Speaker 1: Such a great track. That is when Charlie Nyland or Niland.
I think it's Niland, but we're going to ask him
in just a moment because he is joining us online.
Welcome everybody, if you are listening live. Today is Saturday,
November twenty two, twenty twenty five. This is Matt Connorton
Unleashed and we have entered our number three new Marrow
trace of our program this morning from the studios of
w n H ninety five point three FM in Glorious Manchester,
New Hampshire. And of course you can stream the show
from anywhere. Go to Matt connorton dot com, slash live
for all of your live streaming options, social media links,
contact infosho, archives, et cetera, et cetera. But let's get
Charlie in here, because I am dying to talk with him. Charlie,
are you there, Hi, Matt, Hey, Welcome to the show.
First question, how do you say your last name Niland?
It is Nland? Okay, good, I got it right, I
thought so, but I wasn't one hundred percent sure. I
love that song when and we'll talk about that, and
we'll talk about a lot of things. But what a
great track. Who is that on the song with you
at the end, who's rapping?
Speaker 2: His name is Spirit Child. He's based out of Staten Island.
I've known him here in the New York City area
for about ten years for we both are in this
thing called the Bushwick book Club. It's a performance series. Oh,
I'll tell you more about it when you get to
the song.
Speaker 1: But he's great, sure, sure, yeah, no, he's really good.
It's kind of it's one of those things where when
you listen to the song for the first time, you
don't expect that, but it just it's a surprise, but
it's so seamless, like it just fits so perfectly. You know.
It's a nice surprise, because sometimes somebody might try to
do something like that and you go, I don't know,
it seems a little forced or whatever, but that is
it just fits in perfectly. So good, so good. Absolutely,
And you've got an album let's see this. I guess
this has been out for a little while now, Stories
from the Borderlines or this just came out last month?
Speaker 2: Actually, right, yeah, it's just been a few weeks.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so this is very new. You've got a
new single called Shame. I thought about playing that one,
but we'll probably play that one a little later in
the show because I wanted to play when I wanted
to open with that. It's such a great positive song.
But you've done You've done a lot of work. You're
you're you've been around a while. You know, you've worked
with people like Debbie Harry, Blondie, Rufus, Wainwright, Scissor Sisters.
You're a composer, you know, you've done film and television.
I really want to know tell us a little bit
about your background, and then we'll kind of talk about
what we're we'll come back to what you're doing now
with your music, But I also would like to know
more about you.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm from the Midwest, but I came to the
East Coast and graduated from college and moved to New
York City, and then I was in a band called
Her Vanished Grace for about twenty five years, and a
couple other bands throughout the nineties and into the two thousands.
But in the beginning of the two thousands, I kind
of stumbled into a situation where I was working on
a film score for this movie called The Safety of
Objects Okay, and then I started producing it became part
of a production team, and that's where I worked with
Debbie Harry on her solo album called Necessary Evil, which
came out in two thousand and seven, Okay, And that
was a really exciting experience, and basically we just continued
writing with her after the album came out and ended
up having some of those songs be on the next
Blondie record in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: And since since about twenty thirteen, I've been working on
being a solo artist in addition to producing people, and
that's where I'm now. This is my fourth album.
Speaker 1: Oh no kidding, Okay, what do you find most satisfying?
