Joel Cusumano is somewhat of an unsung hero in the Bay Area underground scene, having served as songwriter and/or lead guitarist in bands such as Sob Stories, R.E. Seraphin, and Body Double. Now he’s striking out with his first solo album WAXWORLD, coming soon on Dandy Boy Records, which was inspired by a stint Cusumano spent in a mental hospital to treat his crippling O.C.D.
“It was bleak,” Cusumano explains about the experience. “For a year I could barely function, barely leave the house. After [the hospital] I recovered pretty rapidly. But instead of feeling relief, there was dread, like, ‘Well, what now’? You spend over a year falling off the deep end and you’re a different person when you hit the ground … I needed to write differently than I had before. I was looking around the world and not recognizing what I saw. The songs had to reflect that alienation. I was done with the ‘angry material’ reflecting his growing unease in a world in unrelenting flux.” Today, Cusumano is debuting the video for the single “Two Arrows” off of WAXWORLD. A bright pop tune with melancholy yet deeply poetic lyrics paired with a trippy lo-fi video makes this song a trippy experience with layers of meaning and imagery.
“The month I was scheduled to start recording the album (with engineer Rob Good from Ryli), I went through a shocking, overnight, ‘We’re done; don’t speak to me again’ breakup,” recalls Cusumano. “For better or worse, those kinds of traumatic experiences fuel my strongest bouts of creativity, so it resulted in an unscheduled final burst of writing as we started recording. Writing and recording this album was kind of the only thing getting me out of bed for a while. ‘Two Arrows’ was literally the last song written for the album, and last to have basic tracks (drum and bass) recorded. We didn’t rehearse it until we were in the studio. Drummer Phil Lantz learned the drum part on the spot, and he tracked a monster performance!
“I’d recently read the myth of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it rhymed emotionally with this cruel, baffling experience of someone I love bailing on me out of the blue,” he continues. “Maybe it’s comforting for me to believe the cause of a thing so painfully incomprehensible must be divine, inflicted by the gods like the stories in the Metamorphoses—Plus it didn’t hurt that the theme of incomprehensible change recurs throughout the album. So the lyrics come from the Apollo and Daphne myth, with some personal invention and commentary here and there.
“I had the verse melody lying around in a voice memo, which is where all my chord progressions and melodies live before I stitch them into fully realized songs. I honestly worried the melody was a bit hokey or sing-songy, and that the arrangement with the key change in the third verse was a bit cliché—but I think we pulled it off with a kind of swaggering drama that sells it, and it became obvious during the mixing process that this was one of the strongest, most immediate songs on the album.
“When writing and recording I typically have songs in my mind as models, and ‘Two Arrows’ was modeled on a Give ‘Em Enough Rope-era Clash single like ‘The Prisoner’ or ‘Capital Radio Two’ (with a lyrical nod to my favorite pop song of all time, ABBA’s ‘The Winner Takes It All,’ in the chorus—specifically that song’s line about ‘the gods may throw the dice / their minds as cold as ice …’). But I never know how those references themselves track to a listener, who has their own personal musical references, and as the creator I’m so wrapped up in the minutiae of performance and production and mixing, etc. The mixing engineer Matt Bullimore said my guitars reminded him of Chris Hayes from Huey Lewis and the News! So what do I know? One time someone said my band sounded like a mix between Linkin Park and Weezer which was … confusing? But I can’t control these things, and I’m happily surprised when people tell me they hear something surprising that I didn’t intend!”
Check out the video below.
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Photo courtesy of Joel Cusumano
