Tabby wants you to stay creative… despite everything

Long Read

28 Mar

A conversation about his recent album and the challenges of living a creative life.

This conversation has been 2.5 years in the making. But I was a fan of Tabby (AKA Adam) way before that. Specifically, I’ve been keeping up with his work for a decade. I was first introduced to him via a reaction and review of Mac Miller’s The Divine Feminine, and something about Tabby’s approach to music felt refreshing. So I kept watching. For 10 years.

While he alluded to his experience in musical theatre, it wasn’t until 2017 that he first released his first mixtape, White Trash, and right off the bat it was clear that he had something special to offer. The mixtape was full of thundering beats and assonant lyrics, building worlds from the story of Rufus the cat’s spiritual journey to battling the loss of a brother at a young age.

The next year, we were introduced to peachfuzz!, an album addressing the meaning of masculinity and its toxicity, never losing sight of his own privilege. Recorded In My Car was a fun reminder of Tabby’s ability to make you find yourself pondering on the dance floor.

Six years later came the long-anticipated beloved curveball, THESPIAN. The most introspective work so far, Tabby steps away from hip-hop towards “pop through the ages”, as he describes it. Heavily inspired by N.E.R.D, Daft Punk, Jeff Rosenstock, and the like, it shows the incredible range that Tabby is capable of. In the process he pays homage to his theatre roots, both in the clown imagery (tackling his relationship with being an entertainer) as well as in the Scene Change interludes and the campy world-building.

He’s been vaguely aware of my existence through Covid-time Instagram livestreams and on-and-off DMs, but it wasn’t until I strategically posted the USA edition of the Mullet Spotlight that I really got his attention. We scheduled a call, and we talked for more than two hours. This conversation is more than an introduction to Tabby’s incredible work, it’s a real insight into what it’s like to live as a creative in today’s day and age.

I was listening to THESPIAN today and yesterday, and I got curious what was the most natural song that happened.

I think the most natural song didn’t even happen to the studio, but the song MARVELOUS. I wrote that hook in the quickest time. I was listening to a lot of N.E.R.D and wanted to do something similar. That was one of the first songs ever done, before we even planned the studio trip and what the album was gonna be. I knew I wanted to do something like that.

But in the studio, CRYBABY was super easy to write. Once I heard how the instrumental was shaping up, those lyrics came to me immediately, and how to sing it and everything to capture that era. That actually felt pretty organic.

SUPERNOVA felt amazing to make. Fun fact, I laid down the keys on that song, at least the main backing melody, that was me on my Casiotone. I don’t have any sort of instrument training outside of alto saxophone in middle school and high school, but I bought that just to fuck around with and teach myself any sort of melody. That’s one of the things that I came up with just at home, and I was like, “oh, this would be a cool 80s melody”, and I just recorded it so I didn’t forget it. Then I brought it over to the studio and played it and they built off of that, which felt really cool.

Usually my writing process is first the hook or something will come to me melodically, and then I kind of fill in the blanks. The last line of the chorus is always hard for me. That’s when I start getting super perfectionist and I need to have it sound amazing, it has to be the perfect ending line. I sit there for hours thinking of it. But then I think Trevor or Zach was the one who thought of the spelling it out stuff afterwards. The guitar solo didn’t happen until 2 years later when it got in the hands of someone else. The first rendition of that was actually Zach, the guy who engineered the song, did a mouth guitar and was gonna tweak it to sound like a Daft Punk vocoder, which would have been cool too. But the guitars, Nate fucking crushed it. The guitar is so sick. He shredded that.

That song is one of my favourites, for sure. Before you dropped this album, I knew it would be different to peachfuzz!, but when it actually came out, I was so surprised by the range. Because peachfuzz! had a very clear A and B side. It felt more outward looking, and THESPIAN is very intimate. Was the recording process different or was it just where your mind was at?

