Middle Sattre's Hunter Prueger on Sufjan Stevens, Selling Pokémon Cards, and Living in Alaska

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Middle Sattre's Tendencies might've been my favorite debut album of 2024. Hunter Prueger's intimate, diaristic songwriting about growing up queer and Mormon was pretty much perfectly paired with arrangements that were reminiscent of early Sufjan Stevens and, at large, the intricate multi-band-member indie-folk that was more visibly prevalent in the 2000s than it is in the landscape today. After spending so much time listening to Tendencies, I had to talk to Hunter, who also recently released an alternate version of album track "Corrupted" as he continues work on the band's next record. You can check out that song and our very fascinating interview below, of course:

You live in Anchorage right now. It's so rare that I'm ever talking to someone who lives in Alaska. Tell me about what that's like.
It's cool. I've only been here for a couple months because my partner started grad school, so we're going to be here for a year and a half more The running is beautiful—we live right next to the mountains, and I can get to the trails in literally a minute and a half, so that's really fun. I haven't had much of a chance to explore Anchorage and the music scene yet—I've mostly just been trying to get my life set up, get a job and a car, all that stuff. But I've been really enjoying it so far. It feels a lot more laid-back, like a small town vibe.

You're coming to this new situation as someone who was previously living in Austin. What's different?
I'm an avid runner, and I just hate running in Austin. So I'm reconnecting with that right now and being reminded why I love that. There's a ruggedness here. Everyone has all these crappy cars, because if you have a nice car, it'll just get destroyed. There are a lot of old and thrifted things, it seems—that's my impression, but someone who's lived in Anchorage for years might say I'm an idiot or whatever [Laughs]. But it seems like shipping is expensive, so a lot of things just make their way around, and I think that's kind of cool. There's definitely not as much of a food scene here, and even though I can't really speak to any art or music scene, I have connected with several musicians in town virtually, and they've all been so warm and welcoming and excited that I reached out, so that was really cool to get that kind of welcome.

I was really impressed by this Middle Sattre record you put out last year. It's hard to nail a sound like this the way that you did it, and it's also very different from the other art that you've made so far. Tell me about your general progression as an artist.
In high school, I was really into band music. I wanted to be a band or film composer, and I had these dreams of going to USC's film music program. But then I took this electronic music class in college, and we learned all about musique concrète and listened to a lot of old, French, electronic weird noise-y stuff. I fell in love with that, and I was like, "I don't want to be a film composer—I want to be a weirdo instead."

I wrote this piece in college where I play saxophone, and the tenor saxophone player in the concert band with me was talking about the melodica. He said it was a fake instrument, and that made me really mad, so I was like, "I'm gonna write a piece for melodica." It's not that cool of an instrument at first glance, so I was like, "What can I do with this thing? What are all of the weird sounds I can make with extended techniques? I'm just going to mess around with it and try and come up with stuff that I've never heard before"—and I had so much fun with that approach. I'd sing while playing it, or growl or scream while tapping the keys in certain ways. It really formed my approach for composing over the next several years—it was a lot about exploring instruments and finding new ways to play them by using accessories and trying to exploit the full range of the instrument. That approach really transferred into the Middle Sattre record. There's a lot of playing guitar with a snare from a snare drum, dragging chains across the strings, and electronically manipulating the sounds in fun ways.

This really is the first songwriting project I've ever taken on. I've always been a really big fan of songwriters. I grew up on Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power, Elliott Smith, and Belle and Sebastian. They were always playing in my house since I was in elementary school—I had cool older sisters.

Even the size of Middle Satture feels very 2000s to me. You're an eight-piece group, right?
Yeah, sometimes nine. It's a fluid collective. We often play in smaller groups, or we'll just have other people come and join us sometimes. I recorded this record in my garage in Salt Lake City, and whenever there was an instrument that I didn't really know how to play, or if I got really stuck on something or I wanted another vocalist, I'd reach out to a friend and say, "Hey, do you want to record this?" This was early-pandemic, so I think a lot of people were like, "Yes, please, anything to be musical right now."

Then I got some advice from a couple different people in the industry saying, "You should make this a band and try and play shows." I didn't know anyone in Salt Lake City, but I knew a lot of musicians in Austin because that's where I went to school, so I called up a few friends and said, "Hey, do you want to make a band?" Several of them were very excited about that. Then I called my friend Wallace, who sings on this record and plays keyboard. Wallace was living in Nashville at the time—we worked together in Michigan at this camp called Interlochen—and I called them and was like, "Hey, this is crazy, but do you want to move to Austin and like, start a band?" They said, "You know, I've been sitting here in Nashville, not knowing what to do with myself. I've been waiting for something to come along and be like, 'You should go do this crazy thing,' so let's do it." Then I called my friend Mitch, who I went to college with. Mitch was living in Moab at the time and came up to Salt Lake to get a tattoo, and we were talking and Mitch was like, "Yeah, I think I'm gonna leave Moab," and I was like, "I'm moving to Austin in February. Do you want to move to Austin?" They were like "No, I'm moving to Portland," and a few weeks later they were like, "Hey, so what if I did move to Austin?"

So we all moved to Austin. We were all roommates and it was really fun. There was one lineup change where a few band members got too busy and were replaced by other friends in the scene. It was always about trying to recreate the recordings live, and there's a lot going on in the recordings, so we could use more people. There was a lot of instrument-switching. Now, it's kind of fun because we're starting to work on the next record, but we're doing as the eight of us, plus a violinist.

