Premiere: Rue Snider splices ‘Tripping on a Raft with Girls’ with ‘Go Back to Carolina’

The past always catches up to you. And you’ll never see it coming. Past traumas often make their presence known in measured drips, contaminating particular aspects of our existence and how we live and love. As we grow older, we’re imbued with certain coping mechanisms to deflect the pain and any harmful toxins, off-shooting the real issues and never actually confronting or processing what we’ve endured. But everyone reaches that tipping point. New York City virtuoso Rue Snider watches the clouds part along his path and scans the oncoming flood with a new split single. He matches his previously issued “Tripping on a Raft with Girls” with the throat-punching “Go Back to Carolina,” premiering exclusively today.

“Maybe, I’ll call her on the phone / Use words to make her cry / To help my grieving,” sings Snider, whose voice tightens its grasp on the skin until it peels. The layers underneath are rose-red and swollen, and there seems to be new blisters popping and oozing. He spits on the hook, “I wish she’d go back to Carolina / And just stay there.” The song, as sweetly bitter as it might be, also serves as a vital cathartic release, unpacking parts of himself that had long poisoned his bloodstream. He once choked on his own problems, but his music has permitted him time, more than anything, to tackle and crush his skeletons.

Even more, scalding underneath the surface, “Go Back to Carolina” demonstrates “the heavy, difficult, important idea of psychological triggers in a funny, sort of profane way that most people will be able understand even if they haven’t been introduced to the concept before,” Snider tells B-Sides & Badlands. “Once I started to grasp the role that my past plays in my current life and began to have compassion for myself for some of my triggered responses, and once I started to really identify what those triggers were, I was able to begin the process of rooting them out. This has lead to a much richer and more rewarding life than I had previously. That freedom is something I celebrate. This song illustrates the absence of that freedom. It’s the brain flooded with cortisol deciding whether to fight, flight or freeze. It’s the moment before awareness. It’s a place everyone has been.”

His upbringing in an evangelical Christian environment seared distortions of reality inside his skull. He explains, “I was subjected to a tremendous amount of manipulation, deception and flat out lies beginning in fourth grade. I was a sensitive, impressionable kid, and I believed these lies taught to me by adults who I now consider to be well meaning but evil people. They were misinformed themselves, but they were old enough to know better. They were pious, self-imposed leaders of children and as such, had a responsibility to recognize the fragility and preciousness of the positions they actively sought. These members of the evangelical Christian community were not held to any consistent standards and weren’t required to have any formal training in childhood development. As such, they became dogmatic agents of religious propaganda.”

Such erroneous indoctrination not only dismantled Snider’s perception of religion and divinity but tore apart his sense of self, limb from limb. That’s not to say all saintly belief systems are virulent, but it’s most frequently soured human beings who strike a far more damaging subplot. “I was taught that asking questions and intellectual rigor were bad, that bodies were evil, that sex was shameful outside the context of heterosexual marriage, that women were subordinate to men, that meat eating and slaughtering animals for food was moral and necessary,” Snider lists in one exasperated heave, “that abortion was murder, that hell was a literal place where anyone who wasn’t a Christian would spend eternity being tortured, that homosexuality was a learned form of perversion, that the earth was 10,000 years old, that God was male, that he literally created the universe in 7 days and that the Bible was literally true, among many other ridiculous things. I developed into an adult fraught with shame and anxiety, and I developed a significant anger management problem. This lead to 21 years of extraordinary alcohol abuse that should have killed me.”

Today, Snider stands taller than he has in a very long time. He’s three and a half years sober, and his face lights up with the invigoration born out of his music and just living life. “Go Back to Carolina” is a triumphant chorus, biting yet breezy. “After a significant amount of therapy, I’ve learned about the reality of psychological triggers. They are any number of words, situations, sounds, smells, places, anything that in the tangled web of our brains can affect a response when they are roused that takes us back to the time and place where we suffered some sort of trauma, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, intellectual, sexual or whatever,” he says. “I have tons of unhealed trauma, and I’ve lived a life essentially free of abuse in a loving middle class family where most of my needs were met all of the time. I am tremendously fucked up, nonetheless. I can not imagine what it’s like to be a person of color, or someone gay who grew up in a small town, or just being a woman in this society. Triggers affect everyone. They’re like gravity which we are subject to regardless of our belief about it.”

