(many thanks to my friend Kléo for collaborating with me on this piece! I’d tried doing it alone but I was really struggling to put pen to paper – I still struggle to put pen to paper, but now I also struggle with existential dread, and in a manner that is both more elegant and more strange than it was before we wrote this piece together. Thankfully, we wrote this piece on our phones, so no pen or paper was harmed in the making of it. Please donate to Friends of the Congo this holiday season if you have the means, though, because a lot of Congolese miners are being harmed in the making of our phones and other electronic devices – thanks!)

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Miracle on the supercontinental highway
• Chapter Two: I am not a decidedly inoffensive Mexican restaurant chain
• Chapter Three: Christmas cactus, chocolate navideño
• Chapter Four: Milagro en la Avenida Neon Clown
• Chapter Five: Cars were covered in blue snow
• Chapter Six: I also released 4 solo albums this year!
• Chapter Seven: You can dance without worrying about knocking over tables of food

Chapter One: Miracle on the supercontinental highway

A few years ago, while I was preparing for the Spring 2023 Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue UK/EU tour, I spent some time visiting family and friends in Oaxaca, the Southern Mexican state that my parents had moved to in the mid-2010s when they retired from their teaching careers and left New York City after having lived there for much of their lives (and mine!)

And, during that time toward the end of 2022, some of my friends in Oaxaca who are known in part for their seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the Oaxacan culinary world invited me out for lunch.

I say “seemingly” because it’s really impossible for a person to have an encyclopedic knowledge of a culinary culture as deeply rooted, ever-evolving, non-linear, varied, and multidimensional as Oaxaca’s – it’s impossible to really convey it in words, and somehow even more impossible to do so using the English language, or any language that originates in Europe.

It can at least be said that these friends of mine who invited me out for lunch are people who know a lot more than I do about Oaxacan food, Oaxacan cooking and where to go to eat it in and around the city of Oaxaca, along with any number of other cuisines from different regions of México, different parts of Latin America and different parts of the world – these friends had taken me to the best Indian restaurant in North America (which is in Oaxaca), and for some of the best Japanese food I’d ever had (which is also in Oaxaca), and for plenty of the incredible traditional Oaxacan food and delicious food from other parts of México that my family and friends who live there are lucky enough to enjoy on a daily basis.

But their choice of restaurant this time surprised me – this time, my friends invited me to VIPs!

*******

For the uninitiated: VIPs is a chain of restaurants that can be found all throughout México, usually by the side of the road as a person is driving around the country – the VIPs where we had lunch that day is right next to the supercontinental highway that runs all the way from Alaska to Patagonia, and you’ll often find diners passing through from all over the US, Canada, México, and Central and South America at this particular VIPs, along with Oaxacans who’ve stopped by on foot as it’s also right by the city center and sandwiched between two of the city’s most beautiful parks.

But VIPs is not known in any capacity for its culinary prestige – it’s known for its retro, USAmerican diner style decor, complete with the extremely comfortable booths where diners can lounge endlessly, malteadas (milk shakes) that a person can enjoy with a wide selection of mostly not-particularly-spicy or terribly risky food offerings, a play area for kids, and TVs that play a selection of popular music videos from all over the world.

It’s not known for being a bad experience either – Mexicans in general have high standards for food, to the point that even a large and successful restaurant chain cannot operate in México for very long without consistently delivering a high quality of food to its customers. I’ve eaten at VIPs myself plenty of times and I tend to enjoy their food – I’ve even recommended it to friends who are visiting México for the first time, though more for the experience and the atmosphere than for the food itself.

The food isn’t bad at all – a lot of it is pretty good! I really like their milanesa poblana, their enfrijoladas and their pay de límon. Still, it’s not a world-class Mexican dining experience – nor does it claim to be!

Anyway, I trust my friends – so I joined them at VIPs, figuring they’d invited me for a good reason.

*******

And so, we were eating at VIPs – either in late 2022 or early 2023, I don’t remember exactly when – but it was around this time of year, about three years ago.

I also don’t remember what we ate exactly – I think it was still early enough that we could order from their breakfast menu.

And I vaguely remember that I ate something involving cecina enchilada.

I probably also drank coffee at some point. I normally drink coffee at some point during any period of time in which something is happening – if there’s a period of time in which something is happening and I don’t drink coffee at some point in that period of time, something is probably very wrong. I still don’t remember if I drank coffee while we were at VIPs. If not, then I definitely drank coffee at some point earlier and/or later that same day.

