Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on Grief, New Age, and Entering Someone Else's Mind

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Alright, moving on—over the last 15 years for me, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's music has frequently emerged like some beautiful revelation. He's always working with a very expressive palette of sound when it comes to the intersections between ambient and noise, and his new record Gift Songs is especially striking, as it represents something of a full-band effort with a more acoustic feel than what people might expect from his work. We hopped on the phone last month to talk about how it was made, his day-to-day life, and much more—and it ended up being a very holistically revealing conversation. Check it out:

You moved upstate four or five years ago. I know a bunch of people who have made the trip upstate to live there recently. Tell me about what adjusting to that has been like.
Obviously, you don't just walk out of your door and walk to your local café—I mean, there are places in Kingston where you can do that. We didn't know a ton of people when we moved up here, so it took time. We certainly found our feet. We had to find jobs, schooling for our kids. We were starting over, in a way.

Did you have to get a car?
Two cars. My partner is a real New Yorker, so she didn't even know how to drive—she grew up in Manhattan—so she had to learn, which is pretty funny.

I'm a car owner in the city. It's good to have. We bought a car during the pandemic, because honestly, we want to be able to leave if that happens again. But the rat problem here is insane now.
I've heard that.

It's really bad. They cause tons of damage to your engine. I have to treat my engine twice a week now with peppermint spray just to keep them out. Anyway, going from a walkable city-type deal to having to be in a car—that's a drastically different vibe.
It is. I grew up in a car city, though, so I feel like I was primed for it. But I drive a lot for my job, so it's a different existence. But being in a car also affords you more time to listen to music or podcasts. I also talk on the phone a bunch when I'm driving, which is nice.

What's your favorite music to listen to while you're in the car?
It depends on whatever phase I'm in at the time. Right now I'm in a real big country music phase.

I love this new record. It obviously has a bit more of an acoustic feel than what you've done in the past. Talk to me about how it came together.
It was a slow process. My friend Joey, who owns the studio and also plays bass on the record, I actually met him the first year we moved up here. But I was just making music by myself in our attic—which I still do a lot of. I really had no intention of working on my next record with a group, or in a studio setting. But Joey and I became friends, and he took me over to what is now his studio, and I saw it being built. Once it was finally finished, he was like, "You should come and record," and I wasn't super motivated to make music by myself anymore. The Poverty tape was a culmination of at least a couple years of work in my attic, by myself.

Joey needed a project to test out the studio with, and I'd been slowly meeting more people. I met Booker, who plays drums—I actually ended up playing a show with him up here after I saw him and really loved his style—and I met Omer, who plays piano, because our kids go to school together. So we went into the studio, and Joey also had a lot of really incredible acoustic instruments—pump organs, harmoniums, some really beautiful different types of acoustic string instruments and vibraphones, marimbas, lots of percussion. So part of the record ended up leaning more acoustic as a result of what was available in the actual studio—all of side A. The first three "gift songs" all came about on the first day, but side A took about four or five months to build up to what it is. But the initial drums and piano were put down on that first day.

It was all very loose, because I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't know if anything interesting was going to come out of this collection of people that I was pulling together. Things just start happening when you start playing, and my job is just to direct things a little bit and be like, "Oh, let's try that again," and, "What if, instead of playing that for five minutes, we played it for 15 or 20 minutes?" The music just emerged out of jams. Those "gift songs" were actually the very first thing Omer and I worked on while we were at the studio waiting for Booker to show up. I was like, "Well, let's just play over here," so I got on the pump organ and we got piano and those songs just kind of happened. I wasn't thinking about it in the moment, but as I listened to the roughs that emerged out of the jams, those songs just started really resonating with me.

Those three "gift songs" set the tone for the record. I was like, "What if it's more acoustic?" It was going to be just that for a long time, but eventually the electric guitar found its way back into the mix.

Talk to me more about collaborating with others as opposed to working on your own.
Ultimately, it's more interesting—and, in my experience, it brings you outside of the limits of your own creative process, because when someone else enters into that sphere, or you enter in someone else's sphere, you don't actually know what's going to emerge. A third thing emerges out of that, and I think that's really interesting. It's my experience that if you have gear set up and you just continually go back to it and play—I play guitar, like, every day—over time, interesting things will start to happen.

But with a collaboration, you're entering someone else's mind, and they're entering yours—and you have no idea what's going to happen, because you're not familiar with that person's choices or what they might do. A lot of the collaborations I've done over the years are mostly file-sharing and occasionally meeting up, so it's really interesting to send stuff out and have it come back with someone else's choices and voice. I find it to be really generative and much more interesting than just my vision of how things should go.

