The day before the release of our third album, ‘Truth or Consequences’, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 an official pandemic. We’d arrived in the United States that morning to play the first show of our North American album release tour in Washington D.C. At this point, all of the tour dates were still set to go ahead, and we were excited to promote an album we had worked on for the last two years. This run was set to be our first ever fully sold-out US tour. The atmosphere was excitable, a little tense, optimistic. However, the chain of events that followed meant that by the time we finished our set that evening, restrictions on venues had been enacted by local governments across the country, and one-after-another, all of our remaining tour dates were cancelled. The performance at DC9 was the first and last show of the ‘Truth or Consequences’ album tour. It was all over, we went our separate ways and flew home the next day – on our album’s release day.
Touring is often the final piece of the puzzle that is an album campaign – the part you fixate on alone in a room, when you perfect a song and imagine how a crowd will react. You may have listened to certain songs a hundred times during the making of the record, but when you’re out on stage, face-to-face with an audience, this is when you start to truly re-contextualise and re-interpret the music, exploring the boundaries, focusing in on different parts of each song’s musical fabric. A new vocal harmony there, a new bassline there – perhaps you add different chord voicings on guitar, or new drum fills that set a new-found intensity to a section.
So after returning home and spending a few numb weeks adjusting to this strange new way of life, April came, the reality set in, and we quickly started to miss that feeling of exploring our new songs by night. We’d missed out on such a crucial part of the process – with no concrete idea of when we might next get the chance. It felt too soon to move on – we felt the pull to work on new music, but still felt a strong attachment, an unresolved connection to this new record that we’d laboured over and had waited so long to release.
Writing new music around them, we took the songs of ‘Truth or Consequences’ and found ourselves a new way of re-contextualising them safely, amidst the tragedy and fear going on in the world outside our windows – and the Alternate Versions were born. We encouraged each other to be bold, fearless, and to experiment like we would on stage – but from the comfort of our own bedrooms, living rooms and hallways. This new reimagining of ‘Truth or Consequences’ is the result of that process. Ten new arrangements that reflect our feelings of optimism, helplessness, and a desire to keep exploring.
Yumi Zouma are: Christie Simpson, Josh Burgess, Charlie Ryder, and Olivia Campion.
With their songs appearing on Black Mirror and Made In Chelsea before their debut album was even released, Kidsmoke are proving that there’s plenty of life in guitar music yet. Echoing the sounds and mood of both The War On Drugs and The Cure in equal measure, the North Wales five-piece have stumbled upon a brand of glistening guitar-pop and heartlands rock that is packed to the rafters with shimmering arpeggiated guitar melodies and lustrous, beautifully crafted rhythms and vocal hooks. By way of a bright blue beginner’s guitar Sophie Ballamy tells us how it all began, “When I was about 13 a few of my friends at school were learning guitar and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever.
My Dad is pretty handy on guitar, but I’d somehow never known about that before, so when I mentioned I’d like to learn he dug out an old electric guitar from somewhere that my uncle had built. That was it, I was hooked. I’m not sure what that guitar was or where it is now – all I know is that it was bright blue, and I immediately wanted to be Jimi Hendrix.” I tend to play quite intricate, melodic guitar parts for Kidsmoke so I think that’s where that comes from. For me, it’s most important to put down what’s right for the song, so whatever I end up playing it’s always carefully considered.
There were a lot of different influences really, but I think you can hear how much we love 80s bands like The Cure, Prefab Sprout and The Smiths – there’s a balance of light and dark that runs through a lot of our work and you can definitely hear that in those bands.
Kidsmoke are proud to present “The Bluest You”, from their album ”A Vision In The Dark” (released via Libertino Records, 2020)
“The Fountain” was supposed to be a full length album but as the songs took shape, I realized that there was something cohesive going on with a smaller batch. They all focused on the theme of platonic love with a sense of gratitude. I think that traditionally, I had mostly written yearning, romantic odes and it was nice to focus on what was right in front of me and have a record be about that for a change. A big part of this project for me is about trying to reflect on the years I’ve spent touring and playing in different bands, mostly punk bands who played in warehouses and never released records. I want this project to be a part of that legacy.
