Blair Jasper talks i’ll eat you, i love you, personal growth, Bennington radiators, and what’s next for Bark Dog.
Blair Jasper, or Bark Dog, is exactly where you’d expect them to be: the Bingham porch.
It’s late April and one of the first real days of spring– warm, sunny, and vibrantly green no matter where you look. As we sit there and I set up my laptop and microphone to get started, the gorgeous day allows me to understand why they must spend so much time sitting on this porch that is inarguably an iconic aspect of their existence on campus. The email I had sent a week prior, asking if they would be interested in me interviewing them for an article about their music and most recent album, included a bit that said we could chat on the porch if the weather permitted. It seemed like it was important to make it happen.
They’re a relaxed, laid-back interviewee– maybe because this is the first time they’ve actually been interviewed. Our conversation comes a little over a month after the release of i’ll eat you, i love you, Jasper’s experimental pop/indie rock record that put them at just over 15 album releases. “Fourteen,” they correct, telling me the 2022 live at bennington college release “doesn’t exactly count” because it’s a live album of previously released songs.
Nonetheless, having fourteen albums released at the age of 25 is nothing to scoff at. It’s a busy time for Jasper even if you take the album creation and release in March out of the equation: it’s their last term, and they’re busy with finals and the formulation of their senior show. Recently, their Instagram documents see them working with various power tools, art supplies, and lighting equipment through the night and into the early morning regularly in order to prepare for their show on the 29th of May. The amount of work going into the show is entirely reasonable: this album is on an entirely different level when propped up next to the rest of the Bark Dog discography.
i’ll eat you, i love you seems to be situated in a musical sweet spot for Jasper. The album is tailed by 13 other albums ranging from indie bedroom folk (2017’s Them’s the Tides), to instrumental near-ambient (2017’s Sinkhole), to an album dedicated to the art of Jasper “not being afraid to try weird shit and just have fun writing songs” laden with EDM and indecipherable crashing noises (2023’s holding pattern). i’ll eat you, i love you weaves together all of these and everything else previously individual in Jasper’s prior albums– each song on the record manages to work towards this common goal of musical maturity, showcasing Jasper’s growth in every aspect of creating these songs.
As the record progresses, the sound is as experimental as it is grounded in so many previously explored sounds for Jasper: judgement day borders unsettling and rough in an obviously personal way like so many songs from albums circa 2016 to 2018, every ten years dissolves into a trap beat like its predecessors on 2023’s holding pattern; birthday card keeps the bright, twinkling acoustics inspired by Jasper’s love for folk music before adopting the electric guitar and strong vocals heard in their more recent work. The album’s opener, aftercare, combines the incredibly literal lyrics and short run time from the early Bark Dog days with glittering synths seen especially post-2020. The stand-out second track in the blind is as nostalgic as it is refreshing and new as it calls back to a harder folk sound reminiscent of some of their first albums.
Combing through their discography, I attempted to find a sort of year 0– some sort of turning point– that marks the “beginning” of Bark Dog’s music as it exists today. It’s almost as if there’s a Bark Dog BCE and Bark Dog CE. Jasper knows this point seems to exist, too, and it nearly seems like it is simply a matter of vulnerability that ends up making such a difference. “I don’t think it holds up– I wasn’t writing for anyone else to hear, but not in a healthy way,” they explain, speaking specifically about their earliest work. “My lyrics were so literal. The word “pain”, if you made a word-cloud of my earliest albums, would probably be the biggest. It started as a very transparent coping mechanism for just dealing with whatever I was dealing with at the time.”
Perhaps, then, the year 0 would be when they arrived at Bennington in 2020. After graduating high school and enrolling in Hampshire College in 2017, Jasper entered a period that, while incredibly difficult, ultimately ended up leading to serious introspection and positivity when viewed in retrospect. “I was not ready for college,” they admit, talking about Hampshire. “I should’ve taken a gap year, but it was just so drilled into me because of my high school– I went to one of those schools where it was like, you’re going to college!– that’s not everyone’s path, but I had it drilled into me that it was mine, and I flew too close to the sun and dropped out.” Their intended field of study during that first term, ironically, was psychology as they intended to become a therapist. Laughing, they look back at it with a new perspective– “I think I just needed therapy more than I needed to be a therapist.”
