Observing yourself through music: interview with Matt Christensen

Let’s start with a little background. You mentioned in another interview that you work in mental health. Could you expand a bit on what kind of work it is and how long you’ve been doing it?

I’ve been working in mental health for probably close to 25 years. I didn’t go to college, so I worked in the trades for 10 years. I got into this line of work because I had a friend who was leaving a position, he recommended me, and I got a really basic entry-level position. I was told that I had a talent for it, but I was just attracted to it because I have my own issues. At that time I took the job because I had to work, and I thought that it was probably the worst thing I could be doing, but it turned out to be the best. I’ve learned a lot of things about the mind, and the illnesses of the mind, and it got me through some rough times. So, then I just stuck around and moved to different positions. I was doing case management in some pretty rough areas for a long time, then I got into employment services, and then, you know, because I got older and I needed more money, I got into management, which I never wanted to do again, ha-ha. I left that, and now I’m basically a state-paid consultant. I work with agencies that are free of charge and do evidence-based practice in employment services for people with severe mental illnesses.

So, by consulting you don’t mean therapy, right?

Right. When I was doing direct service, you know, working with people one on one, it’s quite a bit different from community-based therapy. You are working with people who are really on the edge of hospitalization or incarceration, a lot of drug abuse, some not guilty by reason of insanity cases. So, it’s pretty intense work, and when I told people what I did for a living, they were like: “Oh my God, that must be really stressful”. And it wasn’t. I’ve never really had a bad day that I could attribute to the clients, it’s always just bureaucracy or something else unrelated to the people. You know, I come from a pretty dysfunctional family. Drug addiction, suicide, mental illness, poverty… I think that working with people who are also experiencing these things was really therapeutic for me.

I assume it also inspires your creative work in some way.

Oh, yeah. It becomes kind of hard to tell the difference. I tend to overthink things, I don’t know if it’s because I’m an artist or because I have anxiety and depression, these probably feed into each other, but poverty and city life are a big part of my music, for sure.

This is actually the next thing I was going to ask you about. You have previously cited poverty as one of the main creative influences, and I know that poverty rate in Chicago is pretty high, like, 20% or something, and I was wondering how you interact with poverty in your daily experience and what kind of inspiration it brings you.

That’s a good question. I think there’s something grounding about poverty. What most people would consider a nuanced position on a variety of subjects becomes a lot more concrete and practical for people that are living outside of luxury, if that makes sense. Like, race is a big deal in the states right now, but I think a lot of people who are victims of oppression have a lot more practical attitude about it versus what a lot of people from white middle-class background would do, you know, intellectualizing it, trying to “educate the masses”, whereas a lot of people who are living on the edge of society have a more simple and effective solution for things, they’re like: “We just want equity”. Another example, I think, I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it yesterday, is rape. I just don’t think people should get raped.

I agree with you, ha-ha.

Some people are more affected by it than others, but when we get into a conversation about treating the issue differently for men versus women, women, of course, are much more affected, but I just think everyone shouldn’t be raped. So, long story short, to circle back to poverty, people who are living basically hand to mouth have a quicker snapshot of the truth of things then people from other backgrounds who tend to, again, intellectualize it, because they have a luxury of being able to intellectualize. Suffering is abstract when you see it from a distance, you know what I mean? Whereas people who are generally affected by it often see it more clearly for what it is. There, I think I did a pretty good job.

I’m attracted to that visceral response, and it’s probably more unique to the city experience. I was just talking to my little brother, right before this call, and he went down to Tennessee to work on someone’s farm or something like that. They’re somewhat poor, you know, white, Trump supporters, I just won’t have much exposure to that here, thank God.

I guess I agree. Like, the right, they pretty much despise poor people and have that sort of bootstrapping ideology, while people on the left, although they do show a lot of empathy towards poor people, they tend to present the experience of poor people in this framework of victimization. And while this sentiment comes from a good place in one’s heart, it also does not present their experience exhaustively. I guess, the life of poor people, while undoubtedly very tough, is not just oppression and suffering, it’s more nuanced, multifaceted, and varies from individual to individual.

Yeah, there’s something unintentionally condescending about it. It infantilizes marginalized groups. It’s coming from a good place, there’s compassion there, but it’s still a kind of us and them dynamic. I have a lot of thoughts as to where that comes from with people. Obviously, I believe that there are certain things that you’re born with that affect your mental state and the way you develop, but for the most part people are largely the product of their context. When I talk to other people who identify as liberal (I mostly associate with people who identify as liberal), and they talk about, like, Southern areas and more racist areas, and I’m like: “Why do you think it’s geographically grouped? Don’t you think there’s something cultural there that influences their worldview? It would be really strange if there’s like a genetic marker for racism that happened to be grouped in Arkansas”. People are shaped by their context. Some of the studies about racism and, more generally, tribalism, show that the earlier a child is introduced to different groups, the likelihood that they’re going to develop prejudiced attitudes drops off significantly. That was definitely true for my experience, I went to a super diverse grade school, and the area I grew up in (the same I live in right now) is very racially and economically diverse. There’s a lot of affordable housing that attracted every wave of refugee immigrants, so when I was growing up we had a lot of Pakistani people, Yugoslavia was starting to get fragmented and weird, a lot of Eastern European immigrants. My grade school was, you know, a League of Nations. We were friends with all of them. It was a really good experience that I hadn’t understood the value of until, probably, the last five or six years. So, I’m thankful for that. I feel I’ve kind of lucked out.

You’ve also spoken of the city itself as a source of inspiration, and I assume you have mixed feelings about Chicago. How does the city reflect in your music?

