Purgatory, Missouri Interviews
SLEEPING BAG STUDIOS May 2025 Interview With Stuart Pearson
SBS: Tell us a little bit about the history of your music, and what’s happening with it lately!?!
Stuart Pearson: I guess my genre is Dark Americana / Western Gothic. I’m currently in the process of releasing the first season of my radio show/podcast called Purgatory, Missouri. It’s based on the three albums of Dark Americana music my wife/partner Hunter Lowry and I have released over the last five years (and a new one coming that will act as the soundtrack for the radio show). We’re using the show as a way of giving our songs a context; something for people to grab onto instead of just hoping they’re craving something creepy in their ears. The first season is 7 episodes, with the season finale happening on June 10th.
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SBS: Let’s talk about the before and after of where you’re currently at. What’s something about the music that you’re making now that you don’t think you could have done five years ago, and what’s something you think you’ll be able to do with your music five years from now that you can’t do today? How have you grown as an artist/band, and what steps do you take to continue your artistic evolution?
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Stuart: Five years ago I hadn’t even heard of audio dramas, except for the old, legendary CBS Mystery radio shows. When I was first approached by the producer of Stage for a New Age Productions to make our songs a radio drama I thought it was a ridiculous idea and said no. Oh well, live and learn! It was good timing. I had a sense that after my last album American Gothic, I was out of ideas and would rot on a stick somewhere. Just releasing another album that almost no one would listen to (ain’t nobody got time for that) seemed enervating and frankly, depressing. So now that I get to tell this crazy story and use the songs as touch points, the desire to create has been tickled. And people seem to like the show so far.
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SBS: If you were to assess the overall health of the independent music scene right now, what would you say? What are the positives and the negatives about the current state of independent music, and what do you feel like artists & bands can do to contribute to the community & help it grow beyond the music being made? If you’re not actively looking to listen to the music of other independent artists/bands, is it really all that fair to expect anyone would listen to yours? How do you help the scene around you grow?
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Stuart: It’s not healthy at all. I could argue that it’s dead. Not from a lack of talent. There are more extraordinarily talented bands and artists now than ever before. But with all that talent comes commoditization. Everyone is pushing content on Reels. Everyone is oversharing on TikTok. Content content content. If you’re not willing to constantly market, then you damn well better love making music for the love of it and little else. It’s also gotten so incredibly easy to make quality sounding tracks now that the “magick” everyone wants has been diluted by the sheer massiveness, the extraordinary volume of good material out there. Some people squeeze through to see some sunlight, but yikes. It’s a scary time to pursue music alone. Building community is important, if you can create some scene and put a title on it so it can create its own genre. I think that takes non-musicians to put the type of time and selfless devotion to getting it done. Active musicians are far too selfish to be the center of a community scene. We have to be. And that’s another challenge – creating a “scene” means lots of time spent in clubs, coffeehouses, home concerts and how many people actively making music can put that kind of time into being that public without damaging our dayjobs? We gotta eat, ya know!
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SBS: What do you consider to be the biggest accomplishment or achievement you’ve had with your music to-date? How do you personally measure your own success – is that something that even can be measured? Is it awards, accolades, chart position…or is your definition of success based on something entirely different? Should success, however you define it, be something that artists are continually focused on – or is success something that naturally occurs in the course of doing what you love to do?
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Stuart: My biggest achievement in music to date is probably this radio show. To be approached was very flattering. To work with some of the well-known and soon-to-be-known talent involved with making Purgatory, Missouri happen is humbling and an honor. Another achievement is finding out AI has registered my existence. Hunter and I sometimes go to Chat GPT or Perplexity or,… well, take your pick, and type in “create a lyric in the style of Stuart Pearson” and something spits out that sounds like…umm…a really crappy lyric I might have written. Though sometimes a real gem of a line comes out. When technology acknowledges your existence, that’s a gold star on your calendar.
SBS: When you’re working on something brand-new, and something about it just doesn’t feel like it’s coming together the way that you think it should, how do you know when it’s time to give up on it, or how do you know that it’s time to dig in even harder and find a way to make it work? Are there distinct red flags you can hear when something’s not working? What are the signs you look for that tell you to stop forcing the material? What would actually encourage you to keep going with the process instead?
