Carlson.
“Holy Motors,” from S.G. Carlson’s new release Sing The Hits, ambles along in an easy way, but it’s tinged with a little sadness; it’s a late summer evening with the first bite of fall. That bite is reflected in the lyrics: “You know I’m dying for it / You know I’m dying to be / Just a rock in a stream,” Carlson sings. “And when you’re making your coffee / And when you’re brushing your teeth / I’ll be here living the dream.”
Sing The Hits is a tongue-in-cheek title befitting the humor that courses through the album, which Carlson said centers around a theme: people living in flyover states. When asked what drew him to this theme, Carlson provided a startling answer: That Connecticut is, in its own way, a flyover state. People driving between New York and Boston might not even get out of the car here. It’s a state many in the Northeast don’t have much of an impression of; there is the endless parade of articles in newspapers written by people explaining why they’re leaving; there are those in northern New England who don’t consider Connecticut part of the region, and those in the mid-Atlantic who think of Connecticut as too small and distant to be included.
All this leads to a curious sense of, well, isolation. That theme — plus the fact that Carlson made the album largely by himself — makes Sing The Hits coincidentally relevant to our current situation, even though Carlson started working on it last fall, before anyone had heard of Covid-19.
“As an artist in a small state, I’m a big defender of people doing things for the sake of doing them. If you’re in a larger market, there’s a lot more press and a lot more attention and connections. The avenue to monetary success is a little more clear cut. If you’re in a smaller market, really the only reason to do it is for its own sake,” Carlson said. “It’s just people doing things for themselves and for each other, and it’s kind of a noble goal.”
Carlson is a member of the New Haven bands Laundry Day, Proud Flesh, and Ports of Spain, and in the past couple years has produced albums for several other bands. Yet — except for Mike Skaggs, who plays bass throughout the record, and Ilya Gitelman, who plays lead guitar on one song — all the album is written, performed, and recorded by Carlson.
“I’d done one solo album before of ideas that hadn’t found a home with any of those projects,” Carlson said, meaning the other bands he’s in. “I found that I really enjoyed that process. So I thought I’d do it again with material that was intended for that…. I like it in part because I’m not putting words in anyone else’s mouth. It’s just me. I didn’t have to worry about how anyone else might feel about a certain part or a certain lyric. The only person who worries about it is me — a lot.”
Coming up with material for a solo project was threading a needle, in the sense that Carlson wanted the material to sound different from the other projects he’s involved in. It was also a chance for freedom.
“Because I do a lot of production stuff, it was a good way to try ideas that were all really different, and see what I could do with them. If I messed it up, it would just be me trying something by myself that was bad,” he said with a laugh.
Sing the Hits was also a chance to try on different musical styles and moods. “A lot of the time, if you have a band, you might expect that all the songs sound the same and have the same vibe,” Carlson said. But “my dad is a great songwriter and he tends to do songs all over the map, and then put them on the same album together. So I had a good example at home, that anything that comes from you is your song and you can put them all together.”
Carlson also found that working by himself gave him a chance to hone his own craft. He took inspiration from a friend who is a visual artist. His friend, Carlson said, “said that it took him a long time to like his own hand, and once he liked the way he drew, he was able to do it more constantly.” Carlson felt that way in working on his first solo record. “I had these ideas that were in a bin,” he said. By contrast, with Sing the Hits, “I was learning to like my hand a little more. I could pick an idea and expand on it.”
Having made on a record largely by himself, about a topic involving people who are isolated, has set Carlson in a more philosophical frame of mind as the outbreak has disrupted his and everyone else’s employment, artistic practice, and plans. Carlson works at Cafe Nine and Fairfield Theatre Company. With Cafe Nine closed, he’s seem a loss of income. Fairfield Theatre Company is still open as a business, as it is working to cancel shows through April and reschedule them for the future. He is able to do some mixing and mastering of other bands’ work remotely, but the studio that he was planning to open this spring is now frozen. Carlson also had a show booked at the State House in May, opening for Vetiver, that was to have functioned as a CD release show, but that has been cancelled. He’s not looking to book shows until June or July.
“If you work in the gig economy, if you work in the service industry — financially, all of those people are super-on the rocks right now,” Carlson said. “But because of the shameful wealth disparity in this country, a lot of artists are used to being on the rocks. The pandemic is scary and being out of work is scary, but artists as a financial class tend to have had more than one rodeo in this.”
It has let him think of those whose situations are more precarious than his. Among the lessons he has taken to heart: “Don’t panic-buy food that’s labeled for SNAP recipients, because they might not be able to buy anything else,” he said. He hopes for “changes in the way we approach health care,” and has noticed that “skies are clearer and wildlife is doing better”; these changes could be more long-lasting “if we behave like we’re quarantining most of the time.”
During the quarantine itself, he said, “If everyone just had $1,000 a month coming in from a value-added tax, people might be able to stay indoors and not have to risk their lives to get groceries.” He also made a wry observation: “How robust a system can capitalism be if it needs to be bailed out by socialism every 10 years?”
“I hope this is a period of learning,” he said.
Artistically, for Carlson, the outbreak is a chance to return to first principles, to the most basic reasons people make art in the first place — reasons that were just as valid before the outbreak and will still be fundamental when the outbreak is over. “If you like to paint, your first thought shouldn’t be, ‘can this piece sell?’” he said. “It should be whether or not you like it and enjoy doing it — and that I think that element is more present in artists from flyover states,” all the time.
The arts scene in the state “thinks of itself as kind of an underdog, which I think plays to its strength,” Carlson said. But also, “there’s almost a wistfulness to it. A lot of what I was thinking about and hoping to get across is that you can still just do it for fun.” “Don’t suck the fun out of it for yourself.”
Carlson has perspective on the importance of the arts during the pandemic. “The biggest thing to happen to humanity in 100 years is happening now. I don’t blame anyone for having other things to do” than listen to music, Carlson said.
And on the other hand, “if you’re stuck in your house, you might as well give it a listen,” he said. “Alex Burnet just put out a record that he made in a week. Clem Planets, which is Jon Stone from 10,000 Blades, just put out a three-track. CT Verses — the person who runs it is doing the Lord’s work. Any small band in the state can move a muscle and he publicizes it.”
“It’s a great time to check out new music,” Carlson said. And, he added, “make a new song.”
Sing The Hits is available on Bandcamp.