We’re all suffering from a considerable amount of cabin fever right now. It’s spring. We should be outside, hitting up early music festivals, bar hopping, and spending time with our friends. You know, all the things we can’t do right now. Instead, we’re stuck inside, endlessly binge-watching whatever Netflix or Hulu throws at us, cycling through intermittent panic spirals, random bouts of creativity, and the inexplicable desire to bake focaccia.

Though it’s a tricky time to promote travel — both because the lockdown is continuing and because a huge swath of the nation is financially depleted — it does feel like a nice dose of escapism is in order right about now. So we tapped professional travel photographer Myles McGuinness for a little visual inspiration. Myles was all too happy to help and shared a gallery of images with us from a place he loves dearly: Tahiti (with a few from neighboring Mo’orea and Bora Bora thrown in for good measure).

Myles has seen his photos published and exhibited in National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and the California Surf Museum, among others. He’s made a name for himself by capturing the extreme and stunning beauty of natural environments in a way that seems at once personal and epic in scale. When laying out the images below, he provided captions to help immerse us in each photo plus sage travel advice for the second you’re ready to plan a trip of your own.

Let’s dive into this visual travel guide of Tahiti, curated by Myles McGuinness, and start dreaming of that day when we can hit the road again.

Where can we find the best hiking in Tahiti?

We drove up Mount Marau, which is that peak you see in the lead-off photo, the one with the purple sky and the couple walking out through the ferns. We did that at sunrise and you can hike that or you can drive up to the top. It’s kind of a sketchy drive. The road was one of the scariest I’ve ever been on — it’s a one-way road and the client’s like, “Hey, we got to get out of here before it gets dark.” And I’m like, “Why?” She’s like, “Oh, you remember that road we came up? Well, we’ve got to get back down that in the dark.”

And I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” Of course, two cars meet on the corner where there is a bend in the road and it’s only one car wide and I’m like, “I’m hopping out of the car while you guys shimmy back and forth on this one.”

But it’s a great place to see the sunset or sunrise.

We did the off-road adventures with the ATV’s on Mo’orea and that’s pretty easy to find. There’s a bunch of people that do that. On the main island of Tahiti, they have adventures that go into Papenoo Valley — which is kind of a must-see. That’s where the waterfalls are.

What are some of the must-see sites in the Papenoo Valley?

The main fall with the couple above, and the one with the guy with his arms outstretched — that’s literally right off the road leading into the valley. Supposedly there are eels in that lake, but I didn’t see any.

What’s the best way to stumble upon a secret watering hole or waterfall?

Ask a local. That seems obvious, but that was key for sure. I mean, you can see countless waterfalls in the distance from some of the main roads. But some of the better ones in Papenoo Valley you’ll need someone to take you there.

What spots would you recommend for taking in a great sunrise or sunset if you’re not down for a hike?

Anywhere on the west coast facing the setting sun. I really enjoyed Teahupo’o, which is the end of the road where the waves are, but it’s a great relaxing tranquil spot and you’re away from all the noise of the city.

What is one thing everyone should do when visiting Tahiti?

I’ve been there three times now and I really want to swim with the whales — they come through later in the summer, I think. I’m always there in the middle of the summer, so I’ve missed that. The sharks here were from Bora Bora, but you can also see these guys on Mo’orea too.

Do Tahiti’s water bungalows live up to the hype?

I mean, you’ve got to do that. They invented the water bungalow and now everyone kind of copies the Tahitians. What allows them is there’s an outer reef that protects the island, the atoll, so that surf doesn’t really come in and affect everything. It’s kind of like a lagoon between the beach and the ocean. So the bungalows are nice and calm. There’s not generally surf and crashing waves or anything like that. It’s a pretty tranquil place.

What’s your favorite thing about visiting Tahiti?

Ah, all of it. I mean, it’s like going back in time. I’ve been to Hawaii before, but it’s Hawaii 50 years ago and it’s still quiet and real and the Polynesian culture is still strong and intact and hasn’t been kind of diluted down, and they really do embrace it. It’s not a just put on for the tourists. There is this really cool, authentic culture still intact. The people there are just amazing.

