May 23, 2025 • 24 mins
On an ordinary day in Manhattan, J Lind found inspiration in the smallest moments—ultimately shaping his song Generous. In this episode of The Deepest Cut, J Lind shares how his experiences as a med student and hospice volunteer influence his songwriting. Join us for a conversation on finding beauty in the mundane and meaning in unexpected places.
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S1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Deepest Cut, a podcast about the movement
from painful experiences to meaningful music. I'm your host, Matt Conner.
On a particularly inspired day in his home of New
York City, Jay Lind realized it was going to be
(00:24):
the kind of day he'd eventually document in song. It's
not that it held anything out of the ordinary in
terms of its events. Rather, his routine as a husband
and father, med school student and musical artist had unfolded
with a handful of vignettes that stuck with him for
various reasons. With chances to marvel at the mundane. This
(00:44):
whole theme of finding beauty in the unexpected is a
major theme of Jay's latest album, alchemy. And it certainly
laid out in the song he chose to discuss on
this episode of The Deepest Cut, a beautiful track entitled generous.
What's interesting about this song is how it provided a
sonic challenge for Jay as well to find a way
to stay musically true to the emotions and unnerving realizations
(01:07):
from the scenes that stayed with him. It finds its
greatest resonance in his interactions with a patient who is
confronted with a terminal diagnosis, one who insisted with real
joy that, quote, God had been so good to him.
If you're unfamiliar with Jay's meaningful music, alchemy is a
wonderful introduction to his catalog. The lyrics read like prose,
(01:28):
and the music is layered and intriguing. Part of the
excitement of this podcast, for me, is not only about
these deeper conversational dives, but also the chance to introduce
a listener to a potentially new artist. I hope that's
part of the discovery for you here. On this episode
of The Deepest Cut, I sat down with Jay Lynn
to discuss his years of experience as a hospice volunteer,
(01:49):
his favorite songwriters, and the emotions and experiences of that
inspired day in Manhattan. Here's our conversation with Jay Lynn.
(02:13):
Hello and welcome to the Deepest Cut. My name is
Matt Conner and I'm your host on this episode. I
love this song and and have loved this record alchemy.
I'm here with Jay Lind. Jay, how are you doing
on this morning?
S2 (02:27):
I am doing well. There is sludge on the streets
of New York right now, so I'm glad to be inside.
S1 (02:33):
Right on. Hey. Appreciate you. Uh, you carving out the
time and space to do this. Hey, you mentioned New
York is being in New York. Was that a career
decision for you in the first place? To move there?
Be there?
S2 (02:44):
Yeah. So, um, it was a multiple career decision. Um,
so I was living in Nashville when I did my
last record before alchemy, and the pandemic really made it
difficult to keep doing what I was doing musically there.
And so during the pandemic, I kind of pivoted. I
knew that I had a another vocation I wanted to
pursue alongside music. And so that's psychiatry. So I've been
(03:07):
in medical school here the last four years. I'm getting
ready to start my residency and then I it's a
lot of juggling where I'm, you know, when I'm not
on a rotation, I'm recording or touring and then part
of New York too. Besides the the school option, the
the reason we picked this school, the financial piece was great,
but also in a weird way, it was cheaper to
(03:27):
live in New York than to live in Arizona or Nashville.
S1 (03:30):
You're kidding.
S2 (03:31):
Yeah, some of these old schools have a lot of money,
and so it was actually a better deal for us.
And on top of that, the New York music scene.
A lot of my favorite songwriters grew up here, you know,
cut their teeth here. So it was too good to
pass up.
S1 (03:44):
What would make that list, by the way?
S2 (03:46):
Uh, Leonard Cohen at probably at the top, uh, followed
by Sufjan Stevens, who was in Brooklyn. Um, obviously Bob Dylan,
Paul Simon. It could go on a lot, a lot
of New Yorkers.
S1 (04:01):
That's a great list. By the way, is New York.
I mean, it seems like great fodder for the music
with how much it makes its way into the scenes
on the album. Does it feel that way for you?
Like the great urban inspiration in some way?
S2 (04:14):
It definitely does, I think. You know, it's easy to
I play a lot of house shows and, you know,
sometimes people I say, oh, I live in New York
and people say, oh, I hate it there. And I'll say, oh,
when did you go? And they say, oh, I haven't been.
And so, like, New York can be a polarizing place.
But I think part of that is because it's so
culturally diverse and rich. And I think living here as
(04:36):
as an artist, you just can't help but absorb whatever
the edge of that cultural phenomenon is. And so that's it.
Like couldn't help but come into the album.
S1 (04:47):
We want to talk about generous. Can you take us
into this song and maybe even the bigger picture of
alchemy and like the way it fits into the framework
of what you were trying to do on the whole project.