And, I also vaguely remember that, while we were at VIPs and especially when we’d just arrived and sat down in our very comfortable booths, I was trying to figure out if I should ask what the story was as to why we were there, or if I should wait for one of my friends to say it first.

But then – probably while I was having a bite of the cecina enchilada – one of my friends gave me the answer without me needing to ask.

“You know – we love VIPs and we always invite our friends here, because it’s completely inoffensive.

They have something for everybody, and you don’t have to have anything you don’t want.

If you want to have something spicy, they have it at VIPs.

If you don’t want to have anything spicy, they also have it at VIPs.

They have all types of Mexican dishes and also things you’d have in a diner in the US.

And they do it all pretty well, and they do it inoffensively.”

I looked around me and I realized, VIPs is somehow so inoffensive that it might not even offend an estadounidense – so much about this place had been carefully and cleverly set up so as to be a place that anyone from any part of the American supercontinent could feel completely comfortable and at home on their way to and/or from who-knows-where and who-knows-where-else.

And in that, there’s something really, profoundly beautiful – the layers of clever harmony, culinary and aesthetic inclusivity and near-universal sense of comfort and of being at home, and the way it’s all woven together into something both very original and very mundane, and in a way that just works.

In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of a lot of what I do in my life and in my work as an artist – and in the way that so many seemingly opposing forces can also inspire each other in any number of unexpected ways, it’s also very inspiring to me.

Chapter Two: I am not a decidedly inoffensive Mexican restaurant chain

At first, it might seem strange for me to say that I’m inspired by this aspect of the VIPs dining experience – since my work is notoriously incapable of bringing that sensation of comfort, of ease and of inoffensiveness that VIPs and its staff perform so flawlessly.

There’s just something about the way I work, and the way I live, that has always managed to frustrate, to terrify, to confound and to surprise people, no matter what I happen to be doing – and, rather than seeing this as something negative, I’ve also been able to take great pride in my ability to incite discomfort in my audience, to the point that it’s become an integral part of my career as an artist.

My best-selling and most popular album, to this day, is one of my least accessible, one of my most experimental, hyper-specific, politically polarizing and definitely one of my least inoffensive releases – my 18 song Christmas album Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue, which was released in 2022, about half a year before my friends invited me to VIPs, while I was visiting my parents in Oaxaca in the months leading up to the Spring 2023 UK/EU tour for that same album.

And I do have plenty of more accessible, inoffensive material that I occasionally bring out when I’m performing at events for which it’s more appropriate! My 2023 album Hard to Break might be the source that I draw from the most for those songs, but if you dig through my back catalog rigorously enough you will ultimately find a number of laid-back, easy to digest songs and instrumental pieces that could easily be played in the background at a coffee shop, at a restaurant, or in a suburban shopping mall somewhere – these songs just aren’t what I’m known for, and they’re not where my heart and soul really shine.

*******

Now I’d say that some of this sense of my work as something discomforting or offensive to a certain idea of established social norms is simply due to the environment I grew up in, and how it formed my identity as an artist and as a person.

My work as an artist has always been deeply informed by how, when I was a kid and a teenager in New York City, the US was in the process of illegally invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and our own military and our own increasingly militarized police, all paid for by our own tax dollars, were murdering over 1 million human beings over the course of about a decade, mostly in West Asia and North Africa, but also in my own neighborhood where I grew up, and all over the world, leaving behind countless living, breathing human beings who are now widows, orphans, and survivors of famine and extreme violence, torture, and other heinous crimes including against some of our own countrymen who were (some still are) infamously held without trial and routinely tortured on Guantanamo Bay, and for none of whom there has been any justice or accountability to this day.

And, how I grew up in NYC’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” era, and I graduated from a majority Black and Latino high school where, long before it was public knowledge that the NYPD was officially instructed to racially profile the New Yorkers coming in and out the subway and the whistleblower Adrian Schoolcraft was infamously put in a psychiatric hospital as an attempt to discredit him when he broke his part of the story on this, me and my white classmates talked with our Black and Latino classmates in our high school cafeteria, and they told us about how they were being stopped and frisked by police nearly every single day on their way to and from school – and we could only really awkwardly relate with something along the lines of, “oh yeah, that might’ve happened to me…once? Ever?” 

Now I have to say – a lot of the predominantly white, middle class cultural scenes that I’ve worked in as an adult could’ve really learned something from the kids I went to high school with. Because, even though we were only teenagers, and we had plenty of our own flaws (as all people do), we still knew to stand up for people in our community.

