About two years ago, I interviewed this great vocalist Andrew Choi, who releases music under the name “St. Lenox”. That previous conversation covered a lot of spirituality, and culture. Now Andrew is back with a new album called ‘Ten Modern American Work Songs’. This album carries a lot of themes of middle aged, becoming a parent, looking back on your younger self, and his parents surviving the Korean War. We talked about these topics, and, cooking. (Note: Interview was conducted in late September)
Jeremy Hinks: So Andrew, welcome back.
Andrew Choi: Thank you, it’s good to be back.
JH: Well, I wanted to tell you, out of all the episodes of my show/podcasts, yours has gotten the 4th or 5th highest number of hits.
AC: Wow, that’s great! I can never get anyone to come out to my shows so that’s a good thing to hear.
JH: You’re up there in good company, I see you keep getting like 22 hits in a week after 2 years. You’ve got longevity. I hope to get you a little more exposure with this one.
AC: Well, I have plenty of stuff on the Internet, so there is a rabbit hole to go down there.
JH: Which I have done, and still one of the videos online was that one when you were busking, and your friend came and gave you all that grief, that was very funny. So, when your publicist reached out when I heard about the new album, I said “OH YEAH, I’d love to get him back on”. Because of the previous album, I have to say “Superkamiokande” is one of the best albums to walk the dog to. Those songs are just like, really fun sermons.
AC: Well, that last track, I was actually walking in the mountains.
JH: Yeah, in the Dakotas, but since I’m in Utah, I would just call those “Steep Hills”, not necessarily mountains. So, the new album the first song “Eulogy For A Coworker”, those first chords on the organ, was exactly what you would expect to hear at a funeral viewing. You know, when you walk through and everyone sees the body lying in state, and people cry. That was typical Andrew shenanigans, then you just rolled into
“Farewell, my dear friend Harold, good sir,
You were a kind and good man.
Ever since I joined the firm last year you’ve been
A gracious mentor of mine.
I know you had planned to retire
While you still had your health
So it was unfortunate that you passed on
While you were still a working man.”
That’s a depressing way to kick off an album, talk about that on.
AC: That was a personal story in my life, I thought it was a good opener because what I am trying to do with the record is think about “Ambition Culture”, and what we put into work. I mean I LOVE WORK, I think you need people to make the world go around, but I think there are a lot of people around my age that have been working a lot, and are burnt out. There was “The Great” resignation during Covid, and that first track I wanted to open with a question, “What importance do we place on work”, and “To what extent do we need to attend to work at the expense of other things?”. That was the story of a mentor of mine, who passed away. I had only heard about him being sick a bit before. He retired about the same time, because of the illness, it made me think “How long do I want to work in my life, what role does work have in my life”, it put things in sharp relief. I do wonder about the extent to which society makes us think work is valuable, I think it’s super important, but people can obsess about it to their detriment.
JH: Yeah, I get it, why do we work so hard to die before you are of age to retire? I thought it was a good tribute to him.
AC: That was short, I don’t even consider it a song, cause I still wanted to keep it at 10 songs.
JH: Ok, let’s talk about your song “Courtesan”, it had the exact same vibe as “Teenage Eyes” for this record. I liked how you sang it, belting out “BE HAPPY”!!!!
ST. Lenox – “Courtesan” – JUST LAUGH WHEN YOU WATCH THIS ONE
Related Post: ST. Lenox’s Songs of Praise for “Tumultuous Times”
AC: I don’t know if you can hear it, but I intended that to be a kind of “Broadway Track”, cause in terms of the instrumentation, it’s not Broadway but the main character in the song is looking at the future with hope but there’s some uncertainty. That’s where most Broadway or Disney songs begin with a hopeful feeling, but a slight question of something happening. This is me finishing my 7-8 years of graduate school, I had decided that there were no real jobs for me as a professor in philosophy, so I decided to go to Law School, where I was suddenly surrounded by wealthy people, and potentially if I finished law school well, I would be able to have a lot of nice things that I didn’t have when I was a graduate student. I was looking with some hope, but some speculation about what might happen in the future.
JH: Well then you nailed it, and knocked out my next question. When you sang
“Seven years of sacrifice, I watched the bourgeois sipping
Cocktails and highballs laced with gold flakes and pearls.
While I was slowly plotting my slow ascent to corporate heaven
I could be a popinjay and chomping on them fine cigars.”
I guess that was what you were just saying, of what it was going to be like to survive, and not have to live on ramen. Thank you for the philosophical approach, I studied religion and philosophy at Harvard, and I realized that wasn’t gonna pay the bills to live in Boston, so I dropped out of Harvard, and then I moved to Montreal to study computer science and engineering. As great as a Harvard degree was gonna get me anywhere.
AC: I think the system takes advantage of the fact that you love it so much that you would be willing to do it for almost nothing.
JH: So the same theme you talked about in Eulogy, you threw a couple of those ideas into “New York Speaks Softly At Night”, you being out late at night from being in the office so late, but that song felt to me like the flip-side of Tom Waits’ song “Downtown Train” it’s the other side of the story, there he is focused on those very few things. But your lyrics
“But I saw young love bloom on the subway yesterday
A boy and girl exchange in quiet conversation.
I’m sorry my young astronaut of romance.
She isn’t going to go back home with you tonight.
You were talking about life in New York at night,
as the city tells its story, well done.
