyrics in a specific place, like Los Angeles on “East Side Girls”?

Katie Gavin: I mean, when I write, I’m worried about everything. There’s a certain point within the process where you’re just worried, especially when you already have a platform and you know that people are going to be listening to it.

I think we were really inspired by LA with this whole record, but the thing that we landed on with the “East Side Girls,” especially in the bridge, is that there is a whole historical canon of artistic gay communities on the East Side of a bunch of different cities. I remember being in Berlin and talking about this. Historically, factories have been on the East Side of many cities, so the rent around there is cheaper. The different places we list in the bridge are all places where I know that there has either now or at one point been an East Side culture.

At the same time, the more specific you get, the more people actually do attach to a song. I don’t think you can overestimate people’s ability to put themselves in your shoes. Listeners are so creative. They can fill in with their own experiences, even if you’re giving them a clear feeling in a song.

Can you talk a bit about your decision to lean into political themes on Dancing on the Wall? Did you have any discussions in the band about that?

Naomi McPherson: Our art is going to be politicized whether we like it or not. So, we might as well try our best to make educated, cogent, informed, and interesting statements if we are to make them overtly in the songs.

“Big Stick” was a song that we’ve been working towards, a way to talk about these things in music. I often think songs that are super political run the risk of coming across as condescending, but I think there are plenty of examples of political songs that are super effective. We’ve just been waiting to figure out the way that we could be effective with our version of it without running the risk of people feeling like we think we’re smarter or better than them.

It was never really a conversation of whether or not we should do it. It was just like how and what is the best way. There’s a reference to climate change on “It Gets So Hot,” and “Buzzkiller” has some moments as well. Acknowledging the contemporary political reality that we’re living through is just an effort to write truthfully about our lived experience. To leave that part out would be dishonest. It’s something we’re very preoccupied with and think about a lot, as I’m sure most people do.

Josette Maskin: It’s also been who we are since we started as a band. One of the first singles that we put out was “Loudspeaker,” a song shrouded in the guise of pop music, but with a really heavy message that we felt have always needed to be heard. “Big Stick” is maybe the most overt and also the most critical rather than personally motivated, but it’s part of MUNA’s DNA. There’s never been a question about it.

Naomi, you produced this record, and you’re a producer for other musicians. Do you approach songs differently from a production standpoint than you would as a musician?

NP: I think for me, production is almost like the instrument that I play in the band. I wouldn’t describe myself as the strongest instrumentalist at any one particular instrument. I play keys and guitar when we perform live, and I sing background vocals. But production is where my brain as a musician functions most effectively, and it’s kind of how I think about music. I fell into that role pretty naturally from the beginning of the band. I think production first, and then I figure out what the hell I’m going to be playing for the songs live later. I’m beat first, production first, and then I just figure it out on the backend as a band member. The songs get to take on their own new life in the live iteration of our project, which is cool too.

Did the success of “Silk Chiffon” create any pressure for this record?

KG: The reality of your life when you have success is it immediately becomes, “Okay, so how are you going to keep this up?” Or, “Are you going to do it again? Are you going to be able to repeat this thing that people liked?”

We had a very human response. I don’t think we were reacting against “Silk Chiffon,” but when you cross over to the mild extent that we did, you can feel like people don’t totally understand you because they just know you as the “queer joy mini-skirt rollerblade” band.

We had a desire to take the time and the resources that that song allowed us to make the most cohesive body of work that we could, that we felt really represented who we have been the whole time as a band. If people respond to this record with open arms in the same way that they did with “Silk Chiffon,” I will be so over the moon. But even if they don’t, this is my favorite MUNA record that we’ve ever made. That was our approach to surviving this dilemma of what to do when your dreams come true.

JM: I think it’s less about the song and more about the change in the political climate. We were seen in terms of queer joy, and then queer joy was subsumed by capitalism. We’re in this era where rights are being stripped away. It’s our reaction to that message as queer people who aren’t just joyful. We’re full of rage. We’re people who are full of many emotions. This record hopefully reflects the political climate that we’re in now. We’re not going to fit into a beautiful Target ad.

Was it hard to be vulnerable as a songwriter after that success?

KG: I think that’s always been an involuntary strength of mine as a songwriter, to be honest with you. If anything, I constantly have dysmorphia about the fact that we have gotten bigger or that the platform is bigger. When I’m writing, I forget how many people may hear something, which I guess is a good thing. It’s worked in my favor.

Katie, about you released a solo record since MUNA’s last album. Were there songs on there that you felt like you might save for MUNA? How did you know how to compartmentalize your solo creative process from the band?

KG: The solo record started before our third album came out. It was the result of having a hefty group of songs that Naomi and Jo didn’t feel like were right for a MUNA record, but I still wanted to share with the world. “Aftertaste” was almost a MUNA song, but by that point in the process, I was like, “I need to have a single, so, sorry, but it’s too late.”

I started playing “She Gives Me Feelings” on that tour, and then I started a campaign to get “She Gives Me Feelings” on this most recent MUNA record. We tried it a bunch of different ways, and it just didn’t work. It’s kind of a constant negotiation, but MUNA is my primary project. I think the Katie Gavin solo world is a space for me to be able to experiment with other things, and that’s ultimately really good for me because it closes the loop on a lot of these things so that I can keep the songs moving.

How did the lyrics take shape for this record?

KG: This has definitely been our most collaborative record. “It Gets So Hot” was written in the room together from start to finish. “Girl’s Girl” was written the same way with another songwriter, Justin Tranter. I tend to bring the band the rough draft of something or the first verse and chorus of something. Naomi had a note folder of a bunch of beats that they’d made. If I’m not making a skeleton of an Ableton session and writing over it, I’ll go through and see how to wrap it around something from that.

With Dancing On The Wall, Naomi and I went into the studio and recorded the basic idea for the verse and chorus, and then ended up reworking a lot of the chorus because Josette had ideas about how to fine tune and make it the best version of what it is. We’re really not anti-revision as a pop band. I’ve had to build up my tolerance for that, because obviously you’re always going to idealize the experience of something coming out perfect on the first try. We’ve had so many experiences revising songs. Maybe they don’t get better right away, but they usually end up better. It’s this tried and true thing for us that you have to be willing to try stuff out.

What other creative practices outside of the band feed into MUNA?

NM: I’m hopeful that after this album, I’ll be able to parlay my production into other producing jobs, but I would probably be pretty selective with what I took on.

My girlfriend’s a standup comedian, and we share ideas about our different creative pursuits. I get a kick out of engaging with her and whatever she’s working on because I’m a big comedy nerd. I really enjoy getting to participate to whatever removed extent I can in her world.

JM: When we’re not doing MUNA stuff, I help other people write songs for their projects. That’s always nice, because I do best helping other people reach what they’re trying to say, or at least helping people parlay that. It’s just helpful to see how other people work and think about songwriting in different ways. I think that helps influence the record in terms of song structure and form. I like collaborating. That’s my favorite part about this project, and that’s my favorite part about the other projects that I get to work on. That’s really the creative part, other than bodybuilding.

NM and JM: Gym, tan, laundry.

Is there any overlap in the goals you set for yourself as a musician and the goals you’re setting for yourself at the gym?

JM: My training has literally switched to preparing for the live show. As well as weightlifting, I’m doing jump roping to get cardiovascularly ready. I think we all have to get into a certain amount of shape to be able to perform the actual show because it’s not like we’re just standing around. We’re really going for it.

NM: There is something about having a gym practice that feels almost contemplative for me. Lifting weights is a time for me to gather my thoughts and think about my creative practice, but not be doing it. I have a lot of ideas when I’m at the gym. It does get the juices flowing in other ways.

It really is just a good embodied practice. A lot of our work is totally out there and esoteric. We’re talking about music. It’s very groovy, and weightlifting is very practical. How you track your progress is just a numbers game. There’s something soothing about that, too. I think it’s gained in popularity all over the world because it’s an arena in which you can feel yourself making progress in a world where often that is not made available to a lot of people. You can feel really stagnant and stuck in a life that maybe is very repetitive, and you can’t feel yourself growing, but at the gym you can.

MUNA Recommends:

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

24 Hour Party People

Visiting the LA River and LA Public Library

Singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett on the importance of looking back at your progress

2026-04-16T03:00:00-04:00

How did you get into making music?

I became obsessed with music at some point as a child, maybe from watching my brother and his friends play music. My family listened to music and liked music, but they didn’t really play instruments. I started learning guitar pretty young and then I got lessons from a really great teacher and he essentially showed me how easy it was to put a few chords together. It kind of blew my mind. And so I feel like I started writing songs when I was kind of young; around 8, 9, 10.

Do you remember the first song you wrote where you thought, “I’m proud of this?”

Yeah, I think I was proud of it actually. It was just kind of a love song and I guess I was just kind of copying what I was hearing. When I turned 18, I started doing open mic nights and started performing my own songs. Around that time, I was like, “Oh, I’m proud of these songs enough to perform them.” And then I think in my early 20s, I wrote songs for the first EP that I released. And I think that that’s when I found my voice. I think before then I was kind of imitating or copying other songwriters or other music I was listening to. But I feel like in my early 20s, I just found something that felt really comfortable to me.

I’ve never written a song before, but I imagine you have to think about the lyrics, you have to think about the musicality of it, and then there’s just the general idea and theme. Which one usually comes first for you?

The way I’ve found works the best for me is to almost not think about it. When I think about it too much, it feels really forced or it feels fake or something. So a lot of the times I try to do this kind of free writing, or writing this from this subconscious place or a dream state almost–just to try to tap into the part of my brain that isn’t filtering itself. I’ve really tried to do that on this album. A lot of the time I would find themes afterwards. But it really wasn’t intentional. And I guess I find that interesting because I’m trying to tap into a part of my brain that’s not thinking.

How do you enter that dream state?

I definitely write down all my dreams. I’ve kind of been doing that for a while, but I’ve been trying to be more disciplined about it and study them a bit more and just spend more time thinking and analyzing them. And then in that kind of free writing place, I just kind of have notebooks that I just sit and just write. I try my best to tune out of my brain or sometimes I might pick a theme or pick an idea or whatever, but normally I try to let myself wander off and then I just see where it goes. And often I’ll come back to the same place or I’ll find myself using some of the same words or phrases, which is interesting in itself to see what kind of continues to pop up.

It’s interesting to hear that you are not thinking about theme as you’re writing because while listening to your music over the years, I picked up a lot of themes that carry over across albums: you write about all different types of relationships so beautifully and I appreciate the way that you write about mental health as well. How does that work when you’re putting together an album? Do you ever write songs where you decide, “This actually doesn’t work with this project?”

There were some songs that I omitted. They were in the pile, in the long list of songs, but some of them were older. I think they just felt less relevant, or they were kind of older songs that I had never finished, so it wasn’t so much… I guess that’s the subject matter, but maybe it’s that they felt like they were from a different time or something. But I don’t think that happens very often because I think I really like the idea that an album for me is kind of a document of time, so I feel like it captures this three year period roughly, or whatever it is. And I like seeing all the places that it goes.

Could you talk a bit about your day-to-day when you’re in the process of making an album?

I guess it always changes. I think on this album, I was investigating in a way my method and my writing processes and my writing habits or just my artistic habits in general. Normally I like to have a desk wherever I am, and I like to sit and write. And that’s normally where I start, like I was saying before, just like pages and pages of nonsense. Honestly, whatever is in my head with no direction or filter. That’s almost like my warmup period or something.

