"I don’t need to be creating constantly"
More from my conversation with Anxious singer Grady Allen
Welcome to Human Pursuits, the column that features need-to-know names and stories in media and other creative spaces. Today, a note on constantly creating, and an outtake from my conversation with Grady Allen, lead singer of Anxious.
You heard from me a lot last week.
And so, in the spirit of this excerpt, I’m foregoing this week’s Sunday essay.
Instead, I’m going to make dinner (nacho fries) and watch The 97th Academy Awards.
If that’s not your speed, I’d suggest streaming Anxious’ new album, Bambi. I listened to it on a 7-kilometer run yesterday. The bridge of ‘Some Girls’ hit just as I was approaching Kits Beach. The path was crowded and the sky was slightly overcast and there was the faintest scent of honeysuckle on the wind.
It felt great.
ES: Bambi is a real inflection point for the band. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but I’m wondering what comes next. Are you the kind of band who writes an album and then gets immediately back into the studio?
GA: It depends. Dante [Melucci, guitarist], writes a lot of our material. He’s constantly writing. It’s almost like a bodily function; it has to happen. There are ideas on this record that were being written at the same time as Little Green House. Even now he’ll be sending me ideas, and I have to say, “Dude, there are 11 songs that people are just hearing for the first time.” Laughs.
For me, it’s much more touch-and-go, and it’s a process that doesn’t always deliver. Sometimes I just can’t find the space, the words, or the chords. For a while that inconsistency made me feel inadequate, in part because Dante is so prolific. He’ll pick up the guitar and try something and it’s like, damn, that would be a great song. And that’s a throwaway for him.
This past year, I read two biographies about authors I love, Larry McMurtry and John Cheever. They’ve both written seminal pieces of fiction. But it’s really interesting because they both have prolonged periods where they feel they can’t create anything, or nothing’s coming to them. Or they do write something and it’s horrible. To the point that it’s not just their self-perception of the work. They put things out and everyone goes “This is horrible.”
ES: Laughs. What a nightmare.
GA: Exactly. However, it has helped me realize the artist’s process is not always frequent or flowing. For a lot of people, it does come and go. Having time to read about, and go deep into, other people’s creativity has helped me realize that I don’t need to be creating constantly.
ES: That’s such a great insight. I’m actually not very familiar with Cheever or McMurtry.
GA: They both deal with very different settings. John Cheever writes pretty much exclusively about mid-20th century suburban people in the Northeast, whether it’s New York, Connecticut, etc. And they’re usually leading lives of quiet desperation, longing for things that they can’t have, and being haunted by that fact.
Larry McMurtry writes similarly about people in the Midwest, in the mid-20th century, or sometimes further back. The stories are almost always in Texas. Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. And again, it’s people leading lives of quiet desperation. But he also explores ways of life that are slowly disappearing: cowboys dying out, or small towns getting eaten alive until only ghost towns remain.
ES: There’s often an assumption with pop-punk, emo, and hardcore, that the lyrics are coming from the singer’s first-hand perspective. Is that always the case for you?
I remember finding out, for instance, that Jim Adkins from Jimmy Eat World writes songs from the perspective of different characters he invents, and they might involve scenarios he hasn’t personally experienced.
GA: My writing is mostly autobiographical. It’s always something I’ve been thinking about or experiencing. I tried to switch it up with one song on this past record, to make it more conceptual, but it didn’t work. I abandoned it pretty quickly. I think, Dante, to the extent he writes, sometimes gets a bit more abstract. He’s comfortable trying to explore things from a perspective that isn’t his own.
ES: It sounds like Dante really loves to freak it. Laughs.
GA: If there’s one takeaway from this interview, it’s probably that; he’s a freak through and through.
Grady Allen is the lead singer of Anxious. He lives in Connecticut.