I have promised only to write you when compelled to, and of all the promises minted over the winter, this one stuck

Then I saw these crocuses outside the farmstand this morning and knew I had to tell you about them. A big carpet of them springing up through the mulch. We’ve had snow on the ground for the better part of the last two and a half months, but this week most of it gave way and once I saw those purple throats pushing through, I had all the confirmation I needed. A new season on the march.

My stated objective was to lay low, so I have. I shoveled snow. I read Olivia Laing’s dishy Silver Book, which I loved, and Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive, which includes her Pulitzer-Prize-nominated essay The Instrumentalists. That one persuaded me to give Tár a second chance. Smith analyzes the film less as a #MeToo story flipped on its head and more as a tale of generational divide — Gen X running headfirst into millennial and Gen Z ideas about art, power, and morality. It’s a compelling case, but I wish I’d stuck to my guns. It’s a drab movie, and I’m not just referring to the brutalist concrete-on-concrete interiors. Not even Cate Blanchett or the sight of Olafur Eliasson’s ‘National’ career lamp spark joy for me — only perturbance.

I held off on viewing the film until now because I went to a school not unlike the one it depicts, where old and new worlds collided all the time, if not quite as theatrically. Watching it, I recognized Lydia Tár as an avatar for the institution itself — the self-appointed duty to protect and defend the canon, and decide what counts as serious. I remember one composition teacher dismissing a student for a choice to employ dissonance by saying he could “break the rules like Stravinsky when you’re as good as him.” This was in 2003, nearly a century after The Firebird premiered. It felt like many of my peers were into serialism and the post-minimalism of Steve Reich, and I was into writing my little piano songs. Another declared nothing in popular song after the Beatles’ White Album was of theoretical interest to him. It felt stifling to me then. My impression of classical conservatories was that they were less a place to reckon with the future than to study, revere, and uphold the past.

I’m bored with Art Monsters, anyway. Both reading about the justification for them, and the work they make. Maybe if I’d read Smith’s essay a few years ago I’d have been in a more open state of mind. Lately the idea that powerful people actually face consequences feels more like a fantasy. It was the great Maestro’s Toscanini’s genius, afterall, that assaulted the violinist. Not the Maestro himself.

It’s stupid thrills I want. Can’t we have more sapphic stories that are as lustful and giddy as Heated Rivalry? I crave a show about the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team where players crush on each other for years, finally do something about it, and nothing terrible happens to either of them. Thankfully, from the sound of things, my moms Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe are on top of it.

I found myself on an accidental iPhone sabbatical after it was stolen on a layover. Once the blunt complications of traveling without two-factor authentication subsided, I felt lighter without it. Less chatter from the apps. Head up in the world instead of down. I’m never without a notebook, and I filled one up — not with anything especially deep, mind you, but my mind was on. I felt awake and alert, not as drained at the end of the day after staring at a screen. People of the world who know how much I love them, please take this in stride: I especially liked being less available at all hours and time zones.

In spite of my reluctance to plug back in once I was stateside, I buckled for work. According to Find My, my old phone had traveled a good distance — from Schiphol to a suburb outside Brussels to a strip mall in Mobile, Alabama. We’d had a good run, that phone and I. It was a replacement for one that slid out of my back pocket into the ocean on a date. I demoed most of the last album on it. Godspeed, bricked phones past. I would like to live in a world without you altogether, and I think I may spend more time this year working toward that goal. If any of you have made progress with a dumb phone or a Nothing Phone, hit me up.

And it feels like spring can’t come fast enough. Looking back at some recent posts, I detect a glumness — and honestly, how could one not feel a little under the weather about where this big blue marble of ours is headed? Much of it feels out of our control. But I’m not writing to you about those worries today.

A lot of my mood stems from struggling with the blank slate

I need momentum, or inertia kicks in. Like early spring, when the snow melts but nothing grows yet and the ground just feels heavy and stuck. It’s a feeling of uselessness, but also emptiness. I’ve never found a way around it except to steer directly through the center.

It comes from a good place. Like a lot of creative people, ideas get me out of bed in the morning. I’m at my best when I have that charge to work with, or an insurmountable mountain to move. I like the unset-Jell-O sensation that comes with a riddle. Confronting myself with a texture that’s new, unfamiliar, or a little daunting turns me on — any kind of resistance, really. It’s the same with a workout. I don’t want it to be easy. I want to push myself outside my comfort zone. I need something solid to throw my energy against or I get bored. When I’m bored, that’s when I’m most likely to tap out.

But boredom is something I’m working to stay with. The moment right before something new finds its way rarely feels exciting. I generally have to sit with months-long dry spells before that happens, but sometimes these extend for years. If life is what happens while you’re busing making plans, songwriting’s what happens while you’re busy trying to make a life.

I’ll get one piece that’s interesting, but sometimes seventy percent of the rest feels bland or rehashed, and my first instinct is to assume I’m out of ideas. When I was in my 20s, these periods felt existential. I would never write a song ever again. The fact that I’d managed to write dozens in the past did not occur to me as a data point worth considering. It must have been that I was struck by some kind of good-luck writing fairy and now my luck had run dry.

The discomfort in songwriting never really goes away, and as I have to remind myself every time, you can’t outrun it. Pushing your body to do a push-up doesn’t always feel good in the moment, but it builds strength you draw from later. Sticking with “the process” often feels like that set of push-ups you’d rather procrastinate than do. Suddenly I have a vacuum to run or a dishwasher to unload. Anything so not to sit down and work.

Around now, I usually come back to this list I came up with years ago to guide me through it:

Signs you’re getting in your own way

• Playing the ending too early

• Overthinking the originality

• Trying to repeat past success

• Assuming the song is bad because it’s taking a long time

Signs you might actually be onto something

• Working outside your comfort zone

• You have only one good part so far

• You don’t know what you’re trying to say yet

• Everything sounds familiar / like something you’ve done before and it’s driving you crazy

• You don’t know what the song wants to be yet

What do you do with all these signals?

In the early stages, marketing problems may make their way into the room. It makes sense under capitalism. You haven’t put something out in 10 YEARS. You promised someone else a timeline. Oops. Don’t do that again. I visualize a door where the marketers are hard at work promoting the art we make — then shut it. They are not allowed in until the song is finished. I say all this knowing full well I work best with a tight deadline, and that is why I have friends I collaborate with keep my accountable.

In the infancy of a song it can be hard to tell what’s influence, what’s mimicry, and what’s rich territory you might cover over the course of an entire record. Ack, sorry, to bring up the scary R-word. Pretend I didn’t. You’re not making a record, silly. During these months or years, the body of work has to be set aside. Better to apply that critical lens after you have something meatier to work with. Each song is a snowflake. There may be similarities to work past or each other or Michael MacDonald if you love Michael MacDonald, but this is not an assembly line. Just because something takes a long time doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Good takes as long as good takes. Sometimes years.

On the other hand, some of the feelings that make you think you’re stuck may be signs you’re onto something. You’ve never made something like this before — maybe in genre, maybe in arrangement — and you don’t quite know how the pieces fit together, or whether it will sound silly. That’s often a good sign. Sometimes, silly is good. Sometimes you only have one good part and the rest feels «meh». A great chorus with a boring verse, or a verse you like but no way into the hook. One good piece is not nothing. You can build from one good piece. Sometimes you’re writing about a subject you haven’t broached before, or haven’t broached in years, and you wouldn’t approach it the same way now. That can feel like failure, but it can also mean you need more time to absorb, to read, to watch, to live a little, and come back later.

Songwriting is psychologically unsettling because from the outside it looks like being good at it should mean you can control the outcome. As if treating it like a 9-to-5, or reading Proust, or listening to every Dylan record chronologically including Knocked Out Loaded will unlock the secret key to your magnum opus.

Or maybe it comes down to getting ‘the right ingredients in the broth,’ as Joni said in 1986:

In order to get the right spirit into the music, there’s got to be more than a working relationship. There has to be a sense of passion. There has to be something there for the heart, there has to be something there for the intellect, there has to be something for sensuality and sensation.

For some, it’s less about “how” you get to the good stuff, and watching out that the soup has the right balance of ingredients.

It’s true that the only path to a good song is to make time for it, but hours in the seat are no guarantee of quality or timeline. But, much as I hate to break it you, songwriting is the art of a Hail Mary. A trust fall.

You will fall a little differently every time, and each time you will feel like your center of gravity went the way of my old iPhone.

Where does that leave me? Somewhere located in between these coordinates:

• Coming off a long project, generating a lot of ideas in reaction to it.

• Feeling spiritually empty at the moment. Like I have nothing new to say.

• Unable to tell if I write every day because it feels good to do, or because I’m anxious about what happens if I don’t. Probably both.

So how do we get through it?

Go slow. Take breaks. Listen to other artists. Go to a museum. When I feel empty, it’s my sign to fill up on books, music, films, and anything that might excite or open me back up.

Most importantly: I share the work in progress with friends, as icky as that idea feels. It has never in my life stopped feeling icky, if that’s helpful to know. But shedding light on the work with other songwriters and musicians has helped me out of the rut more times than I can count. Songwriting doesn’t have to be a lone-man-in-the-woods endeavor.

Ok! Quite a bit in the trail mix today, but I hope you enjoyed it. Here’s a snippet from a poem I love by Frances Watkins Harper.

Tell me what you’re reading or listening to. I’ll try to find my way back here to you again soon.

CD

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Between me and the studio is two feet of snow.

One of the first winters here, at the peak of COVID, there was a blizzard so bad it cut all the electricity to the house — and all the heat with it. A drift of snow ran halfway up the door to my kitchen. I gathered Cricket and myself under several blankets, bundled in two sweaters and an extra pair of wool socks. I did not know my neighbors well then. I watched the snow fall in fat clumps, feeling like someone unplugged the world. It was a long night.

It’s been a minute. And before you point out ‘Weren’t they supposed to be on sabbatical?’ I got you. Taking a brief pause from my ongoing pause. I will accept the assembly line required for my other jobs, but I feel protective that this space not be about keeping up a “content calendar.” I’ve suspended paid subscriptions through February, but in light of these last heavy couple of weeks, now does not feel like the time to go completely quiet between us.

I woke at 3am Sunday, parched and feeling like a blown circuit. Storm coming. Don’t let the anecdote above fool you; ordinarily, I love a blizzard. Due for a stretch of travel coming up, something approaching intuition pinged. I’m not terribly superstitious, but around one slate of dates I felt a big stop sign. Not now, it said. Shore up resources. Batten down the hatches. Tend to what is in your backyard. A clear and present no.

After a few injuries last year, I’ve come to view my body as a radio station I’m not tuning into enough. I have long felt like a brain floating through life, scuffing the earth occasionally with my feet. So easy it can be for me to get in my own head and intellectualize its goings-on; in movement I am confronted by the distance between my mental and physical selves. They might as well be situated at two poles. Separate solar systems. I hope one day they will live on the same continent.

Visualization helps. The pelvis as a bowl. The vertebrae like a stack of checkers. I do not have joints but hinges. Everything is held up by a string. In class, I am told to flex my foot and I flex my toe like I’m about to take off in a pirouette. No, not like that. The teacher adjusts again. I feel a muscle coil around my heel, another in the arch of my foot. I think of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill trying to wiggle her big toe in the back of the Pussy Wagon. When I struggle to isolate the muscle I need to, I use an intake of breath to focus. It feels like a periscope, zooming in. A thin cord extends up my calf past the hollow of the knee, and it burns. That’s more like it. A hamstring, so called because a butcher could use the strong tendons to hang a slaughtered pig — also to render it useless. Cut it and make the animal lame. My tendon is piano wire, lengthening out, wrapping around the trunk of an oak.

It makes sense movement works for me in class. It’s almost too obvious; a musician’s way to go about it. Ask us to prep for taxes or remember to pay the water bill on time and we flake out. But give us quarters with a master and an excuse to isolate in concentration for an hour or two — no problemo. I could never get into running, but turns out I love lifting weights. I am the most “in my body” when I sing, but I’m learning one can be intimate with the mechanics of breath control and still clueless about all the other parts that support it. Like my own two feet. Man, your feet are so important. Floss your teeth and invest in good supportive shoes!

Not to come on here to pronounce I’ve become a gym rat, but reframing strength training like running scales or practice is a game changer. I’m less concerned about getting ripped than I am about understanding why I always roll my right ankle and not my left. How can I become more resilient? Why do my knees crunch as I salt the front stoop ever since I hit 38? The body not as a problem, but as its own messenger. This all probably sounds very boring. I have friends who run marathons, for chrissakes.

In some types of therapy, you’re asked to picture where your anxiety shows up. Close your eyes and sense it. In these instances, I feel like a frog pickled in formaldehyde or a crying infant. I know I’m feeling something somewhere, but I can’t locate it or define the source. Is it a full-on meltdown or is it that my socks are bunching at my ankles so I can’t concentrate on anything else? Even the simplest instructions can feel like being handed an IKEA assembly manual.

To get in a better habit around this, I think of the game Operation. As I poke around with my tin tweezers, trying to see where my stress lives, I hit the buzzer again and again and the red clown nose lights up. Was that shame in my spleen? The stomach? The trapezius, so tense you’d need a crowbar to put my scapula at ease. God knows what that’s about. Discomfort, pleasure — it didn’t matter. Everything felt indistinct. My body a floating island, with two factory settings: bad, and not worse.

When I step back from social media, the disruptions to the inner radio lessen. The songwriting channels get clearer, too. It’s easier, absent the noise of the entire internet funneled into my cornea, to clock what the fuck is going on — even if there are fewer funny shitposting memes and low-touch updates from friends to cheer me. I went to a birthday party last week and, for the first time in months, had no idea what my pals had been up to. It was nice to get the download in person.

But feeling “clear” doesn’t always equate to feeling “better.” Sometimes it means having the space to feel more, with less to blunt the edges. The first couple weeks after I remove the apps from my phone always bring a rush of FOMO. How will we stay in contact? What am I missing? This subsides. I remember the people in my life are just as there as they ever were. Maybe more so. We talk on the phone. We grab coffee or Korean hotpot. I cannot stress enough how much hotpot can do to bring a whole wretched week back from the brink.

Outside of exercise and soup, being in person is where it’s at for me. How about you? I notice how it feels to be in class again with other people instead of alone, watching it on demand. Moving in sync (or, you know, groaning on the off-beats together). I get nervous talking to new people, but even I feel something in my cold-hearted crust shatter while sharing space. Note, too, where the money changes hands. It hits different, paying a teacher directly instead of it going to another app. Buying the album instead of streaming it (I know, I know, but it’s still the best alternative to Spotify/streamers.) Going to the local hardware store for a lightbulb instead of ordering one from Amazon. I’m by no means perfect in this department, but I’m trying.

Saturday, my sister texted me that DHS officers has shot another person in Minneapolis. I later learned his name was Alex Pretti. I was writing at the time, and for once hadn’t left my phone behind in the house. The video popped up and went on autoplay. I texted my sister not to watch it, but it was too late. I cried for a long time after that.

Listen. I know you come here for flowers and songs, but I cannot offer that to you tonight. Here instead is what sprung to mind then. I thought of Renée Nicole Good’s face. I thought of others who lost their lives in ICE custody, whose names did not make the headline news in the same way: Ismael Ayala Uribe, Parady La, Santos Reyes-Banegas, Oscar Duarte Rascon, Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr. There are more I am forgetting. We didn’t get here overnight. I thought further back to George Floyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray. People who should still be here now.

Images haunt me, too. Franceola Armstrong, Keith Porter Jr.’s mother, doing the impossible task of memorializing her son during an LA Council Meeting. Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s stunned face, trembling in his cobalt hat as an ICE agent leads him into detention. Renée Good’s wife, collapsed in a driveway, wailing as she held on to their dog. Alex Pretti helping two vets through recovery at the VA ICU, the same guy who carried his elderly dog, Joule, down the stairs so she wouldn’t strain her joints. People trying to be good neighbors or rushing to get their kids to school on time. But this isn’t about “bad things” happening to “good people.” Regardless of someone’s character or immigration status, everyone has a right to live. In this country, everyone, including legal residents and undocumented individuals, is entitled to key protections under the 1st, 4th, or 5th amendments. But setting aside the legal implications, what else is there to say about the spectacle of barging into homes in the middle of the night and zip-tying children but that it’s fucked up and cruel?

What I know is that being idle sucks. Being out in the world, shouldering this with others in my community, is keeping me sane. Or sane-ish.

Alex Pretti’s last words spoken were, “Are you ok?”

I think the only way to see the other side of this is by sticking together. I’ve had the privilege to spend some time in the Twin Cities over the years, and I’m not surprised to see how people have rallied together there. It gives me more than hope. It gives me momentum. And I am feeling it here, in my very small town, when we organize. We may not have the show of numbers of a Chicago or Minneapolis/St. Paul — but we are no less appalled by these goon squads.

Community changes everything. It gives you a sense of pride, for one. How different this storm was, for example. One neighbor with a generator invited us over if the heat went out. Another texted, “you doing ok over there, kiddo?” (I hope none of us are ever too old to be called ‘kiddo.’) When I woke, he had shoveled the walkway and plowed the drive. We traded goofy videos of dogs and kids making tracks in the snow. We have candles and food and flashlights, all the necessities — but few things can top having people you can count on. But community doesn’t happen overnight. It takes an effort.

If nothing else, text your most stoic friend, Are you alright? Ask your neighbors and coworkers how they are doing. If you don’t know your neighbors yet, now’s a good time to introduce yourself.

Lastly, if you’ve been watching the administration’s slide-tackle towards fascism since last January, wondering what to do about it, it’s time to get involved. Many have already done the hard work of grassroots organizing, and I bet there are some where you live. Seek them out. Plug in. Volunteer. This afternoon, the senate failed to advance the DHS funding bill that would give them even more resources. If the thought of that makes your stomach lurch, give them a call. Email them. These actions may feel futile and small in the moment, but they aren’t. There are companies feeling the pressure, too. After sitting silent nearly all month, some business have seen an 80% drop in sales. 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies like Target, Best Buy and UnitedHealth signed a letter to the state chamber of commerce urging de-escalation.

So on that note, if you’re interested, there is a National Shutdown tomorrow, Friday Jan 30. Even if money’s too tight to take off work, could you commit to not shopping? Every gesture counts. More resources I found useful are linked below.

And don’t forget to take in the good things, too. I made Moko Hirayama’s chocochunk cookies and a big pot of soup. There are mustard greens at the farm right now. Delicious in a soup like this. I continue to move my stubborn ham hocks and write. Oz made snow angels that looked like tiny bobsled tracks. Other small stuff cheering us up:

• Greg Bovino losing his job.

• As mentioned, Holly Hill Farm is a nonprofit that manages to stay open year round. A winter’s miracle to get radishes and greens grown around here right now.

• I’m sick of shoveling, but the snow is undeniably beautiful.

• Oz arranges her bones in a neat row on the sofa, inspecting each one. It’s very anal retentive but cute.

• Llew has found a new shoebox to nap in, and we all pretend we haven’t noticed. Like the bones, it’s very cute.

• I just finished The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I dunno, but reading sci-fi about AI, sentient octopi, and what will come of humankind is working for my current headspace. Kinda like how Pluribus feels like a haunting comfort watch.

• I’m living for stories about how small businesses in Minneapolis are coming together from friends there. One that stood out in particular is Smitten Kitten, a queer-owned adult store opening its doors to distribute mutual aid, while passing out dildos to ICE agents. That’s good trouble, right there.

• Samin Nosrat’s recipes are all great, but in particular love this preserved lemon paste that I want to add to everything. Is it a recipe or a way of life? Salad dressings, marinades, a swoosh of yogurt with roasted sweet potatoes on top. When I am stressed I go hard on the condiments.

KCRW's Good Food

Samin Nosrat on Good Food

As for the show this week, I admit to being new to Zoom interviews. We were a radio show for so long (and still are!) that it took me a while to understand why podcasters do so much video. Occasionally, we connect with guests through a Zoom link, but we typically don’t turn the video on. So my interview with…

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6 months ago · 21 likes · Evan Kleiman

Take good care of yourselves.

Until next time,

CD

Helpful steps to take and resources

• Check out the Immigrant Defense Project, a great resource for getting familiar with your rights.

