Ryan Beatty’s “Calico Tour", Houston, 2/16/2024

 Beatty at White Oak Music Hall, Houston, Texas

I recently had the privilege of winning two tickets to see Ryan Beatty in concert. It was all incredibly last minute; one of the other PR directors told me I had won the tickets during an officer meeting, and I remember hurriedly texting my best friend out a tentative plan to get out of tomorrow's classes early and haul ass to Houston. To be honest, I haven't listened to his music in months, but I was nonetheless excited to be hearing his album Calico, which I vaguely remembered to be a pleasant listen, in person. 

I like to think that Beatty and I have a lot in common. In 2018, we were both coming to terms with our identities, both attempting to find ourselves through art and music. A former Disney star, Beatty had recently come out, and channeled this newfound freedom, fear, and excitement into his debut album, Boy in Jeans. By 2020, we were deeply entangled within independent music circles in our own ways. While Beatty was appearing in Brockhampton projects, Tyler, the Creator Christmas singles, and gearing up to tour his second album, I was sitting in class, looking down at the phone in my lap trying to get Brockhampton merchandise and win Camp Flog Gnaw ticket giveaways. 

There's a sort of dreamy haze around Beatty's first albums, his voice like a light coming through clouds of twinkling synths and muted drums. His lyrics have a bit of an adolescent charm to them, especially on Boy in Jeans. Every song seems like it aims to subvert typically heteronormative tropes like the senior prom and meetups on the football field to weave stories of love and longing. It's often unclear as to who Ryan sings as, the line between the stories of a character, a younger Beatty, and the collective joys and pains of queer youth everywhere ever blurrier. The album leads with the uplifting "Haircut", a slinky, R&B-inspired tune about new beginnings. "I smile on, and feel the closure," Beatty sings, "I finally feel like me again."  

The show was at White Oak Music Hall, one of Houston's smaller music venues, in the beautiful neighborhood of the Heights. There's a suburban charm to the area, and my friend and I gushed over the colorful wooden homes nearby as the line slowly made its way in. The wood seemed to continue into the venue, with the walls, stairs, and railings covered in a warm brown paneling, almost a picture frame directing everyone's eyes to the stage. The setup for the concert was minimal. It looked like the crew had simply rolled the instruments out into a semicircle in the center of the stage, from a drum set on the far left to an upright piano on the right. In the center of the arc, there was nothing more than what looked like an amp box and a mic stand. There wasn't much in the way of stage effects or decoration aside from a fog machine, which began to hiss out smoke as the band began to file in. The first to take the stage was the piano player. He began to play a simple progression that winded and turned as the remaining band members took the stage, each one taking their place before Beatty himself, wearing a brown zip-up hoodie and blue jeans, took a seat on the amp box in the middle of the stage. 

Calico is a radical departure from Beatty's earlier work. The dreamy, vaguely alternative R&B sound that defined his first two albums is shelved here for something much more stripped-back and acoustic. I like to think that the staging reflected this new approach. It felt almost like a jam session we were sitting in on, with the piano player and guitarists occasionally adding their own ornament to songs off of Calico. While Beatty would usually dance and interact with the audience at his past shows, he simply sat, drank his tea, and made his appreciation for the band's lush accompaniment known.  

There's an undeniable honesty to Calico that is especially apparent live. Beatty's songwriting spares no detail -- the lyrics to songs like "Cinnamon Bread" build collages out of little sensory details: a copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the sound of a piano being played a bit out of time and tune, the scent of cinnamon bread in the air. "Multiple Endings", later on in the album, paints a picture of a TV running, of fleeting intimacy during a sticky Texas summer. There is no longer any confusion as to who Ryan sings about. As the lights shone down on Beatty, sitting there on his amp box, it was abundantly clear that every lyric, every joy and ache in his voice, reflected stories entirely his own.   

Something that remained with me after his set had ended, after the crowd had filtered out, even after my friend and I had stuffed our faces with late-night breakfast and driven home, was Beatty's performance of "Haircut". The arrangement was simple enough, with the drummer, pianist, and bassist laying down a relaxed tempo for the lap steel and acoustic guitars to glide over. What stuck with me, I think, was the vocal performance.

"It starts right now," the chorus of the song goes, a simple statement of the song's position as the opening for the album as well as a statement of the song's intent to start a new chapter of Beatty's career. It's a fun moment, but there's a pop sheen and a lightness to it that, like a lot of Boy in Jeans, comes across as a bit adolescent.  

In the six years since his debut, Ryan's voice has changed. While he sings as clearly as ever, his voice takes on a deeper, more soulful timbre than it did in 2018. The six years of experience since that debut are evident in his relaxed, assured delivery. The chorus was no longer the simple pop hook it used to be. There's an intention in Beatty's voice, the phrase said with more and more conviction as the crowd began to sing along. This is the start of something new, Beatty seemed to affirm, nodding along as the band crescendoed around him. "It starts right now," he declared, with a conviction I still think about today.

