(This is part of the Selected Interviews series. More of these can be found in the Words section!)

Editor’s note: It would be helpful if I start this off with some context as to what antifolk is, and what Cannonball’s relationship to it is!

So – Cannonball Statman’s live performance career began at block parties in Brooklyn, New York around 2002, when he was 8 years old and a member of various local bands – he wrote, recorded, and released a fair bit of music in the decade that followed, in addition to his live performances and guerrilla filmmaking, photography, and poetry.

But this was the sort of work that was so underground that hardly anyone knew about it until later on – there were a handful of “collectors” who managed to get a hold of his work, and then there were his neighbours, schoolmates, friends, and family who would occasionally turn up to the gigs – but this is not exactly what you’d call a career.

The way Cannonball finally broke out of that mould of performing to a small audience of family and friends was through his chance encounter with a little-known multi-generational New York City arts movement called antifolk – in the year 2012, when a drunken poet randomly accosted him after a performance at the Brooklyn venue Goodbye Blue Monday and told him – “hey, sorry, I’m a total asshole, and I was talking with my friend the whole time you were playing, so I wasn’t listening to anything you did – but you’re antifolk – and I think they’d really like you at this place called the Sidewalk Cafe.”

Cannonball had absolutely no idea who this strange drunk man was – nor had he ever heard of this thing called “antifolk” at the time.

And he’d only vaguely heard of the Sidewalk Cafe – one of the few original fans of his first band, The Band Of The Land, was actually a musician on the Sidewalk scene who had kept herself in the loop about his work from 2002 onwards and had even tried to get him booked for a gig at Sidewalk in 2011, when the club was undergoing renovations and not accepting booking proposals. After that, he basically forgot about the Sidewalk Cafe.

Until about a year later, when, after this chance encounter, he bit the bullet – heeding the advice of the inebriated stranger who would soon become a close friend of his, a then 18 year old Cannonball Statman attended the Sidewalk Cafe’s Monday night AntiHoot open mic, where he performed his songs “Tiger” and “Horse” – and was immediately invited by the host, Ben Krieger, to do a proper gig at the club.

—

From 1993 until its closure in 2019, Sidewalk Cafe was the home of the legendary antifolk scene, which meant it was a second home for antifolk artists – just as antifolk was an extended family for these artists.

The antifolk scene had actually started out in the early 1980s, and lived at several other venues before moving to Sidewalk in 1993 – the reason this scene existed in the first place was primarily because NYC’s West Village folk scene that had given rise to artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs in the 1960s had become incredibly stale, gentrified, and commercial, making it inhospitable to the next generation of folk musicians, who were more inspired by punk ethics and lo-fi sounds.

And indeed, in the early 1980s, the new generation of folk musicians decided to have their scene be located not in the West Village, where NYC’s original folk scene was, but in the East Village, where punk had been invented less than a decade prior.

The artist Cindy Lee Berryhill was the one who came up with the idea to call this new scene “antifolk”, inspired by a club she’d been performing at in Los Angeles called the AntiClub that was a kind of second home for punks and outsiders. The name stuck – and antifolk became a home for many generations of punks and outsiders, in an increasingly un-punk New York City.

As such, antifolk began to incorporate many different styles of music beyond folk music – and even other artistic media, with antifolk poets, antifolk comedians, antifolk illustrators, antifolk playwrights, and antifolk pretty much anything else you could think of.

And since the scene was fundamentally oriented around open mic events, primarily the Monday night AntiHoot (which continues to this day at Baker Falls on Avenue A, now hosted by Joe Bendik) – anyone who really resonated with that scene and its values (even without knowing it at the time) could turn up on a Monday night and become part of that world, and be welcomed into the extended family of antifolk and make Sidewalk their second home.

In the UK, where antifolk is much more widely known about than it is in the states, in large part thanks to Rough Trade Records having released some incredible music from that scene – we often forget that antifolk, which gave rise to the careers of artists such as Jeffrey Lewis, Kimya Dawson, and The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – was also known as “the only place in New York where no one asks to see your papers” – it was never about who you knew, but who you would meet.

This was a scene where you would meet international celebrities who wanted to try out their newest material in front of a small audience, and in the same New York minute you’d meet someone who was about to perform on stage for the first time – and often gave a more compelling and inspiring performance than the seasoned professionals in the room. This was always a place full of people you wanted to meet, who also wanted to meet you.

Paradoxically, the antifolk scene was also notoriously introverted and socially awkward – while this was part of its charm for many artists, it also meant a lot of people walked away from their experiences with it assuming the antifolk scene genuinely hated them – this is also kind of absurd, however, because – as Cannonball also points out – it ultimately implies there’s supposed to be some sort of “welcoming committee” – and why would anyone even remotely familiar with the culture of New York City walk into an East Village underground club expecting such a thing?