I was talking to some friends about it when we were camping last week, and a couple of these people were from the suburbs surrounding the city, and we also had a neighborhood get-together when a couple was moving back to North Dakota. As I’m getting older, I find that people my age are starting to move back to wherever they came from, especially if they have kids. I don’t know why they are doing it, maybe because they want to raise their kids in the same environment they had. And, so, there are things that I’m aware of missing out as a kid. I wasn’t exposed to much nature, we didn’t have a small community where everyone knew each other. There was crime. You know, there’s hypervigilance to living in a city. So, I missed out on some things, it would have been nice to have a little bit more of a peaceful, dreamy childhood, especially being a guy. I have a daughter, she’s fifteen, and just out of paranoia we don’t let her self-transport that much in the city, but by the time I was her age I had been all over the place. When I moved out at seventeen, I started playing music and meeting more artists, so I’ve met all kinds of people from a pretty early age, and then really got thrust into it when I graduated from high school. I don’t think that I would have gotten it in a rural area, or even a smaller city. I mean, you meet so many different types of people, it shaped and re-shaped my perception of the world and people in general. Also, there’s a large gay community. There are a lot of people today identifying as nonbinary and whatever, and I met people like that a long time ago, and I had already had friends like that when it became a national issue. So, I’m thankful for that, I’m thankful for growing up in a city. You kind of have no hope but try and relate to people and see the universal qualities that we share. It’s easier to see the commonalities, at least for me, because the differences had sort of been ironed out. I hope that makes sense.

I also have a thing for, hmm, not slums, but rather urban decay. There’s a little bit here, a bigger deal when I was a child, because Chicago had not been that much of a tourist attraction. I went downtown a couple of months ago, and there’s A LOT of tourists. When I was a kid it looked very much like the 70’s, and it stayed like that for a while. There were plenty of storefronts and architecture from the 20’s and before that, you can still see some of it today. I draw from that quite a bit, too. It’s kind of a pretty city, I think. In a lot of areas it’s very green. Green comes up a lot in the stuff I do. Lots of covers I do are green, there’s a lot of mentions of green, it’s in the name of the last album…

I was born and raised in a small town, and my family moved to Moscow when I was twelve. That was a seminal point in my life, because I began to miss the town a lot and started to “mythologize” it, in a way. And later, as I grew into my late teens, and, to some extent, to this day, it has sort of blended into my identity. But, I guess, it’s different when you identify like that with a big metropolitan city, especially in America, because your cities are very big and hugely diverse in terms of landscapes, environments and communities.

Yeah, there’s some big cities here, New York, Chicago, LA, and I’ve always thought that these places have identities, there’s a vibe to them. But they are so goddamn big! You can reinvent yourself a million times, and, musically, you get spoiled too because there’s something going on every night of the week in multiple places (not right now, of course, but anyway). You’re not going to be into all this stuff, but, you know, other places just aren’t like that. The variety of people you can meet, the variety of food you can access, and it becomes kind of hard for me to come up with a way of describing it. You meet someone who has just moved here, and they may expose you to something you’ve never seen, although you were born and raised here, you know?

Right, you constantly reshape yourself through that exposure. Speaking of which, your lyrics have that stream-of-consciousness manner, which you’ve pointed out yourself. First, I was wondering if singing requires any particular mental state.

Yeah, it’s a good question. I do have a harder time doing it live, in front of other people. I think I’ve gotten better at it, but I definitely work better right here, like, in that chair I’m sitting in, I’ve been working here for the past year, here’s my recording environment, my guitar’s over there, the microphone I’m speaking through is my vocal mic, my amp is right to my left, my pedals are close. I have everything set up all the time. Any time I get an urge, I can turn my amp on and start coming up with something. It’s like a muscle, the more I use it, the more I’m able to pull it out and flex it when I need to. That sounded kind of gross, ha-ha.

No, it’s fine!

If I’m playing a show (it’s been a while), a couple of beers usually helps. That’s pretty much a requirement, just to take a little bit of that muscle tension out, just to slow the brain down a little bit. I do music all the time, I play a lot, I don’t think I’m ever too far from that state that I need to be in.

Another pointy feature is that many, if not most of your songs, deal with topics that are heavy and sorrowful, you bring up a lot of painful stuff in your lyrics. Yet, in all the songs I’ve heard you retain that melancholic, reflexively detached tone of voice. I guess, it conveys something about that mental state.

I think, not to get too deep into it, but I’ve never, even as a kid, believed in the popular concept of free will, like in the Abrahamic religions. I’ve never believed that we had full agency over ourselves, it’s inarguable from the way I see it. Some people are even born with impairments that limit their agency. Not everyone can do anything. I was talking to someone about it recently, or it’s just like a theme that I’ve been thinking about more lately - there are certain ways to achieve or work towards ego-death, for lack of a better way to put it. I think that therapy gives you a little bit of a vantage point where you’re able to step back for a little bit and observe your thoughts happening, good and bad. So, I think, a lot of the stuff I write about, it’s just that I have a depressed mind, these are the thoughts that occur naturally, but what has helped me is that I remind myself that I’m not those thoughts, and I’m not the happy thoughts either. You can’t step outside of it entirely, of course, but you can see a little bit of it, and that’s usually where I’m writing from. Watching my own thoughts, and then, by extrapolation, the rest of the world. I was talking to my daughter about it. She’s fifteen, I don’t know if she thinks like I do, but she has her own mood disorders. I believe that good and bad is happening all the time, and what you consider the way things are is largely what you’re focusing on at the time, some people are just predisposed to focus on one more than the other. I probably focus on the negative more, but I’m aware of it, and in that I get some comfort, if that makes sense.

It does, totally. You know, this topic has become rather mainstream, but what you just told me sort of begs the question: would you compare your “lyrical mindset”, if you will, to meditation?

Ha-ha, yeah, it’s become mainstream. Mindfulness still has so much baggage associated with Buddhism, not that it’s a bad thing. It’s like an alpha-state. I think that artists are trying to get into that state a lot, to be present in the activity of creating art, that is a form of meditation. I think a lot of things are. Driving for me can sometimes be a form of meditation. But I did get into proper meditation for a while, and for me it’s different, I got kind of good at it when I was following a routine, I was doing it three times a day, and, of course, I felt better, and then you feel better and go like, oh, great, it’s fixed, so you stop doing it and anxiety and depression come back. When I was meditating, I also thought of that as a vacation from music. I definitely need to do music every day, it makes me feel better, but after meditating I also realized that I need a break from it too. It’s work, and even though you like it, you need variance in your life, you need to do a lot of different things to stay mentally well.

