On a hot Michigan afternoon in September, 2017, Evan Stephens Hall was onstage at a music festival, tuning his guitar and thinking about his sunglasses. “I feel like it’s unfortunate that I have to wear sunglasses,” he said, lifting them to squint at the sun and at the crowd. “Because the eyes are the best way to let a person know that you mean it.” He was joking, sort of. Hall, who is thirty, is the singer and songwriter for Pinegrove, an indie-rock band that was then assembling an unusually zealous group of fans—Pinenuts, they sometimes called themselves, with self-deprecating sincerity. There is something embarrassing about loving a band enough to give yourself a nickname, just as there is something embarrassing about singing earnest songs full of romantic complaints. “Just trust me—I mean it,” Hall said, with a sheepish smile. Then he led his band through “Visiting,” which seems to chronicle a long-distance entanglement (“I’m spectral for days on end, these days / With thoughts about visiting”), and which drives toward a fervent expression of confusion:
Pinegrove turns lyrics such as these into rousing and sometimes twangy rock songs, which fail to be cool in two different ways: they are equally as likely to elicit cringes from listeners who value emotional restraint as they are from those who demand fashionable innovation. And yet Pinegrove harnesses, perhaps more effectively than any other band of its era, the power of a well-turned musical confession. This music fits, loosely, into the category of emo, which began, in the nineteen-eighties, as a passionate offshoot of hardcore punk, and expanded to include a universe of bands that were simultaneously scrappy and sentimental. In the two-thousands, “emo” often denoted angsty and theatrical hard-rock bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, which briefly dominated MTV and the nation’s high schools. But by the twenty-tens, when Pinegrove emerged, there was no sense in worrying about who would be the next Fall Out Boy; with hip-hop ascendant and MTV essentially dead, it seemed clear that there wouldn’t be one. The spirit of emo was instead nurtured online and at do-it-yourself house shows, where the financial stakes were low. Pinegrove built a following in basements—first in Hall’s home town of Montclair, New Jersey, and then farther afield. After a few years, Hall noticed that audiences were singing along. The band graduated from basements to clubs and got a contract with an independent record label, called Run for Cover. Pinegrove’s breakthrough album, “Cardinal,” released in 2016, contained “Visiting” and seven more songs that were similarly plaintive, and similarly addictive.
By the time Hall played that festival in Michigan, the Pinegrove cult was growing both more obsessive and less exclusive. An article in Vice hailed “Cardinal” as “a perfect album.” The band was selling out midsize clubs nationwide, playing shows that were starting to feel vaguely religious. Fans were getting Pinegrove tattoos—often an outline of interlocking squares, like those on the cover of “Cardinal.” (The actress Kristen Stewart has a Pinegrove tattoo.) After years of living with his parents, Hall had rented a house in rural upstate New York, with a big living room, where the band recorded an elegant and folksy new album, “Skylight.” Pinegrove seemed poised to enlarge its audience significantly, winning over grownup listeners who were drawn in by Hall’s achy sincerity, even if they would never dream of attending a basement emo show.
On November 21, 2017, about two months after the Michigan concert, Hall wrote a Facebook post that changed the way people viewed him and his music. He explained that he had been “accused of sexual coercion,” by a woman with whom he had had a brief relationship. His post contained nearly eight hundred words, but few details. The accusation itself was not made public, and neither was the identity of the accuser; Hall said that he was withholding the full story out of respect for her privacy. He did not admit or deny guilt, nor did he explain what “sexual coercion” entailed, except in negative terms: “i absolutely never threatened her, i never leveraged anything against her.” Hall acknowledged his “privilege as a man” and as a “recognized performer,” and wrote, “i am so sorry.” But his penitence seemed mixed with confusion, and perhaps frustration:
Hall announced that he would be “taking some time off.” Pinegrove cancelled its upcoming tour dates and the planned release of “Skylight,” and Hall vanished from social media.
A different kind of band might have had partisans rushing to defend their hero, but many Pinenuts, after registering their shock and anger, took a more ambivalent position, trying to balance their fandom with their concern for victims of sexual abuse. The power of Hall’s music derived in part from his ability to persuade listeners to trust him. Just as hip-hop fans may expect their favorite rappers to be as tough as they say they are, many Pinenuts wanted Hall to be as thoughtful and sensitive as the narrator of the songs they loved.
