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Popular culture has only accurately captured the spirit of youth twice, and one of those times was when, in the first Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, the ill-intentioned bald-headed record industry figurehead with glasses told the titular rodent band that “The only rule is that there are no rules.” The other instance was at last week’s “Young World II” festival, the second annual installment of a free concert-qua-party held by Brooklyn rapper MIKE and his crew for the music (and weed)-loving young folks of New York City.

As it turns out, the independently-run festival banks heavily on Rule #1 of Alvin and the Chipmunks’ lore — when I arrive about twenty minutes prior to its advertised 5 PM start time, I’m met with scattered throngs of teen-aged friend groups sprawled out across household sheets, some heads rested on the outlines of Poland Spring bottles in drawstring bags, and others nestled in the withering grass of Brooklyn’s fabled Herbert Von King Park. In front of me, one kid seated next to an ostensible girlfriend is wearing a graphic T-Shirt, the back of which reads “DELIVER ME FROM THIS MORTAL COIL (Obscure Image) FOR THERE IS NOTHING FOR ME HERE.” It’s a sentiment that must be echoed by the tightly-wound modus operandi often inherent to events of this nature: in place of strict seating arrangements, itineraries and clear-cut direction, there is, instead, free will, a wherever-you-can-find-shade seating policy, and a widely-circulated notes-app setlist that many attendees impatiently consult screenshots of between performances. Deliver rules from this mortal coil (obscure image), for there is nothing for them here.

For most of the twenty or so minutes I spend waiting for the show to start, the kind of music a cultured grandpa might cue up on aux is blasting from jumbo speakers stageward — one track is Gang Starr’s “Moment of Truth,” which features old-head-friendly maxims like “Actions have reactions, don't be quick to judge / You may not know the hardships people don't speak of” — and a lanky, beer-toting middle-aged man in a white Minnesota Vikings jersey is strangely glancing back at me with arched eyebrows. Whatever his problem with me may be, it seems to be alleviated when, after a series of hushed phone calls and photos of his surrounding area, he runs towards a woman in the portion of the park exposed to the heat, and, like something straight out of a coming-of-age film, they embrace in the golden hour sunlight. Everything here is strangely, endearingly cinematic, which — as cliche as it sounds — makes the whole function feel a little bit like a weirdly beautiful, hyper-grassroots Woodstock on a budget. This is, perhaps, part of what allows its collectivity-oriented selling point to work so well: just as much as there’s nothing besides vibe-check-passing security guards separating artist from audience, nothing’s separating the audience from itself either, and by the time the music's over, you realize that for most of the show, you and the five or so strangers in your immediate area have been taking turns fanning each other with the plastic contraptions handed out by park volunteers earlier on. (An exercise, I must stress, is incredibly necessary, at least in my case — today is my first day using an insulated water bottle my mom got me, so it pains me to see that when I open it up, all of the ice I put in it this morning is still ice. For further context: I am wearing a predominantly black rugby shirt and Champion sweatpants, with an extra pair of gym shorts underneath.)

Young World was founded with these kinds of grassroots, community-centric ideas in mind. “I always thought about artists who have the ability to create their own world, and build that from scratch or from nothing,” MIKE told Rolling Stone prior to this year’s installment. “When I think about basically all the artists that are on the bill, it’s people that have created those types of worlds with music and shit, at least to me. [...] I just want people to be allowed to enjoy good shit. You shouldn’t have to pay mad bread for a good experience.” Along with MIKE, tonight’s bill features DJ-slash-producer Laron, gentle-voiced UK spitter Jadasea, avant-garde Brooklyn wordsmith Maassai, the skate-adjacent Soulja Boy-incarnate TisaKorean, the defiant Jamaica-forged MC Junglepussy, and the OG hip-hop storyteller Slick Rick. Among vendor offerings lined up near a set of benches on the park’s side, there’s live screen printing by AINT WET, clothes by RIGHTEOUSPATH2002 and LOVEGAME, and food courtesy of Sol Sips. As crowds of cultured teens and 20-somethings oscillate between the booths and the stage, it’s difficult to distinguish any one reveler, vendor, or friend group from the other. Everyone is at the same level, and MIKE & Company probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Donning a floppy bucket hat and a gray T-shirt, Laron graces stage a little after 5 PM, at which point — with the help of tonight’s host inviting everyone closer to the stage “so you can all see how pretty I am” — a good portion of the teens laying in the grass by the vendors make a long, smoke-filled pilgrimage to the front of the platform, forming the humble makings of what will soon, over the course of the night, spill out into a massive, undulating swarm. “Young World” applies to everyone here, and this dynamic wastes little time making itself visible. Midway through Laron’s set, an elderly couple drags a pair of green lawn chairs to the front of the head-bopping teenage assemblage, and perches, unbothered, directly behind the barricade. (When they aren’t dancing for the Instagram stories of friendly schoolchildren around them, between sets, they’re pulling out their phones and playing the kinds of Candy Crush spinoffs you see ads for on Twitter.)

It’s a fitting embodiment of the family-oriented approach long prioritized by this corner of New York hip-hop’s underground. The last time I attended something of theirs in-person, it was October, and MIKE was in Nashville for an early stop on his “Small World Big Love” tour. Upon entry, the pair of elderly security guards that checked my ID asked me, with genuine curiosity, who “this group” was. The urge to ask that question was easier to understand once I got inside: in the front row alone, the mixture included smoke-puffing students from local colleges, awkward adults who had traveled solo, and an annoyed-looking father who, between glances at his watch, occasionally reminded his middle school-aged son that “you have to wake up for school tomorrow.” The list of acts (or events, generally speaking) capable of bringing that blend of people into one room, let alone one row, is a short one — and it’s a feat you only achieve when your music can turn fans into family. Both last October and today, the people responsible for this gathering seem to have mastered the formula.

The next performer is summoned via a series of yelped demands from tonight’s host for the audience to shout louder. This doesn’t end up seeming all that necessary, though, because by the time MIKE glides onto the platform alongside his longtime live DJ Taka, the loudest roar of the afternoon has already begun erupting from what is now a significantly larger sea of people on the grass. MIKE’s live act is hinged just as much — if not more so — on highlighting the talent around him, as it is on highlighting the talent he himself has to offer. It feels ritualistic when, in the spoken interludes that carry one song into the next, he breaks into spirited monologues, venturing to thank everyone around him one by one: “My name’s Mike; this is my brother Taka,” he’d start, with rhythmic swagger, pointing a shaky finger back towards the baseball cap-clad mastermind behind him. “Can you guys do me a faaaavvorrrr?” Taka would modulate MIKE’s voice to the point where, with luminous echoes and booming, layered depth, it sounds like that of a disembodied, mythic prophet. “I need y’all to make the most noise for my brother Taka.” The crowd would make the most noise for his brother Taka. “Could you guys do me another faaaavvorrrr? I need y’all to make the most noise for my family in the back.” The crowd would make the most noise for his family in the back. When MIKE raises his arms for the final time, the list of figures he’s thanked includes his manager, every artist on the bill, the vendors, the sound technicians, the lighting technicians (“Come on y’all” he says flatly, when insufficient noise is made for this group. “Can we please get some more noise for the light people.”), and — most often of all — the audience itself. You’re never just applauding MIKE. At the same time that he’s making you love him, he’s making sure you love yourself, and the people around you, too.