The way that you make songs, improvising without pre-planning or writing the lyrics down, do you ever get spontaneous insight into yourself while singing?

Yeah, almost always. I was talking about it in the last interview I did, and the interviewer was reading back some of the lyrics, or, at least, what he thought I was singing. I thought I knew what I was singing at the time, but then, when asked a direct question about what it meant, I started to realize that… It’s like automatic writing. You’re not consciously aware of what you’re saying, you’re speaking subconsciously. And that’s weird, it’s weird to hear that shit back. Especially some things you think you’re kind of over, you know? Issues with my parents and things like that. Usually, I’m like, I don’t think about these things anymore, it’s not that big of a deal, I’m over it. And then you hear yourself singing about it and you are like, maybe you are over it, but it’s still a part of you that’s in there, it’s kicking around in the background. And sometimes I say things to myself in lyrics that are, you know, good advice to myself. Little words of kindness about yourself that you wouldn’t consciously do, that always feels kind of weird, doesn’t it? To say something good about yourself?

Sure, I’ve had similar experiences. For example, last year, a couple of months after I had lost my cat, I was generally feeling okay, like I got over it, I wasn’t thinking as much about it and had a general feeling that things had kind of settled. And then I arranged one of these information-free days when I’m off the phone, I don’t read anything, don’t even listen to music, and, ideally, don’t talk to people. When I went to sleep the night after that day, I had a dream in which the cat was dying, and I was trying to save him, and I woke up in cold sweat feeling really distressed. It revealed to me something I hadn’t recognized was going on on a deeper level.

Yeah, it’s part of you. I was watching this short documentary about a man in his 30’s who was an accomplished composer, but then he had this virus that created a brain fever or something, and now he has, like, four-minute memory. So, he’s in 24-hour care, this was in England, and then they had a woman, who was pretty normal for the most part, didn’t seem weird, but she remembered absolutely everything, like her entire life. Like, if they ask me 20 years from now what you were wearing, I’d say, a modern camo design, an undercut, hair pulled back… It was just wild! I don’t think their brains are necessarily mechanically different, it’s just that everything you’ve ever experienced is within you, and things can come up at various times without permission. It’s interesting. I’m afraid of it, because I have anxiety, and I’m afraid that it can come crashing at any time, and as I’ve gotten older I just got a little more intrigued by what brains are capable of doing, who we are, memory… It’s just wild. I think having a kid is like that too, because you re-live your childhood. I remember things I thought I had forgotten about long ago, friendship, or school, or hearing a concept, or that conviction of belief you held when you were younger, how you could think you had a concept totally ironed out. You know, my daughter has firm perceptions on how the world is right now, culturally, she has a hardline stance on discrimination, and I’m trying to tell her: “As you get older you’re going to be on the wrong side of something”. Like, when you get to fifty, you’ll realize that you thought you had a very progressive mindset, but then comes another group and points out an error in your thinking, and you can either get offended about it or be like, oh, shit, that’s a fair point.

It reminds me of that John Lilly’s quote: “There are infinities within the mind”. Now, you mentioned forgetting your songs as you move on, and I wanted to see if I can get any insights from you about some songs that stood out for me. First, you’ve been asked a lot about I Listen To Country Songs, and I’d like to ask about another song from Constant Green, Tenement Square. When I first saw the title, I thought: “Hmm, is that a reference to Tiananmen square?”. But then I was like, no, probably not. What can you tell me about that song?

I mean, you’re right, that’s why I stuck with that title. You know, sometimes you misread things. I had Tiananmen square in my head when I was writing something and confused words, but I just liked the way it sounded. It’s another one about poverty. There’s this neighborhood in Chicago called Uptown, and Uptown was, I don’t remember if it was predominantly Jewish or something else, but later there was this huge wave of Appalachian folks move into it from, I think, the ‘60s and the ‘70s, so the area got populated by this really non-urban culture, and they had these huge apartment buildings that were, like, single-room occupants and hotels and whatnot, and this area, even to this day, is kind of like a square, it has some little commerce district, now it’s all Vietnamese. That’s where the title came from, a conflation of these two things. There’s really no reference to it.

I think it was written, like a lot of my stuff, in first person. It’s not necessarily me. I think I float back and forth between that, I start off as a character, and as I’m singing it becomes me. That’s a good example of a mood that I default to, and that mood really goes back to, like, when I was growing up, like I said, my neighborhood had lots of trees, and there was this vibe of when you were home from school for the whole summer and had all the time in the world. I used to sit on my porch, and the city’s older yellow streetlights would kind of filter through the trees. I lived right off the lake, about a mile away, and so a cool breeze would come, and it felt very dreamy, but at the same time very real. I could just live in this moment forever. I try to get back to that feeling as often as possible, and that song is largely trying to cultivate that feeling.

You know, you have so many interesting songs that I could interrogate you about them for hours, but I’ll reserve myself to just a couple more. Another one that got me curious is Social Media Death Cult from the album I Am The Blind Man Upstairs. I kind of feel where you’re coming from, and I think it resonates with me, but I’d like to learn more.

You know, I’m a leftie. Some of my attitudes are probably radical left. But one of the things that I got kind of annoyed by during the Trump presidency was the oversimplification of issues by liberals. I know it gets overused, and I don’t really want to demonize the word, but, you know, woke culture oftentimes seems more preoccupied with looking like they’re doing the right thing rather than actually doing the heavy lifting of having principles based on a solid moral philosophy and critical thinking. I saw it on both sides. On the right they say, oh, it’s the death of the American way, men using women’s restrooms, children are going to be molested, our rights are going to be taken away, yadda-yadda-yadda. And on the left you have, oh, it’s the death of democracy, there’s going to be a race war, and the planet is going to burn to a crisp in five years. So, on both sides we have this ridiculous, hand-wringing death cult, and neither side is actually doing anything. They’re really just pretty much shouting into the Ether. I think that it comes from a place of frustation and real pain, but one of the thoughts I started to have is that, well, this is kind of a death cult. They want to group together and have some type of unity in preparation for the end days. There’s just constant negativity on both sides, nothing really solution-focused, and I just got fucking sick of it, ha-ha-ha. I’m still fucking sick of it!