Take a listen below and walk through Snider’s vivid illustration of his current creative headspace, especially coming off 2018’s outstanding and lush City Living, named one of our Best Albums of the year.

https://soundcloud.com/musicbyrue/sets/tripping-on-a-raft-go-back-to/s-E0PiH

The standout lyric of “Go Back to Carolina” (“I kind of miss being her man / Not the way she turned and ran / When we found out I was the reason we were childless”) really exposes your raw nerve. Was this song easy to write?

It’s interesting that you picked that line. To me the the standout lyric is “She was an Avett Brothers fan / So I hate that fucking band.” That’s the center of the song. That’s the trigger. Then, the part you quoted is the memory the trigger, in this case the Avett Brothers song playing on a juke box, takes the singer back to.

This song was very easy to write. It happened quickly. I was in Brooklyn on a break from touring and staying at my friend Jill’s apartment watching her cat. I came up with the melody on my way up Drigg’s Avenue walking past McCarren Park and had most of it worked out by the time I got back to her place in Greenpoint. That’s maybe a 15-minute walk. Then, it was just a matter of dressing up the melody with the lyrical ideas in my head. I knew from the get-go it was about being triggered. I was thinking about the scene in ‘Silver Lining’s Playbook’ where Bradley Cooper is sent off the deep end at his therapist’s office by the song “My Cherie Amour” by Stevie Wonder.

You have such a cool, but biting, demeanor in the song. Not exclusive to this song, but when you are settling into a story, how do you know what take or performance is most fitting to embody the emotions?

The secret to songwriting is to get out of your own fucking way. I think that’s a life lesson, too. When I was a baby songwriter, I used to obsess and worry about whether I had the right melody or whether the story was correct for this song or whether the chords were the most awesome or if they were different enough from the last thing I wrote. I give absolutely zero fucks about any of that now.

When an idea comes, I write it. I don’t judge it. I don’t think about it in the context of anything else I’ve written. I don’t “try.” I just write. Granted, I’ve worked very hard at songwriting, and I’ve written a couple hundred songs, many of which are fucking awful. But most of the time, after I got past being completely green, the awful ones were because I tried to steer the creative process too much instead of being a channel and letting it happen.

That sounds fucking ridiculous when I say it out loud, and it makes it sound like there’s no craft involved. Not true. But overthinking is creativity’s worst enemy. There’s always another goddamn song. It doesn’t matter if this one is any good because there will be another after it.

What I do is write songs. Beyond love, that is my primary function. Along the way, there are things I have to do for money. There are distractions. There are places to go and shows to play and nature to be humbled by. I hope to achieve enough notoriety that I make my living exclusively from my songs. But regardless, my primary means of expression and the way I interact with and interpret the world is by writing songs. So, I don’t worry about what’s “fitting” or whether the emotions work. I go where the song wants to go. When I try to oppose it and go my own way, it’s like swimming upstream, and the song almost always ends up in the garbage bin.

Once something is written, I take some space from it, then revisit it and see what’s there that’s beautiful. Sometimes, it’s just the melody or just the chorus. Sometimes, the lyrics are fantastic but the melody is from someone else’s song, and I can’t use it. Rarely is it all there when I first go back to it. Then, I start making decisions about how to take the furniture I cobbled together with pieces of wood I found behind the White Castle on Northern Boulevard in Queens and make it into something somebody would want to display in their home.

Where “Go Back to Carolina” is a bit more grounded and stabs the throat, “Tripping on a Raft with Girls” is ghost-like. Why pair them up together?

My record ‘City Living’ was originally going to be called ‘Summer Somewhere.’ We recorded 14 songs. After they were done and I took a look at what I’d made, it became clear that the story was about New York City and my experiences as someone new here in 2005. That meant some songs had to come off, one of which was “Go Back To Carolina.”

The early sequencing of the tracks before the decision was made about the ‘City Living’ direction always found “Tripping” and “Carolina” back-to-back. Sonically, they really work. “Tripping” ends with a ferocious and biting guitar, and it’s a song about psychedelic drugs, and “Carolina” is an aggressive rock song start-to-finish with a huge melodic hook in a chorus littered with profanity. They sound good together, and when you’re trafficking in music, sometimes that quality trumps all the others.