So much of those old scenes were about celebrating the time we were living and the friendships we were forming and so this is sort of my older take on those excited sentiments. Basically, what does a punk song about friendships look like 20 years later? Probably a little slower, a little softer and a little more melancholy.
The Night Shop is the Song writing project of Justin Sullivan (Kevin Morby, The Babies, Flat Worms). Songs from the cafe of eternal youth.
Justin Sullivan: vocals, guitar Tiffanie Lanmon: drums Jarvis Taveniere: bass, guitar, piano Anna St. Louis: vocals
The music world this week lost a massive talent far too early when it was announced that Americana singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle had passed away from undisclosed causes at the age of just 38.
He was the son of country music mainstay Steve Earle, and named for his father’s friend and mentor Townes Van Zandt, and this rich pedigree flowing through his veins was wrought clear by both his obvious musical acumen plus the way he was so defiantly determined to forge his own path and do things his own way.
Earle leaves behind eight beautiful albums – the most latest being 2019’s The Saint Of Lost Causes – and a tragically young family (he and wife Jenn Marie only welcomed daughter Etta St. James into the world in 2017), but also the indelible marks he made on the lives of countless people whose paths he crossed along his too-short but action-packed journey. A genuinely fun guy to be around, he was charismatic and opinionated and incredibly open about his own past, completely willing to steer conversation towards the many trials and tribulations he’d faced, and the addictions he’d battled since his early teens.
The impact of his immaculately authentic song writing and consummate performance skills was immediate and invigorating, and when he burst into a stripped-back but hauntingly beautiful cover of The Replacements’ Can’t Hardly Wait, a great version of which followed on Justin’s subsequent album Midnight At The Movies (2009).
From the very beginning was that this was a guy who was not living in his father’s shadow. He didn’t have to come out and say it, but you just knew it. He wanted to pave his own path, and he wanted to lay those bricks – rightly or wrongly – in the way that he saw fit and the way that he thought it should have been. I admired that, because it would have been very easy for Justin in the early stage of his career – around that first album [2008’s The Good Life] and EP [Yuma(2007)] – when it would have been very easy to talk up his father and milk those connections. There were references to it in interviews, but he’d never use it as a calling card. The Americana genre with which Earle is usually synonymous is a large and often nebulous catch-all, but Earle was equally at home mining sounds and emotions from the soul, blues, folk and even rock’n’roll realms as he was from the country music at Americana’s heart. More than that it was the way he so effortlessly brought a modern spin to those old-timey foundations that made his music so widely accessible. But they didn’t see a country act in Justin, they saw a guy onstage who knew his craft and knew his songs and knew how to deliver those songs in a way that made you feel sitting in the audience like you’re the only person there, in the way that Bruce Springsteen does.
“And you kind of get locked in this zone where you think that you’re the only person in the room and that is a gift – an absolute gift – that not many artists possess, but Justin Townes Earle, was one of those who could do it. He’d take you to a place night in, night out that you wanted to go to, because that’s why you were there. “And he knew that, because that was his job. He rolled up the sleeves, put the guitar on and went to work. There was a lot of fun along the way. But seeing Justin playing live is that every time he walked out onto a stage he was doing the best he could at that point.”
“I feel like Justin was a lynchpin to a whole lot of people who lifted their game because of him,” he offers sadly. “He came out kinda rippin’ at his guitar and it inspired a whole generation of songwriters to rip at that claw-hammer finger-pickin’ style and not be timid when you’re writing songs. “He had that Replacements kinda snowball – that relentless drive and that punk element – to country and modern song writing, . He was an important figure for everyone, it was just crazy. He was also a great raconteur – he’d always tell stories and he was always quite open onstage and quite honest. He was a great, great showman. The breadth of fans at his gigs was incredible, Justin would attract people like 70- and 80-year-olds who loved that classic throwback country songwriting – that dusty 78s-era gramophone country – but then you’d have rockabilly kids in their 20s and punk kids, people who love The Replacements. He had that extraordinary breadth of reach.
