Thoughts on Everything You Give
“I want you to know, if you ever read this,” Maggie Nelson writes in Bluets, “there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words.”
Anyone who writes anything is making a Faustian bargain. You’re trading in this real-life moment for a made-up one. There’s an obvious reason why you’d take the deal: when it’s a fantasy, you’re in control. You can transform the imperfections of life into something whole. Why else would I be writing songs this whole time?
Some people leave your life the same way you'd leave a hotel room--a mad dash before check-out with no time to think about what's left behind. Everything You Give is the messy note you wish you’d slipped into their suitcase.
What’s a good heartbreak song? When I was younger, it wasn’t romance. It was songs like Springsteen’s Racing in the Streets or Jason Isbell’s Speed Trap Town, songs about fighting against the limits of one’s unfulfilled existence (and, usually, losing). They didn’t just say, “I’m sad in a lonely world.” They use these feelings as a springboard to express something poignant about the world we live in today. Writing about heartbreak without going anywhere deeper--well, why waste the space of a song with that?
Then, you get lucky: You stay alive! Congrats! Your prize is heartbreak firsthand, the one thing you’re guaranteed access to simply by not dying.
It doesn’t take long before you learn how grief makes the world irrelevant; all that matters is the ache of the here and now, this pesky thing that, no matter what you do, you cannot escape.
This song is the fourth single off of my upcoming album, Empty Country. Like the album itself, it’s about the unfulfilled promise of something that was once here and now gone. Which is as much a political statement as it is a personal one. The album traces the way these two realms bleed into one another, how we make sense of our personal tumult against the larger world—that increasingly entropic state just beyond our capability of comprehension.
But if my goal is to show the relationship between our day-to-day experiences and the world at large, this song is my failure. Because it’s only about heartbreak, and how that heartbreak can winnow a life down, leaving no space for the world to get in.
Stream Everything You Give here.
Thoughts on Why Do You Want
I was three years old when I first heard Third Eye Blind. I was in the backseat of the car, driving through my hometown, and there was that closed-in sadness all old New England mill towns have when the cold starts creeping in, though I wouldn’t have had the words for it then, all while Stephan Jenkins sang about how he’d never let me go. It was a warm summer breeze coming through the radio.
It was also a pure and instantaneous obsession.
Like any obsession, it didn’t take long for it to reconfigure itself, to hew along the contours of the world around me. This probably happened as quickly as it did for me to hear the song. Not only had I fallen in love with the Third Eye Blind because their song was catchy, but it was on the radio! Which meant everyone could hear it. Which meant it was a big deal. And therefore, I figured, worth emulating.
And that’s all it took. In the span of three minutes, I was imprinted with something I’d be searching out for the rest of my life.
Twenty-odd years later, I’d learn Stephan Jenkins is, well, kind of an asshole. Despite that, he still left his mark on who I was and what I was striving to become.
So why do you want what you want?
A simple question, with simple answers: You keep thinking about buying those fancy new shoes because you want sex, you want power, you want money, and you want it in that order. We all do.
But why those things? And how does this play out throughout the course of your life? How do these barely-considered desires shape the arc of your daily life?
That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote this song. It’s both a personal and political reappraisal of my own desires, all over the badass chug of palm-muted power chords.
Thoughts on When I Grow Up Again
They say everyone should have a room with four walls. Mine didn’t. I had three and one big-ass window.
That’s what I think about when I listen to When I Grow Up Again. I’m back in 2016, in my apartment on the corner of Seigel and Bogart. That bedroom window was a magnifying glass in the summer and I was the ant; I roasted in front of it, watched the people pouring out of the Morgan L train stop, their voices half-drunk with sunshine (and, let’s face it, just plain half-drunk). Once the highs hit the 70s, every moment drips with the possibility of some infinite salvation, and they were bathing in it. A neverending stream of beautiful people I’d never know, going somewhere equally beautiful. Where, I had no idea—I just knew it was somewhere better than where I was: sweating away my afternoons in half-broken wooden chair I had scavenged from the streets. Practically everything I owned was scavenged from the streets. My life itself might as well’ve been scavenged from the streets, some picked-over thing I had wiped of grime and claimed as my own.
They’d drift away in waves you could time to the subway. I’d trace the shape of their hypothetical nights: the dinners I couldn’t afford, the parties I didn’t know about, the friends I didn’t have—but you know these beats already, don’t you? They’re the same in every story of any young person that’s just moved to New York.
Which is what this song is about, moving to New York. I believe it requires an assimilation of the soul. Whether that’s a good or bad thing—that’s for you to decide. Obviously, I decided it was good, in the sense that what I experienced matched with something I saw in myself, however nascent (I mean, I live here, don’t I?). For some, this is a seamless exchange, like mailing in a too-tight pair of jeans for the right size. A minor inconvenience but in a few weeks everything fits. For others—or for me, at least—it’s something more difficult than that.
To put it bluntly: I wrote this song about looking at other people’s lives that seemed easier than mine. Which, to me, came down to class. Or, to be even blunter, came down to money. I imagined the people outside my window were born into lives that already put them far down the path toward anything they wanted because of money. I was in my room with nothing but my acoustic guitar, looking for any trail I could find.
Whether that was true, or just due to the distance between the lives of the people outside and my own, I don’t know. No one really knows the full story of anyone. But it was out of this perceived distance that I wrote When I Grow Up Again. It was an exercise in questioning every decision I had ever made. I was delineating the distinction between what was mutable and what remains forever irrevocable.
Which may sound depressing to you. Like I’m resigning my life to forces larger than my own. But to me, it’s not. And when I think back to me in my closet of a bedroom in 2016, it’s a pleasurable experience. So why?
Because not only was I roasting from the heat of my apartment, but from something inside of me that was burning for something more. This isn’t unique—it’s something every other 23-year-old has felt. But for me, that possibility for more all hinged on one word: Again. When I Grow Up Again. Sounds like an impossible task. You can’t grow up again.
But why not? Why can’t you try again? Even if you’ve missed so far in life, you can always take another shot on goal.
I realize that seems irrationally optimistic. But life requires irrational optimism. Otherwise, how could anyone commit themselves to do anything worth doing on the grand scale of their life? How could anyone do anything? Living any life against the backdrop of growing entropy and chaos is inherently an act of irrational optimism.
When you listen to this song, I hope you feel that irrational optimism yourself, that tiny pinprick of hope for something more. If we all keep clawing, keep scratching, why can’t we open up that pinprick into a beautiful, blinding sky?