REISSUE: SMELLS LIKE ISSUE #10

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a digital reprinting of the original SMELLS LIKE ISSUE #10, which was originally digitally printed in the weekly newsletter SMELLS LIKE. The formatting is not a colorful and the images are missing. If you would like to sign up for future issues of SMELLS LIKE, you can do that here.

And now, here’s the thing you wanted…

SMELLS LIKE

MY
BULLSHIT
FRIEND

feat. Brooklyn songwriter Jay Ackley

Each one of these guitars costs two weeks of spreadsheet work.

Hello!

and welcome back to

SMELLS LIKE

the newsletter about

BULLSHIT

that I write weekly unless I have better things to do

WHICH I USUALLY DO NOT.

This week, I’m attempting to get back on the bandwagon, but I’m taking the easy way out.

I’m doing an interview.

An “oral history” if you like.

It’s the first part in a series I’m calling MY BULLSHIT FRIEND where I interview a friend about bullshit.

Because as much as I know about bullshit, there’s always more to know. You know?

This week's bullshit friend is Jay Ackley, who I first met years ago at a weekly open mic at Two Moon Café.

Two Moon was a special place. And, like many special places in Brooklyn, it is long gone. I don’t understand why Two Moon couldn’t sustain a brick-and-mortar business, considering their loyal audience of open mic-ers buying weekly $2 seltzers, but after about a year it was replaced with a drone store.

Almost a decade later, the memory of Two Moon holds a very special place for me. It was my first New York open mic and my first regular gig (in addition to stand up, I also played lounge piano every week). I met longtime friends there and some of the comics I met have gone on to make TV shows.

Of course, many more of them have not gone on to make TV shows. Some of them have gone on to make divorces.

But Jay is happily married and living happily as an artist who has never been on TV.

As Jay says in the interview, we met because he liked my cover of Tom Waits’ “The Piano Has Been Drinking” and I liked his original song about a homemade time machine.

Jay is the greatest musician you’ve never heard and who you’ll never hear again. More than likely, you’ll read some of this interview and discard it with the other emails you have to get through today, if you’re even reading email on a Saturday. More than likely, Jay will exist to you only as a distant memory of a song you once heard. Even if you click into one of my hyperlinks referencing one Jay’s masterpieces, there’s a strong likelihood it won’t mean anything to you.

That’s not to apologized. It’s to be real. This newsletter isn’t about music. It’s about bullshit.

We met outside at one of my favorite Brooklyn bars, Branded Saloon. Talking to Jay was like climbing into a homemade time machine to revisit that moment in my idealistic 20s when I thought me and all my friends were going to be famous. I’m in my 30s now and I’m not famous, and yet, to paraphrase Jay Ackley, I feel free from the idea of fame.

MY BULLSHIT FRIEND JAY ACKLEY

JA
But you sat down and you played, you knocked out a little dreary tune that was delightful in the context of a mostly comedy open mic night. And I think I'd played a couple songs about robots in a dystopian future. And after the show, I think the two of us exchanged some pleasant words about art and music and comedy. And I guess, I'm not sure when we would have crossed paths next, except that I was for a while doing more music at comedy shows there was the backroom of Freddy's that John and Alex used to host. Anyway, I always appreciated your approach to thinking about performance, more generally, than a lot of the comedians doing open mic sets, where you seemed more interested in art and weird stuff, not just on a gimmicky sort of level. And you write well, and I get a kick out of people just putting their weird shit out into the world. And so I am a fan of bullshit, and the semi-regular news/internet publication that you create.

SZ
Yeah, you got the title, right. Art and Weird Stuff. I think we're both fans of these. But I want to actually “double-click”—note, I'm making air quotes in the air, the literal air—on this idea of art. Because that's something that I keep finding myself smitten with as I'm writing this newsletter, the idea of art, which is not something that I set out to do. But nevertheless, I think that there is a great connection between art and bullshit.

JA
I think one of the bigger things in my life has been the idea of success as an artist is bullshit. And it has been toxic to the extent that I feel like I've seen people burn out and become disillusioned with art if they didn't achieve a certain idea of success. And to me, it really comes down to: There is no success. For you can have specific goals with art. You can say, “Oh, I want to be rich,” or “I want to be famous,” and “I want to use art as a tool to do that." And I think that's like a sort of general cultural narrative of what success as an artist means, money or popularity. Ideally, both. And that, if you haven't achieved that level of success, then you failed. But I really see those as, like, discrete things that aren't art. Those are other things you're trying to achieve through art. I think, to the extent that art can be successful, it's the idea of, like, oh, I want this piece of art to convey a sense of whimsy, or I want this to have, like a sense of intimate connection, that creates like feelings of grief in a viewer or listener. And you can succeed at specific goals. But to me, just success in art is just toxic. And it's more like, I'm gonna go for a jog. And it's not like, oh, I succeeded at this jog, or not sure. Maybe I made around the park, that's great. I finished the song, I performed the song, you've accomplished this “piece of art.” But I don't really see that, as the “idea” of “success” that's pitched to—I was doing air quotes there, probably a few times now.

SZ
They're contagious.

