Brad Armstrong was born in Birmingham, AL in the early 1970s. He was a product of hair metal. Later, there was Bob Dylan and the Pixies and all that, but the first things were Motley Crue Shout at the Devil and Van Halen s/t and Kiss Alive II and The Cult Electric. He is not ashamed of this.
Fast forward a few decades, an unimaginable amount of domestic beer and roofing nails, and a never-ending global pandemic, Armstrong’s newest record, Heart Like a Sigil, is out Friday, March 11th, 2022 on Maria Taylor’s (of Azure Ray) LA-based indie label, Flower Moon Records. The album was recorded by the former Syracuse University literature teacher in his home studio tucked away in Red Hook, NY during the early COVID days, and feature guest vocals by Taylor on 10 of 12 tracks. On Armstrong’s 3rd solo release, the indie acoustic-macabre-southern rock songs are matched with the wit, poeticism, and southern drawl of Tom Waits meeting Jason Isbell, finding Armstrong “in a bleak landscape where few other Southern rock bands will even set foot,” as Paste once put it.
During his Birmingham, AL days, Armstrong had a band called 13ghosts that recorded six albums between 2000 and 2011, while also playing guitar in Dexateens, a legendary (or infamous) underground rock and roll institution of the Southeast. Armstrong moved to upstate New York in 2014 and released his first solo record Empire, featuring the song “Brothers” which was later featured in Netflix’s “Kingdom” starring Nick Jonas.
On “Everyone Lost,” Armstrong spins an ancient-seeming melody with Taylor’s exquisite harmonies. The song is a series of benedictions set to a melancholy twist of hope and realism: the very bones of Americana. In our interview, Armstrong writes about his inspirations and, perhaps, the direct through line between “Everyone Lost” and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.”
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
“Forever Young” by Bob Dylan. Incidentally I like the rockin’ version. Structurally it’s three verses and a perfect little chorus. Very simple structure. The lyrics never deviate from the main trope, which is “may you, may this.” It’s a list of wishes for the person or persons he is singing to. And all those things are universal, and everyone can find a place to attach this to their own personal experience. Essentially, it’s a universal song, and a classic, and belongs, in this regard, among the cannon of works like the Psalms and the Bhagavad Gita. And it’s a classic chord progression, and you knew this song before you were born, and it’s just that Bob plucked it out of the ether and committed it to magnetic tape.
Ok, all that is true and it exists on that level. However, if you look at the chorus, “May you stay forever young,” and we accept that as an impossibility, then contextually we have to question every other statement in the song. And this is where it turns. As you may not stay forever young, so may you not build a ladder to the stars, your hands may not always be busy, you will not always be courageous. And yet, the narrator wishes that for us, even though it will never be. Is there hope in that? Or a kind of fatalism? Or what? I dunno. But it’s interesting.
Does your album have an overarching theme?
I really feel like the overarching themes of everything I write are the same. A while back I had this reductive riff that I started playing with, looking at themes, and realized that everything, every emotion, can be boiled down to a fear of loss. That is to say, a fear of death equates to a fear of loss of life. Which is the thing that I am thinking about almost one hundred percent of the time. Happiness is the buoyancy you feel when you don’t lose anything. But then I was thinking about how that ties into love. Love is feeling about someone like you can’t do without them and you would give your life for theirs. Which seems to me to be a fear of loss of that person. Maybe fear is the wrong word. Maybe it’s not fear of loss, but the knowledge that loss is inevitable. I don’t know. Anyway, that is the number one thing I write about, and it’s like every song.
Tell us about the first song you wrote.
The first song I wrote was called “The Sun Also Rises,” because I had that Hemingway book on the shelf. I hadn’t read it or anything. I was about 14. It was my mom’s book, probably. I had been in a cover band for a year or so and felt like it was about time. It was terrible, of course, but the strange thing is, between writing that song and writing the way I do now, it’s like what I am doing now is a lot closer to that first song than everything I did in my 20s and 30s.
It’s almost like we start out simple and true and honest, however cringey that is, and then we get some reading and instruction in us, and we feel like we’ve got to break all the molds and invent the wheel, then we come back around and realize that the old, original ways are best. Keep it simple and direct. Don’t obfuscate the meaning of your work with artifice and self-aggrandizing technique and production. Tell the thing and try to be subtractive rather than additive.
Also, that first song began a long tradition of copping book titles to get into writing the lyrics of a song. Any time I’m stuck for what to write about, I just look over at the bookshelf. Something always pops.
Do you have any songwriting tips you can share?
Well, it ties into the first song thing a little. Which is to say, I spent so long pushing against the idea of form and structure in songwriting. I feel like writing into an outline is very important. So I usually get a chord progression or a lyric idea or a riff or whatever, then I fiddle with it until it feels like a thing. Then I start making mouth noises over it to find a melody and what the thing is. At that point, I might start writing some lines. And I know it needs another part, for sure. Unless it doesn’t. I used to never do choruses.
Anyway, once I get there, I stop the presses and make a little notebook outline of what’s gotta happen. Like an intro, verse 1, verse 2, chorus, bridge, whatever. And I write it out with blanks and stuff for the words to go in. Then when I have the form, I just sit down and write like ten verses or whatever I can get out, just do a glut of stuff, and see what I have, then I pick the best stuff that makes a story or seems to have some kind of sense to it, and plug it in. And try to carve the thing out of all that excess of material, slowly. Very slowly, as I get older.
What have you missed about touring?
As I have gotten older, I have really come to crave the thing that happens when you are playing to a room of people. I mean, I always did, but when I was younger it was tied up with stage fright and trying to create a career. Now that I’m older and care less about any of that, I have come to performances a lot more relaxed than I ever did, and it allows for that mythical communion with the audience to happen a little more often than it doesn’t. I find that I miss that intensely.