'Cos I Wake Up Again and Again: An Interview with Sinai Vessel
Talking with Caleb Cordes about Asheville, Tom Petty, Flannery O'Connor, and the excitement of being declarative on new album I SING.
Stop me if you know this one: God decides to test the faith of a guy named Abraham. Says sacrifice your only son for me, take him up to the mountain. Abraham agrees and in the hot morning dirt he ties up Isaac, grips the weapon, and stands poised to strike– until an angel calls out to him. Hineni, Abraham says in response. “Here I am.” Ready to kill his son, he announced himself, trying as best he could to not let the fear and doubt destroy him.
Recorded in Asheville and produced and mixed by Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, Claire Rousay, Rui Gabriel), I SING is the fourth album for Caleb Cordes under the Sinai Vessel moniker, though its emotional clarity feels more like the stuff of a debut, a first proclamation from Cordes about who he is and at he believes.
On the surface I SING is an album about money and its lack. Cordes has been doing this for a while and I SING voices the frustration over a still-precarious financial footing: anger, disappointment, and doubt at still hustling to make a career out of music. On “Country Mile,” he sings “Ten years eatin’ shit/and going back for seconds/what did you learn from it?” and it could serve as a thesis for the album. What’s the use? Thoughts mixing hope, despair, and just plain painful self-awareness line the lyric sheet as Cordes contemplates the reasons he feels compelled to keep going– keep humming melodies, keep writing songs, keep mapping out tour stops and friends’ houses to stay the night. Because the other option is giving up on music, and for better or worse, that doesn’t seem like an available choice.
Raised in evangelical North Carolina, Caleb Cordes began making music that mostly fit into the emo world, with songs that struggled with faith, the church, and his place in it all. Cordes was a worship leader at his church growing up. He’s written about his love of Pedro the Lion and David Bazan’s 2011 album Strange Negotiations. While his music has moved from emo to indie folk (especially his 2020 album Ground Aswim), Cordes is still writing his way through spiritual questions, though clearly a different set than when he began releasing music in 2011.
I SING imbues Cordes’ persistence with a type of religious significance– sometimes this persistence is a blessing, other times a burden or source of insecurity. Ultimately, it’s just something that is. But it is an act of faith to say who you are, doubt and all. So then, the title’s curt declaration of presence feels like one of faith, or what Abraham might say to God if he had a Bandcamp instead of a son. Here I am– I sing.
Across the album are lines that speak to a larger question about what makes us who we are, of the death and rebirth of the self, of being and unbeing. On the somewhat ironic opener “Doesn’t Matter,” Cordes sings “when we fuck I forget who I am/ and come to myself again / and anything I came here with it/ doesn’t matter.” Later on “Dollar” he delivers the biblically-phrased aphorism “Nothing a dollar buys can stay.” Bogged down by the material world and seeking relief, he looks beyond it.
All that said, don’t take away the impression that I SING is uniformly downcast. It represents Sinai Vessel’s most diverse set of songs. “Country Mile” is a guitar-chugging jam. “Best Witness” is a big, new stab at something Cordes has been building to: a heartland rocker. It makes sense that Cordes just completed a stint on the road opening for Wild Pink, since “Best Witness” is full of sparkly guitar, ethereally watery keyboard, and an open-hearted shout of a refrain. Maybe the best is on the title track, where Cordes matter-of-factly states that he sings because he keeps waking up, before the song ends in a cathartic wash of droning guitar, the lead guitar line blipping across like faint radar.
The closest vocal comp to Cordes on I SING is Jeff Tweedy. “Laughing,” with its unflinching acoustic guitar, gorgeous pedal steel, and narration from an existentially lost highway driver, sounds like a vault track from Wilco’s A.M. This makes sense– I SING lands Sinai Vessel firmly into an emo americana space, there’s a lineage from Wilco, Gillian Welch, Bon Iver, and Wild Pink.
Whistle Stop spoke with Caleb Cordes to discuss Tom Petty’s influence, Flannery O’Connor, Asheville’s minor league baseball team, church music, and making big declarative statements.
Whistle Stop: I love the name Sinai Vessel. What is its genesis?
Caleb Cordes: That dates back to when I initially formed the project when I was in high school. I was definitely in that evangelical Christian context at the time. But I was also just pretty fascinated by the Bible itself, like not as a holy text, but just by like, a really fucking weird story collection.
