My album REAL ONES is out today. You can buy it here and stream it here.

Thanks to my collaborators:
Jack Broza
Alejandra Sofia
Alex Koi
Christian Li
Paul Pandit
Elora
Hudson Freeman
Aaron Holthus
Francesa Lanier
Minsoo Bae
Elliot Cole & Long Echo

who made this record what it is.

Back to regularly scheduled programming (UTI, DOM, et al) soon ~

Underpaid-Twenty-Year-Old-Intern (UTI): Ohhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiii, look who it –

Chase: Yes, UTI, I can’t believe it, but I’m – I mean we – are back for –

UTI: Get in here, champ, get in here! There you go ch –

Me: Is “champ” a term of endearment or because you can’t –

UTI: *Thwacks my back assertively* Big guy! Look at this guy! Sit right here –

Me: You’re just throwing out generic forms of address to mask the fact that –

UTI: Shh buddy. Shhh. Right there buddy. Attaboy. There ya go –

Me: “Buddy” is what school bullies call –

UTI: Chasé with the chardonnay. Chasé with the champagne. Chasé with the rosé. Chasé with –

Me: So you do re-

UTI: Chasé, Jayze, Chandler, Charles, Jay-Z, Chase, it doesn’t matter! We talked about this: there are too many people out here releasing bleeps and boops and –

Chase: I know, I –

UTI: bleeps N boops N boots and boots N –

Chase: UTI!

UTI: *sashaying from side to side* bootsNcatsN, bootsNcatsN, bootsNcatsN –

Me: Please, UTI! I know the situation quite well. I’ve actually been trying to follow some of your advice from our last meeting. I’ve been posting regularly in the lead up to the album re –

UTI: You’re clicking “post,” boy? This isn’t 2016! Why aren’t you having an AI program load, lock, arm, aim, and fire –

Me: Why are you using the language of war to talk about –

Standard of Artistic Purity (SOAP): Is there a fridge in this office, UTI? I have a batch of leftover lentils I want to -

UTI: SOAP! DoorDash gonna be here in a minute -

Doctor of Musicology (DOM): Great, a fellow gig-worker in the office. Honestly, which pays more these days: adjunct professor or DigInn deliverer? And who is more likely to have a job in five years?

UTI: Look, C: you already know what I do. I’m a riser. I’m a grinder. Imma-gonna rise and grind ya. I make –

Me: Legions of fan-bots?

UTI: Empires! That’s EMPIRE with a capital E. E-M-P-I-R-E!

DOM: You remind me of my “university,” which is really just a glorified real-estate developer –

UTI: Exactly, development! All about that growth. Give me the update, C. How has your little posting been going?

Me: Some of the videos have gotten good engagement, UTI, but their average view time is still like seven seconds, and I have no idea if they’ve made a bit of difference in terms of –

UTI: Well where’s the capital? Where’s the investment? You gotta make it RAIN on these –

SOAP: Forget about content, forget about capital – where are your cassettes, Chase? And vinyls? If you’re going to invest anything, you should put it into a medium that encourages –

DOM: You all talk as if “money” were some real thing as opposed to a useful fiction we’ve been collectively coerced into –

Me: I did invest, UTI! After one post did well organically I put $35 into promoting it on socials. But it quickly became apparent that the ad was just going to people who already follow me. Within a matter of hours, both my brother and my housemate messaged me with a screenshot of the ad and –

Chorus of Friends (COF): Get your bag, C!!!! 💰💰💰 Get that money!! Get those b*****🔥💧🔥 oweeeeoweeeeeeoweeeoeoeowow

Me: It was kinda –

SOAP: What are those tiny images? My Nokia 2660 flip phone doesn’t support anything but text –

COF: GET 👏 YOUR 👏 GIG 👏 C 👏 WE 👏 LOVE 👏 TO 👏 SEE 👏 IT

Me: So yeah, I haven’t promoted anything since. And I’m certainly not getting any gigs from this yet –

UTI: $35! I dropped $35 just this morning on chai lattes for me and this girl I’ve been casually seeing three times a week for the past 26 months – actually lemme send her that reminder for my Venmo request right quick –

SOAP: I once lived off rice and beans for three months –

Chorus of Parents (COP): *Hushed, to each other* We talked about this, we talked about this, he’s going to want something more than rice and beans eventually, he’s gonna want a place of his own, a home, he’s gotta be hoping for something more….

Me: Enough, all! Look, at the very least I’m proud of how I’ve been regularly sharing stuff while trying to keep some shred of dignity intact throughout this whole –

COP: That’s excellent, honey, that’s excellent. We’re so proud. You don’t need to own a home. Listen: Are you happy? That’s all that matters to us. You know that, right? Are you happy, Chase?

Me: Well, no, I’m not f****** happy, COP! Constitutively, as part of being a human being, I’m not happy –

DOM: It’s quite psychoanalytic, isn’t it, the fantasy that one’s life could be different if only they had been born into a different fami –

SOAP: I actually have two Dads, you see: Coltrane and Gandhi –

Me: – like I said, I don’t know whether I’m exactly “happy” with the release, either. Neither of my singles have gotten on a playlist, they have just a few hundred streams –

DOM: Another SalvationInStreaming™️ devotee. It’s so – what do my students say? Cringe –

Me: – and I’ve been flailing myself at promoters to try to get a single hour-long release show lined up for an album I spent a year working on –

UTI: Listen, COP is asking you the wrong question, Chase! It’s not “are you happy,” it’s –

Me: Am I fulfilled?

UTI: Are you hot?!?! Look, you wanna do this thing or –

Me: Yes, UTI, I wanna do –

UTI: Well how committed are you to looksmaxxing this fall? What is the skin care routine looking like?

SOAP: It’s not “are you happy” and it’s not “are you hot,” Chase. When you put your music in front of people, you need to ask yourself one thing and one thing only. It’s –

Me: Yes?

SOAP: I’m going to need you to look me right in the eye for this –

Me: I’m looking at you, SOAP.

SOAP: *Whispers* Are you undeniable.

Me: SOAP, what? I can’t hear –

SOAP: *Whispers* I said, are you undeniable.

Me: SOAP, please –

SOAP: *Louder* Are. You. Un. De. Ni. A. Ble.

Are. You. UN-M************-DENIABLE?!?!

Me: *Speechless*

SOAP: *Pecking at leftover lentils in tupperware* That’s it. Pretty straightforward. Plain as day, right?

Me: I – I – I – uh –

SOAP: Are you UNDENIABLE, my brother??

Me: Oh my God. I think…I think…I think….I’m pretty deniable, SOAP. I have been denied. I am being denied, SOAP! Damnit, my whole life has been one big denigrating denial denying denyathon –

DOM: You’re hired! We love people who have been denied a performing ca –

COP: Oh dear, honey. Why don’t you come live at home for a while? Or for the rest of your life, if you feel like it. You could have kids, we could all live together. Or not. Either way is fine. Our home is open. One day, one year, the next 45 years. We’re here for –

Me: I’m not going home, COP! I’m 32 for the love of God. I’m charging ahead. I’m about to release the next single of the album, Mushroom Trip, and it’s the song I’m most excited about. It’s probably my favorite song I’ve written, honestly. It features two amazing musicians and outlines the album’s thesis state–

COP: “Mushroom” like mushroom or mushroom like shroo–

DOM: Dear God, must all music be “about” something? What else might it be able to do if we move beyond –

UTI: “Thesis statement”? This isn’t a fifth-grade class essay! You are thinking too much, Chase –

Me: It’s not just about shrooms, COP, it’s more about friendshi – well, just listen, the chorus says –

UTI: Speaka speaka speaka. Talka talka talka. Keepa your moutha shuta for a minute, ok? Just nod yes or no. Are you familiar with the Pump, Chase?

Me: *Winces in fear*

DOM: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve been more partial to pilates, yoga, and a brisk early evening walk as of –

UTI: Right. You wanna be in the school gym in Budunkadunk, Iowa, doing downward-facing-dog at 55, you go with DOM, C. But you wanna really do this thing, this life, this release, right? You gotta pump, boy.

Me: UTI, please, that’s just wrong on so many –

UTI: Stay with me now, stay with me baby. You’re in the gym, everything’s flowing, you’re checking yourself out in the mirror –

Me: UTI!

UTI: *Starts aggressively air-curling an imaginary barbell* Blood is just flooding into your biceps, pecs, you start looking look hard AF, thinking of all those m************ who said you wouldn’t make it –

Me: UTI, have you ever been to therapy –

UTI: *Continues to thrust forearms up and down with metronomic precision* You gotta keep it flowing this fall, C. No talk. No think. No thesis.

COP: Chase, listen, about this song –

UTI: No COP. No COF. No SOAP. No DOM. No doubt. No –

SOAP: You’re gonna regret this, Chase –

UTI: *In a trance-like state, salivating, grunting* NO regrets.

DOM: I regret so much –

UTI: *Gesticulating arms wildly up and down* Not one regret. Just one life. This life. One post. All flow. Next post. All flow. Just post. Don’t stop. Just go. Give me. Give me. Gimme Gimme Gimme. Give me mo, mo, mo. Go go go go. And post. And post. And post and post and post.

Me: UTI, I’m begging you –

UTI: Just you. Just me. Just you and me. Me and you. Me and you, you and me, me and you suddenly becomes we – oui, oui, oui, baby! THIS moment. THIS life. THIS pump, right here, right now –

Me: I can’t tell if you want me to post on socials, go to the gym, or fuck you, UTI –

COP: Chase, listen, we love you, but we really don’t want to hear a song about mushrooms –

The song’s narrator is fiending for something against their better judgement. They’re caught in a habitual, self-destructive loop; they’re in a wrestling match against themselves. The minor key, slippery melodic chromaticism, and rhythmic repetitions of the song’s verses all reflect this embattled psychological state. Imagine its lyrics –

“Drop it and leave it, I can't/
I don't leave ’cause I do it for me”

being sung in an uptempo swing rhythm in a major key. Addiction would sound blissful, not heartbreaking. The feeling of Carsick’s lyrics is the feeling of its music – right?

Well, it’s more complicated than that, because it feels so good to sing the melody of this song! It is the song’s melody, just as much as its lyrics, that penetrates my skull each morning upon waking. Its sinuous contour and occasional stepwise motion is incredibly catchy. Additionally, we don’t hear the melody just once; it repeats throughout the song, which is enjoyable in and of itself. But I would argue that these musical pleasures enrich, rather than contradict, the song’s lyrics. Is excess only awful, only sad? Does it not feel good to indulge in what we have been told is bad? Is there not a familiarity to the pleasures we try to abstain from – isn’t part of their pull precisely the fact that we know they will make us feel a certain way, as opposed to the uncertainty, the foreboding dullness and nothingness, of a life lived without their relief?

We return to a great melody the way we return to an object of our desire: we just can’t get enough. Indeed, on our day off from the tour, I experienced withdrawal from not hearing the group perform this song (fortunately, I found a fix during my late-night scrolling in this excellent video – “Anyone else here at 1AM on the night off cause they need to hear this at least once every day?”). youbet’s music reminded me that we sing not simply to “paint” the meaning of the words or to reinforce their meaning. Music uniquely allows a speaker to emphasize a lyric’s multidimensionality. When “reading” songs, then, we might ask: how does a lyric’s context – within a particular melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, formal setting – transform the meaning that its words might suggest on their own?

To that question, it’s Carsick’s chorus – just one-line! – that crushed me every time I heard Nick sing it. It’s eight words: “Knowing when to stop / it must be sweet.” To read this lyric is one thing. To say it out loud is another. To hear Nick sing it – in their devastating, nasally, gently pinched, gritty voice – is something else entirely. And to hear it in the particular harmonic context in which it is placed – the Gb Major, Aadd2 chords of “Knowing when to stop” and the Bbmin(b6) chord that accompanies “sweet” – is to open an emotional terrain that is simply inaccessible upon reading the words alone.