Whenever white supremacists tried to start trouble with our Black, Latino, Arab, and Muslim classmates, the general attitude in response wasn’t to shake one’s head or engage in sophistry about “the importance of listening to both sides” – the attitude was to fight back against white supremacists, in some cases through physical force – just as my classmates stood up for me when anyone tried to start trouble with me for being visibly neurodiverse or mysteriously “different” in some way.

And we didn’t do any of this out of any allegiance to any particular political philosophy, movement or organization, or even because we necessarily liked each other that much – we did it because that’s what people do: we stand up for people in our community.

*******

It was a huge culture shock for me, then, to jump from my high school experiences to some of the frankly bizarre experiences I had as a young adult, moving in predominantly white music and arts scenes that mostly consisted of really well-off people who’d recently moved to NYC from the suburbs and decided they already knew the city better than we did as people who’d spent our entire lives there, and they as recent arrivals sought to quickly, forcefully and persistently re-make the city in their own image, complete with their strange and reductive but firmly held pre-conceived beliefs about how New Yorkers, especially non-white New Yorkers, were supposed to behave – to see a lot of these same white supremacist, bourgeois culture vulture attitudes then pop up in the various cultural scenes I’ve worked in all over the world in recent years has been a similar culture shock for me, and I’m not even sure how to navigate it.

Far too often, I’ve found that people in the predominantly white, middle class music and arts scenes will take a Liberal approach: to cry about the injustices of the world and maybe occasionally engage in social media posturing about being ready to fight injustice – but then, when asked to do anything in solidarity with anyone, especially those who aren’t white or middle class, the same white people will then immediately double down on their own White Pride and chauvinistic, bourgeois aspirations, pearl-clutching and scolding the person who made the request – these white people will go on and on about how horrible it is to ask them to simply put their money where their mouth is and be a decent human being, often accusing that person of trying to “cancel” them and basically telling that person that they and “their kind” are what’s wrong with this world and are to blame for any and all societal ills – all because that person made the mistake of trusting a confused white person with an opportunity to do a good deed.

To me, the white supremacist attitudes that so many of my peers have chosen to embrace in recent years are actually completely foreign, controversial, and inaccessible – to me, and to plenty of other people in this world, these are the attitudes that are divisive and polarizing.

Really, I have zero interest in “cancelling” anyone, and I fully believe that a lot of these people will ultimately choose to learn from their mistakes, change their behavior and be held accountable and to make serious reparations and amends for the harm they’ve done, as I hope I will choose to as well (since I also have a responsibility to make reparations and amends for my own complicity in the harm done by White Supremacy, as all white people do!) – and still, it’s not an exaggeration to point out that one of the biggest challenges we face today is not only the continued existence of the militant far right, but the insistence on the part of so many white people, across the political spectrum, on choosing arrogance, cruelty, disconnection and irresponsibility, time and time again, really every time they’ve been given the opportunity to move forward, to find the courage and humility in themselves to do something decent, kind, compassionate and normal in this world and be something other than racial chauvinists.

While to some people in the music industry, it’s a liability and a red flag to see that an artist has spoken up in solidarity with our Palestinian cousins, the exact opposite is true to me and to any number of people who also exist in this industry – to a lot of us, it’s a serious liability and a huge red flag when an artist hasn’t used their platform to speak up in solidarity with our Palestinian cousins, especially in the past couple years.

There are some artists I know who are essentially decent people but simply haven’t publicly spoken up – and it’s something we’ve usually had to talk about! In the world that I come from, this type of silence from a public figure during an ongoing live-streamed genocide is a massive red flag, and it usually indicates that someone is fairly committed to prioritizing the feelings of White Supremacists and genocidal war criminals over the lives and safety of our Palestinian cousins. Or of anyone, really – for someone to do nothing in solidarity with our Palestinian cousins in the midst of a genocidal onslaught is usually an indicator that this person is fundamentally loyal to White Supremacy and to fascism, and they would happily throw any of us and any of our friends and family under the bus when convenient.

*******

So I would say that at least some of this strange (strange to me, at least) notion that my work is somehow uniquely controversial, inaccessible, or polarizing comes from how, in the time and place where I grew up – which is in many ways eerily similar to the time we’re currently living in! – so many of the adults around me were doing immense harm to this world and to the people who live in it, and this harm was largely done in the name of racism and imperialism.

