Xander Duell is a Brooklyn-based composer and songwriter. His latest record, Pegg, with the project Pegg, is out now.
Emma Straub is a novelist and the owner of Books Are Magic in Brooklyn; Xander Duell is a New York-based composer and songwriter who performs under the project Pegg. Pegg’s self-titled debut just came out on IS NOT MUSIC, and to celebrate, the two friends got together to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Emma Straub: My first question for you, Xander, is that you there are approximately 400 different musicians who are on this record and in your life — and yet, when you were thinking about who you wanted to talk to, you picked a novelist instead. I wanted to know: why?
Xander Duell: Well, honestly, I have yet to find a musician who’s able to talk about music in a way that makes any sense.
Emma: [Laughs.]
Xander: There’s a strand of conversation of music that’s all metaphysics — and that’s nice, but it doesn’t really have any practical application. And then there’s a whole strand of conversation that’s all about music theory, which is also wonderful, but that has no emotional meaning, and no meaning meaning. It’s a technical detail. It’s like arguing about punctuation, or something. I’m interested in some of the details, but I’m more interested in the overall mission of what the project is about. Like, why are you making a book? Why are you making a song? So, I find musicians to be really inarticulate. Which I will prove in this next 45 minute conversation.
Emma: Well, I accept the challenge. And I’m glad that knowledge of music theory is not compulsory for this conversation, because I don’t have any.
Xander: We can work on that.
Emma: My musical career consists of working the merch booth at concerts. I’m good at that part. And I was on one tour — I was the opening act for my friend Stephen Merritt’s band, The Magnetic Fields. And for that, he tried to teach me the ukulele so I could sing one song, and the band all came out and sang it with me, but I really couldn’t do it at all. So I can’t even play the ukulele. It’s pathetic.
Xander: It’s not a crime. Well, what do you think about musicians talking about music? Do you listen to interviews with musicians and find them satisfying?
Emma: Yeah, I love it. I actually love what you just described as being not very interesting, which is the really granular stuff like Song Exploder. I love listening to Song Exploder, because especially with really thickly layered songs like yours, I like some songwriter having to try to explain where this synth part came from, or how they figured out what they needed. I love that, even though I don’t understand it.
Xander: Yep. I think a lot of musicians tend to have a toolbox available to them, and they pick a tool that is most appropriate to whatever the task is. So if it’s a guitar solo, they’ll figure out what’s the genre, what’s the tone that’s appropriate, and how do I make this solo work? But I don’t think they’re ever really able to explain why the sound that they’re creating affects somebody in a certain kind of way.
Emma: Wait, maybe this is a good segue, because I want to know: for this record, did you come to it wanting a certain sound? What is your goal when you are like, “I am going to make a record.” How do you approach it?
Xander: Well, I’ve tried a lot of approaches, and I can’t say that they all wound up defining the album. A couple approaches were tried and abandoned, and a few have made it through. The coolest one that I had — this was the idea: imagine the song is playing in a physical space, and it’s being played by a live band over on one side of the room, and then when you make it all the way over to the other side, it’s being played at the same time by a synthetic instrument. You know, drum pads, synths, and stuff like that. What I wanted to do was create songs where the listening experience was wandering through that space, so that the song might start all electronic, and then suddenly you dip around the corner and everything is live and real. So it’s the same musical content, but a drastically different toolbox.
My desire in music is to take somebody on a journey. Whether I succeed or not, who the hell knows. But what I’ve always loved about listening to music is that it lifts you up out of the place you’re at and — like a good book, or any kind of good artistic experience — just brings you to another place. So I love the idea of getting the listener’s mind to react depending on the musical context. You can play the same sequence of notes by two different instruments and get a completely different [reaction]. It’s almost like I’m playing with the listener, like a cat and its prey.
Emma: How much do you think about the listener as you’re writing? Because I have some friends who are artists of various kinds who think about the audience very much as they’re working — whether that’s, “Oh, people are going to love this,” or, “people don’t really love when I do this.” And then I have other friends who never, ever read their reviews, who are not spying on how they’re doing on social media all the time. You know, people who want to keep all of that — the reader or the listener or whatever — at arm’s length. How do you feel? It’s interesting to me that that’s where you start, because I think of you as someone who keeps the audience at arm’s length.