After two lyric-heavy masterclasses by Jadasea and Maassai — “I don’t like talking too much, so let’s just get into it,” Maassai fittingly announces, before her sacred, Nas-evocative set begins — TisaKorean greets his raucous crowd with a series of brazen declarations about how “silly” he is, which all serve to operate as both a warning and a trademark. He’s flanked by a dread-headed skateboarder who does kickflips back and forth across stage throughout his performance, a young rapper named Mighty Bay, and an older, cell phone-toting manager-type, who — speaking of “deprecating”— Tisa jokingly instructs to “get the fuck off the stage, man!” The reason for his ousting is an obstruction to the show of some sort, an infraction that seems to be part of a well-oiled skit. “He always do this shit,” Tisa comically groans. “On the count of three, Imma need y’all to yell Fuck you! One. Two. Three.”

“Fuck you!,” Herbert Von King Park collectively shouts, and the man trudges his way off the stage with his head bowed.

TisaKorean’s stage act looks a lot like someone gave a wild-minded fourth grader, midway through about seven different phases, fifteen minutes to answer a narrative writing prompt — If you could have your very own concert, what would it look like? — for extra credit in an English class taught by a progressive old woman who lives in Forest Hills. And, much like that wild-minded fourth grader would imagine, it’s glorious: all between plagued shouts of “Why am I so silly??,” he’s either moonwalking, jumping clean off the stage and within inches of the front row’s bulging eyes, dousing himself with the entire water bottle the aforementioned managerial-type gave him to drink, or demanding that the audience join him in yelling himself hoarse. “Why y’all looking at me like I’m crazy?,” he asks, genuinely perplexed, when he showers himself in Poland Spring. “I just wanted to pour some water on my head.” It’s an endearing microcosm of Tisa’s all-out impetus writ-large: the same way showering himself in water is a natural response to extreme heat, being “silly” is another itch it’s simply in his blood to scratch. If the raucous quasi-moshpit that has formed around me indicates anything, it’s that the “silly” itch is highly contagious… but compared to other contagious things making headlines today, everyone seems beyond content to allow this into their collective bloodstream.

Following a lengthy changeover DJ session by London’s RedLee — it’s necessary to state that, between transitional DJ gigs before and after every act, and the occasional verse during Jadasea’s set, he’s been working overtime today — the next performer to grace the stage is Junglepussy, the Brooklyn MC whose liberating songs of sexual autonomy have fostered a vibrant, militant community of listeners who flock to the music to find empowered versions of themselves. This is perhaps most visibly true when, upon her emergence from backstage, a group of it-girls huddled together in the front let out a shout so crazy that the rapper’s voice, microphone and all, is indiscernible in my already-hazy tape recording. A similar dynamic winds up being the case for most of Jungelpussy’s set, and as the me of the future writes what you are currently reading, he is frantically fast-forwarding and rewinding his audio file from several nights ago, in desperate search of any wise words — of which there were many — spoken by the defiant spitter that he can salvage for inclusion in this overdue article. Below is a list of the perceptible ones he’s able to swipe off of his SD card:

[Spoken to a lame hypothetical ex-boyfriend] “Yo’ big-ass head… Yo’ ashy butt-crack… Who else gon’ twist ya dreads?? I oughta (indiscernible)! You got a nasty attitude… I don’t like the way you treat me. I don’t get horny when you look at me. You wanna know what turns me on? I met this one (indiscernible) motherfucker… (...) his ass took me to the zoo. The zoo? The zoo. Last dude bought me (indiscernible) lingerie, I’m like eewww! I got n***as taking me to see live animals!!”

“You are now in the presence of an empress.”

“I am so honored to be here… shout out to MIKE, shout out to Young World, shout out to my family here in the b- I was boutta say in the building, but we on the lawn like…”

“You think you up next, but bitch, I’m adjacent.”

Junglepussy’s set is one-third PSA, one-third militant ritual, and another third oral essay. Due in part to her performance’s stream-of-consciousness nature, the audience is stirred into a frenzy every time she utters a mantra they can latch onto — an occasion, as you could likely tell from the above transcriptions, that repeats itself often — but, as valiantly as she’s feeding into the crowd’s fanaticism, it’s also somewhat plausible that she’s doing it just as much for herself. When she lurches into her deep, guttural act, it seems like somewhere behind her dark inconspicuous shades and seductive croon, a switch is flipped, and everything inside comes out in an endless deluge, solely interrupted by applause. By the time she’s through, the spell, much like Tisa’s, looks to be infectious.

It’s dark out when Slick Rick swag-walks his way out onto the platform, and in the time that spans between this moment and the end of the festival — which is not very long — he exhibits what is, very likely, the most industrial use of about ten or so minutes any of us in the audience has seen from a live act in quite some time. In the minutes immediately following the festival’s closing, Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre tweets: “Lmao saw slick Rick get on stage perform 2.5 songs flash his chains and dip exactly what I expected fire.” And he’s right — at this stage in the game, if anyone’s legacy speaks so loudly for them that they don’t have to do much more than have their name printed on a showbill to invigorate thousands, it’s Slick Rick. In the one shaky video I have of his set on my phone, he’s leading a sea of frontward-facing cameras in a spirited “Go Slick Rick, Go Slick Rick, Go!” The thing about it is, aside from these fifteen seconds, I don’t remember anything from when he was on stage. Executed like a true legend: much like the brand of lyrical storytelling he spearheaded in New York’s hip-hop genesis, the only way to experience it is, and was, to be in the moment.

The community-first crux of Young World is personified when, as the legions of cultured teenagers and twenty-somethings file out from the matted grass, some of the acts on the bill are among them. (On my way out, I make eye contact with a perplexed-looking man with an afro in a red T-shirt, only to realize a second later that it’s Jadasea.) After hastily purchasing what I think is a blueberry “Fruit Barrel” drink — four hours later, all of the ice in my water bottle is still ice, and I’ve just spent a majority of the show desperately licking away at the few liquid droplets the insulation let slip — I take a seat on a bench, where I realize that the drink is, in fact, an alcoholic spinoff version of what I initially guessed it was.

Of the voices belonging to various pairs of feet shuffling in front of me, some include a pair of old-heads (maybe the Candy Crush players?) that groan complaints about the brevity of Slick Rick’s set, a stroller-pushing mom flanked by two pesky kids, a group of teenagers who screech through a smoke-infused debrief, and straggling pedestrians on late-night phone calls. It’s another testament to the family-first mission of MIKE & Co: there is no one-size-fits-all demographic valued over the other, and with the door for communal enjoyment open wider than ever, any — and every — one is both allowed, and encouraged, to take part in the moment. Somewhere in the middle of performing “Aww (Zaza),” the earworm smoker’s anthem six tracks deep on his latest LP Disco!, MIKE leads the audience in a spirited call-and-response: “Stuck in the midst of it all… Struggling? Nah.” One of youth’s most effective selling points is the ability to outright reject any implication of the struggle — too young to think about college, too young to think about rent, too young to think about dying — and in this moment, as everyone in Herbert Von King Park turns a collective back towards their problems, the world represented on this fabled patch of grass certainly isn’t old.

