Renegade Saint: In Conversation with Holy Sons’ Emil Amos

There’s always something aflame in the world of Emil Amos. Fresh from the release of Grails’ mind-bending crusade in Miracle Music, Amos quickly moved into the orbit of his solo project, Holy Sons, where he released the fourth edition of the Lost Decade series.

In early August, it was Lost Decade IV that was the intended focal point of our latest conversation. The release followed last year’s Dread, which was home to a solid offering of live recordings and re-works that saw Amos melding together the project’s hi-fi-orientated underdog balladry with the freeing lo-fi recordings of Holy Sons’ earlier days.

It was an interesting juxtaposition in the Holy Sons story, and it was apparent within five minutes of catching up with Amos that the same juxtaposition would reveal itself again – unbeknownst to me prior to our conversation, Amos was frantically grappling with a deadline for Holy Sons’ much-anticipated follow-up to this decade’s shining beacon, Raw and Disfigured.

Puritan Themes would be finished and mixed a week after our talk. Amos’ world, always moving at near unimaginable speeds, and Puritan Themes is no exception. It’s à la carte Holy Sons. Fearless songcraft through a subversive eye, as Amos feels his way through the miasma that masquerades the path to redemption.

Sonically, Amos continues to explore beyond the borders. The doom-laden gunslinging Stand Up Straight Again, shining a light into new corners, while the AM homage of Edge of the Bay is one of the most beautiful songs in the Holy Sons canon. There’s some faint crossover with Raw and Disfigured, too. The song of the same name, exploring the “ego dream” to a backdrop of soulful folk and hip-hop echoes, while the multi-layered dream-doom of Everything sounds like it could be a twisted sequel to Four Walls.

While momentarily caught in the crosshairs of the past, the core of Puritan Themes sees Amos zeroing in on rejection. “Pride is an idiot’s industry,” he confesses on the album’s eponymous opening track, while the open-sourced malevolence of Chain Gang penetrates through to the heart of the mystery (“There’s a kind of soil where nothing grows / The chain gang’s tired and everyone knows / Now comes your time, they say it’s your turn/ Come and drink the acid to burn”). It’s Amos at his damaging best, using denial as a catalyst.

While Chain Gang is undoubtedly Puritan Themes vital pillar, the through line comes from the album’s unlikeliest source in Radio Seance. A mélange of sounds and samples that begins with a voice claiming, “They always leave me on the shelf / I live my life all by myself”, it unravels like a surge towards the white lights. A mosaic of fever dreams, as the warm distortion pushes closer to one’s inevitable conclusion.

Not only does it feel like the major arc on Puritan Themes, but also to the Holy Sons chronicle at large. The most understated of our generation. An anomaly that makes Amos the quintessential prodigy of obscurity. Indeed, the renegade saint.

Sun 13: Where are you living these days?

Emil Amos: “I’ve been on a ‘sabbatical’ in Chicago for two months, getting my head together and mixing this new record. The original idea was to come up here and begin writing a Drifter’s Sympathy book while sequestered alone. And then after I arrived, the deadline for this record came up really quick and, after diving into it, I got fully stuck in its dimension. The more pot I smoked, the more I began to question everything about what music is supposed to be, and halfway through, I suddenly decided to scrap half the record and redefine what it seemed to be trying to say.”

S13: That’s an intense emotional pivot…

EA: “I had to get a military discipline going to accelerate through the maze of mixing at hand. I’d heard the first mastered version on July fourth while very high and surrounded by all the fireworks exploding and got really confused about the record’s overall statement. And the more you descend into that kind of core speculation, the more confusing your job becomes.

“I’ve been staying at my Grails bandmate Anthony Paterra’s place while he’s out of town, and his kitchen alarm clock is set to this bizarre, ’70s AM radio station that plays these sleazy, obscure / lost hits. If I’m stoned and working really late, I’ll eventually pass over into the kitchen to get a bottle of wine where this strange station defines that entire side of the house. Eventually, the music emanating from that station began to haunt me. I was slowly being pulled into its demented world and beginning to ask, ‘Is this what I do?’ It was pumping out this particular style of fake ‘soulfulness’ that played well in the ’70s but hasn’t aged very well… the station suggested this disturbed planet where people danced around with jazz hands as these false characters, trying to distract the common person from their problems. It made me feel very strange about whatever it was I was making. But after I freaked out about how selfish the record was sounding on July fourth, I think the radio station, as bad as it was, had begun to convince me of something important about why we return to a song in the first place.

