Del Water Gap

And while the wind quietly whistles and the rain pours and clatters against the roof, time appears to stop in the café in east London. Holden's energy is refreshing and can best be described, as he puts it, like "a bottle of seltzer." While eating his eggs on toast and savouring his second cup of coffee, he tells me about his most recent album, I Miss You Already + I Haven't Left Yet, relationships in hotel rooms, and how touring feels like "baking a cake and sharing it with people."

As the time flies by, our words turn into a beautiful mosaic of stories, funny moments, and connection. I'm fascinated by Holden's vibrant inner world, which not only translates into his music but shines through his personality. There is something very real about Holden. We connect over being overthinkers and storytellers while he draws his own portrait in my sketchbook. He is not afraid to share his mental health journey and tells me how his song "Want It All" puts into words how you can want to be a great artist, tour the world, and also, in the same sentence, say, "Fuck it, I'm done, I just wanna live in the woods, be in love, and I never wanna go on Instagram again."

Del Water Gap’s new song “Cigarettes & Wine” featuring Holly Humberstone is out now.

How was the photoshoot?
It was really cold but really fun and creative. The experience of the shoot is so dependent on everyone’s energy and once in a while you get a good group and we got a really, really good group. It was just the three of us and we all really got along. It was very loose and creative and the clothing was great.

Well, you’re very into fashion.
Recently, in the last two years, I started to really love clothing. As I have started touring, I used to always wear my own clothes on stage - just a pair of jeans. I still do that quite a bit, but randomly Saint Laurent reached out about dressing me for Gov Ball, a big festival in New York City, and I’ll never forget putting this beautiful short floral suit on and walking out on stage. I was like, “I get this now.” Powerful clothing makes you feel powerful. It was like wearing a suit of armour, so I fell in love with wearing clothing after that experience and it’s become such a part of my world.

One thing I love about your music is that every single song tells a story. When you listen to the lyrics there are so many feelings. For example, with the music video for “All We Ever Do is Talk,” the song in itself describes the beautiful first stage of a relationship which I think is very intense, but there’s also this aspect of wearing a mask still. Can you tell me a little bit more about the music video?
Totally! I really wanted to not work with a music video director. I was inspired by the idea of working with someone who is not a director because I think you can get really interesting results when you ask a creative to do something that is not their normal medium. I had been on a trip to Morocco with Saint Laurent and I met an actress there named Talia Ryder and we met for about forty-five seconds talking about movies in the middle of the dance floor at 3am after a show - completely hectic. She runs up to me and goes, “Do I know you from somewhere?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but we can be friends.” And then she popped into my head three or four months later and we ended up setting up a meeting and talked for about fifteen minutes over Zoom and we really clicked. It was like an immediate meeting of minds and I sort of on the spot asked her if she wanted to make some videos with me. We just took it from there. She sent me a few movies to watch and I sent her a few. We gave each other some homework. I was on tour at the time, so I was running around and trying to pull my ideas together while I was travelling.

Eventually, I put together an idea that was based on a version of some true events that I experienced which was starting my last relationship in hotel rooms. I was on tour for years and years and years and I started seeing someone and the majority of the time that we spent building our connection was in hotel rooms. It was the real experience of a relationship becoming the stability in my life when everything else was moving around. When I was travelling and I wasn’t seeing my friends or bound by my normal routine, the thing that kept me tethered to my sanity was a person. We tried to really display that feeling of how things do change over years - how the character of a relationship changes and how you spend so much time constantly trying to re-fall in love and that's a real active practice.

It’s very cinema inspired. I’m a big lover of film. It’s the main medium that I pull inspiration from. My grandma is a filmmaker so we watch films together every week. We have a film club. We had put together a list of movies that were inspiring to us - a lot of Wong Kar-wai and Gus Van Sant and we talked a lot about Picnic at Hanging Rock and a Vincent Gallo film called Buffalo ‘66. We really shared a creative vision and she’s an absolutely wonderful person and a complete maniac and she really brought a good performance out of me.