The technical side was similar for me. It’s kind of funny, every stage of the recording studio Carpet Booth that I usually go to, with every album I’ve made with Zach, the studio has been different. With White Trash we were in this small office space when he was just renting a little 20x30ft room that he turned into a studio in a strip mall kind of situation. And then for peachfuzz!, he was successful enough to pre-purchase a church building where Carpet Booth is now. He does so much stuff. If you’ve heard of the Gully Boys, he does them. Yung Gravy records are at Carpet Booth, because Yung Gravy is also a Minnesota native. Super funny, my record is right next to his in the hallway.

But yeah, White Trash was in a small space, peachfuzz! was in the basement of that church because the upstairs had yet to be renovated. Then the renovations happened, so THESPIAN was the first time we could do the full range of his upstairs area, which is where the church pews used to be, it’s a big open room with these gorgeous acoustic panels and everything. And then there’s a smaller, more intimate vocal room where the walls are lined with wood tree trunks for the sound-proofing, and it’s just sick to be in there, too. It’s a blast to record with Zach regardless, because he’s so genius when it comes to every level of music.

But as far as the recording process, it was the most different because through peachfuzz!, the songs lover boy and MASKOFF! were the two songs that we made from scratch. MASKOFF! was all digitally made. It was just Zach and me, and he would lay down real instruments and everything, but that song was built from the ground up, and so was lover boy with Author, the band who then helped me record all of THESPIAN pretty much.

So that song inspired me for the next project. I was already thinking ahead, and I really wanted to make an album how we did that song, where everything is made in-house, for a week, and then we just come out with what we have. That’s how THESPIAN started and ended, pretty much, where nothing was pre-made. I had a couple ideas, and there was two different sessions where Trevor and I spent several nights at the studio and we left with about 12 songs.

As the months went by after that, Zach was getting busier and busier, and mixing wasn’t really moving as quick as we wanted to. So in an effort to make Zach’s life easier and to get the project moving, we went with a different mixer. Then ideally that opened up the opportunity for me to add some sounds that I felt were missing.

But then [chuckles] for better or for worse, everything kind of went to shit after that and it became nearly three more entire years before this thing came out. I guess just the process itself entirely was different based off of what we’d done before. With White Trash from peachfuzz!, I was working with olsc. He would make the beats and then I would write for the beats, then I would bring both those things to Zach, and then we would go from there. This is the first time where we made everything from scratch. We just bounced around ideas, we would start and end early and late, all that. It was definitely fun, but stressful. If I ever do it again, I need to be a little bit more prepared lyrically, so I’m not just putting out lyrics that I just think of on the spot and don’t workshop more. But it was good.

It’s just the mixing process was… it’s the first time an album came out and I wasn’t excited about it, to be honest. I was hyped that it was done, but since it had been so long, there was so much bullshit back and forth with why it wasn’t coming out, and excusing behaviours that I probably shouldn’t have, arguing; it just was not a happy process, not streamlined. I felt very sidelined and it just sucked.

So by the time it got out, it felt relieving in the sense that I didn’t have to think about it anymore. Not in a way where I wasn’t proud of it, it is amazing, the place it got to despite everything. But the process itself was so arduous that it’s really hard. That’s why you don’t see me promote this thing, even though I know I should, it’s so, so difficult to gain back that momentum that I felt. For as long as I stayed resilient, it started leaking through, and it just had me thinking, “is it supposed to come out? Am I paying for some weird karma from something? Why the fuck is it so hard to get this released when everything else I’ve done has just kind of come out?”

It’s been truly difficult to go back to this, even though everyone is super supportive, and I’m sitting here with no energy towards it, and I guess I just don’t know what that means for me. I don’t know if it’s just depression about it, if it means that deep down I don’t feel like this is good enough. I don’t know what the real blockage is. All I know is that the whole process burnt me the fuck out and it’s so hard to jump back on it.

There’s so much of what you’re saying that I relate to. But you’re always the one that’s the hardest on yourself. It’s advice as old as time, but for example, one of my favourite songs (Nude, by Radiohead), took 10 years to be made. One song took a decade. I always say that music is inherent to the human experience. You can’t separate it. When you put aside all the marketing or social media, music is such a personal thing to everyone, and you can put as much marketing as you want behind something. If it sucks, it won’t last. Whereas if it resonates, you could pay an entire team and they couldn’t replicate that feeling. When art is as honest as possible, that’s the whole point. Humans were born to express ourselves.

