Q&A: Ralph Castelli Presents a Raw Perspective on New Ambient Record, ‘Hope, Alaska’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY PATTI DOUD ☆
IMAGINE A NIGHT WHERE FROSTY ICE LAYERS ON YOUR NOSE — You’re surrounded only by the conifers swaying and the crickets humming while the real star of the show, the brilliant streaks of green, turquoise and purple dance across the sky. While it’s a dream for most of us to witness a natural phenomenon like the Northern Lights, this is a near-daily occurrence for Alaska-based Ralph Castelli.
The 27 year-old artist found his niche producing hits for well-known indie acts like the Neighbourhood, Blu DeTiger, Dora Jar and Glaive. But it wasn’t always like this. Originally starting as a solo artist project, Castelli gained momentum through his synth-heavy, groovy bedroom pop tracks like “Morning Sex,” which currently clocks over 44,000 videos on TikTok.
Castelli’s new project, however, provides a much softer and more intimate experience. Quiet plucking of a guitar string, ambient acoustics echoing, and indistinct vocal harmonies layered over a jaunty, straightforward drumline. All of these simple acts of artistry often get lost in the noise of modern music, but Castelli utilizes them intentionally on his newest record, Hope, Alaska.
Dubbed as a “destination record” based on Alaska’s influence on the sonic and lyrical content, Castelli reflects on the vast and drastic changes his life has seen in the past few years while relocating to his home state, building a home and multiple cabin studios from scratch, and becoming a father. All of these aspects culminate in a beautiful 12-track record of changing familial dynamics, experiencing love and nature, and facing addiction with comforting melodies as a backtrack.
Castelli sat down with The Luna Collective for an interview discussing these big changes, the album, its inspiration and everything in between. Continue reading below for the full story.
LUNA: Shoutout to your album. I really love it, it's great. You mentioned on Instagram how this [album] relates to your greater family tree while simultaneously representing a lot of changes in your life, like building a house and becoming a father. Did you set out to make this album while it was going on, or did it come more naturally?
CASTELLI: That's actually a really good question in a lot of ways. When I moved out of LA, my wife, Vanessa, got pregnant and we were like, “Oh my goodness, we don't want to raise kids here, we need to run back to Alaska,” where we're from. It's kind of what got us into gear. So the whole thing was, in a sense, rushed. Because when we got to Hope, she was already pregnant, and I felt this crunch-time type of thing.
So, my music wasn't even the priority for a good two years. I would sometimes be able to record something, an idea. I would have these little spouts of two weeks where maybe at night when I was done building something, I would start recording. But there was a good year where we were roughing it. We didn't even have a toilet. So that first nine months until my first daughter, Iris, was born was really intense. There was no way I was even playing the guitar. There was just no rest because I was like, “I need to build a house before we have a baby.” I just [built] this huge pressure for some reason. But then we actually eased our pain, because when Iris was born, we rented an Airbnb for three weeks. Before we were in a tiny little dry cabin, like, there's a bucket on the ground. It was rough. So we were like, “We need to go get an Airbnb.”
That's a long winded way of saying I actually didn't even know I was making an album, and that was never even a conversation I had with Vanessa. But what had happened was I just felt like for the first time in a while I had so much to say, especially about my kids. It’s kind of old head stuff, but at the same time … I lived this crazy experience. I was just thrown in, or I threw myself, into this whirlwind of pretty much the hardest way to do having a first kid. Moving into the middle of nowhere, seeing if you can build a house while your wife's pregnant. But we made it. And then at the end of a two and a half year process of just living in construction, I had this body of songs.
And what's so funny is, I am the type of person that doesn't consider my artist project to be a real thing. I just always hide it from everyone that I produce for and don't share anything about it, [because] it’s so “about everyone else” all the time. A couple of my friends, particularly Dora Jar and Glaive, were like, “Dude, you need to man up and put this stuff out, do it.” There were maybe one or two times that I had shown them one or two things. I think “Iris and I” was one of them, and they were like, “Dude, this song is so important to you. You need to put it out.”