S2 (04:59):
So the, the idea of alchemy, you know, like, I
think like a lot of art, you the beauty of
it is you find what the thesis is as you
do it. Like. It's rare that I start a project thinking, okay,
it's going to be about this. It tends to be
I start writing and I find themes as I'm writing
these songs, and then start to follow those trails. And
the main theme for this project that I found coming
(05:22):
up in my songs was this idea of the beauty
of the unexpected, the fact that many of my most
meaningful experiences were not things that I planned or aimed for. Um,
I think, you know, in the context of our culture,
there's a lot of emphasis. I mean, I see it
most among some of my more techie friends. There's this
(05:44):
emphasis on optimizing and improving and making things better. And
I just this album is a celebration of the things
that we don't have control of that are more chaotic,
that meaningful things that come to us. And so for me,
a big theme on the record is my marriage. I
got married, Um. Right as I was starting this album.
(06:05):
And that was a relationship I was not interested in dating.
A friend set us up on a date that ended
up being a good fit. Um, I could go on.
You know, many of my closest friends and family. I
was not looking to make friends or family, but they, uh,
they kind of fell onto me. And so this song
is another song on this record that does that, because
it's about just a random day in New York and
(06:26):
all this unexpected meaning that comes through.
S1 (06:30):
I love the scenes that you set up here. There's
some real, you know, jarring juxtapositions, especially at the end.
You're describing this scene where it says, I asked a
man about the course of his terminal disease. He said,
the Lord has always been good to me. And that's
kind of this oft repeated refrain at the end. I
would just love to dive into even that scene right
(06:50):
there and like what you're trying to evoke within generous.
S2 (06:54):
I guess, to set the scene for the song. It's
funny because the song, it's a dramatic song, but it
was just all I'm doing is recounting 3 or 4
events that all happened in the same day like it was.
All of these things happened right after each other. And
so it was a kind of profound day in that way.
And again, I wasn't expecting or looking for any of
those experiences. Um, and so that in that final, uh,
(07:16):
section that's referring to I was after all these events
that transpire that I talk about in the song, I'm
rushing to get into the clinic. You know, I, I'm
in medical school, and my job is to interview this patient.
And I go through the checklist of things, you know,
any any allergies. What medications are you on? How's your diet? Exercise.
And I get finally into the medical piece, and I
(07:37):
hadn't even I hadn't had a chance to review the chart.
That was part of the goal of the assignment. And
he had a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I had just
wasted 20 minutes of his time, you know, being the
medical student. And so I started to talk to him
about that. And he said he was of a different
religion than I am. But he said in his way
he said, well, God has always been good to me.
(08:00):
God has always been good to me. Even in the
midst of that, it. He had so much joy and
patience and I was stunned.
S1 (08:06):
Through a day like that, when you said it was
kind of four vignettes within this one day, did you
kind of feel throughout the day, or was it very
clear at the end of the day like, oh man,
I have to write about this?
S2 (08:19):
It's funny, I was talking to my wife Tori at
the end of the day and I said, you know,
I'm just going to make. I usually don't journal. Songwriting
tends to be more where I reflect. But I said,
I'm going to write down what happened because I don't
know how or when, but this is going to come
out in my music because it's just such a strange
series of events. And I thought maybe I'd have a
song about one event and a song about another event,
(08:41):
but it ended up just being altogether.
S1 (08:44):
The prompt for the podcast is, is choosing maybe the
most personal or difficult song that you've chosen to record
and release. What makes this one that entry for you?
S2 (08:55):
For me, it's less, you know, I have other songs
where maybe some of the subject matter was more about
my own personal experience. This song is more of, and
this whole record is a lot of its observing experiences.
And what makes it raw for me though, is, is musically, I.
I wanted to communicate the rawness of of what I
(09:15):
felt that day, and so I really took it into
this sonic space that I haven't gone before. And so
that's why to me, it came to mind as the
deepest cut, because I'm trying to really be vulnerable in
my performance and the instruments to communicate. Yeah, just about
the chaos and how unsettled I felt at the end
of that day.
S1 (09:35):
Can you talk about, like, even trying to capture that,
how you capture that, the way you do that?
S2 (09:40):
It's a it's a challenge when a lot of the
songwriting I enjoy is very, you know, I named folk heroes.
I enjoy folk music tends to be very, you know,
three chords and the truth, and that allows the lyric
to really carry the song. Whereas alternative rock, which is
one of my other favorite genres and was is more
where this song sits. The feel lots of times is
(10:02):
not so much in the lyric, it's more in the music. Um,
that's a generalization, but I think the hard piece is
to make, if you're trying to make a lyric, carry
the song while you're trying to make the song just explode.
