Towards the end of my Zoom with the musician Superfan, formerly known as Kali, he said something which caused me to accidentally knock over my cup of coffee—much to my dismay and unbeknownst to him until, I guess, he happens to read this. “I think bad songs are written when people lie to themselves” is what he said. Simple, yes, but simple in the way that any proverb must be if profundity is latent. The coffee has now seeped into my computer, just as the quote has saturated my mind, leading me to where I am now: at the Apple Store, waiting for my computer to be fixed, as I try to figure out how to write an intro for someone who speaks circles around me.

Coming off the release of Tow Truck Jesus, his first album under the new alias, Superfan embarks now on a tour across the states. The music is decidedly heavier and fuzzier than it once was, carrying with it wisdom and acuity, grounded by moments of tongue in cheek, and altogether a project which is good enough to jump on the chance to listen to it live. He plays today in Los Angeles, followed by a final show in San Diego tomorrow, July 18th. In this interview Superfan does anything but lie to himself, inviting me into an in depth examination of his musical process, the intentions which define such, and the effect of playing live on how he sees and records his own music.

How has the tour been?

The tour has been somewhat hectic, but I also find touring to be pretty peaceful in a sense. My obligations revolve around something that I enjoy severely and work really hard for—it's nice knowing that my anchor for the days I'm playing shows is to play music. That’s the most important thing. I have decision fatigue in my everyday life already, because I do not have the privilege to just lock myself in a room forcing myself to write poetry all day. It's hard to operate on decision fatigue in all aspects, especially living in New York. But when I'm on tour, I can kind of operate on an as needed basis. It forces you to really commit to yourself and be communicative with the people that you're with, and also with yourself around what you're needing and be not inflexible, but just more, I guess, in a way, self-oriented in this semblance of commitment. 

In contrast to film or literature, in which after you put something out into the world, it's sort of locked for the artist and extension comes only from the viewer—it’s the viewers who engage with the finished work and give it more life. But for music, you can release something and then afterwards you can continue playing the music live. ‍So you still, as the artist, potentially have the liberty to affect, re-curate, and reconfigure post the initial release. How has that experience been? You've released your album, but now you're retranslating and rendering the music anew through live performance. With this in mind, how does that make you look back on the released project itself?

The first thing that comes to mind is the way that I go about rehearsals and stuff and music directing, because it's interesting being adjacent to pop music and seeing people that start making music when they're my age and start getting into this stuff and maybe gain success in the middle of their 20s without this foundation of playing live. Playing live and running rehearsals in the way that I do—my friends would call me a dictator and my bandmates would use the words of “loss of autonomy” to describe their role—is as fragile as the music itself. But in a way, it's almost easier because I already know what I want. So it's just a matter of communicating that effectively to other people. 

There's something so indescribable about bringing new songs to life because of that humaneness and the ability to accentuate things that you cannot accentuate on a record. Dynamics is a huge part of that. It's something that you don't really realize when you're recording but it's hard to make things really quiet and soft and really loud and harsh in a way that is palatable and in the same context of one song. And I think also, just with playing shows, depending on what's going on that day, or who's at the show, or how I'm feeling or how my bandmates are feeling, everything kind of effects the next thing and because the songs are so emotional and malleable and receptive to those emotions, it becomes a very potent experience, I think, for people that are watching it. It only furthers the ideas that I'm communicating on the record, like it really just makes the sonic landscape super clear. 

I've been talking about the difference between me playing solo versus me playing with the band. They definitely, to a certain extent, show off different things. My voice is obviously more upfront when it's just me and a guitar and really makes an example of the strength of the songs in their bare bones state and how I wrote them. There's no absence of musicality in the stripped down form. And on the flip side, playing live expresses the full range of my musicality and my ability to compose everything and work with all of these moving parts. But it doesn't negate the strength of the songwriting, either. Everything just kind of supports each other.

Which is probably the mark of a good project. The fact that it can be malleable and flexible, both in interpretation when one is listening to it, but also from your vantage point, in which different things are illuminated based on something as simple as a setlist, or what the tone of the set more generally is. 

I considered playing the album from start to finish, but live-wise, you have a lot more freedom and the record has songs which can exist on their own, without attachment to the context of the record. So it's really been fun to play around with that. And kind of build a different arc, I almost have started to realize it's this matter of openness and vulnerability that the record starts out with. And when we play live, it's reversed in a way where it's like, we're definitely louder in the first half of our set and broader, and then as this set progresses, I'm opening up more and it's way more vulnerable and people actually see me as a person.

Why intuitively do you think you flipped that arc?

I think because even though this is my reality, it would be a little terrifying to open a set talking about, like, my tits being chopped off and all of my worst insecurities. We end the set with that song. I think the first song we play is “I'd Rather Hold Myself.” The way we play that is exactly how I wanted it to be played, which is very satisfying, but it's super loud and there's all of this noise and stuff. And it's funny, in a way it's like me saying, “I don't care if you don't fuck with me, I'm good.” 

