SEAROWS BIO

As a true afficianado of sad gay music, I was really excited to chat to Searows. We spoke about animal metaphors, the horrors and beauty of the ocean, and the kid from Free Willy.

Dani Leever: Hey Alec, it’s so lovely to be chatting. I’d love to dive in and chat about your new album Death in the Business of Wailing.

Starting with the title, it’s a line from Moby Dick in a pretty intense paragraph. It precedes some incredible lines like “in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water” and “take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.” 

These lines speak beautifully to the emotional depth and landscape to the album. Can you tell me about that title and how it was chosen? 

Searows: Yeah. I named the album at the end of the process, after the album had already been made. I mean, we were calling it that for months, just because it sounded cool, and then it was like, Well, it’s time… That’s the name of the album now. 

That whole paragraph is so beautiful, and it feels very reflective of a lot of the themes in at least some of the songs.

The end of that paragraph, being about us humans just not being our body… It’s such a cool whole paragraph that if I try and analyse it, I’m not going to do it justice. There’s so many parts of it that are so cool.

I feel like being unable to grasp and understand the past, like what we can see and perceive feels like a theme [in the album], and also what that paragraph and book is talking about.

DL: Yeah. It definitely speaks to the themes on the album really well. In the first song ‘Belly of the Whale’, the narrator is directly placed in that belly. Then on other tracks, there’s a lot of similar imagery: gutting the heart of a fish, moving to the seaside with your grandma… Throughout the album, these maritime and oceanic references give a real sense of eeriness. What draws you to those themes? 

S: I’ve always been so obsessed with the ocean, and sea creatures and boats. Part of it is definitely because I find it all very beautiful, but I also find it frightening on a visceral level.

I think things that are really huge, like looking at a boat from straight on, the scale of it… It’s so scary. 

And whales, and just the idea of the sea in general is frightening, but it’s one of those things where I’m so intrigued that I can’t look away. I want to see it and I want to know about it; I’ve just always been very obsessed. 

I’ve always been so obsessed with the ocean, and sea creatures and boats. Part of it is definitely because I find it all very beautiful, but I also find it frightening on a visceral level.

DL: Yeah I totally feel that. I’ve been reading a lot of queer sea-related body horror lately. The ocean is just this unknowable mass; it’s so beautiful and also so haunting.

So one of the reasons why I’ve loved your music for so long is that it just punches you in the guts with emotion. I’m literally still recovering from the first time I heard ‘I have more than enough’.

Would you say that you use your lyrics to process your feelings, express them, or a bit of both? How does that vulnerability play out in your music? 

S: It’s definitely a bit of both. I think I am definitely someone who… I don’t feel like I am very good at putting words to a feeling, or even really identifying what it is. I feel like a lot of the time, [writing lyrics] is a good way to understand it myself.

I kind of word vomit something and then it makes a lot more sense later when I’m analysing it, or when I’m putting it into something I’m going to show to other people.

DL: Yeah, that makes sense. On that, I’d really love to talk about ‘Dirt’ on the new album. That one really spoke to me as a beautiful meditation of grief and the inevitability of death, but also what you were saying with the Moby Dick quote – what it is to be in a body, and the body not being your own.

“They’re cuttin’ the wings from off my back,” I thought was a really interesting lyric and image. It reminded me of ‘Coming Clean’ from your Guard Dog record, where you sing, “I don’t wanna be your angel / Wanna see you cut off a limb”.

Can you talk to me about how those two songs spoke to each other, or what they’re expressing? 

Editor’s note: For the ultimate sad, multi-sensory experience, have this playing while you read the rest of the interview. 

S: Yeah, I don’t think I even realised how similar those those lines were honestly! I think I have a lot of lyrics like that, where I have the same theme, thought, metaphor or something that I am always thinking about, and it just keeps coming up in what I’m writing.

I feel like ‘Coming Clean’ is also a song about a type of grieving, but definitely different from like ‘Dirt’. I feel like it’s still ultimately about the human condition or something; I think they’re both trying to understand something that you can’t understand. 

DL: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of similiar themes and metaphors across your music, animals show up so much in your music. 