It’s no secret that WWE has ties to Republican politics. Quite the opposite in fact, since the current President of the United States is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Not only are Vince McMahon and Donald Trump old friends, but Vince’s wife Linda McMahon is a former member of the Trump Administration and currently runs a SuperPAC in support of the President and his reelection bid this year. So it’s no great surprise when a Republican like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares WWE an essential business, allowing them to keep broadcasting live shows from that state despite the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

However, it’s starting to sound like there may be a more direct connection than that. Orlando-based journalist Stephanie Coueignoux pointed out on Twitter that Linda McMahon’s aforementioned SuperPAC, promised to spend 18.5 million dollars in Florida, which ought to give the economy there a significant boost. They announced the spending plan as part of a larger effort in multiple battleground states, but the amount going to Florida is more than twice as much as they’re spending in any other state.

That announcement came on April 9th, which is the same day that Governor DeSantis amended his stay-at-home order to establish that “pro sports” including WWE are essential businesses and can remain open. The very next day, WWE declared their intention to return to live TV. There is no direct evidence of a specific quid pro quo here, nor does Coueignoux claim that there is, but it’s certainly interesting timing.

Last week, social media began to fill up with something familiar yet totally warped, like looking down at a fish swimming underwater on a sunny day. It was the annual Coachella wave, which would normally be flooded with people packing up their cars, stopping at In-N-Out or in Cabazon for a date shake, boomerangs of windmills, and blurry images of Billie Eilish or Marshmello billboards shot at 80 mph. Every April, music fans turn their attention to one spot on the globe regardless of whether they can attend or not, a moment some people love to revel in as much as others adore to scoff at.

But this year, thanks to an unprecedented global pandemic, Twitter and Instagram instead swelled with memories of Coachella past, with longing disappointment of the friends that won’t be seen and the memories that won’t be created, and, probably the biggest, with collective mourning about the music that will not be witnessed. Sure, Coachella was one of the first major music festivals to completely reschedule their event in light of COVID-19, but its absence was still felt deeply over the last week, as people shared stories and photos from Coachella’s last 20 years. Coachella will surely return and life’s current pause is obviously temporary. But still, the polo field-sized hole that its postponement has left in the music world is difficult to fill.

But, Coachella tried to do just that with the release of its documentary on Friday, Coachella: 20 Years In The Desert. Offered up at the exact time that the gates would open for the festival, viewers were given a never-before-seen view at how the festival originated, evolved, and became the cultural behemoth it is today. As Goldenvoice has been filming their event for 20 years (as well as other GV events from the decades that preceded it), the footage is expectedly incredible, featuring moments like the Pixies reunion, Beychella, Jay-Z breaking through as the first hip-hop headliner, and Kanye West’s numerous unforgettable appearances, all with unparalleled access and context. It’s a great story, of how a punk promotor became the ultimate music curator, and it gives insight into why Coachella remains on the cutting edge in the music world (spoiler: it’s because the festival is always looking towards the future while maintaining reverence to its identity and past, while never getting caught trying to recreate or relive previous successes). But the lasting impression remains strongly rooted in the music.

This has been an oft-repeated criticism of Coachella in recent years, though I’ve been hearing the same knock for almost a decade, that Coachella is no longer “about the music,” but has become just a place to be seen, snap selfies, and generally disregard the music that should be the lifeblood of the event. And that’s not to say that there isn’t an element of truth behind such a critique, but that speaks more toward a general cultural shift that includes new technology and evolving societal norms. The idea that “Coachella has changed” isn’t inherently wrong, but the idea this is implicitly a bad thing might be. As the documentary explains, Coachella’s early festivals and musical focuses reflected the times and always looked forward to what was next, be it the rave and underground culture of the ’90s and aughts and into the worlds of hip-hop, pop, and international music of recent years. If Coachella was simply booking the same music for the same people for the last couple of decades, not only would it have not survived, but it would have wound up pleasing few along the way.

