The Retrographer, Special Issue

September 09, 2020

My debut album Sunday, and my first single, “California Days”.

The Retrographer, Special Issue

Bulletins

The Story of SundayTwo months after my dad died in 2014, my partner Emma and I threw a joint birthday party in the basement bar of St. Mazie in Williamsburg. That space is small enough that if you invite enough friends, it becomes a de facto private room as it reaches capacity. As it started filling up with people I knew, I noticed one last table of strangers getting ready to close out, so I decided to sit and talk with them before they left. It was two women and a man. The women were very inviting, but the man stayed focused on a cocktail napkin where he appeared to be sketching something out of my sight. A few minutes after the tab was signed, they kindly said goodbye and the man looked up to hand me the napkin. On it was a sketch with the caption “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRO”. I couldn’t tell if the drawing was of me or my dad.

That night, I pinned the cocktail napkin next to my bed where it stayed for years. Every time I looked at it, I knew it was a drawing of me, because it was I who sat before that anonymous, taciturn artist at the bar. Yet the features were just the same as my dad’s: A swoosh of hair; round glasses; full lips. Was I alone in that depiction? Was it a Rorschach test for my aggrieved heart, or a final visit? It shook and somehow comforted me at the same time; I felt grateful to see him – or his redolence – in the world again, but I knew it was because I bore the features of a person I love who is now gone. That artist in the bar saw me; not just me sitting there but the negative space within me.

The brutal truth of losing someone is that while only the interminable passage of time lessens your suffering, each moment in that passage takes you further from the treasured world you shared. Emma once told me that your pain never gets smaller, your world gets bigger. I knew that in abstract as I began my journey, but I still scrambled hourly for a way to make life more liveable; I looked for other, more immediate solutions. No escape lasted long enough, but because I knew time was my healer, I started work on imagining a future I wanted to live for.

In the depth of my grief I honestly wondered if I would ever feel the same magnitude of happiness I used to when my dad was alive. My emotional spectrum seemed clipped; the parts of my personality I liked the most – my enthusiasm, joy, sense of possibility – were now curtailed or beyond my reach. I worried something had died within me too. But I knew I couldn’t resign myself to a diminished future, and that if that were my fate, I would at the very least regret not doing my best to recapture myself. So I worked on fashioning my own tools for recovery, which produced this album, Sunday.

The first song I wrote for Sunday was “Evening Out”, in February 2014. Then “Pete Williams”, “The Light of the Day” and “Hey Young Man” in 2015, “Snow Walk” and “Small Business” in 2016, “California Days” and “In California” in 2017. Each song was an exercise in conjuring light, warmth, insight, guidance, release – my life’s absent emotional palette. I used music as a way to induce feelings that no longer occurred naturally. My lyrics would either try to create encouragement, or vent the futility of trying. It was, more than anything else, my private therapeutic practice.

In 2016, Andrew Daly Frank heard my band Milhaus broke up and emailed me. We used to play shows with his old group Pastimer, and I always admired the vivid sound of his music and his phenomenal guitar playing. He’s kind, sensitive, and a close listener. He asked what I was going to do next musically, and even as I thought about his question I felt something new starting. I went back to my years of demos and, for fun, broke all the songs I liked best up into LP-length groups, creating a discography of unmade albums. I suddenly saw many records worth of music, much of which had been written after, and in response to, my dad’s passing. Andrew and I kept talking, and I eventually asked him to help make these albums real and be my producer. He became so much more than that, and this album would not have been possible without him.

I asked my friend Ben Wagner if he wanted to start working on some songs, and we began workshopping the core of this album, with me on guitar and him on drums at our shared practice space in Gowanus. In early 2018, we set up shop in the finished garage behind my dad’s house and began recording the band live. In the ensuing two years, Andrew and I met at his old apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, a friend’s place in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, and ultimately at Andy Cass’s Sleeper Cave Records in Williamsburg, Massachusetts to finish tracking. Along the way my Office Culture bandmates Ian Wayne and Winston Cook-Wilson lent vocals and piano respectively; Caitlin Pasko sang too; Alec Spiegelman played saxophones and Cole Kamen-Green played trumpet; Ben added percussion and Andrew played many of the guitar parts, sang, and molded the work. 

In between sessions, Andrew and I talked constantly about what we wanted this album to be and to do. We talked about the luminousness of All Things Must Pass-era George Harrison and New Morning Bob Dylan; about the Grateful Dead’s humming warmth on Europe ‘72’s “Jack Straw” and Kurt Vile’s Wakin on a Pretty Day; the live room on Exile on Main Street, Kacey Musgraves’s warm spaciness, and the oceanic expanse of the War on Drugs’ Lost In The Dream; Talk Talk’s holy presence. We talked about music that exuded light and life and together we tried our best to make an album for people who need it.

I’m incredibly grateful to Andrew and Ben, and to everyone who helped me make this album. I’m grateful to my mom, who has borne the burden of my grief as my surviving parent; to Emma, who was with me every moment of my depths; to my stepmom Lisa who not only supported me, but lent us her garage to make the core of this project in; to my siblings – my dads children – Davey, Caroline, and Peter Walker, who shared this loss with me and kept me from feeling alone. I’m grateful to my dad for giving me almost 24 years of fatherhood, friendship, and love. 

I know I am releasing Sunday at a moment where people are experiencing death and loss at a scale I haven’t experienced in my lifetime. My ambitious hope is that this record of my search for guiding light in enveloping darkness can be illuminating for others going through something similar. At the very least, it helped me. This album arose from death and darkness, and it will succeed if it ultimately feels alive and luminous. It tracks my attempt to regain myself after it seemed like so much of what I loved had slipped away. I thought I was gone for good. Now I look at that cocktail napkin and know who it is. 

CATCH UP ON BACK ISSUES AT TINYLETTER

MONTHLY

#69 August, 2020 | Charlie Kaplan, “Sunday”

ANNUAL

DECENNIAL

THEMED