On taking risks that pay off

When did you first know you were a singer?

I was sung to a lot by my family, which was nice. My dad is a bassist who plays recreationally, and my mom was a singer-actor. She stopped doing that and went to nursing school when I was eight, but she was always singing. I was made to participate. I harmonized with my parents to James Taylor songs, or I sang showtunes to lull myself to sleep.

I understood the gravitas of being a performer because it was so revered by my family. I listened to a lot of Cyndi Lauper, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the B-52s. Those are all really vibrant front people—I was exposed to that energy young.

I’m curious about what your life was like when your first band, Strange Names, came together. What was going on that helped make that happen?

I was in Minneapolis, in college to be an actor. I met [my bandmates] in the dorms. I was reckoning with wanting total creative agency over what I was making, and not wanting to say other people’s words. Even more so than the regular plight of auditioning and rejection, and how tiring that can be for lots of people, I felt conflicted and annoyed by having to recite things that I didn’t believe in.

I came to a crossroads where I could continue acting, or I could throw my all into this band. I chose the band. It was a way to interact with an audience, but more aggressively, and, obviously, with my own compositions. It felt scarier and more challenging. Way more exciting.

In Minneapolis, they’re a really insular, prideful community of artists. They let my band become a big fish in a little pond, which made us feel good. That was also one of the reasons that I chose [music over acting]: instant gratification.

Minneapolis is one of the most special cities in the US. I love to be there, breathing Paul Westerbergian air and thinking about Prince. Going dancing at First Avenue.

Paul Westerberg’s sister, Mary Lucia, was one of the main public radio hosts. She’s a super-cool lady, and she was one of my champions. It was her job to know who every single local artist was, and almost all of the local shows were “brought to you by NPR,” or whatever the muckamuck media company was there. It felt like you were a big deal, even if you weren’t.

You grew up in New York and live here now. How did changing cities affect your work?

In 2014, I stayed for an extra year out of college to keep the band going. We came here because we signed to a label based in New York. It was a very quick fall from grace. We were so championed in the Midwest, then it was, “We’re starting from absolutely square one in New York.” Emotionally, I have my family anchor here—I’m from here, I grew up here, and I always knew I would probably die here. Artistically, we were playing the 6 p.m. show at the Whatever Bar.

Did you sense an opportunity in that?

I was so high on the choice to not be an actor anymore that it didn’t matter. I was consumed by that risky decision that I made [to be a musician]. It was so fun.

I wonder if you brought any of your acting skill set into that risk, and into singing your own words.

The way I move on stage is a direct correlation to how I was mostly a character actor in school. I played old men and monsters, and those are the most fun characters to play. I have these jerky, pelvic go-tos when I’m on stage that I got from playing crazy people. I’ve just scaled it down to a rock and roll level.

You were thinking about scaling things down to a rock and roll level?

It felt really good. When you’re a gay guy in acting school, you’re very conscious of being castable, and not being typecast as always playing a gay character. Saying my own words and performing my own music was a very liberating thing for my sexuality, [one] that I hadn’t allowed myself to explore while I was trying to fit into boxes.

I can imagine how that freedom might radiate into the rest of your life. What else have you learned about yourself from writing and performing music?

It’s weird—when I was in high school in New York City, I was going out all the time. I had an older boyfriend when I was 15 years old. I lived quite a lot. I decided to go to this buttoned-up theater school in the Midwest, which was an act of rebellion against my rebellious phase. And then I had to unlearn all of that stuff that I had internalized in [acting] school to re-characterize myself as this cool guy.

I read something about how you compose lyrics—sometimes, from this remove of imagining someone else looking at you, then thinking, Who do they see?

It all comes down to storytelling, and the best way to tell a story is to embellish. If you’re writing it yourself: taking elements of your life, but not necessarily saying exactly what happened, and making some creative choices with where the story goes. And adding elements that are entirely false.

I’ve always quoted a Björk interview where she talks about “emotional coordinates.” That’s how she writes songs: the first verse can be about a real experience she had. The second verse can be about a movie that she saw, but with a similar emotional provocation as the life experience. The third verse can be about a completely made-up character that is in that same emotional world. You see it kind of on a map. Like historiography, as opposed to history. You see the coordinates of where it is.

Her using those words made a lot of sense to me. Writing from the perspective of me watching myself, or from the perspective of the person that I’m talking to, is within those coordinates. One verse, it’s me; one verse, it’s the person that I’m talking to; then it’s the total objective point of view, floating above all of it.

Do you find that, over time, you’re situated at some sets of coordinates repeatedly? What do you come back to?

For most of the music that I like and listen to, I like pretty melodies and hooks. What goes hand in hand with hooks are elements of yearning and excitability and love and whatnot. That being said, I’m now at a point where I want to very consciously and specifically write from my perspective, and write more testimonially than I have in the past.

What prompted that change?

Being on tour and singing my songs over and over again, there were always parts I felt way more hooked up singing than I would other parts. I knew why. Those parts were closer to my real experience. When Marianne Faithfull died, I was listening to a lot of her music, especially Broken English. She’s so mad on that record—so raw and angry. I was in awe listening to it after I hadn’t in a while, and jealous. Like, “I want to feel that way and write that way.” Whatever I make next, I want it to be direct.

