(Howl 1)

Howl sets an intention of healing and release for an album that deals with trauma. Wolfen is about the contradiction of needing to reconnect with my past in order to break away and heal from it, as well as needing to break away from society in order to integrate into it. Many aspects of the album have two meanings, including the letter mentioned in Howl: it refers to a literal letter that I wrote to my former employer, telling him I won’t be able to come back to work, which is also a goodbye letter to the past – a kind of ego death suicide note (not literally - don’t worry - I’m OK!). My songs have been like love letters to specific men in the past – this album is like a letter to the world I used to know, saying: sorry - I love you - but I’ve got to let you go in order to heal.

Making Wolfen was a profoundly healing experience. The howling in this track is representative of the catharsis that art and music provide and how that instinct is designed to reach others far away.

(Howl 2)

Wolfen is an autobiography of my creative core. It’s impossible to write about my relationship to art without paying respects to the artists who have inspired me, so I’ve woven some of them into the record in various places. Howl gives a shout-out to Allen Ginsberg, who was my favorite poet throughout high school, at a time when I desperately needed that gay magic to transcend the homophobic climate of my hometown in America in the late 90s. I remember getting up front of my 11th grade English class to recite Ginsberg’s Howl. In some ways, releasing Wolfen fills me with the same anxiety that I felt then. 

Wolfen is also an homage to Joni Mitchell – in particular Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, as those albums provided me with essential emotional refuge since I first heard them on my 14th birthday. They also provided the blueprints on how to sing these songs now; the vocal in Howl is informed by particular sounds she makes in the song “Blue Boy”.

(Howl 3)

I got sick with a parasite called Giardia lamblia in the summer of 2019. The initial two rounds of antibiotics failed to eradicate it, although I didn’t learn this until January of 2020 when it was determined that I was still infected, which meant I’d had it for 6 months. The long-term effects of this made me quite ill intermittently, well into April and May. Most of Wolfen was written was while laying in bed with migraine-like headaches, dizziness, nausea and malaise. 

Alongside this Giardiasis, I was also experiencing an intense depression after a breakup and burnout from my day-job. The latter two were the reason I didn’t recognize the fact that I was infected; I chalked up the symptoms to those of depression and burnout. In this sense my body was “crying wolf”, trying to tell me something was wrong but I’d felt bad for so long that I didn’t recognize the problem.

In a sense it didn’t matter which problems were being caused by what. How much was my depression to blame, or trying to balance my day-job with being an artist full-time? The parasite, depression and burnout all congealed into one persistent state of anguish which culminated in January 2020, when I started writing Wolfen.

Howl was the song I finished last, both in writing and recording. Its seven voices are built upon “Chopsticks”, the first song I learned how to play as a child, on an organ at my grandparents’ house.

The song is also paying respects to The Beach Boys’ “Our Prayer”, which opens their album Smile. To me the song feels like a prayer, like if I wanted it enough, then the alchemy of art could transform my physical and emotional state. 

(Haunted 1)

Haunted is the first song I wrote for the album. It begins with the literal trauma to my eyes when I was born which caused blood vessels to burst and apparently gave me a wolf-like appearance to my parents, who dubbed me “Wolfen”. In 2020, I thought about this in a sense of how personal trauma can be like a lens through which everything you see can appear darker or more threatening than it really is. I thought about it in the sense of the solitary, “lone-wolf” nature that has followed me my whole life and how my own trauma is related to that.

During the two years it took me to make my previous LP Sirens, I was so preoccupied with work that I hardly noticed how isolated I’d become; I hardly saw my friends unless we were working together in a professional capacity and I was more or less celibate the whole time. When I fell in love after I’d finished the record, I had to ask myself how I could live without it for so long. But in the moment that I had to choose between him and my art, I ended it abruptly. Feeling like I was already committed to a full-time relationship with my art, he had asked me: “Do you need me at all?” I didn’t respond, but he could tell the answer was “No”. 

This brought me back to an early childhood memory from Kindergarten or 1st grade. I think it was one of the first times a friend had come over my house to visit. It was a bright, sunny day and he wanted to go outside and play in the yard but I just wanted to sit at the table and draw. He acquiesced but soon got bored and insisted we go outside. I said no. I wouldn’t budge. I just wanted to sit there and draw for hours, hardly engaging with him at all. Eventually he asked my mother to call his mother and have her pick him up early. I remember I continued on drawing as they left together, barely looking up from the page. 