Dropping out of Hampshire was more of a slow trickle than a rug-pull at the end of their first term. As that fall semester went on, they recall that they withdrew from every class (that, hilariously, didn’t actually include any requisites for studying psychology) except for one: an acoustics course. During this period, the music they released was– more so than any other music in their catalog– a sort of emotional purge. “A lot of the music I made during that time…Just in the time I was at Hampshire, I put out two albums and an EP. Most of the stuff is really hard to listen to, because I know how miserable I was at the time when I made it,” Jasper explains, talking about the releases of Sinkhole, These Great Big Sun Showers, and Giraffe all during that 2017 fall semester. The music from this era– Bark Dog BCE, if you will– has all the marks of that before that makes it hard for Jasper to listen to the music now, in 2024. The music released from 2020 onwards is not entirely musically different, nor is it unidentifiable when sat next to their earlier releases, but it is obviously coming from a less emotionally raw place for Jasper and bears the marks of a musician exploring and tinkering in an entirely new way. Their arrival in Bennington was something that seemed to be a turning point in both their music and personal life. “I look at the point that I started at when I came to Bennington to now, and it’s just this insane amount of growth as a person.”
One of the undeniable markers of their growth and a delightfully Bennington-esque attribute of Bark Dog and Blair Jasper is their affinity for live shows. “I had never played an actual show with original music, besides a show at my high school, until getting here.” They don’t need to think for very long when asked to recall their first show, and they look back at it with immense fondness. “The first one I made happen about 3 weeks into the term, in front of McCullough, where I lived at the time. I just whipped out my stuff and set up outside, posted on my story that I was doing a show, and did a 30-minute set where people actually showed up. It was…a really fun time.”
My first introduction to Bark Dog was at a show early on in my first term– a good portion of shows (however planned or spontaneous) at Bennington tend to include Bark Dog, so the chances of eventually seeing a performance from them weren’t slim. Their live shows are as calm and intimate as they are rambunctious and intense, depending on what songs they’re choosing to play that time around. “Live music is such a social event,” says Jasper. “It’s such a community, and even if you don’t know anyone else in the audience, you’re still coming together and experiencing something together. When you’re listening to recorded music, it can also be that, but it can also be pretty solitary– it’s so universal. For me, I’ve always enjoyed the really solitary aspect of it. When I got here, I was so lucky to get the opportunity to perform so much.”
Their immense discography– over 200 songs on Spotify and counting– leaves them with immeasurable amounts of combinations for their live shows. Bark Dog’s sheer range can be seen in what sorts of shows they can play and fit remarkably well in; with some shuffling, they can create set lists that work for a more low-key Bingham acoustic set as much as they can play alongside Surgeon General or do a set at Sunfest in 2022 (“I like to scream at shows,” they laugh, which is true). “I usually like to play what’s new,” they eventually settle on when I ask how they can possibly choose what ends up on a live set when they have so many options to choose from. “There’s a performative aspect that you tap into, of course, but something about live shows is that they’re very raw– very vulnerable. You’re being perceived by this mass of people who are, like, captive and listening to you. You’re in the zone.” They ponder their setlists for a bit longer, and burst out into laughter when they think about how many songs they really do have, and how exactly they manage to choose what to play. “There will be no Bark Dog Eras Tour.”
Sometimes, before shows, they will ask the followers of their Instagram if they have any requests. I ask them if they think they have a fan favorite song or a crowd pleaser, and they laugh at the idea at first. “It’s interesting to think about the concept of a crowd pleaser. This is a wild concept to me.” With a little more prompting, they come to their conclusion. “Well, I mean…Caused U Pain, which definitely has the most streams of any of my songs, by far. I don’t like that song,” they admit. “I don’t like that song at all. It wasn’t a healthy song.” For them, it’s half a problem of it being representative of a difficult period in their life; half dislike of the actual sound and musical production. They explain the process of creating the song was something like assembling Frankenstien’s creature, with large components of the song being inspired by their own favorite songs at the time. “I don’t like the song and I’ll probably never play it again.”
