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del water gap

[delwatergap]

finally getting this apartment cleaned up. finally plugged in a vacuum. finally got the doors on the closet, the ones that fell of their track and left scuffs all over the floor. finally hung the painting of the woman kicking her feet up towards the sky, the one that has a gold frame that chips all over my windowsill and leaves me a thin layer of glittering dust that i want to run my fingers through whenever i pass by. i haven't been seeing anyone because i like to fill up on alone time before i leave for tour, when alone time becomes a rare commodity. i like tour because i don't often feel lonely, but there is something about working, eating, sleeping together, twelve or thirteen of us, on and on and on and on, that can feel claustrophobic. i always have a good time on stage. i'm proud of that. but the show is so little of the day. an hour, give or take, in a sea of hours in the day. hours that are spent waiting and sitting and fighting the brain fog to catch a few pages of a book or maybe a movie or a walk around. call someone who has a leg in the real world. find another coffee shop, and another and another. a museum if we're in a major city. a bookstore if we're not. don't forget to brush your teeth. don't forget to eat breakfast and try and move around a bit, go on a walk or a run at least. i have some new people in the mix. we lost some of the old folks but that's okay, that's just the circle of life that swirls around this touring stuff. not everyone does it forever, for all the reasons i just listed. it pulls you away from your life in some ways. in some ways, that pull can be comforting. it's an exit ramp of sorts, from conflict, permanence, stagnant and introspective thoughtfulness. it's a commitment to avoidance. it's simultaneously the most and least productive thing a person can do. i've gotten to an age where when i do anything for long enough i have a moment of realization that this is how i'm spending my life. my time at work, my time in any given relationship, romantic or platonic. my time on this earth has always been finite, but i no longer have that constant and aching feeling that i am sitting in a plastic chair in a waiting room, choosing the magazine, twirling my thumbs and wondering when my name will be called. i've been in new york a few weeks and i'm cold. the heat in my apartment doesn't work well, so i wear a sweater inside and sometimes a hat too. i live in an old building. it's beautiful and it has character and that is one of my favorite things about new york city. the old buildings that get too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, that gather dust inside the windows and flocks of pigeons outside the windows, and smell like the grocery store down the block, in the morning especially, when you've just woken up and you least want the smell of rotisserie chicken filling your nostrils. i feel a bit lonely today as i often do right before i travel and right before life changes drastically. i fly off to los angeles to start rehearsal tomorrow and then we move on to the bus and that's that for a few months, until my birthday in april. a full life will be lived and die off. i reckon i'll read a few books and i'll probably lose a few small but vital items. i always lose things on tour. a piece of jewelry or clothing. last year i lost a photo and it nearly ruined me. but we survive and i like to think that the things we lose end up being loved by another person. or they end up in the stomach of a janitor's vacuum, and they later make their way to a landfill, and that's a sadder fate but that's also okay.

[delwatergap]

my third album, Chasing the Chimera, is out now. i can’t tell you how much this means to me, getting to be a musician, i was supposed to be an accountant or something. i wake up most days and i wonder how i got here and it bowls me over. i’m exhausted so much of the time but i’m happy today. i’ve met thousands of you. i started writing this record in New York last fall running around on fumes, staying up for days, single for the first time in years and longing for clarity and forgiveness. songs about hating myself and the things i’ve chased to try and feel better and fill myself up and sleep okay at night. i’ve found a semblance of love for myself the last year or two. i fell in love a bit the last year or two. i spent time with people who changed my life. i’ve lost some of those people and i get to keep some of the others. i practiced avoidance dressed up as connection. longing for honesty but fearing the cost. travel became an exit ramp for me. avoiding discomfort to preserve short term harmony. some of these songs are for the people i’ve loved, some are for myself. one is for my grandma and one is for my mom and the daughter i hope to have some day. some days i feel like someone who can only make mistakes. i’ve been afraid that i ruined my life before it began. i’ve been afraid of being found out. i think about the masks i wear as i face the world. i keep thinking i need to be fixed before i deserve peace. that’s what Chasing the Chimera means to me. the impossible dream of impossible peace. the shimmering hope of codependence. we code negativity as intelligence and i’ve indulged so deeply in negativity. my soft hearted cynic is in recovery.  

