Ghost Shirt makes tenuous peace with death on ‘Crayon Dragon’

As an only child growing up in rural Kentucky, Branden Barnett said he spent a lot of time on his own. 

In late June, the Ghost Shirt singer and songwriter recalled how as a kid he would boot up the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger and immerse himself alone in imaginary worlds for hours on end. The nostalgia inspired by these memories helped to inform the song “Chrono Trigger,” off of the excellent new Ghost Shirt album Crayon Dragon, which borrows from Barnett’s recollections but adds a long-wished-for companion. 

“We played Chrono Trigger/On your brother’s Super Nintendo,” Barnett sings in harmony with violinist Samantha Schnabel, the two moving on to detail the tune’s central figures playfully rubbing their socked feet together beneath a bedspread while harboring dreams of something, anything better.

“It’s kind of this fictional head canon of what my life could have been like if I wasn’t alone,” Barnett said via Zoom from his home in Florida, joined by Columbus’ Schnabel. “A lot of this record, and really a lot of Ghost Shirt songs, are what I call ‘Appalachian trauma songs.’ … And I love that area. I’ll never say a bad word about it. But Appalachia as a culture, it’s strange and it’s different, and it can be hard to grow up in that and not be a football player or a hunter-type guy. If you’re that, it’s great. But if you’re anything else, it’s pretty rough and invalidating. And a lot of that song is the experience of two kids who are not meant for Eastern Kentucky.”

Throughout Crayon Dragon, there exists a pull between youthful innocence and harsher adult realities, and in particular a heightened awareness of mortality. This tragic specter maintains a presence even when Barnett sings of “smeared finger paint skies” on the tender piano ballad “Basement” – an evocative, childlike descriptor that he soon follows with a line about making wishes on the light from long-dead stars. And it’s a weight that falls particularly heavy on “Child of Illusion,” a song both Barnett and Schnabel said they still struggle to make it through in playing back the album, and which Barnett wrote while considering his own demise and the brutal accompanying reality that in death he would never be able to hold his children again. “Child of illusion, when my body’s gone,” he sings, “I’ll wink at you through every setting sun.”

“It makes me sick. And I’m not trying to be dramatic, but the third verse, it leaves me unable to breathe,” said Barnett, who will join Schnabel and fellow Ghost Shirt bandmates Jacob Wooten (guitar), Ryan Hayez (bass) and David Murphy (drums) for a record release show at Rumba Cafe on Saturday, July 13. “Every parent has thought about it, and every parent has woken up at 2 a.m. and been in a pit of horror knowing that is something that will happen. But no one looks at it long enough to process it. And I’m not sure there is a way to process it. The therapist in me is like, ‘That is impossible. It’s like eating a building.’ … My experiences [with my children] are the most precious things that have ever happened for me. And they’re impermanent, just like everything else. And some big part of me cannot ever believe that. And I wanted to write about it. And I think writing that song at least crowbarred me back into a healthy sense of denial where I could function and be a person again. I think a lot of the album is like that, asking, ‘What do you really think about when you’re 40?’ And it’s not chicks and rock ‘n’ roll and bars. I mean, maybe for some people it is. But I’ve got none of that. It’s just existential sadness and anxiety and wondering what the fuck I’m doing and what is even meaningful anymore.”

For Schnabel, “Child of Illusion” hit in a different but equally impactful way, with a rough demo landing in her inbox at a point in time when she was still reeling from the September 2023 death of a former student. As a middle school and high school teacher, Schnabel said she can have students in her classroom for as long as eight years, with those long-developed bonds extending even after some students have moved to college and beyond. 

“And being a teacher, in the last couple of years I’ve really started to realize that I’m a part of this vast community of people and experiences, and that we’re all connected in this very odd but very real way,” said Schnabel, who recalled a Ghost Shirt concert from October, when she completely broke down as the band performed the song “Orphans.” “And so, coming to these songs, introducing myself to these songs, it was a little tough. And I would find myself listening to them, and then I would have to step away for a couple of weeks to process them because it was so heavy for me. It was touch and go for a while, and then maybe six months ago things really started clicking. … It was almost like I had to mourn the songs before I could move forward.”

Barnett credits Schnabel for Crayon Dragon’s expansive sound – “Her string arrangements and voice, to me, are really central to this album,” he said – and the band members meet the sometimes overwhelming lyrical heaviness with New Orleans-evoking jazz flourishes (“Child of Illusion”), sun-kissed orchestral pop (“Sky Burial”) and, on “Shivering Fits,” vaguely skuzzy, driving rock riffs that gradually give way to dancing piano and weightless violin. “I don’t remember who said this, but someone at some point said, ‘You write toothpaste commercials about death,’” Barnett said, drawing a laugh from Schnabel. “And I really like that juxtaposition. … I want it to be the catchiest pop banger with the most upsetting and honest lyrics that I can pull out of myself.”

A number of these songs emerged post-pandemic – a stretch of time when Barnett lost an uncle to the coronavirus and a grandfather to Alzheimer’s, all while dealing with a case of long Covid that temporarily left him with debilitating neurological symptoms. 

“And I was really struggling with all of that stuff, to the point where there was some depression, some panic attacks, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get out of bed,” he said. “I was still taking care of my kids, still going to work, so it wasn’t a total shutdown. But I was absolutely miserable all of the time for a long time coming out of the early pandemic. … And, honestly, it was like, ‘I have to metabolize these feelings into something tangible, something I can compartmentalize, because I’m not my best for anyone right now.’ And for me, that mechanism is music. … So, really, a lot of it was self-indulgent, like, ‘I need this and hopefully it’ll work.’ And it did. I’m not resolved on death, or death with children, obviously. But I definitely feel like it’s contained now, where for a long time it wasn’t. And I feel a lot more peaceful about a lot of these topics now.”