And then, specifically as a white person who grew up in that time and place, like many others who I grew up around, much of what I inherited from the world I grew up in was this immense guilt, this immense pain, this immense anger, and this immense distrust – specifically, a distrust of people who look like me, talk like me, act like me and appear to be in positions of authority.

After all, these were the people who were committing the most heinous crimes against humanity – which they’ve not only still never been held accountable for, but in many ways they’ve become even more brazen and ambitious in their criminality, and they’ve gone on to do even more harm to this world than they were doing when I was growing up.

And of course, all of this – all of this pain, this anger, this shame and this distrust, comes through in my work.

It’s not something that can simply be set aside and looked at separately from the rest of who I am and what I do – both because it played such an integral role in forming who I am in this world, and because none of these immense systemic problems have actually been resolved today, nor has there been any justice for the harm that has done, in the name of my own people, to so many people, all over the world.

*******

For this reason, I can see why my work plays a different role in the world than that of the decidedly inoffensive Mexican restaurant chain I mentioned earlier that I also happen to like.

And still, I don’t actually see my work as something really controversial or subversive. I’ve embraced the fact that a lot of people do see my work as such, but, especially as I get older, this notion of my work as something inherently rebellious or shocking just seems more and more strange to me – since my “rebellion” isn’t against having to be a decent human being or against having to contribute to the communities I’m part of in sustainable ways.

My “rebellion”, if you can even call it that, is specifically against the kinds of people who think it’s acceptable, or even honorable, to murder and torture Palestinian children.

I’m not a punk musician because I like wearing a leather jacket – I could easily be an electropop singer and still dress the way I do!

The reason I’m a punk musician and specifically that I’ve spent so much of my life immersed in punk and other countercultural scenes, movements and communities is because I realized I have more trust in the working class as a whole, and especially the most marginalized among us who have the least “skin in the game”, than I do in any of the established figures of authority under White Supremacy, Capitalism and Imperialism.

And of course I could also be an electropop singer and still be who I am, if I wanted to make electropop music.

Sometimes, I do make electropop music!

It’s just not what I’m known for.

If I were known for it, then I’d be, again, a “controversial” electropop singer – like Chappell Roan, who committed the (apparently) unforgivable sin of prioritizing Palestinian life over the feelings of genocidal war criminals, and was scolded by the press for some months before they moved on to some other target for their weird vitriol.

And, I would still eat at the decidedly inoffensive Mexican restaurant chain VIPs when I feel like it – and I’d also still have something more “inaccessible” when I feel like having that. As long as I’m able to afford it that day, and as long as my digestive system can handle it!

*******

Following from there, I’d say that, as a result of my own experiences and where I come from – while I don’t even weigh in on social or political issues all that often – I also don’t feel the need to censor myself in the way that a lot of artists seem to do.

But I’d also say that – while it’s been nice, at least for me, to see the resurgence of loud, courageous, and somewhat principled expressions of solidarity from westerners in recent years, both with Palestinians specifically and with so many others in the Global South who are fighting for their lives and liberation, it’s important to remember that, as westerners, we’re not the main character here – nor are we the authorities on how racialized and colonized people should live, organize, or fight for their survival and their freedom.

And, I’d say it’s much more important that we use what we do have in solidarity rather than what we don’t have – and one thing we don’t have is the knowledge on what’s best for Palestine, for Congo, for Sudan, for China, for Cuba, for Vietnam or indeed for any nation in the Global South.

We do have a lot more money than they do, though, and a lot of our money comes as a direct result of the ongoing colonization and exploitation of their lands, lives, bodies, and labor.

So, if you want to do something helpful this holiday season, please consider giving what you can to relief efforts, spreading the word about them to your friends and family, or even organizing a fundraiser event: I’m recommending Grassroots Gaza, Friends of the Congo, Khartoum Aid Kitchen in Sudan, and my friend Tasneem Mahmoud, her daughter Alma and the rest of their family in Gaza who are still relying entirely on our donations to survive.

And, if you haven’t heard the Palestinian pastor Rev. Munther Isaac’s Christ in the Rubble sermon from a couple years ago, it’s something I’d recommend listening to. It’s made me tear up every time I’ve heard it, even though he comes from a different faith and a completely different background from mine.

If you have heard it, I’d recommend hearing it again, especially if you’re in the West and you’re struggling with the contradictions of celebrating Christmas while the US and its allies are still murdering Palestinians en masse, even to the extent of wiping out entire family trees of some of the direct descendants of those who lived alongside Jesus and Mary Christ in their time:

Chapter Three: Christmas cactus, chocolate navideño

Somehow, a lot of this leads back to VIPs.