Midway through putting off a dreaded 20 minute walk back to the Inwood-207 St Subway station, I am joined on the bench by a group of snazzily-dressed teenagers who, it soon becomes clear, are longtime Instagram friends meeting in person for the first time. Through shy laughter and polite outfit compliments, they awkwardly arrange themselves in the little sitting room they’re afforded — until I leave for the subway so they can have the whole thing — and work through a haphazard plan to tackle their first night as a unit together. From TisaKorean’s silliness to Junglepussy’s spell, every contagious thing besides monkeypox tonight has been carried through autonomy — the same brand of it represented by a newfangled friend group for whom, an hour or so to midnight, the fun is just beginning. Five hours after Young World's sweat-soaked start, the words of the bald record industry figurehead from Alvin and the Chipmunks continue to ring true: the only rule is that there are no rules.

Enjoying quinn’s tricked-out sonic footprint doesn’t necessarily mean understanding it, so if you never happened to understand it in the first place, then that’s great! Because she never wanted you to.

17 years old and making music since long before then, she’s dutifully peppered the internet with opaque tunes wrapped in inconspicuous packages, her scatterbrained sonic experiments separated solely by a smattering of odd monikers. In one SoundCloud loosie she quietly released as “DJ Weird Bitch” three months ago — its self-explanatory title: “dj weird bitch goes to NTS live headquarters and sets off a 7 yottabyte zip bomb on the wifi network” — she oscillates mercilessly between sped-up Japanese city pop sax solos, muddied rap-adjacent chatter, and glitched-out barrages punctuated by nifty transitions. Line that up with her most recent project, an eponymous 30-minute LP that puts mellow vocal performances in conversation with the controlled chaos of far-reaching musical contexts, and what you’re left with is a series of unconnectable dots. But when all is said and done, the dots may never have been meant for connection.

“I like adding shit to the cinematic quinneverse,” she says, poring over a bottle of Poland Spring in a busy internet cafe, as her longtime manager cheerfully nods along. It’s about a half-hour before noon on the Lower East Side, and in another thirty or so minutes, she’ll be headed over to the Good Company — a homely, youth-oriented fashion storefront on Allen Street — for a pop-up event where she’s slated to meet fans of hers in-person for the first time in her life. Come 7 PM, she’ll be in Brooklyn to play her first ever concert at the live music venue Elsewhere, chosen specifically for the intimate, living room-esque artist-to-audience dynamic offered by one of its smaller stages. She speaks with a hushed, gravelly-yet-playful inflection that sounds a little bit like a wise parent explaining why they aren’t angry with you, just disappointed. “I need to, bro,” she continues. “I like there being multiple characters to everything I do. I like people seeing me and being like, ‘Is it you? Or you? Or you? Or you?’ I like the vast discography thing. People hear the most popular song I made, and then they hear the ambient tape I made a year ago, and it’s like, ‘Yo, is this the same person? What the fuck?’”

Today, quinn is, at the very least, recognizable enough for me to spot her. When I arrive at the corner of Grand and Eldridge, she’s flanked by a cheery young group that includes her aforementioned manager Jesse, a lanky Finn Wolfhard doppelganger who makes esoteric music under the name saturn, the creative director of grassroots indie label DeadAir Records — to which she’s been signed since last year — and a few other giddy label-mates. “We’re trying to find this journalist,” she says calmly, scanning the surrounding streets behind ovular wire frames. When I reveal that I am, in fact, the journalist (she misheard my introduction over the chatter and thought I was another collaborator of hers named Sabbath), she tells me between poses for a group BeReal selfie that she’s only been in New York for a matter of hours.

The fast-paced day-to-day — from playing Fortnite and smoking weed with friends under a week ago, to trekking to the Big Apple for the most important 10-hour stretch of her career — is both on-brand, and an ebb she’s had to grow more and more accustomed to since storming into the limelight over the past 24 months. The track that put her onto most listeners’ radars was “i dont want that many friends in the first place,” a hyperactive rap number that sees her brazenly rail against the baggage of dead weight over the course of a whiplash-inducing upward climb like her own. At this point in her career, it registers as a necessary gospel. “If you can’t keep up, then okay,” she says matter-of-factly, midway through speaking on the collective progress-oriented mindset she shares with DeadAir. “We’re all trying to make a living. This is our life. And if it’s not your life, too, then no hard feelings, but we’re cutting you out.”

A military kid with a worldview informed by constant movement, and the unforgiving grind of a musical come-up backgrounded by nights spent on couches and floors, quinn both admits, and has been told by countless others, that she’s wise beyond her years. It’s a trait that will come in handy for the pivotal career junction she finds herself in, signaled in grand fashion by a day like today. At DeadAir, she’s gearing up to officially take on a tinge of increased responsibilities as soon as she’s legally old enough to sign them into action. She’s adamant about maintaining a majority of creative control over her cultural product — something she’ll be able to do more contractually when she turns 18 in December — and, with trust incurred among label peers who respect her for her wisdom, the keys are more or less being handed to her to do just that. “Moving around and being a kid and growing up," she says, "it’s never been too much for me, because it feels like I’ve always had too much on my plate.”

Quinn’s youth never really got to look like that of most other kids — no play-dates, no longtime friends, no sitcom-ready at-home hangouts — but at this stage, the best of both the young and old worlds melded together in her persona are spilling into one another. A matter of days ago, she was in Philadelphia playing the aforementioned Fortnite and smoking the aforementioned weed with friends and label-mates. These moments double as the That 70’s Show-esque blunt sessions she missed out on growing up, and the business meetings there won’t be any shortage of in the foreseeable future. “Shit gets hectic sometimes, but that’s just how we work,” she explains. Her Sopranos-esque spiel is somewhat enlivened by her all-black attire, reigning in an ominous inconspicuity familiar to her music: she’s wearing black leather boots, a pair of black tactical cargo pants, a spiked chain that swings menacingly from one black belt loop to another, and a black headwrap. “We work fast, and we work quietly. When it’s business, it’s all business. None of that drama, none of that family shit. Business comes first, then we worry about everything else. That’s why we rehearse first, then smoke weed and play Fortnite after. You know what I mean?”

This doesn’t mean that family shit isn’t in the equation at some level. Jesse Taconelli, a former music journalist who doubles as quinn’s manager and the founder of DeadAir Records, crossed paths with her through coverage of the local hyperpop scene for a publication he was working with. Much of the groundwork for DeadAir was laid by similar roots, lasting connections stemming from times Taconelli interviewed artists and “wouldn’t want the conversation to stop there.” His discovery of quinn came at the peak of a fertile-yet-futile industry moment in which young, upstart acts would take fairly new genres like hyperpop by storm, then whether due to lack of resolve on their parts, or mishandling on the management level, fizzle out as quickly as they emerged. He split with his job to found his grassroots label in hopes of giving quinn a shot at something better, and, in turn, stumbled upon something better for himself as well.

