Interview: Charlie Burg probes literature, his own pain on EP trilogy
Alt-pop newcomer discusses the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his EP trilogy.
American poet, essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson writes on the transcendence of love and concepts of that initial exceptional spark and its rippling effects through self-reliance and social progression. His work titled “Love,” published in 1841 as part of his Essays, First Series collection, examines what exactly love evokes within human interconnectivity. “When the moonlight was a pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures,” reads one particularly affecting excerpt. That passage became a singular force behind electro-pop craftsman Charlie Burg and his lush trilogy of EPs, from 2017’s One, Violet to 2018’s Two, Moonlight to the freshly-dropped Three, Fever.
Burg deliberates on Emerson’s work with the aid of bright synthetics, draped over rich, globe-expanding melodies and lyrics that cut to the bone. When his father gifted him the book of essays, Burg found himself swallowed whole in Emerson’s words, as an ocean rushing into high tide. Then living in a sublet in Ann Arbor in the summer of ’17, Burg, treading water trying “to find the thread that would connect the dots between the songs I was writing for a new project,” he says, stepped from beneath a glimmering and replenishing waterfall of acute knowledge. “Love” completely flipped his world upside down. “There was just something about the combination of lovely words and the carefree way in which Emerson articulated these lofty yet universal human conditions that gave me this feeling in my gut, ‘Wow, there it is. That’s the feeling!'” he recalls. “It guided my songwriting with what I felt was the same thoughtfulness and candidness that Emerson accessed.”
Turning his eye to foundation-laying, brick-by-brick, Burg reconfigures Emerson’s intense energy, his words, his breath, into exuberant and glossy pop music. Burg materializes matters of young love, heartbreaks and coming of age through a rose-pink lens, wise beyond his years. “I immediately knew that I wanted my songs to be painted in the same shades, the same light as that passage. It just conjured this mental image of a beautiful infinite starry night sky, a sweetness in the air, and nothing mattered but honesty and understanding,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands over email. “It created this freeze-frame of life as if you were looking at a painting of your own life. At the same time, though, I saw this image in a blink of an eye, like it was so fleeting, and that embodied another concept I sought to capture in my music.”
Three, Fever cozies up to his explorations of pain, emotional angst and loss of innocence, and through slipping onto the dance floor, as he does with the fizzy funk of “To Dance is to Love,” primped with groovy soul guitar, an homage to Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, he assembles a euphoric escape. “It hurts me to keep it inside / But this honesty is so hard to hide, baby / I’ve been feeling pretty down all week / Won’t you send me a song that makes you think of me?,” he proposes, finessing his heart-torn confessionals as merely uncontrollably glittering rhythms. “Avalanche,” featuring musician austenyo, drowns in a relationship’s glacial shards, slashing into the skin and emptying his shell. “We’re together right now, but I know it’ll never last / You love me right now, least you say that to me,” he sings, fully aware of the impending doomsday.
In evaluating Emerson’s words, and through constructing his own, Burg devotes his booming songbook to “the beauty of the emotional diversity amongst us,” he says. He carefully and thoughtfully calls to The Temptations and Al Green in much of his string-laden compositions, which sharpen the psychological underpinnings. “Everything has been felt before. Pain is universal; all humans and thinkers and writers grapple with it,” he considers. “And some just have a very eloquent way of articulating it that sometimes makes you consider your own pain in a new way. Although, despite the universality of it, each one of us experiences human feelings in unbelievably nuanced ways. That’s what I like to tap into with my music.”
Below, Burg (set to perform NYC’s Baby’s All Right on February 2) discusses what he’s gained through his EP trilogy, feeling alive and his pain.
What was it exactly about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insight that led you to explore his ideas through your own work?
It just made me really think about love and youthful pain and how fleeting life, time and moments are. Emerson has a way of writing that makes you want to hang on every word, every thought as though it’s its own little universe. Even just the sonic beauty of the words he puts together…almost reads like lyrics!
Do you have any other Emerson passages that have stuck with you?
Yes, from his essay “Self Reliance”: “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”
Have you often been utilized literature for music?
I think I’ve maybe inherited some of my writing style from my favorite books, yeah. Sometimes, I’m inspired by how lyrical some of my favorite poets are in their writing.
How would you compare yourself before and after this EP collection?
Before I started work on the series, I think I was less weary, less concerted in my opinions of the world, and less understanding of the way I process things. Where I am now, I’m more solid in my idea of what I need to do to be who I want to be.
Do you feel you gained greater clarity on your life and love?
I think I’ve gained clarity on the fact that any sort of clarity is much harder to achieve than I thought. [laughs] I’ve got work to do.
You’ve spoken previously about how you were seeking to examine your transformation as a young adult. Do you feel you’ve gotten closer to who you were meant to be?
My songs and projects come as often as do moments of self-examination in my life. Sometimes, those moments take the shape of failure, heartbreak, triumph, the uprooting of something that made me feel safe…and so on… and I think I’m starting to learn how necessary that pain or ⏤ pardon my French ⏤ shittiness is in the process of growing and finding oneself.
“We make choices out of our pain” is a key lyric from “Saturday Hymnal / Bad Dreams.” Is that something you found yourself doing?
Yeah, I think we all do. It’s funny I was just talking to one of my roommates about this ⏤ one of the hardest things to do is remove yourself from the intensity of what you’re feeling in the moment and make decisions more based on rationality and foresight. It’s just so interesting how minutely different the ways people handle their emotions are. Everyone feels sadness, hurt, happiness, etc., quite deeply; what differs is the extent to which each person acknowledges and accesses those feelings.
Why does pain make for great art?
That’s a big question. I think it has to do with honesty and vulnerability.
What led to the “when u were u” interlude?
I’m so glad you asked this. I’ve been wanting to talk about it. I made a beat that I really wanted to include on the project, but it didn’t really feel like a full song ⏤ more of an interlude. I asked my friend Brian to play upright bass on it, and once that was recorded, I was sitting with this awesome instrumental ,and I’m like, “Dang, I gotta fit this on the project somehow!” I started listening to Flower Boy, specifically the track “November,” and I got inspired by the way Tyler utilized real-life raw sound-bytes on the track. And since self-discovery/self-love is kind of an underlying inspiration for ‘Three, Fever,’ I had the idea to ask people in my life to send me a voice memo of them describing a moment in their life when they felt the most themselves, their truest form. I just wanted to create this warm, safe sonic world of self-acceptance and honesty. I’m so happy with how it turned out. Might be my favorite track on the project.
Outside of music, when have you felt most alive in your life?
I love traveling alone, being by myself in a brand new place. Whenever I’m traveling with people, I always make a point to branch off by myself for a bit and walk around in solitude. I do that whenever I go to Israel with a group…during my internship in Seattle this summer…it always makes me feel peaceful and present.
Since you were so inspired by Emerson, what would you hope the listener gleans from your music, to in-turn be inspired in their own endeavors?
It sounds simple, but I’d just say to pay attention to everything around you. Keep your eyes and ears open wherever you go. My grandma told me that a few months ago over dinner. Notice people and read and listen to everything you can get your hands on, and acknowledge every feeling that passes through your heart. There’s really no need to contrive or force things, because your life and your mind belong to no one else but you.
Photo Credit: Angela Ricciardi