JA
And it was hard to get my head around the idea that I wanted to do art for its own sake, rather than to achieve anything. And it was one emotional process to get to like, oh, maybe I'm not gonna make a living at this. But like, still, maybe I'll go viral. And lots of people hear my songs that'll be like, this non-monetary viewer, as a metric of success. And it was a whole ‘nother thing to get from the point of like, actually, I don't really need to care how many people hear this thing that I wrote. And just taking the long view, it's easy as hell to resent somebody who can. I don't know. Taylor Swift is too easy to pick on. But like she was able to do what she did, because she was an incredibly talented songwriter. And she had a parental figure writing the checks to let her explore that and do that and to choose that as a career. I'm not offended by her financial and popular success. Because those aren't my goals and the extent to which they are my goals, I think that's toxic and doomed to failure and madness.

JA (cont’d)
I don't think I see many examples of people who become famous or wealthy and remain happy or contented with their life or aren't always on the knife's edge of trying to retain it or achieve more. And I've had a lot better relationship to myself and my own art, and myself as an artist when I stopped thinking about it as something I do other than as self expression for its own sake.

SZ
I love that about you, Jay. Like, your songs are so good. They're so good. And I try to get people to listen to them. I don't try too hard, because that would feel like I was trying to be your agent. And that's not what you want. Right? Watching you perform, I don't feel this nervous energy emanating from you at all or listening to your songs, I don't feel like this guy is trying to be anything more than just what he can do in this moment.

(a waitress breaks up my fumbled flattery by tripping on the curb on her way to ask us how we’re doing. Jay, in his infinite niceness, intercepts her)

JA
Great, thanks. How are you?

SZ
Are you alright? Yeah. I would have been here for you.

WAITRESS
I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know if I’d catch a stranger if they fell on me.

SZ
Well we're here for you. Of course.

(exit Waitress)

SZ
Do you know Tank and the Bangas?

JA
No.

SZ
They’re — She — She's great. I mean, it's really just her. Her name is Tank. And she's a New Orleans soul singer. But like, rap rock fusion, beautiful, beautiful songs. And I had the time in my life. Absolutely. I was also on tremendous amounts of mushrooms. But it was, it was so cool. And like seeing her this this, this feeling of just overwhelming talent and, and passion for what she does. And what she inspires in the group of people. I mean, I turned to my friend, right? And I said, “Everyone in this room will do whatever this woman tells us to do. This is how cults get started.” But there was also this moment in between one of the songs where she started plugging her social media and started plugging her albums and stuff like that. And it didn't detract from what it was. It kind of added a layer to it, for sure, where I was like, oh, she's also hustling, but it did make me a bit sad in that moment thinking like, Joan Baez never had to do that. Or maybe she did I don't know, I don't know enough about Joan Baez.

JA
I remember coming to New York when I was 21 with this idea, like oh, if I just write good songs, somebody's gonna hear them and put me in touch with the person who is going to make me a lot of money doing this. And I had a lot of energy to burn and I played a lot of stupid shows and just assumed it became clear as it was happening that people are only going to make you money if they think they can make more money off you. And it's a hustle and you got a shark and it's a lot less fun if you're worried about getting paid at the end of the night. Then having another idea of how I'm going to have a career in life in the nonprofit sector and in the music is something that I'm not relying on for anything except the opportunity to do it.

JA (cont’d)
I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. We were talking about moving to New York in our early 20s. And so you know, “I'm gonna be a successful artist.” And I really believed that. And he said, “Yeah, we really believed that too, Jay. We believed in you,” in this past tense sort of way that I found a little heart wrenching, because it reminded me that it wasn't just me. We used to sit in our living room with a dozen friends every week and saying, “Jay’s songs are great.” Which I do believe, but I don't think they're particularly marketable. It reminds me a lot of the movie Inside Llewyn Davis, which I imagine you've seen, when he goes to Chicago, and there's the promoter, and he sits down and says, “I'm gonna convince you to make me a star by playing for you.” There's one beautiful song and he plays the song live. And Oscar Isaac does an incredible job of it. And there's nobody in the world who's gonna walk away and say, “Oh, that wasn't a beautiful piece of art.” But the guy’s response is, I don't see any money in this. And that's just like the most heart wrenching thing in the world. I think I thought to myself, Well, I'm not going to be that guy. I'm not going to be this dude who becomes embittered, because he knows his shit so good. But the world and its commercial success doesn't align with his value system. So he's just gonna treat everybody he knows, like shit. And that was a very clarifying moment. To me around whatever the Joan Baez era would have been that it like, even if she wasn't the shark, she had somebody who knew that they could make a lot of money off her. And if they did, the ugly part of it for her. And it's just really sad the way in which art has been perverted into just another commercial enterprise.

SZ
But do you think that's new?

