Allegra Krieger was born a selkie in the Atlantic Ocean in 1845. Taking a more conventional corporeal form, she moved to New York City, where she maintains a residence on the sixth floor of a hotel in East Midtown. She writes songs, bad checks, love letters, and poorly formatted emails and trusts that terrible things can have extraordinary outcomes.
QVC has been playing on the small rectangular TV in her room at a low volume for 13 years straight. She drinks a lukewarm beer on blue cotton sheets and watches two women hawk a tropical blouson sleeve top for three easy payments of $15.99 on the distant screen before drifting into a fitful sleep. How remarkably human!
Her new album, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, will be out on September 13 via Double Double Whammy.
Greg Mendez is a musician and songwriter based in Philadelphia; Allegra Krieger is a musician and songwriter based in New York. Allegra’s new record, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, will be out tomorrow on Double Double Whammy, so to celebrate, the two friends got on a Zoom call to catch up about nature, cars, magnets, and more. Read their conversation below, and catch them on tour together next month.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Greg Mendez: Are you in New York or Vermont?
Allegra Krieger: I’m in New York. I’m at my last week of work at this bar, so I’m just working a lot this week.
Greg: What bar?
Allegra: It’s called Cervo’s in the Lower East Side. It’s a pretty busy place. I like it because they let me come back every summer, and I’m friends with everyone that works there, so it’s fun.
Greg: Would you go if you didn’t work there?
Allegra: Uh, no, because it’s really expensive. But I go sit outside and drink wine because I work there. It’s really good, but I don’t really dine, you know. But, what’s new with you?
Greg: Not much. I’ve been kind of taking it easy this summer, not too many shows or anything. I just went to North Carolina for a vacation.
Allegra: Did you go to the beach or the mountains?
Greg: The mountains.
Allegra: Cool. What mountains?
Greg: The Blue Ridge Mountains.
Allegra: Heard of them. That’s fun. What town did you go to?
Greg: Warrensville, which is near Boone and West Jefferson.
Allegra: I, for a brief moment, lived in Burnsville, which I think is really close to Warrensville and it’s 45 minutes from Boone.
Greg: Oh, cool. How was it?
Allegra: It was cool. It’s beautiful, obviously. It’s cool to be close to Asheville. Burnsville, at least, felt like the South. I was there in 2016 or 2015, so it was around the first Trump era. I was just working at this bar, the Blind Squirrel Brewery. I was living on this farm and I met a lot of cool people. I liked living there, but I like a little bit more movement. It’s a good place to go if you want to, like, grow your own food and take time to write music and hike.
Greg: I don’t want to grow my own food. [Laughs.] Sounds like a lot of work.
Allegra: Yeah, I don’t really either. I respect people that do grow their own food.
Greg: Totally. I respect the people that grow my food.
Allegra: Exactly. I was just thinking about this this morning, actually — I’ve had a lot of plants that I water them, I do my best to keep them alive, and sometimes they just don’t want to live or it’s not the right environment. But then there is one that just lives and I don’t have to do anything to it. You just water it once a week, whatever. I’m not somebody that takes enough care of plant life to sustain a whole garden. I’m kind of like, “If it grows, it grows.”
Greg: I struggle with my physical needs enough.
Allegra: Yeah, you’re like, “I’m not even drinking enough water. I eat like shit…”
Greg: I don’t shower enough.
Allegra: If you can’t shower, how are the plants gonna get enough water?
Greg: I feel like some people thrive on waking up like, “I have to take care of the plants and do this and do this.” But if I have more things like that, I actually just sink more than thrive.
Allegra: Honestly, I really agree with that sentiment. I think the good days are the days where I have nothing looming over me. If there’s any obligation, be it social or work or bills… I don’t know, it feels better to just ignore it and lie down. Keep lying down. [Laughs.]
Greg: That shit will take up my whole day. Like, if I have something that I have to do at 3 PM, that might wreck my day. It might stop me from doing anything until that.
Allegra: I know. I even feel that with the anxiety of having to, like, schedule a conversation with you. I was like, [nervously] “Uh, OK, I gotta…” But really all you gotta do is log on.
Greg: The Zoom stuff is hard, though. I’m not very good with any of this stuff. I record to tape because I’m really terrible at computers, not because I am really good at anything else. I think my technological skill level is the same as someone who’s, like, 30 years older than me.