It’s actually pretty consistent with how social media algorithms work. They funnel people to more radical content to generate more engagement. Mark Zuckerberg, I think, when he testified for congress, and he showed a graph of how radicality influences engagement, and it looked like an asymptote, and the uppermost point of the graph was where people start getting banned for content. So, yeah, it’s pretty much a death cult, I’d agree.

To continue in that lane, another song whose title got me interested is The 2020 Election. In particular, I found it curious that the actual lyrics don’t directly mention the 2020 Election.

You know what, let me get a cup of coffee.

So, actually, when I was making coffee, I was like, fuck, what is he talking about, I need to listen to the song real quick. I remember everything about it now. Last time I did an interview I also pulled up a song the guy asked me about, and it all came back to me. I mean, I record some much shit I forget what stuff is about!

So, as for that song, I remember I had these two chords, just two chords, that’s all it was. So I ask my daughter: “Should I do that? Just do it super simple, on acoustics”. And she was like, yeah, you always put too much stuff in your songs. So, musically, that’s what it was, I think it was almost Smiths-y. We’re both fans of The Smiths. Incidentally, I’m also a big fan of Morissey, and she was asking me questions about his problematic views. I don’t think a lot of people would agree with me on this, but, you know, I grew up with the guy, so, like, when she was talking about his attitudes on Brexit, I was like, this is nothing new, he’s nuts. He’s always said some weird shit that I can’t take seriously. He used to say that wearing leather is equivalent to murdering a person. I can see where he’s coming from, but it’s kind of a ridiculous statement. So, his attitude about immigrants is nothing new, and I still have an affinity for his music without taking him seriously.

As for the lyrics, by the time we had the election and the things were looking weirder and weirder, and polarization and tribalism in our country were reaching that point where it became infuriating to me. I was thinking back to my childhood and how I viewed what I would call binary thinking. You identify with one of these two groups, and with that, for a lot of people (I don’t think they’re aware of it half the time), you just take a whole list of things and just check all those boxes. Again, I agree with most liberals, but I don’t like the way they arrive at their conclusions. They’re not based in principles, in critical thinking, oftentimes they fail to see how their own experiences shape their viewpoint, which isn’t true empathy, because empathy shouldn’t be based on how close something lands to your doorstep. You should put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like if you were them. A lot of people aren’t like that, and that bothers me. I don’t like to believe in things, I like to know things, and if there’s something you don’t know a lot about, you have to look into it really thoughtfully and recognize that you might be wrong about it.

Anyway, as that election got closer and closer, it just became batshit, people were just becoming tribal. I think, when I was a kid, I felt that. When I got older, I thought that this was just the way that a child thinks, but then it came full circle again. This is a problem with our species, that we’re prone to tribalism. So, most of the lyrics were about my early viewpoints on that and how now, forty years later, I started to think that maybe that kid was onto something. It’s a real thing out there. In a lot of ways the election broke my heart. I’ve never considered myself a patriotic person, but I had a little bit more faith in people doing the right thing in the end. Then I just started to realize that a lot of people just don’t know what the right thing is, or they aren’t arriving at the right thing thoughtfully.

I also noticed that the song is on the album called Time. I wonder why you put it on that album and, more generally, how you conceptualize the albums, if you do it in a more or less defined way.

Yeah, I do. That’s just a byproduct of trying to work as quickly as possible. I’ve always written and recorded with a 40-minute target. I think that comes from growing up with vinyl and having that limit of content on one plate. You probably also noticed that on my bandcamp I don’t have any mini-EP’s or singles, and that’s because if I do something that seems like a good idea, but I only have, like, two songs out of it, I just delete those songs, go back and do something until I squeeze forty minutes out of it. At that particular time I was thinking a lot about what I just talked about, but I also joined this Facebook group for my neighborhood, I live in a neighborhood called Rogers Park, it’s far North Chicago. There’s a group called Rogers Park Without Boundaries, and it’s mostly older people who don’t live here anymore sharing pictures of the neighborhood, and I was just looking at how the color of the neighborhood had changed, and the economic situation. Rogers Park, like a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago, was once Jewish, and one of the funny things about it was that there’s a strip in Rogers Park, everyone calls it Little India, which is one of the few Indian districts in the country. There’s a lot of Indian immigrants, people who are just moving here, and it has that whole vibe. So, these people on Facebook are always commenting in that, I think, unintentionally offensive way, like, oh my God, I remember how nice that little neighborhood was, man, it’s really changed, and I’m kind of like, what the fuck? Not only were you an immigrant group that had to build its own little strip because you weren’t really accepted anywhere else in the city, but you’re also historically not far from each other. That got me thinking about how time can shape people’s attitudes just over the course of fifty years, how dramatically it can change.

Another thing I remember thinking about on this record was, you know, my daughter, she’s fifteen, and I don’t really expect her to have a firmly set sexual identity, and she’s kind of moving around, like many other people, because gender today is so ill-defined, as I think it should be. And I was talking to her around that time how, if she were to tell me in the past that we would have made this much progress around sexuality in such a short amount of time, I wouldn’t have believed her. The situation when I was her age seemed lightyears away from where we are today. You can not only be gay, but you can just not identify as anyone and be open to relationships with anybody. When I was a kid that just wouldn’t happen, you’d be shunned by people, and now you got jocks doing that in her school. I think it’s great. Some things got really bad really quickly, but other things can get really good quickly, too. Like, even with climate change, I know it looks grim, but I believe that there can be this groundswell, this change that can take place overnight and start to reverse this process.

I’ve had a similar thought for quite a while. We’ve long had this terrible dynamic with climate change, corporate control over policies, etc., but, on the other hand, we have so much potential. I’ve heard that the Apollo program took just 10 billion dollars over 10 years, so if today America invested a fraction of its, say, military budget into R&D of controlled nuclear fusion, we’d have cheap clean energy for the entire world! The potential is there. That gives me hope.

