A Hat Upon the Bed is something rare: an album that doesn’t flinch from the parts of grief we’re usually told to move past. Charlie Kaplan spent a decade processing the loss of his father, and these songs map that terrain with unsparing honesty. These songs dig into sadness, despair, and the second-order tremors that loss sends through our lives (anxiety that surfaces years later, doubt that wasn’t there before). The record’s sequencing inverts the timeline, starting at the broken end and finishing at the turbulent beginning. I am captivated by how Kaplan refuses easy consolation. He’s drawn to the places where certainty ends and mystery begins, giving shape to what resists understanding. These songs don’t resolve grief so much as they document its strange geography, the places where desperation leads us to bargain with physics, to question the sky, and to trace the limits of what’s knowable about death and what will always remain dark.
A Hat Upon the Bed is OUT NOW on Glamour Gowns.
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Album bio (by Charlie)
This album spans two landmasses of fatherhood, beginning when my father died and ending in the early days when no one but my wife and I knew I would soon become a father. These songs are from the long, fatherless decade I spent processing loss. I chose to reflect this in the sequencing by inverting the experience, starting with a short piece I wrote in a place of quiet wreckage after my dad died, and ending with another short piece I wrote in a place of dire turmoil at the beginning of the end.
In 2016, I decided to start recording my own music by sketching a tetralogy of unfinished, but distinct albums. I knew it would begin with Sunday, my homebrewed medicine for grief, because those songs gave me warmth, and it is easy for me to give others warmth. The artistic challenge there was to begin to bare myself. Through my next two albums, I built confidence presenting my music to others. I knew the fourth album would be this one, because it compiled feelings from that time that I don’t find it easy to show: sadness, despair, resentment, as well as the second- and third-order effects of loss that express as anxiety and doubt. David Bowie once said, “When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” As someone who had barely trusted himself to put minor-key songs on past albums, revealing my sadness to others feels scary enough to be real.
I was in my dad’s hospital room in Manhattan once when a friend of his arrived and, making himself comfortable, laid his baseball cap on the bed. My dad – who put his visitors at ease by hiding his condition behind charm and accommodation – shocked abruptly from his politeness performance. “Don’t put that there,” he commanded. When his guest asked why, he explained. “In old cowboy movies – a hat on the bed is an omen, a premonition that someone will die.”
And he did. My dad was a superstitious person, so a story like this would be one he’d be unable to shake and unwilling to risk provoking by challenging with reason. He sometimes did things that didn’t make sense to me. He had rituals and entertained ideas that weren’t always logical. Often, before we entered my childhood home from the car, he’d stop by the front steps and peer straight up to the stars, nodding his head intensely. When I’d ask what he was doing, he’d break from his reverie – it looked like prayer – turn to me with a smile, and say, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” He never did.
Was he wrong to be superstitious? There’s so much we don’t know about life, and even less about death. Religious skeptics call the spaces between what we understand “the god of the gaps” as a way of criticizing god as an ever-eroding placeholder for science. But when examined, these spaces are so vast they can feel like the expanses between planets, stretching out to infinity. Death is unknowable, so these gaps are in fact boundless; We create universes of unprovable explanations and stories to fill its abyssal void. It’s comforting to believe there’s more out there than meets the eye, especially in the discomfiting absence of meaning in its darkness. My dad left room for the unknown, and in doing so, traced its endlessness.
As I was finishing this album, I thought often of Katie Crutchfield’s lyric from the self-titled closing track of her 2020 album St. Cloud: “Maybe the dead just go on living on the darkest edge of space.” The darkest edge of space: the border of the universe we can observe. The border that divides our ever-expanding known and unlimited unknown. That far end of the stars that, no matter how hard you peer up to the sky, you’ll never see beyond.
For me, A Hat Upon the Bed is about the line between the knowable and unknowable; truth and superstition; science and magic; natural and supernatural; life and death. It’s about the long, violent surrender to an unpersuadable force – final, divine, too large to see. Whether you fight it or not, fate comes for us. It lays a hat upon the bed.
Song breakdown
Seaside
This album is bookended with two instrumental voice memos, starting at the end and closing with the beginning. I wrote this little solo guitar piece on a beach vacation the summer after my dad passed. It’s emblematic of why I was drawn to the guitar during bereavement: When I couldn’t shake myself out of sadness, I could give myself over to its intransigence with exercises like this one, meditative and cathartic.
At first, I imagined it rendered as a string arrangement, but when I realized this album would have pretty heavy string arrangements, I liked the idea of this staying as more of a blueprint, and as a result, it’s just the original demo from my phone.
