Waldo Przekop – brainchild of indie-folk-punk outfit Cigarettes and Milk – is gearing up to release his first album in three years. His last album (They Left Us Alone, which was released in 2017 and was written and recorded in a literal closet, mixing sparing arrangements with lo-fi indie folk production) led him to a time of mental struggle and inner turmoil; depression, death, suicide, love, and darkness. He traveled. He couch-surfed. He had breakdowns, camped, and was homeless for a while.
Since forming in 2013 under the moniker Cigarettes and Milk, Przekop has perfected his folk-punk art in a new album, Rich Kids Can’t Hobo Jump, in which sadness rules Przekop’s world. Emotion dictates theme dictates emotion again; round and round it goes, spinning itself into something that would feel equally apropos in a dark and dusty country home as it would in an urban coffee house. “I usually just sit and play, make coffee, speed write song drafts in 15 minutes, and cripple under my chronic anxiety,” he says.
Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of Rich Kids Can’t Hobo Jump ahead of its release on October 23rd. With his unique fingerpicking and emotive vocals on display, the album finds Przekop alternating between real and beyond real, chronicling events concrete and tangible and mixing them with details abstract and emotive. His expressive folk music, which manages to sound raw and in the moment while also being complex and intimate, finds him dealing with themes of traveling, self-destruction through his own poetic perspective on life’s journey. At time’s, Przekop’s music is reminiscent of the earlier, more stripped down and vulnerable work of Conor Oberst, The Tallest Man on Earth and Shakey Graves, but its his own personality that shines through the most and makes for a compelling, thought-provoking listen.
“This album is very much all over the place, both in time and the mediums used to record. Many different rooms and microphones went into creating this.
I was houseless for a good long while. I owned nothing but clothes, a phone, and my guitar. This album is representative of my mental health. Self destructing all over the place. Trying to get a foot in the door when there aren’t any. I never quite felt that I was capable of being happy, or even properly alive. I’d become so depressed that I would just leave friends and family, move to another state. Then I would do it all again. I felt homeless in my own body.
All of these feelings poured into this album. It may be frantic and a mess, but it was true to myself. From abandoning others, struggles of survival, drugs, alcohol, and a general disdain for occupying space here in the world.”
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