I mean, is working on your own music as a
solo artist? Is that? I don't know if more satisfying
is probably probably not necessarily how you'd want to put it,
but you understand what I'm asking you. I mean, do
you get what do you get the most from in
terms of what you're doing because you've worked in all
these different areas well.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting challenge because I've been in bands a
lot of times where I was I did get to
sing my songs, but it was in like a group
where there was more than one singer, so I was
always like the other singer when there's a female vocalist,
you know. And so I've been writing songs for a
long time and co writing with people, and in the
past ten years, I've got involved, as I mentioned, with
this performance series called the Bushwick Book Club where each
month the book is selected and songwriters react to the
book and write a song, and then there's a show
where all the songs are presented. And I sort of
got involved in producing that, so I ended up writing
a lot of songs that way. Yeah, And I don't know,
I've just been expanding my circle and getting involved with
things like that, and another series called The Loser's Lounge,
which is here in New York, where we sing at
Joe's Pub with a fantastic backing band. It's it's covers,
but it's like there's a theme each for each performance.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But I found that these things have helped me kind
of find my identity as an artist, as a performing artist,
and I'm really excited about it. Now. I enjoy playing
full sets of my own music and I feel like,
you know, I'm a vehicle for this thing that's coming
through me, and so you know, I do love collaborating
those Yeah, and I get to do that a lot
in production, but when I produce my own music, it
does it gets to be It's interesting because I can
really take my time in certain parts of the process
and just try a lot of different ideas, yeah, and
slowly build up layers. I think on stories from the borderlines,
there's a lot of that. It's kind of like a
musical diary. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: In terms of, uh, how you approach how you approach songwriting,
I'm curious if do you consciously try to do something
that's that's unique and out of the mainstream or does
that sort of happen organically because these songs, you know,
none of them are anything that you would necessarily hear, Like,
I don't know what radio format they would fit into
necessarily on commercial radio. You know, they're they're they're different,
which is what makes them so interesting. They're very catchy,
they're very catchy and listenable. They're accessible, but they're but
they're also unique. It kind of reminds me of just
a random example, like like if a band like Talking
Heads were to exist today and someone asked me, Matt,
what would you do with this band? You know, and Obviously,
Talking Heads was hugely commercially successful in the eighties. But
if someone said, you know, if they were out today
and Matt, someone said, Matt, what do you do with
this band? I don't. I don't know exactly. You know,
I'd want to do like maybe some college radio stuff
for them, but I don't know where I would put
them in terms of a commercially viable radio genre. And
I feel like your music is like that, where it's
it's catchy, it's accessible, the songs are great, but I
don't I don't know where they fit necessarily, and I'm
wondering if that's intentional on your part.
Speaker 2: I think it's natural, but I do. I'm aware of
that definitely. I mean, I think for me, I think
the most I think of genre as like a geography.
You know, there are certain kinds of music that that's
right in the middle of it of a genre, and
you're like, oh, that's definitely dance pop, or that's definitely
e DM or that's definitely you know, metal. But I
think out at the edges of the borders of these genres,
it's there are artists who are doing stuff that kind
of freely mixes things and comes up with their own hybrids.
I mean, and that's where someone like Prince came from,
or Bowie or Talking Heads, where like the Talking Heads
weren't commercially successful at first.
Speaker 1: Right, it took a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now they're remembered because they did succeed as
a college rock band. And again that was college rock
became alternative. You know, in the eighties, alternative didn't necessarily
mean what it meant in the nineties, it was kind
of a catch all for stuff that wasn't in a specific,
you know, central style. That they often mixed a lot
of different things together, and so that's kind of my
natural that's my resting place kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've just.
Speaker 2: There's been times when I've been in bands where we
sort of really focused our sound into something that was,
you know, the her vanished grace. We called it power
dream pop. So we were kind of zeroing in on
a certain subset of alternative of post punk and dream pop,
and those are still strong influences in my music. But yeah,
I think, especially in this album, I just allowed each
song to have its own character and its own landscape,
and it's kind of like a series of different movies
or stories. So my girlfriend said it, it's like they're
all different stories, and that kind of led to the
title of the album.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, excellent, excellent. I do want to hear more
about the Bushwick book Love, because I'm curious if when
you when you bring a song into that that forum,
I mean, is that is that intimidating it all? Because
obviously other people are gonna are gonna have their their
their judgments or assessments of it.
Speaker 2: Well, it's fun because everybody has a different approach. Yeah,
and the book for me, I always write a song
that can stand outside the busher Club performance. You don't
have to have read the book to enjoy it, you know. Yeah,
and to relate to it. Usually I use some aspect
of the story or a character or an idea from
the books. Sometimes it's just one page in the book
like sets me off and I'm like, oh, this will
be good imagery for this thing that I've already been
thinking about. And that's kind of what happened with Wyn
And that was part of an interesting an interesting thing
that happened where we got invited to the Kurt Vonnegut
Museum and Library for a whole week for a residency.
Oh wow, and they have a series where they have
a band book Band Book Week nice and usually usually
it's writers that come and participate, but since we've done
a lot of Vonnegut in Bushwick Book Club, they invited
a group of us. It was five us and we
spent the week there and at the end of the
week we presented songs that we had written that week,
all inspired by band books, and we had a concert
Oh wow, And it was to make a long story short.
