INTERVIEW // Ron Gallo’s Orange Dream
Six years ago, someone put on “Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me” by Ron Gallo and I had an awakening. In all honesty, I can’t pinpoint exactly what was awakened, but I knew I felt a shift in my consciousness. I had never heard anything like it, Gallo’s vast, almost theatrical timbre, that heavy, frazzled guitar, and by far the most compelling songwriting I’d ever heard. It was the first single off his 2017 debut, HEAVY META, and a song that is still, in my eyes, one of the greatest ever.
Lucky for us, Gallo has put out a steady stream of killer albums since HEAVY META – Really Nice Guys, Stardust Birthday Party, PEACEMEAL, and most recently, FOREGROUND MUSIC. By far his most profound and thematically intense, FOREGROUND MUSIC is a twisty chronicle of our deeply screwed-up world where Gallo reflects on the tribulations of personhood and somehow manages to spin the worst parts of life into anthemic bangers.
The Philly-based multi-hyphenate writes songs that speak to the drowned-out anxiety of those who refuse to slouch towards acceptance in the capitalist, patriarchal system; those with a razor edge of subversion and anger. But also, those who refuse to let it paralyze them. There’s a hazy blanket of humor and lightheartedness over everything he does, which makes his music even more enthralling.
It’s a gift beyond rationale. No one else could sandwich this verse…
Lately it feels like end of days / But tomorrow just keeps coming / By the way - how are there so many t-shirts on earth? / I mean, let's say on average everyone has 15 / You times that by billions of people / How is there enough raw materials? / I wear the same 3 of them / I've got 124 too many / And they just keep coming / I've got 9 apples in my kitchen / The store has thousands / There's millions of stores / How are there so many apples? / Where are all these trees?
…in between two choruses and still make a song I want to listen to. But I’ll bop my head and sing along like I didn’t lay in bed overthinking the same thing the other day.
Last week, Gallo and band played a sold-out show at Baby’s All Right, a 500-cap venue in South Williamsburg. Opening up the show were possibly the two most diametrically opposing artists one could pull, but somehow, it made sense. John Roseboro is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn whose smooth, tender love ballads induced sways and kisses from lovers who filled the crowd. (Seriously, I had to take a moment to contemplate my choices when I saw the number of couples in that crowd.) Next was Stuyedeyed, a hardcore punk band, also hailing from Brooklyn. That’s where the similarity stops. They were brutal and incendiary and had not one, but two drummers!
Completing this whiplash-inducing lineup was the man himself, Ron Gallo. He played a mix of new songs off FOREGROUND MUSIC and bangers from past records, opening with “ENTITLED MAN” and rounding out the night with “Kill the Medicine Man”. As anticipated at a Ron Gallo show, he pulled off a cheeky little skit, where his friend (who I’m pretty sure is in Post Animal – that’s unconfirmed, though) dressed up as an Amazon delivery man and dropped a bag off on stage. The bag had carrots in it, which Gallo proceeded to use to absolutely shred on his guitar, and I couldn’t help but feel there was a connection to the Great Gallo-Amazon Standoff of 2020 (discussed later in our interview). He also made a point of calling out Baby’s All Right for their profit-driven motives, cutting his set short to account for the second show of the night.
I chatted to Gallo over the phone ahead of his 2023 tour to talk FOREGROUND MUSIC, parallel universes, and sticking it to Amazon. (Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Bella: So you're back home from SXSW and you're trying to take a few moments of peace before you leave for a pretty hefty tour in a couple weeks. How are you feeling about that?
Ron: Mostly good. There's a little bit of nerves surrounding any kind of touring now. Just because it's not the same as it was. But I'm excited to go out and play and bring the new record to people. And so I'm trying to focus on that aspect of it. But it's just very nerve-wracking, the amount that you have to put into making a tour happen.
B: What about touring has changed?
R: Well, the trend is that people are being very selective about what they go to. It's very competitive because everyone's trying to go back out on tour all at the same time. Things are a lot more expensive. There's an ongoing risk, like if someone gets really sick, then it can derail the tour. It's still very much a part of it and the reality of it. And so all these factors are like, "Okay, well, we'll hope for the best." Whereas it all felt so effortless pre-pandemic.
B: 2023 is the year of FOREGROUND MUSIC, and you also have a film and a book and a tour going on. Can you elaborate about those projects at all, and how does it feel to have those things on the horizon?
R: It's exciting. I got the first printings of the books delivered a few days ago, and I held it in my hands. And actually this morning, I flipped through it and I was like, “I'm very proud of this.” It's really cool to work on something on and off for the last year primarily, and then hold it in your hand. I've made records before, so I guess I'm more used to that, but when it comes to the book, it's the first of this. Committing and just getting this thing done and now I can hold it in my hand. So that's cool.
And as far as the film goes, I'm also excited about that! There's still some work to be done. I guess it was May of last year, we did this pop-up, unannounced show on a rooftop in my neighborhood in Fishtown, in Philly. We had like, seven cameras shoot and recorded the audio. And it's coming together really, really nicely. And we're just gonna try to figure out a plan to release the book and, and the film together, cuz they're both companions to the album. Probably more news on it very soon.
