God Loves A Scammer 'album bio'
My 'album bio' in advance of me actually posting on here about other things
Hello!
Before I actually start using this Substack as a place for me to write about other people’s music (new post up next week) I wanted to discuss some personal business over here.
I’ve got a new LP coming out on August 30th called God Loves A Scammer, and I think it’s my favorite thing I have done up to this point. (You can pre-order it here) It’s also the first record I’ve ever self-released. I wrote a first-person bio about a month ago to send to a few writers and friends, and wanted to have it exist in the real world over here. Hopefully it’ll give you a bit of insight into what was going on with me at the moments God Loves A Scammer was being written and recorded:
In 2015, I tried to write a song called “God Loves A Scammer” after nearly being a victim of some low-key bank fraud. I was deeply in debt, having run up a credit card in a vain attempt to make a band more popular (thanks to some bad advice from a musician who found success pre-financial crisis), and was a perfect target for someone claiming to be my bank offering a series of interest-free payoffs. Thankfully my common sense kicked in at the last minute and I started asking some questions. I was immediately hung up on and started working on a song, but was too clouded by shame and anger to finish it the way I wanted.
Eight years later, I found myself in Ireland, unemployed and with a lot of time on my hands. I spent all of 2021 and 2022 touring with Lucy Dacus for her Home Video tour, which felt like getting shot out of a rocket after a year of covid-related uncertainty. The whole tour I had been stringing together different melodies, jotting down lyrics and doing voice memos in stairwells after soundcheck, reading a lot and listening to music I loved from different eras of my life. Afterwards, I started piecing these disparate ideas together into a group of songs that reflected where my head was at at the time (and still is for the most part). The name “God Loves A Scammer” came back to me and the song was written in a day. I was thinking about the frustrations one feels trying to build community and be empathetic in a world of people trying to get one over on each other and how inevitably, a voice inside will say “wouldn’t your life be easier if you started scamming too?”
Still, it’s much more fruitful to believe that it’s important to cultivate the world you would like to see. Hopefully that means a place where humanity and caring about others is more important than a financial bottom line and bankrupting companies/non-profits/people in order to strip resources from them like you’d strip resources from the planet. It feels more and more difficult to do every day. It’s also easy to slide into a full-on conspiracy mindstate, and songs like “Freaks Of The Optical Daytime” and “Short End Of The Stick” are about trying to strike the balance between learning about the horrors wreaked upon the world without becoming a Paul Schrader protagonist.
Scammer’s songs were workshopped on a marathon US tour opening for the band Smidley and then recorded in Philadelphia at Kawari Sound with some collaborators I’m very lucky to know. Zach Goldstein engineered the record, and Alex Luquet, Jacob Blizard, Sarah Goldstone and Lilah Larson drove to suburban Philadelphia from their respective homes to be the band for the sessions. We hung out for a week trying to record every song as live as possible, listening to Velvet Underground bootlegs (specifically “Sweet Sister Ray”), Big Star’s Third, and Silver Jews’ Tanglewood Numbers. We also played a lot of Yahtzee. After this week of recording, I sent the record to Chanele McGuinness, my number one favorite collaborator who is also my wife. Chanele’s harmony vocals on the record add an airy yet grounding quality to my unhinged songs that mirrors the way she makes my life better by being in it. I also had Alex Swartzenruber, an amazing poet who is also the co-host of mumblecore podcast It’s A Beautiful Day In The Gulch, add a poem of his to the tail end of “Babylon Working”, transforming its chaotic jamming into a meditation on how a caterpillar disintegrates in order to become a butterfly, and how sometimes diamonds look kind of shitty.
The power of fantasy and belief is present in so many places on God Loves A Scammer. “Private Plane” explores the belief that the wealthy are a protected class, somehow smarter and thus more deserving of success than the common man. “Babylon Working” is about L. Ron Hubbard scamming famous rocket scientist Jack Parsons into believing he could conjure a moonchild in the desert by following the directions of Aleister Crowley. And “Headway” is about self-deception in making art. The song’s narrator idiotically stumbles around, hoping after years and years of monomaniacal songwriting, doing the same thing again will yield a different result.
It’s been more than ten years since I released my first LP (with my old band that I went into some wrong-headed credit card debt for), and I think God Loves A Scammer is the best thing I’ve ever done. Hopefully I can say that about everything I do in the future, but for now I'll appreciate the fact that I made some headway.
The first single from God Loves A Scammer is out today. It’s called “Freaks Of The Optical Daytime” and it’s about going on beautiful forest walks, reading Emile Zola’s Germinale with friends, reading Gravity’s Rainbow by yourself, and finding enjoyment in the inability to stay present. Hope you enjoy and talk to you soon.