THE PEOPLE ACCORDING 2 HOT LITERATI
Luke Andrew Kelly is in Dallas. He’s just bought makeup for the first time. And after a life of homogeneity and conformity, he puts the makeup all across his eyes.
“Obviously I would do it better now,” he says, showing me the pictures at ForgetMeNot on the Lower East side.
When I met Luke Kelly, I had no idea that he was in a band, or was born in a cult, but I spoke to him with the earnest gusto I’ve learned to walk around with, even when it’s hard, desperate for real connection in a world where it sometimes feels hard to find.
CAFE GITANE
"I like your bracelet," I said, as he sat down to my right.
And that's how we began to chat. About jewelry, about vintage clothing and the death of craftsmanship, and finally, about art.
Luke explained that he was a band, that they were playing a show on Saturday night.
"I would love to come and write about it." I told him.
We traded emails and I left, having finished my afternoon Americano (one in the morning, one in the late afternoon, and on some weekends, one before the night begins).
THE DAY OF THE SHOW
Luke emailed me the concert info a day or so later. It was the same day of the Telfar launch, which I'd left to take a meeting at a restaurant on Bowery.
I went uptown to meet Ananya at Cocina Consuelo (more from her on here soon), then to a Friendsgiving uptown. On the 1 train uptown, I started writing a draft for the Telfar piece, on top of the pie. This little girl was watching me write and I thought about how important it is for children to be exposed to a range of careers growing up, so they can pick one to dream after that isn't in a phone.
I felt a man watching me, and later got this cryptic DM:
Eventually, I left uptown, taking a car deep into Brooklyn. I haven't been in Ridgewood since I was in a band, myself, and my bandmate lived in a basement with no windows. They are uptown now with a window and a kitchen island and a record deal.
THE DRIVE TO THE SHOW
I needed to charge my phone in the car. I played a playlist someone had sent me and immediately hated it. Then I played my own. I've been listening to music in headphones much less. I want to sell my airpods. I think about this at the gym a lot, listening to music in our own little wired silos, singing a song out loud that no one else in the room can hear.
In the car, I also thought about how other people would perceive me going to a random address to hear the band of a man I’d just met. A lot of my friends think I’m crazy. But I believe in trusting the world. I believe that the world is around us and it will show you a good time, will show you the path to becoming who you want to and dream of being, if you are only willing to look up and listen and take a chance on other people, and most importantly, on yourself.
THE SHOW
We pass a train station with the L and I take note. Pull up to an unassuming Brownstone and Luke is standing out front with his guitar and a couple of people.
"Hello" I say, running out in a fur coat and knee high leather boots, "I hope I'm not too late."
Luke assures me kindly that I am not. A group of men walk by, and Luke calls out to them, inviting them in, "We could use the audience," he says.
We all go inside. It is a basement, with one area drawn off with a curtain, where people are getting tattoos. Luke introduces me to:
JACKIE
"You're the writer!" she says, calling me pretty and offering me a drink. They have beer and white wine and I drink neither and ask if there's a deli nearby with white claws, feeling a little particular, but already out of place wearing Chloe boots in more a Doc Marten type of room.
"I don't mean to be difficult," I say.
"No," Jackie obliges, "Not at all," and I actually believe her. Her voice oozes with whimsy and she glows with kindness and earnestness.
I immediately love her.
Jackie is also a musician and she is Luke's manager, responsible for booking the show.
Luke disappears and returns with white claws, and as he begins to prep for his set, I am intercepted by:
LANE
Lane is extremely charming, and he knows it.
He's from Michigan and very early in the conversation I learn that he sold a home. I remark that I'm impressed he had a home to sell so young, and he divulges that he realized very quickly that he was on a life path that he didn't want to be on and needed to get out and go somewhere else.
"Get a tattoo" he tells me enthusiastically, showing me the two he'd just gotten behind the curtain, and suddenly we're gushing over our love of Minneapolis, and how we wish strangers would chat on public transit more. I ask how he pays the bills and learn he works at the same restaurant where I had my afternoon meeting and my afternoon Americano.
He's Chris Evans in Fantastic Four handsome and you can tell he knows it— the type of guy I would have gone for, if I hadn’t sworn off of men in bands after a long fling with a flaky model/guitarist whose idea of a “real date” was a 10 pm bottle of wine on the roof.
Lane tells me he has a tramp stamp, and shows me.
As he cracks open his own white claw, we get to the topic of [redacted].