A lot of roads lead to VIPs, apparently, if you happen to be driving in México and looking for somewhere to eat.

Like my friends said, it’s the inoffensive option – the opposite of me, and the opposite of a lot of people I know and love, but just as important, in the grand scheme of things and especially in finding balance in the universe.

And finding balance in the universe is one feat that’s become increasingly difficult here lately.

Again, if you’re looking for more of a sense of balance and peace in your inner life and in this world, I’d really recommend donating to Palestinians at the moment. No matter how much you might happen to love my music or the weird stories I tell on my blog – I’m not being subjected to an intentional famine, and I’m not one of the over 2 million Palestinians living in tents and subjected to constant ongoing and often fatal violence from the occupying army and settlers in clear violation of the latest “ceasefire agreement” – so please, donate to Palestinian fundraisers and mutual aid projects if you have the means.

*******

A completely different question with regard to how to find balance in the universe, and one that’s far less serious and has far less wide-ranging implications, is how, as New Yorkers, we’ve become accustomed to celebrating Christmas in traditionally Northeastern USian ways that involve snow and giant trees.

Finding ways to celebrate Christmas in a place without these signifiers has been a bit of trial and error, which again feels absurd to me when I consider how little any of our Northeastern US Christmas traditions have to do with the lives of the ancestors of our Palestinian cousins who lived alongside Jesus and Mary a couple thousand years ago, or how most people celebrate Christmas in warm climates today.

For some of the years after my parents moved to Oaxaca, I’ve also been on tour during the holiday season. I had an incredible time at the release party for my 2017 album Playing Dead, not because of anything to do with my music but because the party was at a venue in Tainan City on the Winter Solstice, where they served this incredible traditional Winter Solstice dish – a hot, sweet stew full of rice cakes that had this delicious peanut paste on the inside.

Shortly after that, I performed an impromptu, unexpected Christmas show that was arranged by a country musician from the Southeastern US who runs a pizzeria in Taitung City on the opposite coast of the island of Taiwan – and as a New Yorker, I’m always inclined to deny that someone from the Southeastern US or from anywhere that isn’t NYC can make good pizza, but the pizza at this place was absolutely incredible and made me forget all the pressures of being a touring musician or having to hear myself speak and sing all the time. It was so cool.

And sometimes, my family does try to celebrate Christmas and Chanukah together. That’s what we did in 2019, the year I recorded Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue. And in 2022, the year the album was finally released.

It’s also what we did last year. We might try and do it again this year – I’ve been staying in Oaxaca to help out around the house while my mom is recovering from the injury that she had when I was last on tour in the UK. We’ll see what we can manage.

We do have a Christmas cactus. This is not a Mexican tradition nor was it a tradition in my own family – I don’t know why we did this, in fact.

I like our Christmas cactus, all things considered. I just have to be careful about the thorns!

*******

But now, it seems that I have a new Christmas tradition to add to my list – and of course, this is where our road leads back to VIPs!

While I was having lunch at our local VIPs one day in November this year, they mentioned to me that they have this new dessert option, specifically for the holiday season. Apparently, they had done an even more elaborate and festive edition of this in 2024, to celebrate the 60th birthday of VIPs itself!

And this sort of thing is exactly why my friends took me to VIPs a few years back.

Because everything about this is somehow both so incredibly USAmerican-coded and so incredibly mexicano – and so incredibly both – and so incredibly all, neither, and none of the above.

The decidedly un-Mexican and specifically un-Oaxacan hot chocolate is especially confounding to me, since Oaxaca is where chocolate was invented. Chocolate was specifically invented by Indigenous people in Oaxaca and specifically as a drink – for many generations it was specifically reserved for the Gods, and only later on did it become acceptable for humans to drink chocolate – so, the idea of this very USAmerican style of hot chocolate with marshmallows and without the traditional combination of spices you’ll normally find in Oaxacan chocolate is actually a bit uncanny.

And yet, somehow, it all seems to work – in the way that things are both always evolving and always remaining deeply rooted in tradition, to the point that we have this unexpected and almost absurd reminder of an idea of Christmas that seems completely out-of-place in this part of the world, but also seems like it might be exactly where it belongs.