Stuart: If something isn’t working it usually tells me so pretty quickly. I will stop and give it a day or two and take another crack. Sometimes an idea is just fertilizer for something else (or just flat-out fertilizer). Sometimes a song comes out that is worthwhile, but not right for whatever I’m working on. So it’s a glimmer of the future. The main song in the season one finale of Purgatory, Missouri is called “The Spirit Moves With A Strong Back Hand.” It arrived during the sessions for the first Dark Americana album Stories and Songs, that I recorded in 2020. It just didn’t fit. It was good, but not quite there and the arrangement was goofy (bad goofy) and the vocal wasn’t working and it was just slapping me and the songs at the time in the face, mocking me and making me feel awful. I had no idea its home was in Purgatory (though reading this sentence, I guess it was the whole time!).
SBS: One of the points of general consensus in the art of making music, is that we all get our sound from somewhere…we hear what we like, then more often than not, we take tiny pieces of what we love to find our own voice & approach to go on and make music in our own way. Essentially, what I’m saying is that it’s absolutely natural to be inspired by other artists/bands, and almost every artist/band ends up having that inspiration show up in their own work in some way, shape, or form. What the real key is though, is retaining your own organic perspective – you still wanna be original too, right? So how do you go about doing that? Are there artists or bands that you know have been an influence on your style & sound? How were you able to incorporate that influence without becoming too noticeably derivative and still be yourself? Should we embrace and celebrate our influences more than we do? It’s almost like we try not to admit influences exist in the pursuit of being original, but it’s like, bruh…if it’s there, we can hear it. We all borrow something from those that came before us to some extent, don’t we?
Stuart: Being true to yourself and staying original has to just happen, without worrying if you sound like someone else. At least in making art, not decoration. Music can be art, which means it’s provocative. It pokes at you. Music can also be decorative, like a nice throw rug you find at a wholesale close-out store. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but chances are the musician can’t really choose between the two. The decorative musician might sound strained and preachy if they’re making “A STATEMENT” and the art musician will almost always sabotage whatever decorative tune they’re working on. Years ago, I had the ear of Warner Brothers Publishing for a possible staff job. They asked me to write something in the style of “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship. I came back with a song about being unstuck in time. It had lines like “Funny how it works, Tutankhamen’s a soda jerk, it’s just a word from Disneyland to dilemma.” You can probably hear the door close while you read that.
SBS: Has there ever been a time where you wrote something inside one of your songs…maybe it’s a lyrical line, or maybe it’s a riff of some kind…something that you did, where you surprised yourself? I like to think we all have a moment or two where we can stand back and be amazed by something we created, and appreciate the fact that maybe, just maybe, we exceeded our own expectations of what we thought we could accomplish – you know what I mean? Get as specific as you can so the fans out there know what they should be paying attention to when they hear it – what’s your favorite thing that you’ve written on the inside of one of your songs, and why does this particular piece resonate so much to you?
Stuart: What comes to mind isn’t in a song, it’s in the final statement the character named “One” makes at the end of the season one finale of Purgatory, Missouri; it summed up the character, the show and our current world in general. The dialogue was flowing and it just spat out and made me say “huh.” I don’t “huh” often. Maybe I should. Good pulmonary exercise.
SBS: I’ve been having a lot of great debates lately about whether or not everybody that’s making music has the right to be heard…and you’d probably be surprised by how different people seem to feel about this issue. I know where I stand on it, and I think you can all probably get an idea of what my position would be from this free interview we’re doing here & the way we run things at sleepingbagstudios…but regardless, I’m putting this question out there to you, because I’m interested in YOUR perspective. Just because you’ve made a song, does that mean people should listen? If your answer is yes, do your best to explain why you feel that way & why we should make a sincere effort to listen to the music of others. If your answer is no, explain why you feel that way, but also explain why people should still be listening to your music if that’s the case – what would make your music the exception, and not follow the rule? Is there any value to an idea that’s not finished, or a song in its demo stages, or maybe something that’s not recorded in a top-shelf studio or with good equipment – somebody still took the time to make that song to the best of their ability with the means they had to create it – should that be listened to, or not?
