In my second year of college, 10 years ago (Jesus Christ), I was all of those things, and more, and better, and worse. I, certainly like many of you, had found friends, real friends that are still among the most important people in my life today. That is what A Horse Named Friday (out today, my second album, blah blah) is really about. It is not so cocksure or optimistic as Eating & Drinking & Being in Love, which is as direct as an arrow in flight (I am in LOVE, the world is scary but I am putting my best foot forward). A Horse Named Friday is messy – it is a patchwork quilt of the very best and the very worst of times, the highest of highs (literally, in some cases) and the lowest of lows. The world has drawn back its Ozian curtain and revealed the animatron behind, at once wonderful in its complexity and devastating in the lies it has told.

Today would have been Oliver Freiberg’s 30th birthday. My lifelong friend, the butt of countless jokes, a steadfast brother, son, boyfriend, athlete, over-explainer, high achiever. And now gone nearly two years. The very last time I saw him was at a show of mine at Union Pool. In Jewish tradition, when you bury a loved one, each person puts three shovelfuls of dirt onto their casket. There were enough people at his burial (a hundred? maybe more?) that we filled the hole completely. That is the mark of the friendship he bore all of us. There is nothing sophomoric (immature, silly, juvenile) about that, and yet I couldn’t help but think, as each of us circled back to the end of the line to shovel yet another mound upon his grave, how stupid it was that we were burying our 28-year-old friend. How utterly ridiculous.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? There is so much that we have no control over, and though we rage against the unfairness of loss and sink into the depths of our grief, if we have the right people beside us – our friends, our family, those we love – then that hole we have found ourselves in (that gaping, bottomless pit) is not as deep, nor as world-ending as it may seem. God help me, I am become Trope, the embracer of Cliché, but we filled that hole together, not completely whole but better for the people around us.

And here I stand, with the release of A Horse Named Friday, and I’ve never felt as sophomoric as I do now – that is, filled with piss and vinegar and love and grief and wisdom and folly and friendship. Thank you to all those that made this album possible.

Love,

Theo

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A Horse Named Friday is streaming now wherever you get your music.

I’m going on tour in September! Get your tickets at theokandel.com/tour.

I’m soooo sorry I haven’t written in here in so long!

I have been a victim of procrastination, that sweet and tempting mistress of mismanagement. I have also been busy, and to be quite honest with you, I’ve been a bit down. I’m no doomer, but the music industry (and my place within it) can become overwhelming at times.

I know what you’re thinking: “Theo, you write such beautiful songs and your fingers caress the strings of your guitar like the god Apollo plucking his lyre! How could you possibly fall into despondency?”

The fact is, I am just like you – a normal guy trying to make an honest living doing what he loves. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees. It’s hard to see how far you’ve come when your steps seem so small. When I sit in the same indentation on my couch, day after day, it can be hard to remember that there are people like you out there – people who care, even in the smallest ways, about the music I make.

That is where I take heart, and that is enough of my wallowing in self-pity. I did not write this to bemoan, but to rejoice! There are so many exciting things on the way that I can’t wait to share with you. While I am currently working on Digging Deep posts for “Sadness is a Sine Wave” and “The Station,” I figured I would give you, my most loyal subjects, a brief (yet comprehensive) overview of what is on the horizon.

Note: nobody else is getting this much detailed information. If that tickles your pickle, then hell yeah. If not, then what are you even doing here?

Recently

February 20th: “Sadness is a Sine Wave” was released. One of my favorite songs I’ve ever written.

March 27th: “The Station” was released. Song of the summer, anyone? 🫩 I also announced the release of my second album, A Horse Named Friday. That will be hitting your earwaves on August 21st. I also filmed the music video for “The Station” – it’s gonna be silly and fun and just oh-so-peachy.

Coming Soon

May 1st: “A Horse Named Friday,” the title track off the album, will be released. It is fingerpicky, it is folk, it is ME.

May 5th - May 22nd: I embark on The Very Great Quest Tour, which is gonna be something special. No drums, and all of us will be sitting around a table on stage. Think: delicious acoustic arrangements of your favorite Theo songs, rich with harmony and good cheer. There will be a slew of unreal merch that is exclusive to this tour, so you gotta be there to get it. The wonderful Kate Stephenson and Grace Gardner will be opening the shows (check the poster for which ones).

Get your tickets for The Very Great Quest Tour by clicking HERE.

Things to look forward to

June 5th: Another single - this one is called “Ghost Lives.” I’ve never really teased it, but what a slapper it is.

July 10th: The much-awaited release of “7–10 Split,” which I have been playing live for a while now. The studio version is crispy and umami. Will also be accompanied by probably the coolest music video I will ever make.

August 21st: A Horse Named Friday, my second album, will be released. For all you New York folk out there, keep an eye out for an exclusive album release show/party that I will be throwing the night before.

I may be forgetting some other things (I’m quite sure I am), but for now, I’d just like to say how much I appreciate your support. This shit ain’t for the faint of heart, and my heart is ever so much fuller with you beside me.

Love,

Teaky

In such a game, there is always an endless supply of environmentally generated mobs – that is, a computer-controlled, enemy creature. In New York, these are the squirrels, the rats, and the pigeons. Oh, the pigeons. Some have the classic grey and black coloring with the iridescent neck, some are lighter, and sometimes, you get that rare, jet-black, evil-looking pigeon with one red eye and scarred talons. Growing up in the city, I have always thought of pigeons as rats with wings.

But I have had a change of heart. You see, in recent years, I have developed a tender relationship with another bird in the Columbidae family (of which pigeons, or rock doves, are also a member). I am speaking, of course, of the mourning dove.

(lovely amazing animated video by Granger Willson)

To understand this, we must go back nearly three years, to June 10th, 2023. I was in Chicago, opening for ROSIE on my first real tour. My great-uncle had died a year before, and his gravestone dedication was that day. We had a show that night (at Subterranean, I think?), but my plan was to go to his grave and then play the show. I was staying at my grandparents’ house, which in the middle of June was a balmy 80 degrees inside, so I had opened the window in the middle of the night to cool off. I awoke at 6am to a banging inside the bedroom: a mourning dove had flown in through the open window! After snapping a quick picture, I grabbed the bird and tossed it back out the window.

Later that day, I stopped by Chicago Music Exchange to check out some of their guitars. The very first guitar I saw was a Gibson Dove. I got a text from someone in the crew, telling me to find a diner near the venue that we could go to. I Googled “diners near me,” and the very first diner I saw was Dove’s Luncheonette.

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I do not normally believe in signs, or angels numbers, or any of that kind of hocus pocus, but I could not deny that on June 10th, something was in the air. Some people believe that a mourning dove is a sign from a loved one who has passed away – who was I to deny that when I had felt it so clearly?

A few days later, I got a tattoo of the same mourning dove that had flown in through the bedroom window at my grandparents’ house.

Whew! What a preamble. All that just so I can ramble on about the complex inner workings of “Mourning Dove” to the few that will read this far?

And yet, if you’ve made it this far, then let me extend a warm hand of fraternity to you. I do enjoy writing these and you make it worth it.

Writing Mourning Dove

The song began, as many of mine do, with a nice guitar part and a good bit of mumbling. And something very cool happened while I was recording!

May 5th, 2025

If you go to 0:54, you can hear a pause in my playing, followed by the faint sound of a mourning dove cooing outside my window. I had noticed a mated pair of doves a few weeks before, doing their little dance and ruffling each other’s feathers. I think that was rattling around in my head before I heard the coo. Then, skip to 1:37 to hear me ramble, “a mourning dove outside my blah blah blah.” It’s always nice to have a concrete example of where the inspiration comes from.