• Learn from Jelani Cobb and Stacey Abrams about the history of white supremacy that got us here.

• Call and Email your reps (I like 5Calls and resist.bot which will send your emails loaded up with spelling errors for you, free of charge).

• For those in Massachusetts, LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts has a hotline to report ICE sightings. You can also volunteer.

• Register to Vote. November is not as far away as we might think.

• Big long list of great resources to pull from (ways to donate people to help pay rent, lists of places to donate, and much more.)

  Mad Woman

  THREAD: Fucking bitches unite

  Friends, my attention is frayed today, as I’m sure yours is too, but every time I look at an image of the fierce Minnesotans out there protecting their neighbors, I am moved to tears. I had a thought this weekend, despite the brutal violence, despite how we have all become public death analysts, despite having to explain to my children why the state kee…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 61 likes · 9 comments · Amanda Montei

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I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

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We’re back from LA, home to a fresh blanket of snow and a sheet of ice on the doorstep, which quickly melted in the rain this morning. Back just in time before I kick into a much-needed hibernation. You heard it here first: for the time being, I’ll be pausing paid subscriptions while I take some rest.

Whenever someone asks how it feels to take …

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First, I had no idea last week’s newsletter would land the way it did. I was nervous to send it, and your responses meant the world. Thank you for reading. I’ll try and pull more from the archives again soon.

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On top of the news, yesterday morning greeted me with a zit forming on my forehea…

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I’ve been revisiting a lot of older work lately, and with it, the mess of my own record-keeping.

I’ve never been all that nostalgic or interested in looking back. It always felt a little hokey. But something’s shifted. Maybe it’s turning 40 and recognizing that time is finite. If you don’t take stock of your archives or attic, no one else is likely to.

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The thing about starting your career as a kid is that you operate…like a kid. You don’t hold onto anything. You move cross-country twice and sell off your belongings both times. Masters sent to you over WeTransfer feel evergreen, until six years go by and the link is dead. Instrumentals? You could have sworn you squirreled them away somewhere, maybe they’re on that old hard drive with an obsolete USB 2.0. Or backups you put away for safe keeping don’t turn on anymore. Or you labeled your hard drives with creative names like “XTRA LIFE” that mean nothing to you now. So now I’m on a bit of a wild-goose chase for stems.

Stems and mixes age about as well as the hard drives they live on. Plugins disappear. Sound libraries become incompatible. I have a friend whose graduate work focused on this exact thing—the difficulty of protecting digital archives. We love to say the internet is forever, but in many ways whatever we render digitally has a half-life.

Sorry to bore you with such administrative weeds, but I’m confronting the fact that I’m nowhere near as organized or “future-proofed” as I assumed. It’s reminded me how I wasn’t all that invested in my future when it came to my career. With all my generalized anxiety, I live best in the present. It’s the place where I feel I have the most say in what comes next.

I started with the photos first, because I felt like those might be hardest and I wanted to get that out of the way. But no, they actually were lovely reminders of the people I worked with. Like this, the still from Derrick Belcham’s video for No Devotion. Without trying to, we stumbled on to the exact right moment for the cover.

It’s hard to open the past without confronting how long I’ve been my body’s worst critic. So many shots were eliminated because I didn’t like the angle of my nose or chin or my hips or whatever. I want to tell you this doesn’t happen anymore, but like most people, I still find myself sometimes going down this lane as I age. It’s amazing how dumb comments online can really stick with you. But Lahaina Alcantara’s photography is so sensitive and beautiful, and if I have any regret, it’s not using more of the work she contributed. Some Francesca Woodman vibes. I think at the time I didn’t like how sad and depressed I looked. But I was sad and depressed! I think she found the beauty in it where I couldn’t.

The most interesting part of this process has been finding older versions of released work. Baby, in particular, was probably the hardest record I’ve ever made. I don’t know how much I’ve talked about it, but I was coming out of a brutal period and felt like I was on my knees the entire time. Even after it was released, there wasn’t the usual catharsis I feel after putting out an album, because performing those songs every night seemed to pull me back into the mindset I was trying to climb out of.

Comparitively, My Heart of an Outlaw has been such a joyful process — both the making of it, the publishing, and the question of performing the songs live. They’re just so extroverted and fun.

But not every album is like that. Some projects come with tougher lessons. Baby was one of those. I had a number of false starts with really talented people in Portland, Montreal, and Wisconsin. The songs wouldn’t congeal. Looking back, I think that had a lot to do with feeling unsafe and unsettled, trying to leave a deeply fucked-up situation. My regret, one I know is common among artists, was believing the album would redeem me. That it was okay to stay in turmoil, as long as the music was good. That I could endure as long as the songs came together in the end. It took years to understand it doesn’t work that way. The work cannot save you. Only you can - with support, therapy, community, rest. I look back at some of the promotional junkets for the album and can see how unhealthy I was in my face. It was a hard chapter, hence, why I’ve been so reluctant to go back there.

In the summer of 2012, I went to Montreal with songs in various states of disarray. In the past, that was fine; the studio could function as a forcing mechanism. It was my playground. I was grateful to be away from home, where I was almost certain my problems were compounding. But I struggled to focus, and when I left I had a literal tangle of stems, more than 15 songs, none of them really working.

I eventually took what I had to Aprilbase in the Midwest, hoping I’d find more clarity there. But you know how this story goes. We worked on “David” and layered the Prophet on it. Some of what came out of there was great, but I felt distracted. There was one song I desperately wanted to make work, but it wouldn’t come together, partly because nothing I’d recorded in Montreal was to grid. That song was called “For Nancy,” named for a dear friend of mine.

Here’s the demo:

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Eagle eyes will already know that eventually it became a song on Imitation of a Woman to Love.

Listening to the demo for the first time in 13 years, I was surprised to find myself enjoying it. There’s a lot of strain in it, but strain isn’t always as cringe as you might think. I sound like I’m wrestling something much bigger than me, which makes sense. I was. I still think the final version was the right one, but I wanted to share this (pitchy parts and all) because if you’re working on something and feeling stuck, have faith. Sometimes things take years to finish and to find their true home. What started as a piano ballad ended up finding its way as a pop banger.

There’s so much in that demo that was stunning to hear. I’d forgotten all of it. Many choices in there that surprised me: the reversed grand piano, the entirely organic feel of it, no click track in sight. I love the grandiosity of the bridge progression (“We’re a mad pair, you and I / each of us right on opposing sides”). Maybe because I was writing about someone so vital to me, more was weighing on it than a typical song. I wanted to capture the unique quality of long-haul friendship, how it stretches, challenges, and enriches you. In many ways, it might be one of the most romantic songs I’ve written, because it’s purely about love: accepting that you won’t always see eye-to-eye, and being grateful for the ways a close friend pushes you to show up better in the world.

The lyrics in the demo are completely different from the finished version. Does one feel more “true” to the original inspiration? Honestly, they all felt true at the time. And had I pushed this version harder, it would’ve been tricky anyway — there was a lot of vocal bleed in the piano track. That experience taught me a lot about mic technique, though. On My Heart Is an Outlaw, we found the performances were stronger when I played piano and sang simultaneously. For songs like “Turncoat,” it made the vocal delivery stronger. We only punched in at the beginning, I think.

I’m usually hesitant to share anything unpolished, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the pleasure of going back in time. I’m proud of that younger version of me who was writing through a hard chapter. All that frustration led me to producing —and not to toot my own horn, but Matt LeMay and I did some exciting sonic work on Baby that later helped shape Imitation of a Woman to Love. Songwriting may be my first love, but production is absolutely my second.

Nothing really came together until Matt jumped in. Where some friends had suggested I simplify things, Matt encouraged me to go deeper and define my own sound. There may be songs I’d tackle differently now, but you don’t get the layers on No Devotion without those months spent looking at the mess of my own archive and pulling the tracks together, piece by piece. I don’t think you get a People Can Change or Seventeen without Ring the Bell, which started with one vocal loop hook and took ages to make sense of. I’m still charmed by everything Cole Kamen-Green contributed as an arranger.

All the samples, the dense layers of sound, the organic drums from S. Carey and Neal Morgan stacked with my programming, the multi-layered and manipulated vocal loops. It’s the sound of someone in the thick of it. The distortion made emotional sense. Revisiting it now, feeling so far from that mindset, is oddly tender. I’m very glad to no longer be in that state of mind, but perhaps that album is a record of my way out. It’s interesting to see the choices I made, and the logic behind them. Hold a lot of sympathy for that younger me. Really proud of them for getting through it. I was listening to a podcast the other day where someone described anxiety as “when I’m having a good day, I know it’s temporary. But when I’m having a bad day, it feels like it will last forever.” I sometimes wish I could go back in time and tell them “these feelings are temporary.” But I can tell myself that now on those off days. Back then, I really couldn’t.

I suppose this post is my way of saying it’s okay to look back every now and then. It’s okay for songs to have many lives, past and present. Just like us people, songs are meant to transform over time.

Out of curiosity, if I ever put together and released a collection of archival work, would you be interested in that? Let me know below.

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Until next time.

xo

CD

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I wanted to write this week about the unexpected. Maybe it’s the Mercury in retrograde of it all. Felt we could all use a reminder that good things still happen. Like northern lights ribbon-dancing over the beach.

Some of us in this part of the world had the good fortune to see the aurora drift across our backyards last week. I was coming home from dinner when I noticed the pink and green bands unspooling overhead. I hadn’t even known they were in the forecast. Oz and I switched gears and drove to the beach (me in my slippers). This photo hardly does it justice.

Seeing the northern lights has been on my bucket list. Cheesy, I know, and I always assumed I’d have to fly to Iceland or Norway for it. A few winters back they said you could see them, but the sky looked dull that night, and with all the light pollution folks said you needed to be on the beach to really get a good glimpse. Maybe because it was cold, or we were tired, we didn’t make the trek. But there they were, right over the garden. I suppose this is my reminder to always make the trek. Because it doesn’t always come to be right on your doorstep like this.

Which brings me to pears.

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What to do with a metric fuck ton of pears

Have you ever come around to something so late in the game it stops you cold?

Lately, for me, that something has been the pear.

Specifically, oven-poached pears and apples, cooked down in cider.

This all began when a friend texted to see if I could help offload their Bosc tree, so heavy with fruit the branches were perilously close to snapping. Since moving here, I’ve become the person you call when you have garden abundance you can’t deal with. There are Stop & Shop bags full of end-of-season tomatoes picked just before frost, matsutake cut from the base of a dying oak, subdivided geraniums and hostas, and, yes, bags of orchard fruit on the brink. If you don’t know what to do with it, I will find a way. So when they asked if I wanted a couple pounds of pears, of course I said yes.

I said yes, although I’ve never really understood the pear’s appeal. Maybe it’s the trauma of canned fruit cups served at school lunches. Or those rock-hard grocery-store pears that sit on the counter, more decorative than interested in ripening, until suddenly they’re soft for approximately twelve minutes. Poach them and you see how finicky they are. Undercook them and they’re astringent, overcook them and they dissolve into sugary mush. And it always feels like a shame, because pears are among the last fruits to ripen before winter. From now until April, anything juicy comes from California or Argentina.

But ripe pears from a friend’s tree, as it turns out, are spectacular. Even the underripe ones tasted better than anything I’ve bought. That was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been on a full pear bender. Fist time I can recall waking up craving them. Once honeymoon of eating them out of hand faded, thoughts turned to cooking them again. I remembered a Canal House pear sorbet spiked with eau de vie — what I imagine the platonic ideal of a pear tastes like.

Instead, I decided to be ambitious and made Nicola Lamb’s outrageous Pear Bars, like an almond shortbread had a baby with a pear tart.

Kitchen Projects

KP+: Pear Bars

October is here and freshly picked pears and apples will be making their way to our tables. Sure, I appreciate a cold-storage pear - hardy, mature, impressively unaged and available to us anytime of the year, but nothing hits like eating a juicy pear in a cosy jumper…

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6 months ago · 121 likes · 24 comments · Nicola Lamb

Her recipe calls for gently poaching pears in a light lemon-vanilla syrup, which got me thinking about oven-poaching—lazy, forgiving, and nearly impossible to overcook as long as there’s enough liquid.

I’ve been trying to get better about breakfast, and this trick is helping:

Crank the oven to 350°F. Peel and slice whatever fruit you’ve got; I used pears and apples. Add a couple handfuls of dried fruit. Apricots, prunes, raisins, cranberries. Pour over enough fresh cider to almost cover, plus a little maple syrup to taste. Toss in a cinnamon stick, a few cloves, and some cardamom pods. Remove the peel of a lemon and put that in, too. Cover tightly with foil and bake for 40 minutes, until the fruit is just tender (not mushy). Let it cool, then spoon it over oatmeal or yogurt. It’s wonderful on pancakes too. Keeps a week in the fridge.

In the garden

We’re preparing Lantern for her annual winter hibernation, which can only mean one thing: Bulb Season.

A new bed went in this month, planted with a fresh drift of daffodils. But longtime readers know my heart belongs to the tulips.

I have a few stalwart favorites — Menton with its satiny pink glow, and the dark, dramatic Queen of the Night. I love a tall lily-flowered tulip like Pieter de Leuer for the back of the garden, where their height really sings.

But the varieties I’m most excited about this year are the variegated show-offs: Estella Rijnveld, Blueberry Ripple, Plaisir Greigii. They look hand-painted, each petal looks as if some old Dutch Master brushed them himself.

Listening & reading habits

Thank you to everyone who has listened to My Heart is an Outlaw and bought tickets to our show in Los Angeles on December 13. There’s still tickets left, so tell your friends!

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I’ve been so moved by all of it. The reception. Also, to those who won the sweepstakes I have not forgotten you! Prizes will be mailed out this week.

With the promotional whirlwind in full spin, it’s been a relief to fall back into other artists’ and writers’ worlds again. I’m hungry for music, books, and art to replenish the well. I’m hoping winter will give me a little more space for that.

Like everyone else, as a classical music nerd, I’ve been loving the grandiosity of Rosalia’s LUX. As ambitious as it is, it’s extremely playful. The work of a serious artist, yes, but also the work of someone allowing themselves to play and experiment. This performance made me smile.

I unearthed a bunch of vinyl I had in storage, and Cannonball Adderly’s Take Charge has been on repeat. Great autumn listening.

Goes without saying, but I will always break for Robyn.

As for reading, I just started Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive, after inhaling Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Deep House. I worry I’m reaching the end of my reading list, so please tell me what to refill it with. Tell me what you’re reading.

Leave a comment

Until next time.

xo

CD

If you liked this issue…

I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

It’s been a whirlwind 2 weeks since My Heart is an Outlaw entered the world, and I’ve hardly had a spare minute to sit down and soak it all in.

Listen now

There’s lots in the works at the moment. We’re getting ready for the full-band album release in Los Angeles at Scribble in a couple of weeks, which will be a blast. Some of you are even flying in for it! Wow. How lucky do I feel? Be sure to grab tickets in advance if you’re planning to attend.

• December 13 at Scribble at 8PM

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What else?

I had a chance to sit down with my friend Ben from Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service to talk about songwriting on LaunchLeft. Rain, who hosts the show, does a lovely job of getting all kinds of artists to open up about their process.

Obviously, as a pal who I chat about songwriting’s various ups and downs with from time to time, it felt cozy to open up about the process behind the album with him there. His interview with Rain is a great window into how he approaches work, too, and really showcases one of the things I admire most about his work ethic. He is fully engaged with the process, and loves it as much as I do. He’s long been someone I can bounce an idea off of and expect an honest answer when I need feedback. I often tell younger songwriters the best thing you can do is a build a deep bench of peers to share your work with, and do it often. Don’t be shy. Besides, it’s nice having people to nerd out with.

Speaking of good sounding boards, Adam and I sat down for the Talkhouse to discuss the album, too. A pretty solid window into our banter/work-talk ratio, but some good BTS glimpses into how we collaborate:

Casey: OK, on My Heart Is an Outlaw, what was your favorite song to work on?

Adam: I have a soft spot for the funky one.

Casey: “I’m So Glad You Came.”

Adam: Yeah. I have a soft spot for that one because I think that’s also going to be the most surprising, when people hear you do that speed. But it’s also just one of those songs that it only works if it really works. You can’t fake it after the fact. So it just has gobs and gobs of human majesty all kind of bumping into each other. I think that one’s really fun. Because then production-wise, it’s easy. It just does itself. There’s other ones we kind of built brick-by-brick, and that’s fun in its own way. But the record, I think, is special because it has an even supply of both of those things, where one thing sounds like there was a whole lot of work put into this, and another thing sort of sounds like we played it in our bathrobes and that is what also makes it really good.

This is what makes him such a great producer to work with. While My Heart is an Outlaw is our first time producing work together, we had years of bouncing ideas back and forth to build on — so by the time we had something to co-create, we had a well-established rapport. I knew I could trust him to push me in the direction I wanted to grow.

In the recent spate of press (which I ordinarily hide my eyes from), I’ve been really moved by how writers are engaging with the album critically. In 2025, when media landscape has contracted and consolidated so intensely, I’m grateful any time a writer wants to sit with one of my albums and wax on about it, like Molly Mary O’Brien’s write-up in Pitchfork. Something we don’t talk enough about on here is how important critique is to the delicate ecosystem of making good art. I know 10 years ago it was all the rage for artists to rail against Pitchfork, but it’s become a treat to see what writers I admire have to say, even when they point out things I missed or could have done better. I was particularly moved by ’s spin.

Lavender Sound

New Music Recap w/ Playlist!

Time and money aren’t infinite (thanks, capitalism!), so Lavender Sound can’t quite write full-length reviews for all the great albums we listen to. But because our debut new music recap, which covered January through July, was a hit, here are quick reviews of four albums we like that were released between August and October…

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5 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Max Freedman

There’s also writers like , who have been covering my albums almost as long as I’ve been making them, and I still remember how exciting it was to be featured on Fluxblog for the first time. I love that we’re all still at it, and I still rely in Matthew’s column to cotton on to new music. If you’re bummed with Spotify and looking for alternatives, there’s still no better discovery engine than a trusted friend or music critic (really into Hearing Things these days, too).

Fluxblog: Music Blog

Fluxblog 570: the new Tame Impala record is fine, ok?

This issue’s playlist is JAZZ BEATLES 1965-1971, a selection of jazz renditions of Fab Four classics recorded by the band’s contemporaries around the time the band actually existed…

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5 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Matthew Perpetua

In 2025, no one is entitled to critique. So, I’m happy and honored to be back at it, engaging with it this time with curiosity and real, deep, no-bull-shit gratitude.

As for the travel, I was off working in California for a bit again.

As often happens while away, I feel torn between places. I will always be a Masshole at heart, but I can’t deny the pull cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have on me. I love touching down, going to Dolores Park with a sandwich from Bi-Rite or a burrito from El Buen Sabor, and sitting on the grass to marvel at the people and dogs. Love seeing my friends for a coffee around the corner, and joining their Sunday dinner table. There’s something about the coastline that feels right to me, the people, the incredible and seemingly never-ending supply of insane produce. I had a chance this time to stop into Lunette for lunch, where I had a curry so complex I wanted to stop time and remember each and every ingredient I was tasting. Lemongrass, kaffir lime, then a dense tangle of fresh herbs. Don’t let the line intimidate you, it moves fast, and it is worth it.

It wasn’t all work, no play however. There was a terrific hike, complete with kite-flying and wraparound views that stretched all the way to Stinson Beach, which you could just barely see from the top.

And below us, this vast caldera of fog, through which only the radio tower pierced through. If you’ve ever flown over a mountain range like the Rockies or Alps, this kind of felt like the closest to touching down and walking amongst the skies. My only regret was not bringing enough sunscreen that day.

Caught up with friends over some excellent home-cooked meals, and got a chance to see Rachael and Vilray live with a full band. Their new record is lovely autumnal music. I’ve known both of them since we were in music school, and if you have the chance to catch one of their shows — run, don’t walk! Two once-in-a-lifetime voices singing in harmony. Doesn’t get better than that.