Having given birth to punk, antifolk, no wave, and the profoundly uncanny “art star” scene, New York’s East Village is primarily known for its “characters” and its “freak show” – it’s known for scaring clueless suburban tourists back to Times Square – if even I know this as a fucking Brit – what’s your excuse?

So – Cannonball Statman’s path to “success” as an independent artist ultimately came as a result of him stumbling into Sidewalk Cafe on a Monday night and playing a couple songs he wrote – that’s how that place became his second home, where he began to organise his own monthly events with other artists from various generations of the scene, and performed at any number of festivals, gigs, and open mics both at Sidewalk and at any number of venues all over the tristate area that he connected with through having Sidewalk as his home base.

And it was where he helped to establish the identity of this new generation of antifolk, through his frequent collaborations and tours with other Millennial antifolk artists, which he organised almost entirely while sitting or standing somewhere in the Sidewalk Cafe – if you were ever wondering how Cannonball Statman became an internationally touring artist, while having an unconventional style in a time of conformity and commercialism, the answer is: it all started at Sidewalk Cafe, the home of antifolk.

It was also Cannonball who gave the first ever performance on Sidewalk’s secret “stage 2” as a raucous unplugged duo with drummer K-WAK the Nomad – the audience for this high-octane set included artists of a similar temperament such as Crazy & the Brains frontman Christoph Jesus, so word of this unofficial venue-within-a-venue spread to others in the scene, giving rise to a number of other legendary late night performances.

All this is to say – while he may be known for completely different things all these years later, there was a time in his 20s, in the 2010s, when Cannonball Statman was “the AF/NY guy” – short for, the New York Antifolk guy, as Adam Green was many years prior, as mentioned in the Moldy Peaches song “Jorge Regula” – and now I’m going to stop writing this because Cannonball Statman is about to break into my flat and murder me for comparing him to Adam Green again, he’s really become tired of those comparisons over the years…oh fuck, he’s here now

—

Kléo Michel-Valentin SPARK: “So as I’ve been getting to know you and your work over the years, I’ve increasingly been wanting to pick your brain about this – and once again, I’m putting my incredibly rude and intrusive journalist hat on here – to ask this question – what are you?

Both in interviews and in your song lyrics and other writing, you often delve into topics that would generally be considered “political” and sometimes even “radical”, and in a way that’s quite unexpected for someone who is primarily interested in the more visceral, intangible experiences that tend to come from art – you’re not here to give a speech, you know – you’re here to make us feel something.

And then, you strongly reject this notion that you’re a political figure at all, or that politics is a serious part of your life – you insist that your views are these rather common sense, “mainstream” assessments of consensus reality that are only political to the extent that they involve – well, you say they’re only political in that they involve people – so you’re saying it’s no more political than saying hi to your neighbour or having a conversation with a friend about some relationship drama.

I have my doubts about that, because I find you do have what we might call a more intellectual or philosophical streak in you that is a departure from the more ethereal and primal places you’re also taking us to with a lot of your work.

So as your former publicist, it seems like something worth pushing you on and maybe finally getting a straight answer from you about – and let’s face it, inquiring minds want to know – what is Cannonball Statman?”

Cannonball Statman: “(laughs) I love you and I hate you at the same time, Kléo.

(editor’s note: he said this before he murdered me)

So if you want a simple answer – I’m an artist.

I’m not a politician, I’m not a political scientist, I’m not a historian, I’m not an activist, and I’m not a philosopher.

Ultimately, what I do, what I think about, and what positions I take always come back to what I’m doing as an artist, and how I might be able to better serve the broader public with my art.

And to me, there’s always been this sense of art as something that builds a kind of extended family around it.

This is the kind of group identity that steps in as a bridge to connect you with humanity, the family of 8 billion people we belong to, and even to other species and forms of life – in the same way other group identities can and do. And this is something in your heart – it can’t be intellectualised.

On the one hand, you have the enormous extended family that forms around the totality of all art in existence, which we’re all part of in some sense.

And then there are the much smaller ones – you have the extended families that form around specific movements, subcultures, scenes, genres, subgenres, and eras – like how I was part of the whole extended family that formed around the multi-generational antifolk movement, both in New York where it started in the 1980s, and all over the world, especially in the UK where it’s had a much broader appeal and apparently resonated with a lot of people.”

K: “Yes, that was going to be my next question actually – because a lot of people here know about antifolk – some of your friends from that scene were on Rough Trade however many moons ago, and that left a lasting impression on the British public.

A lot of those British bands that came from the scene at Windmill Brixton in the last decade were influenced by antifolk, to the point where the owner of Windmill begrudgingly allows the London Antifolk Festival to be hosted there now, though he apparently despises it.

