the ugly hug

Everyday for the last three-ish years my daily routine has been pretty simple. I wake up, make a fried egg, deliberate between sourdough bread and multigrain bread while my egg cooks, scroll through mind-numbing Instagram reels hoping to see some content that depresses me enough to put my phone down and spark a change in my daily routine, listen to music and mope around town until I have to go to work or school. And now that I’ve just graduated I thought I’d have more time in my post college life to create, or write, or at least listen to some new albums but playing drunksketball with friends and waiting for the pool table to open up at the local dive bar takes up a lot of my time. 

Really the only thing that keeps me going sometimes is knowing I’m going to make a good breakfast in the morning that lasts me all of five minutes while I listen to Kitchen as the sun shines through my windows and I take my first sips of hot black coffee. Wearing the tape thin on my Breath Too Long cassette is maybe all the structure I need. Kitchen’s music is such a constant in my life that it almost feels impossible to take a step back and reassess why I love his music so much. It’s hard to break down the barriers surrounding his music and him because I hold him on such a pedestal, one that my friends kind of make fun of, and have thought that he was Phoebe Bridgers-level famous based on the way I talk about his music. 

For those who aren’t my friend, and haven’t got the “who is Kitchen” spiel in my bedroom as I pick out a record to throw on to alleviate the stress of an awkward silence, Kitchen is the recording project of Rochester based artist, James Keegan. Before Kitchen, Keegan released dreamy bedroom-pop music under the moniker Loner(s) while he was in high school, and the first Kitchen release, the eclectic set of lo-fi pop tunes, Town came out his senior year. He went to SUNY Purchase where he studied Audio and Music engineering and has released a slew of full albums, EPs, and instrumentals consistently since 2017. I often describe him as the songwriter of our generation, adding a tired “he just gets it” at the end when it becomes too vulnerable for me to try and describe how magical his music is. Much like his music, Kitchen feels like a distant memory, and if you’re not there to hold on to the moment, you’ll miss it all. 

I started re-reading some features on artists I love to determine how other writers painted them. I’ve read numerous MJ Lenderman articles recently that described whatever basketball jersey or 90s alt-country band-T he was repping to show how “he’s just some dude.” So I tried to describe James Keegan the same way. I pictured him in front of The Burlington Bar in Logan Square, where the rest of his bandmates and touring partners in the Conor Lynch band were grabbing post-show beers, as he stood outside with my brother and I in an oversized Attic Abasement-shirt answering our jumbled questions in a hushed murmur with his hands constantly moving between his pockets and the side of his face. “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys played from speakers inside the bar and flooded into the street where we all shared a distracted laugh and a sigh of relief breaking down the awkwardness that separated us a second earlier. I wondered if we were all thinking of that Diary of a Wimpy Kid scene or if we all just needed a minute to acknowledge our surroundings again. I can’t think of James as just some dude, I couldn’t paint him in that light even if I forced myself to. As the three of us shared a “see ya later and get home safe” yell to our friend Nathan as he ran to catch his bus home a few minutes into our interview, I realized that Keegan was so ingrained in my daily routine and life that, standing there, he didn’t even feel real. Minutes before I was thinking about how strange it was to be talking to somebody whose voice follows me everyday in a trail through my earbuds, my tape deck, my car, and then next I was thinking about how oddly in sync we all were. 

There’s so much trust, comfort, and nostalgia embedded in his music. Sometimes it almost feels too vulnerable to me, sharing his latest album, Breath Too Long with somebody might be the most intimate thing one could do, and to write that is even more daring. The title track, a song for when you’re lovesick, or sick in bed with COVID as Keegan was when he wrote it, watching the world pass you by from your back flat on your bed staring up at the ceiling, unable to do anything but toss and turn and replay pathetic conversations and moments where you wish you had more to say. It’s in those restless nights where you finally have the time to confront your feelings and actions and recognize that you’re not as poignant or forward as you want to be. Keegan sings on the track, “you always take the leap of faith, I stay where I know it’s safe, a dream, a distant dream.” 

