On last year’s excellent Eternal Repeator, Charlie Kaplan adopts a mantra early in the LPs run: “I’m getting out of my own way.” A stalwart of the indie-rock scene in Brooklyn, –Kaplan not only releases music under his own name, but plays bass in Office Culture and is the founder of indie label Glamour Gowns – the New Yorker has amassed an accomplished body of work that’s immensely rich in its sonic sensibility and compelling in his frank and emotive lyricism. His latest record, A Hat Upon The Bed, Kaplan’s fourth release in five years, is his most astute and artistically elevated work in how he peels away layers of grief connected to his father’s death over a decade ago, and ties those feelings with his experience of becoming a father. In examining this cycle, Kaplan has produced some of his most vulnerable and resonating work, which is brilliantly bolstered by wonderfully dexterous arrangements that draw elements of Radiohead, Pixies, The Doobie Brothers and more. The marriage of lo-fi and deft melodic structure and instrumentation across the record is as infectious as the freedom in which Kaplan permits himself in articulating the array of emotions that shape this timeless LP.

Northern Transmissions spoke to Charlie Kaplan about the ways his stunning fourth album, A Hat Upon The Bed draws the curtain on a pivotal chapter in his songwriting, the LP’s anchoring themes of fatherhood, grieving it and celebrating it, as well as the impact The Good, The Bad & The Ugly has had on his striking sonic worlds.

NT: I’ve loved listening to A Hat Upon The Bed; it’s such a great listen, and I got something new from it with each return. To start, I love instrumentals, and you’ve really nicely bookended the album with “Seaside” and “Sandy”. I’d love to hear about those songs and their role within the album’s overall narrative structure.

Charlie Kaplan: You’ve touched on one of the deeper conceptual things that I thought about going into the construction of the record. This is an album about grappling with my father’s death. I wrote a lot of music around the time of and following his death dealing with those feelings. A lot of that music went on to my first album, Sunday. Those were the songs that I wrote that made me feel better when I felt terrible. And so, it felt profound to me, but also it felt easy to give to people because it’s easy to give people music that is designed to make someone feel better. But I also wrote a lot of music at that time that was pretty straight-up about profound grief and unresolved feelings. Feelings of sadness. That music was really valid to me, but I felt like I needed to work up to it. That is what this fourth album is made up of; it’s songs that I’ve written since then.

Releasing them now, because I feel like I’m in a place of artistic confidence, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to show people a version of myself that I am that might represent my feelings of discomfort and sadness and may make other people uncomfortable too,’ because they’re sad songs. My hope, though, is that there’s a little bit of solace that can come from that too, you know, in the commiseration. The instrumentals that bookend the record are two instrumentals that I wrote, right at the beginning of my dad’s chemotherapy treatments and then one that I wrote right after he passed, about two years later. I start the record with the instrumental that I wrote after he passed, “Seaside”, and I end the record with the recording that I made when he first got sick, “Sandy”.

There’s a profundity to that, which goes back to where the record itself begins for me. The record itself begins in this place of encountering his absence. It completes with this place of having returned to and reviewed the experience of arriving at the end. That first recording, “Seaside”, I made on a beach vacation. It was the beginning of a musical practice I put together for myself, where I would try to play largely the drones on the guitar, maybe thinking a lot about the Veda concept of oneness. A fair amount of the music that I’ve come up with has been about achieving centeredness.

The last recording, “Sandy”, my dad got his first round of chemotherapy right when Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern coast of the US, and I lived in a town where the power was cut because of the storm. I remember we came home from the hospital, with him having his immune system stripped, and there was no heat in the house. It was a very scary period of time. We had to vacate the house and find another place to stay for a little bit that had heat. They had a piano, and so the recording that ends the record is from then. I snuck into a room and wrote a little piece of music. It’s a quiet, meditative piece. When I listened to it, part of what I hear in it is, both literally and metaphorically, this kind of tummelt; the gathering storm. To me, framing the record with those two bookends, those two instrumentals that were each produced, the place before the storm and after the storm, helped frame the emotional experience of the record in that space. It both defines it and also, to some degree, contains the universe that I’m writing about there.