And those are some of the most popular bands for the younger generation here – so the fact that you were the last New York antifolk guy – or the AF/NY guy as Adam Green refers to himself in that Moldy Peaches song – this is kind of a big deal here.”

C: “First of all, I hate you Kléo, and I am going to break into your flat and murder you when we’re done with this interview.”

K: “Oh no! You’re going to murder me again? What did I do this time?”

C: “(laughs) I’m just tired of being compared to Adam Green. I like his work, but I see no resemblance – it’s a comparison that’s been going on for a really long time, to the point that I made a law against it, in my kingdom.”

K: “That’s fair. Can I at least tell my mum that I love her before you murder me?”

C: “No, your mother hates you now, and she wants you to burn in Hell for all eternity for violating the laws of my kingdom.”

K: “OK. I can understand that – I hate myself, too.”

C: “We all hate you, everyone hates you.

But this is the thing, Kléo – even outside my kingdom, you have to understand that it’s very un-antifolk to compare an antifolk artist to another antifolk artist – with antifolk, there was always this understanding that we each had our own thing going on, and the reason we hung out with each other every night was because we liked each other’s music, not because we wanted to copy each other’s music. Though we were always inspiring each other and being inspired by each other, too.

In fact, you couldn’t even get a gig on the antifolk scene in New York if you sounded too much like Adam Green, or like anyone else on the scene – that was kind of the whole thing, it was the only place in New York that wasn’t overrun with copycats – antifolk was always the place to do something new.”

K: “Well this was going to be my other question – you’re the king of modern antifolk, apparently, and you’re a cruel and horrible tyrant as we’ve just discovered.

But what really is antifolk? I think a lot of us in the UK are vaguely aware that this exists, because of the influence here – sometimes I see British bands calling themselves antifolk bands who aren’t even part of any antifolk scene – they aren’t involved with any of the British antifolk scenes either – but they obviously know enough about it to think it’s a good idea to call themselves as such.

So we want to hear it from you, since you’re a horrible authoritarian on this subject – sorry, a very legitimate authority on this subject – what is this thing they call antifolk?”

C: “Well first of all, thank you for recognizing my authority on this subject, Kléo. I may consider exonerating you – is that even possible in an absolute monarchy?”

K: “I have no idea.”

C: “So it’s something we can look into after the interview – I do want to murder you, but I may be willing to not murder you, at least for now.

Anyway, the idea of me being an actual authority on the scene is somewhat tongue-in-cheek to begin with – but I did learn a fair amount just from being part of the scene for a while, working with a lot of artists from different generations of the scene, asking a lot of questions and really doing my homework.

My understanding is that the whole point of antifolk was about the specific landscape of the New York City music scene – that’s why it came into being, and that’s why it died.

There had famously been the folk scene of the West Village in the 1960s, with a generation of artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez who were doing something new and different with folk music that influenced the whole world, really – they pioneered the whole idea of the singer-songwriter, and we could even say they changed the whole idea of what a human being is, in a sense.

What you sometimes hear about Bob Dylan is that before he came around, the world would look at someone like that and say, “you have to become a dancer” – maybe in a previous era, this person would’ve had to go into a monastery – and now, Bob Dylan comes along and says, “no, you don’t have to be a dancer – you have to do this – write these kinds of songs, play this kind of character – contain many multitudes – destroy everyone’s expectations of you at every point in your life.”

So you might be thinking – after all that coming from the folk scene, why would we want to be antifolk?

But what happened was, after the 1960s, New York City’s West Village folk scene became something incredibly rigid, commercialised, and gentrified – so it wasn’t able to be a home for the next generations of artists who were going to come along and make something new, something different and equally powerful and influential as what had gone on there in the 1960s.

You might know the Joie DBG song “Bleecker Street” which is the classic antifolk anthem about why antifolk exists in the first place – Bleecker Street is a famous street in the West Village, where Bob Dylan and a lot of those artists were performing in the 1960s, but now it essentially exists to profit off of the fact that something happened there in the past – capitalism kills everything it touches.

The chorus for that Joie DBG song is:

“They’re makin’ a killin’ / livin’ off Bob Dylan / let’s burn Bleecker Street to the ground”

What happened in the early 1980s was – the West Village folk scene was just getting worse and worse, the punk scene had already started up in the East Village in the 1970s, and there was a new generation who wanted to make something completely different, sometimes with acoustic instruments and largely with punk ethics.

Lach wanted to call it New Folk, and Cindy Lee Berryhill decided to call it Antifolk, which was better, so they called that scene Antifolk. And that scene called antifolk became something that was just as powerful and influential as the 1960s folk scene, taking off where that scene had left off – it was less widely known, but it had the same degree of influence – the way hardly anyone bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who bought it started a band – it was that kind of scene, it had that magic that affected anything and everything else.

