Confessions: The Interview

Jones: Are you a Christian artist?

Bruder: That’s for my audience and God to decide, I guess. I’m just doing the best I can.

Jones: Who is your audience?

Bruder: I make music for me and my friends, whoever they may be.

Jones: A lot of independent artists have to wear multiple hats to make their art happen. How does your day-to-day life outside of writing music feed into your creative energy, or do you view music as an escape from it?

Bruder: What?

Jones: Well, in an era of the hyper-polished, heavily produced music and highly curated social media personas we see today, your aesthetic feels intentionally unpretentious. Is it difficult to stay grounded and resist the urge to play a character' or look like a try-hard in the modern music industry?

Bruder: That sounds like a conflict of terms, and a confusing place to be. You could say I’m just pretending to be pretentiously unpretentious. I spent a lot of time, too much time, on this album.

Jones: So you’re pretentious?

Bruder: Sometimes…potentially [smirks].

Jones: Who’s someone you hope to work with in the future?

Bruder: Jesus, usually [smirks]. I also hope to work with Steve [Polis] again, he mixed and mastered this record for me and I am really pleased with it. He’s a good friend, too. Paul McCartney.

Jones: You definitely seem to admire Paul. You recorded this project all by yourself, right?

Bruder: Yeah.

Jones: Why is the label named FIG? What is the significance of the fig to you?

Bruder: It’s a prayer which I hope will bear fruit.

Jones: The term "Manchild" appears as a core-realization for you on this project. At what point does a person realize they are stuck between youth and adulthood?

Bruder: One must be a child to see God, right? That’s what they always told me.

Jones: Then why do you ask in the song, 'Why didn't anybody tell me I'm a Manchild?'? Did they let you know, or not?

Bruder: They left out some crucial details.

Jones: Like what?

Bruder: Patience. That it’s okay to be somewhere between now and then, and maybe that it’s important to be humiliated so that you can see yourself more clearly.

Jones: Humiliated?

Bruder: Well, in order to be humble we must be humiliated. I’m not talking about the in-your-underwear-in-front-of-the-class kind of humiliation, though I suppose that has its worth. I’m talking about being emptied: becoming empty so that maybe you can be filled. That’s what we are all looking for here, fulfillment…no?

Jones: In the song Living Now: When the lyric mentions "pills" or a decade spent "stoned," is that a literal retrospective or a metaphor for a period of numbness?

Bruder: Both. I’m not too interested in talking about that, though.

Jones: That’s okay. What exactly constitutes the "American Lie" you seem to reference throughout the album?

Bruder: Someone recently went to their 10-year high school reunion and, of all the hundreds of people who were there, I heard that not one person was married, owned a house, or had kids. That seems like a problem to me, right?

Jones: Yes.

Bruder: Plus, I think that lyric only appears once on the record…but you might know better than me.”

Jones: There appear, to me, to be multiple references to an empire in decline on this project. Moral decay, apocalyptic figures. Personal responsibility. American Idol, Donald Trump (who you mention by name here)…yearning for a time that has long since passed by. What are your politics?

Bruder: Those are my politics.

Jones: What?

Bruder: I want to care about people.

Jones: You feel you don’t care enough?

Bruder: If I cared as much as I should I’d probably be a Priest or dead…or both [laughs].

Jones: Is the song “Lampstand Blues” an admission of failure to live up to a certain moral or spiritual standard?

Bruder: I think I was just angry with a friend that day.

Jones: If the album is a "confession”, who is the intended confessor— the audience, a higher power, or a past version of the self?

Bruder: Who, or what’s, your highest power?

Jones: I don’t think I have one, but I am open to the possibility of…

Bruder: I beg to differ.

Jones: Who’s yours?

Bruder: God, but my faith…my time spent in prayer, is pretty pathetic, really.

Jones: I don’t know. I think a lot of people might listen to this album and walk away thinking you’re a man of strong religious convictions.

Bruder: I think St. Paul says something about somebody being a worthless, clanging cymbal if he doesn’t let love rule his life. Do people really believe in “past-selves”?

Jones: I think it’s just short-hand for the “If I knew then what I know now” phenomena.

Bruder: That makes sense.

Jones: On the track “Living Now”, what is the "hill" referenced in the line about thinking one would die upon it? What did that hill represent?

Bruder: The burdens we place upon ourselves; sometimes out of naivety, sometimes out of a kind of self-mutilation…sometimes just out of boredom. I’ve been very bored in my life. Ideally, though, the hill is the place where life and death meet.

Jones: Is the cynicism in the lyrics throughout the album a defense mechanism, or is it the most honest reaction to the environment being described?

Bruder: I honestly have no idea how to answer that question [laughs]. I don’t think my lyrics are cynical, hopefully I’m not misrepresenting myself. These are just some songs I wrote over the past few years, I am really just learning as I go.

Jones: We are all learning as we go.

Bruder: That’s right!