I wouldn’t know. All I know is that it completely upends my own personal sense of what linear time and space should be, and it challenges me in a way that’s unexpected – especially for VIPs! – and – being who I am, I like this. To me, it’s some kind of Christmas miracle. I don’t know what kind of miracle it is, or what kind of significance or broader impact it will have – it could be a miracle in the best, or the worst, or the most neutral sense of the word, or something completely different.

Time will tell – or maybe it won’t.

Chapter Four: Milagro en la Avenida Neon Clown

Just as so many roads in México seem to lead to a VIPs, many roads in my own life seem to lead back to Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue, that 18 song Christmas album that still seems to be my most popular and well-received album despite being one of my most inaccessible, polarizing and mentally and spiritually unsettling releases.

Even though the album was released in 2022, friends and fans have sometimes reminded me that there’s a significance in how, as Kléo put it, Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue was made “entirely in the 2010s, and was in many ways an ode to the end of that era, with the main character Ace, the Interdimensional Diplomat, personifying the 2000s and 2010s as the 18 songs of the album saw him gradually disappearing from the face of the Earth, and “swallowed by the rivers of America”, never to return.”

At the same time, the album seems to be affecting my life and the lives of the people around me in the 2020s just as much as it was in the 2000s and 2010s when I was writing and recording it.

During the Spring 2023 UK/EU tour for the album, I met a Belgian artist named France, in Paris, France – in my tour diaries, I talked about this and plenty of other adventures and misadventures from that time:

“The house was so full of people when I played that I could barely move when I jumped off stage, which made it difficult for me to do my usual thing of running through the audience during songs. Thankfully, a Belgian woman named France, who was sitting on the floor up front, was very good at moving around when I did that, to give me a little bit of space to move.

After my set, I got to meet a few of the people who’d come to the show, and the journalist and her partner prepared a delicious rice dish for me and my bandmates and the people who stuck around after the show. They also gave us some croissants and brownies to have the next morning.

I met France, the Belgian woman who had been sitting up front, who invited us to see an art opening with her the next night, our night off. France is a very talented musician and multidisciplinary artist herself, and we got to listen to her album Orphéon later on, which I enjoyed so much that I spilled my drink all over the table we were sitting at.”

And although I didn’t know this at the time, France and I would soon end up collaborating on a number of artistic projects, thanks to the serendipitous encounter we had at the secret show in Paris during the Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue tour. If you read my diaries from that tour, there were a lot of strange and somewhat miraculous things that happened – though whether it was thanks to the album or thanks to our bassist or thanks to France’s cat Arthuro or thanks to my dog or thanks to someone or something completely different or some combination of many factors both seen and unseen, I can’t say. It was definitely an experience.

Chapter Five: Cars were covered in blue snow

After we met during the Spring 2023 tour for Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue, I stayed in contact with the Belgian woman named France, who apparently not only makes incredible music and does great work as a photographer and stylist and in other artistic disciplines, but also coined the term “romantic punk” to describe her unique artistic style, philosophy, and approach – romantic punk is a term that’s more recently been applied to my work as well, since France and I have been collaborating and touring together in recent years.

Everyone will have their own definition, of course, since it’s a living, breathing artistic movement – but I’d define romantic punk as romantic art made by artists whose roots are in punk culture – France has roots in the French punk scene, and mine are in both the New York punk scene and the New York antifolk scene, as both emerged in NYC’s East Village, where I spent much of my teens and early 20s performing at and attending countless gigs with artists from all generations of both scenes – and, through a predominantly romantic aesthetic and approach, France and I have both grown and expanded outward from those roots without ever severing them.

As it’s often been forgotten that Cindy Lee Berryhill coined the term “AntiFolk” (in the early 1980s, it was originally going to be called “New Folk”, and Cindy Lee Berryhill pointed out that it could be cool to call it “AntiFolk” as an homage to the LA punk venue “AntiClub” where she’d been a regular before she moved to NYC), I hope people remember that France de Griessen is the one who coined the term “romantic punk” – it’s really cool when the artists themselves are the ones who come up with the names of their genres and artistic movements, so let’s honor that by giving credit to those who do it!

*******

As 2023 went on, we ended up performing together on a number of UK and European dates of the 7-week tour for my album Hard to Break at the end of 2023.

Shortly after that, France joined me in the studio, and contributed vocal parts, percussion, and keys to my self-titled 32nd album that we released last year, along with an incredible photo series she created about the making of the album.

We also toured together in France last spring, and during that tour we had our iconic photoshoot with the photographer Renaud Monfourny for Les Inrockuptibles in the Délégation Générale Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris. And as one of the ways that she contributed her multiple talents to this tour in addition to her music, France also styled us for the photoshoot in her signature romantic punk style.

