The Amalgamation of Al Menne

One of my favorite songs of 2022 was “Triple Axel,” the closing number from Christian Lee Hutson’s sophomore album Quitters. It’s a piano ballad washed in brevity and spun clean with vivid, pastoral lyrics. “Infinity symbol lifting you into the sky, twisting your ankle,” Hutson sings. “Second opinions, trembling out on the ice. Taking walks around the neighborhood, pressing leaves into the baby book. There’s a consolation prize in the corner of my mind.” Perhaps it is either the hopeless romantic, the Tonya Harding apologist or the insufferable poet in me, but I truly believe that “Triple Axel” is a perfect song. When I found out that Al Menne came up with the melody for it while he almost fell asleep watching television. “I’ve never successfully watched The Sopranos all the way through,” he says. “But I was on an attempt to do that, and there was a line like, ‘We marry our mothers’—or something like that. And, for some reason, I was just trying to figure out what that meant in my weird, half-awake/half-asleep mode. Then, I was seeing a melody in my head, so I made a voice memo and sent it to Christian and I was like, ‘Is this something?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah!’”

If the name Al Menne is unfamiliar to you, I’m sure that’s not true. Since 2015, he’s been the vocalist of the Seattle band Great Grandpa and, for a long time, he was doing his own thing as Pickleboy—putting out singles and demos and covers on Bandcamp, along with a duet with Field Medic on the track “Talkin Johnny & June (Your Arms Around Me).” Great Grandpa put out two records—Plastic Cough in 2017 and Four of Arrows in 2019—and have been relatively silent since, having gone on hiatus after COVID hit. The group found themselves all in various transitional points, and time apart from each other was unavoidable—even if there wasn’t a global pandemic. However, if quarantine hadn’t happened, Menne wouldn’t have focused so hard on his solo work. In that time, too, he moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, joining a great ecosystem of musicians like Hutson, Chris Farren, Jay Som and Hand Habits—all of whom, conveniently, appear on Menne’s debut solo album, Freak Accident.

Though it’s always, to some extent, jarring to leave the place you’ve called home your entire life, the transition from living in Washington to living in Southern California has been relatively painless, but it’s the act of finding communal consistency when all of your peers are working musicians that can prove the most solitary. “I feel like I’ve done enough traveling—touring and traveling for fun to visit people—that it didn’t feel that weighted until I was settling in,” Menne explains. “Every city has its own culture for socializing and making friends. I felt like the good friends that I do have in LA, everybody is always on tour—so we’re always missing each other. I just have an endless amount of acquaintances that I see once every five months at a show, or something. The socializing aspect was a little bit harder, but I’m kind of a hermit most of the time, anyways—so I don’t know how much of that was the actual city or just me.”

But Menne isn’t unfamiliar with being alone. When he isn’t moonlighting as a singer/songwriter, he works a lot of odd delivery jobs, whether it’s for DoorDash, Uber Eats or flower companies. On long drives, he notes, he has to exhaust every avenue of energy—be it by catching up on stockpiles of podcasts or, when those aren’t filling his cup, listening through old voice memos and trying to work on lyrics. Despite the isolating weight that spending chunks of a life on the road can carry, the solace can be an empowering turn towards pronounced focus. “I’d just done a big drive down the West Coast, and there’s a lot of time to reflect—especially when you hit the mountains and you don’t really have stuff saved on your phone—for better or for worse,” Menne says “On a long drive, there’s so much time to think, especially when you’re doing it by yourself.”

The first time I was exposed to Menne’s work came about six years ago, when he was doing a slate of solo DIY gigs with Field Medic, Evan Stephens Hall and Derek Ted across the country. Those sets were crucial to Menne’s trajectory as a solo artist, as they helped him figure out his shit and figure out what he would even want to say in a song or what style he’d like to perform in. He hasn’t watched the videos of those sets in a long time, but he understands what role they serve in how Freak Accident came together. “The last time I watched that stuff, I was like, ‘Okay, damn, well, one might say this could be cringe. And one could also say that I’ve experienced a lot of growth,’ which is the way I frame it,” Menne jokes. “If I didn’t play those shows with those artists who really influenced me—as people and as musicians—then I probably wouldn’t be doing the crap I’m doing now.”

I remember dragging my friends (aka my then-partner, my secret crush and her lifelong best friend) to a show at Mahall’s in Lakewood, Ohio because Great Grandpa was playing that night—even though it was Rozwell Kid headlining. I just wanted, so badly, to see Menne and the band rip through songs like “Favorite Show” and “Teen Challenge.” We stood outside of the venue during the first two openers, embalmed by the cigarette fumes emanating from the hands of everyone around us. After Great Grandpa played a handful of songs, the four of us trotted over to the playground across the street and conquered the swings. I hold that memory close, if only because the clear disinterest everyone else in my circle had in driving two hours north from Columbus and paying $15 to see a band they’d never heard of made my love of Menne and his bandmates feel even more unique and valid.

This time around, on Freak Accident, Menne has assembled a larger-than-life coterie of featured players, including Hutson as producer, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte as mixer, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits on guitar, Whitmer Thomas on vocal harmonies and, of course, Chris Farren’s directorial talents on the music video for lead single “Kill Me.” Most sharply, you can hear the pedal steel of Jodi’s Nico Levine—Menne’s partner and collaborator—coursing through the record’s veins. Menne had been a longtime fan of Hutson’s and, after the former put out his debut album Beginners in 2020, the two musicians got linked up. Somebody, somewhere, had turned Hutson on to Great Grandpa, which led to him discovering Menne’s work as Pickleboy—which tumbled into them linking up online, exchanging playlists and becoming great friends. They would write “Triple Axel” together early on, but the first song we hear from the duo came in 2021 on Hutson’s The Version Suicides, Vol. 3 EP—where he and Menne dueted on a cover of Fugazi’s “I’m So Tired.”

“We started to do some co-writing, and we worked on some songs that ended up on Quitters,” Menne explains. “At that point, Great Grandpa had been on an intentional hiatus. I love writing songs, and working with Christian really sparked that again. It was like, ‘Okay, seeing music through somebody else’s lens, sometimes, gives you a clear view to the things that you want to be doing.” Menne began sending Hutson some songs he was working on until he came to the conclusion that he wanted to make a solo album. Hutson gave him a vote of courage and asked if he would let him produce it. “I was like, ‘Okay, obviously,’” Menne adds. “I feel like that happened very naturally, which felt good and comfortable. We were both finding our footing through it all.”

Duterte came into the picture via Whitmer Thomas, who has been a longtime collaborator of Hutson’s. The Jay Som singer/songwriter engineered most of Thomas’ record The Older I Get The Funnier I Was—a project that Menne sings on. “When I was doing backing vocals, I was doing it remotely and sending it to Melina and being like, ‘Hey, let me know if this sounds like shit, but here’s 100 tracks for this one song.’ And she was very, very kind and like, ‘No, it sounds great.’ And then, when Christian and I were talking about who we would want to engineer [Freak Accident], to me, it was very obvious that the choice would be to ask Melina and hope she’s down—because not everybody wants to just be engineering and mixing; a lot of people want to also have the producer’s chair, which is totally understandable, but it worked out.”