When I really felt the album starting, I made a conscious effort to sit at my kitchen table every morning with a notepad and a guitar and try to start one new song idea each day. So that was just a little exercise to exercise that muscle. I always have the best intentions, but I always fall into laziness or procrastination or old habits.

But I think procrastination is good. Instead of beating myself up about it, I try to just say that that is part of it and we need to go and watch a show or go and listen to something or take a walk or whatever it is. I think that there’s a healthy way to look at it without beating ourselves up. So that’s why I’m trying to allow space for those things.

I’m curious how you refill your creative well–do you read a lot, or listen to a lot of different albums?

I don’t listen to much music when I’m working on a project. I think there’s maybe a part of my brain that doesn’t want to be influenced or hear things and then unconsciously imitate them or something. I find myself watching more films. I’ve recently been reading more and getting back to a place of enjoying reading. But I think I tend to find a lot of inspiration from film and like television and television sometimes and even reality TV or something, I’m like, “Well, this is psychologically really interesting.”

I try to look at everything as a form of study, even if it sounds ridiculous, but I’m trying to learn something or at least empathize with what’s going on or just understand it on a deeper level. I think there’s always something to learn.

How do you feel like your relationship to making art and music has changed since that has become your job?

I think it’s hard to understand why and how, but it’s definitely changed and it would be a lie to state otherwise. [The] early songs or early work of any artist–the kind of not knowing if anyone will ever see it or hear it–there is a real kind of innocence and naivety to that, which is pretty beautiful and maybe hard to ever, ever replicate.

I think it’s really interesting to see how that evolves as people do start listening or start coming to shows. But also I think just with experience, general life and writing experience, I kind of like the evolution of my writing. I don’t hate anything I’ve done, but I can look back and I can see the progress or the evolution.

It’s nice to look at it in a curious way instead of like, “Oh, I wish I didn’t write that.” Because that’s growth. And I’ve noticed over the years, even how much a song changes from me playing it in my bedroom and making a demo to showing it to one friend. Not even releasing it or playing it to an audience, just like one person, how much it changes the song.

How does it change the song?

I guess this is a thought in progress, but as soon as someone else perceives it, you see it through a different lens. It’s like a feeling more than anything, I guess, because obviously it doesn’t literally change it. It’s like you can feel the projection. It’s a messy thought. But it’s interesting to see how much it can alter something.

I totally get what you mean. I feel like deciding who the first people are who are going to see something so raw is important. Because even if you say, “I’m not going to take any feedback, it’s not going to impact me”–yes, it is.

Yes, of course. And I guess I’m curious what that actually is. If it’s our own assumptions about what they’re thinking or as soon as you share the thought, you hear it in a different way. I guess it’s like therapy. I started therapy around the same time I started writing this album. So I feel like in a way it’s a similar thing to saying a thought out loud that you’ve never said out loud, but you say it for the first time and it puts it in a different perspective as soon as someone else hears it, or even just as soon as you say it out loud.

You were mentioning earlier that you feel like you can track the growth in your songwriting. How do you feel, particularly with this album, your songwriting grew?

This album was interesting because I feel like I had a lot of writer’s block on this album and I remember a similar feeling from my second album. For some reason I just kept coming up against all these blocks and a lot of self-doubt. And I think when I started it had been a while since I’d written a song, so it felt like I was starting again. There must be some sort of metaphor in there: I was going through this transitional period in a way in my life, and I was, in a way, starting again.

I was trying to find this honesty. Before, I thought I was being honest in my writing, and maybe I was being as honest as I could. But I feel like I would often have a wall up, or I would cover things with sarcasm or humor or whatever it was.

I guess I was looking at that and just trying to be like, what is honesty and what is vulnerability actually? And what is authenticity? Because those words get thrown around, but I think I’m often like, “Well, what does it actually mean? And how do I know I’m being honest because I’m still presenting an image of myself to people.”

Looking to the future, do you have any particular dreams for the rest of your career or next projects or anything?

I’m like a big list maker, so often, over the course of my career, I make little dream lists, which I think is a really fun thing to do because you look back at them sometimes and you’re like, “Oh, I did that. I did this little thing that I thought was a total pipe dream.” So I definitely would encourage anyone to do that because I think it’s a really nice thing to do. But at the moment, I guess I’m so focused on this album and releasing this album, performing this album. And then I think just the hope and the dream is just to keep growing and evolving through my music, through my writing, which sounds so simple, but I think it’s kind of a hard thing to do.

Courtney Barnett recommends:

Stranger Than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch (film)

McCartney II by Paul McCartney (album)

Working With Anger by Thubten Chodron (book)

Pluribus (television)

Hiking in nature (no headphones)

Musician Jana Horn on staying open to interpretation

2026-04-15T00:00:00-04:00

How do songs come to you, or how do you know when they’re arriving?

Ideally, a song appears kind of like a ghost that you make eye contact with and hope it doesn’t fly away or dissolve at any minute. And then there’s just the work of songwriting, which for me is sitting down with a guitar and basically meditating on a few notes. I’ll just pick a couple notes and let A and G or whatever oscillate until words and melodies move through them. In the best case, it’s not a very conscious process, it’s a very intuitive and exciting thing. But you can’t count on that. You can’t just count on a ghost to enter the room. If I’m stuck, sometimes I’ll just say words until something makes sense, like I’m accidentally coherent in some way. I think I just described at least three different ways that I work on music. It’d be cool if songs were always arriving in a divine way, but that’s just not the world we live in necessarily. Or it’s not the world I inhabit all the time.

I feel like memories are always present in your songs, like they’re almost speaking back to you. How do you work with memory as a collaborator?

I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is that memory is so malleable. You really can play with it because it’s so subjective, and the way you remember something is different now than it was after it first happened. Your question is interesting. Do memories remember us, too? Why am I remembering something right now? Is it because that memory is also doing work with me? Is it collaborating with me?

“Go on, move your body,” for example, is an old song that I had no intention of putting on the [new] record, but your idea that memory is a collaborator resonates because I remembered it for some reason. What do you do with a memory once it’s remembered in a completely different context, which is now? So now I have this memory, which is not what it was, but what it is. I mean, I wrote a song sort of about this. There’s a song called “After All This Time” on my last record, which goes: “Remembering is not the same as looking back, windows I pass along the way.” I was thinking about memory and how you don’t actively remember a lot of the time. Memories come back to you, a lot of the time, or can be visited in these spaces that they occupy without you, once they’ve been created… It feels really natural to bring memory into a song because it’s so in and of itself creative. It’s not a fixed thing and can be reinterpreted and made into art and remade into other art. Different songs can be about the same memory and they can be completely different.

Do your songs ever feel like poems to you? There’s something about your lyrics where it looks like they’re also meant to be on the page.

There are some songs that I think of as poems and others not as much. I don’t really set out to write lyrics in any particular way. It’s more about whatever outfits the song best… But, like a poem, I am working word to word most of the time. Once one word comes out, letting the next word follow that word—as opposed to coming with some sort of story to tell. I work on a pretty granular basis, like a poem. Or sometimes on an image basis—again, like a poem. So I think my approach is similar to the approach of writing a poem, but I don’t know if it always comes out that way. Sometimes things just become. I don’t try to be too controlling when I’m writing.

What is the most important element or piece in making music for you?

It definitely is, for me, about connection. Definitely. How I started writing music was by offering it to someone, and their reception of it was ultimate for me. It meant everything. It meant whether the song was a song or the song was not a song. Now it’s about connection in the process of writing it, and about connection in the performance of it. The recording and the product of it is… I mean, it’s necessary, but it’s not important to me from a personal standpoint. I get a lot of energy from performance and the audience-artist relationship, and being able to experience it simultaneously with others and connect with this bigger thing together.

I want to talk about your songs and what I gather from them. I was talking to Dan Wriggins recently about pacing in songs, and how a line is revealed, and what’s going through a listener’s head as bits and pieces are given to them. I think about that with your songs too, but in a completely different way. Your pacing feels less like filling in a blank and more like taking a breath or adding a comma. How do you think about the space you leave in songs?

You win the Unique Question Award. I do think space and silence are really important to me in life, as well as in song. There are plenty of my own songs where I can hear the lack of space and the kind of claustrophobic-ness of them. That’s why I have a sort of conflicting relationship with recording, because once the songs have their clothes on and are all looking a very particular way, they’re just different than the loose and natural thing that they were with me.

I feel like space and silence are opportunities for connection. Silence in a performance is a moment that is shared in a way that noise and words are not. You’re listening and one person is talking, but if it’s silent, it’s shared. Does that make sense? It offers some room. I mean, that is what it is. Space is room. I feel like you can hear if a song is open or if it’s closed and really committed to its intention or whatever. Whereas I’m intending or hoping to leave a song open—for it to be yours, as opposed to, “Please hear what I have to say, and don’t put yourself into it.”

Definitely. On the new album, I was hearing the way a line opens and it feels like something’s being released, and then it pulls back or it lets it contradict itself. It’s almost like touching something to see how it responds. Like the line, “I miss you, I don’t.” Do you think that you play with that tension?

Certainly. I’ve never put it in the words that you have or thought about it that way, but I certainly don’t think life is very coherent or easy… I am wanting there to be conflict in the song, as there is conflict in all things.

Something I love about your work is how often abstract concepts like experience or patience get personified. I’m curious how you communicate and interact with those forces or ideas when you’re writing.

I mean, so many of these songs were written in just a state of surrender and hope for connection to something, or word from something. So the personification of them is obviously an artistic liberty. But it’s true that I was seeking response from memory, from experience, from the offering of patience. Like, “If I offer this much patience, what will I get in response? If I sit here for long enough, will I receive a word?” The answer I felt like I was getting was you have to do more than that. You can’t just sit there and wait. There has to be more exercise involved. Which goes back to your first question. You get these kind of miracle songs, and despite the knowledge that they were miraculous, you believe it’ll happen again or that it’ll happen a lot. But inspiration takes work.

A lot of these songs were written in an attempt to connect with these things that are immaterial, and with instructors that I think are here to help us. But a lot of times it’s more physically demanding than just really, really earnestly hoping to hear from these things.

I want to touch on visuals a little bit, because I feel like your lyrics move in a way that never quite settles. The image I see is of someone taking a spoon and stirring a liquid in a glass.

I like that a lot.

Can you talk a little bit about creating your album covers and what you try to convey through album artwork?

If I’m being honest, the visual aspect of my work is very difficult for me… My first idea for this album cover was for it to be a picture in the desert where it was made. So that was a very intentional decision. But in general, I find the translation process between music and the artwork to be really difficult. I’m not a visual artist. It’s really hard, honestly. I wish you could put your music through a machine and it would spit out the thing that it should look like. But it’s just a part of the process that is really hard. I do a lot of my own art for stuff, and I’ve also had other people do it, too. And it’s like trying to speak a language I don’t know. It doesn’t come naturally to me at all.

Do you feel like the covers convey something that’s present within the album, once they’re complete?

I do. They have personal meaning to me, and so I can identify with them in that way, but it’s extremely hard for me to see something and understand its objective relevance. I can see the desert in the image, and I know that that relates to the record and that is important to me. I can see the image of Optimism and how it was taken by this very dear friend of mine, who was very active in the whole process of making the album. And I can see The Window Is The Dream and how it was also made by a dear friend and how it conveys this particular song and all these things. I can see the thoughts and the threads, but I can’t see the art itself.

