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"The funny isn't funny without the sad, and the sad isn't lifelike and real without the funny" - An Interview with The Male Pattern

Will Schwartz on turning a decade away from music into a strange and darkly funny concept album, writing flawed characters without apologizing for them, and bringing I Was Shot in the Heart! into the world on September 25.

By Chris RoditisMusicngear Lead Editor

There's a certain kind of character you recognize immediately: the man who thinks the whole world has wronged him, who turns every failure into mythology, every inconvenience into persecution, and every bad decision into somebody else's fault. The Male Pattern's I Was Shot in the Heart! takes a man like that and gives him an album.

The debut record from Queens songwriter, novelist, and English professor Will Schwartz is a darkly funny, violent, deeply strange piece of Americana, drawing on Terry Allen and Randy Newman while combining the narrative craft of Bruce Springsteen with the prurience and silliness of Ween. After more than a decade away from music, Schwartz returned to songwriting with a desire to make something more acidic, more mocking, and less concerned with rounding or humanizing its characters.

We talked with Schwartz about why this story needed songs rather than a novel, the gear and sounds behind the record, the strange humanity of his deeply flawed protagonist, the realities of rejection, collaboration, and what success means when you're simply looking for more ears for your work. Along the way, he offered thoughts on laughter and sadness, self-destruction and human nature, and the wonderfully inexplicable business of being alive. 

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Chris Roditis, Musicngear: I Was Shot in the Heart! feels like a novel disguised as an album. Why did this story feel like it needed to become a record instead of a novel?

I think that, ultimately, in a novel, you need a central character with enough depth and mystery in them to sustain interest for over a few hundred pages. I wanted to make something more acidic, more mocking, have more fun with it, and go for more laughs. If there’s depth to my guy, that’s great - but I didn’t want to be beholden to explore it, to round him or humanize him.

The second song on the record, “Soldier,” is about a guy who is mad at his ex-wife, bitter about his DUI because the cop didn’t respond to his sycophantic praise of police, he imagines himself as a veteran because he’s online arguing with liberals all day, and wants the respect that comes with it. I don’t think that story, or that moment, is better served by novelistic depth and exploration. It’s better as a quick shot of something nasty and strange - exactly how we’d encounter such a person in real life. 

There’s a quote from Edgar Allen Poe; he’s talking about short stories, where he says that a short story should communicate a single emotional feeling or vibe, what he called “unity of effect.” I feel that way about songs. I wanted to capture little moments in this character's life, moments of resentment, addiction, bravado, shame, suicidality, and capture those feelings and moods in a very singular, unified way. Again, I didn’t want to be beholden to subtle character exploration, motivations, psychology, etc. I wanted to have some fun, and pin this guy down. 

There’s also an added benefit to songs for this kind of storytelling - at the end of the day, it’s words and melody. I can make fun of the guy all I like, but the songs are also vessels for his feelings, and irony in music can only go so far. At a certain point in the listening experience, you feel what the speaker of the song is feeling on a sincere level.

Even in some of Randy Newman’s most mocking songs, like “My Life is Good,” there are always moments where something life-like comes through the mocking. In that song, the speaker is in a meeting with his kid's teacher, where she’s telling him how his child is bigger than the other kids and plays too rough, and he goes into a kind of defensive crouch. You can kind of sense his vulnerability there, his real fear, his protectiveness. It has something to do with how we encounter songs, on a more intuitive level. 

Musicngear: You’ve spent the last decade writing fiction before returning to music. Was there anything you rediscovered about yourself as a songwriter that surprised you after such a long break?

The thing that surprised me the most was how pleasurable and quick it can be to write songs. I used to labor over my songs, take months and months to produce them, and edit them compulsively. I was always taken with that approach to songwriting, probably best and most famously encapsulated by Leonard Cohen. 

Maybe it was studying fiction that helped me do this, just becoming more confident as a writer, or maybe it was because I became a dad in the intervening years and learned how to really utilize precious pockets of free time, but I just found that I could sit down with an idea for a song - say, for Charlie, I had an idea that I wanted to write a “Meeting Across the River” style ballad but sung by more of an idiot, who steps in shit during the heist. I liked the idea of someone roleplaying as a bad guy, trying to regurgitate a line from a Christopher Nolan movie right at the climax of action, fucking up and firing shots unintentionally.