Also, they are both story songs that aren’t about me. It’s easy for people to assume that if something is first person, it’s about the person who wrote it. I don’t have any idea why people think that with music, because no other art form is bound by that assumption. My songs draw from my emotional lived experience, but the details of the stories in the songs are often fiction. The authenticity comes from honestly grappling with emotions. If I made all the songs literally about my experience, I would have entire records about sitting at home trying to decide whether to rewatch ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street 2’ or ‘3’ and whether or not I should ask my girlfriend to come over and take a nap.

As always, you have such a knack with painting a beautiful portrait of life, of pain, of thrills. Coming off last summer’s City Living, where are you right now, emotionally and musically?

I’m in a really wonderful place, emotionally and musically. I’m in a new relationship with an incredible human where I feel safe and peaceful almost all the time. She demonstrates what it means to care for someone actively every day, and it’s helping me heal and become a better person. I hope that’s reciprocal. I think it is.

I went through a devastating break up last year that caused me to rethink a lot of ways I was living and get some help. I had not done enough work to heal emotionally post-alcohol abuse, and getting back into therapy and starting to really work on my thoughts and find some discipline for my body changed a lot of things. I wrote a double record, 20 songs, in the midst of that break up and my intention for a while had been to record those songs as a concept album. Now that there’s some distance, I think that’s unnecessary.

I put a handful of those songs together with some other new material and those demos sound to me like the best work I’ve done. I plan to make that record this year. It requires a lot of money, which I don’t have in-hand yet, so we’ll see how that goes. A couple very generous people have provided the resources for me to make art the last few years.

It’s virtually impossible to make any waves in the music industry without money, and I don’t have money. But I have hope and a spirit that won’t fucking break. You can’t earn enough on your own to make records. You just can’t. An inexpensive record costs about a third of the median household income in the USA. Making art, being a songwriter, being a musical artist, these are full time endeavors. So, I put together the money I need to pay the rent and stay fed and unashamedly speak the message of patronage because the United States is a country that doesn’t value artists.

If you love music and you have means, I recommend supporting someone’s music or art that you love. And that’s not just buying their records or going to their theater productions. Voices like mine will not ever be heard, otherwise. The internet will continue to exploit the next teen TV show prop that can be used to sell products for multinational corporations, for sure. But there are people who are in a position to support the voices they want to see amplified. I know this because I’ve been the recipient of some of that generosity, and it’s the only reason I’ve been able to make the records I’ve made.

I think it’s important to say these things out loud. To tell the truth. We need to start telling the truth and stop pretending about our lives and careers. I believe in positive self talk and eliminating limiting beliefs. But lying to the world for branding is bullshit and faking it til you make it is a one way train to nowhere. Honesty and self-compassion have opened more doors for me than anything else ever has.

I’m moving forward step-by-step and continuing to tell the truth. Fuck being polite. Fuck worrying about protecting the feelings of anyone on the wrong side of history. Fuck rolling over and accepting income inequality as an immutable fact of life. I’m inspired by the new Congress, especially the women, who are demanding change. That political and societal shift, combined with my effort to grow emotionally and commitment to make music in the face of what appear to be insurmountable financial odds, gives me hope.

I just finished recording three new songs at Restoration Sound in Brooklyn with Lorenzo Wolff producing. We did two of my songs and a cover of a Phoebe Bridgers tune that is hands down the best thing I have ever put to tape. It is un-fucking-real, and I can’t wait for the world to hear it. I hope Phoebe hears it and likes it, too. Her record came out in 2017 and knocked me on my ass. I haven’t been that inspired and impressed with a songwriter in years and years. Those three songs are being mixed now. After this split single comes out, I’m releasing a rock and roll cover of a Lana Del Rey song in March. So, I’m psyched as can be about all the new music on the horizon, and that’s before even recording one note of the next album. I’m trying to tour a lot this year. Last year was basically rest and recover from four years on the road. I’ll be back it at this year in full force.

Follow Snider on his socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website