When I give them a far-fetched hypothetical where they are able to play one song for a sold-out show in Madison Square Garden, they choose in the blind for their one song. I sit up a little straighter at that– that’s one of my favorites. It also currently sits as their number one song from i’ll eat you, i love you on Spotify, with a little over 3,100 streams at the time of writing. When I think of the song, and the fantasized sold-out show, I end up asking them how they feel about the idea of success– whatever “success” even means. “I don’t want to be “2 million listeners on Spotify” famous. I think, knowing myself, being at that level might not be good for me. What I really want is to find wherever my niche is. Whatever city, whatever place that is. I mean, I was always thinking “this is as far as I’m going to get”– and I keep, continuously, breaking that. Ultimately, I’ve been doing so much at Bennington that just…makes me happy.”
It’s about halfway through the interview that I finally get around to explaining why I’m writing this article anyway, and why exactly I was interviewing them. “Oh, yeah– I was wondering why,” they realize before asking me to explain. I tell them that it all started when I saw them at a show last December in DownCaf, the night before move-out for the winter. They nearly launch out of their seat with excitement before I even finish my sentence. “You went to the one my band played?! No way, because, only like, ten people were there!”
Their excitement is palpable, and it’s a reminder to me that as much as you think Bennington musicians are famous in some larger way, they’re really just your classmates who are excited to hear you made it to a little show and liked it or that you listen to their songs. It’s true, though: the show was tiny, with half of the attendees being the friends I went with. It was the first show Jasper played with their new band: Garrett Crusan on guitar, Laila Smith on guitar and banjo, Garteth McCullough on bass, Lily Gibson on violin and mandolin, and Ethan Laird on keyboard. Because it preceded the release of i’ll eat you, i love you, the only songs played from the album were judgement day, perpetual state of disbelief, absolute free fall, and in the blind. The show was intimate and left me thinking about Bark Dog (and listening to absolute free fall, one of two singles for i’ll eat you, i love you) nonstop. Even before the release of the album, I found myself driving around my hometown in Florida and listening to Bark Dog– except, as I drove down the streets that I’d known my entire life, my playlist wasn’t just playing a random artist or song as much as it was playing Blair Jasper, the fellow Bennington student who also lives in Bingham and who was now existing in an entirely different context to me as I drove past my high school listening to their music. There was something about the dichotomy of it all that struck me. After the release of i’ll eat you, i love you, I found myself thinking as I listened to it that it’s not every day you can just send an email to an artist you like, who just so happens to also go to your college, and sit down with them the next week for an extended (two-hour long) chat.
That’s the thing about their music: it, in the current period of their life, cannot fully be removed from Bennington. The context that Vermont provides the music is more than just elucidatory, it provides a sort of communal, if-you-know-you-know aspect to their work that is particularly endearing to me and perhaps the main reason behind my choice to write this and to reach out to Jasper. Here’s a challenge if you’re a Bennington College student: listen to the entirety of i’ll eat you, i love you. In the last 30 or so seconds of auto-return, really crane your ear and listen carefully. Sound familiar?
“It is the radiator!” Jasper laughs, seemingly delighted that I managed to pick up on the clanging of the Colonial radiator that fades in at the end of the fourth track enough for me to ask them for confirmation. Vaguely, I was worried I’d been at Bennington long enough for auditory hallucinations of the radiators to start up. “It was such a deliberate choice with that radiator. I may have even opened the window of the common room to jumpstart the [recording] process. I love the sound and I also hate the sound. When you just start living in these houses and you have no idea, it just sounds like someone is taking an ax to the radiator. It was a clear if you know, you know. If you went to Bennington, you would know that sound anywhere.”
So many aspects of their music, even if it is altered just enough or is nearly imperceptible, is interwoven with Bennington so tightly that it must be acknowledged when discussing it. Perhaps this is the most noticeable– and the most heartrending– in the closer for the album, perpetual state of disbelief. The song, Jasper says, was one of the first written for the album over the summer of 2023. It came at a particularly difficult time for Bennington, and is a song with a palpable outpouring of grief that can only come from a certain type of fondness and love. At shows, it tends to be one of the most requested, maybe because of this cathartic, communal aspect found within the 6-minute track. After finishing the song, Jasper knew it would be the closer for the album immediately, and essentially worked backwards as they continued to write and develop what would eventually become the fully-formed i’ll eat you, i love you. “perpetual state of disbelief is my favorite to perform. It’s a really good closer to the album,” they explain.
