Gay Meat’s Karl Kuehn Talks New Album ‘Blue Water’

K
arl Kuehn can’t help but let out a dry laugh as he remembers the time when Hurricane Florence ripped the roof right off the North Carolina rental house he was staying in. It’s not that it was necessarily a funny thing to experience — more so that it wasn’t the worst thing he had lived through that year.

Six months prior to the storm, Kuehn’s mother, Karen Schmitt, suffered six grand mal seizures in a row, leaving her with severe brain damage and various other health complications. Immediately, Kuehn’s life came to a halt as he grappled with the new reality and took on the role as his mother’s primary caregiver.

“The Hurricane Florence era of 2018 was just the world catching up to how the whole year had been feeling for me,” Kuehn tells Rolling Stone. “It was like a manifestation of all this turbulence I had been experiencing. How could a massive storm not upend my life, too?”

Kuehn, 35, details this arduous chapter of his life over a cold brew coffee at a cafe in Ridgewood, Queens. With each memory he recounts, he is somehow able to find the humor and irony in the smallest of details. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s a few years removed from it all, currently living in Wisconsin with his boyfriend of five years, but Kuehn prefers to credit his mother. “Everything that is good about me on first impression is because of her,” he says.

Kuehn’s mom is also a major presence on his solo debut album as Gay Meat, Blue Water, which he’s releasing on April 24 after six years of working on it. Over 13 tracks, Kuehn preserves his mother’s memory with emo-tinged alt rock that never shies away from her complicated life (“Born Cursed”) or the painful situation he found himself in (“More Good Angels.”) 

After the storm, Kuehn moved into his mother’s fixer-upper in his hometown of Southport, North Carolina. “At the time, I was living on, say it with me, Memory Lane,” Keuhn says with a wry smile. During that time, his mom was staying at a skilled nursing facility in nearby Wilmington to receive rehabilitative care. In January 2021, three years after doctors had given her a prognosis of a few days to months, she died.

“My goal was always to get her home and really bounce back,” he says. “Unfortunately we didn’t get there, but we did have all this beautiful time to recontextualize our relationship… And we even have this incredible record, which I’m so proud of. I’ll always have that,” Kuehn adds, his crystal blue eyes welling up with tears. 

Many of the heartfelt songs on Blue Water came together on the aptly-titled Memory Lane in 2019, when Kuehn spent his days documenting his time with his mom on social media, and his nights trying to make sense of his unpredictable reality. “I would have these moments where I felt like a Sims [character],” he says, adding, “A lot of the record was just me processing what I was feeling inside while the Sim of it was happening to me.”

Once Kuehn had pieced enough tracks together to make an album, he considered what name he would one day release it under. His rather unconventional moniker, Gay Meat, was borne from the same humor his mother taught Kuehn to bring to everything he does. “She was so lighthearted and took the piss out of everything,” he says, adding, “It just feels so right that this insane record about grief is attached to this project named Gay Meat. The total picture is really reflective of who I am and who I am because of her.”

The name also works to honor his identity as a gay man. “With queer musicians and queer art, there’s so much camp built into it, regardless of how serious it is,” he says. Still, he admits that Gay Meat “is a deeply polarizing band name” with cheeky connotations. “So many people are like, ‘I’m not Googling that.’ And I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, I have the SEO on lock,’” he adds.

It’s fair to say that Kuehn has a pretty good handle on band names and the power of discoverability. Prior to coming up with Gay Meat in 2020, he spent a decade as the drummer-singer of pop-punk band Museum Mouth. Kuehn founded the band back in 2009, when he was 18 years old, after years spent circling bands in the Wilmington and Raleigh scene that reminded him of Blink-182 (the first CD he bought with his own money was Enema of the State).

A few years later, Museum Mouth found enough moderate indie success in the local scene that Kuehn dropped out of the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was studying graphic design, to focus on the band. “We truly did so many things that were bucket list,” Kuehn says, like catching the attention of pop-punk mainstays Say Anything (who briefly added him to their lineup in the late 2010s) and playing the Raleigh music festival Hopscotch.

But Kuehn had to put Museum Mouth on pause after Kuehn’s mother suffered through her seizures. Two years later, the coronavirus pandemic “really just obliterated what we had going on,” Kuehn says. The time away from his punk-driven band helped Kuehn stretch his sound, taking inspiration wherever he could find it. “I wasn’t really thinking about music at all in a rock sense. I was just thinking about it in my internal diaries flying out of me,” he says. He cites the baroque indie pop of Perfume Genius and the studio synths of Gorillaz as informing Gay Meat’s “mature palette.”

In between his 10 years self-recording songs and joining DIY tours, the multi-faceetd musician worked on graphic design projects for indie labels and bands and built a healthy roster of collaborators he would eventually tap for Blue Water. Kuehn called up Brett Scott, who had worked on Museum Mouth records, to produce and his high school friends to play bass and drums. He also drew an indie all-star crew of backing vocalists, including Jeff Rosenstock, Chris Farren, and Sarah Tudzin. 

“The girls who grieve together write songs together,” he says of working with Tudzin, who lost her own mother to metastatic breast cancer in 2020. “There’s such a strong bond between people who have experienced loss prematurely that it’s unspoken.” The Illuminati Hotties singer lends her delicate falsetto to the acoustic vignette “The Powerball,” a moving song that also includes a voicemail from Kuehn’s mother. 

That liner-notes credit for his late mom is the one that rises above all. “Her voice is peppered throughout [Blue Water] because it would just be insane of me to try and tell the story without her being in it,” Kuehn says. On the final, title track, his mother delivers a short, sweet melody with a hoarse voice, and true to her silly spirit, her laugh closes out the album. “The fact that she gets to close it, that is exactly how it had to be,” he says.