The sad dignity of empty bars

Bandcamp Friday, and an interview with yours truly

Hey all,

Only the Singer, the new album by my not-really-solo project Domestic Drafts—it shares its name with this very newsletter—came out last Friday, February 28. I’d been meaning to write some sort of reflection on making and releasing it, now that it’s out, but I couldn’t find much to say. That is, until Charlie Kaplan, benevolent bossman of Glamour Gowns records, my label home, sent me a list of questions for an interview series he publishes on the GG instagram. Putting together the answers enriched my own understanding of the album I just made, so I figured they might be interesting to any curious listeners, too. With Charlie’s permission, I’m reposting the interview here.

But also: Today is Bandcamp Friday, meaning the revenue for everything sold on the platform today goes directly to artists and labels, without Bandcamp itself taking its usual cut. If you’ve been considering buying Only the Singer, either in the beautiful-if-I-do-say-so-myself limited LP edition, or as a digital file, today would be a great day to do it. Here it is on Bandcamp. Domestic Drafts, Inc., greatly appreciates your patronage.

OK, here’s the Q&A:

GG: These songs hang together so well. Did you write them all in one period? Did you pick them because they cohere? Or is this just an illusion?

AC: They span a period of several years. We started recording in early 2022. About half were relatively new at the time, and the other half were ones that had just stuck around for a while. The oldest ones—“Geometric Proof,” “I’d Rather Be the Wind,” and “The Devil and His Demons”—date to around 2018, I think. Those older ones might have already cohered in some obscure way, but I think whatever thematic unity the album has arises in large part from the newer batch, which were all addressing a very distinct transitional period in my life from various angles. Hopefully, that unity exerts a sort of gravitational pull on the others. It’s all an illusion, in a way. But I like the idea that grouping these sometimes disparate songs as an album places them into conversation with each other, even if I don’t always understand exactly what that conversation entails.

GG: The narrator in the title track is both modern and timeless: To me, he’s a 1960s Ozymandias watching the longhairs end his empire. I think every generation experiences this: Don Draper in LA, Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tony Soprano. Who is “The Singer” in this record to you?

AC: I’ve always been attracted to stories that take place in the afterglow of the glory days, whether they’re deliberately set in such moments or told by people who are living through them at the time. The has-been understands something deep that the currently-is can’t yet grasp, and the bar whose best years are behind it is more romantic than the place that just opened and is packed every night. It might be sad dignity, but it’s dignity.

Some key texts in this mode for me are Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and Vineland, the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You—that one falls under the category of art made in the afterglow, rather than about it—and the song “Leftover Wine,” written by the mononymous singer-songwriter Melanie and performed to absolute perfection in Della Reese’s candlelit R&B cover version. Melanie wasn’t a one-hit wonder, exactly, but her fame faded pretty quickly, and it’s easy to hear this sad song about sitting around by yourself after a party has ended as an allegory for her relationship to the limelight. I probably had all of this stuff in my mind when writing “Only the Singer,” as well as the book Always Magic in the Air, Ken Emerson’s amazing history of pop music’s early-’60s Brill Building years, which are the glory days the song’s narrative addresses most directly.

But ultimately, the singer is me, of course. I can ruminate on the past with the best of them, but with this song I was looking forward, in fear that a new relationship that was beginning to deepen would fall apart and I’d be left without the person I was falling in love with. I was drawn to the character of the fading pop idol both for the aforementioned reasons and because he would have been singing songs that were written by someone else, a useful if perhaps a little obvious metaphor for the way he feels he’s being carried away from his lover by historical forces beyond his control. I sometimes have difficulty accepting that I’m in control of my own story.

GG: You’ve said elsewhere that the title takes its name from an awkward moment in a Leonard Cohen interview where the interviewer doesn’t even know if Cohen writes his own songs. His answer is funny and gnomic: “I’m only the singer”. Can you tell me what you read from his response? What significance and inspiration did it give you, and how did it guide the album?

AC: That Leonard Cohen interview was another big inspiration for the song—I wrote it in one sitting immediately after watching it—but to be clear, Cohen doesn’t actually say “I’m only the singer.” He handled it with more grace than the interview really deserved: Charlie Rose asks him if he wrote “Suzanne” himself, and Cohen politely informs him that he did. It’s from the ‘80s, and I was struck by how Rose (or his producers) clearly had a sense that Cohen was important enough to be interviewed, but didn’t really bother to find out why. I chose ‘Only the Singer’ for the album title because of the way it speaks to my grappling with the reality of being in charge of my own choices, both in life more broadly and specifically in the making of this record, which also felt in some ways like the making of my identity as a songwriter. I’m writing the songs, but insisting I’m only the singer.

