Brooklyn, New York singer-songwriter Isaiah Singer creates a compelling and enlightening song with his latest release A Prayer For the Living. Isaiah Singer has a string of releases coming up including an album next year and a single in December.
He has been part of garage punk rockers Snatch Attack and the chamber punk band Freedom Haters. Singer has worked with composer and violinist Sean Hagerty (his bandmate from Freedom Haters) and the Third Rail Projects theater company on several shows. Most prominent among these are the phenomenal Off-Broadway act “Then She Fell” and “Ghost Light” at Lincoln Center.
A Prayer For the Living is a steady serene song with a beating heart. The verse establishes itself very well. The rhythm and meter of the song build up to a stunning musical momentum. Organ chords are audible behind the pre-chorus. We get a guitar solo which is fluid. Not the usual sharp blazing guitar tone but sweet and eclectic. The song has a lovely resolution with the guitar riffs for verses. There is a fiery spirit to this song.
The song deals with the loss of faith and lamenting past wrongs. It is also a critique of the irrational and plain harmful aspects of reactionary religion. Politics that is rooted in such reaction and bigotry will doom the people. Catchy guitar riffs and the stone rock groove are the core of the song. Musical and lyrical expression flows in this track. The song is stellarly produced by producer Mike Abiuso at Behind the Curtains Media. A Prayer For the Living by Isaiah Singer is a song of reckoning and acceptance.
We get to speak to Isaiah about the song.
1. Please tell us about your musical influences and upbringing.
I grew up in a religious household that strictly eschewed popular music, among other earthly delights. Fortunately, I had a radio, and in my early teens, I started sneaking off to listen to Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli, Fine Young Cannibals – the sexy, sleek pop music of the late 80s and early nineties. Then I stole a Led Zeppelin record (Houses of the Holy, no less) from a church rummage sale and within a year or two I had somehow saved up enough to buy my first guitar, a black Les Paul Custom, just like Jimmy Page.
I was a voracious record collector in high school and college, and I discovered a lot of bands that I revere to this day: Ministry, Neubauten, Wire, Royal Trux. The common thread, to my ear and my heart, is the emotional complexity behind the chaos that these bands wrought on record and stage.
Ironically, lately, I’ve returned to listening to a ton of mainstream pop music: Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna. Under it all, I’m a sucker for a catchy melody.
2. The song seems to be about loss and faith and lamenting past wrongs. Could you elaborate more on the theme?
“A Prayer for the Living” is definitely a song about coming to terms with a total loss of faith. Losing faith in God is actually the easy part: far more destabilizing has been the realization that my parents allowed me to be exposed to a lot of disturbing and truly terrifying doctrine. The Evangelical teachings regarding the End Times are salacious horror fantasies, and there’s no room in that ideology for even a question about the interpretation of the insane visions of the Apocalypse. Some leathery old creep like Pat Robertson eats some rotten cheese and has a nightmare, the next day he’s spouting it as doctrine on TV, and these sad, broken Evangelicals are lapping up his incoherent word vomit as if they read it in the Bible.
I try to remember that the people who embrace this ideology are victims themselves, but when garbage theology starts informing public policy, well, then it’s time for people who know better to say something about it. I think most reasonable Americans still think I’m exaggerating when I describe the lunacy of the belief ‘system’ that guides maniacs like Ted Cruz and that lumpy shithead governor from Florida, but it’s no joke. These people are very confused and psychologically broken, and hence very dangerous when given power.
3. A hooky guitar riff and sturdy groove are the backbones of the song. It almost flows in its musical and lyrical expression. What was the process of writing the song?
This song was the last one written for the forthcoming album, and unlike some songs which I’ve been rewriting or just playing and living with for a few years, this song came very quickly and fully formed. I used to write a lot in rehearsal with a band, but lately I’m much more likely to come up with a beat and a set of changes on my own and then just build up from there. By the time the basic instrumentation is in place, the melody crystallizes with no conscious effort from me.
