Author B.R. Yeager Discusses Fiction, Extreme Meta…

Uniform‘s new album American Standard is a bold step forward for the NYC band. The punchy industrial stylings have been, in many areas, taken over by droning instrumentals that sound almost like doom metal or shimmering, soaring textures that feel wonderfully at odds with the grimy core. Still, the album is as abrasive as ever, the new sound matching bold new lyrics from vocalist Michael Berdan, who discusses his lifelong struggle with bulimia nervosa throughout American Standard.

To effectively convey ideas and imagery on American Standard, Berdan connected with horror authors B.R. Yeager and Maggie Siebert. The trio worked collaboratively in order to write the lyrics heard on the album. Decibel spoke with Yeager about his contributions to American Standard, as well as his recent novel, Negative Space, the greatest lyricists in extreme metal and the albums he’s been listening to.

American Standard is out now on Sacred Bones. Yeager and Siebert can be found online.

How did you end up linking with Uniform in the first place?
Michael had followed me on Twitter from the Uniform account and then it turned out that we were mutual fans of each other’s work. I’m a really, really big fan of Uniform’s work. I think I had a brief message with him saying, “Hey, thanks for following. I really like your music,” and he mentioned that he really liked the books I had done. 

We had also met up in New York at a certain period in time. Him, myself and Maggie Siebert, who also collaborated on the lyrics for the record—we were all just mutual fans of each other. Maybe it was a year or two after that initial contact that he reached out to Maggie and myself, pitching the whole thing, just wanted to see if we would be interested in working together on putting together lyrics. I was very much down, I was very, very excited about working on that. 

At that point, you and Maggie had already known each other for a while, right? From being authors in the same sphere and on the same publisher.
Maggie and I were in contact pretty early on. She was one of the first people who was aware of my writing at all. We had just been in contact for a long time, so we had been in touch with each other since 2017 and 2018.

We had always talked about working on something together. There was a brief period in time where she had put together an online lit zine called Harsh and there was a brief period of time where she brought me on as a co-editor for it. All of the material that was published on there is archived but it’s not currently in production.

Also, through Harsh she had published one of my short stories, so we had a fairly long history of exchanging stories—she helped me with editing and proofing, and vice versa with her, so we had a friendly relationship that was also creative already. It was a very easy kind of thing to enter into. 

What did that collaborative process look like? Did Michael already have some ideas or did you guys really come in with new ideas and kind of fine tune it with him?
It was very cool. It was a very loose and open collaborative process. It started with Michael sending Maggie and I an email with a kind of basic rundown of topics and themes that he really wanted the record to be about. I would let him kind of speak about those. In the press releases, things revolving around experiencing an eating disorder and things such as that. From there, it was pretty much just a matter of sending each other stuff. We had a group email chain going and it would be the three of us writing on or around a topic and sending it to us in all sorts of different forms. 

For the most part, Maggie and I were even just sending Michael straight prose. It wasn’t even broken down into a poetic or lyrical form, but we were sending blocks of prose. Only speaking for myself, I was doing that for myself because I didn’t want to assume anything about what rhythms or cadences Michael would want to try to apply to things.

Of course, Michael was bringing his own text that was written out in a more lyrical or poetic form and we would all just kind of take whatever and extend it, welding different pieces onto each other’s. One thing that’s been really cool is seeing Michael taking bits that I had written and modifying the nouns and verbs and adjectives to be more personal to him. 

Sometimes he would just use the structure of something that I or Maggie had written, but would change the actual nouns and verbs and adjectives to what he was trying to convey. From my end, it was this generative and inspiring mess because we were just pumping out lines and paragraphs to each other. The other people would rearrange it and it would start taking on new lives. Ultimately, Michael chopped it all up and took the parts that he wanted to use, organized them into actual songs and structures. 

One thing I really like about a project like this, because it’s not really my project, I don’t really have to decide whether anything’s good or not. I can just send whatever’s going on in my mind and then it’s up to Michael to kind of figure out what he wants to use. It’s up to him to figure out what’s good. 

You’ve talked about in other interviews about having played music in the past and you’ve had a lot of your writing published, and part of that is having the selectiveness to be like “That will work, that won’t work.”
Absolutely. This whole process, this was after I had published Negative Space and Negative Space had such a long revision process that I came out of it feeling like I had forgotten how to write or how to get in a state of being truly generative and not hyper-critical of my work. 