I had been (and still am) listening to a lot of Adrienne Lenker. Specifically, her song “Anything,” which is chock full of beautiful imagery and internal rhymes. She walks a delicate balance of meandering lyricism that still feels so tight and satisfying. Using this as my jumping off point, I began to meander myself.

Verse 1 almost

In the second stanza of that you can hear some of those internal rhymes and repetition come through: best, best, obsessively, pressed to me.

In the Theo Kandel Songwriting School of Thought, we generally believe that a prechorus should be more than just a lead-in to the chorus. Rather, it should move and prepare you for what comes next, either with momentum or a lack thereof. A change of rhythm or cadence can always be helpful, or a completely new melody, or a completely new chord structure. The prechorus of “Mourning Dove” does all of this, but I had to work at it to get there. Here’s a recording of that:

Prechorus (figuring it out)

The chorus is repetitive, and I think that works well for the kind of song it is – yearning and circular, hammering the same point home again and again. This is a nice voice memo of me exploring that:

Chorus (figuring it out)

Verse 1 (done), prechorus (moan), chorus (moan)

A Quick Aside

Here’s a little backstory on the 8 1/2 part of the first verse.
Grace and I decided to go see a movie at Film Forum in the West Village, as we are both cultured and inquisitive people. They show real films there, man. She had heard that Fellini’s 8 1/2 was a great movie, maybe one of the best of all time, and Film Forum was screening it in 35mm (wow!), so we went, our cultured hearts all aflutter with anticipation. We were informed the following information when we arrived:

Very cool! Very authentic! So we watched the movie, surrounded by the most enthusiastic cinephiles that New York City had to offer. The crowd laughed and gasped, the theater filledwith oohs and ahs at Fellini’s masterpiece, his chef d’oeuvre. Grace and I were disappointed. The “15%” of the text that was supposed to be unreadable seemed more like 40%, and neither of us speak Italian. I will not get into my philosophy on movies (which centers around the assumption that there were no good movies before 1992 – that’s for another, more insufferable Substack post), but I will say that either I am an uncultured swine, or the movie was bad. Please leave your feedback in the comments.

Back to the song, please

So, armed with my lyrical wit and my newly discovered, soaring vocal melodies, I wrote the song – double first verse, chorus, second verse, chorus. But I knew something was missing! Not a bridge – no, this song did not need one. Not only was it already long enough, but it did not need that cinematic, dramatic turn that many of my bridges often take.

I knew it needed a double final chorus, but one that changed and built on the momentum that already thrummed through the song. It wasn’t until I went into the studio to record the song that I figured it out.

You can peruse my thoughts and rambles from my notebook below.

Recording Mourning Dove

This needed to be a simple recording. It is a simple song, despite the efforts I have gone through in this post to highlight the details. I recorded it, as I did much of this album (and Eating & Drinking & Being in Love) at Grand Street Recording in Williamsburg. Great place; lovely time. I laid down the acoustic guitar twice, and we doubled and panned ‘em. For inquisitive guitar people, it was recorded on a Gibson J-45 that Grand Street has in house. Easy lead vocal – had to keep it raw and intimate. After I got home from the studio, I knew it needed a little more juice. That second guitar part, the almost harp-like one, was recorded on this really cool 1940s Gretsch Jumbo that I had strung Nashville style (lower 4 strings an octave up). Then I added some tasteful, yet epic harmonies.

I then called upon my stringmaster and great friend Shaan Ramaprasad to record strings for the song (Shaan also did strings on “Romanticizing Poets”). I wanted it to be romantic and classic, rising in intensity as the song does. Aaaaand lo and behold: Shaan delivered, just as he always does.

Joe Ulmer mixed the song (and the whole album). It was mastered by Oscar Zambrano.

Reading Comprehension & Discussion Questions

1. This installment of “Digging Deep” comes three full weeks after the song’s release – do you think that T. Kandel is filled with a deep guilt for this blatant and despicable procrastination?

2. Despite his eloquent words to the contrary, do you really believe that T. Kandel no longer believes that pigeons are “rats with wings”? What is your local mob in your day to day life?

3. If you have seen the movie 8 1/2, did you like it? Why, then, might you be wrong?

Love,

Teaky

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“Right This Time,” the first single off of this second album (title to be disclosed at a further date) is out now. It is different; it is familiar. And quite frankly, it was not a labor of love, but was conceived and executed (mostly) in one day. This is much like the birth of Athena, in which she springs, fully formed and fully armed, from the head of Zeus. That’s a pretty good analogy, considering I am fully armed and armored in the music video for the song (watch below).

Writing Right This Time

I wrote “Right This Time” with Mickey Brandolino on May 2nd, 2024. We’d met in person the week before (after an extended friendship on social media, of course), and he was renting a studio in East Hollywood. It was a few months after Mk.gee released Two Star & the Dream Police, and like all musicians at the time, we were obsessed with figuring out his guitar tone. Mickey had a tape machine at the studio, and we decided to mic an acoustic guitar and simultaneously run it through the tape machine into the computer. The tone we ended up with was something akin to Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” – a slight chorus with subtle saturation. We tuned the guitar a full step down and then drop D (essentially drop C in a D-standard tuning), and we were cooking. The riff just flowed out of me. Mickey was noodling around as well and came up with the sweet descending post-chorus riff.

*note: when I refer to chords from here on out, I’ll be pretending like we are in standard drop D tuning, so don’t get all confused when I refer to a C as a D*

The verses felt like they fell into our laps, chock full of colloquialisms and snippets of conversation. Struggling with how to be better in a relationship than the last one, trying to cherish the present (yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift, that’s why it is called the present, thank you Master Oogway).

When it came time to write the bridge (we had skipped over the chorus because of our ~flow state~), we wanted a vibe shift, both musically and lyrically. When writing in drop D, it is easy to get lost in the 1 chord (D, D, D, D), hammering it in because it rings so well. By reworking the post-chorus riff, we were able to transition to the flat 7, major 7 chord (Cmaj7, but of course with the guitar tuned down it’s actually Bbmaj7). You guys know I love Simon & Garfunkel, and if you are a particularly meticulous reader of this Substack you will perhaps remember how the song “America” influenced the bridge of “Flight to JFK.” S&G influence again in “Right This Time!” In “Homeward Bound,” Paul sings, “I’m sitting in a railway station/ Got a ticket for my destination.” In “America,” he sings, “‘Kathy,’ I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh/ ‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now.’” So simple, so easy. You’re sitting right there with him. In “Right This Time,” I sing, “At the subway station/ For the northbound train/ I turn and say ‘Oh Grace, I think I feel insane.’” That’s nice stuff, I think.

*day of creation bridge voice memo*

The chorus was tough. It needed to be epic. It needed to be concise. It needed to be memorable. We tried for a while to get the melody. We eventually got it. I got a voice memo from the 5 minutes where we workshopped it back and forth. We get SO close in this recording, but clearly still had a bit to go.

*getting SO close to the chorus*

After actually finishing the first chorus, we decided it would be cool to extend the chorus each time it happens, adding to the overall build of the instrumentation. And boom! The song was done.

Recording Right This Time

The great part about working with a writer/producer like Mickey is that by the end of that session, we had basically finished the production of the song. The chorus-y acoustic, the nylon layering (done by Mickey), the bass, and a few more layers of acoustic were all done that day. A couple weeks later, I laid down the string parts (yes, violin was my first instrument), and we kinda put the project on hold for a few months.

It took me two separate days to nail the vocals for this song in the studio. Did we make it extremely difficult to sing by putting the song in C and writing the melody that we did? Yes. Do I regret it? Uh, yeah, kinda. But ya know what? It’s too god damn late for that. And I like how it sounds. Unfortunately I will likely never be able to sing it in its original key live. Whatever.

