“I Fucking Hate Folk Music”

In my early twenties living in Memphis, I began to dabble in music at the same time I was making my first no-budget films. I learned to crudely play the banjo from my friend Tim and shortly after, I picked up a guitar. I found songwriting to be invigorating and immediate, similar to making films for no money, with two-person crews and no expectations. In both pursuits, I was motivated by exploration, experimentation and adventure. When I could, I combined my passions. For my first film, Team Picture, I wrote the lead character to be a wannabe singer-songwriter, so I could practice writing songs. I felt myself improving in both endeavors, but pressured to choose one or the other. When I moved to Brooklyn in 2012, I committed entirely to movies, as I thought that was my best chance of creating a sustainable career and affording to live in New York. As my rent skyrocketed from $350 to $850 a month, my relaxed days of music and movies in Memphis were replaced with a frantic hustle for any paying gig, as I sunk deep into credit card debt.

As the decade progressed, I kept plugging away at micro-budget movies, co-directing one with Albert Birney that got into SXSW (Sylvio), then another that got into Sundance (Strawberry Mansion). Eventually, this led to a development deal for a new film, one that promised our first actual budget. Though we were thrilled, we had to acquaint ourselves with a completely different creative process. Now we were on somebody else’s timeline, and every step of the way we had to convince a team of people before moving on to the next stage. Years went by, and frustrations grew about the glacial pace of working this way and dark fears started filtering in — maybe the film would never get made.

After the death of my mother last year, my shock, despondency and anger were followed by an unexpectedly creative period. In between drafts of our project in development, I quickly wrote two other scripts, which came to me easily. There was a lot I wanted to say, a feeling I wanted to capture. I wasn’t sure how long the raw emotions would last, but my grief had unleashed in me a new clarity as a writer. I felt strongly about both scripts and was eager to make them. But I didn’t see a way forward until we’d established we were capable of working with a budget. With the film industry still in emergency mode after the pandemic and strikes, our film didn’t seem like anyone’s top priority. It ate at me that I hadn’t produced any art since our last film in 2019 (other than a failed commercial for a social media giant that never aired). I felt trapped, blocked from doing the thing I’d devoted my life to. I could no longer afford to make no-budget films and trying to make one with a larger budget seemed like a never-ending illusion.

After eight years of not playing music, one day I dug out my old guitar. It happened slowly – at first, I just tried to remember some chords, then some strumming patterns, then I tried to remember my old songs. Gradually, it started to become a creative outlet again. Without thinking about it, I began to write new songs. Several months later, I had 17 new ones. It was just a creative practice, at first, and I had no intention of recording or releasing them. Then one night, riding the Q train over the Manhattan bridge on my way to see the new Ross brothers’ film, it suddenly hit me. I needed to create something and finish it — something I could control from beginning to end. I needed to reconnect with the spirit of my early no-budget filmmaking and music-making, creating freely without overthinking and not worrying about production value or audience expectations. The next day, I bought a cheap four-track recorder and started to lay down the tracks for what would become my album, Old Amateur, alone in my living room.

One of my favorite lines of dialogue in the history of movies is from Inside Llewyn Davis when Oscar Isaac’s character spews out, “Oh God, I hate fucking folk music – I fucking hate folk music!” It comes at the end of the film, after 100 minutes of Llewyn clearly caring deeply about folk music, having put every ounce of heart and soul into his music until he feels so beaten down and unappreciated that he can’t help but lash out in rage. Movies are the same way for me. Sometimes I hate movies so much. I fucking hate movies. At least, everything that comes with trying to make them for a living — the desperation, toiling away forever trying to do something different or pure (whatever those words mean), barely making a dime, subject to the cruelties of the industry and the public eye. Sometimes it feels like there is no audience at all for arthouse films, especially ones that don’t star the celebrity of the moment. When, once in a blue moon, general audiences perk up for a true independent film, it’s easy to convince myself it’s objectionable for one reason or the other, like Grandma Moses on stage at the Gaslight Cafe. I used a clip from this scene at the end of my album, followed by the opening sequence in Ishtar, another all-time classic in the world of delusional musicians.

