What inspired this last release?
In one way or another, it seems like all of us have had some degree of a hard time in recent years. Not only am I no exception, but these have probably been the hardest years for me mentally. I am not old but I am not young. I’ve learned the world can change in an instant, and my anxiety loves to exacerbate that notion by keeping me in a state of impending doom and paranoia. All that is to say, I finally started seeing a therapist after years of self managing my anxiety and panic tendencies. Sidenote: I grew up in a musical home, played in bands from childhood through adulthood, but in the hustle and bustle of our tragic time, had let myself become curiously unproductive, which led to a decrease in motivation, and like most things when it comes to depression, you end up at the bottom of a well and don’t even realize when or how it happened. My therapist noticed how often I would talk about my music and the years I spent touring. She immediately knew to focus on the fact that I have this deeply visceral connection to making music, yet I had not been creating anything at all coincidentally throughout the time I had been at my lowest. It was such an obvious and seemingly simple detail to point out, but it blew through me like a storm wind. Why hadn’t I been creating? Music is quite literally my life’s blood and I had completely abandoned my relationship with it, without even realizing it. This propelled me into what has now become my most productive and motivated period, and the first pursuit I put in motion was Hospital Gown. One thread that seems to run through my body of work from as far back as I can remember, is my penchant for collaboration. This is the reason for the long list of features on this album. It is more or less my calling card- curating those that conjure my love for music to begin with, in order to make new music alongside them. I love music so much I want to be inside of it. I want to be a part of the fabric that has surrounded me and been such a tremendous source of inspiration and comfort. The way I do that is by seeking out those that inspire me and attempt to work with them. Musicians like Sam and Kitty Ray from Teen Suicide, Petal Supply, Kreayshawn, Cindytalk, Fleming from Modern Color, the list goes on and on.
What inspires your aesthetics?
I am greatly motivated by exploring my own dichotomous existence. Exploring what it means to be a man, whilst having no traditionally manly interests. Pushing back on heteronormative stereotypes and shining a light on the absurd and the human idiosyncrasies that expose us for who we really are: flawed creatures. Some choose to embrace the flaws. Others pretend they don’t exist. The latter are the ones who think their shit doesn’t stink and call the HOA when you have a single weed on your lawn, because it somehow disrupts the lack of power they feel in their own lives. So take insecurity, pushing back on gender norms, and my own struggles to figure out where I fit in the masculine/feminine dichotomy, and you get the fetish mask that I use as the shell for performance and art. I also love utilizing cellophane in photoshoots. That is something I have been doing for years, and will continue to explore.
Any funny anecdotes from the time you were recording or writing this?
One interesting fact is the album was essentially recorded backwards. Most of the time one lays down the music first then records vocals over that. I wrote the lyrics and melodies first, recorded them to a click track so they would stay in time, and then sent those vocals down the path of collaborators who would mold and shape the direction. It is interesting to see how it took shape. The songs were essentially built in skeletal form when I reached out to Knife Girl, a brilliant producer from Finland, simply to see if she would be interested in adding some vocals to a song. She wrote back and said I should send the music over, and suggested that maybe she would be able to add more than some vocals. Five months later the songs that were once a skeleton sounding one way, had taken a completely different shape under her direction. It was an astounding transformation, and I learned a long time ago to trust the process…so while the songs ended up sounding entirely different than they did at the beginning of the process, the level that she helped take the songs was so undeniably excellent, that there was no choice but to embrace where the process took the art. Another anecdote was one of my collaborators was impossible to get in contact with, but I am not one to give up, so I tried signing up for OnlyFans in order to reach them, and it worked. An awkward but out-of-the-box solution to my problem.
What’s your favorite thing to do besides music?
My absolute favorite thing besides music is to go to the movies by myself. The stresses of everyday life can often compound to unmanageable levels, and there is something incredibly relaxing about sitting in an empty theater and watching a great film. I love film and feel as though the artform is so incredibly adjacent to music and musical composition and production. I just completed filming, directing, editing, and coloring my next music video, a first for me. I had a lot of fun doing it and am very proud of how it turned out.
What’s a record or artist that shaped your creativity?
When you are around something long enough, it starts to rub off on you and often penetrate your mind even if it is something that under normal circumstances you wouldn’t find yourself delving into. I have two daughters and during their earliest, formative years, I would have Taylor Swift’s “Red” album on constant rotation in the car. I listened to it so much that it became the gateway into female pop artists that I have been immersed in ever since. What is funny is around the time this happened, I had been deep into obscure black metal and noise music. So maybe this was also a refreshing break from the constant barrage of bleak and melancholy noise. After “Red” broke the seal, the first really big album to change me was Ellie Goulding’s “Delirium” which I absolutely wore out listening nonstop. The next album after that to just blow my mind was Charli XCX’s “Pop 2”, then Kim Petras’s “Clarity” and Tommy Genesis’s self titled album. It has really been a steady diet of that ever since. Sometimes I will take a break and get my aggression fix listening to classic screamo bands like Funeral Diner and Page NinetyNine, both of whom are represented in the features of the Hospital Gown album. I think some might assume I am diving head first into the hyperpop trend, but they’ve clearly not listened to the album. The sound of this album is nothing like I’ve ever heard in terms of a clear cut genre, and quite honestly most hyperpop is complete rubbish.
Who is an artist or band you look up to today?
Sam and Kitty Ray from Teen Suicide have my complete respect. Through this process of collaboration, I have been able to see alot about alot of people. I have experienced great communication, shitty communication, passive aggressive behavior, narcissism from artists that take themselves and their microscopic scene way too seriously. But Sam and Kitty are real ones. First, they are incredible musicians. Second, they’ve experienced getting fucked over and they’ve learned from it. Third, they don’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks. Fourth, they enthusiastically went in on this collaboration and refused any sort of commission (I typically try to compensate those I work with, because being an artist who perpetually gets nothing for what they create is one of the great imbalances in our society). Last time I was in Philly we met up and walked their dogs around the neighborhood. They’re real, humble, focused, and kind. That’s what I strive to be. It was reassuring to see that glimpse of kindness, because it seems like the world is entirely less and less kind.
What excites you the most about what you do?
This one is bittersweet. I create for myself. But when I create something, I am proud of it and want to show anyone that might care. So it excites me to create and then put it out there, hoping that my art can somehow connect with people in the way that music has provided such respite and inspiration for me. The problem is, we’ve become such a machine that rapidly consumes art and spits it out to move onto the next thing, that it has become painful to share. A great recent example of this would be my experience with Reddit. I don’t use it. It adds no value to my life, so I have never had the interest nor the need. As an outsider, my perception of Reddit is that it is a cluster of communities that gather to talk about shared interests on the corresponding subreddit pages. When I first finished the Hospital Gown album and was ready to share it with people, I thought since it was a new project, an easy way to share it might be to find a community on Reddit that would appreciate it. So I found a subreddit page that was appropriately adjacent to what I was wanting to share. But as you probably know, if you are new to Reddit and don’t have Reddit Karma built up, you might as well be Warner Brothers or Sony trying to peddle your release to these online communities, and as such, the communities have become very bitter and resentful towards anyone new that presents something new. The irony here is that they are communities built on shared interests, yet you are not allowed to share a completely appropriate interest with the community if you are an outsider. So subreddit pages become closed feedback loops for people to masturbate each other in. So I posted in one and got eaten alive by a gatekeeper unwilling to realize that the post was completely relevant. All of this is to say what excites me is to create and put the art into the world. But the world is a snake eating its own tail most of the time, so it is becoming more and more difficult to expose people to something entirely new.