Xander: Well, that is at the track-crafting part of the process, not the songwriting part of the process. So at that point, the scary work is done — the scary work of looking at a blank page and being like, What am I writing about? What am I eliciting? At this point, you’re saying, How do I get this idea to the listener effectively?
Emma: I see.
Xander: Still, though, it’s an imagined listener. I long lost the ability to figure out what people like. Stuff that I like, sometimes people like, and then sometimes they don’t. I’ve really been focusing on the disembodied voice in my head that tells me what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea. Because my theory is, especially going into an era with more and more AI stuff, that the main interesting factor in a piece of art is the artist’s goals, or the artist’s system of decision making, what belongs and what doesn’t. So these days when I’m writing, I’m trying mostly to be true to whatever is giving me the ideas in the first place. I get pretty messed up thinking about the audience, because, you know, people want to hear a love song or they want to dance… I get thrown out of my comfort zone very quickly.
Emma: OK, let’s talk about the audience slightly differently. I want to talk about your show — you just had a show called A Wake at the River Church here in Brooklyn. This was two weeks ago, and it was wonderful. I loved it — and, as I said to you directly following, which I feel like you did not love, was, “I have a lot of questions.” [Laughs.] But my first question had to do with my understanding of what a concert is. And in the performance, in which you very cleverly and clearly and politely made sure that the audience did not clap until the very end — you know, I was ready to clap and cheer like a giddy schoolgirl, but you kept it going so there was never a moment of silence which the audience could fill in with applause. Can you tell me about that, how that fits into what you’re describing as the experience that you’re trying to create?
Xander: Well, the live experience and the album experience are two separate things. Albums are so interesting, because no matter what you do, the user has infinite flexibility. It’s like if you had a book and the user experience was somebody reading it from across a river. People will listen to my album out of their phone speakers — which I have no problem with, but it leads to a lot of confusion as to how clear you’re being when you’re laying this stuff down.
One of the reasons that I wanted to do this show like this — so, it was basically a concert, but it was trying to be more immersive. Not immersive in the sense that a lot of these things are these days, where they’re surrounding you with multimedia relating to the project. This was more like the band was around the room and the audience was within the room, and the songs were played to the audience, not just to the space. The idea with that was it was supposed to induce kind of a dream state, and I thought that applause would kind of suck you out of the thing. There could have been applause breaks between the big three chunks of the thing, but breaks between each song just seemed… I don’t think I’ve got a good answer for you. It just seemed to mess up the flow of the performance somehow.
Emma: I feel like it was your way of controlling the space, too.
Xander: Very much so.
Emma: I hadn’t thought about it that way, that with most people listening on Spotify or digitally, you literally never know if people are going to listen to your record in the order that you want them to. People are going to jump around, or maybe they like one song the most, and so they’re going to listen to that song 16 times in a row by pushing a button.
Xander: And that’s very, very frustrating because — and again, I’m not complaining. I embrace modernity and all of its challenges and fun, exciting things. But there’s something I actually figured out through baseball, that sometimes there’s a pitch that a pitcher will throw that doesn’t have any purpose in of itself, it’s only to set up the following pitch. So maybe he’ll throw really high or he’ll throw really away, and what it’s doing is it’s leading the batter into feeling more comfortable in this area. And as you’re describing, when somebody’s got your record on Spotify, they can skip ahead. You don’t have control over the time. And it is a very time-centric medium. You have to let the two minute song exist in two minutes, because if you skip it after one minute, you literally don’t experience the effect that it was designed to create. So by forcing people to listen to it the way that I want it to sound, I can actually communicate it. Which feels so good, to be able to directly put the ideas in somebody’s head.
Emma: Well, that leads to something else that I wanted to talk to you about, which is collaboration. I went into listening to the record being like, This is Xander’s record. But it’s not called “Xander the Musical,” right? It’s called Pegg. And there are a bunch of other musicians on it, and I understand that it was more of a collaboration between you and all these people. Can you talk a little bit about how the other people on this record came to be on this record? And like, what is a band? [Laughs.]