“Justin was such a rollercoaster ride of confidence and fragility – he was the extreme of every adjective you can imagine – and people could relate to his journey and his ride. People followed him and they related to him on his ups and his down and his variation from tour to tour in his states of mind, and that made him approachable and incredibly easy to follow and kind of befriend.
He was always incredibly interesting and a song writing genius – so you couldn’t really ignore him, and that’s really rare. He had a force of personality that’s really rare in the music industry these days, apart from the obvious loss – is just the talent that Justin had, it was so immense but in many respects it didn’t reach it’s peak, and that’s terribly sad.
He was a guy who gave a lot onstage, and the talent that Justin possessed was almost inconceivable. He brought a whole lot of rock’n’roll to Americana, he was a real rock star – and sadly you can’t help but feel that he had so many great songs left in him, that his best work was still to come.
“If you have a vacancy for another favourite new band on your listening device, Pom Poko would like to apply for the role,” tweeted Tim Burgess last April, as Norway’s finest punk-pop anti-conformists revisited their joyous debut album, “Birthday”, for one of Tim’s mood-lifting twitter listening parties.
Pom Poko pimp their cv on all fronts with their glorious second album, “Cheater”, is due for release via Bella Union in November. between the quartet’s sweet melodies, galvanic punky ructions and wild-at-art-rock eruptions, Cheater is the sound of a band celebrating the binding extremes that make them so uniquely qualified to thrill: and, like Tim’s listening party, to fulfil any need you might have for a pick-you-up. as singer Ragnhild Fangel explains of the leap from “Birthday” to “Cheater”, “I think it’s very accurate to say that we wanted to embrace our extremes a bit more. in the production process I think we aimed more for some sort of contrast between the meticulously written and arranged songs and a more chaotic execution and recording, but also let ourselves explore the less frantic parts of the Pom Poko universe.
I think both in the more extreme and painful way, and in the sweet and lovely way, this album is kind of amplified.” both sonically and thematically, that sense of amplification asserts itself right off the bat with the tearaway title-track. bursting into life on the back of a blast of fractious guitar noise, a thrashing riff and a sweetly sardonic vocal, “Cheater” laces its serotonin rush with tangy lyrics about dreams and, says Ragnhild, the kind of “cheating kid who doesn’t understand why they didn’t get things exactly like they wanted on their first try”: thematic motifs that reverberate throughout the album. from here, Pom Poko court their extremes with firecracker confidence. its lilting melody laced with a critique of gender stereotypes and set to a breeders-style lurch, “like a lady” is sharp and catchy. “Andrew” upholds a facility for simplicity in one of Pom Poko’s loveliest choruses, though a band such as this will never settle for the obvious: Martin Miguel tonne’s jazzy guitars seem to do everything except what you expect them to.
