Musician Tris McCall wants everyone to discover America for themselves, just as he has. His latest album, Almanac, bears witness to the America Tris explored, beginning in 2015. Each page of Tris’ Almanac represents a different American city and contains a song set in that city, with a shorty story about the main character of that particular song, with photographs, cartoons, and even tips for visitors. (Hip Video Promo) His latest single, “The Unmapped Man,” references New Orleans, and the song’s narrator is a young kid from a small, Southern town, looking to escape in the city. Themes of modern-day American shine brightly through “The Unmapped Man,” and the Almanac project altogether.
Tris is not only a musician, he’s been in several bands, written for popular music and culture newspapers and magazines, and dabbled in regional politics. His love of his home state of New Jersey is featured in his novel, The Trespassers, including much of his music. He’s also been featured in many local New Jersey publications, including Jersey Beat, the Jersey Journal, and the Jersey City Independent. The video for “The Unmapped Man,” was inspired by The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, and director Rob Fitzgerald mastered a thought-provoking, haunting, and emotive lyric video featuring clips of vintage footage of New Orleans.
Tris had an in-depth discussion about his latest album, Almanac, its concept, which cities and state have had a significant impact on him, how his own writing (journalism) influences his own music, and his fun music favorites.
Your latest album, Almanac, features songs that are all about discovering America and getting to know it better. What was the initial concept derivated from leading to this album?
Tris McCall: In 2013, I came to the conclusion that something was really wrong in America — something different both in degree and kind from the intractable problems that we Americans have faced for as long as I’ve been alive, at least. I decided that the only way to write about it was to look at it straight on. So I began traveling.
What I discovered was an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. This was particularly acute among American men, who struggled to find a place in a society where masculine imperatives and masculine characteristics weren’t valued as they once were. Some of these men were acting out, sometimes violently, sometimes through proxies. Some had retreated to the Internet, or to other technological forms of shelter. Some sublimated their aggression only to see it mutate, some attempted, with poor success, to adapt to a new world. Nobody was happy. And it seemed to me that this unhappiness had curdled into rage, and that discontent was spreading like an overturned inkwell, all over the map, from coast to coast. Many of the characters I wrote about in the McCall’s Almanac stories are directly in the way of this wave of rage. They’re jeopardized by it. A few of them are passively furthering it. At least one of them is actively furthering it.
I’m aware that that’s just one pale Carly Rae Jepsen fan’s perception, and whatever conclusions I’ve drawn are heavily colored by my own experiences and proclivities. I know what the journalist Robert Kaplan means when he calls writing about your country the most complicated and dangerous form of autobiography. The writer will always be driven along on the blue highways by his unconscious motivations. I have been a conscientious objector to masculinity for as long as I can remember. In a way, that makes me the right reporter for the assignment, no? In another, it leaves me prone to putting too fine a point on things in a country that’s awash with ambiguity.
So I tried to split the difference by making the narrators as not-me as I could. Each one is an imaginary character from a different part of the country, struggling with the same feelings of impending catastrophe, blurred identity, and loss of potency. Sometimes that means a loss of sexual potency, sometimes it’s a loss of political or symbolic potency, and sometimes, they’re just lost. In all the stories, there’s a core feeling of powerlessness that prods the main characters into action or inaction. Powerless was one of the working titles of the musical album meant to accompany the Almanac short stories, and I still think it fits. It’s one of those single-word personality descriptors that pop musicians like to use, to sum up their projects — like Taylor Swift’s Fearless or Rihanna’s Unapologetic – and this is basically pop music, even if nobody will mistake it for Taylor Swift or Rihanna.
I love that each song on Almanac is about a different city in the US, featuring photos, cartoons and tips specific to said city. Are there certain cities that had a significant impact on you musically and lyrically? If so, why?
Tris: With the exception of Las Vegas, there is no North American city I’ve visited that I’m not at least half in love with. Some of them — Richmond, San Juan, Atlanta, every town in California I can think of — have my heart and my allegiance forever. I’ve found that once I engage with a city, it attains a purchase on my imagination that it never, ever relinquishes. I’ll stare at the map for hours. I’ll check out real-estate sites and try to imagine what life would be like if we were to relocate there. But I know I’m a tourist, and I hope that people who are actually from those cities can forgive the occasional voyeurism in the lyrics. It can’t be helped.
