by Emma Riva
When I first heard 2020K’s “Small Times” off of Jeff Betten’s compilation LP Pittsubaagu no Yu, I immediately pressed repeat. I played it on the bus to work, I played it walking over the Birmingham Bridge, I played it in my kitchen. “Small Times” feels like an existential but somehow still peaceful cross between Bo Burnham’s “All Eyes on Me” and MARINA’s “Handmade Heaven.” One of the things it manages is convey intense emotion while still being a tightly-mixed electronic track. Proves you don’t need a weepy acoustic song in order to feel things. I had one of those moments where I knew I had to talk to the artist about what I was hearing. Here’s 2020K on “Small Times.”
ER: You mentioned on Instagram a field recording of the Andy Warhol Bridge being “buried” in the song — where is that present? That’s also the bridge in the Pittsubaagu no Yu painting—is that a coincidence?
2020K: It’s all just very pleasant happenstance. The cemetery Andy Warhol is buried (no pun) in is a few minutes away from me — he’s my neighbor. I make almost yearly pilgrimages to The Warhol Museum and his diaries are a staple on my living room end table.
The field recording is present throughout the entire song. You can hear it most prominently where the arrangement is sparse, but it never stops. More often than not there’s a field recording or some other type of constant that’s running in the underbelly of my songs as a means to further humanize it, but it also functions as a personal sonic diary for me — where I was, physically, while working on a song, which is a very non- physical form of art.
Another example of me working in environmental textures is a song I did with Wet Eye for a Touched. Music compilation series called “Sea Bound.” That one has the tranquil sounds of a park I used to live next to and it’s there to juxtapose a relaxing, but insidious organ loop that was taken from the beginning of the Jonestown Tape.
ER: How did Livefromthecity work with you on the track? Is that their voice we hear near the end?
2020K: All of the songs on Pittsubaagu No Yu were commissioned through email by Jeff Betten from Hellbender Vinyl with a really simple prompt: here’s a painting of Pittsburgh by Hiroshi Yoshida — write a song about it. After I turned in a solo version of Small Times, Jeff reached out to Jordan Howard (Livefromthecity) and asked if he’d like to contribute a verse. Jordan’s someone I’ve deeply admired in Pittsburgh music for years, and he went above and beyond recording the parts he did on that track. He handles the third verse and, yes, joins me on the chorus in the end.
ER: This lyric couplet really sticks out to me: “Walk across the bridge and hope nobody pushes me off / Wait for the traffic lights to signal that it’s safe to walk / Stop for wine / no stop for coffee / stop for nothing at all / just need to get home / just need to get home.” It feels so evocative and vulnerable, grounded in a specific moment. Could you go into these words a little bit?
The drowning of Dakota James in 2017 is something crosses my mind every single time I walk across a bridge. Every single time. That bridge or not. I didn’t personally know him, but it really gave the entire LGBTQIA+ community in Pittsburgh pause. His death was ruled an accidental drowning, but even the Dakota James Foundation’s website has a blurb on their homepage that detectives and professors are convinced that most of these types of drowning are homicides. We don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate, but I wanted to give this type of story a voice. As a Queer artist, I will always include Queer subtext in my work and try to give a voice to those who don’t or feel as if they don’t have one — always.
I don’t know if Livefromthecity inherently picked up on this context? I never asked him, but thinking about it now, his verse aligns really deeply with loss and grief.
You can connect the indecision of wanting to stop for wine or coffee, then deciding to go home with the lines ‘I want to suspend my love for you.’ “Small Times” was written, in part, about trying to make sense of my life in the face of a breakup with a longterm boyfriend. I would cross the Andy Warhol Bridge daily to go to my day job, then try really hard to find reasons to stay out after work. I was still living with this man, and as a result, didn’t want to spend time at home. Do I want to be caffeinated in the evening and suffer from insomnia? No. Do I want to go home drunk and feel bad about myself? No. Okay, I’ll go home, but I don’t want to.
