On observing how language affects our past, present, and future

You’ve been in New York, working on something you couldn’t talk about for a while…

No, it’s OK. I got permission to tell people—it’s a musical adaptation of Thelma and Louise. I’m writing the music, and Callie Khouri, who wrote the original movie, is writing the story. But I’m still not really into telling people—I don’t want to be the guy who spoils stuff.

I wanted to ask you what it’s like to step into these other media—your Substack, the musical, your memoir—that are different from the ones you’ve worked in for so long. I have this probably mistaken idea about myself that if I were suddenly to write a Broadway musical, having never even seen one, it would be really good. Do you believe in beginner’s luck?

Sort of. I’m lucky that I don’t have any qualms asking for help; musicals are so specific, and there’s no reason I should know what I’m doing.

What about with writing your book? Did you have something in mind, a model, when you started out?

I read a lot of fiction. I love it. I love nonfiction too. There’s no sort of book that I like more than another. I thought a lot about Geek Love, because I love Katherine Dunn’s sentences. You can drop in anywhere, read three sentences, and go, “What the fuck is this? This is insane. Wow,” and be totally hooked by whatever’s on that page.

Recently, I’ve been learning how to teach young people how to read. There are all these benchmarks for what kinds of figurative language they should be able to grasp at different ages—like, at seven, they should get “her hair is like spaghetti” but maybe not “time is money.” In your book, you capture these early childhood experiences with such complexity—like how the path between houses on the edge of town was “like the cracked, jagged part of a water-damaged ceiling that’s eventually going to cave.” What do you think allows you to see and describe things this way? Most people wouldn’t know how to put something like that into words.

I’m an observer. I’m always looking for ways to describe what I see. Painting a scene is something I really enjoy doing. I think it’s the joy of it, maybe. I don’t know that it’s an ability so much as there’s a certain joy in it.

What does it feel like when you come up with the perfect metaphor?

I don’t know that I’ve come up with the perfect metaphor yet.

How about a metaphor that’s merely very, very good?

I don’t know. I’m always moving forward. I don’t write something and then crack open a forty and sit on the porch and watch the traffic go by and feel satisfied. I wish that’s what I did, but usually I’m under a deadline, and I have to keep moving, so I don’t.

In an interview from 2023, you write about slipping free from “the tractor beam of the male gaze.” In The Harder I Fight, you describe your mom as “Dopplering into a blur” when she was withdrawn, and when you visited archaeological work sites with your mom and stepdad, you write about these hypersonic artifact cleaners that have women’s names: Francine and Lorraine.

Oh, I loved Francine and Lorraine. I was totally obsessed with them.

Do you ever think of machines as having their own sort of presence or personality?

Yeah. This is going to sound really weird, but when I’m driving my car, I make sure to tell it that it’s doing a good job. I don’t have Siri or Alexa or any of that stuff—I hate that stuff. But I do have GPS, the voice one for when you’re driving, and I’ll talk to it.

I’ve noticed that so many people verbally abuse Alexa, Siri, and whatever voice is coming out, especially if it’s a woman. So I really practice respecting machines, respecting even that AI stuff, because it translates to how you talk to other people—it translates to misogyny. Even if it’s just a tiny bit of mercury in your groundwater, it’s not good. It bothers me that just because something could be abused, people take the opportunity to abuse it, just for the sake of abusing it. When I hear somebody go, “Siri, you fucking bitch,” I’m just like, “What are you like, really?”

I’m from the middle of nowhere Mountain West—which was very white, very repressive, where there really was a dominant culture that insisted on its superiority, and country music was a big part of that. In the way of subcultural affiliation, listening to black music was basically the most well-worn pathway for defecting from all that. I remember when I first encountered your music, it was like I had to get over—like, come to terms with—the fact that your music was country music, because that was something I had only ever encountered as a tool for these people around me that I felt menaced by to shore up their really shitty belief system.

The gatekeepers of country music are very out of touch with country music itself. It’s a shame that it’s just about oppression and superiority, like you said. It’s all about white supremacy now, despite the fact that, lately, a lot of it is ripping off hip-hop and rap music—but it’s not even good! It’s so bad you can’t even laugh at it; I want it to be funny, and it’s just not even funny. Country music was started by musicians of color, and they deserve a place there, but watching the way the gatekeepers of Nashville manage to mangle everything, it’s just depressing. The gatekeepers of country music think their audience is stupid, and it’s really sad. I just don’t respect it, modern country music. It doesn’t have anything going for it, and you’re not allowed to play women on the radio more than once an hour. They think if they play women on the radio more than once an hour, people will drive their cars off the road—they’ll freak out, you know?