So then I thought I might have an album. I didn't even know what I was doing … There was no way I could have known what I was doing. But then my friends kind of gave me confidence to do it.
LUNA: Nice, that's really sweet. And leave it to friends to put it in a different perspective, even when you're like, “Oh, well, this doesn't feel like it needs to be seen by the world,”… they're like, “No, but obviously it's important.”
CASTELLI: Yeah, totally, I know. I'm so private, honestly, like to my own demise. In so many ways, I've had so many opportunities to just not be private and grow … So this felt really scary, because it's a song about my daughter, and there's a couple songs about addiction in there. Stuff that's super raw and personal. So the whole project is super vulnerable, which is so funny, because I wouldn't say that some of my music before was very vulnerable. I just wasn't in a state to be super raw like that. Like, “Morning Sex” isn't a vulnerable song.
LUNA: Yeah. It’s a great song, but you can’t say it’s the core of your being. Once you got past the grind of building the house and welcoming your first daughter, what did those early days in Alaska look like?
CASTELLI: Yeah, the transition was really gnarly. When we showed up [in Alaska], we bought an ambulance, which was used as a work truck and we would drive all my friends around. I didn't even think there were seatbelts in the back. This is before we had kids.
LUNA: Of course, of course.
CASTELLI: So we were mobbing around in this nineties ambulance. We showed up, bought some land from a kind of pseudo-grandpa of mine, Frank. So the whole transition was… it felt kind of like a one year-long camping trip. So then, as we built the house Vanessa, my wife, designed it.
She has an engineering degree, so she designed it on her software, then I started building it. And my dad is the construction GOAT. So he was teaching me the ropes of how to build. And then, once the house was warm, with electricity, flushing toilets, showers. Habitable. It was like, “Whoa. We're living out here, this is awesome.” I mean, it's still really hard, but wow.
So we're doing it, and a whole other year goes by of it being comfortable, and then, yeah, we have a second kid. He's six months now, and everything's changed yet again. Everything is all the time. But yeah, we've gotten pretty comfortable now.
Now, we've been trying different iterations of like … [finding purpose]. Right now we have chickens. That's probably not our vibe. We're trying to figure out, like, “Are we farmers? What are we doing?”
LUNA: I get that. Over Christmas I went to Australia and we stayed with our family there, and they're off the grid too, but they don't have any chickens or anything like that. Although I really want chickens, I've been trying to get my family to get some. And they're like, “No, why would we get chickens?” But I'm like, “Guys in this economy, with these egg prices!”
CASTELLI: [Laughs] I know, we just started a couple months ago, but honestly, we're so overwhelmed with kids.
LUNA: Yeah, chickens and kids at the same time is crazy, especially a six month old and a three year old.
CASTELLI: Yeah, a friend of ours might take them and just give us some eggs. They farm, so, it’s like, “Would you mind taking the damn chickens?”
LUNA: [Laughs] Yeah.
CASTELLI: I mean, we're definitely trying to not [do too much], because the reality is I took so much on that music was way down in the priority list, and I don't want that to happen again. I super cherish music, especially more now than ever, [and appreciate] my ability to make music. I just want to make music all the time, and that was way down here for a long while. And that hurt because I was like, “Oh my god, I'm working in the rain, in the dark, all day for months. This sucks.”
LUNA: Yeah, you need your pick-me-up. I totally get that. In some ways, being an adult is just figuring out how to prioritize that while also doing the sh*t you need to do.
CASTELLI: Yeah, totally, because life hits you pretty hard and sometimes music can become a job. Like in LA, it became my job. I mean, it still is my job, that's my main thing. But it was a really good reminder that I get to do it. I'm lucky, and this is so cool. I think you can hear it in my music too, that it was an expression after such a gnarly experience or a gnarly day. Some of it's pretty playful and fun.
