Photos and feature by Lauren Khalfayan, find more of her work here.
I remember first stumbling across Kyle Craft back in 2016 with his debut album Dolls of Highland. I’m not sure why it made such a strong impression on me — maybe it was the pink kaleidoscope LOSER edition vinyl or the mysterious face looking out from the darkness — but even the unwrapping process felt like a religious experience. Quickly, it became one of my most played records. Followed by the spiraling Full Circle Nightmare, Craft is back with his third release, Showboat Honey, on which he fully embraces his band as collaborators. On a humid evening in Brooklyn, I sat down with Kyle and chatted about drug store cowboys, mysticism, being a ghost, and the additional baggage that accompanies making music and “participating” in society in 2019.
I’m familiar with the sort of process of how this album came to be, because you scratched the first draft of it, right? And you said that was sort of a gut reaction where you just knew that it was not “the album”
Yeah. There were some songs that survived — “Broken Mirror Pose”, “She’s Lily Riptide”, “Blood in the Water”, “Buzzkill Caterwaul”, “Johnny Free and Easy” — basically the entire second side of the record is the old record and then “Broken Mirror Pose” is the only song on the first side from the old set.
I feel a lot of the times as an artist you have a tendency to be your own worst critic, so how was that gut feeling different from just being overly critical of your work? Do you feel like that’s an awareness that’s become more developed since your early work?
Well with this one I feel like it was a little bit different cause there were other people involved. There were a few voices in the band, or one in particular, that was like, “This is the record. This record’s perfect.” And I was like, “Hmm, I don’t know if it is.” I think the old version is good, it just felt like I was doing the same thing. I wanted to challenge myself a little bit, not like “sonically” challenge myself, but challenge myself with ideas like, “Oh, I want to write a short song.” I can get carried away with myself. If you look at my entire catalogue most of the songs run between 4-5 minutes and over that, so I was like, what would it be like to have a two minute song? I wrote the new songs that are on the first half of the record in, I don’t know, two weeks. They were just two different records, I think they were both good though.
In terms of challenging yourself with how you’re writing songs, it sounds like you think of it in terms of the structure you create or building parameters for your creativity?
I don’t — that was the first time I ever tried to do that with the writing of the album. That was the first time I had ever thought about it like, ok I’m going to try to do this for this song. Otherwise I just kind of let the song live and breathe on it’s own. I don’t know if I’ll do that again, cause I do like to let songs go where they go. My favorite songs are upwards of 6 minutes — “Visions of Johanna” by [Bob] Dylan is my favorite song ever and that’s like close to 8 minutes long and when I’m listening to that song I never once feel like it’s getting old. It’s a strange thing — I don’t think a lot of people dig that nowadays
Do you think that’s attention spans or —?
I do — I think it’s attention spans and what would be a good way to put that… I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I think maybe it’s because nowadays it’s such a culture where people themselves want to feel larger than life and have the capacity to be and the mental state to be. Nowadays maybe people are too concerned with their own miniature version of attention and stardom where it’s like, “Oh this songs cool, but I’m gonna put on this cause it’s gonna make me look like a baller in this Instagram story,” or something. I think people just have the ability to be their own stars now — everyone has a little bit of Donald Trump in them
Oh that’s terrifying. Speaking of Dylan — was he the person that made you fall in love with poetry and storytelling? Because going along the similar theme of people don’t make 8 minute songs, people aren’t really telling stories with their music as much — I feel
I feel the same way. I mean you have people that do that, but they do that on a fictional level I think. And Dylan did that too, for sure, but there’s this golden era of personal grief and experience that leaked into his work and eventually started to phase out, which is natural. I think I’m kind of doing that now. Up until this point I’ve written about completely what’s happening in front of me, but Dylan was the guy for sure. First I got into his protest-y songs when I was younger, like 16 or something, and then I somehow, I remember reading this quote Bruce Springsteen had on hearing the Rolling Stones for the first time and it was about that time and it hit me in the same way cause it was so strange and it felt like nothing else existed in a way. I felt like I was hearing a rolling stone for the first time with everyone else. cause I’m from a small town. No one from where I’m from listens to anything other than “Sweet Home Alabama” and ACDC or something. So to hear this song, Springsteen’s quote was when he first heard that snare drum that starts the song it blew open the doors of his mind or something like that. I think that was sort of the quote. And immediately everything changed. The way I wrote, the way I pursued it, everything. He still is my guy, he’s my number one. And he still always exists in that way to me and hopefully always will. I always imagine 1965 Dylan behind me when I’m writing being like, “That’s all right,” like the ghost of Dylan past. But I also don’t want… I’m not in the game of emulating which gets really hard to understand for people in this day and age cause it’s a weird sound. But it’s just rock n’ roll. It’s not glam rock or it’s not… it’s just strange to me the way people perceive that type of songwriting. Like it can’t exist nowadays without it being old fashioned or nostalgic. Cause in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago. I think rock n’ roll’s gonna have it’s little comeback.