“Essentially, if a song is efficient and unselfconscious, it performs with a certain practicality and respect for the listener. It was a slow realisation that art should generally feel spontaneous and light rather than overbearing… and yet it also requires a serious focus to render. So, the crossroads between those two things can be hard to find if you start questioning everything about what music is supposed to be.”

S13: Is there any kind of philosophy or drug that can carry someone through those levels of doubt after you’ve become that unsure?

EA: “I think records really only sound the way they do only because other records have suggested what a record is… so building a record from the ground up when you’re completely alone and in a strange place mentally can definitely leave you lost in an aesthetic maze if you begin to question the purpose of all of this (which I believe always comes back to being a form of ‘communication’). 

“But if your spiritual priorities are set and committed, everything else has to be sacrificed to get to the place you need to be. Sacrificing yourself for any kind of religious goal can also easily become an uncomfortable lifestyle that can slip into a form of self-torture. Growing up, I’d decided that self-loathing helped me burn off parts of myself I didn’t need or want. But looking back, I’m not sure where the truth is exactly… everything seems so relative. Either way, I just have to go back to work, pass through this blizzard of discomfort and the knot will become unravelled for a brief moment before I start the process all over again.”

S13: What you’re saying makes it feel like this record carved a deeper path through the marshlands than Raw and Disfigured…

EA: “The experience of making this record may’ve been darker, but what I’m trying to make isn’t necessarily trying to reflect that. If you go all the way back to Lost Decade, I don’t think you hear a person trying to push dark music on the listener. The Lost Decade stuff sounds like a person up late in a lab, tearing through different experiments for the love of it. And then in the middle period of my career, maybe I was trying to reconcile much darker things and floor it into a nastier place.

“For the new record, this strict work schedule has been restoring me from some pretty serious life confusions I was dealing with… it’s been really important to remember that art is ultimately a daily spiritual practice. I mix all day and then head out into Douglass Park when the sun is setting to lay in the grass, stare at the sky and forget about things for a moment. Then I smoke pot and listen back to everything on headphones to try to get an objective view of the record before going back in to make the necessary changes. Eventually it started to feel inane to try and make some kind of over-serious statement… it felt like I needed to return to a kind of ‘first thought, best thought’ approach within every aspect of the record. If a work of art is too over-controlled, it can end up feeling oppressive in some fundamental way.”

S13: Letting go of the whole statement of a record feels like the other end of spectrum for you…

EA: “I just kept coming back to the fact that the history of music has largely been people making a sound that’s fun to listen to again and again on repeat… that’s the whole fucking thing. It just comes down to that narcotic feeling a listener gets alone with a track that makes them want to come back to it. Why do they want to hear it again? Nobody cares, it just has to be fun to listen to.

“Art becomes more worthwhile when it achieves some measure of universality – your specific, selfish narrative might never have been the point after all. That’s an important touchstone at this point of my life. I’ve already gone down into the dungeon, made various deals with Satan and have something like 2,000 songs out there… it’s time to shape all this shit up into a kind of larger statement.”

S13: In some way, this pure universality you’re talking about could be a kind of Holy Grail you’re after…

EA: “One summer when I was a kid in Boston, I pulled out the guitar one night to sing my guru to sleep. I picked out a couple new songs and he reacted strongly, saying something like ‘Oh, you decided to bring out the good stuff tonight!’ He’d been impressing upon me that music should actually be somewhat ‘commercial’ in its way. Like, if it’s catchy enough to want to hear again, you can trojan horse whatever you want into someone’s mind. But if you’re just going to babble about your current baggage over some non-descript chords, why are you even sharing it? I was looking at the most radical, uncommercial person I’ve known and thinking ‘Is he gaslighting me, or is this some kind of massive contradiction?’ 

“When we were saying goodbye once in the ’90s, he tossed me a couple cassettes of America and Bread; I didn’t know what those bands really were because I’d never listened to the radio that much. But I think he was trying to impress upon me that you don’t have to be such a pretentious asshole all the time. He’d say things like, ‘The world desperately needs laid back sounds’, and other gems like ‘Fast music is fucking stupid’. This person that was making such hard to listen to music was deeply drawn to the healing power of mellower sounds and consciously understood music as more a part of the greater collective unconscious than I did.”

S13: It’s been seven years since Lost Decade Part III came out. Was the length between releases intentional?