A Hat Upon the Bed
One day in the hospital, a friend of my dad’s came in, took his cap off, and laid it on the hospital bed. To protect himself from constantly confronting the looming threat of his cancer, my dad was typically a lighthearted and amiable host in his hospital room. This made him crack. He sharply told the friend to remove it; A hat on the bed, he explained, was an old trope from cowboy movies foretelling someone’s death. I’m not superstitious, but death loomed near. After he died, I thought back to this moment – not because it made me believe the omen, but because it illustrated just how inexplicable death is to those near to it. There are few choices but to turn, instead, to explanations imbued with meaning from beyond reason or earthly experience.
I visited home many times after he passed to see my family and commune with his memory. Sometimes I’d walk – alone, sometimes late at night – about half an hour to the beach. Arriving at the water, I’d talk aloud, knowing nobody was near to hear. I asked what I should do with my pain, asked the sky what I did to deserve the punishment of grief, I begged forgiveness from it, told him I missed him. I was met, inevitably but tragically, with silence. Intimating the sky felt like it spoke to the contradiction in loss: Unrelenting, unresolvable pain drove me to absurdity; Longing finding, in desperation, fantasy. My full lyric is “pray or confide it, scrutinize your mindset, but look and you’ll find that fate’s laying a hat upon the bed.” To me, this spoke to the cruel finality of death: It’s not negotiable or explainable. It’s a fated sentence passed down from a hidden magistrate. So however unsuperstitious I am, I questioned skyward. What is there, beyond life, beyond knowability, out there in the starless dark?
It was important for me to capture the space I started writing this song in, which was in the dark, lying in bed with my guitar. A place of unguarded reflection. Nico Hedley engineered the guitar and vocals and helped keep it quiet, close, lo-fi like the demos it was recorded in. I wanted strings on it, so Winston Cook-Wilson, Nate Mendelsohn, and I stood by while Kristen Drymala (cello) and Zosha Warpeha (5-string viola) took turns improvising the string part with our coaching. I think it came out beautifully.
Halley
My dad used to do this odd thing. When we’d get home, he’d stop at the steps of our house and, before walking in, crane skyward and nod vigorously, peering at the stars. I’d stand quietly by, as if I were witnessing him pray. Once I broke the silence by asking what he was doing, and he gave me an answer that he’d given me at other times when I’d ask about mysterious behavior: “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” He never did.
Halley is named for Halley’s Comet. It follows thematically from the previous track and is inspired partly by repeating a lyric from an older song of mine, “Evening Out”, “I can’t tell if that’s a star or a satellite”. I’m tracing the border of knowledge – the dead-end loss leads you to, when a lost person is unreachable past the threshold of our temporal plane. The song starts with a familiar experience, which was looking out the window in my childhood home (maybe after coming home from one of those walks), seeking my dad in the sky he used to nod at. I quote Mark Twain, who mystically was born and died in the comet’s perihelion. It finishes with an exercise in surrealistic futility – begging Halley’s Comet to come back on command – that for me illustrates the absurdity of accepting death. The universe can’t be bent to your will at any extreme of desperation.
There are many elements of this song I think are amazing, including Ian Wayne’s bellowing backing vocals and Nico Hedley’s noise guitar, which weaves together in the outro with lead parts both from Andrew Daly Frank and me. Feels like the flaming tail of the comet to me.
Transmission
Bargaining is the third stage of grief, which, to me, is intimately tied up with the first stage, denial. As a way of denying the finality of loss, grievers seek some other way out, some agreement that can get them out of an inescapable deal. How can you see a lost person again?
This song fantasizes about this question through the lens of Einsteinian physics and the speed of light. A light year is the distance light travels in a year; Someone a light year away will see you as you were a year ago. Of course, we can’t move faster than the speed of light, so we can’t travel to a place where we could look back and see our own pasts from a requisite distance. But I imagined coasting on the light beams that reflected from the world I inhabited with my dad – “a prow above a wave of light, the present borne from endless night, alive in our receding sight” – as a means of staying with him in a present that only evaded becoming the future by traveling ever further away “in reflections lost to the void.” A particularly important inspiration for this song and others was Waxahatchee’s lyric, “I guess the dead just go on living at the darkest edge of space.”
This song inspired the most exploration from the ensemble; at first, Jason Burger approached it with gigantic, climactic builds, but then adjusted to more of a metronomic, krautrock feel. I especially enjoyed sitting with Nate in his studio to figure out how to shape Andrew’s closing solo, where we took some producerial license with cueing in different parts and using fun reverse effects.
