Learn more about J. Mamana at JMamana.net and Bandcamp.
J. Mamana: Well, yeah, I lost my childhood best friend, and my college best friend. People I was really close with at the time. And, I think the first record I made, I was just out of college. I was full of like, you know, political, vengeful feelings and a sense that I needed to uncover some great network of references, and I was interested in these accreted layers of history. And then I think these things happen in your life and you start to have to face yourself more and it becomes difficult to just look at the political situation or read your esoteric history books and and find answers that make you feel okay. So, I felt like I had to explore myself, which was something I was very disinterested in doing initially. Actually, I thought it was kind of silly. The idea that you would make a pop record or a rock record and pretend that you were doing something authentically yourself.
So I felt like, oh, I’m not feeling very good, I really want to deal with this stuff, you know. And I talked to the therapist and I’m not feeling better yet, and so I was like, well, maybe I’ll just, like, write a song about how sad I am, and then I would be like, what? I’m going to write a song, I’m going to write a song about how sad I am?
Is that, isn’t that what they’re all supposed to be or whatever? And so I started kind of building these layers of, I don’t know, second order meaning around what would it mean for me to make an album about myself? What would it mean to turn inward? And I still don’t have the language really to talk about it, but that was the idea.
James Baumgartner: That brings to mind one of the songs on your album, Hope Saved July, and you sing about pain. You say, “it’s so profane, surely no one else in the world has felt this kind of pain.” Can you say a little bit more about that?
Mamana: Absolutely. That is, you know, what we in the biz call a joke. Well, I thought it was funny, the way that when something happens to you that feels so monumental, you’re like, oh my god, I can’t even believe how bad this feels to miss this person or to have lost this. And then you think for a little bit and you’re like, well, this is, everybody has this experience. Death is this universal thing. It’s guaranteed. I think there’s just, I wanted to represent that experience of being like, no one’s ever felt as bad as I have, but of course, everybody has felt that bad. That’s what that line is about, I think.
[Music: Hope Saved July]
Baumgartner: Let’s go back to the music for a second. The album opens very boldly to my ears with “Genius or Apostle.” It opens with a fugue for string quartet.
[Music: Genius or Apostle]
And to my ears, that string quartet has some hints of Bartok, maybe some hints of Shostakovich. And then it resolves as the piano enters and I’m thinking what is this? Oh, this really sounds very familiar to me. I know this song. There’s something here that really reminds me. What was that?
Mamana: Yeah, so the melody you’re referencing is a melody that is foundational for me. It’s from the slow movement of the Beethoven Pathétique Piano Sonata, his 8th Piano Sonata. [Music: Beethoven: 8th Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement] It is a fugue. It’s one of the first, I’m not like a fugue master, but I always wanted to write a fugue. I thought it’d be kind of crazy to open with a fugue. If you’re writing for string quartet, you’ll have two violins, a viola, and a cello. And you’ll have four versions basically of the same melody. And those four melodies in that fugue were written around that Beethoven melody. Like, in absence. So I was trying to create the sense that you were experiencing that Beethoven melody, but the melody wasn’t there. And in some sense, that melody being very, very personally important to me, I love Beethoven, he’s kind of my, one of my favorite guys.
After my friend Mark passed away, obviously I didn’t know he was going to pass away, I was driving down to New York to see him the day before he died, or I found out he died. And two days later, I had tickets to go see Beethoven’s Opus 131 String Quartet number 14. And, yeah, I just found it to be, I don’t know, extremely moving and important that I was able to experience this music in that period of time, and I felt like the record should open with an homage to this person, my friend, through the experience that I had of this music.
[Music: Genius or Apostle]
Baumgartner: And one of the key moments in Genius or Apostle is: “as he appears…” Who is he?
Mamana: You like to leave things open ended, but I was always imagining him as like the singer, the performer. There’s a lot of confusion, amongst artists, amongst listeners, critics, whatever, about who’s singing to you. Who’s the singer? Is it, when David Bowie sings to you, is it Ziggy Stardust? Is it Davey Jones? Or is it David Bowie? Who knows who it is. And so I think that because the album, “For Every Set of Eyes,” was meant to be an exploration of myself, I felt like I needed to open by creating the character of myself.
“He appears before you.” Who is he? What does he want? He’s gonna sing at you. He’s gonna do all these demagogic tricks to like, make his sadness will be your sadness all of a sudden. And I feel like pop music has a weird way of that. I think of like Plastic Ono Band, the John Lennon album or something, these albums where people are like really sad and they’re supposed to be being primal and authentic. I’m just like, suddenly John Lennon’s mom being dead is like my sadness. I’m experiencing it and it’s him communicating his specific sadness, but also it’s run through the mythology of John Lennon and the strange cultural detritus through which I’m able to access this guy. I never met him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he was really feeling. So all that felt, Genius or Apostle for me is like a stage setting moment. Here’s the singer. Here’s what he’s going to do. Like, should we trust this guy? I don’t know.
Baumgartner: J. Mamana, thanks so much for talking with us today.
Mamana: Thanks for having me.
Baumgartner: J. Mamana’s second album, “For Every Set of Eyes” will come out on August 23rd via Holy Family, but the first single is out today on Bandcamp and streaming platforms, it’s called “Hope Saved July.” Mamana played a couple of songs for us when he visited the studio including “Hope Saved July,” and “Peace on Earth.” He will be one of the special guests at a show at the Columbus Theatre on June 8 featuring Museum Legs and Noah B. Harley.