NT: Thank you for sharing that. How have you found that your relationship with your grief has evolved through writing extensively about it? Of course, the absence of someone you love is never easy, but have you found that making music, going back, as you said to your debut Sunday, has helped you in your grieving process?

Charlie Kaplan: Absolutely. I definitely think it’s helped me a ton. There’s a quote that I’m going to pull up right now from Aeschylus that meant a lot to me during this period of time. The quote is, ‘Even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God’. When I heard that, I heard it before my dad died, but it took on a new meaning to me after his passing, because what it showed me is that we can’t take any actions in our own lives to resolve the sadness. It changes, as the quote says, drop by drop. It doesn’t resolve back to happiness; it doesn’t return the lost person to you. At best, it turns to wisdom, and it describes that wisdom as the awful grace of God. I hear “awful” in two ways in that quote. One, I hear it as “terrible”, the way we currently use it in the sense that passage through grief is a terrible experience, it’s a brutal experience. But also, in the Bible, they use the word “awful” as “awe-inspiring” or “awesome”. And so, to me, it’s also awe-ful in that way that you’re full of awe about the enormity of the experience of life and death. That’s what it impresses upon me.

Knowing that I was useless to or helpless to resolve the grief that I had to pass through, but rather that I simply had to survive it. I had to just go each day, tolerating it until my life got big enough that I could move towards that sort of awful wisdom. That made music this very profound thing; music was a way for me to both process the experience and to try to understand myself better. But also, quite literally, in the way that music is a way to pass through time. Which, again, it’s the only way through. Going back to that Vedic concept, I felt so often like out of sorts with grief. I felt like I couldn’t gather myself or know who I was. The experience of sitting with the guitar and droning on an open string, and then trying to find melodies on top of that, but that open string, that chord drone was a steadying beam beneath me. I was inventing my own steadiness through the music, and it turned into a really therapeutic exercise. Not even a musical exercise, it was like a way for me to just feel better on a bad day. So many songs came out of that.

NT: You also became a father this year, congratulations. It’s interesting to think about how you’re in a place of writing about your father and your son, and you’re the generation in the middle. How has the experience of fatherhood altered your songwriting and even just the way you think about life? I have to imagine it’s pretty intense!

Charlie Kaplan: Absolutely! Especially because there’s such a neatness to it. The earliest recording on the album is that song “Sandy”, which is the beginning of the end for my father, and the very last recording session that we had for the record was the week before my son was born. The creation process for this album perfectly describes the period in my life where fatherhood was transforming for me. Demarcated up to the point where it turned into this entirely new thing, which I haven’t even begun to understand yet. As a result, I always think that closure is not a concept I personally resonate with, because the loves in my life live permanently in my life. I do feel like there’s something like closure in this process in the sense that I think I passed from one epic of my life into another one. I thought of it as a fatherless decade.

There was a period of time from, he died in November 2013, so let’s say starting from 2014 through 2024, when I recorded this whole thing. That is a chunk of time where my life was described by the absence of fatherhood. Firstly, it was losing my own father, but then later on, becoming a father myself. It’s a very neat zone in my life. But also, a pretty rife one. It was pretty productive, certainly.

NT: You’ve said this album will be the finale of a tetralogy. You made your four albums within the space of five years. A lot of people in my life are musicians, and I see how much time and work goes into everything involved in making an album, so to have done four in five years is amazing. I’m curious to hear how you see the ways that the albums relate to one another, and maybe the ways that they interact with one another like siblings?

Charlie Kaplan: That’s a great question. I’m glad that you are invoking your own community here, because for me, the defining reason these albums exist is barely even because of me. It’s actually much more because I found a supportive community of people who I think gave me virtually everything that I needed to take these things from existing in my voice demos to become recordings that exist in the world and are pressed to vinyl! I learned how to write songs in my 20s, and I had a band then. I was not confident about recording it. I wasn’t even that confident about singing in front of people. I had to have a big evolution in my relationship to myself and my music to get there. That band that I had been in broke up, but we used to split bills all the time with this friend of mine, who has subsequently played on everything that I’ve done, Andrew Frank. He reached out to me in 2016, the band broke up, and he asked me ‘What are you going to do now? I love your songs. Would you ever make a solo record?’