This was very helpful to teaching me how to write again and how to access that state where I’m being very free and I’m not worrying about the outcome or the quality of the thing because that’s for someone else to decide. 

So you were working on this with Maggie and Michael after Negative Space and before [Burn You the Fuck Alive] the short story collection you released?
I was working on it concurrently with the short story collection. 

This is a much different process in general than anything you had previously worked on and had published.
Definitely. Again, just having to not worry. With any project I do, I tend to be a control freak, which is why I tend toward solitary projects or why I gravitated toward fiction writing, since it’s all on me. I tend to be a control freak and this was so completely different. 

A big thing with fiction writing for me is that it’s always kind of an exercise in trying to understand other people. You’re trying to write people who may be different from yourself or who have different perspectives, who have different values, different experiences. It’s about trying to find how to express that in an honest way, how to approach it in an honest and non-judgmental way and how to find those aspects of commonality. 

It was me essentially trying to write from his perspective, which is something that would be impossible for me to do because I have never inhabited his life. But there are commonalities. I don’t necessarily know what it’s like to have an eating disorder, but I sure as hell know what it’s like to have a body and what it’s like to hate your body, so I just found little aspects that I found personal to myself.

It was very different in that respect but similar in terms of… it’s like if I was writing fiction and trying to get inside one of the character’s heads and trying to see what their perspective is.

It seems like this has a commonality with some of your other writing where you write about these topics that are pretty visceral and can be uncomfortable to read and write about, but you always seem to be able to navigate. A lot of the characters in your writing have struggles and experiences like suicidal ideation and drugs, and in this I see a commonality. An eating disorder is kind of an uncomfortable and tough thing to talk about in a way that’s honest and respectful and still conveys all of what it is.
Totally, totally, and I think that’s something I really admire in Michael’s work, in Maggie’s work and what I try to do in my own work. It’s up to other people to decide if I’m successful, but we don’t ever want to sort of romanticize it being fucked up or having a particular struggle, either with mental health or physicality, but we also don’t want to be looking down on it. We’re always just trying to approach from a position of empathy and personal resonance. It’s never about “Oh, it’s so cool to have suicidal ideation” or “It’s fucked up and a bad thing to have that,” or it’s a bad thing to have an eating disorder. I think it’s always trying to come from a perspective of “How are these aspects of life like our own? In which ways are they not?” 

There’s always the person at the end of it. We can put these labels and diagnoses on whatever, but there’s always a human being at the end of it. How do we convey the experience of someone experiencing these things so that it can act as a buoy or a life jacket for someone who is experiencing it? 

I know that’s something Michael has talked about, because I think it’s something we’ve all experienced. We’ll have this struggle that seems so personal that no one else has dealt with it before, but then we encounter a work of art or an album or a book or something that is able to articulate what’s been in our head that we thought was completely unique to us and maybe isolating in that uniqueness. 

I never want to speak for anyone but myself but from the conversations I’ve had with Michael and Maggie, I think we’re all kind of operating from that same perspective. 

Your own books are getting more popular. Is it weird that something you wrote that is pretty niche and kind of strange has taken off to that kind of level?
It’s profoundly weird. It’s a level of attention that I’m extremely appreciative but there’s a degree of discomfort that comes with it as well. I don’t think anyone really writes weird, borderline plotless, transgressive horror with the idea of hitting it big or anything like that. It’s one of those things that’s been extremely flattering. It means a lot to me. It’s also profoundly overwhelming. 

Especially going into your next projects.
Before, I never really understood why musicians would have a sophomore slump or why certain artists would fall off after their initial success and now it makes an absolute lot of sense why that happens. You really have to fight constantly to not succumb to it, keep your head grounded. It’s very hard to keep yourself grounded after that and to stay motivated to have the same diligence for quality in your own work. You can get your endorphin fix by hopping online and seeing what nice things people are writing about you. It’s easy to get trapped in that. 

It’s an ongoing process of trying to manage my own ego and actively staying grounded while maintaining a rational perspective on everything. I’m very thankful for it. 

It’s kind of like when your friend’s band starts playing music just ’cause and they start to really do it when it was never something that was meant to leave the neighborhood or the state. … It’s cool to see things that are small and niche resonate because they’re authentic.
It’s cliche because in every generation everyone kind of feels like things are going to Hell in a way, but it just feels more so now the way the algorithms are working. But the fact that we still see art that ends up catching on in sometimes a massive way that is coming purely from passion and from honesty and truthfulness. That’s why I get up in the morning: because people are still doing that. 