It's kind of outlandish, fantasy writing. It's really wild. But I was fascinated by Mount Sinai as it appears in the Bible, it's this mountain that is cloaked in dark clouds. And it's where Moses would go up and speak to God, he’d have to venture into this darkness to this meeting point. And I was just fascinated by, you know, how dark and strange that would be– it's a very Old Testament understanding of meeting with God, rather than the kind of like, you know, God is your buddy thing that evangelical Christianity had going on.
I really wanted to know what the word Sinai meant and so I looked it up in a Bible concordance. It said “uncertain,” and I was like, “Oh, so Sinai is the Hebrew word for uncertain. That's cool.” And so I sort of smashed it on to vessel being like, I'm uncertain exactly where to steer this vessel. It's essentially a long way to say project or band or jar, I'm going to fill this with whatever I want, I'm uncertain of what it means or what it is. But the fun thing about it is that many, many years later, I realized that Sinai was not the Hebrew word for uncertain. They were just uncertain of the definition of that word. [laughs]
That’s so awesome. Do you have any memories of your early life with music?
I just remember being pretty obsessed with music at a young age. Really obsessed with the capacity music had to transport me somewhere. My parents had a pretty extensive CD collection and a really nice stereo. So some of my earliest memories are just taking CDs down and letting the cover art lead me into putting them on. When you’re a kid and you have absolutely no reference point for any song that you’re hearing, music is honestly terrifying. I had no idea what I was experiencing and it felt so loud, it really moved me. I wore out Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits. It’s still probably my favorite record of all time. Came out the year I was born in ‘93 so I guess it was a brand new CD I was spinning when I was like 2. And I remember when I was a child listening to REM. My parents kind of raised me on REM, one of their first dates was an REM show. That and Peter Gabriel, probably just anything that was bombastic and loud.
I'm glad you brought up Tom Petty. I hear his influence on I SING. What is it about Tom Petty that you want to emulate or that you liked about him?
I think I’ve asked myself that question over the years and why I've had such an enduring attraction to his music. First of all, it feels like the default, it's like the best that music can get to me. It's what pop music is to me. Like, everyone kind of has their like, central idea of like, “Oh, it's the Beatles,” or like, it could be a Charli XCX record or something like that. But for me, that is the most ideal sort of realized music. I mean he's also put out a lot of goofy music too. But that Greatest Hits record is it and yeah, I’ve just loved his music for a long time. I've really loved his capacity to kick out a hit at so many different points in his career. And it was honestly just music that I loved without really thinking about it for a long time.
And then maybe like around five or six years ago, it deepened for me. I read his biography by Warren Zanes. And then watched the documentary, which essentially follows the narrative thrust of that biography almost exactly. And for a long time, I thought that Tom Petty was writing in Beatles mode, where lyrics don't really mean that much. But then I began to click with him as a songwriter. Just like, actually meeting everything he was saying. And you know, I feel like I was more used to, at that point, like a post-2000s, very confessional kind of songwriting. But I think that he was, especially for male rock music, because it's written in the first person, I think that he was a much more honest, tender, and direct songwriter than a lot of his peers. And it really rings through and makes the songs vital.
I had a couple of rules for I SING. I really wanted to figure out how to make pop music that was concise but still retained my own identity completely. And I also wanted to experiment with making music that works just as well ignored as it did engaged with. And I think somebody like Tom Petty really works in that way– you can zoom in and pick it apart, read it as text on a page, or you can just put it on while you're on a fucking boat or something and it just works. There's so many directions that you can try to idolize it and emulate it from.
[On Ground Aswim] there was a song called “Guest In Your Life” that was maybe the most pop-forward song that I’d ever made at that point. And that definitely had some flavors, that was sort of like the jumping off point maybe in the last record for the new one, just trying to make more songs like that, that just like kind of hit very quickly.
I want to go back in time a bit. As a younger person, you were a worship leader?
Yeah I was the worship leader in youth group and then eventually also in the adult Sunday morning church as well.
And worship leader means you’re playing guitar and leading people in song?
Yes, yeah. And like kind of fronting the bands. And then also was at one point, for both the adult and youth groups, arranging and choosing the songs and then also booking the musicians. I was doing all of this in high school, which is pretty wild– and all unpaid.
What was it like?