Yeah, honestly I’ve been hoping the pendulum swings back
It always does, for sure. I don’t know the pattern it swings in, but it always does and I think it will. Right now we’re in the thick of the drugstore cowboy era. Like everybody’s doing that thing which is great and fine, it just gets funny sometimes. Like the same way John Fogerty singing about being born on the Bayou and it’s like, “Dude, you’re from the bay!” What bullfrogs are you talking about man? But I mean, it’s nothing to get salty about. It is funny to see the trend of things. And that’s one thing, from the very beginning of this, the one thing that I want to do is be completely honest with myself and not latch on and in my mind that’s what selling out would be. Like, oh what’s happening right now? I need to make my pop record or my cowboy record. I do have another record that I’ve written where I’m getting back to this thing I haven’t done in a long time which is making music that sounds like where I’m from. And I think everything I do has a little bit of swamp water in it, but I want to make an album that has that on display. Cause I think I’ve always been a little afraid of that. Cause I don’t necessarily like where I’m from. But I’m kind of coming to grips that I don’t like a lot of the people where I’m from, not the actual place. I love Louisiana. I complain about the cold everywhere else all the time. I miss Louisiana, I miss the woods and being out there alone and that swampy stuff. I found my home was there when I lived there and not so much [with the] outrageous closet racism and bigotry that exists there, that’s the hard part to be around. It’s the part that exists that very hard for me to be around, it really gets to me emotionally.
Do you think that with the internet and social media, while there’s a lot of negatives we’re seeing, the world’s becoming increasingly smaller — whereas you discovering Dylan at such a young age [where you lived] was so outside the norm, do you think there’s more opportunities for people in places like Louisiana now with the increased accessibility to information to have those kinds of discoveries? Or do we not have the kind of material to make those discoveries worthwhile?
I don’t know. I was an only child and the only way I learned about the “cool shit” was I had older friends and they didn’t know about any of that shit until they went to college. So when they would come back from college, they’d be like, “Dude, you gotta check this out.” Luckily I found Dylan on my own through reading — I always made my way back in researching who did this person know and so on. And when I was fifteen I was super into Aerosmith and I got this book where Steven Tyler was talking about how he loved John Lennon. And I was like, “Who’s John Lennon?” Cause I didn’t even know who The Beatles were at that age which was crazy. That’s stupid. That’s totally stupid. I should’ve known who The Beatles were. So I listened to John Lennon before I even listened to The Beatles. And then I got a book about John Lennon and read him talking about Bob Dylan and that’s how I found out about Dylan. So John Lennon showed me Bob Dylan… but to answer your question: I have no idea. Cause I have showed my little sister who is now 16, when she was younger I would try to sneak in things here and there like, “Oh you should listen to this,” which is amazing cause it worked on her. On the other hand, I showed my stepbrothers — I got them a Bowie record and a Dylan record for Christmas one year and when I came home for Christmas the next year it was still in the package. So it’s like, ah cool. I guess it just works with whoever cares. I know my little sister growing up kind of had this idea about what I was doing and always was kind of like, “Where is my brother? What’s he out there doing?” So I don’t know the answer to that question. I think people just get so consumed in what “pop culture” is that it’s hard to even feel slightly cool in a friend group by listening to the weirdo folk singer with the strange voice, do you know what I mean? They wanna hear whatever the newest radio artist is… I don’t know. It’s so strange to me. I’m so detached from all of it. I just try not to pay attention to it, unless I like something. It’s funny too, the way I listen to things, I feel like every time I do an interview it’s like “5 albums that you love” whatever — I always pick old stuff. And I feel like that almost makes me come off as I don’t listen to new stuff, but I do. It’s just that it never hits me in the same way. And there’s new stuff that I dig, but it’s so few and far between that I always land back on those other things.