And where the criticism of Coachella’s changing musical focus falters is in the idea that by booking Ariana Grande or Calvin Harris to close out their event, they have somehow made their event not “about the music.” It’s a weird sort of rockist mentality, that the music that a prior generation of Coachella attendee is somehow purer or more authentic than the current one. Or, that the fans of Radiohead are somehow more invested in the music they adore than the fans of Beyonce. It’s an unfortunate side effect of aging that people tend to look at music and fans that way, that what’s next is always somehow worse than that which came before. But the beautiful thing is in how little the younger generations care about that. Coachella was never meant to be everything to everyone, but, as Beck puts in during an interview in the doc, more a sort of state of the union of what is happening in the music world. Coachella is meant to appeal to the music fans of right now, and those fans are always changing.

Coachella: 20 Years In The Desert presents the festival’s history as a through-line, where the logic of creating a festival to highlight The Rapture and Bjork is the same that in recent years has seen standout moments from Blackpink and Pharrell Williams. Once dominant genres like techno and punk haven’t been eradicated from the festival, but have been given their own standalone tents, where they can still highlight the best of worlds that have less appeal to the youthful Coachella attendees. Travis Scott is presented as the natural offspring of punk ideals, a Bigbang reunion as the 2020 version of getting Bauhaus or Jane’s Addiction to reform. The characters may change over time, but the ideals remain the same.

Make no mistake, Coachella is an experience that extends beyond music. Its food scene is unrivaled. It is stunning to look at with art installations extending to every horizon. And, yes, there is a culture of beauty and celebrity that is intrinsic to its Southern California home. And all of these are pretty much glossed over in the doc, save for a shot of Danny DeVito hugging Amy Winehouse to display how Coachella eventually grew into attracting stars to both their stages and their audience. It’s not that Coachella doesn’t recognize these pieces as crucial to the overall ethos of their event. It’s that they know that they all exist in service to the music and that the music is the tie that binds everything together.

One of my favorite moments of the film is a section that tracks Tyler The Creator from youthful Coachella attendee to main stage performer. His ascent is symbolic in a way, how the people that come out to the desert for a weekend can somehow rise not only to take the stage at the event but to create their own impact on the festival’s story. Whether it is Steve Aoki recalling how influential a Daft Punk Coachella performance was on his life or seeing the next generation of promoters in Rene Contreras taking a similar step from the punk scene of Pomona to the Coachella grounds that founder Paul Tollett did, the festival remains not just a reflection of the contemporary music scene, but a breathing entity that can push music scenes into new directions. It’s a true symbiotic relationship that few, if any, other festivals can match. As much as Coachella has grown into something its founders could never have dreamed of, there is no doubt that music remains the star around which all other things orbit. It’s enough to make October, or whenever Coachella returns, feel like it will be worth the wait. It might even better because of it.

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Doja Cat is well-known for giving her quirky sense of humor free reign on her social media channels, leading to both conflict and comedy. While a recent tweet put her squarely in the sights of Nicki Minaj’s Barbz, over on TikTok, Doja’s shenanigans are much more appreciated. Late on Monday, quarantine boredom prompted her to try to spark a new social media challenge and with Doja being Doja, it’s naturally completely off-the-wall and a wild departure from the usual attempts.

Rather than cooking up a new dance routine for a song from Hot Pink — like the fan-created dance for “Say So” that Doja put into the official music video — Doja instead came up with an arm-flailing performance to Xzibit’s 2002 Man Vs. Machine cut, “Choke Me, Spank Me (Pull My Hair)” while employing a face-distorting filter. She dubbed the “challenge” the #ChokeMeChallenge. She then re-posted the video to Instagram with the caption: “I’m sorry I know I been wilin but I wanted to make a challenge cuz I’m bored as f*ck f*ck u.”

The LA-based rapper and singer also recently used social media to make some semi-controversial statements about the ongoing coronavirus crisis, stating that she was unafraid of the virus. It’s just fortunate for her that she’s proven immune to social media’s habit of “canceling” controversial acts, but in the meantime, maybe she should stick to being a comedian.

