As summer came to a close, we were thankfully almost finished with this whole project of digging through all these decades of physical and digital archives that was all proving to be a lot more time-consuming and exhausting than we’d initially thought it would be going into it – at the same time, we were ultimately pretty happy about the whole thing, as it was also proving to be a lot more rewarding and kind of profoundly fulfilling than we’d imagined it would be.

We finished the whole thing just in time for the release of my latest album on the 17th of October this year – I was still putting some finishing touches on a bunch of the new pieces for the site on that day!

And two of the last bits we worked on for this months-long project were our homages to two NYC venues that played an important role in my life, in the lives of countless others, and in the broader local, national, and international cultural scenes: Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk (the home of the Antifolk Movement from 1993 until 2019).

I was really happy with how these came out – I got to finally put into words what these places and the communities around them had meant to me and how they helped make me the person I am today, and how a lot of my career exists because of those communities.

For each piece, we combined the words I wrote with a selection of photos, videos, fan art, and other memories from over the years that captured something of what those places meant to us then, and how we feel about those places in the here and now, moving forward.

These are mine and Kléo’s perspectives on things – if you’re interested in the history of those scenes, you might also learn more from going to gigs and talking with other people who were part of those scenes in various eras – in fact, the antifolk scene moved to Sidewalk the year I was born, and even before that, it had already existed for years – plenty of people, including artists I’ve collaborated and toured with, were involved with that scene for decades before I even knew about it, and of course I’ve never claimed to be an authority on the antifolk scene or other NYC scenes – I’m just someone who’s been part of those scenes and I sometimes share my perspective from my own personal experience.

People have sometimes treated me as a kind of “memory bank” for this kind of cultural history, because they’re under the impression that I’m somewhat reliable, or organized, or that I have a decent recall of things – but I think the jury’s still out on all that!

And – a lot like with the rest of this project of digging through the archives – writing these pieces about the two spaces that had essentially been spiritual homes for me during a pivotal time in my life, and in the life of my home city and so many others who lived there, was a pretty deep dive for us and brought a lot of different layers to the surface and put a lot into perspective.

It forced me to think about how a lot of people these days ask me how I’m able to survive as an artist in this world, and how I’m able to do the gigs I do – people tend to be really surprised by this, simply because I’m not a social media influencer or industry-backed celebrity.

Among some people, particularly those of my generation who grew up in Western countries with the paranoid cultural narratives and economic anxieties that colored our formative years, there’s even an expectation that I’d be dead by now, considering my line of work, my approach to it, and how long I’ve been in it – people have a tendency to imagine that the entertainment industry is even more hazardous than it already is, and that basically anyone who isn’t Taylor Swift is in grave physical danger, experiencing extreme mental states, and/or in abject poverty all the time.

And sure, there are a lot of problems in the industry and we’ve all been through some rough times, but the day-to-day reality of our lives is usually far more mundane and less extreme than people sometimes imagine it to be.

So, with all that in mind – when I meet people who ask me these kinds of questions about survival in the entertainment industry, and I say I come from a grassroots scene through which I grew and developed as an artist, and how that’s where I built a name for myself and made the connections that allowed me to do the tours and other work that I do, this often feels like a foreign concept to them.

Especially in countries like the US, people struggle to relate to the notion of being part of any real-world community, especially one focused on the arts. This is part of the broader problem of how growing up in hyper-individualistic, anti-social countries like the US has stopped a lot of people from developing social skills, empathy, or a sense that they’re part of anything beyond themselves at all.

On a much more micro level, in my personal life, this means people from the US often have a harder time relating to me, even though I also grew up in the US. Which has always been kind of sad for me – there’s this great joy in how I can relate to people from a small city in Slovakia or a community in rural Mexico or a giant metropolis in Taiwan, but also a real sadness in how sometimes I feel like I can only relate to a small handful of people from my own country – on the other hand, that sense of alienation itself is something I seem to have in common with a lot of people from my own country!

With artists specifically, I think partly there’s also some confusion because of how the publicized “origin stories” of successful artists from this era tend to leave out the story of the grassroots communities and cultural movements that built those artists up – there’s this individualistic, “self-made man” mythology that presents our life stories as if we do everything in total isolation and even in hostile competition with our fellow artists on the scene – and, in reality, I wouldn’t even be able to perform on stage if not for the support of my fellow artists, and they wouldn’t be doing any of what they do if not for our support either – the music scene in reality is far more collectivistic than people make it out to be, and that’s partly out of necessity – if the music scene really ran on this myopic fantasy logic that seeks to atomize us, pit us against each other, and disconnect us from our communities and from the real material and social contexts we’re coming from and living in, then we really would all be dead by now.