I was like, the last one to finish my song.
Everyone's gonna got a song going, and I was like,
I'm having really struggling. It was a great book I
was working on I was working with called All Boys
Aren't Blue. It was one of the most banned books
in two thousand and twenty two, really and yeah, it's
a coming of age story. It's a ya book about
being young, black and queer, and it was really a
beautifully written book, but at the time there was a
strong book banning thing going on in schools. So anyway,
I woke up in the middle of the night with
the chorus words to that song I just want you
to win Oh, and I kind of like just wrote
it down in the notes app on my phone. I
got up in the morning and I was like, whoa
this is this really feels good. And then I'd also
been thinking about some other stuff and the song just
all like poured out that morning. And we all supported
each other in terms of being each other's backup musicians
for the concert at the end of the week, and
so we started working on my song and spirit Child
was there doing his music and I was like, you know,
I think this would sound great if you came up
with something for this. Yeah, And so the at the
show it was a kind of a combination of stuff
he had written, you know, in response to my lyrics
and freestyled kind of at the same time. And that
got recorded and then when I went to record the
and it was so great, you know. So when I
recorded the album like a year or two later, I
asked Spiritual to contribut you to it. And now recently
we just at our album release show, he was able
to join us live on stage and it was fantastic.
It really kicked the room into overdrive. It was so good.
Speaker 1: I can imagine, yeah, I can imagine, Yeah, that song
must go over well live anyway, I would think, because
it's got such an energy to it, And you know,
I really like the lyrics, and I think you know,
you talked about what the lyrics are about, and I
think you even referenced this that you know, obviously they're
about that book, but also there's relatable themes within those
lyrics that anyone can relate to, and and anyone who's
ever felt marginalized in some way.
Speaker 2: Or actually a lot of a lot of.
Speaker 1: Your music I think is probably relatable for anyone who's
ever felt marginalized or ostracized or I mean, I feel
like that's kind of a theme. You know, you've kind
of you've got everybody's back, you know, you're in terms
of what they're going through.
Speaker 2: Well, I think, in my view and my uh I envision,
that we've created identities for ourselves that make it feel
like we're all separate from each other, but there's an
underlying thing that we're all part of one energy wave.
So if all these things that we've taught ourselves about
other people and the way we relate to people that
we feel are our adversaries or our enemies, actually they
become very close to us. You know, we really wrap
ourselves up and identifying ourselves in opposition to things, and
and if that dissolves a little bit, that's really a
solvent for a lot of the strife that's going on.
And I just want to be a part of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I notice that, you know, these ongoing sort of
cultural battles around gender identity and all of it, you know,
which is seems like it's become so heightened in these times,
and I feel like the music that you're making is
really this is kind of the moment for it, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think we can be playful about it.
And I understand that a lot of it comes from
fear and fear of people that we feel are opposed
to us or are you know, symbolize something of an other.
But so I'm sympathetic to that. I don't think people
should be ostracized because of that. But I also feel like,
I don't know, I think everybody has because there's been
the systems in place of systematic racism and stuff like that.
We all have work to do, but it's it's something
that we can all give each other some space to
do instead of, you know, being cruel to each other.
Speaker 1: No, I like the way you say that. I like
the way you say that because I think it's important
to you know, not everything. I mean, obviously, no one
should be ostracized and marginalized and all of that, but
I think that there's a difference, you know, fear. Use
that term fear, and I think that's an important word
to use, because people tend to fear what they don't understand,
or what they've never been exposed to, or what seems
unusual to them. And you know, not not all of
that stems from not all of it stems from hate.
You know, some people are just blinded with hate for
the you know, the quote unquote the other, and some
people are just you know, they're just afraid. And I
think music is a great music is a great vehicle
to reach them.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, I think. I mean, we're only fifty
fifty hundred thousand years away from the Savannah, you know,
we were. We there's a lot of evolutionary imperatives that
were still that created this amazing survival in ste that
we have as Homo sapiens. And but those things can
really create problems for us too, right, and so we're
still we have all these instincts that cause us to
be tribal and cause us to to over identify with groups.
I mean, at the same time, we have a lot
of wisdom that comes through with and I think a
lot of it comes through culture and comes through art,
and I think that helps dissolve some of this stuff
and helps people, you know, kind of forget to be
so hateful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you see reactions with your music?