Watch Doja Cat’s goofy “Choke Me Challenge” video above.

When Hayley Williams first excited her Paramore fans and announced her pivot to a solo career, there was no way she could have predicted that she would be promoting the album during a global pandemic. Even still, the singer has been releasing a handful of singles off her upcoming debut LP Petals For Amor. Like many other musicians during this time, Williams is staying engaged with fans through social media and livestreams. In a recent live session, the singer shared a cover of Tegan And Sara.

At home in quarantine, Williams decided to play a few acoustic tracks to her fans on social media. The singer dipped into the discography of her fellow musicians Tegan And Sara to play a track off their 2007 record The Con. With just an acoustic guitar, Williams shared a faithful cover of the Tegan And Sara track “Call It Off.”

Sharing the cover to Instagram, Williams wrote: “amateur hour / self-serenade. my strings are old, i have no pants on, i felt like playing this sad song.”

Tegan And Sara were pleased with Williams’ rendition. The duo shared the cover on Twitter, urging fans to go watch it. “Especially if you haven’t had your daily ‘lay in the fetal position and cry moment,’” they wrote.

Watch Williams cover Tegan And Sara’s “Call It Off” above.

Petals For Armor is out 5/8 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Brittany Howard has time and time again proven herself to be a powerhouse performer, whether she’s on a big stage or in a cramped office space. She brings her all in the studio, too, and now she has done so again with her new Spotify Singles release. For the two-track effort, she recorded a new version of “Stay High,” a standout from her 2019 solo album Jaime, as well as a cover of Funkadelic’s “You And Your Folks, Me and My Folks.”

Howard takes the song from the classic 1971 psychedelic album Maggot Brain and totally owns it, bringing her signature charisma to the track. Classic funk is right in Howard’s wheelhouse, and she and her band completely did the song justice here. She’s not a stranger to psychedelia, as she previously showed on her Jaime single “13th Century Metal.”

Howard subtly teased the inclusion of the Funkadelic ahead of the Spotify Singles release, sharing a photo of her in the studio and writing on Twitter, “Me and my folks recorded a @Spotify single session earlier this year in LA that’s out tomorrow! Stay tuned!”

Stream Howard’s cover of “You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks” and her new rendition of “Stay High” below. Also revisit our review of Jaime here.

Trying to map out a return for sports leagues in the United States is tricky. There’s no guarantee that it’ll be safe for games to occur as long as social distancing is strongly recommended — something that makes participating in some kind of sporting event quite hard — and figuring out the issue of whether or not fans can attend looms over everything, among a handful of other questions that would need to be answered.

In the eyes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, there is a way that sports can resume sometime in the not too distant future. There are a few catches, though: Fauci, in a Snapchat interview with Peter Hamby of Good Morning America, believes games would need to occur without fans and with players staying in some sort of isolated area, like a hotel, where they could constantly get tested.

“There’s a way of doing that,” Fauci said. “Nobody comes to the stadium. Put them in big hotels, wherever you want to play, keep them very well surveilled, but have them tested every week and make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family and just let them play the season out. People say, ‘Well, you can’t play without spectators,’ well, I think you’ll probably get enough buy-in from people who are dying to see a baseball game.”

This sort of plan has been kicked around by MLB, which is reportedly considering a bubble league in Arizona, while the NBA has reportedly floated the idea of doing something similar in a place like Las Vegas. These are not foolproof ideas, of course, and there are legitimate concerns about how feasible these things would be — especially when it comes to testing, as leagues would need thousands of tests a week at a time when the United States still is not testing nearly enough people.

Still, Fauci will presumably play a role in leagues deciding to restart, whenever that day may come, and if this is the best path forward, then perhaps we should expect serious conversations about these sorts of things rolling out sometime over the next few months.

