Talking about Carrion with Gage Rhodes

This is the first of what will hopefully be a new series of YTM articles - joining the single, EP, and album reviews we’ve been publishing. In this article, YTM’s Seth Mitchell is speaking with Maryland-based songwriter Gage Rhodes discussing his Carrion album, an 8 song collection of indie folk rock originals.

Background

YOUR TOWN MUSIC (SETH MITCHELL): Gage, I know that you're a great songwriter. I know you as a guitar player. I've seen you play the mandolin. What could we add to that?

GAGE RHODES: That kind of covers it. I think of myself as a songwriter first, mostly out of humility. Around the time that I was working on Carrion, I started getting into bluegrass in a big way. It is interesting how the record came out because it captures a little bit of a pivot point. I found myself pivoting in the middle of making this record.

YTM:  Were these songs, generally speaking, written in one creative phase? Or had you been sitting on some of these longer than others?

GR:  Some of both. I realized that I hadn't put anything out in a little while. And I had all these songs that I was sitting on and that I thought had something to them. But it got to a point during COVID where I realized that I had the money, I had the desire, and everyone was available, since gigs hadn't fully returned yet.. That had been the difficulty before: trying to get a band together while everyone was gigging four or five nights a week and then working their day job during the day so there was no way for me to get all the people that I wanted on the record to the studio, let alone for eight hours at a time.

YTM:  When was it recorded?

GR: It was, I think, 2021 through 2023.

YTM: And then released 2024.

GR: Yeah. A lot of that time was just mixing and mastering. A lot of the time was the scheduling thing, trying to get the band, which had, during COVID and during the preceding years, spread out a little bit, so it was tough getting everybody in the studio, but that's what took up a majority of it. It was also me being a little bit of a perfectionist and then getting over that perfectionism.

YTM: It sounds good.

GR: Thank you… Maybe this is my hubris, but I think it would have sounded as good if it took a year, if I had, you know, kind of borne down. It would sound different, I think, but it might sound as good in a different way had I just said, “all right, I'm not rehashing this over and over again.”

YTM: I think the vocals sound very good. Having heard you sing in the same room with me, even without mics, I love how true to life your vocals are - true to your sound - but also they fit right in the mix.

GR: I was really particular about how we did those. Because, as a songwriter, I wasn't planning on dazzling anybody with the instrumentals much. I was thinking ‘I’ve really got to showcase these lyrics’ so I made it a point to put the vocals and the lyrics in a more prominent position.

YTM: Yeah, I think that shows up on the record.

GR: Thank God.

YTM: Are there themes on this record?

GR: Absolutely. The first record that I did, called All I Did, was sort of me becoming an adult. It was stuff that I had written up until my 21st birthday. And it wasn't a super conscious choice to do that, it just worked out.

YTM: ‘Chapter one’ or ‘volume one.’

GR: Yeah, the early history. I had written stuff that I cringed to listen to back in 2016, but that was my first adult record... In retrospect, it was not, I still had a lot of growing up to do.

YTM: I'm told that's kind of the journey.

GR: I fear that that's the case. That has been the running theme in my life, looking back and being like, “oh man, I was so young. I could have done something.” But the themes of the previous record were coming to terms with growing up and with early early adulthood where everything is kind of crazy. 

This one.. I did a lot of growing up from that first record to this one, and I've done a lot of growing up, since recording this record to now. But the main themes of this record, I think, are kind of becoming an actual, capital A adult. And realizing that the early 20s’ thing of going out all the time, and burning the midnight oil are not always the things I would have done in retrospect. Doing these self-destructive things in the name of seizing my youth and for the sake of seizing my youth, arbitrarily because this is the only way that I know to seize my youth or capitalize on my youth, is different than the things that I would have done in retrospect.

Other themes include delusions that I had had about relationships, and my hometown and, the friends that I had made growing up, and coming to terms with what happens in your early 20s to friendships and relationships, not only romantic and platonic but also with your parents and with your hometown, and your family, and your younger self. A lot of it revolves around that. That was the space that I was in, looking back on a lot of years of hard lessons.

1. Come Out Tonight

YTM: I've noticed that “Come Out Tonight”, even stylistically, feels more like the previous record. This is maybe thr dying gasp of that 21-year-old Gage Rhodes here.

