When it came time to write and record his new album, Jonah Kagen set out to do so alone—literally.
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Crammed in an airstream with only his dog for company, Kagen wrote and produced his forthcoming record, Sunflowers and Leather, as he traveled across the U.S.
The move came after a breakup left him feeling “cooped up” and introspective.
“I had moved to Miami, a city that I did not belong, for a girl, which was a horrible idea,” Kagen told American Songwriter. “… I’d always had this itch to get out and just see more than what was just inside the four walls. I knew there was so much that I hadn’t seen and that deeply bothered me.”
When he read Matthew McConaughey’s autobiography, Greenlights, the book pushed him to put his long-held feeling of wanderlust into action.
“He had a year where he went out on the road in an airstream, and I was like, ‘That’s how I’m gonna do it,’” Kagen said. “I just decided that this was gonna be the next at least year of my life. I was gonna move into it, and I was going to make all my music in there and then kind of let it live in the airstream.”
Over the year that followed, Kagen committed himself to living in a way “that would leave me with stories,” both those of “beautiful moments” and “really human, weird struggles.”
The solo aspect of the journey was an important part of the adventure for Kagen.
“I felt like, in order to do something that really scared me and [write] songs that really meant something, I needed to do it myself,” he said of writing and producing the record alone. “That was the truth about the living style as well… I just needed that experience.”
Jonah Kagen on “You Again”
Kagen’s self-inflicted isolation and the existential thoughts that it inspired led to a deeply personal record, both lyrically and sonically. That’s never more true than with the lead single, “You Again,” Kagen’s “favorite song ever.”
“It so aptly described the emotion I was going for. With those more anthemic, bigger songs, I try to match the emotional experience with the sonic one,” he said. “… With this one, it feels like a panic attack. The music feels like what the words are saying, at least to me… It was just kind of this really nice culmination of all the things that I was trying to do with this album.”
The song highlights Kagen’s focus on lyrics and intimacy in his music, a through line on Sunflowers and Leather that was only achievable thanks his “experience being on the road by myself and making this in the airstream.”
As much as the LP, which is due out Sept. 5, means to Kagen, he knows that, once it’s out in the world, it will take on a multitude of other connotations for listeners.
“For me, I just know the perspective from which I wrote it was, I have a finite amount of time on the Earth. I’m afraid that when I die, I won’t have done enough here, and so while I’m here here, I would like to live a life that is beautiful, and also weathered, and lived in, and one that I can sit down at the end of my life and tell all these these beautiful stories,” Kagen said. “However people want to take those stories and make them their own, then it’s theirs.”
Photo by AJ Woomer
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