(Via ProFootballTalk)

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The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

In an alternate timeline, Joseph D’Agostino is on the road right now, promoting the excellent self-titled debut album from his new project, Empty Country. A vividly cinematic songwriter who garnered acclaim as the frontman of the intense, ’10s-era emo band Cymbals Eat Guitars, D’Agostino spent more than a year crafting the LP, which he released via Bandcamp last month. Artistically, it’s a triumph — you simply can’t find a better-written rock record at the moment. But, as is the case for nearly all indie artists, this fraught period has inevitably hurt his career.

It would be understandable if D’Agostino allowed the current pandemic to discourage him, given how it’s taken him out of commission as a touring act for the foreseeable future, right at the moment when he’s trying to get Empty Country in as many ears as possible without the benefit of a PR machine. But when reached recently at home in Philadelphia, he seemed pleased by how the album — which ranks among the very best indie releases to come out in the first quarter of 2020 — has done so far, due almost entirely to positive word of mouth.

“I think there was a really beautiful wave of support where a lot of people just kind of woke up and were like, ‘Oh my God, these people, whose sources of income is playing live shows, now can no longer even do that and you have to help them in some way,’” D’Agostino said. “So I definitely was able to ride that nice wave of goodwill and get the record out in the early days of quarantine and social distancing.”

Of course, D’Agostino by now is used to managing disasters, both universal and personal. In spite of how great the album is, Empty Country has marked a long, bad stretch of horrendous professional luck for him. Work on the album dates back to late 2017, right when Cymbals Eat Guitars was about to wrap a rocky, decade-long career marked by early indie fame and prolonged, post-buzz band disappointment. For his new group, D’Agostino resolved to move in a direction that was musically simpler and more focused on his highly visual storytelling lyrics. In Cymbals, he was already well-regarded for spinning narratives that mixed closely observed scenes taken from his own life with heavy doses of surrealism, an evocative if disorienting approach that made his songs feel like five-minute movies directed by David Lynch or Richard Kelly.

With Empty Country, he pared back his former band’s grandiosity and complicated song structures in favor of a highly stylized, alt-rock version of Americana, emphasizing sonic elements like Zena Kay’s pedal steel guitar to accentuate the anxious drama of his lyrics. The results are frequently stunning, like an early ’80s Springsteen record goosed with the extreme dynamics of prime-era Bright Eyes, with scores of deep and generous songs that demand dozens of close listens to decipher the myriad details that D’Agostino carefully places throughout, whether it’s the medium who sees her own death in “Marian” or the hollow-faced self-described sociopath with the unseemly 9/11 tattoo who narrates “Swim.”

Upon finishing the album in early 2019, D’Agostino “was ecstatic with it. I thought it was the best thing I ever did,” he said. That feeling is justified — along with 2014’s LOSE, Cymbals’ high-water creative mark, Empty Country is his richest work. However, many in D’Agostino’s professional circle didn’t agree. His manager and booking agent dropped him within 24 hours of hearing Empty Country. His attempts at shopping the album to top indie record labels also came up empty. The LP languished, and so did D’Agostino, who was already being treated for Bipolar II disorder. The shabby treatment of Empty Country sunk him even lower.

He eventually found a taker in the once well-regarded indie Tiny Engines, but that label collapsed before they could put out Empty Country amid accusations of financial impropriety from artists. D’Agostino now felt truly adrift, a feeling compounded from being prescribed an improper dose of his psychiatric medication. He even contemplated suicide, he admits.

And then came perhaps the worst blow of all: His songwriting idol David Berman, who had become a personal and artistic confidant while D’Agostino worked on Empty Country, took his own life in August of 2019, on the eve of a Purple Mountains tour that D’Agostino was set to join on select dates. To say that Berman’s death crushed him would be an understatement.

“I mean, I’ve been in therapy and everything, but I shared a lot of that with Dave, as well, deepest, darkest type stuff, and he was always very helpful,” he said. “So when he committed suicide … Just thinking about that song on the Purple Mountains record. All of them are just impossibly difficult to listen to now. But just like, ‘I Love Being My Mother’s Son.’ Because when he committed suicide, I just thought about how he must’ve just felt like a lost child. His mother was gone, and his father was a demon.”