I know your love for movies is a big theme even in your songs. If you could create a soundtrack for any movie, which movie would you choose?
That’s such a good question. It’s interesting because I think one of the reasons that I love film so much is that I don’t understand it. I have trouble sometimes listening to music because I understand music so well, so when I listen to something, I’m hearing all the pieces. It’s harder for me to hear the sum of parts. So, I think trying to place my head in building a soundtrack for a film, it almost becomes a question of worthiness. Is my music cool enough to be in a film that I would love? I imagine my music working in a rom-com. But, the film lover in me, the film snob in me, would love to have the opportunity to score a very slow and beautiful and subdued A24 indie film. Knowing myself, my music would be good for some sort of Mila Kunis-John Krasinski rom-com Failure to Launch-Hitch type film. I think I could have a sense of humour about it and some pride in that. It’s funny. I’ve seen my music in a few films and it’s so interesting to see how the two mediums work together - how integral music is to film and how a film can reframe a song. It’s really beautiful.

So true. I don't know if you've ever seen those projects where you have, for example, a scene and then you get basically different soundtracks to it and see how different you feel about it.
I’ve actually gone through this a bit watching movies on silent. One of the things I’ll do when working in the studio is put movies on silent and I’ll just watch them with subtitles on and it sort of helps keep me company and keep me relaxed.

I know you took your camera and started recording while you were on tour and one of your songs, “Coping on Unemployment,” was all your footage together for the music video. I think that’s amazing! You also said that you used to give your camera to someone before a show so that they would interview someone else. Do you still do this?
Yeah, once in a while! I did that a lot on my first US tour and I’m so happy from an archival standpoint to have that. Tour is so much travel and there’s a lot of alone time and I think the most shocking thing for me about becoming a touring musician is realising how much waiting goes into being a touring musician. You’re spending all day sitting and waiting. You set up, you eat some food, and then you sit around waiting for the show. Your whole life revolves around this hour and fifteen minutes that you get to play music. Then, a little bit before and after that time, I try to talk to people and meet people and it’s such a validating practice. It’s the reason that we do all the rest of it. It’s the reason I’m thousands and thousands of miles away from home right now and I spent tens of thousands of dollars to get ten people over to the UK. It’s insane. It’s not something that’s as obvious to people on the other side - the people coming to the show. I have found that the more that I’ve toured, the more and more I’ve realised that this career is not as much about me as I thought it was. That realisation has been very relieving because I’ve always struggled fundamentally with the notion that being a professional musician or artist in any way requires you to have a heightened sense of self-focus, or at its worst, narcissism, from constantly telling your story. Being here and talking to you and telling my story and that being inherently some sort of self-focused practice is just something that I have complicated feelings about. But, the more that I tour and realise there’s an aspect to this that is public service - getting to talk to people and hand them that camera and hear their story within this story - has been something that’s been incredibly validating for me and helped me deconstruct this notion that I’m baking a cake to sit down and eat all by myself. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m baking a cake and sharing it with people. I have to remind myself of that.

It’s really about connecting with people, and you said this really nice thing about how you like to remember before a show how you felt when you attended your first ever show which I think you said was at twelve years old. How would you say it feels for you knowing that you’re potentially creating that experience for someone else?
I mean, it’s the most beautiful thing. It’s a really active practice to try to remember that. To be completely honest, I struggle a lot with feeling really numbed out when I’m playing shows because it’s become so normal. I’m sure you get it. It’s like you start a new job, you fall in love with someone, or you move to a new city, and for a while everything is so fresh and so new and so inspiring and then naturally, as humans, that starts to wear off and we have to practise feeling moved by things in the same way. I have found that with shows, but I am very lucky to have very thoughtful people around me and we try to take time every night before the show to meditate on that. There’s real flashes of beauty and I’m lucky enough to be in touch with it. I shed tears on stage every once in a while and a lot of that comes from focusing on one or two people at the show and really feeling attraction to someone and experiencing a version of what you were talking about. Seeing someone processing and screaming-singing every word to a song and crying - I don’t know what they’re going through, maybe they’re going through a break up or maybe they’re in love with someone - but I’m helping them process in some way. That’s an incredibly powerful thing. What an honour to get to do that.