Talking about visuals, I also wanted to mention that I love the video for “Go on, move your body” so much. It’s charming, but it also adds this new dimension to the album. The thought I started carrying was the idea that love doesn’t necessarily make things easier, but it changes the way that you see and move. Sometimes you don’t realize that your hands can help someone reach something, when their hands are helping you dig down into something. Did you want that video to be a companion to the album in some way?

I did. I think that there’s a way of listening to the songs where it just feels really heavy or something like that. But I don’t think that’s really true. I think that there’s a lot of lightness and playfulness. I love the juxtaposition of that video and the song, but I also don’t see it as juxtaposition, really. To me, it’s in line. I love that and the way you put it: the hands reaching and the hands digging. The idea behind the video was that it’s two people who’ve chosen to live this way, and so the relationship between them is co-creative, and lifelike, and co-conspiratorial as well. Just a sense of togetherness.

When the song “All in bet” came out, it felt like something I really needed to hear. What are you betting on these days?

What am I betting on? I guess I’m trying to live in a more fully fledged way. I think writing goes hand in hand with that. Writing can feel counterintuitive at times, because it implies will, intention, accessibility to yourself and others. It’s combative, in a way. And it’s really easy to want to be protective when things are so scary and overwhelming.

I think about the Parable of the Talents, where everyone is allotted some amount. $10, let’s just say. And you don’t want to lose your $10, so you bury it. You keep it safe. Meanwhile everyone else is going out with their $10 and spending it and increasing their wealth. So at the end of the day, someone has $100 and someone has $1,000 or whatever, and you still only have $10, because you were afraid to lose it. It feels increasingly important to me to give away what was given to me. Betting on… life is too big of a word, but it’s true—or it’s what I meant in the song and beyond. Betting on this thing that we’re all here to do, and have to make the choice to keep doing—and to do well, hopefully.

I really agree with that idea. I have also been thinking about not always waiting for something to come back for you, or giving and not expecting something in return.

Me too. It makes me think of this quote I think I heard in grad school about writing every day without hope and without despair. Giving without expectation—not easy.

Jana Horn recommends:

Packing your lunch

Always leaving one unwashed dish in the sink

Movies starring Sandra Hüller

Big Bend (currently under the threat of a border wall)

This cake

Documentary filmmaker Viv Li on prioritizing the process instead of the outcome

2026-04-14T03:00:00-04:00

I never thought about making documentaries until I watched films from directors like Bing Liu and Sean Wang. Then I was like, “Oh, this type of documentary is stuff I’m interested in.” What was that moment for you, or have you always known that you wanted to be a documentary filmmaker?

I always loved film, so I just really wanted to do film. I studied theater, so I was in theater for a long time. Then I worked for fashion for a bit as well. Later on I just felt like, “Oh, I really want to do films again.” Then I found out about this scholarship in Europe for documentary-making. That was the first time that I felt like, “Okay, I want to try to do something with documentaries.” My understanding of documentaries was almost zero. Then I went to the school, and I got the scholarship. Because the program is in Europe and takes place in three schools, they have quite an open way of teaching what counts as a documentary. It gave me a lot of ideas of like, “Okay, it could be very personal or it could be very artistic. It could be more on the installation side. They can all be called documentaries.”

I spent two years in school trying really hard to make a documentary that the teacher would approve of, but it was never that good because you can never imitate something as good as the original. In 2019, I went to a film festival called IDFA in Amsterdam. I saw a film by a Canadian director called L.A. Tea Time. The director’s name is Sophie Bédard Marcotte. It’s called a documentary, but you clearly see that a lot of scenes are kind of staged. It’s about how she drove from Montreal or somewhere in Quebec to L.A. to meet Miranda July.

That’s funny!

Yeah! Then in the end, Miranda July didn’t meet her. I don’t know, it was quite inspiring for me. It’s not really a famous documentary, but I just watched it and was like, “Wow, that’s a documentary. You can actually make a film however it is for you.” In my last semester, I made a short film in my own way, and it got good reception. I thought, “Okay, maybe this is my way of making films.” That’s how I started the journey of this feature film as well. I do feel what you said about how there’s a lot of people, especially in the North American market, that have a certain idea about documentaries, and in China as well, like in Asia. I think in Europe, the line between documentary and fiction is very blurred. Nowadays if you go to festivals, they don’t really separate the two, but put them in competition together, because in the end, it’s just storytelling.

So it’s 2019 and you’re just discovering this medium and how to do it your own way. But still, there’s not that much of a blueprint. You see one documentary film and you’re like, “Oh, this is different.” But you don’t see a bunch of films like that. How did you jump from that to working on Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest over four or five years and have confidence that it would become something and not just like…a giant waste of time?

Yeah, I think that’s a good question because I think everything starts with the unknown and insecurity. I think even the biggest filmmakers in the world don’t really know if what they’re making is going to work out. I don’t believe that anybody just knows from the very beginning that something will be a masterpiece, but a masterpiece is made by all the decisions and all the people that you encounter along the way. For me, working on Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest was very simple, because I came to Berlin during the pandemic, and I was completely lost I would say. I thought that I would stay here and that the pandemic would finish in a few months, and then I could start working. But there was absolutely no jobs back in 2020 here in Berlin. So basically, I had nothing else to do but to focus on making this film.

For me, it was also a way to meet people. Making the film was partially just to enjoy my life or find friends. I filmed more than 300 hours of material, and I would say that 280 of them, I’m just really happy to be with the people that I’m there with. Those 280 hours and the time that I spent with them are definitely not wasted. You can never really control the result or see into the future.

I feel like if you can control the moment that you’re in, then whatever the result is, you at least know that those five years are not wasted. I look back at those five years, where I went to the desert, met so many interesting people, and became a different person because of all of these experiences. Then I also spent a lot of time with family. Because of that, in the end the film came out with good results as well.

I was going on Instagram like normal people do, and I saw a clip of David Bowie saying something like, “All artists will be more interested in you asking for the process than what their work means.” Because for me, I think the point of making films is to keep making films. I want to be on set and be with people. I think for any artist, making a film is never really about standing on the stage with the film, but more about creating it.

Even though you don’t think about the result, it must be somewhat in the back of your mind anyways. How do you balance making art with things like funding and the logistical, un-sexy sides of the process, and not let that take over from, say, funneling your project into a grant proposal that sounds more palatable? How do you balance that?

I started working on Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest by myself. I think the first two years I was completely alone. I did things on Kickstarter and applied for grants. I got a little bit of money and I was really happy, but quickly I knew that it was never going to be enough to finish the film. In 2023, I made a short fiction film. There, I realized that a director’s job is actually just two very important things. The first is to find the best people that you can find, and the second is to communicate with them what you want, gather them together and charm them to work with you. I realized that I am never going to be good enough to fund my film, so I need to find people who are good at it. For me, it’s really as simple as that, to just find the best people and communicate with them. Obviously, you need a lot to convince them to work with you. I did a lot of pitches in the beginning, and shot a lot of film myself and edited myself.

Rather than working on something I’m not really good at, I worked a lot to convince people to work with me. I think my producers, who are German and Dutch, are really good at finding funding and they’re really sharp at it. I went for them, and in the end it worked out really well. I didn’t really need to think about money anymore.

Then again, the first two years I was struggling myself trying to find money. I guess it’s the same for everybody. This goes back to the even more important point that you really need to enjoy what you’re doing. Otherwise, all these ugly things will just consume you too much.

Okay so once you involve these producers, now you’re working with a bunch of people and this is a very personal film. How did you know when to stop filming? What was your sense with feeling like, okay, now I’m done?

To be honest I talked a lot with my editor. We started editing before we finished shooting. I think the moment for me would be when I realized that I am not really enjoying this anymore. I realized that I’m just shooting for the film now. It’s not something that’s like, okay, I’m going to go to this desert anyways and then I’m going to film.

I think what I became quite good at from working on this film was how to distinguish myself from myself as a character. I separate them very clearly. When I watched the film in editing room, I didn’t see myself at all. I am just another person. Then I also did the same thing, where I would just ask myself, “Do you still want to do this or is it really just for the film?” If my answer is, “I would still do this even if I don’t shoot it,” then I will shoot it.

But then if my answer is, “I don’t think I would ever do this if it wasn’t for the film,” then I probably will not shoot it. In the end, I just realized that my desire to shoot and to go somewhere became less and less. My life changed a lot. I really see this film as a chapter of my life that already ended. My life is different now. It was a gradual learning process to say, “Okay, maybe we don’t need to shoot anymore.” And also from the editing point of view, my editor said that we really have enough footage. He watched so many gossip conversations between my family and my friends.

I feel like when you’re editing, you’re getting all these different ideas of what the film could be about. What were other ideas that you were playing with that felt strong, and what made this eventual edit feel more right?

Actually, there was a lot of different things on the plate in the beginning. If you see our deck from the very beginning, it’s very different from what the film turned out to be. I remember when we were showing the film to the funder, we were a bit nervous because it was completely different from what she saw before, but she was really happy about the film because she really related to it. I think the strength of documentary is that you can always rely on reality and you can always rely on your material more-so than with fiction. You can just watch the footage and see what speaks to you the most. Some things that I thought were interesting before were not really interesting anymore. Then in the footage, you see something else that comes out and you just have to be honest with the material. For me, I just saw something more about loneliness in the footage. I never thought that I was lonely, but there’s so many lonely moments in the film. I never thought the film would be about loneliness.

Interesting.

Yeah. I always thought that maybe the film is about belonging home, but then in the film, there’s so many lonely moments. I always thought that the film would be about sexuality, and that gender is the front row of the film, but in the end it’s not. It’s more about the cultural differences, and that was just part of it. You have to be honest with this. I think for documentaries we are really lucky to have all this material to work with. With fiction, it’s very difficult. That’s why in the writing process with fiction, you need way longer because you need to research, go back to real life, and fact check to see if things really work this way.

That’s so interesting because I often assume documentary is harder because you don’t have a script, but I think you’re right because you can be more honest with what you see. You can’t fake what’s in front of you.

I think there’s two sides of that point in both documentary and fiction, and I try to mix them a little bit. In my documentary work, there’s also hybrid parts. There’s scripted parts. In my fiction work, I take documentary elements as well, because it’s just more interesting that way. Then you just see what speaks to you the most.

I feel like the first film I made was also very personal and that was the first time I had an editor. Something that I realized was that it is really hard to not be so attached to your narrative, especially when it’s personal. Is that something that you struggled with?

I think I’m always very detached. I don’t know why, but I just know that this film is a story. This film doesn’t represent me. In this film, we hid a lot of the facts. We felt like there were a lot of things that are were not very interesting so we really removed it from the story. I had a boyfriend during this period, but we just removed all of it.

I didn’t see a boyfriend in your film!

Yeah. It’s a bit sad for him, but it wasn’t really helping the story. In the film, you also don’t see me working, but I was working throughout it, so we removed working part as well.

What advice would you give to anyone, not just making a documentary, but anyone who wants to make art, who feels particularly discouraged in this economic environment or feels like they’re just competing with people who were born into it?

This is something very interesting because I’m Chinese and I grew up in China. I grew up in a very normal middle-class family, I would say. I never really thought that making films would be realistic for me, because I didn’t go to film school, and most people need to have some extra money to make films. Then I came to Europe and realized there’s all this public funding that I can apply for. I can support what I want to do even as an immigrant here.

For me, everything was just better and I didn’t think everything was worse. I was just like, “There’s all these new opportunities that I can try. And then I hear all my other friends who have been supported for many years in Europe and said, “Ah, everything is so bad and everything is getting cut.” I really think it’s just about perspective.