And then, antifolk became a multi-generational scene that wasn’t just acoustic music, and it wasn’t just music, even – there were poets, illustrators, filmmakers, punk bands, noise musicians, any number of things happening there – it destroyed everyone’s expectations of what this kind of thing was going to be, and destroyed the idea of what a scene even was.

A lot of people don’t realise how much of a scene this wasn’t, at least in the conventional sense – I was talking to one of your countrymen who’s pretty well-versed in antifolk and has a fairly solid understanding of what antifolk really is – and he still struggled to understand why I was saying antifolk is essentially dead – he kept trying to comfort me actually, by saying this music will live on and people will keep discovering it for many generations.

Well, of course the music lives on – we’re still making music, we’re still going on tour – but I had to explain it to him, the scene is dead! He didn’t get that.

Because that’s what a scene is still about, for a lot of people – the idea is, the point of a scene is to bring a bunch of artists together who aren’t very well-known or even necessarily very good, and to then build a fanbase for those artists by riding on each other’s coattails and performing to each other’s friends, who then become their fans – so when I say the scene is dead, some people interpret that as “these artists are selling fewer tickets or getting fewer streams than they used to.”

When in fact, we’re selling more tickets than we ever did! Our audiences have actually grown substantially since the scene died – there’s so much more interest in our music now.

After all – antifolk was a scene that turned all of that on its head – the point of antifolk was, we only have artists who are good enough to build a fanbase of their own accord – nobody here needs a “scene” to build an audience – we’re actually here because we want to hang out with our friends and listen to each other’s songs – we want to hear new songs, specifically – we had a thing called “new song applause” where everyone had to applaud if an antifolk artist announced the song they were about to play was new – we had all kinds of (anti)traditions like that.

And that’s what died. That physical scene we had, where we hung out several nights a week and listened to each other’s new songs and played off of each other’s ideas and created this thing together that was bigger than any one of us – and I’m glad antifolk died, because now we’re all doing completely different things that work better in the here and now – we miss it a lot, too, though.

The British antifolk crowd is incredible, by the way – they seem to know about a lot of our (anti)traditions and they know a lot of antifolk lore – for instance, I performed at the London Antifolk Festival at Windmill Brixton last year during my European tour with Jason Trachtenburg, and I played my song “Flushing”, which has that line “off to play a Bushwick antifolk show for the bartender, walls, and weirdos” – which is a reference to how Lach used to say you were playing to the “waitress, walls, and weirdos” when you were performing after hours at Sidewalk Cafe, and pretty much everyone had gone home by then because it was so late, even for a New Yorker – and Kléo, everyone at the festival in London understood this reference! I was amazed. Most people in New York don’t even get that one these days!

And in New York, antifolk was also fundamentally about growing and developing as an artist, and as a person – a lot of people didn’t know that.

New York had this whole idea about it, that this is a place where an artist goes in their 20s or whatever to become themselves – the idea that New York has this environment that facilitates a kind of personal transformation and growth, where you shed all the nonsense and social restrictions you internalised growing up in this rigid, puritanical culture, and you become your true self and you keep evolving and expanding who you are.

But by the time the antifolk scene came around, most of New York was just as rigid and puritanical as anywhere else – this was the 1980s, so Reagan was doing his whole thing unto the world – and, I mean, it’s only got worse since then.

So antifolk was about creating a space where you could still do what, really, all of New York was supposedly going to allow you to do.

Antifolk is how I developed and evolved as an artist during that time in my life, my late teens and early 20s – I was part of one of the last generations of it – there was only really one generation after ours!

And that final generation were really cool, but you could also tell they were already just done with it – I remember talking to a Gen Z New York antifolk artist, and he was great, but still, his whole attitude was sort of like – “why am I in the antifolk scene in Manhattan when I could be doing some cool shit in Brooklyn?” – and my attitude was like – “I don’t know! Why don’t you go to Brooklyn and do some cool shit?”

I mean, we’re not actually a cult – like, you’re allowed to play in Brooklyn – I grew up in Brooklyn, I’ve played countless gigs there and it was at one of my Brooklyn gigs where I first found out about antifolk, from a drunk antifolk poet in the audience who mentioned it to me. We’re not forcing anyone to be part of the scene, and we’re not saying you can’t also be part of other things.

Pretty much everyone in my generation of antifolk artists was also involved with other scenes, and that led to all these collaborations that were really cool – it really expanded our horizons.