This weekend, back home, I finally had the chance to unpack the suitcase, and veg the fuck out. We carved pumpkins (badly). I made pumpkin soup and put some out for the ancestors. We watched Hocus Pocus 2, which does not hold a black-flame candle to the original, but hit the “dumb-and-mindless-fun” spot anyway. The next day, I yanked all the dahlias up, gave them a good bath, and put them in the shed to dry out before I tuck them away until next year, packed in brown paper. Always sad to say so long to the showgirls.

I was worried I would miss the leaves at their peak, but it appears I came home just in the nick of time. We’ve had a nice run of crisp, cool, and blue-skied days this week. New England was made for autumn weather. Spooky cemetaries, old saltbox homes decked out in gourds, and small cider mills run out of a neighbor’s backyard. The farmer’s market has wound down, but our local farm is open year-round, and stocked up with the good stuff. Acorn, honeynut, and delicata squashes. Fresh ginger. Apples and sage and the hardy leafy greens. Time to cook.

I’ve ordered my bulbs for next year, so I’ll come back soon to tell you more about that. Lots of stripey, varigated tulips with names like Blueberry Ripple. Curious what you’ve got planned, if anything?

Oz and I send you love in this crazy world. She attacked a ballpoint pen this morning and made a new etch-a-sketch drawing all over the sofa. A nap was earned.

Best,

Casey

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It’s been among the busiest 2 months of my short life, marking one of my proudest moments to date.

My Heart is an Outlaw is out everywhere today. Gonna take a minute to let that sink in.

Listen now

I hope you’ll give it a listen. Bump it on a night drive, take it on a highway. It’s really meant to be listened to in your car. To get you there a little faster, here’s one more song from the record, Outlaws. Complete with a video dreamed up by my dear friend Alex Basco Koch. It’s so beautiful and made me tear up watching again just now, so go enjoy!

As Alex says

Outlaws broke open my heart on the very first listen, and never stopped doing so. I had this image of the happiest, freest moment of childhood, and of flying. I think we were able to capture that story, and how we need to relearn that simple gift of feeling wind run through your hair, and sun kiss your skin.

The thesis statement of the album is embedded in the bridge.

Outlaws is a lesson in patience. I put this melody and lyric away in a pocket 8 years ago, like so many of the songs on this album. At one point it was placed in another unreleased song.

Sometimes you have these scraps you don’t know how to work with. It felt almost too simple. That’s how the truest songs go sometimes. Granted, I penned that line a long time ago. It’s not to say that it’s always been a safe world, certainly not for queer people, but the ‘outlaw’ metaphor has taken on a different meaning since. According to the ACLU, there are over 614 anti-LGBTQ+ bills up for vote in the US this year. If passed, we could see things like the legal redefinition of sex put in place in some states, along with restrictions on gender affirming healthcare, and forced outing policies in schools.

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When Proposition 8 was passed in California, I remember my uncle Jim saying “Who cares? I don’t want to spend my life fighting to play house.” We had a big argument that night. How could he be so flippant? Jim lived through the AIDs crisis, and by the 90s had lost many friends already. The state had not protected them then, so why would he look to the state to offer protection now? A complicated figure, he was a bon vivant and a big drinker, and by the time I was born had survived a lot of trauma. When I was 18, he took me to Paris and sat me down to dinner and told me he was gay. I already knew. I think he knew I knew. I sometimes wonder if he thought I would open up in the same way, but I didn’t that night. I didn’t really know who I was yet, except that I was going to be a Musician with a capital M. I tabled any inner dialogue around my own queerness right into my early 30s. He was gone before I could ever take him to dinner in Paris and tell him about myself. I really wish he could be here right now to listen to this record with me.

A big touchpoint tonally for the album, and Outlaws in particular, is Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. (Pay close attention to the artwork, I think you’ll see.) ‘Outlaws’ is loosely inspired by the campfire scene. See this from Criterion:

It’s on a trip to find Mike’s mother that the two friends spend the night, like so many cowboy duos have done, huddled over the campfire. And Mike, more daring and desperate than those cowboys before him, risks, or perhaps courts, a repetition of his primal loss by confessing his love to Scott… Mike’s raw need is too much for the self-protective Scott to cope with.

Mike is a narcoleptic oscillating in and out of consciousness throughout the film, which opens on a passed out River Phoenix dreaming of a barn dropping on a highway, coming to as he climaxes with a john. (A god tier opening to a film, and another example of Van Sant’s masterful use of contrast to advance storytelling forward). Scott is a rich dilletante who wants one final hurrah before succumbing in to the inevitable pressures to marry and inherit his father’s business. If Mike hustles to survive, Scott hustles as rebellion. But in this scene, Mike breaks the fourth wall. The chasm between them is plain to see. Scott’s freedom is derived from his privilege. With his beauty and ability to pass in hetero spaces, he has freedom to roam through parts of the world Mike can’t. Watching Phoenix, there is a porousness there. There is also tremendous courage in professing his love, fumbling through it, knowing it might not be reciprocated.

“I love you, and you don’t pay me” he tells Scott, who struggles to see Mike’s point of view. For him, everything is a capitalist exchange. Sex for money. Marriage for status. Everything in their world is transactional. But what Mike longs for has no currency. The parallels may not be obvious, but I saw something of myself in Mike’s yearning. For many years I went door to door with what came across as a similar need to be loved, but was actually a yearning to come home. To belong somewhere. To someone. A place. Every way to Sunday I could belong, I tried, and it backfired.

Coming out is different for every single person. Mine happened relatively late, in my 30s. My nonbinariness was a slow process of becoming (and seemingly always in progress) — sometimes painful, sometimes liberating. Like Mike, I felt like I lived in and out of consciousness with my body. I felt and still occasionally experience guilt asking friends and colleagues to use my preferred pronouns, not wanting to cause a fuss or make it seem gimmicky. But whenever someone I dated referred to me as their “girlfriend” or a friend referred to me as “she” I’d have a little tweak in my brain. Like chewing tin foil in there. I assumed everyone had these kinds of tweaks in their head about something. I assumed I could live with them, so not to make anyone else uncomfortable.

Conversely, ‘they’ has always fit like a beautifully tailored suit since the day I slipped it on. It gives me a sense of relief to remove all the pressure away, and simply ‘be.’ I am me, Casey. I’m they and them. ‘They’ is expansive, ‘they’ is neither masc nor femme, nor is it none-of-the-above, and sometimes it is all of it, all at once. To this day, I don’t quite know why ‘they’ feels like a struggle for some to understand (for those curious, I think andrea bennet’s like a boy but not a boy is a good place to start). It’s intergalactic yet rooted. It’s matter-of-fact. It confirms what I know true. I will likely always float in the in between. But as opposed to feeling like an alien, ‘they’ is belonging. It connects me to a much wider web of people and their lived experience. It has given me a home within myself, similar to how moving back to Massachusetts has anchored me and the work I make. I do better on terra firma. I am no good as a tortured artist.

I know I’m tangenting. What does all of this have to do with this song and album? Outlaws is the full Havest moon, it’s things coming full circle. It’s the sound of where I grew up. Where I live now. It’s the coast of Massachusetts, the marsh, the dunes out in Provincetown.

Most albums tend to tread a question or two posed by the artist. My Heart is an Outlaw at present seems to be about self-reliance versus interdependence. That big need to belong somewhere. Creating that may start within us as individuals, but in my experience it also requires a web of support to come full circle. Can you stand on your own two feet? Can you lean on your community? There I am, in the middle again. I think the healthiest path forward is a mix of both. Making sure you can care for yourself, set a boundary and keep it, and retain enough tenderness to let others in. I’m still learning how to do that last one! I’m sure I’ll come to receive even more messages from these songs in 5 years time, especially as I play them live more. But for now, today, in this life, I’m really grateful for what they’ve taught me. And I’m overjoyed to pass them all onto you now.

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The truth is complicated. I needed to get there on my own. But I never got there on my own, either.

I had my chosen family and friends along with me, so I’d like to spend the rest of today thanking them.

Adam Schatz () took on the helm as producer in a beautiful, sensitive way (he would not like me gassing him up like this maybe, but he deserves all the praise!). We had so much fun together, pushed each other, and made so much delicious pasta and meals from Dishoom. Honestly, I think in addition to a studio he ought to open a restaurant. Thank you, thank you, thank you. No one makes me laugh harder, and no one pushes me to be better as a songwriter than you.

Rob Shelton pulled out all the bells and whistles while engineering the basic tracks, and put up with a lot of questions from me along the way. All songs started with the band live in one room, a call Adam made early on — which I think absolutely makes all the difference. I will never forget watching how he mic’d the strings to get this incredible stereo quality. We started off with the highest quality recordings to take into mixing, and really, what this confirmed for me was that sometimes the best strategy is not only to call in great players, but to make sure your engineering isn’t phoned in. So many of these songs sounded completely great on their own as a result of Rob’s work. Same, too with Nate Mendelsohn who engineered the horns and vocal tracks. He absolutely nailed it.

As for mixing, Jake Aron’s ear was indispensable. Mixing is a main character on this record. We had a big assignment, to capture both the big room sound and up-close details. He was able to bring out all the best twinkly textures from the arrangements (some of which had so many tracks it was hard to keep track) without losing the low-endy goodness and fidelity. Always thoughtful, kind. Every time I got a new mix felt like Christmas.

Heba Kadry’s mastering also falls into the indispensable category. Her sensitivity to everything, from the sequencing for vinyl to getting the right mix of volume, made a massive impact on the quality. I can always trust her to make the final LP stronger. Seriously, if you take a look of the most beautiful albums out there this year (like Blood Orange’s Essex Honey and Cecile McLorin Salvant’s Oh Snap), her mark is across many of them.

I feel privileged to work with all of the people above, and the others listed below.

‘My Heart is an Outlaw’ is now all yours. I hope you love it as much I loved making it. ❤️‍🔥

Definitely come celebrate with us December 13 at Scribble in LA.

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ALBUM PERSONNEL

• Casey Dienel | Vocals + Piano

• Adam Schatz | Synths + Tenor Sax

• Max Jaffe | Drums + Percussion

• Spencer Zahn | Bass

• Carly Bond | Guitar (People Can Change, Seventeen, Outlaws, Tough Thing)

• Meg Duffy|(Your Girl’s Upstairs, I’m So Glad You Came, The Butcher is My Friend, 3 of Cups, Junkyard Dog)

• Aaron Rockers | Trumpet (People Can Change, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws, Tough Thing)

• Adam Dotson | Trombone (People Can Change, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws, Tough Thing)

• Jonah Parzen-Johnson | Baritone Sax (People Can Change, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws, Tough Thing)

• Laurann Angel | Violin (Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Turncoats, Outlaws, Junkyard Dog)

• Lily Honigberg | Violin (Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Turncoats, Outlaws, Junkyard Dog)

• Marta Honer | Viola (Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Turncoats, Outlaws, Junkyard Dog)

• Emily Elkin | Cello (Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Turncoats, Outlaws, Junkyard Dog)

• Starr Busby | Vocals (People Can Change, Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws)

• Jachary | Vocals (People Can Change, Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws)

• Nina Moffitt | Vocals (People Can Change, Seventeen, I’m So Glad You Came, Outlaws)

PRODUCTION CREDITS

• Adam Schatz | Producer

• Jake Aron | Mixer

• Heba Kadry | Mastering

• Rob Shelton | Engineer

• Nate Mendelsohn | Engineer (Vocals & Horns)

Recorded at: Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, and the Chamber of Commerce in Vermont.

Album photography by Shervin Lainez. Layout and design by Daniel Murphy.

OUTLAWS VIDEO CREDITS

• Director | Alex Basco Koch

• Camera | Zak Cedarholm + Alex Basco Koch

• Editor | Zak Cedarholm

• Cast (in order of appearance) | Maya Stanley-Cacchione, Olivia Stanley-Cacchione, Sam Gray, Kathy Huynh-Phan, Ava Yaghmaie, Monica Sanborn, Kevin Townley, Raul Luna, Kelly Hurt, Casey Dienel, Celine Merle

• Additional VFX | Stephanie Beattie

• Special Thanks | Tamara Cacchione, Anais Merle, Monica Sanborne, Claire Karoff, August Basil Karoff Koch

• Production | Ghost Corporeal + Cedar Studios

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Chicago’s been on my mind, as is every family and protester currently facing ICE right now. It’s been a dispiriting week, interspersed with some personal sweetness. I spent the weekend visiting my sister and her family, including the newest member, who’s just six weeks old. There was apple picking, ample snuggles, and a long-overdue reunion with my childhood best friend.

The time when I’m not working feels especially precious, and I want to share it with the people I love and hold closest. These hours are the ones I’ll never get back, so I want to use them wisely. If, like me, you’re struggling to keep your head above water amid the news, I hope you can carve out a little time to find your center of gravity. For me, that’s movement (unfortunately, exercise and stretching do help keep my foulest moods at bay), cooking, hot baths, and walking my dog. As a big treat, Oz and I went to the beach to watch the moonrise.

What I admire most about the moon is how it refuses to be captured on camera. It insists we put our phones down and watch. Just when Oz was getting antsy and I thought of packing it in due to cloud cover, there she was — the peach-colored Harvest Moon, rising from the ocean.

Meanwhile, the album is out in a little over a week(October 17). Every time I hear someone’s been listening feels like a miracle. I’m so glad you’re enjoying People Can Change and The Butcher is My Friend. I’ve asked Rob at Jealous Butcher to send out the vinyl a bit early to those of you who have already pre-ordered. You should see them in the post sometime this week. ;)

Pre-order / Pre-save

My Take: Writing ‘People Can Change’

We tackled this song first during the initial tracking session in LA back in 2024. There was a kind of symmetry to that — it was also the first song I finished for My Heart is an Outlaw, long before I even knew I was making an album.

You can still hear the bones: the same piano melody at the opening, that little staccato chord before the first verse. The song really began with rhythm — a triplet shuffle, 6/8-ish — though the swing was different then. Max’s playing is obviously a massive improvement on what I started with. I’d used mostly organic drum samples to mimic a live kit. In hindsight, that was the first clue that what I really missed was playing in a band again — having a drummer in the room. Maybe it’s the pianist in me, but rhythm is almost always the primary building block, even before the progression is sorted.

In 2020, I’d moved back to Massachusetts during lockdown, working out of my parents’ basement where my piano was stored. I barely wrote for a year and a half — the longest break since I was a teenager. I wish we’d normalize those breaks more widely. They’re a way of metabolizing and composting old work to make space for what comes next. When this album cycle ends, I plan to do the same. Putting your kit away for a while does two crucial things:

1. It forces a change in perspective.

2. It lets you miss the practice again.

Do long breaks make it harder to restart the engine? Yes and no. I’m sure fewer reviewers are writing about the album than they would if I released more consistently. But there’s no point in spending your budget on promotion if the music can’t stand on its own.

Music can be all-consuming; album touring demands a lot, even with a team behind you. These follow periods are about replenishing the well. Refilling your cup, however you want to put it. It’s essential to reconnect with the group chat, take your nephew for ice cream, go to your friends’ kids’ birthday parties, and not be the main character.

I was thinking about that while testing out The Life of a Showgirl on the drive to Logan. Though it doesn’t come up often, I’m a Reputation guy. The new record sounds driven by the push to be productive rather than the impulse to create. That’s not unique to Swift — many of pop’s apex predators eventually find themselves hermetically sealed off by stan culture and wealth.

Being a celebrity is, in practice, quite boring. Their lives are cloistered. If a songwriter is meant to mirror humanity, you limit yourself flying private and dining in VIP rooms — putting the work at risk. At the top of the mountain, what’s left to write about except being up there? Owning the haters with your Amex isn’t a compelling redemption arc because consumption isn’t a story. Buying diamonds and real estate isn’t hard if you have gobs of money.

Warhol once said, “People are only glamorous if you don’t see them.”

My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person…There is something about people on screen that makes them so special; when you see them in person, they are so different and the whole illusion is gone.

Feels truer than ever now. In Screen Tests, that illusion goes up in smoke. The longer you look, the less mystique there is. Edie blinks. All her glamour disintegrates as the camera keeps rolling. In motion, she’s not the It Girl, but a woman who seems both fidgety and bored.

Warhol’s use of screenprinting (like the famous Coca Cola prints and endlessly reproduced Marilyns) mimicked assembly-line production. One I was thinking about is 1963’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster). Reproduction drains a lot of the aura of the image. In that work, which is about 12 feet tall, the image of a car wreck is replicated a dozen times. He’d lifted it from a tabloid. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have the same effect.”

One could say our present is Warholian, where the daily horrors of Gazans starving live on the same loop as videos promoting Korean cutting jelly and a baby hippo eating a carrot. In pop, the artist’s brand is the product, scaled and replicated until the two blur. The goal is always to get bigger and ubiquitous. To be Nike or Coca Cola. To hold a product to the same standard as art is to misunderstand both.

I experience this in tech circles with AI. Writers often ask, Who asked for this? Why would we want AI to write for us when there’s so much pleasure in working through an idea, in plucking the exact right phrase out of midair? When language is a delicious puzzle, it feels wrong to hand off that “struggle” to an LLM. But when the ultra-rich determine which products get built, those products inevitably reflect their narrow worldview. As a songwriter, if 75% of the people you interact with are on your payroll or just as powerful as you, you lose access to genuine, bi-directional feedback — the kind that sharpens your writing and deepens your self-awareness.

It’s a songwriter’s prerogative to make things no one asked for —or to make things before the rest of the world knows to ask for it. It’s a marketer’s prerogative to give the people what they want. Somewhere between those two poles is where most of us selling work commercially live — trying not to get too precious or too cynical about it, taking pleasure in the process without losing sight of the bigger picture.

It feels silly to compare myself to a popstar, but everyone benefits from lying fallow for awhile. I had my own bout of fart-sniffing about ten years ago when my career was on the upswing, when a friend at dinner said, “Can we just hang out and have you not talk about your work for a bit?” That’s a real friend, right there.

She was right. My work had become my identity. I didn’t have hobbies, just side hustles. I didn’t have the headspace to date, because I was always pulled back into work. When I stepped back, I didn’t intend to return to music — I just switched careers. I started copywriting and immediately repeated the same pattern: overworking, saying yes to everything, forgetting to take breaks. My burnout was deep. It wasn’t until 2020 that I could finally see it for what it was — working myself to the bone to avoid grief about leaving a career I loved.

Those same pernicious tendencies resurfaced while writing this song. I used to stay up all night perfecting a song; now I couldn’t. I had to be at work by 9 a.m. That constraint helped. I could get up and play before work because it felt good. I wrote because it helped me feel connected — not because I was chasing a product. It let me step outside the mindset of we need a bop or that’s too long for a single. In the scheme of things, nothing I make from here on out has to adhere to any business standard.

“People Can Change” came together lyrically in mostly chronological order. I quit the idea, quit the ideal of me, too. Several songs on Outlaw unfolded that way — lines that sound like they’re about a relationship but are really about something bigger: the music industry, burnout, the personas we build to survive, and the slow work of unbecoming them.

There’s also a streak of situational comedy in there — from the second verse (“Don’t ask me what I think unless you’re ready to hear my opinion”) to the coda (“Why can’t you write something happy?”). Those might be the truest summaries of my communication style.

Sometimes when you write, your more ungenerous qualities rise to the surface. To edit out the petulance, stubbornness, or unwillingness to compromise would undercut the whole point. In any relationship — romantic, platonic, or creative — there’s always more than one perspective. The tricky part is finding the courage to see where you could’ve been softer, fairer, or kinder.

That, to me, is what My Heart is an Outlaw is about. Looking at all of it — the good, the bad, the ugly. Holding the contradictions. Taking accountability for our worst impulses, and a little credit when we do better. Sometimes you can’t stay in a relationship anymore precisely because you love that job or person or city. You need to quit.

Watching the full moon, I thought about what I want to see happen for us all in the year ahead. One wish is keep making work that feels alive and risky. The other is to resist the pressure to produce — to replicate, to hustle, to power through. To remember creative work should be fun, healing, and help us understand our world a little better.

In that sense, People Can Change was the perfect first song to break through the herd. To change your mindset, you’ve got to surrender first.

(I’ve left you the chart below if you’d like to try your hand at playing it.)

People Can Change Copy

50KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

ICYMI: The Outlaws Giveaway

Ok, after all the pondering above, I have to shill a little bit here. Have you entered the giveway? It’s easy.

