This is False Paradise.
Warning: This may be a trigger for anyone who is a survivor of sexual abuse.
Tomorrow, the record my band Young Elk has been working on for more than two years comes out.
It’s called “False Paradise.” If you’ve heard our band or have seen us live, it’s probably apparent that the music is immersed in darkness as a matter of principle. Not because we’re brooding existentialists all the time, but because we gravitate towards telling thematic and sonic stories that shine a light on the dark corners of the universe. That sounds very self important, but it’s true.
But to quote a music writer who declined to review our album, “[False Paradise]…is a new kind of depressing.”
Due to that simple fact, I felt compelled to spend a few moments talking about it.
The songs came together disturbingly quickly.
We sent our first LP, The Dark Side of the Holy Ghost to be pressed to vinyl in August 2016. Over the next month, I wrote 15 songs.
The following year, I would force these tunes on my poor bandmates. The songs started to come together quickly, and we began to play the tunes at shows within months of our first pass at arranging them.
It became clear pretty quickly that we were headed to a different headspace on this record. The whole thing just felt extra heavy.
Some of the earliest songs we were putting together were about intense marital jealousy, murder, uncontrollable lust, divorce. The whole thing was taking on a new brand of darkness. We all knew it.
Recording “False Paradise” is the most fun we’ve ever had making music.
I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I talk about the process of recording this record was a pretty magical experience for us all. We were headed to a new place sonically, so we took a totally different approach to this record. We committed early on to do everything ourselves with the reluctant leadership of our bass player Bruce Reed, who engineered and mixed the whole thing.
Even before the songs were finished, we knew we wanted to head to a remote location — far away from our obligations, family and friends so that we would be 100% invested into the record we were aiming to make.
So in the summer of 2018 we sequestered ourselves in a cabin truly in the middle of nowhere in the Elliot Forest near the Central Oregon Coast.
I can’t say enough about that experience. It changed how I view the art of record making. I can’t imagine doing it another way.
The songs were a lot for me to stomach (and I wrote them)
After 7 days of tracking in this beautiful environment, we emerged with 10 songs that would make up our new LP. But even as we were headed home listening to the super rough mixes the whole thing felt gnarly.
On the long drive home, Bruce said to me, “It’s possible that people wont be able to get on board with this.”
I didn’t even protest a little bit. It’s not an easy listen. In fact, I was having serious emotional fatigue singing those songs at the end of recording, and for good reason.
There are many reasons the record is hard to stomach, chief among them is that the title track is a play-by-play account of my own encounter with sexual abuse as a small child.
The song “False Paradise” is the unsettling true story about my own sexual abuse story
It happened to me when I was five years old.
Statistically, if you identify as male it happened to you, too. About 9% of sexual assault victims are male, and about 30% of those victims are under the age of 10.
For a long time, I wasn’t sure if it really happened because people I trusted and loved told me so.
Yet, glimpses of the event would hit me in intense ways over the years.
…and at random times.
I’d be out with friends and recall the drive to a dinner with family friends.
The details would go back to being fuzzy, but when they’d emerge the thought of them made me feel like throwing up.
The fuzzy details would have moments of clarity in conversations about my childhood with my mom and my sisters.
In 2016, after a near-miss with death, I started therapy. That’s when the pieces started to come together.
Specific details.
Meatloaf at the dinner table.
The smell of mold as was commonly present in pacific northwestern shoddily built mobile homes. I knew the smell. I lived in one.
I remember the family we went to visit that night. They had two adopted children: a younger girl and an older brother.
As is often the impetus of parents aiming to get young children to connect with “peers,” I was urged to play with the older brother. “Go play with Joey” they’d demand. “Don’t be antisocial.”
I didn’t want to play. I wanted to eat my fucking meatloaf and just go home.
He grabbed me by the arm and we went to his room.
What happened next is incredibly devastating to speak about as a grown man. I was five. He was a teenager. He had all the power. I had none.
It’s impossible to put that sentiment into words. If you’ve survived sexual trauma, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I can feel it now creeping up in my chest — the fear, the dread of even revisiting it.
The truth of the matter is that a family friend — 10 years or more older than me—forced me to have a sexual experience.
At five years old, I did not have the economy of words to tell the story…to stand up for myself…to protect myself.
So when I tried to tell the story, I wasn’t believed.
I came up against what many sexual abused young boys come up against—disbelief, shock, and horror.
I was trying to get attention.
I was young.
I imagined it.
I was a kid. They were adults. So I learned to believe an inconvenient truth: no one wants the real story if it fucks with their sense of comfort.
So I gave people a different story — anything to make the trauma disappear. I just wanted to be a normal kid, though there was no way for that to happen.
Ultimately, we made a record about abuse.
Tomorrow we unleash False Paradise on the few people who care about what we do. They will hear me struggle to choke back tears as I sing the song’s refrain, “That’s when the lights went out.”
I often thought that this wouldn’t be able to see the light of day. Who wants to hear this story?
The answer is, no one does. And that’s the point.
Since no one wants to hear the story, and no one wants to talk about it—I’m doomed to erase it.
And that’s what “dudes” do. Anything to erase the trauma.
The result is more abuse. More suffering. More evil. More toxicity. Less humanity.
I started talking about this in therapy because the truth of my childhood sexual assault was eating me alive. I was becoming increasingly bitter, angry, neglectful to the people I loved the most.
And that’s the best case scenario. The more likely tale is much more grim.
So we decided to make an album telling the story of what happens when all of this goes wrong. What happens when our trauma reaches its final conclusion? What happens when the bottom drops out?
When I wrote these songs, I didn’t think it would feel so devastating to sing them.
It’s not very cool to say, but I’ve never put so much of my heart into something, so I hope you do like the record we’ve labored to make.
But I also know that “False Paradise” is a hard, hard listen.
And I think we’re OK with that.
