motel void

MOTEL VOID: You’re from New England. Where exactly? And how would you describe the current music scene there? Do you feel that you’re part of it?

SAY SOMETHING IN THE MORNING: I grew up around Peekskill, NY in the Hudson Valley but I bounced around that area through my 20s. Eventually I felt like it was becoming too stifling and crowded/hip. The whole area has changed so much since I was a kid and I wanted to go somewhere quiet and uncool. In 2021 I bought an old farmhouse with my wife and brother in Southbury, Connecticut we have been fixing up. There’s not much of a music scene in town, but I’m about 40 minutes from New Haven and there’s a lot going on there. In some ways I feel disconnected from that scene. It’s a lot of Connecticut emo, and I grew up listening to emo music mainly, and it has had some kind of influence on what I want to do and plan on doing with this project.

MOTEL VOID: Could you recommend your favorite local artists and venues?

SAY SOMETHING IN THE MORNING: Local artists, well I would have to mention my friend Bobby Dyckman who is a great performer and asked me to play a show one night, I might take him up on that if I can get a band together. And there’s a band called Arms Like Roses based out of New Haven as well. Incredible stage presence. Almost mesmerizing.

Venues – I spent most of my time at The Chance and the loft in Poughkeepsie, which sadly just closed. That’s where I met my friend Jayce from Secret Secret Dino Club. I was a 19 year old kid with a video camera who wanted to make a living doing something with music videography. He took me under his wing and all around the country, to England, out to LA. I met my wife Kayla Loren through him, and through her met my friend Max and my producer Joe. This is before I ever even picked up a guitar, but I owe the trajectory of the last decade of my life to that venue in some ways.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve just released a great new single ‘Deny Deny Deny’. Could you tell us more about the recording and writing process? Will it be a part of you new album?

SAY SOMETHING IN THE MORNING: I was standing by this old window frame on our house fixing it up when the melody popped into my head, I usually start writing with a vocal melody of sounds or made up words and then try to find what would fit into that. That’s how most songs start. This one was a bit different in that I recorded a demo in my attic, and then brought it to Joe and re-recorded it. He has a studio in Beacon so I’ll go there and play all these instruments, sometimes I’ll go and just play one thing and we will sit for a few hours and talk about whatever. He’s a great friend.

Most of my writing is stream of consciousness and I am a big fan of Jack Kerouac, he is a personal hero of mine. But for this one I changed some of the lyrics after, to give it some kind of story and make it less metaphorical. So it’s a bit more straight forward. The old version of the song has a 2 minute instrumental outro, and I was listening to it one day and thought this is too strange and meandering, so I wrote the ending last. It’s a nice song, I think it captures what I was trying to do with this project at the outset sonically. It’s very rough and imperfect, shrill, kind of wild carnival music. I had a visual in my head of some kind of weird broken freak show / parade moving through a field, and that captures that image, for me at least.

This was originally supposed to be a part of a larger album but I’m probably gonna scrap everything else I worked on. It feels so distant from where I was when I wrote all these other songs. I have changed as a person even in just a year. I work for the railroad now and was thinking about how almost everything exists in a state of transit. So I think I’ll take some time and write something else I feel like I connect with more. My process is slow. I’ll remake something over and over and then throw it out, it’s my biggest weakness. My producer Joe Costable has done a great job of saying “no this is a bad idea, you shouldn’t do that” and there have been times where I should have listened to his advice. So it’s all a learning process.

MOTEL VOID: Your plans and goals for 2024?

SAY SOMETHING IN THE MORNING: I don’t think about this stuff too much, whatever happens is gonna happen weather I think about it or not, because the unconscious mind usually makes decisions for you. I already know the answers but, I’m gonna only know that I know them after the fact. If that makes sense.