LUNA: Yeah, totally, I love that. I saw you talking about the concept of a destination record. I just love that idea, I think it's very niche and cool, but also very relevant right now. You built a studio alongside your house; why do you think providing a space like that is important?
CASTELLI: Yeah, right now there's kind of two guest cabins and then a main house. One of the little guest cabins is operating as a studio, but I'm building the big studio, and then there will be two guest cabins for bigger bands and stuff like that. But so far, it's been smaller-in-size groups, like Glaive and Dora, where it's not like a huge, nine-person band or something like that. So yeah, there’s one there, but I'm working on even a bigger one.
LUNA: Dang, you’re so ambitious. Would you consider your album to be a destination record?
CASTELLI: Yeah, I definitely think my record is a destination record because of how much the place impacted my music. And I think that destination records are very important, especially now, because of the state of music. I don't know if people know how the state of music is but it's based a lot in session culture right now, which is when you show up in LA as an artist, and then you shop around different producers. You end up with an amalgamation of songs, and I think that there's a lot of validity in that. But I think a lot of artists, especially after their first or second record, are looking for a record that sounds like it's in one place.
I also think it just makes sense. Like, there's so many reasons that destination records make sense, [even] financially. You set aside the time and then you go tour the record. I actually think that artists need that compartmentalization of “I'm here to make a record for the next two months, and I don't need to worry about anything else.” And so I think, over the years, I've noticed that when my friends come up to Alaska and we record, they're so happy about it. So that puts me on game as a producer…Part of being a producer is providing a space. and I want my space to be special. Like in LA, it was special. I was really proud of my space there, and I wanted it to be a whole different level up.
LUNA: Yeah, totally, that's awesome. Do you think any of your work with other artists, as a producer, was influencing this record, too?
CASTELLI: Definitely. What's so funny is that over the years, like my early artist stuff, I wasn't really a producer at that time. I just liked what I liked and I feel like you can really hear it. But what's crazy is I feel like I grew so much as a producer, a guitar player, a singer, everything, whilst working on everyone else's records that I never showed my current skill [in my artist project]. And I give all that credit to the people that I work with. I mean, I learned so much just writing with my friends and it's definitely impacted me. And what's so funny is they’re such polar opposites.
Since we already mentioned Dora and Glaive, Glaive couldn't be further from Dora, but they both impacted me so much. A classic Glaive thing is, we’ll make a whole song, and then pitch it up one or two, and release that … I do that a couple times on this record. Just different creative freedoms that are so cool to be like, “F*ck it. I'm just gonna put it out pitched up.” That's what I learned from Glaive. He's just so … if he likes it like that, it doesn't matter. There's no weird, “The song is important in this key, how I naturally did it.” He's like, “F*ck it up and play with it.”
LUNA: Yeah, just totally take the knife to it.
CASTELLI: And then Dora is just obviously a fantastic songwriter. And, I mean, both Glaive and Dora are, but Dora's got this way of just melting you.
LUNA: So true. I feel like that's so obvious when you listen to her music too. It feels like a state of being, almost, when you listen to her music.
CASTELLI: I've spent so much time with her, and she's been to Alaska several times. And we've just spent so much time together that it would be impossible for it not to affect my music. Even just slowing down and writing a song on guitar again, obviously that really impacted my record. Making a whole song on my guitar and not trying to make it all crazy.
LUNA: I love that. It just reminds me of that quote that's like, “You're just a museum of everyone you've ever loved.” You get to kind of take everyone's little things, just a few little things from here and there, and get to make that form something. In your case, the album.
CASTELLI: It’s so subconscious too, just naturally happening. I never reference any of my friends in my music [directly], like “I did this because of this person.” It's just so deep in there at this point. I’ve spent hundreds of days with these people, it's obviously going to show up somewhere. We practically lived together for periods of time, actually, we literally lived together for periods of time. So it's impossible to not.
