On focusing on the small things

Do you remember what your relationship with music was like before you started learning to play anything or before you were drawn to creating?

I felt it so much as a kid. Just hearing a song on the radio, it would demolish me. I was in the back seat of my parents’ minivan and Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch” came on, and I was like, “I’ve never felt emotions like this before, and I don’t know what to do with them.” My parents kind of joke around like, “It’s crazy that you’re so into music because you weren’t obsessed with it as a kid.” I think I wasn’t very loud about it and it wasn’t the only thing I wanted to do, but it was the thing I thought about all the time. Everything I did, I was like, “Yeah, this is fun, but I need to be going and listening to music.”

I think I’ve always had this pseudo-religious experience with what happens when a song hits you and hits you hard… I still do feel it when I find a song—whether it’s just been released or it’s new to me—and it wrecks me, and then I have to listen to it over and over and over again. Kind of like I’m trying to learn from it. Less so from a musical standpoint, but it’s like there’s something in it that is talking to me and I’m trying to figure out who’s in there.

When you think about your early days of making music, were there things or people that gave you permission to believe it was possible? Do those things still feel present to you now?

My family is pretty musical. My parents met on a worship team in the ’80s, I think. They’re not religious at all now, but there’s all these leftovers and hand-me-downs from that part of their life. I have my grandma’s piano, and that’s what my grandma and all of her siblings, and my mom and all her siblings, learned to play on. So it’s an heirloom on one end, but I’ve used it on so many records. It’s kind of like, “If we’re moving, got to take the piano.”

Do you remember a time you went out of your way for music? Did you ever give something up to chase something else?

I think I had people in my life and in school who were like, “You’re really bright, you could do a bunch of different things.” And then when I told them what I wanted to do, they weren’t like, “Oh, that’s not going to work out, but they were like, “That’s going to be very tough.” I think that made it feel like even more of a good challenge. Less so to try and prove them wrong, but more so to be like, “No, there’s tons of people who do this and who make cool records and I want to be like them. That’s not that far-fetched.” There was a period of my life, right before college started, where I felt like I had to have that conversation a lot… When I was around the other musician friends in my life, like Jake [Lenderman] and Karly [Hartzman] and my roommate Louis at the time, that’s when I [realized] this is tough, but at least I’m here and I don’t have to prove myself to these folks outside of, “let’s just play a good show” or “let’s make this record the best it can be with what we have.”

With your melodies, it feels like there’s this moment of recognition or like they arrived mid-thought. How does a song begins for you?

Oftentimes it’s truly random. It could be the drone of my neighbor mowing the lawn—like, “Oh, what if I used that?” And then there’s all sorts of start points that I have to record into my phone or dictate in some way to myself, just to remember that stuff, because it’s so temporal. I’m grabbing on and holding onto those temporal things. That’s interesting to me: being able to put that in amber.

In my phone… I guess it just feels endless. You just scroll and scroll and scroll. [I’ll have] a note that is just lines I thought were interesting that popped into my head, things that I overheard people say, a text message that I loved how it was worded… Kind of getting back to that thing I was telling you about with a song, there’s something in it that I’m obsessed with and I don’t know what it is. So I feel the need to write it down, whether it becomes a part of another song or just informs it. The act of listening to that feeling is really important, because I want my songs to have that feeling for me and for other people. If I didn’t do that, I would be starting truly from scratch every single time I went to record. And that sounds pretty terrifying.

If you were to sit down and write from scratch, would you be able to?

Yeah, I do that as an exercise. Mitch Hedberg would write jokes that way. From what I’ve seen of his journals, literally every impulse he had he would write down. He was just following his mind and trying to put it down on paper as fast as possible. When you do that and you’re interacting with it, I think it opens it up for there to be that kind of artistic conversation. Whether it becomes a song or a joke or whatever, it allows this really small thing that otherwise you would just lose immediately to have your focus and allow it to be very interesting.

Does your writing process involve sharing parts of songs or lyrics with anyone else early on? Or do you have to see something fully first?

I need to have it playable before I show it. I think my best analogy for it is, when I was 18, me and my friends were building a small studio in a basement. Another one of our friends had just gotten back from Europe [and when he] walked in and just saw 2x4s and the framing, he was like, “I mean, it’s not really a studio.” We got pissed at him, but we were both right. This thing was mostly an idea still, but the bones were literally there. On our part, we needed the trust that they would like it. On their part, they needed to use their imagination to know what it was going to look like. I think that was a lesson for me. I think I’ve become a bit more slow to show people things because I want it to not necessarily be perfect, but be more fleshed out than not.

There’s a song from Hook, called “In the Dark,” which I haven’t been able to listen to recently without tearing up. That feels connected to Losin’. It feels like a song that holds the same kind of space as something written after loss, but I think it was written before [your good friend and landlord] Gary [King] passed?

Yeah, definitely.

Do you remember what it felt like to write that song? How does it feel to hold songs that were written before a loss alongside songs that came after?

It feels weird because that song is about this time when Gary was losing his eyesight and we couldn’t figure out why, and he was already blind in one eye. It was essentially a quick fix, but it was this thing where he had partial vision in one eye for three months, and I was just like, “That is the most excruciating thing [to] have such a small sliver of vision.” It was heartbreaking, and it was a sign that Gary’s health was starting to go downhill. It’s not the “your friend is gone” type thing, but you can see them starting to leave against their will, and you’re having to reckon with that.