I had the idea to put some drums in as we were finishing up – found a nice Splice sample and sent it to Mickey. He recreated the sample with real drums, and now we’ve got a groovy song.

Joe Ulmer, who plays drums when I play with a band, mixed the song (and the whole album!).

Reading Comprehension Questions

1. This particular deep dive is pretty short compared to the other ones. Do you think T. Kandel grows weary of digging deep?

2. Hmm, the verse melody does sound a lot like Mk.gee’s “Are You Looking Up” (actually accidental). Do you think anyone will actually notice? Do you think T. Kandel will get sued? Do you think anyone cares enough to give him grief about it?

3. What direction do you think T. Kandel is going with this new album???

That’s all – enjoy your Sunday! Oh also the first single off my next album, “Right This Time,” comes out on Friday, December 12th. Presave here if you want me to continue to be able to make music.

love,

teaky

Buckle up folks. I am basically about to become the Guy Fieri of tour food. Which is kind of what he already does in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. But this is different. Kind of. I’m probably one of the most hyperbolic people you’ll ever meet when it comes to food, which means you should take all of my reviews with a grain of salt. But not really actually because I have some pretty goddamn good recommendations when it comes to the hole-in-the-wall, word of mouth, hidden gems that you can only find when it’s just you, your 2006 Honda CR-V, and the great open road of this beautiful country.

Note: these meals were all eaten on my most recent tour opening for Billy Raffoul.

One tour mantra of mine is: Lunch is Pleasure; Dinner is Fuel. This is very important, as an ill-timed, heavy (and adventurous) dinner right before you go on stage is a recipe for utter disaster. You know what I’m talking about. So most of these meals I am writing about are lunch meals. I’ve also sprinkled in some random beers because why the eff not.

Date: October 9th

Establishment: Skyline Chili

Location: North of Mansfield, Ohio

Let me start by saying that this is ridiculous food. I had never had Skyline Chili before (Cincinnati origin, Greek-influenced), and I had no idea what to expect. It’s basically really good chili on a variety of items and then absolutely SMOTHERED in cheese. The closer plate is a “coney” with the chili on it. The dishes they’re known for are the 3-Way (plain chili on spaghetti), the 4-Way (chili with onions OR beans on spaghetti), and the 5-Way (chili with onions AND beans on spaghetti). I was with my friend Ben Farhi. We got the 5-Way. It was good. But Jesus did it sit heavy.

Date: October 9th

Establishment: Mahall’s

Location: Cleveland

Mahall’s is one of the coolest places I’ve ever been to. 100 year old bowling alley? Check. Cheap beers? Check. Sweet retro style bar? Check. Vintage shopping? Check. Two music venues? Check. This is the kind of place I would like to own one day.

Date: October 10th

Establishment: Superior Pho

Location: Cleveland

Look, Ohio treated me reallllly well on this tour. This was the day that I started to feel sick, so this spicy pho brought me back to life. Although my illness did spiral out soon after this picture was taken.

Date: October 11th

Establishment: Duff’s

Location: Buffalo

When in Rome, you get the pizza, and they get mad at you if you don’t eat it with a fork and knife. When in Buffalo, you get the wings. Duh. In the deepest throes of my illness (Norovirus, I believe), I found the strength necessary to put down 12 of these delicious wings. I won’t tell you what happened next, just as we arrived at Niagara Falls. Use your imagination.

Date: October 15th

Establishment: Grace’s Apartment

Location: Brooklyn

I was still sick by the time I made it back to New York for the Brooklyn show. Grace made me avgolemono, a Greek lemon chicken soup kinda thing. It’s really good, and Grace makes it really well. Comfort food!

Date: October 19th

Establishment: Stevensville Crab Shack

Location: Kent Island, Maryland

When you’re driving between Philadelphia and DC, you can take the boring route – through Baltimore. Or, you can take the fun route – the one that brings you across the Chesapeake Bay, through Anapolis. And that means you gotta get crab, baby! This plate featured a delicious crab cake, half a pound of shrimp, cucumber salad, and deviled eggs. Oh mannnnnnn, oh man. This was an awesome meal.

Date: October 9th

Establishment: Kirwan’s On The Wharf

Location: Washington, D.C.

This is more of an honorable mention. A creamy Guinness overlooking the Washington Channel. It got really scary and stormy after this, but whatever.

Date: October 20th

Establishment: The Pig

Location: Chapel Hill

I guess there’s some big beef (or pork, I should say, ugh) between the different types of North Carolina barbecue sauces – the western part of the state uses a red sauce, whereas the east uses a vinegar sauce. I’m not going to insert myself into that debate. I like barbecue. This plate featured pulled pork, hush puppies, a weird but good yellow slaw, and pickles (sweet).

Date: October 22nd

Establishment: Hinson’s Drive In

Location: Matthews(?), North Carolina, just southeast of Charlotte

Hinson’s Drive In was founded in 1954, and I found it by asking the guy who worked at a vintage clothing store where I should get some good food. It’s super old school – just a bar counter with the grill right there and a back area with some darts. It’s still owned and run by the Hinsons – it was a father-daughter operation when I was there, and they knew every single person that walked in. They knew their orders too. I spent an hour chatting with all the regulars, and Mr. Hinson even came out to the show in Charlotte that night.

These Carolinians have something about naming things “Carolina-style,” but I’m not complaining. Apparently a “Carolina-style burger” has chili, onions, slaw, and mustard. I opted out of the chili here, and it was fucking amazing. I got a second burger right after I finished the first. I also got some pretzel-crusted, deep-fried pimento cheese balls. JESUS. And a Miller High Life because of course.

Date: October 23rd

Establishment: The Pleasants’ House

Location: Hickory, NC

I stayed at my college roommate Ben Pleasant’s house when I was passing through North Carolina, and his parents threw a little dinner party for me when I was there. They invited all their friends, and told them to bring me snacks for the road. The people delivered! I was set for the rest of tour. Thank you William and Shannon <3

Date: October 24th

Establishment: Pita House

Location: Greenville, South Carolina

This is one of my favorite places in the country. I stop here every time I am on tour and have to drive from Charlotte/Chapel Hill to Atlanta. It’s directly halfway. This is a Palestinian-Israeli restaurant and grocery, and they have some of the best falafel I’ve had in my life. No joke. My boy Faraz is there every time, and he always asks how tour is going. The mahmoul is unreal. It is never lost on me that this place exists in Greenville, South Carolina. They’ve been there for like 30 years. What!!!?

Date: October 26th

Establishment: Cafe Roze

Location: Nashville

Yes, I’m a basic boy when I’m in Nashville. I get Hattie B’s. I go play every guitar at Carter Vintage. I also go to Cafe Roze, which hits so hard every time. I got the egg bowl and added a chicken skewer.

Date: November 1st

Establishment: THE MILLER HIGH LIFE BREWERY

Location: Milwaukee

You got me. This whole tour was a front just so I could make my pilgrimage to my personal holy land, the champagne region of the United States, the birthplace of the greatest beer in the world. I learned a whole lot about the history and logistics of Miller (a lot of logistics, actually – we were literally in the packaging plant, which was super cool). I drank a beer in the original beer cave they built in the 1800s to keep the stored beer cold (they mined blocks of ice and lined the walls with it). I’m still buzzing. SPONSOR ME ALREADY MILLER HIGH LIFE.

Date: November 2nd

Establishment: Norske Nook

Location: Osseo, Wisconsin

Billy told me we had to stop here on our way from Milwaukee to Minneapolis. Norske Nook is a Norwegian-American diner famous for their pies, and Osseo is a tiny little town that almost feels like the Wild West. I got a Corned Beef Lefse Wrap, which was eggs, cheese, and corned beef hash, all wrapped up in lefse, which is a Norwegian flatbread kinda thing. Then drenched in hollandaise sauce. It was pretty gas. Then for dessert I got their award-winning Banana Cream Pie, which knocked my socks off.