listening back to this album for the first time since we put a bow on it, i hear a narrator in flux. i hear a reluctant man with a guilt complex, vacillating between grandeur and contrition. two helpings of shame. a romantic with a god problem. a boy with a woman’s heart and a man’s hunger. compulsive people pleasing has slowly turned him into a pathological white liar. he sat on the tour bus going through the letters sent to him by the girl he almost loved, and shortly after that, he was robbed. the songs emerge from the collision of ambition and unease. they’re about grief, sex, spiritual confusion. about trying to make sense of adoration and love and loss. about the ache of self-awareness. about the hilarity of being alive. about what it means to be a man? waiting and wanting to be soft but feeling like he needs armor.

we should talk about the Chimera. she is a figure from Greek mythology, often symbolizing the unnatural, the monstrous, or the impossible, with the body and head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and a goat rising from her back. she is the daughter of the two monsters Echidna and Typhon, and sister to Cerberus — the three-headed dog — the Hydra, and the Sphinx ——-— quite the family unit. her myth is very closely tied to the hero Bellerophon, who was sent on an impossible quest to kill her. with the help of Pegasus, the winged horse, Bellerophon flew above the Chimera’s fire and struck her down from the air —— — a classic underdog story.  

in modern usage, and with regard to this body of work, the Chimera represents an illusion, an impossible dream, a wildly unrealistic ambition. i came across the Chimera via a film by the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher aptly named La Chimera. i watched the film with the film club i run with my grandma, and immediately connected with the film’s protagonist, Arthur. Arthur is a soft hearted criminal archaeologist. in the film, he is searching — both literally, for Etruscan artifacts, and emotionally for his lost love Beniamina. it is unclear whether she has died or just gone away somewhere. to me, in this film, the Chimera represents both the dream of recovery, of peace and connection, but also the fantasy of getting rich off history; the reconciliation of the living and the dead by prying open the doors of ancient tombs. i always felt like songwriting was a bit like criminal archaeology, like grave robbing. a music career can equally be a practice in getting rich off history. songs most often come about without the consent of the ghosts we rob them from.

i have done so much to try and reconcile my own pain and confusion. my Chimeras have taken so many forms. i’m sure you have your own. this album is like an old house i’ve been reluctantly trying to move out of. it’s full of ghosts and dust and collapsing cardboard boxes. beauty and ruin. i tried to write songs that could hold both. from the memories that have nourished me and the ones that have rotted me from the inside. today i feel like i can finally move out.  

[delwatergap]

i am finally home from five weeks in australia and new zealand and my brain is mashed potatoes from the jet lag and yet i am pleased to tell you all that after two years —— i will be headlining in the usa and all over the world again this coming january 2026 !!!

as far as i can remember (through my mashed potato brains), my last headline tour was one of the happiest few months of my life. it was hard too. i was going through a break up and i got really sick somewhere around boston. i was so lonely because for the first time in so long i didn’t really have anyone to text all day. it was cold and the bus broke down. we shuffled through a few drivers. i don’t know where they kept going. but yeah despite all this, counterintuitively, i was happy. i just remember quietly reveling in the fact that i had a place to be every day. i also remember feeling shocked that i could show up pretty much anywhere in the states and play to a room full of people who knew my songs. i loved meeting so many of you. you made me bracelets and clothing and cookies (which i cautiously ate after i made my guitar player nick take a test-bite) and i heard so many of your stories. i have said this many times before, but the most life affirming moments of my career have been hearing your stories about my music; the moments in which my words get to weave into the meaningful and menial moments of your lives. when you tell me that you fell in love to one of my songs, or lost someone to one of my songs. a lot of folks tell me about discovering my music with a partner they’ve since broken up with; how they had to let their person go but they got to hold on to me. those are the things that make me want to combust, and make me want to keep my head up on the days when it all feels like a waste.

and i have met so many more of you since that tour two years ago. i traveled the world with niall and with halsey and i played festivals and some shows of my own in europe and the uk and australia (mash potatoes brain). if you’re newer here —- hi. i love you. thank you for stopping by. i can’t wait to meet you. when you come to the show you’ll hear all about the highs and lows of tour. if you’ve been to a show of mine before maybe i’ve said something on stage about it: “i was sobbing thirty five minutes ago and then i had a fig bar and now i’m out here on stage with you and things are looking up!!!” it’s lonely out there sometimes. when i was a child the notion of touring and playing my songs was the ultimate picture of freedom. it still feels like that on the good days, but i’m finding that the more time i spend on this earth, the more i realize that there is a sadness baked into freedom.