When I hear this lyric in this harmonic progression, I can’t help but perceive darker undertones than the song’s words might suggest when spoken aloud. The aeolian darkness that envelops “sweet” suggests that the narrator is not just kindly pondering, “wouldn’t it be nice if I knew when to stop?” Nor, too, are they cheering on those who are able to act in accordance with their better judgement – “it’s so great you know how to stop! I’ll get there someday” – this is not an earnest toast to the GoodPeople™️. To the contrary, there seems to be an undercurrent of loathing, directed both inwards and outwards. The narrator is at once agential and preconfigured. On the one hand, the harmonic content seems to be suggesting, “f*** me for not being able to stop – why can’t I just stop?! I’ve been here before, I know how the story ends; I can change it!” But it also, even more pointedly, seems to be saying, “ f*** the unfairness of this world, which allows some people to stop so effortlessly while fixing me in a lifelong struggle with this object of my desire.”

As I elaborated in an earlier post, a song’s pleasures can often be found in the associative machinery it kicks into gear – its ability to inspire projections, recollections, aspirations, or lamentations on the part of the listener – in addition to whatever “meaning” or “aboutness” its narrator is trying to deliver. Like many songs I love, “Carsick’s” lyrics are powerful precisely because they say enough without saying too much. The experience of desiring something that we know is bad for us is a near universal one. youbet’s lyrics are affective and effective for the way they both index the narrator’s struggle and invite the listener to recollect their own.

This Friday, August 21, I’m releasing the next single, “Run Around,” from my forthcoming album. You can presave the song here.

Let’s read its final stanza together:

If you’re wondering what I’m asking in return, dear
You’ll be glad to know that my demands are small
Say it’s me that you’ll adore for now and evermore
That’s all, that’s all

These lyrics perfectly exemplify why I recoil from those of much of the American songbook: they are overly simplistic and saccharine. There’s little figurative or inventive language; multiplicity and contradiction are foreclosed. The narrator could be sheepish about his request, but, given the song’s earlier lyrical content, he’s more likely to genuinely believe his offering (of everlasting affection, both given and received) is small, meager – straightforward – relative to the grand items (“the world for a toy”) others have proffered his partner.

These lyrics would not be captivating if they were read as a poem, without accompaniment. They need music to help tell a more persuasive story. Fortunately, the best voices are pleasurable in and of themselves, independent of what words they sing. Hence the idiom “I would listen to X sing the phone book” – and, indeed, I would love to listen to a recording of Nat King Cole singing the phone book. Now combine that voice with the world imagined by the song’s narrator: a future of uninterrupted romance, seamless courtship, and perpetual desire. Who would not want, even momentarily, to inhabit this fantasy? One of music’s pleasures is the way it so efficaciously acts as a conduit for escapism; through song, we can momentarily indulge in a life that is all satisfaction and no frustration.

Most popular settings of the song employ musical scaffolding that serves to underline this quixotic conception of partnership. The song gained widespread recognition as the theme music for American Airlines’ “Music Til Dawn” AM radio program in the 1950s and 60s, which you can hear at this link:

The triumphant brass, lush strings, and plucked harp: it's easy to become swept up in the romanticism of it all. In so doing, one can become more forgiving of – and, when it is an instrumental version, entirely forget – the triteness of the song’s lyrics. The comments section of this video reveals that this rendition activates a host of warm memories for former listeners of the radio program. As @earlbraverman7569 remarks,

”No matter what was happening, when I heard the beginning notes, I knew all was well. I this [sic] I had something like this now. Where have the years gone. [sic]”

That feeling – of “all [being] well” – that Earl points to is the very hope of both the lyrics of “That’s All” and of this particular musical setting.

But! Do we really want “all is well” to be the only word on courtship, desire, and love? Do we even genuinely believe that is all the lyrics themselves might have to “say” – to evoke, to provoke – on these topics? Must music always reinforce the ostensible “meaning” of the words, or can it render them far more multidimensional, such that we hear them with renewed appreciation and attention?

Thoughtful arranging can lead us to hear something beyond the canon’s idealistic fictions. Mim and Mort’s setting is a case in point. Listen to the way the duo transforms this standard into something mysterious, brooding, and almost tragic:

Their changes to traditional renderings of this song are subtle: they use suspended chords instead of major chords at the beginning of the A sections; they make use of a bass line that moves by steps instead of leaps; their entire arrangement foregrounds Morten’s arpeggiating guitar, with an intoxicating mixture of open and stopped strings that contribute to the song’s airiness. Combined, these help to excavate a more melancholy, truthful feeling-tone than those its lyrics, with their unfettered romanticism, establish.

When I read the lyrics of the final stanza, I perceive a breeziness and easiness; when I hear Mim sing them, I perceive emotional depth and uncertainty. When Mim sings these words in this setting, I hear her index the pitfalls of love – it often fades or changes – and those of desire – it often moves us to ask for too much from a partner; it often articulates itself assertively, forcefully, only to become more illegible and opaque over time. Does that make partnership a project not worth pursuing? Of course not; to the contrary, it can be the source of life’s greatest satisfactions. The issue is that the lyrics of so many standards do not account for its two-sidedness. Instead, they seem to articulate partnership as a horizon beyond questions, where a narrator, now happily coupled, will be fully complete. But as psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips relays in his gorgeous On Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, that project deserves a re-thinking:

"To recognize our desire for what it is – dependent on others – reveals us as too unacceptable to ourselves, too conflicted, too endangered; it puts us, quite literally, at odds with ourselves. It shows us too starkly just how disturbed we can be by our own needs…only the dialectic, the see-saw, between recognition and misrecognition makes things bearable; were we to straightforwardly recognize the essential aspects of ourselves, we would not be able to bear the anxiety. Were we to see our desires all the time as they really are, we would be incapacitated. We are, in actuality, something we don’t have the wherewithal to recognize….there is nothing we could know about ourselves or another than can solve the problem that other people actually exist, and we are utterly dependent on them as actually existing, separate other people whom we need.”

What standard says THAT??? Of course, we don’t want to hear anyone sing the words in that paragraph. But music is powerful precisely for its ability to evoke, to suggest, what is not said, and Mim and Mort’s musical setting, rather extraordinarily, brings the listener close to this robust portrait of love. A lyric’s setting helps to establish its arrangers orientation toward their audience: do they want to offer the listener false refuge in an easy cliché, or, instead, have them bear witness to our more vicissitudinous, unpredictable, patterned experiences?

There is no “right” or “wrong” approach; we need moments of escape. But when escapism has become the norm with a song, it’s refreshing to hear a rendition that resists its easy pleasures. To perform a song’s lyrics, to sing them, is to render them palimpsestic; great arrangements, like Mim’s and Mort’s, make this legible. With the right delivery, we can both admit our helpless entanglement with normative configurations of desire and give voice to our more complicated, contradictory experiences.

The next single, “Run Around,” from my forthcoming album comes out on August 21! You can pre-save it here.

This is the first music I’ve released that I sing on. The band (Jack Broza, Alejandra Sofia, Elora, and Christian Li) crushed, as did the recording engineers ( & Francesca Lanier). Magnet Magazine gave the song a sweet write-up. Full album is coming later this year!

We’ll play the song at my next New York show, on Tuesday, July 21 at 3’s Brewing (333 Douglass St) at 8pm. Elise Petersen & will also be performing!

Other July Events:

Sunday, July 12 & Monday, July 13 – with in Buffalo and Rochester

Friday, July 17 – I’ll be reading poems at ’s Music & Words Series in Bushwick. Message me if you’d like to attend!

Saturday, July 18 – with at Hart Bar in Bushwick

Friday, July 24 – with at Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island

Monday, July 27 – with and at the Filthy Diamond in Bushwick

Thursday, July 30 and Friday, July 31 – with at Pickathon Festival in Oregon

I hosted a roof concert last Wednesday in Crown Heights. , , Morten Duun, and were magic!!

Hudson sensitively strums the intro to his arrangement of “Martha Sways” at a hushed dynamic. I zone out for a moment and yawn unthinkingly. Suddenly, a strident voice sounds from the crowd

Drunk-Ass-Man (DAM): Hey, look, the drummer is yawning!

~The following may or may not be true~

Me: *red in the face, embarrassed, standing up from the throne*: Cut! Cut! Cut! Hudson, stop strumming. Who just said that? Let me see your face! Look me in the eye!

DAM: Oh, I’m looking right into your eyes, drummer boy! Good luck seeing me, though, through those bright stage lights and haze machine –

Me: I knew I recognized your sloppy, smug, self-absorbed cadence, your indifference to any sense of decency! I heard you at our shows in Colorado, Texas, and New Jersey –

DAM: You don’t know me like you think you do, baby boy! I am faceless, I am nameless, I come and go whenever and say whatever I wish! I was born with a single purpose: to ruin your day. I am: DAM!

Me: Damnit, DAM! Didn’t you yell out “Slappa da bass, man” to Aaron in Austin? Not again! Not tonight! Come up here, DAM, come up to the stage when you address me. Show yourself!

DAM: Oh I’m quite comfortable right where I am, tequila in my left hand, lady in my….baby? Baby? Where did my baby go?

Me: I hope she fled as far –

DAM: You’re just mad because I GOT you!! You ripped a HUGE yawn during Hudson’s beautiful solo moment –

Me: Yes, you got me, DAM. I yawned. I’m upset at myself for doing so. It was –

DAM: Nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah,-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah! You sad. You mad. You fugly. You about to release a single ‘bout bumbling and fumbling that no one’s gonna even mumble about!

Me: DAM, I swear to God –

DAM: What, you bored? Chasey-wacey tried? Chasey-wacey had a long day in the van? Baby boy wanna go to bed, have Mommy tuck him in? Chasey no ready for this? Chasey no want this gig any more?

Me: “Chasey-wacey” isn’t “bored,” DAM. How dare you insinuate such a thing, knowing nothing about me, knowing nothing about this group. I’ve written extensively about how lucky I feel to be on this gig at all –

DAM: Aw, you think people actually read your little posts! Trust that I’m getting a great read right here, right now – a read of how salty you are for getting dunked on! This is better than a book, this is –

Me: Yes, I’m salty, DAM! I was wrong. It was unprofessional. Yes, I was tired: our day of driving across the southeast, the past few days of switching homes, of sharing bunk beds with another 32-year-old man. The weeks of going from one city to the next. The daily schlepping, packing and repacking, loading and unloading of cymbals, drums, pedals, and stands. There’s no AC on this stage, it’s the middle of June and humid as –

DAM: JUNK DRAWER. Play JUNK DRAWER! Everyone, clap with me! Junk. Drawer. Junk. Drawer. Everyone! Junk. Drawer. Junk –

Me: This concert isn’t an open forum, DAM, for you to air whatever inane thoughts enter your consciousness! We already played that song, anyway; where were you during the first part of our set –

DAM: DAM was back with his baby at the bar, watching your Knicks get crushed in the first quarter! But now? DAM in your head like Wembanyama was in Mitch Robinson’s! Look at your face, you look ready to –

Me: Even as a Knicks fan, to hear you compare yourself to a supremely talented human being like Wemby is just beyond – listen, DAM, did you really think it was appropriate to announce my yawn to the entire crowd, to the band, to Hudson? In this, the most quiet, intimate moment of our entire set? You literally couldn’t have picked a worse time to say something. What were you thinking? What were you –

DAM: I never “think,” Chasey! Me no likey the thinky. Me likey the drinky. Me see something and me make fun fun funny. Me likey me baby to come back to me.
Baby?!? Where my baby at?!?!