That’s why for me, I always talk to my other friends who are in different situations. I talk to my U.S. friends all the time who make films. It’s so hard. They always put their own money into the budget and in China as well. My friends who are Southeast Asian filmmakers always just do films on such a tight, shoe-string budget. I talk to my African filmmakers and friends and it’s also very difficult for them. I think I would not think or depend too much on the outside environment, but just try to just find different perspectives so that we can keep hopeful and still fight for things. I think if you can shift the perspective and realize that there’s a lot of good parts of your life, then you can really fight for it. And so for me, that was really helpful for me.

Viv Li recommends:

No Longer Human, book by Osamu Dazai

Teresa Teng, Taiwanese singer

A Year Without Summer, theatre show by Florentina Holzinger

Yanji, a Chinese town at the border of North Korea, very fun and great food

Xiao Wu, 1997, a film by Jia Zhangke

Photographer Aabid Youssef on keeping it simple

2026-04-13T00:00:00-04:00

Something I really like about your work is how strongly it reflects Montreal. You’ve photographed so many musicians in the city, whether at shows or in your studio, and it really captures that scene. Was there ever a conscious decision to document your community and youth culture in general? What was your entry point?

It’s definitely a bit of a concerted effort. There’s such an overwhelming amount of talent in the city, and I feel like it needs to be honored and documented. Over time, I think people will realize how special it was that all these artists were in the same place at the same moment, creating so much incredible work. In a way, it feels like a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t go to waste and is captured visually. At the same time, I’m really just documenting what’s already happening. Everyone has their own kind of magic.

Mainstream culture can feel overbearing, and because of that, some people don’t always get the chance to showcase their voices. For me, photography is a way of redirecting the spotlight—even within my own small world—toward people who are doing something countercultural or genuinely interesting, whether it’s their look or their sound. If I can highlight that and support them in any way, then why not?

Justine Lacoste

Your studio work has such a distinct style: often black-and-white and with strong contrast. Your live show photography, on the other hand, feels much more kinetic, with performers caught in such expressive moments. How do you approach each of those environments, and what are you trying to capture in each?

In the studio, I try to create an environment where the subject feels completely comfortable. I’m not looking to change who they are, but to document the essence of their personality—whatever makes them unique. With live photos, there’s already so much energy on stage, and I’m just trying to capture that. Using flash helps me lock in those moments and really emphasize the intensity of the performance. On stage, that’s who they are in that moment, how they express themselves. In the studio, it’s different; they’re not in that same headspace, so I’m not trying to force it. That’s why my photos aren’t overly posed or performative. I like to strip things back, keep it simple, and make the image as straightforward as possible. It’s about showing who the person is, capturing their energy, and getting to the most honest version of them without too much getting in the way.

I feel like your studio portraits are incredibly intimate, both in the expressions you capture and in the level of detail. You can notice the smallest things, like someone’s lipstick or the texture of wet hair. There’s a kind of clarity that really draws you in.

They’re definitely very intimate sessions, and that’s intentional. I generally try to avoid a lot of noise, whether that’s other people or competing personalities. The sessions are usually quite quick, but I’m focused on connecting with the person. I want to capture as much detail as possible, which is where the sharpness comes in. I shoot in black and white because I don’t want the image to be influenced by anything else. It’s really about removing that extra noise. Sometimes I see color as adding too much to a photo, so this is a way of breaking things down to their most basic visual elements, while also focusing on the emotion of who the person is. That’s why the setup is very simple and fairly consistent across everyone I photograph. Technical aspects matter, of course, but they’re not the most important part. It’s really about emotional honesty.

Danny Pretzel

How did you develop the ability to make people feel comfortable? Is it something that shows up in other areas of your life?

It’s been a couple of decades of just shooting, and that understanding develops over time. As you get older, you learn better ways to interact with people and how to genuinely put them at ease. I also keep the sessions short for that reason. I want the experience to be fun. It’s not about having someone in the studio for three or four hours until their energy drains. It’s about being efficient and valuing their time. People can sense that, and they leave feeling like they were photographed beautifully.

Over time, I’ve realized that brevity and simplicity produce the best results. From assisting and working on other shoots, I’ve seen how energy can dip throughout a long day. So now I keep it concise—less noise, less fluff. One light, one studio, one subject. That’s the approach that consistently works.

Do you listen to anything while shooting? Do you play music in the studio?

I usually play whatever I’m into at the moment. Nothing too distracting, just something that matches the mood I’m trying to create while shooting.

When you’re shooting digitally and scrolling through a lot of images, what do you look for in a photo?

The right moment is when someone is really connecting with the camera. It’s a combination of lighting, expression, and pose. When those three come together, it creates the perfect triangle.

Aidan

As a musician yourself, what is it like being on the other side of the lens?

It was a very interesting transition, going in front of people and performing. Definitely fun and very rewarding. Attending and photographing so many shows has, in a way, influenced my experience of being on stage. We haven’t performed many times, but on the occasions we have and had photographs taken of us, I’ve been very happy with the results. I think it helps that we put thought into how we want to be perceived and how we want to look on stage. That’s part of the fun for us—creating a little world and playing with all the references we like.

What are some of those references?

For my bandmate Alex Jung and myself, inspiration can come from anywhere. It could be any music we love, from Prince to The Clash, or even a perfume or an outfit we notice. Anything has the potential to spark a creative idea for a song or shape how we want to perform.

What perfume?

Funny enough, when we started the project and came up with the name Crescendo, we discovered there’s actually a perfume called Crescendo. I thought, “I need to smell that,” though the remaining bottle is probably long expired.

We pull references from cinema, music, and fashion. That’s really how Alex and I develop ideas. The internet throws so much at you, so it’s fun to pick through it, see what resonates, and translate that into music while having fun with it.

Would you say you have developed a persona for this project?

I definitely feel like we’re presenting ourselves in a way that matches the music. There’s a level of performance to it, though we haven’t gone as far as creating entirely separate personas, because that starts to feel very pop star. Still, there’s thought behind it. As a photographer, I understand the importance of presentation, and the look of a project has to be considered carefully.

Marlaena

Can you talk a bit about making music videos? You have one coming out soon, right?

Yeah! I worked on a second video with the band Hush. It was really fun collaborating with them and developing the concept. The idea and execution were a joint effort between one of the band members, Paige, and myself. They put a lot of trust in me to deliver the final result.

I’d say it’s similar to what I do with photography, but in a different way. In a music video, I focus on being emotionally true to the song. My usual stark, black-and-white style doesn’t always fit, so it’s more about capturing the emotion accurately. The best music videos, to me, enhance the song. I want people to watch it and then be excited to hear the track again, without changing the meaning or vibe too much.

As a photographer, do you mostly work alone?

Generally, I work pretty solo, because I’m going for a very personal feeling. If a project is bigger or there are a lot of people involved, I might get some help in the studio. But if it’s just one or two people, I usually keep it solo so the subject isn’t distracted. I want the session to feel as personal as possible, and I find that really helps. It comes through in the shots. When I’m photographing someone in that setting, I can often see their guard drop as they relax into it. It also reduces anything that could get in the way, like technical issues or other distractions. By simplifying things, I make sure nothing interferes with that focused, almost sacred moment between me and my subject.

What other challenges come up other than distractions in the moment? Is there anything that you feel you constantly have to contend with?

Earlier in my career, the biggest challenge was developing an understanding of the technical process. At the start, it was about learning to simplify and pare things down again and again. The more I shot, the better I understood the moment when an image was truly captured and that overshooting can be counterproductive. It’s about finding the right balance between capturing enough and taking too much, and that’s something I’ve only learned over time.

When you know you have it, do you end the shoot?

Yes.

Do you feel like your subject often agrees with you?

I think they’re actually always in agreement. So far, everyone’s happy!

Sean Nicholas Savage

What do you hope people feel when they encounter your work?

I like to imagine viewers being drawn to the person in the portrait, rather than thinking about the photographer. I picture them focusing on the moment, on who this person is, the story, and the emotion being captured. A very visceral reaction is what I hope for. The best outcome is someone getting completely absorbed in the photo, intrigued by it—and if it also brings more attention to the person I’m photographing, that’s even better.

It seems like your whole practice is about making others feel seen, giving them attention, and shining a spotlight on them. I’m curious, if someone were to photograph you the way you photograph others, what do you think that would look like?

When being photographed, I’d be very aware of all the elements. I would need to establish the same level of trust I try to create with my subjects. Otherwise, I’d start overthinking all the details—the set, the lighting, everything. I can imagine how it might look, but I think it could be a challenge I would have to face in order to just be present in the moment.

You’re very generous as an artist in this community, always welcoming people in and giving others a platform. I hope you feel that same energy reflected in your own project.

I always feel that in all my photographs, especially because of my specific approach. There’s a lot of myself in every photo. So I’m always thinking, “No, it’s really about the artist now.” Choosing to shoot in black and white, focusing on emotion, and working in this manner is all about capturing the magic of what makes this person unique and shining the light on them. It becomes a collaboration between us. Their presence and personality combine with me photographing them, and then the photo just takes on a life of its own. People look at it and feel whatever they want to feel.

Aabid Youssef recommends:

Maximum Exposure. A singular voice translating today via the hypnotic records, words and visuals of Tony Price.

Pierluigi Giombini in studio. One of my favourite modern pop composers performing Gazebo’s 1984 track “Lunatic” on piano and synth with a miniature bust of Bach approving.

Alix Fernz. A dear friend and a seminal figure in the Montreal underground. Two incredible back-to-back albums that are only eclipsed by his humility and grace.

Shelby Fenlon. One of the best photographers working today. In a short time she has developed a visual language so self assured and confident while remaining beautifully understated.

Angelo Mallia, “Hideaway.”

Greg Diemond and Diana Orena (owners of Honore Club + Di’s Corner) on creating a space to gather

2026-04-10T00:00:00-04:00

How did you both get into bartending?

Greg Diemond: It was back in Chicago. My buddy Ben was a bartender for a long time. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing at the time—me and my buddy were managing a pizza and Italian beef spot downtown. Flexible schedule, you know, and having fun while you’re working. So I staged with him at Prosecco for a while, and then ended up getting a job bartending at Citizen Bar, which is long gone. I started there on door, then bar back. I really worked my way up. I worked everything there except for running the place.

Diana Orena: I was working for a law firm at the time and my friends and I were regulars at a bar on Bedford called Blackbird. The owner really liked us, so he decided to let me and my best friend Cassie guest bartend one night, and we never left. I quit my law firm job because I was having so much fun. And then I went on to other bars, then Skinny Dennis for nine years, and Lucky Jack’s. Then I met Greg and opened up this spot.

Greg: I bartended right down the street at Extra Fancy.

Diana: We would go to each other’s shifts.

Greg: One of the partners at Extra Fancy had this space when it was a burrito spot, and he was looking to unload it. Me and Diana were like, “Hey, I think we could make a bar in there.” So we took it off his hands.

Diana: We had no idea what we were doing… Everything was brand new. It was scary, but it was fun.

What was the learning process like?

Greg: We did have some mentorship from one of the partners at Extra Fancy, one of our really good friends, Mark. He helped us with the layout and design. We knew what we wanted to do and he helped us execute it. You know, talk to a carpenter… He really helped bring our ideas into play and put us in touch with different upholstery people, purveyors, and stuff like that.

Diana: We mirrored this bar after our favorite dive bars and meshed them all together. Some of our favorite spots in Chicago and Pennsylvania, Detroit, all around the Midwest. We picked what we liked about certain places and tried to put that all into a design of a place.