To continue with this topic of social turmoil, you’ve frequently stressed the importance of not being judgmental. How do you maintain that attitude when you witness something you fundamentally oppose? Like, for example, there are people who not only justify the murder of George Floyd, but outright cheer for it.

I think about that stuff all the time. I mean, I am judgmental. We all are, we have to be, it’s a by-product of evolution, but I actively try to challenge those thoughts as they fire off in my mind. Say, you meet a guy, a friend of a friend, and he’s wearing Reeboks and khaki shorts, has a sports hat on, and I immediately think, oh, this guy is a square, I’m not going to have anything in common with him, and I just have to shut those things down as much as I can. The thing is, if you really start paying attention to your predictive powers, you’ll find that you are wrong as often as you are right. Confirmation bias. You count all your hits and disregard your misses. You meet that guy in khaki shorts and a sports hat, he turns out to be a shallow prick, and you go like, a-ha, see? I knew it. But you forget the other nine times you were wrong.

Race is complicated in this country. No one has figured it out yet, no one’s going to be able to come up with a unified theory of how to fix it. For one thing, I wish people would sit down and talk about black people for a second. There are a lot of groups who have it shitty, but this is the worst, we continue to fuck this one up royally, compared to the other one. The reluctance to face it may have to do with being related to racists in the past, other people just think that this whole race of people is just genetically inferior, and I think it has to do with how they grew up. Like I said earlier, it would be unscientific to think there would be this many “bad people” grouped into certain geographical regions. These are just blank slates of people who have had these ideas thrust upon them, and I have to give them a little bit of slack for that. You can see signs of that all over the place. I was recently talking to a friend about how your gender identity is influenced by your culture. I have short hair, I don’t wear makeup, why is that? Well, that’s because I was born with a penis, those things just start to happen, and I think it’s the same thing when it comes to race. Another thing in this country is that conservatives feel talked down to, and they’re not wrong about that. Liberals and democrats tend to think that republicans aren’t as intelligent, and people react to it.

I have something to add to that. I agree that there was this period, in the years before Trump’s election, when this “woke” culture grew into a dominant political force, and during that period there was a lot of woke censorship, and that implicit censorship, which made people constantly afraid of saying something “problematic”. This backlash of right-wing, nationalist, and often neo-nazi attitudes, was a reaction to that in many ways. But now there’s this “cancel culture” meme, and every conservative talk show host is now talking about on largest national TV channels to hundreds of millions of people about how they’re censored. It also has been majorly overblown. I guess, people just lean towards extremes.

There is an element of truth to it. There’s the same self-righteousness as in woke culture. Again, I believe in and agree with many of the goals and principles of the woke movement, I just have a problem with the way they arrive at it. There’s definitely some arrogance to the way it’s conveyed, but I do kind of laugh when conservatives talk about being censored. Conservative attitudes in this country are so wrapped up in religion, and if any group doesn’t have a right to say it’s being persecuted, it’s fucking religious people in America. It’s on our goddamn money, you’re forced to say it when you’re in grade school, you know, the pledge of allegiance, one nation under god. They hold all the power. It’s silly.

Again, there is an element of truth, and with woke culture, I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen, but I’m kind of worried about the victim becoming the oppressor. It just doesn’t fit into my view about humanity when people critically talk about, for example, “straight white men”. Like, who are you talking about, me? No. Is it your dad? No. Your friends? No. Well, are you then just so special that you’ve surrounded yourself with all the good ones?

I’ve just encountered the same shit on YouTube today. I was watching a response to a PragerU video of this guy, he calls himself a psychologist and parenting advice expert. The idea was that you have to be authoritarian to your child, explaining to your child why something needs to be done just makes them more argumentative, it’s okay to lock your child in the room for a month… At some point he literally referred to the child as “it”. That was obviously batshit crazy, but someone wrote in the comments: “If an old white man is giving you advice, run away”. I was like, whoa, you’re both SO cringe. What do you think about, say, Noam Chomsky, or Bernie Sanders? They’re old white men too. To summarize this whole discourse about political climate, the majority of people just have to go touch some fucking grass.

Ha-ha-ha! Yeah! I mean there is a grain of truth to that, because white male culture is so ubiquitous that you live in it even if you don’t interact with it. I have a couple of life principles that I’ve been testing for years and years, and they really stood the test of time. One is that you have to approach each person as an individual. You have to. You can feel that you don’t want to do it, but you just fucking have to. In my experience, nine out of ten times when you experience something detestable about a person it is because there’s a wounded animal in there, acting out. Something happened to them that’s making them angry, and you can work through that by listening to people and trying to show compassion. The other one, and it’s a really scary feeling, some people have it early on in their lives, it is that there is no purpose in life, at all. You have to make it, and at some point you find out what it is for you, and it grounds you, you now have a purpose. But you can’t give it to anybody else either. I know what resonates with me and makes me keep waking up, but I can’t tell you what to do. Okay, it’s a little bit off the thing we were talking about, the “evil white men”. In our society white people definitely have significant advantages, but… Let’s attack that problem, not everyone who looks like they might be part of that problem. Not only does it hurt people, but it’s also not a reliable tool.

And it contributes to the problem too.

Yeah. You’re guilty of the same thing. The stakes aren’t as high, the harm isn’t as severe, but you’re still essentially practicing a form of discrimination.

Absolutely, amen to that. To kind of finish off this segment, another idea that you’ve expressed in a previous interview is that “your biggest enemy is cynicism”. What helps you avoid cynicism and combat it during these times, when so many things seem to be wildly out of control and are spiraling down like crazy?

The thing about it is that it was right before Trump won the election. I was talking to a person, a person of faith actually, and the whole group of people we were hanging out with were kind of lamenting this, you know, oh, this is fucking terrible, people are shit, how can this be happening, and he just said: “Our biggest enemy is cynicism”. At first I was like, no, that’s some hippie-dippie shit, but in the back of my mind I thought: “Damn, he’s right”. Giving up is never the preferable way to do it, to check out and be the death cult we were talking about earlier. Cynicism is kind of intoxicating, it validates your pain and your feeling that things are hopeless and terrible, and then you use examples that bolster that feeling. It makes you feel like you have a right to be as depressed as you are. But, like I said earlier, things are simultaneously good and bad most of the time. If you put it as whether it is preferable to be solution-focused or not, I think most people would prefer to be solution-focused, you know what I mean? And you can’t be both cynical and solution-focused at the same time, at least I can’t see how you could hold both of those feelings simultaneously, I can’t see the logic in that. I do get cynical sometimes and think, like, fuck it all, we should just all burn to a crisp, but then I tell myself, well, this is not what I want, this is not where I think things should go, and I try to force myself to see the solutions and signs that solutions are possible.