At the same time, I was completely miserable in trying to re-acclimate myself into society after recovering from a disability that left me homebound and completely reliant on that boyfriend and my family. To have so many collapses in such a short span of time…I’d never felt such isolation in my life. Sometimes I didn’t even want to be around me — I strangely even felt fully isolated from myself and tried to encapsulate these feelings.
ER: Another lyric question: I’m really curious about the refrain “The city’s about me.” It’s such a unique construction of words. How did that fragment come together with “even if I feel much bigger than it / I still feel so small at times”?
People who live in Pittsburgh have a lot of pride about the city itself and I wanted to put that into the song, but, I guess I’ve lived in opposition to that a little bit. I’ve lived in the Pittsburgh area for almost my entire life, but I’ve almost always felt like I’m trying to claw my way out. I grew up in a suburb an hour outside of the city and didn’t have a good time there as a little Queer kid — moved near the city only to find that the city is like a small town, just a little more population dense. I don’t know, I’ve always liked the vibes of Toronto, Chicago, or New York — bigger places with a lot of people, diversity, and things to do. But, at my core, I’ve spent so much time in Pittsburgh that I know it’s a city that will always been a large part of me.
ER: This is the final track on Side A of the LP, and it feels like a concluding moment for it. It also fades really interestingly into the first track if you have the album on loop. How intentional was the order of the tracks?
2020K: Intentional. Side A also denotes a Side B, doesn’t it?
Absolutely everything I do and am involved in is intentional. Very, very layered and very, very intentional. This is why it’s taking so long for me to release the follow up to 2016’s Burst Mode. My art is never created for the sake of being only surface level
ER: You also mentioned swapping the current track in for the most recent master. What are the differences in the masters? (I also just don’t know anything about music production).
2020K: I want to make it clear that I have no animosity toward Jake Hanner, who mastered this record, or Jeff Betten, who threw this master up. Jake wanted to stem master the track. Anytime I’ve ever had somebody stem master it’s turned into a nightmare. If anyone asks me to send them song stems so they can stem master in the future, the answer is a hard no. It’s the biggest red flag to me. It’s like taking my finished painting and adding your own brush strokes to it.
In relating audio production into simple art terms, you can think of mixing as the painting process and mastering as the framing process. You don’t fuck with Van Gogh — you put him in a gilded frame and leave his work alone!
Or, to put it in Yinzer terms, you don’t pluck Pittsburgh out of the Rust Belt and stick it in the midwest!
In its current form, I biggest have a problem with it is that there are bass drops that are off beat. I’d been very clearly asking Jake and Jeff to fix them since 2022 and it didn’t happen. So, I fixed it myself, did the master, and Jeff will throw it up eventually. If anyone wants my master before it goes up though, email me and you’ll get a .wav file.
ER: As a follow up, how did the song change throughout out the process? You heard it in many different forms. I’d love to hear about the moment it came out of your mind and into the page or notes app or wherever your thoughts come out. When did you decide to write it? What new things did you learn about it as it changed?
“Small Times” didn’t change much, it just evolved sonically with the inclusion of Livefromthecity into its different mastering incantations. I was renting a rehearsal space in the South Side with a few other bands and would commute to it in the mornings, before the loud metal bands would fill the entire floor with their sound, and spend hours recording these really delicate vocal lines. There had to have been over 100 vocal takes for this song.
It’s interesting, my next record is called Will Not False My Identity and has been in the making for eight years, but “Small Times” came together in two months. I think I wrote the lyrics in a little over an hour. They poured out of me. It was a catharsis I desperately needed.
2020K is a Queer Pop and Experimental Electronic project solely headed by artist RJ Kozain, who was raised and currently resides in the Pittsburgh, PA area.
Listen to “Small Times” off of Pittsubaagu no Yu on Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp.
PETRICHOR 