It’s rare to hear music that has mistakes or obvious imperfections. There are many in Old Amateur — I flub lyrics, sing out of tune, my tempo is erratic; you can hear ambulances blaring in the background, flies buzzing around the microphone, my stomach growling. I would forget to mute my laptop sometimes and email dings would come in during the recordings. While singing “Wow AI,” my computer’s Siri was activated by a lyric on public opinions — it interrupted the song to explain what a public opinion poll was. I left it in, feeling like it added a layer of irony to a song about artificial intelligence. I pose the question, “What would you say if AI wrote this song? / How would you feel if it asked you to sing along?” The truth was that it wasn’t written by AI, its irregularities were all too human. Every time I play the songs, they’re different. I change vocal inflections or recite the lyrics instead of singing them, or improvise guitar picking patterns. Having developed our latest film for years, I was worried we were smoothing out too many rough edges. I wanted to get back to raw spontaneity, to show the fingerprints and smudges. The tracks don’t have the punch of a studio record with a full band, but they have something I was more eager to present — intimacy and vulnerability. When I made Team Picture in 2007, it was lumped into an emerging subgenre called mumblecore. These were films characterized by lo-fi production value, naturalism and improvised scenes. I loved to make films this way and missed the free-wheeling attitude that came with it. I couldn’t do it anymore, so I did the next best thing: I made mumblecore music.

I wanted to begin the album by establishing a poetic feeling about the grand mystery of life. The central concept in the opening song, “We Were Born,” was inspired by a line in a Wendall Berry book called How it Went – “We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from.” I was struck by the cosmic thought and it inspired me to reflect on the ways we currently live – a huge chunk of our time spent looking at screens, scrolling social media, bingeing Netflix, etc. At our jobs, we feel stuck and voiceless. There’s sadness and heaviness there that I wanted to capture. It’s an endlessly fascinating condition being alive on Earth and having no idea why we are here. Many of us feel the need to come up with an explanation and it’s always incomprehensible to the rational mind. So we usually just land in a place of not thinking about it too much. After establishing the foundation, I didn’t want to linger too long in the world of the metaphysical. Most of the album takes place on the ground floor, from the point-of-view of a man observing the world as he sees it. Some songs come from an autobiographical place and others don’t. For instance, I don’t have kids and I’m not rich, contrary to what I sing on “Why do I have to know this” or “I saw a tree.”

Tonally, the songs range from earnest to satirical, from sensitive to aggrieved. There are moments of humor and heartbreak. I thread together themes of alienation from the modern world, distaste for the current state of the internet, the war machine, the free press and pharmaceutical companies.

Another theme I explore is the gap between the youth of today and my generation. In my job as a film programmer for NoBudge, I’m constantly reckoning with the shifting mores and attitudes of kids in their 20s. In some ways, I still feel that young spiritually. But it’s fascinating that we’re all at different stages of our lives and trying to get along with each other. As I say in “The Generation Gap,” “the young are growing upside down / the old, sideways.” I feel like I’m doing both. In the second half of the album, with the song “If She Has Her Best,” the mood shifts into a more introspective mode. It’s a love song of sorts, but a sad one. I was trying to capture a melancholic feeling of seasons changing and hardships endured. Fall moving into winter, when the days get short, and the holidays creep up on us steadily and without fail. This period last year was particularly poignant for me, because I was grieving my mom and trying to imagine the holidays without her, and my wife was out of town a lot for work. I sank into a period of intense loneliness and isolation. This might be the heart of the album, if you can stomach the sentimentality and the imperfections, which are particularly glaring in this song.

All told, 12 tracks running 45 minutes, sometimes direct, sometimes obscure, a picture of a man in his early forties reckoning with his past and present. The album title, Old Amateur, comes from the feeling of having lost my youth, but still being unsure of my place in my chosen profession. The thing is, I like being an amateur. I like things to be rough, to lack polish and professionalism. It feels honest that way. There’s nowhere to hide. Listening back to the album, I had a thought: You can hear me receiving an email on the recording of the last song – I think it’s funny to imagine this was a message from our film financier saying that we got the final greenlight to make our new film, signaling that I can finally go back to making movies and forgot about this half-baked musical side project. It wasn’t. We’re still waiting.