Greg: Wood paneling. Formica tables—you see those a lot in Detroit.

Diana: The soffit came from a bar in Pennsylvania that I fell in love with.

Greg: The soffit hangs over the bar. The Old Style sign, we got that from a bar that was closed in Chicago. We took it apart and made four signs out of it. That ended up being a pretty big part of the design for the place. It was a major project to put it in the ceiling, and to get it out of the original bar that it was at. We went there with my little Hyundai Santa Fe thinking, “We got this.” We went to my friend’s brother’s house, grabbed his ladder. I was leaning a huge ladder against a tin roof, and I started to try to take down the sign. My buddy’s down below holding the ladder and he’s like, “Hey, I just realized my best friend does this for a living. He’s a sign guy.” So he sent a picture and his buddy was like, “Tell him to get the fuck off that ladder, I’m coming over.” So he came over with a crane. It was December.

December in Chicago, no less. I love the bar signs everywhere—the mirrors, the bouncing Miller Light, the “wax on wax off” neon.

Greg: We went hard on those. We picked little things that we liked throughout bars in the Midwest.

Diana: That’s a super fun part, sourcing all that stuff. Finding some guy in New Jersey and picking up the sign and realizing he has a whole warehouse and being like, “Hi, can we please go in there?”

I truly love signs. It’s one of my favorite things about Chicago.

Diana: They’re so special. And you can have them hanging [outside] in Chicago. Here, it’s a whole nightmare. You can’t really have hanging signs unless it’s grandfathered in. All the signs in Chicago that are still old neons and stuff—you don’t see those around here.

What do you think about the way that the design of an interior dictates how a place feels?

Greg: I think it does for sure. Right down to the colors of lights that you put in.

Diana: The lighting is number one. You’ve all been to super lit bars… I can’t stay there for that long. It just feels cold. The music’s low and the lights are up. It’s like, do you want me in here?

So everything is hyper-intentional?

Greg: Down to the height of the booths and all that. Obviously, we didn’t have a lot of space to work with, so every half-inch mattered.

Diana: And that’s why there are lulls in the bar. Spaces. If we were to put a chair there, it would block people from going to the backyard—there’d be pinch points.

Greg: You need the inches behind the bar, half inches behind the bar… Working with limited space like that is chaotic. Tough.

There’s something so specific about a bar: how it looks, who comes, and the way that people interact there. Honore in particular has a significant cohort of regulars who form this micro-community. Theo and I made a map a few years ago and it came out to, like, 70 people.

Greg: We talk about it all the time. What’s awesome is how many friendships, and bands, and projects, and jobs, and softball teams were born out of this space. All we did was make its four walls, and that’s all you can do. The rest is everybody else. That makes the bar what it is. Watching that develop over the years, it’s so beautiful. It’s rad. That’s my favorite part.

Did you have any kind of intention to foster community?

Greg: We just wanted to make a bar that we would love to hang out in. A vibe and atmosphere that is fun and inviting.

Diana: I think a lot of it has to do with our staff. It’s who you hire.

So many people who work here and who come here are like musically inclined. Bands form here. There are Honore-specific shows.

Greg: It might have something to do with the practice spaces being right there. We are, like, a block away from the practice spaces, so people come in with their guitars on their back. They want a beer after the practice, and then that starts snowballing. Half our staff plays in bands.

You’re romantic partners as well as business partners. How do you manage that?

Diana: For the first four or five years, we worked [the bar] every Saturday night. It’s fun as hell. We don’t do it a lot anymore.

Greg: It’s fun if it randomly happens. Like, if someone gets off, Diana will cover.

Diana: But to keep it healthy, we both do different jobs completely. I’m more financial, insurance, all that stuff. And he is ordering and fixing and all of that.

Greg: She talks to the accountant, the CPA, the insurance people, all that boring stuff. And I’m more bar stuff.

Did you figure that out right away?

Greg: Right when we were first doing the buildout, Diana immediately just took over that part. I was working until 5 A.M. on the Lower East Side and then coming here at 8, and she opened up my brain so I could just do this. She took care of the paperwork and all that. And then it stayed that way ever since. But we obviously do payroll and stuff together.

What are the most valuable resources that you have, as bar owners?

Greg: The community. Other bar owners and bartenders are a super valuable source. If a pipe breaks at midnight and you don’t want to get screwed over, who’s a really reliable person that can fix this? We’ve been in positions where you get an emergency plumber in, and they don’t fix it and they’re dinging you out for thousands of dollars. That’s one of my big ones: the other people in your business, the business community. What about you?

Diana: I was gonna say a good accountant. [laughs] Having a list of people that you can trust to do work, because the thing about bars is something is always broken. Something will break.

Do you remember that crazy storm in 2021? Knickerbocker was flooded. There was, like, a lake between the yard door and the stairs because the drain was clogged. Water started flooding into the bar. Part of the ceiling fell down. Maybe 10, 15 minutes later, Bronson and Dave were here with a ladder, unplugging stuff so there wouldn’t be a fire. Smolko was out in the yard with my umbrella and a broom unplugging the drain. How does a community like that form so that you’re able to call on someone to help you?

Greg: More than any other business I’ve ever worked in, there’s a lot of trust in who you have as your bartender, because that person is also the manager on duty. As a bartender, you’re the only one there. Sometimes it goes south, and you gotta figure it out. Having someone you really trust and you know is not gonna be blackout drunk when a problem happens at 2 in the morning—that’s huge. Over the years working with people like that, you find those qualities and people like, “Yeah, that’s exactly the person I want behind my bar.” Everybody here fits that.

Last week, the door handle broke on the bathroom and you had a caravan of people wanting to help. Like, “Hey, I think if you do this…” and “I’ll run to Ace.” Just incredible to watch.

Greg: I can’t count how many times something’s broken and the homie sitting at the bar is a professional in that field. Our walk-in’s down or our ice machine’s down, and James, he’s on it. I don’t know that that can be said for so many other industries.

Returning to this kind of philosophy of interiors, I want to ask about the aura of the space. I know there were a bunch of businesses in this spot before you that didn’t last even a year.

Greg: The amount of people that told us that this place was cursed…

Diana: “You’re doomed.” “Don’t even bother.” “I give it a year.” All that. And then opening up [in 2018] and then COVID. We’re like, “Oh…” But we defied the odds. I think COVID really is what—unfortunately or fortunately—put us on the map. It gave us an opportunity to meet the whole neighborhood because we put the frozen machine in the front door and had [our late Bernese Mountain Dog] Bo here for it.

Greg: A lot of the kids in their 20s didn’t even think that this was a bar they were allowed to come into. They thought it was like a VFW or Allegiance Hall or something.

Diana: We were making hot dogs and serving frozen drinks out the front door. Perfect opportunity to meet everybody, you know? We had been open for a year, but people that walked by every single day were like, “I didn’t know you guys were a bar.”

Greg: That was before people were even allowed in the bar, so they couldn’t even come in to use the restroom. I remember people being like, “Oh my god, soon we’re gonna be allowed to go in the yard.” Everyone was so excited to see the space.

It’s an almost hidden storefront, in a very Chicago way. You have to know where you’re going. And there’s something about the space, the vibe in here, that means you can basically be assured no one’s gonna bother you.

Diana: We don’t even—knock on wood—need security. We have all of our regulars here. In the rare occasion that something does happen, we’re all ready to defend. It’s the importance of community. I met Amanda Dayon here, one of my closest friends when she passed away, but she was also everyone’s good friend here. Absolutely there’s that sense of community. I wanted to be here more because Amanda was here, but everyone felt the same thing. This was our spot, everyone’s spot, meeting spot. That’s the one thing I’m most grateful for. Neighbors, friends, regulars, everyone totally make this place what it is. Otherwise, we would just be a bar.

Greg Diemond and Diana Orena recommend:

Caribbean Social Club

Puppeteer and musician Tristan Allen on being okay with not knowing what’s next

2026-04-09T03:00:00-04:00

When I looked at the links you sent about the magic of puppetry, I was struck by the fact that puppetry has an intricate relationship with music. Can you talk about how the two are inextricable for you or to what extent you see them as separate things?

The first thing I’ll say about puppetry and the people I’ve met through it is, there doesn’t seem to be one way that people find it. No one really chooses to be a puppeteer. It just kind of happens to them. Generally, it happens to them because of a medium that they’re pursuing that leads to it.

For better or worse, the majority of people that fall into puppetry come from the theater world, whether it’s actors or set designers or things like that. They’ll find that, maybe, they want to play all the parts, or they want the set to be more forward-facing than the characters. There’s also animators, people who pay attention to the fact that when somebody gets up, they put their hand first and then they get up. They’re in tune with detail and motion. Dancers, too, especially dancers who can no longer do the split that they want to do.

I came into puppetry as a music person who wanted to be a pianist or composer. My idea of what puppetry could be was a way to perform my music. That’s not the case for everybody’s relationship between music and puppetry, but for me, puppetry was a means to put my music in front of people and tell a story without words dictated.

I’ve read that you got into puppetry through a Craigslist ad, but also that your father has some puppetry background. Can you tell me about your journey into puppetry?

When I was growing up, our basement had a briefcase of what I later found out were hand puppets that my dad made to apply for theater school in Montreal. He also would decorate our Christmas tree with a blue papier-mâché angel, which I later found out was one of the puppets used when he was participating in the early days of the Bread and Puppet Theater. It was never made clear that puppetry played any role in my dad’s life explicitly, but these things were around.

Also, I studied Gamelan, which is Balinese traditional music, and I got to go there. And there, I saw my first shadow puppetry, which is called wayang kulit, and that left a mark, especially because of how loud it was.

Then, I went to school for piano. I was a music person. The visual aspect of my work came about because I just didn’t want to be pushing buttons on stage to perform the music I inevitably ended up falling in love with. There was this question of, “I want to perform this music, but I don’t really know how in a way that feels more fantasy than sci-fi.”

I kind of ran out of Boston and had just a few months to find work in New York. In that time, I saw an ad for auditions to be a marionette performer at one of the two marionette theaters in New York City, Puppetworks. The auditions were quite intense. There was this thing they had you do where they tied an egg to a string, and they told you to move the egg into the basket. This was one of the exercises that Mike Leach, the person who hired and trained me, put me through. He later told me that it had nothing to do with getting the egg in the basket, and it had everything to do with how you get it there, and that was what the test was for.

I think he didn’t want to work with a puppeteer, he wanted to train someone to be a puppeteer. Because I have this ability to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time because I play piano, I think he saw that and saw that I was taking puppetry very seriously, in a way that a lot of people don’t relate with.

It took me a very long time to learn how to walk with a marionette. At this point, I was already doing two or three shows a day, five days a week, and I did that for roughly three years up until the pandemic. In that time, I had my answer: “I’m going to perform my music with puppetry.” That’s hopefully what I’ll end up doing for the rest of my life.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about taking puppetry seriously, because I believe you, but puppetry often has a sense of whimsy to it. I’d love to hear about the contrast of being committed to your craft and your craft being associated with humor and whimsy.

It’s funny to watch puppetry from behind the curtain, seeing two people curse at each other while desperately trying to hit the cue on a bridge—which is basically the top bunk of a bunk bed—elbowing each other, puppets flying everywhere. It’s absolute mayhem. When you watch it from the front, maybe as a kid seeing The Magic Flute, it’s these delicate little motions and characters being set in gravity.