Kitchen’s music is simultaneously so bare yet so cloaked in fuzziness that it gives this feeling of a distant daydream. His music quite literally feels like “snow on the dead brown leaves” as he sings on one of his earliest songs “November Prayer.” It’s the moment you hear wind gushing outside your window as you grab your comforter tighter and curl it around your toes. It’s the four step distance you walk behind your friends when you think you sense sparks between them and don’t want to be overbearing. It’s hesitant and it’s bold. It’s pathetic and abashed, yet confident and unashamed. Everytime I felt like I didn’t have the words, I wished I could send somebody a Kitchen song that matched my emotions. Keegan expresses your feelings and takes away the fear of sounding pathetic so you hold it in until the moment has passed and there’s nothing you can do about it now. 

In our digital age, we share everything online; even our dumbest thoughts that consist of a new iteration of hawk tuah recalling a Silver Jews or Sparklehorse lyric find a home on Twitter and our most revealing selfies that also show off a new band poster freshly picked out from the local record store to make sure the person you like knows how indie you are can live on Instagram for 24 hours. It almost feels like nobody has a sense of shame anymore, yet we all do. We’re just looking for somebody who will relate to us and make us feel like our words and feelings hold some weight. Everything moves so quickly that we start to lose a sense of ourselves. We live in an age where a like on an Instagram story means more than a wave at a show or a nod at the bar, so we’re always thinking about our next tweet, or what song to post on our story and the most relatable Letterboxd review. I have less and less of an actual person to hold onto and more of a figure of a person, shapeless and malleable, nothing on the inside but a projection of what I think I want to be. 

Kitchen’s music is so magical to me because it reminds me of moments and pieces of myself that I forgot existed. While losing yourself in the world he creates within his albums, you somehow become more aware of yourself and your environment. I fear sometimes that if I don’t listen to his music I’ll forget the streets I’ve walked down 100 times because I was always listening to his music while doing so. I’ll forget how the dying streetlight blinks in time with “I Want You” and I’ll miss the people having a fight outside of the bar while Keegan sings “when I was a kid so obsessed with love, a word with permanence, you fall and don’t get up.” Rain doesn’t fall as peacefully when it’s not being soundtracked by “World is Big” and smiles from strangers as I pass the gas station don’t seem as genuine when I don’t have the reassurance of “Already Going Home” in my headphones. 

During his performance at The Attic, a house venue in Logan Square, Chicago just a few hours before the interview, I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness. Huddled around the five-piece ensemble framed by beautiful wooden ceilings and stained glass windows overlooking the neighborhood park, dripping sweat from the back of my neck, I wrapped my arm around my brother as tears swelled in my eyes, feeling a sense of belonging and comfort I had thought I’d lost. One moment I was zeroed in on every movement on stage, the next I was completely blacked out singing along to “Domino” and imagining every step I’ve taken mumbling along to that song in my hometown in North Carolina, being reminded of every time I looked up at a stop light and felt my heart sink and long to slip into one of the strangers passing me on the street. 

I started thinking about how Hanif Abdurraqib profiled artists, usually making them seem larger than life. It feels like an innate human reaction to obsess over people and hold them up to standards that are above themselves. Maybe it was because I had just read a chapter in his book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, about the Weekend and his superhero-like ability to turn a crowd of thousands of people into sex-crazed animals, and it made me think about the humor in how most people obsess over huge pop stars, people like Taylor Swift or Drake who have big personalities and heaps of charm and charisma, but the person I obsess over is an artist with the posture of Bart Simpson who works at a fast food restaurant, and maybe everyone should make that pivot, too.

Maybe looking up to figures that are larger than life is what’s stopping us from making the changes in our daily routine that will push us towards a realization that we can take small actions to get us out of this mind numbing repetition. If our inspirations are more grounded in everyday life and our peers, then the disconnect between our motivations and our willingness to delve into our passions will disappear. 

Even Keegan’s recording process when making a Kitchen album is reflective and representative of how it seems our generation is feeling. There’s tons of kids who are getting into analog recording with the hunger to connect to a creative process that grows with you and naturally takes the shape of your environment. It’s harder to delete or record over a mistake on a tape recording, but it becomes easier to accept and work with it, forming the rest of your recording process around that moment. 

“I was really inspired by Spirit of the Beehive for a while and I moved away from tape recordings, but then I stopped doing the computer stuff so much because it’s all MIDI and you can get any sound you want. You can make an instrument play any sound you want. Most of what I like about a lot of the music I listen to is that it feels very natural and feels like things happen almost by accident,” Keegan said when talking about the evolution of his recording process. 

