The Albuquerque-based musician recorded the introspective I Can’t Believe They Invented It! at The Unknown in Anacortes, Washington
A dog was clearly audible through the computer speakers as I Skyped Tristan Puig from their home in Albuquerque. It’s Mimo; Puig’s had him for about three years. By sheer coincidence, he looks a lot like the dog on the cover of Puig’s single “From A Dog To Its Master,” which the singer-songwriter first released before buying the dog but which only last year found its way onto their debut full-length, I Can’t Believe They Invented It!
“From A Dog To Its Master” is about a dog who loves its master, who couldn’t care less.
“There’s this school of thought that dogs aren’t capable of feeling love and that any affection they seem to be showing towards you is because you’re the provider of its food and shelter and things like that,” Puig says. “I don’t think it’s true, but I love the idea that it could be. The most romanticized thing to us as humans is probably dogs.”
I suggest to Puig that in order to keep yourself happy, you have to think sort of irrationally. They agree. For instance, Puig is an avid baseball fan who roots for the Dodgers. Given their last few seasons, Puig argues, being a fan requires a somewhat irrational way of thinking.
“In order to love anything, I guess you have to think a little irrationally,” Puig concludes. “And I’m willing to make that exception for baseball, I’m willing to make that exception for dogs, and I’m willing to make that exception for music.”
Puig was born in L.A. and spent most of their life there before moving briefly to Prague last year, where they worked as a booking agent for other artists. It was an impulsive decision (“I wanted to take myself completely out of my element,” Puig says), and during this time, they barely played any shows and largely removed themselves from the machinations of the music industry.
“I think about how little of the time and energy I’ve dedicated to music has gone towards songwriting,” Puig says. “So much of it goes towards booking my own shows, booking other people’s shows, making merch. When I write songs I’ll write one, two, three in a week, then I won’t write anything for eight to 10 months.”
Prague was a creative boon for Puig, but Albuquerque represents a welcome return to playing shows — and a welcoming scene.
They’ve already attended a number of meetings among local D.I.Y. musicians on “how to keep people safe, how to combat abuse, how to keep drugs as minimally dangerous as possible.” Puig’s noticed that Albuquerqueans tend to thank their bus drivers, which they believe is a strong indicator of a town’s moral character. And the shows Puig’s attended so far in Albuquerque are more their element than those in Prague or L.A.
“The music was really great,” says Puig. “It was interesting and introspective. House shows a lot of the time in a lot of places are just exclusively for getting fucked up to — well, good music, but kind of loud, instrumentally-based music, whereas this was a little bit calmer and more my speed.”
Introspection is Puig’s M.O. Puig is a self-proclaimed “bedroom-pop” musician, and though this term usually evokes sedentary synth wizards hunched over laptops, Puig is more interested in the intimacy the form implies. “If I recorded something in my bedroom it would not sound shitty in the way it’s supposed to — it’d just sound bad,” they joke.
Puig’s songs are close-mic’d, starkly arranged, and based on acoustic guitar. On I Can’t Believe They Invented It!, named for a Simpsons gag, their vocals are near-constantly doubled by singer Kelsie Grissom. They’re not love duets, though. Her voice is more like a faint, misty presence hovering near Puig’s own. Think Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris, or Rachel Ware’s presence on the Mountain Goats’ Sweden.
I Can’t Believe They Invented It! — the “they” in the title can be plural or singular, Puig points out — was recorded at The Unknown in Anacortes, Washington. This is a windswept island town off the coast near the Canadian border, and it’s the first time Puig says they’ve been “starstruck by a place.”
Anacortes has a rich indie-rock legacy thanks to a cabal of musicians led by Phil Elverum, best-known for his Microphones and Mount Eerie projects. Though Elverum usually trades in awed, animist odes to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, his last two albums — 2017’s A Crow Looked At Me and last year’s Now Only — were spare and emotionally intense accounts of his grief following the death of his wife.
Puig cites these as among their favorite recent records, which isn’t surprising given how willing Puig is to dive into raw and uncomfortable patches of emotion. I Can’t Believe They Invented It!, per Puig, is about “trying your best to be the best version of you and it not really being enough.”
Opener “Balance,” for instance, is about two people who nearly let each other drown. Each swears they’ll never let it happen again; “I don’t think I believe you,” the protagonist sings. The lyrics to each song on the record are written in a single block of text, free of line breaks, like a poem. They’re the rare lyrics that read as well on the page as they sound when they’re sung.
One major theme on the record is what Puig described as “the futility of monogamy.” But Puig is quick to point out they’re not justifying any promiscuous habits.
“I crave functional monogamy so much,” says the singer-songwriter. “But, evolutionarily speaking, monogamy is just nonsense. It’s the opposite of how our predecessors have done things for thousands of years, and it hurts that monogamy — alongside art — has made me the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Another irrational thing we think to ourselves to stay happy.
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Feature image by Tristan Puig
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