Preorder / Presave

How to enter:

1. Buy the vinyl. Pre-order or purchase My Heart is an Outlaw on vinyl anytime before October 31 (all prior purchases since the album was announced in August are eligible).

2. Send proof. Reply to this email or HMU at CD@whoiscaseydienel.com with a photo of your receipt. That’s it!

Prizes:

• Everyone who enters gets a free 1-year paid subscription to Notes From Lantern House (this opens up all the archived posts).

• 10 winners chosen at random will receive a handwritten postcard and a one-of-a-kind Polaroid of something that inspired the album.

• 1 Golden Ticket winner will receive a Mystery Box and a private 30-min AMA on Zoom with me.

The Golden Ticket Mystery Box
A curated bundle of my favorite things:

• A signed test pressing of the vinyl

• A candle, handmade soap, and dish by a New England maker

• A favorite book of mine

• Polaroids, a recipe, and a handwritten note about the album

• More treats TBD ;)

30-Min Private AMA
Your time to ask me anything — about the album, songwriting, gear I use, or shoot the shit about what bulbs I’m planting next spring.

✨ Winners will be chosen on Nov 1 and contacted that week. The record is the map. Follow it, and you just might find the bounty.

If you liked this issue…

I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

Picking singles is hard. Every song on My Heart is an Outlaw has earned its place, and I honestly believe there’s something here for everyone. Then, a few weeks ago, I was reminded that I’m captain of this ship. I get to make the rules. S

o for the final single before the album arrives on October 17, I’m giving you a double. Two special songs.

Today People Can Change and The Butcher is My Friend is out!

Listen

Subscribe now

The Outlaws Giveaway 🏴‍☠️☠️

With the full album landing in just 18 days, I wanted to thank everyone who picks up the vinyl with a little game — where everyone wins something.

How to enter:

1. Buy the vinyl. Pre-order or purchase My Heart is an Outlaw on vinyl anytime before October 31 (all prior purchases since the album was announced in August count).

2. Send proof. Reply to this email, HMU at CD@whoiscaseydienel.com, or DM me on IG with a photo of your receipt.

3. Claim your bounty.

Prizes:

• Everyone who enters gets a free 1-year paid subscription to Notes From Lantern House (this opens up all the archived posts).

• 10 winners chosen at random will receive a handwritten postcard and a one-of-a-kind Polaroid of something that inspired the album.

• 1 Golden Ticket winner will receive a Mystery Box and a private 30-min AMA on Zoom with me.

The Golden Ticket Mystery Box
A curated bundle of my favorite things:

• A signed test pressing of the vinyl

• A candle, handmade soap, and dish by a New England maker

• A favorite book of mine

• Polaroids, a recipe, and a handwritten note about the album

• More treats TBD ;)

30-Min Private AMA
Your time to ask me anything — about the album, songwriting, gear I use, or shoot the shit about what bulbs I’m planting next spring.

✨ Winners will be chosen on Nov 1 and contacted that week. The record is the map. Follow it, and you just might find the bounty.

Pre-order / Pre-save

About ‘People Can Change’ and ‘The Butcher is My Friend’

Across the album, there are songs I think of as “Jedi worriers.” By now you’ve heard the banger and the barn burner. But the Jedi worriers dredge up what I’d rather not say out loud. Telling you what they’re about feels like voluntarily opening a cavity.

‘People Can Change’ is the aftermath. Saying “enough is enough.” It could be a person, but I was writing about my workaholism. Specifically, the music industry. It’s the first line of the record, and the thesis of it all. I quit the idea of me. I quit the ideal of me, too. I quit trying to mother things that aren’t working for me. It’s about how much we can reasonably ask of one another: a moment to pull yourself together? A lifetime? The sky and the ocean?

It was the first song I completed writing for the album in 2020. Wasn’t consciously trying to “make an album,” but it arrived in May of that year anyway. This marked the beginning of returning to how I wrote as a kid — just me and my Steinway. It reminded me that sometimes what comes most naturally to me can also yield something powerful. I’m especially proud of Schatz’s brass arrangements here. We gave the song the lush, old-school studio treatment, with horns, strings, and voices building into a big Technicolor finish.

Personnel:
Casey Dienel | Vocals + Piano
Adam Schatz | Synths + Tenor Sax
Max Jaffe | Drums + Percussion
Spencer Zahn | Bass
Carly Bond | Guitar
Aaron Rockers | Trumpet
Adam Dotson | Trombone
Jonah Parzen-Johnson | Baritone Sax
Starr Busby | Vocals
Jachary | Vocals
Nina Moffitt | Vocals

Produced Adam Schatz, mixed by Jake Aron, engineered by Rob Shelton. Backup vocals and horns engineered by Nate Mendelsohn, and mastered by Heba Kadry. Recorded at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, and The Chamber of Commerce in Vermont.

‘The Butcher is My Friend.’ This one is about limerence in inhospitable terrain. It’s the fever dream. New love is a leap of faith. Here’s a song about how we stand in our own way. In the early days, you’re all sexed up and lovesick, riding a high so good it feels unsustainable. The butcher within is that inner voice telling you it can’t last, sharpening his knife. Is it self-sabotage? Or your gut reminding you to protect your heart?

Initially, it sounded like a ballad, but by the end of tracking it had transformed into something bigger. Admittedly, there are big gaps in my listening library. Bruce Hornbsy is one. (Don’t get it.) Elvis Costello is another (blame it on all the mopey a cappella covers of ‘Alison’ I was subjected to in high school). Adam and I had a really lengthy reference mix filled with Madonna and George Michael and Springsteen, and he insisted I take a listen to This Year’s Model. Not long after, this song took on this Costello-y/E-Street Band vibe. Adam’s driving synths, me doing the most leadfoot piano line, Spencer going full 80s on the bass, Meg from ’s layered up guitar, and, yes, a sax solo by the inimitable Schatz himself. Why not? Life’s short, and these are dire times.

I love a contrast. Draping this macho scaffolding around some of the most vulnerable lyrics on the album (“Built it anyway / that shitty little garden there / loved it so hard though nothing came up”). I was thinking about Freddie Mercury’s ability to take those deep, reflective moments into that blown-out, widescreen Live at Wembley space. I’d never allowed myself to go there. Well, reader, this time I did. This one belongs in a stadium.

Personnel:
Casey Dienel | Vocals + Piano
Adam Schatz | Synths + Tenor Sax
Max Jaffe | Drums + Percussion
Spencer Zahn | Bass
Meg Duffy | Guitar

Produced Adam Schatz, mixed by Jake Aron, engineered by Rob Shelton, and mastered by Heba Kadry. Recorded at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, and The Chamber of Commerce in Vermont.

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At its core, both songs circle the same tension: how do you tell the difference between intuition and fear? Between love and being high on the supply of someone new? How do you know when something’s worth holding onto, and when it’s time to let go?

When I say “my heart is an outlaw,” I mean I don’t always find my own heart trustworthy. This album charts the path of learning to follow my own compass again. That kind of repair isn’t the work of one record — it’ll take my lifetime. But it cracked open a door that had been jammed shut for a long time.

Writing is like pulling a tarot card from the deck. Each song has a message for the querent. Each one is far wiser than I’ll ever be. Unseen forces surround us, things I trust without question. Gardening and music have given me the blueprint. If you can have faith in something as big as this planet and as humble as the soil, you can find a way to believe in yourself. All of us, the irreplaceable, lovable specks in the vast universe that we are.

By the way, will we see any of you in Los Angeles Dec 13 at Scribble? Tickets are still available.

Get tix

xo

Casey

If you liked this issue…

I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

Big transitions everywhere right now. A hearty thank you to everyone bopping Seventeen. It’s a sleeper hit, but I love seeing it land on your playlists. Maybe now you understand why we let the tape roll for 15+ minutes. ;) And though I don’t usually read my own reviews, Matt Mitchell’s write-up in Paste floored me:

Adapted from real “memories and revelations” and set at a pub in Galway, Dienel turns a dance song about a charming stranger into a braided essay about infatuation and brevity and boozy ephemera with too many tattooable lines. I especially can’t get this one out of my head: “Some people are like magnets, they really got a shine to them. I guess you had to be there.”

I really hope someone gets that tattoo.

I’m savoring this phase where the work that’s been so private and intensely mine suddenly becomes something we share. You catch things even I miss, and that exchange keeps me excited for the whole record on October 17 — which is somehow only a month away. How?!

Presave 'My Heart is an Outlaw'

Garden report

This summer’s been lighter on flowers than usual, album lead-up has taken over. For those of you who come here for garden porn, I’m sorry to be a bit of a letdown this season. Fewer flowers than I’d like to share with you! I’m not deadheading as I should be, and feeling the pang of guilt every time I walk past the rose bushes. Still, a few gems persist.

The never-ending battle with predators in the garden wages on. Some would say I’m too soft on them. I don’t like sending eviction notices to animals, preferring to find a compromise where I can. I love to look up at the bats at dusk, gorging themselves on no-see-‘ems, and I’ve grown fond of Shuggie, our chubby groundhog, keeping lookout for his lunchtime waddle across the lawn. That he sometimes mows down a dahlia or rudbeckia is a fact of life.

The chipmunks are just as persistent as Shuggie is hungry. If you plant a bulb, it’s a race between them and squirrels to unearth it. I’ll spare you my reaction when I was a month late to plant the bulbs and came into the shed to find every bag and box I’d ordered completely ransacked. Lucky, my neighbor’s cat offers no help, preffering to nap in the geraniums. I don’t use chemicals in the garden, but I did hear that owls could be a good deterrent, so I bought an owl box a few years ago and hoisted it up on an oak by where the studio is now. No owls for two winters. But a few evenings ago, while sitting out after work, what did I hear for the first time? The unmistakable call of a screech owl in a cedar. We finally have a tenant. Bad news for chipmunks, but I’ll take the win.

Rest and the dreaded ‘no’ muscle

This cycle, I’m learning to resist the reflexive “yes.” The people-pleaser in me wants to say, Of course I’ll tour right away! These album cycles can be unhealthy and full of manufactured stress. Why rush to do the release show the week of release when we could draw it out a little?

Let this be your reminder that you can’t do it all, and that’s ok.

Btw, LA friends: Our show show on Dec 13 is on sale now. Have you bought your tickets yet?

Buy Tickets

Homefront updates

Daily swims have tapered off. It’s not like me to give up the ghost on summer this early, but when the temp dropped a few weekends ago and we got a much-needed rainfall set in Saturday, I was grateful for the excuse to read all day and drink tea.

September in Massachusetts is the sweetest. The tourists trickle out, and the locals can return with their dogs to the beaches and park without a sticker. The leaves are just beginning to turn, and I’m feeling pre-emptive anxiety that I will miss them at their peak next month while away.

I tested out a new pub in town with a friend, which got us both excited for the colder months. Roast chicken and potato hash, rabbit ragu with piles of papparadelle, and steaming bowls of mussels (not for me, alas, I’m allergic, but they smelled amazing). It’s called Hooper’s Judge, and if you find yourself on the south shore of Massachusetts, definitely give it a go. It’s special. They have cocktails on draft, too. Em had an espresso martini, which he loved. I had a daiquiri, which I will keep on my wishlist for a future rainy day.

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What I’m listening to

* Not affiliate links, just stuff I like.

• I made you a September playlist, a mix of everything I’m listening to right now. Some highlights below:

  • Deradoorian - No No Yes Yes

    Is there anything Angel can’t do? Groovy, hooky, like everything off of Ready for Heaven. Check it out!

  • Sudan Archives - My Type

    Headphone candy, her production’s so slick it makes me want to make more slutty 4-on-the-floor tracks. I’m so excited to listen to all of the BPM. Her Tiny Desk concert is one of my all-time favorites.

  • King Princess - Cry Cry Cry

    Mikaela’s songwriting feels like it was custom-made in a lab for me. Lived-in, clever lyrics, plus Heba Kadry (who mastered my album) worked on it.Found her recent interview on the Zach Sang Show a poignant listen.

  • Kirby - Na$ty

    “Is you a Karen or is you just caring?” Best lyric of the year. Not one line is put to waste, and the Stax-inflected production is bliss. Bits of Carla Thomas, Sly, Funkadelic, and something entirely her own. I’m obsessed.

  • Cuddle Magic - Hundred Million

    Lifers with breathtaking vocals. My forever favorite band. Their newest album, Underwater is out now. Listening to Kristin sing is like seeing one of those figure skaters land a triple axle jump.

A few nice things:

• More of this energy in my life, please.

  

  @theinsiderloop“Go Birds, F*ck ICE and Free Palestine” Hannah Einbeinder during her #Emmys acceptance speech #theinsiderloop #hannaheinbinder

  Tiktok failed to load.
  
  Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

• Boycotts work (see the recent Target petition), and we should all be doing more of them. Not into what’s happening with Nextstar and ABC right now? Same. Cancel your Disney+/Hulu subscription. Ethical consumer is a good place to start, and this list of companies is a solid reference. You don’t have to be a purist. Start where you can.

• The internet is a known dumpster fire, but there are softer corners I retreat to. Homeworthy, for instance, when I need a breather from creeping fascism. Laura Jackson’s house tour is a good gateway. The tours are like an hour long and get really close up on the details. I can zone out thinking about paint chips. I nearly died watching Melissa Fetter show off her Delft ceramics collection, declaring, “it’s the dressmaker details that really make this canopy bed shine.” I also turn to Taylor Swaim’s feed when I need a hug. We’re both in the quirky old house restoration club.

• Ranting in the group chat re:The Summer I Turned Pretty. This show is a jigsaw puzzle I cannot solve. I have so many questions. E.g. What deal with Bezos did Jenny Han make to secure music budget for the entire T.Swift catalog? Why do these fresh college grads have their own apartments (in this economy)? Is no one worried the heroine can only fixate on two brothers? How did Belly get fluent in French in three months? Why is one brother permanently spray-tanned while the other just mumbles? Sometimes it’s better not to ask and just admire the Michaels-sourced faux hydrangea display.

• I’ve been having trouble sleep through the whole night for over a year now. Thanks perimenopause! I’ve had a little better luck with Ancient + Brave’s True Magnesium+ capsules, when I remember to take them. If this is also a thing you’re dealing with, LMK what’s worked for you.

• During an interview the other day, the journalist remarked I seem to be made of opinions. Caught red-handed! But in all seriousness, if you don’t have any strong reactions to the recent crackdown on free speech, from ’s firing from the WSJ to Kimmel getting booted off of ABC, now is a good a time as any to read up and develop some.

  The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah

  The Washington Post Fired Me — But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced.

  Last week, the Washington Post fired me…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 6790 likes · 1527 comments · Karen Attiah

• I’m on a cookbook embargo. I know deep down in my bones I don’t need more, but I may cave for ’s new one. I tested his lasagne al ragù last weekend, looking for a project that wasn’t doomscrolling. No bone-in short ribs at the store, so I tossed a marrow bone into the pot. Worked like a charm. Short rib, mince, and sausage slow-cooked for hours = the most velvety gravy. I cheated with store-bought pasta (ours has great fresh options), but if you want to roll your own, fucking go for it! It’s 70 degrees out and all I want is winter food. C’est la vie.

  How I Cook

  LASAGNE AL RAGU

  Hello, Welcome back to How I Cook+. Thanks for bearing with me the past few weeks, it’s been pretty hectic with the book being published and all that comes as part of that exciting package. BUT, I am pleased to announce that we are very kuch back in business. I’m excited to get stuck into…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 34 likes · 6 comments · Ben Lippett

  That’s all for this week. Let me know what’s helping keep your head up in the comments.

  Leave a comment

  xo

  CD

  ---

If you liked this issue…

I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

First, the big news:‘Seventeen’ is out today, the second single off my forthcoming album ‘My Heart is an Outlaw’ (out October 17). Go on and give it a listen, I’ll wait. ;)

They say you shouldn’t play favorites with your children, but this song is a real pop gem, if I do say so myself. Maybe some would say it’s crazy to release a 8 minute single, but I think you’ll see why it needed to be the length it is when you hear it — commercial standards be damned!

Just to remind you, you can pre-order My Heart is an Outlaw on vinyl or save it on the streaming service of your choice using the link below.

Pre-order / Pre-save

Album release show

The other big news: We announced the record release show today. It will take place in Los Angeles on December 13 at Scribble. Tickets go on sale at 10 AM PST.

I haven’t played a show in years, but the songs feel too good to hold off on playing them live. It felt right to bring the band together in the place where the album started.

This show will feature a few very special guests and is the only show on the books for this year — so if you’re local, I hope you’ll come out and say hi!

Get tickets

About ‘Seventeen’

It’s a strange moment in time to be releasing happy music. Yet, the darker things get, the tighter I cling to joy. Not the vibes-only, rosé-all-day variety, but what Audre Lorde called ‘a form of energy for change.’

I’m not delusional enough to believe that joy alone is enough to resist the powerful forces we’re up against. It’s been a mindfuck working up the will to promote personal work with all the news lately. No doubt many of you are experiencing a similar sense of fatigue around buying new music or just getting on with your life. 2 years of streaming an ongoing g3nocide in our phones, demonizing trans people, masked officers whisking people off the street and renditioning them to prisons overseas, I could go on... I hang up the phone after calling my senators again about ICE raids and detentions in Plymouth County, then log back into IG to set up the next post. Every day, it feels like we are up against another disheartening mountain.

Here is what I know for sure. Music is my joy to share with you. Listening to and making it gives me the strength to keep going, be in community, and fight. Writing helps me make some sense of a senseless world. So, here is my offering. If ‘Seventeen’ gives you a little respite and energy to keep going, then I’ll feel I’ve done my job.

What does joy sound like? Writing ‘happy’ has never come easily to me. I wonder if ‘Seventeen’ took 7 years to finish (a year for every minute!) because I needed that time to figure out how to capture joy as I honestly experience it: Taking the world in your arms, as complicated and messy as it is, and finding beauty in it anyway. Fleeting, life-giving, infectious. Always over too soon.

There’s no fiction in this song. Everything I describe more or less happened. I stopped in Galway on a solo trip. The plan was to hike the west coast of Ireland and listen to as much trad music as possible. At Tig Cóilí, a charismatic guy named Carol outsang the whole bar, invited me to Connemara, then ghosted me in the morning. The chemistry in that moment wasn’t romantic, per se, but something about it grabbed me. He took a big swig of beer and shouted ‘Tell me, Casey. When’s the last time you really lived?’

I had no reply.

A wiser person might have turned his offer down, but he had a point. Wasn’t that the reason for the trip? Stop saying ‘no’ to everything. Open myself up to something new and different. Carol was a no-show the next day — but I decided to take his advice and go to Connemara anyway. On the way, I narrowly escaped being run off by a horde of sheep; on the hike, I met someone else. Sliding doors. It reminded me how joy often arrives tangled up with disappointment, risk, and surprise — and that a stranger can briefly cross your path and change your life forever. Any of us could be that stranger for someone else. No idea what happened to the magical Carol, but I thank him for this song.

Condensing all of this life into lyrics took patience. How to capture that fizzy, giddy feeling of a night on the town? Much of songwriting and arranging is contingent on conjuring the right mood. What is the sound of sensing some internal revolution on its way? How do you do it in a way that isn’t cheesy? The string melody you hear in the chorus has been with me since the earliest demo, but in many instances, it sounded too melodramatic and silly. There are so many alternate versions of this song that weren’t quite right. Ultimately, it needed people — talented players like Carly on guitar and Max on percussion. To distill the chemistry of that night in Galway, we needed to spark some of our own in the studio. We needed the elasticity of Spencer’s playing on bass, just as we needed a few months to find the exact right shimmery texture on Adam’s opening arpeggio (if you haven’t been following along with him on the JBrekkie tour, DO IT! You can see a bit of his mad scientist synth skills at work). Adam also wrote the string arrangement here, and I loved seeing him take the strands of my original melody and run wild with it. Hearing it live with a string quartet gave me chills. This is what music is all about. It’s a conversation. I’m happy to report that what you’ll hear on record sounds as fun as it was to make. One of those songs that got everyone bopping their heads in the room immediately.