i put out a song last week called “Damn” that i wrote on a day when i was feeling very struck by this. “Damn” is about the counterintuitive nature of finally getting what you’ve put on a pedestal for years. the illusion of arrival and the nauseating nature of a morning full of infinite possibility. do you ever feel more anxious on the empty days — the ones you fetishize all week when you’re busy as all hell — than on the days you are needed somewhere? it’s something like standing at the top of the halfpipe, urging yourself to drop in. i sometimes get scared on days like that. something about wasted potential maybe. 

the song is also about dropping my defenses in love. the emotional violence of intimacy and the feeling of going under the knife by agreeing to be loved by someone. staying in something because it feels nobler to suffer. questions of guilt, shame, and unintentional harm. real connection vs. performance? lived experience vs. the story we tell ourselves about the lived experience in retrospect. personality vs. emotional armor. the part of myself that believes i am too difficult to love. the absurdity of emotional intimacy. the tender and strange ways that people stay attached. humor living next to grief. how love becomes ritualistic, superstitious, and even pathetic. masculinity and exhaustion. choosing softness. the faith at the start and the dread at the edge. how time chips away at the young and idealistic parts of ourselves. how to reckon with the promise of a new day starting to feel nauseating rather than hopeful?

[delwatergap]

the last five or so years since ive been making albums and such, ive held the practice of writing quite a bit of prose around my work to share with the people with whom i work as things start rolling out. this practice is an attempt to help my team help me, and help my music stand on its own legs as it stumbles its way out into the world from the very private place from which it originates. on my first two albums it was just that, a postnatal unpacking and contextualization of the songs. so the record would be more or less mixed and mastered, and i would sit down and open a google doc and start writing this and that and this and that and eventually, finally, i would have something slightly resembling a neatly distilled explanation of a messy body of work.

on my third album however, this album, i did quite a bit of prose writing in the short window of time between the process of writing the songs and recording the songs. this was partially because for the first time since i signed a record deal in 2021, these two processes of writing and recording were distinctive. i spent a few months with a good friend and a guitar and a stack of poetry books and legal pads and wrote songs in this very pure and undistracted way, not unlike the way i used to, the way it all started for me when i was fifteen or so. and then i stepped away from the songs for a few months of travel and shows, and then eventually the recording started. and in that liminal few months in between, i started a bit of a blueprint for myself, in the form of short essays. it was my attempt to honor the songs by entering the recording process with a bible of sorts. an insurance plan, a set of vows. i was afraid that i could and would too quickly forget where the songs really came from, and somehow betray them during the process of recording them. regardless, these essays were never meant to be for any eyes but my own, but eventually, begrudgingly, they made their way to my closest collaborator, and then a friend or two, and then my manager and my partner on the visual bits. and then i started thinking about closeness and loosing up my grip a little and how would that feel? so, i thought, maybe i could find a way to trickle some of my writing out to you, whoever you are, who has agreed to be here with me.

in the coming weeks and months im going to try my best to show up here with authenticity and heart and some semblance of consistency, as much as my travels allow, and share pieces of these essays that i wrote during my album process. im also going to share some current writing as it comes.

my intention in sharing all of this is not to continue the performance that is my artist project, but rather a way to give you some human context for twelve written songs that are deeply personal and special to me. i think there is something beyond the sum of the parts apparent in the finished songs. i hope so at least. the more of you i meet, the more i realize we are not so different. we live in an anxious time and i feel anxious a lot of the time too, and im horribly afraid of being found out. in writing this album, i tried my best to put that fear and my many others aside and just make something that felt true. a body of work that i could be proud of in ten or twenty years if i were lucky. it was a hard album to make, and i was ashamed a lot of the time. i was transcendently proud a lot of the time, too.

i hope that in reading my essays as the songs come out, you can come to the work with a different mindset. maybe i was wrong and this is partially about entertainment after all. but this is also about me. i played a little show in a garden in the east village a few nights ago, and i told the small crowd ‘if something feels hard, it’s probably worth doing’. this feels not only hard, but deeply wrong on some level, so it’s probably worth doing.