Do you see reactions from advocacy groups and like, is
there any any contact from anybody wanting you to get
involved with their organizations or anything because of your music specifically?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I did. In fact, I when I did
an interview with journalist who has a series called on Tyranny,
and it was about artists and their reactions to authoritarianism.
So I said a bunch of this stuff that I
just said, you know, But at the same time, I'm
an artist, I'm not I'm getting more engaged politically, just
on a local level here where I live in New Jersey.
But yeah, that's just I think it's I think getting
hand ringing and doom scrolling about the national political and
world political situation can be a little overwhelming, and I
think if you just get involved on your local level,
that's way more helpful. So I've been doing that too.
Speaker 1: No, that's great. I think that's I think that's great advice.
I do want to talk a bit about the song Shame,
and we'll play that at the end of our conversation. Actually,
I'm probably gonna play both that and Brutalist Monuments because
at the end of our conversation, because I love both
those songs, So I'll probably just play those two back
to back. But but I do want to talk about
Shame because officially Shame is the current single.
Speaker 2: Is that correct, Yeah, it was the second single. Yes,
it's the current single led the album.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, yeah, I want to ask you about this.
This is another great track. There's an interesting line in
it too, we eroticize what we despise, and I'm I'm
curious about that, and uh, and if you could talk
to about the song and you know, in a broader
sense about what it's about, what the theme is, and
and how it relates to everything that we've been discussing.
Speaker 2: Well again, I think that this was a song that
was written as part of a Busher book club event
based around a book called When brook When Brooklyn was Queer,
and it was a history of of queer and gay
experience in Brooklyn for the past few hundred years, and uh,
I was just really struck by. There was a part
in the book where they describe how there was a
really thriving waterfront scene in Brooklyn in like the eighteen
eighties and eighteen nineties where in the river on the
Hudson River part of Brooklyn or the Gowanis River. Maybe
I'm sorry getting lost there, but that there was a
lot of drag performing and there was these were kind
of like bars and clubs where people would meet. But
at the same time, there were a lot of people
just came for the culture and came for the entertainment.
And then at that time, there wasn't even a word
homosexual hadn't really been coined yet and starting around I
think it came into use around the time Freud was writing,
and after that it became a diagnosis. And after that
they started putting gays in jail in the New York area.
They even made a special penitentiary for them, did they like,
I didn't know that in Brooklyn. Yeah, And it to
me that just struck me as like once the name
got coined, then a lot of people were able to
focus in on that and say, oh, this is the
thing we're afraid of. And it just reminded me of now,
how there's so much like sort of a fetishization of
trans culture. And like RuPaul's drag Race was like water
cooler TV. You know, everybody talked about and everyone watched
it and found it really entertaining. But then when the
transidentities got weaponized by politics, all of a sudden, those
same people who are so fascinated and kind of titillated
by it were full of like, Okay, let's get these
people out of public of public view. And I just
think there's a real that my little phrase, we eoticize
what we despise Again, it's like we get wrapped up
in identification with something that we are opposed to, and
when actually there's a lot there's an extreme similarity between
what we think of as our shadow, you know. Yeah,
So this song is sort of like creates a couple
of different identities and the verses one like one person
is going to see the entertainment and the other person
is the entertainer, and they come together in the chorus
where one says, you'll know what you are when I
give you a name, and the other says, you'll know
what you are when you give me a name, and
it kind of goes back and forth, and then at
the end it's like, you know, we're basically the same, right.
Speaker 1: I love that. I love that. Oh. I want to
ask you about the video too, because I love the
video and I was reading that you worked with Hypno
Doll as the director and editor and Alice Teepele as cinematographer,
if I have that correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Hypna Doll is a friend of mine who
has been doing my artwork for the past couple albums
and has done several videos for me, and we just
relate really well. And she came up with the concept
for the video of a band that kind of exists
in several different time zone timelines. Yeah, and so, and
then we had a whole bunch of our friends kind
of join us at the end, like the band sort
of explodes into a bunch of different identities. Yeah. But
we did it. You know, we did it in my
recording studio. You know, it was definitely not trying to
look high budget, but it the editing is so good,
has a great energy.