“I was working as a janitor at a Whole Foods when quinn hired me,” Taconelli says, a second after which quinn instructs me to “put this in the interview.” “When she came back from the hiatus and the cat mother [another of quinn’s several monikers, this one dedicated mostly to jungle] stuff, I just wanted to have a talk, and it changed my life. From being a full-time janitor at a Whole Foods to working with quinn.

“Our first convo was just about shoegaze music,” he continues, as the woman who will go on to save this interview by hunting us down and returning my forgotten tape recorder takes a seat nearby. “My Bloody Valentine was the topic. I could just tell we got along. I asked to hear [quinn’s] record — it was a very early take on Drive-By Lullabies — and the rest was history.”

“I sent him the draft,” quinn adds, “and he agreed to get to work on it, as a team. And yeah, shit was history after that.”

Drive-By Lullabies was quinn’s 2021 DeadAir debut, and its cover — her upper body holding an intricate drum machine in front of her head — quickly became an image seared into the brains of longtime listeners, and soon-to-be fans alike. Much like quinn’s overarching lore writ large, it spread like wildfire, mostly fueled by word-of-mouth. (I was sent an Apple Music link to it by a college friend after a long post-midnight conversation about the Neptunes sparked by getting lost on campus.) In its most streamed track on Spotify, the sinister, rustling PSA “from paris, with love,” she sneers threateningly abrasive mantras into a void studded with trap-infused vampire thriller beats and ominous, click-tracky snares. “You gon’ have to kill me if you want me,” she warns in the song’s first verse, her monotone registering as both numb and a little bit disinterested. The detachment makes her words all the more potent. “Put down your guns, approach me slowly / Black suit, camouflaged, can’t see shit / How you hop up on the wave, but you’re seasick?”

Much of the record banked on this on-edge ethos, a focal point of its messaging being hinged by the anxious sense of someone on the cusp of just as many dangers as triumphs. quinn, its month-old 2022 follow-up, sounds like something a bit closer to the light at the end of the tunnel — it boasts a more polished, less mixtape-ish feel; quinn’s vocals seem to come with ease; it feels like a message from the throne, rather than one from an aggressive contender for it — albeit, for all the ostensible ground gained, it refuses to let go of the rough roots that forged its peaks. Before I got a chance to listen to it in full, the same college friend who introduced me to Drive-By Lullabies sent me a link to “Two Door Tiffany,” the fourth track on the new record. “The way I see it,” she muses in its opening lyrics, “there’s a war inside me / and I don’t go nowhere, I don’t let myself go / So with those words out now, I think I’ll let you know.” Her parting message embodies the vulnerable chord her music has struck with listeners up to now: “This next segment is for anybody who's stressed… Depressed, uh, fuckin', I don't know, hahaha.”

For a while, this was quinn. “I was going through a lot,” she tells me, citing the comfort of her four walls as a reprieve she basked in before she was willing to do things like what she’s gearing up to do today. “I didn’t want to go through that outside of my room. I didn’t want to come here and still be going through some shit and ruin the whole experience. But now I feel like I’m recovering. I’ve been recovering from a very long depression. Now is the perfect time to see that there’s more to life.”

The sentiment wastes little time echoing itself. Upon entering the pleasantly air-conditioned Good Company — after getting lost several times en route, which quinn enjoys, because she’s planning to move out to New York soon and is taking every chance she can get to scope out the city — it doesn’t take long for us to see what exactly the “more to life” she’s talking about looks like. Before the first few awestruck fans enter, the room is occupied by the same cheery bunch from the corner of Grand and Eldridge, with the addition of DeadAir co-founder Billie Bugara, and a few giddy friends intermittently taking the first few group flicks of what will be a long day of “_______ mentioned you in their story” notifications for the phenom at the center of attention.

“She’s been on the label as long as we’ve had the label,” Bugara tells me, midway through a conversation about freelance writing and imposter syndrome. “Actually, the first piece I ever wrote for Complex was about her. It was the ‘Best New Artist’ thing, but it was, like, a blurb. We’ve always been at each other’s sides in a certain way. Because I’m not doing the music stuff like she is, and she’s not doing my stuff, you know? But we can still help each other out. We’ve been on a steady rise.

“When we started the label, it was just like, ‘How could we not have her on it?’,” she continues. “Especially with the trust dynamic and stuff, and how she’s responded to other, major labels. This fit is so perfect for her, and now we’re here.”

Back at Granddaddy’s Cafe, quinn told me that it was her uncle who informed her of “how evil the industry was.” (Before signing to DeadAir, quinn rejected offers from labels including Universal, Interscope, and 300.) “He educated me on that shit, because he’s seen it all happen. He was a DJ back in the 90s, him and my dad, Baltimore club, all that shit. They’re legends, they have no fucking clue. But he taught me the difference between business and a family.”

In the tiny interior of the Good Company, if it isn’t family, it’s hard to tell what else quinn’s DeadAir crew could be. The label’s modest clientele sheet is made up of quinn, the aforementioned esoteric act saturn, and the upstart indie songster Jane Remover. Aside from them, other figures that arrive at the Good Company to share laughs and selfies include the digicore innovator angelus, the concrete-grinned fashion heartthrob Oliver Leone, the Indiana-bred hyperpop scene graduate Midwxst, and the prolific eldia DJ Dazegxd. When followers of quinn’s begin to trickle through the cracked storefront door, and, over the course of the afternoon, the talkative congregation spills out into the surrounding streets, it’s difficult to tell who — from the local high school students nervously encircling their favorite artists to ask for photos, to the fashionable adults befriending each other over conversations about underground music — is on a pedestal, and who isn’t. Much like the modus operandi of her first show in a few hours, the scales are even, and it’s a familial sense that feels nurtured, if not intentional.

“I think it’s definitely a big change,” one local high school student tells me of the new album, “between something she would put out in, say, 2020, versus what she just dropped. You could tell it’s a big shift, whether it be in direction, or stylistic choices. I’d say it’s definitely welcome, because you could see artists that never really change from what they blew up doing, or never really grow. But with quinn, I feel like that versatility and the ability to go from some stupid electronics to some more chill, R&B type shit, makes her a really interesting artist to listen to.”

Another high school student, who goes to a school with mean science teachers in the Bronx, stopped by because he saw the pop-up on quinn’s Instagram story, and is actively deciding whether he will try to persuade his strict dad to let him attend the concert tonight. “quinn got me into Eric[doa], Eric got me into Midwxst, then Midwxst got me into the new wave of hyperpop,” he tells me. “It all started with quinn. quinn opened me up to everything.”

