Heavy

It took me years to finally get this out:

Cancer Bats first record is called Birthing the Giant, and boy oh boy, finally putting this thing out certainly feels that way

On Friday, I finally released my first full-length album as Tearing Up. Thanks to everyone who took the time to listen. It’s not really what you would call “easy listening”.

I wanted it to feel like something beyond just a collection of songs.

I wanted this record to hurt.

Yadda yadda yadda, my problem is that I really do take myself pretty seriously. No one  likes to admit that, I don’t think. I think we’d rather admire the ones who are more willing to embrace the flow of life and see where it takes them, instead of some whiny brat who’s yelling at everyone to watch them say their big, super-important story (which is always about them). 

I don’t want to act like my problems are somehow bigger than everyone else’s, I have it very, very, easy in comparison to countless other people so it occasionally makes it difficult to see my own suffering as something worth paying attention to. 

Sure, a few of my friends and family members died, but I’m still a financially stable, straight-white-cis-het dude who listens to too many podcasts (one is too many) living in a country with a relatively decent social safety net. So all things considered, no matter the fall, I’m aware that I’ve got a bit of a cushion to land on. 

2018 was a really brutal year for me and my family, but it felt like it actually started in the fall of 2017. That was when I went to what would be the first in a long line of funerals. I lost a family friend to an overdose, not 10 days later my family would lose one of our youngest members to suicide, and a little over two months after that: I lost my Dad. 

Most of the songs were written... sort of before my Dad died, I know people want to say all these important things about how “music got me through the hardest times in my life” but that’s not really true for me. It was the people in my life that really got me through the hardest parts, and.. frankly... not so much the music itself, but just having something to do. 

I know right? Not really the “last night a record saved my life” story that we’re all used to hearing in these things. 

I don’t know if a record has saved my life, but there are definitely ones that have hurt. Maybe left a scar. 

I saw the Microphones on their most recent tour thanks to being friends with the venue's sound tech, I probably wouldn’t have gone if he didn’t get me in. I got into Phil Elverum’s stuff only recently, and when I finally got around to listening to Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me, I thought it was so devastatingly beautiful I couldn’t play it again. Crow was quite haunting in how Elverum describes his experience losing his wife to cancer. His descriptions of how she began to lose her mobility hit very close to home. Seeing The Microphones in 2020 was to some extent, equally impactful, because Elverum’s descriptions of his 17-year-old self were told with the kind of tenderness you give to your own child. For someone who (quite literally) violently cringes at the very thought of most things I did when I was 17-Yesterday, I was taken aback by the kindness he showed to his former self. 

Early in my career as Billy Moon I remember watching the frontman of some Gaslight- Anthem-esque band talk about how a song was about his late father and thinking: “that’s a threat, that’s a gun to the audience’s head saying: “you can’t say anything bad about this song, because if you do, I will be very sad.” I’m aware that saying how personal or how painful an experience was in the process of making art is kind of a way to shield the artist from criticism, but I promise I’m not doing that here. Then again, I could be lying. Artists do that. 

In the beginning of 2020, I left a therapy session after it got cut short, and 45 minutes later, ended up crying uncontrollably in an LA Fitness. After that I’ve realized some things about myself, but it’s also made some music harder to listen to, since I now know what buttons are being pushed. 

Billy Bragg’s “Sexuality”, Dixie Chicks “Wide Open Spaces”, Andy Shauf’s “My Dear Helen”, Cindy Lauper’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”... Even writing this list makes me misty. At the real root of it, I think I just wanted to write a song that could make someone cry. Just something that would make a person feel something, realize something, or remember something they thought they’d forgotten. I hope I’ve done that with this record. 

After the pandemic hit I was kind of relieved. A full year of touring, recording, and managing all the other members of the band had been really draining on me. Not to mention my brother and I had spent a full year preparing our childhood home to be sold, plus as much of our father’s estate as we could. In the midst of all that I was still touring and recording. 

October of 2017 to January of 2020 basically felt like one very, very, long year. But even before that, the record was always going to be called Heavy. 

And now it’s finally here.

Thanks for being a friend,

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