An interesting thing about it is, in a way, when you start, you are more connected directly to the people because it's less people but as you grow it’s harder to have a singular connection with fans. I know with the EP you released in 2017, there was a number which was actually your number and people did start calling you. Do you remember any weird or interesting conversations?
Yeah! I’m happy you brought that up because it was so long ago, but I think in a way, that decision to release that record with that number attached to it completely informed my relationship with my fans for the rest of my career up until now. It set a real tone of an open lane between me and them that has stayed open. I think it’s the reason I’ve been successful and that I’m happy making this music. I really think that was a very important decision and not something that I’ve talked about a lot. I’m really happy you brought it up! I had a flip phone on my desk and people would call it! Once in a while, I would pick up and have conversations with people. The best was just the shock of people being like, “Is this actually you?” and telling them “Yeah! What’s up? Here I am.” I think one of the things I love about being a musician and talking to people about my music is hearing about the ways in which my music soundtracks people’s lives. It’s one of the only art forms that people mostly consume passively, right? We listen to music while we’re commuting, while we’re brushing our teeth, doing laundry, hooking up, and that’s not true of most other art forms. One of my favourite things is hearing about the ways in which a song of mine has been a part of the soundtrack of an early relationship or a death or a birth. In a way, that phone number became a really palpable reminder of that specific dynamic between my music and my fans. There would be someone in the car with their friends driving listening to my music and the phone would come on and they would be stoned like, “Hey! What’s up? We’re driving to a party and we’re listening to your music and we thought we’d call the number!” All of a sudden, I was transported into that moment. It was a truly magical thing. I ended up losing the number. I stopped paying the bill accidentally and the number got reassigned to someone else. I think a series of some very unfortunate people have inherited that number and receive hundreds of calls from random people.

I think it’s amazing and something you will always remember. And they will always remember! You just talked about those intense emotions we feel as human beings and this is reflected in your songs which touch on romantic encounters and all the highs and lows. Personally, I feel everything a lot. What I like to remember is that nature has so much growth and decay and seasons. This question might be a little strange, but if you think about water, what form of water would describe your emotions the best?
Wow! I’m similar to you. I can get incredibly cynical and nihilistic and I can get incredibly hopeful to a fault. I’m a dreamer. Honestly, I think I’m a bottle of seltzer because I love seltzer.

Why, though?
Ok. Because I think that before you open a bottle of seltzer, there’s all this pressure in there. Before you open the bottle, you don’t see the bubbles and you wouldn’t know that they’re there. You only see the bubbles once you open the bottle and I always thought that there was something really curious about that even when I was a kid. I think that, as an aficionado of seltzer, I am very aware of the difference between the first sip when it punches you in the face and the feeling of leaving it out for a few hours. It’s completely flat but there's still the essence of seltzer in there. I think I can compare that to my mental states throughout the course of a day. As I’ve grown more mature, I’ve been struck by the fleeting nature of really strong thoughts and emotions. At 8am, you can be so enraged with something or someone and by noon you’re like, “What was that? That’s a completely different person.” I don’t know. There’s just something very dynamic about the arc of the life of seltzer that makes me relate it to the arc of the emotional world within my day. I’m also a water park.

I love that! I’m sure your answer also changes based on the day.
Oh, yeah! Some days I’m a tea kettle…

In general, I feel like we need to play with our inner child more. If you could live a completely different life, what would you choose?
Before I was making money off of music, some of my favourite jobs were just working with my hands. I did a lot of manual labour. I worked for a painting company for a little while and in a lot of ways it was a terrible job, but it was the happiest I’ve ever been in a workday. I loved the calming and spiritual aspect of repetitive motion. Granted, I only did it for a year. One summer, I painted a basement in New York City and spent the whole summer on my hands and knees first scraping paint off the floor and walls of this basement by hand for hours and hours and hours and then repainting it. I spent the entire summer listening to audiobooks and music. I was just sitting there in my own world and doing these repetitive motions. There was something about it that really deactivated my existential dread and anxiety. Also, seeing physical progress - very quantifiable progress - was comforting. Adversely, as an artist, one of the things I struggle with and I think a lot of artists struggle with is knowing when something is done. It’s hard to know. I found a lot of comfort in building and finishing. I think it’s something that I could really enjoy whether it would be working with the land or in agriculture in some capacity. I have a very loud internal world and I’m someone who is very happy being with myself and being in my head. I wake up every morning and lie in bed for about an hour and just think. Some of my most cherished time during the day is time spent wandering around my brain. It’s something that has caused trouble in relationships for me because the focus in my eyes will go out and I’ll space out and wander.

