Roland Faunte Wants You to Tap into Your Subconscious.
In today’s age, having memes made about you is a love language. So when rising indie-pop artist Roland Faunte came across his first fan-made meme page (‘Roland Faunte Memes’), he felt seen. That was the year 2018, and he had just released ‘Sewing Kit’ from his bedroom after a tough year battling depression and bipolarism. Now, nearly 200K monthly Spotify listeners and a pandemic later, he has a new album out. “Needle and Thread” breathes hope into his mental health struggles, its honest lyrics connecting a generation of listeners with similar battles.
For PILOT’s latest feature, even over Zoom, where conversations are awkward and nothing is real, Roland tells it as it is.
His secret? Subconsciousness.
Interviewer: What direction are you taking your new album, “Needle and Thread”? How are you departing from “Sewing Kit”?
R: “Sewing Kit” was an emotional reaction to an emergency, but “Needle and Thread” is sort of an analysis of “okay, the initial explosion is over, but I’m going to have this disease for the rest of my life. What is that going to look like? It is the same emotions, but I’m hopeful about it. I feel like I can contain them and succeed with them.
A new lens.
Yeah, a new lens. There is a line in a song called “Ode”: “After thinking of death as a friend, I see things through a different lens.” I had those heavily suicidal thoughts, and I still kind of have them, but I have them under control. I definitely see life in a totally different way.
How has quarantine affected your career?
It took away the possibility of touring. I never thought I’d be making a lot of YouTube videos ever, for the duration of my entire life beyond TikTok. I hated it for so long and tried to resist it as long as I could, but if you can’t play a show, you have to find new ways to promote yourself. I put everything I’ve had in this album, so I couldn’t just do nothing with it. TikTok is an incredible discovery-learning platform, and it worked.
I don’t know if you are aware of them, but there are a few meme pages flowing around. How do you feel about that division of your fans making stuff like that?
The original Roland Faunte Memes has been up since I was a very unknown artist. Honestly, seeing those memes and seeing that what I was making was sparking creativity in other people was incredibly encouraging. If I made something that was so profound and impactful to you that it inspired you to create some other thing, it’d probably hit you pretty deep, right? I haven’t seen the other ones, but that one page (Roland Faunte Memes) is incredible, and I’ve held it very close to my heart.
Your music is special because you’re expressing your subconscious thoughts transparently, whereas other artists sometimes force it in a more pretentious, almost inaccessible way. Do you have any advice for artists to stay true to themselves and go with their gut more?
Going with your gut is exactly the idea. When I left college, I worked at a sales job. I felt really shitty about it and quit because there was a lot of lying. I thought a lot about how if you tell a lie to someone, you’re separating people from reality. I decided to stop lying all together and to see if I could go my whole life without lying. Once I wasn’t able to lie to other people, I had a hard time lying to myself. That made art so much easier because I would come up with a lyric that I thought would be popular, but I knew in truth it wasn’t that real for me.
So if you are trying to write real stuff, be really careful about trying at all. It’s kind of like vomiting; it just comes out and you can piece it together afterwards. The default network in the brain is basically what happens when you’re daydreaming and when people look at paintings that they think are really profound. Their default lights up and that’s when we get into deeper thinking. I write my best stuff when I’m daydreaming, or not trying to write.
I think of the subconscious as a really shy animal, and you have to bait it out and show to it that it is like “it is safe, no one is going to judge you, here you can do whatever you like”. Then, it’ll slowly come out.
You’re great about being open about your mental health, and your music is definitely a window to that headspace. Do you have any advice for readers, particularly male-identifying readers, on opening up about their mental health struggles?
The first thing I would say to male-identifying readers is that I know where you are coming from. It took a lot for me to start talking about these things, and I basically had to completely deconstruct my masculinity as I understood it, which is a serious thing to do. My entire identity was wrapped up in the classic idea of strength like how “I’m the protector so I can’t allow myself to be weak.” I know this isn’t easy; I don’t want you to think that I’m saying “just open up it’s not that hard.” It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do because I had to completely adjust the way I thought of myself. I went from being a happy golden boy, in my mind, to a sick, sad, dysfunctional, diseased person.
If you have bipolar disorder as I do, you have to accept that this is the truth of your life. It is like gravity; it will persist whether or not you acknowledge it or not, and your life is going to be a lot easier if you can just take that first step.
You don’t have to open up to everyone. The most important thing you can do is get yourself a mental health professional. I am super open with my music and certain people in my life, but there are also people in my life that I don’t talk to about this stuff because I don’t think their opinion would be useful.
There is this song in the next album, with the lyric, “it is not a weakness to start spilling all your secrets. I think it is brave and I think lives just might be saved if people talk about their pain out loud, no more things that we don’t talk about.” You might think that bottling it in and powering through it is the brave thing, but it is actually way braver and stronger to get in front of someone and take that first step for yourself. I’m not insulting people that don’t do it as if they are weak — you are not weak — but I’m saying that the true courageous move is to come to terms with the reality of your life if you have one of these disorders or diseases.
I feel like going through it is hard enough, and it is great how you have been able to have these words for people at the same time. This type of thing could just be really helpful for people.
This is the product of me talking to myself perpetually for years. I would be going through it and tell myself, “Dude, this isn’t working! Whatever you are doing isn’t going to work,” and I’d respond, “No, it is going to work. I can get through this. I am a strong person. Everyone deals with their own shit, and I can do it too,” you know? Conversations I’ve had with other people about this stuff are conversations I’ve had with myself thousands of times.
What is the weirdest thing about love?
I don’t know, but I will tell you one thing that is interesting. I was listening to this podcast about the subconscious, and everyone that has been in a serious relationship knows that no matter how much you love someone, you can get really frustrated, angry or sad or nervous. Positive emotions and negative emotions don’t cancel each other out in the subconscious, so you can actually love and hate someone at the same time. That is why you can get to the end of the relationship and have three year’s worth of hatred.
Knowing that is so important in a relationship because even though you love someone so much, you have to tell them when they are pissing you off. Love doesn’t cancel out the hate. If you actively clear out all the resentment as you go through the relationship, everything will be so much easier.
The other day, Roland Faunte was just doing the dishes when a great melody birthed from his subconscious. He tells me he immediately ran to the piano and wrote it all out.
So, if you’re reading this, this is a sign to let your daydreams flow. There is something real and rare about being in tune with all parts of yourself.
Be sure to keep up with Roland Faunte on Instagram and check out ‘Needle and Thread’ below!
Visuals courtesy of Roland Faunte