“It was just such a statement. It was the equivalent of the end of a book– it was just the completion; what you walk away with. It was an idea that I couldn’t be more concise about or say any other way, so I developed the album thinking about how I could build up to it. In the sense of worldbuilding, it was like, this is true. What else is true? That’s how I feel like I write in general. I don’t really plan things out. If this line exists, what other line exists? If this song exists, what other song exists? What makes sense in this world? It might not all sound the same, but it’s all working towards something,” they continue. The album, then, works as an unraveling that ends with the wind being knocked out of you. It isn’t so much of a punch as it is falling onto your back and staring straight up at the sky. The lyrics are gently devastating: When I find myself on Walnut Street / In a perpetual state of disbelief / I will make another offering / Under that tree that you admired.
Curious, then, I ask them about the experience of writing such intimate songs and sharing them so publicly when we exist in a place as small as Bennington with barely 800 classmates. It seems nearly terrifying to me: your life is so centralized, all of the people you know are in one place, and you write songs about your life. How could you possibly navigate the inevitable strangeness that comes from wanting to, say, write about a connection with someone and then see them in D-Hall the next day? Jasper insists it’s not as difficult as I seem to think it is, and their opinion on the matter seems to be the result of evolving as a musician and writer. Because of their previous proclivity for writing things in the most literal way possible, they have grown accustomed to (and fond of) giving their lyrics a bit more of a semi-opaque finish.
“Well, I think about perpetual state of disbelief. There were some people who suggested that I said “Second Street”. I thought that would be a little…too on the nose,” Jasper explains as an example. “Walnut Street”, the lyric they ended up settling on, is the street of both their childhood home and highschool in Newton, Massachusetts. “As I’ve worked that [songwriting] muscle, I realize I want to tell stories. My earlier stuff really did have such a 1:1 ratio of what my life was, and the life of the song. There are more songs than others where I’m just painting a picture of a relationship, or a dynamic, or an idea. If it feels too personal, too direct and too explicit, it almost feels too self-serving. I want other people to be able to think about their own lives and experiences when they listen to [my music]– that’s art, to me.” And as for how they’ve grown as a writer? “Time. Songwriting is pretty innate for me now. You don’t sit down and think “how am I going to write a sentence this time?”– you just do it.”
For Jasper, music seems to be so innate because of how long they’ve been working at their craft. As a child, they were in a variety of music lessons and were creative from the get-go.
“I was doing performing in high school and middle school, and I started playing guitar– self taught– in 8th grade. It was the first instrument I started playing for myself, really. I think I started playing ukulele a year before that. I had taken drum lessons from seventh grade to sophomore year of highschool, and piano lessons from first to third grade– and I never practiced either and detested those lessons,” they laugh. In high school, they acted (“I describe myself as a recovering theatre kid,” Jasper tells me, before also letting me know that joke was originally from a stand-up comedy set of theirs), before deciding to leave theatre behind because of its demanding, and incredibly draining, atmosphere. While Jasper was still in high school, they saw the creation of an album for the first time. For a capstone project, a senior they vaguely knew created an album. To say this impressed and inspired Jasper would be a severe understatement.
“It was mind blowing to me as a freshman that someone could just…pull all of that together, and do that. It was super inspiring. The seeds were being planted, but it still felt unattainable to me. Like “oh, yeah, someone can do that– not me though”. I would just fool around on a drum kit or on random instruments at home, and there wasn’t really any sort of know-how, or vision, besides getting ideas out,” they tell me. Around this time, their perspective on music-making changed from something that reminded them of despised piano lessons to something that was more individual and rewarding. “That was the foundation for what the early Bark Dog days were like. By the time I got around to making my first album, it was the summer before my junior year of high school.”
It was a different world for them then– the first album, Today and Then Tomorrow, from the way they describe it to me, seems to have come from an entirely starry-eyed Blair Jasper that had no idea they would end up releasing 14 albums in the span of eight years. “I was just putting everything I had into it, because I was so hopeful. I had never done it before, there were no precedents. It was freeing in a way, because I could try a lot of shit I would never do now. Half the songs on my first album are instrumental– it’s my longest album to date at 42 minutes. 15 songs, I think.”