One can get lost in the other. And I think
the way we made that work was, um, to really
kind of set the scene with the first couple verses
and just focus on the storytelling. So there's this sense of, oh,
(10:24):
I actually really want to pay attention to the lyric
to see what this story ends. And then it happens
to be in this wall of sound that you kind
of still listen for.
S1 (10:33):
Did you know, like, how this would end up in
that way? Like, was the plan to kind of save
that last vignette as this crescendo moment?
S2 (10:41):
More or less. I wrote the piano piece that carries
the motif, that kind of carries the song or the arpeggio.
I wrote, um, a while ago, for I was thinking
of just. I wrote it while I was watching The ocean,
and I just had this sense of this ocean flow,
you know, like the waves coming in and out. And
I think, uh, once I had the story, I realized
(11:03):
this song has to has to go there because the
lyrics are going there. And once I had that idea,
the song, the whole song kind of came together quickly.
S1 (11:11):
You have a pretty extensive background. You've done hospice work
in the past. Can you describe that? And then it
makes me curious about the ways that that has influenced
the art that you've created on the other side of
those experiences.
S2 (11:23):
So I was a hospice volunteer for about five years,
and I did a few different states, mostly in new Jersey.
And each week I would just go and see people
sit with them for an hour a week, an hour
or two. Um, some people were nonverbal. So because they
had a neurological problem, or maybe they were, um, weren't
(11:44):
conscious in some way. So I would play music for
those folks and folks who could speak. Lots of times
I just sat and listened because they, you know, it's
a very vulnerable space where people are willing to share
a lot. And that's a privilege. As a songwriter who's,
you know, I don't want to sound too utilitarian, but
who's looking for stories? And hospice is a place where
(12:07):
you hear people's full stories. And there's I think there's
a catharsis that comes with telling your story. And there's
also a catharsis that comes with hearing someone's story. And so, um,
that that definitely informed a lot of what I do musically. My,
my first album, uh, with the Tiger on it, for
what it's worth, is all inspired by stories from that world,
but it still finds its way into the work I'm
(12:29):
doing now. I think.
S1 (12:30):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would occur to
me that maybe that sort of experience would open you
up earlier in life to sort of a new level
of vulnerability and honesty and like a rawness that maybe
is missing from a lot of art that could be
postured for the marketplace. I guess I just wonder, like,
is that a real value for you? Is that something
(12:52):
that came from that?
S2 (12:53):
Yeah, I think and I would encourage anyone listening to
volunteer in hospice. First off, because there's so many ways
you can get involved and bring your skills, and it
is an environment that you can make such a difference
in so many people's lives. For me, I was drawn
to it because I had lost a family member around
that time, and I also lost a friend who was
(13:14):
about my age. So this was end of high school,
and both of them had had really positive hospice experiences
before they died. And I thought, so there's this draw
to serve in that way. But there was also a draw,
just curiosity, because I don't I hadn't seen death firsthand.
And I had all these questions about how is death?
(13:35):
Is death painful? Is death, you know, what are the
emotions that surround it? And what will that do to
me being in that space? So there was both like
an others and a self-centered piece to my motivation in
terms of how that influences me. I don't feel like
I understand death better. I don't feel like I know
(13:57):
much more about the dying process. But there's a I
do think to your point, there's a sense of contingency.
This idea that so many of our activities in life
are framed by the fact that we're going to die.
And I find that very motivating and important thing to
talk about. I think there's a terrible side to that.
And there's a beautiful side, like it adds a lot.
S1 (14:20):
I'm just still so drawn to that idea, because it
just feels like so many of us don't even think
about death, don't want to consider our mortality until we
have to. You know, like we're just afraid of the
whole space. By the way, did that impact medical school decision?
S2 (14:36):
Certainly, in some ways it moved me away from some
areas of medicine because I thought, uh, you know, this
is very sad. And also, um, there are a lot
of things we can't fix or cure, but it moved
me closer to psychiatry, which is what I'm pursuing. Um,
because there was this humanistic piece and there was this
emphasis on the subjective experience of suffering. You know, even
(15:00):
beyond the objective reality of the diseases.
S1 (15:04):
Is there a responsibility there for you within the music?
Balancing the sorrowful with something hopeful. How much despair do
you allow within a song?
S2 (15:13):
Yeah. I don't think of. I think of myself as
a hopeful songwriter. I don't think of myself as a downer.
But that said, I've played a lot of these songs
in like, Rowdy Bars, and I know that they are downers,
so I'm under no illusion about that. In the span
of the pop universe. But I think a lot of
the lyrics and especially like even the songs I have
(15:33):
that end in desolation or end in sadness, the arc
of the album, almost every project is trying to be.