It's way more interesting to give yourself over to a process—and that's what collaboration is. Maybe there's always the germ of, "What if we did this? What if you played that?" and that's that's a great place to start. But, at some point, the music begins to lead the way, and that's way more fun in the long run. There's a way in which we can just get stuck in our own ideas about how things should be, or get bogged down on some idea that we're trying to fit the music into. That's way less interesting to me than, "Hey, let's see what happens if we do this," and then responding to that. You can do that by yourself—and I do—but collaboration, ups the ante.

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on a lot of the ambient and "New Age" music that's emerged across this decade. When I talked to Dan Lopatin about it a few years ago, he acknowledged that there's a snake-oil aspect to some of it at this point.
I haven't really given it that much thought. I like Dan's answer. [Laughs] But, you know, I mean, that is a slightly cynical take, you know.

But it's not inaccurate!
Absolutely. One of the problems with having this conversation is that you immediately have to acknowledge the marketing aspect of even having a genre of music—how that's part and parcel to selling it. It really has nothing to do with actually describing the process or the intent of the artist as much as it does someone trying to get it into the marketplace and give it its niche—its corner where value can be extracted from it and money can be gained um.

Culturally, the emergence of ambient music and the New Age stuff is interesting. I'm 50 now, and I still listen to a lot of music. There's a whole emergence of new pop bands that sound a lot like pop-indie rock music I was listening to in the '90s—Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., Helium. So maybe it's just this cultural thing that things just loop around, and we're always digging for what the next thing might be. We seem to be in a culture that really values irony, pulling things from the past, and
and holding them up in some kind of new, interesting way that exposes some aspect that wasn't seen before—like the way that disco is re-evaluated now, or any other genre for that matter, the way country is having a popular moment now.

Maybe there's just too many causes and conditions to really say, but just psychologically, I think maybe there can be a a longing to have music that's a bit more spacious doesn't pick up so much of your...I don't want to say attention, because I think ambient music definitely can, at least in the way that I think about it. But maybe there's a longing for that, or for having a kind of music that opens up your heart and mind in kind of a different way than, say, popular Top 40 music does—that has a kind of different intentionality to it. It's not necessarily about entertainment. I never think of my music in terms of trying to entertain people. I think about it in terms of mood.

Talk to me about what you do as your job.
I'm a hospice chaplain, so I do spiritual and emotional support for people who are dying, or their caretakers or family. I do this in people's homes, so I drive around. I live in a rural area, so today I'm going to go see someone after we talk, and that's going to be at least a 35-minute drive to get down there.

How long have you been doing that for?
I've been specifically working in hospice for about three years, but I did about three years of training before that, including a year at Mount Sinai Hospital in the city when COVID hit. So,including my training, six or seven years.

What's the training like? Obviously, it's a job that requires a certain type of person to do it.
I resonate with that. You do need to be trained, but a lot of the training is around your own subjectivity in relationship to loss, grief, fear, anxiety, joy, and celebration. How do you make meaning out of the losses that you've experienced in your life? Can you use that well of your own life experience as a way to walk alongside people who are experiencing grief, loss, or illness—and in a way to support them, not to fix or change it, but to be a companion?

My job is a lot about companionship. I don't give people advice, I don't tell them what to do. Certainly, I can't fix their situation or change things. So it's a really powerful experience, and I feel a lot of gratitude that I'm able to walk alongside people in the dying process and support them.

But it is demanding in terms of being clear about one's own relationship to death, loss, and grief. If you're not in relationship with your own fear, anxiety, wonder, or curiosity around death, then you can't hold space for other people because you're just feeling anxious or afraid, or you don't know what to say.The thing that we say about "I wouldn't know what to say" is that it's not really about having the right thing to say. It's much more about listening and just responding from the heart.

Of course, in dominant American culture, we don't have a lot of language around grief. We don't have rituals, other than a funeral and maybe a wake. But these are pretty atrophied, really. So just culturally, we actually don't know how to have space in our culture for death and endings in general, because obviously we're always looking towards the next thing—the horizon, making things great again, the future, how things are going to be. There's a utopian technological utopia that we're headed towards, but without actually attending to all the great loss, grief, and sadness that that people carry with them day-to-day—because we're all experiencing loss all the time, but we don't attend to it.

From my perspective as a chaplain, part of the insanity of what we see in our country now is a psychosis that's borne out of not acknowledging the deep pain and loss that people carry with them. Even "Black Lives Matter"—people couldn't even hear that phrase without feeling like they somehow were left out if they weren't Black. But when you have such a sense of your own grief and your own voice not being heard, how can you hold anyone else's pain? It's not possible. So we have a culture where we don't listen to anyone's pain.