And yet, in spite of all the adversity, the quality of Empty Country is undeniable. Thankfully it has seen the light of day, so that the rest of us can appreciate its brilliance. I talked to D’Agostino about the album, his personal and professional struggles, and his resolve to keep going.

When you were working on these songs, did you have a conceptual idea of what you wanted Empty Country to be? Did you define it against like what Cymbals Eat Guitars was?

I knew that for the new project I wanted to assume a little bit more responsibility over the whole proceeding. So I made it a point to write for every instrument and really work hard to make sure that everything was thought out pretty well. It was actually more akin to writing the first Cymbals albums than any of the ones that followed.

Cymbals had fallen into this [scene]. We did a lot of tours with bands like Say Anything and Brand New, pop-punk tours and things like that. I think that the sound of the band was influenced by the types of tours we were doing and the types of crowds we were playing in front of, and the types of career or success that we envisioned or hoped for ourselves. So with the new project, I had a resolve to not have that stuff figure into it.

This is sort of a vague comment, but Empty Country seems less bombastic and melodramatic than Cymbals. This is another dreadful term but “grown up” also comes to mind.

I think there was a conscious effort to not mellow it out and be a middle-aged guy in adult-contemporary music. But I definitely was trying to make a conscious decision to not have there be a lot of signature Cymbals moves, I guess you would call them, which are the signature Modest Mouse moves, or whatever else, that early Cymbals stuff was derived from. Just extreme loud, intense, screaming stuff, and intense bombast. I wanted this to be a little more laidback in the approach, and fewer parts, and just a little more easy-going in the song structures. Like the song “Becca,” for instance, it’s just three chords, except the bridge. Where in Cymbals I may have really tried to get 40 chords in there.

Was that motivated at all by a desire to bring the lyrics out more? Because as good as your words are, they could be hard to pick out in Cymbals Eat Guitars’ songs.

For sure. Especially on the songs that are more narrative driven like “Becca,” like “Swim,” like “Marian,” although you can still only hear 80 or 85 percent of it, if I’m being honest with myself. I always have been proud of the lyrics for most of the Cymbals stuff, so I did want them to be a little more audible, and just have the vocals fit in a way that accentuated more of what was going on lyrically rather than the wall-of-sound type approach.

I’m curious about your songwriting method, because you have lines in your songs that are so visual that they could also work in a short story or even a screenplay. For instance, the image in “Swim” of the guy with a tattoo of an airplane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11. Have you ever considered writing in a different format?

I’ve never really written a short story outside of the time that I spent in primary school, and a little bit of college. I used to write poetry, but now rather than thinking about what I write as poetry, I just think about it as free verse to eventually be paired and shaped into lyrics for songs, for better or worse. That’s my medium, my niche, just the thing that I feel is the best vehicle for what I do.

With “Swim,” I actually got the idea of that song from my wife Rachel. When we were living in Kensington [a neighborhood in Philadelphia], she made the observation one day when we were sitting outside on our stoop that the family across the street, our neighbors, had old faces. Not in the sense of prematurely aged, but they looked like Dust Bowl era farmers, and from that, which I thought was true, I just started dreaming up the various characters. But there’s one that stuck out, that ended up the main character person in “Swim.”

I interviewed David Berman not long before he passed last year, and he brought you up, unprompted, in our conversation, singling you out as a “very good writer.”

Wow.

I know you two had a friendship, and of course you were set to open up a few dates of the Purple Mountains tour that never occurred. How did he influence you?

He’s my idol since I was 16. I fell in love with Starlite Walker and American Water and Natural Bridge, and to a slightly lesser extent, Bright Flight, which I told him, and he understood. [Laughs.] But when I was learning to drive, and driving by myself for the first time where I lived in South Jersey to Vintage Vinyl up in Fords, New Jersey to buy records, I was listening to his music, and his lyrics were everything that I wanted to ever come close to accomplishing. At the time I also had Actual Air, and I lived and breathed his music. It was a huge deal when Tanglewood Numbers came out. I was still in high school at the time, so I was really sucked in and I was this huge fan. Everything I ever did, everything I’ve ever done, is to some degree because of, or inspired by, or just filled with the energy that he kindled in me as a teenager and young adult. So yeah, his influence can’t be overstated.

