Where and when did you record the album?
I recorded 90% of the album at my friend Nick’s house. He also did much of the mixing you hear on the record, mainly in Ableton. The one song not recorded at his house was Sadie’s Flowers, which was recorded at my former guitar teacher/friend Brian’s house. The guitar on Sadie’s is also different, it’s this really beautiful Taylor he has and you can hear how good it sounds on record.

What was the catalyst for recording it?
Alasdair from the Clientele (one of my all-time favorite bands) said something along the lines of the first few Clientele records released were driven by a sense of urgent necessity, like you just have to get them out “or else.” That’s kind of how I feel about this album and whatever subsequent releases that may come after this one. I couldn’t really live with myself any longer not having a record out, and I don’t mean that in a dramatic “I’m a true artist and the world needs to hear my work” sort of way, I just really felt the desire to create guitar music, in particular American Primitive as it was the first genre I felt like I could properly use as a conduit for my creativity, and have some tangibility behind it like a record. I think albums are pretty sacred things and I’m proud of how it turned out, but mostly eternally grateful to all the people that helped get it out along the way.

Is there a theme behind it/what was the idea or influence?
With creating the record it was essentially composing the songs over a period of a few months and trying to arrange them in a way that felt like a cohesive story, despite all the songs sounding very different. I think if there’s any theme behind the record I would say it’s youth, I feel like this is a record I could only have made at this particular time in my life as a 20-21 year old and the songs I think have a pronounced sense of juvenilia behind them for better and for worse. Another creative flashpoint for the record comes from a desire to skewer my perceived cliches in the AmPrim genre and trying to refract my own musical tastes onto guitar (I pray for the day people stop surnaming knotty revisions of Stefan Grossman tunes “Blues” or “Rag”). I also wanted to invoke some of the sounds of those early Fahey records with that heavy lo-fi sound that I think is part of what makes Fahey so great, as well as capturing imperfections in the performance which I think really make a huge difference in a record to me.

When did you first pick up the guitar, and what drew you to it?
I was in middle school when I first started playing for no other reason than I wanted to play Weezer songs, and did the typical infantile guitar gamut of watching all the now-obnoxious guitar YouTube channels and learning popular riffs and whatnot. I think guitar was something that was a means to an end of learning my favorite songs and other sorts of music for a while, but I grew to really become obsessed and endlessly fascinated by the physicality, versatility and timbre of the instrument.

Who were your earliest musical influences, both inside and outside of guitar music?
Pavement. At risk of sounding like a parody, they are my favorite band and I listened to Crooked Rain pretty much every day for a long time during middle school. Chiefly, the attitude of “let’s not take ourselves seriously but take the music seriously” was big on me, and from them (and Guided By Voices) I learned albums can be kind of messy with some throwaway or weirder tracks and still be good, and generally the importance of sequencing, as well as accepting mistakes while recording a song and that mistakes and other blemishes, in small doses, really make a difference as far as capturing that spur of the moment authenticity. I also kind of grew up on Bandcamp and listened to a lot of old reissued albums and compilations from records specializing in music from Africa, like Highlife and Soukous music as well as field recorded stuff from Hugh Tracey (See: ‘56, it’s an Ali Farka Touré cover, Sponger Money is also a Bahamian folk tune and island music influences a lot of what I play as someone who’s half-Cuban). Other more immediate influences are obviously Fahey as far as the skeleton of the record with it being American Primitive, but I think James Blackshaw and William Tyler are probably the two biggest ones, in particular I think William Tyler you can hear all over the record, I rip-off a lot of songs off of Behold the Spirit and Impossible Truth. This other fingerstyle guitarist, DBH, is really amazing and I’ve taken a few cues from him as well. Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins are also really big for me, they’re both total geniuses and Oklawaha is partially borrowed from Anne Briggs’ version of Blackwaterside (Bert Jansch’s too). Oklawaha was a deliberate attempt to play a slow slide song that wasn’t just Jack Rose worship, and most of that song is me thinking about the English folk revival guys at the time, all that stuff was really great in its heyday. Nathan Salsburg’s stuff also comes up at times, Bold Ruler’s Joys helped me flesh out part of Olustee. I’d probably say most of this record is a collage of music I really love and admire, mashing it together and Pareto Principling it with basic songwriting fundamentals.