LUNA: That's so sweet. It's obviously a very personal record...It feels very cohesive and it feels like it has a lot of similar themes. So what kinds of messages or experiences do you hope people will have with this record, or will get from the record?
CASTELLI: I think in the first half of the record, I don't know if anyone's going to listen this intently, but what I was really doing was realizing that everything is alive around me. I remember people saying that, because, I grew up in Alaska, but I was a kid, so I just didn't really dig deep spiritually. Spending a bunch of time in Australia, and then LA, and being in cities, then back to being in no man's land, I realized just how alive everything is here. It's such an extreme place that, I mean, my friends make fun of me because I say stuff like, “I think the mountains are, like, conscious and alive.” I'm like, “They do things, I'm telling you!” Avalanches break, they have a mind of their own. I've experienced it, it sounds so trippy and silly, but …
LUNA: No, but I for sure believe that, because I went to University of Kentucky, so I was around people from Appalachia and the Appalachian Mountains.
CASTELLI: Oh, I’m obsessed with Appalachia.
LUNA: Oh yeah, I mean, it's amazing, it's everything. And I will say … because I'm from Ohio, I didn't think that there would be such a cultural difference from going from Ohio to Kentucky, especially just for school. But there so is and there's something about the way that people in Kentucky embrace what they do and where they're from. I feel like people make fun of the typical Southerner, or the Appalachian, but these people are so in-tune with where they live and how they feel and I think that's so amazing. It sounds similar to being in Alaska. I'm sure when your closest, living neighbor is probably like a bear or something.
CASTELLI: Yeah, I truly have so much experience with bears now. So the whole first half of the record is me having these spiritual experiences. There would be so many nights that the northern lights would come out and, I swear, it was coming out and hitting me.
LUNA: Yeah, a little caress on the face.
CASTELLI: It was insane. And when you're experiencing that stuff so removed from everything, you're like, “I swear it knows I'm here, this is crazy.” So that first half the record’s a lot of that; it’s my experiences being here. And then the second half is more geared toward my personal experiences not in nature. “Out Of Tune” is about my relationship with music. Then there's obviously a song about addiction, which is “Weening My Way Down;” I've had my own struggles with that. That's a personal experience that has nothing to do with nature, but I feel like I just wanted to kind of lay it all out. I wrote the song “Iris and I” when she was still in the womb about what she looks like.
So I hope it's on the nose enough that people would understand “Northern Lights” is clearly about me experiencing the Northern Lights over and over and over. And then I would hope that people would know that “Iris and I” is about my daughter, and “Out Of Tune” is about that, and “Weening My Way Down” is about this. And hopefully that’s that, because I don't like being sneaky; I don't like hiding my intentions much. I grew up listening to Sujfan Stevens and stuff where it felt so clear, listening to what he's writing about.
LUNA: No, definitely. And it doesn't feel like an album that has a lot of hidden meanings. It feels like a very straightforward record that has balance. What I appreciate about it is that it seems like you have every experience as a human being in one record, which is super crazy. And I think it's funny that you were like, “Oh, that's like an old head thing.” But there is something too about getting older that also is just not really seen much in music. I mean, so many people start at such a young age, and kudos to them. It's great, but there's such a difference between when you're 14 and when you're 27: There’s a huge difference. So I love that about this record, for sure.
CASTELLI: Yeah, I think that's what makes me love music, is even when something's not cool, technically, I think it's so important to write songs about it. Like, me and Dora have talked a lot about different artists that we love. And I always reference Adrianne Lenker, and her songwriting and the way that she can recontextualize things to make it feel almost romantic in some weird sense. But yeah, there needs to be more representation of all different types of life, not just like, single life or party life or whatever, I think we need more music from mothers in general. I think we need music from people experiencing all different things. It's so human. We need more music.
LUNA: How did Vanessa react to the record? Obviously she was a big inspiration, because she's your wife and the mother of your children.