Lyrically, this is such a vivid and expressive record. I feel like the last time I heard something embracing a narrative bent that captured my attention like this was probably the first Perfume Genius record.
That's so funny that you said that, because I wrote my first song when I was working at Interlochen. I was walking around one night listening to Perfume Genius' first record and there were a couple moments in there where it really hit me. It was the first time I'd ever listened to that record, and I realized, "I have stories like this. Is that all it takes to be a songwriter?" I'd been wanting to try writing songs for a while, so I got a guitar, took my headphones out, and kept walking around the campus and woods and started setting it to this melody that I'd written for a video game project a couple of years prior. I was putting together a story of an experience that I'd had that this Perfume Genius song reminded me of. I realized while doing that—just putting it to a melody and trying to make sure that all of the syllables and accents fit the melody was very therapeutic. It forced me to examine this experience that I had in a completely different way, and I was pretty sold after that.

After that first song, there were many others really quickly, and I realized there were some things that I really needed to work through—mostly just being gay and feeling a lot of shame for that. I'd never really allowed myself to date anyone. I really wanted to, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it because I felt so much guilt. I was like, "I'm going to tackle this with songwriting." I told myself I was never going to share them with anyone, and inevitably I did share it with some friends and then they responded very positively and encouraged me to keep doing it. It was not always easy—it was actually really, really hard to share this music at first—but I got used to it.

Tell me more about that. I think sometimes listeners take for granted how rough it can be to express vulnerability in your art when it comes to personal experiences.
Well, for one thing, I care a lot about my family, and I didn't want my parents to hear this and be like, "Oh, wow, we failed by raising Hunter in the Mormon church" or whatever. Also, up until sharing this music, I've always been more of a closed-off person, so it was really scary to share that. Another risk is that when you're playing music live that's this vulnerable, sometimes it just doesn't feel right and afterwards I'm like, "Wow, I really regretted doing that. I just opened up to a bunch of people and it was like they didn't even care." That doesn't always feel good, and it can be really draining to do that.

But there's also something about playing a lot of shows. I've always thought of it as putting [the music] in a snow globe—I can hold it and look at it from different angles, and it feels more separate from me. There's value in that, too. I don't have to feel all of this intense weight anymore, and I think that's good. When I went on tour this past summer, it was kind of long, and I told myself going into it that if there's a show where I walk in and I'm like, "I'm not feeling it," I just won't play songs from this record. It helped a lot. When I was playing for friends who'd heard my music a lot, I'd say, "I'm only doing new stuff for friends so I can have a bit more fun with it."

You mentioned Sufjan before, who's probably one of our greatest living songwriters. His talent is so specific in what he does that it's very rare where I'm hearing other artists who embody that sound. When I listened to this record, I was like, "Oh, okay, they get it."
Sufjan Stevens is my favorite artist, and when I started writing and recording this record, I told myself that if I ever listened back to something and said, "That sounds like Sufjan," I'd change it. I made efforts to not sound like him—and still, every time I play, people go, "Are you a fan of Sufjan?" And I'm like, "Yes, I know." It's a compliment, obviously. My favorite record is Illinois, which has so many different angles and perspectives in it—historical, religious, personal. The way that he wraps it all up so cohesively that it doesn't feel disjointed at all—that's insane, to me. He's using the history of a state to talk about personal experiences and religious faith, and that kind of abstraction is really cool to me. I also really appreciate his sense of melody. I think he can write a really good hook. I think about Sufjan, like, all the time.

Tell me about the financial aspects of your music career. Obviously, a record that has eight people on it can cost some money in general.
Yeah, there are many elements to it. I went to grad school for music composition at the University of Texas, and this might sound like an advertisement for them, but if anyone wants to get paid to go to music school, you should go there. They gave me so much money to go to school there and be a TA. So I had a pretty good buffer and savings that I was able to dip into. Part of that is due to the graduate student union, which lobbied for free tuition for all grad students—and they got it, which was insane. But, I mean, UT is also funded by oil. They have the biggest endowment in the country. They used to be second to Yale. Now, they're the first. So, there's that too.

I graduated in 2020 in the pandemic. I had all these plans to go teach English abroad or whatever, and I couldn't do that anymore, so I ended up moving to Salt Lake City and moved into my sister's basement. I wasn't paying rent, and eventually I decided to get my own place to really focus on recording this album. When my sister was in high school, she had an boyfriend who was trying to win her back, so he gifted me his entire Pokémon card collection. I had some really rare Pokémon cards in there—and this was the 25th anniversary of Pokémon, when they were giving out cards at McDonald's and Pokémon cards were worth a lot. I don't know if they're worth more or less now than then, but I know that in that moment they were worth a lot, so I sold a lot of them and got a lot of money from that.

That's incredible. Talk to me about the next record you've been working on.
I wrote most of it on tour, and I was struggling with it for a very long time. With this last record, I feel like i got good at writing about one thing, and it took so much out of me—the promotion, playing shows, being on social media, making merch. I hate making merch. It's like, "Here's this trauma I have—want to buy it as a T-shirt?" I was really drained, so for this next album I came up with this framework that tells a story front-to-back. It might not come across as a concept album, but I guess you could kind of call it that. The songs are still getting there—I'm still tweaking, editing, and revising them—but I feel really good about it. It's shorter than the last one. The last one was a long album. With this one, I had a goal to keep it under 40 minutes, and that's still my goal. We'll see if that happens.

I also had a bunch of other songs that I felt like didn't really fit on this new one, but I still liked them and want to record them. Sonically, they're all a bit more stripped-back. I think I'm going to compile those into an EP, which might come first. I might release that one first. We'll see.