Done with Doing is the first solo album from Chris Lee-Rodriguez, founding member of beloved emo/jazz/post-rock outfit Really From, and while he’d love for you to listen, he doesn’t want to make too big a deal over it.
“I’m trying to reorient my relationship with making music,” he said. “I’ve always felt confident about the music that I make. I’ve never equated its worth to its reception. I’ve felt bad when I release something and no one listens to it, but I’ve never thought, ‘No one listened to this, so it must not be good.’ It was moreso, ‘No one listened to it, so I didn’t do a good enough job putting it out there.’”
There’s a grim reality plaguing DIY musicians the world over: how do you self-promote without being cringe? How do you get the word out about your music without label support for marketing? The short, sad, and cringe answer: you make content. Lee-Rodriguez is initially repulsed by the idea. “I made some videos and I hate making the [mocking voice] ‘song of the year, listen to the song,’ or making bits—I’m not inherently that funny in terms of making stuff.”
The Boston musician sports an earnest demeanor and speaks in an even tone. It’s probably what makes him an in-demand educator—he teaches music at Zumix and Boston Arts Academy—and it lends to his distinctly non-comedic presence on Instagram. “I always have confidence that the stuff I make is good and hopefully it speaks for itself, it’s just fighting against the algorithm and the capitalist framework that we’re in now is always a challenge.”
According to Lee-Rodriguez, the animating spirit to Done With Doing, comes from a cosmic gumbo of “anarchist and taoist/nihilist ideas, and gratitude.” Fittingly, the title comes from Ursula Le Guin in her book The Farthest Shore. “The thesis of [the album] is trying to find beauty in the mundanity of things,” he said. Songs will often approach small moments and arrive at big feelings, like on the song “SKUNK!” where Lee-Rodriguez describes an encounter he and his wife had with a skunk in their walls and ends with a devotional plea of love to her.
The album’s making, too, was grounded in a sense of communalism. Before recording Done with Doing, Lee-Rodriguez won a creative individual grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to the tune of $5,000. “I was like ‘This is awesome. I could use this for my wedding but I have all these songs, why not make a record?’” He used the funds to pay his friends for their contributions (including Mercet’s Sai Boddupalli and canteenkilla’s Samuel Ogoe), and to cover mixing and mastering costs. “It was really nice to have this money to compensate people for their time. I was trying to manifest the Marxist phrase ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’”
The music on Done with Doing is a mix of acoustic guitar balladry, synth-pop, and twinkly emo rockers that fans of Really From will surely enjoy. Lee-Rodriguez also adds a few wrinkles throughout, like modulating his voice with autotune, a move he says he picked up watching Bo Burnham’s Inside. Though it started as a joke, he came to like the effect and likened it to the way you can add dimension to a guitar’s tone by distorting it.
The songs also have a strong anti-capitalist bent running through them, particularly on late-album heater “Bread.” “We are such multifaceted people,” Lee-Rodriguez said. He paraphrases Marx, who spoke of the needs of people to be more than just their labor. “Having a boring, simple life is itself a fight against this capitalist notion of always trying to be better, and always trying to be more, always trying to produce and produce.”
Done with Doing comes out Friday, November 15 but since you read this far you can listen to it right now, courtesy of Allston Pudding.