Allegra: Yeah. I just really can’t problem solve. If somebody gives me something and it’s set up and it’s going to work, then I can press record, great. But it has to be, like, one perfect take because I have no editing skills and I get really frustrated really easily that I’ll just kind of give up. I actually haven’t even really delved into recording my own stuff because I am so adverse to computers and gear. I’m really not a gear person. It’s just a different language that I have very little patience for. Although I did just buy a drum machine. It’s an old analog drum machine, but it has five buttons and I was like, “That’s the most I can do.”
Greg: That’s the way I feel. Everything that I use was kind of born out of — well, a lot of it was, what could I get for that I could afford? And then the other aspect was, what is the easiest to use? Because I didn’t go to school for recording or anything like that. I just figured out over time by being like, “What is the easiest way to do this? How can I put a microphone in front of myself and get it to sound good enough as quickly and painlessly as possible?”
Allegra: What do you record with?
Greg: The last record was a reel-to-reel.
Allegra: Oh, cool.
Greg: There was a little bit of learning curve in terms of loading the reels of tape and figuring out how to route the board to it, which is something that I had never done before. But it was pretty intuitive.
Allegra: So you mix from a board with the knobs?
Greg: Yeah. Which was a little bit intimidating, but it ended up being pretty easy. The thing that always fucks me up with computers is, if something’s not working, what do you even do? Like, it’s a computer program…
Allegra: Yeah, you need a straight genius to fix that.
Greg: Yeah. The full breadth of my problem solving techniques on a computer is to restart the computer.
Allegra: [Laughs.] Yeah.
Greg: But with physical things, it’s like, “Oh, maybe this cable doesn’t work.”
Allegra: And you could technically open up the machine, I imagine, and see where the problem is happening pretty visually. And with the computer, it’s like a black box that might explode. That was the shit with my last computer — I had a really old Apple laptop, and then I was like, “Fuck Apple.” Every few years, they reboot, shit stops working, and then they make new chargers and they want you to spend more money. So I got a Dell, and the Dell lasted less than a year because it was getting so hot that I was like, “It’s gonna explode.” I was just afraid of using it. But now my my sister is living with me, so I get to use her [computer], which is nice.
Greg: Yeah, my computer situation was pretty horrible. I held on to this one that still worked, but I wasn’t updating it so I couldn’t do anything new with it. And then my hard drive filled up and no matter what, I deleted, it was still full.
Allegra: Also I’m like, “What’s a hard drive?”
Greg: I don’t know. But I also don’t understand what a tape is. It’s, like, magnetic? I don’t understand how you put information on there, though.
Allegra: When was the last time you felt really strong magnets together? Because that is fucking cool. My coworker has a couple magnets that he just keeps in his pocket and plays with because it’s like a nice fidget. Then I was playing with them and I was like, “This is so cool,” because they’re really strong. When you put two magnets [together] — I sound like a literal child talking about this, but it was awesome to play with them. It had been so long.
Greg: They’re cool. Kind of recently, actually, I did a transmission fluid drain on our car and the drain plug is a magnet. It’s really hard to get back in because when you’re done, before you got it to where it needed to be, it would stick.
Allegra: Because it’s such a strong magnet?
Greg: Yeah.
Allegra: Woah. Do you still have that gold car?
Greg: I do, yeah. But we got another one. We got one that makes more sense for touring than that.
Allegra: I was wondering, because I guess you and V [Greg’s partner] don’t have a huge setup. You just bring bass, guitar, and then a little keyboard. So you could technically tour in that. But [the car] seemed old, and the last time I saw you driving it, maybe slightly dangerous.
Greg: I mean, it’s always got something going on with it. Also, we’d fit all our stuff in it, but it was really cramped. The back seat was full of shit. And I’m trying to bring more merch, because we kept running out of merch on tour because we just weren’t able to fit very much in our car.
Allegra: Yeah. That’s the shit with merch, it’s just hard to carry all that.
Greg: Yeah, it’s a lot. We got those giant totes from Home Depot — you know, with the yellow tops.
Allegra: Yeah, yeah.
Greg: The ones that I’ve been seeing bands have for over a decade and I’m like, “I want to get one of those.” And now it’s finally happening.
Allegra: It’s the time. Have you had a merch person before, someone to help you sell?
Greg: I haven’t, but we’re gonna have one.
Allegra: Nice! For upcoming tours this fall?
Greg: Yeah. Which is another thing — with the gold car, we couldn’t bring anybody.