Have a Nice Day
I was in a Wikipedia rabbit hole one sleepless night when I came across Roko’s basilisk, a thought experiment about an “artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future that would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.” I wrote this song as a little science fiction story where I imagined being one of the basilisk’s future victims. What would it feel like to be hunted by a technology that powerful? Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, which made me write the lyric: “The inescapable domain of the divine is online.” I particularly like the lyrics in the bridge – “wondering what key the microwave is in” to me feels like seeking the humanity in machines; “when the right words suddenly came to him” is precisely what AIs like ChatGPT do by delivering technology increasingly indistinguishable from humanity. I based the chorus around the famous John Donne line, “send not to know. For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.” to speak to both our collective self-interest in the face of our simulacra, and to name this AI gorgon as the bell-toller.
I’m so grateful to Winston Cook-Wilson for writing the big George Martin/”Life on Mars?” string parts at the end of this song. His arrangement style – as often has been true in our band Office Culture on songs like “Suddenly”, which he also arranges for – has been to take a core band performance and write strings that catch some of the melodies and frame them within his larger arrangement. Listen, for example, to how he grabs Julian Cubillos’s and Andrew’s riffs and plays them through as if they were following his composition. So cool.
Is It Gonna Be Alright?
When I hear this song, I feel those beautiful, unseasonably warm days in February or November. Days that happen altogether too often now. Just below the surface, there is a great fear that the world we know is slipping away from us, and that not too long from now, the stability we once took as a natural fact will be gone. I wrote it soon after a trip to Florida, where I saw endless, unchecked development – paradise paved, like Joni Mitchell said – and left with a hard-to-shake feeling of doom. I started the song thinking of a climate refugee in one of the dwindling stable environments awaiting an unpromised, increasingly perilous tomorrow; I thought of biblical plagues, environmental collapse, mass extinction, demagogues, the Passover myth, and the existential fear – the glare of reality – that we cower from when we attack one another instead of protecting our shared interest. I thought about how “the glare of reality” drives fearful people to turn to hucksters and snake oil salesmen. Each of those unseasonably warm days, I feel helpless to our shared fate, “trapped in the belly of a ship sinking in a boiling sea.” This song’s concern with existential threats resulted in some synchronicities with the prior track. The hope I feel is that the closing question, the title of the song, stays unanswered despite its repeated asking, even as it sinks into the torrent around it.
Since, for me, this song addresses climate catastrophe, I asked Winston to write a part that would make the listener feel like they were being enveloped by floodwaters. He came up with a core motif on piano in rehearsal, then adapted that into a whole arrangement. I think this is most effective when Nate fades the vocals down into the strings in the outro, as if they’re being submerged.
I’m In Love With You
Loss makes pain in proportion to love. So loss – not just in death, but in heartbreak or strife – makes the statement that titles this song a punishment. What if you love someone you can’t be with? Or shouldn’t? Or who doesn’t love you in return? I wanted to speak not only to experiences I’ve had, but to times I’ve seen people I care about struggle under unrequited or lost love. Only love, a wise man once said, can break your heart.
I did not think we were going to record this song as a band – the plan was for me to multitrack it and get everyone to add parts later. However, we had a little less than an hour at the end of our second and final day of recording, so I figured we could give it a shot. The results astounded me, especially Julian’s gorgeous, McCartney-esque descending bassline and Andrew’s titanic lead guitar part.
Top of the Tree
Going home – especially after my dad’s passing – has become a complicated experience for me. Returning to my family in the years after his death often meant confronting its brokenness. I wrote this song sitting on the floor of my bedroom at my mom’s house, which strangely only has three-and-a-half walls: the fourth wall is a ledge down which, during the holidays, I can see the Christmas tree. In many ways, it felt like a perfect setting to describe my feelings at that moment.
I think everyone got a kick out of figuring out this arrangement, from Jason nailing the entrance and giving the song its strut, to Winston sweetly matching “erase it from my mind” on the piano.
No More Mistakes
This song touches on a recurrent theme in my music – which I touch on in older songs like “Pete Williams” and “I Got It” – about life when a parent isn’t there to look out for you any longer. In a way, it’s a song about growing up and accepting responsibilities, and the doubts and resentments that emerge therein. The chorus has a lot of meanings to me, primarily the sense that my future is up to me; the trapeze has no net. I don’t mean to literally say that I can’t make any more mistakes, but rather to give voice to the wobbly precarity of stepping into adulthood.
