Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: My earliest memories are songs by the Four Tops and Marvin Gaye, & my dad also loved Jim Croce and Leonard Cohen. The biggest impact was probably the emotional isolation though , which yes was sad but it gave me space to feel and discover the guitar and songwriting.
Q: “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was written mid-heartbreak after an eight- year relationship. When you hear it now, does it still feel raw, or has its meaning shifted with time?
A: Not nearly as raw as when I wrote it! No, to be honest that relationship ending made it hard for me to even figure out how to keep going. It’s probably not healthy but it was a full on mutual obsession and those don’t typically end well do they? At least I got a few albums out of the pain.
Q: “Baby Baby Baby Baby” grew out of a relationship complicated by religious differences. What did that love — and its limits — teach you about yourself?
A: The religious differences weren’t that big of a deal, she was definitely more observant than me, but we’re both Jewish. It was more her attitude towards trans folks, which was unkind. I believe the way someone feels about trans people literally trying to exist says a lot about them. Here are people that just want live truthfully and what do they get? Hatred from our president, violence from small minded insecure men, and disparagement and debate about their participation in sports. Men in the USA couldn’t care less about protecting women and girls otherwise, but when someone’s expression of gender slightly confuses their own brain, they make it their whole personality. People that disparage and debate Trans folks existing are pathetic and need to get a life.
Q: You wrote “Hawk in the Nest” after seeing a literal hawk in your backyard. What was it about that moment that broke something open for you?
A: Birds always seem so free, don’t they? And they are flying around eating and fucking and fighting and caring for their babies. They aren’t texting you 50 times a day and then leaving you on “read” when you ask a question that requires a clear answer about what is happening in your relationship.
Q: You’ve said the final verse of “Hawk in the Nest” arrived while you were crying on the subway. Can you describe what that moment unlocked lyrically?
A: Well, it was an E train at 8:30am in New York City, so I was packed in like a sardine and trying to play the chords over and over in my head because I knew I was getting close to what I wanted to say. Then bookmark it alk just came to “let me be the tear drops that roll down your face, and the muscle and bone that keep everything in place” it just really described my all-encompassing love for that person. I cried because it said it in a way I couldn’t have expressed otherwise, but I also cried because I was heartbroken.
Q: “Ex Text” was sparked by a birthday message you weren’t supposed to receive. Why do those tiny, fleeting moments sometimes hit harder than the big breakups themselves?
A: Yeah, we agreed never to talk again so that really asinine and perfectly respectable text really sent me over the edge but I probably would have been thinking about them anyway, I just wanted to feel anything other than defeated, I think . My mom told me not to text them back, but I did anyway, to be honest.
Q: In “Naked,” there’s a razor-sharp honesty about passion, insecurity, and being led on. How did you navigate writing lyrics that are both sexual and deeply wounded?
A: I wrote the whole song based off that first line ! Sex is such an intimate and terrifying thing when you care about someone, to me anyway, especially if it means way more to one person than the other. Like all these songs to some extent I was expressing a desire to be loved equally by someone that just didn’t and I just accepted that instead of leaving. That’s why there should be no shame at all for those that love casual sex, or polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, etc because there seems to be a lot of communication there . Sex workers too are doing work and I have tremendous respect for them.
Q: “Crutch” captures what it feels like to love someone who only wants you halfway. Was there a particular moment in your life that made you realize you were someone’s ‘crutch’?
A: Oh yeah same relationship. I was like I do not care about my self-esteem, just keep using me for emotional support and sex and I’ll write songs and be miserable about it.
Q: Several songs reference Torah stories, biblical imagery, and Jewish cultural identity. How consciously do you weave spiritual storytelling into modern heartbreak?
A: It’s almost completely unconscious. I grew up very involved in the Synagogue, speaking Hebrew and my grandparents spoke Yiddish. My father was an historian of the Holocaust. My childhood was very involved with learning, and those stories seem to express something universal, especially those stories that Christians just adopted as the Bible, which is crazy. Imagine worshipping a literal Jewish communist by having mega churches, arresting legal immigrants, starving poor families, and giving tax breaks to billionaires that do nothing but tweet all day and buy yachts. I can’t believe any working-class person is a Republican, it boggles my mind. Republicans despise the working class even more than the Democratic establishment.
Q: Did you face any challenges while writing or recording the LP?
A: Honestly the only challenge was myself and trying to find a time to put this record out where it didn’t feel like the fascist Trump and his party of cowardly sycophants were actively terrorizing the most powerless among us, but it never came so I said “ fuck it” and chose now.