Further evidence arrives in the contrast between the thrilling, think-on-its-feet thrash-pop of “My Candidacy” – made in less than three hours – and the mellifluous “Danger Baby”, a tale of irrational fears with Ragnhild’s vocal and Martin’s guitar merged in unexpected union. That love for surprise synchronicities, slanted sounds and unexpected subject matter propels “Andy Go ToSchool”, where a tempo-tweaked guitar line accompanies a lyric extolling the pleasures of water parks and a free-flowing sonic palette. “Towards the end one of the guitar pedals made a huge bzzz sound in a pause, but we thought it was cool and raw so we just rolled with it,” says Ragnhild. “We like to mix the feeling of a surgically produced piece of music with the random sounds that also happen when you are a band playing together.” after its opening, almost Bolan-esque belches of guitar, “Look” extends that spirit of openness to an invitation to look outside of one’s self, before “Body Level” ends the album on a characteristically generous, unguarded – amplified – note of positivity. “Things Get Better,” sings Fangel, embracing directness with the same readiness as Pom Poko exult in giddy intricacy. The sound of four distinct personalities driving in divergent directions towards one destination, the result is an evolved snapshot of the bracingly contrary chemistry forged when Fangel, Tonne, Jonas Krøvel (bass) and Ola Djupvik (drums) united to play punk during a jazz gig at a literature festival in Trondheim (the band-members studied jazz there.) taking their name and spirit from japanese animation visionaries studio Ghibli’s marvellously out-there film about raccoon-dog rebels with unfeasibly large testicles, Pom Poko showcased that convulsive individuality to exuberant effect on 2019’s Birthday. along the way, they drew praise from NME, interview magazine, DIY, Popmatters, the Line of Best Fit, the Independent and BBC radio 6, where Miranda Sawyer was moved to note that Birthday’s“Crazy Energy Night” seems to contain about 20 songs in one.
Meanwhile, a huge touring schedule included countless sold-out headline shows and a rapturously received uk jaunt with Ezra Furman. Written in the same run that produced interim releases “Leg Day” (with its playful dance-based video) and “Praise”, and recorded/produced in cooperation with Marcus Forsgren (jaga jazzist, broen, arc iris), Cheater does its predecessor proud on every front. bursting with colour and wonky life from its cover art (by close collaborator Erlend Peder Kvam) outwards, it differs from Birthday primarily in that its songs did not have a chance to be road-tested before going into the studio. but you wouldn’t know it. as Ragnhild explains, “that meant we had to practice the songs in a more serious way, but it also meant the songs had more potential to change when we recorded them since we didn’t have such a clear image of what each song should/could be as the last time.” in other words, consider that vacancy for free-thinking punk-pop adventurism in your life filled.
A first album happens the same way that Great Britain acquired an empire, in a fit of absence of mind. You write a song – a sheepish exercise at best, because only songwriters write songs, and you can’t be a songwriter until you’ve written one – and then you write another, and a few more, and pretty soon you have a bunch of them. You play them for your friends at beer parties, but it’s hard to know what else to do with them besides make an album. If you weren’t going to record them, what the hell have you been up to? In the Midwest, where a bent toward art that isn’t immediately financially remunerative is often treated as a type of infirmity, if you aren’t a songwriter working toward an album, you may be just a self-absorbed person with an odd private habit. It’s a fine line.
The second album happens because you made the first one, some people liked it, and now you’re in the terrifying position of having to prove that it wasn’t an accident, which you’re pretty sure it was. So you hire a producer (in this case the fantastic David Goodrich) and book a week to record, lying through your teeth that you have a lot of great new songs, and then spend a couple of fevered weeks drinking multiple pots of coffee a day, desperately trying to fill out the forty-odd minutes of an album.
That’s how “Stripping Cane” went down. I was trying to understand form, taking various types of American music into the shop and putting them up on the lift – country, country blues, gospel, murder-ballad, twelve-bar – to understand how they worked. I’d been a student of songs, but I’d always paid more attention to the the spiritual charisma of the singer, or to the language. You will hear people say that form is content. You should be suspicious of those people.
I didn’t pick up the guitar until I was seventeen, and I was writing, recording, and eventually even touring before I’d acquired the hours I needed for anything like mastery of my instrument, or my voice. So I spent a lot of time after my first album came out (and ever since, really) holed up trying to become a better musician, and a more concise writer.
I still play about half the songs on Stripping Cane – songs like ‘Northbound 35,’ ‘Cross of Flowers,’ ‘4&20 Blues,’ – and they’ve mostly worn well. They’re songs about the polarities of the life I was living at the time: home and away, leaving and left, right and wrong, love and its absence, and I was between 24 and 27 when I wrote them.