I was thinking about how Matthew Silver was part of our generation of the antifolk scene, for instance – but that’s not what he’s known for at all, and I don’t think he would consider himself as such either – he was part of all kinds of different scenes, and really with his own thing going on that was beyond any scene – I’d say most antifolk artists were ultimately beyond the limits of any scene, in that sense – but we all performed together in that whole antifolk circuit quite a lot too, and we all inspired each other quite a lot.

And, going back to when we were talking about the West Village folk scene of the 1960s – I would say Matthew Silver is the Bob Dylan of our generation.

In the sense of how – you had all these people our age and even younger who were moving to New York to be “the next Bob Dylan” – we called them Bob Dylan impersonators because they had nothing to say, they were just ripping off Bob Dylan – as Joie DBG pointed out in that song “Bleecker Street”, since the same thing was happening during his generation too – it’s been happening since the 1980s, if not earlier.

But then Matthew Silver came along – this wedding videographer from New Jersey – who got up on stage sometimes, but normally just performed on the street – sometimes in a white wedding dress, usually just in his underwear – and he was just screaming at people, and he had this whole shopping cart full of strange objects that he would throw at people – he hit me in the face once with a plastic heart at a gig we did together in Brooklyn – and when he did this on the street, it was like an 8-hour performance sometimes – for a while, that was his work day – he would perform from 9-5 like that, on the street, in Union Square, and also in Washington Square – which of course is where the old West Village folk scene also used to have their hootenannies in the 1960s.

And Matt’s whole thing at first was that he was incredibly nihilistic – his performances had a dark vibe to them – he was talking about how we’re all fucked, this is all worthless, he hates his job, that sort of thing – I remember I was 17 or 18 or something and he just came up to me at a gig we were playing together in Brooklyn, and he told me he was smoking so much that he was going to lose his voice and he would never perform again – and I was thinking, “but how could he ever stop performing? He’s Matthew Silver: The Great Performer!” – that was his tag line at the time – I tried to convince him it was going to be alright, but he was really going through it, at least in his act.

But then – all of a sudden – there was this moment, and you could feel this shift in the antifolk scene for sure – when Matthew Silver found “the love portal” – and the piece of cardboard he’d carry around that used to say “The Great Performer” now said “Love Portal” – and his whole act became this whole thing about finding love – not as in romance, but love as in this profound universal energy that came in through a portal and it was this spiritual awakening he had – I think we all felt it – I sure did!

That was when his act really started to take off, and he was in these viral videos where he was talking about the meaning of life and making chicken noises and whatnot – he grew out his beard and he became this kind of spiritual figure for a lot of people – I remember I was playing guitar in his band for a bit of one of his 8-hour street performances in Union Square one day, and there must’ve been over 300 people gathered around watching us, it was incredible – one of them spoke to me afterwards about how she’d found God through Matt’s performance art, and she saw him as someone who was awakening the world.

But that was also when he started organising these elaborate performance art events with many different performers around the city – and there were countless people who were doing their own performance art projects who were very inspired by what he was doing – I went to some of these events, and it was just a whole crowd around him, he had his own scene that was massive – and I was just thinking, Matt is the Bob Dylan of our generation.

Just like Bob Dylan showed people you’re not supposed to be a dancer or a monk any more – Matthew Silver showed all these people that you’re not supposed to be a Bob Dylan impersonator any more, and you’re not even supposed to write songs or play an instrument any more – you’re supposed to run around in your underwear and make chicken noises and scream at people about your spiritual awakening – that’s what you do now.

He got rid of all my competition, basically.”

K: “But doesn’t this also make you a reactionary? And you’re actually kind of just admitting it?

If I heard you correctly, it would appear you’ve come to your senses and you’re finally acknowledging that guitar music is incredibly passé?”

C: “No, because I’m not a Bob Dylan impersonator. I’m not Bob Dylan with a guitar, I’m Cannonball Statman with a guitar.

There’s that line in my song “Carlos is on Fire” – “I’m just Cannonball Statman with a guitar” – no one was ever Cannonball Statman with a guitar until I did it.

I had a dog called Cannonball Statman when I was a kid, that’s who I got my name from – but he didn’t play guitar – and he had a different name that he released his music under, actually.”

K: “I feel like the guitar has effectively run its course. It’s time for something completely different.”

C: “I feel like the West has run its course – the whole idea of Western civilisation – it’s just done. And you know this, because it has nothing left to say.

Guitar music will live on, because it comes from before all this – it comes from Africa, originally. It’s been appropriated as a White culture thing in this weird way, but that’s not where it actually comes from.

And even among White people in the West, a lot of the regional relationships to guitar music are distinct and have their own timelines that are not reliant on White supremacy or anything we’re talking about – I think about the relationship a lot of the English working class has with guitar music, and this is something that exists on its own timeline and a lot of it is more of a working class rebellion against all this bullshit, not an endorsement of it.