One of the Almanac pages is about that very thing. The Baltimore song and story are a look at the misapprehensions that occur when a visitor engages with a place through its associated kitsch: Berger cookies, Natty Boh, pink flamingos, crab cakes, ruin porn, et cetera. Though I think most people just hear that song as a simple and superficial celebration of Baltimore, which is fine by me. There’s no city I love any more than I love Baltimore.
You covered twenty-eight cities, thus far, on Almanac, and you plan to visit and write about many more. Did you plan for 28 cities, or did it just come about that way?
I definitely intended to visit more. Alas, that’s not possible now. McCall’s Almanac is very much a pre-catastrophe project. But I think there’s so much foreboding in these songs and stories – especially the stories – that I’ll flatter myself to say that it captures the pre-catastrophe psychological state of America pretty well. You could call it instant ancient historical fiction if you like. 2015 really does seem like a lifetime ago.
Will I return to it? I’d love to. Like everybody else, I’m waiting on a way. Life has been quite a challenge lately. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to make it to the next day, should it?
You were influenced by the book The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, for the “The Unmapped Man.” What was the creative vision like for you behind and on the screen?
Tris: About The Moviegoer, you mean? It’s a huge favorite of mine. The descriptions of New Orleans and the bayous are so vivid. Literary critics might object to this, but I’ve always read Binx Bolling, the main character, as extremely queer – not in the sexual sense, necessarily, but in his rejection of the sword of Southern masculinity, and his gentle but determined search for another way to define himself. His resistance is mostly passive, but it doesn’t go unnoticed by the people around him. There’s a great section toward the end of the book where he’s called out about it by an elderly aunt. It’s a thunderstorm of words. By the end of it, you’re soaked and maybe struck by lightning too.
So my challenge for “The Unmapped Man” was to write a narrator who wasn’t Binx, but who shared with Binx some attitudes that might be salient to life in the early 20th century. And on my first pass, I didn’t succeed in the slightest: the original lyric was just Binx, or my interpretation of Binx, and I even called the song “Binx Bolling’s Blues”.
I sidestepped the problem by making the narrator of “The Unmapped Man” a newcomer to New Orleans. And I wrote the story in a very different tone: one that I hope that Walker Percy would have appreciated, but a little more cartoonish and zany than he’d ever want to be. I really do love that story, and I hope that if people like the song, they’ll visit McCall’s Almanac, scroll down and read it through.
How do you think the themes featured in the video for “The Unmapped Man,” and relevant and timely for today?
Tris: The lyric video for “The Unmapped Man” was created by Rob Fitzgerald, who is a filmmaker and musician here in New Jersey. I don’t think timeliness was a consideration at all for him – I think he was trying to respect the reverence I have for New Orleans music and storytelling. I also think that Rob agrees with me that in order to know where you’re going, it’s best to understand where you’ve been. The wistful tone of his clip suits the subject matter, too: the song is an expression of the narrator’s enthusiasm for his new city and its possibilities, but I think the listener knows that it’s unsustainable. Rob mentioned this to me when he was putting the clip together – people will often relocate in order to try to escape, but it’s a sucker’s bet because you can’t outrun yourself. Wherever you go, there you are, right?
You’re also a journalist/writer for various newspapers and magazines. How does your writing influence your pursuit of music?
Tris: Phil Ochs called himself a singing journalist, and I always thought that sounded like something to aspire to. Some of the best known Ochs songs are really editorials – they were position papers with a political argument, like “Here’s To The State Of Mississippi” – and I don’t really do that. But then there are others that are sung from the point of view of an invented character. Which is an underutilized journalistic tactic, if you ask me! Anybody doing a story worth anything must first create a voice, and that includes autobiographical stories. I think that’s something that good writers do reflexively: even emo records, which are supposed to be true reflections of the singer’s soul, are invariably sung from the perspective of a gonzo version of the writer. It would be pop malpractice to do anything else. Pop demands a character, and that character should be, if not larger-than-life, at least wrestling with larger-than-life stuff.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about journalism is that it’s meant to be transparent: that the reporter and the publication are just filters through which the reader accesses something objectively true. The first thing you learn when you do journalism is that that’s impossible. The writer and the publication are always present. He’s the conduit through which the story arrives. The more interesting the conduit is, the more resonance the story will achieve. That’s something that Orwell understood, deeply, even as he was telling us all that good writing was like a pane of glass. His writing was never a pane of glass, thank goodness!
