Alternative liner notes for “Freedom”
Parker Kindred: Bones, skeletal frame
Jody Wheeler: Kidney, liver
Delicate Steve: Skin, extremities
Panoram: Eyes
Damon McMahon: Transmissions of electricity

Over the last ten years Damon McMahon has released five records as Amen Dunes, but there is something elusive about the project’s singer, songwriter, and spiritual leader. He looks different in every photograph. In old pictures, he’s scruffy and unkempt, a curly-haired, unshaven rock n’roller in faded t-shirts and black denim. His style recently is more urban utilitarian—a white singlet beneath an open sports jacket, combat boots, close-cropped hair, and single gold earring. The cover art for the latest record, Freedom, may be a portrait of his face in close-up, but it remains in shadow. When I went to meet him at a local Greenpoint diner, it felt like something of a blind date: I wasn’t sure who I was about to spend an hour with, or if I’d recognize him from the pictures on the internet. 

Rock n’roll has always been about reinvention—of sound, of the self—and for McMahon, the idea of being a musician is inseparable from the messy human struggle to make peace with a private and public ego. The early Amen Dunes records evoke the growing pains of spiritual and artistic development—meditative and insular, shrouded in layers of eclectic sound that lie just beyond recognition, they recall the memory of familiar musical genres rather than belonging in any particular one. Freedom is the result of personal transformation. Sonically, it is a portrait of an artist coming into focus and stepping toward the light.

In conversation McMahon is contradictory, in turns reverent and irreverent when it comes to talking about music. He is suspicious of the technical study of the craft but considers himself a traditional songwriter. One of the first things he said when he slid into the red vinyl booth was that he doesn’t like musicians, but later he spoke of classic icons like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan as personal patron saints. 

On the page, this can come across antithetical or deliberately contrary, but in person McMahon is polite, soft-spoken, open. McMahon’s contradictions are actually a form of fluidity, a way of denying absolutes by asserting and then rebuking them, refusing to take one fixed position. He speaks of his creative process as something close to divine intervention, where songwriting is act of emotional communion, a harnessing energy and electricity by shaping feeling into sound. He comes across less as an artist confident in who he is, but rather one who has decided that for his purposes, whoever he is is beside the point. 

—Madelaine Lucas

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