I'm not trying to write tragic albums. I'm trying to
write comic albums like like comic in the sense of
ending high ending, looking up or forward. Um, so I
do feel I do feel responsibility, but it doesn't even
(15:55):
feel like a responsibility to others. It feels like a
responsibility to myself and my own faith. Like it wouldn't
feel honest unless, you know, if I was really having
a hard time. Maybe that'd be very honest. Time to
end an album. You know, very sadly. But generally I
write albums partly to encourage myself and to reflect back
(16:15):
at myself. What I try to express in my faith.
S1 (16:20):
I want to get to the song because I want
it's it's beautiful, and I think people are going to
be anxious to hear it and listen to it. I
do also want to add you have a family now,
you mentioned medical school. I mean, how much are you
able to tour? How much are you able to support
or like, I would just love to give you a
chance to kind of even tell us, like creatively, what's
coming up for you?
S2 (16:40):
Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm a professional juggler first and foremost,
because it is what's great about medicine medical school so far.
And this seems to be the case, um, some specialties
are more manageable than others, too, like psychiatry tends to
be one of the more, um, malleable specialties as opposed
to like, plastic surgery. And so, um, for me, it's,
(17:02):
it's very much finding pockets for both and I in
in beneath that though every day before I do anything clinically,
I do music and art. So I always try to
spend close to an hour every morning, and sometimes that
means I have to get up at like four. Especially
with having a baby. That means I have to get up,
you know, three. But that's for me. It's it's a necessity.
(17:23):
Like I think of them as vocations that are synergistic.
I don't think to me they're one they're kind of
one thing. But I realized that that's not that's not
going to make sense in the world we live in. But, um,
I think that's part of the extension of my faith
is thinking like, I really feel called to be a
songwriter and to be a psychiatrist among, you know, being
(17:44):
a father and so on. In terms of what's on deck,
I have a new album coming out in a few months,
which I haven't told anyone yet, but it's coming, and
then I have another album after that. Both of these
things are pretty much written and I don't know the
exact well, I do know the exact timeline, but I'm
not going to say it in case things don't work out.
(18:04):
But I have planned out like the next several years. Like, meticulously.
S1 (18:09):
Wow. Wow. Is that due to the discipline, by the way?
I mean, if you're if you're applying yourself that much
every day, is it just like I have a backlog
and so I've got two albums worth.
S2 (18:19):
Um. Discipline? Neuroticism. I don't know. Um, it's I, I
get very excited. I mentioned Sufjan Stevens. I get very
excited by concepts. I'm not personally, I'm not at this
season of my creative life. I'm not a singles person.
I'm very much like, I have this long form story
I want to tell. And so once I have that story,
(18:40):
I have to write it. And so I've written two
of those long stories and, um, I'm about to start
writing the third, uh, but we'll see when that happens.
S1 (18:50):
Favorite Sufjan album, by the way?
S2 (18:52):
Oh my God, I you know, Karen Lowell is probably
the magnum opus or Illinois, but my favorite is Seven Swans.
S1 (19:02):
I'm so glad I have a Seven Swans tattoo. No
need to go into Sufjan Stevens on this. Hey, Jay,
I would love to give you the chance to to
introduce the song and say anything else about generous that
you would that you would like to.
S2 (19:12):
I guess one more time. My name is Jay Lind. Um,
this is my song. Generous, and I hope it serves
as a candle for you in whatever season you find
yourself in.
S3 (20:01):
We took the train to get bagels in Brooklyn. They
might be the best in New York. A man passed
out onto the tracks when they rescued him. He almost
went back for his phone. And you cried to me
(20:23):
about the crack in the screen that this city won't
let us ignore. It's all in your face. Till it
gets to your brain. And you can't see the spirits anymore. Oh,
but I think it's time we get back to our dog.
(20:48):
She'll be waiting for us. Oh, I think we might
feed her early. I'm feeling more general. And under the
(21:25):
scaffold you notice the vigil that I thought were candles
for a sailor. So I made a joke about the
face in the photo. I said, that must be why
they don't sell you shit. I don't think that those
(21:49):
are for us. As I swallow my tongue. I think
that was a kind way of filling me in. General.
S4 (22:06):
Good. Lord. As I made my way back to the
(22:32):
cancer infirmary. Lord, I hardly noticed the fight breaking out
the form. Below. I asked him about the course of
(22:52):
his first disease. He said the Lord has all ways
been good to me. Even so, the Lord has always,
always been good to me.
