Bellows has been writing and self-producing records for the better part of the last decade, recording four full length albums and multiple shorter collections of song-a-day projects in the years since 2011’s As If To Say I Hate Daylight, a quietly brooding album recorded on a single microphone, for which Kalb challenged himself to create a large, fully orchestrated blanket of sounds without the use of synthesizers or any digital sounds. Over the next eight years, Bellows’ palate of sounds has expanded and changed with each successive album. On Blue Breath (2014), which Kalb recorded over the course of three years in several cities across the United States, dozens of strange sounds were layered over would-be humble folk songs, resulting in a soaring pop record that tread the line between minuscule and gigantic. Blue Breath was named one of Bob Boilen of NPR’s All Songs Considered‘s favorite records of 2014. Bellows’ third album Fist & Palm (2016) meditated on the ending of a friendship, contrasting its stark and gutting lyrics with warm pop and dance-music based orchestrations of fluttering synthesizers, drum machines, choir harmonies and strings. Fist & Palm was featured twice on Stereogum’s 100 Best Songs of 2016 list. Bellows’ latest album The Rose Gardener was released on Topshelf Records in February 2019.
Interview
Nathaniel Farrell
Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lost Horizon (UDP 2019) — a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals — and Newcomer (UDP 2014), a lyric personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign. He teaches college composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City.
An excerpt of Lost Horizon was published in the Brooklyn Rail.
Hilary Plum
Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires(2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She has worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history, and politics.
She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Oversound, the Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of a memoir and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her new novel, Sketchtasy, was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by NPR Books.
Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her previous title, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.
Her next book, The Freezer Door, will be published in fall 2020. Watch out, world…
This is her second interview, the first one can be heard here.