A Review of Custard's Loverama

(This article was originally written almost a year ago, as an album review for a magazine published by my university's student radio organization. This version incorporates some suggestions made by a creative writing professor.)

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I’ve come to realize that I have a weakness for bands whose target audience is middle-aged, somewhat nerdy, white men. Frankly, I don’t know what went wrong. My parents are both big 90's pop and R&B fans, and groups like TLC and Boyz II Men served as the soundtrack to many days spent helping clean the house. As of March 2023, however, my all-time top artist on Spotify is They Might Be Giants (of “Istanbul, not Constantinople” fame), with dad rock icons Fleetwood Mac following closely behind. 

 

In my defense, I will say that underneath their unassuming appearances, a lot of these bands have a knack for approaching complicated, at times morbid, topics in an interesting and accessible way. They Might Be Giants’ favorite subject to sing about is death, and Fleetwood Mac’s most popular album, Rumors, is about relationship issues, lyrically made up of jabs at past relationships, attacking people who were usually in the studio recording the song with them.

 

The latest band in this vein to plague my listening history has been the Australian indie rock band Custard. Founded and fronted by David McCormack (whose husky voice is now known to many as that of Bandit in the hit kids' show Bluey), the band combines punchy guitar work with a tongue-in-cheek lyrical style to deliver short and sweet pop songs that often make fun of themselves or the music scene. One of their most popular singles is “Music is Crap,” in which drummer Glenn Thompson explains how aliens came to him in a dream and told him how all music sucks. Most of their work follows this sort of pattern, but their 1999 album Loverama sees the band take a turn into decidedly gloomier territory. While they mostly retain their carefree tone, it is Custard’s surprisingly nuanced approach to the idea of moving on that makes Loverama their best record to date. 

 

The 90's were an eventful decade for Custard. In 1995, they got their first hit in the single “Apartment,” a driving, almost frantic rock song that became an instant favorite of alternative stations across Australia. More successful singles followed, and by 1997, the band was touring the country alongside acts like Weezer, Frank Black, and Beck. After years of recording, performing, and promoting, however, the band began to slow down. The combination of a disastrous attempt at an American tour, the growing internal cracks within the group, and personal issues the band members were facing made it abundantly clear that the next project they sat down to record had a chance of being their last. 

 

I was first under the impression that Loverama was just another Custard album. On first glance, it has that same unabashedly geeky, sleazy charm that most of their work does — the title of its first song and leading single, ‘Girls Like That (Don’t Go For Guys Like Us)’, should clue you in on the kind of people that popped this album into their car stereos regularly. Once I put my headphones in and looked past the song titles, however, I found myself noticing something deeper, something more forlorn, brewing beneath their typical sarcasm.

 

"It’s more lovelorn than love lust," McCormack said in an interview with alternative station Triple J, "I like to think of it as our most bleak and negative album that we could possibly make with no redeeming features, except that you can dance to it." 

 

I couldn’t have put it better. Loverama is a blast to listen to: drummer Glenn Thompson and bassist Paul Medew lay down a solid, thumping foundation for Matthew Strong’s driving lead guitar playing and McCormack’s gawky delivery. The band’s firing on all cylinders here, pumping out groove after groove that’ll, at the very least, get your foot tapping. Lyrically, however, Custard sound a little different from their typically lighthearted selves. The shift is most noticeable on songs like ‘Nervous Breakdance’, in which McCormack gets uncharacteristically direct about trying to get over a breakup, assuring himself that the pain will be over soon while he frantically looks for any sign that it really will. Perhaps the most poignant example of this is the album’s closer, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, a sort of reenactment of the awkward, circular conversations you have with any ex. McCormack, it seems, finally has the chance to get back with the nebulous ex he’s been yearning for the whole album. Instead of desperately asking for them back, though, he seems to have recognized that it’s time to move on. “I’ve already answered that question,” he retorts to the ex’s increasingly frustrating inquiries. The conversation goes in circles as the music builds, culminating in an explosion of strings and guitar. The song ends on a line that some argue hints at his own feelings about Custard’s impending breakup, “nostalgia’s all I’ve got to look forward to, in the end.”