A few musicians from the scene condemned Hall’s statement, or his character; one compared him to the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Many more were conspicuously silent. A fan posted a melancholy plea on Twitter:
In September, 2018, Hall resurfaced. He told the music site Pitchfork that, at the request of his accuser, he had gone a full year without touring. A couple of months later, the band launched a comeback tour, with a concert in Montclair and another in Brooklyn, where Hall only alluded to the topic on everyone’s mind. “This has been a really challenging year,” he said. The band split with its label—a mutual decision, both sides maintained—and released “Skylight” independently. Online, plenty of people wondered why, in a world with no shortage of earnest indie bands, it made sense to support one with a singer accused of sexual misbehavior. But many Pinenuts returned, filling up bigger venues than ever before.
Fans trying to sort out the ethics of supporting Pinegrove didn’t have much to go on. The accuser had declined to comment to Pitchfork, but she had confirmed some details through an unnamed intermediary, who explained only that Hall had applied “verbal and contextual pressure.” In Hall’s Facebook post, he had written, “i have been flirtatious with fans and on a few occasions been intimate with people that i’ve met on tour,” adding that he had “reached the conclusion now that that’s not ever appropriate.” Some people assumed that the accusation had come from a fan.
In fact, Hall’s accuser had been on tour with Pinegrove as a member of the band’s crew. Although she still wishes to remain anonymous, she told The New Yorker that she was willing to disclose her professional experience, to make clearer the pressure that she felt when she and Hall began their relationship. An indie tour can feel like a non-stop party, or like an extended road trip, but it is also a workplace—albeit one with few written rules, and no distinct boundaries between personal and professional lives. She says that this atmosphere, combined with Hall’s power as the leader of the band, gave rise to a romantic relationship that she now sees as implicitly manipulative. “He really had no control over me,” she says. “But, in the bubble of tour, I really felt like he did.” The relationship ended soon after the tour, and she says that it took her a while to figure out that, even though there had been no violence in the relationship, she felt damaged by it—and that she wanted Hall to take some time to reflect on the damage he had done.
Hall, too, talks about the disorienting insularity of touring. He says that, in those early days, he didn’t give much thought to the fact that the people on tour with him were in some sense his employees, not merely his friends. “The culture was really one of equality,” he says. “I perhaps naïvely thought there was no power structure there.” He still resists the idea that he was his accuser’s boss, since at the time the band was not in a position to offer anyone a long-term job or even a living wage. Of course, the leader of a burgeoning band nevertheless wields plenty of influence, no matter how little money he makes. Every rock concert involves a power dynamic: even at an egalitarian basement show, a small number of people make most of the noise, and a larger number of people do most of the listening. Hall says that, as Pinegrove has grown, the band has developed “more self-aware professional practices,” with “more clearly delineated boundaries”; romantic relationships between band members and crew members are now “emphatically discouraged.”
The rise of Pinegrove was a communal phenomenon, enabled by fans and fellow-musicians who became friends, all of them devoted to creating a world apart from the corporate music industry. But Hall’s accuser says that, for her, this lack of structure posed a problem: she wishes that she’d had access to the indie-tour equivalent of a human-resources department. “I think that could have helped me at the time,” she says. “Just having someone that I know I could call.”
“Skylight” was essentially completed before the band disappeared; when Hall published the Facebook post, the label had already distributed advance copies for review. Now Pinegrove is releasing “Marigold,” the first album to reflect the band’s changed circumstances. On a recent snowy afternoon upstate, Hall answered the door wearing a royal-blue cardigan and hand-painted Vans, and he talked readily but carefully about “Marigold,” which, he says, is the product of “a period of intense self-reflection.” Pinegrove’s drummer, Zack Levine, was there, too. Levine lives down the road from Hall with his wife, Nandi Rose, a former Pinegrove member, who now leads her own band, Half Waif.
Hall found emo relatively late in life. In high school, his favorite band was Radiohead, whose lyric sheets resemble postmodern collages. He started a grungy rock group with Levine, his childhood best friend. (Levine’s father plays in a cover band with Hall’s father, Doug, a commercial musician whose biggest hit is better known than any Pinegrove song: he wrote the infernally catchy comic-opera jingle for the financial-services company J. G. Wentworth.) Hall formed Pinegrove while studying at Kenyon College, in Ohio, and found himself drawn to richer melodies, cleaner guitars, and more forthright lyrics. Levine was a founding member, and so was his sibling, Nick Levine, whose pedal steel echoes the sorrowful sound of Hall’s voice.