What you’re saying is genuinely really inspiring to hear after I just said all the shit I said. So thank you for your outlook on that because it’s super important and really, really cool to just be reminded. You’re absolutely right, what’s so beautiful about music and what’s so tragic about what is happening—music’s not dead by any stretch—but how playlists are so popular, and everyone complains about Discover Weekly being bad because there’s the same songs over and over. But you have control over that. You can go seek out what you want. You do not have to depend on the app telling you how to live your life.

It's the same with everything. What's happening right now, which is so goddamn tragic, is nobody seeks any single thing out for themselves fucking at all. It’s all about optics and opinions and competition. Everybody forgot how to be just real. Just stop giving a shit about how people think about you, no one actually thinks about you, and that's a good thing, that a beautiful thing to realise.

— Tabby

(For the sake of brevity, I have cut out the tangent in which we start talking about existing offline and using your free time to practice silly voices in the bathroom.)

You did some voice acting right?

It’s something I made the effort to do. I was just missing acting onstage but there’s no opportunity to fit it in my life. So, in an effort to capture that feeling again, it’s something I wanted to try to do. It was frustrating because a lot of the stuff that I auditioned for, I would get responses from or the videos that I would post would do more numbers than I thought they would, that was cool to see. But then it’s just every single one I did, it’s nothing. And that’s a big part of that world, so it’s nothing that surprises me, but there was a big project I was super excited about that went fucking AWOL for a year. It's just been weird.

It was hard to post those things too, because I know it was in the midst of, “where’s the album?” I want to do so many things. I wanna act, I wanna write music, I wanna design, I wanna draw, I wanna teach myself instruments, I wanna teach myself production. I feel like I could find a home in so many things. For a time—and what I hope to one day reclaim—music was hitting a lot of those things at once. I could write, I could make music videos, edit the videos, design the covers, design the merch. I was doing all the things I liked doing in one package, and that’s why it felt super good to keep doing. But with this last record, it just all kind of got lost. Now I feel like... am I supposed to do that? If this was so hard to do, what is life trying to tell me right now? I know it’s not necessarily saying to give up, but what does that mean for me? What should I pursue that just comes more natural than whatever the hell I just went through?

It’s such an incredibly personal and scary thing to do, but when you know your intuition and your gut feeling of why you keep doing what you’re doing, then all the anxious distracted voices are just static, not the actual focus.

I have that same voice for all of the shit that I do want to do. [Finishing THESPIAN] was a completionist thing, because unless I am up against a wall, I do not quit. If I’m throwing in the towel on something, it is because I threw all my energy at it. I guess I accidentally threw in the towel [with THESPIAN]. I didn’t expect to throw my hands up and be like, “Oh, my God, I can wash my hands clean. I’m done.” The thought of needing to pay attention to it more, despite the positive criticism and all that, it’s just hard.

What’s interesting is that when White Trash was done, I was already thinking about peachfuzz!, when peachfuzz! was done, I was already thinking about the next thing, and now I’m kind of just like, what the fuck is the next thing? I have ideas, but it does begin with learning a bunch of stuff.

I get inspired by so many things, and then when I go to do things, that burnout kicks in, and I feel like I’m not giving THESPIAN a chance. The second I try to start something, I feel guilty about not doing that. It's hard to know the through line of what to pursue, I guess.

I want to make what I want to make for fuck's sake. And if it sounds a little worse for it then at least it’ll sound more authentic. I like collaboration, but this whole thing was a learning experience that I need to stick to those people who I know, people who I can trust, and first and foremost stick to me. I need to be selfish when it comes to this.

READ MORE | Are subcultures dead?

The most fulfilling projects are those made with an almost childish sense of creation, where you go in your room and you draw some weird shit and then present it to the world just with pure pride and excitement.

That’s what I want to capture for any potential future stuff. It’s funny, I also saw the Joji track list just dropped today for his next album, and that’s the life I want where I’m not posting shit until something’s done. Or Fiona Apple, where you’re radio silent for years, and then just, boom, and people freak the fuck out. That seems so sick. I know you have to really establish yourself for that.

