Sorry for the delay! This issue features some tricky topics (content warning: svsh) and I wanted to make sure I did them justice and thought through my points before publishing. Thanks for your patience.
You didn’t miss anything; check out 610 disguise, 611 just like this, 612 too much of a good thing, 613 all the best, 614 dark side, and 615 behold.
Sometimes I think about how magical and perfect my life could be if I just moved to Los Angeles. If I pulled up my roots and moseyed down south, I would obviously be a really good musician with really good musician friends. These friends would obviously be integrated into the music community that I perceive to exist in LA, which may or may not be as cohesive as I believe it to be. And then obviously I would casually meet my favorite artists, who all seem to be based there. And obviously we would become great friends and they would ask me to live with them, because that’s how my brain works. And then I would have what SASAMI and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits have:
Of course, my life here in the Bay is also magical and perfect, but it lacks this specific living situation in which my roommate is also my producer, and vice versa. My favorite Hand Habits track, “4th of july,” features SASAMI’s vocals prominently, as does Fun House (2021). Meg plays guitar on a lot of the new SASAMI record, Squeeze (2022). They seem so blissful, going on tour and supporting each other and sharing their little home. I can’t imagine how powerful I’d be if I were constantly basking in the light of my friends’ beautiful art, if I were swathed in their genius.
I’ve been fantasizing about this move-to-LA-become-friends-with-Meg-Duffy pipeline a lot recently because I saw them perform at the Chapel a few weeks ago. The venue is rather small, and I’m consistently too early to shows, so I was right in the front row. Meg Duffy is the sole member of Hand Habits, like John Darnielle is The Mountain Goats or Dev Hynes is Blood Orange, but they tour with an all-star band of what they endearingly call “beautiful boys.” They got their start as a guitarist in Kevin Morby’s band and went on to play for The War on Drugs and Weyes Blood, among others.
Their style of guitar playing is fascinating to me; they use a fat strat, which is a Fender Stratocaster set up with two single coil pickups on the neck and middle and one humbucker pickup at the bridge. Humbuckers are wired such that the two single coils inside face opposite directions, thereby canceling out some of the higher frequencies. The result is a darker sound, and its setting near the bridge, where the strings resonate more brightly, creates a warm twang. This sound is signature to Hand Habits songs, especially those on Fun House, and translated into a really captivating live set with the backing of the touring band. It was one of my favorite shows—of thirteen so far—that I’ve seen in 2022.
There’s been a lot of controversy around Pinegrove in the past five years. I didn’t hear about them until they were on the other side of the drama, after the reckoning and the penance, and being cautiously welcomed back into the hearts of their ardent fans. When I first heard a Pinegrove song played on an NPR show along with a disclaimer about the band’s past, I saw the vague outlines of a what looked like a pretty typical sexual assault allegation against the lead singer, Evan Stephens Hall. I started doing research on the situation in early 2020, deep into the #MeToo movement, but the incident actually predates the larger social reckoning by years.
Pinegrove was a band that, like The Mountain Goats or Wilco, attracts superfans. There’s a whole contingency of people out there—including Kristen Stewart—with an identical tattoo of two interlocking squares, the symbol featured prominently on the album cover of Cardinal (2016). They call themselves Pinenuts, and in my experience, they’re sincere, earnest people who appreciate Hall’s lyrical style, which hinges on his rather dramatic experience of his own life. Exhibit A, from “The Alarmist:”
Marigold in the garden
My heart is out in the garbage
I am being
An alarmist
And Exhibit B, from “Aphasia:”
Just when I thought I had this pattern sorted out
Apparently my ventricles are full of doubt
Now things go wrong sometimes don't let it freak you out
But if I don't have you by me then I'll go underground
I, of course, love this kind of writing. It’s honest and unrestrained, almost to the point of being embarrassing, and flits between extended metaphor and stark descriptions of people and things and emotions. Phoebe Bridgers is a great example of someone who writes in this style. See “Moon Song:”
You are sick, and you're married
And you might be dying
But you're holding me like water in your hands
Evan Stephens Hall and Phoebe Bridgers are both experts at finding the poetic parts of life’s most banal moments and weaving them into a narrative. It makes their writing compelling; they say the things everyone is thinking, but better. I find it arresting, as if someone has pointed out an optical illusion in my field of vision.
Pinegrove had amassed a small but obsessive following when Evan Stephens Hall posted an eight hundred word apology for a situation that hadn’t even become public yet: he had been “accused of sexual coercion” by someone with whom he had a romantic relationship. He provided few details and even fewer explanations. The band cancelled their tour dates and the delayed the release of their upcoming album. Hall vanished from the internet entirely.
