The music that influenced Stephen Becker’s latest album Middle Child Syndrome
Stephen Becker’s Middle Child Syndrome draws inspiration from both urban anxieties and personal reflection, blending themes of decay, permanence, and unresolved memories. Influenced by films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Becker uses his music to explore societal and personal concerns, like New York City’s waste systems and emotional scars from past relationships. With a sound shaped by experimental pop, jazz, and baroque influences, the album tackles complex topics such as imposter syndrome, failed communication, and familial tension, all while experimenting with intricate song structures and rich, collaborative production.
The following songs are the records that influenced this latest project, Middle Child Syndrome.
Spirit of the Beehive – ‘mantra is repeated’
I’ve been a fan of this band ever since I saw them at Trans Pecos in Brooklyn in 2019. Hypnic Jerks is a home run for me on so many levels – the production, the songwriting, the arrangements, the dramatic tonal shifts, the incorporation of found sound and dialogue. Boundless experimentation over glimmering earworms, a Philly-punk DIY Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, echoes of the Beatles, Madlib, Deerhoof, Aphex Twin. Beehive was a big influence on my most recent album, Middle Child Syndrome.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Judee Sill – ‘Emerald River Dance’
This song…not sure what to say. It’s perfect, sad, insightful. A dusty home recording from the last tragic period of her life that never saw the light of day until it did. I think about this one lyric basically every day: “The deeper sorrow carves in the heart of your being the more joy it can contain.” I try to find big resounding truths like that one in my lyrics, hopefully successfully sometimes.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Blake Mills – ‘Like It’s Something’
Blake Mill is a never-ending fountain of inspo for me. I used to go see him while I was still in high school – he grew up not that far from me and was the stuff of legend even then. I remember when he broke off from Simon Dawes and released his first album and started playing his first solo shows. Those gigs blew my mind – it was a combination of excellent songwriting and guitar playing that I hadn’t quite heard before.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Juana Molina – ‘Cálculos y Oráculos’
I saw Juana Molina while I was on tour – we were playing at a theater directly above her in a two-story venue in Toronto. She sounded incredible, but then something went wrong with her light / sound rig and the show briefly stopped. However, her keyboard was still working, so she shrugged off the tech mishap and went into this small, meditative piece by herself – a simple interlocking chord progression and melody, no lights or backing tracks or anything else. It was powerful. I never figured out which song it was, I don’t think it was this one, ‘Cálculos y Oráculos.’
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Chris Weisman – ‘Maya Properties’
It’s impossible to pick one Chris Weisman song so here is all of the first Maya Properties. I met Chris back in 2016 and then I actually started studying music with him. I would drive up to Vermont a few times a year for 1-hour long guitar lessons that lasted more like 4 hours. Chris is so dedicated to the craft and really treats it like a study, it’s inspiring. We would improvise together, sing weird intervals, play jazz tunes, write weird chord progressions based on rolled dice and thought experiments. We talked about Thelonious Monk, Josh Ashberry, Les Blank. I’m so grateful for the influence his work has had on me.
Mount Eerie – ‘Real Death’
This album unlocked something for me lyrically. I didn’t know that it was possible to be so honest, confessional, and raw. To talk about life, death, and family in the way he does. His story is tragic, but there’s a lightness in the music, and a resulting equilibrium that I feel like is being established again and again each time the record plays out, like a journal entry that he’s processing and that we’re processing with him. I tried to incorporate some of this feeling into my album.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
When you’re done here lose yourself in our full library of features.