All of the ideas I have are big, and to go back on what we were talking about, the thing that motivated me to finish THESPIAN outside of just not wanting to quit is that for better or for worse, I don’t know what else to do. My famous joke is that if there is a God, he made me good at everything that does not make me money or is not sustainable [laughs]. Everything I love and I’m passionate about is a huge risk, and I combine all of them. But at the end of the day, if I’m entertaining people or making someone feel less alone, that’s all I want to do. And music, or just entertainment in general, is the most confident I feel in doing so.

— Tabby

What’s very important to keep in mind is to cut out all the noise. I say this to you, but I say it to myself as well, just forget what everybody else is doing, just focus on what resonates with you and that’ll always come the most naturally. It goes back to being a kid drawing in your room, and maybe it sucks. Chances are it sucks. Everything I did when I was 14, that’s never seeing the light of day. But I learned and it was fun and fulfilling.

[Laughs] That’s what’s exciting about it, too. You’re never really failing. Art is too subjective for me to really care about what people think about it. It sure sucks to not find your audience, and if people don’t resonate or are not as excited about it as you, it’s not the coolest feeling to feel. But at the end of the day, if it’s something that is true to you, that’s the best place to be.

That’s how the best art happens. I was watching a YouTube video that touched on the fact that the best painters, movie makers, authors, musicians, and so on; their most respected work was what they did just for themselves. Because then you get to that human part that is universal as opposed to trying to write some boardroom TikTok clip song that’s going to last 5 minutes. But obviously this is way easier said than done. Being a creative person is rough.

Hell on earth. Wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. But at the same time, I would recommend this to everybody. I wish I loved banking or something. Oh my god. Can you imagine? If I just knew how to code, I wouldn't give a shit.

(At this point Adam and I went on a Love-Is-Blind / coding-related tangent, then found our way back to the topic).

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the forever vacant feeling as an artist [laughs], just something light and not deep. How fulfilment as an artist is extremely hard to get and that no one should ever do it, but then also should do it because it’s fun. No big deal.

I wish I could just tell everyone, “just follow your dreams and you’ll be fine”, but if anybody is gonna give it a fair shot at making music, they need to know what they’re getting themselves into.

100%, and there’s so many levels to that. For me, the most realistic part about making any art is just accepting that people aren’t gonna like it. It is straight up going to be a 50-50 split of people who really, really like it and people who really, really hate it. Especially now, the in-between people will not tell you. The only people who are gonna tell you are people who love it or who hate it, and you don’t need to appease that side at all because you’re not gonna change their mind. I’ve learned that from experience too.

I’m in the wheelhouse of—and this is coming from someone who is truly burnt out and lost—I think it’s truly never too late for a single person on earth, especially now. And you should do it especially now, because there’s so much shit going on it’s beyond the point of escapism that people require. People need to feel human shit more than ever. So much of it is drowned out by any ecosystem on the internet, by any Al shit, and that’s why I like to be able to share, in an effort for relation. That’s so important, and if you can realistically support yourself doing that, then do it.

This is something I’m trying not to fall into the trap in too, but there’s nothing worse than nihilism. Cynicism is fine, but once it becomes nihilism, you’re kind of fucked. You have to get yourself out of nihilism, because that is the exact place where both your inner and outer demons want you to be, that is exactly where you’re the most vulnerable, the easiest to eat up. That’s a corner that I really don’t want anyone to be in. Even if it’s for good reason, there are ways to get yourself out of that.

Life is so open ended, you can make it anything. You can still be affected by what’s going on, it’s not a call to ignore what’s happening around us, but you gotta press on if you want to see a difference somewhere. Big global things are gonna be big global things all the time. What can you do to control and assist your environment so that the people around you and yourself can exist while things are going on? Or work towards a better way for those things to stop? Or just to help anybody? That’s all that needs to be focussed on right now.

— Tabby

It’s true but it’s incredibly hard to act on, because there’s so many external factors that maybe aren’t actively trying to get you in that bad mindset, but are incredibly successful at it. It gets easy to slip into “no one will see my work so I won’t do it”. But I saw the question somewhere that asked, what would you do if no one else was watching?” It’s a question that everyone can benefit from asking themselves.

