On not being afraid of hard work

Which came first? The solo songwriting or collaborating with others?

I started collaborating first, kind of by a long shot. All my siblings play music. We spent many years and many hundreds of hours, just in our parents’ basement, playing Sublime and Weezer covers. All rotating on instruments. When we were kids, my brother Elliot was the natural frontman. He was the charismatic one. He’d write songs, and we’d back him up on those.

I moved to Chicago in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. Once things started to open up a little more towards the end of 2021, I started playing in other people’s bands, at first as a way to meet people and make friends, and also just experience playing music with people who were not my siblings. That was a huge deal to me, and I quickly knew I wanted music to be the new big thing in my life.

Around that time, I’d started dabbling in writing songs, but I didn’t have a band or anyone to help me play them. I was very shy about it. Horse Like Me was my first time recording my songs in a studio. I did it with two of my best friends, Seth Engel and Nick Levine. They definitely took on a mentor/guide role for me because it was my first time in a studio environment, and they’ve lived and breathed that lifestyle for decades.

I’ve learned so much from them, and I’m still learning. What’s interesting about releasing these songs now, years after first working on them, is realizing how different things feel. I have a consistent band these days, and none of them play on the record. Horse Like Me was my first real experience leading a project while collaborating. I’d spent a lot of time playing on other people’s songs, so I had a strong sense of what it meant to support someone else’s vision and lift it up. That’s still one of my favorite roles to play.

It was a huge learning experience to start writing songs, playing them with other people, and bringing their creative voices into my work. It was a lot of stumbling around, retrying things, and figuring out how to shape the process so it actually worked for me. By the time we started recording in 2023, I finally had a better sense of how to do that.

When working on your own music, how do you navigate that autonomy and shape a cohesive concept for the album?

So far, it hasn’t come until I have a number of songs written. I don’t think about that much while I’m writing an individual song, but themes start to pop up over time. Discussing these concepts with the people that I’m working with is pretty illuminating, too.

Sometimes, just verbalizing my songwriting process is enough for me to get a much clearer picture. It helps me zoom out and see the album as a single piece of art rather than a collection of songs. I think the collaboration is vital to developing thematic cohesion.

Many of the artists that you’ve worked with in the past contributed to your record. What was it like shifting responsibilities so you were the one at the helm?

It was really cool. It stays fascinating. At this point, I’ve played in enough bands and seen so many different ways to lead a project, and I feel like I’ve had a variety of roles that have taught me what is most helpful in a supporting role. Obviously, it’s different for everyone, but openness to others’ ways of working and processes is essential. I go into something with a vision knowing that it’s not final. Part of what’s exciting is leaving it a little open-ended so other people can contribute.

Working with people whom I’ve already collaborated with a bunch feels very safe. I’m always working with people I love and people who I admire creatively, so I know they’re going to do something awesome.

When you’re contributing to someone else’s project, how close do you try to stay to their original vision?

I find that a working relationship is most beneficial when there is openness to discuss and revise ideas that felt more solidified at first. It’s important to leave room for spontaneity. Playing around is a vital part of the process.

The moments of lightheartedness, where you’re just hanging out with your instruments, can yield the most powerful musical moments. Sometimes you work through a bunch of clunker ideas, but then you land on something you never would’ve thought of if you’d gone with the original intention.

When you’re touring or recording with someone else, and you’re giving feedback or suggestions or shaping the material in any way, when do you decide that’s enough on your part and to let them take it from here?

It feels pretty different case by case; there’s usually a lot of talking about it as it goes. Something I love about that process is when the group is stumped. It’s an opportunity to put my voice in there and approach it as if I’m working on a song that I wrote. I’m like, “What would I do if this were my song?” I love that freedom to try wacky shit and, if the person who wrote the song is not into it, that’s fine, and you can try something else.