In hand puppetry, you generally have your hands above your head. For a 40-minute show, to have your hands above your head, it’s just agony. It’s hard to get through that in a whimsical manner like, “This is fun. I’m going to make some people laugh and then continue.” It’s hard to get through something like that if you don’t take the craft of it and what it can do very seriously and passionately. Having your arms up for that long stops being “haha, these are dolls that I’m wiggling” really fast.

How do you feel about making wordless music with a story to it but knowing it’s possible that, without seeing the puppetry aspect of it, a listener might not understand it?

I think instrumental music has the power to allow for the listener to be the protagonist. If you’re curious and have imagination, it’s quite possible to, as the listener, put yourself in the setting that the music creates and to have your own journey through that.

I think, unfortunately, instrumental music gets relegated to accompaniment or background. Obviously, the word “ambient” being used a lot, or soundtracks being very dominant in instrumental music, takes away from people’s idea that they can actually be the one that guides and tells the story. Even with [my] puppetry—I run into this a lot in the puppet community—people [say] they see my narrative as poetic, so to speak. I think it’s a nice way of saying “I don’t know what happened.”

You’re not really going to know what happens when you see ballet, but there’s something genuinely powerful about that because you learn so much about yourself and the person next to you based on how you experience the same thing. Instrumental music isn’t a form that has a main character. It’s never going to grab your hand and pull you to where it wants you to go. And I think it can be very rewarding to see where you go.

What would you say motivates you across your creative output—the music, the puppetry, their intersection?

I wish I knew, just so I could focus on that motivation as much as possible so that I would work as much as I can. Honestly, it’s confusing when people say “I do what I love,” because this stuff does not feel like I love it while I’m doing it a lot of the time, and that’s OK. Obviously, there are moments, especially those moments where you lose time in the creative process, that are the thing I’m completely infatuated by, but I just have to do it.

I’ve felt that I’ve needed to do it, whether it’s music or puppetry, since I was little. What that is and why, I have no idea. To tell you the truth, maybe it’s good that I don’t have an idea because I’m always propelled to find the answer.

Are there other moments besides getting lost in time when you’re like, “OK, this is what I love”?

Honestly, I hate to admit it, but I like being on stage, and I like it when people clap and say, “Good job.”

I think we stigmatize vanity as a society, to some extent fairly, but to another extent, it blocks people from being able to share themselves on stage and feel OK with putting themselves out there. If you’re on stage and you’re getting praised, you’re making a connection with people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I think that gets lumped in with vanity.

I see what you’re saying. It can be pretty lonely. A lot of people warn you about how hard it is to make money, but they don’t really tell you that you’re just going to be in a room alone for most of the day. The counterbalance of being in a room with everybody all at once, I think, is necessary to have any forward momentum.

On the note of being alone in a room all day, I keep seeing everything behind you, and it looks like you’re in your creative space. If that’s right, how have you made this space work for you? What needs to be in a space for you to feel able to be creative there?

I know many people are the exact opposite, but I’m pretty organized and have my pencils straight. Everything’s there when I need it to be there. I’ve got a desk for music and a desk for puppets, and I go between the two.

I’ve got trinkets. I like trinkets. I’m a little bit of a collector and a very competitive person. Where I’m working, I try to treat it as my gymnasium for the imagination and treat it like a muscle. It’s like I’m trying to win at the Imagination Olympics. Every day, I tally the amount of hours I’ve spent doing creative work, and I keep them on these card-shaped wooden things, and they’re all behind me looking at me. I try to beat my score every month or at least get a good one. And then, I see over the years that I’m getting better at creativity, which is what I want to be the best at.

One more thing about the room is I have the privilege now of sleeping in a different room than I work in. That wasn’t always the case. It’s really hard to love the piano, the bass, or your puppets when you’re waking up and you see them staring down at you. You can almost hear their internal voice yelling at you like, “Why aren’t you practicing?” Even though my separation is by just one wall, even that alone is huge.

To ask more about this competitiveness, am I understanding correctly that this competitiveness is mostly with yourself?

Honestly, I’m just competitive. I’ve been getting into a little bit of ping-pong, and I adore it. I grew up competing as a Magic: The Gathering player. I was always too small to be good at sports, but I wanted so bad to find a way to break them that would give me favor.

I wouldn’t say [my competitiveness is] just with myself or against others. I’m just somebody who has this need, even if it’s maybe not in my health’s best interest, to do the most and the best I can.

I’d love to hear about what success means to you, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be just within your creativity.

What success means to me is changing depending on where I am. I’ve always had these very simple but concrete goalposts. One that I have currently is for a stranger to invite me to a place far away that I’ve never been, someone who has enough incentive to see me perform and is able to pay for a night at a hotel. And then, I would take a bath in that hotel after the show, and under the water, I would scream, “I did it,” and then I would come up with my next goal.

Is there anything more you want to say about creativity, or anything more in response to a question I asked that, when I first asked it, you didn’t quite feel you were able to articulate?

I think I struggled with discipline and creative working, getting in the chair, for a very long time, and it made me quite miserable. In that time, I was treating creativity very romantically, waiting for a lightning-bolt moment or, like in the movies, things to just explode out of me. For me, that doesn’t exist. It kind of bums me out, but I really do believe that, if you’re going to be doing this stuff, you’ve got to do it every day. Really beautiful things will happen, but don’t expect to want to be doing it all the time or feel inspired to do it all the time.

Tristan Allen Recommends:

Philippe Genty - object & bunraku inspired puppetry

Ilka Schonbein - hand puppetry

Ines Pasic - body puppetry

Richard Teschner - rod puppetry

Bruce Schwartz - rod puppetry

Filmmaker Christopher Radcliff on creating with urgency

2026-04-08T03:00:00-04:00

Creatively, are you someone who requires closure in your work or someone who enjoys frequent change?

I get really attached to projects–not just the film, the story, and the characters–but also the team and community that arises from the project. I worked as a freelance editor for a number of years, and when working with a new team on a new film, you have to sort out your workflow and how the project coalesces around the team. In my mind, I always felt like, “Oh, this is my life now. This is it. This is my job now, forever,” even though it’s very short-term most of the time. It’s one reason why I ended up liking documentary, which tends to be a longer process, and can feel endless. I did always feel mentally ill-suited for the freelance aspect of the whole thing. Over the years, I’ve had to learn how to disengage from a project. And there’s always an element of sadness when an era ends. But, creatively speaking, if you can end a project having taken [the film] as far as you could, and don’t feel like there’s a lot left unsaid, I think that’s a really nice feeling if you can get there.

How do you approach silence in your films? Is that something that you design from the outset or does it emerge more so in the edit?

It was actually a really important realization that I had in some of my earlier work that silence is almost equally as valuable as a line of dialogue is. I think when you’re first starting out and you’re writing the script, you think the dialogue is always saying the important thing that you want to communicate to the audience. I’m thinking specifically of a short film I made called The Strange Ones. As I was editing the film, it just wasn’t working. There were some scenes that felt way too verbose and overwritten. There was too much dialogue. And as soon as I started pulling out the dialogue and replacing it with just meaningful silences where the character is just reacting or contemplating something, it all of a sudden became so much more realistic and resonant in the ways that I wanted it to be. I do think that editing is very helpful if you are somebody that writes and directs. You start to be able to perceive the entire work as one thing as opposed to disparate elements that build upon each other. Having perspective on how the words will eventually manifest, not even just on screen but in the edit temporally, is really helpful.

When you’re writing something new, how much space do you hold for a new script before sharing it with someone else?

I keep it very close to the chest for a very long time. Probably too long, to be honest. I’m very reluctant to reveal something until I feel like it’s communicating what I want it to be communicating. And I’m very self-critical about that. So I tend to rework scripts quite a bit before I start to show them to people. It’s actually something that I’m trying to be more comfortable with earlier—sharing things. It becomes deleterious to hold onto [a script] for too long because you then rethink things endlessly in a loop, but you need to break out of that with an outside perspective in order to inspire the next form of the film. And film is such a collaborative medium that someone will see your words sooner or later. I’m often trying to rip the bandaid off a little bit earlier, now.

What creative risks are urgent for you right now that might not have been earlier in your career?

I want to start making things in a way that doesn’t take so long. Creating with more of an urgency is something that has always felt inherently risky—to make something and share it before you’re altogether comfortable—but I feel much more urgency around doing that now. The more I create, the more I realize that when you’re stuck on an idea, it’s almost like you’re stuck in time. Meanwhile, the world is spinning around you and changing, and by the time you come out of that frozen time period with that idea, you’re in a different world and the work has a different relationship with the world. That’s always the tricky thing with film because films take so long to make.

So many people starting out in film are advised to “write what you know.” Do you feel like you haven’t followed that traditional scheme, and are now, after making other work, looking internally for inspiration?

With [my film, We Were the Scenery], oftentimes young Asian American audience members and aspiring filmmakers would say that the film made them want to talk to their parents. It was a really gratifying reaction. There was something about [the film] that made them say, “I just want to go home. I want to interview my parents. I want to see what their story is.” And I would tell them, “If you are an Asian American person or you are a product of the diaspora, there is an interesting story there no matter what.” Then, I started to think about [making more personal work] myself. It’s something that I’m circling mentally. But it’s very unique to this moment in my career. I don’t know if I would’ve had these thoughts and feelings if I hadn’t made this film first. While not at all based on my life, the work that I’ve done has always been personal or following a feeling or question that I was intensely curious about. I’ve always been very envious of people that can make compelling work out of the people and places that they know. It’s a really admirable and impressive thing to do. Only now am I starting to see it with new eyes and perceive the complex layers that exist in my personal spaces that are potentially quite compelling to not just me, but to an audience. So we’ll see. We’ll see what comes of it.

Do you believe films should be made for the person making it, or for the audience experiencing it?

You want something that’s deeply felt and resonates with the person that made it. And if that’s personal and therapeutic, that’s a really beautiful result from making a film. But films are, just by their nature, public objects in a sense. I was obsessed with Roger Ebert, the film critic, when I was a kid. It was how I started to love film. He has many famous quotes, but one of the most memorable is, more or less: “cinema is an empathy machine.” And that’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. We can’t help but empathize to an extent even when the characters are troubled or doing things that are disturbing in certain ways. You know what I mean? That, to me, is one of the core utilities of film: to see and understand things in a new way. So, in that regard, I think I really value the relationship between the film and the audience. Almost as a filmmaker, I try to put myself secondary to that. Even though you are the engine that’s driving the creation of the piece, in a weird way, you have to hold yourself to the standard that it can’t just be important to you. It also has to be communicating something to other people as well.

Is specificity of perspective mutually exclusive with being resonant to a wide audience?

In fact, it’s the opposite. The more specific you can be about the way you think and feel and see things, the more people will understand that. It’s one of the weird tricks of cinema: the more specific it is, the more universal it is. I do believe that. Films can illuminate a perspective in a way that, even if it’s a world that is totally different from yours, the visceral emotion of it still speaks to everybody in a really universal, human way. If you’re trying to avoid that, or if you are creating work that is general or broad, it feels like you’re just skimming the surface of a story. And we’re so deeply involved in our own stories that that’s what we appreciate. We appreciate the willingness to plunge into those depths in the same way that we live our own stories. If you can give something to a viewer that is culturally specific in a certain way or unique to you in whatever way, but that they still understand on that visceral, emotional level, then that’s how empathy for the world beyond ourselves is created.

When you’re finishing one film, are you already paving the road for the next one?