I had that idea, and then I wrote the song. I had fun writing it - more fun than writing fiction is, usually. I could write it in pockets, while watching my kids in the park or at an infernal indoor play gym or whatever. It was easy; it was fun. Novels can be fun to write, but not in the same way. They require commitment, plotting, very close attention to detail, constant editing. Songwriting can be more vibes-based. 

Musicngear: Aside from a handful of guest contributions, you performed every part on the album. Since we’re a music gear publication, we’d love to know: what guitars, amps, pedals, microphones, software, or other gear became the backbone of this record? Were there any unexpected pieces of equipment that ended up shaping its sound?

I play a Goodall AAA rosewood parlor guitar. I love it. It’s got big, big bass presence, and sounds good and sweet all over the neck. It’s a great fingerpicking guitar. I played my lap-steel on the record too, a 1947 Fender lap that I’ve had for years and years. Very nice playability. 

I’m not much of a gearhead otherwise. I tend to use Shure SM57 LCs and Shure SM58S because I grew up listening to Eliot Smith records and always loved their sound. My buddy Bateman, from Frog, turned me on to the Electro-Voice 635 Dynamic microphone, which sounds kind of similar to a 57 but has a bigger range and bigger sound. We recorded one of the tracks - “Charlie" at his home studio, and we used that for the vocal take. I liked it so much I bought one for myself. 

Musicngear: The album borrows from Americana while twisting its familiar myths into something satirical, violent, and strangely funny. Was there ever a moment where you worried the humor might undercut the emotional weight or was that tension exactly what you were chasing?

No, I don’t think like that. There’s a David Berman line where he says that he knew his songs worked if he played them for his wife and there was laughter and tears - both had to be there. I’m probably messing it up. But I kind of live by that for songs. I don’t really care what the balance is.

I worked really closely with my friend Andrew Piccone on this record, who is a photographer and visual artist. That was always the test- for both of our respective work, when we’d give notes. Were we laughing? Were we crying? If one of those things is missing, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if the song is 99% laughs and 1% tears, or that’s inverted - they just both have to be present for the song to work. The funny isn’t funny without the sad, and the sad isn’t lifelike and real without the funny. 

Musicngear: Your protagonist is deeply flawed, yet you somehow keep listeners invested in him. Did you ever catch yourself sympathizing with him more than you expected while writing, or were you always one step ahead of him as the storyteller?

I like people. I’m a compulsive small talker. At night after my kids are asleep, I often go out on the street in my neighborhood in Queens, walk my dog, and just chit-chat with neighbors and strangers for an hour or two. It’s how I’ve always been.

If you’re this way, you can’t be a purist with people. Because people are flawed and very shitty, a lot of the time. People have terrible, unexamined beliefs; they’re propagandized and conditioned to support or ignore cruelty; they’re selfish and self-aggrandizing. If you love people, you have to handle that dissonance.

You also have to be aware that there were times in your life where you were resentful, bitter, propagandized, or cavalier toward others’ suffering. No one is really that much better than anyone else. 

So, sure, I sympathize with my guy as I sympathize with anyone. 

Musicngear: Your songs are packed with incredibly specific details: restaurant chains, escape rooms, TV episodes, highway names, sports radio, frozen meatballs. How do you decide which ordinary details become powerful storytelling tools instead of just background scenery?

When something makes me laugh, I write it down. I don’t know why “Bourbon-glazed chicken wings” is funny to me, but it is.

I also just wrote about the shit I populate my life with. I love Law and Order and Westerns and all the other stuff I write about in “The Television Watcher.”  I drive on I-95 and the Whitestone Bridge; I grew up shopping at Stop-and-Shop, and I love and have called into WFAN Sports Radio in New York. All the details were pretty quickly accessible for me. They’re real and life-lending, I hope, because they’re real and life-lending to me. 

Musicngear: Looking back on your journey as an artist, what has been the biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome, and what advice would you give to musicians who are facing a similar challenge right now?

This isn’t a very exciting answer, but probably rejection. When you make art, you’re engaging in a kind of rhetoric; you need an audience to make the art really work. That audience doesn’t need to be huge - it could just be for friends, or for one friend, but for the circuit to be complete on what you’re building, you do need other people. 

That dependence on other people can be something that’s hard to manage. You want people to love the work. But the world is inundated with art and media, and anyway, not everyone is going to like what you do. You know that for the most part, even if what you worked on is successful, it will face almost limitless rejection. And it’s hard to get rejected all the time - it’s hard for the confidence you need to make art, for your own self-image. 

