Ethan Gold (Credit - Travis Keller)
Ethan Gold, the San Francisco-raised, Los Angeles-based songwriter is an introvert who has spent years making a nightlife record.
Earth City 2: Nightfolk is the second album in a trilogy Gold began with Earth City 1: The Longing in 2021. Where the first was about solitude, this one is about going out. Gold recorded across four cities, wove subway sounds captured through train windows in New York, Berlin, and London into the music, and composed much of it from phone notes taken in the middle of the night. He is also a filmmaker: his latest project, Brother Verses Brother, a love letter to San Francisco’s North Beach, recently acquired Francis Ford Coppola as executive producer.
The album opens with everyone heading out for the weekend, pressed together on trains and in good enough spirits. It closes with someone alone in the same crowd, not feeling so great about it. Gold is forthcoming with Jason Barnard about what sits in between.
I understand that Earth City 1 was about loneliness and you’ve said this record is about connecting with others. Yet it closes with someone alone on a train, surrounded by people and completely disconnected. Was that ending always planned?
There are two ways to end an album – I usually bring things down, though I do love some albums that end on up notes. I think of this as a nightlife record, for an introvert anyway. I always knew I wanted the album to roughly arc from early evening to late evening. “When the Evening Comes” starts the album with everyone making their way from work for the weekend, also on trains surrounded by people but in a celebratory mood. And there are subways in other spots as well. I suppose my fundamental depression reveals itself in “I’m Always Sad,” again on a train, alone in a crowd, but not feeling so great about it. I think that’s a feeling a lot of us have these days. But the song also hints at some of where I’m going in Earth City 3. There’s some stuff about the state of the world embedded in the second verse. So the album starts and ends on a train, alone while surrounded by people, the night folk, in this simultaneously hyper-connected and lonely world.
You’ve described yourself as an introvert, made a record about nightlife and human connection, and called your style “art rock for hermits.” What draws you to write about spaces and experiences that are out of your comfort zone?
If I didn’t push myself every day, creatively and personally, I’d be in bed doomscrolling, or worse. I hate the world and hate myself and also love the world and love myself. It’s a battle. And I definitely lose if I don’t try, over and over again, to learn, to live, to be, to find the colors in the grey of life, or to adore the grey in the colors.
The album’s emotional arc tracks a single imagined night from early evening to the comedown. Did you have the full shape of that night mapped out before you started recording, or did it emerge?
It emerged as I was making it. I had hundreds of songs vying for my attention and chose songs that fit the arc. This album is a story of cities at night.
You recorded subway sounds from windows in New York, Berlin, and London and wove them into the music. Trains also run through the lyrics. Is the train a metaphor for transit and longing, or is there something more literal going on about how you live?
Both, for sure. I genuinely have love of trains and public transport. As a way to get around that’s environmentally sound, as a way to meet strangers, as a way to learn cities, as a place to contemplate. I’ve been told my love of trains is ‘autistic’. There’s a sense of being with others, but also on one’s own journey, that appeals to me very much. There’s much more possibility than in cars. So it’s a real love, and also a real way of getting around, and also a metaphor. Where Glasgow’s clockwork orange fits into that metaphor I’m not sure, but walking cities is also a great way to live.
“When the Evening Comes” was inspired by your grandparents’ relationship. You’ve described it as an ode to old-school monogamy. What was it about their relationship struck you as worth writing about, and what made it feel right as the opening track?
Back to the trains again I suppose. Honestly it was thinking of my grandfather riding the trains every single day to work, over an hour each day, every day, for over 40 years. These are some of the stories of the city. There are songs about artists on the record, but there are all kinds of people in the world. And my grandfather being a stiff WASPy person who didn’t express emotion at all, did not do what we call creative work, but clearly, blatantly adored his wife, my grandmother. His magic was there, in that relationship. Despite his depression and his workaholism, and her perfectionism and drinking. They were still flirting, always, til the end. And they also always dressed well.
You said you sometimes start taking notes on your phone in the middle of the night, and that some of those recordings are on the album. What do you hear in those recordings?
There are moments you can’t recapture in a studio. Raw feeling. The recording process, since I recorded in so many different places, was a process of deciding when to push, and when to allow things to be what they were. And I like having those different colors in an album. I always loved albums that felt like they were whole universes, with bright stars, black holes, comets, warmth and cold. I also like monotone albums but it doesn’t seem to be what I like to make.
