Jae Matthews

I grew up in upstate New York, in a small farming community in the central Leatherstocking region outside Syracuse. I had the back room upstairs, so I could look into the backyard. When I visualize it now, all I see is snow. I remember looking out and just seeing a blanket of snow, and the gray dusk.

My house was at the bottom of a valley, so snowfall was immense compared to other parts of upstate New York. When I think of the sound, it was very muted—that dampened effect snow gives. It didn’t snow all year, of course, but those are the moments that really stick with me.

I’m almost 40 now. Back then, the region wasn’t nearly as coveted as it is now. Hudson was probably always experiencing some level of interest, but now it seems like every town up here has become very strange. There are so many transplants. It’s bizarre to grow up in the middle of nowhere, and now to hear people talk about buying in Troy or Albany. Everything on the train line from New York City to Albany has experienced a lot of movement. But I grew up some distance from here, and it’s still impoverished and bleak and incredibly conservative. It’s a huge state, and these changes have been uneven.

My mom died three years ago. That was the moment I started to really feel some restlessness. I have only been back home once since then—a year after her passing, for the memorial. Then not long after her death, Gus and I broke up. That period was so brutal in its totality. We were living in the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, which is where he grew up. So I’m known there by proxy to someone else, and I realized I didn’t want to be there anymore. The road album became my process of finding where to live, which is funny because I didn’t move far in the end.

The trip actually started in the woods outside Mexico City. The caretaker of the property was a woman named Soledad—“solitude,” which was very apt. I went to shed some of the grief I was feeling, and when I returned to the States I knew that I needed to find a new place to live. I had been precious about the question before then, but now it was desperate. So I drove down to Georgia, where I used to live. It felt very Runaway Bride-style, like I was trying on all these experiences or futures. Ultimately Savannah wouldn’t work, even though I wanted it to, so I visited friends in Florida and then drove to West Texas. That was a big consideration, but it’s so remote. The people who live in Marfa and Terlingua and Valentine—I really have to give them credit, because you have to be really comfortable with being alone. Finally, I tried the Pacific Northwest, just outside Astoria, Oregon. Really, really beautiful, and really haunting. I was inspired by the old-growth forest—it’s one of the only places in the country with bona fide old-growth rainforest. I loved it. I walked Cape Disappointment every day. But ultimately it wasn’t right either.

I had been my mom’s caretaker for years, so every week I had driven from the Pioneer Valley to upstate New York. You do it by way of the Pike, driving through the Berkshires. It’s the highest point on I-90 east of South Dakota, and it’s incredibly gorgeous. Every time I drove, I would pass through Lee and Otis and Becket, and I became fascinated with that faraway highway view. So I just started looking at houses and picked one on a whim. It felt like my opportunity to escape. I’m really fearful of change, and I’m also really fearful of permanence—incongruous, I know. But I told myself: “Hey, if this doesn’t work out, I can always try to start over again.” Years earlier, I had a therapist who told me that indecision is still a decision. I’d tell her I wasn’t making a decision, and she’d be like, “Yes, you are.”

So much of this album developed while I was just like, totally Manic Monday. The lyrics for “Falling” and “Break Me” came while I was in West Texas, in the world’s shittiest recording setup ever. I brought my interface and a microphone, but I rented what was essentially a barn. Everything was totally unusable. But the project did progress, with this acceptance that I was on a journey. I insisted on driving because I like feeling in control, and I feel most in control when I’m driving.

In Texas, I was still trying to find my voice without Gus. I was so used to recording myself through another person, so this “middle of nowhere” was deeply personal. You're in this open landscape, and you have to really understand and accept being alone. I knew no one, and I would go out to these bars by myself. It's a really distinct, sad feeling to go alone to a bar in the middle of the desert. It was in the Pacific Northwest that I began to feel a little hope for my future—oddly, because it’s a very gloomy place. It was very rainy, but then every day in the afternoon there was this intense sun. The more positive tracks came to me there. The lyrics of “Faulty” are really tough, but to me that is one of the most anthemic, celebratory tracks on the album—“I Will Survive”-esque, you know?

In the desert, I tried to make temporary romance work, and "Ronny" is one of my favorite songs because it incorporates this recurring theme of my life: sleeping with junkies. For some reason, I have had many momentary affairs with addicts. They all kind of embody the same vibe, which is that they're unavailable. And that is alluring. There was this teeny little cowboy in Marfa who was an addict, and when I felt I needed a connection, I picked him. It's bizarre—you really see yourself in those moments. There's no distraction. None of your friends are around, and often we use our friends as reflections. Deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, I don't know how people can live without some sense of spirituality. But West Texas is so stark, I understand why some people there don't believe in God.

I would hazard to say no. A toxic trait of mine that I'm trying to get over is that I really allow others to inform my emotional fixations, and that's usually where I get creative. If I'm having some level of obsession over something—over a lust, or a negligence—that's where it comes from. Maybe the seasons will cater to some of the drama, certainly. But that's what's wild about Boy Harsher and our breakup: Probably 80 percent of the songs I've written are about Gus, and not about how much I love him. It's all about hurt and desire.