I really relate to that. I love drawing which keeps my hands busy. Sometimes I need to do things with my hands to bring me out of my head. Your song “Want It All” represents a similar theme of trying to understand yourself. There’s this lyric, “Thinkin’ ‘bout killin’ myself all the time / Ain’t too good for business / Ain’t good for this headache / Ain’t good for my mind…I want it all, want it / No, I want nothing at all.” These lyrics really resonate with me and the feeling of not knowing your place in this world. How would you describe your mental health journey so far?
I’m happy you bring that song up because it’s not something I’ve really talked about since no one has asked me. I’ve struggled a lot with my mental health over the last few years. So many people I know and love have, especially going through the pandemic. It’s been a rough time. When I finished college, I really started struggling with my mental health whereas I hadn’t before and I think some of it was physiological and some of it was circumstance. I had substance abuse problems - taking a lot of drugs and drinking a lot and not taking care of myself. When the pandemic hit, as is true for so many of us, it was the first time I really had to pause and sit with myself. I was living in a house with my girlfriend at the time in Maine and we were spending our first real alone time together and we were having, like, two bottles of wine for dinner to celebrate the break from reality. This was early on in the pandemic before it really sunk in and when it still felt like a big snow day. Then, I had time to sit with myself and take stock of what it felt like in my head all the time and I realised I was a pretty unhappy person. I had some really bad habits. I got sober during the pandemic, started running, and started taking care of myself. As soon as that happened, my career started changing and I came out of the pandemic and toured for three years. The pattern and rhythm of being a touring musician and the athleticism of that, again, really knocked me down a few pegs. I think in all of the joy and bliss of getting to tour for the first time and play shows and signing a record deal, there was also a lot of darkness and sadness and loneliness that came with that. That line in that song in particular is a bit tongue-in-cheek as a reflection of the last few years of my career. In short, the things that we need to do as artists to be successful, the ways that we need to push ourselves, often go against the things that we need to do to take care of ourselves. I think I was coming off the back end of years of negotiating that and feeling like a problem in some ways. When you’re ideating, you don’t want to go play a show or go live on Instagram. But, these are the pressures we put on ourselves as creators and public figures or just as people in the world in 2024. I’m sure that you go on Instagram and compare yourself to other people. Seeing these things be in such direct contradiction: I love my art and want the world to hear my art and want to be a successful artist but striving to do those things is so bad for my mental health in some ways.

As I negotiate this, I have that question of, I want it all, I want to be a great artist, I want to tour the world and in the same sentence saying, “Fuck it, I’m done, I just wanna live in the woods and be in love and I never wanna go on Instagram again” and then in the same sentence flipping back saying, “oh but I get to go to Australia and tour. Ok great let's do that” and then flipping back and being like, “this isn't why I got into music.” I didn't get into music to be seen or be successful or make money or become socially viable in some way or feel bigger or better about myself. I got into this because I was a shy kid who loved writing songs so what has this become? I’ve bastardised this whole beautiful part of my spirit. There’s constant back and forth. And I’m very aware of the resentment I feel towards my career, my management, and the people that work with me. I love them and we love each other, but it’s hard to be an artist and to negotiate the demands of it with the people around you who push you for the good of your business and career. A lot of it is very anti-spirit.

I have a date tonight that I’m very excited about and in the middle of that date I have to do a Reddit AMA. I’m very excited to do the Reddit AMA. I’m going to talk about my music and share the story of a song I just put out, but it’s such a funny thing. This is what we negotiate. I’m going to be with this person that I’m trying to connect with and then have to say, “Sorry. I’m going to take an hour and go on my phone to answer questions about this song I wrote.” That’s a silly example because it’s not as grave as wanting to kill myself, but you get it. It’s a very unromantic thing to do in the middle of what will hopefully be a romantic evening.