You chose different concert pitches for different songs across this album, based on what you called the level of freedom each song needed. How did you decide which tuning belonged to which song?
I became a bit obsessive, thinking about the emotional resonance of frequencies. Ultimately I played each song over and over at different pitches, and micro-pitches, until they felt like they were what they wanted to be. Some of them, like “I’m Always Sad,” were at 440 in order to tap into the cold reality we still live under.
You’ve described “I’m Always Sad” as your angriest track on this record. The title could point somewhere. What’s the anger in it?
The rage of the caged. Which a lot of us are. Humans weren’t built to live like this, in massive confusing crowds, in the world or bouncing in our heads online, atomized, disconnected, every man for himself, disconnected from the Earth, unable to stop the destruction of the Earth, and under the weight of a thousand ego concerns and constant self-judgement. Plus occasional actual mockery and shaming coming from other disconnected rage-filled souls. We were emotionally built to live in small villages or tribes and loving the Earth. There’s something missing and we know it. I hope to answer some of this in Earth City 3.
“Mirror Don’t Have Any Feelings” is the grief song on the album. You haven’t spoken much about whose loss it’s addressing. Are you willing to say?
An ex, a woman I dated somewhat briefly but was sort of reconnecting with during the time after my head injury. She killed herself in her mother’s home. One never knows, but there was an anxiety she felt with her family I think, and a pressure, which amplified her constant judgement of herself. This is a song for her and for all the artists and for all of us who judge ourselves in all kinds of mirrors.
You’ve spoken before about the aftermath of your head injury. How has that changed the way you write, particularly on this album?
I used to take months to write a song. Now I usually finish them in an hour or two. I used to love music, and as Mitch Hedberg would say, I still do, too. But now I know what I want to sing about. The lyrics are easier. I’m probably still an overthinker but not as ridiculously as I once was.
You named Grace Jones’s Compass Point recordings as a production influence that you said nobody would actually hear in your music. What is it about those records that lodged so deeply in your production thinking?
The way different elements sit together. European, Caribbean, and American elements. Intellectual and also sexual. Each instrument having a place, a different place, a different function. Unlike a lot of rock music where often different instruments are doing the same thing, to make a big machine. There’s a satisfaction in that, but those Grace Jones recordings and things like them are more like a world of different elements where each part has joy, each part is its own piece of music. Then together it creates a puzzle that’s something else entirely. I love that aspect. To be clear, I really don’t sound like Grace Jones. But she’s great, and Alex Sadkin was great, and Sly and Robbie, and Wally Badarou, and the whole crew. All fantastic.
You’ve said marketing is your albatross and social media is your kryptonite. The trilogy format seems partly designed as a structural argument against short-form culture. But you still have to work within the same distribution systems as everyone else. What does the practical reality of that look like?
The practical reality is it’s more than I can handle well as an indie artist. I’ve been running catastrophically late on everything, pissing off a lot of people. I’ve also put a lot of love and work and creative energy into music videos, which has slowed down my music output. I’ll cut back on videos. I do my best to do those god-forsaken promotional things online, but I definitely don’t feel I have a formula, other than willpower.
The Earth City trilogy was described early on as reaching, by its third part, toward how we want to connect as a civilisation. That’s a big promise to have made in advance. Where do you currently think part three is going?
Yeah, it’s a big promise. I don’t know what to say. That’s how I think of my music, or it’s how I put together albums, anyway. I don’t seem to be able to not think in terms of larger things. When I write a song I immediately start thinking of what larger work should contain it. I have collections of wind, water, fire songs. Consciousness songs. Relapse out of consciousness songs. Brutality and obscenity songs. Animal songs. Joke songs. But yes, in Earth City I’m trying to do something. I wouldn’t want to throw all the loneliness of Earth City 1: The Longing into the air, and not answer it somehow. I have my theories about what’s wrong with me and with all of us, and it has a lot to do with our separation from Earth. That’s where this is going in Earth City 3, but for now, in Earth City 2: Nightfolk we’re going out, riding the trains through a weekend night, connecting with each other in the City and with the City. Metaphorically and also literally. We’ve got to try, or we can’t ever know our yes and no.
Further information
Earth City 2: Nightfolk is out now