"I was on a mission trip," he said, talking about how they'd paint something and then spend the rest of the time on the beach. "Once we went around the circle saying what a successful life means to you"
"What a successful life means to you," I repeated, noting how good of a question this was.
"And everyone said having kids and I realized I hadn't even thought of them."
A shorter woman walks by, "Are you telling her about [redacted]?" she says.
And this is how I meet:
ALEX WOLF
She's a photographer. Does concert photography to "pay the bills," and this statement leaves me questioning the distinction between a show and a concert. She met a lot of the members, as far I can tell, at Music Inn.
We talk about art, I don't remember how we get there, but then we talk about compulsive art marking.
"If you want to talk about compulsive art making, you should talk to him," she says. Enter:
ASHTON HERRES
He's wearing a coat inside. Sort of feels like Tate in AHS meets one of those 2000s bad boy rejects, and I can't tell if it's procured or who he really is.
We get to the subject of the internet and social media. He has a lot of disdain for it, even though it is apparently how he pays rent.
"Brand deals or?" I ask.
"Commissions." He says.
I tell him that I love the internet. That one day I woke up and stopped feeling like a slave to it and started seeing it as a new medium.
This is the point in the night where I realize I should be writing some of this down. I take his instagram and name. He left a note for me.
I think this is the point in the night where I meet:
FLETCHER
"Get a tattoo!!!"
He is Australian and a few beers in and exactly what a drummer in a band should be. I tell him my name and he tells me that he has a cat named Halo.
That his goal is to go home and see her one more time before she dies and gets hers.
Then, Fletcher is pulled to the center of the basement for:
THE MUSIC
Luke seems maybe a little nervous or just engaged, I can't really tell.
"I was born in a cult" he says into the mic, standing with Lane to his right and Fletcher on the far right. (This was my first time learning this)
There aren't a ton of people, and I remember Luke saying "we need audience" the men outside.
There are more people out back, up some stairs.
"If they miss it, they must." One of them says, maybe Lane.
"They'll come when we start playing."
They started playing. And they did come.
The band strummed out dark, folky chords as Luke crooned into the mic.
"This is your song now," he says, "It is about what ever you want it to be."
Alex Wolf is writhing on the floor, getting angles pointed upward. Someone walks by singing the lyrics and clinks her beer to another’s.
They're very good. Fletcher keeps a steady rhythm, Lane has a very sweet voice and plays a crush-worthy bass, but Luke adds so much depth to the mix. He is extremely interesting and you get the sense that you need real time with him, consuming his work to even begin to understand him.
I love live music. To hear it with others. Builds trust. Feels spiritual almost. I lean on a pillar in the basement throughout the entire set. As they end, I sneak behind the curtain and meet:
BAILEY THOMPSON
I point to two of my tattoos.
"I got them done in Minnesota," I say, "But I don't like them very much. What would you do to make them more interesting?"
He throws out one option. And then a second. And I love the second.
"I trust you," I say, "but we are in a Ridgewood basement so I would like to see the fresh needle.”
He shows it to me and shows me the alcohol he uses to wipe my arm and suddenly the needle is on my skin. We talk about Long Island, where he's from.
"You grow up around a bunch of people who look exactly like you, even though you're so close to New York" he says.
We talk about God.
And then he's finished.
I remember what Lane said about Bailey an hour or so before.
"I trust him because he has the same name as my sister but also because I trust him."
I trusted him too. He has a very calming presence. And I love the tattoos.
LUKE (ON THE BACK PATIO)
I find Luke sitting in the back with a group of people. I want to broach the subject of the cult.
He remarks maybe on a different day, when he has a voice again, because he's been recording his album in Tucson. We pass a white claw back and forth and I realize that maybe he’s tired of talking about it as some crazy part of his life, some click-baity string of words that would make someone pay attention to him.
So instead of asking, I share. That I myself did a brief stint in a religious cult in college, that 15 years of classical ballet and 9 years of pageants left me ambitious but conformist and empty and afraid to speak without rehearsing the phrase in my head. That I only very recently woke up to the act of actually being myself.
And he opens up. About the story of the cult. The fact that they could only wear dress shirts, that the women aren’t allowed to wear eye makeup. I can tell Luke takes this, our conversation very seriously, But people keep coming out back and interrupting, "We're going to get burritos," one, two, three people pop out and tell us.
"Okay," Luke says, "we'll meet you after the interview.
And eventually, we give up and join them.
FLETCHER (ON THE WALK TO THE DELI)
"Guys we're going the wrong way." Lane yells.