Xander: [Laughs.] I was actually just thinking about this myself earlier today. What is a band? People band together to do something… What ties these people together? My current lineup of people is — it’s all kismet. It’s 100% people that I’ve been talking about working with forever, and sort of just wound up here at this time, doing this thing at the right moment. It’s really not a band in the sense of a handful of people who are all for one, one for all, sleeping on the floors on tour. It’s more of an extended family, this particular project. Or loosely-affiliated group of like-minded lunatics.
Emma: But you are the maypole around which the project spins.
Xander: Yeah. So I think a lot of this project with Pegg has a lot to do with — I guess “ego death” would be the simple way to put it. As you can see on the poster, I’m bearing my own head… Well, these are questions I have for you. As an artist, how much are you trying to communicate something meaningful? How much are you trying to put yourself forward as the center of attention and make sure that everybody is looking to you for these interesting, poignant things? There’s a give and take sometimes. It’s been a long time focusing on me, me, me, making it the “Xander project” and trying to be the main guy. It was leaving a really bad taste in my mouth. Why was it leaving a bad taste in my mouth? Maybe because you don’t just play music by yourself. Music requires a listener. I don’t know why, but it’s drastically different to play a song in an empty room than it is to play it in a room filled with one person even. Maybe it was something about trying to hoard it for myself, both the credit and the experience of delivering the meaning. Maybe I just decided it was time to share that. You don’t exist without a huge support system anyway. And I wanted to make sure that they were part of the identity.
Emma: That’s what I was just going to say. For someone like you who’s capable of playing lots of different instruments, it seems logistically simpler to make a record on your own and layer together Xander playing the harp, Xander playing the guitar, Xander playing the piano. But that also seems much lonelier. And I say that as a person whose entire job as a writer is sitting by myself.
Xander: I don’t know how you do it.
Emma: I love it.
Xander: Well, it’s more true for music than it is for writing, but nothing I do exists on its own. So you pluck a guitar string, and you’re not creating the note. You are using something created by somebody that has been honed over hundreds of years. You’re already building on other people’s work. You sit at a piano and you’re already limiting yourself to a very specific set of tones and a very specific format. So I kind of feel like you’re collaborating anyway when you’re doing anything in music. Unless you’re just beating on your chest and singing, which is valid, I think.
Emma: You didn’t do that on this record.
Xander: Not enough. Not on mic.
Emma: [Laughs.] That’s the bonus track. So, ego death was the answer to the problem that you’d been having, which was that it wasn’t feeling right doing it on your own.
Xander: I was taking myself too seriously. I think Pegg is an attempt to adopt an old lady’s name. That’s when I grew my mustache — which I’m very anti-mustache — but the the whole endeavor is trying to decentralize myself. I got the strong sense that focusing really hard on myself isn’t going to lead me to any interesting musical discoveries. I have a lot of interesting thoughts, but they need to be brought into the real world and made real, and I can’t do that all by myself. I need to build on other people’s efforts.
Emma: I’m going to ask you a question that — I don’t know if I can still call myself “young,” but I’m going to do it anyway — that young women novelists get asked all the time, which is about how autobiographical things are. Sixty year old male novelists do not get asked about their projects being autobiographical, but women novelists always do.
Xander: Why?
Emma: It’s sexism and misogyny, I would say.
Xander: Is it the assumption that women can’t come up with a story?
Emma: I think it’s that it’s not as serious, it’s not as smart. I think I am aging out of this a little bit, which is actually nice, but it’s also like: you get this cute, young 25, 30 year old woman, and you can take glamorous photos of her. You get treated more like a young actress or a pop star. I mean, I get this probably happens to men, too. But in terms of having it all tied in to your own life, it’s deadly. But I do want to ask you about the part of the record that isn’t collaborative, which is writing the songs. Because this record, to me, feels personal, and certainly the way it was presented at the show made me actually even more aware of how personal it was. Can we talk about that too? Is that allowed?
Xander: [Laughs.] Everything is allowed, Emma.