Me: You’re incorrigible, DAM! Just a few hours ago, I was walking along a shaded path by the French Broad River, in the temperate cool of dusk, amidst joggers, bikers, women rolling strollers, friends licking ice cream cones. I looked out to the water and found myself saying earnest things, feeling full of love, contemplating the fact that everything that makes life worth living can be found while walking between 7-8pm in the week leading up to the summer solstice. But now I’m going to be thinking about YOU for the rest of the night. We still have eight songs to go! I have half a mind to pick up and heave this cymbal at –

DAM: Oh, you won’t! You won’t! He won’t! You a little b**** from Connecticut! What are you gonna do, attack me with a lacrosse stick? Let’s see it! Put those hands up! Put ‘em –

Me: *Takes EFX cymbal off stand, winds up to heave it at DAM*

Bespectacled-Altruistic-Levelheaded-Man (BALM): Wait!! Wait!! Hold on!! Chase, hold on just a second, there. Easy. Inhale. Exhale. That’s good. That’s good. Put the cymbal down, slowly –

Me: Hark! Who is that? Your voice goes down like a magical elixir. I can feel my heart rate dropping –

DAM: “Hark”? Who the f*** says “Hark”? *Begins to atonally-gargle “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”*

BALM: Ignore him, Chase. Focus on me. Inhale – 1-2-3-4; hold – 1-2-3-4; exhale – 1-2-3-4. Good. I’m so sorry to interrupt. I wasn’t planning on saying anything until coming up to you at the merch table tonight.

Me: I’m touched you planned to come up to my merch table, BALM! Folks aren’t usually interested in the side people’s music. Thank you for intervening. Honestly, I was about to throw that –

BALM: I could tell! Remember: DAM is just one voice. He doesn’t speak for everyone. We love what you’re doing. Thank you for stopping here on the tour. We appreciate it.

Me: Your voice is just a balm, BALM! Every word feels like an offering or invitation. What sort of work do you do?

BALM: I’m currently a cook in the dining room at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. But I just finished an online master’s degree in social work. I’m hoping to start seeing clients as a therapist in a few months.

Me: You speak with such care, measure, and warmth, BALM; I can already tell you’re going to be a great –

BALM: Enough about me! Listen, I was going to wait until I met you at the merch table to offer this, but I worry you won’t make it through your set unless I do so now. Did I hear Hudson say earlier that you all have a day-off tomorrow? I want to gift you and the touring crew six free passes to the Biltmore Gardens. Trust me, it’s worth it – tickets are usually $80/person! You all can spend the day strolling through the flowerbeds, looking out at the stunning Blue Ridge Mountain vista, sipping on iced beverages. I think the view is so beautiful that it might even make one of the tour managers cry. After you’re done walking through the gardens, stop by the dining room at the Inn. I’ll send you off with six bottles of wine and bespoke petit fours from our kitchen.

Me: BALM! You’re restoring my faith in –

BALM: Don’t mention it, it’s really a pleasure –

Me: No, really: I was spiraling, beside myself, overcome with inane thoughts and impulses….to think, you could have said nothing about the gardens, enjoyed the show, said hello, and left. But to offer this, out of the kindness of – oh, you’re gonna make me cry, BALM, cry like a little baby – wait, what is that voice coming from the bar in the back???

DAM *in the distance*: Baby?!? Baby??? Where my baby go?!?!

Underpaid Twenty-Year-Old Intern (UTI): Yes! Hey! Chaz? Chad?

Me: Chase….

UTI: Chase! I knew it was something with C, C-h, C-h-a….get in here man, get in here!! *vigorously waves* Sit down, right here, right there, down, here, there, now, yes, that’s good, good.

Me: Wasn’t I supposed to be meeting with –

UTI *Takes huge rip from cherry vape pen* No, no, the head of the record label is away on an ayahuasca retreat in Peru at the moment. It’s an annual eco-excursion that his Williamsburg mindfulness group organizes. Did I forget to update his auto-reply?

Me: I didn’t get the ayahuasca update. Who are you? I hope you don’t mind that I brought these other people with me. I don’t really have a choice; they follow me everywhere. I told them to sit quietly and listen.

UTI: Don’t worry! I’m his assistant and I’m going to share everything we talk about with him. Look, I’m recording our conversation with this great device, “Pocket,” which uses AI to quickly convert everything we say into a streamlined document –

Me: That’s seems kind of dystopian –

UTI: – a streamlined document of actionable items –

Me: Even the word “actionable” in and of itself is kind of a red flag for me, honestly –

UTI: Alright, Chance, let’s get right to it: where are you at with –

Me: It’s Chase –

UTI: Chase! C, C-H, C-H-A, I’m right there. We’re right there. Here we are. Be here now! Who said that, again? Alright, Chase, talk to me: where are you, now?

Me: Right, yeah, that’s why I reached out. I recently finished recording an album, and I’m feeling pretty confused about what it means to release something today, or even how to go about that whole thing. The album is ready to go, it’s called –

UTI: DON’T JUST SAY THE TITLE!! Have you lost your mind?? This is what you musicians do; you pour your pathetic Pisces hearts into something – over years! – only to unthinkingly release it in one fell swoop, as if this were some drunken 12AM heart-to-heart with a best friend. This is business, not a teary-eyed venting session!! Let’s start here: exactly how many videos do you have for the first single on this –

Me: Video? You must have misunderstood me. I have an album – you know, music – eight songs I wrote and recorded over a two-year period.

*10 second pause as UTI looks absorbedly into his phone*

Me: Hello??

UTI: Ah! Sorry. Right, listen, Chard –

Me: Chase!

UTI: Chase! Listen, Chase. I know you’re excited about your little songs. But if you want people to really hear your music, if you really wanna reach people – and I’m not talking about your Mom, or your Aunt, or your brother and his girlfriend while they cook dinner, boy!! – hear me when I say this: you gotta post.

Me: You know, I’m quite skeptical, UTI, when anyone unilaterally prescribes a particular behavior – “you gotta do this, you gotta do that” – it just wreaks of self-help-speak, of an uncritically normative conception of what constitutes a good life, as if there is just one right way to –

Chorus of Parents (COP): That’s right, sweetie, that’s right. We raised you well. Are you having fun? That’s all that really matters, you know. We just love it when it looks like you’re having fun on that stage.

Me: Moms, Dads! Moms and Dads! Why do you always say that shit? It’s so belittling. Yes, I’m “having fun”! But I’m not doing all of this just for fun! You know this takes work, right? I’m here because I want to figure out how – I just think it would be great if this music could turn into –

UTI: Exactly! Do you just want the COP to be your audience, boy?!?! Let’s turn this album into something! Let’s BLOW IT UP!

Me: Blow what up?

UTI: I mean let’s BLOW YOU UP!

Me: I think –

COP: We’ll always be your audience, sweetie, whether you like it or not –

UTI: I mean let’s BLOW THIS ALBUM UP!

Doctor of Musicology (DOM): *Pretentiously guffaws* Hah! Ho! Me, may, ma, mo, moo! See, the very slipperiness of this terminology – that it speaks to both a building up and a breaking down, an explosion and an implosion, a birth and a death, makes it ripe for scholastic inquiry. I’m actually getting quite aroused just thinking about it. Anyone else? Just me? UTI, you seem to be well-versed in the sartorial trends of the moment – what color blazer should I wear when I take the Greyhound to Cleveland to speak at a conference about this?

UTI: See, Chase, even DOM is thinking about image, branding, drip, content, rizz –

Me: Not now, DOM, not now! We’re on summer break, please, I was looking forward to three months of pleasure, of pretending that the music itself –

UTI: Less music talk, Chase! Where’s your content at?! We’re gonna need 16 long-form – one minute – videos per single, so 128 total, and then at least 256 individual stories, and it would also be ideal if you could be constantly filming a vlog that chronicles this entire process –

Me: One-minute is now long-form content?! This is what I mean, UTI – earlier in this conversation, you said “if you want your music to be heard, you have to post.” But how much music is really being heard on these platforms? I already wrote about all of this in great detail six years ago. The situation has only gotten worse, obviously. I don’t really think anyone’s listening to much on these platforms. In fact, I think within the first three seconds, people make a decision whether or not to engage based on these three criteria:

1. Does this sound pretty good? Or at the very least does it sound crazy?

2. Does the video look good or epic or is there at least a fog machine or a haze machine or are they in nature or a setting where we don’t expect to hear music?

3. Do these people look hot? How much skin do we got on display here?

UTI: Yes! Let’s *get* *those* *arms* *out* boy!! Sleeves off, arms out, full eyes, clear hearts –

Me: Listen, UTI, when one of Hudson’s videos received a lot of engagement the other week, he posted the average watch time to his close friend’s story. Do you know what it was?? 12 seconds!! And that’s GOOD!! That’s actually an extraordinarily long average watch time for videos on these platforms. Should I really invest so much psychic energy and time into releasing videos in a space where people are going to judge and discard them based on the most reptilian-brain criteria? This reminds me that my friend Max suggested a fourth category people use to quickly judge what they see: “Am I afraid?”

Standard of Artistic Purity (SOAP): Exactly, my friend, exactly. Be not afraid, though.

Me: Oh my God, I almost forgot you were — where are your shoes and socks?!?

SOAP: It’s quite simple: do you want to help perpetuate these awful modes of engaging with art? Imagine another life, one filled to the brim with moments of awe, flourishing, and wonder. You go vegan, first of all. Then: you cancel all streaming subscriptions and social media accounts. You hurl – not toss, not drop, hurl – your iPhone into the East River. You leave the city behind, take off for the woods, find a cabin, make a cabin, create a home. For sustenance, you forage for berries and nuts. You let the spirit move through you and commune with God! When the fruits of your labor are ready, you make cassettes to bring to live shows, which you’ll invite people to with handwritten letters you pen by candlelight –

Me: SOAP! I love you and your ideas but you are not looking well, my friend! Are you eating?

SOAP: Here and there, yes. I often feel so full after just planting my feet in the grass each morning that it can be hard to stomach –

UTI: *Fervently devouring a steak slop bowl from CAVA* Look (gestures to SOAP) – is that what you want, Chandler? To be some anemic long-haired buffoon playing the pan-flute in the woods for an audience of deities and spirits?

Me: I don’t just think he’s just – no, I don’t want to be an anemic long-haired buffoon, UTI –

UTI: *heaving sporkfuls of slop, jabbering with his mouth full* Thank G** for fast casual. Seriously. I don’t care what any of you sanctimonious m************ says, I don’t care what Eater says, I don’t care what the YouTube comment section says. F*** that overpriced “cute new lunch spot” with a $25 dollar sandwich with one eensy cube of meat on it. Thank G** for this bowl. I feel my G** in this bowl, I feel iron in my bones, right here, right now –

Me: I can’t believe it but part of me agrees with what – anyways, yes, yes, UTI, part of me is quite determined to promote the album. I’m not just going to print a cassette and call it a day. If that means posting more videos I guess I’ll try it – but then I hear about that insane psy-op shit, those “burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions [that are] fabricated out of digital cloth” and, again, I’m called to —

SOAP: Opt-out entirely, yes! It starts right here, right now, take one step –

DOM: We really have a duty to historicize the whole GeeseGate™️thing –

UTI: I tried to get a job at Chaotic Good! But I made the mistake of not proofreading the cover letter ChatGPT wrote for me, which began with “That’s a really sharp question – and you know what, Goddamn, you look so f****** hot today, too –

DOM: As I was saying, the history of music is, in many senses, the history of capital. The proliferation of digital slop accounts might be novel and particularly pernicious, but is this really that different from the work that publicists and marketing teams have been engaged in for the last century? Success in the arts has long been contingent on the work of a PR industry that has outsize influence on awards, opportunities, press –

Me: It just seems like the focus of that industry has shifted from getting placements in legacy media to inflating the streaming and social media metrics of specific bands and artists.