During initial tracking at Altamira, we let the tape roll for eleven minutes or more. It could have kept going longer. Schatz looked over at me to see if I wanted to call ‘cut,’ but I shook my head. Life’s too short to constrain ourselves to three and a half minutes.

I want you to stay in the feeling a little longer, too. Enjoy this one!

Listen now

Song credits:

Produced Adam Schatz, mixed by Jake Aron, engineered by Rob Shelton and Nate Mendelsohn, and mastered by Heba Kadry. The album was made at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, and The Chamber of Commerce in Vermont.

Personnel

• Casey Dienel | Vocals + Piano

• Adam Schatz | Synths

• Max Jaffe | Drums + Percussion

• Spencer Zahn | Bass

• Carly Bond | Guitar

• Laurann Angel | Violin

• Lily Honigberg | Violin

• Marta Honer | Viola

• Emily Elkin | Cello

• Starr Busby | Vocals

• Jachary | Vocals

• Nina Moffitt | Vocals

xo

Casey

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Hello and welcome to volume 40.

Rage is a funny little smokescreen. I have so much of it right now that some mornings I marvel at my ability to get out of bed. I look out at the intentionally flooded zone, wondering where to devote my energy this morning. Where to guide all this frustration? When so much needs our care. When some crises are manufactured, while actual ones receive little more than thoughts and prayers, if not deafening silence. All around us, life goes on. My dog still lights up when the barista gives her a milk bone. There are still the cheap but in no way small pleasures: A good nap, a cool swim, a new book, the long catch-up with an old friend in the park. The album promo continues — life on what a friend of mine calls ‘the split screen.’

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The past weekend was a good one, spent in the company of old friends, two of whom got hitched. While I may not be the institution of marriage’s #1 fanboy, I love me a wedding. I am moved to tears by handwritten vows, and will never turn up my nose at any occasion to put on a nice suit or party dress. Then there’s the practical benefits of marriage. While the current administration toys with overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, I do not blame any queer couples out there looking to shore up the rights that marriage privileges them while they can. Take nothing for granted. Now, if only all of us could have our weddings officiated by Lucy Dacus.

As ceremonies go, this was the gayest wedding I’ve been to yet, which is to say it was one of the most beautiful. Poems by Chen Chen and Essex Hemphill were read, and songs by Randy Newman and ABBA were sung. The brides wore a kilt and a gown of red Dupioni silk with a train so long it flowed like a river behind them. Every aspect of the ceremony was hand-embroidered with a personal touch. It was so them.

Some weddings are a spectacle. Some are intimate. The very best is a cocktail of both. The morning after, friends hosted a brunch in their garden. Multiple generations sat around enjoying the fine weather over piles of French toast and berries and hashbrowns. Kids chased each other with an armada of cardboard swords and daggers. There was baklava. So. Much. Baklava. Those old enough to have lived through it shared stories about surviving the 1970s in marriages that weren’t state-recognized—hiding their spouses from coworkers to keep their jobs, or their children. 4 or 5 decades are not too distant from the present. Did it feel like it does now? Worse? Better?

It is easy to confuse the internet with a town crier or gathering place, but it is not the same as a community. When you’re feeling hopeless, what do you turn to? Stories. Music. Pot-lucks. Marches and sit-ins and demonstrations. But what keeps these running is people. We need each other to stay sane. To gather. Observe. Tell about it. No, you’re not crazy. It isn't good out there right now. And also, there is still this. This is not nothing.

The following day, a few of us hiked out to the Muir Woods, a cathedral of redwoods, once stewarded by the Coastal Miwok. If it’s not one of the Wonders of the World, it should be. (Sidebar: It seems everyone who works at that park is extremely hot and friendly, and I wasn’t the only one in my company who noticed.) Approximately 95% of the old-growth forest was logged by settlers during the gold rush. The fog had lifted off the shoulders of the trees, so occasionally a ray of sunshine broke through the canopy, cloaking everything in honey. Every so often, we’d stop and look at a cluster of trees to see their story. The one cracked in half by lightning, then over time grew back together, its sister trees touching the trunk like a makeshift splint. Many of the elder trees were charred in places by a fire from the 1800s, and around them grew circles of young trees. At their base, we saw saplings clustered.

‘It’s like a little nursery,’ one of us remarked. ‘Like a redwoods kindergarten.’

The park ranger reminded us that the trees needed to stay close to survive, as their roots are relatively shallow. No more than 5 or 6 feet deep. What keeps them standing through a windstorm is proximity and flexibility. If you’ve ever felt a redwood, you know what I mean. Their trunks feel like a softened brillo pad. They grow in groves by the hundreds, interlocking their roots together. The metaphor here is not subtle. A psychic nod from the ancestors to remember that now is the time to weave those roots and support one another. No bootstrapping will cut it.

I thought long and hard about this on the flight back, after many excellent Mission burritos from El Buen Sabor and a solid week of wondering why I don’t live in California, where lavender is a shrub and aloes grow to the size of a Volkswagen bug.

This week’s issue continues below.

xo

CD

My Take: ‘Your Girl’s Upstairs’

I’m late on my next “One Take” issue, but I thought I’d switch things up with My Take: A behind-the-scenes look at what went into the making of the album, starting with Your Girl’s Upstairs. If you like it, I might write a little bit about each track for the heads (which you can pre-save or pre-order here). WDYT?

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As we’ve discussed, sometimes a song falls in your lap and you don’t have to do very much to it. However, that’s typically the result of extensive backward engineering, spanning years at a time.

Your Girl’s Upstairs is in E♭ major, a favorite key of mine to write for because it has a golden hue to it, somewhere between honey and caramel. It can take on a lot of interesting progressions without sounding too melodramatic, something my inner music theory nerd really appreciates. Plus, my voice is very comfortable in this range, and while I’d thought about shifting it down a bit, I found it too bright in D major for my liking.

Here’s a very early demo of the song — you can hear me working through some of the choruses (to go full Loretta Lynn on the chorus melody or not?). I’m singing so quietly, probably because it was very early in the morning — like most of the songs on the record, written between 6-9 am. You can even hear the wrens outside. Even when alone, some songwriters can feel quite shy recording a demo!

I wrote it while weeding the rose garden, and then went inside to transpose it on the piano. But from its infancy, I was thinking the guitar would suit the saloon vibe of the tune.

The song came so easily, and at first, I wrote it off as too small to be a contender. My mistake. This is a good example of why demoing can be a big assist as you write. You listen back, you get a fresh set of ears on an idea to size it up later. Don’t try to be the judge and jury while you’re demo’ing or writing. This, my friends, is the road to self-criticism. It doesn’t take that much extra time to set a song away for a night and sleep on it.

Take the lyrics for the first verse.

Verse 1

Don’t be mad

Your girl was with me again

Even though she likes to say we’re just friends

With your sad-boy tattoos and wide-swinging moods

Do you blame her for wanting fun now and then?

CHORUS

She played house, played dead

Played anything to keep your head from crying

Crying

But I can’t steal something you never had

Good, but needs some work. Now imagine if I’d left ‘knuckle tattoos’ and ‘depressing moods.’ Thank goodness I didn’t! It doesn’t feel specific enough. It doesn’t draw out the contrast as clearly — the jealous, moody boyfriend who’s upset his girlfriend might be having more fun with someone else — namely, not a cis man.

What was clear early on, however, was the twist of the Chorus. The lift from the A♭ major to the B major is relatively high-drama in an otherwise low-key sounding tune. I am a progression that reads as melancholy or tense using major chords, and in that first demo, it sounds pretty melancholic. I think you need this there to justify the stakes of the lyrics. To go from playing house to playing dead. In what could otherwise be a narrative kiss—off about stealing someone’s girlfriend, the second chorus tips over the narrative’s cart. Everything the girl upstairs is dealing with — the possessive partner, the secret lover, the thirst for autonomy, a room of her own — the narrator has lived through in their own way. They’re singing from the other side of that struggle.

Verse 2 opens the aperture on that initial scene and reveals their personal journey by the second chorus’s end.

Verse 2

Can’t sleep so I’m up with the wrens

Can’t think, so I’m gardening

I’m allergic to bed-rot, not playing for keeps

Most come here like I did, to carve out their peace

Verse 3

I played house, played dead

Played anything to keep his head from crying

Crying

And though he tried

he couldn’t have what was always mine.

As for the amount of biography here, it’s safe to say most of my songwriting is a mix of autofiction and ‘just-the-facts ma’am’ storytelling. I’m a very literal thinker (as is Billy Joel, as I found out in HBO Max’s recent documentary And So It Goes).

I think a good songwriter can pickpocket personal experience to inform the text, and weave in fictional references as needed. You don’t need to have lived it to write it, or to know the feeling your song’s narrator wishes. Think of the writer’s room on a show like Grey’s Anatomy. You don’t have to know what it’s like to do open-heart surgery to capture the high-stakes pressure of that environment and what it might do to everyone in the operating room — one slight tremor, and this could all go sideways real quick. Drawing parallels is the name of the gig. In fact, I think the more boring my private life is, the more interesting my songs get.

In popular song, “the other woman” is a big trope. Dolly begs Jolene not to take her man. Carrie Underwood (before she was cancelled) dug her keys into the side of your pretty-little-souped-up 4WD. In this case, while I do know what it’s like to be someone’s “friend” in public and lover undercover, that’s he least interesting part of the song’s emotional stakes as I see it. I really wanted to explore the concept of domesticity. Most of our fairy tales end in the prince marrying the princess and riding off into the sunset. But the sun has to rise. Who is gonna do the prince’s dishes? Who’s going to help get the first-in-line to school on time? The most interesting stories, as I see it, start after the marriage plot ends.

This is where I have to give a lot of credit to Raymond Carver’s work, where many of his poems are brief but take you right within the heart of the scene. I wonder if, like with John Prine (my other lyrical hero), some of his observational skill comes from many years of holding down odd jobs like picking tulips, sweeping hospital floors, and pumping gas. One thing I really miss about being a shopgirl was the open season on eavesdropping it afforded me. You can learn a great deal about a person by observing how they interact with waitstaff or shop clerks. Retail trains you to pick up on small cues to upsell people more crap they don’t really need. An anxious spouse who fucked up with his pregnant wife? Steer him toward the pretty pearl earrings. Nervous couple moving into their first apartment? Suggest they get a pair of hand-thrown mugs and come back for more as they get settled in. Place the capitalism aside, however, and I came away with a surprising tenderness for a lot of people. Their motivations. Their quirks.

Take Carver’s poem Margo as an example of what I mean. Look at the length, and how much is packed in.

The beauty of this poem, in my opinion, is that it starts with Margo’s husband, Tug, and by the poem’s end, Margo is free. Free to go “places she, being a girl, and cargo, never dreamed of getting to.” It’s like seeing the outline of a person drawn in chalk, and then finally zooming in on her face. You get the whole picture, or at least a solid sketch of it. Her controlling husband. Margo, so easygoing and dreamy. It isn’t really until we see Margo “break loose” that we learn about her motivations. Her hopes and dreams. And what it might have cost her to find her way. How patriarchal systems would have prevented her from going to those places off the map. In the end, she found a way to get there on her own. By being more “show” and less “tell,” we learn about Margo’s character.

I’m interested in how, in one short song, we can put a foothold in all of these dynamics. Freedom. Power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who’s doing the emotional labor in a relationship? Do they want to be doing it? Even in open relationships, the spelunking required to date ethically can come as a big shock. You may think you’re supportive of your girlfriend dating someone else, until you're confronted with the reality of it.

Contradictions excite me. I’m curious why we collectively fear leaving a relationship that isn’t serving the people involved. There are many real-world reasons why some of us stay. Housing, shared finances, children, pets. But in instances where I stayed longer than I should have, or where all parties began to fall back to their lesser impulses, it was not love that kept me there but fear. Wasn’t a ‘good relationship’ one where both parties ‘did the work’ instead of calling it quits? Yet, when I could no longer soldier through and those relationships fell away, didn’t we both feel happier once separated? It is a harsh truth about loving someone that wanting the best for them may include the possibility of one day no longer being together. A topic for another day, perhaps…

While I produced demos for albums in the past, none were demoed as extensively as this.

We created charts and demos for nearly all the songs, except for two. I cannot take credit for this. Adam suggested it, thinking that the best way to overcome my performance nerves would be to get as prepared as possible. We spruced up the demo for the studio sessions to make it a little tidier — I believe Adam is the one playing the Wurlitzer here.

You can hear the song coming together, getting tighter. This was part of the second grouping of recording sessions, meaning Adam and I had begun to get a sense of how the album arc might flow. My mission was clear: let’s bring in some tunes that were shorter and a little varied in arrangement than the full-band tracks. By now, you can hear how the lead melody on the choruses sits in place with the progression. Doing it this way removed any guesswork when it came time for the session at Altamira Sound in LA.

The arrangement of this song originally was intended to include piano or wurlitzer, but as you’ll hear on the rest of My Heart is an Outlaw (out October 17!), we had a clutch of tunes with grand piano on them already. Something really refreshing happened when we took our foot off the brakes and made it just a few beats short of a duet between Meg and myself. Here we are in Altamira listening to the playback. Even unmixed, it still sounds so good!

This was a big part of the modus operandi from day one. In the age of AI, it feels so old-fashioned to make a studio album, but that’s the whole point. Why innovate what ain’t broken? You don’t need to rent out a big room to replicate this magic at home. Recording music with your pals, a halfway decent DAW, and an armload of songs is FUN. AI companies are in the business of generating content faster. Not actual music.

Call in great players, put them all in one room, and mic it all properly. Yes, it is incredible what can be done in post now with Pro Tools and Ableton in terms of mixing. Still, I find it more time-consuming overall to punch in performances than it is to gather everyone together for a couple of days and settle on something live and special. Meg’s playing is so rich (I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to Hand Habit’s new record Blue Reminder — one of my favorite collections to come out this year). The last thing we wanted was to bog their guitar part down with unnecessary shellacking. Max’s percussion is pretty minimal, as is Spencer’s bass. Everything hinges on the lead vocal, harmonies, and guitar. Rob, our engineer, tracked my lead vocal and harmonies which we stacked to be like old-school Nashville session singers. I’m obsessed with these kinds of close harmonies, mixed real thick and close to the lead vocal. Jake Aron, who mixed the song, did incredible work on the finished version.

The most important thing about a recording sometimes is knowing when to step back. Sometimes it is as easy as the third or fourth take. Fussing, in my experience, rarely leads to perfection. In most cases, it makes things more turgid. And besides, this album was never supposed to be about perfection. As much as I love glassy, sophisticated pop production, I wanted something undone. It’s meant to make you feel like an eavesdropper. Like you were in the room with us. That, as I see it, is the best lesson I could take away from Carver’s poems and Prine’s songwriting. A slice of life you can return to over and over.

Here is the chart for those of you who’d like to play along. I think it works great on both guitar and piano, and honestly, I sometimes have visions of releasing the psychic twin of 'My Heart is an Outlaw’ as a solo piano/voice record.

If you record a cover of Your Girl’s Upstairs (which I hope you do!), please tag me over on Instagram or TikTok.

And if you haven’t already, you can pre-order the vinyl from Jealous Butcher now. I think you’ll love what we cooked up, from the seaglass green vinyl to the lyric booklet.

More soon (like the next single, perhaps…),

xo

CD

What’s turning me on right now:

• YOU! Thank you to everyone for your patience as I navigate this brave new world of releasing an album in 2025. I goofed the link on the Laylo announcement send. I am 99% positive this post will have typos. But you continue to be patient and also point out the broken links and all the rest. Balancing working full-time on this and my day job can be exhausting, but you have all made it so worth it. Appreciate you to the ends of the earth and then some!

• Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski. It’s not too late for summer reading! At least, that is what I have to believe. This one was perfect for a luxurious campfire read.

• Slow-roasted tomatoes. I have been riffing on Molly Wizenberg’s riff on Molly O’Neill’s recipe since 2005, it looks like. Well, what I can say is if you have a couple of pints of Sungold cherry tomatoes right now, you can make this slow and low in the oven without even slicing them. Sometimes I substitute basil for oregano, or add rosemary and flowering thyme. Works a treat, tossed with spaghetti or with bread. Do not waste a drop of the olive oil. The purists will say roasting a summer tomato is sacrilege when you could put it between Martin’s Potato Bread and call it a day, but I am happy to die on this hill that this is the best way to eat a tomato in late summer. I will eat this once a week until all summer tomatoes are gone.

• It’s been a TRIP to see Your Girl’s Upstairs cropping up in so many playlists, from the Guardian to the NYTimes — but it’s the personal ones that make me happiest, like Tygermylk’s I thought I knew what love was. Please keep sending them along! I love seeing what else you’re listening to.

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Here’s a little interview about the making of the album with Urbanista. Here’s an excerpt below:

If “Your Girl’s Upstairs” were a scene in a movie, what would it look like—what’s playing, who’s there, what’s the mood?

I think it’s the scene in My Own Private Idaho where Mike’s locked himself in the Hans’ hotel bathroom to have a bubble bath. I’m the person at the threesome, wondering how much longer is polite before I can go home and read my book. River Phoenix plays me. Cillian Murphy plays Hans. Scott is off-screen, but King Princess plays him. The mood is horny, annoyed, and hungry for French fries and a Coke. From the fountain, on ice. Not from a can.

More soon,

xo

CD

I’d love to hear from you. I read every message people send.

And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. Not only will you get every issue delivered right to your inbox, but it helps support more writing like this.

Cat’s out of the bag: I have a new song out today. ‘Your Girl’s Upstairs.’

But that’s not all. It’s the first single off my new album! ‘My Heart is an Outlaw’ will be out October 17 on Jealous Butcher. You can preorder/pre-save it below. And yes, there is a limited edition vinyl run for the heads. ;)

Pre-order / Pre-save

It feels surreal to type all of this, and also, so freeing! To many of you following around here, this news won’t come as a total surprise, but I want to thank you. Some albums are a lonely affair; not this one. Thank you for coming along for the ride.

It was produced by Adam Schatz (of ), mixed by Jake Aron, engineered by Rob Shelton and Nate Mendelsohn, and mastered by Heba Kadry. The album was made at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, and The Chamber of Commerce in Vermont.

Here is the album art. Taken by Shervin Lainez.

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Shervin’s the mastermind behind my last album’s cover, so it was a no-brainer to bring him back. This time we bopped around NYC and in the Catskills. The visuals are inspired by My Own Private Idaho. His work has a sense of heightened romance and motion to it, and I can always trust him to be punk about the process with me. Hey, I’m taking a bath at 2, come take pictures. Let’s drive around the backroads until the light is right and shoot in the middle of the highway. Rather than over-conceptualize it, I wanted us to stick to the spirit of the album. Excellent construction; loose and free in execution. Improvised and unmussed in the right ways. I went to Duane Reade, bought a gallon of bubble bath, and we got to work. I love it and, as someone who can be a bit camera-shy, truly relished how comfortable the whole shoot felt.

Daniel Murphy, who has worked on nearly all of my albums since 2008 but one, did art direction, design layout, and the handwritten font. Together, we came up with the gatefold design for the LP, complete with seaglass color vinyl. I am, after all, a Pisces. This album is situated in the deep end.

Pre-order vinyl now from the Jealous Butcher store below.

Pre-order My Heart is an Outlaw

So many of you have asked what is the best way to support musicians. I am still, for now, offering my music on Spotify and all the streamers. But the best way is to buy it from the stores like my label’s above, or in my Bandcamp store. And, trust me, we pulled out all the stops for this one. It’s a beautiful gatefold LP.

In a similar punkish vein, my dear friend Alex Basco-Koch directed the music video for Your Girl’s Upstairs. Alex was my upstairs neighbor in Brooklyn for many years, and we spent many late nights cooking and talking about what might become of our creative work, including several of the songs that made it onto this album some 8 years later.

I wanted the video to take you into the world where I live now, where so much of this record was written. The home I’ve made, the garden, and behind-the-scenes footage taken while making this album with Adam, with the best people. I wanted to give you a sense of how much fun we had together, the magic of being in a studio tracking. A good swim at the end of long day. My silly little dog. The sweet stuff of a New England summer.