As an artist, there’s this weird idea that intense emotion equals great work. If everything is okay and you have no anxiety, sometimes it’s like, “What do I write about?” That makes me think of another lyric, “She slept in her mascara / And says ‘I think your music got worse / Since you went fully sober / At least now you won’t kill yourself’” Often, we associate artists with sex and drugs and having heavy mental states because this is where they draw inspiration from. Do you feel like going sober affected your way of creating art?
Yeah! I have found that there’s this self-fulfilling prophecy. Growing up loving Kurt Cobain, for example, or Jim Morrison, you, consciously or not, associate anguish with great art. So, in dealing with my own substance abuse, it made me more reluctant to take care of myself. I believed this notion for years and years, but I don’t anymore because of the help of a great therapist. Actually, a happy artist is a great artist. I really believe that! I think that most of what we do as artists is storytelling. Through the lens of Del Water Gap, I take my real-life experiences, get distance from them, add or subtract details, metabolise, and create songs. Being clear-headed has allowed me to do that in a more powerful way. Personally, sobriety has been a bit of a journey. I had a drug problem right before COVID and that is what caused me to fully detox. I never went to rehab. One day I just woke up and decided, “I’m done being this version of myself.” I stopped drinking. I stopped smoking. I stopped drinking caffeine. I fully cut everything out of my brain. I started running and decided I was going to run a marathon. It was wild! I saw the difference it made in my headspace and over the last five years, being a bit agnostic about it, I decided that I never want to be addicted to drugs again, but with regard to drinking and trying spiritually-altering substances like mushrooms, I’ve re-introduced these things back into my life to see if there’s a way to have a more copacetic relationship with them. Like anything else, It’s been a real open conversation. The goal of all of this is to live a beautiful life and to have peace. I don’t know, the older I get, the more important the beautiful life and peace part becomes. We don’t get that much time here. We don’t get that much time young. We don’t get that much time as healthy people. My grandma is really old. She’s 99. Watching her fall apart over the last few years is a really good way to remind yourself that you’re lucky to be young and healthy. When you see someone getting older and losing their health and mobility, you see how their world becomes so small. Our day is so big today! We can go wherever we want, walk around, see whoever we want, go to a museum, and there’s nothing holding us back. That won’t be forever - might as well not be tortured.

I really resonate with everything you just said. Sometimes I have very existential questions and anxiety, but I have to remind myself to be present.
Being present is such a practice, right? The more you consider these existential questions, the more you learn to just try to have perspective.

I know you’re into meditation. Are there any other things you do on a daily basis to keep your mental health in check?
As I mentioned, running is huge for me. I try to run every day. I don’t listen to anything while I run, which is big. I try not to go out with headphones or with my phone or anything. There’s a real meditation in distance running. The first two or three miles of a run, I’ll usually feel pretty uncomfortable mentally. I get a lot of anger just as my adrenaline kicks in and then there’s always this moment of flow state when I break through if I run long enough when everything just calms down and there’s this immense feeling of quiet. On tour, it might sound kind of pedestrian, but my skincare routine has been really big for me. I never really cared about taking care of my skin and then I started touring and I started letting myself spend more money on skincare products. Having these little rituals no matter how tired I am or how bad a show I’ve had, I’m always going to wash my face and put on moisturiser, and to at least know I’ve done that for myself has been really helpful - brushing off the energy of the day literally and spiritually. The greatest form of spirituality in my life - the moments in which I have felt or seen God - is solely in friendship. The feeling that I have with my close friends is the closest thing I’ve felt to standing in the presence of God. So, I have a good friend that I made when I was sixteen and we talk almost every day. We have an incredibly strong connection. He is a very normalising and calming presence in my life, so honestly, [it’s important for me to] be in touch with him more so than any romantic partner or my family. We truly share a channel between us.

I think it’s so important to have people in your life that bring peace to you. In a podcast, you said, “You only are who you say you are,” and I find this interesting because for me, it depends on the people I am with and the places I am in. Sometimes I struggle a bit with a sense of identity. I know you move around too. If you imagine all the people you know at a dinner table together, who are you then?
This is such an interesting question. I’ve thought about this recently when a few of my friends have gotten married. Often, your wedding day is the only time that this scenario actually materialises. It’s an incredible question because growing up, I was pretty shy and a people pleaser. I was always a bit of a social chameleon. I was a floater. I wasn’t really popular in high school, but I wasn’t unpopular. People just sort of tolerated me, I guess, in a way that was fine. I’m going to save that question for my date tonight! I grew up with an older brother who’s two years older than me and I really idolised him and looked up to him. I think that, more than any of my other identities, I identify as a little brother. That identity contains so many identities within it. I think as a little brother, I am used to being someone who is tagging along. I didn’t have many friends and my older brother had a lot of friends and he was always doing things and I was always five steps behind him. I really enjoy being a supporting character! I’m very observant and being shy and quiet made me a good listener. I like to just be along for the ride sitting in the back seat.

