Q&A: Livingston Stays True to Sincerity and Courage on “Gravedigger”
“BORN FROM THE DUST AND THE UNDERGROUND” — Livingston sings in his new single, “Gravedigger.” Released on July 26, the empowering song is the 22-year-old’s first release to follow his debut album, A Hometown Odyssey.
The song is cinematic with its imagery of buried greatness emerging, of afterlife, and of night. There’s a thrumming bass throughout, as if the undead were marching at midnight. Livingston’s close attention to ambience creates an immersive listening experience, as enjoyable as watching a film.
The track’s charm captured Livingston’s dedicated supporters well before its official release — they pieced together snippets of “Gravedigger” and memorized it through his live performances.
“Gravedigger” is heartfelt and powerful, showcased through its authenticity and dark sound, but there’s also a subtle element of playfulness or irony, such as the line “Go figure, go figure,” which repeats throughout. It’s reminiscent of clever Shakespearean fools, like the gravediggers in Hamlet, who insert reflection through wit. In Livingston’s song, there’s an inevitability of moving on and moving forward: “Go figure, go figure / I grew up to be the gravedigger / My own gravedigger / When you call my name, don’t you know I’m not the same?”
One of Livingston’s greatest strengths is his inspiring self-reflection. Experiences of being different and of timidity become lessons and battle scars rather than tragedies. Read our conversation with him below as he discusses this theme and more on “Gravedigger.”
LUNA: Instrumentally, I’m curious to learn more about the individual components of “Gravedigger.” Tell me about the mesh here — what are we hearing specifically, and how did these pieces come together to create one body?
LIVINGSTON: When I make productions in general, I think of it in environmental terms. How does the song make me feel lyrically, and how can I communicate that using instruments? Rather than just, “I want to add guitars here, or pianos here.” With this song, I started with the percussion because I felt like there was something about this trotting, heavy, darker, shovel kind of movement, [which comes from] a bass layer of the production. It was building on that to make it feel musical and melodic. It started with that pulse, which was driving everything with the bass, and then finding a way to bring in the strings and the pianos.
LUNA: It starts with a sequence of notes, and you can immediately tell that there’s going to be a build up, and it does deliver.
LIVINGSTON: I’m a big Tim Burton fan and I’m a big fan of Danny Elfman, who has really playful melodies in his themes and motifs. With “Gravedigger,” it felt almost like an ironic, playful, light melody at the beginning of a really dark song. One of my favorite things is when you can have huge emotional contrast in a song because it’s showing people the opposite of what you’re saying, or how the lyrics feel — that reminds them of how heavy it is.
LUNA: Let’s also talk about the lyrics. My personal favorite is “When you call my name / Don’t you know, I’m not the same?” Not only does the line land powerfully, there’s also a turn there sonically.
LIVINGSTON: This song was written three years ago. I shifted [the verse] from how it was originally because I’m in a very different place in my life. And that part of the chorus, that lyric, felt like it needed to be simpler than what it was originally. I listened to the original demo and thought, “What was I really trying to say here? What ties back into the theme of the song?” I realized this is about an internal struggle, and when you go through a big internal struggle, especially in my life, I find that I change a lot. The way I look at the world changes, the way I act, and interface with the world changes. So it’s talking to this person and saying, when you call my name now, after everything I’ve been through, I’m not the same person — don’t expect the same things out of me. It came from kind of a bird’s eye view of a song that was written at a different time in my life.
LUNA: So when you listen back to a completed song, especially music like yours, which comes from life experiences, do you return to what you were feeling at the time of creation? Or does it become like a memory in a jar through that process of creation and giving it a tangible form?
LIVINGSTON: My absolute favorite thing is finding a line through the chaos. I think a good song is a clear song. A lot of people have different definitions of what a good song is. My favorite songs that I’ve ever heard and my favorite songs I’ve made are the ones that feel the clearest. They captured a real raw emotion — it can never be taken back or skewed, and there was no further that I could have pushed it. I think it’s maybe why some of my songs are so dramatic because I want to get everything that’s inside of that feeling out, not leave anything on the table. So I think the memory in a jar is probably the most accurate.
LUNA: That dramatic, raw emotion, as you mentioned, comes from the reality of feelings we have in life — that’s why people connect to your music so much. “Gravedigger” is a good example of this because people are already so excited for it before release, but when your listeners, whether at shows or on social media, reach out and tell you about the significance of your words in their lives, how does that feel?
LIVINGSTON: When I talk to the crowd before the show sometimes, [I joke that I] feel like a fly on the wall when a song is getting made. I really feel like the idea and the lyrics are coming from somewhere else. It’s channeling things that I can’t articulate in any other way. When it hits people in the way that it does, all that it makes me feel is grateful that they feel the same thing I felt. Maybe [they] now have some sort of clarity in the chaos because that’s my favorite thing about making songs. It brings me so much joy to know that after everything else I can’t control — and there’s so much chaos in the world and chaos in my life that I can’t control — this thing that I was lucky enough to make can have the same effect on someone.
LUNA: It’s being grounded in your community.
LIVINGSTON: Yeah, that’s real and no one can take that away.
LUNA: In your music, there’s this recurring theme of uplifting yourself through all shades of deterrents. That feeling of empowerment is only getting stronger in your sound with each release. What stage, or what phase, of Livingston are we approaching now with this new single
LIVINGSTON: With “Gravedigger,” and with all the new releases, we’re transitioning out of the comic-book-origin story of a kid from Texas who grew up different and kind of overlooked, just starting to find his confidence. Because of the people, what they’ve given, and how this music is spread, I fully believe in what this is and what it can be. I want to take those messages of being able to pull yourself out of anything. You have power inside of you to truly change the world at an even bigger, more confident, and more dramatic scale.