DOM: Which might not even translate to economic or professional success!

Me: Exactly. In which case, why bother with the video-spheres? Having your music written about might not make a difference in terms of getting gigs, but at least it matters for feeling heard and understood. You know, actually feeling that your music was received – not just scrolled through while dropping a deuce – by someone! I don’t think we need publicists to do this, though. Why don’t we just directly reach out to the writers we admire? When I did that for my last album, I was rejected by basically everyone, but I also ended up having an amazing conversation with Scott Gutterman (of the Brooklyn Rail) in his office at the Neue Galerie. I’ll never forget that afternoon. There are so many great people writing about music and literature in this space right here – , , , , , , , , , , , , –

COP: We love your Substack, sweetie –

UTI: Great plan, Charice. Perfect. Go ahead and bring the Substack press quotes out when you try to get a gig. We know at least COP will show up –

COP: Yes! Sweetie, when is your next gig that starts before 5pm, is within a 25-minute commute of our condo, and doesn’t involve wading through an ungodly number of hipsters who need to shower?

Me: I’m not saying they will help me get a gig, UTI! I’m saying these writers’ work reflects a way of engaging with music that I find more meaningful than scrolling through videos and double-tapping on a hard rectangle. Can any of us honestly say we feel good – sustainably, life-affirmingly good – when we’re on Instagram, whether to post or consume? The site is a psychological horror show!

DOM: Am I hearing you right, Chase? On the one hand, you know these platforms are bad, not just for you on a personal, psychological level, but also for our collective relations, for any hope of communal flourishing. Yet you have a hard time imagining what “success” might look like outside of their containers. This is exactly what Lauren Berlant’s project was – to “[seek] out the conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings.” Is this not the case here?

Me: That’s part of it, yes. But it’s easy for me to imagine what success looks like outside of their containers. Listening to an album I bought on Bandcamp, one referred to me in a conversation with a friend. Attending a concert I heard about through the fabulous online bulletin board cal.red. Performing in a house show organized by my friends Jan and Chloe, who use an email newsletter to invite people to come out. Reading about music from any of the fabulous sources I listed above. There are other ways to transmit information and discover music besides Instagram and Spotify! But yes, these platforms do seem to have an intractable pull –

DOM: Which is precisely why it’s so common to see artists try to articulate a new way of describing their music while also needing to draw on the categories established by the tech conglomerates to do so. People are all like, f*** the algorithmic playlists, while also recognizing that they have undeniable cultural currency in terms of orienting people to different musics. This is precisely what Foucault was after with his “Reverse Discourse” idea –

UTI: Foo-cow? Foo-ho? Listen, Charlie & co, this isn’t the right fit. I’m afraid you all just don’t have that killer instinct we need.

Me: For the last time, it’s Cha – you know what, you’re right. Honestly, I wasn’t even allowed to play violent video games growing up, and I quit football after –

COP: You didn’t “quit,” honey, you just had different gifts and talents –

UTI: Enough, boy! This isn’t about to turn into a therapy session. Once you decide you actually want to have an audience for your music, come to me and we’ll get your 16-week-content-plan dialed in –

Me: Like I said, I am going to post about this album –

SOAP: *nibbling on almonds* Give it ten years baby, give it ten years. Once you hit 40 you’ll come my way –

Read more

Read more

Chase (C): Mmmm….uh….eh….it was really novel, in every sense….

Self-Help-Influencer-Legend (SHIL): “Novel,” bro? Novel?? This isn’t your fucking contemporary literature class in the corn field! Own this shit, boy!! You just crushed in front of 20K people, the biggest crowd you’ve ever played for BY FAR, and you’re really out here talking about “novel”.....SMH

Conservatory Public Relations (CPR): You sound a tad aggravated, SHIL! I don’t think he is necessarily downplaying how cool the experience was. I think he may simply be calling attention to the fact that it brought up a lot of complicated feelings –

Determinist Downer (DD): If there’s anything he should call attention to, it’s the fact of how dammmmn LUCKY he was to be on that stage at all! Do you know how many millions of things had to miraculously go right to put him there? Do you really think he “deserved” this opportunity, SHIL? Do you really think music is a meritocracy? Roll back the tape, look at him smiling while enveloped by that ridiculous fog machine on stage. You think every deserving drummer gets to be clouded in smoke while they play with their best friends in an arena? But it’s fine, keep selling people your life-transformation workshops and miracle supplements….

Chorus of Parents (COP): Did this gig include health insurance?

Doctor of Musicology (DOM): *Pretentious cough to interject* You are all always just thinking about yourselves! You believe your proximity is uniquely illuminating, that it grants you access to something those far away can’t understand. But it’s actually rendering you entirely unable to give an account of what happened, because you’re too blinded by your own biases, your own preoccupations! Don’t you remember what Matthew Rahaim said? “The idea of radical immediacy underlying so many construals of participation surrenders the critical function of ethnomusicology in unveiling oppressive forms of mediation and mimesis…” Where is that critical function??? This whole conversation has been about your own neuroses and insecurities! I barely have a sense of what actually happened at this thing. Let’s start here: how many –

SHIL: *Rolls eyes, shakes head vigorously back and forth* This cat again, rocking his blue corduroy blazer. What mumbo-jumbo did he just spout? We get it, sir! You’re getting a PhD. You know I heard he actually wore that jacket to the rock club on the most recent run? Where’s management? Mendel Records! Why haven’t we outsourced his wardrobe to someone?!? Is there an unpaid intern who can look into this?? He ain’t ever going viral looking like that…except maybe on Bookstagram….

Headlining Rock Stars (HRS): You’re so right, SHIL. That’s why we rolled up with a team of people supporting us. 30 staff members were working on our behalf from the crack of dawn to the curtain call –

CPR: 30! 30! That’s quite a number. In fact, by 2030, that will be more people than are majoring in the humanities at our school….

COP: And to think, we paid for all those music lessons, just so he could go to a school that’s going to become obsolete, just so he could perform for some drunken revelers who partied the day away at the Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa Bay, Florida –

DOM: Interesting – to you, HRS, economic and infrastructural support might be the center of the bullseye, but for other musicians, the size of their support staff wouldn’t mean –

HRS: That’s right, like I said, 30 people, working across lighting, visuals, sound, catering, logistics, load-in, load-out, wheels up, touch down – we keep everything dialed in! We don’t even do our own soundcheck; our techs do that for us. It makes everything so much easier! For this show, Hudson’s band arrived around 11AM and were waiting around the stadium the whole day, whereas we jetted in just before showtime.

DOM: This is completely fascinating – I also heard you had five dressing rooms, HRS, one for each member –

HRS: Of course, you think we’re sharing amenities at this point in our career? This isn’t the DIY van, Doctor! Remind me – do you prefer Doctor or DOM?? Speaking of outfits, SHIL – you should have seen my drip on that arena stage! I even broke out a custom-fitted, monogrammed Tampa Bay Lightning jersey for the encore. People went nuts. This is the attention to detail I’m talking about! You think you can just get on an arena stage and call tunes, read down a lead sheet? These kids in music school think it’s allll about the playing and barely give a thought to the production, the presentation! We had a whole lighting rig, synchronized to the rhythms of every one of our songs; we created lyric videos that rolled on a huge projector screen. People were transfixed! This is why we’re out here flicking sticks and picks to adoring fans while these SadJazzBois ™ are stuck playing for their friends in the same bar over and over again…..

DOM: I have so many questions, HRS, starting with how you amassed the cultural and economic capital to –

CPR: I don’t define “cultural capital” as one’s ability to “flick picks,” DOM!! No, no, no – this is not what we want our students to aspire to. Here at the conservatory, we have a motto: “Learning and Labor,” with an emphasis on labor! Believe me, a lot of it goes into preparing oneself to live the life of a professional musician. All of our graduates put in thousands of hours of hard work, of practice time on their instruments...of course, playing in front of 20,000 people is perhaps one of the most legible forms of professional success to folks who don’t dedicate their lives to music, but that doesn’t make it the most meaningful for those who do…what matters is how the bands played!

DD: Thank you so much for bringing up labor. You do know music practice is just unpaid labor, right? You talk about it with some holier-than-thou mystique. Anyone who has the time to practice thousands of hours means they didn’t need to worry about making money during that time. So yeah, SHIL, C “decided” to practice thousands of hours so he could be ready when an opportunity like this presented itself. But if he had been born in different circumstances, could he have really “decided” that at all? This goes back to what I was saying about luck….

SHIL: It wasn’t just the practicing, DD! You know how C first met Hudson? He was walking down Dean Street three years ago, saw Hudson and Sophie (complete strangers at the time) sitting on their stoop, and decided to say hello. What if he hadn’t said anything? You know how psychopathic it was to approach two random strangers, even in 2023? He could have easily just kept walking. But he didn’t. He chose to be gregarious, to be outgoing. He chose to say hello! As I like to preach at my Esalen workshop, it’s ultimately on us to Say Yes To Life (#SYTL)

DD: Are you still digesting whatever magic ‘shroom was in your tea at Esalen, my friend? You’re only reinforcing my point. People might be scrolling, seeing these videos, thinking C orchestrated his life to be on this huge stadium gig, but it was really so random! He’s only on the gig because, by the grace of God, he was walking down Dean Street at that hour on that day! Do you ever talk about this in the classroom, CPR?? Think of the hundreds of other drummers in NYC who could have crushed this gig! Why weren’t they on the stage?

HRS: Y’all! I don’t care about any of this! And please, don’t get my message twisted. Hudson and his band were great. They played fantastically and the audience was really warm. Yeah, some of the crowd talked throughout the set but that’s almost always the case for openers. When H told the stadium it was his first arena show they absolutely erupted with cheers and support! It was so sweet, actually.

C: If I could jump in here for a second, HRS – thank you for that bottle of top-shelf tequila you left in our dressing room, by the way! – there are two things I definitely remember from the actual performance: one was the beginning of the set, looking out, and feeling a bit like I was in some sort of dream – both in the sense of “this is kind of a dream come true,” but also as in: “what is going on???” I had just never had the experience of looking out and seeing that many faces staring back at me. You have to understand, HRS, that most of the shows I play are for 30, maybe 50 people – with a lot of shows for maybe 5-20 people! Hudson and I were playing for three years at small places across Brooklyn for very few people, little pay, etc. Then all of a sudden, we’re here, presented with the opportunity, and it’s kind of like, alright, are we ready? When we began, I noticed myself feeling a little nervous, like I was playing but couldn’t quite access everything I’m usually able to. But after a song or two that quickly faded and I actually felt really comfortable, like I was just playing with my friends in the basement. And that led to the second thing I remember from the show itself: just smiling, feeling really happy, and being really happy for my friend, that he was having this opportunity.

HRS: Chase! I’m so glad we caught you for a second. We wanted to talk with you more after the show, but, you know, we had to run to catch our private jet back to Nashville….

DOM: Did you say you walked off to your private jet?!?! Again, the asymmetries of power, the fact that you’re jet-setting while these people in NYC are stuck Venmoing the same $50 around….

C: It’s funny you mention that, DOM – the very next day, I flew back to Brooklyn to play at 3’s Brewing with my band in a split bill with Kirsten Maxwell and Polsky West. 3’s is exactly one of those small places you were talking about before, where usually ~30 people come out, each person makes $50, etc. But I found the experience to be just as meaningful as the stadium gig the night before. In fact, during Kirsten’s opening set, I found myself thinking: “am I even a musician??” – she was playing the most gut-wrenchingly beautiful songs, imbued with such honesty, vulnerability, transparency, and feelingfulness. It was as if she had emerged from the womb with a guitar in her hand, singing, like she was just born to do this – it felt that natural, that good, that effortless. At that moment, it didn’t matter that I had played in a stadium the night before, it was like, no, here is the next thing, this is what I’m striving for….

