Subway Platforms and Album Talk: An Interview with Husks
[UNPUBLISHED:] Tell us about yourself.
[HUSKS:] I'm an artist and producer working out of Brooklyn. I make primarily experimental dark pop music, but I try to transcend different genres. I've worked in some hip hops, trap, and dark electronic stuff. I try to run the gamut of what I can within that.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the inspiration for your new single ‘You Will Find a Garden’?
[HUSKS:] The song has been a journey. I started writing it about two years ago. Musically, it’s quite different from what it ended up being, where right now it's a dark pop, melancholic, but also a bittersweet song. It started out as Baroque, very slow, a Gregorian thing. I was just beating my head against the wall. I brought in my friend who at the time was actually my roommate, Ben Appel, who's the co-writer on the song, and we tore it down from scratch, started over, and built it up to what it was now. He came up with this really cool piano part and then that's kind of what the song rests on now. Lyrically, it's a song that I wrote for my partner who, at the time was going through some pretty major life changes, she had just decided to quit her job and move to California to pursue acting. She was struggling with the feelings of leaving home for the first time – her family's all here, I'm here – and just taking a leap of faith on herself. I really wanted to give her a little piece of home that she could take with her to listen to and give her a little bit of comfort. That's where the songs come in. Since COVID, it's kind of taken on a little bit of a new light, just given everything that went on six months or so without seeing each other. It's evolved as time went on.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You've got an album coming out later this year. Did they follow a similar theme to this song?
[HUSKS:] I'm putting this one out first, but it’s different from the rest of the album. This is actually the last song on the entire project excluding a couple of interludes, it's 13 full songs. A lot of them are dark and pretty isolating. I'm exploring these themes that I've been dealing with for the last couple of years. Coming to terms with my own loss of faith and finding faith in myself, that's a narrative arc of the album. But within that, there are different songs that touch on understanding a new way to think about masculinity, my relationship with my father, and the idea of becoming a father myself someday. There's a lot of different things that I tried to touch on. A couple of near-death experiences I had in there as well. They really run the gamut of different types of songs and themes but thematically, I put this one last because it kind of ties it all together on a positive note. I think one of the ways it's evolved for me is writing this album. As I went through, this was one of the ones I finished around the midpoint of the writing process for the project. Once I collected all the songs that in isolation felt very different from each other and found that narrative arc, it really became this song that was a love song for my partner but I think also morphed into this love song to myself as well and saying you really can trust yourself. You can really go forward in life, even though there's uncertainty, and understand that as long as you have yourself and your self-reliance, that can be enough.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there any reason why you wanted to release that one first?
[HUSKS:] I'd be lying if I said it was all me, I tend to try to workshop some songs with my friends who are musically inclined, and some people who are just a little less musically inclined and just kind of see what people vibe to. This is one where people were like, “That's a good song.” I was like, “Okay, that's telling me something”, and I try to remove myself from the process as much as possible.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there a story behind the artwork for your album?
[HUSKS:] I'm going to leave it up for interpretation. I'm going to leave that up to the people looking and listening. But in terms of how I came to find the album art, I work with a graphic designer and a photographer named Sean Mundy. He's based out of Canada. He did the artwork for my EP, he's done a lot of work with me. He's one of the most talented graphic designers I've ever met in my life. He's also a musician. About three years ago, when I started working on this project, I kind of went to him and I was like, ”Hey, I have this idea in my head of this loose concept album, I'm starting to write to it but I really want an image to write to.” We FaceTimed for an hour or so and just talked about my experiences at the time, but also growing up, very religious and the things I was dealing with at the time. We started thinking “Okay, how can we represent that visually?” I was trying to express like that idea of loss and that was before I found this song that I'm putting out now where it's reclaiming that identity, but I was operating from this real sense of lack and sense of loss. That's what I asked him to represent in the album art. I think he did an awesome job but I also think it's cool to let people kind of infer what they want to from it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Were you writing to this image as a muse?
[HUSKS:] I know a lot of musicians experience this, when I'm writing or producing, I often have a color or an image in my head. So, for this, I was feeling a lot of, reds and blacks and golds already. Then he actually came back to me with that color palette, without me ever mentioning it. I thought, “That's a sign.” I was just thinking about what that little figure was doing in each song and expressing in the world.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You have been described as the ‘Hans Zimmer of the dance floor’. How would you describe your music?
[HUSKS:] The person who described me as that is my old roommate and a producer. I was showing him this new music I was making, a long time ago. When we first moved in together, he's like, “This makes me think of if Hans Zimmer was making dance music”. It's always hard to describe, but I try to make music that has some sense of mystical quality to it. But I try to ground it in pop sensibilities, and I also try to ground it in a lot of texture in production. If I had to put a genre to it I'd say experimental, dark industrial pop, which doesn't roll off the tongue. When you listen to the full album, there's a little bit of art pop, some are a little more mainstream pop. There's some techno there's elements, my music, my influences are FKA twigs and Arca. I think you'll kind of hear some of that.
[UNPUBLISHED:] On your album, did you have a particular song that you struggled with either lyrically or musically?
[HUSKS:] There's a song called ‘Gold’ on there. It was one of the first ones I finished, but it's one I struggled with a lot because in terms of subject matter, that's one that is heavy thematically for me. That's about a near-death experience that I had, actually right before COVID where I was coming out of the subway. I was coming out of the New York subway, and it was a packed train. I stepped backwards without looking and the gap was longer at this particular subway stop than others. I then fell straight down, and I was holding onto the platform and some very lovely people dragged me out and basically saved my life because the train was about to go. Getting myself to a point where I could even think about it took a long time and to write about it, and to process it that way. That was the final step for me. It took a lot of processing, it took a lot of time working that through with my therapist, and I don't think it's like the most palatable song on the record, but it's definitely one I'm proud of. Another one is ‘The Other Side’, which is about a friend of mine who passed away right after high school from a drug overdose. That was another one where I had to reach back and take from the feelings that I was feeling at that time and put myself back in that place, which anybody who is working on something artistic has to draw on emotions that they may have compartmentalised before. That was, that was a moment for me where I was like, “I have to really put myself back in that place to get this song.”
[UNPUBLISHED:] If you could have anyone alive or dead be at your birthday party, who would it be?
[HUSKS:] I think B.B King. I think he's one of the most authentic people who's ever lived. Beyond the wealth of knowledge as a human and as a musician. I think you can learn a lot just being in the presence of somebody like that. I think he would be a great one. I never got to see him. I actually found out the year before he died, he went and played a show in my hometown and I didn't even know about it. I was pretty bummed.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a place you would love to perform?
[HUSKS:] What would be a great one for me is ‘Citizens Bank Centre’ in Philadelphia. That's just a personal thing. I went to all my first shows there and it's just a very cool vibe. I think that'd be a good one.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Anything you would like to add?
[HUSKS:] I try to be the kind of artist who really engages with people who want to connect to me – fans or anybody who is in the orbit of my music. I always like to add that anybody who wants to connect with me, who found something in this interview that was interesting or helpful, anybody who even just wants to ask a question on Instagram or something, I always encourage people to reach out to me directly.
