Photo Credit: Alfra Martini
With ‘Next Year’s Ghost’ by Zachary Cale out May 24th, we thought it wise to sit down and talk with him about everything that went into this eight-song record, including isolation, loss, and piano-driven moments. All of that and then some awaits below…
Kendra: Amid the pandemic, you dropped a couple of records, one in 2020 and then another right around when we were starting to crawl back to normalcy, 2022’s Skywriting. With that, it’s safe to say no one is the same person they were in February 2020 – but for you, how do you feel the past four or so years have changed you as not a person, but an artist?
Zachary Cale: I think the main thing is community. In the music business, it’s pretty easy to lose sight of that as it’s pretty competitive. When the world stopped during that brief time the pointlessness of everything really set in. Like this is life and death here, does music matter? Do my little songs matter? And yes that’s a resounding affirmative but it’s the community around me where I live, where I work, my friends, my music buds, the energy in the city I live that makes me want to continue. Yeah maybe art is pointless but being part of that energy is what makes it meaningful. Community is how we change things. Politically and creatively.
I have to remind myself daily that I’m fortunate to have the extra time to daydream about art. If you don’t pinch yourself every once in a while and say hey I’m good, I’m healthy, I’m not getting bombed out of my home, I get to make art with my friends. That’s a privilege. And yes you’re right maybe no one is the same person pre-pandemic but even so it seems that society has a selective memory. We want so badly to go back to how it was before. No one wants to think about that dark time. I get it. We wanna forget that it happened. Those conflicting feelings are the root of what this album ‘Next Year’s Ghost’ is about.
Kendra: It’s been noted that the first song you did for 2024’s ‘Next Year’s Ghost,’ “Shatterstar,” a song you’ve said was written for friends, who were also musicians, whom you lost during the pandemic. Do you feel as if that song took the helm and helped guide you in the direction the rest of the album ultimately took?
Zachary Cale: Yeah I lost a few people during and shortly after. I think some people just checked out. They saw the writing on the wall, the ugliness of everything, and couldn’t deal. NYC was incredibly bleak in the first year of lockdown. And for a lot of people even after it was over, in the return to normalcy, that adjustment period was even harder. I have a lot of talented friends. That was a time when being talented didn’t save you from the reality of not making a living. It definitely made me question why I do what I do and in the face of this thing larger what does it add up to? You question everything, you doubt yourself, what you’ve achieved, everything. It’s mental health.
“Shatterstar” came out of that. I suppose since it was the first song I wrote in that period it ended up being a guide for the rest of the album. That’s usually how my songwriting brain works. There’s usually a long spell of not writing and then one song comes that is saying something new and it opens up the tap, and the rest follows suit.
Kendra: ‘Next Year’s Ghost’ captures a lot of what I’ve been hearing in music over the past couple of years; isolation and uncertainty. Two aspects I feel were placed under a microscope in recent years, but they’re also aspects I feel have been very much present throughout the 21st Century with 9/11 kicking off our collective uncertainty, and social media somehow connecting us more while also making us hermits whose only communication is via the internet. All of that said, do you think society will turn over a new leaf in the coming years, and perhaps enter a happier chapter?
Zachary Cale: Here’s hoping. It all goes back to the community again. Contributing positive energy and communication to your corner of the world is the way forward. I try not to be cynical but it sure looks bad out there. I took a break from social media for a month and it really helped clear some of the noise out of my brain, but now that I’m promoting music again I’m back in the thick of it. The election, the genocide happening in Gaza, Putin’s insane war with Ukraine, climate breakdown, politicians trying to ban abortion and dehumanize immigrants, it goes on. Social media has ruined us.
Instead of bringing people together and making communication easier, it causes division and rancor. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle though. You can decide not to use it, but unfortunately being an artist requires that you do. I don’t see any of the things I mentioned being solved anytime soon but throwing your hands up in despair is dangerous too and that’s why I continue to buckle down, continue the work, and help my community as much as I can.
Kendra: Let’s take it back to the music because this album is piano-driven, I think making it a bit more emotional. There’s just something captivating about the way that instrument elevates music. What made you go from having minimal experience with the piano to writing an album based on its sounds?
Zachary Cale: There’s something about playing a piano alone in a room that’s very transportive. When lockdown started I’d use it as a way to get out of my head and zone out. It was pure meditation at first. I’ve always loved the sound and it’s the only instrument other than guitar that I ever had a major interest in learning. It’s a great songwriting tool of course and so it helped me learn about theory in a way that I never thought about as a guitarist.
I always think back to the lockdown days as being a very quiet time. People were shuttered in their homes. No cars were moving about. NYC was deserted. There was a desolate eerie vibe in those early days and the ambient piano felt like a good soundtrack. Of course, the quietude eventually ended when the George Floyd murder happened. Then all I heard were ambulance sirens and police helicopters. A lot of that unrest found its way into a bunch of the songs. Maybe we’ve already forgotten how dark that was. It felt like the end of the world to me.
Kendra: Time for a side note – With it being May, there are a lot of graduations happening across the country right now, and I’d love for you to share a song with the collective class of 2024. So what song would you dedicate to them? Can be one of yours, or another artist’s.
Lastly, with ‘Next Year’s Ghost’ out on May 24th, what else can the people expect as we start to roll into summer?
Zachary Cale: I guess I’ll have to go with the most positive life-affirming song on the new album and that’s “Rough Devotion”. It’s about perseverance and celebrating the things you hold dear. It can be easy to lose sight of the things that matter so the song is a reminder. “Please take this as a token, what’s life without devotion? The will of love has spoken, what’s life without devotion?”
I don’t have any big travel plans at the moment but hopefully, there’ll be some shows to support the album, and probably more recording soon, but I’m also looking forward to getting back into a writing zone. As always the work continues.