What would you do without anybody looking ever again? What's the first thing you think that makes you think of?

Me? I don't know. I just really love talking about music. Like things like this, I could do forever.

That’s sick! Music journalism is an incredible profession, and I would say—to relate to the thing I opened this conversation up with—it’s like necessary to have a real person talk about music in a real way. Not in the scope of trying to review shit, or sound smart, but: what does the artist feel about their art? That’s so important.

Lately people are also just listening to the music, or watching the content, the show, and they're not thinking about who’s in it why is it being made, what are those specific themes… to a large scale, obviously there are still people doing that, of course. But the drive to ask questions and be present with things is so missing and vacant from everybody.

Even as a music listener, these things can be as small as listening to an album instead of a playlist. You don’t have to change your life. You don’t have to boycott Spotify. Just click “album”.

I guess in my time on YouTube I tried my hardest to understand the perspective of why someone made what I was listening to. I did not jump to, “Is it good? Is it bad?” That type of music listening to me is almost like a poison. Even if musically you don’t relate to what you’re hearing, at least you’ll be able to appreciate what the person who made it did for it. That’s what interests me: why did they make this? In a positive way. I just want to understand where this person’s coming from and really listen to what they’re trying to say. It doesn’t even have to be verbatim what the lyrics are saying, what does the song convey to you? What emotion are they trying to express? Insert your own definition. You’re never gonna really know. For fun, make up your own shit. Write your own narrative on what you’re hearing, because that makes it more interesting to listen to, even if you’re not gonna return to it. Be curious, bro.

I think making music kind of killed my channel in a sense because it unlocked my brain. Just experiencing the entire process front to back and seeing every step it takes. I’m like, “well, if my process is this, then every artist ever, no matter how simple you think their shit is, there are a billion steps you’re not knowing at all”. There’s so many layers to things that people put out that gets immediately absorbed as simple. It was so boring.

(At this point in the conversation, Tabby’s cat Olive demanded some attention and we rightfully discussed her zodiac sign. Gemini. We then found our way back to discussing BULLHEAD (because Taurus). Bear with us.)

That was a big I’m-letting-people-down song. My favourite point on that song is the, “it’s end of the world as we know it” spoken section interpolation. I was impressed to hear how the mixer did make that song sound really fucking cool, and just made it sound like something you would easily hear in 2010 or something.

Your vocals sounded very Jeff Rosenstock.

Yay! That’s exactly who I was trying to emulate. That song was inspired directly by his music. I listened to him today, actually, for the first time in a while. I fucking love Jeff Rosenstock.

That’s something too, if the solo stuff doesn’t work, I would fucking love to be in just a yelp-y band like that, just a bunch of people in their late 30s or something, singing about the world. That’d be so sick. Because then at least I don’t have to worry about instrumentals. I can just sing or write or something. I would love to be making songs from scratch with a group of people.

— Tabby

It’s still fascinating to me how music happens from scratch, it feels like magic to me.

[Laughs] It’s something I can’t explain either, a melody will come to my head and then... It’s literally just words start appearing. I don’t know how else to describe it. The first sentence pops up, and then I’ll continue what I just said in my brain and see how that can either be point blank what I’m talking about or how can I twist what I just thought of to fit something I do want to talk about. I try to match the lyrics to the vibe of the song that I’m hearing.

BACK TO SHOWBIZ was so easy to do that too, because the instrumental was so zany and cartoony and sounded like a overly sarcastic song, and it was just easy to be cynical. The vibe is just when you’re done lamenting and you have to laugh at what the fuck is going on with your life, you’re just like... I don’t know, fucking whatever. That one’s definitely a top for me too. And I’m surprised at how well it fit in with the other tracks.

What’s impressed me about the whole process is how all of it really goes into the next thing seamlessly. No song sounds too out of place. That’s something I’m very proud about this record. I meticulously made the track list feel seamless. With the effort of making the first half of it sound like older pop, and then it started becoming more and more synth-y and futuristic as it went on. Pop through the ages, is how I described the record while it was being made, because [the song] THESPIAN is straight up musical theatre, which is the roots of the record.