Emma: OK, OK.
Xander: It’s interesting. I mean, music lends a real plausible deniability to everything, because lyrics can be so vague in a way that you probably couldn’t get away with in a novel.
Emma: Is that something that you like about writing songs? Is that something that songwriters in general like about writing songs?
Xander: I’ll tell you what’s funny nowadays, that I never experienced in the past, is that now when I write a song from a character’s perspective, I get in trouble for it. You grow up, and I used to hear songs about so-and-so the murderous cowboy, who went and killed a thousand prostitutes in Las Vegas or whatever. But now, I wrote a song from the voice of a character who is annoyed that the waiter didn’t show up with his food yet, and somebody was like, “This is too entitled.” It’s interesting. I think that if you don’t even write about yourself, you might reveal more about yourself in doing so, than writing about anything else.
Emma: So people might conflate things. I think that certainly happens with writing fiction. I’ve written things that are more autobiographical and less autobiographical, but still, even the things that I think of as being not very autobiographical, there are things in there that are extremely revealing and very personal.
Xander: In my songs, I have a lot of messages to myself that are written in code. A lot of references to other songs that I’ve written, a lot of inside jokes between me and myself. I’m not sure why I do that.
Emma: To amuse yourself! Because you’re having a conversation, over the course of your life. I think that’s fair. So, do you not want to talk about personal things? Because I feel like there were moments in the show in particular where you talk about very personal things, and then you lead into a song.
Xander: I think personal things are only as interesting as they can be applied to the audience members themselves. This is coming straight out of my ass right now, so it could be wrong. But it seems to me that when I’m talking about the autobiographical nature of the meaning of the songs, people take little bits and pieces and apply it to their own lives. It immediately becomes not about me.
Emma: Right. I mean, I think that’s what art does in general. Having written a book that was all about my father dying, I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten, how many people have come up to me at the bookstore, how many messages on Instagram that people have sent me about their grief, and the way that my transformation of my own grief into this object — which looks like a book, and in fact is a book — helped them sort out their own grief a little bit, or maybe just kept their grief company. I don’t claim to have solved anybody’s problems, but I do think that I have kept some people company for a little while, in writing about my own grief in a fictional way. And that’s fiction, and it’s amazing. I love when that happens.
Xander: To answer your question, I think there’s a sort of fictional nature to autobiography in a way. Like, you pick and choose which aspects of yourself you declare true and which you’re allowing to go by the wayside. You ask how much autobiography [is in the record], and it’s funny because there’s a lot about myself that I just blow right by and pretend doesn’t exist as far as the art is concerned. But I think it’s because it doesn’t resonate with me. There’s certain things I do that don’t affect my emotional life. But then, you know, my mom dying — that permeates every aspect of my daily and sleeping mind. So since it’s resonating with me in a deeper way, it becomes something I can use to elicit similarly deep emotions from other people.
Emma: Yeah. Do you think of the record as being about grief?
Xander: In part. It’s a theme for sure.
Emma: What I love about that, about knowing that and thinking about that, is that there is so much of this record that is very upbeat and fun. It’s not like a dirge — which is how I think about grief, that it’s not this one-note bog. I mean, maybe it is a one-note bog for a time, but it doesn’t stay that way. Other emotions and feelings can coexist with it.
Xander: Some of the best parties I’ve been to are after funerals.
Emma: [Laughs.] Yeah, I agree.
Xander: You lost your dad around the same time I lost my mom, and it kind of finds its way into everything, right?
Emma: Oh, yeah. The irony of it for me is that my dad was a novelist also, and he would have loved — I mean, he read my last book before he died, which I will always be grateful for — but I think he would have loved to see what his dying did to my work. Because it would have made him feel terrific. [Laughs.]
Xander: One thing about the record is that it was always a rolling process. So it’s not at all like, “Up until a certain date, I was living. At that date, I removed myself and created the album, and then came back with the album.” It came in a lot of fits and starts and there’s periods of time when I was more upset and periods of time when I was more reconciled. And, you know, there’s something to grieve every day, big or small, and something to celebrate every day, big or small.