I think that it’s very admirable that you’ve stuck to your guns this whole time and just done your thing, because I feel like it’s so easy for people not to. Because it’s so hard to make money in music, it’s just like, “Ok, what’s the shortest route I can take to make this a sustainable thing,” versus actually caring about the music. Like it’s more about the business than what you’re making at a certain point
Oh for sure. I can imagine it’s hard for most musicians. You never know, it’s all a crap shoot. I’m still learning how it works, but part of me doesn’t even want to know cause I don’t want it to affect what I’m honestly doing. I think the one thing I wanna do is just be me. I guess some of the backstory to that is that I used to be in another band when I was younger, probably from when I was 18-21, and we sounded just like Neutral Milk Hotel. Cause Neutral Milk Hotel did to me at the time kind of what Dylan did to me when I heard it for the first time. And I was like, “Oh my god this is what I want to do!” I thought I was hearing a genre of music. I hadn’t had that loss of innocence yet when you get like “Is this cool?” I was just like “This is cool! I wanna do this! I wanna make this weird fuzzed out folk music, this is cool to me. And I start this band and when that band’s fanbase, when they’re real dedicated can be really mean. So that loss of innocence didn’t take very long to set in. I was like oh my god everybody’s a total asshole and it got to me so much that I was like ok I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t even want these people to like me. Screw it. And from there I set out on a back to the basics, who-am-i kind of journey and I think I got there, honestly. I think I’ve settled in to my voice now which feels good. At least my voice, I don’t know about my sound, but my voice at least — I think I sound like me. If I did anything else it would be me faking. It would be me trying to do like, “Oh I’m gonna do my country thing,” versus me just being natural. I don’t know, maybe I’ll do one album where I sing really deeply, but otherwise, I don’t see the point in changing the way I see.
You have this one lyric “What’s there to write about when nothing’s going wrong” — it made me think about… not the tortured artist thing, but I guess through these different periods of your life there’s either good shit or bad shit and translating that… cause if that’s your source of inspiration and creation, when shit’s not going wrong, how do you figure that out creatively?
I don’t know cause it’s never exactly gone right. If I were completely ok, I don’t know what exactly would happen. Maybe I would start writing fiction at that point. A big part of what I do is a release for me. That’s my fix, I think, being able to get it out and singing it. And that doesn’t change or fix anything in the real world. But in the little ether of my head it makes things feel better for some reason. Maybe turning something ugly into something beautiful is what the fix is. Not that everything I do is beautiful. I’m not a fan of my voice, it’s not my favorite thing, but I said, if I was doing anything different… it’s just what I got to work with, what people gotta hear if they wanna hear it. It’s funny cause even my good mood vibes songs, the good mood playlist songs on Spotify, even those are sprinkled with apocalypse to some degree and everything sucks outside of it. With my fiancé for example, there was so much in the last couple years… I don’t even know how long it’s been, but since the album before this one came out, there’s been so much stuff that’s been just circumstances and bad luck and all these things and she was the only thing that kept me in line through all of that. And it’s funny cause when I write a love song it’s still has that, “well I hate everything else” vibe to it, but yeah I don’t know. I will say that I write way better when I’m sad or pissed off, but I should probably change that.
Like you said, it’s a need thing and it’s hard to find your way out or your release when everything’s okay besides being like “life’s great”
And so much of that is self-inflicted in a way cause I don’t have to be an artist. I could work in a food truck or a movie theater or something. A lot of the troubles kind of arose out of being an artist in a way, not all of them, but some of them. And romance, for sure. Which was always a rodeo cause I’m an artist. But I’m pretty good now. I mean the Dolls of Highland thing, that album was the settling in to being… I’d gotten out of, well we mutually split, after like 8 years and I was like I’m going to go to Portland, Oregon and start a band and be free cause I’ve never done that in my life. So Dolls of Highland was kinda of like this saga of me just being out there and having fun and then the next album was like the coming to. The first album was like walking through the door and you’re in this hall and that first album was walking through the hall through all the obstacles and shit and you get to the other door and you open that. And that’s Full Circle Nightmare and you’re looking back on all that crazy shit being like that was a wild time and I gotta go. It was nutty. But from that album on until now was such a nightmare to run and it was hard.