B: That's so exciting and congratulations! On the topic of FOREGROUND MUSIC, what does it mean to you? In the context of the record, but also just as a term that you've used?
R: It has a sense of humor to me. The stupid, simple thing of it just being the opposite of background music. When I try to think about what kind of music I make, that's when I came up with it because that's what it's the opposite of. It's very in your face, intense sonically, and on this record, especially the topics, lyrically and whatnot, are kind of all the issues that we're all facing. Whether it's the anxieties of being alive in 2023, or social and political issues. I mean, these are things that are pretty unavoidable. So all that stuff, blending together, foreground music feels like the best thing to sum it all up.
B: There's a lot of heavy ideas and topics that you do a really great job of making feel approachable and listenable. What role do you think your music plays in the political climate we're currently living in?
R: Well, it's hard to say what difference anything can really make. I mean, I know where I stand and I think that a lot of people that are gonna listen to this record have probably felt a similar way. The people that are against that forward motion are the people that seem to be making me the most angry over the last few years. And whether it's political or even just people that have the financial power in the world, how that kind of affects normal people trying to live and get by.
They're very much connected because when I talk to most people, most people are just burned out and tired, and then they're struggling to pay increasingly higher costs of living. And so when you bundle it all together, there's a group of people that have a severe lack of humanity and empathy. Not to be specific, people can interpret that and it's probably pretty obvious who I'm talking about, but… The haters man, the haters.
B: Do you find that immortalizing all of these themes in your music is kind of a cathartic way to deal with your frustration over the state of affairs? Or does it ever get tiring to bring those up every night on tour?
R: I get a lot of life out of it actually. It’s definitely cathartic and therapeutic to make these songs and to record them. Especially because I have zero fear about talking about things and addressing things in song form, whereas I might be a little bit more afraid to like, go up to someone to their face and confront them.I think a lot of the stuff on this record, my mind isn't gonna change about it. And that was intentional cuz, I mean, do I have to go out and tour behind these songs and sing them every night and play them every night.
B: That leads me right into my next question, which is about the Amazon livestream you did and calling out this giant for not wanting to pay you and for being this awful company. Can you talk more about what was going through your head when you did that and what the imperative to call out someone like them was?
R: So it was mid-pandemic, the initial lockdown period. Everything was livestream back then. And my label said, “Hey five of our artists are doing this Amazon livestream.We really want you to do it. We need you to do it.” You know, the mindset for musicians in the industry is always, well, you gotta do it even if it's you just for the sake of the promo or for the benefit of the label to sell records. It's like this “lucky to be here” kind of attitude. So I just found myself saying, unconsciously, “Well count me in.” And I guess I was like, are they paying? You know, it's Amazon after all. I know they have money and the label reached out and they said there's no pay for the livestream performance.
So a couple weeks passed and the show came around and I got really, really bitter. I was like, why did I say yes to doing a livestream for Amazon in the middle of a pandemic when musicians' livelihoods are being completely taken away from them? And why do I just accept them saying no? I really didn't feel good about it, and it was kind of too late to bail. So I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna use it as an opportunity to call them out on it. So rather than just be really direct, I like to find fun ways to be critical, which I guess is what I do musically, so I wrote like a fake script that Amazon “sent me”. And I pretended to read that to display all of this behind-the-scenes information about their lack of paying the artist and all this stuff. And then I just went into the songs. I got a bunch of calls right at the end of that and I guess a lot of people were really upset and there was a lot of chaos going on at Amazon, and it ended up in all the artists getting paid. That was very validating for me because as much as I was messing around and just trying to use the platform against them, the fact that it actually made a difference was kind of mindblowing to be honest with you.
B: That says a lot! If you could prescribe like one sentiment/sentence/descriptor to FOREGROUND MUSIC, what would that be?
R: Well, the thing I've been saying is that it's a very fun existential crisis. It's like that constant balance between light and dark. And that's what life feels like to me!
B: If you were the creator of your own universe in a very “Everything Everywhere All At Once” kind of way, what would be the weird thing about your universe that differentiated it from the regular timeline?
R: God, this is such a great question and I wish I could think about it for like the whole day. But I think the first thing that comes to mind, especially because the room I'm standing in, which is my studio at home, everything would be the color orange.
B: That seems to be super recurring. Is there something about that color for you?
R: I don't know. I've always loved it since I was a kid and I guess I thought it was weird when I was younger. But now I've really just leaned into it and embraced it. It's loud and intense, but for some reason it gives me comfort. When I'm surrounded by it, I feel good.
B: What's a book you think everyone should read and a record that everyone should listen to?
R: A book that everyone should read, which is the first thing that came to mind and was pretty life-changing for me, is a book called A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. It can have kind of like a new-agey, weird kind of… that whole vibe. But if you can get past that reading, that book definitely changed my life, and just how you perceive things and deal with things, and especially in an anxious world. And a record. I would probably go with “Girl from Ipanama” by Stan Getz and Gilberto, which is like a Boston Nova jazz record from the 60s. That's a record that I think I could listen to on loop for eternity and probably be okay with it.
Photos: Hannah Roberts
Keep up with Ron Gallo on Instagram and stream on Spotify or Apple Music.
