So, rewinding all the way back to how this year began and how the previous one ended – we closed out 2023 with the 7-week UK/EU tour for Hard to Break, which you can see photos and videos from on the site now!

After a top-secret post-tour ritual involving a caffeinated soup in Gothenburg, and an uneventful flight from Gothenburg to London, where I spent an hour or two catching up with a friend who’d been generously storing a bunch of my stuff there during the tour, I caught a train through the Southwestern region of England and across the border into Wales, where I eventually arrived in Swansea. 

I spent some of the winter in Swansea, in addition to Cardiff and some smaller towns in Wales – for years now, people had been recommending I spend some time in Wales, to get to know more of the rich musical culture there and maybe make some connections for myself and other artists on a similar wavelength who frequently tour the UK but have a difficult time knowing who to contact in Wales. Since I was about to record my new album in the Southwest of England, and then I was gearing up for some spring tours in the UK and mainland Europe shortly after that, it seemed like a good idea to spend the winter in Wales as I’d been meaning to do for ages at this point.

And despite the notoriously bad weather, all in all I’d say it was a good idea!

It was great to be able to spend some time in the place where John Cale and Dylan Thomas grew up, meet some artists who are doing incredible work there now, see some good gigs, and visit the oldest records store in the world, Spillers Records, which is in Cardiff – throughout the winter, I got to meet some really lovely and talented people, made some new friends, and learned a bit about the culture and history of a pretty incredible place that I’d been wanting to visit for a long time – and I got some good writing done, and plenty of booking and admin work I’d been needing to do for ages.

In mid-January, France de Griessen and I ventured a few blocks East of the Welsh-English border, to Axe & Trap Studios in Somerset, where we recorded my new album, Cannonball Statman, with the producer Ben Turner, who’d also recorded Playing Dead (2017) and last year’s Hard to Break.

France and I had started collaborating on some songs last summer, not long after we met, and we sang on a few of each other’s songs during our joint gigs on the Hard to Break tour last year, in the UK, France, and Belgium – at that point, fans were already comparing our on-stage chemistry to Adam and Kimya from the early 2000s NYC antifolk group The Moldy Peaches, who’d recently had a reunion tour and seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds – as they should be, because they’re an incredible band! And some of Kimya’s solo work is even better.

Now – in addition to the demand from some of our fanbase for more collaborations from us, France and I also just really love making music together! So I figured it’d be a good idea to invite her to Somerset to sing and play a bit of keys and percussion on the album.

Which she did, and we had a great time!

And – as it turns out, France was also the artist who coined the term “romantic punk”, to describe romantic music and art made by people with roots in punk culture – as someone who makes romantic music and art and came of age in various NYC underground scenes that were born out of the original East Village punk scene, I’d been looking for a term to describe what I do, and I asked France if she’d be OK with me using that term to describe my work – she gave me the go-ahead to do that, and we realized it could also be fun to bill our upcoming spring tour as a Romantic Punk Tour.

It was great to finally have a way of describing what I do – people had sometimes labeled me as an antifolk artist, since that was the name of the scene I came from in NYC, and an indication of the networks of artists I was most closely involved with when I started out – but in that sense, antifolk is more of an attitude and idea that unites a group of wildly different artists than a specific genre or style, so it says very little about what I actually do – romantic punk is a great way to describe the music I actually make.

So now when people ask me what kind of music I do, I finally have something to tell them! After being a musician for more than two decades and somehow not having come up with a coherent response to that question!

And – right after returning to Wales from recording the new album, I took another trip across the border – this time to Bristol, to see my old friend Brook Pridemore on their UK tour with Myles Bullen and Boom Boom Raccoon – Brook was one of the first people I met on the NYC antifolk scene back in the early 2010s, and I directed the video for their song “Oh, E!” – it was good to catch up with Brook and meet some of the people they were on tour with, including Myles, who is an absolutely incredible performer and songwriter, as is Brook.

In addition to everything else that was going on this winter, I also spontaneously started a covert psy-op called Marzipan that distributed what the New York painter and memoirist Katherine Koch described as “loopy silliness” and what Swedish musician and songwriter Jonas Selander described as “propaganda of non-existence within the very existence it is trying to deny” and “actually a bit scary”. No one is sure exactly why I did this. It was mostly a fun experience, though (I think?)

Somehow, I also ended up in some kind of row with the Dull Men’s Club moderation team around the same time, which Kléo and I documented here. And I even went on some kind of unprovoked crusade against Robert Smith while I was in Cardiff – but then I had my overpriced, not particularly good coffee, and everything was OK from then on.

Many thanks go out to everyone who participated in, and put up with, the Marzipan project, everyone I put Brook and Myles in contact with who booked them on their UK and EU tours, everyone who helped make my winter in Wales fun and memorable, the entirety of the NYC and UK antifolk scenes, and – of course – France de Griessen, Ben Turner, the Martins, Negrita Yani, Duo Toque de Azafrán, Jaziel Dominguez, and everyone else who made the new album possible.

But before the end of winter, and right before I headed across the English Channel for the Spring 2024 Romantic Punk Tour with France de Griessen, I took a short trip to Manchester and caught up with some friends I hadn’t seen in awhile – in addition to making some kind of incomprehensible statement about Morrissey (I had too much coffee this time).

I’m glad I got to spend some time in the Manchester area before heading back on the road – it was great to see some friends I hadn’t seen in awhile, and that part of the UK is an important place for me because of the albums I released with the Salford label German Shepherd Records in the 2010s, and the immense support I’ve been really fortunate to have from radio presenters there, including DJ Stephen Doyle, who was one of the first people to play me and any number of other artists on the radio.

I got to catch up with Stephen while I was in the area, and it was great to see him as always – he’d come to a bunch of our tour dates in the North of England the year before, and even gave an impromptu speech at one of them, but we hadn’t had much time to hang out with how busy I get when I’m on the road – so it was really good to actually spend some time with him when I wasn’t also working.

This month, as a complete shock to many of us and at far too young an age, Stephen passed away – Bob Osborne wrote a moving tribute to him that says anything I would’ve said better than I would’ve said it. Stephen was a great guy, and he will be greatly missed.

Next → Page 5: Spring Romantic Punk touring season in Europe and the UK

or jump to:

Page 1: Dancing dogs and insects in the days before the party, visual art and guests start to arrive

Page 2: Poetry and Music at the party

Page 3: Cannonball Statman at the party

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Page 6: Summer performances in Mexico, digging through the archives in Oaxaca and Puebla

Page 7: Autumn reflections on the NYC underground scene and the power of music

Page 8: What am I doing in 2025?

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