What I love about creating albums is that it is a community effort, even though my name is on the masthead. The work has to pass through many talented hands before it is finished. We flew to LA in February of 2024, with low expectations that anything would come of it. Maybe I’d get one song down. Instead, we got 11. It’d been 7 years since I’d been in a professional studio, but with Adam’s help, I took a leap of faith. The moment I sat down behind the board, I knew I was back home. Where I’m happiest, and meant to be.

I’ll tell you more about the behind-the-scenes process in the coming weeks, but for today, take a first listen at what we made together.

About ‘Your Girl’s Upstairs’

Although I technically “quit” being a professional musician in 2018, I never stopped writing.

By spring of 2023, I was in an interesting place with the album — not stuck, exactly, but unsure when or how I’d finish it. Was it an album? Could I even say I was a musician anymore?

I had several songs in the works, but nothing was clicking yet. Around that time, I went out to visit my friend Chris in Colorado, and she invited me to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Red Rocks. opened. It was only my second concert since lockdown. I have long loved PG’s albums, and while I was familiar with ’ music, I’d never seen them live. The whole concert was incredible. Karen O had this beatific smile on her face at the end of her set, and I can’t tell you how fucking cool and inspiring it was to see one of my heroes still at it. This may sound funny, but it was the first time in 5 years where I felt like I wanted to be back onstage. Seeing meg and Greg Uhlmann play in that space reignited my love of guitar. Their styles were liquid and muscular in all the best ways. That set was one of my all-time favorites — such a sharp reminder of how life-changing live music can be.

When I got back from that trip, I thought about songwriting differently. What if I wrote for guitar even though I can’t play it? What if I approached it like some of my favorite directors approach their fillms, like Gus Van Sant or Chantal Akermann or Agnes Varda? Pull different people in to tell the story. That shift opened up everything.

Schatz and I connected later in the year and decided to approach each song like a scene in a film: What kind of room does this song live in? Who should be cast in this world? It blew the project wide open. For a long time and for very necessary reasons I won’t go into, my recording process had become solitary and tightly controlled. This time around, I had nothing to lose. I wanted a gregarious, looser sound. I craved people in the room. I wanted to break the seal on some of those trust issues. I wanted to be sure everyone was paid fairly. No corner cutting.

I don’t know if any of you felt like you touched the bottom of your loneliness during COVID, but when I came back up for air I wondered where everyone had gone. Where had I gone? Would I be able to recover the relationships I lost? Was I even capable of being in relationship with others? The truth is, as you’ll hear on many of the songs to come, I don’t believe in rugged individualism. We need each other. Maybe that’s why we get tight around the things we believe we have control over. We’re scared to appear needy. But it’s when we dismiss these needs in ourselves or others that we tend to do the most harm. Love is not optional. Nor, as I have come to learn, is art.

Lots of gardening parallels. A beautiful, thriving garden depends on promiscuity when it comes to planting. You need a variety of types and blooming windows to cultivate something rich, biodiverse, and sustainable. Plants have very specific needs, and ways of communicating when they are unmet or put under stress. They thrive under a variety of conditions and care, some that might seem inhospitable to us are their concept of paradise. Same goes with people. People are essential to creating meaning in our lives. Not just one primary relationship, but a whole constellation of them, cultivated over many years. Ultimately, when it came to my own music, I had to stop and ask: ‘What’s stopping you from letting other people in?’ When I found my courage at last, I found they had been there all along — ready to play.

So we invited the musicians we admired. Spencer Zahn. Max Jaffe. Carly Bond. Meg Duffy. They said yes. And so many others that I will introduce to you soon. We had our dream team.

“Your Girl’s Upstairs” is a sleight-of-hand of a song. I knew we needed something short, since many of the others are longer. It’s structurally simple: verse/chorus x2, no bridge, just a guitar solo outro. We recorded most of it in a day or so. Meg laid down the loop you hear at the top, then we added Spencer’s bass, Max’s percussion, my vocals and the harmonies. I call the harmony parts ‘icing.’ Whenever we’re tracking, I always try to leave a little room for icing at the end. My voice has lowered in the last couple of years. My grandfather, who was an incredible baritone, had told me that would happen in my later 30s. ‘Your voice becomes richer, then. It’s when many singers come into their own.’ He was right.

The demo was just me and a Wurlitzer, but once we were all together, Schatz and I realized it wasn’t needed any longer. That happened more than once in the sessions. Sometimes I’d be mic’d up at the piano and realize I didn’t need to play at all. The trick is knowing when to let something breathe—to do just enough, and not shellack it with unnecessary stuff.

Spencer said the song title sounds like something from an old Western. I wrote it one early morning, out in the garden. Most of this album was written between 6–9 a.m., before work. That window became sacred. I wasn’t sure how songwriting would work with a full-time job. I’d lived my life in reverse, going from full-time artist to full-time corporate employee who made music on the side. But it turns out three quiet hours are plenty. In some ways, the day job has helped me cherish that time even more. My time.

The morning I wrote this song, I didn’t want to wake my guest, so I padded outside to weed. I love writing while moving about. As I sat there pulling snails off the irises, it unspooled pretty quickly. Some songs are like that. Easy. Like you’re dipping into this timeless body of water, scooping it up in your hands.

I have always felt like a late bloomer. I’m so grateful for the quiet, for the space to think, for a home that’s truly mine. I’m not saying marriage can’t provide that — of course it can. But having experienced the domineering side of domestic partnerships, I’ve come to value not having to “play house” or “play dead” just to keep the peace. There’s joy and stability in freedom, in building a home on your terms. It is a contradiction I’ve always wrestled with. This deep need for love and independence. It can feel scary to tiptoe out on the ledge and realize you want different things from most people. Even from your own partner. That who you are is different. I feel lucky to know that no matter how turned around I may get, I have this place I can come back to and regroup. I love seeing it become a soft landing place for the people I care about in various forms of transition or creative in-between. Friends and lovers come here to paint, write, cross-stitch, cook, pal around and have a think. “Lantern” has become shorthand for come home. (Except perhaps for my dear friend Martha who just told me she wrote a short story about her spooky experience housesitting while dealing with the ghost in the attic. But hey, look at how it has inspired so much creativity…!)

There’s a spot in the garden I love best. When I moved in, the yard was just one big lawn. But I could already picture it — just like I could picture the album before it existed. Now, when I look out the window and see the wrens at their birdhouse, the Casablanca lilies in bloom rinsing the morning with their heavy fragrance, dew still hugging the grass — I remember why I live here. Eight years ago, I had to blow up my life to set things right again. I needed to meaningfully quit the music industry and take stock of what it would take to engage with my work in a way that’s not a soul-suck, not just for me, but for everyone involved. Modest as it is, sometimes I can’t believe this is my life. I’m just a few miles away from the house where I was raised. From the beach and the woods where I spent my childhood learning how to write my life into song.

I had break up with the music business to repair my approach to it. I had to travel the world to realize the place I feel most at home is exactly where I started.

Here goes nothing. Thank you for being an essential part of this process. I’m excited for this album to be yours, very soon.

xo

Casey

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Last weekend, I saw The Materialists at the theater. I’d heard rumblings it wasn’t great, but as a Past Lives fan, low-to-mid expectations die hard and it was a blistering hot day. Besides, you can’t trust everything you read on the internet.

For years, going to the movies alone was my favorite way to spend a weekend. When I lived in New York, that might mean an Antonioni matinee at Film Forum or a big popcorn flick at Regal. A perfect Saturday was two movies in a row, sometimes sneaking into the second one without buying another ticket. That habit fell away during the pandemic, and now the idea of going to the movies feels more like a nice concept than something I actually do, like going to the store for ice cream and coming back with everything but the pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Plus, I have the Criterion app.::shrugs::

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My one exception is the local old theater. It’s more time capsule than cinema. The building used to be a temperance hall. The seats creak, Ryanair flights have better legroom. The popcorn is always room temp, and the old woman at the counter will warn you about the butter (“I don’t know how long it’s been sitting out”), which oozes from a metal dispenser that’s been there since the ’90s, still labeled in big bubbly Comic Sans- adjacent font: BUTTER. The A/C rattles but doesn’t cool, same goes for the heat. The red velvet curtains clash with the yellowing drop ceiling. The bathrooms haven’t been updated since Roosevelt was in office. I climb to the balcony with a box of M&Ms, sink into my seat, and look down at the dozen or so other people scattered through the hall. Lights down. Picture up. Heaven.

I won’t waste much time trashing The Materialists, except to say its hollowness made me weirdly sad, like Narcissus watching his reflection blink back. It’s a rom-com in setup only; tonally, more aligned with the self-serving flavor of US politics. None of the characters seem to have friends. People, like money, are treated as resources. And not even in a subtle way! Literally, they spend half the time talking about people as ‘assets'.’ Something to invest in, flip, or discard.

The Philippe Starck floor lamps, Lucy’s Doen-on-discount wardrobe, and carefully curated silver jewelry are meant to signal taste, or at least give these characters something to aspire to. Pedro Pascal’s character lives in an apartment that’s actually staged for a Lulu and Georgia shoot. Halfway through, I realized I couldn’t remember the names of the male leads. This is the issue I have with ‘quiet-luxury’ interiors. All the priciest herringbone floors and beige textiles in the world amount to a home that looks totally ‘meh.’ Congratulations, you figured out that mixed neutrals mean nothing ever clashes. That’s a mood board, not a personal aesthetic. I’m bored.

Even New York looked AI-generated, the way so many city centers with new builds are starting to look these days. It’s weird to see a place you know so intimately sterilized, in whose arms and subway cars you have sweated and cried and done walks of shame. If a rom-com is meant to offer escape, this was giving escape room. I left the theater queasy and overheated, sweat trickling down the backs of my thighs. I took my sweaty ass down the road for a martini and a think.

The central flaw, I think, is that nobody in The Materialists actually loves anything. Not each other, not their jobs, not even themselves. They don’t even seem to enjoy the money and status they’ve inherited or worked so hard to obtain. What they profess to love is the social currency of marriage. Marriage as leverage. Marriage as insulation against poverty, social pariahism, aging, etc. However, to think that one thing can save you from change, loneliness, or disappointment is an illusion. Nothing is permanent. Not you, not anyone you love, not the things you build. Nothing lasts forever, not the good, nor the bad. This is probably the most challenging aspect of love to come to terms with. How do we agree to be together, knowing nothing is going to stay the same?

Love, as I’ve come to understand it, is more verb than noun. The care you give, the messy nature of showing up for your friends, family, pets, chosen people, and community. It’s driving an hour in traffic to pick someone up from the airport so they don’t spend $150 on an Uber. Calling for a second opinion about the fit from the dressing room. It’s trimming your dog’s nails while she growls and holding your nephew’s hand as he steps into the ocean and lets loose a giggle like none you’ve ever heard. When he calls me by my auntie name, GoGo, with pure joy in his voice, it undoes a week’s worth of trouble. That kid, barely two, is more fluent in love than most people in Congress right now.

And it’s love that courses through the lows. Seeing one another sick, frazzled, irritable, and sticking around. Being annoying is a universal human condition. I’ve come to believe nothing is sexier than someone who can say, “I’m sorry” and mean it. I’m not married, but many of my closest friendships have lasted decades. These relationships are the central nervous system of my life. My chosen family. Some have known me since before I could drive. If you survived my teenage years and still talk to me? That’s love.

One thing I’ve observed in dating for many years, rather than choosing to be in a closed marriage, is that we often bring our best selves to the first 3–6 months before backsliding into our lesser impulses. Maybe you lovebomb then ghost, or cheat, or withdraw, but I think a lot of this comes down to waiting for the bubble to pop. Or, as the bards of MTV’s Real World would say, to stop being polite and start getting real. Personally, I yearn to feel out of the woods around this point, and not necessarily because of how things are going. Sometimes, I’m tired of first dates, of masking, or appearing to hold it together. Limerence turns out to be somewhat taxing on my immune system. The worst way this plays out is expecting something in its infancy to fit like an old pair of jeans. To quote Phil Elverum, I want to ‘get out of the romance, all the sweetness in the world looks gross in that disguise.’ For someone else to come along and pump the brakes for me, telling me it’s okay and 'olly-olly-oxen-free.’ But it’s not really up to them. It’s down to me deciding to give them the benefit of the doubt to decide if I’m too much. And sometimes I am. Sometimes they are, too.

One of the most irritating aspects of autism is how seemingly minor events can really do a number on my system, like being at a dinner party with 6 people, 4 of whom I don’t know, all talking over each other while the wine flows. I call this the Masking Olympics, where I spend the night silently wondering which of the 5 topics I rehearsed in my head will be acceptable, or worrying if my friends are aware of the ‘tism and are clocking my stimming like hair playing, face touching, repeating certain phrases. Will they pull me aside to ask, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

Ah, yes. Are you OK? Here lies my road to ruin. Put me on the spot and I feel like I’m holding a faulty metal detector. I may ostensibly know I’m not 100%, but unable to pinpoint why or what specifically I’m feeling. ‘I don’t know,' I’ll say. It’s the honest thing, because I genuinely do not know. There is no data. Similar to being in bed with a new partner, when they ask what I like and I go blank. Like this:

Days later, I can write paragraphs about the feeling in pixel-precise language, tracing all the way back to my childhood.

When a friend says they’re bringing someone I’ve never met to dinner and I openly wince, it’s not because I don’t want to meet them, but that the context switching has broken my brain. What looks like annoyance to something someone said might just be me frustrated with the tag on the back of my shirt rubbing against my neck, or a sock bunching at my ankles. Or, say, I’ll be on a date and hear a dog barking outside, and my brain derails while they’re telling me something important. A date recently said, “It’s like you’re not even here.” What could I say? They were not wrong. It is very hard to “be here now” when you’re sensitive to everything. Overhead lighting (homophobic, honestly). The chewing sounds of your dining neighbor. The music on the sound system. First, the decibel, then the actual music itself. Who can eat to Imagine Dragons?

I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can’t hang the way I used to. No more loud bars. Limited alcohol. Early bedtimes (this is not a sacrifice — it’s a gift to myself to go to bed at 9 pm). If I do all the things to “pass,” I pay for it later. It used to feel like getting away with something when someone complimented me on how charming I was at a social event, unaware that I was dissociating the whole time. Like, hah, they didn’t figure out my dirty little secret!

That dirty little secret is that I require more support than I appear to on first glance. My ability to dissociate — a skill that served me well on tour, from scraping mold off greenroom carrots to toilets without seats — does me no favors anymore. Only recently have I started tuning into Casey’s Body Scan FM, and no wonder I avoided it. No Selena hits on this station, mostly joints to the tune of: “lay down, drink more water, it’s ok that some people love having playlists on 24-7 and you prefer to sit in total silence.”

Even basic decisions can be fraught. Shower now and deal with wet hair sticking to my neck or shower before bed and deal with wet hair on pillowcase? Picking a restaurant to meet at means calculating sound levels, bathroom access, sensory bugaboos. Sound, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, is a minefield (I hear those acquainted with me saying: No shit, Sherlock.) Gushing, popping, screaming, slurping, or squelching sounds are like chewing tin foil in my brain, ruling out most horror films or blue comedy. Food textures stymie me. Cartilaginous things that squeak when you bite them are a no-go. Food surprises in general. Encountering a pinbone in a fish. The trendy tinned fish parties? Not for me. I stopped eating breakfast for years because both hot and cold options were a turn-off. Yoghurt can be too cold and slippery, and granola too sharp. Overnight oats gave me visions of my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth. Add to that list: Eggs over hard, smoothies with blueberries, chia pudding (like a saucer of fish eggs), and Canadian Bacon. I have finally settled into the same breakfast every day, loosely based on what I order in a hotel. Softly set scrambled eggs and buttered toast with a small bowl of blueberries or a banana. No Fun Zone is my middle name!

But what’s worse than being too much is not letting anyone know what’s up. In my experience, it’s staying with the feeling that’s hardest. To stop hiding or doing handstands so people won’t see how fried I am, not so much because I doubt they’re up to the task of helping, but because seeing their open concern makes me feel icky, needy, and helpless. Because sometimes when someone asks, ‘What can I do?’ it might take me a week to come up with an answer.

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Over the last couple of weeks, perhaps due to heat and work stress, my body has pulled rank. Migraines that force me to be horizontal, cancel plans, and days when my brain is just offline. I don’t know the exact autism-to-migraine pipeline, but I seem to get them when I overdo it. I’ve been overdoing it.

So this weekend, I pulled the plug on my plans to drive to Hudson with friends and waited out the migraine. I binged ’s Too Much, lying on the couch with an ice pack on my face. I missed the window on Girls — maybe because I myself was a couple of years older than the cast, and it felt weird to watch a show about 20-somethings in Brooklyn after having lived out part of my early twenties there.

While watching Too Much, I remembered how sharp the patter of Dunham’s writing is. It may sound weird, but I like it when you can tell a writer is a big book or film nerd. I really enjoyed Catherine Called Birdy and Sharp Stick. The dialog in her latest series is great, the one-liners very funny, and Rhea Perlman eats up the scenery. Meg Stalter is absurdly hot and, in my opinion, holds the title for Funniest Person Alive, but I also found Jessica’s antics relatable — even when she crosses the line. I too have been the person at the dinner table blabbing about my chronic UTIs. Jess loves freely and with abandon — her family, her friends, her dog Astrid, British period films, loud outfits and cheesy pop, and yes, Will Sharpe’s Felix.

As for their romance, what this show gets right is that often, what drive a wedge between people are the same things that bring them together. Their impressive intellect, good taste, or lack of inhibition morphs into being too highbrow, snobbish, or attention-seeking, etc.

I think calling this a cut-and-dry romcom is a stretch. Like all of those who have been jilted or done the jilting, no one past the age of 30 walks into a new relationship without baggage. Nora Ephron was the queen of the romcom because characters come to us fully flawed and messy. When I recently rewatched When Harry Met Sally, I thought of how funny it was to root for two people I probably wouldn’t want to be friends with in real life. Harry is sexist, full of himself, and a cynic. Sally is high-maintenance, neurotic, and persnickety.The strongest writing on Too Much sets up a lead character who genuinely loves herself, even as she fucks up royally. Rather than having Jess start from zero confidence and build herself up, she exhibits no false modesty, even as we see her past mistakes via flashback. In fact, the only time we see Jess get down on herself is when someone else is trying to police her, like her ex picking on her outfits or music taste or Felix’s triumvirate of judgy Pollys.

THIS person was much more compelling and interesting to me than any character in the Materialists. Not perfect, no, nor is she as winsome as the trailer might have you believe, but Jess is very human. I have my own reservations about Felix, but I could totally see what he sees in Jessica. She’s beautiful inside and out. A total bombshell.

Thank you for reading, sweet people.

Btw, I’m almost through my summer reading list. Send me your recommendations in the comments, pretty please?

CD

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Some nice things

• Not to belabor the point, but HOW GOOD are Meg Stalter’s press outfits?

• Samin Nosrat’s basil pesto. Yes, I’m giving you pesto recommendations two weeks in a row. It is hot as a motherfucker out there. I want to eat only things I know I like. This is the best pesto recipe I know of, and I make it in my food processor. You don’t have to be a hero and do it by hand to eat well.

• While we’re on the subject of food, in summer I am pretty feral. Chopped watermelon and hacked up haloumi served cold right out of the fridge with whatever salad dressing I have tucked away? DINNER IS SERVED. A peach and a plate of salami and some leaves dipped in the same leftover salad dressing? WELCOME TO THE CHAT, LUNCH. I am eating blueberries like a little squirrel; always a little bowl out somewhere. I sometimes need to remind myself, living alone, that there is no one to impress. The secret to dressing things up is putting them on a pretty plate. The last time I was in Paris, I picked up some vintage white plates at an antique store. They really delight me.

  

• Although it is sweltering outside, I still find baths the best way to regulate. Even lukewarm ones. Magnesium is your friend. This insomnia-ending magnesium bath soak can help me touch grass in a pinch.

• Surprise, I’m fussy about bedding. I love a cool sleep, and I like sheets to be extra smooth and soft — I don't fuck with linen, which gets crinkly and, for unknown reasons, always makes me feel overheated. Give me crisp hotel sheets any day. These Brooklinen Luxury Sateen sets have really upped my sleep game.

• The lovely Forestbound had a neat vintage sale last week, and I picked up one of these inlaid mother-of-pearl silver lighter covers. I’m always curious to see what Alice hunts down at estate sales.