That’s actually so interesting because I feel like that’s so different from you being on stage!
Completely! And in a lot of ways, I think that makes me a good performer. I have a lot of friends who are musicians and are, sort of, the stars of their lives - the frontman, the charismatic, well-spoken, well-dressed person. It comes naturally to them, but it’s something that I’ve had to learn and it’s made me better at it in my own way. I’ve had to learn to carry my own torch a little bit. It’s made me a version of a protagonist that I really like. At the fear of sounding over self-referential or narcissistic, I really do think that I’m a good version of a lead singer. Because of who I am at my core as someone who doesn’t demand attention, I think that being given a platform has been a successful experiment.

I went to your show in London and I loved it! You came on stage and there was a feeling of connection with the crowd. It was funny and deep and emotional. It was amazing!
I have a real instinct to take care of the people at my shows. I have the instinct to be a good example emotionally. I don’t think I’m a model citizen, but I think if there’s one thing that I am, it's emotionally open. I really enjoyed going on stage and talking about feeling terrible and spending the entire day in my head, hating myself, or obsessing over something, and now I’m here and it’s fine. If you had that day too, I’m so sorry and it’s fine. Don’t give too much stock to whatever that thing your head is telling you. For years touring, I really wanted to play it cool and be this swarthy front man - mysterious and all of those things. But the more I started being myself, the more successful I became. I think it’s really comforting to people to see someone else being themself.

It’s coming as you are. This is who I am today. I might be different tomorrow. There’s something else I wanted to ask you about your most recent album. I love the title I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet and the story behind it. I know your grandad wrote this to your grandma. How did their relationship affect your view of romantic love?
I was really, really close with him and he died when I was pretty young. I have great memories of him. I’m still very close with my grandma, but I never really knew their relationship when he was alive. What I know of is their relationship as my grandma has explained it to me. I have felt a real urge, as my grandma has gotten older, to ask her as many questions as I can. One of the easiest things to get her to talk about is David. They met later. They were both married a few times and they connected in their forties. She talks about living an entire life and then falling in love for the first time at age forty. She talks about knowing that being with him would not be the easiest life, but not being able to help herself. She talks about having no choice like she could not have been without him. Hearing that from a forty year old is really moving in a way that hearing it from a twenty year old is not. When you’re twenty, you feel that way about anyone you like. This notion that this great love could happen in that way was always very inspiring to me. They were both artists and worked together quite a bit. He was a record executive and a musician and she’s a filmmaker. They just had a lot of fun together. They had a big, open, intellectual, exciting life. I’ve heard hundreds of stories. They used to go camping all the time and read to each other. She told me a great story about how they were camping together one time and my grandpa was a chef and obsessed with mushrooms, so they found an incredibly rare mushroom on a tree during a hike, and my grandfather was so excited about finding this mushroom that he left my grandma in the tent and drove three or four hours to the closest city to buy a cookbook, and then drove back to make this specific dish. Just hearing about a love that brings out that side of people - this incredible joie de vivre and passion or enjoyment [is so inspiring]. She’s told me they had a very volatile relationship at times. They fought a lot, but they loved hard and took really good care of each other. I’ve been in volatile relationships where lines were crossed that could not be uncrossed and she has always told me, “We loved a lot and we fought a lot but we respected each other and we took care of each other within our differences.” That’s an incredibly beautiful thing - the notion of being in a relationship where you can be your ugliest self but still take care of the other person. That’s not something I’ve felt. I’ve been in relationships that were ugly and there was no care in that and I’ve been in relationships that were perfect and polite where neither of us could express how we really felt.

This is actually really inspiring. In our twenties and thirties, we feel like we need to figure everything out, but we have time. What is the best advice your grandma has given you? I know she’s a huge inspiration.
We’re very similar and I think the best advice she has given me is, ironically, something that she resented that her mother said to her. She was dealing with some sort of mental health crisis and obsessing over something, and granted this happened in the 1940s, her mother sat her down and said, “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?” I think it’s a mean thing to say to a kid, but what’s tied up in that statement is that you don’t need to think about yourself all the time. You don’t need to narrate all the time. That’s something she has really pushed me to do. She tells me that Zoloft was invented in the 1990s, so she started taking it in the 90s and it completely changed her internal world and she mourned the fact that she spent the first sixty-seventy years of her life being in her head - being unhappy, being depressed. Seeing similarities in me, she has really pushed me to try and turn the camera outside more and spend less time on rumination and analysing and trying to make meaning out of every single thing that happens and every relationship and every decision. Time gives the greatest perspective. At worst, you’ll forget about the worst thing that is happening to you right now in a few years and at best, you’ll laugh at it.