CASTELLI: She is so funny because I am so inconsistent with how I feel about my music and how I feel about music as a whole. Sometimes I don't even want to listen to music … It's so funny, so she knows how to ride the wave with me. But what's really cool is she also has this, I feel like, respect for the insanity of it … [she knows] when I'm ready to show some music, I'm ready to show some music. But in a lot of ways, she probably had never even heard the whole record till it was out.
LUNA: Really? Wow. Did you ask for help with any decisions on the track list or anything? Or she was just there to help when you needed it?
CASTELLI: I sometimes will backboard stuff off her, yeah. But there are a lot of times where there's miscommunication. [For example,] like “April” is a great song. I'm personifying the month of April, and it's sort of supposed to be a love song to how good the month of April feels after winter. But, on the face of it, it's like, “Who's April? Who the hell is April?” It’s like, babe, we're out here in the middle of nowhere!
LUNA: Yeah [laughing]. Like, it's the bear in the backyard.
CASTELLI: So in that way, it's really fun to show her stuff and to surprise her. She's so supportive and understanding. And that's mostly a joke, her joke … she does help, but in a lot of ways, because I'm so recluse, I don't really want to know anyone's input, even the people that inspired the record the most … I can't handle it. Maybe I'm not emotionally mature enough to handle input about something so vulnerable.
LUNA: Yeah, totally. I mean, I feel like that's kind of normal too. It's your art, it's, you know, very subjective, and it's your representation of them too. So it's almost like, “Okay, I actually don't want you to hear it.”
CASTELLI: Yeah, but it's so kind to her … she's the best person I've ever known. I start off the record with a song about her. I think I'm also not much of a gusher, because, I'm not, like “Look at this love song now you need to love it. It's about you, let me watch you listen to it.” Maybe I'm Alaskan in that way where it's, like, kind of unspoken, I don’t know.
LUNA: That's sweet. I love that. What should fans expect from you in the future? Do you have any interesting plans coming up? Are you working on stuff? Or are you just glad to have the album out? You're obviously working on your studios, I suppose.
CASTELLI: Yeah, I think through this process, I also realized I’ve been doing music for a while. It feels like I've been doing it for a long time, even though it hasn't been super long. But I will get messages from people that are like, “I've been listening to you since middle school and I'm going to college now.” I feel like I've seen so many different phases of music just in the last eight, nine years … and then I think the only way for me to keep going, which I want so badly and will, is to just make records and put them out and let it run. That's it, and you guys are gonna get some f*cking weird records from me. Electronic records, and it might not be the most cohesive or whatever, but I'm just gonna do it … I'm not gonna hide my music as much.
The state of music is so confusing right now for me. I see what my friends go through, that I'm producing for, to be an artist. What it takes to write, the touring, the Instagram, the TikTok, and how much effort it takes for them. I might not play ball with that part. I'm still gonna put out my music, and I don't know, hopefully some people still care, but I've seen so many phases that I'm like, it's not gonna stop me from putting out music. In fact, it's gonna inspire me to throw everything out there.
LUNA: Totally. Is there anything else you want to add, or any other narrative, any other production that you want to talk about, about any of the songs that really were special to you?
CASTELLI: Yeah, I mean, if someone has the time to listen, with the setting in mind, hopefully understanding what I was going through and what the songs mean on the face of them, because that's what there is. It's an ask for people to listen to a whole record [but] hopefully they enjoy it. And also shout out to my buddy Micah Prieta, he helped me with the first three songs, and I think he's just such a beautiful songwriter and guitar player. My buddy Jeremy Friedman, too, who helped me write “April.” So, yeah, I've had different friends help me, and so many shoutouts I can’t do them all.
LUNA: Shout out to all the people, to all the helpers.
CASTELLI: Yeah, totally. And all the animals out here.
LUNA: And your secret lover, April, your backyard bear.
Check out Ralph Castelli’s new album, Hope, Alaska, and keep up with him on socials like Instagram, X and Tik Tok.