GR: Yeah, absolutely.

YTM: It is the peppiest and happiest song, by far. As a musician, that's normally the one we put first on an album because you need your leadoff hitter to have some speed and get on base. I also think it sets the stage for the character development, the plot arc that follows. So this is a good time song, but there's more going on here, isn't there?

GR: Yeah and this is admittedly a sort of a half-baked idea’ but I worked on it for so long that it kind of became a concept album. 

YTM: I wasn't going to use the word.

GR: [Laughs] Thank you! I grew up with Coheed and Cambria, who did, for the longest time, only concept albums, which had an explicit story that you could read and follow. I've always kind of wanted to do one, and I think I sat on this long enough that the themes and the narrative emerged to me.

So “Come Out Tonight” is one of those. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said ‘freshly 21.’ And it was from - I don't remember now if I'd heard another band talk about it or if I saw someone on Facebook had the idea - but this idea of going on dating apps and just swiping indiscriminately to get people to come out to a show.

YTM: Meet me at the Gage Rhodes show?

GR: Yeah, like a weird rogue advertising campaign. Like, “I'm not really from this area, I have no way of meeting people organically. But hey, I'm playing in this place..”

YTM: Positive chaos.

GR: Yeah, and I think the band was up front about it but I thought that was so funny. Also, I think most if not all 21-year-olds have had that peer pressure where it's like, “just come out. Just come out tonight. It's going to be fun. Just come out tonight!” And it is pretty tongue-in-cheek. I wanted to write a fun one that would sort of set the scene.

YTM: I have mapped the concept album in my notes here…

GR: Fantastic.

YTM: And I have this one labeled “fun”, but I also underlined the words, “I got a problem.”

GR: Yeah.

YTM: And I think that you're up to something with “meet me on the barroom floor.” Because that sounds perhaps like it's a hotel bar and you've got to come down to the first floor. But perhaps also “what are you doing on the floor, Gage - Do you have a problem”? And I think you put hints in this one. It’s fun and peppy, but a listener can see through some of the facade here.

GR: Yeah, I’m glad that that comes through. It is something that I started to realize in the bar scene Capital B, capital S…

YTM: [Laughs]

GR: But when I was writing it the shine of the bar scene had started to wear off. It was sort of fun when it's like, “oh, we really burned it down this week, we hit every bar and we saw every gig.” And that’s one thing when you're young and full of life and you don't get hangovers real bad yet. But you would see people that are doing that and they're not gregarious, they're not having a great time like you are…You wonder, ‘what's the difference between me and that guy? I'm still having fun with it…’ But it's one of those things where it's as simple as “just come out tonight, dude, just come out.” ..all right, well, I'll come out for one… And then, you know, you end up…

YTM: You end up feeling like track two, “Hungover You”.

GR: Yeah.

2. Hungover You

YTM: On my map I say that this is a reflection on track one. Track one is “all in”, not a lot of contemplation. In track two, you wake up, you're hungover, you're seeing through all these things… “I used to be cool. No I didn't, I was just drunk.” We also have the best, smoothest use of the phrase ‘logical fallacy’ I've ever seen in lyrics.

GR: I was really happy that I squeezed that one in there. Yeah, it is sort of a response to “Come Out Tonight,” realizing that maybe this wild and rowdy youth thing is either overrated or it was fun while it lasted. You start to wonder what's left after that, without going out. I do the bit on stage that I wrote it with Sam Pugh after I bought a house and had to buckle down and save money. And then I started getting really excited about house stuff, and I wasn't drinking as much, wasn't going out as much. I realized I'm talking to fewer people regularly and I started to - I don't know if lonely is the right word - but I started to notice the absence of people in my life. I realized I had been drinking with this guy every week or every weekend or, every whatever open mic and now, this cat hasn't texted me in three weeks, not a ‘hey’, ‘hi’, nothing. Maybe this going out thing is flawed or not what I was looking for in some way.

YTM: Here in “Hungover You” we see a relationship with alcohol set in parallel to the relationship with this individual. 

