Pale Cicada by Makeunder

When people ask me, “where are you from?”, I tell them I was born in California but grew up in Texas. The longer version has always felt too complicated – when I was two, my unorthodox parents moved my siblings and me from rural northern California to suburban San Antonio hoping to find work. We struggled, never really finding our place there, and those impressions of alienation and hardship have left me feeling like a stranger everywhere I’ve ever lived since. And even this longer version, which took me years to learn how to express, doesn’t do the story justice. After a lifetime of composing music as a means of escaping these feelings, I recorded Pale Cicada to come to terms with my impressions of growing up poor and out-of-step in America, and to reflect on how my eccentric family and I managed to survive through it. Ramshackle and chaotic, the songs migrate from R&B to clav funk to country, as if Stevie Wonder, Prince, Sturgill Simpson and St. Vincent conspired to make a voodoo doll out of me and pushed air through my vocal chords in the studio. The stories told on the album are meant to be both subversively upbeat and crushingly tragic, greatly complicated by the questions left unanswered when my father died of lung cancer in 2011, before I was old enough to see things from his perspective. Truthfully, I found the songwriting process overwhelmingly painful, but ultimately cathartic – and now that the record is done and I’ve gotten my own story straight, I feel a little more at peace when I tell people the shorter version.

Led by songwriter Hamilton Ulmer, Makeunder wrestles diverse tastes - from Renaissance motet, to art rock, to 90's R&B, synth pop, soul, & modern orchestral music - into powerful songs about death, survival, migration, & loss.

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