Q&A: Feeling ‘Infinitely Tall’: Charlie Burg on Growing Pains and the Performance of Place

Q&AMusic

Sep 2

☆ BY Britt Astrid Alphson ☆

THE BABBLING FOUNTAINS OF CHILDHOOD and riverbeds in Bandemer, corner stores and a lover’s apartment — Charlie Burg is an artist defined by place.

His deeply intentional debut album, Infinitely Tall, is divided into three chapters that represent three houses Burg has lived in — from his childhood and adolescence in Detroit to his college years in Syracuse, to his young adulthood now spent in New York. There’s mentions of the Midwest moon and grass-stained jeans, digs at a girl who claims to be a communist on her dating profile, a plea for an old partner to regard the relationship with more sacredness. In his specificity, Burg is never solipsistic — rather, the acuteness of his lyrics provide listeners a framework by which not only to access his own coming-of-age experience but to reflect on and honor their own. We may be in different towns, but we’ve all driven down back roads. It may be at different ages, but we all outgrow our homes.

Burg also brings his sentimentality for places to the state of New York — since moving, he has displayed reverence for the city through partnering with City Harvest to raise $1,000 to combat food insecurity in Brooklyn and has performed a live show in the basement of Little Italy’s Bella Ciao to raise money for reproductive justice.

Perhaps the genre-defying, ageless, elastic progressions of Burg’s songs are further indications of the scattering sense of time and place we all feel: of how Gen Z is a generation at once deeply informed by what has happened and yet saddled with shaping what lies ahead. Certain tracks off the record feel like Phoebe Bridgers by way of D’Angelo, or Vampire Weekend by way of Prince; it is a beautiful, adventurous blending of home-spun lyricism with neo-soul instrumentations, of bridges mentioning TikTok in one moment and a Kraftwerk album the next.

Read below to find out more about Burg’s sonic influences, upcoming tour, and thoughts on letting go of those things we all tend to hold onto.

LUNA: Hey, so nice to meet you! What do you feel is the intention of Infinitely Tall and its overarching narrative?

BURG: It's 15 songs, and each sort of chapter is five songs. So each one kind of symbolizes a different house or a space that I came to be myself in or learned about myself in. And it's just sort of this chronological journey through growing up into adulthood, and it's kind of a reflection on letting go and allowing yourself to move on and not hold onto things that aren't necessarily productive to hold onto.

LUNA: This record feels very intentional and meant to be listened to in its entirety. That's really cool, especially now with TikTok virality and the album being this mash of disconnected songs that are hopefully going to be viral hits. Is that something that you did crafted intentionally?

BURG: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted, in a way, to combat the shortening attention span of the modern music consumer, which in some ways you have to work with your consumer base and, you know, you can't alienate them too much. But I wanted to put out a very full-body project that just kind of did what it had to do without cutting corners, and that's what it turned out to be. Pretty lengthy project.

LUNA: Do you feel like the places that you've lived or even that you grew up in informed your sonic profile?

BURG: I grew up in the Detroit area and I grew up listening to my dad's Motown records in addition to stuff my mom would play, like Simon Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell. These are sort of my lyrical influences. Rock ’n’ roll is a huge part of my upbringing and taste, and punk rock as well. I love The Strokes. I love bands from that era, from the second wave of the rock invasion in New York. Yeah, certainly.

LUNA: What would you say is the song on the album that you feel most proud of or most emblematic of the entire album?

BURG: Honestly, I'd say “97 Avalon” is probably the most encapsulating portrait of the album themes and the sound — that one is kind of Sades-influenced and Prince-influenced. By the end of it just kind of tells a whole story.

LUNA: You're going on tour — tell me about that.

BURG: Yes, going on tour in two weeks. We're starting two-ish weeks in Europe and then coming back and doing a full US tour.

LUNA: I feel like it’s special to make a record about finding the beauty in growing older. Do you feel you’re able to connect with audience members listening to you at a pivotal time in their life?

BURG: I've been saying that I couldn't have made any other albums if I tried. This is the one that happened naturally for me. And so I'd be interested to hear what a person in a different stage of life thinks about it or takes away from it, or how they internalize it. Because some of these songs are from years ago. There's a song on this album called “Your Friends, Not Mine,” which I wrote in 2015. I mean, I wrote that like, seven years ago. And it's from a completely different era so there's literal music on here that spans my past. I don't know, I'd be interested to hear what people from different kinds of age groups have to say about it.

LUNA: And you play almost like every instrument on this album, right?

BURG: Yeah, I played the drums, bass, keys, and guitar on these records, and the wind stuff, like saxophone and the strings and violins, I didn't play, but yeah. I played all the core stuff.

LUNA: What are you looking forward to in the rest of 2022?

BURG: Well, I'm excited to go on my first headline tour, of course. And I'm also secretly working on new music again. I'm really excited to keep at that and visit home with my parents, my dog, and my grandma. And, I don't know, just kind of get back into it. I'm excited for the holidays. I hope they feel more “holiday” this year. I feel like since the pandemic, holidays have not felt right.

LUNA: I feel like it's hard to find an actual sense of home anywhere.

BURG: Exactly.

LUNA: Is there anything else that you'd like to say about your album in general?

BURG: Before I dropped this album, I did a three-EP series. Like, I put out one EP a year for three years, and they kind of collected to be this three-part album. And I think of Infinitely Tall as like the head of all that, like the peak of the mountain, the culmination of the sort of trilogy structure. I think I’ve had my fill of a trilogy and that's such a classic, almost biblical form. And it was really fun and fulfilling to explore that for a while. I also associate something in nature with every project that I write. Like, those three pieces were like flowers, moons, rivers, and then Infinitely Tall I see as this sunset.

LUNA: That’s beautiful. It's like it's ending now — it's going down.

BURG: Yeah, it feels like the brilliant, royal end of an era, in a way. But in a really vibrant, brilliant way.

CONNECT WITH CHARLIE BURG

INSTAGRAM

SPOTIFY

TIKTOK

TWITTER

Listen

INSTAGRAM

We couldn’t be more stoked to have Suriel Hess as our new headliner for our upcoming LA show 🤩 🫶 Not gonna lie, us & Notorious Noise kinda went OFF with this line up & you’re not gonna wanna miss it - ticket link in bio 🎫