GR: If you’re a carpenter, all of your relationships will be filtered through the fact that you are a carpenter. If you're a drinker, they'll be filtered through the fact that, you know, you're a drinker. If you smoke, your relationships are going to be tinged by the fact that, like, you smell like cigarettes. Just 24-7, you kind of smell like cigarettes. And this may be a commentary on myself and my tendencies, but it’s the nature of unhealthy things to drag you back in.

YTM: This song captures that really well.

GR: I'm glad.

YTM: I'd like to confirm your lyrics, Genius says “three sheets to the wind in the sheets.” I had hoped you were saying “in a Sheetz,” meaning the gas station, maybe getting the $2 hot dogs at midnight. This may be my bias here, since I'm from Western Pennsylvania.

GR: [Laughs] That's the way that I'm going to sing it from now on. “Three sheets to the wind in a Sheetz,” Oh my God. 

3. Point Pleasant, WV

YTM: “Point Pleasant, WV” feels like it zooms out a little bit. The relationship between track one and track two is clearer, it seems like “Come Out Tonight” is the night before, “Hungover You” is the morning after. You're not from West Virginia, are you?

GR: Nope. It's embarrassing but as of this recording, I haven't been to Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I have looked into playing the festival there but I think I missed the boat this year.

YTM: They never tell you when the boat leaves. In my plot of the concept album I’ve summarized this one as the speaker asking the entity, the person or substance or feeling, to haunt them. Am I close?

GR: I think it is maybe a different protagonist or the same protagonist maybe many years later or a time later. I do think of it as zooming out. I sort of wrote this one as a joke and then found out later that I accidentally did therapy.

YTM: What do you mean by therapy?

GR: I wrote it truly as a joke. My friend challenge me to write a love song about Mothman and said I'll take that challenge. And then I realized that it kind of mirrored the idea of building someone up in your head, either positively or negatively. And if you do it so often or for so long that you, your idea of the person and the actual living person become two entirely separate things. But you could think someone is so great and put them on a pedestal, or you can think someone is the devil incarnated and in reality, the person is probably just a flawed human being trying to figure it out like everybody else in the entire world.

YTM: But not Mothman, Mothman is worthy of your admiration.

GR: Exactly. And that's the thing, you can build it up so much. And that's, to get into the nitty gritty of it, try to prove that the person is real. So we've heard of Mothman or this person or concept that we’re building up in our head. But Do you have a picture of them? Is it rooted in reality? Is this a delusion? 

I wrote the chorus based off of X-Files, and it came out pretty quickly, but it's also sort of self-aware, like “I know this is crazy, I know that I am maybe not being my most rational right now.” That's the general gist of it: reflecting back and wondering “have I made all of this up?”

YTM: I love the moth behavioral references that you get in at every verse.

GR: The first verse came out and I thought “okay, that's pretty good” then thought “oh, this could be one those moments..” I'll admit that it kind of came together. Moving the lamps in the living room so you can dance…

YTM: I have been listening to this song while doing other things and forgot it was your Mothman song, then hearing that line I was picturing a relational setting and someone dancing around the living room. It feels very intimate and down to earth. Then I remember “oh, right: that's the moth, the lamp.”

GR: I'm really glad it's had that effect because that mirror is kind of what I'm trying to impart, which is how real these things can feel. It can seem so normal to think about, for example, me and this friend always had such great times. Me and this friend, we never argued. We always got along. And then you look back through text messages or something and see that while you were good friends with this person and the relationship was good, it wasn't perfect. You are editorializing.

YTM: The ‘point of view’ line jumps out there.

GR: And I consider Mothman flying over a town.

YTM: I thought it might be their weird buggy eyes.

GR: That too, yeah. But it's also someone that you can kind of confide in. 

YTM: Right, right. Thread the needle there.

GR: Yeah, I'm very pleased with how it turned out because you can listen to it knowing that it's about a person. And you can read it as “about a person” or it can read as about… A non-person cryptid thing.

YTM: An idea, even.

GR: Yeah.

4. Birds of a Feather

YTM: So I remember in Hungover You it says ‘I'll be back if I relapse.’ Is “Birds of a Feather” the relapse?

GR: Kind of. I think it is in a sense, but this is written more about high school parties, reminiscing on times when everybody was confused. Nobody knew what was happening, but we were all kind of waiting for the cool thing to start. We're all going to go to college, or we're all going to graduate college and get jobs. 