Emma: Yeah. One thing that I want to ask you about is ambition, because I find that — well, I am older than you are. I’m 44.
Xander: I’m 23.
Emma: You look terrible. [Laughs.] I find that my ambition is really different now than it used to be. Like when I was 23, I had already written three novels, and I was trying to get them published and nobody would publish them because they were terrible. But I didn’t care because I was going to be a novelist and I was just like a train and nothing was going to stop me. And my ambition, certainly for the first 10 years that I was really trying to be a novelist, was enormous. And now I feel like… it’s not that that is gone, because part of it still exists, and I do have some concrete things that I still want to accomplish. But it’s just totally different than it used to be. I wonder if that is true for you also? Because you’ve been making music, I think, your whole life. When did you first imagine yourself a proper musician?
Xander: I think before I could even play music, I was strumming on a tennis racket when I was five and pretending like I was on stage.
Emma: That’s cute.
Xander: Ambition is a funny thing, right? It has changed to when I was younger, for sure. I don’t know how you feel, but I always kind of felt like I was able to do this. Like, I was able to create something really awesome, so therefore I was required to do it. Kind of like Spider-Man. And I still feel that call of responsibility to get this shit out there. The main feeling back then though was, “Give me attention.” My desire for achievement was really wrapped up in my desire for attention.
Emma: And this is when you’re a teenager.?
Xander: Yeah. You know, typical middle child, everybody ignores you and you get up on stage and do your thing and suddenly everybody wants to talk to you. But that can actually be confusing, because that’s not really helpful in terms of getting any closer to what your internal guiding voice is trying to tell you. And it can be leading you in the wrong direction a little bit, even as it can sustain you and keep you hooked on the process of creation. There’s a real interplay between glory and accomplishment. I don’t really know where one ends and the other one begins. How about you? What’s your feeling on posterity? Are you looking to have people reading your stuff in 300 years, and building a statue to Emma?
Emma: I mean, sure, that sounds great. But no, I don’t. I think mostly, honestly, because of the bookstore, I feel so much more aware of how quickly books go out of print. My first book came out 13 years ago, and I’m really lucky that all of my books are still in print. It’s unusual. And I mean, that’s because they’ve done well. If you sell enough copies, they’ll keep something in print, most of the time. But I don’t flatter myself that that will always be the case. I think in part because I saw that there were books of my dad’s that went out of print, and that happens. But I mean, I don’t really think about the super, super long term.
Xander: What I don’t want to do is get subsumed into somebody else’s legend. You know, like the history of reggae — there’s a chapter on Bob Marley and that’s it. All the other guys have just been stolen away. Same thing with blues and big band. Anybody who’s not, like, the top two biggest names just get forgotten, really. Just rolled up into the successful one’s career.
Emma: Yeah.
Xander: I think about that sometimes, too — there’s some people whose whole life is about getting their names on things. And they accomplish it. We still pay Con Edison based on Edison being such a smart guy. But was he really?
Emma: [Laughs.] I’m just thinking now about all of the lists that I would be rolled up into.
Xander: Who’s the most popular author in your genre? J.K.?
Emma: Oh, god no. I was just thinking about even smaller categories, like “blonde novelists who own bookstores.” There are lots of us.
Xander: I saw the other day, they put out some hyper-concentrated bit of data on a chip to send in outer space, with the human genome and all sorts of other important things. Something about that strikes me as so silly, even though my life is about trying to leave stuff for posterity.
Emma: Because the aliens are gonna have the same kind of computers, that can download that information? Yeah, I don’t know. I really don’t think about that, honestly, I guess mostly because it seems so far-fetched. You have to have such incredible timing, and even more incredible luck, to be that person. Putting aside all of the talent and the hard work. But to be — I mean, J.K. Rowling, eugh. Nobody wants to be her right now. Not me.
Xander: My mom was a painter. Her studio was full — every wall was covered in stacks and stacks and stacks of paintings. Hundreds, probably thousands of paintings, honestly. One day, she got this huge dumpster in our driveway and just started throwing them all away.
Emma: Why?!
Xander: She just didn’t want them anymore. And I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that, because I thought the whole idea was that you were going to keep them to show people.