A more literal embodiment of the family-esque dynamic comes when quinn’s brother, an imposing-albeit-chill fellow quinn introduces as “the biggest dude you’ve ever seen,” arrives to the tune of frenzied commotion, hugs, and a large assemblage at the storefront’s window. He took a bus here from Baltimore the second he heard that the event was happening, and plans to get something to eat before biking all the way to Brooklyn for the concert once the pop-up ends (partly because he doesn’t want to risk getting lost on the Subway).

“I watched quinn grow up, man,” he says, toting a joint and leaning against a wall outside. “This been quinn’s dream. So when I heard the show was happening, no matter what I had to do to come up here, I was going to do it.”

quinn’s latest album opens with the mantra “there’s no need to knock the hustle when you kinda are the hustle,” and, one track later, features the triumphant assertion that “I’m in a new place, I’m in a new light / I’m where I’ve always wanted to be.” None of these factors — the hustle, nor the new light — can exist without the other, and for her, it’s a sentiment she’s embodied long enough to speak on from the outside looking in, rather than the dark-shrouded position she long occupied, wondering whether she’d ever get to where she is now. As much success as it’s already wielded, for both herself and DeadAir, the upward climb continues to prove necessary. But at least for now, no level of acclaim can convince quinn to have it any other way. “There’s fun to be found in the grind,” she says. “You stop grinding, that’s when shit’s boring. It’s like having all the cheat codes to the video game. The fuck you gonna do now?

“I mean that,” she continues, segueing to the opening mantra of her new LP. “There’s no need to knock the hustle if you kinda are the hustle. I am the hustle.”

Knocking the hustle often stems from not understanding it, and understanding quinn’s hustle looks like understanding her music. Fear not: if you never happened to understand it in the first place, then that’s great! Because she never wanted you to.

Genesis Evans is cruising down the lively neighboring streets of Prospect Park in an all-black Nissan Rogue, ambitious ideas leaving his mouth with the mechanical speed of rugged, veteran subway rats — of which, in our destination of the Eartern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum 2/3 Station below, many are lurking. One of these ideas revolves around hopes for a collaborative endeavor with Xbox. It’s a core facet of his fit for today: hanging loosely over a pair of straight-legged navy blue bottoms is a lime-green Seattle Sounders jersey, the word “XBOX” emblazoned in larger-than-life letters across its front.

Spoken with a sense of modest earnesty long focal to his lore, the plan makes sense coming out of his mouth. It’s just that there’s one crippling, damning roadblock: “...How do I talk to someone at Xbox?,” he says, with a burst of laughter. He quiets down, and turns his steely gaze, searing through Urkel-esque tortoise-shell frames, back towards the road. “I have these crazy ideas,” he admits, solemnly. “I hope to one day, when I have them, have people say ‘Hold on, let me actually listen to him.’”

These days, a good amount of ears are perked. A few weeks ago, Evans, who used to drop one-off loosies under the moniker “foghornleghornn” before switching over to “genny!”, independently released 8 SONGS, a far-ranging debut album that somehow manages to squeeze chopped-up baptist-church chipmunk soul, transcendental Yoshi samples, and funk-inflected digi-core raps into 22 scorching minutes. Everything about the record — from its running time, to the mid-joyride artwork gracing its cover, to some of its most thrilling moments — points a finger back to an elusive sense of haste. It's a value doubled down upon by its title: 8 SONGS may register as impulsive, because in some ways, that’s exactly what it was.

Two weekends ago at the cozy Brooklyn bar Gold Sounds, Evans performed his own music live for the first time on a bill consisting of, among other upstart skate-adjacent acts, Florida skater-slash-rapper 454, and gritty New York spitter Niontay. A matter of days before he graced the stage in a McDonald’s-branded NASCAR baseball cap and a burgundy wig, he had considered quitting music. “Right before I dropped, I was like ‘Man, I’m about to quit music and everything,’” he says, meeting me across the street from the towering Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, and beginning to lead me down a lengthy route that seems familiar. “Because I [had] been sitting on it for so long, stressing myself out. But having that show forced me to put it out. I didn’t want to do the show without having stuff out. I didn’t even care at that point. I felt like it was the right time. But I at first didn’t feel like it.”

And for a while, he didn’t have the necessary patience, either. One evening back in December, Evans was grinning in the endearingly-cluttered studio room of his Bed-Stuy apartment, prefacing selections from a desktop bearing hundreds of audio files with brief, spoken blurbs about the various projects he had mustered the inspiration to start, but lacked the follow-through to finish. He played early versions of “REGAL” and “ZOINKS!” on a floor-rumbling speaker, contemplating whether, and how, to rearrange certain verses, put lyrics where there weren’t any, or revamp the sonics of musical undertakings he already had a footprint on. Something Evans believes to heart is that he’s here, on planet Earth, “to inspire people,” and for a long time, much like that afternoon, the fuel for such inspiration remained trapped within his four walls. This happened for a variety of reasons: maybe for music, he was stuck in a cycle of perfectionist edits; maybe for fashion, the attention span (and finances) necessary to support Humble, the folk-legend streetwear brand he founded with Conor Prunty years ago, were at a low; maybe with art, more paintings were being started than completed. But across all mediums, the consistent factor was that baggage was being accumulated — and just when he’d venture towards getting rid of one heap, another would always present itself.

“I wouldn’t be able to work on other things, on my own, as well as I can now,” he says, channeling an analogy that likens his cluttered creative headspace to a messy room. “Because I would just be thinking about my messy room. It’s harder to work on other things, because I would always be like ‘I should be cleaning my room.’ I’ve sat on this project for so long. That’s what this project felt like. The room keeps getting more filled up, and more filled up. Now, I feel like it’s clean a little bit.”

Sonically, 8 SONGS sounds like what the disparate bowels of a freshly-used vacuum might look like, broad nuggets of sonic ephemera juxtaposed with one another in a way that’s as enthralling to consume as it must have been to create. (With a smile, he mentions that a friend told him he “invented a new genre.”) On “hostess,” a bubbly number that boasts a masterful combination of slinky auto-tune tenors and layered bass riffs likenable to meat falling off the bone, he skirts his way around playful tales about how he eats “the motherfucking cake like it’s hostess,” boasting endearingly about his love being big enough to fill a mansion, and lamenting with tongue-in-cheek flair on the perils of everyone being the same (“but not me, though”). The following track, “FEELING” — a sped-up version of which was previewed in the outro of “hostess”’s music video this past May — features churned-out, slow-burn waves of reverbed electric guitar foregrounded by mellow vocals, not too far in nature from the skater-slash-musician’s reserved speaking voice. It resonates like the sort of lighthearted, city-bred living limerick Patia Borja references when she captions patiasfantasyworld posts with “#nyc”: “Feeling all the emotions," he narrates in its opening verse, "Still balling and boasting / She calling me a hoe / Sorry I don't even know / What your girl said she saw / Is they friend? Is they foe? / Will I land? Will I fall? You be playing on the low.”