So then we get back to antifolk, which comes from the East Village – people used to refer to what went on in that neighbourhood as the “East Village freak show” – not just antifolk, but also the Art Star scene and punk and all these other things that were happening.

I remember I did a gig at a bar in that area, where the owner was one of these confused people from somewhere, and he thought it was a good idea to hire Johnny Bizarre as a bartender – Johnny was known for his performances where he would stick screwdrivers into his various orifices – I backed him up on guitar a couple times – but then there was this night I was performing at this venue, and the owner runs into the venue while I’m on stage and starts screaming at the bar staff, “why is this guy playing here?! He’s too loud! He woke me up! I was asleep upstairs! And he’s underage! He doesn’t even drink! How are we going to sell drinks to this kid? And where’s Johnny Bizarre anyway? Tonight’s his shift!”

And someone behind the bar was like, “Johnny’s in jail again.”

Then the owner was like, “He’s in jail again?! It’s like I’m running a fucking freak show here!!!”

And everyone in the room just looked at each other like – why would you open a bar in the East Village if you didn’t want to be running a fucking freak show?

Because that’s the whole point.

But the idea about the East Village was also, it’s not just this pointless spectacle – you go to the East Village because you have something to say.

That’s why we wouldn’t book an artist for a gig if they sounded too much like someone else – the point is, you have to have something to say – if someone is already saying what you’re saying, you have no reason to be here – you can go to the West Village and do your Bob Dylan impersonation or your Adam Green tribute or your White, conventionally attractive Kimya Dawson impression – which she did a brilliant song about on TikTok the other day, because people kept sending her these things like that – and it’s just insulting to do that to her, when you consider who she actually is and what her music is about.

So my point here is, that’s the big thing we kind of “specialise” in, coming from that scene – if you have something to say, we’ll know about it – so if the West had something else to say, we’d be the first to know about it – and the West has nothing left to say!

It’s been repeating the same shit for decades at this point – pseudoscientific nonsense about racial superiority, liberty to exploit the working people of the world, some word salad about defending “Judeo-Christian values” simultaneously combined with Hitlerian anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people destroying the West, citing random statistics about IQ and wealth, endless racist rants about Muslims and Black people and indigenous folks – none of this is any different from what the “defenders of the West” have been saying since I was a kid. They’re just recycling all the same shit. It is so desperate.

The West is done.

And the point is – now, we have the opportunity to work together to build something much better, something fundamentally aligned with humanity.

Maybe we can do some of that in the East Village, even – I still perform there sometimes, you know – it’s going through something very different from what was happening when I lived in New York, because the whole world is so different now.

And antifolk is dead, but some of that spirit lives on, in a different way – a lot of those artists themselves are still around and they’re still performing together in the East Village.

Oh, right – all this stuff about antifolk – it’s all about New York City neighbourhoods and New York City real estate, essentially – which is all we ever talk about in New York, as you know.

It’s almost arbitrary that we ended up having something called antifolk in that time and place – and I probably would’ve been considered a folk artist if I’d grown up in a different city.

When I was first gigging as a solo artist, I actually was doing the West Village folk scene – I had mostly gigged with bands in Brooklyn as a kid, so I didn’t even know about this whole history of folk vs. antifolk and West Village vs. East Village, because it was a totally different world from what I was part of.

I just figured, “I’m doing my acoustic project, so I’m going to perform at these folk clubs” – I didn’t understand the history of why they had all these weird arbitrary rules about not being too loud or anything like that, or the political significance of showing up with a nylon string guitar vs. a steel string guitar – but this is all really important stuff that still defined the geography of the New York scene, decades after the emergence of antifolk as this distinct thing – and yeah, people in the antifolk scene had very little patience for nylon string guitars, it was basically illegal there – but this was a law you could break if you were really that good – and I got to see some really great artists break that rule and get quite a lot of applause for doing so – I was never good enough to break that rule, which is why I haven’t done anything with a nylon string guitar since I was a teenager! Maybe I’ll get back into it, if I ever get really good at music.

And it was only really through talking with people in the antifolk scene about it that I came to understand why the West Village folk clubs were the way they were – exploitative, restrictive, disorganised, lifeless, often on the brink of shutting down, no real community around any of it, lots of substance abuse and addiction, and the audiences hated the fact that I would come in with different songs every time – but in the antifolk scene, people loved the fact that I came in with new songs! And in the antifolk scene, they loved it when I played loud!

This was all about this very specific New York music scene history that goes back to before I was even born – so I always find it interesting that there even is an antifolk scene in a place like the UK, where the meanings of these things seem to be completely different.

