On my radar: St Vincent’s cultural highlights

The Rehearsal (Season 2)

I’ve been a fan of Nathan Fielder for a while, and on our last tour the band and I would get together after shows and watch season two of The Rehearsal. We were slack-jawed. The premise is that Fielder believes, based on some research, that a number of plane crashes happen when the co-pilot doesn’t question the authority or judgment of the pilot. So he sets about trying to prove this premise by insane and expensive and elaborate means. Every point at which he could raise the stakes, he raises those stakes. I love his mind.

Love and Radio

This is one of the more daring and experimental podcasts I’ve ever listened to. They will interview outsiders, freaks and contrarians – sometimes deeply malignant contrarians, and sometimes just people with really interesting stories. What makes it is the sound design. It’s the best use of music with storytelling I’ve ever heard – truly psychedelic and experimental. According to my Patreon subscription, there’s a new season coming soon. It’s been coming soon for a while now, but it’ll be worth the wait.

Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter

Cameron Winter is a young New Yorker who is in an incredible band called Geese. He put out this solo record recently and it really moved me. That’s all I’m interested in at this point with music: my heart being moved. I’ve listened to Heavy Metal through my headphones all over the world, from South America to Europe and China. I hear in it a lot of references – it’s Tom Waitsy, it’s Rufus Wainwrighty – but really he sounds like himself. The track that really gets me is Drinking Age. It makes me feel comfortably melancholy, which is my default.

Chordbot

This is a midi app that I used to write most of my [2021] record Daddy’s Home, and I find it to be such a useful tool. You can make chord progressions that involve all the fancy chords and it’s such a quick and elegant way to write songs. If you’re not great at keys, which I’m not, or if you’re tired of writing on guitar, you can just put chords together in a sequence and then sing melodies over them. I now use it all the time.

Oh, Mary!

I am obsessed with [actor and playwright] Cole Escola – one of our great American treasures. Their show Oh, Mary! asks what if Mary Todd Lincoln had a dream to be a cabaret star and Abe was squashing her dreams, and what if the best thing that ever happened to her was Lincoln’s assassination. I saw it on Broadway, right after playing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The second I got off stage, I ran the few blocks down the street to the Lyceum. I’ve never seen a crowd enjoy themselves so much. Cole’s just heaven.

The Brutalist

I watched the multi-Oscar-winning film on a plane and for the first 10 minutes I thought it was silent. I was thinking, wow, what a bold choice. I was captivated – until I reached for my champagne and jiggled the headphone jack and realised that, in fact, there was sound. Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian immigrant in America after the second world war who works his way up as a brilliant brutalist architect and finds himself under the sway of a waspy American magnate. It’s a film that every artist who interacts with capitalism can relate to.

Photographs by Alex Da Corte/Alamy/AP/HBO