Jones: Are you a Christian artist?

Bruder: That’s for my audience and God to decide, I guess. I’m just doing the best I can.

Jones: Who is your audience?

Bruder: I make music for me and my friends, whoever they may be.

Jones: A lot of independent artists have to wear multiple hats to make their art happen. How does your day-to-day life outside of writing music feed into your creative energy, or do you view music as an escape from it?

Bruder: What?

Jones: Well, in an era of the hyper-polished, heavily produced music and highly curated social media personas we see today, your aesthetic feels intentionally unpretentious. Is it difficult to stay grounded and resist the urge to play a character' or look like a try-hard in the modern music industry?

Bruder: That sounds like a conflict of terms, and a confusing place to be. You could say I’m just pretending to be pretentiously unpretentious. I spent a lot of time, too much time, on this album.

Jones: So you are pretentious?

Bruder: Sometimes…potentially [smirks].

Jones: Who’s someone you hope to work with in the future?

Bruder: Jesus, usually [smirks, again]. I also hope to work with Steve [Polis] again, he mixed and mastered this record for me and I am really pleased with it. He’s a good friend, too. Paul McCartney.

Jones: You definitely seem to admire Paul. You recorded this project all by yourself, right?

Bruder: Yeah.

Jones: Why is the label named FIG? What is the significance of the fig to you?

Bruder: It’s a prayer which I hope will bear fruit.

Jones: The term "Manchild" appears as a core-realization for you on this project. At what point does a person realize they are stuck between youth and adulthood?

Bruder: One must be a child to see God, right? That’s what they always told me.

Jones: Then why do you ask in the song, 'Why didn't anybody tell me I'm a Manchild?'? Did they let you know, or not?

Bruder: They left out some crucial details.

Jones: Like what?

Bruder: Patience. That it’s okay to be somewhere between now and then, and maybe that it’s important to be humiliated so that you can see yourself more clearly.

Jones: Humiliated?

Bruder: Well, in order to be humble we must be humiliated. I’m not talking about the in-your-underwear-in-front-of-the-class kind of humiliation, though I suppose that has its worth. I’m talking about being emptied: becoming empty so that maybe you can be filled. That’s what we are all looking for here, fulfillment…no?

Jones: In the song Living Now: When the lyric mentions "pills" or a decade spent "stoned," is that a literal retrospective or a metaphor for a period of numbness?

Bruder: Both. I’m not too interested in talking about that, though.

Jones: That’s okay. What exactly constitutes the "American Lie" you seem to reference throughout the album?

Bruder: Someone recently went to their 10-year high school reunion and, of all the hundreds of people who were there, I heard that not one person was married, owned a house, or had kids. That seems like a problem to me, right?

Jones: Yes.

Bruder: Plus, I think that lyric only appears once on the record…but you might know better than me.

Jones: There appear, to me, to be multiple references to an empire in decline on this project: Moral decay, apocalyptic figures…Personal responsibility…American Idol, Donald Trump (who you mention by name here). It’s as if you’re yearning for a time that has long since passed by. What are your politics?

Bruder: Those are my politics.

Jones: What?

Bruder: I want to care about people.

Jones: You feel you don’t care enough?

Bruder: If I cared as much as I should I’d probably be a Priest or dead…or both [laughs].

Jones: Is the song “Lampstand Blues” an admission of failure to live up to a certain moral or spiritual standard?

Bruder: I think I was just angry with a friend that day.

Jones: If the album is a "confession”, who is the intended confessor— the audience, a higher power, or a past version of the self?

Bruder: Who, or what’s, your highest power?

Jones: I don’t think I have one, but I am open to the possibility of…

Bruder: I beg to differ.

Jones: Who’s yours?

Bruder: God, but my faith…my time spent in prayer, is pretty pathetic, really.

Jones: I don’t know. I think a lot of people might listen to this album and walk away thinking you’re a man of strong religious convictions.

Bruder: I think St. Paul says something about somebody being a worthless, clanging cymbal if he doesn’t let love rule his life. Do people really believe in “past-selves”?

Jones: I think it’s just short-hand for the “if I knew then what I know now” phenomena.

Bruder: That makes sense.

Jones: On the track “Living Now”, what is the "hill" referenced in the line about thinking one would die upon it? What did that hill represent?

Bruder: The burdens we place upon ourselves; sometimes out of naivety, sometimes out of a kind of self-mutilation…sometimes just out of boredom. I’ve been very bored in my life. Ideally, though, the hill is the place where life and death meet.

Jones: Is the cynicism in the lyrics throughout the album a defense mechanism, or is it the most honest reaction to the environment being described?

Bruder: I honestly have no idea how to answer that question [laughs]. I don’t think my lyrics are cynical, hopefully I’m not misrepresenting myself. These are just some songs I wrote over the past few years, I am really just learning as I go.

Jones: We are all learning as we go!

Bruder: That’s right!