Driving along Route 78 on the way to visit his sister in the hospital in Pennsylvania, Jim Andralis passed a diner embellished with multiple miniature American flags. The image struck the New York City-based singer and songwriter, flipping between already present feelings of grief and anger, dealing with his sibling’s health issue, and societal and political undoing. The patriotic snapshot and the possibility of losing his sister, who later recovered, was enough momentum to push Andralis to write “The Worst Thing” for his fifth solo album Ghosts.
“This song is an attempt to give myself permission to feel overwhelming terror, rage, and despair,” said Andralis, who was also prompted by the then-recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s also an expression of contempt toward the arrogant belief that we can be spared the world’s horrors if we do things right. Writing this song was my way of coping with the chaos and finding a mindset to help me survive.”’
Though Andralis’s sister survived, the experience made him more conscious of who and what he’s lost and all that remains in his life. “I’m lucky enough to be alive at my age with two living parents whom I love,” Andralis tells American Songwriter. “But so many friends of theirs are gone. As long as we live, and hopefully have love in our lives, there will be big losses So it’s hard not to think about that. And for me, it was hard to write about anything else.”
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Ghosts is Andralis’ record of the living and departed. Navigating life and loss, and the connections in between, “5 Minutes” is a tribute to Andralis’ first dog and the unconditional love of a pet, while the striding ballad “You,” honors his late vocal coach Barbara Maier Gustern, who died after being shoved on a New York City street in 2022.
The sounds we make, they all sound like you, sings Andralis for his friend, who also worked with Broadway artists, along with Blondie‘s Debbie Harry, Diamanda Galas, Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre), and other artists throughout her career.
“Not even Taylor Swift can turn a phrase as clever as Jim Andralis can,” Hanna tells American Songwriter, adding that Andralis is “one of the most underrated songwriters of our generation.” Hanna and Andralis with his band the Syntonics, previously shared the stage in New York City at Irving Plaza and remained friends.
On “Manhattanhenge,” Andralis pulls from Esther Matieu’s poem “Absence,” and imagines an afterlife together in New York City, singing with his husband and Syntonics’ bandmate Larry Krone, while the Americana-pulsed “Lake,” a duet with Syntonics’ Julie DeLano, reflects back on the solitude and isolation during the pandemic. “Brooklyn” jumps around the intoxication of love before the heavenly close of “Carnival,” a reminder that he’ll one day reunite with those who have passed.
While writing his 2022 EP, I Can’t Stop Trying, during the pandemic, the songs were coming from a “specific headspace of living quarantined” in New York City, says Andralis. “Everything I wrote then was filtered through that terror and loneliness,” he shares. “I remember trying to convince myself to keep writing even though the songs I was writing didn’t make much sense to me logically. They felt true, though, and I tried to trust that.”
Andralis adds, “I think I built on that trust as I wrote the songs that are now ‘Ghosts.’ I had lost some very important people and found myself writing songs that represented a whole spectrum of what that feels like.”
“Part of what makes me so proud of this record is what it feels like to listen to it,” says Andralis of Ghosts. “I work with talented, sensitive people who really care about the work they put into my music. There’s also something about the sequencing, I think, that makes this record feel like it takes you somewhere.
I’ve come to think of it, weirdly, as its own entity with a 42-minute lifespan, but then you get to start it over if you want.”
Photo: Courtesy of Present PR
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