 

It was on my fourth or fifth listen-through of this album that I noticed one of my favorite things about it. It’s at the tail end of the song “The New Matthew”, one of my favorites off the album for personal reasons, and in typical Custard fashion it plays out as almost a joke. The lyrics are a vague reference to difficulties guitarist Matthew Strong was going through at the time, and the music video sees the band half-playing along and lip syncing along to the song in a storage unit with a cardboard cutout of the absent Strong. Looking past the tongue-in-cheek video, there’s an undeniably wistful air to the song, arguably reflecting their fatigue after years of touring and promoting. This sleepiness doesn’t last long, though. On the album version of the song, at around the 3:12 mark, you’ll hear someone ask “The fuck’s going on? It’s a party”. An entirely different song begins to play, a short funk interlude that leads into the obnoxiously catchy “Ringo (I Feel Like)”, Custard’s best (and thankfully only) attempt at a disco song. When I first noticed the transition, I was a little amused. They’re hiding, I remember thinking, attempting to make a joke out of their pain and keep the party going like nothing happened. As I did more research though, I found myself questioning this idea. While McCormack admits that a lot of their wide-eyed, youthful enthusiasm had been sapped away by years of touring, recording the album was not the sob-fest I’d imagined it to be. In contrast to their last two albums, which were recorded in studios across America, Loverama was recorded in their hometown, Brisbane. This proximity to home made recording the album not only easy for the band, but for those close to them: Strong’s parents contributed claps to “Hit Song”, while McCormack’s dad contributed lyrics to “Funny”. Martin Lee, a friend of the group and drummer of Brisbane band Regurgitator, often came by the studio, drinks in tow.

 

Loverama was a huge success for the group. It peaked at #19 on Australia’s ARIA charts, the band’s highest charting album to date, and it would eventually become their most commercially successful. ‘Girls Like That’ became, arguably, the band’s biggest hit, ranking #3 on Triple J’s Top 100 in 1998. Reviews of the album were generally favorable, with audiences praising the album’s eclectic mix of garage pop, disco, funk, and country, as well as the more introspective writing on the second half of the album.
The album’s success would be their last. Soon after the release of Loverama, Custard went on a six-month hiatus. Their hiatus would continue into the new millennium, eventually becoming a full-on breakup, announced alongside a greatest hits compilation aptly titled ‘Goodbye, Cruel World’. 

 

A lot of the public reactions I’ve seen to the breakup express the same sort of pity; the kind of sentiment you’d see poured out for a show canceled too soon. “Very enjoyable album,” user Mr_Busby laments on Loverama’s rateyourmusic page, “they ended on such a high note”. I have to say I empathize with them. I think I’ve always had a hard time letting go of things. When I was little, I cried for a week because my mom was going back to work after a weekend with us at home. I couldn’t sleep the night before my high school graduation and struggled to walk up the football field to get my diploma. It’s hard for me to close chapters of my life. I’ll admit that I’m a creature of habit, I love routines and familiarity and I struggle to willingly give these comforts up in pursuit of something novel. Despite this, I’m able to recognize that their attitudes are a little misguided. 

 

Endings, of bands or of relationships, are often seen as spectacles. The breakup is an event to behold, a fiery explosion of who said what, and understandably so. In a sick sort of way, it’s fun to watch these bonds stretch and break. It’s hard not to want to listen to the news surrounding the latest one. Picking sides and starting arguments is something that can be fun for decades. After all, people still argue about who broke up the Beatles (it was John, not Yoko).

 

I don’t think Custard was one of these cases. While the increasing creative differences and disagreements within the band could suggest that they could have gone through some behind the scenes fight, Loverama and the press around it never seemed angry or bitter. Interviews done around the album’s release date saw the band being as insufferable as ever, providing meandering, made-up, half-answers to simple questions as they always have. Custard’s break up was a recognition of the fact that the band was no longer able to reconcile their diverging goals and ideas. It was just time to move on.
 

"It was like the last week of high school," McCormack explained, "everyone except Paul was moving out of Brisbane, everything was changing”. A lot did for the group in the years following the breakup. McCormack moved south to Sydney, keeping busy by founding and fronting a few new bands, starting a soundtrack collective, and, eventually, settling down to start a family.

 

My friend Charlie often tells this story about a book they've read. A divorced professor is invited to their ex’s wedding, and instead of making up some lie to slip out of attending, the professor suddenly accepts ever gig he’s ever been invited to. He sets himself up for a dash around the world, attending conference after conference, giving speech after speech. He wants to send the message that he’s doing fine, that he’s booked and busy and is flourishing without her in his life. It is in a brief moment of respite on this mad trip that Charlie found the story’s most poignant moment. One of the professor’s acquaintances is sitting with him, seeing right through his act. Love isn’t wasted, he tells him. The time that the professor and his wife spent together wasn’t wasted. The love existed and is gone, but the time that they shared, the things they saw, and the lessons they learned will remain with him forever. Just because it has ended doesn’t mean that it ceases to matter. 

 

I don’t think I’ll ever be at peace with moving on. I know for a fact that I’ll struggle to walk up to the stage at my college graduation, and that the day I finally, officially move out from my parents’ house will be a tearful one. Despite this, Custard and their album Loverama have shown me that the process doesn’t have to be so terrifying. Sure, you mourn the end of a relationship, but there’s nothing stopping you from dancing while you do it. You can write songs knowing that they may be your last, but you should make them as obnoxious and light-hearted as you always have. Moving on, they seem to argue, is difficult - but it’s not the impossible task that it's often made out to be.