Date: November 3rd

Establishment: Our Kitchen

Location: Minneapolis

I was looking forward to this for the entirety of tour. There are some pretty heavy hitters on this list, but this place is by far my favorite. I can’t even. This is the best diner breakfast I’ve ever had. I wrote an entire Substack post about it a few months ago – read it if you want to hear me wax even more poetic about this place. It holds up every time. It blows my mind every time.

IN CONCLUSION

I love touring for many reasons – I even wrote a piece after my last headline tour called Why Touring is a Waste of Time (clickbait headline). I won’t go into everything now. But what I will say is that I am lucky to be young and alive and sporadically nomadic in a country that despite its faults, still holds a ton of beauty. And that beauty can always be found in the kitchen.

love,

teaky

Today, my great friend, collaborator, and friendly neighborhood giant Wingtip (née Nick Perloff-Giles) has released his new album, Luckyman. This magnificent project is the culmination of months of work, and I am so very proud that it is out in the world.

Some Deep (and Probably Unnecessary) Backstory

*if you don’t want the backstory, skip down to the part where I highlight each song from the album*

I first met Nick in the summer of 2021, right after I moved to Los Angeles. Wingtip had been on my “fans also like” tab of my Spotify page for a few months (this was back when I was more “pop” oriented lol), so I was familiar with his work. One day, I came across a viral tweet of his that made me laugh out loud:

Seeing my in, I hit him with a dm saying “nice tweet, blah blah, would love to meet up when I move to LA, blah blah.” He responded with affirmation (rare in the unsolicited dm game). So, we met up in LA. Sparks flew! We talked and laughed and made music. He ended up producing my song “Half as Cool.”

Months later, he invited me to a session with a producer he knew. This was Jack Kleinick (who ended up producing all of Eating & Drinking & Being in Love). The Theo + Jack Love Story is for another time, though. That day, and in subsequent days, we made some sweet new Wingtip music (check out the song “Talk” and the EP Laughter from the Other Room). But we all knew it was just the tip of the iceberg.

In July of 2024, Nick hit me and Jack up and told us he was putting together a team – a special team. A HEIST. A heist to steal the hearts and souls of old fans and new in an effort to make the best album of all time. He also brought in Bren Chamberlain-Simon, a literal rocket scientist/wonderful musician and songwriter (check out Proud Father).

Nick rented an Airbnb in Malibu for one weekend, and the goal was to make as many songs as humanly possible. And by god, by gosh, by golly, we fucking did it. I’m not going to go into the process of each song, but I will give you a quick elevator pitch of each song on the album.

LUCKYMAN

1. Luckyman (Intro)

   Okay, I actually didn’t work on this track. But it’s cool and ambient and rips.

2. Luckyman

   In my mind, this has some early Coldplay vibes to it. Damn, things seem like they suck, but take a step back, man. Life can be good! You might have everything you need right at your fingertips!

3. You, Me, and the Flood

   Energy, baby! New love – what a beautiful thing that is. There’s a new sea rising up! It’s us: we are the flood.

4. Satellites

   This one is low key my favorite from the album right now, but hey! I’m not picking favorites. Japanese House vibes? When you really zoom out, our little Earthly problems are nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. But maybe that makes them all the more special.

5. Ugly

   Petty break up song? Nah, there’s some nuance to it. I wish you all the best, blah blah blah, but I’m actually working on myself and I’m living my best life. Talking Heads vibes. This one feels good.

6. Borderline

   Okay, now this one is giving The 1975, but like if they were doper and sicker. I’m scared to say “I Love You” because it’s scary, man! But that’s the beauty of it. I’m thinking ahead now, and it’s daunting but awesome.

7. Brite Spot

   You get drunk with your friends and have an epic night. You wake up hungover and you know just the cure: a diner. When has that not solved all your problems? And ya know what? It’s only Saturday morning. Let’s have a whole ass day and night. Weekend with your friends! Good times with the boys in LA!

8. Think About

   Oh, quiet moments of peace and love. Acoustic song (Theo loves Acoustic Song). Tender Wingtip. :’-)

9. Bloodstream

   This is like if “When My Time Comes” by Dawes had a baby with, uh, another song that is equally awesome. Theo rips a guitar solo on this one! I’m addicted to your love, baby. Your love is a drug to me! I want it mainlined right into my veins.

10. Love is Such a Stupid Feeling

    Love is not only a “stupid funny limbo,” but also “such a stupid feeling.” Love is dumb – love makes you stupid – love makes you spin around in your room like an idiot.

Some Parting Words

I wrote this post in the hopes that you would be so inspired by my words as to go stuff your ears with Wingtip’s new album. But before you go, let me get real for a second. I am ashamed to admit that I do sometimes take for granted that I am able to make music with my friends and call it a job. The pay is shit, the hours are unpredictable, and there is no real HR department. But it is in moments like these, listening through a project that is the culmination of years of friendship, that I realize how special this life can be. I’m so proud of Nick, and Jack, and Bren, and myself. I truly am… lucky, man.

Love,

teaky

I whipped up a little tutorial for “Leroy’s Song” because it would make my day to hear you guys singing this song and tickling those strings just like I do.

I do have an admission, though. At first, I was like, damn, I really don’t want to have to transcribe these licks into tabs, it’ll take so long, etc. so much to my chagrin, I tried to have ChatGPT do it. Yuck! I know! But in the spirit of full honesty that is this Substack page, I have decided to reveal my transgression to you. In the end though, Chat couldn’t do it anyway. I was very pleased that Chat couldn’t do it.

So I ended up doing the tabs myself, and uploaded them, along with the correct chords, to Ultimate Guitar (both the bane and boon of any musician). But I was hit with another roadblock!

The NERVE. “Simplified duplicate” my ass. But fret not – this is a happy story. I kept pushing back and ultimately my tab was approved. Thank god. Here’s the link to that so you can follow along with the video, or use on its own if you don’t wanna hear me yap.

That’s all for now. Happy Labor Day.

Love,

Teaky

I have been a bit lax here lately, traveling and working and such. So I figured I’d give a little treat to my lovely paid subscribers! This one is called…

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I just finished a sixteen day run of shows, and let me tell you, I’m still exhausted. My back still hurts from sitting in a van eight hours a day, and the tips of my fingers feel like burnt toast. We played Amagansett, Nashville, Charlotte, Carrboro, Decatur, DC, Philadelphia, Cambridge, NYC, and Westport, and drove the whole way in a janky 2005 Ford E-350 with 217k miles on it. We had to get all four tires replaced on the second day of tour after we noticed dry rot and full balding. I could feel every bump and pothole directly on my tailbone. My ass hurts.

At this stage in my career, touring is a waste of time. Touring is a waste of money! But like all truly good things in this world, sometimes the act of wasting is precisely what makes it worth it. That’s probably an oxymoron. Then call me a moron! But first, let me explain.

I’ve been on tours before – I’ve opened for incredible artists all around the country, and I’ve played headline shows to quite literally 2 people (don’t ask me about Philly on July 13th, 2022). It can be demoralizing, dehumanizing, and disillusioning, but it can also be triumphant, euphoric, and beautiful, in ways both larger and smaller than I could have ever imagined. This is the contract we musicians sign with ourselves – to crawl through the shit in order to end up victorious on a beach in Mexico (that is a poor reference to The Shawshank Redemption). The highest of the highs in exchange for the lowest of the lows. Or that’s one way to look at it.

