This is the long version of the story on Larry Bonk I published in the Voice this summer:
"Song Writer at Home"
Larry Bonk has invited me over to his apartment, a rare occurrence in our friendship. He's slippery usually, hard to track down and slick with excuses when you finally manage to get him, but lately he's been downright accessible.
Until recently, he suffered from a writer’s block so systemic it dictated his life. He hid inside his apartment, disengaged from his friends, his career, and most of all, his music. Around the time we met in 2004, though, he'd been working obsessively on fifteen songs for two years, convinced he could create the perfect album. It never materialized; shortly after he relocated to New York to record, Larry's bandmate stole and pawned all of his equipment before fleeing the city. When Larry found out, he was so crushed that he destroyed their reels. After that, he produced virtually nothing for five years until January 1st, 2009, when he made a grandiose resolution: every day for the next year, he'd write and record a song. So far, he's made good on his pledge – over three hundred songs and counting.
The main reason he’s overcome his social reluctance this Sunday night is because I’ve expressed interest in his newest project, and Larry never, ever turns down press. I’m glad to have the excuse – in person he’s warm, charming, the guest celebrity who shows up late to parties and ends up holding court on the back deck till 4am, whose evasiveness makes his presence all the more desirable.
Things are going well for him so far; he’s been churning out haunting, lo-fi pop gems that belie the short amount of time he’s able to spend on them (he posts them daily to his website, anotherdayonearth.net, for free). He’s been featured on BBC and had two flippant-but-flattering features in wincingly ‘cool’ Vice Magazine, and as is typical with Larry some of his interviewers have become attached to him. He has a way of disarming people, sidestepping into their hearts after just a few conversations. Aly Carr, the host of an indie radio show, became so enamored she created an Another Day on Earth twitter page for him and bubbled over in emails to me about his honesty and soulfulness, his “creative, progressive and brave” music. Still, he’s struggling to keep up with his bills, and so there’s a subtle urgency to my visit; he’s got high hopes for this interview.
The sun is just setting when I arrive at his apartment, the basement of a brownstone in Park Slope. He opens the door fresh from the shower, damp and sockless, his dark hair frizzing into a shape not unlike a small shrub. A little self-conscious, he leads me down the dark hallway to his bedroom. It’s a windowless square, pretty dismal, littered with keyboards and guitars and flotsam – a worn sock here, a crumpled receipt there. His bed, which I sit on, is unmade and dotted with bits of dirt, as though he hasn’t thought to change the sheets in a while. The walls are plastered with topographic maps that are coming untaped, peeling and folding over one another like a shedding lizard skin.
He roots around in the corner, shrugging on a Michelin Man-style puffy parka that makes him look endearingly cartoonish in preparation for a trip to the bodega. Watching me scribble in my notebook, he rolls his eyes. “Oh geez,” he says, “is it depressing?”
When I first met Larry five years ago, he was still living in Tallahassee, Florida, writing music with his best friend Adam Perry. He’d played in bands before and achieved mild success in Plastic Mastery – a European tour, credibility in the (admittedly tiny) indie pop scene – but he had more lofty ambitions this time around. He and Adam were building a studio in what used to be a skate shop in downtown Tallahassee, dissatisfied with the spare bedroom that, up until then, they’d been renting as practice/recording space. Larry was amassing an ungodly amount of equipment with inheritance money he’d received after his grandmother’s recent death, and they’d run out of room for it all.
He and Adam were driving all over the country to score rare pieces, like an enormous mixing console they bought in Louisiana from Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers singer Michael McDonald (whom Larry never met, actually, because he passed out in the van and missed the transaction). After about a year and a half of acquiring and writing and playing, they had the beginnings of fifteen tracks recorded. Larry figured they were a little more than halfway there, and that as soon as the studio was done they would work in earnest to finish the songs. But over the course of just a few days, Adam announced he was moving to New York to live with his girlfriend, packed some bags and left Florida. The studio, which he and Larry had just finished building, sat unused.
Larry stewed for months. He couldn’t really finish the tracks without Adam, so the studio was defunct. Eventually, with Adam’s encouragement, he decided to move to New York, bringing a truck full of his best equipment and selling the rest to finance the trip. He decided they would find a studio in the city, barter the use of the equipment for recording time and finish the album there. And at first it all went fine; Larry’s aunt let him stay with her in New Jersey while he looked for work and got settled; Adam and some friends lent space in their apartments to house the equipment; he found a cooperative studio in Chinatown and planned to start moving everything over shortly. Then everything unraveled.
Adam had relapsed into a sizeable heroin addiction during their months apart and been secretly pawning Larry’s equipment to finance it ever since he arrived in New York. Because everyone knew they were working together, no one questioned Adam when he dropped in to pick up an instrument or two. No one knew there was anything strange happening at all until Larry stopped by one of the lofts and balked at the empty space. By that point, the damage was very thoroughly done; the only pieces remaining were the ones that had been too heavy to move, and Adam was gone, first to a halfway house upstate, then shipped up to rehab in Michigan by his parents, unreachable. Larry halfheartedly called some local pawnshops, but he never found the missing instruments.
The experience with Adam is still difficult for Larry to address. “So I found out I didn’t have any equipment anymore,” he says in summary, shifting uncomfortably. “Which, uh, obviously reneged the deal with [the studio in Chinatown], because there’s no reason for me to be there if I don’t have the equipment. So that went away, and that was also the end of the recording of that album, because it was half Adam’s... And then I couldn’t even think about it anymore. As a matter of fact, I threw most of the reels away and burned one of them. I just didn’t care. I knew I wasn’t going to finish it. I didn’t even listen to them.”