YTM: Some arrival point.

GR: Yeah, we're going to cross the capital R Rubicon, and we are going to have made it. And that's when it'll be good, and that's when we’ll all cross the finish line together and celebrate. And that’s not quite how it worked out . In the bridge, there’s the realization that a lot of the people that I leaned on or called friends were out doing their own thing.

YTM: I like this bridge.

GR: Thank you. I think I had written this song pretty close to All I Did when I was still relatively young. All my friends were scattered in the wind doing their own things. And I was feeling that I could just drive somewhere or go to a totally new place.

YTM: And it’s an arrival point, but it's yours. It's separate from this group.

GR: It's finding that there is no finish line, yeah. There is no set distance and there's no medal at the end of it. 

5. Stay Inside

YTM: My first question about “Stay Inside” is, how did this arrangement come together? Your guitar part is actually quite simple, but the texture between all of the parts in this song is just awesome.

GR: A lot of that - I would say most of it - is Crosby Cofod's fault. And truly, the whole record wouldn't be what it is without him and his parts, he’s just a brilliant musician on every level. Guitar, fiddle, strings - nothing would be what it is without him. But yeah, “Stay Inside” is the weird one.

YTM: It is the weird one, yeah. And at your album release show you did a huge jam version of the song, but on the record, it's two and a half minutes. Yet, there's a spaciousness to it, there's a darkness to it. This is one of my favorites on the record, because there's a cryptic dimension to it. You've got this sort of worrying-about-agriculture-at-night vibe going on. Can you tell me about the poetry in this song?

GR: It still feels weird for me to call it poetry.

YTM: Lyrics, If you will…

GR: I'll call them lyrics.

YTM: The words?

GR: They're words, they are definitely words. I was spending a lot of time driving around my hometown, just going on drives. I was still smoking at the time. So, early 20s, chain smoking when something big would happen or if I just felt like I needed to get out and be somewhere else. I’d drive around to a lot of the spots in the area around my hometown on Kent Island. It's my hometown. It's safe. Nothing’s gonna happen.

Kent Island at the time was very safe and still is extremely safe right, but I would park in park and rides near patches of woods and just kind of let the time go by, or I would try to work on something that I was writing, or just kill time and smoke cigarettes in a parking lot. But at some point during that time I was watching a lot of horror movies and it was probably sometime late summer. The air was hot and sticky and it got to be that time of night or late evening where everything kind of goes quiet a little bit. There's no light and I'm hanging out near my car and I realized ”oh.. I'm in the first five minutes of a horror movie right now. This place is a little bit creepy….” I could see my hometown as though it weren't my hometown. 

It was before I had a word for it, before I knew it what I was feeling was anxiety. I didn't fully understand anxiety at the time. I was younger and I didn't necessarily have the resources or people to say “this is a symptom, what you're feeling.” So I would just kind of feel restless and I would go for a drive. But it is that anxious feeling of sitting and feeling like “I'm in danger. What's happening?”

YTM: Very well portrayed in the arrangement, too.

GR: Thank you.

YTM: How do you relate this to the record’s narrative arc? 

GR: I consider it tangentially related as it's sort of the alternative to ”Come Out Tonight,” sort of the “anti-Come Out Tonight.” “Come Out Tonight” is a simple song. I wrote it in open E, and there might be a six chord in there. Maybe… But this one is more complex. There's a lot going on and it's more anxious. And it's all that to say, this is sort of the antithesis. I have to stay inside. I don't want to be going out and doing all these things. I want to stay inside. You like you have to stay inside, too. It's dangerous out there. I don't want to go out because I'm too anxious to leave the house, but I can't stay in the house because I'm too anxious to stay in the house. So I have to go out into the world, but I'm creeped out by the world. And it's sort of an anxious spiral.

6. Best Friend

YTM: “Best friend.” This is an open-tuning song, right?

GR: Yeah, it's in Dagad.

YTM: There's a richness to the details in this song, and yet I don't fully understand how all of the pieces might fit together. In my notes I have “Best Friend” described as an explosion. And of course there’s the Gage Rhodes-ist line on this record, “if you're looking for your knife, well, it's in my back again.”