A big part of it, too, is respecting the original vision while putting your own voice on it. It’s a delicate balance, but I love it so much. At this point, a lot of the bands I play with, I’ve been playing with for a few years, so we feel very comfortable with the road we go down. We know what to expect from each other and what each other’s strengths are. These expectations streamline the process.

We all play in each other’s projects. We’ve worked on so many different things outside of Free Range and Red PK. Plus, we hang out all the time. Jack, Bailey, and I play in hemlock, too. When we tap into that flow state, it feels like sharing a brain. We know where each other is going because we’ve seen it so many times before.

When you rely so much on this synergetic hive mind, how do you, as an individual, define progress?

That’s a real philosophical question. Something I’m dealing with when putting out songs from years ago is leaning into the discomfort of sharing songs from what feels like a past life.

I’ve changed so much as a person in the last four or five years, and a handful of the songs on Horse Like Me are very personal to what I was going through at that time. And on top of that, taste changes, style changes. At this point, I’ve got a handful of years more experience writing songs and collaborating with people.

In a weird way, having that discomfort is a sign of growth as an artist because it means that’s no longer the process I’m comfortable with. Maybe I wouldn’t have written these songs today, but I think that’s cool. I hope I feel that with every record I put out, I can make a better one today.

It weighed on me so much that all my friends have heard me talk about it, and many of them have said they’ve felt something similar. Realizing it was a pretty universal feeling took me a while to process. But since working on Horse Like Me, I’ve written so many more songs, and over the last couple of years, I’ve developed a much stronger musical voice. All of that together feels like real growth as an artist.

That totally makes sense. I was redoing my portfolio the other week and looking over some of my old articles. I cringed because not everything was good, but that means I’m progressing.

It’s important to think about how you felt while working on it.  I look back on childhood, and there are things that I made when I was a kid where I’m like, “this can never ever see the light of day,” but it’s cool to look back on.

I think one of the most powerful things about art is that it is a capture of time. We’ve been playing the songs on the record live for many years now, but the way we play them live is different from how we recorded them.

In certain ways, it captures the time you’re in, but in other ways, a song is never really done unless you want it to be. There are always revisions, and you can always re-record things. That’s something that I admire about Carolina from hemlock. They’ll do the “song a day” challenge and end up with so many versions of the same song, but then we’ll revisit their iPhone recordings as a band years later and try to imagine them as a whole painted picture. It’s so fun.

What was it like revisiting old songs? Were there any changes you made during the recording process?

I made this record primarily with Seth Engel, whose project is Options. He’s a drummer and recording engineer who’s worked on so many of my favorite records. He’s based in Chicago, and he’s also one of my best friends.

Going into it, I knew he’d be patient with me. He knew this was my first time doing this, and he was very cool about letting me get stumped and leaving me to figure out how to get out of it. If I really hit a wall, he’d give me suggestions, but he let me figure out the puzzle for the first time. We cut a number of songs from the record. We ended up re-tracking vocals for a bunch of songs, and we tracked this record for a couple of years, I think in large part because he gave me space to move through creative blocks.

Funny enough, it was while recording that I fell in love with writing songs. I was very passive about songwriting before, but then I realized it’s my favorite thing on earth. When we started recording Horse Like Me, I intended it to be a five-song EP, but I ended up writing a bunch more songs and turned it into a 10-song record. A handful of the songs that were originally going to be on the EP aren’t even on the record.  I had a lot of room to try a bunch of things, get stumped, figure it out, and scrap a bunch of shit. I just learned so much because of that process.

How do you decide when a song is finished?

I feel like my answer to that is different now than it would’ve been working on Horse Like Me. Today, I try to work relatively quickly. If I don’t get it done within a few days, I have a massive tendency to overthink, especially with lyrics. Now, if I can get a song written in one sitting, that’s perfect. I try to limit writing and recording a demo to a couple of days. You can always revise it, obviously, but I try to have the bones of a song finished within a few days. My marker is when I feel comfortable sending it to a friend.

You are best known for your contributions to artists in Chicago. How do you nurture that community while also growing as an individual artist?