S1 (23:48):
You've been listening to the deepest cut part of the
Rabbit Room podcast network audio production and theme music by
Isaac Vining. Logo and identity work by Meg Cook. The
Deepest Cut was created and hosted by me, Matt Conner.
Thank you so much for listening.
Welcome to the Deepest Cut, a podcast about the movement
from painful experiences to meaningful music. I'm your host, Matt Conner.
On a particularly inspired day in his home of New
York City, Jay Lind realized it was going to be
(00:24):
the kind of day he'd eventually document in song. It's
not that it held anything out of the ordinary in
terms of its events. Rather, his routine as a husband
and father, med school student and musical artist had unfolded
with a handful of vignettes that stuck with him for
various reasons. With chances to marvel at the mundane. This
(00:44):
whole theme of finding beauty in the unexpected is a
major theme of Jay's latest album, alchemy. And it certainly
laid out in the song he chose to discuss on
this episode of The Deepest Cut, a beautiful track entitled generous.
What's interesting about this song is how it provided a
sonic challenge for Jay as well to find a way
to stay musically true to the emotions and unnerving realizations
(01:07):
from the scenes that stayed with him. It finds its
greatest resonance in his interactions with a patient who is
confronted with a terminal diagnosis, one who insisted with real
joy that, quote, God had been so good to him.
If you're unfamiliar with Jay's meaningful music, alchemy is a
wonderful introduction to his catalog. The lyrics read like prose,
(01:28):
and the music is layered and intriguing. Part of the
excitement of this podcast, for me, is not only about
these deeper conversational dives, but also the chance to introduce
a listener to a potentially new artist. I hope that's
part of the discovery for you here. On this episode
of The Deepest Cut, I sat down with Jay Lynn
to discuss his years of experience as a hospice volunteer,
(01:49):
his favorite songwriters, and the emotions and experiences of that
inspired day in Manhattan. Here's our conversation with Jay Lynn.
(02:13):
Hello and welcome to the Deepest Cut. My name is
Matt Conner and I'm your host on this episode. I
love this song and and have loved this record alchemy.
I'm here with Jay Lind. Jay, how are you doing
on this morning?
S2 (02:27):
I am doing well. There is sludge on the streets
of New York right now, so I'm glad to be inside.
S1 (02:33):
Right on. Hey. Appreciate you. Uh, you carving out the
time and space to do this. Hey, you mentioned New
York is being in New York. Was that a career
decision for you in the first place? To move there?
Be there?
S2 (02:44):
Yeah. So, um, it was a multiple career decision. Um,
so I was living in Nashville when I did my
last record before alchemy, and the pandemic really made it
difficult to keep doing what I was doing musically there.
And so during the pandemic, I kind of pivoted. I
knew that I had a another vocation I wanted to
pursue alongside music. And so that's psychiatry. So I've been
(03:07):
in medical school here the last four years. I'm getting
ready to start my residency and then I it's a
lot of juggling where I'm, you know, when I'm not
on a rotation, I'm recording or touring and then part
of New York too. Besides the the school option, the
the reason we picked this school, the financial piece was great,
but also in a weird way, it was cheaper to
(03:27):
live in New York than to live in Arizona or Nashville.
S1 (03:30):
You're kidding.
S2 (03:31):
Yeah, some of these old schools have a lot of money,
and so it was actually a better deal for us.
And on top of that, the New York music scene.
A lot of my favorite songwriters grew up here, you know,
cut their teeth here. So it was too good to
pass up.
S1 (03:44):
What would make that list, by the way?
S2 (03:46):
Uh, Leonard Cohen at probably at the top, uh, followed
by Sufjan Stevens, who was in Brooklyn. Um, obviously Bob Dylan,
Paul Simon. It could go on a lot, a lot
of New Yorkers.
S1 (04:01):
That's a great list. By the way, is New York.
I mean, it seems like great fodder for the music
with how much it makes its way into the scenes
on the album. Does it feel that way for you?
Like the great urban inspiration in some way?
S2 (04:14):
It definitely does, I think. You know, it's easy to
I play a lot of house shows and, you know,
sometimes people I say, oh, I live in New York
and people say, oh, I hate it there. And I'll say, oh,
when did you go? And they say, oh, I haven't been.
And so, like, New York can be a polarizing place.
But I think part of that is because it's so
culturally diverse and rich. And I think living here as
(04:36):
as an artist, you just can't help but absorb whatever
the edge of that cultural phenomenon is. And so that's it.
Like couldn't help but come into the album.
S1 (04:47):
We want to talk about generous. Can you take us
into this song and maybe even the bigger picture of
alchemy and like the way it fits into the framework
of what you were trying to do on the whole project.
