It’s been a year, two years, that can feel like a decade. Do you need a good cry?
It happened for me somewhere in the middle of “Teach a Rat to Fish,” the fourth song on This Guitar Was Stolen Along With Years of Our Lives, the new album by New Haven-born and raised indie hip hop hero Julio Ramos, a.k.a. Ceschi. The effect was cumulative, starting with the album’s opener, “Long Shot,” and proceeding through the second and third songs, “Consider It a Win” and “Heaven at Your Fingertips.” The emotions were all there, raw and real; This Guitar is maybe the most vulnerable recording ever done by an artist known for being raw and real for years. But there was something about the way the middle section of “Teach a Rat to Fish” unfolded, something in the combination of the flow of Ceschi’s rap, the tone of his voice and the instrumentation swirling around him, that suddenly cracked something open, and there I was, crying in the car, my hands on the steering wheel as I shot north up Route 8 in the dark somewhere north of Waterbury. In the liner notes to the album, Ceschi wrote that the song is “specifically written for my good friends Bobby and Pepe who are in federal prison right now,” and that’s what the lyrics are about. But at that point I was crying about everything, the past two years — no, the past several years and what it has revealed about the country we live in — the day-to-day work I see all around me of people trying to keep it together, the people I know who’ve gotten sick, the people I know who are mourning those they’ve lost.
It’s that kind of album. Maybe This Guitar Was Stolen Along With Years of Our Lives isn’t for everyone. But for some people, it’s the album they need right now.
Brian Slattery Photo
Ceschi performing at the Space Ballroom in June.
Ceschi has torn a path for himself through the world of indie hip hop, but he’s a broader, much more versatile musician than any specific genre label can take in. He’s a forceful, nimble guitar player, a muscular singer, and a formidable rapper. When he plays with brother David Ramos on drums and Max Heath on keyboards as Anonymous, Inc., the trio flashes from prog rock to electro pop in a heartbeat. By himself, armed with only a guitar, Ceschi can deliver nueva canción like he was born to it, which in many senses he was. Even his most straight-ahead hip hop bears the mark of his restless musical imagination.
Lyrically, Ceschi’s songs have always felt like dispatches from the most desperate corners of American society, the places where things are not working out and people are struggling, hard. His keen eye and huge heart have always made him a vital chronicler of what’s around him and his own place in it, and maybe few people are better equipped than he was to pull his experience of the past two years into a clear artistic statement. Ceschi reveals in the liner notes that “a lot of this guitar album was started shortly before & during lockdown while i lived in Glassell Park, east side of Los Ángeles. Across the country from my family, living in a house with my manager, her boyfriend & a lovely woman who understandably no longer wished to be a chronically depressed musician’s partner. Dreams turned to letdowns, the world was on fire, nothing happened as we had wished nor imagined. After our quiet, peaceful relationship disintegrated, I helped her move to Long Beach then mostly locked myself in a room, ordered excessive vegan food & played guitar like I was 13 years old and listening to In Utero for the first time. Time didn’t matter the way it used to.
“While the world was witnessing deaths of millions due to a highly contagious virus, most of the lives lost around me were to suicide & drugs. Faces i hadn’t been able to see for a long time no longer had faces & the final memories between us consisted of short text message check-ins, heart emojis or songs shared between friends struggling to come up with proper words to help each other wade through the swamps of our shared reality.
“It felt like I stayed in bed for weeks at a time on some Brian Wilson shit,” Ceschi continues, “between livestreams, reading or watching celebrities ruin the song ‘Imagine’ on TV. It felt as if i was doing nothing. But, as it did in prison, nostalgia would slap me in heavy waves. The dreams were a little more vivid & memories of youth began to reappear clearly. I started to write songs that reminded me of simpler times, of the grunge, indie rock or punk of tween years. Songs that unearthed pain from youth that had not yet been confronted.”
This Guitar fits most easily in the genre of folk punk, in its anger and sadness and in its cathartic energy, as well as its instrumentation; acoustic guitar figures heavily along with accordion, banjo, vibraphone, horns, strings, and piano. The heart of the album is perhaps the sixth song, “2020 BC,” which Ceschi reveals took him about seven months to write. Clocking in at almost eight minutes, it’s musically the simplest song on the album — it features just Ceschi, singing and playing guitar — and lyrically easily its most ambitious. Its central idea is a metaphor in which we, living under the system we live under, have become like animals trained to attack each other. “Seek the good in humanity, right? / Even if it’s a struggle most times / Is hate natural or were we trained to fight like some pitbulls? / We’ve been locking jaws into each other’s backs well before Christ / Is that what it takes to survive? / Who taught us how to survive? / Fuck your neighbor to survive / Eat your neighbor to survive / We were hiding our faces long before pandemics arrived,” he sings.
The words, combined with the music and Ceschi’s visceral delivery, offer one of the most clear-eyed and horrified accounts of the way the pandemic collided with an American society that already wasn’t working for most of the people in it. He aims straight for the way Covid-19 tore open all of the problems we’d been skirting for years — our gross inequality, the national reckoning with racism, the continued rise of nationalist extremism. Near the end of “2020 BC” Ceschi is in a full-throated scream. “This ain’t no song about peace / Those are easy to sing but hard to believe / It’s tough to trust human beings / But don’t blame us for how we were trained to be.” Fueling his rage is deep compassion, compassion for how most of us have been and are still getting screwed, and it’s from that wounded empathy that the tears come.
There’s more, so much more, to this album. There’s the aching heartbreak over a lost relationship in “If I Woke Up.” The raging desperation in “Nod Off.” The tenderness in “Heaven at Your Fingertips.” The overwhelming gratitude punching through the sadness in “Lucky to Know,” the album’s closer. It’s fitting that it starts with the broken anthem “Long Shot”: “I know that the road’s covered in glass / I’ll walk anyway / Feet bleeding down a precarious path / Take a long shot on me.”
Ceschi isn’t a savior here; he’s with us, he is us, and if you connect with the album in this way, it can split you open. I’m not the only one. Across social media among Ceschi’s fan base are accounts like mine, of people relating to one another which song made them start crying, maybe where they were when it happened. It’s the kind of outpouring of emotion that, in the end, can strengthen a community, the kind of catharsis that helps us be kinder to one another afterward and — who knows? — maybe push us toward some new way of living, no matter how small. “They’ll never take everything from us,” Ceschi writes in the liner notes. The strength in that realization is easier to find because he’s given up so much.
Ceschi’s This Guitar Was Stolen Along With Years of Our Lives is available on Bandcamp and through all major streaming services.