Still, he’s hesitant to classify it as a betrayal. He never pressed charges, and he and Adam have long since reconciled. Larry’s actually protective of Adam; he won’t tolerate any kind of talk he considers slanderous toward him. When pushed for a comment, he says, simply, “I’m really private, and he was the only person I let in for the music. And that’s kind of the reason that this [project] is the opposite, because I’m letting everyone in, warts and all, from the beginning.”
Today Adam is living in West Palm Beach, and says he’s been clean – finally, fully – for a year and a half; he’s finishing his BFA in painting and plans to teach art one day. For now, he’s working at Costco.
“I’d like to say that I wasn’t like an animal, but there I was, just like an animal,” he admits to me late one night, after one of his shifts. He says he’s been through years of therapy and treatment programs since then, and it shows in his language: “It was like air to breathe, so I needed it more than my relationship with Larry.” He wants to pay Larry back eventually. It is hard, he says, to pick up a guitar anymore, because it reminds him of what he stole.
No one, least of all Larry, understands fully why it took him so long to be able to make music again, or why New Year’s Day this year was the moment he chose to emerge from his shell. His friends have (not unjustly) tended to blame Adam, but Another Day on Earth illuminates an older, deeper issue – Larry has always been obsessive in ways that are difficult to maintain. Even when he was writing every day, he never knew when he was done with a song. In the span of an average night, he would sometimes write four new parts, each of which could conceivably work as the beginnings of new songs – great songs – but most of which were scrapped due to indecision.
It’s not that Larry’s music is inherently different or ‘evolved’ now; there is the same commingling of graceful sadness and relentlessly catchy hooks, as if Neil Young and an aging Brian Wilson sat down for dinner and Teenage Fanclub crashed in with a case of beer. It’s that forcing himself to publish imperfect songs on an unyielding schedule has had a galvanizing effect – he no longer second-guesses himself or makes excuses to avoid finishing a song (or creating in the first place).
He hasn’t really solved his inability to make final decisions but rather constructed a framework in which he doesn’t have to. He sings repeatedly about “growing sideways,” and maybe that’s what he’s doing: figuring out a system that works with his pathologies instead against them. “I’m not always brilliant enough to think of the right thing at the right time; some things need to gestate,” he says. “But it’s good because a lot of things I probably would have doubted away if I had time.” And it is a good thing, because some of my favorite songs on his site, like February 2nd’s “Seesaw Rhythm,” never would have been heard by anyone otherwise; he admits that it wasn’t finished when the clock struck midnight, and so he posted it even though his “musical carriage turned into a rotten ole pumpkin.”
Ultimately, he says that he’s not sure if the fifteen lost songs were really any better than what he’s produced since January; he just kept going over them again and again, never satisfied, too close to the material to have any objective sense of them.
Though he occasionally invites guest singers/collaborators, he works largely alone now, relying on guitar, keyboard, bass and a combination of electronic beats and loops. Sometimes he favors jangly guitar and fuzzy vocals, at other times blaring, drum-machine driven pop anthems; the common thread is his voice – honest, personal and humanist.
“I just can’t find the door,” he sings on January 14 in a twangy, ambling song called “We’re Just Floating Away.” “I don’t know what I want anymore/But I just know for sure /That I want it.../When I look at the mail in my box/Will I always rip it up?/But I want it.” (That last line isn’t analogy – I mailed him a full Metrocard once to help him out in a tight spot, but he didn’t know what it was, and so he never opened it.) He's singing about self-defeat, chronic little failures that he can't overcome despite his desire to, yet his tone is carefree. Larry loves to do this: temper dark revelations with nonchalance and humor. "I've thought of a couple of hazards regarding this project," he notes in the description below the song. "Deafness and obesity."
On January 23rd he describes what he calls a “sorta boring life” – his attempt to write about regular life, he tells me. “Fold up some clothes/And unfold other clothes/Now I’m home/They don’t smell clean…/Lying in bed I hear noises/But nothing’s going on/I have dreams I’m so glad that I’m home/But I don’t recall them.” There’s a quiet sadness humming along under the surface of these lyrics, in the chords and harmonies he chooses. Yet in describing this song, he writes, “A sorta boring life. There’s nothing really wrong with it. We can start a nice garden.” The tension between his admissions of loneliness and subsequent disavowal of his problems is what makes his work relatable – he’s simultaneously self-indulgent and self-effacing in a way that rings true to anyone who’s ever felt isolated or, well, depressed.
He’s not misanthropic, but he loves to poke fun at the futility of peoples’ efforts in life (mainly his own). In a photo accompanying his February 9th song “Traded in a dream for another dream,” a banner flaps against the side of a tract home (or modest community church – it’s hard to tell), proclaiming in proud letters, “The secret of happiness is t–”
The rest of the banner has been torn away.
Shortly after our initial interview, his roommates ask him to stop playing, and rather than compromise the project, he moves to a back room in a sympathetic friend’s apartment. At this point, aside from the ten hours or so he devotes daily to his music, he’s not working much; he squeaks by on a weekend gig installing computers at the UN and the occasional donation to his website. At times, the financial stress makes him deeply unhappy.
“This is my year to be a total scumbag,” he says to me late one night, absently stealing a sip of my tea. He wants to be sure I realize this, that I note it in my piece, as if it will absolve him of some perceived judgment for being so immersed, for skipping friends’ weddings because he can’t afford a weekend away. “When I finish this year, I’ll either somehow make ends meet making music, or just be a regular Joe with a regular job.”
He doesn’t meditate on the likelihood of the latter. Even though he wakes up miserable each morning with the day’s impossible deadline looming over his head, and ends the day manic, high from having created something (“it’s very bipolar,” he says), it may be the only system for him, someone who gravitates forever towards extremes. Everything exposed, or nothing at all. Every day, for a year.
He says it has a ring to it.