Early on, Hall described Pinegrove as “language-arts rock,” but some of his most memorable lyrics were so matter-of-fact that they scarcely seemed to have been written at all: “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago / I saw some old friends at her funeral.” He had no evident fear of sounding solipsistic—a word that appears in the Pinegrove corpus—or of issuing, from time to time, the kind of histrionic pronouncements commonly associated with teen-agers. (From “Aphasia,” a crowd favorite: “If I don’t have you by me / Then I’ll go underground!”)
“Marigold,” to be released by the esteemed British label Rough Trade, is noticeably more stoic. Hall says that he wants to avoid the perception that he is seeking sympathy or luxuriating in self-pity. “Yes, I’ve had plenty of emotions about what’s going on,” he says. “But that’s not really what my focus is as an artist.” A singer known for sharing his feelings is trying to be more circumspect. One of the most arresting songs on the album is “Spiral,” which consists of thirty-two amphibrachs—three-syllable lines, with the stress in the middle—building toward an affirmation:
Hall is quick to remind people that his songs are not necessarily reflections of his own life. But on “Marigold” there are plenty of parallels. “Alcove,” which was inspired by a trip to California to see his extended family, is a message from a man heading into exile: “I’ll go if you want.” The end of the album is anticlimactic—the last song is “Neighbor,” an allegory about dead animals that sounds a bit like an undergraduate writing exercise, and it is followed by a meditative six-minute instrumental track, during which the band cycles slowly between chords. But “The Alarmist,” a beautiful lament in 6/8 time, suggests that Hall has not, in fact, sworn off self-pity:
Hall spoke warmly of the musical community that once nurtured Pinegrove, but when asked whether he still felt like part of such a community he paused for a long while. “That’s a hell of a question,” he finally said. Eventually, he was saved by a scratching sound emanating from the kitchen. “Maybe a mouse,” Levine said.
“Yeah, well, they’re around,” Hall said. “It’s cold outside. Let’s let ’em in.”
Two years ago, the survival of Pinegrove was not assured. Many of the band’s fans inhabit a musical subculture where allegations of sexual misbehavior are taken seriously, or at least more seriously than they often are elsewhere. (About a week before Hall’s post, Jesse Lacey, the lead singer of the beloved emo band Brand New, was accused of soliciting explicit photographs from an underage fan; within days, the band had effectively ceased to exist.) This vigilance reflects a shift within the world of emo, long dominated by boys singing about girls, and now increasingly self-conscious about that history. It also reflects a shift in the broader culture, in which consumers are newly aware of their power to penalize public figures who misbehave—not just criminals but everyday manipulative creeps, too. The rise of music streaming has created an illusion of infinite choice: no matter what kind of music you like, there are an endless number of “artists,” as Spotify calls them, eager to find a place in your playlists. On Twitter, one music critic voiced exasperation that people were still writing about Pinegrove: “THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER BANDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That is true. And it is true, too, that a singer like Hall makes it impossible to listen to his music without thinking about his life. But, even in an age of abundance, great songs are a rarity. A band like Pinegrove can certainly be ignored, but, for fans, it can’t easily be replaced.
Although streaming services like Spotify deliver music online, they also offer refuge from the Internet: their algorithms serve up new artists automatically while providing little information beyond names and thumbnail images. And so the release of “Marigold” will surely bring Pinegrove lots of new listeners, many of whom will know nothing about the band’s backstory. Those who do know may find themselves considering whether a yearlong hiatus is satisfactory penance.
Hall’s accuser wants to distance herself from the band’s comeback. “At the end of the year,” she says, “I felt like, The year is up, do what you’re going to do, and I don’t want any part of it.” Certainly, Hall has reacted less like someone who thinks he did an awful thing than like someone who thinks he has been thrust into an awful situation. “It’s a complicated position to be in,” he says. “But I’m trying to play the hand that’s been dealt.” Hall went to therapy weekly during his year away and is trying to live in a “more intentional” way. During one song from “Marigold,” he sings, gently, “No drugs and alcohol tonight / I follow my shadow up and out the skylight.” Since returning to touring, he says, he has been working toward performing all his concerts sober.
Is this enough? Some listeners will be moved by Hall’s determination to keep anger at bay, but others may be disturbed that he is singing—still!—songs that seem to be about his private sorrows. There is no way to judge the sufficiency of Hall’s atonement without deciding how much he had to atone for in the first place. The new Pinegrove sounds darker and more subdued, and the joyful camaraderie of early Pinegrove concerts has been replaced by a warier kind of intimacy. These days, everyone still sings along, but fewer people seem to be taking pictures. They are happy to be there, but not quite ready, perhaps, to tell the world. ♦