Stuart: Well, should we know about everyone in the world who falls in love? I could say that’s WAY too big a time commitment. I could also make the case that it would make civilization a much sweeter and happier place if we DID have to hear every love story out there. There’s too much music is like saying there’s too much love. To some people, I’m sure that’s true. To me? …it’s weird. I believe there are two main types of musicians (forget the art/decorative thing from before. Those were the words of an idiot); 1) There is the creating musician and 2) The listening musician. Music is like two tin cans tied together with a string. Stretch them away from each other and you can speak to and hear each other in the cans. Drop one of the cans, and…fuck that phone. When I’m deep in a music recording project, I can’t really hear other peoples’ music – I analyze too much. I hear things I would have done differently. If something awesome hits my ears that I couldn’t do, I grumble. Yes, I suck. BUT, in the months it took me to edit Purgatory, I haven’t written any new music – just using the elements of the songs as spice in the episodes. Since I haven’t been writing, I have been listening, mainly to vinyl I have collected over the years. And now I am in my listening musician mode: allowing myself to be blown away by different bits of songs, not judging, just enjoying and allowing my synesthesia to run amuck. I totally get why vinyl has made such a comeback. A record is fragile, like a small creature. You need to care for it gently to get the best out of the plastic. It takes technology to listen to them. All the things a musician does to his/her instruments.
SBS: There are ups and downs in the dynamics of almost every album we listen to, with very few exceptions. Even those exceptions, probably still come down to more of a personal preference about what we enjoy about music and how we personally hear it, rather than anything being completely and totally “perfect” – you know what I mean? Does an album actually need to have some kind of up/down dynamics in terms of what’s appealing to the masses in order for the best of the best songs in a lineup to be fully appreciated? Wouldn’t every artist & band avoid the ‘down’ side (less accessible/less popular for example) if they could? Does the ‘down’ side represent something else perhaps, like the story of an album or journey of an artist? Is the ‘up’ side of a record as potent or noticeable if it doesn’t have a ‘down’ side to go with it? Would a completely balanced album somehow be boring if it didn’t have the ups/downs that most have? Do we HAVE to like every single song on a record for it to be considered complete? Are the dynamics of an album something anyone can really steer in the direction they want to, or are all artists & bands simply going with the strongest material they have created at the time?
Stuart: Interesting question! I’m in a Sparks obsession at the moment (I get fixated by them every few years since the early 80s). Ron and Russell Mael, when they want to, can shove a song in your head that won’t get out and make you fall on the floor laughing while also making you think about the bigger meaning of the song. And in the very next song they may make you go “eh.” And it’s frustrating because you know their genius is THERE, just…sitting on a Barcalounger? Sunning on the patio? And you are PISSED because you want the next witty salvo. But it makes them human too. It makes you read importance into the lesser songs, maybe without merit. Instead of thinking of it like a “lesser” song, should you look at it in the context of the songs around it? I’m speaking in terms of albums, not singles. If the artist in question is one of those decorative artists I mentioned (forget that “creator/listener musician” nonsense. That was thought detritus of a moron) and just sings love songs or sex songs, then it’s all carpeting anyway. Lyrics are valuable real estate and I don’t like to see old Chevy engine blocks on my neighbor’s lawn.
SBS: This final space is what we call the SBS Open Floor – a spot where you can say anything else you want to say to the people out there. It can be anything at all…your main websites…something else you want them to know about you and/or your music…your favorite bands in the scene right now…the secret 11 herbs and spices to the Colonel’s secret recipe – you get the idea, and it’s probably best you choose something that suits you rather than take any of my suggestions, but feel free to take the SBS Open Floor for a ride. Whatever it is you want the people to know, now is the prime time for you to tell’em! Thanks again for everything – keep in touch!
Stuart: Have a listen to Purgatory, Missouri. It is FREE. It’s 7 episodes long, on all podcast platforms and is the supernatural drama version of a concept album. Spooky songs! Drama! Chills! Zombies (sort of)! Celebrities! Everything a bunch of actors can offer you for your morning drive. Listen then please share with your friends and we’ll all get through this somehow.