There’s a sense of satisfaction that you get when committing to things, whether it’s finally finishing that Cormac McCarthy book that’s been sitting on your shelf for a year, or completing a week of journal entries, or following through on plans to hangout with your friends, sticking to your word is one of the hardest things to do especially when we are constantly distracted by the endless cycle of Instagram reels from friends we have to watch or new Pitchfork articles we have to read and argue about on Twitter. We’ve become so scared to share any imperfection of ourselves or our work that we often lose all strength to do anything at all, but Keegan has learned to embrace imperfections during his recording and writing process and even finds stability in them. 

“When I was recording ‘Pike’ years ago I accidentally recorded one second over every track so there was a gap in the song that I couldn’t fix and I ended up having to re-record the whole thing. This was one of the worst mistakes I ever made while recording and the track was shaping up to be exactly how I wanted it, but it ended up being even better when I re-recorded it.”  

After years of recording, Keegan has found a method that works well for him, bridging all of his influences into a succinct and memorable writing and recording style. In a short period of time Keegan has been able to create a distinct sound for himself that goes past his abilities to write catchy and relatable pop tunes. From the minute you hear the tape hiss, to the first down stroke of his guitar, to his shaky voice breaking over the track, you immediately settle into the comfortability of his work, allowing yourself to let your walls down as he does in the same breath. The combination of digital and analog recording styles is a reflection of the world he wants to create, full of imperfections, insecurities, and timidness, as well as patience, desire, and care. 

Keegan described how his most recent record was made through this process, “You can hear when it’s tape stuff. ‘Fall’ is all digital, but ‘Halloween in August’ is a blend. The first half was recorded on a boombox and the second half was recorded into logic. The vocals were all recorded into the boom box, and then I cut them up and put them on top of the track.”

There’s so much care that goes into Kitchen’s recordings. His music builds upon intense swells, yet they’re never emphasized by crashing symbols or heightened vocals. They’re intensified by the realization of seeing yourself in Keegan’s music more and more. The lyrics become more weighted and backed by the world he creates throughout his albums. While his records may not be conceptually planned, there’s lots of nuance that leads you from song to song. “I Want You” wouldn’t make you cry as hard if it didn’t follow “Halloween in August,” continuing in Keegan’s story pining over someone. He has such a unique way of making you see the beauty in the mundane, and genuinely walk away feeling it. Weaving instrumental interludes between songs carries the feelings over from one place to another, transporting emotional spells from one song to another. 

The other night I watched the movie The Lunchbox by Ritesh Batra, and in it the main character passed a street artist who painted the same place every day, but in each painting there were small differences. A kid riding a bike, a guy walking a dog, a couple holding hands would appear somewhere in the painting. The main character thought he saw himself in one of the paintings so he bought it and held the painting to his chest the whole train ride home. Keegan’s music feels like bits and pieces of a larger feeling. Each time I listen to a Kitchen song I see myself in a different world. His music is instantly so familiar that you sink into his world so instantaneously, holding on to your own memories and creating more within his albums. In a time where feelings are so quickly passed through, especially in the way that we’ve become accustomed to consuming and processing feelings, Kitchen’s music is so permanent and tender. His music instills a sort of stillness that feels very important and impactful right now. “Everything I do is cautious, can’t make my arms do what I want.” 

“I think I process stuff very slowly. It takes me a really long time to figure out how I feel about something a lot of the time. By the time I figure it out, it’s a little bit too late to do anything about it but write a song. Maybe that sounds fucked up.” 

Unknowingly, Kitchen connects rooms full of kids acting like adults based around a sense of hope that while we outwardly try and project how unique we are, we all feel the same sense of desperation, hopelessness, and passion. At his show he closed with one of my favorite songs, “Demon (Yellow)” and it only feels right to me to end this piece by quoting my favorite lines from it because Keegan always has the words for when I don’t, “crossing oceans, desperate phrasing I can’t talk cause I’m too lazy.”

Keegan just announced that you can now pre-order the first Kitchen album, town, on both vinyl and cassette. You can purchase a copy here. Kitchen will also be playing a few upcoming shows with Hello Shark in Troy, NY on November 15th and in Buffalo, NY on the 16th, then in Rochester on the 17th with Spencer Radcliffe, Hello Shark, Attic Abasement and A Wonderful.

Written by Eilee Centeno