Written by Emily Moosbrugger | Photo Courtesy from 0 Stars

At the start of each year, 0 stars’ Mikey Buishas creates a bingo board. He organizes 25 new year’s resolutions neatly into squares and hangs them from his wall as a visual reminder. If he accomplishes five in a row in any direction, he gets a bingo. “I was thinking, this is the year I get off the notes app and I get a pencil,” he said. 

Much of Buishas’ songwriting starts this way – through simple, self-imposed creative restrictions. Similar to getting off the notes app, a goal set with the intention of confronting his habit of overthinking lyrics, he collects pages and pages of games he’s invented to close the borders on himself creatively. Sometimes these are open-ended ‘write a song a day’ challenges, other times they’re based on more specific constraints, like writing a song without using any pronouns. “I think every record I’ve ever made, which is like 10 or something at this point, is usually just a collection of these dart thrown attempts at a song in 20 minutes before midnight type things,” he said. 

To record World No. 2, his second album as 0 Stars, Buishas brought a collection of songs that he’d kept stored on his 8-track to the studio of his good friend and musical inspiration, Hunter Davidsohn. “I basically brought some reels up there where everything was out of tune. He just helped me, with his tape machine and my tape machine, sort of cobble together these things,” he said. Buishas and Davidsohn spent half a week with the reels, re-recording instrumental sections, re-doing some songs in different keys, stitching parts of different songs together and scrapping others entirely. “It’s kind of the first thing I’ve made that I feel 100% proud of and I think that’s largely because of my friend Hunter who helped record it,” Buishas said of the album. 

Written over the span of the last six years, World No. 2 deals with the complexity of taking change as it comes and settling into life’s slowing pace as we grow older. “I wanted the burst of an immediate wind/ Started over and over and over and over/ Tipped over the poison/ Started again,” he sings gingerly on the album’s title track, a tender acoustic ballad echoing an ever-evolving attitude towards life’s unpredictability. Much of the beauty of World No. 2 is in the moments just after our momentum is lost; feedback hanging in the air after a guitar solo is abandoned, raindrops bursting on the windshield at an uncomfortably long red light, fragments of conversation still lingering on the walk back to the car. Like the feeling of quieting the mind with a long walk, it’s a reflection of slowing down and finding an abundance of comfort in the world that exists around you. 

Buishas’ lighthearted approach to songwriting is reflected on “Jeanine,” a rocking 90-second song inspired by Arthur Russell’s “Janine.” “You know I want to write a song like ‘Janine,’” he explained of his thought process. “If I title it ‘Jeanine,’ okay I’m like 20% there and it just becomes a little game. And you’re like ‘oh maybe I should write about… I know a Jeanine!’ And now you’re like 30% there.” In the first half of the song, Buishas casually contemplates his mom’s thoughts about his musical pursuits: “Maybe if I start a band/ Jeanine would understand.” But as the song progresses, he creates a steady balance between his tongue-in-cheek lyrical storytelling and the self-doubt that comes with maintaining a long-term creative project: “It’s hard to say for sure/ How long this will endure/ I want to free you from the panic/ And plop you in the hammock.” 

Throughout World No. 2, the songs shift between the driving, spirited indie-rock of “Jeanine” and the lush, intimate acoustic recordings of songs like “Link in Bio” and “They Say.” Others like “Atlantic” land somewhere in the middle, with dreamy, soft-rock verses punctuated by brisk electric guitars and a droning feedback section. “Atlantic” moves through a series of lyrical vignettes detailing the experience of running errands on a rainy day: “Mow me down at the DMV/ Make me frown, make me see/ That I’m nothing without my documents.” Like “Jeanine,” there is push and pull between comedy and introspection that gives the everyday occurrences Buishas writes about a layer of absurdity. But there is also tension between the way he depicts beauty and mundanity that gives these lyrical situations their own surreal feeling, like being caught somewhere between a daydream and reality. It’s that feeling that makes World No. 2 feel so unique and so intimate. 

“I like pointing to something and alluding to something else that maybe isn’t there. So maybe what would’ve been funnier is ‘World No. 3,’ because wait, what happened to ‘World No. 2?’ Or what are the confines of this world? What is ‘World No. 1?’” Buishas asked, explaining his thinking behind the album’s title. “I think it means a hundred different things depending on what point in the album I’m in, but basically just a different kind of Heaven that you think exists and then find out you’re already living in it.”

You can listen to World No. 2 out now as well as get it on cassette via Worm Records.