(Haunted 2)

I’ve always needed to create in order to fully experience life, and in some ways it’s all I really want. This worked out OK throughout school although creativity doesn’t always jive well with institutions and it often got me into trouble. 

Once you reach that age in a capitalist society where your creative obsession isn’t enough to pay your dues, you’ve got to start putting in your time, punching the clock. I started working at my first job when I was 15 and left my last job recently at 37. I had 21 different jobs in those 22 years, during which I never went for more than a couple of months without grinding for mostly minimum wage, making a lot of wealthy people wealthier with my neurotically meticulous work ethic because my brain is wired in such a way that I’ll make whatever it is front of me my art production and in doing so, I’ll obsessively try to make it better, regardless of financial outcome.

I consider myself really lucky to have enjoyed some commercial success as a painter at a young age. The downside is that I entrusted my art to people who didn’t have my best interest in mind. When I got a full-time job in 2012, I was relieved to not have to rely on art as a source of income at all; it gave me the freedom to make art completely independently of all that – in theory. In reality, I was fed up and so disenchanted with the art world that I just wanted a break from it.

(Haunted 4)

I took a trip to Amsterdam in January 2020 in the midst of an intense depression. I was there to plan a concert at Bitterzoet but planning the show felt more like running from my problems than anything. In typical workaholic fashion I was unable to sit alone with myself on the long train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam without drawing up stage plots and tech riders for a show that was still 10 months away.

I’d been in Amsterdam with my family once before, when I was 11 years old, but we had to cut the trip short when I came down with the worst virus I’ve ever had. I remember the fever dream I had that night back in ‘94 vividly: it was a landscape at nighttime and I was standing on one side of a divide, like a river. I was alone on my side and a crowd of people were on the other, all laughing at me. I couldn’t see their faces through the foggy darkness but it was terrifying. I woke up vomiting in the bathtub, confused as to how I got there. 

That memory felt inextricably tied to the foggy horror I felt upon visiting the city a second time in January 2020. It was like a bad acid trip. The epitome of the cognitive dissonance I felt was when I took this photo and sent it to my family in our group chat with a note like “It’s so pretty here”, while actually feeling like I wanted to throw myself into that canal and drown. I wandered around the city aimlessly, feeling like my heart was dripping acid onto my guts while my ex-boyfriend’s question echoed in my mind: “Do you need me at all? Do you even need anyone?”

(Haunted 5)

In this foggy and fairly agonizing state of mind I paid a visit to the Van Gogh museum. Like Joni Mitchell’s songs, Van Gogh’s paintings had provided me emotional refuge since a young age. Some of my earliest memories are of getting lost in a poster of the 1984 Van Gogh in Arles exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The poster hung in my childhood bedroom. From spending a lot of time at a very young age watching my mother paint with watercolors in her attic studio, I developed a tactile understanding of the mechanics of paintings. In a sense, I could “reverse engineer” them and traverse the surface. When situations at home became turbulent, I could seek refuge in art, transporting myself from Saugerties, New York to Van Gogh’s Arles, France. So in January 2020, it seemed like the best place to escape the hell I was feeling internally to spend a cold, rainy afternoon with my old friend Vincent.

But once inside, it was the opposite of refuge. This was my first time in this museum and in retrospect I feel like I should have expected it but it caught me off guard that the very first thing in the museum is a timeline of his life on the wall about the traumas he suffered – his life delineated into events like: CUTS OFF EAR or SHOOTS HIMSELF FIRST TIME. 

This very on-the-nose trauma porn was incredibly triggering in that volatile state. It made me think about art like the society’s shadow, one that easily contorts artists into monsters when the light is a particular angle – monsters we snuff out with Schadenfreude. I thought about all of the times people said to me: “Your paintings will be worth a lot more when you’re dead.” In the context of the skull-crushing depression I was experiencing, none of this seemed OK or remotely funny. Art is in a state of crisis – we’re drowning in shallow waters – as was evident in the cancelling of Philip Guston’s retrospective later that year. That quagmire of bad feelings which had welled up in my gut like gasoline was set on fire with a rebellious indignation. Queer as in let’s burn it down.

