GAY MEAT – BLUE WATER

In a small seaside town in North Carolina, Karl Kuehn is back living with his mom Karen. It’s been just the two of them since he was 11, a little life painted with chit chats about her beloved cat Penny, two cups left in the sink overnight, the ocean-glow of the TV. The year is 2018 and after suffering six grand mal seizures in a row, Karen’s brain is permanently damaged. Her language, once fiery and flowing, now finds itself stunted, and after spending seven weeks in the hospital, Kuehn becomes his mother’s legal guardian and caregiver. This hairpin bed, a sudden brake on a frozen road, turns his life into a slow motion movie––reality as passive consumer, dazed, fingers unable to grasp the sudden shift. 

The doctors gave Karen a week to a year, but it wasn’t until January 2021 that she passed away, a gift of time that gave Kuehn a chance to get to know the person behind the parent. Those three years, marred by a roof-ripping hurricane, a pandemic and a life turned upside down, Kuehn found solace in the only way he knew how; he picked up any instrument within reach and began to piece together their story. Blue Water is the first album under his new moniker Gay Meat, and lovingly, gently says goodbye to a mom, piecing together the sepia patchwork of memories through a child’s eyes and asks which direction to walk without the foundation of family, no matter how small it was in the first place.

Kuehn’s musical exploration began as a teen, when he started emo three-piece Museum Mouth. They released four full length albums, played over 300 shows, touring with the likes of mewithoutyou and Say Anything, and signed with Max Bemis’ label through Equal Vision Records. 2016 through to 2018 was the busiest they’d ever been but Kuehn was called home after Karen’s seizures, loosening his grip on Museum Mouth’s career high, his life forever altered. “It was just me and her, so everything became very tunnel vision,” he explains. With Karen suddenly so deeply entrenched in Kuehn’s life, songs began to form as a way of coping with this newly strange, incapacitated mental state. 

This psychosis of grief is recreated with “Hymn 1 (Severance Pay),” a foggy kaleidoscopic flora, bursting through the stoic concrete of keeping it altogether. “How did you figure this all out? Or did you just start running?” he asks himself, his mom, to anyone who will listen, to no one in particular. Pain circling above rising synths and booming snares, mimicking the cacophony of feeling one thousand things at once. As with the swirling wide rooms of grief, there are also bright moments of beloved memories, like “The Powerball” where Kuehn describes the road trips he and his mom would take across state lines when he was a kid, in hopes that the lottery tickets purchased there would give them a whole new life. It was the only track written after Karen’s death, when Kuehn found himself driving to the state line alone, his spiralling bereavement as puppeteer. 

The record was written alone, in rooms shadowed by anticipatory loss, but during the recording process with Brett Scott and Alex Thompson, Kuehn borrowed instruments from friends and old bandmates, and welcomed the likes of Jeff Rosenstock, Chris Farren, Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties) and Lamont Brown (Rnie) on backing vocals as well as Taylor Haag on drums. Like a tangible example of a support system after a loss, the foundation of Blue Water may be insular but the final result is reaching for help and receiving a chorus of support. “Vodka Sprite” for instance, details the disorientation caused by the disappearance of the person you would normally call on to help work through these huge feelings and not only that––they’re the reason you’re feeling them in the first place. Kuehn’s community showed up as the new navigators.

Artist Jana Sojka tells us that “there are blues for every kind of leaving and every kind of return,” and it’s on Blue Water that Gay Meat lets the waves of grief envelope his chest while keeping the horizon in view, treading water until he’s ready to step foot on land again. Eclectic in its sonic space, the album details the overflowing, chaotic state of sorrow that ebbs and flows between the quiet and still nature of realization, synths and guitars and keys coalescing like the influx of every emotion. The final track––a sweet sing-songy recording from Karen after she learned to use her voice again––marks the departure of the reality Kuehn once knew while recognizing the familial stamp he can always return to. Blue Water is deeply, sincerely an album about grief but it’s also a call to the glittering resilience within each of us and the tiny moments that make up a life. A clutching of chiaroscuro, laughing through the tears.

[artist bio by Sammy Maine]