“We’re not certain a satirical concept album described as ‘Springsteen meets Ween’ was on our bingo card of releases in 2026, but sometimes you only realise you’ve been waiting for something when it finally arrives.” So we wrote of I Was Shot in the Heart!, the new album from The Male Pattern, back in August, heralding a character-led record which takes inspiration from the likes of Terry Allen and Randy Newman to weave a narrative about an unnamed suburban dad who slides towards chaos in the aftermath of an acriomonious divorce. Lead Will Schwartz developed the project after spending the best part of a decade working on his fiction, both as a student and a teacher, and on one level the album can be viewed as a rejection of the kind of characters and narrative the workshop model can inadvertantly favour. “There is a pressure, perhaps self-enforced […] to develop work that appeals to the people around you, aesthetically and morally, in the most immediate way possible,” Schwartz explains:
I had the feeling that most writing in this environment becomes an advertisement for yourself and your virtues. There is importance and beauty in writing characters and stories that are filled with the good you wish to see in the real world, but sitting around a table of like-minded individuals doesn’t always leave a lot of room for narrative art that is ugly and weird.
The story I’m telling is ugly and weird. It’s mean-spirited, it makes fun of its characters, it’s violent, and I go for cheap laughs. The songs that emerged for this project, the first I’ve written in over a decade, probably speak to an urge to make art like that, which I’ve likely repressed in my fiction writing for polite academia and peer-to-peer workshopping.
After foreshadowing opener ‘The Television Watcher’, single ‘I’m a Soldier’ introduced the tone of the record, not least how The Male Pattern’s style of storytelling manages to carry emotional and thematic weight despite its wacky, off-the-wall charms. “The undeniable irony and playfulness do nothing to undermine the heartbreaking loneliness running through its heart,” as we put it in our preview. “An anthem of America in 2026, where vapidity, ridiculousness and mean-spirited self-interest feel like symptoms of some dark, cursed pathology lurking beneath the surface.”
Latest single ‘Charlie (The Robbery)’ zips us further through the story, finding our protagonist sinking ever further into the underbelly of society, and teetering on the precipice of something far worse. He can’t quite get back on the job market, can’t keep his urine clean enough to satisying the state, has taken to carrying a gun around with the American urge that someone might give him an excuse to use it (“It’s my God-given right”). But firearms and narcotics have never been a good mix, especially not when the characters involved are quite so desperate, and an ostensibly foolproof plan to rob a small-time dealer inevitably tilts towards disaster. “This gun might be loaded but we only need to show it,” as the next verse goes, “And then it’s all for the taking, there’s no way to blow it.” Only, of course, there is a way to blow it. The obvious fate for anyone TV-brained swinging a loaded gun.
Stick ‘em up, this is a heist, put your hands up toward the sky
Don’t reach for that piece unless your ready for heat
Charlie looked like he was going to cry
I got too excited
I tried to say a line from The Dark Knight Rises
When Charlie made his move
I blew him half way across the room
I grabbed the score and I ran for the door
Photos by Andrew Piccone, album design & art by Edelweiss Cardenas