In general, being alive in the last five years has has really felt like a grieving process.
Yes.

Obviously, you have all the deaths from COVID. But I think people are also grieving what they might have perceived as a previous way of living. It seems like the first time that a lot of people are experiencing the loss of understanding a world that was previously very accessible to them. It's very easy to sneer at people who might be just "waking up" to everything, but I've found it to be kind of tragic, too.
Well, we have no container culturally for that. Also, our driving principles culturally are that we're individuals, and that if you're not being productive or creating something, then you have no value. So, to actually feel grief, or feel like your world's collapsing, or you don't understand how things are changing—what are you going to do with that? Where's it going to go if it's not processed? It's going to turn into anger and bitterness.

I mean, look at our politics. It's all so bitter. I feel like we're unable to hold the complexity of what it means to be a human being. You're either good and perfect and doing things right, or you're wrong and you need to be damned. And it's like, no, we're all a mess, this whole thing is a mess—this capitalist death machine that we find ourselves in.

Part of what we're talking about here is the point of arrival when it comes to accepting these things, mentally and philosophically. I know that you practice meditation, and I'm curious to hear about your own personal journey in terms of philosophies and beliefs—working on arriving at the point that you're currently at. What has that been like for you?
Really harsh, really difficult. I've gotten a lot of help, and I think that's important. We have to have elders in our lives that help us. Part of modern psychosis can be traced back to unprocessed grief and not recognizing loss, and then being surrounded by a culture that's like, "What's wrong with you? Get back to work. Pull yourself up from your bootstraps. Come on, let's go. You should be making shit."

I had to come to terms with myself,—the conditions of my own family and childhood, all that stuff I had to grieve. To a greater or lesser degree, none of us have a perfect family system, and we all inherit the pain of our ancestors that hasn't been worked out yet. It's like, "Hey, welcome to the world. Here you go." So that's definitely been part of my path.

I'm not someone who has a grand plan. My life has kind of tumbled along. That's how it feels for me, and I've ended up where I have. But meditation has been really important to becoming acquainted with my own internal landscape. Meditation's obviously not the only way to do that, but to live a full life really means to have some generosity and familiarity with what's going on internally for us, being curious about that, and being able to hold it and live from—not necessarily our wounds, but our own internal goodness. That takes real work and commitment, and support from friendships, community, and elders has all been really important in my path—and creativity has been deeply healing and nourishing for me.

Tell me about how you balance your creative and personal life. What has that been like for you?
Making ceramics and cooking a lot are big creative outlets for me, and I don't really see those things as extra things in my life. They're necessary and deeply nourishing, and I think all humans are just innately creative, curious beings. I've been so unbelievably fortunate to stumble into music-making, and people seem to like it and still pay attention. But my life is very full. I have a career, a family, and a spiritual practice that takes up a lot of my time.

Music-making is integral to that, but I don't put it out in the world to prop up some version of me as a musician. That's not a persona that I'm worried about. I'm not getting on Instagram, looking for validation. I love doing what I do, and I'll continue to do it as long as people are interested in putting things out—and even if
they aren't, maybe I'll just put things out on my own. If people want to listen, that would be nice, it doesn't occupy my mind. I don't draw my personal worth from it. I just make music and spend time with my friends making music.

Conditions come together where there's a label and it's time to put something out, and I do it. But once the record is done, I'll just stop doing interviews and go back to my life until I decide to make another record. I'm not gonna try to maintain some social media image in the interim. I don't have the energy or the time for it. I'm much more interested in being a good parent.

I also don't even know if it would matter at this point. When you go on social media now, you're flooded with images of people that are turning their whole lives into a product, and I'm not going to do that. I'm so happy that people like to listen to my music, and I love making it and putting it out in the world, but it just stops there. I'm not going to turn myself somehow into like a persona that has to be maintained.

Maybe it's a generational thing, too. If I was 20 or 30 years younger, maybe I would feel different about it. I'm willing to concede that I'm a 50-year-old dad.
It's a different calculus for me than for someone who's 25. Young musicians will write me and be like, "How do I get my music out there?" And I'm genuinely like, "I'm as confused as you are." If I was starting right now, I wouldn't know what to do. When I started making music as part of Tarentel, we were literally putting music in the mail to send it to labels. We were calling people on the phone like, "Hey, can we send you some music?" Talk about loss—that world's totally over, and there's been few iterations of this digital world since then. I don't even understand how one gets themselves through the signal-to-noise ratio right now,
and I feel deep empathy for folks who are trying to just be creative and make that their life. More power to them, but I wouldn't know what to do.