I randomly met him in Nashville at two in the morning after a show that Cymbals played in 2015 to nobody. And he just walked up, and he was just so gracious, right from the very beginning. For all the Empty Country songs, each one, he was one of maybe four or five people I would send my demos to. And Dave Berman would always be the first to respond, and he would always say something A) encouraging, but B) that would turn me on my ear, in a helpful way. I think he was a natural teacher. I do feel, for a precious couple of years, I was able to have this masterclass. But he didn’t try to exert anything, any kind of influence, to whatever I was doing, although I remember once he said to me, “You should try singing in a lower register.”

When I interviewed Berman, he specifically praised the Empty Country album, which you hadn’t announced yet. And he mentioned how good of a writer you are while also complaining that he couldn’t understand all the lyrics.

Yeah, he was like, “There’s been a lot of these helium boy, like Mercury Rev-type singers,” and I was like, Dave, my voice isn’t low. [Laughs.] I sing the way I sing because it’s how I sing. So he was able to get with that eventually. He realized I couldn’t change, it’s a physical thing in my throat.

You had a terrible run of bad career luck with this album before it came out. You’ve said it eventually culminated with a mental breakdown. Do you want to talk about that?

I was undiagnosed Bipolar II for my entire life, up until I was 28, and the doctor I was seeing at the time, when all the bad stuff started happening after the record was done, had me on Wellbutrin, and they upped the dose when I got extra despondent. But it kind of did the opposite of what you think a drug like Wellbutrin would do. It drove me into the ground. It was just the difference between 150 mg and 300 mg, taking more of it just made everything so much worse, and I definitely had suicidal ideation.

When something that I put so much into was rejected in the way that it was, and in combination with this disastrous medication change, I was just in bed thinking about what it would be like to have my brains smashed against the asphalt, or jumping off of the top of the house that I live in, or just smashing my face into my desk repeatedly, and knocking out my teeth, and breaking my nose, and just wanting to hurt myself and be hurt. Obviously something was very wrong on a chemical level. Thankfully, I was able to figure that out, with the help of my wife Rachel and a doctor. Once I got on Prozac, things started to become a little less bleak. I don’t know what would have happened if I wasn’t medicated through Dave’s suicide.

So this happened before he died?

It was before Dave died. I’m sure you know what he was going through. You talked to him. He was like a TMI machine as far as depression and medication-resistant depression. He and I would talk about medications and we were both on Wellbutrin and would share our experiences and just talk about what had worked over the years for him. Since I was relatively new to psych meds, he was there to be a sounding board.

After everything you’ve been through, how do you feel about making another record after this? Is that something you want to do? I would understand if you just felt like, “This is too much for me. I don’t know if I can put myself this.” But you’re also really great at it. Where are you at with that?

I haven’t finished a song in a couple of years, but that is kind of the way it’s always been. I’ll finish something on this record, and then I will bask in the glow of having finished something that I’m proud of for a while, and not put any pressure on myself, and just read a lot, and watch a lot of movies, and try and make myself happy through other people’s art. And that invariably results in something coming out. Aside from my own death, I don’t think anything is going to change that.

Especially now, the situation being what it is with social isolation and everything, I would give anything to go back to the worst attended, most brutal Cymbals show in Oklahoma City. I would do anything to go back there and to play with them. Just a rehearsal. And it hasn’t been that long. Playing shows is all I did for 10 years, and haven’t played many since 2017. I feel like when I’m in a room with these people again — with [his Empty Country bandmates] Dan, and Pat, and Rachel, and Zena, and Zoe — I am just going to be so elated just to be there.

Empty Country is out now on Get Better Records. Get it here.