This is how I make a living right now, so if you have the wherewithal and these songs have meant something in your life, you can square up for a show via Paypal, Venmo, or the U.S. Mail (assuming we still have it), as you see fit. I don’t have to fly anywhere, and you don’t have to hire a sitter, so whatever seems like a reasonable cover charge ought to be fine.
Justin Townes Earle, an acclaimed US songwriter and son of Steve Earle, has died, in news confirmed on the artist’s Facebook page on Sunday night.
“It is with tremendous sadness that we inform you of the passing of our son, husband, father and friend Justin,” the post read. “So many of you have relied on his music and lyrics over the years and we hope that his music will continue to guide you on your journeys. You will be missed dearly.”
Named for his father’s friend and idol Townes Van Zandt, Earle, 38, battled addiction throughout his life. He released eight albums across the course of his career, which saw him honoured twice at the Americana Music awards including for his best-known song, “Harlem River Blues”.
Many have paid tribute to the artist on Twitter, with the musician Samantha Crain reflecting on their friendship: “Such a tremendous songwriter. He took me on two tours and always treated me so kindly. He understood struggle, he understood joy I saw him at the peaks and valleys of both through the 13 years I knew him.” His friend and collaborator Jason Isbell said: “Had a lot of good times and made a lot of good music with JTE. So sad for his family tonight.”
“When you start with my middle and last names,”said Earle, “how much worse can the expectations be? My father is one of the greatest songwriters who’s ever lived, and I couldn’t write a song like [revered singer-songwriter] Townes Van Zandt if my life depended on it. But you know going through the door you’re gonna be judged based on that, so you better be ready.”
By the time he was 14, Earle was doing residencies in the competitive Nashville songwriter’s scene. It was the mid-1990s, and artists in the so-called alternative country movement, spearheaded by acts such as Uncle Tupelo, BR-549 and Neko Case, were mixing post-punk energy with honky-tonk twang. Earle’s first three records were released by Bloodshot Records, one of the drivers of the scene and inheritors to Steve Earle’s 1980s blue-collar barroom country. Earle was an on-and-off member of the raucous country-rock band the Sadies. As Earle gained confidence, he committed to being a solo artist.
The writer and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib praised Earle as “an incredible writer of narrative – stories that flourished beyond the music they were laid over”. the NPR music critic Ann Powers described his last album, “The Saint of Lost Causes”, as “a powerful road map of America … we’ve lost someone with real vision.”
Earle is survived by his mother Carol-Ann Hunter, his wife, Jenn Marie, and their daughter, Etta St. James Earle.
New West Records has created a rad compilation album exclusively benefitting their artists. The album is available today, in conjunction with Bandcamp’s pledge to waive fees for artists. 100% of proceeds go to the artist. The setlist is included below. The album is only available digitally, and only from Bandcamp or at newwestrecords.com. Link to purchase: http://newwst.com/forthecure.
Any collection that kicks off with Nikki Lane channeling Wanda Jackson is worth having by definition. The rest is just fine, too, especially Seratones’ apocalyptic take on State Trooper. New West clearly curated this collection with care.
1. Nikki Lane – Funnel of Love
2. Justin Townes Earle – Rocket 88
3. The Texas Gentlemen – Dream Along (Bonnaroo Haybale Session)
4. Jaime Wyatt – I Miss Drinkin’
5. Ron Gallo – Always Elsewhere (Bonnaroo Haybale Session)
6. Andrew Combs – You’re Like The Country
7. Sammy Brue – Before It Gets Good Again
8. Seratones – State Trooper (Live on WFUV)
9. Robert Ellis – Heartbeat
10. Kacy & Clayton – The Gallery
11. Dan Luke and The Raid – Be Good
12. Caroline Rose – More Of The Same (Bonnaroo Haybale Session)
13. Sam Doores – True To My Luck
14. American Aquarium – Darkness on the Edge of Town (Outlaw Session)
15. Lilly Hiatt – No Good
16. Pokey LaFarge – Oval Room
All proceeds from the sale of this album go to the artists involved.
