by Shea Roney (@uglyhug_)
“I had a teacher in art school,” David DiAngelis begins the anecdote, remarking on his time at Mass Art.
This side track in our conversation came in reference to a story I shared of one of my 6th grade students who wore a shirt with the cover of Elliott Smith’s self-titled pasted on to the fabric. The kid, catching my attention as a very young Elliott Smith fan, brought up a common farce from one music sad sack to another – listening to particular artists like Smith is an automatic means to pain and suffering; reciprocated from the art and artists own existence to the listeners.
DiAngelis continues, “I remember being really frustrated at this point and so I made my thesis pretty silly and that teacher brought me aside, and said, ‘you know, behind all great humor is a great sadness.”
There was an unintentional pause as both our faces scrunched, as if those words held a distasteful odor, until DiAngelis broke out – “like, ‘she's not wrong!”
DiAngelis is the artistic stamina behind the Brooklyn-based bedroom project, Helenor. With the release of his sophomore record, A public place, the album has become an embodiment of DiAngelis’ last few years of transition. I called him up a month prior to its release to discuss the movement in his life and the changes he made in the name of betterment.
Tired of being idle as his footing shifted around him in his hometown of Boston, DiAngelis packed up his belongings in a commercial storage unit and moved to Brooklyn as the pandemic was seemingly safer. “Within that process I was kind of already recording these songs, and they were already shaping up,” he recalls, as a plan for a new record began to form.
With hopes to dip a toe in the New York music community, DiAngelis was thrown on a bill – a “songs in the round” type show at Rockwood Music Hall with other NY musicians, Wilson and Steven Van Betten. “That night we're leaving and it was like, ‘did we just start a band?” he tells the story, laughing at the sheer impracticality of chance. But low and behold, “they then effectively became part of the band.”
“I think it's really easy, If you have a call to make art, to suppress it. There are 1 million reasons to suppress it every day. so I think that sometimes, regardless of what that calling is, if you really want to do something. you're gonna crack a bunch of egg shells to get closer to that goal.”
This forward motion, a big location shift, singing to a label and searching out creative collaboration and community became a significant and conscious gesture in the creation of A public place.
“Something that has changed in my process from when I was writing songs a few years back,” DiAngelis says, was an effort to leave “opportunities at every point of the creative process, just in case we wanna change it later, because that's gonna equal something better in the end;” a dissolution that most starting producers go through in the name of perfection. “I would say that that is a thief of good art in a lot of ways,” he admits. This time around, he focused on making strict creative choices and seeing them through to the end. “I'm not a super impulsive person, so I think that form of permanence is a lot like coming to terms with making active choices to be less like that.”
Permanence is a conflicting word; its connotation is just as liable for pushing people over the edge as it is a welcome mat to wipe your shoes on and feel at home. Most of where A public place comes from is DiAngelis’ exercise of taking risks to alter his perception of permanence.
“There's big career change stuff, big relationship stuff, there's big family stuff, there was death stuff – so all of the boxes were checked in the last few years for me.” Not just a shift in his process, A public place is a relic to his personal life’s stability as well; the age-old tale of weighing fate and free will as the only two definitive options in front of you.
“Grief is also a relationship to permanence,” he admits with sincerity. “It's permanence that you don't like and you can't change it. All you can change is how you react to it.”
“There is something to feel bad about today/Keep it In your heart and punch me in the face” is a rough line. It’s also the very first line that introduces A public place on the album opener, Bad2”. This fixation on the bad, similar to that punchline of a 6th grade Elliott Smith fan, holds these predetermined expectations of pain and suffering. But to DiAngelis’ efforts, that’s kind of the point of opening A public place with this song. As the album weaves in and out of Helenor’s charming styles, lyrical poetry and infatuating production, there is a shift in “feeling bad” as it becomes a way for him to chronicle his journey of sifting through grief.
“I kind of started taking songwriting, I don't want to say seriously, cause that's a funny word, but just, you know, making it more of a priority,” DiAngelas says. “When you go through so much in such a short period of time it's confusing. But you begin to take stake in the things that are consistent throughout those times and then to have songwriting be its own version of therapy or consistency that you can come back to because you could always be excited to work on the song.”
“Behind all great humor is a great sadness,” referred to as the sad clown paradox, does hold some truth in the midst of rigid psychological studies, but it doesn’t always paint a vivid and complete portrait. “There is something about you even remarking on dark humor that made me laugh,” he says in regards to my question. “So there's definitely a level of when it's happening, I find myself leaning in more.”
“We all have our own versions of trauma, and that is for a different interview, but I would say that humor is not necessarily a deflection, but a source of analysis for me in my life, and kind of always has been. The faucets on type of thing,” as he explains it.
As A public place enters the cosmos of new releases and DiAngelis lets go of everything he has worked on, it's up to interpretation if it offers definitive answers to grief, but in no way does this album feel passive in its presence. The title itself, A public place, sets an image of vulnerability at the hands of being seen, whether that be through accountability or encouragement, yet DiAngelis will be the first to say, “if you’re consistently unhappy in your life, then you should change something.” So he wrote an album to do just that.