"We're not going to a bar," Jackie calls back, "We realized that we're broke."
Somewhere between the front of the basement and the sidewalk, I learn that Fletcher, the brash, Australian drummer, also happens to be getting an advanced degree in Quantum Physics.
I gush to him about how much I love Schrödinger's Theory ever since I read a Hofstader book.
"You are way too pretty to be talking like that he says," and proceeds, while walking and carrying his snare to tell me about the Copenhagen Interpretation and Spooky Action at a distance, promising that it would be easier to understand if he could reach his notebook to make me a picture.
I am surprised, but then I kick myself for being surprised. Of course the one banging a snarehead can be brilliant. Two things can happen at once, as Einstein believed.
THE DELI
Jackie thinks about her order. She orders one thing, then pivots remembering "it's not breakfast" and hoping that her order will be easier for them to make.
We chat about art making, how she needs to be outside and grounded to do it. She tells me that I'm comfortable floating in and out of spaces because I'm a Libra.
I think about the time and the commute home, and how much of my Sunday I want to be functional for.
"What did you order Hailo," Lane asks.
"A car home," I respond.
FORGETMENOTCAFE
Luke orders a beer. I ask for a couple of types of gin that they don’t have, and land on Tanqueray.
We share the fries. I have a few general questions, about the band’s name, which was once Human Tradition, until he pivoted to his own name.
“I realized one day that I couldn’t hide from myself,” he says.
I ask about the cult. How he got out. What life was life after.
He describes having to learn how to be a person again. That he used to stand on the sidewalk and just watch people—noting how they walked, what they wore, before being able to reconnect with his own personal identity.
He was married once. To someone he met in the cult. They got their first tattoos together. They also got divorced.
“I’m in the archive room / that all the drawers are in / with all your letters / oh they never displayed them / every year of our whole life is in this basement / i wanna burn them all but i don’t want to waste them” - one more match
Luke’s first tattoo was one on his wrist.
“LOOK UP,” it says.
This tickles my brain. I feel such a connection with Luke, even though I don’t necessarily understand it.
He describes feeling like an alien in the world, moving throughout it trying to be one hundred percent himself, even as he learns who that is in a dramatically new context.
I tell him that I once heard something similar, from Kurt Cobain’s journals, I think. That notion of feeling like an alien on earth. I feel like that myself sometimes. I think my writing from 2023 that really began building this blog is that dissonance. That desperation for someone to say “Hello, I hear you, I see you, and you are…. You are what.”
“When an alien moves to a foreign planet, and then feels so alone, and then meets another alien, they don’t feel alone…” - from Thanksgiving with Genevieve
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The videos and photos of Luke putting makeup on his face in Dallas show what I perceive as curiosity and confusion in the act of being oneself. This story gave me chills because I saw myself in it. Myself, alone in a Minneapolis hotel room, sobbing as I finished the draft of my own novel. Looking at what felt like reflections of the darkest parts of myself on a screen and then in a mirror and then at a bar downstairs.
But that’s what art can be. A reflection of yourself. The process of working through it.
That’s what this album is. You can hear it in his voice, which is raw and raspy and real. It’s a journey in processing a life that has had difficulties and beauties and confusion and joy in coming home to oneself and the people around you who see you as you feel you are and point out who you could also be, but are maybe afraid to.
“The family that i was born with, the family that I built, the family that found me, the family that i will find...If you want a friend, ask someone to be your friend. If you want a lover, ask someone to be your lover.. Be yourself in every single moment and if you cant do it every single moment do it for one moment ” - from How are you doing
When I met Luke at Cafe Gitane, I had no idea that he was in a band, or was born in a cult. But I said hello. And he said hello back. And I could sense that he meant it. That he was game to be human with me, if I was game to be human with him.
I think you should listen to the album. Not because I’m writing this, but because it is real art. An exploration and expression of oneself, doing something one loves, to be shared with the people they love.
this is my personal favorite song from the album. it brought me to tears and I couldn't really explain why. that's how i feel about all of my favorite books.
A WORD FROM LUKE:
Thank You Note
To Jackie Beck, to Lane Ellens, to Fletcher Gull, to Hunter Lyons, to Dylan Barnes (MicTV), to Hailo. Luke Andrew Kelly is alive – finally – because of you.
From the bottom of his third person heart, he thanks you. And he cries.
Album was produced by MicTV with Luke Andrew Kelly.
All songs copyrighted Luke Andrew Kelly. All rights reserved.
The album will be released on all streaming on December 31st at 11:59AM.
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