Sometimes I still might work and rework the lyrics, but “Prayer” didn’t take a lot of rewriting. From my perspective, the whole song basically appeared in twenty minutes, and I never second guessed the tone or the lyrics.
4. Here the guitar solo tone sounds fluid, not piercing as solos tend to be but almost cathartic actually. What are the gear, and effects behind the tone?
I’m a big fan of a brash, slashing guitar solo, but this particular solo just sort of flowed from the melody and tone that had already been established as the song was being written. I played a lot of different guitars on this album, but I very often came back to my Les Paul, especially for solos that want a certain ease and fluidity – it’s one of those instruments that has a life and energy of its own, it’s effortless to play and always sounds good. Sometimes I’ll fine tune a melodic solo, just by playing it over and over until it’s perfect, but this one was just so clear from the beginning. Mike Abiuso, the producer, took a pretty basic tone and made it sound like an organ or something – I’m not even sure what effects are on it, but it’s the perfect touch of weirdness, I think.
5. Did you have any collaborators on the song? How did figure out the elements of the production and arrangement?
The arrangement was pretty much set from the moment the song was written, but the producer, Mike Abiuso at Behind the Curtains Media, took my basic tracks and basically made everything sound amazing. He also took the beat I looped while writing the song and expanded it into a very appropriately contained and simple drum track that he played. We’ve done it a lot of different ways for this album: some tracks with drums that I recorded remotely with a phenomenal drummer during lock down, some tracks that we recorded live in studio with that drummer (Mike Lunoe); and some tracks where Mike Abiuso has just said ‘let me try it’ and banged out a perfect drum part. It’s definitely not a homogenous sounding album.
6. What is the story behind the single cover art?
I took that photo myself on a trip to see Nine Inch Nails and Ministry outside of Cleveland a few months ago. The driver (incidentally, another drummer friend named Mike) got routed through the countryside of Ohio and the saturated colors of these dilapidated country estates caught my eye. I was later reading about that area and some of the weird Christian cults that thrived there a hundred years ago or more, and I pulled the central ghostly figure from a photo of one of those cults. A very common story among American Christian communities: some sexually obsessed creep with incredible charisma starts cultvating an overwhelming sense of sexual shame among his followers, telling them they can only fuck this way or that way. Meanwhile, the leader fucks whomever “God” tells him to: wives, husband, kids. In the church I grew up in, it was actually the pastor’s son who was molesting children, but I guess that’s just a variation on a theme.
7. How different was it making music as your previous band/act The Seventh Word and now as a solo artist?
Ironically, The Seventh Word actually began, years ago, as a name for my solo project. The first album was very much an eclectic folk project: I played lots of harmonica on that, and some of the songs were solo acoustic numbers, basically what I was playing in coffee shops in the Bay Area during and after college.
After I moved from California to New York, The Seventh Word name carried over to a few different band projects, mostly power trios. For a while I was mostly playing bass and singing, which was a special challenge that I enjoyed adapting to, especially with Freedom Haters, which started as a drums/bass/violin trio. Then I started missing playing self-indugent guitar solos of my own!
8. What are your upcoming plans for music releases and live gigs? Heard you had plans for more music next year.
The album is almost finished, the plan is to release that early next year. I’ll convene a band of long-time collaborators to play some shows on the East Coast in 2023. In the meantime, there’s another single coming out in December, a song that was recorded for an experimental film that came out this year to much critical acclaim. I think this song, “The Numbers on the Door”, might have been lost if not for my long-time collaborator Sean Hagerty (the violinist from Freedom Haters, who has become one of the masterminds of live sound for immersive theater). He and the film’s director asked for a sound-alike for a song that they couldn’t get the rights to, and I thought of this instrumental tune that I’d recorded a long time ago. Once we started working on it, a chorus and a melody made themselves evident, and suddenly we had a song that I really liked and wanted to remix for this album because it just fit so perfectly in vibe and theme. I’m really excited to share that soon.
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