  

• If you live in Massachusetts on the south shore, I can’t say enough good things about Holly Hill Farm. This is our weekly treat for veg (much of which is grown on-site or sourced from nearby), and on Saturdays, they carry Steel & Rye’s sourdough. Possibly the best loaf I’ve found around here — super tangy and the perfect toast vehicle for piling high with greens and ricotta. The lettuces and garlic that HH grows are at their peak now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of their tomatoes. The general store also has nice selection of cheese, pickles, and maple syrup.

• My other local pick is Teodora’s Boucherie. Teodora is a European-style butcher. I don’t eat meat often, but when I do I go here. Everything she stocks is of amazing quality, and she carries really interesting cuts of steak. Do not sleep on the meatballs made in-house.

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Maybe they’re born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline. Or maybe it’s perimenopause and they can’t seem to sleep past 4 am…

This will be a ramble because I’m enjoying the free associations of writing to you first thing when I get up. Oz has graduated to free-sleeping in bed with me, which I swore I’d never let happen. Pets rule the roost; I’m only here to pay the utilities to keep their fancy food refrigerated. Llew hides under a pillow while I type away.

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I wasn’t always a morning person. For most of my twenties, I couldn’t get up before ten. That changed during lockdown, when I stopped commuting to work. I realized that 6–9 am was my time, my quiet hours when no one expects anything from me. Most of the album was written during that window. If the weather’s good, I take my coffee outside and weed a little. If I’m feeling off, I get back in bed. But either way, I write.

Even though we finished tracking last year, I write most days, even while traveling. Sometimes it’s songs. I've gotten into a real groove of writing lyrics and melody away from the piano. Keeps the progressions from getting rote. I wonder if it’s different for guitarists. Piano is so visual. You can see the entire thing laid out before you. If I’m in A♭, I already know I’ll likely head to E♭, and so on. I love having it as a sword to pull from the stone at will, but stepping away from the instrument has helped loosen my choices and write for other instruments. Guitarists, do you ever feel locked in like this? Am I idealizing the writing process on your instrument?

But early in the morning, I haven’t had time to talk myself out of anything yet. With plenty of coffee and ‘me time’, I find it easier to access the prima materia that makes a song weirder, more flexible. Then I go about trying to find my way to the progression later, like one of those Outward Bound survivalist camps where you have only a flashlight, a lighter, and a couple of granola bars. Good luck, coyote. It's truly incredible to have done something this long and still feel like a novice. I hope I never lose that.

A practice is nice because it keeps the channels clear. A steady drip is usually preferable to a deluge for me. When that happens, while exciting, it’s destabilizing. One of the last songs on the record came to me while in the Uber to the airport for the second and final tracking session. Lyrics, melody, all of it. I spent the entire flight mumbling to myself, humming, and jotting down notes in my app. We put it on the punch list, unconvinced if it would cut. I dictated the chords to the band on a lunch break, trying to decipher what key it was in. We recorded the whole thing an hour later. I looked at Rob, our engineer, who was chuckling. ‘So that didn’t exist before yesterday?’

That’s the touching the hot stove version of songwriting. I’m not cut out to work that way regularly. I’ve been watching that Owen Wilson show ‘Stick.’ It’s fine (I love Judy Greer), but I do empathize with the talented kid, ruled by his emotions. His big feelings completely dictate his best and worst moves on the course (green? field?). When you’re younger, songs offer unlimited catharsis, flooding oxytocin to the brain. You feel bad? Don’t even worry about metabolizing it. Just write about it! It’s only with time that you learn the writing improves when you approach it like a director approaches a treatment. Wide lens, close-up, on a dolly track, etc. Varied shots give more perspective. A little distance can be good.

The records we love travel a long road to get to us, and you’d think I remember, but each album is released, and amnesia kicks in. Biography is the focus of this current phase, and I find it the hardest and ooziest. Biography so corny. Take one song. How do you distill what went into those 3 minutes? Do you talk about the micro or the macro? Or both? And, also, in the scheme of things, does any of it matter? This axiom turns over, like Apple’s rainbow spinning wheel of death. thinking…thinking…

Thinking is my achilles. I could spend years just thinking about what I need to do, what I’d like for breakfast tomorrow and every day after for the next week, what to get at the farmers market and which bag to bring. I could think my way through a whole date before ever committing to it. This is probably a neurodivergence thing. I have been working to be more TL;DR in certain areas, Just Do It! in others, but it’s like brushing Llew’s fur against the grain. Nothing could be more unnatural.

So how do I tell you what the song’s about? I think the answer is to, in the words of Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell it slant. Do not overcomplicate it. Here is a song about gay chaos, it says so in my notes app. Here is the one about almost dying on the Wild Atlantic Way, the one about how, during lockdown, it seemed like every person in the apps was GGG and ENM or poly, yet still adhering to the same old hetero marriage plot and shitty behaviors. There’s this temptation to show how far you’ve traveled and tie it up with a neat little bow, but it becomes a parade of clichés — later-in-life genderqueer. Check. Read All Fours, fully prepared to hate it, then enjoyed it (could take or leave the clean-eating food passages). Check.

I was thinking about this, observing the rollout of Lorde’s new album. Recreational MDMA, check. Duct tape, check. Five gum. Liquid crystal in your pocket. An iridescent water bottle. Coming off birth control. I’ve only given the album a spin once so far, and yet I know from the marketing that there is ego death, rebirth, and a mons pubis in PVC. I don’t know who decided all these things needed to go out in front, and I’m not saying any of it is bad. Chappell is your favorite artist’s favorite artist. Sabrina is manifesting while being horny on main. Billie Eilish comes out to Rolling Stone, and fans shove her back in the closet for kissing a dude. Resist the urge to thot in these biphobic waters. If it all looks and sounds a little corny, I think that’s because biography is inherently corny. Telling what was always meant to be shown. Artists, I guess, wouldn’t be artists if we weren’t all a bit obsessed with our navels, and more than a little cranky about it. This is why it’s essential to have friends to point to your belly button and say 'cut that shit out!’

A song is a Polaroid. Very rarely does a song provide answers. If anything, the opposite. It complicates the memory, fucks with the chronology, shuffling things out of sequence. Gaps in the sidewalk. If I could decode the message, would I spend seven years trying to write it? Lucky for me, I’m a baby artist so stakes are nonexistent. All I’ve learned is that my purpose is to stay a little longer with something hot, nasty, funny, or gross than what’s comfy in polite society. However, I cannot for the life of me explain why I latch onto certain memories or images.

Take, for instance, this man at a bar in Galway in 2018. Why did my brain choose to remember his face over all the others? His jack-o-lantern smile. His cheeks lobster red from singing at the top of his lungs. Why is this the image I have chosen to dip in amber and implant in your brain one day, not so long from now?

A big part of me wants to put a sticker cover that says ‘no artist became a sage in the making of this work.’

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Some nice things

• I don’t know if you follow , but his videos have helped crawl out of a prolonged food rut. It’s everything I want to eat right now. I can’t get up the excitement to make anything at the end of the day. I made a take on his pesto with peas the other night, and he is right — parmesan and pecorino make it better. It may be hell’s oven outside, but I needed the reminder that boiling a pot of water for pasta doesn’t make the whole kitchen a furnace. It is a perfect weeknight dinner.

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• Daily dips are back. There is nothing better for turning off my brain than throwing my body into the ocean at the end of the day. I took Oz for a swim the other day as well. Much to my surprise, she likes the water. Not a big fan of the waves, however.

• Espresso tonics. I’ve cut back on coffee consumption significantly to improve my sleep, but I was generously gifted an espresso machine for Christmas a year ago, and it has completely changed my world at home. I spend less money overall. Having an espresso tonic in the early afternoon is a real treat. I put a little bit of orange or lemon zest in.

• Ottolenghi Raspberry Rose Jam. I brought back a few jars from my last trip to London, and sadly, I am down to my last one. Not all jam is created equally or worth £5.25, but this one is excellent. Platonic ideal is spooning it on Cafe Cecilia Guinness Bread with a thick slice of butter. I make a loaf of this bread and slice it to freeze for later.

• This is a Night Rider lily. The next 3-4 weeks, there’s a lull in the garden. The big rose show is mostly over for now, and the dahlias are coming up quickly, thanks to the heat, but they still have some time to go. I am really happy with these chocolatey, wine-dark lillies. If you’re someone who likes goth flowers, I highly recommend.

• I may be an early riser, but I have never been a breakfast person. I’m trying to put a stop to that once and for all by loading the fridge with food my neurospicy brain cannot resist. One of those things is coconut yogurt — it doesn’t create the film on the roof of my mouth that dairy yogurts do, which sends me down a sensory rabbit hole that’s no bueno. It’s summer, so cold food is a nice and soothing treat. Sometimes I splurge on passion fruit at the store, which is my personal favorite, or else I’ll opt for blueberries and a banana.

  The only downside about coconut yogurt is that it costs an arm and a leg — not in this economy! So I’ve been using this hack to make my own. I also make labne from scratch now. I’m like a one-person fermentation lab.

@condimentclairehomemade pre/probiotic yogurt?! 🥛🥥 recipe will be on my substack tomorrow ✨🥣

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CondimentClaire

Homemade Coconut Probiotic Yogurt Recipe

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely like me and splurge on a few *fancy* food goodies when traveling. Items we usually wouldn’t reach for on the shelf because of the price tag at home are simply more tempting when the price is written in a different currency. Although I don’t love to mention brands on my newsletter, I have to admit that I had been wanting to try…

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10 months ago · 39 likes · 9 comments · Claire Dinhut

That’s all for now. If in the US, please remember the 4th is a hot dog holiday — AKA the perfect condiment vehicle — and there is no such thing as “too many hot dogs.” Do not come at me with your ketchup. It’s Gulden’s mustard or bust.

xo

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Maybe it doesn’t feel like summer yet because I’m buried in behind-the-scenes work (more on that soon). But for now, I’m thrilled to share the latest issue of One Take below. Please to enjoy. <3 CD

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One Take: ‘Corporeal’ by Broadcast

A friend texted the other day that it’s official. Indie sleaze is back. I’d argue Brat made that abundantly clear a year ago. It makes sense to me; it’s been 20 years. Time for a re-up. The American Apparel onesies, skinny guys that love coke and dress like The Dare, the squelchy synths, blurry flash photos from a Canon Powershot at 2 AM.

I’m an introvert, but old enough to have had a Makeoutclub profile, lived through a painfully bad sideswept shag, and wore jeans so low once a woman at Rein’s Deli asked me to pull them up so she could finish her reuben.

I was reflecting on this period after hearing Billy Jones had passed, a truly iconic booker who helped me get some of my earliest shows at Piano’s. While I can’t vouch for all Y2K trends (maybe don’t resuscitate the babydoll dress over bootcut jeans look), the music didn’t suck. It was a great era for slutty indie pop. Britney and N*Sync were on TV, but the bands hipsters listened to were raw and energetic. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, CSS. The softer, woolier groups were shambolic, too. Even Grizzly Bear, in the Myspace era, started as a bedroom project, not nearly as baroque as their sound would become after the release of Yellow House.

Global fame was for the people on MTV’s TRL. There was something cozy about how DIY groups weren’t Rock Gods yet, just kids with bad haircuts like yours and access to a Tascam 8-track. And there was plenty of disillusionment floating around to fuel the ‘no fucks given’ hedonism — The Iraq war, Bush-era nationalism, surveillance tech on the rise. It felt like the future was canceled, in a way. Sound familiar?

I’m all for coming down hard on Millenials for pivoting so quickly from ‘fuck the pain away’ irony in college to the ‘buy the pain away’ consumerism of the Girl Boss / Tech Unicorn era, but that swing makes total sense to me. Just like some late hippies turned into yuppie neocons by the 1980s, every generation has its version of selling out.

That said, I wasn’t as taken with the sweaty dancefloor stuff as I am now. Back then, I was hooked on the proggy, kraut-y bands on Warp, Matador, and Elektra records around 2002, thanks to my friends from summer camp who made mixes to listen to while driving aimlessly through the Boston suburbs. We were the obnoxious, artsy types who stayed up late smoking cloves, the car stinking of weed, reading Gary Snyder and Richard Brautigan. The soundtrack was Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, and Broadcast. You may roll your eyes. But you’re only a teenager once. It was terrific fun.

Broadcast’s Ha Ha Sound became a big touchstone for me; great lush, sweeping music to listen to late at night. But it was Tender Buttons that sunk its hooks into me the deepest. It sounded like a message from the future, if that future was forecast in 1965. Which, apparently, was what they were going for. Released in 2005, two years before the iPhone. Corporeal was a mainstay of party mixes, even though the lyrics, like so many of Keenan’s, are quite somber. It was the soundtrack to sloppy makeouts, or the time I threw a friend in a cold shower to sober him up. It’s hypnotic, punctuated by glitches, tape hiss, and a synth warbling in and out of tune. Like someone is about to pull the plug at any second. The drum loop doesn’t always line up to grid. It’s catchy and sexy and uncanny, all at once. But at the center is Keenan’s contralto voice that makes every song sound like a séance, as if she saw into the future and knew something the rest of us wouldn’t discover until much later.

To talk about Broadcast at all is to wonder what might have been. Keenan passed at 42. And when I hear Corporeal now, twenty years later, it feels less like a relic and more like a blueprint for the AI-everywhere present, like it was assembled by a machine trying to mimic human emotion. But it was made at home in Birmingham, by Trish Keenan and James Cargill on a Mackie board in their living room, with tape decks and drum machines and a clutch of analog synths.

‘Under the x-ray, I’m just a vertebrae’

Classificiation is the root of our existence online. Without metadata, how would we find anything? How would anyone find us? This week, DSPs have been top of mind, and not only for business purposes. Much of the music created before it was reclassified as content (I recommend reading ‘s take on ‘How musicians became creators’) is now subject to implications deeper than your playlists. Spotify’s CEO has invested 690M euro in Helsing, an AI defense company specializing in drone technology. From the Fader:

The company's corporate slogan at the time was “AI to serve democracies," Wired reported, and they claimed to never sell to autocratic countries. However, the publication did not receive an answer from Helsing when they asked if they would sell their products to countries that "where governments have stripped judges of their independence and cracked down on LGBTQ rights."

Yikes.

In robotics, the uncanny valley is the eerie, liminal space where something artificial almost passes for human, but not quite. In ‘Corporeal,’ the band makes muse of analog tech to address directly our mortality. What makes something of ‘mankind,’ and not ‘mannikin?’

The machine as instrument figures prominently on ‘Corporeal,’ and all of Tender Buttons. As Cargill shared with The Wire in 2009:

It certainly felt with Haha Sound that we managed to get close to where we wanted, incorporating our love for Czech films, library music etc. Tender Buttons is the first time we worked as a duo. It completely changed the sound, dynamics, everything really. Its sparseness is a result of that but we were also quite certain we wanted to take a different turn from Haha. It wasn't actually meant to end up sounding the way it did. Those were sort of example versions to be arranged and played in a group. But the group never materialised.

In terms of arrangement, it’s minimal. Broadcast made use of the same components across most tracks on Tender Buttons:

1. A drum machine (to my ear, sounds like a Boss DR-55).

2. Bass guitar

3. Synths, most notably a monophonic Jen SX1000 synth

4. Keenan’s singular voice

Take a look at the primary melodic component introduced at the top of the song, that buzzy synth that sounds ripped from a QuadraSID, like theme music from an old Ninendo game. The notes of the topline melody outline the progression, emphasizing the 4-interval step down drop:

Dmaj (V) → A7/ (V7/V) → Cmaj (IV) Cmaj/E (IV6) → G maj (I)

The song is in G major, but starting it on the dominant chord is part of what sets the ear up to wonder what’s going on.

Let’s break the progression down a little further, paying special attention to what the G does:

D → A7

• D major is the V scale degree in G. V7/V, the secondary dominant, would usually point us toward D major.

• Instead of resolving to D, it moves to C major, making it a denied cadence. This is good destabilization! It’s like foreplay. If you want to help the ear travel without introducing too much dissonance, this lands the listener somewhere unexpected. Happy surprises are good. That’s how I usually make a hook. I take the expected thing and twist it ever so slightly.

C → C/E → G

• C major is the IV scale degree in G.

• C/E is just the first inversion, so you get a smoother bass motion down to G, our home base. (E → G)

• The resolution from IV → I is gentle, classic, and satisfying, but more satisfying here because of the weird lead-up.

The progression is consistent throughout, as is the noodly bassline, which give runway to fuck with the arrangement. Thanks to this, there’s more room for knob-twiddling and distortion like at the 2:00 mark.

And, of course, the nice thing about the simplicity is in spite of the distortion, you don’t lose Keenan’s voice in the mix. The chorus is a simple melody, almost hymn-like in delivery. Keenan’s vocal is double-tracked and given only sparse harmony on the backing vocals on the choruses. It’s treated thick and leveled close to parity with the lead synth. This makes the glitchiness at 3:00 and beyond feel more welcome, gives it the feeling of a literal ghost in the machine, communicating through the static noise.

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Language as texture

Sometimes you may have a story desperate to get out of you in a song. As we’ve discussed, I love that type of storytelling deeply and most of my catalog leans in that direction. But there are many ways to peel an onion and you may find yourself wanting to veer down a path more abstract.

Go down this route, and words become sonic elements — as important as the drum sound or reverb you pick. Plate verb, for instance, is going to give you something more vintage and stylized than room reverb. Character, spatial awareness, color and sheen.

Apply this logic to your lyrics. Think of how they feel rolling off the tongue as you sing them. You can invoke anything you want with sound. Smoothness, friction, syncopation.

Deeply influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, from which the album gets its name, Keenan’s lyrics are often slippery, suggestive, almost entirely absent of narrative. Each one feels as polished as a perfect skipping stone, simultaneously textural and gestural, and reads to me a like automatic writing:

We are mankind
We are manikin
With and without mind
With or without Darwin

Compare it to one of my favorite of Stein’s poems from that book:

RHUBARB.

Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.

10/10 no notes!

I confess I find most of Stein’s work to be tedious. I blame this on a college class where we studied her libretto for Virgil Thompson’s equally tedious opera The Mother of Us All. I do, however, see value in the accretive style of her technique, where sense leads over literal meaning. In this poem, the “s” sounds add up. It’s frothy, non? Soft, a little hypnotic, though I can’t put my finger on why. Try reading it out loud to see what I mean. It feels good to recite. Does it matter why?

‘Corporeal' feels lyrically less ‘written’ and more assembled, like a collage, a little like Joe Brainard’s writing, take for example ‘Little-known Facts About People’:

Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landingon a highway.

When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer?

Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.

Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a kid too.

D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.

Here, the parallels illustrate how most of us grew up wanting to be someone else than who we become. Even celebrities. Styling the prose as random-gathered-facts makes each sentence a micro-revelation. A conceit so simple you might mistake it for a first draft, if it were less effective.

While Keenan’s delivery may convey emotional distance, what she taps into is all flesh and bone. (I don’t know why, but I find it hard to talk about songs in any other tense than the present, even if it was written two decades ago). In an interview with The Wire, Keenan shared an interest in the paranormal, or what some might refer to as sidewalk tarot:

“For me the paranormal is most powerful when it's unassuming, not obviously spooky or dark and I do feel synchrony and coincidence all the time…when we first moved from Birmingham to Hungerford I noticed these odd reminders of people and things from the last place, object names and people names were crossing over, swapping. For instance we shared a house in Birmingham with a man called Jerome and when we moved to Hungerford he was suddenly replaced by a boat. The lady who occupies the downstairs flat was his girlfriend’s döppelganger. Even my mum was replaced by an old toothless poodle!”

I am not the first to observe how as AI and surveillance tech embeds itself deeper into our daily reality, so increases a collective interest in the paranormal or woo. I’m not immune. I have not one but 3 astrology apps on my phone. I do tarot readings for loved ones. I think the more we hedge our bets on the algorithm to come a save us, the more likely some go seeking what else is ‘out there.’ The cosmos and the paranormal beckon.

