“I used to send Dave [Berman] everything I wrote,” says Empty Country’s Joe D’Agostino, explaining the theme of his latest single, ‘David’ . “Whether he praised the work or was critical of it, his responses were always generous and insightful, and invariably drove me to write more. He treated me as a peer. We both suffered from severe clinical depression, so we’d talk about that a lot, too. Sometimes I’d get an email that was just a subject line. ‘Where are you in the struggle?’ For a long while after he passed, I kept sending songs, poems, and lyrics to his email. Eventually, the mailer-daemon started bouncing them back.”
Having made a name as the lead of indie rock icons Cymbals Eat Guitars, D’Agostino turned to Empty Country as something of a new beginning. Joined by Rachel Browne (Field Mouse), CEG drummer Charlotte Anne Dole and her twin brother Pat, the project is far from a strictly a solo endeavour, and retains the sense of experimentation and inventiveness that has long marked D’Agostino’s work. Following on from the cassette/book Basilisk, which came out earlier this year, November sees the release of the latest Empty Country full-length album. Titled, succinctly, Empty Country II.
A joint release between Get Better Records and Tough Love Records, the album feels like the culmination of D’Agostino’s work across both projects. The autobiographical immediacy of Cymbals Eat Guitars meets the fictional style of Empty Country, each track a short story aiming to evoke the strange, idiosyncratic milieu of contemporary America with both honesty and empathy. There’s a character who sends “letters and Violent Femmes” to John Hinckley, a Calvinist bogeyman, a whole host of strange visions and uninhabitable landscapes and the oddballs who wander across them. If not the actual US, then the apocalyptic fever dream of its addled mind.
If ‘David’ sees D’Agostino himself step into this semi-fictional world, then the mailer-daemon comes to take on a different shape. A literal malevolent being, just another hellion working to make life a misery within this fallen world. The single is essentially the next rung down in the hierarchy of communication. Face-to-face is no longer possible, the illusion of cyberspace now removed. So all that remains is art, be it as a plea or a tribute, or indeed an old-fashioned lament, as D’Agostino cites “Elegy,” the short poem by W.S. Merwin, as a key influence:
Elegy
Who would I show it to
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I finally wrote this song for you
But I don’t know who I’d show it to
I’m scared to die
I’m not scared of death
Put on your records
It feels like forever
Self-portrait at 33
Check out the video by Andrew Futral below:
Empty Country II is out on the 3rd November via Get Better Records (US) / Tough Love Records (UK) and you can pre-order it now, including a version bundled with the recent Basilisk release.
Photography and layout by Rachel Browne