Emma: Wow.
Xander: And then, even in your most wild dreams, how far do you think your reputation could extend into the future, past your death? Not very.
Emma: Yeah. But it’s interesting — I feel like your ambition is bigger than mine, because you’re even asking these questions. I’m like, Past my death?! I’m thinking, at most, one to two years in advance. The book that I’m working on now won’t come out until early 2026, probably. They haven’t given me a pub date yet, but let’s say January, February 2026 — which feels so far away. I guess I feel like I’m getting older, and it’s not quite that I’m calling the dumpster for my paintings, but I do feel now more than I ever have before that my pleasure is in making the object and not what happens when it comes out.
Xander: Yeah. I mean, how many book launch parties have you had before they started getting boring? Or are they still exciting each and every time?
Emma: I mean, they’re always fun.
Xander: But the meaning of the experience isn’t to be found there. That’s not what you go home at night and live with. You don’t sustain yourself on the party.
Emma: No. I mean, I had a few events for my very first book tour that did feel so, so thrilling that it did feel like it was part of the whole project. Because I had been trying to do it for so long, and to finally have an object that other people could hold in their hands… I don’t know how it is for music, but when you publish your first book, that is when your childhood dentist comes, and your mom’s friend who she plays tennis with, and all your friends from summer camp — everybody shows up. And so it does feel sort of like it’s your own wedding. It does not feel like that anymore. It still feels nice, but it doesn’t feel like that.
Xander: So you write for yourself?
Emma: Yeah.
Xander: Because you enjoy the process.
Emma: I mean, certainly.
Xander: I don’t enjoy the process so much as I enjoy just having finished something I think is good. Do you feel that, too? I’ll be enjoying myself writing, whatever, but when I finish something and I’m like, That was solid — that’s the feeling I enjoy the most. That’s the feeling I chase.
Emma: That sounds very nice. I think for me, what I like the most is when I am deep into a book and I have a whole day where I don’t have to do anything else, and I barely move for six hours. That is my favorite.
Xander: Do you always write? Or do you ever go for a walk and let these things form in your head?
Emma: No, I’m too distractible.
Xander: I wander around. I write music walking around a lot.
Emma: Do you sing things into your telephone?
Xander: Sometimes.
Emma: Otherwise you just remember them in your brain?
Xander: Well, there’s only 12 notes, first of all. And then second of all, it’s usually broad strokes of the song or the composition that comes to mind, or a particular musical puzzle. So it’s not like I remember, measure five has a B-flat, or whatever. It’s more like I’ll figure out one particular problem on a walk, or I’ll come up with a big picture on a walk. Of course, I hobble now. I don’t walk as well as I used to.
Emma: Well, I don’t think speed has anything to do with it. Is the work that you are making now weirder than it was pre-pandemic?
Xander: No. I’ve always been weird.
Emma: [Laughs.] OK, well, did it change at all?
Xander: It’s interesting, the whole time of the pandemic — if I’m not writing music, I feel very guilty. I just can’t let myself off the hook for some reason. But during COVID, I did. I was like, You know what? No music. I’m not going to feel guilty. There’s no clubs open. Nobody’s going out and watching music. So I let myself off the hook for however long. That was a year-and-a-half, and I spent all the time taking art lessons and just drawing. And that was weird. But the most impactful thing was just the time. That was a pretty long stretch of time. Over that time, I’ve learned a lot and changed a bit.
Emma: Do you still draw a lot?
Xander: A little. I don’t have the potential to be great at it, but that was what made it fun to be able to explore it, without any hope of it being worth something one day. Almost like you were saying about how fun it is to work on the book — you’re writing, writing, writing, writing. But in this particular situation, I wasn’t expecting to ever have to show it to somebody, which was very liberating.
Emma: That sounds great.
Xander: My next project is pies. I want to start learning how to make pies. I actually have a book waiting for me in your bookstore — Four & Twenty Blackbirds’ pie recipes.
Emma: I like their salted salted caramel apple pie. I will accept that as payment.
(Photo Credit: left, Jennifer Bastian)