My hometown is in the Rust Belt, a stop on I-90 which goes all the way to Ohio. It’s a term given to the abandoned mill industry and all its factories. I don’t know if I’m drawn to postindustrial sites as much as I am to places without tons of people. Cities tend to stress me out—even in New York, I’m usually hiding out in Red Hook or Maspeth. Our music tends to conjure this industrial factory room: the fan in front of the light, the fog, the chains. I’m not sure that’s my site personally, as Jae Matthews. But it can be Boy Harsher’s site.

Classic EBM and industrial music, a heavy Boy Harsher inspiration, comes out of a particular postwar moment asking how to break free from the stoicism of the Cold War. I don’t know if we are in a similar moment per se, but we are definitely in another moment of chaos and anxiety. I wonder if that is what really draws people to our music; there’s nothing like a driving bassline to reaffirm your anxiety, but to soothe it as well.

The new album is quite different sonically. It’s less about the decay and more about the rebirth that comes after. When Gus and I decided to move forward professionally after our breakup, it was hard to understand how we could possibly do so. I guess the ruins Get Mean came from were less of a physical place, and more so our emotions. It became an opportunity to collect what we had developed, but then to really, really experiment with it—to just have fucking fun. It’s our most upbeat project to date, which has really confused some people. But I went through the hardest part of my life, and during that time I could only work on music that made me happy. I wrote Lesser Man at a very, very different point in my life, back when I wasn’t so aware of just how fucked up everything can become.

Desire can feel pretty dark, maybe because of its association with shame. On the dance floor, you are hopefully allowed to experience a freedom you might not be granted in real life. You can participate in whatever type of body you want to for that moment, without the expectation of being a certain person. With our music and the themes we’re exploring, we expose the links between these emotions, though one could easily consider them to be polar. Lust and desire are also anxious and rageful, so when I’m writing about those concepts they don’t butt up against one another. And if you pull it apart, Gus’s dark, computer music-heavy sound production is composed of incredibly anxious pieces. Yet together, they can feel really sexy and exciting. I’m not sure exactly why that is.

I am a driving person. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, and there's no sense of non-driving when you grow up in that climate. I feel the most connected to music when I'm in my car driving, because I think that's one way I can experience the world fully autonomously—or at least feel like I am. A friend once said to me that being a driver is the ultimate cyborg connection: You are the car. And truly, that's how I feel it. The technique is second nature—shifting, turning the wheel. It's already built in. When I introduce music on top of that, playing my favorite tape and turning the volume up, it’s a holy thing. It is somehow divine.

I'm very interested in connection, in every element of my life. Music and art are obviously at the forefront, but even daily—I like looking people in the eye, and I like understanding where they're coming from. Maybe it's a bit nonsensical, but my experience of live Boy Harsher is very different from the audience's experience of it. Still, there is transference. Vocalists especially experience this; you need transference between yourself and the crowd in order to be the best performer you can be. The relationship is trying to cultivate energy. It's like collecting this ball and sending it into that space, and then being able to receive it coming back. Have you heard of ball lightning?

Google it! It all sounds so woo-woo, but I’m obsessed. You can see it in a weather pattern, but I’m most excited about the phenomenon when it occurs inside interiors. An electrical current gets sent out of an outlet, and it's an orb, just this beautiful ball. And then it dissipates. If I were to visually describe what I want my transference to feel like, it's that: This electrically charged ball comes out of my body, I push it into a mass of people, and then they're able to internalize it and send it right back to me.

Truthfully, I'm not a huge horror head. I like to sit in the anxious moment before anything bad happens—I'm a thriller head, I guess. When we made The Runner, I was revisiting themes that have been on my mind for years. I'm very interested in using vampirism and cannibalism as a metaphor for unmediated desire, or unrelenting lust. That's what the Runner is for me. She's this entity, this creature, this woman who cannot control her need to consume. Desire and destruction have always been linked. I’m not sure why.

Maybe because I was a really, really lonely child, and I was deeply nonsexual until my actual adulthood. I was functionally a witness as all my friends were engaging in these young romances and becoming very sexually active, and I felt very sidelined, not allowed to have something I so desperately wanted. A lot of that, too, was from closeted gayness. When you're a teenager, any type of desire feels shameful, or at least it did for me. Maybe that's why I can write about this horrific woman who gets her rocks off by physically consuming someone else.

I always wanted to be a filmmaker. Gus and I started making music because it felt like the closest way to generate cinematic content when we couldn't afford to make our own films. Music was our way to create something evocative and cinematic, and to explore all these themes we'd been going through: desire and fear and horror. There are certain things that can only really be captured visually. My favorite parts of The Runner are these following shots of the truck driving through the woods. It would be really, really hard to translate that without the visual. Maybe it's just me, but there's something about following a vehicle through the foggy woods at dawn that's irreplaceable. In the end, the film set me up to move back here a few years later; we shot in the Berkshires, ironically in a town called Florida, and now I live here.

