(EDITOR’S NOTE — We had a great talk with Buffalo singer-songwriter Ian McCuen, who will be dropping their new album, ‘As the Oceans Rise and the Empire Falls,’ this Friday, Nov. 29. It’s a hauntingly beautiful and lyrically rich piece of art, which Ian will mark with an album release show at Mohawk Place Friday night with guests Tyler Bagwell & Sally Schaefer, and Spud. The first two singles from the album, ‘A Ghost Story for the Sheltered’ and ‘A Love Song for Last Call’ are now available on streaming platforms. We thank Ian for their time. Please read our story below.)
1120 PRESS: Thank you so much for speaking with us! Congratulations on the new album. Twenty-two songs; it’s quiet an ambitious endeavor. How do you feel now that it's about to be dropped into the world?
IAN MCCUEN: Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. It's definitely my biggest, most ambitious project. I've been making albums solo for a while now, and I've always wanted to build with each one. This will be my seventh full length. And this one, there's a lot going on. There's strings and horns and stuff like that. I had the original idea for the record for, like, eight years and I've kind of just been slowly chipping away at it. So, yeah, for it to finally be coming out is pretty exciting and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
1120: This was germinating for eight years?
IM: Yeah. Most of my records actually have taken a while to get to, mostly just because I work on multiple things at once. So, it's always just piecemeal like that. But yeah, this one took about eight years.
1120: When you say that the idea started eight years ago, what was the trigger? What was that idea?
IM: The record is not about this directly at all, but it was birthed in the lead up to the 2016 election and just feeling very alienated by a lot of the things going on — not only politically but even with people I knew at the time, and things I was going through parallel to all that. I was going through a pretty heavy depressive episode at the time. So, I was retreating inward a lot and spending a lot of time alone, trying to grapple with these heavy feelings. And it just kind of was birthed out of that alienation and kind of like demoralized feeling. Then I just slowly flushed it out from there, basically.
1120: So, when the idea hit you eight years ago to write this album, in the lead up to the 2016 election of Donald Trump, you had no idea it was going to take you eight years to complete. Fast forward, and it's culminating now with Trump being elected for a second time. Does that coincidence blow your mind?
IM: I didn't even think about that. Yeah. It is very weird the way that happened. It’s weird too because this is not the first time that’s happened. A few years ago, I put out an album called ‘Westward, to Nowhere,’ which is fully a concept album. I had never been out west before that.
It was just conceptual. And then I actually ended up living in Utah for three years. People were just like, ‘oh, is this about moving to Utah?’ And I was like, ‘no. I wrote this before I even knew that was a thing that was going to happen.’
1120: Is this new album a concept album? It seems like one the way the songs are laid out and then separated by musical passages. You have an overture, and an interlude and what you call an ‘outerlude,’ and then an encore. On paper, it almost reads like a four-part play, especially the way the songs bleed into one another.
IM: For sure. Yeah, it kind of is. The songs themselves are just like observations and me sorting through different ideas and feelings. But there is definitely an arc. The overarching concept, I guess, is that I did want it to feel like a play, or like a stage production, from start to finish with multiple acts and like a break in between. I explore a lot of socio-political stuff on this record. There's even a song called ‘Life is a Performance,’ and I wanted it to feel that way on purpose. The idea at the time was kind of like: Every day is a kind of performance; like getting up and having to go through the motions of the day; and the encore is just, tomorrow you have to do it again.
1120: So, going back to the trigger for the idea of this album, how are you feeling since Election Day?
IM: I mean, everything feels terrible. (laughs) But it already did feel terrible before Election Day. What are we gonna do about it? You know what I mean? So, I think after maybe having already processed this the last time in 2016, it made this time around maybe easier. We’ve been led right back to where we were. The fact that the start of this album happened that year, and its completion comes with Trump being elected again — you’re right, it absolutely blows my mind. But I also don't want that to be the focus of this album either. This is not a Trump-reaction record.
Like I was saying before, it was the parallel of being in a very dark place mentally and trying to weigh that against what was happening politically and socially. It was really just a way for me to just kind of angrily put out a bunch of feelings about American life and American society and American politics. But I'm a person who very much believes that the political is personal and personal is political. It didn't make sense to explore that without talking about the things that were going on in my life as well, because they definitely went hand-in-hand. The feeling of not being able to get out of bed in the morning was as much influenced by a feeling of political alienation as much as it was social alienation. And during that period, my grandmother died, and I was dealing with some feelings about my personal relationships and things like that, as well as familial drama. In my mind it all felt very connected because like I said, the personal is political. It all felt part of the same world, all occupied the same space in my head that was making me feel very, very depressed. And this album really was almost like a placeholder for going to therapy essentially — like just getting it all out in song form.