That had never occurred to me. Maybe it’s because I was afraid to contemplate the idea of it just being me. Having a single person who encouraged me was a floodgates-opening moment. In the subsequent years, this amazing thing has happened, which is that I’ve passed into this community of people who have been so instrumental in helping me not only record music, but develop a really active, continuous process around recording. Critical to that certainly is Andrew and Winston Cook-Wilson, who I’m in his band Office Culture with and is one of my best friends since I was like 19. In addition to that, there’s Julian Cubillos, Jason Burger, who play bass and drums and are such incredible musicians who can show up, learn songs in two days and then make a record like this really quickly. Nate Mendelsohn produced it and also engineered it. They’re all people who are my friends, who I can call and say, ‘Can we do this?’ and they can just do it! That’s given me so many things. It’s giving me a sense of community. It’s giving me an apparatus to make stuff. It’s letting me finish something in the past right back into the next thing. That’s an amazing process to be within.

The reason why it’s described as a tetralogy is when Andrew first said to me, ‘Hey, do you want to make a solo record?’ I went into my voice memos, and just for fun, I started making playlists of albums. I was like, ‘Oh, this one could look like this. This one could look like that.’ They were all unfinished; maybe they had five or six songs in them. I realized I had the contours of the beginning of a discography already. It was up to me to figure out what kind of songs to finish those records. That’s what each of those four records are. And they do, as you’re saying, follow this evolution where it was like, I start with Sunday. Which was the record that I thought, ‘If I died the day that it came out, those are the songs that I had to make sure made it into the world!’ They’re like homebrewed medicine. If someone finds themselves in the position that I was in, here’s what I’d be able to offer them in terms of trying to help them.

My second record, Country Life in America, was the most fun songs I had written. I couldn’t allow these songs not to come out. They bring me so much joy. It felt so exciting and energetic to me. Then, Eternal Repeater, which came out in November last year, that was a record of songs that I had workshopped a lot with my then drummer Ben Wagner, and I had this album that was effectively already done just in the rehearsal space, and so I was like, ‘This is great. ’ I had some political messages that really meant something to me, and I really wanted to get them out. I think of those first three records, in some ways as being the training zone for my confidence and emotional fortitude to be able to bear putting out this fourth record, which deals with such heavy themes. I feel like I really had to work up to this moment, to feel like I could tolerate sharing with people. It might be the record that means the most to me because it’s so challenging to me, and the relationship to the music feels so profound.

NT: That’s lovely to hear about the community around you, which I imagine makes it somewhat easier to share your songs with them for the first time. I’m thinking of the song “Fear of Choking” where you sing, “How am I supposed to even stay alive, and I can barely be alone with myself.” How did you find sharing that with the people around you, who you’re making the album with, for the first time? Is that scary to you, or does knowing that you have their support create a space where you feel comfortable showing them that side of you?

Charlie Kaplan: You’re completely right. That’s a great encapsulation of the process; knowing that I’m gonna show this side of myself to people. I’m gonna allow myself to pass through the person who wants to have fun, and as the first album tried to do, create warmth and community, but I’m a whole person, and these feelings exists within me, too. Especially since I’ve had this experience of loss in my life. With that song, it’s interesting because there’s a period of time where I was having these pretty consistent intrusive thoughts where I would just be doing whatever and all of a sudden, there would be a flash vision out of nowhere or something gruesome. It was very uncomfortable, and I didn’t quite understand why it was happening. This hasn’t always been the case for me, over time I started to realize that when you look within me, there’s this well of sadness and confusion and the fear right of death that I’ve witnessed and it’s gonna come out somehow. It’s gonna be expressed somewhere in my life and so part of the challenge in writing lyrics for this record, because so much the music that I love is unafraid to say this stuff, I can sit around and listen to Radiohead and Elliot Smith all day long, but am I going to challenge myself as an artist to engage with those themes?