No, unfortunately not. We’ve been so intensely busy with [We Were the Scenery], just shepherding its run as a short film. What a blessing to have such a long life for short. But it being really intensely time-consuming alongside making this feature that I was a producer on meant that I hadn’t really been able to lay the groundwork for my next film. So after premiering [Zi] at Sundance and after the end of the [We Were the Scenery] awards campaign, reentry into my normal life was actually really somewhat jarring. I was like, “Oh my god, I have hours. I can actually sit and think about an idea. So, what do I do?” That’s something I’m still groping around, trying to find my way into the next thing. But I do feel creatively stockpiled with ideas that I had been developing beforehand.

The public-facing release part of the process is a legit huge chapter that we often don’t engage with. As a filmmaker, I never really considered that. I have to be able to switch gears from my dreamy fantasy land version of the process to the public-facing part, and engage with the viewers and with the world again. It’s a whole muscle and skill and mindset that you have to nurture at the same time.

If you could trace a throughline across all of your work so far, is there any one question that rises to the surface that you’ve been trying to answer?

What I try to do in films is almost get into the secret layer of things that exist beneath the public layer of a story. I try to dig into this subterranean layer beneath the surface of what we think we know. That is a little bit of a dynamic that exists in all of my work in a weird way. I’m also now more interested in asking questions than I am in providing answers. And so if I can take this kind of idea of dealing with secrets, but actually be open-minded to the telling of the secret that still creates additional questions, that is interesting to me.

Christopher Radcliff recommends:

IWGP, a live action Japanese tv series from the early 00’s about unruly teenagers in Tokyo getting into various adventures in their neighborhood (Ikebukuro). It’s on Netflix. Low budget and somehow both dated (in a good way) and ahead of its time, it’s extremely fun and playful, and the pace of its storytelling is kind of awe inspiring.

Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber. I started making jam recently kind of as a hobby, and I really love this book’s recipes which are pretty simple for the most part but have a very specific, rather time-consuming process that yields something really special. I also like how Ferber, a legend in the jam world, says “a batch of jam is always an act of creation.”

Exploring via Google Maps streetview / Geoguessing. I think it’s interesting to just explore places via streetview, both far flung locations I’ve never been and my own neighborhoods. I like how it makes everything feel familiar and otherworldly at the same time. Along with that I recently became aware of geoguessing, and how it’s an entire e-sport with a world cup and stuff, which is pretty mind-boggling.

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, by Agota Kristof. Incredibly bleak and harrowing, I first read this three-part novel over fifteen years ago and still think about passages from it regularly. A Hungarian writing in her second language (French), Kristof uses simplicity and omission in a way I really admire.

Writing screenplays by hand. I started doing this recently and I really like how it makes me more aware of the fact that a first draft is just the beginning of a process that will eventually have to lead to many future versions and iterations. And knowing this helps me to be more free.

Songwriter and musician Yea-Ming Chen on giving yourself permission

2026-04-07T03:00:00-04:00

What advice do you have for people who want to build a life around making art?

My biggest advice is just to keep doing it. Despite anything. Despite any results. You’ll be disappointed sometimes, and sometimes you’ll be excited. Especially when you’re younger, you’ll see stars everywhere and get one big show and think, “Oh, this is it—I’m going straight to the top.” But when you’re older, you realize it goes up and down. You have high points and low points. One moment might be the highest you’ll ever be, and then things change again.

So my advice is to be grateful for every moment—every interaction, every chance you get to explore the joy of playing and doing the thing that you love. And also, not letting the disappointments bog you down. I still struggle with that. If a show doesn’t go well, or I make a mistake, I can crawl into a hole and not play for a while. But that’s pointless. You can grieve about it, but you have to keep going forward, especially if it’s something you love to do.

For a lot of us who pursue art, it’s not because we thought it would make us famous or bring us a lot of money. It’s because it’s the thing that makes us feel human. It gives us a sense of purpose. It pushes away loneliness and depression. It’s a survival thing. So, if that’s the case, then you just have to listen to that. Your body knows what you need to do.

Between your earlier records and the new album you’re finishing now, how has your songwriting process shifted?

I just finished working on a new Rumours record called Residue. When I started writing it, I felt a little bored with my usual habits. The Rumours has always been my lo-fi, folkier project—my place for the more sensitive songs. Ryli is where I rock out more and collaborate.

With this record I felt somewhat tapped out with the journeys I usually take, so I started experimenting with synthesized drums and beats just to see what would happen. When I get stuck, I like to give myself challenges. I’ll say, “Try to write a song that sounds like Mazzy Star,” or I’ll take a weird drum beat I’ve never written to before and see what happens. Sometimes the challenge itself opens a door.

When you look back at your albums, do they feel tied to specific emotional or life chapters?

Definitely. For example, So, Bird, which was the first Rumours record Dandy Boy put out, was absolutely my pandemic record. You can hear the isolation when you listen to it. I also had a three-month-old baby at the time, so there was this feeling of solitude and identity crisis in the music. I was parenting alone a lot during that time. It was really hard, but there was also something freeing about it. The world got quiet. There were no shows or gigs happening, and that removed a lot of pressure. I grew up being compared to other people constantly, so I always have this voice in my head that turns things into a competition. During the pandemic, that voice disappeared for a while because nothing was happening. It allowed me to just explore whatever I wanted to.

You said something in another interview that really stayed with me: that you think of yourself more as a songwriter than a musician. I was curious about that distinction.

Honestly, I think of myself more as a songwriter than a musician. I almost feel like being a musician is just the gateway that allows me to be a songwriter. Songwriting is the thing I care about the most. It’s where I’m trying to grasp a very specific feeling—jealousy, missing someone, toxicity, whatever it is—and turn it into something. To me, songwriting is basically poetry in music form. My favorite poems capture a small snippet of a feeling or moment but somehow make it feel huge and universal. That’s always what I’m striving for.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck? I ask because I’ve noticed that for me, it’s often not a lack of ideas—it’s that I’ve drifted too far into promotion, logistics, or the administrative side of making things.

I’m stuck right now, actually. Usually when I’m stuck, it’s because I’ve forgotten to read. I haven’t been reading enough. So, one of my tricks is to go back to reading again. I also journal a lot and listen to a lot of music. When I’m promoting a record or dealing with the PR side of things, that tends to drain the creative energy out of me. Right now, I know that’s why I’m stuck—I’ve been working on the promotional side of the new record instead of doing the things that actually inspire me.

That makes sense to me. Sometimes promoting work on Instagram feels more like playing a strange little video game. What is your relationship with social media as an artist?

It’s terrible for me. I have a really distractible ADHD brain, so social media can easily swallow my entire day. I actually use an app that blocks Instagram except for certain windows: a few minutes in the morning, a few minutes at noon, and a little time in the evening. Sometimes I miss those windows, which is actually fine. When you release a record, you’re expected to be on social media constantly. Before I set those limits, I’d open Instagram and suddenly ten hours had passed. So now I schedule posts ahead of time and try to keep it contained.

As someone who’s been doing this for a long time, I’m curious how you define success now?

For me, success is feeling content. There’s the outward version of success—press, good shows, whatever—but those moments are never as good as the feeling of exploring an emotion and turning it into a song. When you manage to capture something inside yourself and make it tangible, that feels incredibly rewarding. I also love practicing. Even though I’ve said I don’t think of myself primarily as a musician, working on my craft and getting better technically makes me feel really happy. Those moments make me feel like I want to go through this life.

What does collaboration give you that working alone doesn’t?

Playing with other people is incredible. When you find a group of people you really gel with, the energy becomes bigger than yourself. That’s how it feels playing with Ryli. Those guys are incredibly talented, and it pushes me to keep up with them. When you have a great practice or a great show where everyone locks in together, it’s almost like an out-of-body experience. It’s kind of orgasmic.

You also teach music. How does teaching shape your creative life?

Teaching is actually how I make most of my income. I mostly teach piano to kids between seven and twelve, with a few adult students too. The nice thing about teaching is that it allows me to structure my day, so my mornings are free for creative work. I teach in the afternoons, which means I can spend the earlier part of the day writing or practicing. It also keeps me connected to music in a different way. I’m constantly reminding my students that mistakes aren’t the end of the world, and that music is about expression, not perfection. Of course, I still struggle with that myself.

Do you feel like people are seeing and hearing you differently now than when you were younger?

I remember being in my twenties and feeling like people were looking at me more than they were actually listening. It was like, “Oh, it’s a cute Asian girl playing guitar.” That was the vibe I felt from the room sometimes. And I’d be thinking, I’m actually really proud of this song. I worked hard on these words.

Do you feel like that’s changed as you’ve gotten older?

Yes, definitely. I do feel more respected now and more listened to. At the same time, I do think the music industry takes younger women seriously in a certain way—or maybe values them differently. There’s something about youth in music, especially for women, that gets rewarded. That part has always driven me crazy, because I feel like I’m so much better now. I’ve learned so much since I was twenty years old.

So yes, I think younger women are often given more attention by the industry, but in my actual experience, I feel like people are listening to me more now than they were then. When I was younger, I felt more like a novelty. Now I feel like the audience is actually hearing the music, and there’s a relief in that.

Do you feel disciplined in your creative life?

I’m a very scattered person, but I am serious. For a long time, I didn’t like admitting that. There’s this cultural pressure to seem effortless—like you’re naturally talented and everything just flows. But the truth is I work really hard behind the scenes. Sometimes I even hide that from friends or my partner. I’ll go home and practice for hours or work on a song idea and not really talk about it. I like getting better at what I do.

I kept thinking about your album title, I Can’t Have It All. A lot of women are taught that wanting too much—career, art, motherhood—is somehow selfish. Do you ever feel that tension yourself?

That’s something I’ve struggled with. When I think about having both Ryli and the Rumours, sometimes I still feel like, “Who said I’m allowed to have this?” Like I’m greedy for wanting two creative outlets while also being a mom. But then I remind myself that for so long I didn’t allow myself to pursue what I wanted because of the way I was raised. I internalized a lot of voices telling me what I wasn’t allowed to do. Now when I look back at the things I missed because of that, I think I deserve to have these things. I’m just catching up!

Yea-Ming Chen recommends:

Severance (TV show)—I’m a science fiction nut, and if you haven’t watched this yet, you are sleeping. Also, the theme song is epic.

A social media blocker app—The specific one I use is called Refocus, but there are tons available. I have my phone set up so that I can get onto Instagram from 9:00–9:30 AM, 12:00–12:30 PM, and 6:00–6:30 PM. It’s enough to get the dirty work done, but it stops me from scrolling until the cows come home.

Beta blockers for performance—They really just maintain a physical state of calm without any awful side effects. The good kind of nerves in your brain still exist to help you stay present and locked in.

Gardens—Gardens are like curated nature. I love being surrounded by plants and trees and flowers and feeling the presence of another person’s thoughtful process in putting the pieces together.

Games with friends—For introverts (or those on the cusp) who want to be around people but get overstimulated by multiple conversations happening at once, games are a perfect solution because everyone is focused on one thing. I think that’s why I like band practice.

Author and podcaster Caro Claire Burke on reconnecting with your ambition

2026-04-06T03:00:00-04:00

Your critically acclaimed debut novel, Yesteryear comes out in April. It’s also being made into a film starring Anne Hathaway. It’s about a contemporary trad wife that wakes up one morning in 1855. An excellent elevator pitch. Did you ever in your wildest dream imagine this amount of buzz for your first book?

God, no. I still don’t believe it. I sold the book in 2024 so it’s almost been two years, and it took me a year after selling it [to fully believe it]. I would wake up and check my email because I was so certain that it hadn’t happened. I was writing for a decade before this. I used to have dreams that a literary agent finally emailed me back. I would wake up and be like, “did I just make all of that up?” So no, not even in a million years…

How has your life changed and/or stayed the same since Yesteryear?