Speaker 1: It does it really does. No, It's I love it,
and uh yeah, that's it's so important too. I think
it's it to some people. It might sound odd to
say this in the year twenty twenty five, but I
think music videos are more important than they've ever been,
you know, especially now. I mean MTV is apparently going
away permanently, but they haven't played music videos in forever.
But uh, I've noticed, and I don't know if you've
noticed this. People outside the music industry, a lot of
people have this perception that music video as an art
form is dead, you know, because MTV gave up on it,
you know, a couple decades ago. But in reality, because
of social media, I think making videos and making a
great video, it's a great video, even if it's low budget,
it's I think it's fantastic, like like the video for Shame.
It's so it's so important as a as a tool
to get your you know, people. Still, it's always been
the case, at least since I was a kid, and
it's still the case today. People listen with their eyes
just as much as they do with their.
Speaker 2: Ears, exactly. There's been a lot of notice that came
from exerpting the video and putting up in little bites
and then sharing the whole video, but just also just
that it had a performance aspect involved all these other people.
I mean, but there are other videos that Himnadala has
done for me, like for the song Drown, that were
more just full of images and stuff. So I mean,
I think they're different. There's room for different ways to
approach it, but I agree. I want to make some
more videos myself for some of the for some more
of the songs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 2: So what's kind of.
Speaker 1: The future trajectory? Do you have another Is there another
single that's going to be coming after Shame or what's
what's kind of the short term or even the long
term plan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that there'll be one more single. I'm trying to
decide which one it is. It might be Brutalless Monuments,
or might be another completely different kind of song that's
called Today that's on the album as well.
Speaker 1: Okay, but.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I've put together a really great band
and we've started performing and we have another show this
month I'm sorry, in December. It's almost December, and I
just want to keep playing out and just bringing in
new possibilities by putting myself out there and playing the music,
and and you know, I'm sure at some point I'll
have enough songs to do another release. I might not
do full albums. I said that this time. Yeah, I
did throughout full album. But I think you know a
lot of times people just put on EPs now and
they don't have to take us long between releases. That's
intriguing to me. Yeah, but you know, I have a
besides the next show I have as Charlie Eland for
my band, I'm doing a Loser's Lounge performance at the
beginning of December where they're doing Brian Wilson and the
Beach Boys, and I'm singing a Beach Boys song I
really love called All I Want to Do. And that's
really exciting to sing. It's it's really nerve wracking just
to sing one song in front of a crowded room,
you know, with a great, great band, But it's it's
it's taught me a lot about how to breathe and
be in the moment, and it's really helped my own
performing for for my music too. Oh.
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent, Charlie. Where's the best place for people to
go online to keep up with everything that you're doing?
Speaker 2: Well? Is it? Charlie naland website, and I E. L
A and d yes and you know, I sell the
music through band Camp, which isn't not all people know
about that. I mean, of course I'm on streaming all
the streaming platforms, but band Camp is a way you
can stream and you can also buy the music as
a digital release in any form that you like. Yeah,
and I you know a lot of my artists friends
work on that too, and we all kind of support
each other on that. So check out band camp. I'm
on band Camp, I'm on Apple Music and Spotify and
all those places.
Speaker 1: Absolutely absolutely well, Charlie Neland thank you so much for
joining us this morning. This has been fantastic. I'm actually
gonna play I will have time, so I'm gonna play
both Shame and then I'm gonna play Brutalist Monuments as well,
but both both great tracks. But I really appreciate you
joining us. This has been a fascinating discussion. I love
your music, and hey, when the next single is ready
to go, I definitely want to have you back on
if you're amenable to that.
Speaker 2: I'd love that. Thank you so much, Matt. This has
been a total pleasure.
Speaker 1: Wonderful, all right, Thanks Charlie, we'll let you go, and
now I have a great have a great weekend.
Speaker 2: You too, all right, take care, bye bye bye bye.
All right.
Speaker 1: That was Charlie Niland. And let's play these. I'm gonna
play both of these. We're gonna play Shame. This is
a great track. Yeah, pay attention to the lyrics and
I appreciate I appreciate the song even more now that
I know after talking to Charlie, now that I know
exactly what's going on in these lyrics and the different characters.
But yeah, this is this is interesting, so pay attention.
But this is really good. This is Shame by Charlie Neeland.