AC: That was me trying to romanticize late night, and coming on the subways. That was the first song that I kept that I wrote about New York City, that song is at least 10 years old. I used to open with that song when I was performing live because it’s a good opener.
JH: So, in your song “The house I left for work in New York” when you were talking about what you were going through, I love how personal your songs are. I don’t know how to explain what I love about your music, but you’re like that holy roller, just letting the verses fly in constructed rambling, with extra details. Like that opening scene in “Pulp Fiction” Samuel Jackson, and John Travolta were just walking around the halls talking about nothing of consequence. It was about nothing, but so interesting at the same time. Not many people write like you. Example
I have a quiet townhouse, just off Westerville Road.
Next to the public golf course, where golfers chase the swans.
In a neighborhood of good folks, who mow their own lawns weekly.
They wave to the passersby when they go on their walks.
You can see a family of deer, out in the woods out back behind it,
They pay us no attention.
You gave us these details, that just draw the picture for us.
AC: I don’t know how successful I am at it, but I think how is it that you should try and move people with music? I think people who write political stuff, to get people to move, just tell people what to do with the literal lyrics of the song, use a lot of slogans, what I would call “Red Meat” to get people to move. I think if I use a sort of vividness to the story that I am telling, it will get them into the right frame of mind, if they are seeing what I am seeing, it might help them to move in that direction. I could write a song that would say “You should join a union”, I could make a poppy song about that, but I don’t think that’s super effective political writing, it’s more important to tell a story to the people listening to it. That song about the house outlined the importance of work, the reason is I really did love that house. It was just a townhouse, including the money I got back for renovating, it cost less than 30 thousand dollars. When I moved into the house, the Realtor showed me the brown shag carpet, 2 inches thick, walking up the stairs to the 2nd floor there was a used condom on the stairs, we just walked past it. I put a lot of work into it, as a graduate student, and there was a space in the living room, that was my bed, and my dog and me. I had my parent’s old minivan, and started renovating, til I had reclaimed the house. So it was a lot for me when I left it and went on to law school.
JH: Ok let’s talk about Rudy, was that your husband in the video?
AC: YES!! It was very gracious for him to agree to appear in my video.
JH: I loved the story in the video, and how it was just a typical scene, of a boring married couple, and one saying, “Ok I’ll cook tonight”, and there is the music going, and then the subtitles are telling a completely different story. What were you making?
AC: I was making Korean Dumplings.
JH: So you’re talking a lot about cooking and then forgetting your mom’s birthday, I noticed in most of your songwriting, two stories, one song.
AC: The song Rudy is about someone putting a lot of time into being ambitious at work, with jealousy looking at someone doing family stuff, because he has been working so much, the conflict of being ambitious, and being domestic. The preface to the video was that we left New York for New Jersey, I couldn’t walk 10 minutes to a Michelin 4-star restaurant. I have to now get reservations, so if I can’t, I just cook, and enjoy living in a place more suburban. It’s the flip of the song. Take out the written lyrics, and if you look at anyone’s video has NOTHING to do with the song. Dance videos? Someone doing a constructed dance that was not the author, what does that have to do with the song? Or the classic, indie pop video is the singer is in a room, and someone wearing an animal mask or a costume, dancing around bugging the person that is singing. That was all they had the budget for.
JH: So is your husband an introvert, is that why he’s not gonna be in your videos? Cause you’re not.
AC: It’s me, I am still very much figuring out how I want to do video work, I didn’t go to film school, these are the first videos where you will see some dialog. It’s difficult to direct and tell a story, if I knew how to write an extended scene of dialog, direct my husband to execute, and have a conversation on screen, I have a much greater appreciation of how difficult it is to do that. My husband is the funnier of the two of us.
JH: So, people from other cultures, I watched it after our last interview, and I noticed some themes, and then this is referenced in “Rudy”, there was your mother cooking, and showing the world she grew up in the Korean War, then it turned into this exquisite corpse, of the war, then her, you drinking a soda. But this stands out a lot in your writing, respect your elders.
AC: I knew that put in a story about my mom in the video for “Rudy”, but didn’t know that keep going back to that.
JH: You keep going back to your mom cooking. First of all, “People from other cultures” was a beautiful video. You said, “You know when she was just a young one, she saw the UN soldiers firing back on battle cruisers out in the distance. It makes you feel a little stupid talking back to her, she still recalls it all”. You show this beautiful devout woman who was from a different culture, and man, she came from something awful. And you talked about your dad and what he experienced in the war. I’m thinking of your parents, and what you became, they bridged the history, and that was a great song.
AC: I would say of course I would keep talking about my parents and cooking, if you look at the amount of awake time at home as a kid, cooking is going to take up a big chunk of that. And actually, our daughter was born last month. And feeding her is taking up a huge portion of interaction with her. I guess that affects everything that goes on in the rest of your life after that. I keep talking about the importance of domestic things in your life, it takes up 100% of your life, and at home, food is going to be a big portion of that. So, of course, that’s going to find its way into the video. I really didn’t notice the extent of my parents being in my work as much as they actually are, I’m going to have to think about that.
JH: I’m glad I saw that and connected it back to that song. You are a man with a lot of respect. This has been a great conversation, Andrew, thanks for your time, always a pleasure, I’m glad we got a round 2 conversation. Congratulations on your daughter, and all the best.
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