The right of passage has been carved out for me by hundreds of artists from whom I have drawn inspiration and whose art I have borrowed and stolen. I would like to name some of the musicians, and their respective albums, that I have drawn from.

Like this:

-D’Angelo, Voodoo:  D’Angelo is leading the analogue revolution (or what I hope becomes a revolution).  In the late 90s he assembled an incredible ensemble of black artists, to include Questlove, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Common, J Dilla, and many others, collaborating with the “Soulquarians” to produce Voodoo entirely on analogue, 2” tape at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, a facility that Jimi Hendrix commissioned and where legends such as Stevie Wonder recorded.  Voodoo is immaculate, and never touched a computer.  If I had not heard Voodoo, none of this would be happening.  In the liner notes of Voodoo, D’Angelo writes a surreal explanation of the concept album, a densely rhythmic study of, and homage to, great black music traditions through the physical, material process of analogue recording and production.  Questlove gives some awesome interviews about D’Angelo clapping milliseconds behind the click track while recording drums to give songs like “Devil’s Pie” a nuanced, stuttered feel.  Recording that way on tape is almost impossible, and the musicianship on Voodoo rivals the prestige of a symphony.  It is tasteful and brilliant and revolutionary.

-Buffy St. Marie, Illuminations:  Buffy St. Marie is an Indigenous Canadian-American folk artist.  While Buffy St. Marie was producing albums in the mid to late 60s alongside other politically active musicians such as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, she was blacklisted from American radio stations by the Lyndon Johnson administration for her advocacy of Native American Rights.  Perhaps in response to the alienation she experienced in the 60s while so many voices were being lifted, Marie wrote and released Illuminations, the first folktronica album to ever be released, the first quadrophonic vocal album to ever be released, and the first album to utilize a Buchla synthesizer for vocal production.  Illuminations is a ground shattering work that has largely gone unnoticed.  Similar to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, it isolated her from her folk contemporaries due to its sharp left turn from her prior work.  Unlike Dylan’s homage to the Blues, Illuminations is gothic, eerie, electronic, and experimental in nature.  Released in December of 1969, the same month as the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, Illuminations is the revelatory apocalypse of the 60s.  Unlike albums from Dylan and the Stones, Illuminations has not received any awards or accolades and is rarely cited by modern folk and electronica contemporaries.  While Bon Iver received Grammy nods for 22, A Million for the experimental, electronic nature of the album, Buffy St. Marie was experimenting with vocal texturing and synth modulations amidst acoustic guitars in 1969.  To this day, Illuminations is still largely hidden, a culturally enigmatic, masterpiece.  And both its grandeur and its blacklisting has, in large part, to due with the fact that Marie is a strong and bold Native American woman in music.  If Buffy had not experimented with the Buchla synth, I would not be combining Bolsa Bass and banjo.  Thank you, Illuminations.

-Julien Baker, Sprained Ankle:  Julien Baker’s freshman album is wild.  It is thoroughly post-Christian, while also being rooted in the hope of the goodness of human life.  While Noah Gunderson croons of self-aggrandized deprecation and a pseudo-Nihilism, Julien Baker seems to transcend American-martyrdom by simply being honest and being herself–queer, Christian, recovering alcoholic, woman, electric guitarist.  Sprained Ankle is intimate, heartwrenching, and angelic at times, and the title track may be in my top 10 favorite songs of all time (“Sprinter learning to wait, a marathon runner, my ankles are sprained” literally brings me to tears every time I hear it).  I should own that I formatically borrowed the transition from “Blacktop” to “Sprained Ankle” in The Responsorial and essentially stole the timbre, tone, and tuning of “Blacktop.”  Sprained Ankle was the musical influence that sparked the initial song for The Responsorial, “Acting Out.”  I probably owe Julien Baker money.

-Phoebe Bridgers, Stranger In The Alps:  Phoebe should not have needed Ryan Adams to be heard.  “Killer” was poetic before its final production, and the subsequent Stranger In The Alps is perhaps the most important indie folk album of our time.  It musically and lyrically captures millenialism while being simultaneously frivolous in character and distinctively mature in evaluation of contemporary culture.  The production is timely and clean, but the songwriting is timeless and I am convinced it will continue to influence musicians one hundred years from now.  I have listened to “Smoke Signals” and “Funeral” on repeat to understand the direction of The Responsorial, and I also think no one should cover a song ever again following “You Missed My Heart;” Phoebe Bridgers won, covers are cancelled.  Stranger In The Alps is genre defining, and if I were asked what to compare my music to, I would probably name this album first, in spite of the scowls and questionable glances.  I am very indebted to Phoebe Bridgers’ music.

-Sufjan Stevens, Illinois and Carrie & Lowell:  I did not fully grasp minimalism before Illinois.  I cannot overstate Sufjan’s influence on me.  I recall watching Sufjan perform Carrie & Lowell with the guitalin and suddenly understanding the intersection between folk revival and modern songwriting, unearthing traditional instruments alongside painfully vulnerable emotion.  The concert left us all in tears and Sufjan performed the album about his mother’s death front to back without speaking a word in between songs, and then walked off stage.  If ended at that point, I would have been moved by the performance, but maybe left confused.  Then, the band walks back on stage and Sufjan goes, “Hi, I’m Sufjan Stevens,” and proceeds to play almost the entirety of Seven Swans in traditional folk-concert style, telling funny stories and using metaphor between songs, eliciting audience participation, and talking about the human experience from behind an open-back, duck-taped banjo.  Somehow this is all happening amidst a foundation of polyrhythmic, orchestral minimalism.  It is musically dense, historically significant, and thoroughly American-folk–everything that I hope to accomplish.  Sufjan recently released two tracks in celebration of Pride month, both of which are beautiful throughout their folk-like arrangement and folk-like sensibility, as they lift and honor the LGBTQ+ community.

