Enfnts Terribles

How are you? How was the tour with Dermot Kennedy through Europe so far?

Dermot Kennedy’s crew is the most helpful crew that I ever toured with as support, and they’ve made our lives honestly too easy. I feel like it’s the difficulties of a tour that make you aware you’re on tour so without those difficulties, are you even on tour? I’m kidding, but it’s honestly been really good.

You’re releasing an album soon and released a handful of tracks so far, with your song “Mommy” being one of the most personal songs you put out yet. How is it for you to release this song and immediately play it to so many people live?

Interesting, because I was already on tour when I released the song. While I’m trying to build more audience in Europe and there are definitely some listeners in Germany, a majority of the audience is still in the US. So I felt far away from the release in a way. I felt a bit detached because I wasn’t there physically. Releases are always strange and I think I always feel a bit detached when the song is released. Even when a song is very personal. Maybe I try not to think about it too much.

And maybe that’s a coping mechanism because if I thought about every single person that was listening to the song and how exposing that is, then I would probably want to
hide under the covers. But it’s been really interesting to play the song live on this tour. We haven’t played it every night but we’ve played it some nights and it is quite emotional for me even though I think lyrically, there are definitely other songs that are more overtly emotional or more overtly sad. For some reason, this song, because it’s about my parents, feels very personal.

When you put music out nowadays, it may feel like a more distant experience because it just appears on a streaming platform, and don’t necessarily see the person behind a stream. Does that make you feel detached from your music?

For me, when I release the music, it almost feels like it is no longer mine and it’s like you open the cage and a little bird flies away and then it’s free. Artists all feel very differently about that, but I’m not that precious about my music once it’s released. When I’m
writing songs, it feels extremely personal. I am thinking about every element that goes into it. I’m very protective of who gets to touch it and how they get to touch it. It feels like the process of making music with other people requires a lot of trust and a lot of intimacy and then once the song’s done, my feeling about it almost completely changes and I think “OK bye!” The relief. The story is told and I’m already more interested in my next song. So, I’m much more attached, at this point, to the demo that I have on my phone that I wrote three weeks ago, than the song that I’m putting out right now.

What does help to bring me back to the music, are personal messages from people. That always feels super meaningful to me and I do read my DM’s. That’s important to me – having that personal connection with people even if it’s just reading a couple of sentences of somebody’s experience of listening to the song and then me just saying: “Thank you so much!” It’s a simple conversation that’s very meaningful to me and really important. I kind of can’t imagine releasing music without that element being possible because if it’s just looking at numbers on the back end of your Spotify account, that doesn’t feel emotionally fulfilling to me. If I see thousands of numbers on Spotify and then I get one message in my inbox of a personal story from somebody, that feels so much more gratifying and really can make my day. I just like to connect with people and that’s a really important part of releasing music. Everything can be so focused on streaming now, and that feels alienating.

Would you say that these comments affect you in some kind of way?

I don’t get offended by comments like that because I think that these visualizers that we’re using, require a certain amount of the viewer’s brain and emotions to apply meaning to it because it’s the same image repeated again and again. If you’re watching it with an open heart, I feel like what will happen is that the image and the music, as the song goes on, they’ll inform each other. The image will start meaning different things as it’s applied over a different lyric, so if you’re willing to see that, you’ll understand it. I don’t have control over how people watch or listen.

A lot of the photographs are very classic portraits, quite normal, but there’s something slightly off. Surreality without going fully surreal. The photographer Jonny Marlow and I spent a lot of time talking about color and how to print each image. We didn’t just apply the same system to every image. As the album goes on, some of the images are digital, and some of them are film. Everything has this kind of handmade feel to it. There’s a lot of hand-drawn text by Chase Shewbridge and then, there’s also the texture of printing, reprinting, and scanning. There’s also just straight digital information as well, which is what I like and think reflects the music because the music is live and organic but also produced and in the box. I like that mixture of textures.