Oh, she's definitely me. She's so me, 100 percent. I've been writing the same story over and over and over again, and it's always some version of The Runner. The monster is me, and I just keep writing her. I don’t know what it means exactly—I’m just trying to figure myself out.

The theme explored in The Runner predates my diagnosis, but the film allowed me an entryway into my physical form. The gift any autoimmune disease gives you is this concept of the body. Previously, I was very disconnected from my physical form, partially due to insecurity and partially due to being a woman. You’re conditioned to believe your body is everyone else’s to scrutinize. And MS is a condition wherein your body literally attacks a fundamental part of itself. It makes you sit with who you are to understand the signs. It’s very intuitive in a way. I never allowed that before. I wasn’t patient at all with myself. Now I have to be more dedicated to myself and live in myself in a really sincere way, or I’ll continue to get sick. It’s funny: Being closer to my physicality has granted me a lot more confidence. It took getting sick to make me feel hot. There was a ton of fear in the beginning, but once I started to listen to my body more, I began to feel more in touch.

I think you’re right. They're all connected, even though at times they feel like separate parts.

I think I'm still learning how to mourn, which is rich coming from me because I'm no stranger to death. My father, Jerry, died when I was 16. Then “Jerry Number Two”—the man my mom remarried, whom we also loved and who cared for us deeply—died a decade later. And then Mom died three years ago. At times it feels endless. It’s confronting. Losing your family is incredibly difficult, and the only respite is that it's part of life. Death is one piece of humanity that universalizes us.

Regardless of the number of times I’ve experienced it, I don’t know if I have developed a mourning practice. Sadly, I’m not spiritual at all, even though I’d really like to be. My father was an ex-minister, and I think he didn’t want me and my twin to grow up relying on a set of rules that were distorted. He told us, “There isn’t an all-knowing God, there isn’t a heaven or a hell. You are a creation, and you get to decide what your life is.” But inadvertently, those teachings made me lack the ability to mourn—and probably to celebrate properly too. By the time he died, he had convinced me there was no heaven, and I think that really screwed me up. I couldn’t stop thinking of these horrific images of him buried, decomposing, over and over again.

Then came the final lesson: losing my mother, whom I cared so deeply for. We were losing her in a chronic way, because she had dementia. With dementia, you basically witness and participate in the death of your person over and over again. The mother I knew and adored as a child died maybe 20 years ago, because dementia shifts your personality constantly. At times it's erratic, and that in itself is really devastating. I think my sister was able to celebrate every version of her, and I was stuck grieving even while she was alive. I wish now, in hindsight, that I'd been able to participate in her daily new being. That would have given her joy, and it would have given me the ability to mourn properly. I really do think the antithesis of mourning is guilt—and sitting in guilt, which I do. To mourn means actually celebrating someone's life. A really proper way to mourn is to hold in regard the ways this person was loved.

I went to all these places to mourn my relationship and my mother. When I was in the Pacific Northwest, I was walking in Cape Disappointment and saw this plaque on one of the old-growth trees. It's called something like a bearing tree. The plaque says that if you harm or destroy this tree, you are killing a lineage. That really stayed with me, because I think the role of grief and mourning is also being able to put a plaque on something and say, “We need to protect this.” Maybe the way I can relate it to the deaths in my family is that I need to put a plaque on the memories and protect them. When I sit in my guilt, I'm not honoring the things that made those relationships so important and so special. When you allow yourself to mourn properly, it becomes celebration. We need to celebrate the Earth, and celebrate the rainforests we still have, like those in Oregon and Washington. And then once we're sitting in that feeling, I think we'll save it.

Absolutely. The trip granted me, finally, a sense of decision to leave the Pioneer Valley. No matter what I decided, I knew I needed to go. I was living in a mausoleum. I was living in a home that represented my relationship that was over. It represented my mother, who was deceased. It was a version of me that no longer existed, and I needed to move on. I think I knew that on a subconscious level, but the travels enabled me to see it clearly: “Get the fuck out. It’s time.”

My first experience with death was my grandmother, who was also a caretaker when we were young, and whom I adored. She had polio, so she was partially paralyzed—fully functional, in my opinion, but her dominant arm never came back. She talked about her post-life intentions quite a bit, even when we were young. It was really important for her to be cremated, because after developing polio, she felt very disconnected from her body. She was really insecure about her arm, her hand. So from a young age, I connected cremation to a way of releasing your form: If you want to disengage from your body, you get cremated. My mother was also cremated, and Jerry Number Two was cremated. My father, funnily enough, was not cremated, but he had a closed casket. I think his odd rejection of religion came back in the end, so he felt he couldn’t be cremated.

Because of all this, I want to be cremated. There's this amazing class I took before and after my mother died where you read a lot about death practices, locally and globally. I heard about one very small town in Colorado called Crestone that has figured out a loophole to do open-air pyres. At one point I thought that maybe I should do that. But now, I want my end-of-life plans to be really quiet and really private. I would really prefer that the people I love figure out how to mourn me, and use that for themselves.