GG: On that same note: Who are your favorite lyricists? What are your favorite lyrics from them?

AC: Katie Battistoni (Katy the Kyng): “The world’s the place we practice our goodbyes.”

Winston Cook-Wilson (Office Culture): “He thought it’d be easy/And it was for a while.”

Sam Sodomsky (The Bird Calls):

“Frozen in a constant meltdown
This is how the season felt
How many songs have been written about
Precisely what I’m singing about?
And still I feel compelled to describe
Is there anything more beautiful
Than snowfall forming icicles?
Long enough to kill but so delicate and still
Half-translucent, sharp and smoky
Like crystal molds of shark’s teeth
And one day they will be
Just puddles at our feet
As we walk into a warmer world”

Warren Zevon: “Cigarettes make the sun come up/Whiskey makes the sun go down/And in between/We do a lot of standing around.”

GG: One thing I hear throughout the album is a kind of escapism: Choosing the freedom of the wind instead of a litany of domestic installations, escaping to someplace without rain, doing laundry at home while someone else escapes west for the weekend, the list goes on. Can you tell me where your mind went while writing and recording?

AC: I wrote a lot of these songs at a time music wasn’t yet as central to my life as it is now. An hour spent working a song felt like an hour stolen from other obligations that seemed more real and pressing at the time. So it makes sense to me that escaping from daily life would arise as a theme, because that’s what I felt like I was doing when I wrote them. I listen to some of them now and I hear myself working up the courage to change my situation, or else telling myself I’d never be able to change it.

“I’d Rather Be the Wind” was a really early one, and it was sort of breakthrough for me, because it helped me to realize that I could create a sort of caricature of myself to narrate the song, just zeroing in on one aspect of my personality or mood and inhabiting it more fully than I do day to day. In that case, it was this fancy-free ramblin’ gamblin’ man who’s more concerned with his own freedom than anything else. I think anyone who knows me would agree that I’m not really that guy, but he’s in there somewhere, and it feels good to let him take the wheel for the four minutes of that song. “Someplace Without Rain” came quite a few years later, at a time when the questions of freedom and responsibility were a lot more pressing in my life, so they come out a bit more solemnly than they do on “Wind,” which is ultimately pretty lighthearted. I’m glad the record has both.

GG: On the same note: Can you talk about the sensory component of this album to you? Does it have a sense of place, definite sonic references, color?

AC: I’ve never tried to articulate it before, but certain songs do have certain colors: “Geometric Proof,” “I’d Rather Be the Wind,” and “Only the Singer” are sort of rusty red-orange, “The Devil and His Demons” is more yellowish, “Someplace Without Rain” is wintry blue and “After the Big Score” is sort of neon-y turquoise. It might have to do with what keys they’re in.

The places are mostly wherever I wrote them: some at my old apartment in Crown Heights, some in my basement in Kingston, NY, one at my parents’ old house in Maryland. “Someplace Without Rain” makes me think of the Ashokan Reservoir, where I used to take walks all the time when I lived in Kingston. “Only the Singer” ends in Vegas, and “After the Big Score” talks about heading west, so those two are my western songs.

I didn’t really have sonic references in mind for the album as a whole, I think because I was so desperate to get the songs recorded that it was difficult to even consider how the recordings might sound. But I did have them for certain moments, especially as we got into the overdubs, which gave me an opportunity to think a little more deliberately about production and arrangement. The songwriting of “The Devil and His Demons” was heavily inspired by the Roches, so it seemed only right to bring that big chorus of harmony singers in eventually. With the guitarmonies at the end of “What I Need You to Know” I was trying to do something like, what if George Harrison were in Thin Lizzy? But a lot of the sound of the album comes from the other musicians, who had pretty free reign to do what they wanted, and played beautifully. One thing I’m proud of with this album is the way the passages that are more intentionally arranged blend and coexist with the ones where it’s more just the band kicking it out on the fly.

GG: You have an incredible sense of humor. I notice your funniest stuff - “The Way Through”, “The Devil and his Demons” is potted in desperation (paranoid dissociation around coworkers, talking yourself into giving dog shit a kiss). Do you find that writing these songs served the purpose of addressing distress? Was it a salve?