Later that same year, we returned to the same studio in Somerset where we’d recorded my self-titled together, and recorded her upcoming album Dawn Breakers, which will be released in February 2026 on the French label Prohibited Records – we’re very excited about the release of this album and we had a great time making it together, at Axe & Trap Studios with the producer Ben Turner who had previously worked on numerous albums of mine including Playing Dead and Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue.

For Dawn Breakers, I contributed vocal parts, percussion, and electric guitar to some of France’s songs, just as she contributed vocals, percussion, and keys to my album we recorded earlier that same year – we took a similarly stripped-down, acoustic approach on this album just as we had with my self-titled, with arrangements more similar to our live performances as solo artists than what we’d normally done in the studio – this was a departure for both of us and a lot of fun to experiment with.

And, just as France had made a photography series about the making of my album earlier that year, I was inspired to draw from some of my earlier history as an underground filmmaker, and capture some video during the making of Dawn Breakers, including some footage in Italy and France during our tour that spring.

However, throughout the past couple years, I’ve had an absurd number of problems with my laptop and a number of other technological issues, even to the point where I was completely unable to edit the footage as I’d been planning to, since my laptop crashed every time I tried to open any editing software for it.

And then, earlier this year, France wrote to me to say that her hard drives had also just crashed, and she’d lost all her copies of the video footage that I’d made during the making of the album.

Now this was pretty sad for both of us – though we were excited for the release of the album either way, we’d been really happy with how the video footage came out, and I’d been looking forward to finally editing it one day.

*******

Months went by, and I’d come to accept that the footage would likely never materialize.

At least we had the album itself to look forward to, which Ben Turner had done an incredible job producing, mixing and mastering, and for which France had done a great job singing and playing and writing the songs, I felt like I’d done a pretty good job with my lead guitar parts and guest vocals, and the folks at Prohibited Records were preparing a great release.

France had told me they’d specifically arranged to have the album released at the beginning of Spring 2026, which I felt was a great idea, since the album is all about new beginnings and it just has that springtime vibe – I couldn’t think of a better time to release it.

*******

So then –

– imagine my surprise when, a few weeks ago…

…out of the blue, I had a message from France!

And this was a message telling me not only that the debut single from the album “Blue Snow” would be released this month, but that the footage I’d made had been miraculously recovered, and the scenes I shot in Italy had been brilliantly pieced together by the editor Mike Borgia into a short film called Blue Snow that would be released on the same day as the single.

I’m still not exactly sure how this happened, but I’m incredibly happy about it and I’m profoundly grateful to all involved in making it happen!

The film is available to watch now online, and it will be screened at the Cinéma du Panthéon in Paris this Saturday, the 13th of December at 11am. More info on the screening can be found on France’s website.

Chapter Six: I also released 4 solo albums this year!

As 2025 comes to a close, I’m also reflecting on this past year and looking forward to the year ahead.

This was an unusual year for me, musically, in the sense that I released a lot of music I’d been digging out of the archives in recent years, and spent a lot of time re-learning and adapting these songs so that I can perform them on future tours – and I wrote a lot of new songs this year for upcoming albums – but due to the sheer quantity of music I’ve been releasing from the archives, I’m staying as far away from a recording studio as I possibly can – I definitely want to wait a bit before releasing more music after all this:

In July, I released The Cut’s That Deep!, which is a collection of never-before-heard, often completely unexpected arrangements of Cannonball Statman songs you might already know from other albums, like an acoustic demo of “Hard to Break” from when I first wrote it during the COVID-19 lockdowns and a lo-fi electric piano version of “F Train Over Brooklyn” from when I was a teenager, with some versions of other tunes that are less well-known.

And then came the 15th anniversary reissue of Wooden Room – Wooden Room is a lo-fi, home recorded acoustic album that I made when I was a teenager, about growing up in NYC and the overwhelming sense of alienation, melancholy, and absurdity in that time and place. Wooden Room was originally released as a limited edition CD, and was released online for the first time in honor of its 15th anniversary, in August this year.

Following from Wooden Room, Space Travel is also a lo-fi, home recorded album that I made when I was a teenager – unlike Wooden Room, though, it’s an experimental rock and roll album. The lyrical themes are similar to Wooden Room and other music I made in the same year, but presented in a completely different style and with lots more electric guitars. Like Wooden Room, Space Travel was originally released as a limited edition CD in 2010, and then reissued online this year for its 15th anniversary, in October, a couple weeks before my 32nd birthday.