EA: “No. If you look back at all the things I was working on at the time, it makes sense. All of the podcast seasons, Zone Black, Anches En Maat, Dread, Miracle Music, Raw and Disfigured, Fantasy World… I have a deep obligation to make sure all of these the things get off my hard drive and into the world. But by the time I got to Chicago and plugged my computer in, I was dealing with this other question which is, ‘Why am I so depressed?’ And part of it was immediately solved when I became immersed in Holy Sons material again.

“After I put everything else in the background and dissolved into this record alone, the practice began to alleviate my depression. I was forced to remember that Holy Sons is something I’ve done since I was 13, and it’s effectively functioned as an anti-depressant medication. So I immediately realised this record was fully worth pursuing and did nothing else but live inside it for two months.”

S13: People talk about good and bad nostalgia. How does it feel when you’re digging back through the archives?

EA: “The first Lost Decade was mostly a collection of the current songs a few friends had liked in the summer of 1999. But Lost Decade II was assembled 15 years later… so you pull out all the tapes and begin re-ascertaining what creates an accurate picture of a person in that time. I think I realised there was some kind of deep obligation to get right up to the border of full-on embarrassment and throw pieces of art in front of people that show what it’s like to be a confused kid.

“You can be attractive some of the time, but part of the nature of intimacy is being willing to expose yourself and see if someone loves you for who you really are; so you’re playing with the boundary of attractiveness with a project like this. You’re knowingly going to repulse someone at some point, but you also want them to see why they’d want to have a drink with this person, too.”

S13: There’s some kind of perfect emotional frequency in your crosshairs. It seems like you knew, really early on, what land you were trying to sail towards, in a way?

EA: “I didn’t realise how small the culture was that I was inside of exactly. It could’ve been just 45 kids spread around the world, who were also imagining they were in this home-recording cult with the same bloodlust I had. When you hear the Lost Decade recordings, that person was sort of forced to create an imaginary music scene up in the mountains for themselves, because in their mind, they’re living in the time of some grand cultural arrival point like the Summer of Love… but, in reality, they’re actually completely disconnected and isolated up in the blue ridge parkway on acid. So when you play it back now, it sounds like a madman who’s gotten a hold of some instruments and strangled everything into a bizarre kind of sculpture to be dug up later.”

S13: Were other lo-fi practitioners like John Darnielle on your radar at that time?

EA: “Just the suggestion that he was doing everything with a boom box was a huge green light in itself. I felt side by side to John, like ‘We’re in this struggle together’. Like any young person, I couldn’t buy that much music financially. So whatever you heard at your friend’s house was huge. I didn’t own the first Silver Jews record, I heard it at this particular house. I didn’t own a copy of Bee Thousand, I heard it at that house. They had an Uncle Tupelo poster, I didn’t know what that was. They were college kids, and I was 16… that house was where my guru had introduced me to this small gaggle of super progressive college kids. So when he went back to Boston, I ended up being their best friend as much as they would tolerate me. There were drugs, a boom box and a nerf basketball hoop. We had everything.” (laughs)

S13: This didn’t happen to be the house that you guys burned down, as mentioned in the Drifter’s Sympathy podcast?

EA: (Laughs) “It was. That house was the church of confirmation of everything I had been working on. By age 15, I was playing all the instruments to make finished records at home. So by age 16, I probably thought I was an old pro. And by 18, I had a few hundred songs, and any lo-fi music that was hitting on a Nationally visible level played a big part in thinking that this was all possible… which was essentially wrong. It wasn’t really possible, I was just slowly forcing it into something adjacent to a possibility. Just because Beck was dancing around on TV, didn’t mean the world was ever going to understand me.” (laughs)

S13: Do you think of Holy Sons as a lo-fi versus hi-fi situation? The past versus the present?

EA: “If I wanted to be in competition with myself, I could lose to my younger self. Inside the tiny box of a four track, everything in the world can happen. And then when you exit that tiny little box and start to deal with the THX version of record-making we take for granted now, that early stuff can humble you… because you realise people don’t really need any bells and whistles to love music. Everything is extremely processed now and feels behind glass. People dial tracks up and it sounds finished quickly these days because all the equipment you’re using is fully pre-programmed… it contains no dangerous algorithmic potential. It sounds good, but it means nothing… we’ve got to find that middle road between feeling good and doing all the hard work that actually pays off again.”

S13: I’ve always associated Holy Sons with an insularity, and while a track like Denmark takes us to an exotic place, it still feels insular. Kansas City is the first time I’ve associated a kind of freedom with your work in terms of the imagery…

EA: “Maybe because I didn’t totally write that one! I woke up hungover in our new living room in Portland early on and plugged the guitar into Alex’s [Hall – Grails co-founder] amp. My guru had just left a phone message on the answering machine where he was singing something like ‘Touchdown, Kansas City, and I’m feeling pretty shitty’. I couldn’t really hear what he was saying and just took the melody and finished it. There’s a whole song after that section about my dad being on LSD when I was conceived, but it got cut out at some point because it was never recorded correctly.