Fun Questions
Who was your first concert, and who’s been your favorite so far?
Tris: I’ve given this some thought. I think the single best concert I’ve ever seen was the one that Beyoncé did for the opening of the Atlantic City casino called Revel. The casino is now gone, but the memory of that show is indelible. The band’s approach to the material that night was intensely musical – they were finding all kinds of dimensions in the songs without overcomplicating things or slowing the momentum. And the star was ridiculously charismatic: she danced through the whole thing like every step was critical to land with force and conviction, which of course it was. I’ve seen Beyoncé more than a few times in many different contexts, and she’s always wonderful. But when I’ve met other fans who were at the Atlantic City show, they’ll all tell me the same thing: they were thunderstruck by the Revel concert, and they’ve never seen her be anywhere near as commanding as she was that night.
The first concert I ever saw must have been something bar-band-like at the Jersey Shore. When we’d vacation there, there was always music on the piers, on the amusement parks, on the beaches, in cupboards, in vacant lots, you name it. New Jersey has a reputation for great music, everywhere, and it’s well-earned. One day I hope to live up to the high standard set by those bands.
What was your first album on cassette, CD and/or vinyl?
Tris: Here’s a funny story: when I was about ten years old, I was sent out by my parents to weed the front yard. Right there in the grass was a cassette copy of Give The People What They Want by The Kinks. In retrospect, I think it must have been dropped there by God.
I took it back in the house, and played it, and played it, and played it until I’d memorized every note and every phrase; I mean, it’s not even a very good album by Kinks standards, although it has “Better Things” and “Destroyer” on it. But I think that Ray Davies’s storytelling, and characterization, and sense of incongruity and compassion, became something that I’d chase for the rest of my days. Of all the bands that could have been left on the lawn, it’s ironic in a way that Davies would understand that it was the Kinks. Because there’s never been any artist who has done that literary stuff as well as Davies does, and that includes the Beatles. I play synthesizer in a pop group called Overlord, and one of our songs is about the things that might have happened in a person’s childhood that shifted his drives into gear. There’s mine.
Which five albums and/or artists would you not want to live without?
Tris: Man, I couldn’t even narrow it down to five Genesis albums. You want me to do the entirety of pop music?
Do you have a guilty music and/or entertainment pleasure?
Tris: Nope. I never feel guilty about music. I only feel guilty about everything else.
What have you currently been reading, watching, and/or listening to?
Tris: If you like storytelling musical projects, here’s one you don’t want to miss: Ajai, by Serengeti. It’s a pair of continuous narratives, one of which picks up from a series of prior records about a character named Kenny Dennis, a working-class white rapper from Chicago. At the time of Ajai, he’s in his fifties, living in Minneapolis, trying to be as fly, and relevant, as he can be while nursing old grievances. And that’s great and illuminating, but the really transcendent part of the project is the first half, which is narrated by the title character, an Indian-American aesthete obsessed with exclusive sneaker drops. He’s married to an overachiever who he keeps embarrassing and inconveniencing, and later in the set, Kenny Dennis confirms that they’ve separated. There’s a scene where he tries to get an epidemiologist interested in a sneaker deal and another one where he wanders around Paris in search of stain remover. The whole thing is insanely detailed, slyly trenchant, and beautifully produced by Kenny Segal, who worked on one of last year’s best albums – Hiding Places with Billy Woods. It’s tipped me off to Serengeti’s back catalog, which is pretty amazing, too. That’s music, right?, thousands of oddballs, doing oddball projects, each of which stands a real chance to enrich your life if you’ve got the patience to engage closely with it.
Find Tris on Facebook, Twitter, and his musical roadmap website, McCall’s Almanac.