So, I think it just comes down to my own relationship to playing live and performing. I would never want to start the set with “When You Come to LA,” because I wouldn't want that hyper specificity that is so easily taken advantage of and misused to come across as performance. I’d rather wear my armor at the beginning and then kind of take one piece off at a time versus, you know, start naked and put things on, you know?

Totally. The arc feels very conversational—when you meet someone, it's not necessarily common practice to sort of leave the armor at the door, and just say everything. You sort of have to earn the other’s consent to be vulnerable. And not just earn their consent because of proper etiquette, but also because it's more profound or meaningful if it comes over time.

Yes, it's way more meaningful. And people start to understand the context of these vulnerabilities by the end of the set. But you have to gain their trust, and they have to gain your trust as well. 

When you were recording the album itself, how much were you thinking about performance and the live renditions of it? Were you actively thinking, ‘Oh, this would sound good live’, or ‘I should make this decision because this is something that will lend itself to being played live’?

To a certain extent, yes, but for different reasons. Because all of the recordings of the songs were rooted in my arrangements that I had toiled away at from playing the songs so often live, just me and the acoustic guitar. And so at the core of every song is just me playing that song live on guitar—just me singing and playing. And then we built around that. And then as we were building the project that I had made before, which I had made years before at this point, I wasn't conscious of live arrangements at all.

I knew that for this record, and just based on the music that I've listened to, I didn't want to be put in a position where I'd have to rely on an Ableton Live situation with 80 tracks of layered guitars and ambient synths and stuff that comes in and out. So I did think about it in that sense, and I didn't want it to feel too claustrophobic. I didn't want them to be reliant on hiding the sentimentality of the songs. And I think also because the songs were written before I recorded them and I had already played them live, I had a sense of what was necessary and what would just be like, ‘Why are we putting up a facade? What are we getting out of this?’ If you throw too much paint at the wall or something.

I remember a conversation we had a couple of months ago where you were speaking about how you did want stuff to be stripped down in contrast to how you've recorded in the past or arranged in the past. One, because you just wanted to get to the essence of something and didn’t want to clutter that, and two because you wanted to make room for the lyrics, which over time has become a really important aspect of your music, especially with the new Superfan project. 

‍So it's both practical from the live point of view with a plethora of tracks having to be considered—all of these ambient components that are hard to arrange on the stage and require a lot more equipment and personnel—but it's simultaneously a way to make room for the aspects of your music that you’d like to show off.

When I toured the previous project, I was running tracks, and it was a three-piece, but I produced these songs so densely; and in a way, I was so attached to each piece, I could defend each piece. I definitely was like, ‘This comes in! And then this comes in! And then this comes in!’ And the songs ended up feeling so attached to those recordings. 

It was a pain in the ass because there were all of these malfunctions in Logic and the files were too big, and it was like this extra layer of stress that wasn’t needed when I was already tweaking because I'm letting people in on this experience of playing these songs. It's crazy. I've talked to my bandmates, and it's really beautiful because I've found people that I can trust and who are super receptive and understand my references and my point of view. It's really worked out. It's worked out fantastic, and it's just a beautiful thing now.

How much room do you make for improvisation? We were talking about how playing live is a sort of conversational thing in which energy bounces off of the audience, and you're sort of receptive to it, and based on that you sort of move differently or re-curate. So, prior to that, do you make room for the potential to extend parts of songs or to change tones, etc.? 

Definitely. It is still a conversation when I'm working with a band, but I know the conversation exists in this air of like, okay, how can we support the song? It depends on the song, but there are lots of times where we have to deviate from the original parts on the album, and I have to come up with something new or it doesn't work in the same way. Because we are working with live instruments, there’s feedback yada yada, yada. But the energy thing is really important. I was talking to my bandmates about this—and it's been something that I've just been thinking of as a concept in general. When you are in an intimate setting with somebody, whether it’s a friend or a partner, or, for me, in the context of a band, I think that it's a myth that two people aren't feeling the same things. They may be thinking different things, and may be processing what is actually being shared differently, but you can all feel it when the song is good, and the tempo is right, and something's right. 

And you can all feel it when something's not right. You know? And so that's something that's really important to me and finding people that I trust enough to be like, ‘I can't figure this out. I'm hitting a wall. What do you think?’ To find somebody that you can bounce ideas off of in that space is super vulnerable for me. So there is that kind of conversation, but it is in the context of me having played everything and written all the parts for everything and knowing my intention with each of the songs and their tone. But my bandmates are all super talented, so they'll be like, ‘Wait, what if I do this?’ And then I'll be like, ‘Oh, that is exactly what I'm looking for.’ And other times they do something and I'm like, ‘Please don't ever do that again.’