And, in November, I released Raridades: El Bol de Xóchi, which is a collection of 60 never-before-heard tracks, ranging from acoustic, folk-punkish demos and early live outings recorded on cassettes in the 2010s, to early recordings by The Band Of The Land in 2002-’04, to fully fleshed out rock and roll arrangements of previously unknown songs, and experimental tracks ranging from ethereal, dreamlike instrumentals to harsh, abrasive anti-music. All 60 of these songs are meticulously ordered from start to finish to tell the story of how Cannonball Statman came to be, and how this project changed and evolved over time.

These releases cover a lot of ground, musically, and ultimately a lot of what’s on them is first and foremost for the die-hard Cannonball fans – The Cut’s That Deep is probably the most accessible of the 4, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something completely different ends up being more popular over time, judging from what happened with Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue.

Chapter Seven: You can dance without worrying about knocking over tables of food

At the end of last year, I also promised you that I’d be releasing little bits and pieces of the new songs I’ve been working on in addition to what I’ve been digging out of the archives.

I didn’t want to release a ton of these new songs because I wanted to leave room for you to process all the other material I’ve been releasing this year, much of which is not new to me but it’s new to pretty much everyone else.

But I did release this home recorded demo of my new song “He had an ice cream shop” that comes with a slideshow of photos of me both on and off-stage in Paris from recent years that go along with the story of the song:

I also released a home recorded demo of my new song “Bad influence”, which is only available as a bonus track that comes with a purchase of the 15th anniversary reissue of Wooden Room from BandCamp.

In addition to that, I did something else that was completely different from anything I’d expected to do this year, but is a new song and a window into some of the new avenues I’m exploring in my solo work – I co-wrote and featured as a guest vocalist on the song “Fuck Me Up” by the absolutely brilliant Scottish singer-songwriter Ben Eales, which can be heard on his new album Do Me Dirty.

Ben just keeps getting better and better with every release, and it was already really good from the start – I highly recommend you check out his back catalog if you haven’t already!

His latest release, Do Me Dirty, is an album full of incredibly catchy, fun and relatable pop songs about some of the more taboo queer experiences that are still seldom discussed, even within many queer communities themselves – Ben’s way of setting these stories to music you can dance to is both impressive and inspiring to me, as I’m sure it is to most people who’ve heard the album.

And again, it all brings me back to where we started this whole piece – with the way Ben manages to make a relatively taboo subject matter so relatable, fun and accessible, I wouldn’t even be surprised if I were to hear a track from this album while I was studying the menu at our local VIPs with my Oaxacan foodie friends who tricked me into joining them for lunch at that establishment a few years ago – which happens to be only a block away from Jardín Conzatti, where I was sitting when I wrote my parts for the song.

There aren’t many artists I know who I could say that about. Though if I did hear Ben’s music in a restaurant in town, it wouldn’t even be the first time I heard an anglophone friend’s music in rotation at a local establishment – Oaxacans have good taste.

My only concern with the idea of hearing his music in a restaurant here is that it’s probably best appreciated in an establishment where you can dance without worrying about knocking over tables of food. In an anglophone country, a restaurant might also worry about certain lyrical content being too risqué or affecting the digestive health of their patrons.

But I am not a restaurant, so none of these concerns are actually relevant to me. I just really like the album.

As for 2026? I still have no idea what I’m doing in 2026!

I’ll probably still be playing guitar and singing songs on stage.

But that’s what I do pretty much every year.

I hope I’ll be a better person in 2026 than I’ve been in 2025, and I hope I’ll be happier and better able to bring joy and catharsis into others’ lives than I have this year.

But these are the kinds of things I hope for at the end of pretty much every year.

I’ve been working on a lot of new songs in recent years, and some of them might be ready to record or release in the coming year – I might also be back on tour if the conditions are right.

But that’s, again, the kind of thing I say at the end of pretty much every year.

Since I’ve finally finished the big series of reissues and rarities compilations I’d been working on putting together from my archives here, I have some free time to think about other things – we’ll have to see what’s doable.

And feel free to get in touch if you’d like to collaborate on a project together – the info for how to contact me is on my Booking page.

In the meantime, I’m wishing you a happy holiday season and a happy 2026, whatever it may bring! I’ll see you next time we’re in the same place – hopefully soon.

– Jesse “Cannonball” Statman