Ten Million Lights are an indie shoegaze band from Portland, Oregon who tap into something special on their new single “Myanmar.”
The band captures a level of rocking fuzzy goodness that creates a stirring non-stop atmosphere that still finds room for the heavenly floating vocals that mix with the shoegazey guitar work that feels like a mix of bands like Ride and Slowdive. Even better yet is the band’s description of the song:
The lyrics are highly imaginative about looking over the Event Horizon into a black hole to try and meet your maker only to find out its a praying mantis lizard who is turning our sun into a crystal. Have fun with this quick ditty. You just might have to play it twice…It doesn’t get much better than that.
Joe D’Agostino talks about his new solo album and why his former band decided to call it quits, and debuts the album opener “Marian.”
How do you dissolve a beloved band you’ve devoted your life to since the age of 18?. If you are Joe D’Agostino, frontman of Cymbals Eat Guitars, you do so as quietly and tastefully as possible. In late 2017, the New Jersey-bred indie heroes performed three farewell shows, including a raucous gig at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom, which was packed with fans who had no idea it was a farewell. They shared the stage with home-state idol Charles Bissell, of elusive Jersey favorites The Wrens fame, and dusted off early-career gems like “Indiana” and “Some Trees.”
And then, without a word, one of the decade’s most rewarding and emotionally searing rock bands simply ceased to exist. There was no announcement. (Consequently, many fans have continued hoping for a new album) “We wanted to quietly deep-six it,” D’Agostino explains two years later. “We could have told everybody that our December 2017 shows were gonna be our final shows, but — I dunno. It just seemed a little gaudy to do so. We were never people to draw attention to ourselves in that way.”
Causes of the breakup included deep exhaustion with touring, bassist Matt Whipple’s decision to return to school for interior design, and a brooding sense that — despite consistent acclaim and a committed cadre of fans — “there was nowhere else for us to go.” During that grueling final year, the band toured with alt-rock legends the Pixies, “which was just crazy — like, dream scenario stuff,” the singer says. “And then we went back to the same cities that we played with Pixies in to headline, three months later. And nobody came.”
It was bleak, the bleakness compounded by brutal summer temperatures and self-destructive patterns that had emerged across lengthy touring cycles. “It was over many years,” D’Agostino says. “And it was like, I had to drink to perform. Especially towards the end.”
Eventually, the band updated its Twitter bio to resemble a tombstone: “2007–2017.” If that suggests an untimely demise, the subsequent years, 2018–2019, signify rebirth. D’Agostino has spent them carving out some semblance of domestic bliss with his wife, Rachel Browne (singer of Philly indie band Field Mouse), in their adopted hometown of Philadelphia and figuring out what it means to make music post-Cymbals. For much of 2018, he was cooped up on the first floor of an old Victorian in West Philly — the couple’s home of two years — writing, arranging, and self-producing an ambitious set of solo songs. (Kyle Gilbride, Swearin’ member and prolific indie engineer, co-produced and engineered.)
The result is his new project, Empty Country, whose self-titled album will be released by Tiny Engines (The Hotelier, Somos) next February. The title comes from a Cymbals deep cut, “Wavelengths.” (At Browne’s suggestion, D’Agostino scoured his band’s old lyrics when stuck on a name: “For whatever reason, those two words jumped out at me.”) The album combines D’Agostino’s knack for vivid, impressionistic imagery — capable of summoning a romantic LSD trip or a nightmarish cancer scare — with arrangements more ornate than anything from his former band: “Untitled” is a bleary-eyed excursion into acoustic psychedelia, while “Swim” closes the album with a gorgeous reverie of string swells.
