Sunday by Charlie Kaplan

The cover of singer/songwriter Charlie Kaplan’s debut record, Sunday, is an image of himself, comprised of just a few squiggled pen marks. In 2014—two months after the passing of Kaplan’s father—a stranger at a bar in Brooklyn sketched it for him on a napkin, as a birthday present. Its haphazard style reflects the presumably dim light by which it was drawn.

“I couldn’t tell if the drawing was of me or my dad,” Kaplan writes, remembering the moment of receiving the gift. “I knew it was a drawing of me, because it was I who sat before that anonymous, taciturn artist at the bar. Yet the features were just the same as my dad’s: a swoosh of hair; round glasses; full lips…It shook and somehow comforted me at the same time. That artist in the bar saw me; not just me sitting there but the negative space within me.”

Sunday has been in process more or less since that night. In the wake of his father’s death, Kaplan re-applied himself to writing songs on guitar, accumulating a deep lexicon of voice memos that would take years to sift through and finish. “Each song was an exercise in conjuring light, warmth, insight, guidance, release – my life’s absent emotional palette,” he explains. “I used music as a way to induce feelings that no longer occurred naturally.”

Developed by Kaplan, producer/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Daly Frank, and drummer Ben Wagner over the course of nearly three years, Sunday’s central mood is celebratory—Kaplan’s private iPhone exercises blown out into extroverted pop, bolstered by bright, classic-rock-infused arrangements. As the music took shape over the years, its redemptive quality was enhanced by contributions from Kaplan’s friends and close musical associates, including his Office Culture bandmates Winston Cook-Wilson and Ian Wayne, Caitlin Pasko, and Cuddle Magic horn section Alec Spiegelman and Cole Kamen-Green.

The songs exude joy and an almost childlike sense of wonder, and sound the handiwork of an artist who is relishing every aspect of making their first album—dialing in the right reverb or amp tone, bouncing half-joking ideas off of friends, geeking out over musical reference points, beaming as the sound of long-festering ideas slowly becomes realized. Kaplan reveals a natural pop prowess by stripping away pretense and bells and whistles from his songwriting, which often doesn’t require much more than three chords to get its point across and alternately may recall the likes of Springsteen, Lou Reed, and Mac DeMarco. Baroque flourishes (sax solos straight out of Bowie’s “Young Americans” or the Bobby Keys playbook) and moments of studio exploration (the ambient feedback washes in meditative piano-ballad closer “Hey Young Man”) never get in the way of the main hook—clearly, Kaplan would consider doing such a thing a cardinal sin.

These songs eschew heavy atmosphere and never land on a minor chord for more than a passing moment, but the sense of loss that informed them is never too far from the surface. Even airy and playful tracks like “California Days” and “In California” (comprised entirely of fake town names lyrically) play out like bittersweet daydreams—a longtime New Yorker imagining idealized sunnier climes from his couch in Manhattan. The concept of “California” here feels more like an imagined unencumbered way of life than a literal geographic destination. The songwriting bears out this ideal, channeling the Grateful Dead of the early 1970s and hazy stoner strummers by Kurt Vile and The War on Drugs.

Despite these moments of distraction, the central coping strategy on Sunday’s songs is not escapism. Kaplan spends many of them grappling directly with loss and existential dread, while grinning back into the void. Kaplan often gives pep talks to himself; on “Pete Williams,” he assumes the voice of his high-school guidance counselor, inspired by finding his high school transcript while going through his childhood bedroom following his dad’s passing. The exuberant chorus—“Should I relax?/And take it slow?”—crystallizes a central dilemma that crops up through these songs: will life ever be the same again? How can I find joy, or regain my sense of control? How can I find a new place in the world?

Straight-ahead rocker and implicit Stones tribute “The Light of the Day” also theorizes the concept of “taking it”: Kaplan proposes some broad-strokes codes of conduct for himself, including “taking it day-by-day/and living life off the fat of the land. It’s Springsteen-like pith at its best—both a tribute and a send-up of satisfying pop song refrains.

“I’ve always thought that ‘taking it’ is a funny term to use, because it can mean ‘going with the flow’ or ‘enduring a hardship,’” Kaplan says of the line.

Woody Guthrie once summarized his life philosophy as such: “Take it easy, but take it.” It seems to embrace both of Kaplan’s interpretations of “take it” at once—a Taoist truism made up by someone who likes to ride boxcars. Sunday is not a record that aims for moralizing, but if there is an implicit message in its methodology, maybe it’s something along those lines.

- Winston Cook-Wilson

I'm an independent songwriter.