S2 (04:59):
So the, the idea of alchemy, you know, like, I
think like a lot of art, you the beauty of
it is you find what the thesis is as you
do it. Like. It's rare that I start a project thinking, okay,
it's going to be about this. It tends to be
I start writing and I find themes as I'm writing
these songs, and then start to follow those trails. And
the main theme for this project that I found coming
(05:22):
up in my songs was this idea of the beauty
of the unexpected, the fact that many of my most
meaningful experiences were not things that I planned or aimed for. Um,
I think, you know, in the context of our culture,
there's a lot of emphasis. I mean, I see it
most among some of my more techie friends. There's this
(05:44):
emphasis on optimizing and improving and making things better. And
I just this album is a celebration of the things
that we don't have control of that are more chaotic,
that meaningful things that come to us. And so for me,
a big theme on the record is my marriage. I
got married, Um. Right as I was starting this album.
(06:05):
And that was a relationship I was not interested in dating.
A friend set us up on a date that ended
up being a good fit. Um, I could go on.
You know, many of my closest friends and family. I
was not looking to make friends or family, but they, uh,
they kind of fell onto me. And so this song
is another song on this record that does that, because
it's about just a random day in New York and
(06:26):
all this unexpected meaning that comes through.
S1 (06:30):
I love the scenes that you set up here. There's
some real, you know, jarring juxtapositions, especially at the end.
You're describing this scene where it says, I asked a
man about the course of his terminal disease. He said,
the Lord has always been good to me. And that's
kind of this oft repeated refrain at the end. I
would just love to dive into even that scene right
(06:50):
there and like what you're trying to evoke within generous.
S2 (06:54):
I guess, to set the scene for the song. It's
funny because the song, it's a dramatic song, but it
was just all I'm doing is recounting 3 or 4
events that all happened in the same day like it was.
All of these things happened right after each other. And
so it was a kind of profound day in that way.
And again, I wasn't expecting or looking for any of
those experiences. Um, and so that in that final, uh,
(07:16):
section that's referring to I was after all these events
that transpire that I talk about in the song, I'm
rushing to get into the clinic. You know, I, I'm
in medical school, and my job is to interview this patient.
And I go through the checklist of things, you know,
any any allergies. What medications are you on? How's your diet? Exercise.
And I get finally into the medical piece, and I
(07:37):
hadn't even I hadn't had a chance to review the chart.
That was part of the goal of the assignment. And
he had a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I had just
wasted 20 minutes of his time, you know, being the
medical student. And so I started to talk to him
about that. And he said he was of a different
religion than I am. But he said in his way
he said, well, God has always been good to me.
(08:00):
God has always been good to me. Even in the
midst of that, it. He had so much joy and
patience and I was stunned.
S1 (08:06):
Through a day like that, when you said it was
kind of four vignettes within this one day, did you
kind of feel throughout the day, or was it very
clear at the end of the day like, oh man,
I have to write about this?
S2 (08:19):
It's funny, I was talking to my wife Tori at
the end of the day and I said, you know,
I'm just going to make. I usually don't journal. Songwriting
tends to be more where I reflect. But I said,
I'm going to write down what happened because I don't
know how or when, but this is going to come
out in my music because it's just such a strange
series of events. And I thought maybe I'd have a
song about one event and a song about another event,
(08:41):
but it ended up just being altogether.
S1 (08:44):
The prompt for the podcast is, is choosing maybe the
most personal or difficult song that you've chosen to record
and release. What makes this one that entry for you?
S2 (08:55):
For me, it's less, you know, I have other songs
where maybe some of the subject matter was more about
my own personal experience. This song is more of, and
this whole record is a lot of its observing experiences.
And what makes it raw for me though, is, is musically, I.
I wanted to communicate the rawness of of what I
(09:15):
felt that day, and so I really took it into
this sonic space that I haven't gone before. And so
that's why to me, it came to mind as the
deepest cut, because I'm trying to really be vulnerable in
my performance and the instruments to communicate. Yeah, just about
the chaos and how unsettled I felt at the end
of that day.
S1 (09:35):
Can you talk about, like, even trying to capture that,
how you capture that, the way you do that?
S2 (09:40):
It's a it's a challenge when a lot of the
songwriting I enjoy is very, you know, I named folk heroes.
I enjoy folk music tends to be very, you know,
three chords and the truth, and that allows the lyric
to really carry the song. Whereas alternative rock, which is
one of my other favorite genres and was is more
where this song sits. The feel lots of times is
(10:02):
not so much in the lyric, it's more in the music. Um,
that's a generalization, but I think the hard piece is
to make, if you're trying to make a lyric, carry
the song while you're trying to make the song just explode.