Both sonically and lyrically, the most somber moment on 8 SONGS comes in its opening track, “REGAL,” which Evans recorded alongside his younger brother in the wee hours of the morning while his mother dealt with a health scare during the pandemic. He sounds like a ghost. The song’s instrumental backing — sampled from the Nintendo 64 game Yoshi’s Story, and featuring, if you listen closely, his little brother humming along — hinges on warped moments of tension and release, Evans’ funereal murmur bridging the gaps between life and death with lofty, directionless existentialism. “When the steam blows, where will we go?,” he asks, denatured strings echoing his disorientation. “Can we go by the rocks at Prospect Park, sit and stare at the people?”

Today in Brooklyn, the answer is yes. It’s exactly this that lies at the end of the winding thirty-minute walk that started with Evans meeting me at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, cutting through lawns and rocky roadways, dodging summer camp cohorts rife with rugrats in bright T-shirts, and navigating through greenery-laden shortcuts. At some point, he slows to a near-stop and gestures toward a railing overlooking a quiet lake. Sitting next to me on the banister, he periodically gets up to squash charred joints against the pavement, looking down at the water every now and again to observe large swans and their interactions with very small turtles who swim in bunches around them.

“I feel like I’ve always attracted people who I felt were just truly themselves,” he says, as a bunch of summer campers straggle behind their counselors to gawk at the sea creatures. “They would inspire me, and I would inspire them. I feel like it just happens by being naturally you. If you are just naturally, unapologetically you, you are going to inspire me. And I think that same thing is transferred with everything I do that inspires people, no matter what it is.”

For a majority of those familiar with his story, the first facet of Evans that proved broadly inspirational was his skating. Hailing from a generative batch of scrawny homies-turned-legends who flocked Brooklyn’s skateboarding infrastructure and frequented Tompkins Square Park, he forged a niche online legend with personable clips uploaded to an intimate, impulsively-titled YouTube channel called foghornleghornn, and the aforementioned streetwear brand Humble he co-founded alongside Conor Prunty. In one cinematic short titled “Genny’s Day Out,” uploaded to the foghornleghornn channel in 2017, he navigates the streets of Brooklyn like a 21st Century take on Forrest Gump, skating from impromptu run-ins with boisterous friends, to brush-ups with rushy modeling scouts who assure him they’ll make him a superstar, to charming moments with newfound romantic interests. By the video’s final frame — a modest floral offering of his fluttering into Humble’s equally-modest hand-drawn logo — it feels like, corny as it may sound, the cliche made apparent through its messaging rings true: the only one keeping your life from being interesting is you.

Working at Supreme’s Lafayette Street location for years upon leaving high school, Evans briefly skated for the team, his beanie-clad, Cookie (a la Ned’s Declassified)-esque image reigning in a welcome sense that the sport wasn’t solely reserved for swagged-out cool kids in designer wear, but anyone comfortable enough in their own skin to do it their way. In 2020, he took the do-it-yourself gospel into his own hands: within 24 hours of stumbling upon the Wikipedia page of his estranged grandfather, the Panamanian jazz musician Carlos Garnett, and mustering a long-churning passion to pursue music on his own, he quit his job.

Two years removed from the decision, things are beginning to make more sense in retrospect than they may have as they were happening. The sentiment isn’t lost on the music. “Now, even looking at the album artwork, I’m just like ‘Wow, this is such a fragment of my life,’” Evans says, grinning. “It’s my first car, my first project… I look at this Yoshi [plush] all the time… Everything just low-key randomly fucking worked out.

“It just made sense,” he continues. “When I made the ‘REGAL’ beat, I didn’t even have a car yet, but I could hear a car door closing, so I added that and it made sense. And then, I didn’t even think about it, but I was just like ‘’toeonthegas’ has to be next.’ But now that I’m thinking about it, ‘toe on the gas’ is like starting the car. And the Yoshi sample is in that, and that’s what I’m looking at on the dashboard. Then the colors remind me of ‘simple’ and ‘MILAH’S POEM’ and ‘REGAL’ — the color of the painting is the color of those songs, to me. But then the sun in the back is more like the end, like ‘hostess’ and ‘ZOINKS!’. It all just made sense. But I wasn’t thinking about it this deeply when I was making it… I was just making it. And it’s fucking crazy how that shit happens.”

Creativity is inherently indebted to a similar brand of entropy, and for Evans, the wide-ranging creative impulses he felt as a kid are now beginning to materialize into something concrete. But as much as the imagination may be sustaining itself with more flecks of maturity, the kid in Evans still has yet to go anywhere. Cruising down the lively neighboring streets of Prospect Park in his Nissan Rogue to drop me off at the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum Subway Station, it’s this version of him that rails off ingenious idea after ingenious idea, threads of scatterbrained youthfulness visibly beginning to latch onto spindles of aged reasoning.

At one point, he tells me he wants to someday have a solo art exhibition. “I’ve been in a lot of group shows when I was younger,” he says, the failed kickflips of a practicing pre-teen skater slapping against pavement in the near distance. “And those are fun. But it’s usually more of a reason for people to get together, get fucked up and hang out. It’s fun, but I’m so over that shit. I want to do something that has some passion and some meaning behind it.”

Imagine being a kid in bum fuck Northern California. You’re spending your days skating around rural areas and small towns with your friends, smoking weed and whatever you can find, doing drugs, graffitiing, interacting with nomads, fucking around, and being debaucherous. You’re not too good for anything or anyone. This was recording artist and producer Emmett Kai’s childhood. This sensibility, a kind of search for freedom and appreciation of strange characters, has remained with him into his adulthood. The anonymous people in the US of A are among the most real and inspiring to Emmett, whether they’re calcified in their small towns or wandering, transient.

“Nature’s Voice is a Cry” is Kai’s latest release, a single to precede his upcoming album. The multitalented creator has tailored his life to be the most conducive to creating great art, which to him, meant moving upstate and leading a simpler existence, not bogged down by consumerism and the fast paced, wasteful culture of New York City. Today, he releases the early two thousands inspired music video for his nostalgic and sweet song. While the Y2K era was “unhinged” and “consumerish”, it was also “drowned out and lost.” Kai is interested in exploring these two simultaneous and not mutually exclusive truths.

"Nature's Voice is a Cry" and its corresponding video are our entry way into Kai’s freakpop world that we will be fully immersed in when the rest of the project comes out. “I tend to think of myself as having many different personalities that don’t get along,” he explains. “Freak Pop is my self defined world that I created for myself and those personalities to live in. The people that search the nooks and crannies for safety pins and cigarette butts. The people that grew up with very little knowledge on what’s cool and what isn’t.”

Calling from his home studio in Kingston, NY, where he creates the majority of his music, Kai tells us about his hippie upbringing, his creative process, and the paths that have led him to this release. The single echoes the cries of mother earth in a three and a half minute meandering track, replete with drum machines and nostalgic guitar licks. Kai gently tosses us into the imagery of his youth:

“Walk down lover’s lane

Nothing but this gravel road

Nice night for an escapade

Promise me you’ll take it slow”

He creates this environment that to him is so personal, while also singing about a fond farewell to California, as he grows roots in the East and watches the West burn.

Take a trip with us through our exclusive interview with Emmett Kai below.