I think they directly feed off of each other, especially since a bunch of the friends whose bands I play in also play in mine. It feels like a very steady ecosystem where we’re all feeding into each other’s projects and inspiring one another.

I naturally hear creative tendencies in my friends’ music. It just happens that way because, of course, I’m a fan of the music they make, but we also spend so much time together in creative settings that I’m bound to pick up on some of their habits. It’s like a shared language.

I hear this, in particular, from Sofia, who plays as Free Range. It’s very fun playing in each other’s bands because sometimes I’m like, “Oh, this song I wrote kind of sounds like a Sofia song,” and they’re playing on it. A similar thing happens in reverse. I feel constantly inspired by my friends, and it feeds directly into my own songwriting.

You recently quit your day job to pursue music full-time. What advice would you give to someone considering that leap?

Believe in yourself and be down to work really hard. Since quitting my day job, I’m working harder than I ever have in my life. I’m more fulfilled than I ever have been. Since fully diving in like that, it’s been all the more affirming that this is my favorite thing to do.

It’s something I am down to work incredibly hard for, and in a way, I’ve never felt at any other job I’ve had. That excitement has changed my perspective and forced me to lean into spontaneity in a way that I was never comfortable with before. I think that’s one of the biggest changes within myself in the last couple of years, which is scary in a way that’s exciting.

That combination of feelings is important to experience. It’s good to be scared sometimes. Don’t be afraid of hard work.

So much of that full-time creative lifestyle is saying yes to anything and seeing where it goes.

Yeah, totally. It’s a balance. It’s also important to make sure you’re working on things that feel fulfilling, because that’ll slow down any feelings of burnout. The burnout will hit you from time to time; that’s inevitable. Right now, I’m on break from a tour with Ratboys, and we’re all very grateful for it. It’s nine days off in the middle of seven or eight weeks of touring.

I can’t imagine being on the road for many months straight, even though I’m playing music I love with people I love. It’s so exciting to me, but burnout is inevitable at a certain point. Taking breaks is essential. It took me a while to learn I have to prioritize time alone and doing things other than music, which can be hard because I love it so much. I think of it like charging your phone.

What is a creative instinct you have to fight against, and how do you do it?

The first thing that comes to mind is thinking of anyone else’s opinion while you’re working on something. I struggled with that a lot, especially when I first got into writing songs. I’d ask myself, “What does this sound like? What other band does this sound like? Does it sound too much like them? What would this person think hearing it?” You’re not going to finish a song if you’re worried about someone else’s opinion, and you’re not going to make something that is really authentic.

That’s part of why I try to write quickly now, so I don’t leave space for those thoughts to creep in. If you’re working on a song, focus 100% on that right now. That’s the thing you’re working on. You don’t need to think about interpersonal stuff or about sharing it with anyone while you’re making it.

And I think another part of that, too, is not being afraid to write songs that you don’t like. You can decide what to share with people after it’s made. It was powerful for me to realize I can just write for myself. If I have songs I want to share with other people, I can do that, but I’ve got a lot of songs I don’t ever intend to show people. It’s like a journal.

I think the internet has encouraged us to share our every thought. So many visual artists have paintings that have never seen the light of day. Keeping things private doesn’t mean they’re bad or shameful.

Absolutely. Not to sound like a boomer, but so much of the culture, even outside of music, encourages us to post everything that happens. That logic, of course, extends to music and the age of content creation as well. I used to be a lot more okay with posting my music, even though I felt uncomfortable about it. Then there came a point where I was like, “Why am I even doing this? This doesn’t feel good.”

It is tough, though, especially doing music full-time, because you have to use Instagram. You have to. But then the line blurs, and you start to wonder, “Am I checking Instagram socially or is this for work?” And all of a sudden, I’ve spent half an hour scrolling, and I don’t remember what I’ve seen. Obviously, it’s a constant battle, but the internet can be cool, too.