Another way is to embrace the ten hour van rides, to buy groceries and cook dinner on off days, to laugh at the inconveniences that are so inevitable that it would be suspicious if there weren’t any. To hang out with the band, with your comrades in arms. On our first long driving day, I wanted to listen to The Lord of the Rings audiobook (specifically The Two Towers, which is where I was at). But alas! Jacob and Charlie had never read the books or seen the movies. So Andre and I, resident LOTR experts, spent four hours explaining in great detail the plot of The Fellowship of the Ring, with Silmarillion-esque contextual background of Tolkein’s world. The rest of the tour was filled with audiobook listening, movie watching (extended editions of course), and lively discussions about Middle Earth.

A few more lovely moments that will forever be burned into my memory: Joe cheffing up a delicious dinner in Spring Run, PA, fishing in the Catawba River, playing Super Mario Tennis on Andre’s Switch in the green rooms, eating fresh crab for lunch in Baltimore (ill-advised before playing a show, but so yummy). These are all “wastes of time.” But they will stick with me just as much as the best shows we played on tour.

Okay, onto the shows themselves. And I’m gonna be honest with you, loyal readers, otherwise what’s the point of this whole damn thing? We didn’t sell out every show, but we did sell out Cambridge, and DC sure felt like we did. The other shows were well attended, but there were still a good number of tickets available. I, like you, am on social media constantly (although I’ve been trying to look at it less, blah blah). I see my other artist friends sell out big venues; I see them post things about ticket presales and how those sell out before the shows are even on sale; I see people lining up by the hundreds on the street. Do I get jealous? Of course I do. But my jealousy these days is a mosquito whining in my ear, more of an inconvenience than a crushing weight on my chest. I do believe that in this industry (or at least the corner where my community is) a rising tide will lift all boats.

I’m realizing that the paragraph above may seem ungrateful, but my point is exactly the opposite. This was the first tour I’ve ever done where it felt like people were there to really see me play. They came for the songs. They came for the music. And at the end of the day, the ticket counts didn’t matter to me as long as the people who were actually at the shows felt like their cups were runnething over. I had to get a whole bucket because my cup was runnething over so much. And that makes it all worth it.

Before I close, I have to give a quick shoutout to Washington DC. DC, man! That show was really nuts. I’ve never seen a crowd know every single word to every single song, even “Leroy’s Song,” which had come out less than a week before. You guys made me break my rule about encores. To all you other cities, get on DC’s level.

Alright, enough of my blustering. To recap: tour is a waste, but also not. It’s the best thing I’ve ever been a part of. And thank you all for being a part of it with me.

All my love,

teaky

With that out of the way, I wanted to let you guys know something very important… there will be no encore at the shows because I hate encores. Here’s a little piece I wrote about it.

*disclaimer* sorry if your feelings get hurt by this…

There’s a feet-shuffling silence after the applause, a pregnant pause that seems to hold all the world’s idiocy in its space. The band has quickly left the stage, but you can see their dumb little faces peeking through the curtain. An audience member (a plant, no doubt) gives a half-hearted, “One more song!” and slowly, reluctantly, resignedly, others join in. The band, seeing their cue, saunters back to the stage. “Thought you were done with us, eh?” drawls the lead singer, who is undoubtedly dressed like a Costco-brand Harry Styles. They play their most popular song in the end, but it is equally likely that they first unplug their instruments and do an “impromptu” acoustic song in the middle of the crowd, during which the fans desperately try to avoid eye contact.

My friends, it is time to put to rest that horribly overplayed display of self-indulgence that is The Encore.

Now, you know that I am a touring musician. Whether this lends me an extra layer of credibility or puts me too close to the subject at hand is for you to decide. But I have seen The Encore at hundreds of shows, and have unfortunately partaken in its seductive ways myself. It is very nearly always bad, and mostly never worth it.

You may be thinking, But I saw [insert beloved artist] at [insert arena] and they brought out [insert slightly more niche beloved artist] for their encore! It was amazing! To you, sweet reader, I would ask a few questions. How long was that show? Probably two hours at the minimum. Were you genuinely surprised when, after the contrived rigamarole of leaving the stage, the artist came back? Doubt it. Did you get a UTI from holding in your pee so long? Definitely.

And finally: couldn’t they have just done it all in one set?

In our beautiful day and age where it costs $11 for a dozen eggs, we all want to get the best bang for our buck. Because of this, artists have felt the need to not only play for longer, but to sprinkle little gimmicks throughout the show to placate our insatiable desire to have the best Instagram story. Split screen Temple Run on a TikTok type beat. Baby want binky kinda shit. Bread and circuses, plebeians.

The Encore, perhaps at one time, was a mystical occurrence. When Elvis would haul himself back to the stage to continue gyrating his preeminent pelvis, thousands of teenage girls probably passed the fuck out. I’ve seen a video of a Michael Jackson fan literally falling unconscious when he did that hip thing. In such times, The Encore had an element of surprise, and that is what it should have.

But the jig is up. The mysterious, larger-than-life artist is no more, ousted by the wave of social media influencers masquerading as musicians. It’s all drop shipping, man! The Krabby Patty formula is out! We know what’s coming every single time! And no amount of pageantry will distract us from the fact that we know the show isn’t over until we hear that song, our song (the top song on the Artist’s Profile).

If the crowd really wants “one more song!” then by all means, pop off. Play your little heart out. But me? I’ll already be first in line at the halal cart on the corner.

Love,

teaky

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One of my friends texted me the other day and asked what I do when I have writer’s block. I hadn’t really thought about it before – usually, when I can’t finish a song, or find myself at a creative impasse, I bang my head against the wall and drink 4-7 beers. I’ll tell you right now, though, that doesn’t often work. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve been absolutely cranking on some new tunes, flowing from my cranium like wine at the Roman Bacchanalia of old. Why does it happen like this, in spurts? ‘Tis no muse from which songs course through me – I do not believe in such divine forms of inspiration (although maybe it would help me if I did). It is more pedestrian. I have come to realize that creativity begets creativity; that is, when I am making, I make more as a result.

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I told my friend, perhaps retrospectively, that when I have writer’s block I try to start as many songs as I can. Each song acts as a kind of grease, a lubrication for the machinations of my mind. The wheels spin; the gears turn; the pulleys and levers do their pulleying and levering. And through this process, I am able to either complete the project I was working on, or create something better.

Such was the case for the writing process of “Stupid Funny Limbo.” It may surprise you that the song is over two and a half years old. It may delight you (if you truly are a fan of mine) that it was written in the same week as “Flight to JFK,” and in the same month as the rewritten version of “What if it all works out in the end?.” When it rains, it pours!

Writing Stupid Funny Limbo

“Stupid Funny Limbo” began, as many of my songs do, with a little fingerpicking and a pinch of mumbling:

nyc, 08.29.2022

I’m not going to get into the details of my romantic life, but suffice it to say that I was in love, unsure of how it would turn out (long distance), and bursting with situational details to add to my songs.

With a rough verse melody down, I moved on to the chorus. This 4 minute voice recording is all rambles, so skip it if you want, but listen if you’re interested to hear me say “no!” again and again.

nyc, 08.31.2022, part 1

A few minutes later, I locked in at least part of the chorus melody:

nyc, 08.31.2022, part 2

The end of the chorus was tricky, but maybe only tricky because of my inclination to make songs more complicated than they need to be. This next recording shows the structure of the verse moving into the prechorus (still lyricless, but the melody formed), and then the chorus, which still isn’t quite there:

connecticut, 09.05.2022

I really enjoy the melody of the prechorus. The minor 5 chord in there, if my memory serves, was taken from “Elegy,” where it is ubiquitous. Maybe too ubiquitous, maybe beating it over the head. This time, I had a little more tact.