With the song ‘I have more than enough’, the opening really stuck with me for so long:

There is a crow that I can see on my street almost every day
He lets me watch him there as long as I stand far away
And as long as I am quiet

My honey leaves him with a present
Something shiny, something glistening
And we wait for him to bring us back another thing
And we can’t believe he does

Can you tell me about that crow? And more broadly, why and how animal metaphors show up so often in your lyrics? 

S: That was from there being a lot of crows outside of my house, and they’re just so fascinating and intelligent. I’m always coming back to animal metaphors; they’re just a really interesting way to analyse the way that people act, because they’re so intelligent and can have such similar social structures as people, but they don’t keep us much from each other.

There are a lot of things that we do that are developed through the way that we socialise. There are animal examples of that too that I just don’t know about. They’re just so fascinating. 

DL: I think I read somewhere that you were like, I will never stop writing dog metaphors in my songs.

S: Yeah, exactly.

DL: Speaking of which, I love your necklace. Is that a little skull? It’s so gorgeous.

S: It’s a bird skull! I don’t actually know what kind of bird it is, I should figure that out.

DL: In an interview recently, I really enjoyed hearing you speak about this kind of pressure, or oddness, when talking to the trans experience.

You mentioned how people just naturally assume that your lyrics are all going to be about gender, which is interesting. From personal experience, it happens with writers too, a lot. People are like, This must be your trans allegory! When it’s just about, like, going to the shops. 

Can you talk to me about that lens that’s been applied to your music, and how trans discussions show up for you because of that?

S: Yeah, I feel like there are so many people who understand that I mean. When I look into what people interpret my songs as, or what they are reading from it – I think that people are always gonna have their own interpretation, but it is interesting that people will be like, It’s his message to when he was his pre-transitioned self.

You can totally go ahead and theorise what I’m writing about, ’cause I definitely don’t explain stuff very much. Interpret it how you want, but it’s just interesting, ’cause it’s usually a very simplified idea of gender, I think, when people try and have those analyses.

I think people also have an idea of like “trans music” now. I feel like for a while, it there weren’t any trans musicians in the mainstream music industry.

But [now], I feel like people just think of a genre as like “the transmasc genre” or “the trans women genre”; it’s a very strange thing that people do.

I don’t know, it’s weird. I love trans people music, whatever that is. 

DL: That’s so interesting. I really resonate with what you were saying about how people think you must be talking to your pre-transition self.

Do you think it’s because – even with more trans artists out there – transness is still seen as something to be processed, or that it’s very much attached to being distressed? 

S: Totally, yeah! I feel like people are very focused on the suffering of trans people, because that’s how you get people to care about something. 

As a person who writes really sad music, I feel like there are definitely people out there who are like, Oh, it’s because of trans. [laughs] Which is… it’s just funny.

As a person who writes really sad music, I feel like there are definitely people out there who are like, Oh, it’s because of trans.

DL: [laughs] I feel that so much. If I’m having a bad day, it might be ’cause the supermarket was out of my favorite snack, it’s not always because I’m trans.

I think about that a lot: how your transness can sometimes be measured by your level of distress, and the idea that a story is kind of only worth telling if it’s that really simplified version of like sad, dysphoric → transition → happy, everything’s good.

S: Yeah. And like, your past self is dead, and you have to, like, escape from the chains of it. I don’t know, it’s very strange.

DL: You’re like, My music is sad, but it’s not because of trans. Life is really complicated, everyone. There are a lot of other feelings. 

S: There’s a lot of other things to be sad about, actually. [laughs]

DL: That’s great, I really appreciate that. To finish off our chat, I’d love to hear about a TV or movie character you either had a queer crush on, or gender envy toward, as a kid. When I chatted to MUNA recently, Katie said she had a crush on the girl from Rocket Power, and Naomi said they had gender envy for Mulan. 

S: Okay, I feel like there are so many. This one is also thematically relevant: I have a lifelong Free Willy obsession. Jesse from Free Willy: looking back, I realised that [as a kid], I wanted to be that little boy.

DL: That’s so real. Thank you so much for the chat. I’m really excited to see your show at the Melbourne Recital Centre. How are you feeling about that big upcoming trip?

S: I’m very excited. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. I hate flying, so it’s going to be… long, but it’s worth it.

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