Do you think your environment, the place you find yourself in, the things you’re listening to or watching, do those things infuse themselves into what you make or can you create work that is separate from those influences?
I think I’m not affected by where I’m at as much as who or what spirit is on me at the time. Like with this last record I felt really heavy Patti Smith vibes and Leon Russell which is a very strange combination, but that was what I kind of felt — that spirit or something. Cause you can see it in certain people. What parts of people leak into others. For example, like Pattie Smith with Dylan. Like when she started doing her thing there was an obvious like, “Oh, you’re a Dylan person.” Same way with Dylan where it was like, “Oh, you’re totally doing the James Dean thing.” But I don’t think that where I’m at effects me as much as what kind of ghost is on me at the time. I feel like I could write a southern rock opera as easily in Portland as I could in New Orleans. Sometimes those things stick more — I get a certain vibe of music in my head whenever I’m walking through New York city. Every time it’s the same vibe, it’s the same pace, there are horns, there’s this thing. It’s almost this second line, rock n’ roll thing that happens whenever I’m wandering around New York city. I don’t know why it’s a thing, I very seldom listen to very much music when I’m walking around or on my own time. It’s usually just me trying to think.
I mean, myself included, a lot of people are constantly listening to music and drowning out there own thoughts to the point where it becomes this very weird thing and people aren’t comfortable being alone with themselves in silence. I know especially here it’s like a “don’t fuck with me, don’t talk to me” kind of thing.
There’s this one song I wrote when I was in Chicago, Lydia my fiancé was taking a greyhound to Louisville and I was taking one to Chicago and the band was meeting me there the next day. And I step on and immediately the first seat, there’s this little old lady and she looks at me all crazy eyed and she’s like “sit by me” and I’m like alright. Here’s a song. Here it comes, I know this is going to be a song. And it was amazing, she was amazing. And I wrote this song. And I like that interaction. I don’t like everyone [in their zone]. Like do you only talk at family reunions? And it’s not just here it’s everywhere. It’s not where you are, it’s when. It’s 2019, it’s just how everyone is.
It sounds like you’re a somewhat — I’m not sure if it’s the right word, but — spiritual person with the the ghosts and the spirits — is that a correct assumption?
I don’t consider myself really spiritual. I’m a bit of a nihilist maybe. I think you can let things put their hand on you as much as you want. I try to only let the right things put their hand on me. Spiritual is not the word I don’t think. Mystic maybe. I’ve semi-surrounded myself with those kinds of people. It’s hard to find musicians in that same vein, so it’s like the whole band isn’t in that. But a lot of the people I consider very close and admire and have a lot of love for I would consider in that realm of existence. And I definitely think there’s some — I’m not saying I believe in ghosts in that way — but I do believe in certain energies I think. And that’s even a stretch for me to say that. I guess I’m just trying to be just as me as possible around those things — like if you want to let a “spirit” if we want to call it that sink in to you really hard, you can, it’s just letting go I think of what you thought you were.
Are you finding a lot of people in music or your circle of people you’re surrounding yourself with who are like minded in terms of how you like to create your work or how you view the world?
I don’t know if I’ve ever had anyone that thinks like me as my friend
Only enemies
(laughs) Yeah, spiritual warfare. but yeah, I really don’t. It’s always been sort of — it’s weird. My guitar player the other night said something and it was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say something and I was like, “Oh, wait, I am like that.” Everybody kind of has a hard time pinning it, not that I’m a hard person to understand, at all, but I stay quiet most of the time. But we were all really drunk at 6 in the morning at our friend Peter’s house and he was like, “You know what man, you’re just a fly on the wall, that’s what you are and you reflect everything that’s around you and you don’t really exist. You’re a ghost in a way.” That’s how I like to be and that’s how I feel. I just kind of bite my tongue a lot until I sing. I don’t like people who are just so quick to be so mean. I don’t like destroying people in the same way people like to destroy people.
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