But the ethics are fundamentally the same – the UK antifolk scenes are a lot like New York antifolk in that they’re all fundamentally about creating a space for developing this kind of soulful, interesting, original work in an increasingly soulless, bland, corporate world. And you like our sense of humour.

Antifolk elsewhere generally has a similar vibe – each place has its own relationship to it, and it’s fundamentally those same ethics – there’s a Catalan history with antifolk that’s pretty incredible, and we did some antifolk nights there with The Missing Leech last year and way back in 2016 – I don’t know enough about the history of Catalan antifolk to really talk about that, but Maurici from The Missing Leech would know a lot more.

What I’m saying here is, antifolk means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and there’s no “right or wrong” interpretation of what it is – and, there’s a reality of what it was, what some of us knew it as – as a physical scene in New York, that served a specific purpose, and died when it had fulfilled that purpose.

When I think about the final generations of antifolk, one thing that really stands out is how we were all people who were already living in the area anyway – almost all of us had grown up in the New York Tristate Area, and those who hadn’t were already living there for some other reason – we all kind of stumbled upon that scene by chance, and realised it was a place where we could do something really cool that we couldn’t do in any other part of the city.

That’s very different from a generation where people were moving to the area because of this scene they’d heard about – and what it says is, if we happened to live somewhere else, we probably wouldn’t have been part of the antifolk scene at all.

I’m glad we were, because it was an incredible thing to be part of and it means a lot to us – I simply point this out because it’s important to acknowledge how relative it is, when we’re talking about it in a global context – you’re British and I don’t live in the US any more – and our audience is all over the world.

So this is why we say I’m romantic punk, because that’s universal, it’s something people intuitively understand – no one knows what it means when someone says I’m antifolk, because the whole idea of antifolk is either completely shrouded in mystery, or associated with a tiny handful of artists who sound nothing like me or like any of the other hundreds of antifolk artists – we never label me as an antifolk artist any more, or even as a New York artist or an American artist – we say I’m an international artist, because I’ve lived in many different countries and my work is connected with scenes all over the world, it’s just as connected with some of the British and Slovak and Taiwanese music scenes as it is with the USA – there was an exception to that earlier this year, because DJ Stephen Doyle listed me as one of the Top 15 New York Artists of All Time, so we put that in my new press release – but that’s more because we were happy to find out DJ Stephen Doyle still likes my music – we really like his radio shows.

But there was a time when antifolk was my whole thing, and a lot of my life revolved around physically being part of that scene in New York, and bringing it around the world on tour – and this is where we segue back to talking about the issues around extended family and identity that you brought up at the beginning of this interview, and how that plays into what you described as this intellectual streak in my work that you see as a departure from what you referred to as the more primal or ethereal aspects of it.

We were joking about my kingdom earlier – that’s a nod to how I was given that whole tongue-in-cheek royal title of “the king of modern antifolk” – because I was so active in that whole 2010s wave of antifolk in New York and internationally, and my work ended up – really unexpectedly – meaning a lot to that scene – though the whole royal title thing was obviously a joke, it was Brian Kelly who came up with it one day and it just kind of stuck.

But then you look at it and it’s like – I never cared all that much about being an American, or even about being a New Yorker, really – I certainly never cared about being White, or being a Zionist or any kind of supremacist.

So when we think about extended family and about concepts like nationhood that are these deep, powerful connections we all hold deeply in our hearts in some sense – well, I’ve got nothing.

I have an American passport – but I look in my heart of hearts, what I’m actually connected to in this world on a profound level – and obviously I have no nation there. Absolutely nothing.

I have humanity – and I have my immediate family and inner circles – but what’s in between those two extremes of macro and micro? What gives me that greater sense of belonging that acts as that bridge from me and the people closest to me to the 8 billion human beings on Earth?

A lot of people from a background like mine are facing that kind of dilemma.

And one solution a lot of us found for that dilemma is that instead of having a national identity, a lot of us have connected with that broader human family through becoming part of this extended family that may be the size of a small – or even quite large! – nation, but extends across national borders and is more about common values and tastes than it is about a shared land, ancestry, or history.

Instead of becoming part of a nation, a lot of us now become part of the extended families that form around art, and we connect with that on a profound emotional level – be it the extended family that forms around a specific artist or band, or a small group of artists and bands – or something more like what I mentioned earlier and what I was part of in my teens and 20s, the kind of extended family that emerges around something like antifolk – or punk or hip-hop or rock and roll – or a specific record label, a specific venue, something like that where you’re connecting with a lot of different artists and a lot of different fans and other people around all that all at once.

When I think back to my feelings about all this, when I was in my 20s and these New York venues like Sidewalk Cafe and Goodbye Blue Monday were nothing short of a second home for me and for so many people I knew – and I was touring around the world and connecting with all these different people in different places as a kind of delegate from the New York antifolk scene – again – I never felt like an American, or even a New Yorker: I was antifolk – that was my identity.