Okay – onward! This next recording comes a week later, once I was back in Los Angeles. You’ll notice that the verse is all there, and the prechorus is almost done. “Love is a stupid thing in limbo,” I say. I hadn’t cracked the code yet!

The chorus is pretty much done, except for a really dumb “for me” at the end, which obviously changes to “for us.” The second half of the chorus benefits from my enormous Harry Potter fixation. If you, dear reader, recognized some similarities between the line “circumstance can wreck the best laid plans” in this song and Voldemort’s fire quote from Deathly Hallows “I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans,” then you deserve a prize. If you didn’t notice, then whatever.

los angeles, 09.13.2022

The rest of the lyrics of the song came together nicely, using my real life. Yeah.

Here’s the first full song recording I did, which is from the next day in Los Angeles. I use the second prechorus as a pseudo bridge. That changes in the final version.

stupid funny limbo rough 9.14.2022

Once the song was done, it sat waiting, expectant. It was on the shortlist of songs to make the album, but with time, I lost interest in it. I made a few demos that layered a bunch of acoustic instruments, and even got my friend Shaan to do a little string arrangement, but nothing was hitting. Argh! Nothing I did could really capture the essence of the song. So there it sat, collecting dust.

And then: eureka! I was brainstorming the songs for Somewhere Along the Trail, Vol. 2, and from the shadows of my private demo playlists, I caught a flash, a gleam of something bright. Renewed again was my love for the song, and revisiting it two years later made it seem all the more fresh.

Recording Stupid Funny Limbo

I will get much deeper into the recording process when I write my post on Somewhere Along the Trail, Vol. 2, which is slated for release on June 13th, but for now I’ll just say that like Volume 1, we aimed to capture the sound and feel of being in the room with me as I sing these songs. I headed into the studio with my buddy Michael, and with two mics, one camera (courtesy of Lou Palacios), and yer boy, we managed to do just that.

Reading Comprehension Questions

1. How does T. Kandel, in his words, break writer’s block?

2. What “unexpected” chord is featured in the prechoruses? Do you think it does anything interesting for the song, or is T. Kandel just flexing his musical theory knowledge?

3. What other songs do you think will be on Somewhere Along the Trail, Vol. 2?

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It is time for some new music. Folk music, to be precise! Stupid Funny Limbo comes out on April 18th (presave here if you’re a homie), and it’s the beginning of Somewhere Along the Trail, Vol. 2, which comes out June 13th. Announce video below because I’m proud of it.

Let me explain Somewhere Along the Trail for those that don’t know. Two and a half years ago, I was musically confused – I had been experimenting with different genres (vocoder type stuff, indie-pop type stuff, pop-punk type stuff), and none of it really felt true to who I was as a songwriter and artist. My first musical influences were as folk as folk comes (Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, the whole Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack, etc.), and my first good songs were in a similar vein. It’s all about the song, baby! In the fall of 2022, I had written three songs that were pure, unfettered by the chains of sampled drums and indie plugins. I recorded those songs live in studio, just me and my guitar. Flight to JFK, Grail Quest, Fig Tree. All with videos too – find those here. I called it Somewhere Along the Trail, named after the last words my uncle spoke to me before he died. I figured it would be a nice reset to come back to every couple of years, a little reminder to you guys (and myself most of all) what my music is all about.

So here we are, post-Eating & Drinking & Being in Love, and with the next album almost fully written(!) it seems like the right time for a second volume.

My paying subscribers to this humble Substack can find a secret link to a teaser video of Stupid Funny Limbo below. To the rest, bonne chance!

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Tour is going great. I’m having lots of fun, and I’m not even homesick!

Before I get into the meat (and eggs, and hash browns, and pancakes) of this chronicle, let me first talk about The Midwest. I am writing this in Minneapolis, Minnesota – otherwise known as The City of Lakes, The Mill City, and The Mini Apple (as a New Yorker, that one is cute, but dumb) – and I suppose a part of me has always identified with America’s Heartland. My mom’s side of the family is from Chicago, hence the line in “The Painters,” “You’ll meet my family out in Chicago.” Duh. So let me be the first to tell you: the regional stereotypes out here are ALL true, from the rhotic speech to the kindness to the “Ope!” when you bump into someone. Everyone is at least 6’ 2” and they don’t feel cold ever and they say “plastic bæg” and they only eat casserole.

This may come as a surprise to you, dear reader, but the Midwest comes in many colors. The Minneapolitans are different from the Chicagoans are different from the St. Louisans, and so on and so forth. It’s a melting pot, baby, just like the rest of this country! And yet, the stereotypes exist for a reason. When I encounter them (the good ones, the down to earth ones), I am inexpressibly giddy. What follows here is such a story.

Allow me to set the scene: it is 9:30am in Minneapolis, the weather app says it’s 10 degrees but feels like 0 with the wind chill, and I have just picked up my rental car. It’s a Chevy Trax. Side note (too many side notes, Theo) – I love renting cars. I am hungry, tired, and cold. The streets are covered in a thin layer of icy slick. I can’t check into my Airbnb until 3pm, so I’m driving around. I see a tiny little diner with a big sign: Our Kitchen. On the awning it reads “World Famous Hash Browns / Scratch Made Pancakes.” It’s go time.

I walk in, dusting off the slush from my boots, and oh man, it’s perfect. Maybe 15, 20 seats max, counter service, single griddle right in front of you, big ol’ coffee burner. The waitress tells me to sit wherever I like and immediately pours me some coffee. It’s just her and the chef, and they both seem to know every single person that walks in. Her accent is so Minnesotan it feels like someone on SNL doing an impression of a Minnesotan accent. She’s incredibly nice. She tells me to get the Kitchen Special, which comes with eggs, hash browns, sausage, and a pancake or toast. I opt for the pancake, obviously. The food comes quickly.

Reader, often the written word fails to describe those moments that transcend the mundanity of our everyday lives. I suppose this is why I find a good deal of expression in music. But even music would not be enough to capture this experience. Among my friends, I am known for my hyperbole, but please do not let that diminish my feelings when I tell you that this was the best diner breakfast I have ever had. The eggs: fluffy. The sausage: smashed patty, juicy. The pancake: huge, dense but not too dense, golden. And the hash browns! Oh, the hash browns. Crispy and crunchy on the outside, soft and buttery on the inside. Thick and perfect. I have had many similar diner breakfasts over the years, all around the country, but not one holds a candle to this magnificent spread. The meal was as if someone had delved into my mind, identified in my subconscious exactly how I like each breakfast item, and created a feast so Edenic that I thought myself transported back to that idyllic Garden of legend.

I paid for my food and left, stomach fit to burst. I’ll spare you the finer details of the rest of the day, but it included getting in a pump at the gym, buying a cool hat at a vintage clothing store, and playing a kickass show at 7th Street Entry opening for Max McNown. Whew, almost forgot I was on tour for a second.

This morning, I woke up and knew I had to go back. So go back I did, and it was, again, amazing. I suppose there’s too much of a good thing, but not in this case. I leave tomorrow for two shows in Chicago, and who knows what favorable winds might blow me back to Minneapolis, or when?

Tonight, I play more music, but my heart will forever sing with the memory of the breakfast at Our Kitchen.

love,

teaky

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P.S.

You, dear reader, might be interested in a number of my shows that are coming up, so I’ll list em below.

2.20, NASHVILLE, supporting Briscoe

2.21, CHATTANOOGA, supporting Briscoe

2.23 DURHAM, supporting Briscoe

2.25 ATLANTA, supporting Briscoe

2.26, BIRMINGHAM, supporting Briscoe

3.2, LOS ANGELES, supporting Max McNown (Sold Out)

I am also playing four shows in March opening for one of my favorite artists, but I am not allowed to announce them yet, so stay tuned for those as well.