(Haunted 6)

By the time I reached the last room in the exhibit where his final painting hangs, I felt ready to explode. And then I read the final wall text: a month or so before he took his life, his doctor gave him one final prescription: just paint. Sister snapped. I was crying as I rushed out of the museum and continued crying in the street all the way back to the hotel. I felt like I got the answer to my ex’s question.

I saw the timeline of my own life written on the wall with all of my own traumas: being admitted to a psychiatric ward at 17, various alcohol poisonings and overdoses, various forms of abuse all laid out to see. I jumped onto that timeline like a train track. The first stop was 2003, when aspects of the music within “Haunted” were written, in a song called “The World Or Your Pain” (particularly the lyrics in the coda). There were elements of that song which had answers to the questions I was asking myself now.

(Faggot 1)

It was late January 2020 when I wrote Faggot but my own quarantine had already begun, as circumstances forced me to stop running and to spend time alone with my thoughts and memory, but in the metaphysical ambiguity of that solitude and the monotony of my tiny studio apartment, linear time felt shattered into thousands of fragments and seemingly disparate moments in time were connected by their meaning – as opposed to their temporal consequence. When I looked back through archives of paintings I’d made and songs and poems I’d written over the past 20 years, they led me to resources of emotional strength that I didn’t recognize when I first made them. In some cases I didn’t know what I was painting about at the time I painted it but it was all making sense on this trip now. The works were like breadcrumbs leading me to the next key memory.

(Faggot 2)

Faggot is rooted in one of my earliest memories: a winter day, mid-1980s and my mother zipping up my coat before I went outside to play in the snow. In her utterance of “Bundle up, it’s cold out there!” there was the cozy protection of a mother’s love and then the stark contrast of the bundle of sticks that represents a threat much harsher than winter: homophobia. I used to think people called us “faggots” because we’re supposed to burn in hell’s fire or something unimaginative like that. I later learned that it was a term that men would use to refer to their wives in the sense that they were the burden they’d have to carry with them, like a bundle of sticks on their back. Over time this idea was transferred onto gay men: the straight world’s burden. I thought this was as ridiculous as it was enraging: how absurd an idea that queer people should be anyone’s burden? We are some of the most beautiful creatures out there: glowing you up, designing your homes and weddings, millennia at your service, writing the plays you love to see, painting Vatican ceilings, “paying the rent”… and we’re just out there vibing and surviving until someone comes along and kills us, breaks our bones, uses our identities and livelihoods like political shields or fodder and yet we’re expected to cheer the pope on for almost recognizing our humanity. Almost. The truth is that the burden has always been on us to adopt resilience as a means of survival within a system that won’t protect us. Michelangelo broke his back painting the Sistine Chapel. 

(Faggot 3)

Making Wolfen felt like taking my clothes off in front of the world, so this track seemed like the right moment to do this literally – to be as vulnerable as possible against the bleak background of our still very homophobic world because that vulnerability is one of the strongest antidotes to toxic masculinity and homophobia.

Throughout making my previous album Sirens and getting sober, I started to see homophobia all around me in places I’d never seen it before. I learned how much drugs and alcohol had been shielding me from it for so long. I liken the experience of uncovering different layers of homophobia to Russian dolls: it’s in religions and governments… go deeper… it’s in economics… go deeper… it’s in my neighborhood… it’s in my workplace… it’s in my colleagues and friends… it’s in my family… wait – no – fucking hell… it’s in me. It exists in my persistent fear of being too much and the tendency to want to reel myself in to make the majority feel more at ease. 

Faggot is about transmuting my fear and my shyness into power, especially since that shyness was forged in the fire of a homophobic society. I’m removing that burden from my own back of how I should be defined at all in terms of how I relate to the straight majority, dropping that language and ideology completely, because it’s not mine and it never was.

Despite all my rage, I am still just a bee-bullet pimping my butterfly wings in a frame.

