Sam Ray references close friends in his song titles and monikers (e.g., Julia Brown), creating elaborate back stories for his real-life characters.
It’s almost 6 p.m. on a cold evening in late February, but Sam Ray is just eating his first meal of the day. This comes after nearly staying up all night.
The 21-year-old musician eats and sleeps in sporadic cycles. He spends most of his time in College Park but doesn’t go to school at this university or hold a job nearby. He’s even had trouble mustering enough effort to write music he’s proud of.
“[Inspiration] comes and goes,” he said, chewing on a Plato’s Diner chicken finger.
But right now, he’s hit a creative stride.
Ray’s newest act, Julia Brown, dropped its debut album to be close to you — a warm, wistful, lo-fi collection of eight pop songs — on Feb. 22. The reception was overwhelmingly positive; Pitchfork and Consequence of Sound both gave glowing endorsements to the song “Library” at the end of March, and the album itself reached the Bandcamp download limit of 500 within the first day.
Ray’s estimate for total sales, including all of the free Mediafire and Bandcamp downloads as well as cassette tapes, now stands at 2,200.
Julia Brown will play in Baltimore at Club K on Wednesday and the Charm City Art Space on Sunday.
Ray is also organizing a multipart compilation called “420 Love Songs,” a project inspired by the iconic Magnetic Fields record 69 Love Songs. Most tracks are recorded by him or his close circle of collaborators — including sophomore English major Caroline White, senior sociology major John Toohey and senior psychology major Alec Simke — with the exception of a few choice submissions by random musicians that Ray green-lighted himself.
Ray posts all of the songs in sporadic fashion — with lyrics and a brief introduction — to a bare, cream-colored Tumblr page featuring a pink heart cursor and a doodle of a black cat that stares at you as you scroll up and down. As of yesterday, the project had reached song 99.
In January, he chose to amiably end his punk band Teen Suicide — founded initially as a two-piece in Columbia with drummer Eric Livingston — with a final gig at Baltimore’s Bell Foundry. The show culminated in a chorus of people screaming the words to Ray’s coffeehouse staple “Methadone Kids,” their heads banging in unison to the song’s euphoric ending.
Music is his focus, the stable part of an adulthood always in flux. Yet he’s only gotten serious about the music now — which meant ending Teen Suicide.
“It’s a weird time thinking of myself as an actual musician,” Ray said. “It weirds me out. I never took it seriously until the Julia Brown album. Songwriting-wise, all Teen Suicide stuff was fun. It was just messing around.”
It’s also been difficult for Ray to come to terms with the fact that this “messing around” has greatly impacted a lot of people.
“My friends have a similar story about their band,” he said, referring to Teen Suicide’s influence. “People got their lyrics tattooed and stuff, and they were just like, ‘Well, that’s something we came up with while we were smoking crack, and people have that on their bodies.’ We didn’t write anything smoking crack, but it’s weird.”
“I’m not trying to devalue it,” he added. “I’m glad people are into it. But it got the attention that it did when it wasn’t something that I was trying for at all.”
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Ray is a bundle of contradictions. He oscillates between craving attention and finding it difficult to stomach.
On the one hand, he’s got Julia Brown, Teen Suicide, his ambient moniker Ricky Eat Acid (a name he’s recorded under since 2009), “420 Love Songs” and other miscellaneous projects with his frequent collaborators, all adding up to a prolific amount of music.
He’s commanding and candid on the Internet. A Ray post can range from a long Tumblr essay that vaguely reveals the framework of a troubled past to a short status on the Julia Brown Facebook page denouncing “folk punk” and its fans. His outbursts even extend to his personal Facebook page; for example: “Talentless f—s live forever, and my judgment day is nigh, friends.”
He also peppers most of his music with inside jokes and references to his circle of friends. Only someone close to Ray would know who Dan Collins, Hayden, Dermis, Anne and Erica the supposed goblin are. Yet all these people are featured — sometimes prominently — as characters or allusions in Teen Suicide songs. Even more peripherally, you probably don’t even know who Julia Brown is. But this specificity piques your interest and makes you want to know more.
At the same time, misanthropy and self-deprecation are frequent songwriting themes of Ray’s.
In one lyric from Teen Suicide’s “The Same Things Happening To Me All The Time, Even In My Dreams,” Ray sings, “I wish that I’d never met a lot of the people that I’ve met/ Not because I don’t like them/ But because I only let them down/ And when you disappoint everyone all the time/ It’s hard not to want to die.”
Recently — instead of dwelling on the effects of these contradictions — he’s turned his attention to the professional side of music. He’s been spending time in a real studio rather than recording at his home, placing a special emphasis on craftsmanship and precision.
Ray still loves the DIY ethos — something he says won’t change anytime soon — but Ray’s two goals at this point are making money and gaining artistic validation.
“It’s all a lot more structured and official, and it’s fun,” Ray said, referring to the business world. “Like filling out tax forms about music, that’s the part that I enjoy the most — the stupid, bureaucratic bulls— of it. I feel that everyone who wants to be a musician as a kid is like, ‘Yeah, I want to just play shows and travel and tour and have people like what I do.’ I’m like, ‘I want to make money from this.’”
Ray talks about business with a directness that is unprecedented for him. In contrast, discussions of his past in Teen Suicide are tinged with superfluity and a noticeable amount of filler words such as “like” and “weird.”
Even with Ray providing direction and guidance, collaborating is an open, democratic experience for everyone.
“I feel like as I spent more and more time playing with him, it got heavier and more chaotic and thrashy and that was more like my side, what I’m really into,” said Simke, Julia Brown’s bassist. “We kind of seem to play off each other.”
“We are still always sharing music, and that was probably a factor in us working together so well, knowing what kind of stuff bands were doing that the other person was stoked on,” said Livingston, Teen Suicide’s former drummer. “It helped our artistic vision align by kind of mushing it together. We both influenced each other’s tastes.”
Ray’s Julia Brown bandmates, while fully invested in their work together, remain slightly mystified by him and his ambitious future plans for them.
They speak in speculative terms, hinting at a relationship filled with constant entropy.
“With Sam’s other projects, it seemed like there was some internal conflict that kept him from really trying to promote his music and get it as popular as he could,” said Toohey, one of Ray’s current collaborators and Julia Brown’s drummer. “With Julia Brown, it seems like he’s just ready to take this as far as it can go. Things are about to get kind of crazy.”
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Even with constant feedback from dedicated bandmates and a new focus on professionalism, Ray’s quirks and contradictions remain very much a part of who he is.
Ray attended a local College Park house show in March, but he kept mostly to himself, hardly interacting with anyone there.
It wasn’t until the party was slowly dying out, with all of the bands long since finished, that he decided to make his presence known.
Ambling over to a blue fender mustang, he plugged in and started playing the opening chords to Teen Suicide’s “Everything Is Fine.” Slowly, people started to file in.
Ray then moved on to the jagged riffs of “Dan Collins v. The Maryland Judiciary System” — another Teen Suicide song. Thrashing his head in time with the strumming, the peak of his black wool cap flapping from side to side, Ray shouted, “I said/ I don’t want anyone to notice me.”
More people entered. “I just wanna stay far away from anyone,” Ray continued.
Everyone kept their distance — but nobody wanted him to stop.