One can get lost in the other. And I think
the way we made that work was, um, to really
kind of set the scene with the first couple verses
and just focus on the storytelling. So there's this sense of, oh,
(10:24):
I actually really want to pay attention to the lyric
to see what this story ends. And then it happens
to be in this wall of sound that you kind
of still listen for.
S1 (10:33):
Did you know, like, how this would end up in
that way? Like, was the plan to kind of save
that last vignette as this crescendo moment?
S2 (10:41):
More or less. I wrote the piano piece that carries
the motif, that kind of carries the song or the arpeggio.
I wrote, um, a while ago, for I was thinking
of just. I wrote it while I was watching The ocean,
and I just had this sense of this ocean flow,
you know, like the waves coming in and out. And
I think, uh, once I had the story, I realized
(11:03):
this song has to has to go there because the
lyrics are going there. And once I had that idea,
the song, the whole song kind of came together quickly.
S1 (11:11):
You have a pretty extensive background. You've done hospice work
in the past. Can you describe that? And then it
makes me curious about the ways that that has influenced
the art that you've created on the other side of
those experiences.
S2 (11:23):
So I was a hospice volunteer for about five years,
and I did a few different states, mostly in new Jersey.
And each week I would just go and see people
sit with them for an hour a week, an hour
or two. Um, some people were nonverbal. So because they
had a neurological problem, or maybe they were, um, weren't
(11:44):
conscious in some way. So I would play music for
those folks and folks who could speak. Lots of times
I just sat and listened because they, you know, it's
a very vulnerable space where people are willing to share
a lot. And that's a privilege. As a songwriter who's,
you know, I don't want to sound too utilitarian, but
who's looking for stories? And hospice is a place where
(12:07):
you hear people's full stories. And there's I think there's
a catharsis that comes with telling your story. And there's
also a catharsis that comes with hearing someone's story. And so, um,
that that definitely informed a lot of what I do musically. My,
my first album, uh, with the Tiger on it, for
what it's worth, is all inspired by stories from that world,
but it still finds its way into the work I'm
(12:29):
doing now. I think.
S1 (12:30):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would occur to
me that maybe that sort of experience would open you
up earlier in life to sort of a new level
of vulnerability and honesty and like a rawness that maybe
is missing from a lot of art that could be
postured for the marketplace. I guess I just wonder, like,
is that a real value for you? Is that something
(12:52):
that came from that?
S2 (12:53):
Yeah, I think and I would encourage anyone listening to
volunteer in hospice. First off, because there's so many ways
you can get involved and bring your skills, and it
is an environment that you can make such a difference
in so many people's lives. For me, I was drawn
to it because I had lost a family member around
that time, and I also lost a friend who was
(13:14):
about my age. So this was end of high school,
and both of them had had really positive hospice experiences
before they died. And I thought, so there's this draw
to serve in that way. But there was also a draw,
just curiosity, because I don't I hadn't seen death firsthand.
And I had all these questions about how is death?
(13:35):
Is death painful? Is death, you know, what are the
emotions that surround it? And what will that do to
me being in that space? So there was both like
an others and a self-centered piece to my motivation in
terms of how that influences me. I don't feel like
I understand death better. I don't feel like I know
(13:57):
much more about the dying process. But there's a I
do think to your point, there's a sense of contingency.
This idea that so many of our activities in life
are framed by the fact that we're going to die.
And I find that very motivating and important thing to
talk about. I think there's a terrible side to that.
And there's a beautiful side, like it adds a lot.
S1 (14:20):
I'm just still so drawn to that idea, because it
just feels like so many of us don't even think
about death, don't want to consider our mortality until we
have to. You know, like we're just afraid of the
whole space. By the way, did that impact medical school decision?
S2 (14:36):
Certainly, in some ways it moved me away from some
areas of medicine because I thought, uh, you know, this
is very sad. And also, um, there are a lot
of things we can't fix or cure, but it moved
me closer to psychiatry, which is what I'm pursuing. Um,
because there was this humanistic piece and there was this
emphasis on the subjective experience of suffering. You know, even
(15:00):
beyond the objective reality of the diseases.
S1 (15:04):
Is there a responsibility there for you within the music?
Balancing the sorrowful with something hopeful. How much despair do
you allow within a song?
S2 (15:13):
Yeah. I don't think of. I think of myself as
a hopeful songwriter. I don't think of myself as a downer.
But that said, I've played a lot of these songs
in like, Rowdy Bars, and I know that they are downers,
so I'm under no illusion about that. In the span
of the pop universe. But I think a lot of
the lyrics and especially like even the songs I have
(15:33):
that end in desolation or end in sadness, the arc
of the album, almost every project is trying to be.