Experimental sound and sound as a medium separate from music is incredibly important to Jasper. From how they explain it to me– someone with essentially no “real” knowledge of music beyond what I like and what sounds good to me– sound is something entirely different from music at times. In this experimentation era, they did everything from releasing a song that was essentially silence with interspersed, random background noises (and has since been removed from BandCamp simply because of how much it annoyed Jasper– “It was so stupid”) to mixing their first album entirely on notoriously fickle and primitive Audacity. The fascination with sound has been life-long for them, and they recall a childhood memory that seems to capture this: “I got this laser spy toy kit…there was a little, cheap voice recorder and the quality was so shitty, but I just would talk into it or record other sounds and I was so interested in the terrible quality. With that lo-fi, it just adds a texture. It’s just not how you’re used to hearing sound.”
After hearing a friend’s older sibling’s experimental radio show on Oberlin College’s Oberlin Radio, they were hooked on the idea of experimenting, even seemingly absurdly, with sound. “It was a sound art show, sound pieces, and I was totally enamored with the idea. I had never thought about an art existing as sound other than just music and what we perceive as music.”
Besides the interest as a child and the fact that they’ve always been sensitive to sound, they chalk it up to simply enjoying the sensory aspect of it. “I like to be stimulated. In a certain setting, when you actually want it, it’s wonderful. I think that might be why people do drugs. It’s a controlled dose of a wild experiment that you’re willing to be a part of for a certain period of time,” they explain, before adding: “Drugs are a little less universal than music.”
Speaking of visuals, something that is particularly important for Jasper in the context of creating these fully immersive, artistic experiences comes from their family. In the summer of 2023, Jasper shared photos of art from their late great-uncle, Paul Slapion. Described by Jasper as a “humble but prolific artistic genius”, Slapion passed away after a fight with pancreatic cancer in 2006. Slapion, primarily in the 80s, created immense amounts of art in a variety of mediums: framed mixed-media, sculptures, photographs, digital collages, and a unique form of photographic silkscreen printing that involved printing onto layers of plexiglass. As Jasper helped move their great-aunt out of the home she had shared with Paul this past summer, they sifted through boxes of art in his art studio that had not been touched since his passing.
Even though they were 8 at the time of their great-uncle’s death, the discovery of his art lead to Jasper establishing a sort of artistic kinship with Slapion as they worked on i’ll eat you, i love you starting that summer, surrounded by the art that had been placed in Jasper’s childhood bedroom for safekeeping. Over the course of the summer, Jasper created those first tracks– perpetual state of disbelief, in the blind, birthday card, and judgement day– with great-uncle Paul Slapion’s art staring them head-on. “Suffice to say, we missed each other in terms of being able to connect about our art, and it haunts me that I never will get the chance to have known him like that,” Jasper writes in an Instagram caption from July 2023. “But I am so grateful to have gotten to know him like this.”
i’ll eat you, i love you features Slapion’s art for both singles, brass tax and absolute free fall, and for the album itself. The colorful, layered paintings have a sort of depth that can never truly be captured on a 2-D screen simply because of the way they were created– they were painted on several different glass panels that have been fused together. It’s a wonderful choice for the album’s artwork of course because of the sentimental value, but also because of the similarities between Slapion’s art and Jasper’s music: both are passionate, vibrant splashes of color that create a cohesive whole with countless hours of dedication and love behind them.
Throughout the interview, Jasper and I kept returning to a joke of “and what’s next for Barkdog?” It seemed funny because of how cliche the question is, but as time progressed, I found that the potential answer was inevitably only getting more interesting the more I learned about them. How can you create so much in one place, and then go elsewhere? Perhaps it’s naïve, but as their graduation approaches at the end of the month, I wondered what in the world Bark Dog would be if they weren’t impromptu house shows, or DownCaf, or avoiding walking to Jennings to record sometimes because “it’s a pain”. Sure, they’ve existed and been making music long before their arrival at Bennington, but the version of Bark Dog that comes before us today only exists in the way that they do because of existing in Bennington. Not wanting to give them an existential crisis, I bite my tongue for the most part. I do hit them with the question of “what’s next for Bark Dog?”, though.