In the next year, while Pinegrove fans tried to reconcile their adoration of the band, specifically the writing of this man, Hall was taking a year off. When he emerged, he spoke with Pitchfork and announced a tour, but did not really address the controversy. Fans split down the middle; some asked why they should support someone even slightly questionable when there are so many other indie artists, others believed that Hall had served his time and that it was important to believe that people could change. When you start typing “pinegrove” into google, it still suggests “is pinegrove cancelled” and “is pinegrove problematic,” which provides insight into the turmoil in the fandom.
It was revealed in that limbo year that the accusation had come from a member of the touring crew with whom Hall had been romantically involved. She declined comment on the Pitchfork article and was generally rather removed, which is well within her rights, but which reduced the clarity of the situation, left much to conjecture; without proper representation of the victim’s perspective, who are we to believe but Hall? She asked him to take a year off the road and he did, but it is unclear what happened in that timeframe, whether time away is enough to constitute change or even repentance. Even if we had perfect information, if we knew exactly how Hall spent every single moment of those three hundred sixty five days, we would not be able to agree on how much is enough, how much grief and self-work absolves someone of some harm they inflicted, if at all.
Finally, taking a step away from the specific details of the Pinegrove controversy, the larger cultural narrative of cancelling problematic individuals rages on like a forest fire, destroying everything in its path. How do we hope to rehabilitate people like
Evan Stephans Hall, people who have transgressed but could perhaps stop transgressing? Where is the productive, growth-encouraging stage of being cancelled, the stage at which you are asked to make active steps towards change with the active support of a community? And whose responsibility is it to facilitate and guide that growth?
In reading about Pinegrove, I thought a lot about abolitionist and activist adrienne maree brown’s book We Will Not Cancel Us (2020), which stemmed from this earlier piece. In it, she writes, “Canceling is punishment, and punishment doesn’t stop the cycle of harm, not long term.” Years later, it seems that Pinegrove has successfully navigated a comeback from cancellation. Evan Stephens Hall hurt someone, attempted to apologize, took time away, and returned after a “period of intense self-reflection.” He still makes music, makes a living off of touring and writing and singing. His band is bigger than ever.
I wonder often if liking Pinegrove is problematic. Certainly, it’s complicated; I did a lot of research and have a lot of thoughts. Similar questions arise around Michael Jackson and Ryan Adams, two personal examples, as well as many other artists. A few years ago, this google doc was making the rounds on the indie music internet. It’s titled “bands to not support” and it’s quite long, a list of allegations against musicians that goes on for pages. It features a little disclaimer about receiving “thousands of messages” regarding abuse, sexual assault, and the like.
It’s disturbing—flat out, it’s disturbing, we could leave it there, but we won’t—to see an alphabetized list of over a hundred artists and bands that have all done some kind of harm. It’s also flattening and lacks nuance to lump all these stories into the same bucket, to call for the same sort of boycott against people who committed heinous acts of violation and people who made someone feel weird once at a bar. We will never create arenas for restorative justice, on a larger, cultural level, if we hold on to the practice of outright abandoning people when they disappoint us, if we fail to recognize shades of harm or violence. It’s indicative of, perhaps even symptomatic to, the disposability culture that devalues everything around us, from our purchases to our entertainment to each other.
Pinegrove does not appear on this list. Maybe they fall outside the unspoken genre bounds, maybe the story was too big to be considered news, maybe by the time it was published in 2020 the indie music community had decided to forgive Evan Stephens Hall. Infractions more and less severe are listed, implying that his case would have been scrutinized by the anonymous author of this document. Its absence puzzles me, still.
After careful consideration, I purchased Pinegrove tickets for their upcoming tour. I started putting their songs on my playlists, because I really like them and because I want to believe that people can change. I try to hold both realities at once, recognizing the layers, the effect of the passage of time, the ways in which the situation was and is complicated. I click the suggested question “is pinegrove cancelled” and, as it turns out, nobody knows.
guitar spec clarification from meg: https://twitter.com/hand_habits/status/1503776773015687171?s=20&t=G7KScx5Ob-CrWlPdRUMwjQ
Well said! there is an almost religious zeal to hold people to ever increasing purity tests and orthodoxy. And as you note, it's always "either/or," and rarely "yes, and."
To be clear, None of that should ever take away from the thoughts and/or credibility of victims. They matter. Always.
But I believe it's possible to like the music/art/whatever someone has created while also acknowledging the very real damage they've caused offstage. Both thoughts can exist at the same time, and IMO, it's okay that they do. Louie CK did some undeniably terrible things to women, but it'd be intellectually dishonest of me to deny that I love his bit about air travel.
Would I buy a Michael Jackson record today? Probably not, but that doesn't erase the copy of Thriller sitting 15 ft. away from me as I type this, or how many times I've listened to it over the years.
Each choice is situational, and each person will have a different thought on them. For example, You chose to get Pinegrove tix, while someone else would never do that. Maybe a 3rd person will only listen to their music, but never buy another record of theirs. All of those are perfectly valid decisions to make, I think.
I hope that makes more sense than I think it does?