-Radiohead, Kid A and In Rainbows: it would be a boldfaced lie to not mention Radiohead (Stan Donwood and Nigel Godrich, included).  Kid A changed everything for me: musically, artistically, philosophically–it was defining.  I remember sitting in my dorm room as a senior listening through a CD copy I had bought from Cow Records, captivated, horrified, and realizing I wanted to write very, very different music than I had been up until that point.  Kid A is conceptually the backbone of “Sirens Sound” (don’t use guitars!) and a formulaic sketch for The Responsorial (sing without reservation, for everything and nothing, and never be ironic ever again).  Further, there are two tracks from In Rainbows that changed the way I produce music: “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and “Videotape.”  I borrow the polyrhythmic interplay of electric guitars on “Weird Fishes” in several tracks of The Responsorial, most noticeably by overlapping timing in 3/8 and 5/8 with a core backbone of 4/4.  Similarly, I steal the idea for sparse drum loops from “Videotape” in an unnamed track Steve and I are currently producing.  I think both tracks are listed in my top 5 most played in itunes.

-Kanye West, Yeezus:  it pains me to see how we roast Kanye as Americans.  No less dysfunctional than Andy Warhol or Frank Zappa, West’s art seems to be usurped by his public image.  Most folk seem to both love and hate him for the same things, interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammys or wearing MAGA hats.  Fame does not seem to accommodate mental illness, and the public eye both enthrones and crucifies black men suffering with it.  Perhaps it’s the same reason we hate rap and love Rick Rubin (SOAD, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Yeezus-ironically).  On that note, I think Kanye actually gets it–how his fame works.  On Yeezus Kanye utilized the talent and fame of Rick Rubin to craft a reductionist, industrial, 10 song slap in the face detailing grandeur, addiction, fame, mental illness, and isolation.  It is a seminal work that drew lines in the sand amongst many fans of Kanye West, a smart and brave left turn.  It cemented Kanye’s mean reputation in a way that feels knowingly ironic and still firmly rooted in the rap game, despite its utilization of Daft Punk and Bon Iver.  It is a conceptual influence that I owe to Kanye West, as I do not pretend to sound anything like his music, nor could I do it well.  It seems lame to admit, but Yeezus made me feel like it was alright to swear in music, and from it I borrowed the sentiment that less really is more in much of art.

mewithoutYou, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright:  philosophically, this is perhaps the largest debt that I owe.  The same friends who inspired this post are also the people who introduced me to It’s All Crazy! right at the time I was wrestling with a redefining of religious doctrine and amidst intense abandoned anger regarding the church.  For this album, songwriter Aaron Weiss studied and reassembled stories, poems, and folklore from M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadden, the Hebrew Bible, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Greek New Testament, Rumi, Shaikh Muhaiyaddeen, and Hafiz, to create a radical, existential, eternal question mark at ground zero of Being(?) that got the album (and probably the band entirely) burned, boarded up, and kicked out of Berean Christian Bookstore and many fundamental churches, an exile for only the holiest of martys and saints alike.  The final, and sort of title track, of the album, ﷲ ﷲ ﷲ, is an exhortation of Neutral Milk Hotel proportions, proclaiming, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what effect is without a cause? It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, so lay your faithless head down on necessity’s cotton hand, there’s a love that never changes no matter what you’ve done.”  What feels like embodiment of the spirit of George MacDonald, Weiss and crew hint at eternal damnation and eternal salvation for all–probably in that order.  I am not nearly as well read as Aaron Weiss.  And, like lots of poorly researched scholarship, many of the songs from The Responsorial draw from the ideas of the works cited that mewithoutYou offers on It’s All Crazy! and I am eternally grateful, and indebted, for this.

-Solange, When I Get Home:  the latter two albums I am referencing as influences were released post-writing period for The Responsorial, and their influence comes in the way that I am wanting to musically and artistically align my work.  In When I Get Home, Solange borrowed from Steve Reich’s work in minimalism, repeating phases and patterns, to create a modern homage to both her home and to R&B/soul music.  When I Get Home is unlike anything I’ve heard before: it is moving, funky, passionately written, and also unapologetically academic in its study of repetition.  The beginning track of the album is one line recapitulated, seeminglyt tempo rubato, through reharmonized melodies; “I saw things I imagined,” over and over and over again.  Solange is before me, and combining minimalism with her work in R&B, hip hop, and soul.  I hope to do the same with folk music.

-Adrianne Lenker, Songs and Instrumentals:  Adrianne Lenker released Songs during the lockdown in 2020, an album recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely on 8-track reel to reel tape.  Someone else!  There are very few musicians pushing analogue, and fewer doing it well.  Lenker wrote and recorded an almost flawless record 100% on tape.  It is incredibly moving, and I am listening to it over and over as I try to figure out what things sound good on tape, what things do not, and how to multitrack well without digital processing as a single-performing musician.  Per Big Thief’s discography, Lenker’s lyrics continue to present with introspective, object oriented metaphors throughout their letter format, observational narrative structure.  Shifting between first and second person, the songs of Songs are surreal and intimate.  Adrienne Lenker is doing it much more successfully than I am, and I feel excited to internally think of myself as a contemporary artist.