When you were writing these lyrics with Uniform, you hadn’t heard the music yet, had you?
No. I actually didn’t hear the music until very recently. I heard it all with the master that he sent Maggie and I. He had talked initially about how they were going to be switching up the sound a little bit and getting away from thrashy and moshy stuff and pulling in more inspiration from Swans and The Fall. 

Even discounting my involvement, I was floored by the sonics of this fucking record. 

Did you have an idea in your head of what you thought it would sound like and did it match that?
I really didn’t, necessarily. I didn’t have an idea and if I did have an idea, it was very unclear and constantly shifting. I was very, very floored by the music and performances of this one. I don’t know what I expected at the beginning but it definitely rose above whatever those expectations were.

When an artist does that [sonic] pivot, even your best guess is just hoping your imagination lands in the right area.
One reason I like Uniform so much and one reason I have so much respect for them is that they seem to be a band that is constantly searching sonically throughout all of their records. Each of their records sounds very different from the one that came before while still sounding like Uniform. There’s not really any band that sounds like Uniform, but even then each of their records sounds pretty much completely different from one another. There’s very few bands I can say that about. The fact that they just seem to be constantly searching for ways to expand upon their sound and bring in new elements to drive the experience that they want to have on people. 

That’s something I really admire. 

Other than Uniform, do you listen to a lot of other metal these days? Are there certain bands or genres that you gravitate towards?
I’d say about 90% of the music I listen to is heavy music of some variety. I think I was more pretentious when I was younger and I was into really sort of angular, artsy screamo music and things like that, post-metal. I was and still am a big Hydra Head guy. Discovering Hydra Head was one of the biggest things for me. 

As I’ve gotten older, I still love a lot of the artsy stuff but my tastes have skewed more towards boneheaded and ignorant. I have a newfound love of beatdown hardcore and shit like that, even though I’m the definition of not a tough guy whatsoever. I like really raw black metal. I find myself digging into a lot of older artists. This record that I got into this year which I really love, do you know the project Blood From the Soul [featuring Shane Embury]? I didn’t know about their first record from the ’90s, with Lou Koller from Sick of It All on vocals. 

That’s a deep cut.
That’s been my record of the summer. I’ve been going back and finding a lot of stuff I missed. I’m constantly looking for new stuff. I’ve been listening to a lot of Blood From the Soul, Maggie turned me on to this black metal band Gauntlet Ring that was really into. I bought a couple of their CDs and they’re terrific. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Khanate. Alan Dubin is maybe the greatest lyricist in heavy music. 

Huge influence as a lyricist, particularly because of his detail and how he’s conveying a lot of things that are very typical in heavy and aggressive music, like getting into the mind of a serial killer, but the details that he includes. 

I do just want to mention that I’ve been really obsessed with Witching’s last record, Incendium. I’m so stoked—I’m going to be running an Apocalypse Party table at this local metal fest that Bongzilla and Prong are headlining. Witching is playing it. I’m so stoked I get to see them. The songwriting, the vocals on that fucking record are unbelievable. Obviously they’re pulling from so many sounds and doing so many different things, but the fact that they’re kind of writing traditional old-school heavy metal songs that are so unique that they’re still coming up with new heavy metal riffs, they’re just phenomenal. I love that record.

You’re now working on a different kind of novel. Is part of the creative process for you just doing different mediums, ideas and genres?
With the process for collaborating with the lyrics for this record, it opened me up to different approaches and different ways to think about writing. I think anything that can help me break out of my solitary routine is really helpful. I’m constantly in need of doing something different or changing my style in a certain way, or my practice in a certain way. Otherwise, it gets stale and I get bored with it. As a result, I think my readers would get bored with it. 

That’s extremely helpful. My first love will always be music, particularly aggressive music, so any opportunity to participate in that. The more I’ve gotten to know professional musicians, I’ve determined that’s just not a lifestyle I was cut out for. 

It sounds miserable to me.
If I get to participate by giving words to someone to use, that satisfies a need that I have from there. I’m happy to ride any band’s coattails. [laughs]

It sounds like it created something rewarding for you and I’m sure the contributions from you and Maggie are not a small part of what helped push Uniform in a different direction. Everybody contributes.
I can’t speak for them on that. I’m just happy to play any part and throw anything their way.