SHIL: Chase! Don’t lose the plot, baby! You can always play at the brewery, but we have to remember that the stadium show marked a real turning point for you all, in terms of the possibility of making a living from playing music you love – wasn’t that always a goal? Otherwise music is more of a hobby, right? We’re not just churning out reels for the aesthetic….

CPR: Off the record, SHIL – between us, please! – you’re right! I’m secretly thrilled that one of our graduates is actually getting paid –

DOM: Supposedly getting paid! Again, it’s often unclear how these things translate –

COP: Yes, can someone please explain to me what the arena health insurance policy –

CPR: like I was saying, we’re just thrilled they’re getting paid to play music! Most of our students end up doing a computer science bootcamp to pay the bills. At the very least, most graduates usually end up having a huge, cringe-worthy existential crisis of some sort –

C: *nods*

CPR: – a needless escalation and pathologization of self-harming behaviors –

C: *mhmm*

CPR: – and hundreds of hours of therapy to sort through the whole mess –

C: It was more like 50, but yes….

CPR: – before they settle into something that feels right. We keep these facts out of our brochures, though. Hey, COP, I’ll give your grandkids a 10% scholarship if you promise not to tell anyone this!

COP: Grandkids! Grandkids! Do you think this gig will maybe make it so these boys can bring us Grandkids?!?

DOM: The nuclear family is an oppressive apparatus, replete with unacknowledged, unpaid labor, and privatized forms of care –

1. It’s Saturday, December 20 at 11pm and I’m an hour into a deep clean of my kitchen, hands soaked in dish soap, squeezing the last wrings of water from a blue sponge. Lily Talmers’ “My Mortal Wound” is playing over the speaker and I quickly realize that it’s one of the most beautiful songs…

Read more

I was talking with a friend a few months ago who suggested that superficiality, surfaceness, and silliness are actually constitutive forces holding many relationships together. Their point was that the more you get to know about anyone, the more likely it is you’ll find something you don’t like. This seems both cynical and true to me. As ou…

Read more

Chang begins the poem, much like we might begin a season, a project, an endeavor, a life, thinking Martin’s drawing is “about” something clear and definable. The title of the work is straightforward; Chang begins by directly referencing it. But as the poem goes on, we also accompany Chang in the process of looking more closely at what is before her and behind her: the drawing itself as well as the interpretive strategies she first employs when engaging with it. Far from leading to crystalline realizations, however, close observation allows multiple contradictions to emerge. Perhaps the drawing is “about” the end of the summer season, but perhaps, given that some artists title their works as an afterthought, it isn’t “about” that, or anything, at all. We zoom in with Chang to the textured intricacies of the work – much like we might zoom in to different moments of our life in therapy or in great conversation with friends – and realize there are equally compelling, equally true, but quite different interpretations we could take away. The abstraction, the too-muchness of the drawing, perhaps like the too-muchness of a life, eludes straightforward interpretation. Its rows of squares and rectangles could all be read negatively (lines blurring, dulling, the leaden edges of suffering intensifying) or positively (the beauty of form, a form that persists across 56 years of movement). We’re looking right at the thing and can’t make sense of it.

It is a poem just as much about the act of looking as it is Martin’s drawing itself. Chang suggests that scrupulous, close observation renders attempts to neatly narrativize a work, indeed, to chart any “clear course” with a singular “concrete meaning,” as misguided. But before she concedes entirely, she delivers this dagger: “The interval between today and now really does shorten as we age.” Why is this last line so absolutely gutting? It exerts the forcefulness of revelation: a pithy distillation of a shared experience that is difficult to articulate. I am quite moved by it; I’ve shared it with probably ten friends over the past few months. If the first part of the poem works to destabilize our relationship with narrative as a mode of constituting a work, this last line arrives as something like the articulation of a truth, precisely because it is replete with ambiguity, bewilderment, contradiction, simultaneity, and two-sidedness. It makes the head spin and demands – much like Martin’s drawing itself – to be read over and over again.

Unlike spiritual grifters or self-help gurus who uncritically wield phrases like “carpe diem” or “the power of now” to sanctimoniously shepherd us to more enlightened lives, Chang does not use language in service of didacticisms. Instead, she takes the familiar “today” and “now” – which we so often reach for to establish both our temporal situatedness within, and our affective orientation towards, the lives we are living – and queers them. The effect is unnerving: in some sense, of course, “today” has always been “now.” We are always “in” today (though we might wish to be anywhere else). When we are in “now,” we are necessarily in “today.” In Chang’s discerning formulation, though, “now” is not some static, non-agential referent we point to with an unchanging emotional tenor throughout our lives. Instead, it has a character, a feeling-tone, one that unmistakably changes as we get older. It’s not just that our cognitive capacities lapse, our hair turns grey, and we start to look mid AF. It’s not just that the air is a bit cooler this month than it was last month. It’s that we realize the containers of language we once relied on to construct a sense of self and capture our experience are not nearly as solid as we had imagined.

When we are young, there is so much ahead of us: we, silently or aloud, articulate aspirations, deadlines, milestones we want to reach at certain points in the future. It is easy to think that “now” is not “now” – or at least, is not the only “now,” because surely there are so many other “nows” in the future that we will inhabit. “Now” necessarily has a softer, looser, more distant quality; it can be disentangled from the tasks, activities, and requirements of “today.” Take another look at the Agnes Martin drawing that inspired this poem (and Chang’s larger collection), which could be read as a life’s calendar of sorts. We might begin in the top left, with thousands of days on the horizon. From this vantage point, the “interval,” to use Chang’s word, between today and the rest of your life seems huge. There is a whole chunk of “nows” to wade through. Suddenly, though, you find yourself in boxes – in “todays” – very far from where you began. Unfailingly, the “then” of the past becomes the “now;” the “today” of the future becomes today – or, more concerningly, yesterday, last year, or ten years ago. Somehow, we arrive, and we’re left to reckon: is this the now that we expected, hoped for? Is this the “now” I articulated for myself, for others, then, when now was not now? And if it’s not – and this is the especially striking part of Chang’s observation, for me – when do I expect that to change – when do I expect myself to change? Right now becomes the now when I thought I’d have x together. Today is now the now when I said I’d do x. “Today” and “now” – once nonchalantly, thoughtlessly separated; one lived, one put off – begin to collapse. Today becomes, with a forcefulness that only increases with each September, each season, each year – each time you walk out that apartment door to begin again – synonymous with “now.”

A September full of music is ahead. I keep an updated calendar here. I’m quite excited about two upcoming performances in particular: Sunday, September 14 at Three’s Brewing (333 Douglass St), where my band will perform in a split bill with Sibyl and Emma Frank, and Friday, October 17 at Public Records (233 Butler Street), where we will open for Mike Kota.

Warmth,
Chase

Myles provides context in direct, plainspoken language at the beginning of the text: they recently purchased an expensive red tea kettle from an online store, only to learn that it had been stolen from their building’s lobby before they had a chance to bring it to their apartment. They feel sad about this, but they’re not sure where to put this “ordinary sadness” in relation to the news of genocide, murder, and political violence that keeps flitting across their screen. Then, at the end of the poem’s first stanza, they start to break:

“I’m back to poet
boiling water in a poet pot
and I forget poet pot
is not spelled
poet
poet
pot pot pot”

It’s the first of four distinct moments where this pair of words is repeated, in various configurations and combinations, as Myles proceeds to elaborate on and constellate between the various afflictions – political, personal, poetic – they face. It’s significant that this refrain emerges after Myles states their situation as dispassionately as they can, which, while communicatively effective, does little affective work. We might “understand” what Myles means when they state “I don’t know where to put the ordinary sadness I feel about my expensive red tea kettle [in relation to the news that Israel has begun bombing Gaza again]” – but do we feel what they are saying? Does the language send a charge through our spines? Crucially: does such a statement even capture exactly how Myles is feeling themselves?

After the first break, Myles attempts to return to a composed, “sense-making” mode of speaking – decrying political idiocy at home and abroad, lamenting the fact that they, sans-whistling-tea-kettle, will continue to forget that the water is boiling – but they can’t help but return, with increasing frequency, to the repeated dyad:

“if I had a whistling
pot I wouldn’t
forget the water
is boiling
I wouldn’t burn
everything
would I

must everything burn
if Gaza burns
must everything burn
don’t they know
do I know
our president is obscene
I sip my tea
poet pot poet poet
poet poet pot
poet pot”

With each iteration, the listener begins to better understand just what is at stake. It becomes clear this is not just a poem decrying dictators and thieves; it’s just as much a text about cognition and concentration – how both are compromised when one tries to attend to all of the horrors of the world, and how that compromised state renders one unable to mobilize both politically and creatively.

Repetition is one of the most effective communicative tools to make this flustered mode of cognition legible to a listener or reader. With each of Myles’ iterations – and the subtle changes of register, tone, and dynamic imbued in each – new contradictions and complications open up. Myles is frustrated at the world, yes, but I’d submit that the most interesting anger they index is that directed inwards. The repetitions, taken in aggregate, suggest at least six different feeling-tones that Myles is grappling with:

1. They’re mad at the horrors and violence in the world – their cruelty, their endlessness, their politicization

2. They’re mad at whoever stole their tea kettle – what type of heartless person would do this?! They were really looking forward to this glistening new object, this small pleasure, this aesthetically pleasing appliance, with its promise to repeatedly produce caffeinated respites. Oh, and they did so much research before deciding to buy this particular kettle – they compared it with others, they read the reviews – what a waste of time!

3. Wait – now they’re mad that they’re mad about the tea kettle – how could they be angry about such a trivial nicety when there are people being murdered? Is this really how they want to be living their life? Fuming over something as small as this? And now it’s impacting their ability to think clearly, to reason, to spell…(“I forget pot is not spelled poet”)

4. Ok, but what do they have to attend to all of this suffering? What tools are at their disposal? Now Myles interrogates their own profession: a writer! A poet! How are they supposed to have any effect on the world with their pen? Is this really all they have to return to – “I’m back to poet” – to process the situation, to enact change? They’re so disgusted with their practice that they cross the word out on the page (and motion with their hand at the reading to visually indicate this) – and try to focus on what’s at stake, the burning abroad, the pot at home….not everything needs to be creative fodder….

5. No, they love writing – of course it means something, in fact it’s the only thing they’ve ever loved. Moreover, it’s the only way they know how to think – not even a full stanza of thought could go by before they thought of the poetics of the situation….but how are they to create anything good out of this whole event? (Earlier in the evening, they perceptively stated – “I feel like being a poet is being in a workshop with yourself for your entire life”). This whole five minutes of stewing would really be a waste if they are unable to produce some art out of this – why else bother experiencing anything at all? For its own sake? Lol! Leave “experience” to the philistines! We’re all about that WORK WORK WORK WORK WORK

6. Actually, are they so sure that they want to reference politics at all? To ignore it, to just create “art” as if this were any ordinary moment, separate from the political, would be wrong, worse, a lie! They can’t really think of anything else, anyways – the line from the pot to the poet to the president is a short one – but they don’t want anyone to think they’re aestheticizing depravity, atrocity….how are they supposed to proceed? And why can’t they think of anything worth saying in this moment? They can’t even string together a coherent thought! POT POET POT POET POT POET

Sometimes the container of the English language – with its rules, regulations, best practices, and facade of producing truthful, transparent communication – is just not suitable to express the feeling we want to express. Often, “making sense” with words is not what’s needed, nor is it true to the experience one is having, nor is it the reason we go to poems or songs in the first place. When a situation is fundamentally senseless – replete with contradiction and confusion, violence and vindictiveness – is our cognition really humming along unperturbed, producing flowery, syntactically sound sentences? Quite the opposite! We bang our head against the wall and try to figure out how to take even one step forward, how to put even one word on the page. We’re made dumb. This is perhaps the fundamental, first loss that accompanies anger and rage: it takes away ones ability to think clearly, to reason, to speak in full sentences, to be “in control” of one’s self. It is, in a sense, at direct odds with the mandates of “English.” Myles is so beside themself, their thinking is so jumbled, that they can’t even remember how to spell pot, how to distinguish between their profession and their appliance. “Being mad” leads to madness.