I equate cynicism with depression. I was talking about it to a friend of mine who’s got anxiety and depression, and we were talking about quarantine, Trump, and how everyone is losing their minds. We were both joking that it was kind of an amateur hour for people struggling with anxiety and depression for the first time. We were like, yeah, guys, no shit, you know. Welcome to our world. So, when I’m feeling cynical, I question whether or not it is a mental state or I am seeing things accurately, and usually you’re not seeing things truthfully. For the most part there’s very little we know in general, there are very few things that are fact-based, and the rest is open to interpretation, so as long as you interpret things, why not put a progressive spin on it?

Does music help you overcome cynicism?

Ideally, when I’m making music, it puts me into a neutral state. I consider being relaxed and neutral even superior to happiness, because I feel that I’m being the most objective, and it sounds Buddhist and Zen, but I think I am in more accordance with the universe when I’m in that neutral state.

I actually absolutely share that, I myself have many times realized that I’d prefer tranquility over happiness.

Oh, yeah. I remember how Werner Herzog said in an interview that happiness is overrated. The host and the guests kind of laughed at that, but he was saying that happiness isn’t a worthwhile goal, and that we have this entire culture of people that are trying to give a presentation of happiness, and that there are more interesting things in life than pursuing happiness, like pursuing beauty, and justice, and trust. I don’t think he won that host over, but that guy gets a bad rap. People view him as a nihilist, and he definitely has nihilistic tendencies, but I think he’s definitely more than that, and you can really see that in some of his documentaries lately. If you go back to the stuff from the ‘70s and ‘80s, yeah, it is darker, but I thought that Grizzly Man was a really compassionate, thoughtful and humanist movie, and his attitude about it was really pretty warm and sensitive. Definitely not the Werner Herzog that people think of.

But, yeah, happiness is a temporary state, it’s not sustainable. Happiness and sadness aren’t default states for us, they come and go, and I think it’s better to view them as temporary states.

Yeah, exactly. I’d also add that I view them as bowls of a scale, happiness is one, sadness is the other one, but tranquility, and, I really like this word Shinzen Young uses a lot, equanimity, they are equilibrium, they are balance, which is in my view the most stable and optimal way of running things.

Happiness and sadness are co-dependent states, one cannot exist without the other, you know?

Now, the quote about cynicism being the greatest enemy actually came from an interview about Zelienople, so I think it would be a nice segue into a conversation about it. The first thing I’m going to ask is how do you delineate your approach to and the kinds of inspiration that inform your solo project and the band? Am I butchering the pronunciation of the name, by the way?

Ha-ha, no, we were mispronouncing it for years, we were saying Zee-lienople for a long time. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, it’s a small town in Pennsylvania, and I’m a big fan of George Romero. So, we were on a road trip, me and Brian from Zelienople, we broke down there, and I found out that they had used a lot of the townpeople for extras, and that the original Night of the Living Dead was filmed not too far from there, and I was, like, oh, that’s so cool, and my girlfriend at the time said: “That might be a cool name for a band!”, and I’m like, yeah, let’s do it.

As for your question, it’s quite hard to answer, because we’ve been together for so long, it’s gonna be thirty years, and I don’t think about it all that much. I think that the three of us, the three core members, agree that there’s a shared identity. We all do something different on our own, outside of the band. Initially, that probably was not the case, I think on the first two records we did I had much more of a voice, did a lot of the instrumentation...

Yeah, it shows in the sound.

I also mixed all the records to date. Brian wasn’t involved so much in the songwriting, and he didn’t play as many instruments as he does now, but he and I are definitely doing a lot of work together. That’s the thing about this band. There are periods when Brian doesn’t play much, but when I say doesn’t play much that usually means he might not pick up his guitar for a week. Other than that, we’re pretty fucking serious about music, and we put in a lot of time during the recording process as a group.

We’ve also started to branch off a little bit more, Mike is doing a lot more solo stuff, we have families. We’ve had less time to come together as a group, and that’s when I just had to keep the pace, had to keep playing and recording as much as we did before, and after that I started writing and recording all the time. I think that where I am now is a clear indication of the difference between the two things. Back then it was just me being a singer-songwriter with that band, and now I’m kind of existing as a separate entity. Obviously, the same guy, you can hear a lot of similarities, a big difference is the drums, because Mike is a very good drummer. I think that we’re more influenced by jazz, to a certain degree, as a group. We were considered a drone band for a long time, because there was a lot of drone happening, but when we first started to play, we were a lot more influenced by Indian drone rather than synthesizer stuff, we were all fans of Indian music.

Like what? I really like sitar music, Vilayat Khan and the like, hence the question.

We didn’t have a sitar, because those are expensive, but we were doing certain guitar treatments that would simulate a sitar. I also made a fretless guitar, and then made a resonating bridge for it, we had harmoniums. I was generally building a lot of instruments at the time that were trying to simulate drone strings, like a sitar, or a shruti box, or a tamboura, where there’d probably be one or two drone strings, and then a melody string, I was building a lot of things like that. Mike, I think, still plays one of the things which I built a long time ago, which is basically just a forty-stringed block with pickups, and you don’t really fret any of the strings, they’re just tuned to whatever tune you want, and you play it like a percussion instrument. That’s what we’re really into. We did use synthesizers, but it wasn’t that spirit that we were trying to capture.

I have a feeling that the sound you make with Zelienople is hard to pin down in terms of genres and hashtags.

Yeah, for as long as we have been together people have called us whatever genre was happening at the time.

Could you give some examples?