Automatic writing, popular with the the psychoanalysts and spiritualists, took off in popularity after WWI as a method of channeling spirits or accessing suppressed parts of the psyche. In the face of incomprehensible violence, perhaps meaning could be mined in the subconscious. Jung and Freud were big fangirls. The Dadaists and Surrealists developed the exquisite corpse technique and took scissors to images and syntax in equal measure, culminating in work like Breton’s The Magnetic Fields.

There is a pink cup; an order is given and without haste the servants respond. The great curtains of the sky draw open. A buzzing protests this hasty departure. Who can run so softly? The names lose their faces.

Big aesthetic movements tend to crop up in response to unchecked power, war, or some type of societal/economic collapse — because these events lay bare how institutions fail us, again and again. When our faith in the systems that order our lives, systems built before our birth, get rocked, we frequently turn to art — if not for answers, per se, then catharsis, community, or both. It could be nonsense, as with Dada, or unexpressed rage as with punk after Vietnam.

Broadcast’s roots in the Birmingham sound of the 1960s loom large. As Keenan explained:

“It always seems as though music is ahead of political correctness or social thought. In the late eighties I was obsessed with the kitchen sink idea of the 60s, I felt umbilically connected with it because of my upbringing, it was the Britain I was born into, a Cathy Come Home England. I discovered psychedelia and it seemed to have self help properties that allowed me to let go of an immobilizing working class pride that was cementing a false identity into my psyche, stopping me from transforming.”

In terms of imagery, I think Corporeal has a visual döppelganger in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. In it, Deren stars a woman walking through her home over and over. Doubles are everywhere. A key becomes a knife. A mirror-faced figure stalks her. The viewer never quite knows if they’re the subject or the observer. What defines our consciousness? What makes you more human than your double?

And I can only speak for myself, but it feels like a good time to take stock of what defines our humanity. War is a very old story we keep revisiting, thinking the outcomes will change — when in reality it destabilizes, leaving ripple effects for generations. AI services, for all their promise to reduce our workloads and free us from manual labor, still have a major, unreconciled environmental problem. Music gives us space to dream up better alternatives for the future. A song can remind us we have agency, even if that agency feels hard to exercise. We do not have to cheer on tacky billionaires while sea levels rise. A candidate like Zohran Mamdani can win the democratic ticket for the NYC mayoral race because fed up people got organized. A group of civilians can choose to take a stand and sail a flotilla with aid to Gaza. We do not have to become what the powers that be would have us become.

It is not easy, but we can still surprise the machine.

That’s what Corporeal does so well. In building from simplicity — a bare bones drum machine loop, a monophonic synth and bass line, and one distinctive vocal - you can create something haunting and complete. You do not need much. Every part earns a seat at the table here. This restraint rewards the listener on repeat listens. The lyrics dissemble, grow stranger, a body broken down into its parts. Vertebrae. Bone. Heart. Muscle. Anatomy. We are the sum of our parts; all of it temporary. But a song plays with time, suspends it, and in recorded form, turns into a time-travel machine. You can always revisit where you were when you first heard it. Someone long gone can live again, if only for a few short minutes. If that’s not magic, I’m not sure what is.

Keenan would have turned 57 this year. Right up until her passing, she was pushing the boundaries of her technique, experimenting with cut-up lyrics. Your own practice can always evolve alongside you. I find myself wondering what version of the space age they might have dreamed up now — how Broadcast’s music would metabolize the machine learning era. 20 years later, and Corporeal still sounds like a message in the bottle from some iridescent future, if not this one.

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Further down the rabbit hole

• Even if you don’t know your rising sign or care about tarot, I recommend giving automatic writing a try. Carve out some time (I like first thing in the morning) and set a timer, usually no more than 30 minutes to start or an hour as you get more used to it. Watch what associations accumulate, and in accumulating, generate new meaning.

• Liz Pelly on Spotify’s surveilance tech
  "Streambait Pop" (The Baffler)
  "The Problem with Muzak"

• Sean Adams on how music turned into ‘content’

  “Glooooooop: How musicians became 'creators“ (Drowned in Sound)

• Broadcast’s full Wire interview (2009)
  Read it here

• Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1912)
  Free eBook from Project Gutenberg

• Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon
  Watch it on YouTube

• Lizzy Goodman’s incredibly juicy book on rock history in NYC btw 2001-2011

  Meet Me in the Bathroom

• FYI: If you’ve ever listened to my album Kairos (in particular Moon Jam), you’ll hear immediately hear how much I love Broadcast. ;)

This Substack experiment is two years old. Writing to you (semi-)consistently has taught me so much. For one, it’s illuminated how much I love the writing process, even on days when my head feels emptier than a blank page. I love it the…

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One Take: ‘I’m a little lost without you’

I always think of early June when I hear Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost.”

My sophomore year of college had just finished, and I took the Fung Wah bus to New York for $20 to visit a friend. Some recently graduated classmates had made the big post-music-school pilgrimage from Boston to NYC, but I was still due back in the fall. I was thinking of dropping out and sitting on a pile of songs I’d been recording that winter. “Show tunes,” the department head called them.

A teacher sporting an Archduke Ferdinand moustache told me I could break rules like Igor Stravinsky —once I became Igor Stravinsky. I look back now with a great deal of empathy for the teachers who were doing their job. My teacher, Lee, was exceptionally kind and patient. I really loved him. Even while on sabbatical in Rome, he’d email asking what I was writing. “Have you listened to Laura Nyro much? I think you should.” Song world was starting to feel more compelling than composer world. More immediate.

And immediate was good, because my feelings were all over the place then. My friend and I had started exchanging emails shortly after he moved, sharing Goodwill book finds, recipes, and small life updates. I’ve had a number of these epistolary romances with men since adolescence, always a bit of a double-edged sword — like, do I want to have sex with you, or do I want to be you?

Sometimes I suspect it was about wanting what came so easily to them and felt impossible for me: the dilettantish liberty, a kind of Merchant-Ivory romanticism with the world, and the lazy, easy beauty of a soft boy — River Phoenix, Jeff Buckley, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, Keats, Jeremy from Brideshead Revisited. Tender, dreamy, a little doomed. I wanted to touch the world with pinkies up like they did. To wear your heart on your sleeve looked different on them, and I envied it. On me, it didn’t look romantic,just doomed. Too much. Too intense.

But this friend was generous and lovely. Not moody or doomed at all. As I recall, he had a girlfriend, but they were open, and at some point, the emails took a romantic turn. We’d spent plenty of time together as friends, but curiosity grew, as it tends to. I don’t remember who kissed who first — but knowing me, it was probably me. He invited me down, and the cheap fare to New York didn’t hurt either.

His apartment was a ground-level unit just around the corner from the Waverly Diner, which was perfect because I could wake up before the house and write in a booth. He had one roommate, a mutual friend from school, who had recently become interested in the Mevlevi Dervishes and lit patchouli incense every morning before meditating. He was tall, soft-spoken, and stooped to get around the low ceilings. He had the best taste in books and music.

They lived simply. Mattress on the floor, books stacked as end tables, instruments and CDs everywhere. There was always beautiful music filtering in from somewhere, a tea kettle whistling, one of them strumming or picking apart a tune. To say it was lovely doesn’t quite do it justice.

One morning, I came back from the diner to find him playing something I hadn’t heard before that knocked me flat. It was Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost.” Like falling for someone new, it leaves you wondering: how did I get by living up until now without this feeling?

You could say I went to visit him, but I was also nursing another crush: New York itself. It was beginning to feel less like an “if” and more like a “when.” New York represented freedom — from school, from where I grew up, from the idea that music was something you had to master before you were allowed to make it.

One night, I took my fake ID out for a drink and ended up seated next to William Eggleston at the bar. I recognized him immediately and sat very still. He was completely out of it, cause unknown, nursing an old-fashioned and mumbling into the wood grain, but I couldn’t believe my luck. One morning, I passed David Byrne riding his bike uptown. We all went to hear some friends play at 55 Bar; I think Mat Maneri was playing. Life was firing on all cylinders, like we were dangling our legs off a cliff or standing at the mouth of some vast river delta, unsure if we’d be swept away or sucked under.

By the end of the trip, I made a pact with myself to leave school and move there by year’s end, before I could chicken out and go back. The roommate sent me home with a burned copy of Russell’s ‘Another Thought’ to listen to when I got back.

I wore it into the ground.

Maybe I was vibing with Russell because he was another classically trained weirdo who found his unconventional way to pop via moving to New York. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1951, the cellist’s biography reads like mad libs. He clocked time at a Buddhist commune before studying at an avant-garde conservatory and getting into underground disco as a DJ. He moved to New York in the 1970s, where he rubbed shoulders in the downtown scene with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Philip Glass. But unlike a lot of his peers, Russell resisted pigeon-holing himself to a single genre or community. He embraced minimalism, cello-and-voice folk songs, and lengthy ecstatic dance tracks, sometimes mixing them all together.

In the best biography about him by Tim Lawrence (a must read), Hold On to Your Dreams, he describes how much of his music went unreleased during his lifetime, in part because he was such a relentless reviser. Lawrence describes Russell as someone with his own criteria of success, an artist who found beauty in the unfinished and the imperfect:

But if we're not going to use the genius word to describe Arthur, then I can maybe say that what was extraordinary about him was the way he was able work on so many sounds and projects simultaneously, to the extent that he really never seemed to look to close down a possibility. If a possibility presented itself to him, Arthur would almost invariably follow it. It was this openness to possibility that led Arthur to record in several different genres or scenes at the same time, and he ended up doing this as much if not more than any other downtown musician - and this in a period when cross-generic expression was becoming really quite common.

Russell died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 40. His work remained largely obscure until a series of posthumous releases, including Calling Out of Context and Another Thought, revealed the range and emotional clarity of his recordings.

“A Little Lost” was one of those uncovered gems. A track that feels like both an invitation and an interruption. That captures in real time the complexity of a feeling unfolding, bouncing from one thought to another. It’s an incredible sleight of hand.

Showing the artist’s hand

Last time, we talked about constructing a perfect pop anthem. But sometimes, you may want a song to show its edges. Sometimes, choosing not to edit something out helps give the song more intimacy and depth. It can, as in the case of this song, even make it transcendent.

The arrangement of ‘A Little Lost’ is about as bare-bones as it gets. Just a cello acting as both the song’s harmonic and rhythmic center, a lightly-picked acoustic, and Russell’s unmistakable vocal with an echo delay layered on top. No vocal overdubs until the song’s last lyrics “another thought.”

We commonly refer to this lo-fi production style as ‘bedroom pop,’ a genre so convoluted that all kinds of acts get lumped in it now, from Clairo to beebadoobee to Billie Eilish. Maaaaaybe some still consider ‘Where We All Fall Asleep’ bedroom pop due to the fact it was largely produced at home in a bedroom, but can we at least agree FINNEAS’ glossy production, while delicious, is as far from lo-fi as it gets?

For my money, the most important feature of ‘bedroom’ or ‘shoegaze’ anything is that you can see the makers’ hand. It’s anti-polish, the way Shaker-style furniture is designed to show you the beauty of an object well-constructed.

I consider Russell an early pioneer of the ‘bedroom pop’ genre. First thought, best thought. He was always chasing his muse, notoriously allergic to repeating himself. When John Hammond II, the famous talent scout, cherry-picked Russell to be the next Dylan or Springsteen, instead of showing up with his acoustic guitar to lay down some basic demos, he turned up with a cadre of downtown artists and began playing his own weirdo pop much to Hammond’s dismay. The lore goes: Did he sabotoge his own commercial prospects or follow his own arrow? If you ask me, two things can be true. As Lawrence covers in the bio:

“He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there."

There’s a specific kind of intimacy in the recording, like you, as the listener, are eavesdropping on Russell playing just for himself. His cello, slightly out of tune, has a soft attack and this wide open, throaty resonance. It’s the quality we’re more accustomed to hearing in fiddle-playing technique, but on a cello it takes on a cooler register. It’s a little melancholy. Across the song, typical edits in the production process are eschewed. You can hear him take a breath, hear his fingers squeak across strings. Tape hiss acts almost like a rhythm section.

Later on in the ‘90s and early aughts, this ethos really blooms in lo-fi havens in the UK and US. I’m thinking specifically K Records, like the sparse, diaristic beauty of Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie records like ‘Dawn’ or ‘Lost Wisdom (feat. Julie Doiron & Fred Squire).’

I also hear Russell’s lo-fi impulses echo across the pond in early 4AD UK acts who prized atmosphere, emotional abstraction, and stuff that sounds like the sonic equivalent of bedhead. These were artists who embraced tape hiss, delay pedals, and fragmentary structures, an aesthetic choice as much as a technical one. Think of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser’s gauzy vocals moving in curlicues, the hypnotic yet poppy work found on Insides’ Euphoria, or This Mortal Coil’s heartbreaking cover of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren.’ In all this work, there is beauty in texture and mystery rather than clarity. Like Russell, these artists truck in atmosphere to convey emotion, to help the listener feel something before they understand it. It’s a deliberate exposure that puts us in the position of paying deeper attention. What I love about this kind of approach is it it’s like a trustfall between the artist and audience. We’re supposed to feel a little bit unmoored. A little bit “where are we going?” There is pleasure in the journey, man.

Harmonic Terrain

The song’s harmonic territory is deceptively simple. The song is in C major, with the primary melody drawing heavily from the pentatonic scale, occasionally breaking ranks to hit the B(7th) and F(4th) for tension or contras. The chords move elliptically, arpeggios circling.

The opening progression follows this pattern:

| Cmaj7 | G/C | Fmaj7 | Cmaj7 |

There’s an ambiguous modal feel to it that I love. Have you ever tasted buckwheat or chestnut honey? The first time you do, it’s so funky and bittersweet, you can’t be sure if you like it at first. I feel like the G/C chord in particular fascinates in a similar way: It retains the root of C in the bass but layers a dominant G chord over it, blurring the harmonic center. Is this song moving somewhere? Or are we floating?

What aids this is the beguiling work happening in the cello, acting as both bass and percussion. In 4/4, but off grid throughout, he attacks with dotted quarter notes for that triplet feel. His vocal delivery leans into the triplet feel, almost a little behind the beat at key points. It swings.

The verse progression loops between C, Fmaj7, and G variants—classic chords, but used in a way that avoids cadence. There’s rarely a V–I movement that lets you land. It’s all IVs and Imaj7s, circular and unresolved.

The chorus is even more minimal:

| Fmaj7 | Cmaj7 | G | Cmaj7 |

It suggests arrival without ever really arriving. You’re always just a little off to the left of the tonic.

The music mimics the emotional logic of the lyric: Wanting something, while struggling to say it directly.

Singing with authenticity

The song hangs upon two things: The perpetual motion of the cello line and Russells’s distinctive vocal delivery.

What makes a voice distinctive? It can be a number of things. For some singers, like James Blake, it’s their falsetto. Technically, Russell’s is not a falsetto, though it lives in an upper, unguarded register. It’s a bit nasal, at times shaky on pitch, a little Kermit-y, even. (I mean this as a compliment). Sometimes we say a singer is ‘quirky’ by means to say they’re singing from their throat or drawing in a lot of tension from their nasal cavity. (Example: Bob Dylan.)

This is why I stress all singers are different, and sometimes a classically good voice is not what’s needed. Here, it works because it sounds like someone trying to put words to a feeling that’s still forming. There’s an urgency here that feels justified and nervy. Arthur Russell always sounds like Arthur Russell.

Take the line: “I’m so busy thinking about kissing you.” It’s like a crush distilled. A little awkward, plainspoken. It’s designed to disarm you. It’s not overly poetic within the phrasing, especially where he cuts off and repeats himself “I’m so busy / so busy” to match the ascending melody. This welcomes us into the narrarators’ state of mind; the distraction, yearning, and daisy-chain of interrupted thoughts. It washes the concept of a performance away.

I have a theory it’s this no-filter quality that made Brat hit so hard last summer. We’ve had a lot of vibes-only Songs of the Summer since 2020, Levitating, As it Was, ‘Blinding Lights, and don’t hate me but I’m gonna tuck ‘Espresso’ in there, too. Then something comes along that sticks out, in part because the lyrics in a lot of the best songs on that album feel uncut, like the first draft in a Notes App, like on ‘Girl, So Confusing.’ The power isn’t in the polish, it’s in the contradictions, the half-finished feelings and gossipy bits.

Yeah, I don't know if you like me
Sometimes I think you might hate me
Sometimes I think I might hate you
Maybe you just wanna be me
You always say, "Let's go out"
So we go eat at a restaurant
Sometimes it feels a bit awkward
'Cause we don't have much in common

It’s primitive, in a way. But it works. Jealousy, obsession, overthinking. These are untidy feelings. And untidy feelings call for untidy language. If you feel yourself veering for cover with poetics, maybe stop yourself a second. Sometimes the unadordned contradictions within are more interesting.

Same with ‘A Little Lost.’ Look at this moment, broken by slashes for where Russel pauses or takes a breath:

Out on the ocean surf /
I'll have to / pull my / self together
Now it's / harder / I'm / not on my turf
Just me and / me and those big old waves
/ Rolling in

To me, the flow and breaks remind me of Emily Dickinson’s use of em dashes and capitalization. Take “I cannot live with You” for example:

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down —
You — could not —

Here is another example where form conveys overwhelm more effectively than plain text, like how a production’s aesthetic choices can inform what the artist leaves for interpretation. Like tape delay or distortion, the dashes interrupt and suspend, marking out breath, confusion, a thought reconsidered or shut down. In Russell’s pauses, I hear the same way thought process can work, when faced with a feeling to big to describe in one go. The lines drift, catch, and start over again.

"That Could Be an Understatement"

This is the linchpin upon which all of the song suspends, as I see it. “That could be an understatement.” His delivery feels tossed-off, which makes what comes next more palbable.

I’m so busy, so busy thinking ‘bout

Kissing you

And now I want to do that

Without entertaining another thought

It’s such a sweet sentiment, almost childlike in its simplicity. Like cutting a conversation short because you’ve run out of the right words to say. You’re ready to get to the good part. It’s one of the most romantic lines in pop music I can think of.

And underneath: the boppiest melodic line ever given to the cello. A real earworm, the kind that today might get treated like a millennial whoop or synth hook. It’s positively infectious.

I think my entire songwriting life, I’ve been hoping to find my own ‘A Little Lost.’ He’d probably tell me I’m missing the point, and he’d be right. It is an endeavor I am happy to take on and fail at over and over. As I see it, Russell was a queer artist in every sense of the word, resisting commercial definition, fully aware of what that might cost him. Like Lawrence says:

"He just couldn't repeat himself. That is kind of a definition of freedom. [...] He was prepared to sell fewer records to get that kind of freedom." —Tim Lawrence

Instead of commodifying his work, he preferred to see his ideas reincarnate. A song, to him, was an idea — and never a finished product. A living, breathing entity to be revisited and reshaped into another thought, and then another.

And the joy for us, as the listener, is to go on a scavenger hunt of our own to find traces of “A Little Lost” across his catalog. Maybe it’s over here, in this 1985 recording of ‘This is How We Walk on the Moon.’ Maybe it’s in the disco/synth pop suite that is ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination,’ or Rahim Redcars’s sublime cover of it.

We are not eternal, but in some ways our songs and ideas can live on long after us. When I write, I think of Arthur’s ideas around form, melody, and sonics as a constellation I can tap into. I can let that first thought be my best thought for the day. I can choose to take my sense of play very seriously. We can each knit ourselves into this playfulness and go forth, make ourselves a little more free, a little more weird. Leave the world a little more beautiful than we found it this morning.

xo

CD

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What’s turning me on right now:

• Using FiveCalls to berate my senators and representatives to oppose banning gender-affirming healthcare and apply pressure to ensure life-saving humanitarian aid gets into Gaza.

• I started to make you a playlist for Pride, then I realized basically did an even better one with all my favorite songs released thus far this year.

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GAY POP Picks: The Best Music of 2025 (So Far)

Three disclaimers. Firstly: I know we’re not precisely halfway through the year just yet. Truthfully, this writer is a smidge burnt out from assignment season, and this piece was a lighter load than GAY POP’s usual in-depth music coverage, hence why it’s out at the start of June and not the end. Secondly, the ranked format of this list doesn’t necessari…

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10 months ago · 18 likes · Archie Marks

• My playlist for pride is here anyway. Enjoy and remember pride started as a protest!

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