With each repetition, we as listeners move closer to understanding and embodying the bewilderment, the confusion, the rage Myles feels. The dyad begins to interrupt Myles’ train of thought at far smaller intervals:

O Canada is great
pot pot poet poet
must everything burn
poet poet pot poet

Before the repetitions, we “know” – or think we know – at least part of the story; through the repetition, we feel like we are a part of the story, right there alongside Myles as they grapple with a triple senselessness: their own, the world’s, and that of language itself as their only medium to interface between the two.

Repetition also allows us to stay alongside Myles long after the reading is over. POT/POET are engraved into my memory in a way nothing else is from that evening, simply because they were stated over and over again. I’ve written elsewhere about how the technologies of speech and song are not the best options for allowing listeners to follow along with detailed, denotative content, which quickly becomes difficult to understand without the aid of visual text. I rarely enjoy hearing a novelist read their work aloud for this reason: the density and velocity of information in long-form writing are often too overwhelming to process without the ability to stop and re-trace one’s steps. Using repetition gives the listener a backdoor in: anchoring the text in a specific phrase allows them to internalize some of what they’re hearing and situate those words in a larger matrix of meaning. When the words linger, their various associations emerge.

Elizabeth Margulis, outlines this idea, with assistance from musicologist Peter Kivy, in her seminal book On Repetition:

“Auditory stimuli are temporally delineated—you can’t stop and look at them for as long as you wish….remembering a passage is impractical while listening to music, as the music typically does not stop to allow this kind of rumination. Musical repetitions, therefore, can be viewed as a kind of re-presenting, a kind of prosthetic memory, whereby past events are put once more before the ears. As Kivy describes it: ‘Musical repeats…are the composer’s way of allowing us, indeed compelling us to linger; to retrace our steps so that we can fix the fleeting sonic pattern; they allow us to grope so that we can grasp” (p. 356). This groping and grasping facilitates learning, in that details missed on the first hearing can be encoded on the next” (22).

While Margulis is talking about repetition in music, the same holds true in spoken word. In music, repetition allows us to “hear the details we missed;” in poetry, repetition often allows us to perceive the meanings we might have missed – to interrogate the various ways words function, as both denotative markers of meaning, clusters of sound, and confounding signifiers of identity, subjectivity, and affiliation.

“Pot” and “Poet,” when repeated as Myles does, are not simply “words.” With each iteration, we “grasp,” and realize they do not just refer back to an object and an occupation. Through repetition, we realize the words come to implicate both process and positionality: they index both the mystifying act of trying to put one’s experiences into words and the maddening circuity of an anger that ceaselessly shifts outwards (towards the dictators, assassins, package thieves) and inwards (toward Myles’ own pettiness, privilege, and even their own poetry!). There are times when we are so overcome with feelings – however crystalline or contradictory they may be – that communication breaks down. We become caught in a ruminative loop, words tumble out, nothing makes sense. The brilliance of Myles’ repetition is that it uses the technology of language to enact precisely this asphyxiating, dizzying cognitive state.

The songwriter Dijon gets after a similar idea in his song “Many Times,” an incantatory cry for help directed towards a lover who has, repeatedly, done him wrong. After directly articulating his situation in the first verse – “there you go again/putting on a show again” – he launches into a pre-chorus that features one of my favorite stanzas in the history of recorded music:

Well, strawberry, raspberry, candlelight
Satellite, television, X-ray vision
What's it gonna take for you to listen?

Much like Myles, Dijon sings from a position of being overcome. As in Myles’ poem, the words here are not just “words” – the way they are sung is just as significant, as both their denotative content and Dijon’s tone work in tandem to index his cognitive state. Listen to the music, watch the music video: he’s bewildered, desperate, exasperated, left with no choice but to breathlessly sound out any possible solution to connect with his lover. Could he literally mean “if I gave you a strawberry, raspberry, and lit a candle, would you listen?” Yes, I suppose he could possibly be ruminating on offering those gifts & acts of service. But what about “satellite, television, x-ray-vision”….? Hmmm….they could watch a show together? He could provide her with medical care? He could try to look beneath her skin, into her soul…..?

No. No. No.

The “meaning” of this entire phrase – its brilliance! – lies precisely in its senselessness: Dijon is willing to say anything to get this person to understand him. This requires abandoning the impulse to use words to craft some coherent message. Coherence and persuasion have not worked! At this point, he’s throwing sounds out into the ether, hoping that one combination, by some alchemical magic, may unlock a sense of compassion in his partner. Why not, given that the usual succession of sounds produced to make meaning in the English language have been ineffective? And what better way to do this than with a self-aware swagger, one that comes from putting these associative verbal clusters into a rousing, pleasurable cadence with satisfying internal rhymes? He’s so sure he’s in the right here that he’s going to still sound good while saying something senseless. What words can you find when you’ve returned to someone one thousand and one times and they still don’t listen?

Subscribe now

Huge congratulations to my dear friend Hudson Freeman on the release of his record Is a Folk Artist, out today on Mendel Records. I’m happy to have contributed drums to a few songs on the album, including “Dean,” the name of the street where we serendipitously met two years ago.

I’m excited for a summer full of concerts, readings, and togetherness. I keep an updated calendar here.

I’ll be hosting roof concerts+readings again throughout the season. Send me a message if you’d like to share a song or poem at one!

The next time I’m playing with my band is in a split bill at The Owl with Chris Morrissey’s group on Friday, July 11. It is always meaningful to see a friend in the audience.

(from the Poetics of Songs course I led at Brooklyn Poets this spring)

Read more

Songwriters and lyricists face a different sort of dilemma. If the filmmaker must negotiate between the visual and the sonic, the songwriter is tasked with negotiating between the connotative and the denotative – and, pointedly, threading the denotative within the parameters of the connotative. On the connotative side, we have melody, harmony, rhythm, form, production, timbre – all of those musical elements that conjure powerful, and often indescribable, feeling-states. They can be intellectualized and denoted, yes – “this is a Phrygian scale; this is a Sonata form” – but they do not necessarily point to some clear meaning outside of the world of music. On the denotative side, we have words and sentences – the “literal meaning” imparted by the words the vocalist is singing. Yes, meaning is culturally contingent; nonetheless, uttering “Hanging your jeans with a clothespin” will direct listeners towards a certain shared set of images, while simply playing a C Major scale will not. And, finally, we also have the “music of the words” – the way the sounds of the words being sung create a logic and (potential) pleasure all of their own. The way a composer balances these poles – the weight they give to any one dimension – will vary depending on the context in which the music will be heard and the intention of the composition.

While there are a wide variety of lyrical stylings that can work, I’ve found myself in the audience at shows asking this question a lot lately: Why are you singing? I don’t mean this rhetorically or flippantly. It’s a genuine inquiry, borne out of a desire to better understand what, exactly, songs – particularly songs with words – are good for.

My musical “education” – though I never understood it in those terms at the time – began in earnest when I was five and began to attend weekly Sunday services with my family at our town’s Episcopal church. I didn’t have a choice in the matter and surely didn’t attend on my own volition; my Mom had to drag my brothers and me there, kicking and screaming, on more than one occasion. While I was no doubt exceedingly bored and restless during many of those services, I developed a fondness for the choir that sang each Sunday. Some of the music was quite beautiful, and looking back on it now, there was an earnestness and selflessness to the choir’s pursuit that is appealing. Many of the songs they performed have stuck with me to this day.

While sitting in the pews – or singing, when I joined the choir in middle school – I certainly never asked this question: why are we singing? What’s going on here? What exactly is the point of the lyrics? What exactly is the point of this?

It was clear: the music was meant to give it up to G**. It was ode, incantation, celebration, homage. It was surrender, atonement, forgiveness. Some of the music was incredibly banal, of course. None of it was especially complex. But there was an utter clarity to the project, on both a song-by-song and larger programmatic level – regardless of one’s take on the epistemology and ontology of the project of religion as a whole. I certainly wasn’t imbibing the rhetoric uncritically (I was likely thinking about when I could go home and watch sports), nor did I necessarily “believe” the words the choir were singing. But I very clearly understood what the point of the song was – what it meant to the composer and, possibly, to those singing it.

Contrast this clarity of intention and understanding with some questions that routinely come up for me at live performances – perhaps best thought of as “sub-questions” to the larger inquiry of “why are you singing?” :

• Does anyone understand what the vocalist is singing – on a word-for-word basis, on the level of phrases, and sweeping out to the largest narrative arc they may be trying to communicate?

• Does anyone care about what the vocalist is singing – i.e., is what they are singing relevant to their enjoyment of the song? Or are we vibing regardless?

• What is this song gaining from having a lyric involved? Does knowing what this lyric is saying take away from our enjoyment of the song? Does it add to our enjoyment?

• What does this setting, image, narrative, or feeling-state gain from being put in a musical form? Could these lyrics stand on their own as a poem? Could another medium work?

These questions reveal two distinct, but related, challenges for the songwriter who cares about the lyrics they are writing. For one, the pitch and timbre of singing – as contrasted with those of speaking – is often not conducive to clearly delivering a set of words to a listener. Of course, the acoustics of many music venues all but ensure that the vocals will be drowned out by the other instruments on stage anyways. But even if the acoustics of a space are pristine and the vocalist’s articulation crystalline, the fact remains that it is often more difficult to process information aurally than visually. In this searching conversation, poet Louise Glück states her feelings plainly:

“Oh, I hate listening. I really do. I don’t hear well when I listen, and I think the poets who write for the spoken word, I think, qualities get emphasized at the expense of what only the page can deliver. On a page, if a word has multiple meanings, you can see them, you feel the whole range of meanings of a particular word will be present to you. In a reading the reader has to decide among the various options that that prism of the word affords. The poet has to decide on one way to do it, emphasizing one particular quality. And the reading is…it can sound beautiful, it can sound more beautiful than it actually is. It masks defects in the poem that the writer should be aware of because the writer could take some perhaps, but it also simplifies the poem. It may dramatize it, but it simplifies it. And that makes me angry. And I don’t want the reader’s personality substituted for the poem. I don’t like that intersession. I want the experience of the poem. And whatever the voice of the poem is, I want to hear it, and I hear better reading.”

Glück’s complaints bring us to the second conundrum of lyric writing: when overwhelmed by the currents of rhythm, harmony, and melody – the connotative – listeners can often not help but relegate lyrics – the denotative – to an ornamental afterthought. The words will be noticed and potentially valued, but they are often rendered ancillary to the main “point” or message of the song. As, I would argue, should be the case, because otherwise the question of this essay might be why are you playing music? We play music because it activates a sense of affective, attitudinal, cognitive, and relational capacities that are not accessible via speech – or other artistic mediums – alone. In contrast to Glück, we live for the dramatization, the expansion, the situatedness of a lyric within a larger sonic ecosystem.

Imagine driving in a car and having this dialogue:

Friend – “hey, have you heard ‘anything’ by Adrienne Lenker?
You – Ah, I’ve been wanting to listen to that! Can you put it on?
Friend – Sure, one second ….*pulls up lyrics.com sheet and begins to speak the lyrics aloud*

We return time and again to our favorite songs, not the lyric sheets of songs, because how the lyrics are incorporated into the musical environment is precisely what makes them so meaningful and feeling-ful. Indeed, part of my skepticism with the project of lyric writing is that I believe songs need not have a “point” at all – oftentimes the pleasure of the sounds of the words and instruments do the most important affective weightlifting all by themselves, and a lyric can even detract from these crucial elements.