Completing this song was one of the best visceral experiences I’ve ever felt. I had the riff and prechorus from several years back, but never really knew where it should go. Like “Pete Williams” and “I Got It”, the pieces of the song I had felt so good that finding other pieces to complete it was daunting. They’d set too high a bar. Then one day, I was sitting alone working on it, and it was like all the lights came on in the room at once: I found the chorus, bridge, and outro; the lyrics; the riffs. It was so electrifying, I couldn’t stop playing it.
I am so impressed by the parts everyone came up with for this song. In particular, Winston’s ear picked up on the quintal harmony of my first chord, which he used to write a very Copland-like piano part. Andrew matched this beautifully with a very poppy, low-register lead guitar line; additive but not in the way.
Fear of Choking
This is my tribute to intrusive thoughts – shocking, sudden, gruesome visions that hit me at my most vulnerable moments, like trying to fall asleep or doing the dishes. I thought it would be funny to write a bouncy, fun song about the myriad ways my imagination proposed I be grievously injured or killed. To me, these intrusive thoughts are agita leakages; stress from elsewhere popping out unexpectedly. In this way, it has something in common with “No More Mistakes” – stakes heightened by an underlying condition.
This song is, to me, Jason Burger’s highlight on the album. He plays both kit and percussion and laid a very tight groove with just the right amount of cheeky fills to push it along. I also love the way Winston and Andrew weave in and out in their lead playing.
No Way Am I
I started this song out as a challenge: Could I write a song where I only used one finger on my fingering hand? I liked what came out, even though it ended up a lot sadder than I could’ve expected.
To me, this song is about the people who weren’t there for me in my interminable years of grief – years where I felt like I was “in the dead of the night, in the middle of the blight, an alluvial pool of unfrozen starlight” and the ungranted wishes for release (“make a wish upon a bone”) that I imagined in the netherworld of a setting from my childhood (“in the mall fountain from whence it was thrown”). I speak to them directly here – “I know you got so far up your ass / you didn’t know how I grew up so fast.”
I knew I wanted some backing vocals for this song, and I always think of Caitlin Pasko first. She has the most incredibly clear voice, which Winston was able to sample and turn into a synth.
Leading Man
Like “No More Mistakes”, this song is about the role of leadership I felt in my family after my dad passed and how small I felt in his footsteps. I wrote it on an afternoon alone in his house, quietly navigating the piano with the mute pedal on.
One lyric came from a strange place: “I’m waiting in the back of the van”. This came from a paparazzi photo I saw of Zendaya waiting for Tom Holland in a car outside the stage door of his performances in Romeo and Juliet. Seeing her proud and patient made me think of the profound brevity of life, its fleeting preciousness. Imagining myself as each of them connected me to the title of the song and helped me find another emotional core for it.
A big breakthrough on this song happened in the studio: Nate encouraged me to take big up-and-down strokes on the acoustic guitar, which gives it its sort of paradelike canter by the chorus.
Heaven
In my darkest times, I thought of a quote from Aeschylus:
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
One thing I took from this quote is that grief doesn’t return to joy; it describes joy with the size of its absence. In its excruciating advance grief resolves, at best, to wisdom. It arrives not at our entreatment but by – however defined – God’s grace. This grace is awful both in how terrible it is and in how it inspires awe. The closing image of the album is awe in this way: Glimpsing the enormity of fate and knowing it’s too large to see beyond.
Grief diminished me for years. At the time, I wondered if I’d ever feel the same magnitude of happiness again or if I’d sustained my own sort of mortal injury in loss. I wished dearly that I could find reassurance from someone who would tell me I’d be okay again. Speaking to myself from the future now, I am grateful to say I did find real, profound happiness again. But this song isn’t for now. This song depicts how the end seemed then: broken, unresolved, the ruins of a tribute to a god whose deliverance never came. I couldn’t, in good conscience, close this album on any other note than the one that described how I felt then: a final, wailing “why?”
Sandy
The album finishes with a second bookend instrumental. It’s the oldest recording on the album. I wrote and recorded it during Hurricane Sandy after my dad’s first chemotherapy treatment. The chemo stripped him of his immune system, and the storm stripped us of power and heat. My stepmom arranged for us to decamp to another house in our town that still had power. I’d never been there before and didn’t know its owners. The family had evacuated, so we were there alone. The situation was tenuous: only portions of the house still had electricity, so many rooms were dark. I had a couch to sleep on and their piano nearby. In a quiet moment, I sat at it and made this recording. It documents not the calm before the storm, but the wreckage after it. An omen of things to come.
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