Allegra: I’m trying to figure out a vehicle situation. I have this little Volkswagen Golf that my friend — I was on tour on the West Coast doing buses and trains, and it was his brother’s and it was sitting in Joshua Tree. I took it and it drove me back home to the East Coast, but I haven’t been able to fix it since then. It doesn’t run. And I keep thinking, Oh, I just need probably $1,500 to $2,000 to put into it. But then it’s also not great for touring. It’s so small. I don’t know if I should just sell it for parts… I can borrow Kevin [Copeland, Allegra’s partner]’s car, but now Kevin’s truck isn’t really working. That’s what I was actually just doing this morning — I had to go sit in his truck for street sweeping, because he’s on tour.
Greg: Classic. I used to do that for my friend when I lived in New York.
Allegra: When did you live in New York again?
Greg: There was some time that I was unofficially there in the early 2010s — I lived on my friend’s couch for six months. And then I lived there from 2014 to 2017.
Allegra: If you moved to North Carolina — what is prompting that change?
Greg: V really likes it down there, and I feel like doesn’t want to live in a city. I like the movement, so I don’t know if I want to do that. But I guess I’d be open to trying.
Allegra: I’m always feeling that with Vermont. It’s so beautiful up there and really peaceful. And then when I’m there for a few months consecutively, which I’ve done a couple winters now, I start to get a little cuckoo. But I wonder also if, as I get older, maybe you crave more peaceful, quieter times… And it’s cheaper.
Greg: Maybe. But maybe some people just don’t. I think something about a bunch of things going on around me kind of settles me.
Allegra: Yeah, me too. It lulls me. A little blanket of noise kind of makes me feel more peaceful, somehow. When I’m in a really quiet place, it’s harder for me to sleep because every sound just sticks out.
Greg: Yeah, totally. But I also like being able to be distracted at any point. It’s really easy in New York — you just sit in a park and there’s a million different things that you can watch and get sucked into, and a bunch of little dramas happening.
Allegra: Totally. Even just a street sweeping, I had to sit for an hour and a half and I saw two altercations happen. I also saw a guy walking by with no shoes — and it seemed like he had somewhere to go. He was walking very swiftly.
Greg: I need things like that.
Allegra: Yeah. I feel like when I’m in nature — like, beautiful nature — it’s almost too beautiful. I can’t really absorb what’s in front of me. And then when I’m in a city, it’s like humanity. I’m like, I know what that’s like. I feel like New York — and Philly too — where it’s brimming with humanity, where people are just exposing the undercurrents of darkness… It’s just something I relate more, that sort of comical, darker underbelly, with the love of people watching out for one another. And then and when I’m in nature, especially when I’m alone, I’m just like, This is way bigger than me. And I admire it, and obviously I think all people need access to spaces with real earthly things. But it’s almost overwhelming, and I can’t appreciate it as much after a certain point.
Greg: I think there is the same kind of drama in nature, but I don’t know how to decipher it. It’s like a foreign language to me. And then also — well, I’m thinking about your song now, where you talk about the yellow butterfly. [“Into Eternity.”]
Allegra: Oh, yeah.
Greg: Which I love.
Allegra: Thanks.
Greg: If you see a yellow butterfly and you’re in fucking North Carolina and everything is beautiful, it’s like, “Oh, there’s one in a million yellow butterflies.”
Allegra: Yeah, absolutely.
Greg: It doesn’t mean anything to me. Somewhere like Philly or New York, if you see one little beautiful thing, it’s really precious because everything around you sucks.
Allegra: [Laughs.] Yeah.
Greg: Or not sucks, but the contrast is is bigger.
Allegra: I totally agree. It’s the same thing with flowers — springtime in New York when you see buds and you’re like, “How could this be here right now? It’s so beautiful.” Also, I think reserving the feeling of [wonder]— I want to be awed. When I go to the West Coast and I’m around Big Sur and you see this beauty, it’s so impactful, but if I lived there and I saw that every day, I don’t know if it would impact me at all.
Greg: How quickly do you get jaded?
Allegra: Like, “Oh, the ocean. Cool.”
Greg: “Same old view.”
Allegra: Yeah. You’re just going for a swim in this massive body of water and it’s, like, nothing. And you still have normal human problems that always override whenever they’re present and pertinent and heavy. That’s another thing I like about New York — when you’re down in the dirt, you walk around and you’re like, Hey, I’m not alone. But if you’re down in the dirt in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains… I don’t know, I guess some people are healed by that and that’s valuable. But for me, I just want to stay inside because I’m like, It doesn’t deserve my my negative vibe.
Greg: Yeah. In New York, you could find a stranger within five minutes who’s feeling the same way that you are.
Allegra: Yeah. There’s some camaraderie there.