What brought you to the Hudson Valley?

I'm from, like, a super small town and every town around me, super small, and there's not a lot of action, and there's not a lot of quote, unquote “cool” stuff going on. I just met the right person at the right time who took me to New York to visit. I felt super compelled to uproot my entire life. I had nothing to lose and I was like, I got a couple grand in cash, you know, and I'm like, I'll find an apartment on Facebook and just move my entire life. And so yeah, I've kind of been here ever since. I did try to go back to California during the pandemic, like in 2020. Early, early pandemic. But then we got burned out by the fires. I just was like, literally Google searched: “Where's the safest place to live in America when it comes to natural disasters?”. And the Hudson Valley was number one on the list. I was like, Dude, what are the, you know, what are the odds? I can see my friends in Brooklyn if I want and be close to all those people, but then also have my little country life and, you know, not be bothered.

I love it there so much. Do you consider yourself a small town type of person?

For sure. I think that I thrived in ways I didn't know were possible in the city. I just didn't know what to expect when I lived there. I remember one person told me, Just give it two months, just give it two months and then you'll know for sure if you wanna stay or if you wanna leave. But I know hella fools that showed up in New York and then, like, three weeks later, moved back home, you know? And it's like, that sucks. I don't wanna be that person. So I ended up staying for three years. and it was cool, but I always knew in the back of my mind, I'm not gonna be here forever. This isn't really my vibe. My morals don't really align with city life. No shade to, you know, like I'm not throwing shade at any of my friends or anybody that lives in the city, but just like personally, I don't really vibe with the city like that. It's too much consumption, too much fast fashion. Everything's so fast, which means that things just get drowned out. There's not a lot of mindfulness when it comes to consuming things and creating things and the longevity of things. I felt this sense of urgency all the time in New York.

Yeah. It was like everything that I ever did was like, it needed to be done yesterday. It was like this sense of this importance to be seen, too. I felt like everybody's looking at you, but they're not at the same time. I think when I was there, I was younger, and where I was at that point, I was just kind of like, I want to be known, and I wanna make a mark, and I wanna make an impact. And I quickly realized that everything that I have to do in the city to do that is very unattractive to me.

I feel you. And you no longer feel that way at all? Or has it just changed?

One thing that I toy with a lot is, I want to be known for my art, you know, and that's really what it comes down to, is that if I devoted my life to my art, and that's the only thing that I care about aside from my family, that's what I put most of my energy into. That's when I wake up and go to sleep, you know, I get up every morning for that—living in the city took away from that so much. I've found being isolated way more productive. Especially struggling with mental health and addiction and stuff like that. I think that living in the city was really numbing for that kind of stuff. I don't think that it was conducive to a healthy lifestyle for me. Especially trying to be sober and trying to be super level headed and make smart decisions and stuff like that. I did make smart decisions, but it just made it so much harder, and here it's like, you know, my lifestyle now is so much more focused, so much less distraction, so much more room for me to think.

But I'll tell you, it took me a good year of living here to feel actually grounded for once, and be like, I actually feel like I'm in a good place. I know who I am. Identity crisis too. I'm sure that all artists kind of struggle with identity crises. In the city, it was really apparent to me. I was just struggling, constantly. Everybody thinks they're so cool here. I mean, it's like that in a lot of cities, like in any kind of like metropolitan big city where there are artists. Where people flock to perform and there's clicks and there's scenes. I always felt like everybody thinks they're so cool here. And like, I don't necessarily think any of it's cool. I can't tell what's cool. I need to zoom out and step back to understand what I actually think is cool. ‘Cause it's all just too much. I don't know if that may makes sense or not.

No, it definitely makes sense. I'm gonna go backwards a little bit with my next question. How do you think kind of having the east coast, New York, and then growing up in California, has influenced your sound and your art?

I think that growing up in California, I had a very limited, well, it has nothing to do with California, but it has more so to do with where and how I grew up. The way that I grew up, in the area that I grew up in California, is very like, it's known for being kind of like “back to the earth” or like the “hippie rebel” kind of Cowboys, whatever, you know what I mean? It’s super rural and I never had internet growing up. So I never was exposed to like, you know, like MySpace, like—

Yeah. Dude, like pop culture was never really in my life. It was always coming to me later when it wasn't cool, you know, or whatever it was. If you went to the skate park, you would run into somebody who was older, who was listening to something that was cool. Or maybe they were the rich kids that had lived in town and they had internet.They were downloading all this music off LimeWire, you know? And you would come up on music that way. So the only thing that I really had going on was my mom. My mom played Cocteau Twins in the house when I was growing up, my mom played Smashing Pumpkins and the Smiths. She was a huge fan of all those kinds of like eighties, nineties shoey indie rock.

Yeah, that's my shit, too. That's what I grew up on. I was born in ’92, so I missed a lot of that stuff as a super lucid adult. It always struck a chord for me. So I took that stuff, and I ran with it, and I loved that stuff, and I played in bands. The best thing that happened to me was I got expelled from my school when I was in middle school. I got forced to go live with my dad in my freshman year of high school. I went to this town called Santa Rosa, which was like a small city. I went from a school with, like, 500 kids to 2000 kids. All of a sudden, I lived in a town with diversity and streets and, you know, cigarette discount stores and, you know what I mean? And weed stores or whatever, you know, like skate shops and all these cool little nooks and crannies, just so much more stuff.

And I think through that, I found a bunch of pockets of hardcore music and punk and then, and hip hop and rap. I just thought everything was so cool. So forever, I just was indulging in all of this stuff, playing in punk bands and playing drums and then singing and then also hanging out with some kids that rapped and would learn how to make beats and all that kind of stuff. Then I got into electronic music and was DJing and taking drugs and partying and staying out till six in the morning. When I was really young, I was raving a lot.

If you fast forward through all those years, when I moved to New York, I think that I got a little more dialed in on what my sound was, ‘cause I had already gone through a bunch of stuff that was kind of just shedding all the dead skin. By the time I got to New York City and was between New York City and Brooklyn, that was the beginning of me dialing in what I’m doing. I still make rap music. I still make electronic music. My artist project is very rock based, band based, or indie, you know? And so it's like, I still have all of these things. It's just learning how to compartmentalize all of them. It was really the whole objective.

Right. So that brings us to now. Your new single, "Nature's Voice is a Cry": Where did that title come from? Could you tell me a little bit about the origin of that song?

The title is definitely a bit like climate changey. Here's the thing. At the end of 2020, we drove to New York from California. We left because the fires were just so outta control.

Yeah. I mean, it's almost every year now, but, the fires were so outta control. This was the third time that I had dealt with the fires. I also had my partner with me, and I was like, This is so whack. I don't want you to have to go through this ever again. I want to try to build a healthy life and a healthy home base, you know? So, we left, and we came here to New York again. We got here in December and then in June I went back for my friend's 31st birthday.

