Joseph Keckler is a singer and writer who often zeroes in on moments of daily life and spins them into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. Hailed by the New York Times as “major vocal talent…a singer whose range shatters the conventional boundaries…with a trickster’s dark humor,” his original performances have been presented by Lincoln Center, Cenre Pompidou, NPR Tiny Desk and many others. His first collection of writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2018.

Interview by Tyler Nesler

In the introduction to your book Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, “My Life is a House on Fire,” you recount watching your family's house burn to the ground at the age of three. Because you lost all the artifacts of your very early childhood, you “became nervously vigilant about keeping lost time alive. In my adulthood, I've managed to make a practice, and a career, somehow, of this nagging need to reconstruct certain episodes from my life.”

If it hadn't been for this catastrophic event at such a young age, do you think you would still always be wondering (prompted by your older brother telling you not to be ridiculous when you asked if your parents might die) – “what is the meaning of ridiculous?”

That piece is mainly about memory, as you mention – I suspect my infant recollections are so numerous and vivid because of the fire, since that night broke my life into a before and an after. An era burned up and was also burned into my mind.

I end the chapter with that moment in order to open it up really, to create a poetic origin story for my interest in the ridiculous. I had recently turned three. Through the nearest neighbors’ distant window, I was watching my parents as they tore back and forth, their tiny silhouettes grazing the inferno that devoured everything we had. My teenage brother was kindly assuaging my fears in a catastrophic moment, and in my memory he said something like, “no, no, don’t be ridiculous…” and I wondered about the meaning of the word. Since my parents were clearly in danger, however, such fears were founded.

Perhaps it follows, ever so loosely, that in the book I’m looking at “ridiculous” characters and then asking…but are they really? My subjects move in and out of self-awareness, of credibility. They are too much for this world. Their absurdity represents both lack of awareness and hyper-awareness, liability and superpower.

Some of my favorite stories from your book recount the various marginal jobs you've had over the years in New York: hawking audio guides at the Guggenheim, working for a blind gallerist, toiling away in the rental library of a classical music publishing company, working for a man who pirated opera recordings — along with the various characters you met through these gigs, who in one way or another either taught you things or possibly made you feel less singular as an outsider via their own deep and longstanding commitments to their eccentricities. Could you talk about any of the jobs you've had and people in them who you feel strongly helped to shape your eventual creative path in unexpected ways?

In my experience, jobs provide an abundance of material. Mine have anyway. And since none ever paid much, I needed them to provide that.

Two of those individuals are dead. I’ll mention them: Steve Cannon, beloved literary figure in New York, founder of Gathering of the Tribes – which will be represented in The Whitney Biennial – and author of novel Groove, Jive and Bang Around, an exuberant 220-page medley of sex. And Ed Rosen – the “opera pirate” – whom the Metropolitan made an official archivist. He was an old school connoisseur, a sweet man, who was also very encouraging of my singing. That gig ended up influencing my course, because when I was writing stories about my various employment experiences, I decided the episode about working for Ed shouldn’t be a simple essay or monologue, but an aria! Not only were we listening to opera all the time there, but the repetition of duplicating disks all day was very rhythmic. (The drama paired with monotonous labor felt rich.) So I composed an aria about this, and sang it in Italian: for me, a form was born.

In your story “Anxiety Dreams at the Amato,” you relate your time performing at the Amato, an opera house on the Bowery. You write, “It sat next to the Bowery Mission, a men's shelter and soup kitchen, and two doors down from the legendary punk club CBGB. There was a time when denizens from all three places routinely stood outside for fresh air, or a cigarette, and sometimes one could not tell who belonged where.” The scene there was a freewheeling, chaotic mix of performers in various states of career highs or lows or somewhere in-between. Do you think your experience at this ragtag venue was a significant influence on your eventual direction of using opera in such an unconventional way?