First and foremost, I get to write full time now. I think that’s the greatest privilege a writer can have. When I was writing Yesteryear, I would get up at five in the morning and work on it before work. And so being able to actually dedicate a full amount of time to creativity is crazy. I would say that’s the biggest outcome. And then I ended up with a team of people who really believe in my work, which I also think is a really big privilege. When you’re writing, sometimes before you sell a book and sometimes after, it can be really hard to maintain a sense of belief in yourself, like when you’re dealing with rejections from literary mags or from agents or from editors or whatever. Through the Yesteryear process, I now have a team who believe in me as a writer, and not just in Yesteryear. And that makes a big difference.

Were you always a writer? Would love to hear a bit about your journey to the page. Your creative origin story.

I was not always a writer. I enjoyed writing. I read and I wrote on the side, but I barely did any creative writing in college. I got a job at a startup. I wish I had journaled, because I would love to be able to go back in time. But when I was 23, I was just like, “I want to write a novel.” I became obsessed with it. Since then, it’s become the thing that I’ve been obsessed with. Depending on who you are, that might sound like a late onset or an early onset.

What was your relationship with creativity growing up? Was it something that felt available to you, or was it something you had to reach for?

I think that I always had an inclination towards fiction in particular. Sometimes I would write little short stories as a kid, but I was not aware that it could be something that you could do as a craft or that it could be a full-time job. I grew up in an area where most people became doctors or lawyers or went into business. Then I went to a prep school in New England, and then UVA. Ironically, UVA has a great MFA program and a great English program, but UVA also is a place with a lot of mainstream strivers, the kids who are going to go into consulting, kids who are going to law school. I thought I was prelaw for a while. I just didn’t know that you could be a full time writer. That wasn’t something that I knew about until maybe 22 or 23. I remember reading a book by Emily Giffin and seeing in her bio that she was a lawyer, and she wrote books. And I was like, “oh, that’s how it happens. You have a job, and then you get to write books.” So I just didn’t grow up in that space. I enjoyed creativity, but like the NFL, I thought “you’re not going to be a professional football player,” you know? So it took me a while to realize that maybe you could be a professional football player.

We both got our MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Do you think an MFA is necessary to write professionally in this day and age?

The only thing you need to be a writer is you have to write. You just have to write a lot. And obviously, then you have to figure out how to climb the ladder. An MFA is a place that helps you facilitate writing. If you want that, that’s great. But at the end of the day, you just have to write.

For me, the biggest advantage of going to Bennington was gaining access to people who cared about what I cared about. And now I do stay in touch with a lot of those people and reach out to them and be like, “What books are you reading?” Or, “Hey, do you know anyone who knows this agent?” Or, “My book is coming out, what should I prepare for?” That stuff is great, but that’s a function of networking. Some people get that in undergrad. Some people get that just from being in a city. For me, I got that at Bennington.

I needed someone to tell me I was a writer.

The legitimacy, too. It’s not nothing to make a decision that reinforces your own sense of legitimacy. When you’re an artist, everything feels so illegitimate all the time. So anything that reinforces that what you’re doing matters and deserves carving out time, is useful.

I know you used to write short stories based on Taylor Swift songs and built a huge audience. Where did that idea come from? Was this creative constraint helpful for generating new work? What did you learn about the internet, writing, social media, and building an audience through this project?

I view myself primarily as a novelist. I was in the middle of working on my second manuscript. This is the one that came before Yesteryear. When you have a full manuscript, you’ve edited it a million times, you’re like, “I don’t know if my agent likes it.” (This is a different agent than the one I have now.) And I was just feeling really low. The folklore album came out, and I remember being like, “Oh my god, there are so many good stories in this.” Like Seven by Taylor Swift. There was such a story there. And, My Tears Ricochet. I was already a big Taylor Swift fan, and I had written some short stories and I had played around with formatting them and sharing them online, but I had never figured out a way to serialize them.

I started with all the songs in Folklore. I really couldn’t tell if there was any function to it, but now I realize that it was such a boot camp in writing. Every week you just have to write something, and you’re not waiting for the muse to speak to you. And that was 100 percent why I was able to write Yesteryear pretty quickly. I got used to a deadline, and I became much less precious about it, and that was a huge turning point for me. As opposed to being like, “each sentence has to be beautiful to get to the next one.” It was like, “No, get the story out, and then you can worry about the sentences after.” That was a massive transition for me in terms of how I thought about writing.

Your podcast Diabolical Lies covers the full gamut of contemporary takes, from ICE Raids to zeitgeist-y HBO shows like Heated Rivalry. What do you love most about this particular platform? What is different about a podcast vs. social media vs. traditional publishing? What was the initial intent of the podcast? Has anything surprised you along the way?

I never would have done the podcast if I didn’t sell Yesteryear and have a financial footing to try something new. Selling Yesteryear didn’t just give me the chance to work on other writing, it gave me the chance to ask myself, “what do you want to make if you’re not beholden to a company?” [My co-host and I] had only known each other for a few weeks. We would send each other voice notes just talking about shit. And so it was very, very much a soft launch. The whole thing is pretty lofi. We don’t have a theme song. It just started with us sharing thoughts about culture in a way that we didn’t see elsewhere. I think there’s a lot of crossover between Yesteryear and Diabolical Lies.

I have an urge to write, but more than that, I have an urge to communicate. And I think that’s why I started a TikTok. I didn’t always know I was going to succeed as a writer. Each platform has different value. A novel has staying power. I like to dream that maybe 50 or 100 years from now, someone could be reading my book. No one’s gonna be watching my TikToks. With short form, you can reach a lot of people, but it’s very ephemeral. As for podcasts, I got into it when it was already dead. I think that podcasts have mid-level staying power. What’s fun about podcasts is that we can do whatever we want. As soon as you write and sell a novel, it becomes a product. It no longer belongs to me, but the podcast, it belongs to me and my co-host, and that is a lot of fun. It has been very helpful for me as a creative, to have certain things that I know are only mine and that I’m actually not producing with a team, and that are not a commercial product.

What about the Yesteryear film project with Anne Hathaway? I don’t know what you’re allowed to say about it, but how involved do you get to be? Do you feel like your project is out of your hands?

I’m an executive producer, so I’m involved, but I’m not the script writer, and that was a decision that I tortured over for two weeks during the film rights. My agent, God bless her, was like, “Carolyn, you don’t want to be a screenwriter, you want to be a novelist and if you want to be a screenwriter, then this is going to take up all your time for years.” It was really useful to have someone in my ear at that moment. “You’ve written one book, but now you have to have a career. It’s time for you to be thinking and developing stuff.” And so I’m so happy that I am not the screenwriter. We have an amazing screenwriter. She’s a genius. I’m so happy they gave it to her. We have a script, and it’s being shopped, and it’s super cool.

I can’t stress enough the importance of a good agent. Agents become more important after you sell your book. So if your agent is not emailing you back the same day, if they are not very interested in your work, that will become more important after you sell the book. It’s so important to have someone who is genuinely invested in your career.

What sparked the idea for Yesteryear? And what did the creative process look like when writing it?

Fiction is very meditative for me. It’s like prayer.

I was working on my second manuscript. No one wanted it. Dead on arrival. I switched agents. It was the winter of 2024. I was like, “I’m just going to stop writing for a while. I just need to take a breath.” So I downloaded TikTok on a whim. None of my friends were on it. And I was like, “this is kind of fun.” Tradwives were becoming this whole cultural thing, and so I started sharing my opinion, and it ballooned until it was something where I was very much a part of that cultural moment. Because I was thinking about it all the time, I literally woke up one morning and was like, “Yesteryear.” It was such a world. Like, Westworld.

I had the elevator pitch, and I didn’t know yet how she was going to get out, but I loved the idea of pushing this woman to her farthest constraints. I emailed my agent, and she was like, “Absolutely, go for it.” I don’t know if I would have written it in the same way if I didn’t have her in that moment, because I was feeling very burned out. I was feeling like a huge failure. So I was really lucky to have someone who believed in me as a writer. It’s hard to be the sole engine of your own belief system.

I wrote it all that winter. And then we sold it that spring. It was a crazy experience, so unlike the first two manuscripts I had written. And it’s a totally different book. My first two books had been a little bit more quiet. One was a family story/coming of age, and then one was a campus novel. And so this was like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here. I’ve never written a thriller, I’ve never written a comedy, I’ve never done dual timelines.” And so I think because it was so foreign, it didn’t feel like there were any stakes.

I recently wrote a craft essay about where ideas come from. I’m interested in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ideas cloud from Big Magic. How there’s this ideas cloud, and we’re all kind of sitting under it, and at any point an idea can strike you or pass you by and you have to stick around for the next one. What do you think?

Yeah, I love that idea. I think that’s true. I think that so much of writing is just not being the person who quits. I think Ta-Nehisi Coates said something like, “I only began to pick up steam as a writer at 35, but by then, most of my peers had given up.” So eventually you become the most talented person, because you’re taking the most time. I am not Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I very much relate to that, because I have been, almost to an embarrassing degree, constantly trying to put myself in the way of the moment. With Yesteryear, I felt this almost panicked push forward, “you’re finally in the right place at the right time.”

I will take your Liz Gilbert theory and give you a Cormac McCarthy theory that I recently came across. Basically, Cormac McCarthy theorized that our subconscious mind is the oldest tool we have, like it’s arguably millions of years old. We only began to communicate via language very recently, and when you’re writing fiction, you are bridging the gap between your oldest tool and your newest tool. And we don’t understand why that happens. And every writer understands you’re not in control of the sentences that come out. You might have an idea. You might get struck by the Liz Gilbert ideas cloud. But then when you start—and this is why I think it’s kind of like a form of prayer or meditation—you’re not in control. And with Yesteryear, it’s almost a combination of those two things: 1. I was in the right place at the right time. I got hit by the ideas cloud. 2. But I had no idea that I was going to write Natalie’s voice the way that I did. That really just came out as I was typing, and I was like, “Who is this woman?” There was something taking place in my subconscious that I have no control over that I don’t understand or have the words for because our newest tool is not yet able to fully bridge that. It’s a magical thing that happens, and fiction is such an expression of the subconscious in that way.

On your Instagram stories the other day you were discussing reconnecting with your old ambition. Why are women so allergic to outwardly exploring their ambitions? How have you reconnected with your own ambition?

I think ambition requires centering yourself in your own story, and I think that women are cultured from a very young age to associate that with selfishness. And as you get older, that tension becomes more and more uncomfortable, to the point of being unbearable. So, if you have children, if you want to have children, if you get married, even if you’re single, there is a lot of stigmatization around ambitious women as being selfish women or narcissistic women, and you have to kind of overcome that. Actually, it’s perfectly appropriate for me to center myself in my own life.

Yesteryear continues to be a very shocking experience. I hope people are going to like the book, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to think that I earned it, or maybe that’s just in my head.

Since selling Yesteryear, I’ve been the recipient of a lot of attention, and now I really want to prove to people that I deserve it. And that is something that can only happen over a career. I want Yesteryear to succeed, but more than that, I want to have a successful career. It has been really scary and sometimes gives me an anxiety attack. But more often than not, it’s exciting to be given an opportunity.

Five Things Caro Recommends

A novel: Whidbey, by T Kira Madden

A podcast: In the Dark, Season Three

A movie: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

An album: West End Girl, Lily Allen

An activity: going on a walk and leaving your phone in the car