1120: Something that really struck us listening to the album is its instrumentation, which is fascinating. We can’t remember the last time we listened to an album with an Omnichord and Stylophone and pocket piano. And your guest musicians too — like Sally Schaefer (violin), Randy Devlin (trumpet) and Matt Wisniewski (flute) — were used, it seems, with such perfect intention. Can you talk about the musical direction and sound you wanted to go for on this album?
IM: Yeah, going along with what I was kind of just saying about the concept for the album, I wanted the sound to match that. I wanted it to be kind of chaotic and all over the place in its instrumentation. I always had an orchestra in mind. Going back to the whole stage-production thing. So I always had the orchestra in mind as being a component. But then some of the more electric-guitar sounds, and the synth sounds like the Omnichord and pocket piano and Stylophone — that kind of just came from wanting to blend these natural and acoustic sounds with synthetic ones. It's weird because I don't necessarily like to pay too much conscious attention; I write everything in my head. Maybe this sounds weird, but I heard the record before I wrote it
1120: That doesn’t necessarily surprise us because there seems to be this dream-like element to it. How would you describe your music to someone who wasn't familiar with it?
IM: First and foremost, I just describe myself as a singer songwriter, because that's really where all this comes from. And I like to blend different musical influences together. I've been a musician my entire life. I grew up playing jazz. I picked up the guitar, my original instrument's piano, and I played it all through college. And just like, having that classical training throughout my whole life, and being in jazz and then also listening to old records that my dad had, I’ve just always kind of had a voracious appetite for finding new, different things and blending (them).
1120: Something else that struck us in listening to this album, and especially reading the lyrics, and we would ask you this question even if your last name wasn’t ‘McCuen,’ but are you influenced at all by Irish music or Irish literature? There’s a tone and depth that’s very reminiscent of it.
IM: Definitely, yeah. I mean, my name’s Ian Patrick McCuen, so I'm like, very, very Irish. I love folk music in general and Irish folk music. Celtic music is definitely something that I love and appreciate. And James Joyce is, honestly, like, I love his writing, and I love that kind of dense literature kind-of-thing. And when I go back to my lyrics, like, for performance purposes to practice them for playing out live, I'm like, ‘Why the fuck did I write so many fucking words?’ (laughs)
1120: What drives the ambition to write a 22-song album? You already described what your inspiration was, but this is just such a behemoth endeavor, where does the inspiration come from to keep going with that sort of singular vision to such an extent and to see it through?
IM: I was out last night and I ran into a friend and he was asking me about my music and I told him I had a new album coming out. And he was like, ‘how many songs is this one?’ And I said ‘22.’ And he literally like choked. When I was writing, I didn't know exactly that it was going to be 22 songs. But I knew that I wanted it to be a long record because I wanted to explore these big ideas as well as explore big musical ideas. I always leave room on my records for instrumental passages because as a musician first, I like having the space on the records to just do musical shit. And most of my instrumentals are improvised. So that's kind of what adds to it, wanting to have these passages. And the songs themselves, which are lyrically heavy, they're musically heavy too. The last few albums I've made, like ‘Westward, to Nowhere,’ which I mentioned before, was 18 songs that came out two years ago. The album I put out last year, which is called ‘What It Means To Be Young, Sad and Alone,’ was 20 songs. The one that I'm currently finishing writing is going to be 24 songs. That's part of the reason why the albums take so long is because I have multiple ideas at once. And that's why it takes me so long to finish records. ‘Westward, to Nowhere’ took me 10 years from inception to completion.
1120: So, what now? Where do you go from here? You have this album coming out. What’s the immediate future hold for you?
IM: I will continue to push this new album and promote it. And I’m putting together a band for the album release show on Nov. 29 at Mohawk Place. This will be the first time I play my solo material with a band. So, that'll be a focus for sure. I haven't toured since before COVID so I'm going to try and maybe work on some touring for next year and you know, tour and promote the record, hopefully, with the band. And, obviously, finishing the next album I have going. It's weird to say because it's like I'm definitely focused on getting this album out and promoting it. But it's like as soon as I finished, as soon as those masters were finished, it was like, ‘Okay, that frees up space. Now I can finish writing the next record.’ And that's basically the cycle I've been in for years at this point. And it's probably not going to stop for a few more years at least.
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