Though billed as a solo album, it’s very much a family affair, inhabited by loved ones both alive and dead. Anne Dole, Cymbals’ former drummer, performed drums; her twin brother, Pat, handled bass. Browne and her sister Zoë contributed backing vocals. “Chance,” with its gushing a cappella break, is an affectionate tribute to the sisters’ dad — D’Agostino’s father-in-law — the longtime cartoonist Robert “Chance” Browne. And the opening track, “Marian,” is named after D’Agostino’s grandmother, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1983. It’s an expansive epic that coaxes unexpected sunlight from one of the singer’s most generous falsetto hooks. Lyrically, it’s sung from the perspective of a clairvoyant miner who foresees his own death in 1960s West Virginia: “The mine collapses in spring of ʼ67/ I was a bastard anyway.” .
Meanwhile, the intensity that once landed Cymbals a tour with emo stalwarts Say Anything roars to life on “Ultrasound,” home to the record’s most screamable chorus. The song, with its mortified reference to “a shadow on the ultrasound,” is about a cancer scare. Browne’s sister is a survivor of metastatic breast cancer, so Browne goes in semi-regularly for routine imaging. In early 2018, doctors found “what looked like something that could be very serious,” D’Agostino says. “I was with her at the doctor, and — I mean, the doctor just scared the shit out of us.”
The song describes the nightmarish week that followed: waiting for the biopsy report, collapsing into fits of crying every hour. “I wrote the lyrics over the course of like two or three hours,” the singer says, “and I was just weeping the entire time.” (The health scare, fortunately, turned out to be a false alarm.)
Tragedy struck anew the day “Ultrasound” was issued as Empty Country’s first-ever single: August 7th, 2019. D’Agostino was full of nervous energy about debuting the project. He was also due to open for Purple Mountains — the new project of Silver Jews songwriter and veteran rock cult hero David Berman — in three days, so he went to get a haircut. D’Agostino was to join Purple Mountains for two dates, in Jersey City and Philadelphia. He had extensively rehearsed a six-piece band, which included Browne and her sister, for the occasion. He was leaving the barber when Browne called with news: Berman was dead.
“[It was] just utterly devastating,” D’Agostino says. He gets choked up recalling how much Berman meant to him. As a teenager, he blasted Silver Jews records on roadtrips. A decade later, he met Berman by chance during the LOSE tour in 2015. Cymbals had just played a sparsely attended show at a Nashville dive bar.
“I was loading up a van after that show, kind of dejected but whatever,” D’Agostino recalls. “He walked up to the back of the van. He asked if the music was over. I recognized his voice immediately. I was like, ‘You’re David Berman.’ He was like, ‘Yep.’ And we talked for a long time that night… I left town feeling like, whatever this career is or isn’t, it brought me to this exact moment in time where this person — this idol, this hero of mine — and I could just cross paths in this way.”
A year later, D’Agostino received an email from Berman, which he describes as “long and free-associative and beautiful.” The two began corresponding regularly. Berman told D’Agostino he could be a poet and attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the strength of the LOSE lyrics. Before his death, Berman listened to Empty Country demos and was quick to offer encouragement. “He was just such a brilliant and kind man,” D’Agostino says. “I will forever hold memories and correspondences that I have of him. But I haven’t listened to his music since he passed.”
Ten years ago, D’Agostino was in the eye of the hurricane that was Cymbals Eat Guitars’ sudden ascent. “I was blown out of the cannon at age 19 and 20,” he says, “with all of this praise — the indie-rock bubble, the hype.”
It was 2009, the golden age of “blog rock,” when guitar music still reigned and a few impressive songs on a MySpace page could, and did, earn a band like Cymbals a glowing Pitchfork review and major festival slots seemingly overnight. The band’s debut, the impressively expansive Why There Are Mountains, drew raves despite being self-released: “Are Staten Island’s Cymbals Eat Guitars indie rock’s next big thing?” blared one headline from a local outlet. Suddenly, D’Agostino and his bandmates found themselves in London opening for The Flaming Lips, and being courted by managers and agents.
He’d been a nerd at his Central Jersey high school. Now he reveled in the sudden validation — behaving callously, abusing prescription meds. “It went to my head,” he admits. Now 30, he barely seems to recognize that kid. “I concentrated on one thing for so long. All I wanted from when I was 15 to when I was 20 — and I got it! And I don’t think I knew how to handle it, emotionally or ego-wise or physically. I was always just destroying my body, getting sick on the road.”