?

Oh, like, it’s space rock, it’s shoegaze, it’s post-rock, it’s new weird America, what else… Lost era… It was whatever the fuck was happening. Also, we’re from Chicago, and at that time there was Tortoise and all those other bands, and I think there are some fair comparisons, like, it’s not rock, but, I mean, we’re not Tortoise. A lot of times people would not know what we were doing or follow what we were doing, but they had heard Tortoise, and they were like, oh, you guys are like Tortoise, you’re not playing rock music. Well, no, we’re not really Tortoise. I mean, it sounds arrogant, everyone says they don’t set out to do anything specific, but when people say “Oh, you’re trying to sound like this band”, or “You’re trying to sound like Slowdive”, I do tell people: “Dude, I will show you what I’m trying to sound like”. I don’t rip off Talk Talk’s “Laughing Stock”, though I love Talk Talk, but when I heard this album, I was like, oh my God, this is what I want to do. I’ve also been heavily influenced by Neil Young. And a lot of other bands that people guess are “off”.

So, that identity of Zelienople that you mentioned. Is there a conceptual layer of some sort to that identity as well?

No, probably the opposite. It’s interesting, we’re going to record next weekend, and it will be the first time someone else will be recording. That’s going to be weird. Mike, the drummer, moved to Michigan over quarantine, so we don’t have his house, that’s where we did a lot of our records. We all lived within four miles of each other for years and years, so a lot of our recording would happen very quickly. We would dick around, and by that I don’t mean we would be just hanging out and barbecuing or anything. We would start off with a concept of what we wanted us to sound, get unhappy with that, and then, all of a sudden, things would kind of just snap in the focus, but it wouldn’t be deliberate. We’d just be like, okay, that’s what it’s supposed to sound like, that’s what we’re going to do, and we would end up getting a good record done in, like, a week. This time we’ll have to try to be productive on the spot, but in some ways we’re the least prepared we’ve ever been. I have no songs written, I never really write songs, I have a really rough outline of what I want to play and sing, but the guys can completely change that for me in a moment, I can totally rework it depending on what they give me. So, this is going to be weird. I’m kind of excited about it, kind of worried.

So, we never really have a concept. I think, what we’ve been good at is that while I’m the singer, and I have a fair bit of say in the overall narrative of the song, but we share responsibilities equally, and we’ll beat that out of each other over the course of the recording, we’re trying to iron out everyone’s “voice”, for lack of a better word. We don’t want anyone to be in the front, we don’t want to be like voice-bass-guitar-drums, it has to be one thing, one solid sound.

One thing about that, just to clarify. One impression I get about Zelienople is that the improvisational approach you have in your solo music is also the modus operandi of Zelienople. How hard is it to balance the spontaneity of improvisation with the imperative to iron out your voices? These two are kind of contradictory, aren’t they?

Well, no, I mean, there’s a difference between improvising solo and improvising in a group. Experience with the other players definitely helps with improvisation, shared sensibilities also help. Like, I’ve got a buddy, he’s a good musician, and we can usually figure out a traditional sound on the fly together because we have similar sensibilities, as far as that goes. Again, it’s really hard to separate my individual style and performance in the band, because we’ve been together for so fucking long, we’ve influenced each other so much over time.

Yeah, that checks out, when you’ve played together for that long it just comes naturally. I’ve even heard about studies that show that improvisational jazz players sort of turn off a certain part of the brain that is responsible for planning and self-censoring, so, given the long history that you guys have, it makes perfect sense.

Another thing I’m curious about are those custom-made instruments. You’ve told me about that sitar-like guitar that you made, with a resonating bridge. Could you tell me about some other ones? You know, how you employ them, what character they have, your relationship with these instruments, perhaps.

I think that I started building those things for our third record, which was Ink.

I like that one.

Oh, thanks. I think we recorded that one at my house, that wasn’t done at Mike’s house, I don’t even think Mike had that house that we used for subsequent recordings at that time. We did Pyjama Avenue and Sleeper Coach at my house, and then Ink. Then I moved into a condo at that time where I had a dedicated music room, so I built… Hmm… I modified that guitar, I had a Stratocaster copy, and I pulled the frets out and made a resonating bridge, and I also put a piezo disc underneath the picker, and also replaced the picker with a metal picker. You could make a bunch of weird sounds. You could bang it and it would sound like metal percussion. It really did sound like a sitar.

Then I built that thing, we call it the ski bass because there’s this place by us called American Scientific Surplus, you know, a lot of science-nerd type stuff, chemistry stuff and various components sold in bulk. I went there one time, and they had these two, like, Nordic track skis, there was a bucket with, like, eight of those, good, hard-wood, well-finished skis. I got two of them. With one, I made another thing that was similar to that fretless sitar-drone instrument, it didn’t sound as good, but with the other one, I took that five foot-long ski and made two strings out of a heavy suspension cable, which were tunable. It was a bass instrument, but we used that a lot. Brian was really good at playing it, he was really able to get songs out of it, I was never good at it. I could only, like, vibrate the strings and make low drones, but he played the fucking thing. He played it on a couple of songs on the Ink record, you can hear something like a bass line, and it’s him playing that thing.

And then I made another one, I think we called it the lap bass. It was like a lap steel that was bass, but I put the strings high enough and you couldn’t really play it with a slide because the strings were too heavy, and there was a big gap between the fretboard and the top of the string, and the strings were suspended over to a galvanized pipe that was the bridge. It has a hollow sound, and it also sustains for quite a long time. So, Mike played it, he used it for his improv sets for a really long time, he would do solo percussion stuff, and he would play that thing with mallets. I think we used it on several records after that one.

I also had an artillery shell that I got from the same surplus place, it was a big one, about that big, and Mike would bow that, he loved it.

I wonder if the shell had been fired at some point.

No, I think it was hollowed out and emptied. It was like a military surplus, they also have grenades that were, like, decommissioned, and stuff like that.