I'm talking so much about the live aspect, I guess because you're on tour, but also because I find the tension between how you record—its asociality—and how social it becomes once you’re playing live to be really fascinating. You recorded, essentially, all or most of the instruments, which means that these components weren't arriving simultaneously—you're sort of piecemealing composition, in contrast to playing live where everything’s happening at once. The opportunity to single out and mediate isn't as easy when it's all happening at the same time. 

That is a huge challenge of it. It's something that my drummer and I have talked about a lot because we just play differently. The music we listen to is different. He's super interested in experimenting with different drum tones in a way that I have never experienced with a drummer. And he's super attentive. He has all of these ideas in a way that I wouldn't usually expect from a drummer. Even just in regards to playing the drums. And there are times where, I'll be like, ‘This is not feeling right, the way that you're playing this.’ It's not that it's incorrect, but it's not serving the song. And oftentimes, it comes down to a mindset thing. Instead of just being like, ‘Okay, can you play this instead? Or can you play this instead?’ It's like, ‘Can you think about it like this? This is what needs to be felt.’ It's a lot more orchestral in a way.

Rather than just, ‘Here are the parts, play this thing here, play that thing there loud.’ It's including people in the landscape of my brain in terms of composing, and my vision for things and trying to figure out how to explain that. Which is essentially what I'm doing with making music, at least to myself, it's trying to make sense of the world around me and the way that I'm existing within it, or the way that I'm seeing things through making music. And with live performances, I'm doing that with my band. It's like this meta thing, explaining the explanation of my life to other people. It's almost like a cult in a way. 

Yeah, I guess that would make you the Manson of the group. 

Jesus.

Considering that your bandmates have shown you that they can arrive at new approaches to the music that are ‘exactly what you were looking for,’ but weren’t seen before by you, do you have any desire to incorporate aspects of that into the recording of your next project? I know you worked with a producer who gives you the liberty to bounce a lot of things off of him, but do you have any interest in recording in a way that mimics the process you utilize when playing live?

I think at some point in my career, but the recording process is so special to me because that's the one part of my life where I'm like, ‘Okay, I have full control over this.’ So when I do bring people in or let somebody else play something, it is so intentional. Either I cannot do it, or the way that they are doing it, in the band setting, is actually exactly what I'm wanting. But starting from a place where I am doing everything myself is important for me right now because each song is a puzzle that doesn't have instructions yet. So if it's necessary to bring other people that become the pieces, then that's decided then. But I never know until I'm there because I really enjoy just going in on my own. I know that music moves through me. I always have a vague, very intangible idea of what the song should be. And that's the most gratifying thing about making music. For me, I feel like I always wind up in the place that I need to be. Everything leads to the next thing. And it all works out. 

Even if it takes me three months, I ended up getting to the place that I wanted to be in. I hate the idea of concept albums before things are written. It's one thing to conceptualize. I often find myself conceptualizing after I've gotten past the halfway point when I start to realize a pattern. And I'm giving into patterns and cohesion and my conscious awareness of my preferences and stuff. But the idea of identifying what something is, before it exists, is something that I strongly, strongly discourage and dislike in the context of making music. But that is different from being like, ‘Okay, I want to do this, or I want to make this kind of thing.’ I can see it, but I need to do the things in order to get there.

There are a lot of writers I admire that discourage one from starting with an explicit theme. Instead, you should begin with the characters, and eventually they will surprise you and lead you somewhere more interesting. But to start with an explicit point usually leads the story into an early death, or the rhythm ceases to exist, or in the worst cases, all of your cards are played—you bleed your point in excess and naturalness is lost. Is that one of the reasons you avoid starting with a concept?

I think so. I also think it's dishonesty. It's the dishonesty that exists in hyper-identifying with stuff. Which is something you and I continue to talk about, just because it is so prevalent in everything and in people and in the way that we engage with the world. It's starting to become natural for certain age groups and stuff. It's really important to me and in my practice, to check myself on my intentions and continue to ask myself if this is serving the song. I think bad songs are written when people lie to themselves, not only about being good, but about why they're making it or what it's about, etc. I never feel like I know what a song is about until but much, much later down the path.

When you predetermine what something is going to be, you are setting yourself up for failure, because then you have this expectation that it should be a certain way, when in actuality, you're gonna diverge from that, and it's not gonna be that. So it's good to have intentions and be like, I like these things, or, I kind of think this could work, but not to put too much pressure on that, because you never know. 

With Tow Truck Jesus I did not know that it was gonna be what it became at all. I had no idea, and that's the fun part—being pleasantly shocked and surprised when you open yourself up to letting things move through you. I think it's a lesson that I'm trying to learn in my life. Music teaches me a lot of lessons about the way that I would like to live my life, because it's almost like the ideal version of myself is the person that makes these projects and takes them as far as I can. It's not about shoulds and shouldn'ts. It's about what feels right and listening to that.