GR: I've never heard it called the Gage Rhodes-ist line. [Laughs] I have to reflect upon that.

YTM: What's going on in this song?

GR: This song is using a thing that happened, which is a dear friend of mine at the time re-affiliating themselves with a religious group and telling our friend group. We said “yeah, absolutely. We will support that in any way that we can. We love you, we support whatever makes your life better.” And within a week I think we had all been blocked and deleted. To my knowledge that person has never spoken to any of us again.

In your early 20s, a lot of your friends get married and have kids and move away and do all that stuff. So in a sense it's about that, and about “growing up” at a different rate than your friends. But it's also about when you lose a friend by any means, whether it's you outlive them, or you find yourself in different stages of your life, or there's a friend breakup or a regular breakup. I think it's very easy to feel as though you've been stabbed in the back when a friendship ends, or when any kind of relationship ends. A big feeling, whether misplaced or imagined, is betrayal. Like there had been an unspoken contract to be friends forever and they agreed. Sort of the Goonies Never Die thing. Where it feels like, “no, we were supposed to be childhood friends forever, dude. You sold out.”

YTM: Yeah. In the second verse, the line, the abandoned house that you burnt to the ground, what I take from that is that there has been distance in the friendship, so no one's living in the house. And then the other person burns it, destroys it, so now you can't ever get back to the level of closeness.

GR: Yeah.I had never thought of it that way, I just knew that that's a thing that kids do.

YTM: So you were talking about a fictional act of arson.

GR: Yeah and it is entirely fictional - I don’t know of any actual people that broke anything. But I remember knowing that people hang out in abandoned houses when they are teenagers. I can neither confirm nor deny that that's a thing that I did.

YTM: Same.

GR: But, it's sort of a universal thing: there's always an abandoned house. And about 50% of the time, if it's abandoned for long enough, it gets burned to the ground. Whether it's someone staying in there, the fire department burns down, or whatever. A lot of people have that experience. And it befalls a lot of abandoned houses for whatever reason.

YTM: So an unintentional perfect metaphor? 

GR: Perfect is kind, but that's a great way to look at it. I never thought about it that way.

7. God Only Knows

YTM: Tell us about “God Only Knows.”

GR: I think this song was born out of going to too many of my friends' funerals. Too many people that I was very, very close with are dead. If they’re not dead, some of them are in a bad way or have been in a bad way. Right before I wrote this one, I reconnected with a friend from that time period. He's since moved away and is doing fine but it was one of those things.. I didn't realize at the time that we were surviving those times. And a lot of people didn't. A lot of people didn't get off scot-free, as it were. Why were we the ones that.. you know, not even why, but how did we make it through relatively unscathed or not too worse for wear?

YTM: “Do you think they'll forgive me if I change the lyrics?” feels a bit like survivor's guilt.

GR: A little bit. A lot of those cats were the early people that I played music with. But I think people move away when you're in your early 20s or late teens. This was kind of written after people started to come back. They stopped hating their hometown and when they come back and start to reminisce they find immediately that there are certain people that are no longer around. “What happened to so-and-so?” Oh, he's dead, or in jail or what have you. 

It was a crazy feeling that here I am as an adult, near the same playground or whatever that we used to hang out at as kids. But now we're adults and we have to pay taxes. And we're the only ones here because we're the only ones that can be here. It was a crazy feeling, like getting hit by a truck to realize “I am not back then anymore.”

YTM: You have that paradox there in your lyrics between clinging to things and expecting them to fall apart and clinging to things, because if you love it, don't let go. And the mystery that God only knows. Spoiler: the title says all you need to know. You can't really figure out which of those choices relates to which of these outcomes in your life or others.

GR: And the dual notion of this too shall pass. In the good times, hold on because it's not going to be good forever. And in the bad times, you know it's not going to be bad forever. And I've said it before, but you can only cry so much until you laugh, and you can only laugh so much until you cry. But to this day I still feel, and I think it's a natural human feeling, to want to hold on to the good stuff. And you want to hold on to it for dear life. What if nothing good ever happens ever again? What if you've used your allotment of good for your life? That's not ever how it goes. And if you freak out and try to hold on to anything too tightly, you lose it.