I don’t really play “In the Dark” live because it’s intense and it’s hard to go there when I am in the midst of processing the grief of someone being gone. It’s hard to go to where the grieving process started. It’s almost like it starts the movie over again. That song has kind of been in limbo for me a little bit, but I’m proud of it as a song, and I think it’s good enough to still be out there. It’s a natural thing for people to have growing relationships with each of their songs or their pieces of art. As you move away from them, or as they get closer, or as you remember them or are confronted with them in different ways, it can mean different things at different times.

How do you think Gary would feel about living on through your work? Or how do you think about legacies? Not even in a big way, but just in retelling someone’s story and letting it form into new shapes for a listener.

He’d give us an immense amount of shit for living the life that we’re living, but he would also be very proud of it, and I think he would think it’s pretty cool. He loved good music and he always had the country station going 24/7. Even after he died, [his radio] was still plugged in on the country station, just blaring. It was so loud. I think with what we’re doing, he’d probably say something like, “These songs are good, but you need to figure out how to get them on 99.9 Kiss Country. So just keep working at it.” But I think at the root of it, he loved all the music we made and that he heard when he was still alive, and loved that we were practicing at the houses. One time we had run an extension cable and we were playing music out in the woods in the back. He let it go for an hour, and then he called us, like, “I’ve already gotten five complaints, y’all got to wrap it up.” But he had waited until he couldn’t ignore it. So I think he really enjoyed that we were making interesting stuff and that he was able to kind of support that.

The detail about the radio playing made me think that there’s all of these signs of presence hovering in your songs, or images of physical reminders. Do you find you hold onto things physically as a way to live beside loss? Do you find any comfort in the proof of something being here?

Oh, big time. I have this behavior of having people’s things to feel connected to them. I’ve always had that. My grandma was kind of the family historian and had a piece of the log cabin that our ancestors lived in, in Southern Illinois in the early 1800s or mid-1800s. It was little things like that, where I was always fascinated by it and understood why my grandma was fascinated by it.

I have Gary’s last cigarette framed because it’s like, that dude smoked a lot of cigarettes, but there’s only one last cigarette. I just think those things are special—and whether they’re special forever is a whole ‘nother conversation, but it feels important to hold onto things that are really special right now. That’s kind of the theme of this conversation. That’s another form of that thing that I’m obsessed with, and I can’t really describe why… There’s something there that I can’t let go of and I don’t want to, and I enjoy having it around so that I can explore [what interests me about it] more.

There’s kind of a network, I think, that forms around a release, via the people that help bring something into the world. It feels very personal in your case. I’m thinking about the album bio for Haw Creek, which I love so much, or the way that Matthew Reed’s art sits right beside Losin’. Is it important to you to have people around a project that not only believe in the work but who know you as a person?

I’m sure the day will come when somebody’s an integral part of the art of my projects that I don’t know super well, but for the time being, I really need to know them. Even if it was like, “Hey, this person makes great art and has offered to do your album cover” or something, I would want to meet them before. And not just a phone conversation. There’s something so personal about that connection.

It feels really important [that] the people who are helping me push this out into the world are also people that I trust and I admire. I think it makes it easy to stand behind a project fully when you have that kind of connection. And I think it’s really easy to move away from that. It’s very efficient to find somebody’s art on Instagram and be like, “Hey, can I hire you to do X, Y, and Z? And this is what I want it to look like.” But so many of my favorite musicians use their friends as kind of the first port of call to do album art. I love that tradition. I love keeping that going. And I genuinely love what Matt makes, and I love Evan [Gray] and Ashleigh [Bryant Phillips]’s writing. So it’s like the best of every world.

You’ve been on the road pretty consistently for a while now. Has the schedule or rhythm made you think about what you want—or hope to protect—creatively or personally?

It’s definitely made me realize how much I love being at home and how important that is to me as a person. I think some people genuinely just love being on the road all the time and have a really hard time being home because it feels like dead time. But as soon as I get home, I cook a meal for myself and my fiance. Even if I’m home for only four days, I need to feel that agency of, “I’m back in my house, I am cooking for myself, I’m providing for my body.” It’s like I am in my spot in the world. Because that space is so important for me to make the decisions I make about what art I want to make, who I want to support musically, or what projects I want to take on. It’s really hard for me to have that kind of clarity when there’s no down time to decompress and actually have my baseline of how I operate.

Do you feel like your care is spread wider now, in that there’s people in other cities that you want to stay connected with?

I think my favorite part of touring is that it’s made the world smaller and I have friends all over the world now. Or I have a shred of understanding where other people are from and what it’s like on the other side of the world.

I know you have a strong connection to your home base, as do I. Lately I’ve been telling people I’d rather see something happen here [in Ithaca, NY] than have to go and watch it happen somewhere else. I don’t think it’s about putting something on the map, but wanting to contribute to the things that watered me growing up. I’m curious how you feel about the place where you grew up and if you feel your ability to contribute to it has changed?

That’s what has driven a lot of my own and my friends’ decisions of not moving to a city, or even moving to a bigger music town, and deciding to tour as heavily as we do. It’s also because the place means so much to our music and our process of making music that moving away would feel like denying that in some way. I feel like I pressure a lot of people now to not move to a big city—wherever they are, if they believe in it, to stay in it and push it to create the best kind of scene it can. It is ultimately pretty easy to move, but then it’s very hard to put roots in a place where you’re not from.

It’s been really interesting to tour around to so many different places… [and I] ultimately feel like most of the people I see happily making art are people who are from there and have a deeply rooted community there, or who have lived there a really long time and been able to establish that. You either have to commit to where you are, or move and commit to being there for a really long time and understand that it takes a lot of time to actually be part of the community. I think about that a lot. Place is very important, at least for me, for making things.