Last summer, I expressed this ambivalence in an email to – a songwriter I really admire – in response to his own essay on lyric-writing:

“As someone who also obsesses about lyrics, I wanted to share an idea that has been unnerving + preoccupying me lately: if the vibe is good, the lyrics don't really matter that much. I realize that's a bit of an overshoot, and I don't totally believe it – but I do think there are a lot of songs where I don't really know what's being said, but I find the ‘associative machinery’ that the sound and timing of the lyrics evoke to be quite pleasurable. Of course, that may be difficult to achieve without the track having an intensely produced quality of some sort, which disperses one's attention – i.e. it's easier to hide lyrics amidst a washy synthscape than a chord plucked on a grand piano...for instance, on ML Buch's stunning new album, Suntub, the sounds are so good that I'm immediately drawn in, and in a way, after hearing them, she's already ‘won’ – the lyrics that follow would have to be utterly disastrous to move me out of the trance-like state the sound worlds inspire.”

I stand by that conviction, six months after first articulating it. However, examining Buch’s words alone reveals just how much a great lyric can elevate – whether subconsciously or consciously – the feeling-ful experience of listening to a song. When I was writing to Kahane, I had Buch’s fabulous “Well Bucket” – the quintessence of what I mean by a vibe-first experience, in which I’m immediately swept in by the chorused-out guitar – on repeat. I was intuitively drawn to the last stanza of the song, but I had absolutely no idea what was being sung on a larger, narrative level throughout the text. It wasn’t important to my enjoyment of the song. As I looked up the lyrics, however, I learned Buch penned a piercing, visceral, brilliantly articulated examination of family lineage and intergenerational continuities:

Spit in this well bucket
Of ancestors drool
Look down and look up their noses
Into their eye pools

Wipe off your tears
With this flesh rag
Wrench it in
This flesh bag

Scatter scurf and freckles
From scalp and chin
On stretched stone skin
Existing in

Folds and overlaps
Hollows and gaps
Folds and overlaps (folds and overlaps)
Hollows and gaps (hollows and gaps)

The last stanza is particularly effective and affective for me. Its lines are vocalically consonant and thus pleasurable to the ear – a perfect example of the “music” of poetry that Glück speaks about. “Ohs” predominate, as we hear that vowel four times (folds, over, twice on holl-”ows”) within the four words. The simple rhyme of “laps” and “gaps” adds a brief landing point, as we plant our feet and then fly away again with the “ohs” of folds, overlaps, and hollows. Second, its lines are repeated a number of times, which allows them to take on incantatory quality – to begin to generate their own meaning, potentially separate from the rest of the lyrics in the song. It’s through these repetitions that the listener is “let in” and allowed to (mentally) articulate their own associations with these words – with moments, people, loves of their lives that have come in and out, passed away, moved abroad, etc. These more abstract verbs and images are all the more effective and expansive given that they follow a number of “harder images” – nouns such as “scalp,” “scurf,” and “freckles,” which operate at a more specific, granular level.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Buch enacts the semantic meaning of the stanzas in her performance. She doesn’t simply repeat these lines in the same character/register over and over again – she begins to overlap the lines themselves in the recording as she experiments with delay, panning, placement, register, and vocal doubling. This is certainly where we might find a correlation in poetry – while each lyric is placed one after another in online lyric sheets for this song, a writer could certainly experiment with lineation, spatial placement, and pagination to represent this type of vertiginous dialogue more faithfully on the page. This is a perfect example of a song that doesn’t need a lyric to be meaningful and feelingful, but whose impact is enhanced by the way its lyricist gracefully situates her words, sound, narrative, and performance within the larger sonic dimensions of the song.

I’m preparing to formalize/communalize/institutionalize these inquiries this spring, when I’ll be teaching a five-week seminar at Brooklyn Poets entitled “The Poetics of Songs.” The main goal of the course is to explore the relationship between lyric-writing and poetry – to study examples in each medium and use them as signposts to help us produce new work. In preparation, I want to use this newsletter over the coming few weeks to think through some preliminary ideas on the topic, drawing on my own thoughts and by engaging with lyricists and writers in the community here in New York. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

2. Mid-February, gesturing outwards with my hands during my band’s master class at Smith College, espousing the importance of developing a sense of care within an ensemble, saying that playing/sharing work with one another can be vulnerable because “music is such a feeling-full expanse of interiority” and feeling like I wanted to…

Read more

“Mk.gee is about to drop the album of the year.”

I took note, writing down Mk.gee’s (Michael Gordon) name amongst a host of others they had mentioned throughout our talk. Their statement was delivered more as a hushed revelation than a bold declaration – as if to say, “people don’t know about this guy yet for some reason – you should really check this out before the word gets out.”

When Two Star & the Dream Police dropped just four days later, I quickly understood what the Pete’s crü was talking about. The album – compelling from its first squeak to its final thunk – seemed to casually index the arrival of something singular and urgent. This is due in large part to the kaleidoscopic range of sonorities Gordon coaxes out of each selection, which all somehow coalesce into a sound. Gritty guitar textures, ecstatic yelps, post-industrial-percussive-explosions, anthemic piano chants, lyrics of hunger (“I Want”) and resolution (“Never wanna talk about it”) – they’re all here, often at the same time, and they all somehow work in a way I have never quite heard before. The album feels at once a natural extension of stalwart pop icons from the 80s (Sting, Whitney, Debarge) and entirely of of the moment in which it was released.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mk.gee quickly began to take on the role of “that-pop-adjacent-musician-who-so-many-people-in-the-NY-jazz-adjacent-senes-are-talking-about” – I kept hearing his name mentioned by people I admire. Amongst other things, I think folks were thrilled that a genuinely fabulous musician was getting some modicum of mainstream visibility – a rarity in a Pop world that is dominated by instrument-less front-people. Finally, there seemed to be a guitar hero of sorts, and everyone was trying to figure out what alchemical combination he and his band were sowing together in the studio and on the stage.

When he announced a September show at Terminal 5, I immediately bought tickets, and continued to listen to his music in the intervening months. 

Then, in early September, the New York Times released an extensive profile of Gordon (I’m gifting the article), and he said something midway that really made my head spin – like in a “damn this guy’s kind of a conceited prick and I might sell my tickets to the show” type of way –

“I made the best record ever,” Gordon said, at first as if it were slightly naughty to admit his ambition. But then he said it again. And again.”

I’m doing my best to remember exactly what went through my head when I read this for the first time. I’m pretty sure all of these thoughts came up, in varying degrees of order and intensity – 

“Man that’s so f***** up. Have you even heard of Bach?” [yes I know Bach didn’t “make” an album]

“How are you really going to go out into the world and look at your friends – you know your talented friends like Dijon and John Keek, who have made great albums themselves – in the eye after saying that? How are you gonna get on the ten-hour-long-bus-ride with them? Isn’t some degree of self-effacement and deprecation necessary to maintain amicable social relations?”

“Ok, ok even Bach aside, what about Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Chaka Khan, Prince, Miles Davis, etc. etc….are you really just about to anoint your album above all of their work?”

Gordon’s comments, repeated and celebrated, reeking of ignorance and arrogance, ignited something within me. I was so off-put that I posted that I was selling my tickets to the performance. 

While I was stewing, I found myself listening to a This Jungian Life episode where analysts Lisa Marchiano, Joseph Lee, and Deborah Stewart discuss the concept of “The Shadow.” In Jungian analysis, the “shadow” refers to the repressed parts of one's psyche – those character traits and ways of acting that we have been taught to shun. At 10:35, Marchinao says,

“In my family, there was a real value [placed on] modesty. One thing that was really frowned on was being boastful, or attention-seeking – this ended up being a shadow characteristic for me to the point where…[I began] to project it out onto other people, and really began to hate it. We get really turned off when we see someone living out our shadow. I’ve always felt really irritated by women claiming center stage…it's like nails on a chalkboard.”

I’m often skeptical of talk therapy – the way it can easily slip into rumination and intellectualization instead of embodied healing and transformation, and its commitment to individualized, apolitical solutions that don’t speak to structural conditions – but I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so immediately seen as I did when I heard these words emerge in succession from Marchiano’s mouth. It dawned on me: was I just upset at Gordon because he was articulating a way of relating to music I aspire to have, but was repeatedly taught to avoid? If so, where did that come from? And if it came from somewhere, was Gordon’s position actually “wrong” – or was it just wrong to me?

Unlike Marchiano, I believe this shadow emerged – if only obliquely – through my study of music in school instead of through my family. I studied music in three different institutions and had some truly fabulous teachers and meaningful experiences. But I also have come to believe that the very process of institutionalization may be antithetical to the development of artistry – or, at the very least, that the development of artistry is something that can only take place outside of the claustrophobic confines of conservatory campuses. I don’t subscribe to an aesthetic binary between “classical” and “pop,” but I do believe they may be useful terms for thinking through different ways musicians relate to their work. Here’s what comes up for me when I think of each –

Classical – (this is the defensive sensibility that jumped into action when I heard Gordon’s comments):

My place in the vast continuum of “Art” is infinitesimally small. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants before me. I will strive every day to live up to their example. I may never reach it. What my teachers say I must learn is, in fact, what I must learn to be great. Becoming “great” requires following a set of discrete steps and a defined path that has been laid out before me. If I disregard – or cannot execute – what my teachers tell me I must learn, I am not a great artist. My teachers know what is best for me and what the world needs to hear from me. Reaching people would be nice, but if they don’t come they probably don’t get it, and I don’t have time to try to reach them. My music is OK, but it is nothing compared with the music of my heroes, and my heroes’ heroes, not to mention my heroes’ heroes’ heroes….

Pop –

I have something unique and indispensable to offer that may be unlike anything the world has heard before. The world needs my music. I deserve and demand to be heard and celebrated. I am taking the influences from my heroes and transforming them into something that is uniquely my own.  When I make something great, people will come to hear it. I love the music I make – in fact, the music I make is my favorite music in the world. 

Now, I recognize these are crude generalizations, and no musician nor institution fits perfectly into one or the other. Something is certainly lost when one capitulates completely to either side – the classical position I sketched suggests a Juilliard-AI-Automaton-with-no-agency; the “Pop,” a Rick-Rubinfied-Artist’s-Way-Junkie who is getting a little too high on their own supply and may lack fundamental skills of self-awareness.

Regardless, if I had to choose, I think most conservatories are more invested in the “classical” mode of operation. This is not inherently bad; clearly, this type of pressure-cooker, deferential environment produces lots of great instrumentalists. Many educators have told me that they are fearful of – and in some case, grappling with – the lowering of academic standards, the inflation of grades, the “it’s-all-good-man” approach, the “I’m an artist” in one breath with the “I don’t know what a minor iv chord is” in another, in which students are taught nothing and deposited into a cutthroat ecosystem with no discernible skills. Gordon certainly has an immense amount of “craft” in his playing – it’s why there are thousands of videos of people online trying to figure out how exactly he is getting that sound on “Are You Looking Up?”   

But he also, crucially, has something of that other sensibility – and I do worry that school, with its endless canons and criticisms, knocks that out of many students. Is it any wonder that Mk.Gee dropped out of USC? Could he have really cultivated the mindset articulated in the NYT article while in Jazz Big Band 1 ™? Could he really have produced Two Star and the Dream Police while worrying about what all of his professors thought about what music should be?

