New album, new publication
A quick note on what I've been up to
Hey all,
I hope 2025 is treating you well so far. I haven’t sent out a dispatch in a while, and I figured I’d explain why.
That blurry picture of me above is the cover of ‘Only the Singer,’ the first proper album from my songwriting project Domestic Drafts, which shares its name uneasily with this newsletter. I released the title track as the first single this week. You can hear it below, or on any streaming platform. If you like it, it would mean a lot to me if you’d consider pre-ordering the vinyl LP—or the digital version!—on Bandcamp. It will be released on 2/28 on Glamour Gowns, the new-ish label founded by Charlie Kaplan, an amazing songwriter and instrumentalist whose band I play in sometimes (he has also played bass in live iterations of Domestic Drafts), who is a massive pillar of my musical community here in New York.
The album contains 10 of my songs that didn’t quite feel like they fit in with Garcia Peoples, often because the writing voice is a bit more idiosyncratically personal than the archetypal mode that the sound of GP usually guides me toward. But it’s still very much in the GP extended universe, not least because Tom and Cesar are part of the core band, along with me and Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture and a million other projects. (You could get a nearly comprehensive portrait of a particular Brooklyn songwriting scene just by gathering all of the albums that Winston has worked on in some capacity over the last few years.) There are also some stellar contributions from Jeff Tobias on various saxophones, Dan Iead on pedal steel, Katie Battistoni on additional guitar and voice, and Ian Wayne—who also did a wonderful job of engineering and co-producing the record—on a bit of synth and backing vocals.
The unlikely germ of “Only the Singer,” the title track and first single, is an interview that Leonard Cohen gave to Charlie Rose in 1988, in which Rose is completely, embarrassingly clueless about who he is talking to. His watch alarm goes off in the middle of Cohen’s first answer, and soon after that he asks the master if he wrote “Suzanne” or is only well-known for performing it. I was perversely delighted by the idea of a Cohen-like figure as a tragic pop star, adding his weary gravitas to songs that were in fact music-industry confections, only pretending that he’d pulled the words from his own poetic depths. I ended up writing this song from the perspective of a more conventional Brill Building-era teen idol, watching his own claim to relevance fade away amid the musical upheavals of the second half of the ‘60s, and blaming that decline—rightly or wrongly—for the loss of the woman he loves. But something of my imaginary tortured balladeer survives in the bedraggled musical atmosphere and delivery; I hope it sounds like the kind of sad song that guy would have performed.
Some of the songs are in that narrative-driven mode, which tend to be musically simpler; others are more impressionistic in terms of the writing, which tend to be a little more adventurous, with some stretched-out improvisatory passages that I hope will appeal to the GP fans among you. I’m excited to share one of the latter as the next single.
Through some combination of insecurity, financial barriers, various upheavals in my personal life, and the classic musician problem of shifting your enthusiasm and energy to the prospect of the next album, the actually new shit, before this one is even out, it took me a long time to gather the stones to actually release this record. I just checked the other day and was mildly horrified to learn that the first recording sessions were in February 2021, and some of the songs were quite old even then. But now that it’s finally on its way to release I can hear it with fresh ears and honestly say I’m really fucking proud of it. I can’t wait to get the vinyl and start shipping it out. One last time: I’d love it if you pre-ordered!
Speaking of things I’m really fucking proud of, you may have seen—perhaps in the New York Times?????—that several ex-Pitchfork colleagues and I started our own music publication called Hearing Things in October. I talked a lot about my personal aims for the site in an interview with Adlan Jackson of Hell Gate a while back, which I encourage you to read if you’re interested. I’ll spare you the rambling here, and instead link to a few of my favorite things I’ve written so far: a profile of Ulyssa Records, whose project of reissuing music with fewer than 1,000 Spotify streams seems to me like a rich and provocative artwork in itself in addition to the more traditional label role as a conduit for musicians’ work; an interview with a charming stoner anarchist who figured out a small but beautifully ingenious way to vandalize and disrupt the major streaming platforms; and a critical essay about The Talented Mr. Ripley and Miles Davis’s Tutu.
I am part of a five-person team—Ryan Dombal, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Dylan Green, and Jill Mapes are the others—that runs both the editorial and the business side of Hearing Things. It’s my full-time job and then some, which means it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting very frequently here for the time being. (I’ll probably send another dispatch about the album once it’s out in late February.) At present, Hearing Things is where you’ll find my writing, so if you like what I do and haven’t yet checked it out, please do. At the risk of plugging too many things in one newsletter: We are trying to make Hearing Things work on a subscriber-based model rather than relying on ads, which are annoying for readers and increasingly negligible as a revenue source for publications. You can subscribe here if you’re interested.
I will wrap up with two more plugs, but righteous ones. As you surely know, wildfires are currently tearing through Los Angeles and destroying many peoples’ homes. Among them are lots of musicians, including at least one friend of mine in Howlin’ Rain drummer Justin Smith, a hell of a player and an absolute mensch. I won’t pretend to know the best way to help, but if you want to throw some money to affected musicians, there is a spreadsheet of GoFundMe links here. Unrelatedly but just as urgently: Sasha Vine, another dear friend (who I interviewed along with her Weak Signal bandmates for the newsletter in 2023) is going through cancer and raising funds for treatment and recovery. I don’t mean to bombard you with fundraising links, but I figured it can’t hurt to share them.
I’ll leave you with that Leonard Cohen interview I mentioned before, a truly insane thing to behold. Thanks for reading.