(T.F.I.B.R. 1)

A lot of Wolfen revolves around the idea of a switch – a shift – a break – or an inversion. There are various layers of meaning to this: a shift in consciousness, an inversion from introvert to extrovert, art reflecting life to life reflecting art, rugged capitalist individualism to socialism, a shifting back and forth between the personal and the political as well as the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. 2020 seemed to me to be hinged upon many of these dualities.

These inversions are represented in many moments in Wolfen when the key moves from minor to major and back again (though not in this song) and also in the painting Wolfen, in the juxtaposition of the scene outside the window and everything else within the painting. The window represents art, memory, the external world and the transmuting of chaos into harmony and idealized form. It also references the Van Gogh in Arles poster that hung in my childhood bedroom – a refuge from turbulence into solace. Much of Wolfen is about reconciling that aspect of art that is artifice and idealism with the harsh realities of our world, like Van Gogh’s sunflowers verses his severed ear. It’s about personal emancipation – breaking with the past – as well as creativity breaking free of art’s institutions. The main inversion that underscores T.F.I.B.R. and Wolfen as a whole is: “I don’t belong to anyone / I belong to everyone.”

(T.F.I.B.R. 2)

I wrote T.F.I.B.R. at my own “ground zero” of the pandemic, on March 13th, 2020. The arrangement was written to sound like a broken machine and like a tea kettle boiling – how that whistle starts out low and quickly escalates into a hysterical, screaming siren approaching boiling point. Like some of the vocals in Howl, I was pushing my voice to go as high as it could and allowing that struggle to come through sonically, as it related to the feeling that I’d reached my own limits physically. The song is rooted in a particularly female energy (as is Howl), so the limitations of my male body are illustrated through the breaking of my voice (on a personal level) or a female energy being limited within a male system (on a political level). The twig snapping represents breaking through those limitations as well a break from the past – no longer holding on and trying to conform or appease. Any leftover illusions I’d carried with me evaporated and any remaining strips of paint on the walls were blasted off. 

Here is an inversion.

(Cruising at the End of the World 1)

2020 was filled with hyperbolic contradictions; for me it was the saddest and most painful year and also the most healing and one of the most beautiful. The world was experiencing so much sickness at a time when I was getting over a long-term malaise and I was reconnecting with myself at a moment when so many were becoming disconnected with each other. In spite of so much sadness, I felt optimistic.

(Cruising at the End of the World 2)

In the early days of the crisis, when springtime had arrived in Berlin, I rode my bike into the park most days and this was the only time I’d leave my apartment other than to go to the store or my painting studio.

The arrangement for this song was based on a couple I rode past who were shouting at one another on the sidewalk: the trumpet is the woman’s voice and the trombone is the man’s. In the context of a global catastrophe, even their fighting sounded beautiful because it was human and since it felt like everything was slipping away from us, I wanted to record every bit of humanity that I could before it disappeared, taking snapshots in my mind of these beautiful people on the streets. 

At the same time as these daily bike rides, I started painting portraits to get by, since my furloughed pay wasn’t enough to pay the bills. This daily process of portrait painting also echoed that feeling of wanting to record some last impressions of humankind before it faded away.

(RAGE. 1)

Wolfen is about recognizing your true nature and insisting upon it no matter what anyone else says. I think a lot of artists are suffering in this late capitalist world and much of Wolfen is about carving out your own space from within yourself in spite of that broken system and claiming your birthright. It’s about recognizing artists not only as spectacles and iconoclasts but as integral parts of our society: workers as essential as electricians or plumbers. It’s about legitimising your queer existence radically in the face of a world that asks you to make yourself smaller, bow politely when they throw you some rights-crumbs after deeming you non-essential, looking back and saying: “I wasn’t sick here... I shouldn’t have been hospitalized there... none of my nature was wrong, even if it was treated like an ailment and a burden on those around me.” Creativity has always felt akin to madness and carrying that flame through a world which threatens to extinguish it has been a real battle. In some ways I see Wolfen as a story about going mad in order to gain my sanity. It’s reverting to an audacious teenage rebellion that says: actually, the system is fucked, and no, I’m not going to play your game anymore. Queer as in fuck you. (Not my fffs though... friends, fans & fam... I love you.) 