Oliver and I met in kindergarten, and for the next 24 years he was a staple figure in my life. He was a funny, ridiculous guy, steadfast and adamant about the things (big or small) that he chose to take a stand on.

On Friday, our high school hosted a dinner event in honor of Oliver, and his mom asked me to play a song. Of course, “One More Night (With My Friends in the City)” first came to mind, as it has become a sad but ultimately uplifting reminder to cherish nights with the boys, but I knew I wanted to give Freiberg something more personal.

I worked on this song for a while, and tried at least five different ideas before I settled on one. I couldn’t seem to capture what I wanted to say. Too many memories kept flitting through my head: drinking soda at 2am on a sleepover just so we could play more video games, him insisting his skinny jeans would fit over his long underwear at The Mountain School, or the last time I saw him – at a show I played in Brooklyn in July. He loved coming out to my shows.

It’s through those memories that I wrote this song, which I am tentatively naming “That’s How I Will Think of You (For Oliver)” (I do love my long ass song titles). He’ll never be just one moment or just one superlative. He’s the culmination of all the time we, and everyone else in his life, spent with him.

I miss you dude, and hopefully you can hear this song from wherever you are.

love,

teaky

LYRICS:

New Digging Deep coming soon, new tutorials coming soon.

Smooches!

teaky

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The Preamble

There seems to be a kind of societal preoccupation with not growing up. Hold onto your childish whimsy, your steadfast sense of wonder, your wildest dreams! I would call it a Disney-ification of childhood, but that would limit its scope. There is a vast subculture (perhaps subculture is the wrong word, but whatever) of infantilism on The Internet – parts of it dark and pedophilic, other parts simply cringe – and whether it’s someone cosplaying a favorite animated character of their youth or another heinous TikTok song using an interpolation of a nursery rhyme, it makes me think that we’ve taken this whole Neverland thing too far.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” to quote the original Peter & Wendy by J.M. Barrie. Perhaps it is better to keep on believing you can fly. That’s not what rubs me the wrong way, though – it’s this commercialization of childhood, sold to adults, that feels icky. An insidious form of escapism, to be verbose; a bombardment of nostalgia-based marketing techniques. Don’t you remember when things were better? it seems to ask, while you’re mid-binge of a television show you’ve seen dozens of times under a weighted blanket just to feel less anxious.

This is a roundabout way for me to start talking about “Romanticizing Poets,” which exists within the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. I see RP as the logical progression of songs in my catalog like “Older Now” and “Half as Cool.” In both of those songs I basically just whine about getting older, how I still feel like a kid, yadda yadda. I wrote “Older Now” when I was 22 and “Half as Cool” when I was 23, so I think that checks out. Post-college blues, unsure of myself as a musician, lost in my own existential contemplations of the universe. I am not immune to the retrospective! “Romanticizing Poets,” written right before turning 27, takes a different approach (we will get there, I promise).

Birthdays are perfect catalysts for these feelings to resurface; in this, I am sure I’m not alone. In your early twenties, there’s a fixation on being young and staying young, and the dreaded 25th feels like death (“Now every birthday feels like dying” - see What if it all works out in the end?). The only salve at 25 is knowing you can rent a car.

However, when I turned 26 (that devilish, dirty double baker’s dozen of an age), I found myself finally, unexpectedly, feeling comfortable in my own skin. There are perhaps many reasons for this, but at risk of this post becoming a psychological self-assessment rather than an analysis of my music, I’ll move on. Of course, the idea of turning 30 is still horrifying, but not so much as it used to be.

Writing Romanticizing Poets (The Music)

Grace and I took a trip to France in late August/early September of 2023, and that’s where the song is set. I’m obviously a big fan of real, concrete imagery in songs (see my Digging Deep: Flight to JFK post for some more context on that), so I decided to pack this song full of some of the most distinct moments from our trip. Raining at the Sacre Coeur, rolling our own cigarettes, playing rummy at the same cafe every day we were in Aix-en-Provence, willow trees on the bank of the Seine, etc.

But before I put pen to paper, I first put finger to string! The verse melody and guitar part of this song came through my classic mumbling technique:

10/16/23 verse ideation

I clearly didn’t have the ending of the verse nailed down yet, but in my notes app I had the song idea written: romanticizing poets. You can hear it come together a bit more in this next one:

10/16/23 verse locking in

In my stumbling and mumbling, I attempted to figure out a chorus. Indeed, often in my nebulous grasping for a song, I fall back on my tried and true techniques. I’ll show you what I came up with at first, but be warned: this song did not end up having a chorus! More on that next.

10/16/23 fumbling for a chorus that never quite emerged

This song, with the refrain “oh I’m romanticizing poets again” already in place, was starting to feel like a classic kind of song. Why tarnish that with a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus template? Why not instead exercise my vast songwriting knowledge and pick a different template! Enter the verse/refrain/verse/refrain/bridge/verse/refrain, seen often in jazz standards. In my own interpretation of these kind of songs, the verses explore an idea and cap it off with the grand refrain. Then the bridge expands on that idea, maybe tosses in a tentative explanation. Okay Theo, let’s run with that.

10/16/23 bridge idea interesting!

If these Digging Deep posts have been interesting to you at all, then I think you’ll have appreciated the meandering nature of that last voice note. Some of the pieces are there, but it’s wilder, untamed. Just needed a little pruning. I really had written the music of this song before the words – not unheard of for me, but definitely different.

Now let’s discuss the lyrics.

Writing Romanticizing Poets (The Lyrics)

As I mentioned above, I wanted this song to be chock full of poignant moments from our France trip. But that’s more or less a guise under which I was hoping to develop the idea of “romanticizing poets.” Please allow me to ramble for a second.

You are probably familiar with the “27 Club,” a so-called list of musicians, writers, and artists who all died at the age of 27, in the prime of their lives and careers. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse are some of the big names on the list. The “white lighter curse” goes hand in hand with the 27 Club idea – allegedly a number of these artists had a white BIC lighter in their pockets when they died (a theory debunked by historical fact). The whole thing has been sensationalized, mythologized to the point of legend. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself. What I think is damaging is the celebration of the destructive habits that many of these people engaged in. We have created a fiction around these godlike creative figures. See “too bright, how they burned.”

Too many people (myself included) have exalted these stories as legends while forgetting the very real people with very real issues behind them. I’ve always wondered if my music would be better if I was more tortured, more troubled, more mystical. (Shoutout Vincent Van Gogh, shoutout Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.) I use so much of my own life in my songs that I often feel like I’m fictionalizing it, and I don’t want to lose the humanity of it all in my journey for success. See “tragedy to fiction to a trite mythology.”

It goes beyond the 27 Club, though. Elvis is a good example of the sanitization of a musical hero, and of course that kind of list goes on and on. We often whitewash the more unsavory parts of a person’s life to keep them on a pedestal that we’ve posthumously constructed, and that does as much damage as forgetting them in the first place. See “an inconvenient contradiction, a neat mythology.”

So yeah. I think that all came together pretty well in the song. The writing process for this one took precisely one week, from October 16th to October 23rd, 2023.

10/23/23 first full, rough recording I took of the song

Recording Romanticizing Poets

It’s always a daunting process to try to record a song that I wrote so cleanly and clearly with just an acoustic guitar. How do you translate the dynamics of a live performance? How do you retain the emotionality of the song while making it sound better than the voice recording?