How did you discover fingerstyle guitar, and what made you fall in love with it?
I started learning jazz in high school but always felt like there was something missing with playing jazz, I mainly kept it up because I felt like it was a vaguely “artsy” genre and I didn’t want to be playing the landfill ripoff Mac DeMarco-Boy Pablo indie everyone else was playing at the time, so I tried fingerstyle jazz a la a deeply middling and mediocre impression of Joe Pass and got my fingers under that. For a while I kind of floated between different types of genres until I found Fahey, and I can’t quite remember when exactly I started listening to him, I do remember a friend of mine showing me Buck Dancer’s Choice and I spent like a week trying to learn that song with no real Travis picking experience aside from a few failed attempts at learned Mr. Sandman in sophomore year of high school. After that it was turtles all the way down and I got sucked down the rabbit hole quickly. I did a radio show on campus where I just played a new string of pieces live on air every week. It was tough learning a dozen or so songs a week but I think it was really helpful toward developing his style and ear for the genre and gave him a good internal library of songs to pull from. I love fingerstyle guitar because there’s just so much you can do with it and so much variance and permutations as far as compositional freedom.

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your musical journey that changed everything for you?
I think with most musicians there’s a lot of smaller moments that build on each other, rather than a single big one, but I think it was actually reading the Arthur Magazine Jack Rose interview where he talks about artists like Stars of the Lid, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and a bunch of other popular figures in the underground and that really propelled my tastes and led me to discovering a ton of music I wouldn’t have otherwise. To me that was a really big deal discovering how interconnected everything was and how huge music truly gets as far as the sheer amount of people who have made such incredible art.

How do you approach composing a new piece—do you start with a melody, a tuning, or a feeling?
Usually comes from improvisation, to me compositional is very unconscious, I always feel like it’s sort of like fishing and sculpting, where you essentially plunk at the guitar for an hour and hopefully something inspired comes from it, and the rest of the time is shaping that idea and fleshing it out. I try to compose very unconsciously and without expectations. I often feel like I’ve discovered a melody rather than having created it myself, so there’s always a bit of distance from how I see my songs versus myself as an “Artist.” Sometimes the songs come out fully formed, but that’s a bit rarer. I also put a lot of stock into improvising something while recording and seeing if anything can come from that. Cardinal’s Air’s second half was partially improvised during the recording and I’m really happy about that. Also listening to records while playing can help jumpstart creativity. Most songs like I said before are pretty Pareto Principled, so just finding that single really good idea to iterate on that drives the rest of the song is super important in my opinion, like A Room Forever.

What non-musical influences (e.g., nature, literature, philosophy) inspire your compositions?
Not sure, I always think it’s a little pretentious to go outside of your lane in art, like when guitarists compare themselves to painters or writers or whatever (Everyone wants to be a painter it seems), I sort of get what they mean but I also just think at the end of the day you’re a guitarist making guitar music, I think that’s something to keep in mind. Subconsciously I do think Florida and my upbringing definitely impacts the songs, particularly the flat and swampy nature of the Everglades and being so close to it, but it’s not something I try to deliberately evoke. Once you add lyrics it’s a different story but I don’t think there’s much about my music that exists outside the continuum of influences I mentioned before outside the titles of certain songs like A Room Forever. I will say, Sadie’s Flowers is named after a real person but I only met her once, I’m not sure how much of that song is the title inspiring the tune or the other way around.

What tunings have you used in this album?
Standard (Sponger Money/Buck Dancer’s Choice), Drop D (Olustee, Angel Parade), Open G (Room Forever), CGCGCD (Memories of Hecate County), Open D (Swanee River, Cardinal’s Air), DADGAD (Oklawaha, Sadie’s Flowers). Pretty generic stuff, but I do like the idea of trying to make a generic tuning like Open G and making it not sound like a generic tuning if that makes any sense.

What guitar(s) do you currently play, and why did you choose them?
I still play the first crappy Epiphone I got when I was like 13, and the 12 string I used is technically on loan. I did buy my lap steel and that’s about the only piece of decent acoustic gear I own, I’m not much of a gear person.

What kind of strings, picks, or other gear do you use to achieve your tone?
No idea, it’s not something I ever think about unless I’m buying it.

Chamber Music is released on 3rd April on all streaming services and limited edition CD.