Like the antithesis of when you were acting and having to say other people’s words.

Exactly. I still want to use poetic imagery to illustrate what I’m feeling, but I want it to come from a real place. I’ve had friends ask, “When are you going to make an angry record? When are you going to make a spiky record?” I want to challenge myself to do that.

I want to ask about your day-to-day art practice. What do you need in order to make your work?

I need to walk around a lot. It’s extremely physical, as far as I can’t sit down and write anything, ever, lyrically—even melodically, I have to be walking. That’s the only way I meditate. I have voice memos and notes filled with little humming melodies and words that I think of, and street signs that I see. I need to be able to actively observe and fantasize. The only time I can achieve that is not in stillness.

Then I need someone… well, it’s me ultimately, but I need someone to hold me down and force me to pick up my instrument and execute it, because I could live in the fantasizing period forever. But just like when you’re reading a book or watching a slow, artsy movie, you need to get through the first 30 minutes, and then you’re hooked.

Then you’re home free.

Oftentimes, drugs help with that. If not, that first 30 minutes of reckoning with your skills is the most tedious, horrible thing. Picking up the guitar or opening a session to actually start writing a song, I’m confronted with my skill set, as opposed to my more ambient creative process. It’s suddenly, “What are you actually capable of executing? Can you play this? Can you figure out the software?” That’s when I get into my head. “It took you too long to figure this out. You’re not a real artist. You’re not as much of a genius as you think you are.”

Doesn’t it suck that that’s part of the art job, no matter what you’re making? Given that feeling, it’s a wonder anything gets done. Who helps hold you down?

My boyfriend is extremely helpful. He writes fiction, and he’s really good at telling me to focus, and I do the same for him. That’s been nice. Otherwise, nobody is telling me to do anything. I’m telling myself to do everything.

So much of my last record […And His Splash Band] was an attempt to grow my sounding board. I’m so used to working alone that it was a very aggressive pursuit of community. It was feature-heavy, and I had friends in my band. When I listen to the record, it feels less like a totally cohesive piece of work and more like an Uber Pool, where one friend hops in—they have no relation to the next friend—then they hop out, and then the next one hops in.

I wanted community around me when I was releasing music—I wanted my friends there, and I wanted my friends invested. That was absolutely my armor. The most stressful, maddening time to make music is once the singles start rolling out. You have that weird rollercoaster several months before the record actually comes out, and you’re thinking about press and tour. Because I had accumulated this group of people, I felt very, very held by my peers during that time. I didn’t have to think so much about labels and PR and whatever—I could just call my friend who I worked on the song with and be like, “It’s out, huh?” It made it fun.

When you mounted this aggressive pursuit of collaborators, how did you go about it?

It was a very concerted, conceptual effort. For my band, none of them played instruments before we started playing together. Creating the Splash Band was my attempt at industry-plant aesthetics: what it looks like to be a band that’s been handpicked not necessarily based on skill, but on chemistry, looks, and style. I wanted that artificial element to exist on the surface, but then have the music actually mean something. My initial idea was, “It’s going to be a stage show where I’m actually singing, but you’re all miming. I want you in the pictures, but I want this to be fully just a show—I want it to be something different.” But once we got together to rehearse, it made sense for them to just learn the song, and suddenly we were just rehearsing for real, for real.

I’m not a trained musician—I’m self-taught. I’ve often felt like an imposter because I don’t have the lingo that a lot of musicians have. I consciously brought in these people that didn’t have that vocabulary so that I could feel more comfortable, and we could all feel comfortable. Because I wasn’t surrounded by session or touring musicians, we were all using the same onomatopoeia to get where we needed to go.

How do you define success and failure in your work?

It’s always been the validation of my art practice over financial things. I want to be admired by artists that I admire. Success, for me, is depth. Failure is phoning it in, and making something that you don’t totally believe in. Granted, I cringe when I hear some of my older music—even if I did really believe in it. But that’s where the work you make means different things to you at different points in your life. I don’t hate any of it.

The goalpost for success moves constantly. The grass is absolutely always greener for me. I’ve been doing this for a little while, and there have been times when I’ve felt gatekept from music journalism. I’ve often thought that it’s because I’m a gay guy. While there are a million horrible things that are happening in the world and it seems a bit trite, there’s still a lot of homophobia in music. As a gay musician, you kind of have to win the lottery with journalists in order to get to the next level. I talk about this a lot with my other gay-guy musician friends who experience the same thing.

This is all under this success-failure thing. Success is what I said before—having work that means something to you recognized—and failure is moral compromise.

Do you have any creative advice that took you a minute to find out for yourself?

The landscape of music is so different now than it was when I first started, as far as how to hawk your songs palatably for consumers, like TikTok dances and whatever. If this is your lifeblood, then you will continue to do it no matter what, and you can be comforted by that notion of your character. No matter what happens, or no matter what obstacles you come up against, you are a sick individual, and you will never not do this.

There’s something really liberating about that. I can’t imagine living unless I’m doing this. Sometimes I lean too much into that, and that’s when I spiral. When I’m not leaning into it in a dark way, it’s really quite nice. That’s what I needed to tell myself as a kid: just trust in your being insatiable.