Being part of the world of the Amato was one of the most magical experiences of my life and taught me a lot about how to be a performer. The atmosphere and character of the place was of another time, and timeless…You only got one rehearsal, so there was this strong aspect of blind faith, and a necessary familial bond among the people there. I can’t say the Amato influenced my unconventional sensibility, exactly, though it certainly appealed to it.

Did you ever entertain a more conventional opera career path, or do you think that never would have been the right fit for you?

It’s interesting that just before the pandemic I really started working in the opera world, as a singer-creator. Well, I started out as a painter and trained as a singer at the same time. And I started writing very early on. So my head was always in a very generative headspace versus an interpretive one – in other words, it’s not that I began in a rigid conservatory context and then defected…I was always driven to define my own terms. I’m also cursed with the impulse to not want to be a member of any club that would have me – or even the ones that might!

I was encouraged to pursue that career because I have the instrument for it. And I flirted with the idea; I once entered the Met’s competition on a lark and was a regional winner…In my early training and time spent in that world I became aware that singers have to contend with a lot of subjugation – from certain directors, producers conductors, even coaches. Actors have to deal with that too. While I have another kind of fortitude, I lack the kind it would have taken to withstand that. More importantly, I didn’t know how to stop writing...I needed to honor my interests and gifts at the risk of becoming inscrutable, even sometimes to myself. Tortuous path, tenuous existence, can’t claim it wasn’t in some ways a perverse choice.

Are there any other performers past or present who've also incorporated opera in unusual ways that influenced or inspired you?

Some performers brought a classical edge to other forms – Nina Simone channeling Bach in a jazz standard, tearing apart a popular song and making it transcendent. The classical recitals of polymath Paul Robeson, who was also dangerous political artist. Sometimes a certain vitality can be restored to classical material, and techniques, when they are deterritorialized.

In New York, John Moran and Saori Tsukada performed John’s highly constructed sound scores of casual interactions, precisely moving and lip syncing to their own pre-recorded voices, and you often couldn’t tell what was pre-recorded or live. So John’s work – which he refers to as opera – is both formal and subversive and played with perception and liveness in a way that inspired me.

I was also exposed to the work of performance artist John Kelly, who trained as a countertenor and incorporated opera into his work in a poetic way. The fact of his multiplicity intrigued me. And I was aware of singers from the past who deployed opera in a pop context – Nina Hagen, for instance. Later I learned about the Italian singer Giuni Russo…they used the operatic ingredient in a really different way than I do. I wanted to do something new with it.

Performing *A Train With No Midnight* - photo by Paula Lobo

You were part of a group reading this past fall at the Berlin bar in New York. The bill featured New York literary and music luminaries such as Lucy Sante, Adele Bertei, with the headliner none other than the punk legend Lydia Lunch. They're all important figures from the late 70s downtown NYC art and music worlds, but you're from a younger generation.

Your inclusion in this event is a kind of perfect connecting of the older NYC underground with the new. It actually reaffirms to me that this type of experimental spirit is still alive in the city, even in its ultra-gentrified state. How did that night’s performance impact you?

My main supporters in the past few years are non-binary teenagers and icons of the 20th century. It is a good group. That was the first indoor gig I’d done in two years, and it reminded me why I love performing. It was a momentous occasion. I respect those three individuals a lot. I love Lydia as a person and as an artist.

Joseph Keckler with (clockwise from top right), Lucy Sante, Adele Bertei, and Lydia Lunch - photo by Jasmine Hirst

The videos you've created for many of your performance pieces work well to stylishly highlight your talent for absurdist melodrama mixed with deadpan comedy – the recounting of an intense psychedelic mushroom trip (“Shroom Trip Opera”), your “relapse” into a teenage goth identity (“Goth Song”), your impulsive invitation of strangers from the internet to your home (“Strangers From the Internet”), and an atmospheric nighttime video for your song “The Ride.”

You've directed several of these yourself and I notice you've frequently worked with Laura Terruso for the cinematography. How did you come to work with her? Is there anyone else involved you'd like to mention who brought something unexpected or unique to the final versions of these videos?