That’s something that I’m trying to do more now - to not take everything so seriously.
Yeah, it’s trying to think about the version of yourself two weeks from now or two years from now that will look back on this and say, “That wasn’t that bad and I’m happy it happened.” If you’re 99, you’ve been through a lot. She’s been through wars, divorce, the love of her life dying, and there’s so much that happens. The only constant is change. The only thing that we can depend on is that nothing will be permanent. Everyone that we know and love will die and that’s okay. That’s not even a nihilistic statement. It’s a true statement. So, there is comfort in impermanence.

[had him draw his own portrait]

There’s a saying that you are a combination of the five people closest to you. What do you think about that?
Wow! I think that is very real. I think about this in terms of art all the time. That we are what we eat. We write the way that we’re reading. And I think it’s completely true about relationships and the people we spend our time with. It’s the reason this species has survived. We are social creatures and we connect with people and bounce off each other and collaborate. It is so hardwired in us, I think, to mirror other people and to share beliefs. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that every version of humanity has had spirituality, or some form of God. I think that leads into fandom - that spirituality extends to the musicians we love and sports teams that we love. We thrive in community. I’m definitely a combination of all the people I spend my time with.

Me too, and we have to be so mindful of how we spend our time because it can have a beautiful effect on us but it can also have a negative effect.
Once again, as we get older, I think we become more conscious of that! You want to be very mindful of how you’re spending your time.

It relates to what you said before about embracing how you only have one life and learning to be present. Talking about inspirations, I know you said before that New York had a huge impact on you and your identity as an artist. But I know you grew up between two dairy farms which is a completely different environment. What would you say is the biggest impact the change of scenery had on you?
Honestly, to the last point, just being around other artists for the first time and learning about who I was as an artist by seeing myself mirrored back by my community. I’d never really been around creative kids before. No one in my town was really into art or music and then all of a sudden I was in NYC surrounded by a bunch of pretentious eighteen year olds who were trying to change the world. I think that self knowledge is one of the most important parts of being a great artist - knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I think that I moved to New York and realised I’m not a great singer. I think I’m a great singer now, but at the time, I couldn’t really sing or play the guitar. So, being around people who were great singers and not being able to impress people by the way that I sing, I thought I’d better be really good at writing. So, it made me really work on my writing. I spent years and years and years becoming a writer. I never would have known that had I not moved and been around people who were better at certain things than I was.

Again, it’s about the connection and how the people around you inspire you and draw you in. Do you have any coffee shop recommendations in New York? And what is your coffee order?
Oh, yeah! A flat white. If I’m really tired, I get the beer shot combo of coffee which is a flat white and a shot of espresso which is a full face melt. You could go 100mph. Favourite coffee shops: There’s La Colombe by NYU on Lafayette or Broadway, I can’t remember. It’s a beautiful coffee shop on a corner with huge windows and great light. It’s great for people watching. You can sit outside and see the most interesting people walking around. Honestly, more than coffee shops, I love sitting in great diners in NYC - to sit at the counter and get unlimited coffee. There’s a great diner in Greenpoint on Manhattan Ave that I used to sit in for hours and write and order eggs and coffee. I was just talking to someone about this the other day. One of the things I’ve been normalising on tour is going to coffee shops because pretty much everywhere you go in the world and in America there’s a good coffee shop. You can go to any part of the midwest and Alabama and the south and find a good little coffee shop somewhere. I really do remember the last three years of my life in coffee shops. I don’t remember every show, but I remember every coffee shop. It’s wild! In a lot of places, it’s where the intellectuals congregate and work and read.

It always makes me feel better. Going to a coffee shop and getting your coffee and people watching. On the final note, what are you manifesting for this year?
I really am just trying to maximise my joy. I want to have such a great time. I want to work really hard and love working hard. I want to be with my friends and spend a lot of time alone taking care of myself. I want to run a marathon and I think the process of doing that will be really hard and really gratifying. I just want to be nice to myself and good to myself.