I flew back to California and I had this new panic disorder that had just hit me. I just started going to therapy again. I was struggling a lot, as I think a lot of people were after the pandemic. The vaccine had just been rolled out. So I went back to California in 2021. I was driving through my hometown and everything was burned, bro. Everything was black and crazy. Charred and weird and eerie. And my buddy was like, Wasn't that drive beautiful? And I was like, Dude, not really. Like, it's actually pretty depressing. It was not what I remember as a child. So I’ve been writing about that.

For the last year, I’ve been capturing that element of me kissing California goodbye and being kind of like, Farewell. I will always identify with you and love you as a state and as a culture. And just as bringing me up as a human being, but I've gotta move on. And so when I wrote this song, it was this homage to California and, not only just California. "Nature’s Voice is a Cry" is kind of this cry out for help.

Can you speak to a particular lyric that you feel illustrates that the most?

Writing lyrics for me is super avant garde and secondary. I mean I can answer the question. Yeah. But writing lyrics for me is usually secondary. I try to write the music first. And then I come up with melodies that hit the vibe, and I'm not really saying that I'm I have synesthesia—I don't really know if I do or not—but the way that I've always put it is, I try to capture just an overall feeling. And vibe. I'll make a hundred versions of it and then I'll know which one's the right one.

The first thing I wrote down when I was listening to your song was the word "nostalgia," and I feel like that was part of what you were going for. You're thinking about growing up in California and how things used to be greener. You were a child, but—

Used to be more wet

Used to actually rain. Yeah, so you accomplished that, for sure. I wrote down “nostalgia” and “sweetness”. That’s what I thought while listening to it.

Thank you. The lyrics that say, “Walk down lovers lane. Nothing but this gravel road,” it's like the first line. My grandmother's property where we all grew up, my mother, my aunt, and a lot of my friends grew up there. It was just this super rough property that has all these outbuildings. And if you go into town and you meet any of the locals, half of them have lived there. It's always been this old stomping ground. It's very West Coast hippie, in a way, which is where I get a lot of the sound for that song. That one lyric was kind of like, you would always walk up and down the driveway and it's this long gravel road. It's the only road that's gravel too. It's like the only road that nobody's paved yet, you know? I think that it's more just imagery. I just kinda write from images.

The nostalgia definitely comes from missing stuff and missing what it used to be and not in like an old head kind of mentality, not in like a “Make America Great Again” mentality, you know what I mean? Of course not, but more, I just wish that California wasn't burning. I just wish that there was more water. Just wishful thinking. I try to capture that over and over and over again.

In terms of your creative process, like you said, you focus on the music first. Can you speak more to that, particularly for this upcoming album?

Yeah. I definitely focus on the music first. Singing was the last thing I ever did. I was always playing instruments and writing songs with other people in mind for singing or for other vocalists. My first step in the creative process is always coming up with music. When I listen to songs that I think think are inspiring or that I have on repeat, you know, I was just telling somebody the other day, actually. We were all super high, sitting around a campfire, talking about music and art and the current climate of the world when it comes to the art world and stuff like that. I was kind of going back into what I've been doing over the last couple months of just writing and producing for people and myself and whatnot. And I’ll just, whatever I have on all the time, I'll just listen to it for two weeks straight. It'll be a couple artists that are usually a vintage record or an older artist that I just really identify with. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Joan Baez. Maybe it's one measure of a song that just hits me right. I'll be like, I wish I could write a whole album off just that one moment of that song. So I'll try to do that over and over and over again. And try to harness that more and more and more.

I feel like there's a great comparison with a painter or something. Or writers, writers are like that. You just write, you know, hundreds of drafts. Or maybe not hundreds, but you know what I mean? You write hella drafts and then, like, you finally nailed it and you know, your intuition is like, oh, that's the one. Yeah, that’s the right one for sure. And so when it comes to vocals in lyrics, it's unfortunately a lot of the time, if my vocals don't sound good over it, then I usually just scrap it and it sucks. It'll be like the coolest piece of music. And I'll just be like, oh, I'm just gonna put it over here and just save it for somebody else down the road. But the lyrics are always kind of hard 'cause I really don't like writing conventionally.

Yeah, exactly. People are always telling me I need to follow that structure, and I'm trying to get better at it ‘cause I do think it'll pay off, you know?

I also struggle with that ‘cause I'm the opposite as you. I was a writer first. So most of my songs start with poetry. 

But you know what, that's the thing, I think that’s the best art. There's a whole world out there for people that are songwriters and they work on pop records and they write the new Beyonce record. And they write, you know, like Dua Lipa’s next album, or whatever. I love all that stuff, don't get me wrong, but that is a carved out formula for the masses, for sure. And that's, that's great. But when it's debatable, that's really artistic in my opinion, which is controversial, I'm sure. But a lot of the records that I love and that I listen to and that I identify with and that I, you know, find inspiring are usually, just the people have to not know what they're doing.

I actually really feel like the music you make before you understand how to do anything—when you’re not super familiar with your medium, whatever it is—and you don’t know the rules, it is easier to be much more free with it.

I totally agree. The worst thing that I ever did was try to become a professional at it. I feel like I listen to these old demos sometimes. I'm not saying I'm doomed, but like, I used to be able to write a song and play the drums, the bass, the guitar, the keys, and record it all in like a day and be excited about it. Now it takes me 30 times— 30, like that's an exaggeration. It just takes me so much longer to achieve what I have in my head. But I also think that that's because my ideas are getting a little bit more outlandish.

There's only, there's two ways I can look at it. Willa, there's one way, one way is that I'm doomed, you know? Things are getting harder for me. Or the other one is, I'm becoming more of a genius. You know?

I think it's the second one. I don't think you’re doomed.

I mean, I'm definitely not. Maybe.

Maybe you're in a transitional phase as an artist.

I think my quality of work is getting better and better. I'm really happy with what I'm writing now and what I'm actually putting out in the world. I'm only gonna give the world what I think is my best work.

How is your upcoming album differentiating from your last album, “Freak Pop Novelty”?

I thought my last album was perceived really great. It got synced on a bunch of TV shows and each song felt like a really strong single to me.

I wrote all those songs in Brooklyn. I finished them all in Brooklyn, but I started the project in California. I took a month's vacation back home where I got to use a bunch of Bob Weir's gear from the Grateful Dead.

That’s amazing. How did that happen?

It just happened. I just hit up a friend of mine who was like the youngest employee at the studios in Marin. I said, Hey, I want to do a little like solo writing trip. Could I borrow some gear? He was like, Send me a list of what you need. And when you get into town drive over to, you know, I'll tell you where to meet me. And it was very much like a drug deal. I showed up and I had to drive through a gate, they saw my face and I walked in, I drove into this location and I opened up my trunk and he loaded all the goods into the back of my car. I took off and I just recorded with them and used them.

And they all said “Weir” all over them. I got to fly back to New York with all these ideas. It was just really special. The last record just felt really right. I want six singles, I want them to all be able to stand on their own and then I'm gonna package it and I'm gonna put it out there. We pressed it on vinyl and we sold out of the vinyl real fast and it was a really good experience overall.

Please confirm that you are at least 18 years old.