Pop Songwriter Ron Gallo’s  Stream-of-Consciousness Anxieties

He’s joking, but only a little. Gallo says the early days of the pandemic removed the usual distractions from his day-to-day life, and he was left to engage with and reflect on the world around him, uninterrupted. It started to feel like he was stuck between two extremes.

“If you’re tuned into news and social media and paying attention to everything that’s happening everywhere, the world can seem absolutely chaotic,” says Gallo. “But then you can walk out your front door and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a nice day, the neighbors are nice, and I’m okay.’ It’s like living in two realities simultaneously.”

FOREGROUND MUSIC is in part an effort to make sense of how to navigate between those two states. There are moments of relief and calm, but the record is most often tense and sharp—a tightly coiled spring threatening to burst. Gallo’s lyrics are acidic and blunt. The spoken-word interlude on the title track sounds like someone yanked open the cranium of a chronic overthinker and funneled their brain’s stream-of-consciousness anxieties right onto a page: “By the way, how are there so many t-shirts on Earth? / I mean, let's say on average everyone has 15 / You times that by billions of people / How is there enough raw materials?”