I also wanted that song to have a Jeff Rosenstock moment of breaking down and scream singing. I like to have these moments, like TWO WEEK’S NOTICE. I thought would be cool to have this visual army of people fed up with shit and marching down the street. That whole outro of that song, too, was made by accident. Zach was just fucking around with a melody he found, and I thought, “this kind of sounds like a fucked up Irish pub crawl thingy”. So I thought it’d be cool to do that. But as far as a whole package, I’m really proud of how all of that blended together.

The crying in THESPIAN leads right into CRYBABY. That was on purpose, right?

Oh, yeah, 100%. I wrote CRYBABY first and then the THESPIAN song was something I came back in with the second sessions. That gave me enough time to realise, “I’ll just cry at the end of it, and then I’ll just lean into CRYBABY. Duh”.

Was the clown imagery just to fit in with the campy theatre pop atmosphere or was that just for fun?

It’s the visual I had the entire time, even before starting this process of using the sad cloud motif, because that’s how I was feeling. It was right at the cusp of, “do I pursue the music thing, or the YouTube thing”. As an entertainer you hit that point where you feel like people are giving a shit and you just perform. The sad cloud imagery was this response to that, me finding a way to make that music. I realised l’ve never tried to do musical theatre stuff, I haven’t been in theatre in a while, it might be cool to be inspired by that part of my life, because it is a huge part of my life that I’ve never talked about or really done, outside of skits for the videos I was doing. So it just kind of came naturally. There’s a scrapped music video now, and I had whole plan for this record, and nothing happened for it.

You never know, I mean, nothing stops you from doing it way later.

I know… I mean, I started thinking about the clown shit for me, and then the album took a while, then all of a sudden I’m seeing every goddamn artist ever doing clown or performance shit. If there’s some energy bubble, I’m tapped the fuck in. I know that. I can confidently say that I’m tapped into something, and I’m not saying it all that I’m the inventor of anything I’m talking about, but I have these ideas, I have these drives, I’m not seeing it trending anywhere, and then I don’t put it out quick enough, and then I see everyone else do it. How did that just happen? I just missed my window, and now when I’m putting it out it looks like I’m following something. It’s not happened every time, but the clown shit was egregious.

— Tabby

It’s like getting professionally blue balled.

That’s exactly how it feels. Or I can’t get my shit out, but then I see everybody else easily do what they want to do. I’m obviously inserting the assumption that it’s easy for them. But I don’t know. It’s just... fucking nuts.

But anyway, what I wanted to say before the clown tangent is my dream. I can so vividly see myself performing on the SNL stage for example, any of the songs that I just put out, and then also being in it. I can visually see myself in that environment, it does not sound crazy to me to think about.

What I don’t see myself is as a stadium artist, I don’t really want that life. My dream at the highest level would be like a Mac Miller level, someone who’s really, really known and really well respected and just cool, but he doesn’t have to go into hiding to live. I felt the stress level at 100,000 YouTube subscribers.

But that’s why I still hang [my YouTube plaque] up, because it’s a reminder that it’s what I’m meant to do in some capacity. It’s just visions that I see, and I don’t expect it, I just see it. And I want that. I want to achieve that. That’s what drives me, but then also what holds me back because I feel too much pressure from that same vision.

After I managed to squeeze in yet another Fiona Apple mention, Adam politely told me he had to head out. It was a beautiful and refreshing conversation about things that I feel almost every creative can relate to: having infinite interests and struggling to make them work, all while navigating algorithms and trying to keep a sense of certainty that this is what you’re meant to be doing.

If you’ve not listened to his music, do yourself a favour and play it today. You’ll be impressed by his lyricism, range, and theatricality—even before THESPIAN and even beyond music. The struggles he discusses in feeling lost is purely an indication of his range of abilities: he’s a singer, a rapper, an actor, an illustrator, a clothing designer, and a very nice person (that’s also a skill). He lives and breathes the term “creative”, and he really is someone to keep an eye on.

Interview