Oh, it was wonderful. I never second guessed it or never thought about like, “do I want to do this or not?” It was one of the most natural things in the world. I just was really excited to have an outlet to play music and there was just no question about it. I really, really adored it, really adored singing. When I wasn't leading, I literally played everything else in the worship band, drums or bass or guitar. Our church grew to where we had multiple church services so we got to sometimes do it more than once a day and I was just eating it up. I've always been a person who, if I was having like band practices in middle school or high school, like when everybody went to go play Halo or something, I just stayed in the band room and started playing drums or something. Outside of playing in a couple hardcore and punk bands in middle and high school, that was the biggest musical outlet, just playing in church. And it was gratifying too because there was a real regimented purpose for it. It was very much an outlet that served a use.
What was the vernacular music in church at that time?
It was very contemporary. I don't know how to describe it, almost like pop rock. It's really interesting. I've watched indie pop music essentially start sounding like that now, someone like Phoebe Bridgers basically puts out music that sounds like what worship music was in the mid-aughts. [laughs] It's very mood heavy. But with a lot of nice textures, like really big drums.
So yeah, it was it was really lush music. Worship music kind of just sounded like moodier versions of popular music. Like there was worship music that essentially sounded like the Gin Blossoms, almost like jangle worship.
it's interesting for me, because living in New Orleans, I got really into country music. And then through that, gospel music. And I love that stuff. But I have had trouble getting into the more Christian Contemporary. In my head they should be more or less the same because it's all religious music. But it’s quite different.
Yeah, I would say so too. It's very much a tool. It really is fascinating. It's like, really emotionally manipulative music. [laughs] It’s used to evoke a feeling. And I think it's really important to put it in its context, which is like, it's very much used in a live and collective church service. And it's evangelical in the sense that it's music that is used to proselytize. It's used to make somebody who may not be associated with anything that's going on, they will feel something anyway, because of the structure of the music that's being played. And it engenders this feeling of yearning that you know, is then answered, the answer that's given in the church service would be Christ, the gospel, or whatever. It's music that they used to sort of stir up those feelings.
When in your life did that dawn on you, that the music had that function?
I think that it really infused my melodic sensibility for a long time. And I think that I just had to spend a lot of time away from it in order to really understand that context. I do remember there was this one time-- this had to be maybe six or seven years ago. I hadn't been to the church that I grew up at in a really long time, and I went home on Easter, and my family was going to church so I tagged along. I had been to church since then but it was a different denomination, it was a Presbyterian Church, just singing hymns with a piano in a very light-filled old building. But this church is a Pentecostal denomination: there's like no windows, super dark, it's a prefab building. The music is super loud. There's a ton of screens. And then you have this overwhelmingly manipulative, emotional music being played. And it’s stirring people into this kind of heart-rending frenzy. And I was overwhelmed by it and went to the bathroom to escape it and then discovered that since I had left, they'd installed a PA speaker in the bathroom. So you couldn't escape. And it was just so loud. It was unbelievable. I really couldn't believe how loud it was. Just like true rock concert loud. And I was just like, “This is insane. I like actually have to get out of here. This is so fucked up. I'm just feeling, I'm not even feeling attached to anything. I'm just feeling tender for no reason.”
It’s interesting to me because a lot of your music deals with faith, but not explicitly in this album as with past stuff.
There's a song on Ground Aswim called “Antechamber,” which is about like, you know whenever you move from place to place you just have like, a box of bullshit? Like why the fuck do I keep moving this from place to place? I kind of realized that there were some aspects of beliefs that I was still schlepping throughout my life and I just realized that I could just put that down or you know, donate it to Goodwill or something. And yeah, I kicked out the last of it. But totally, everything on that record and before concerns faith.
So are you in Asheville right now?
Yeah, so presently I’m in my minivan traveling from Asheville where I live and have lived since 2021. I moved here from Nashville. But I was born in Asheville and lived all over North Carolina. I grew up in the eastern part of the state and then where my folks still live in Conovor, which is about an hour east of Asheville. But presently live in Asheville, coming on three years.
Why did you move back to Asheville?
I was in the throes of a very era-typical pandemic existential questioning. I moved to Nashville essentially under the hope of making music full-time, or being involved in music full-time in some capacity. I felt that what I did was an anomaly, where I lived in Chatanooga, which is where I went to school and lived for about 7 years. And I wanted to move to a place where more peole were doing what I do. Then the pandemic happened, things fell apart, and I thought to myself “Maybe finishing undergrad would be a good idea.” And outside of Asheville there’s a really tiny school deep in the mountains called Western Carolina University, about an hour away from Asheville. Together with the state they have a reduced tuition program for in-state residents in order to get people to go to this college. It’s like $500 a semester, which is unbelievable. So I was like “You know what, it would be good to go back to school and finish up, see what I can salvage from my burned-out undergrad degree.” I started touring very early on in my 20s and that happened simultaneously with going to school– obviously didn’t pan out. But I thought I’d go back to school and I’ll become a counselor. But I moved to Asheville, tried to work there for a year to gain residency and then along the way, I fell ass backwards into doing music more than ever.