Then I made a couple of spring boxes that he was playing. I’m thinking about it now, he had a traditional kit set up, but then he had this table where we would put all this stuff, and he would integrate it into his kit really well. It was awesome. So, the spring box is like a box that has springs on top of it, and you can get a lot of sounds out of it. You can hit the side of the box and get more of a woodblock sound, but then the springs were able to produce all these weird overtones, it was kind of cool. We spent a lot of time building stuff, I would reject certain concepts that didn’t work and I would build something else, and I’ve always tried to get whatever I was building to be able to produce more than one sound, wanted it to be a versatile instrument that you could get a lot of mileage out of.

Man, we built some other stuff too. I think I tried to build some circuits, that’s an entirely different animal, and I’m not too good at it.

Like a modular synthesizer?

Umm, no, thank God I never got into that (laughs). There was a couple of kits, one was an Atari Punk console (?), which was pretty simple, a lot of people were building that, I built one of those, that was easy. Then, that guy died, but it was Music From Outer Space, he sold kits, and some of the kits were, like, full monophonic synthesizer kits that were pretty advanced. I bought this one kit thinking it was easy to build, but it wasn’t, so I spent quite a long time putting that fucking thing together and I don’t think I really got much use out of it, and it was really hard to build, so I decided I was not going to build anymore circuits.

This guy Eric, who’s playing with us now in the band, he was on the last record, he got into modular a little bit, so I got to spend a lot of time with a Make Noise, pre-ordered, I think it was like a 16-module thing, and I was like, fuck this, let’s not learn another instrument, I don’t wanna do this.

You gotta watch that guy now, you know, get him into rehab if he develops gear acquisition syndrome, ha-ha.

He sold it. He’s a traditional player, he needs a keyboard, but I found it maddening. I did a couple of records with that guy Nick Turner, and he doesn’t know traditional music theory. Like, when we were getting together to work on that stuff, he wouldn’t always know what key he was in, he would send me stuff that was in microtonal scales, and I was like, dude, I can’t play guitar in this, I have to tune down a quarter-step, and he’s like, oh, I had no idea. But when he sits in front of his modular shit, I’m just like, I have no idea how he’s doing it. How the fuck are you able to navigate this terrain? And he said: “I don’t know, it’s pretty simple”. It’s a different instrument, and I just don’t get it (laughs).

I understand, and you’ve made it pretty clear in other interviews, that you’re constantly trying to expand the boundaries of what you can sound like. Whatever works, works.

Yeah. I mean, I think I don’t really concern myself too much with whether or not what I’m doing could be “considered good” or liked by people a lot of times (that being said, I’d be bummed out if no one was listening), but it’s not coming from a place of arrogance, it’s coming from that I really do believe, now that I’m older, if I’m not pleasing myself, it doesn’t fucking matter. Someone could like something, but if I don’t like it, it’s not going to change my opinion, I’m going to hate it. But I also think that creativity is a habit. Someone was asking me one time: “How do you keep doing stuff, how do you stay productive?”. And my idea is that you’re always creating. You’re just not always liking what you’re creating, you know what I mean? You can sit down and produce something, you might just not like it. And I have come to recognize that, for me, there is a rhythm where I have to finish that thought before another one comes. I can’t force myself to do this particular style or that particular sound, while if I just let it happen, my creative energy is giving me what I’m asking for. I’ve just kind of learned to get out of its way, you know? Being like, okay, I hope I like this. I’ll go ahead and do whatever my hands are telling me to do and what my brain wants me to do. Hopefully, it will be something I’ll enjoy listening to, but I’m not going to move on to the next thing until it gets out. There will be periods of time when I just don’t play guitar and get a little bit back more into synthesis, and, I haven’t done that in a while, but there are times when I lean pretty heavily into African style guitar, and for a while I was doing that, like, every third or fourth Bandcamp album would be an album in that style.

So, I have this idea for a question to conclude this interview with, and it’s funny, because I was originally planning to ask it earlier, I just forgot about it. You draw inspiration, I understand, from your environment, from the people you interact with, from your city and what you see as you go around the country when you do go around. So, you’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a patriotic person, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but there is this Americana vibe to your music.

Uh-huh. Absolutely.

So, I guess, you do, in a certain way, identify with your country, and I wonder if you could expand a little bit on the character of that identification.

Absolutely, man, hey, you’re absolutely right. I think, and people talk about this all the time, that I am a patriot in the sense that I’m not a patriot (laughs).

Ha-ha-ha.

From what I understand about our culture here, and the way we were intended to develop as a country, we were supposed to be a nation of sceptics, you know? Of the people, you know? We were a nation that was born of dissent and questioning authority. When being a dissident is labeled as unpatriotic, I’ve always thought that it sounds like a lot of shit when I was a kid. I was always like, man, as I understand from what you’re telling us, we should be raising our fists, demanding, questioning motives and stuff. So, yeah, I guess, in that way I’m pretty American.

I like the blues. I think I misunderstood it for a long time when I was younger. I also think that playing guitar and being in a band, the traditional set-up, you know, drums-bass-guitar, you can’t fucking avoid it. It’s in the instrument for the most part. You grow up hearing pieces of it, and, as I got older, I think I’ve come to appreciate the blues for what it is. I think that the blues is a repetitious and somewhat generic sounding artform, on the surface. And what it basically is, like a lot of, for lack of a better way of putting it, indigenous music styles, it’s more about the emotion conveyed through that vehicle, rather than the actual composition that’s supposed to dazzle you with changes and transcending melodies. It’s the player using this format to say something that you really can’t transcribe, if that makes sense. I really started to get more into that as I got older. I’m like, oh, I finally fucking understand what this is! It’s not about, like, Eric Clapton solos which, don’t get me started, I hate that stuff, but the heart of the blues is fantastic.

I also have a serious love affair for LA. Probably, old Hollywood, and also what I imagined LA to be growing up in the ‘80s, that whole period of, you know, palm trees, like it was in the old movies and shit. I think about it all the time, I think it has influenced me to some degree.

These are pretty unique, American things. Jazz is another example too. You get really into jazz, collect records and stuff, and, while I do have a number of records and listen to them on occasion, I feel that I gravitate more towards the spirit of it than anything else. Does that answer the question at all?

Yeah, pretty much.