But it’s also true that a lot of our scenes are “on life support” as they say. That whole dream of individual success at the expense of the community is a powerful fantasy for a lot of people who aspire to make music for a living – and I’ve seen countless times how much harm this attitude has done to communities, while ultimately also crippling a lot of the aspiring young artists themselves, who then become uprooted and disconnected from their own fanbase and creative drive and autonomy as a result of getting what at first might seem like their “big break” in the industry, when it comes in ways that separate them from the grassroots communities and movements that sustain them in the first place.

So when I’m engaged in any sort of publicity effort, be it a radio interview or a post on our own blog, I always make sure to intentionally frame my work in the context of the broader cultural movements, collaborations, and communities that I’m coming from and working within. Even though this can make us appear unprofessional, undesirable, or even threatening to some in the industry who hold different values and principles from us, and it’s not easy sticking to that path, it’s also an essential and integral aspect of our work! This is something Kléo and I really align on, and a big part of why we decided to work together.

And people “on the scene” usually understand where we’re coming from with that, and many of them are involved with any number of initiatives to support grassroots music and arts communities themselves. But when I talk to people from outside the scene, the general attitude towards what we do – if people think of it at all – has usually been something like, “dude, Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago and real life only happens on the Internet anymore – why are you still doing this?”

Which is a sad mentality to have, but it’s really just a sign of the times – it’ll give way to something better when more people are ready for it.

Working on those two pieces also forced me to reflect on how, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Fukuyama’s infamous declaration that Liberal Democracy was “The End Of History” and there would never be a better system to replace it, the whole idea of making money from art (or from any kind of work) also seems to be inherently bound up with this understanding of making profitable work, rather than understanding the work as a service to this world – a service that’s never going to be profitable for investors, but is always going to be understood as a necessary part of life, and therefore it’s essential to pay artists a livable wage for our work – because it’s good for society. Like any other job, really.

Grassroots, underground cultural scenes seem to understand that intuitively, and support our work in material ways – but social media companies, streaming services, and the entertainment industry more broadly? Not so much. It’s simply not in their “rational self-interest” to invest in that which benefits society – they’ll invest in that which benefits themselves and their shareholders.

Which rarely has anything to do with what’s happening in the live music scene, let alone the poetry scene or other “unprofitable” arts that are still completely necessary to society. As William Carlos Williams, who worked as both a medical doctor and as a poet, wrote in his 1955 poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

And that’s just true! Of poetry and of all forms of art, really. People have often told us our work saved their lives, and that it helped them through all kinds of adversity. And since other artists’ work saved my life plenty of times, I know a bit of what that’s like – so it feels like a real honor when people tell me I was able to do the same for them with my work, especially since, unlike artists I admire like William Carlos Williams or Joe Crow Ryan, I’ve never worked as a life-saving medical doctor, so I tend to feel self-conscious about describing what I’m doing as a kind of medicine.

Anyway – overall, I feel like art is more empowering than not, and thinking about it in terms of profit is incredibly depressing – and not even practical, since making profitable music is rarely a great idea for a musician who wants to make a decent living – it tends to make more money for everyone in the industry except the musicians, and now there have been these reports that practically no one is making money from their own music anymore, even when their music is incredibly profitable for the industry.

But this all points to something really hopeful – one of the main reasons people in this industry can be so incredibly exploitative is that (not unlike healthcare), music is such an incredibly powerful thing – otherwise, people wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of it as they are.

So whenever we can figure out how to protect and support music and the other arts, there can be a seriously thriving culture around it all – things might seem dire sometimes, but they also come back around.

And that’s what it all comes back to – whether we’re talking about making an album or putting together a tour or putting together this absurd project that we spent months digging through the archives for, we couldn’t have done any of it without the support and collaboration of so many different people and so many different communities.

As Renaud Monfourny said in describing the collaborations France de Griessen and I have been cooking up: it’s about “beautiful musical friendship” – that’s ultimately what I think we’re all trying to build here. I hope we’re doing a good job.

Next → Page 8: What am I doing in 2025?

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

Page 4: Winter in Wales, recording the new album in Somerset

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

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

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