Edward Glen
We Got To Sit Down With Edward Glen For A Few Questions, Here What He Had To Say!
What’s your name and where are you from?
I am Edward Glen, from Auburndale, Massachusetts.
What made your first want to get into making music?
It was kind of a reflex at first. When I first really fell in love with the power of music, it was listening to this conscious rap group from Seattle, The Blue Scholars. I was probably about eleven at the time, and I was an avid reader. These dudes were rapping about leftist stuff, specifically the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” which was a huge protest and riot against global capitalism and the WTO. And they were describing this epic struggle of the righteous poor against this all-powerful, incalculable evil and I was like “Oh, shit, this is so powerful” It was just like Star Wars, except it had a sick beat and this really cool cadence and delivery and it was all real. Their power to make me feel something and get so invested in this story and the textures they painted it with was really attractive to me. That was the very initial step, then over time my inspirations and methods changed, but that was the Big Bang for me.
Favorite music memory?
There’s this look that people get when you’ve touched them deeply with your performance. I recognize it in myself after a really great show, when you come up to the artist and you’re trying to stay cool while still conveying to them that they’ve just changed your life. Music, especially live music, has the power to make us feel so unbelievably good, and when you can get in touch with your audience in that way there’s this pure, unspoiled love that they have for you which you can’t really replicate almost anywhere else. Anytime someone’s come up to me after a show with that look in their eyes, that’s it. Or when I’ve come up to someone else after a show feeling that way. I love music, man.
What’s your creative process for making a song / album?
I think in many ways the song and the album write themselves. Your job as a creative person is to observe critically and shape to allow the song and the record to take their best form. Often, I don’t really understand what a song is about until after or even long after it’s already written, but I’ll look back at the lyrics and be like “oh, so that’s what I was trying to say.” And I knew it subconsciously at the time, but couldn’t have articulated why the lyrics were the way they were. But I’ve learned to trust those moments.
Then, once you have enough songs, you can take a look at what they all mean and how they relate to one another, and start building a concept for an album in your head. I mean, I didn’t have any idea what my new album was going to be called or be about until some time after all the songs had been written. Then I was just sort of musing about what I had written and I arrived at the concept for the album that we have now, or at least a prototypical version of it.
Favorite song of yours currently?
That’s a great question. I think asking an artist to choose among their work is a great exercise, because it forces you to think about what you really value in your work. Generally I feel like my favorite song of mine is always my newest one, and in this case that’s pretty much true. I wrote a song called “Honey, Stick By Me” Which is a balled about the Bee Lady of Longmeadow. I’ve been experimenting with writing songs about things that don’t have anything to do with me, and her story really inspired me and I felt like she deserved a song written about her.
Continued:
Basically, the Sherriffs in Longmeadow, MA were serving this super-fucked-up unjust eviction on this guy and there were protests outside his house by local activists. And this woman, I guess she’d just had enough of cops doing bullshit and kicking people out of their homes, she brought four fucking beehives and dumped them out on the front steps as the police were trying to get in. She unleashed like two hundred thousand angry bees on these fucking evil nazi cops and sent a couple of them to the hospital.
I think there’s something so poetic about using a force of nature as a weapon to fight capitalism. It reminds me that the world is on our side. Anyway, it’s not my best song ever. It’ll probably never be a radio hit, but I’m proud of the way it sounds and proud of stepping out of my comfort zone, writing-wise, since usually I just write about girls.
What can you tell us about the new project?
It’s a four-track EP called Songs for Auto. It’s made up of songs from 2018 and 2019 that are a little more mature and self-actualized than the songs on Lightning, Asteroid. (the first LP) At that time, I was learning to celebrate my agency and my ability to choose. I chose the car as a symbol for personal freedom and kinda ran with that as a concept. “Songs for Auto,” is a double entendre, since it’s like “Songs for the Auto” as in, songs for the car, and also “auto” is the greek root word for “self,” which is how we get “auto-mobile” (self-movement), so “Songs for Auto” is also a reference to “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, which is an amazing poem about the self and its relationship to the universe, and also about sex, which this album is also definitely about ;).
Biggest musical influence?
I feel like I’ve given the impression with some of these answers that we’re a very politically charged band. We definitely aren’t, at least not as far as songwriting usually goes. Very few of my songs are about anything other than women and cars. The band that influences me the most isn’t Rage Against the Machine or anything like that, although I do love Rage. My biggest single influence is probably Pinegrove. Not only do I take some cues from his songwriting, but I also look to them for inspiration in terms of vibe and instrumentation and stuff like that. My other biggest influence (sorry, I shouldn’t be allowed two) is Chris Stapleton, the greatest country songwriter of our generation. In my opinion, he’s one the best songwriters of all time.
You’re stuck on an island with an ipod with only one album, what are you choosing?
Another fantastic question. Any album I chose would eventually get really old, so I would want to pick something really long and really varied. For that reason, I’d probably pick “Montclair (Live at the Wellmont Theatre)” which is a fantastic live album by Pinegrove, where they cover material from their first four records. It has most of my favorite songs of theirs and a bunch of moments that are just unforgettable, and it frees me from having to pick only one of their records. It’s also about an hour long, which rules for this purpose.
Plans for the future?
Get famous, tour the world, etc. I want to do a tour with Ed Sheeran and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros called the “Ed, Edd, and Eddy” tour. For more short-term plans, I’m gonna drop this album, tour the album, then record another album. We have another album already recorded, so we need to get that mixed, which is going to require a lot of money and a lot of time, which is fine. So we’re going to play local shows and maybe do some weekenders around the northeast while that one gets mixed and we record the next one. I hate recording but I love writing songs, so I always end up with this big backlog of songs that are written but not recorded, so I’m trying to counteract that by just forcing myself to record everything we have written. So, you can expect a lot of music in the next couple years, God willing.
Message to the youth:
There is no hope for the end of global capitalism, but there is hope for survival in our communities. Never trust a politician, a cop, a landlord, or your boss. Give money, as much as you can every time, to homeless people. Break laws, especially those that are designed to make your life boring. Open-container drinking in public is a human fucking right. Don’t let them leech the fun out of your miserable existence. Don’t give in to punitive or carceral logic. Scream, fuck, fight your friends, kiss your enemies. Take every single opportunity you can to steal things, especially from your job. Stop looking at your fucking phone. Refuse to give in to the urge to stay home. Go out and do something, anything, other than your job. Seriously, use the internet as little as possible. Stop using Google maps to get around and learn how to navigate the place you live in with your head. Become vegan. Buy a gun. Learn the names of the nameless streams and hills in your town, or name them yourself. Use xenopronouns to be annoying. Have, I repeat, HAVE a fucking basement show. Go to every basement show. Talk, for Christ’s sake, talk to people who aren’t your age. Talk with gen X’ers and boomers and little kids. And I don’t mean just about the weather either. Hang out with those motherfuckers. Get married as young as you can. Not all of your friends are going to live to see 25. Sacrifice always, compromise never.
Don’t you see? They’re taking us apart with the service jobs and the smart phones, they’re trying to isolate us from one another. The only weapon you have is a bottle of glue. So glue yourself to everything you see.