You write about this in the book—how more than half of the songs on a radio revue you used to listen to as a kid were by women—and you say that this was long before you started keeping score in this way that would ultimately prove to be quite onerous, which you refer to as “that chronic math.” When did you start thinking that way? When did that set in?

Well, I didn’t realize that I was doing it, but I was probably doing it around eleven years old onward. I think I realized it in my late teens, early 20s.

Near the end of your book, you write, “I was surprised to learn we were Ukrainian when I thought we were Russian. Our family name was Shevchenko, and a couple of friends, as well as my Russian teacher, pointed out that it wasn’t a Russian name. What strikes me about the incident is how it took only one generation—one!—to erase my family’s ethnic origin, experiences, and language.” Reading this, I found myself thinking about how quickly something else took root in its place. It’s not just that the loss happened so fast—it’s that, just as quickly, you came to command this extremely plaintive, twangy American language.

I read a lot of writing by Indigenous people, and they talk a lot about the suppression of their native languages, which are organic, living things. A lot of languages are living pharmacopeias—instruction manuals about how to get food, prepare food, make medicine, and all these other things. Ours was erased on purpose by my family because they wanted to assimilate here. At least that’s what I suspect. Nobody would tell me why, so I’ll never know what happened.

But in your work, you call on this very specific vocabulary—the sort of semi-tragic, spooky language of American lower-middle-class longing. I’m thinking, I don’t know, of a line of yours like, “There’s glass in my thermos and blood on my jeans.” Isn’t this way of saying things its own kind of instruction manual for living?

If you look back at the origins of the words, sure. The words that exist now, not so much. Ours is a Germanic language, and it’s got some very interesting roots. I find that fascinating, but I don’t get to spend enough time checking that out. I was taking languages in junior college, and then I went to art school where they didn’t have any language stuff at all, so I didn’t get to continue that, unfortunately. And now there’s just no time.

I love your song “I’m From Nowhere.” Your memoir is also very much about being from nowhere. In it, you describe being shuttled around these really remote locations as a kid, and there were periods when you would go so long without seeing other people. You write about longing for a moment of “species recognition”—I love this phrase, to mean just bumping into one of your own out in the wild. Do you find yourself drawn to other people who are also from nowhere?

Sometimes. You know what I love? I love hearing that people are from tiny, tiny, tiny towns that you’d never have heard of if you hadn’t met them, because I love to find out what people would do, the lengths they would go to have fun, or what’s something that happened on Saturday night? Or where did the kids go to play? Did everybody know each other? It’s an interesting way to grow up.

Can you give me examples of the lengths that people would go to have fun?

Oh, that’s a good question. Doing really dangerous shit. Like, “Let’s climb the solid wall of that canyon. Let’s just climb up it.” Boredom or remoteness will make you do some pretty strange things. We used to stand on the porch and drink Cokes; we would meet to drink Cokes after school every day, or we would drive up to some giant rock or something and just hang out. You know what I mean?

Yeah, drive to the giant rock and just stand near it.

Totally. “We’ll stand near the rock, just hanging out, because that’s the only place we have privacy as a burgeoning society of young people.”

I found your music when I was around twelve or thirteen. I’d collect quarters, walk to the grocery store, buy Visa gift cards, and use them to get your albums on iTunes. I was almost superstitious about when I could listen to it. I didn’t want it to become background noise or get mixed up with the wrong memories. I can’t even imagine having that feeling about music now that you can just pull up anything whenever. Reading your memoir—the part about finding a discarded back issue of Mad Magazine and reading it over and over because it was either that or stare at the wall—made me think about childhood boredom, about moving between being alone and being with others. What’s your relationship to boredom now?

It wasn’t always boredom when I was young; I was more unsettled by how alone I was. And that’s still kind of true. I don’t think I’m ever bored, really. I mean, I don’t like being on really long flights. Sometimes on a really long car ride, I’ll get a little bored, but that’s what audiobooks are for.

Speaking of audiobooks—what was it like to record your memoir?

It was a lot of work. It sounds easy, but it’s not. Reading your own words definitely points a mirror back at you that kind of makes you feel like a little bit of a dork. But I was working with two really incredible engineers, and they were so smart and funny and supportive and nice. And you know, with music, I’ve never played a solo show, never played by myself on stage. I always wanted to be in a band—I think because I actually, initially, wanted to be in a gang. I didn’t get into music to be by myself.