“That song was recorded at the opening of the next decade. So I’m a little older and trying to get a little more sober, and you can hear the sound of someone who’s not as enthusiastic anymore. I think that’s the dawn of what became the sound of I Want to Live a Peaceful Life, which is the sound of someone getting really depressed. The person sees now that they’ll never take the world by storm.”

S13: I think that Lost Decade IV has a lot of recordings where you can draw a line to I Want to Live a Peaceful Life and even Decline of the West. When going back through the archives with this specific release, did you have a sense of that?

EA: “It’s just an inevitable thing with a body of work that big. But I think, across the arc of it all, the person sounds just as wise in the beginning as in the end. That kid might’ve wanted to seem attractive in these recordings 70 percent of the time, but there’s this other 30 percent of the time where you get to view a kind of raw, potentially unattractive behaviour, too. It’s an unusual private archive in that way.

S13: If it’s Lawless being the first song is a nice touch…

EA: “The version on Lost Decade II was recorded a few years later; I’d already moved to Portland and was basically covering this older version. That’s why the later one was much more mellow whereas the original version is extra bratty. There’s a bizarre touch of ’70s easy listening chords tossed into that song, which wasn’t related to the youth movement at all. It was just something I’d taken from my guru’s America and Bread tapes. 

“You were supposed to name the ‘publishing company’ on the back of your CD back then. So mine became ‘Reviving the Easy Listening Movement’ as a sarcastic reference to this angle he’d put me on. Even down to the way the drums are distorting through the Walkman they were recorded on, if it hadn’t been recorded and rescued, no one would imagine anyone would’ve wanted to combine these contradictory things. Songs like that bring me back to thinking of music as a kind of candy. Give them the sweet part that tastes good but with something bitter inside.”

S13: Since you constantly pivot from one to project to the next, do you see yourself in a Holy Sons mindset for this next six to 12 months?

EA: “It’s what I should do because it’s making me happy again. I think a lot of it has to do with the physical act of singing, which takes me back to an early Bill Callahan quote I read in Magnet Magazine around 1999. In the photo for the feature, he was sitting in a chair, looking pretty grim, and the blow up quote next to him said something like: ‘The act of singing, as a kind of gospel tradition, is what takes the pain away… We do it because it heals us.’ That re-realisation has stuck with me.”

S13: With regards to reworking songs, like If It’s Lawless, it got me thinking about how important Neil Young must have been for you in those early days?

EA: “He was a massive chess piece. I was already such a huge fan by the time I got to college; I knew how to play all those songs. On the Beach had been out of print for years at the time, so the fact that I borrowed a few chords from Motion Pictures for Young Man was a kind of flex back then because hardly anyone knew that music from our generation.

“Look Out for My Love is totally a blueprint for the I Want to Live a Peaceful Life style, too. The way he throws in hooks out of nowhere and then abandons them. Also the way that record is sequenced, where he puts a piece of garbage next to the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. That was a huge influence in the way that you can re-contextualise yourself on a whim, but with a selfish, conceptual passion that defies commercial logic. That power to re-lens yourself really affected me.”

S13: Surprisingly, we’ve never really discussed your working process. I imagine it would be vastly differently from one project to the next?

EA: “If you look inside any volume of Lost Decade, you can see a little kid pivoting through so many different approaches and methods to sort of show off in a search for love in a way. Or at least that’s how it can look to me now, like a kid trying to crack a code and bottle their frustrations but also see if the world might possibly understand them. But that’s also something like what a chemist would do in looking for a cure; mathematically running through extreme experiments on themselves, knowing they can delete the results.”

S13: Could an all-encompassing religion like this really ever end or be completed?

EA: “I built a little planet out of extreme obsession and personal necessity for myself that probably shouldn’t have existed in a capitalist universe. And now its working process houses my entire meaning in life. Which is a very strong method of being in the world, but one that has to allow for a ton of contained, internal drama.

“I can’t stop because this process is holding up the whole house of cards I live in. But it’d also be nice to ‘enjoy my life’ at some point too, which is something I do in certain compartments… but mostly I’ve just been working.”

Puritan Themes is out Friday via Thrill Jockey. Purchase from Bandcamp.