Where did you start undergrad in Chattanooga?
So I technically started in a city called Cleveland which is just outside of Chattanooga at a small Christian college called Lee University. I studied loosely what could be called Critical Theory or Philosophy or Literary Theory, just like a permanently academic field.
I saw online that you’d went to school in Cleveland and I was looking it up and trying to guess what school it might be. I saw that there was a 75% chance it was a bible college.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I was home visiting my folks last weekend and was so going on a run and thinking about how similar where I ended up going to college is to where I grew up. I thought it was this big change, like 4 hours away, but it’s incredibly similar. Super tiny town.
How does literature and philosophy square with a bible college?
It was actually really interesting, and was a pretty good fit with the kid that I was coming into that. I had always been a book kid, interested in philosophy and theology, and I got to run into a couple of professors early on that had such great taste in all kinds of media and the way that they thought about Christianity and spirituality and belief as applied to that media. There was definitely an intersection of Christianity and the text, but they were just kind of serious academics who happened to be Christian, which was awesome. When I look back now– I mean, I went to a bible college in the Obama era, and it felt like a very different place. [laughs] Like, I’ve seen footage of Mike Pence visiting the campus now. It wasn’t the symbol that it probably is now, of like this last bastion of conservative whatever. It was a fairly progressive atmosphere at that school at the time which is really crazy to look back on.
Something that I love about your songwriting is its literary quality. But even past that, you’ve got explicit literary references– I was listening to “Flannery” and it made a lot of sense to me that a writer interested in theology might reference her.
It’s not on this record, but I did that with a new song, where I just did the tactic of retelling one of her stories in song. It’s in the bag for the next record. I revisited that tactic ten years later.
What is it about her writing that draws you in?
The direct literary quality of reading her work is just so much fun. I also love writers who kind of have a really heavy tone immediately. Like something about maybe being a musician first makes me really attracted to authors who, whether by their diction or their sentence structure, are like “I’m the dom, I’m the one painting this scene, this is how it feels to read my work.” It’s just immediately engrossing, even before you get into talking about how interesting the themes are, how unique the stories are. Very violent in a really fascianting way.
This is a total tangent but I was reading Rachel Cusk, she has this wonderful essay about women’s writing and how it’s become this special category because for so long the default was that writing was done by men. And she sort of plays with this idea and plays with the idea that there’s no precedent for women’s writing and what it’s supposed to be, so it can be anything. And then I feel like Flannery O’Connor very much falls into that world. Like there’s no one like her, no precendent. Naturally, being a Catholic female writer from the South, she stands far afield from everybody. And that comes through in what she does.
Sinai Vessel started out in the emo world but made a transit out of that. How did that happen?
In 2017 the other members of the band (when Sinai Vessel was an actual collective) left, which sort of granted me this opportunity to take it back to a songwriter project, which is what the band started as– It's not on Spotify or anything, but the band's first LP ever I put out in 2011. And there's traces of emo on it, but honestly, I feel like the new record is most like the first record that I made when I was 18. It feels like I've gone on this wide arc to now go back to that place. It's really strange. I don't know why I felt that with this whole record but I think that it's because I have now returned to a place where I'm not thinking about genre at all and just doing whatever excites me rather than actively trying to say something. I mean I have songwriting goals like I said with the Tom Petty thing, but now it feels just like doing what I want, which is wonderful.
Something that I was struck by listening to I SING is you've got a lot of songs and lyrics here that feel declarative and essential in a way that a strong debut album might feel. A lot of the songs are coming from a self-aware place of knowing who you are as a writer and why you are a writer.
Writing I SING really excited me because it felt like I wasn't hiding behind any kind of flowery imagery. It just felt really concrete, and stark, and cut-and-dry in a way that I hadn't explored lyrically before. And it also felt like it was very one-to-one with my internal dialogue. I felt like I was able to be more directly honest in songs than I ever had before.