With their answer, I realize that they’re not terrified for the future or anxious about the dissolving of some sort of life or artistry that can only be extant under incredibly specific circumstances in an incredibly specific place. In fact, they’re deeply thoughtful, and very excited. “There’s been a lot of thought about what’s next and taking time after this album to not rush and do something right away again,” they tell me before going on to clarify that, perhaps, this is more Bark Dog taking a break more than Blair Jasper taking a break. “And that’s under the Bark Dog name. It’s not dead, but I need a sec to regroup– to see what else is there. I have a lot more life to live before I have more to say. I think there’s a lot of room in my brain right now for collaboration. If there’s another Bark Dog album, it’s not for another…two years, at least.”
Beyond just being inspired by what is to come, Jasper also just wants to be somewhere that isn’t Bennington for a change of scenery. “I’m ready to exist in a place that isn’t here, you know. It always seems like this is all there is. It’s not, at all.” They share some of their thoughts regarding Bennington, which have all been shared in various different ways by presumably nearly every student since the inception of Bennington College: isolated, echo-chamber, bubble. All of the things that make you eager to rejoin the “real world” at some point, no matter how fond you are of it in Bennington.
Going back, I ask them about collaboration, and they light up. This, they tell me, is one of their favorite aspects of creating music. Jasper tells me about some of the collaborators they’ve had and artists they’ve worked with, mostly other Bennington musicians and artists. Garret Crusan, who plays guitar in the Bark Dog band, is described as being from “Surgeon General fame”. Again, I forget that these are other Bennington students as much as they are nano-celebrities who are all related to each other’s music in some way. It’s sort of like a Dave Grohl creating the Foo Fighters after Nirvana situation. “The through-line of collaborating with Garrett has been consistent and wonderful. There was the sort of proto-Surgeon General band called Good Question, where Garrett was on guitar and singing, Lily Gibson on bass, me on synth and the occasional sampler thing, Finn McLaughlin on drums, and Layla Smith on guitar. It was really fun, not very high-stakes– we even played Sunfest.”
Jasper thinks of some of the people they’ve already mentioned, and then considers who else they need to “shout out” for a minute before continuing. “Lily Gibson has been a really great collaborator, she plays violin in my band. We’re just homies. She’s been working on her own music under the name Lily May. Oh! Olivia Phillips– who does music under the name Lovebait– is someone– well, the only person I’ve actually written a song with. That’s something I’m really proud of. Marina Flemming has done some backup vocals for some of my songs– and her music is so awesome.”
In this period between i’ll eat you, i love you and whatever project they’ll release next, Blair Jasper has some goals. “I need to strengthen my collaborative muscle,” they say, for one. “More shows in the Boston area, hopefully.” When I ask them how they’ll know when it’s time to start really creating with this next, faraway project in mind, they explain it’s the sort of thing that simply will feel right when the time is right. “I think– whatever it is– it has to be worth breathing life into. You kind of let go, and then people will own it after you.”
When I glance at my voice memo ticking towards the 2-hour-mark, I feel a bit disappointed that I have to end such a wonderful conversion that strayed so far from the typical formalities of an interview. As we finish up, Jasper chats about what song of theirs they could recommend as the “introductory Bark Dog song” (they decide it’s in the blind, same song from their hypothetical Madison Square Garden gig), the fact that they hope to do more live drumming in their future projects, and what demos of their songs tend to sound like. I feel like I’ve been introduced to their world in the span of the conversation, right down to the detail of being on the Bingham porch.
“Bark Dog”, for Blair Jasper, could be defined in many ways: a beloved project, something they can always return to, the name under which they release music, a living diary, themself, an alter-ego. Though, in this part of their life, Bark Dog seems representative of a philosophy for Jasper more than anything else, and they absolutely do not mince their words. “I just had this moment, somewhat recently, where I thought: No, really. Fuck it. This is the one life I have. I want to spend it doing the thing that’s most important to me. That, and what I really care about is my happiness and the happiness of people around me.” They smile at that. “That’s all.”
Bark Dog can be found on Youtube, Spotify, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud. Their senior show, i’ll eat you, i love you, will be held at 9 pm on March 29th in the Lester Martin Theater.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. These services are free and confidential. For Bennington students in need of support, Campus Safety can be reached at 802-447-4250 for connection with 24/7 on-call therapists.
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