I’ve found, as I’ve gotten older, that in order to keep writing - because that’s the important thing - I just focus on writing for a few friends and other artists whose opinions I trust and admire. If I can excite them with my work, if they see what I’m doing, I feel good. It also helped with writing fiction, where the rejection is more constant, structured, and formal. Meeting lots of other writers and getting alongside them was good for me, to put my own rejection in context. 

Musicngear: This is your first musical release in over a decade. What does success for I Was Shot in the Heart! actually look like to you? Are you aiming for streaming numbers, press coverage, live shows, building a cult audience or something entirely different? And what's your strategy for making that happen?

I just want ears for my record. If, at the end of this cycle and having put out my record, I have more dedicated listeners to my work- people who might come to a show or check out the next thing I make- it will have been a success. I have a job I love, I don’t want money, and I do think that what I do is ultimately a little niche, so I don’t really want or expect huge numbers for it. 

I like the idea of scrapping for one listener at a time. Every individual person that engages with the work, that finds meaning in it, that’s meaningful for me. I loved making this record, and I want to share it. If it’s shared, if people respond, I’m happy. I don’t need that to happen on a mass scale, but of course, the more the merrier. 

Musicngear: If this album opens new doors for The Male Pattern, who would you most love to collaborate with in the future? And are there any venues or festivals that sit at the very top of your bucket list?

This was a solo effort. I’m a dad of two kids under 5, and my wife and I are about to have a third. I needed to make this record in the hours of free time that I had, on my own terms. 

I would love it if, on my next record, I collaborated more, but the names I have in mind aren’t famous. I have a lot of friends I haven’t played music with in years who are brilliant drummers, pianists, engineers, etc. I’d love to collaborate with them again. I also love working with Danny Bateman (from Frog), because he’s brilliant, and because he’s been my best buddy forever, so more of that as well. 

Musicngear: Your writing often blurs the line between tragedy and absurd comedy. Do you think people laugh because the situations are ridiculous or because they recognize uncomfortable pieces of themselves in your characters?

Both, I hope!! Either? I think it depends on the line. Like in the song, “Soldier,” nobody has ever cosplayed as a security guard at a restaurant pro bono in order to show off how tough they are. Or if they have, they aren’t listening to my record. That’s just a ridiculous and funny situation for my character.

But that feeling over completely over-killed emotionality and excitement when you watch a plate of fajitas leave a kitchen? Or just recounting the plot of an episode of Law & Order SVU as if it’s something meaningful and rich to you - these things are more everyday, and still very funny to me. 

But that feeling of completely over-the-top emotionality and excitement when you watch a plate of fajitas leave a kitchen?

People are mysteries, people are strange, people are unpredictable, people long for an insane and indiscernible cocktail of destruction, death, beauty and the infinite

Musicngear: Imagine your album exists as a physical place someone can walk into. What's the first room they enter, what do they hear, and what object absolutely has to be there?

It’s an Applebee's on or just off of a major secondary or tertiary highway in America. There is an appetizer sampler on the table and a large, frozen cocktail. You’re drunk, and you’re alone. 

Musicngear: If you could preserve just one message from I Was Shot in the Heart! inside a time capsule for future generations to discover, what would it be, and why?

The record doesn’t have a moral, or even much of a sense of morality, so there’s no proper “message.” But I guess in some way, the record speaks to self-destructiveness in all of us.

Contrary to what you might encounter in an Ayn Rand novel or in a microeconomics course, human beings really aren’t “self-interested,” whatever that means. Or rather, their self-interest is an expression of values and priorities that wouldn’t make sense to everyone else. As much as we chase life and success, we also chase death, excess, and addiction. I always hated that very narrow concept of homo economicus that I think pervades a lot of how we think about social life in America.

People are mysteries, people are strange, people are unpredictable, people long for an insane and indiscernible cocktail of destruction, death, beauty and the infinite that can’t really be described, let alone mapped out. Some people call that jouissance. So that’s my message - pursue the ineffable, eat too much and get sick, live, laugh, and love.   

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About Chris Roditis

Chris Roditis has been an active musician since 1995 in various bands and projects across a variety of genres ranging from acoustic, electronic to nu metal, british rock and trip hop. He has extensive experience as a mixing engineer and producer and has built recording studios for most of the projects he has been involved with. His passion for music steered his entrepreneurial skills into founding MusicNGear in 2012.

Contact Chris Roditis at chrisroditis@musicngear.com

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