(RAGE. 2)

I was always getting into trouble as a teenager. My family was often distressed that I wouldn’t join them in watching television because I was busy writing poems and drawing in my attic studio every night. My initiation into the system went together like oil and water. I was suspended from school for refusing to put my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to the flag. I often got into trouble with the local police and with many employers as well. I dropped out of the School of Visual Arts in New York with a security guard chasing me down 21st street because I had just graffitied FREE YOURSELF FROM THE INSTITUTION on the school’s white walls after flicking off my drawing professor. After many visits to therapists, psychiatrists, and a visit to a psychiatric ward, I slowly learned to shape-shift, to get along, and get by. 

It took a lot of sanding down of my edges and painful acquiescing to ways of living that never felt like my own in order to function in the world the way it needed me to. I started working at 15 years old and never had more than a couple of months of unemployment from 15 to 37. I made art and music consistently throughout those 22 years (save for a few years I “took off” from ages 29 – 32) but I usually had no energy left over at the end of the day because just getting through the working day was a battle, especially when I’d exhaust whatever resources I had left by getting fucked up in the evening.

I gradually developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in that time. A toxic mix of internalized homophobia and insecurity made it easier for me to believe the lie of Rugged American Ultra-Capitalist Individualism. 

(RAGE. 3)

The last job I had was at a karaoke bar and queer venue in Berlin. It’s the only job I’d ever kept for longer than a year, and I worked there for a whole decade. Karaoke came to mean a lot more to me than just a fun thing to do with friends on a Saturday night; it taught me about the power of catharsis and the transformative power of the stage, watching night after night how ordinary, shy folks became rock stars under the stage lights the moment their song came on. I love so many of those people and I loved that place so much but when the crisis hit, I knew I had to leave. It was clear in the months beforehand that I was no longer going to sustain two full-time jobs, trying to balance art and music with being the creative director for a popular nightclub.

Art is like a message in a bottle and it was becoming impossible to grab hold of those bottles, so they were piling up in my studio. In order to deliver them (and the letter / this album), I needed to sever ties with this and all false pretenses, and I needed to free myself from any of art’s institutions which have adapted themselves to those pretenses. Many artists have become confined within their craft historically, sometimes driving them to complete madness. Instead of cutting off my ear, I had to relinquish the part of me that had acquiesced to American brainwashing, rugged individualism, capitalist gas-lighting and anyone who told me I had to do anything other than to just stay creative.

(RAGE. 4)

Letting go of so much all at once was very painful. What made it harder were folks who didn’t take me seriously in terms of both the sickness and the burnout I was experiencing. I was on the phone arguing with my health insurance company who insisted I see a psychiatrist so that I might take medications that would make me “fit for work” again. I even heard from one doctor that my symptoms were “all in my head”. It started to feel like a twilight zone episode where I was being gaslit from all sides by people who desperately needed me to support their illusions. They needed me to tell them how stunning the emperor looked in his new clothes. Luckily, I’m stubborn as hell, so when they were all insisting I quit Wolfen and come out and play, telling me how bright and sunny it is outside, I said no. I wouldn’t budge. I’m barely looking up from the page. 

RAGE. is a love letter to my former colleagues and the regular guests at that club. Leaving that place was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, especially considering it was such a microcosm of a larger breakup with society as I’d known it. As I wrote the lyrics, I saw them written in my mind like a karaoke video and I imagined singing them on that stage. Talking Heads’ Remain In Light LP hung on the wall in that venue and it seemed like the perfect message to send to those folks. It’s also one of my favorite albums, so this is another nod to artists who inspired me.

The trumpet arrangement at the end is also another respect payed to Joni Mitchell and Ladies of the Canyon, as it references her song “For Free”, which is in some ways an anti-capitalist anthem. The reference felt appropriate to this shift from grinding all day and night for money to working steadily and daily on my craft, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not, but just because it’s what I’ve got to do. And yea, I’ve used this same idea in the arrangement for my song “Sirens” but that’s fine; I can do whatever the fuck I want!! :-P

(Metropolitan 2)

I’ve never told my coming-out story because it’s associated with a relationship which was too painful to re-visit. I’ve rarely talked about that relationship at all outside of a few therapy sessions and confiding in ex-boyfriends over the years. But even when I had talked about it, I hadn’t ever done so in an honest way that looks directly into the heart of that trauma and sees it for exactly what it is. Re-telling that story in a dishonest way was never helping me overcome it or heal from it, so my first relationship was a pandora’s box that I just didn’t open, let alone visit the room where that box lives.