Sadly, it seems many people leave their conservatory education with such a rattled sense of who they are and what their value is that they never get the chance to consider what it is they – not their teachers, the curriculum, the exam, the jury, the recital – want to do in the first place, which is really all that matters when you leave the school behind. I’m drawing on an admittedly limited sample pool, but: I know absolutely no one who went to music school and said “oh yeah, that was a universally positive experience from which I emerged entirely unscathed and with an abiding love for + belief in the work I am putting out into the world.” Is it any surprise? You go to this fortified palace – at the tender age of 18, when you’re just beginning to develop an individuated sense of self in the world – where an immense amount of talent is concentrated into a few hallways + recital halls, you’re assigned piece after piece, which you perform mostly for your accomplished musician peers, and you’re continually asked to measure up to the expectations of a renowned group of teachers, whose feedback can take on the quality not of an offering but of Gospel – because, after all, you’re relying on them for grades, opportunities, a sense of being “OK” in the field and in the world.

Accordingly, I know many people who graduated from conservatory only to find themselves saying “yeah that really messed me up, I have to remember why I love music” or “eh…I did that school thing and now I don’t play jazz at all” or “I met some great friends but damn my private teacher said this or that f***** up thing and I still haven’t really recovered” or “the classes made me question why I was even bothering in the first place.” I know absolutely no one who has said something to the effect of: “I just dropped the greatest album ever.” Conversely, most people I know seem to have left school and said: “I really have to figure out what it is I want to do – and why – in the first place.”

Fortunately, there are some teachers who are committed to pushing back on this type of rhetoric. It’s one of the reasons I’ll be forever appreciative of bassist Ben Street, who I worked with a bit during my master’s program at Berklee. Ben is a raw vegan given (if memory serves) to idiosyncratic shoe choices and somewhat iconoclastic beliefs, and I always found his transparent, anti-BS positions to be a welcome, hilarious addition to the school environment, which can so often be filled with posturing and pleasantries. 

During one master class during my program, an ensemble got up on stage to play, and launched into the usual preparatory discussion: 

Drummer – “What tune do you all want to play?”

Saxophonist – “I don’t know….”

Guitarist – “Yeah, not sure….I don’t know, any song is good.”

Street jumped into action: “It’s never ‘any song’!” he ranted. “It’s always the same five songs…Stella, It Could Happen To You, Alone Together….is there any song you all actually love? Is there anything you all actually want to play? You know, you could organize your entire lives such that you never need to play a jazz standard again.”

It’s impossible to overstate what a radical – yet beautifully honest – statement this was. After all, he was delivering it in a jazz studies program!  I loved it because it centered – and called out! – the students' desires. He wasn’t saying: “how awful you don’t know more tunes,” or “holy s*** you’ll never be a great musician if you don’t learn these tunes” or “if you don’t learn more tunes I will fail you in this course” or “this great musician knew this song, how can you ever expect to be great like Her if you don’t know it too?!?” He was asking – “what TF do you ACTUALLY want to do in this life?” It wasn’t about the class. It wasn’t about the curriculum. It was about the desire that was directing every moment of these students’ lives – that is, their entire lives, of which ultimately this class, this course, this day was an infinitesimally small part. Street was giving these students permission – because apparently no one had before – to really make what they wanted to make. Yes, Ben Street, given his own aesthetic inclinations, probably would have preferred that they knew more tunes. But what he ultimately cared about was what they loved – because following that, not what he told them to learn – was probably going to yield the most meaningful results long after they left the classroom setting.

Music is medicinal, but it’s not medicine. We don’t want to enter the ER with a rogue doctor who “went their own way” – we need standardized medical school curriculums that prepare students for the responsibilities of the positions they will step into. But what, exactly, is the goal of music school? Is it merely to produce students of competence and craftsmanship? And if so, what is being lost – who is being lost – when schools focus a preponderance of their efforts on the “classical” mode of operation at the expense of the “pop?” I would hope we want to live in a world in which there are a proliferation of artists chasing something that is their own – that they love. And there can be no doubt: Mk.gee loves what he makes. 

I saw this firsthand. After re-assessing Gordon’s interview in this context, I decided to go to the Terminal 5 concert. It was one of the best shows I have ever seen. The sound – guitars, drum samples, and Gordon’s shimmering voice – was somehow better than that on the recording. The place was packed; 3,000 people were singing along to every word of his songs. It was such a novel experience that I confess I had a brief moment of  “what is happening here?” after entering the room – most of the concerts I go to have anywhere from 5-75 people at them, with some outliers in the ~300 people range. I actually can’t remember the last show I went to that had so many people at it. I’m sad to say I may have even forgotten that music can have that effect on people – can, as Jamey Haddad would say, “change the color of the room” and bring people together in catharsis and communion, a sort of secularized church. Standing there, singing along with thousands of other random people, had a bit of the character of a psychedelic experience, in both senses – it engendered feelings of awe, expansiveness, connectivity, wonder, and is a bit hard to talk about/cringe to re-watch afterwards – you really have to be there in the flesh to experience its power.  

Midway through the set, Mk.gee looked up and said, with a tone of bewildered appreciation – “this is crazy!” And he’s right – it was crazy – here were thousands of people hanging on every word of this avant-pop-guitarist who was somewhat of a fringe figure until just a few months ago. The performance, coupled with my This-Jugnian-Life intervention, caused me to do a complete 180 on my interpretation of his comments in the NYT article: what I before interpreted as Ego, I now interpret as righteous celebration of and investment in the work he is making; what I interpreted before as hubristic pride, of putting his album above those of other artists, I now interpret as playful, jovial competitiveness – jostling those around him (like his sparring partner, Dijon) to create their own best work, much like great athletes who train together; what I interpreted as off-putting, arrogant, I now interpret as attractive, confident, and in fact an attitude that is perhaps useful to create something truly fabulous – as was clear looking around at the thousands of adoring fans, we like to see people confidently playing something they love. 

There was a moment towards the end of the set where Mk.gee played his song “DMN.” Its buoyant, springy beat, incantatory, I’m-calling-you-out lyricism, and celebratory piano cadence makes it ripe to incite a joyous romp in the audience. People loved it, but it was too short – the track, at just 1:58, doesn’t let the good feeling last long. Then the iconic beginning moment – where the song “clicks” into place – rang out again. People lost it. Shouts and screams rang out, arms flared, heads turned, bodies synchronized. But now that Mk.gee had given it to the audience a second time, the crowd became insatiable. When it ended, people wanted more, pleaded in unison at the top of their lungs: “One more time. One more time.” Then, agian, the click. People went, for lack of a better word, ga-ga. Pre-verbal, ecstatic joy. Mk.Gee proceeded to play the song once more after that, and again as an encore. It was such a powerful gesture, in that it communalized what is usually a solitary listening practice, that of playing a song you love over and over again. We do this all the time at home, in the car, on the road. If you really love the music you make and have the opportunity to share it with others, why not play it, over and over and over again?

(DMN #1….)

If you made it this far, thank you. I have two more shows with my music this year:

This Wednesday, November 20, at Three’s Brewing (333 Douglass Street), 8pm

Friday, December 6 at a house show in Crown Heights, 8pm – message me for the address

I have a new video out, recorded at my album release show at Public Records this May. This song was inspired by Victoria Chang’s collection of poems, Obit. Claire, Yvonne, and Paul play so beautifully on this –

Wishing you a lovely week ahead,

Chase

Perhaps not surprisingly, before the scene cut away, I caught myself thinking: “I want that.”

But what was it, exactly, that I wanted? No doubt, it was the emotional tranquility, material stability, and intrapersonal self-assuredness that I was projecting onto the scene, which really had nothing at all to do with what was actually going on in the film at that moment. It is hardly a moment of unencumbered quietude: Lacy is home early from summer camp, friendless and filled with suicidal ideation + existential distress; Wayne (the boyfriend) is subdued, but elsewhere shows himself to be prone to eccentric and violent outbursts; and Janet (Lacy’s Mom) is caught between the obligations of motherhood and her own emergent romantic impulses. The scene is outwardly beautiful, but masks a complicated emotional matrix that thrums throughout the film. 

This moment – of being completely lost in thought, entirely unable to view a simple scene without the frame of my own desires, insecurities, and whims intruding – has stayed with me since then. I find myself continually confronted with this question: am I actually observing anything at all? Or am I constantly lost in, or succumbing to, whatever thought loop, whatever mode of cognitive automaticity, most immediately comes online?

These questions struck me with a redoubled sense of urgency after I finished Rachel Cusk’s brilliant Outline earlier this summer. Perspectivism and narratorial agency are amongst the book's primary themes, and they are especially salient when Faye, the narrator, teaches a writing workshop for adults. She assigns a simple task to her students: to share something they observed on the way to the classroom. As they begin to converse, it quickly becomes clear that no one will be able to give a straightforward answer  – their observations (or lack thereof) about their environments are gateways to lengthy meditations, both petty and profound, about their own personal histories, politics, and relationships. Faye recalls the contribution of one student, who sums up the proceedings well: 

“It had been interesting for her to realize how little she noticed of the objective world. Her consciousness, at this point – she was forty-three years old – was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge, and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s – gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathizing, worrying – that she was frightened most of the boundaries separating these numerous type of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was non longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real.” (154)

Surely there’s an evolutionary bias towards filtering experience through our own subjectivity: we focus on what is most important for us to survive, reproduce, and actualize. It’s also now cliché to cite the postmodern theorists who shattered paradigms of epistemic objectivity; we know our cultural conditioning and unique histories influence our interpretations of the world around us. All that aside, Faye’s assignment lingers, and I find myself trying to complete simple tasks: Can I observe the brand of a passerby’s shoes while I am biking to my practice studio? Can I vividly remember the color of a single shirt I passed while running? Can I note the emotional tenor of a customer beside me in a store? Can I index what shade of light is emanating from a lamp in a club?

Crucially: can I hear the music – or will I just hear my thoughts about the music?

Close observation seems to be one way out of the recursive, self-referential doom-loop that colors so much of waking life. But

it’s a rather uninspiring way to live – in the words of novelist John Williams, it positions life as something to be “understood and analyzed” rather than “experienced.” It fixes you as a disinterested third-party, casually at a distance from everything you encounter.

Poet Madeleine Cravens, in her collection Pleasure Principle, offers another way out:

It’s a love poem, but its poignancy lies in the way it indexes, in just seven lines, the horror and fear that accompany the process of being changed by someone. It uses the language of war – annihilation, terror, denial –  perhaps because falling in love with someone is predicated on an abiding sense of loss. The narrator enters the relationship cooly – in control of her wants, her future, her destiny – but completely loses it – loses herself! – throughout the encounter with her partner. The future she thought she wanted is not so much changed as eviscerated: the partner now figures as an inextricable part of the entire projected web of the narrator’s beyond. Admitting this, acknowledging this desire, is vulnerable precisely because it might not be realized. But does the speaker have a choice? She wasn’t moved or persuaded – she was annihilated – and nothing makes sense outside of the immediacy of that feeling. In fact, whatever she felt before was “nothing” in comparison. Perhaps the highest compliment we can pay anyone – lover, friend, musician, partner – is to walk away from them and catch ourselves saying:

I am not the I I thought I was.

I’m fortunate to have upcoming performances with many musicians I admire – Hudson Freeman, Jan Esbra, Anjoli Simone, Isabella Ashton, and Matei Predescu. I try to keep an up-to-date calendar here. If you’re in NYC, I want to invite you to The Owl (497 Rogers Avenue) this Friday, September 13, and Three’s Brewing (333 Douglass Street) on Wednesday, October 2, where I’ll be performing original music. I’m excited to include vocal harmonies on my music for the first time on these gigs. I’ve been struck with such clarity while sitting in the audience at various gigs this year: that there is simply no feeling more powerful (for me) than the one that comes from hearing multiple people singing together. If you’ve read this far, enjoy this short voice memo of the amazing pianist/vocalist Alejandra Sofia trying out some ideas on my song “Tense,” which we’ll perform this Friday. Hope to see you there.

See you soon,
Chase

Subscribe now

(Coney Island in September)