JA
It doesn't seem like it. The scale of it, I think, is new. Once we got into the idea of recorded music and being able to have global superstars, the magnitude of the money to be made from a single person. I mean, I read about even the difference between 30 years ago, it made sense to have bands, but now like, oh, that's four guys you don't need to pay. You just need one person to be a face. And there are so few bands, finding air-quotes success in that way. But it is bullshit. And it's, it's sad. I've got a song about ghosts. And the lyric goes,

Now if the myth of ghosts were true
They’d definitely be on YouTube
And there’d be this whole giant ghost industry
And they’d be marketed relentlessly
And they’d be mercilessly monetized
Just like everything else magical in this world

… and I consider music to be magic in that way that like, it is incredible what it does to us on an emotional psychological level. And just as communication and art and music. And that can exist outside of I mean, that can exist on its own terms. It also exists in something that is bastardized for profit, just like anything else.

SZ
First, the song about ghosts—is that in a linked version that I can use hyperlinks to send people to?

JA
I even got a stop motion music video for it.

SZ
And here I'm air hyperlinking so that I can hypertextually provide this free art to my thousands of subscribers. So please send that to me. And the second thing is, you brought up the B word, bullshit. We're talking about this art and commerce idea. But I want to challenge it a little bit, because I'm even challenging myself here. Because it's not old. But it's maybe framed in a new way, in this new world, right? Is it possible that what we see as the bullshit of art and commerce, to a different generation is seen as authenticity, not bullshit? By that I mean: Maybe to Tank and the Bangas or Taylor Swift, sharing your socials on the stage or doing a Capital One commercial is just part of the art of it.

JA
Creating a personal brand can feel genuinely authentic, even if it is also hopefully strategic. Just the phrase bullshit, when I think of somebody using it, I'm thinking like, somebody just scored a point against me in a game of basketball because they did something questionable and you're saying this, after you've lost something? They say, That's bullshit. You're calling bullshit on something because something has happened that you don't think should have been allowed to happen. And I think that's a very understandable response to seeing artists who present themselves as having effortlessly achieved this thing, just because they were so good. And there's a thousand reasons why anybody can point to the infrastructure of commerce that elevated one person and not them, and they call it bullshit. But it's not. I don't feel embittered. I feel free from those ideas. And I think the extent to which I want to ascribe the label of bullshit to those ideas, it's this idea of helping a younger version of myself, understand what my relationship can be to these things that I still find immense value in, even if it's not, in the specific terms that I once was told that they were by movies and shit. I remember my last year of college, I went to a battle of the bands open mic sort of thing. It was just like, here's 16 people that are going to be matched up against somebody else. It was over the course of one night in London, some bar near Hammersmith. And my buddy Eric was on slide guitar, and we were playing my songs and we got to the finals. And we did really good. 100 pounds was the was the reward. And we got absolutely creamed in the last round by these guys who were just so charismatic, just born performers. Everybody else was doing stupid little acoustic guitar music. And these guys had a couple of drums and this wonderful rapport with the audience like they were born performers in a way that we weren't. I was like, Oh, darn it, okay, obviously, they won whatever, I didn't succeed at this event, air quotes succeed. And then within a week, I got a random check in the mail from my university, this minor academic award, that was for 100 pounds, because I had done well, on a series of courses. I didn't know this award existed. They send me this check in the mail, and it's like, “Seems like I'm gonna be rewarded my life for being good at math and spreadsheets. And despite the fact that I care a lot more about my songs, that's not where the money is gonna be.” And that was, I think, maybe I still moved to New York after that with this idea of just like, oh, I'll just write songs, and I'll be discovered. I think that's the dream of the young artist, being discovered. And it's such a passive dream.

SZ
But there's that other song, the one that's about your friends, the one with the chorus I remember: “I don't want to go to Williamsburg.”

JA
“OMG”

SZ
That's the one! I think I listened to it a hundred times. And every time I was like, “This guy could be famous if he was gonna try.” Back then, I had other people listen to it, thinking I could help you out. But it's weird when you get somebody to listen to something that is so pure in that way that doesn't have the branding behind it. They just don't have time for it, or they don't want to make space for it. Or they'll say, oh, yeah, this is good. And then when is that ever going to enter their life again, that little moment. To me, I want those moments of pure joy.

JA
A song that’s coming out on Songs for Grownups Volume 3, which I haven’t started recording yet, is this idea of what music and what it’s for, as a music maker. And I just had this idea of these cycles that exist and that we all recognize. That on some level the same way that the moon goes around the earth and has this repeating cycle of phases and the earth goes around the sun and we have days and we have seasons and there are these cycles that repeat, I think on some level we understand that cycles exist. And the same way that clapping along with something in rhythm in some fundamental way, that the cycle of rhythm of our heart beating, of music that we make is the same as this cosmic reality we live in that is governed by cycles and our music making is something that resonates because it approximates that. And it is that. We exist in cycles as people. When we can then put poems on top of that and we can really articulate our most vulnerable selves, in a way that rhymes and enmeshes itself in these cycles that we exist in, it makes the pains of heartbreak and existence feel like they are part of the cosmic cycles that we all exist in, in a way that I find a lot of solace in, because it makes it feel natural rather than something fundamentally wrong with myself or with the world.

SZ
But how is it going to make money?

(We laugh and laugh. The waitress comes over again, and though she has no idea what we’re laugh about, starts laughing with us. A loud ambulance passes by.)