But confronting my internalized homophobia and all of that pain finally led me to its source: my deepest trauma and the truth about that first relationship: it wasn’t one. By which I mean: it wasn’t love. 

This is one of the biggest lessons that this album taught me; it’s important what we call things: painter, artist... job, work… Jonathan, Wolfen... love, abuse. That first relationship wasn’t love. It was abuse. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He was an abuser. 

This isn’t about calling him out. I wish him all the healing the world can offer him. It’s not about him. It’s about me and it’s about the lies I told myself because I didn’t know what else to believe. In my small hometown in upstate New York in 1997 there was zero queer representation. The word “queer” didn’t even exist outside of the mouths of the homophobic majority. Matthew Shepard was one of the only gay men I heard about at all.

(Metropolitan 3)

While living in Germany from 1992-96, my 7th grade class went on a trip to Florence and while we sketched Michelangelo’s heroic male sculptures, I knew on some level that I was attracted to men, but drawn to art: an impossible ideal of the male form, unattainable in its awesome stature but also so tangible, right in front of me as I studied its curves with my eyes and fingers.

I wrote a piece about the relationship between my art and sexuality for Gay Star News in 2019 – I even wrote my college thesis on this topic – and yet one particular memory was buried so far away that it didn’t even come to the surface when writing those pieces. But in early February 2020, having finally found the space and the will to look at that first relationship for what it really was, underneath all of that dirt and pain was a little diamond of a memory which I’d completely forgotten about: our first date.

(Metropolitan 4)

It was the fall of 1997. He was 17. I was 14. He had found me on AOL and we’d been chatting for a few weeks when he asked me if I wanted to join him on a class trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. There were extra seats on the bus and the chaperones had allowed for a few friends of the class to come along. 

It was the first time I’d met him in person and I had no idea what to expect about any of it, but sitting next to him on the bus ride to the city, I had the same feeling I had in Florence a year or two earlier. He was tall and strong with curly, golden hair and he looked like a Roman God to me. What followed is hard to put into words because the memory becomes so expansive that it’s hard to tell what’s what. I remember walking through the Met for hours. I remember standing inside a reconstruction of an Egyptian pyramid with him, looking at ancient artifacts, and like the song says, I remember marble statues, Greek and Roman figures all around us. What’s strange about this memory are two things: for one, I can’t remember any other person in the museum. Of course the Met is always filled with guests, but in this memory we’re the only ones there and it seems like the lights are off, as if we were there after hours. The other strange thing about the memory is how impossibly long it seems to go on for, like we were there for days on end. 

I didn’t know he was pursuing me, and I don’t think I even fully grasped what it was I felt for him, but I knew I longed for him and that it was gay love that I felt. That memory is probably the most beautiful one of my life because it was a moment in which all ideals of art and love weren’t just possible, but alive, lived and real.

(Metropolitan 5)

I fell asleep on his shoulder on the bus ride home and he and I were both blushing when I awoke. A classmate in the seat in front of us turned around and smiled and said: “You guys are so cute.” I felt confused and excited and didn’t know what to make of that whole day, which felt like a never-ending dream. In some ways it was a never-ending dream because when it became a nightmare soon thereafter, instead of getting out of it – I stayed – and just painted a different picture in my mind of what it was. I had nowhere else to go. Like I said, queer life didn’t exist in that town at that time – it was all just him – and art. Instead of taking refuge in a painting on the wall, I painted over the circumstance around me. I transformed my world into art but more in the sense of artifice: he was that Roman statue and our relationship was somehow beautiful and pure in spite of its abusive nature. I made my world a trompe l'oeil – an illusion. In a sense, I’d never woken up from that dream and a part of me hadn’t left that museum until February 13th, 2020, when that memory came flooding back to me and the song came pouring out of me all at once in what was the most cathartic and healing experience I’ve ever had.