Laura co-directed and shot “The Ride” and “Goth.” And she shot “Strangers from the Internet,” which I directed. We met when we were both performing in clubs – she actually had a drag alter-ego, an Italian-American teenager named Castrato who wove Baroque arias into his raps. She has exploded as a director of course – she is directing De Niro now.

The comedian Chris Hardwick produced the “Shroom” video and Liam Lynch directed it.

For the recent Tiny Desk Concert, photographer Michael Sharkey and I produced that in his and Andromache Chalfant’s space in Red Hook, 153 Coffey St…

Being the director of several of your own videos, it seems you've got a knack for filmmaking — but I don't get the impression that filmmaking itself is a primary interest for you, or is it? Do you harbor any wider filmmaking ambitions or do you view these videos more as just another variation/expression of your work?

I love working in film. Though a visual and musical background helps, I have no training in film, so my involvement in that area is often a process of collaborating with talented people who do, and of learning…

Yes, I was engaged by a TV network the past number of years with a big project that got messed up during the pandemic, and I’m working on a couple of films now. In a way, my interest does extend from the performance, as the performance extends from the writing.

I have no interest in documenting performance – if I’m documenting performance, to me the medium then is film, and I want to actually work in the medium at hand. Some work becomes most complete as films. The films you mentioned were amazingly made for next to nothing. At the moment I need a bit more to accomplish what I want to in that area. I am conceiving an episodic series.

In 2019, you toured with Sleater-Kinney as their national support act, and I've read that it happened because Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein saw you perform, which also inspired their song “The Future is Here.”

How did their audiences react to you as an opener? And in what ways do you think you inspired “The Future is Here,” (which is about how isolating it is to be surrounded by people fixated on screens and social media)?

Regarding “The Future is Here,” I think Carrie and Corin had seen me perform “GPS Song,” where technology comes into play as a kind of characterless character.

I was shown immense love by the group and their audience. The shows themselves were exhilarating. I liked it all – the energy, context, schedule, and scale. I also slept better on that tour bus than I ever have – was it the coffin-like pod that so comforted me? The constant motion? Lack of oxygen?

Joseph during an opening performance for Sleater-Kinney

You recently contributed to McSweeney's first-ever “audio issue.” What was your contribution, and has the experience made you think about other possible approaches to voice work/radio play-style pieces?

After the house burned down, my only possession for a while was a pink rubber pig that squeaked, and we spoke late into the night throughout my entire childhood. In “Piggy” I attempt to have another conversation with him, but as an adult. I recorded myself as a chorus, trying to make it sound like a bunch of different people…It is, truly, ridiculous.

In that one there’s an interplay between what’s on the page and what is heard. Otherwise, it felt like familiar terrain to me on a formal level. But I have made radio pieces in the past and would love to work more in that area. A piece of juvenilia, my cult hit “Cat Names,” was once broadcast across Australia! I’d love to do an audio book, a podcast…

Do you have any other projects or works coming out in the near future that you would like people to know about?

I am aiming to finish three short albums and a video series. I’m also working on two large films that I can discuss soon…I’ll be doing concerts in London April 1 & 2nd, at Joe’s Pub April 8th and before that, with Lydia at TV EYE March 13th and in Detroit at UFO Factory March 27th.

A complete list of Joseph’s upcoming performances:

March 25 - Ann Arbor Film Festival, film screening with Lydia Lunch in Ann Arbor, MI

March 26 - Ann Arbor Film Festival

March 27 - UFO Factory with Jex Blackmore + Lydia Lunch in Detroit, MI

April 1 & 2 - Watermans Arts Centre in London, England

April 8 - Joe’s Pub in NYC

April 28 - Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig, Germany

Check out some of our other interviews with or about figures related to this interview:

Filmmaker Beth B discusses her feature length documentary Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over

Interview with Lucy Sante about her recent essay collection Maybe the People Would be the Times

Interview with performer and activist Jex Blackmore

Interview with musician and actor Eszter Balint