When I was about 5 years old, I remember walking to school and realizing I didn’t know what would happen if I were to die. I thought about a car careening off the street and crashing right into me, where would I go? My first thought was obviously heaven, I remember looking up and imagining a bright light beaming down, scooping me up and carrying me to a place I couldn’t even understand.
But what I remember above all else is for the first time feeling that maybe there was nothing afterward. I tried to imagine nothing. But I couldn’t, because every nothing was something, if that makes sense. Needless to say, that was an interesting day for a 5-year-old me, and that day inspired what would later become a lifetime of searching for an answer to one seemingly simple question: If I don’t know the final destination, how do I know which way to go?
Under The Rug doesn’t give an answer, nor a destination, but in “happiness is easy =)” they share something else altogether: themselves. “The first rule is that no matter what you write, it’s always a character, even if you think it’s yourself, even if it’s in first person, because you can’t encapsulate the entirety of a human being’s complexity within a five stanza poem,” Cassie Dayan, vocalist and writer for Under The Rug, said. “But I started breaking my own rule … and started writing from my own self, which was uncomfortable. My writing used to be so tidy, now I’m wrestling with more complex topics.”
“There’s a filter that a lot of that emotion goes through in our older tunes being very character based,” Sean Campbell, guitarist and band member, said. “And it almost feels like this new album is somehow even more unfiltered, raw emotion than the other ones.”
For Under The Rug, the latest chapter of their journey started after the success of their album “Homesick for Another World.” When one song off the album experienced chart topping virality, they were faced with a choice: chase the hit or pursue the art.
“We are still struggling with that success. ‘Lonesome and Mad’ was a moment that created a career for us, and there are stakes that come with that moment,” Dayan said. “All signs pointed towards having to make a decision between two polar opposites. And we doubled down on every single thing that was sort of the ‘bad business decision,’ but good for the art. We said no to the labels, we hired the agent that said he believed in us … we hired the manager instead of the management company … we decided to create an album that sounded nothing like anything else we had made, and to continue exploring new musical territory.”
Happiness for me was sitting in my dads truck bed, it was racing against time as the sun melted my otter pop, it was watching the lady bugs glide across the horizon. Happiness, for a long time, was easy.
“We were on tour in Florida, in Pensacola, and somebody we were staying with had a little nephew. This was a keyboardist that was playing with us at the time, his little nephew had made a bookmark … and the bookmark was sitting in an old dirty cup full of leaky pens, and the bookmark had been creased and crinkled with time,” Dayan said. “It was missing an eye. It was the optimism of childhood left for years in a cup full of pens. And there was a slat of light coming in through the morning window, shining directly on it, and a bag of Cheetos leaning up against the wall behind it.”
“And it just felt the same way [the album did]. Because, a lot of this record is my negotiation with being trans in this moment that has a lot of vitriol towards trans people. And just thinking about my childhood and where I came from and how I got here. I very much felt broken, that being trans made me broken, and so having this vestige of childhood optimism in its triumphant, crumpled way, I saw myself in that,” Dayan said.
That bookmark would later be recreated as the album cover for “happiness is easy =)” part one, a departure from Under The Rugs typically hand drawn album covers. This stylistic shift not only affects the album’s visuals and vocals, but its instrumentation as well.
Through music, people can live each other’s lives, experience each other’s experiences, become the characters in the songs. For Under The Rug, this culminated in an entirely new experience while recording their latest single “The Devil Smiles.” “I remember we talked about tapping into the feeling of that song. And I was recording the guitar at the end, where it opens up, and I just started crying in front of everybody,” Campbell said. “It was like do another take, do another take, over and over and over again. And it wasn’t even getting better, I was just riding … It was cathartic, in a way, it felt good.”
“There’s this weird connection with music that is hard to describe, where the switch flips and you’re in this new world, new moment, and you feel unavoidable emotion welling in you, whether that’s anger or even shame, which is a big theme in this album. It’s really important when I’m trying to arrange instrumentation around lyrics that Cassie writes, being able to understand what I’m playing and really connect with it is so important. Because if I didn’t, I would just be a session player on other people’s music, just writing the part that I thought people would like. But instead it means so much more than just a guitar part. There’s so much feeling behind it and connection with each other, which was also another big thing in this album. Not only was it an exploration for Cassie of her transition, it was Brendan and I having to do a lot of searching within about what gender meant to us and our relationship to queerness and femininity and things that we just didn’t really have to think about, because we have a privilege to not think about them,” Campbell said.
When I look back on those memories as a kid, I don’t see them through a kid’s eyes. My eyes have grown, changed, and with my changing came a changing perspective on happiness. I look back on that truck bed and I see myself sitting there smiling, an ink stained memory, polished by time. That truck bed was hot, and it was certainly not comfortable, but it was happy.
Under The Rug found a very possible destination, but instead of settling they chose to continue their journey. Through their music, every listener gets a taste of that journey as well, an alternative path on a long and winding road. For some, the road may seem foreign, for others it might feel like home. But to Under The Rug, what mattered most was that it was out there, for themselves and for their listeners alike.
Their newest single, “The Devil Smiles,” is out now on all major platforms, and the “second half” to “happiness is easy =)” is slated to come out sometime 2025. They credit a lot of their success to their one of a kind fanbase, who have their own secret hideout.
Under The Rug is not the same band that they started as in college, but their evolution has been consistently one of the most interesting in the industry. From rock to folk, their catalog has something for just about anyone. And to anyone who feels lost, and is still searching for their destination, I’ll leave you with this story from Cassie Dayan, their lead singer, that I hope inspires you as much as it did me.
“I was really struggling with whether or not to continue medically transitioning at one point, and I was very distraught. I could not wrap my head around making this the rest of my life. In a sense, there’s so much bundled shame and self hatred, which is so silly. I don’t do this, but I drew a bath. I was like, I’m going to take a bath. I’m just gonna take the hottest bath, and I’m just gonna sweat and think about stuff. I had this yellow legal pad, and I had started this pros and cons list of transitioning. On the con side, I had this long list. And on the pro side, there were very few things. And on the con side, I had written, ‘will have to really focus on my health’ … ‘[will have to] be twice as good of a musician as I would have had to to be before’, just to be relevant, just to be in the conversation. I’m gonna have to fight for it so much harder. I am going to have to eat a very conscious diet. I’m going to have to explore new territories of my voice and maybe create an entirely new artistic character. Which, it took me 30 years just to come up with anything that people liked, right? … And anyways, the list went on, but I was crying … and my eyes were making bokeh of the room, and I looked over my shoulder at this sort of wet notepad that was resting against the hem of the bathtub. And I looked at the cons side, and I thought it was the pros side, because all of those things were like, I’m going to be really healthy, going to be twice as good of a musician, going to care about my diet. So I thought it was the pro side for a moment, and in that moment, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a good thing.’ It’s hard work, like all those things. But when am I ever shy? When have any of us ever shied away from working really hard … And I think in that moment, I was like, ‘bring it on.’”