YTM: The song does a great job of communicating all that. 

GR: Thank you.

YTM: I might edit some of my compliments out but I do like to express them.

GR: I appreciate it.

8. Like A Plague

YTM: I noticed that the first line in “Like a Plague” is about somebody's number, which calls back to the first line in the chorus of ‘Come out tonight.’

GR: I had been writing this one since before I put out All I Did and it just wasn't ready. It's gone through a bunch of iterations. But I think I noticed that when we were doing the track list. I always knew that this one was probably going to be the last, and I always kind of knew that that “Come Out Tonight” was going to be first. It was one of those moments where I thought “that's going to look very good.”

YTM: It does. I noticed.

GR: People are going to think that I had a whole plan.

YTM: You did! And “West Virginia” creates more unity, this time tying in with “Point Pleasant, WV.”

GR: That got added later on. That got added in the studio, I believe. It's hard to remember when it all coagulated looking back at it. I had been constantly working on it, tweaking it, and editing it. I kept adding more and more to the end because I liked it and because I thought it could hit hard. I eventually had to stop writing for it, but I experimented with a couple of lines to end it on and that was the one that felt like it connected everything. 

“Like a Plague” is on a couple levels, at least for me. There's the narrative that I have for it.. If you want to read the entire album as though it's talking about one person with one person, one person going through one relationship, you can read it like that. But I meant at least that very last line to kind of be open-ended, so it could be about whoever or whatever you're calling ‘Point Pleasant, West Virginia.’ Whatever that ‘Mothman’ is, that's what is happening in this whole song. Or it could be your hometown.

YTM: I noticed that Mothman isn't real and isn't flying overhead. But vultures are real. And they do fly overhead.

GR: Absolutely.

YTM: Which makes the emotions of this song seem much more probable.

GR: Yeah. This one is dense in my mind. Essentially, it's wanting things to be better. When I started writing it, there was the notion that you have to do extraordinary things to make big changes. You have to draw on stuff that you have never drawn on before or tap into something otherworldly. As it evolved it became more about the idea that if you will always pay the price, like a concept in magic or something - you will pay the price. You'll pay at least an equal, if not greater price for what you are given and it will twist around. In every piece of folklore, no one ever ends up happier having taken the easy way or having taken the way that is less work. So the choices that you make for your benefit or for others' benefit will have consequences no matter what. 

“Like a Plague,” narratively, for me, is someone reckoning with not being so full of self-loathing or so self-destructive or just destructive in general and wanting desperately to do good, but everything that you do is informed by what you have done and what you regularly do. So it's like trying to “save somebody” without any of the hard work of compassion. It’s if “saving them” is making a choice for somebody or making a judgment call on what the best thing for a person is without knowing or factoring in their wants.

YTM: “Optical transplant.” We're talking about new eyeballs? 

GR: Yeah.

YTM: Nice.

GR: I like stories, and so the story that I have here is about an old house - and this is totally a fictional thing that I had made up in my head. I think stories are cool. But there was a house that I drove by every day and it was abandoned. Not very recently, but in the last five years before this. It had been abandoned and a roost of vultures moved into it. There’s like a thousand vultures on one big abandoned house that I drove past every day. So I was start imagining “what happened there?” And I went to this idea of someone killing their significant other with witchcraft.

YTM: Okay.

GR: In the story I left it intentionally vague as to whether it was a mercy or if it was just that the protagonist didn't want to deal with it, or thought they were doing a mercy and then realized they shouldn't have taken the easy way out and it has come to ruin them. Like It has changed this person to have loved someone so much. 

YTM: Deep, dark, stormy, relational waters

GR: Yeah, the idea of loving someone so much that you don't want to drag them down with you or you don’t want to let them be in pain. Are you causing the pain? Is the pain external to you? And the question of what a person can do and still deserve to be loved or what it means to love someone and lose them. And having lost them was maybe your fault, or maybe it was completely out of your control. Did you even do any magic anyway? All of that is left to the listener, I hope.

YTM: Wow. That's awesome. I appreciate you talking to us through these songs

.GR: Absolutely.

Like a Plague was released on May 24, 2024