Part of what’s amazing about this community is that I’m surrounded by people who love and understand music as a mode of expression, and are making their own music that’s as honest and forthright. What’s so cool about that, is that they don’t meet it with shock. I didn’t even think truly that I imagined it would be shocking. I don’t know what it was, I think it was a way of externalizing my internal pain around the experience, projecting it onto others It’s been an incredibly touching experience and solidified what that community means to me. They’re people who I can trust.

NT: As well as being really compelled by the lyrical elements of the album, I loved how diverse the sonic reference points were across the songs. You mentioned Radiohead and Elliot Smith, I could hear Pixies, Sonic, some slowed down Jerry Garcia riffs, Wilco and also the Doobie Brothers from the bright “No More Mistakes”. Within all of those worlds and reference points, there’s a driving sound that’s very much your own. I also loved the string accompaniments scattered through the album, they brought a great depth of texture. Can you tell me building a diverse musical world and identity for A Hat Upon The Bed, it sounds like it was so much fun to make these songs.

Charlie Kaplan: You’re right you’re completely right about that! We had this core ensemble in the studio, it was a quintet of Winston, Andrew, Julian, Jason and me, and I was amazed at how far that took us and what came out of it. I got the bounces from that session and as I was listening to it, I was thinking about what should the arrangement be? I knew that I wanted to have strings on this album because it was easy for me to picture a handful of these songs with string arrangements, specifically the title track. We actually didn’t end-up doing this particular idea, but I sing this vocal melody at the end and I thought it could be a string part. In the end, we didn’t do a string part for that so it ended-up being this next level of approaching arrangement. Winston wrote string arrangements for a handful of the songs, “Is It Gonna Be Alright?”, “Have a Nice Day” and “No More Mistakes”, in addition to that, we did some improvisatory string stuff so Kristen Drymala and Zosia Warpeha, the cellist and the five string violist, who are on the recording for the title song just made-up parts on the spot which was mind-boggling to me because they sound so considered, they sound so intentional. Those two musicians are so special and they’re so familiar with the form that they were able to come up with these gorgeous parts. The approach that came from them was so cool, the strings for me end-up being the sort of defining element of the whole record.

There were lots of other really cool things that people brought, having some guest vocalists was an amazingly fun experience. Ian Wayne sings on “Halley”, he’s got a much more powerful voice than I do so he’s bellowing in the background while I’m singing quietly in the front. Caitlin Pasko has got such an incredible clarity to her voice, she sang backup vocals on “No Way Am I” and Winston turned her voice into a synthesizer. He sampled it and put on his keys. He’s playing the keys of her voice, which is incredible. With things like that, you’re right, that’s as fun as you can possibly have! You can’t have more fun recording something than just sitting with people and they’re making up solutions to the problems before you even had them and then to hear the mix and how well everything hangs together.

NT: The album’s title comes from Western films and the superstition of a hat on a bed signalling death. Do you have a favorite Western film?

Charlie Kaplan: Well, it’s a tie between The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is probably one of the most psychedelic experiences I’ve ever had with a movie! I was maybe 15 or 14 years-old when I rented it from a video store, how old I and I watched the first 10 or 15 minutes and I wanted a glass of water, so I paused it and walked downstairs into the kitchen of my family house, and the kitchen looked different because I’d been watching that movie. All of a sudden, this sort of space and grandeur of the West, as captured in that film, which is obviously a Spaghetti Western, but the size and sparseness of that, for a kid that grew up in the suburbs of New York City, I’d never seen anything like that in my real life, was so tonally impactful. So much so that later on in my life, I’ve made it a point to go out into the West and go to Utah or to Montana to see these wide open spaces. They’re so evocative for me. Also, when I was writing for the first record, songs like “California Days” or “Small Business”, were very much trying to find a sonic spaciousness that corresponded to that visual spaciousness that I saw in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Then, with Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, that’s just such a fun movie. It’s so funny as a send-up of Westerns, it’s so fantastic. Also, there have never been two more handsome men on earth than Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It’s unbelievable how good they look in that! And yeah, it’s an amazing portrait of the West.

Pre-order A Hat Upon The Bed by Charlie Kaplan HERE