And antifolk was never a genre or a style for most of us – the whole point was that antifolk was this big extended family we were part of, instead of this racist police state of the USA, or Whiteness, or New York City.

In fact, whenever people labelled my music as “antifolk” I felt kind of weird about it, because it says nothing about the genre or style of what I’m doing – if anything, calling me “antifolk” just gave someone a sense of who some of my friends are, who I know on the New York scene and elsewhere.

It’s super odd to put “antifolk” in the same place where you might say “rock and roll” or “hip-hop” when those actually tell you something about the aesthetic of this artist or band – “antifolk” never really became a genre in that way – it was only ever a kind of terrifying international conspiracy to make all this music and other forms of art in these new and different ways that we thought were fun and cool.

So then there was the closure of the Sidewalk Cafe in 2019 – and that resulted in the death of antifolk, at least in the way we’d been connecting with it.

The whole thing about Sidewalk Cafe was, this was the place where Lach had famously moved the whole scene to in 1993, and it was where we’d all gather every Monday night and play new songs for each other and bounce ideas off each other – it was where a lot of us would spend several nights a week, and so many things happened there – there are countless stories of these kinds of legendary happenings that would go on with various people on the scene, but it was also just a very productive place for a lot of people – all my early tours were organised from the Sidewalk Cafe, that was like a headquarters for me and so many other people I knew.

So when Sidewalk closed – the scene found new spaces – now even the famous Monday night “AntiHoot” where dozens of people play a song or two every Monday is up and running again, and it’s at Baker Falls, right across the street from where Sidewalk used to be, and it’s hosted by Joe Bendik, who’s an incredible guy and he’s been part of the scene since the 1980s.

And still, after Sidewalk closed, there was just this understanding for most people on the scene that this is no longer a living, breathing thing.

The idea is – “go to the AntiHoot, or go to an antifolk gig in New York, and that’s this time capsule where you get to relive all your antifolk memories” – and the thing people are saying is, that’s just not a living scene.

And I was thinking – it’s actually quite strange, because everyone I know from that scene who’s still making music is very alive – and they’re all doing really interesting new stuff, both as artists and as people.

I was thinking about one of the recent antifolk gigs in New York, with an absolutely incredible line-up – and how the social media promotion was all this stuff like “this is gonna be a time capsule of what we were doing at Sidewalk in 2014!” – and I was reading this and the first thing I thought was, “no it fucking isn’t, because if this is seriously going to be a re-enactment of what we were doing in 2014 then half of the people on this line-up are going to die of a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning, because I fucking remember what a lot of us were doing back then and I’m really fucking happy that a lot of us are clean and sober now and not dead.”

But then there was my second thought – which is – if antifolk is dead, and this is just a time capsule, but the people on this line-up are all very much alive and doing new and interesting and really good stuff with their lives and their music – maybe that just means – we’ve each evolved in our own individual ways to become each part of our own kind of extended family that’s about the music each individual artist or band is doing, or that a much smaller handful of closely connected artists and bands are doing.

So now it’s all evolved into what, for me at least, is this whole new way of doing it – where – I’m part of Cannonball Statman, this broader community that includes so many co-conspirators of mine and all my fans – and, sometimes just as a fan and sometimes also as co-conspirator, I’m also part of all these communities that form around these other artists. And that’s a beautiful thing.

And again – it matters so much more to me and is so much more of a part of anything resembling an actual identity than being White, or American, or a New Yorker, or any of that.

So getting back to your original question here, Kléo – you asked what I am – and the answer is simply that I’m Cannonball Statman. That’s what I’m connecting with in that tender, intuitive, emotional way that someone else might connect with a nation – I’m connecting with what this work means to me, and to my fans, and to the people I’m collaborating with. That’s my identity.

And when I’m singing about the problems of US imperialism, or doing these interviews with you, that’s still coming from this place of how my heart feels the need to bring this into the work – you pointed this out as something that feels very different from my other work, and I would say that while it does feel different, it’s not any different on a fundamental level from what you’re referring to as my more ethereal or primal work – it’s a different layer – a more cerebral layer – of the same work.”

K: “So you’ve just spent a considerable amount of time, purportedly answering this question, but essentially just to conclude, as I figured you would, that your insistence on elaborately dodging this question and belittling the very notion of its existence is the only righteous thing to do and that I’m kind of a horrible person for even bothering you this question.

Why anyone even goes through the motions of attempting to interview you is beyond me at this point, as it’s such a sad, undignified, and gruelling experience.

My follow-up question: are you still planning on murdering me after this interview?”

C: “Yes, Kléo. I’ve been planning on murdering you since the day we first met.”