(Metropolitan 6)

Art provided me a time machine and I was able to reconnect with a part of myself that existed right before everything went awry. Seeing the past 22 years from his perspective allowed me to better understand so much of what had happened – to let go of it and forgive. It allowed me to understand the work from his perspective; even the nightmare I’d had in Amsterdam in 1994 showed up in many paintings over the years. My ego had become cynical about my work when I couldn’t grasp its origin, while my core was busy keeping the fire alive and eventually leading me to it. I’d never told my coming out story because this song was my coming out. Wolfen is my coming out story. 

(Metropolitan 7)

When the bus dropped us off at our school, he offered to give me a ride home in his truck. When we got inside, he said “Look under your seat”. I reached under the seat and felt the cold metal grip of a gun. I picked it up and held it in front of me, confused and scared. Welcome to cognitive dissonance.

That was a month or so before my 15th birthday, which was the year I started working. 

Welcome to the machine. 

(Metropolitan 8)

It was a number of things that led me to uncover the memory of that first date. Facing my own homophobia had loaded the gun but the trigger was watching the film Call Me By Your Name, as the lead roles in that film had a physical dynamic that was startlingly similar to ours back then. This was compounded by the film’s soundtrack, particularly the melody in Sufjan Stevens’ song “Mystery of Love” – specifically in the E – F# - G – D – B of the line “the first time that you kissed me”. The lyric itself didn’t trigger the memory as much as those five notes and how they recalled the string arrangement of The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, a song that he had included on a mix tape he gave me a few weeks after that first date. For all the turmoil and pain of that time, I am grateful that he introduced me to The Smiths and Morrissey (particularly Bona Drag, the first gay lyrics I’d ever heard) because in doing so, he gave me a way out.

This is why those five notes snuck into the arrangement of “Haunted” subconsciously (I didn’t notice this until months after it’d been written). 

(Metropolitan 9)

So much of Wolfen seemed to kind of write itself. There were many happy accidents along the way and the happiest of those accidents were in the video for Metropolitan. 

I had only instructed the Rome team to film at the first two locations (the Pantheon and the Temple of Hadrian); I wasn’t sure where Matteo Aprile should do the dance at the end of the video. The third location – the National Gallery of Modern Art – was Marcello Paolillo’s suggestion, who was the project advisor and coordinator. I had only seen some photos of the museum’s facade at a distance on Google and it seemed like a good choice, so I went with it without realizing what was written on the steps leading up to the museum: TIME IS OUT OF JOINT. This has been the title of the museum’s current installation since 2016. After the Rome footage was shot, I looked up the meaning of the phrase and was surprised and happy about how it related to many of the themes within Wolfen. The National Gallery’s website states: 

“The exhibition, whose title quotes a verse from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, investigates the notion of time in its fluidity, non-linearity, and stratification; a fragmented time which seems to embody art historian Hans Belting’s dilemma: “the end of the history of art, or art’s freedom.” Hamlet’s line “The time is out of joint” … (translates) “time” into “il tempo” but also into the world or nature, and “out of joint” into our of sorts, off its hinges, out of square, disjointed, unhinged, disconnected.”

The wooden crates in front of the museum on which Matteo is dancing spell the word “OPEN”.

(Carousel 2)

The chords and melody for Carousel were written in 2004 on a very tumultuous and intoxicating trip to Provincetown with an ex-boyfriend and another couple. The night before I wrote it, I went to my very first drag show and having just had a horrible fight with my boyfriend, I sat and cried my eyes out in the audience while the queen on stage sang a Mariah Carey song. She looked at me with loads of pity as she sang and it was pretty awkward for a lot of people in the room to be sitting there while I sobbed (um yea that might be an allegory for this online exhibition but whatever… queer as is in normalize men exploring their emotional worlds and healing lest we remain broken boys breaking our world) but it also felt safe to cry because of her vulnerability on stage. So whoever that queen was and wherever she is now, I’m dedicating Carousel to her.

(Carousel 3)

I recognize the incredible privilege I have to be able to make this record at all. I wouldn’t have had the time or resources to make it had I not received furloughed pay and a grant from the city of Berlin. I wonder how many artists are out there dying of thirst like fish out of water, maladjusted to a system in which they’re barely scraping by – a system which might not have their best interest in mind. I think we can’t even imagine the wave of ideas and innovations we would encounter if those artists were set free by enacting a universal basic income.