Alcohol became a problem. It got worse near the end, when D’Agostino found himself needing three or four drinks just to go onstage — especially in places like Oklahoma City, where only five people would show. How else could he summon the vigour to obliterate the scream in signature anthem “…And the Hazy Sea?” His health became compromised, his blood pressure unusually high. “I was just utterly consumed with anxiety and deep depression, and it was compounded by the lifestyle of touring,” he says. “There’s a bottle of fucking booze and a case of beer in your green room every night.”
Since the band’s breakup, D’Agostino has been in treatment for Bipolar II disorder and on psychiatric medication. (He no longer self-medicates with alcohol, though he does use pot and hesitates to identify as sober.) He has a day job in customer service, which lets him work from home and eases the financial precarity of a career in music. The end of Cymbals seems to have delivered some relief from the nonstop jockeying for status and success. “I didn’t make this [solo] record to be famous or to be a career musician, though that was my ambition as a younger man,” he texts me after our interview. “I made it to document and honor my human experience and that of my family.”
Ten years removed from indie fame is a weird place to be. D’Agostino sometimes jokes that Cymbals will reunite at Riot Fest in 2039 for the 30th anniversary of Mountains. When asked if he feels proud of what Cymbals accomplished, he lets out a long, heavy sigh. “I do,” he says finally. “I feel very proud of the four records we made together. And incredibly proud of a lot of the shows that we did. I have beautiful memories of each of my bandmates and all of us together.”
He is careful not to seem bitter about the fact that none of Cymbals’ other albums matched that level of commercial success. Yet some bitterness might be warranted, especially considering the band’s real masterpiece, LOSE, a sweeping and cathartic excavation of adolescent grief, did not arrive until 2014. That was the album that established D’Agostino’s astonishing eye for lyrical detail, set in a world of failed drug deals and deceased friends’ MySpace pages. Pretty Years, the 2016 follow-up, proved it wasn’t a fluke and even teased out some stadium-ready hooks. But the mercurial engine of hype no longer seemed to be on the band’s side. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the band’s ambition often brushed up against the impatient expectations of the market (or of a manager who pressured them to write “their ‘Two Weeks’”).
Much of the Empty Country album is inspired by D’Agostino’s reckoning with things he’s ashamed of from his past life. You could trace this reflective gene back to 2016’s “Have a Heart,” a song about falling in love and finding a new capacity for empathy. On “Swim,” the new album’s elegiac finale, he sings: “I was a blue-eyed sociopath / Black out, often / Not sure / Think I might have hurt someone.” Though the song describes a fictional character — the singer is neither blue-eyed nor a sociopath, he assures me — who has a 9/11 tattoo, it clearly carries personal resonance.
“Come and live it down with me,” D’Agostino sings at the song’s climax, luxuriating in a mournful string refrain that seems to echo long after the song has faded away. It’s the record’s emotional peak. As for the string players, “I didn’t even have charts for them,” D’Agostino texts me when I ask. “I just sang them the parts five minutes beforehand, and what you hear is what they delivered.” He sobbed when the violin took the lead for the final refrain. “You might actually be able to hear me,” he adds. I can’t hear it, but I trust that it’s there.
Throughout Cymbals’ career, D’Agostino’s songwriting was remarkably adept at capturing dimensions of loss — loss of a friend (“XR”), of youth (“Dancing Days”), even loss of a family dog (“Chambers”). Empty Country retains this talent. Except here, the songwriter also takes profound stock of what he’s gained.
That includes wisdom, and a new sense of purpose in music-making. “It’s not a vehicle for your ego, or so you can get somewhere in life or get tours or get whatever the fuck you want,” he says. “It’s the moment of creation — when you make something that’s true to you and to the people that you love.”
The Fat Angel Sings 