AC: I assume it’s obvious that those two songs are about depression, which I struggle with from time to time. I’m not that interested in songs that are just sad, sad, sad, all the way through—I think in order to deliver something like that well, you have to be a really good singer, which I’m not. I do think it’s helpful to me to crack jokes about my sadness, and it feels more honest to me than just wallowing. I am deeply moved by Nina Simone singing “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” but I don’t have that kind of operatic, thundering sadness in me. Maybe it’s the era we live in.

GG: Can you pick a song that you did not write that you think would fit on “Only the Singer”, place it in the track order, and tell me a little about it?

AC: I’m aiming preposterously high here, but the first one that came to mind is “Pretty Good” by John Prine. The lyric is both extremely deep and extremely funny, and the band is totally dialed in, but in this casual way where it sounds like they’re not really trying. They’re all really mellow except for the lead guitarist, who’s got this super harsh treble-y fuzz sound going the whole time, like he’s got completely the wrong idea about what kind of session he’s in. It’s the kind of song where you hear it and it feels like nothing can touch you—basically what I was trying to write with “I’d Rather Be the Wind.” If I could just cut that song, which opens side two of my album, and add this one instead, I’d be very happy.

GG: You also write music for your other band, Garcia Peoples. How do you know what is a Domestic Drafts song vs. a Garcia Peoples song?

AC: When I write lyrics for Garcia Peoples, they tend to be less jokey and specific, more archetypal and—at least I hope—sort of mysterious. The other guys in that band write great lyrics that are more in the latter mode and I’m very inspired by them on that front. I don’t want to break the spell with a line about kissing a piece of dog shit, or whatever. That’s the main difference. Sometimes there’s stuff I write where it’s just obvious that Danny, Tom, Cesar, Pat, and I are the ones who should be playing it. There’s a certain feeling to it that I know those guys will understand, and I know it won’t fuck up the larger flow of what we’re doing as a band. The GP songs tend to be more about grooves and riffs and the sound of the band playing together, and the DD songs tend to be more about words and chords and melody: rock songs versus song songs, basically. But it’s not a totally clear-cut distinction, and there’s give and take in both directions. There’s at least one GP song that I wrote thinking at first that it might be a DD song, and vice versa.

GG: What was the collaboration like in the creation of this album? For example: the beautiful doubled guitar lines in “What I Need You To Know”. What was the process for creating these arrangements?

AC: First, I handed over the songs to three musicians I deeply trust—Cesar Arakaki on drums, Winston Cook-Wilson on keys, and Tom Malach on guitar—and let them do whatever they saw fit. A lot of arrangement ideas came from those guys, on the fly, as we played the songs live and felt our way around them. “Flesh Like a Fountain” is a good example. I didn’t tell any of them what to play, and I didn’t overdub anything after the fact. The stuff they came up with in the room now feels totally essential to the song’s identity. Another good one is the backing vocal part that Ian Wayne, who recorded the album, sang on the chorus of “Geometric Proof.” It’s a subtle thing, but it really made the song for me. Before that, I was starting to feel like, Maybe this song sucks. Ian saved it.

There were multiple long periods between sessions after we knocked out the basic tracks with the live band, and I used that time to sculpt out some more deliberate arrangement ideas to overlay on the band performances, like I mentioned before. Sometimes that involved playing stuff myself, and sometimes it involved bringing in more musicians: Katie Battistoni on additional guitar, Jeff Tobias on sax, and Dan Iead on pedal steel guitar.

In “What I Need You To Know,” the dual guitar stuff at the beginning is just me and Tom doing the live take together—I’m on the right side, playing the little solo guitar arrangement I made for that song before I’d gotten the band together, and he’s on the left side, taking it to a completely new level with this incredibly sweet part he wrote that sort of weaves in and out of mine. I am more familiar with Tom’s guitar playing than almost anyone in the world, and I gotta say that’s one of my favorite things he’s ever done. I’m honored to have it on the record. The dual guitar stuff at the end of that song—the guitarmonies I mentioned before—is just me nerding out with overdubs by myself. That’s an example of an arrangement idea that came much later, with a lot of tinkering, as opposed to some of the more spontaneous moments.

GG: Can you please pick four songs from “Only the Singer”, then pick one artist to cover each of them?

AC: Bonnie “Prince” Billy - “Geometric Proof,” Nina Simone - “What I Need You to Know,” The Roches - “The Devil and His Demons,” Ryley Walker - “Someplace Without Rain.”

GG: What does this album mean to you?

AC: It means I’m finally free of these songs that have been following me around for so long. On to the next one!