I'm not trying to write tragic albums. I'm trying to
write comic albums like like comic in the sense of
ending high ending, looking up or forward. Um, so I
do feel I do feel responsibility, but it doesn't even
(15:55):
feel like a responsibility to others. It feels like a
responsibility to myself and my own faith. Like it wouldn't
feel honest unless, you know, if I was really having
a hard time. Maybe that'd be very honest. Time to
end an album. You know, very sadly. But generally I
write albums partly to encourage myself and to reflect back
(16:15):
at myself. What I try to express in my faith.
S1 (16:20):
I want to get to the song because I want
it's it's beautiful, and I think people are going to
be anxious to hear it and listen to it. I
do also want to add you have a family now,
you mentioned medical school. I mean, how much are you
able to tour? How much are you able to support
or like, I would just love to give you a
chance to kind of even tell us, like creatively, what's
coming up for you?
S2 (16:40):
Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm a professional juggler first and foremost,
because it is what's great about medicine medical school so far.
And this seems to be the case, um, some specialties
are more manageable than others, too, like psychiatry tends to
be one of the more, um, malleable specialties as opposed
to like, plastic surgery. And so, um, for me, it's,
(17:02):
it's very much finding pockets for both and I in
in beneath that though every day before I do anything clinically,
I do music and art. So I always try to
spend close to an hour every morning, and sometimes that
means I have to get up at like four. Especially
with having a baby. That means I have to get up,
you know, three. But that's for me. It's it's a necessity.
(17:23):
Like I think of them as vocations that are synergistic.
I don't think to me they're one they're kind of
one thing. But I realized that that's not that's not
going to make sense in the world we live in. But, um,
I think that's part of the extension of my faith
is thinking like, I really feel called to be a
songwriter and to be a psychiatrist among, you know, being
(17:44):
a father and so on. In terms of what's on deck,
I have a new album coming out in a few months,
which I haven't told anyone yet, but it's coming, and
then I have another album after that. Both of these
things are pretty much written and I don't know the
exact well, I do know the exact timeline, but I'm
not going to say it in case things don't work out.
(18:04):
But I have planned out like the next several years. Like, meticulously.
S1 (18:09):
Wow. Wow. Is that due to the discipline, by the way?
I mean, if you're if you're applying yourself that much
every day, is it just like I have a backlog
and so I've got two albums worth.
S2 (18:19):
Um. Discipline? Neuroticism. I don't know. Um, it's I, I
get very excited. I mentioned Sufjan Stevens. I get very
excited by concepts. I'm not personally, I'm not at this
season of my creative life. I'm not a singles person.
I'm very much like, I have this long form story
I want to tell. And so once I have that story,
(18:40):
I have to write it. And so I've written two
of those long stories and, um, I'm about to start
writing the third, uh, but we'll see when that happens.
S1 (18:50):
Favorite Sufjan album, by the way?
S2 (18:52):
Oh my God, I you know, Karen Lowell is probably
the magnum opus or Illinois, but my favorite is Seven Swans.
S1 (19:02):
I'm so glad I have a Seven Swans tattoo. No
need to go into Sufjan Stevens on this. Hey, Jay,
I would love to give you the chance to to
introduce the song and say anything else about generous that
you would that you would like to.
S2 (19:12):
I guess one more time. My name is Jay Lind. Um,
this is my song. Generous, and I hope it serves
as a candle for you in whatever season you find
yourself in.
S3 (20:01):
We took the train to get bagels in Brooklyn. They
might be the best in New York. A man passed
out onto the tracks when they rescued him. He almost
went back for his phone. And you cried to me
(20:23):
about the crack in the screen that this city won't
let us ignore. It's all in your face. Till it
gets to your brain. And you can't see the spirits anymore. Oh,
but I think it's time we get back to our dog.
(20:48):
She'll be waiting for us. Oh, I think we might
feed her early. I'm feeling more general. And under the
(21:25):
scaffold you notice the vigil that I thought were candles
for a sailor. So I made a joke about the
face in the photo. I said, that must be why
they don't sell you shit. I don't think that those
(21:49):
are for us. As I swallow my tongue. I think
that was a kind way of filling me in. General.
S4 (22:06):
Good. Lord. As I made my way back to the
(22:32):
cancer infirmary. Lord, I hardly noticed the fight breaking out
the form. Below. I asked him about the course of
(22:52):
his first disease. He said the Lord has all ways
been good to me. Even so, the Lord has always,
always been good to me.
S1 (23:48):
You've been listening to the deepest cut part of the
Rabbit Room podcast network audio production and theme music by
Isaac Vining. Logo and identity work by Meg Cook. The
Deepest Cut was created and hosted by me, Matt Conner.
Thank you so much for listening.
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