A lot of the record deals with essentially finding out…I put out Ground Aswim, which I felt was such a different kind of statement. And people really responded well to it. But making music didn't become a career for me or anything after that. I think that I had some delusions of grandeur. I had some existential crises. And then discovered myself still making music in spite of all of that. A lot of the record, even if not directly, just kind of spiritually is made with the thinking that music is just this curious thing that I'm habituated to doing. And often it's just a strange thing to spend so much time doing. I've never really done anything else with my life, which as one gets older, it feels like honestly a pretty stupid gamble to have done. And especially with this record being pretty economically aware and so much of the songs talk about money or reference money in some kind of way, and that intersects with having spent so much time on music and not really having anything to show for it besides the craft itself. So, yeah, it felt really good to make, like, almost violent declarative statements, just because that's how I was feeling. This is a really angry record in a lot of ways. I mean, it's a record that's called I SING, but it could also just be called “So what” or something.
On the subject of money, what are your day jobs?
C: Yeah, jobs is a really great way to phrase it. [laughs] There's many. So I only had one job for the past couple of years up until last October, I was a server at like, suffice to say, a sexy barbecue restaurant. Like written up in food magazines kind of place, tons of traffic, really, really high volume, a pretty fun place to work. And also just like great money and flexibility, kind of the ideal musician job. But that restaurant sadly closed and so I was forced to look for something else. So right now for the past couple months I got my first kind of actual hourly W2 job. I’d somehow managed to survive on freelance up until that point. But this record and the last record as well as like all of our touring are entirely just financed by me only. So I have to generate extra income somehow.
So yeah, presently working full time at a cafe as a barista. And then, since October of last year, I have a job copywriting for an environmental NGO. I started writing artists bios this year.
All that stuff and also donating blood platelets every week. You can do it once a month if you're donating blood, but platelets you can do that once a week. I try to time it right. If you start doing it a lot they start calling you and making you aware of when the bonus stuff is. But it can be anywhere from 50 bucks to like, if they are in dire need, a couple hundred. It's really wild and tax-free. And you just get to sit there and read a book for an hour and a half while they take your blood out of you. It rocks. I think that typically the Red Cross does it but in western North Carolina, there's like one private company that has a contract with all the hospitals out there. So it's a very direct need and I think that they're able to have better funding because of it, but it turned out to be a pretty lucrative way to spend a spare hour.
I did a little bit of research on Asheville and I found something that I think is strange, which is that the AAA baseball team is The Tourists. Is Asheville known as a tourism destination?
Yeah. Very, very much. Heavy tourism destination. It's fascinating. It's just known as this like, beautiful art town that's in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's the tourist-friendly symbol of Appalachia. And there's great restaurants and hiking galore. There's been so much tourism spending and it's really worked. And people all over the country who haven't been to Asheville speak about it in this way. That it's where everyone just really wants to go. The sexy barbecue restaurant I worked at was bachelor and bachelorette party central. Like, it's just such a big restaurant and really catered to that kind of party and yeah, people just come from all over, it gets really, really busy. Understandably so, it's an incredibly beautiful place to live or to visit. Especially in the summertime or the fall or yeah, I guess really, anytime.
Were you struck by tourism as a kid? Or did you ever feel any way about tourists?
Not really, I mean I grew up in a really tiny town. So I just was one, wherever we went, we were definitely the tourists. We visited Asheville a lot because that's where my parents lived when they had me, I lived there until I was three years old. So it was always a special place to them. They were essentially tourists that moved there. I would say I wasn't really aware of tourists as a population of people until I lived in Nashville. And then began to see that on Broadway and at the cafes that I worked at. As opposed to Nashville, where the tourism accounts for, I don’t know, like a third of the people in a busy restaurant or something, if not half, In Asheville, especially in the places where I worked, it's overwhelmingly tourists. It's a pretty small town otherwise. So much of it caters to tourists, and it's also an extraordinarily expensive place to live for the South. It's extraordinarily expensive to like, eat, because everything is gouged for tourists.
Have you ever been to those AAA baseball games?
Oh yeah, all the time. I fucking love it. It's one of my favorite things to do in Asheville. It’s also incredibly close to my house, I can walk there, bike there. They do such a good job of promoting, it's pretty easy to get into a handful of games per season for free. There's just so many places around town that have free tickets and do promos and stuff. And there's great deals on like dollar beer nights. It's just a really fun thing to do in Asheville. And it also invites a really broad cross section of people. It feels like one of the few true Asheville resident sort of common things to do.
I SING comes out 7/26.