Jack Kleinick (album producer) and I struggled with this at first. I wanted to do a simple live recording, no click, just me and a guitar. Jack allowed it, and the very last day of recording at Grand Street in Brooklyn, at the buzzer, I did a take that I thought was absolute money. Turns out I was too drunk on the High Lifes and Jack Daniels to realize I was playing it incredibly slowly. I am literally laughing out loud listening to the plodding tempo. Here it is, in all its glory:

11/20/23, the drunk and languorous take

Okay, back to the drawing board. I had enjoyed borrowing the studio’s Gibson J-45 – it had a nice deep and woody quality, and as the song requires the guitar to be tuned down a whole step, it really resonated. Most of the guitars I own are smaller, concert sized, so they project well but often lack the low end that a dreadnought can provide. Once we got back to LA, I called up my friend Sam and asked if I could borrow his Gibson Hummingbird (previously mentioned in Digging Deep #8: Nothing New). At Jack’s home studio (a recurring theme of the album recording process), I recorded it again in one take, no click. Et voila! C’était parfait.

Parfait for the moment, I should say, but not quite fini. The song needed a bit more jeuje, a je ne sais quoi. And then it hit me. Strings! It is called “Romanticizing Poets,” after all. I hit up my friend Shaan Ramaprasad, the best strings guy I know, and told him I wanted “something spooky.” Just kidding. I told him I wanted something grand and romantic, and that is just what he did. It’s a simple recording for a simple song.

Reading Comprehension Questions

1. Do you think that T. Kandel actually believes in the stance he takes in The Preamble, or was he just feeling particularly bitter the day he wrote this?

2. What’s your favorite line in “Romanticizing Poets”?

3. Were you able to discern T. Kandel’s lyric scribbles in his notebook? Should he work on his handwriting?

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Might put this one out next year… Somewhere Along the Trail, Vol. 2 anyone???

all my love,

tea…

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But enough of the preamble! You are here, I hope, to immerse yourself in my wondrous, arcane creative process, and for that, I will happily oblige you. Today, we are discussing “Nothing New,” which has quickly become a fan favorite on the album. I always hoped it would be – with the James Taylor style guitar, the sweet and sappy lyrics, and the subtle (yet intriguing) production, it was bound to reel some people in.

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The Writing Process

Although “Nothing New” may sound like a quintessentially “solo-written” Theo song, it was, in fact, a cowrite. I’ve mentioned cowriting in a previous Digging Deep post, and it continues to surprise me how the writing process can change each time I do it with someone different. I guess it shouldn’t really be surprising, but whatever. I’m a sucker for the music!

I wrote “Nothing New” in LA on February 4th, 2023 with my friend Sam Varga, a talented songwriter and artist that I (think) I met in Nashville when I was living there. I’m not sure if I had started to think about the new songs I was writing as part of Eating & Drinking & Being in Love, but something was definitely ruminating in there. I go through phases of enjoying different chord shapes; at this time, I was playing around in D. You can visit my Nothing New tutorial for more details on this, but I had just learned “You Can Close Your Eyes” by James Taylor, and like so many James Taylor songs, he noodles around in D. It’s pretty versatile and fun to craft some delicious riffs with.

Sam and I talked about the classic love song trope of “everything feels so new with you/blah blah blah/the sunrise looks different/yadda yadda yadda” and how it would be nice to turn it on its head a bit. Mumbling a chorus melody brought us here:

chorus melody ish (too close to 49 Winchester) with chorus ending

I had also been listening a ton to the song “Russell County Line” by 49 Winchester, and this melody is essentially a full rip off of that. Still, there are elements of the final song in there. If you listen at 0:39, you can hear me completely write off what Sam says about what actually ends up as the hook of the song. lol.

This next voice note is really interesting (to me at least, and to those of you that like this sort of thing). Sure, it’s almost 7 minutes long, but if you listen through, you can really hear the song take shape. I’m not usually recording for this long when I write (normally after the fact), so it’s a nice taste of the actual mumble ––> melody ––> lyrics process. I’ll include some time stamps so you can skip around.

figuring out verse melody, lyrics, chorus melody, lyrics

(0:00 - 0:56) - verse melody mumbling, with a few of the right words/phrasing

(0:56 - 1:10) - chorus melody mumbling (too close to 49 Winchester still)

(1:10 - 2:57) - lightbulb moment for Theo! unfortunately nothing good just rumination

(2:57 - 6:43) - figuring out chorus lyrics + melody, still rough. highlight at 3:46 where we come up with the first line of the chorus

chorus melody rough

This one is just ironing out chorus melody with lyrics. Things are still a bit shaky here, but they’re taking shape.

prechorus mumbling & rambling

It’s all about the mumbles, baby! When people ask me if I write the lyrics or melody first, I tell ‘em that often I just mumble until something falls into place. This is one such instance, and you can hear hints of John Denver in here. One of my favorite John Denver songs is “Poems, Prayers & Promises,” and this song is certainly chock full of Denver idiosyncrasies as well.

By the end of the day we had the song. Here’s the rough full take we did that day. A few things to note: the second verse has a prechorus that ends up being a bridge of sorts in the final version, and the riff isn’t ironed out yet.

rough full before switching prechorus

A few weeks later, I continued to smooth out the song. The first riff iteration I came up with is cool, but I realized it sounded way too much like Allison Ponthier’s “Faking My Own Death” (which is a super awesome song). If you don’t know Allison’s music, then go check it out – her songs are great, and her visuals are insane. Sometimes my strokes of inspiration are just me unconsciously copying someone else.

riff that sounds too much like faking my own death

The next day, I fixed the riff, which, as we all know, is gorgeous and beautiful and totally unique.

phone demo when it was all done

The Recording Process

Recording such a pure, fingerpicking song can be a daunting task if you decide to forego the easy path of doing it live acoustic. How do you produce it tastefully? How do you retain the dynamic quality of the song while beefing it up in the right places? These are questions that Jack Kleinick (producer) and I grappled with when we were figuring this one out.

We started by recording the fingerpicked guitar at Grand Street Recording on a Gibson J-45 that they have there. We ended up scrapping that guitar take. It’s definitely a sweet acoustic guitar, but it didn’t have the clarity in the higher frequencies that we wanted to really highlight the fingerpicking. A few months later, we re-recorded it in Jack’s home studio in LA on my friend Sam’s Gibson Hummingbird. Way better diction on that guitar.

Back to the November recording sessions, though. When we were at the old Hit Factory studio (long story I can’t remember if I’ve told you before), Michael (Andrew) started noodling around on his vintage Yamaha CP70. It’s basically an electric piano that they developed in the 70s to emulate the sound and feel of a real piano while being small enough to bring on tour (although it’s not that small). Michael laid down some Bruce Hornsby (ish) parts, and that’s when I started to feel the real meat of the song.

Michael (the noodler) Andrew tickling those keys

We let the song sit for a few months, and in that time, I experimented a bit with some layered guitar parts for a postchorus riff. These ideas ended up becoming the riff that you hear in the song itself! There was still something missing, though. I wanted a mandolin-type texture on that riff, but my mandolin is shit and sounded awful when I tried to record it. Jack’s girlfriend, Madeline (a great artist herself) has this cool South American(?) stringed instrument that worked perfectly. I can’t remember what it’s called, but I think it’s something like a cittern. It looks kinda like this:

All in all, the final effort was mainly about balancing each element we added to the song without compromising the songwriting. I think we did a pretty good job.

Finally, I just wanted to include in here a funny little recap video I took after I got home from the final night of recording the album in November. Enjoy!

Reading Comprehension Questions/Things to Think About

1. What are some of T. Kandel’s main songwriting influences for this song?

2. Should T. Kandel diversify his reading to include more than just sci-fi/fantasy? Do YOU have any recommendations?

3. What is your favorite song on the album?

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