On a drizzly Friday morning in September, Jade Lilitri is sitting on the beach, talking about how its sweep can make you feel as small as a grain of sand. He once wrote a song about that, 2017’s “The Walk,” for his radiant one-man post-emo project, Oso Oso. Surrendering the ego with such grace is uncommon, and no less in the often solipsistic realm of emo.
“The Walk” was inspired by the very boardwalk we’ve just crossed in Long Beach, New York—a short distance from where the 27-year-old grew up and lived with his parents, working odd jobs. Before Lilitri moved to Pennsylvania last summer, he would bring his guitar to the boardwalk at night to write. “If you come out here feeling some kind of way,” says Lilitri, “you can find a million metaphors.” On this small barrier island just below Long Island’s south shore, we’re about 45 minutes from Manhattan, and today the beach is deserted, save for the seagulls, the lifeguard, and a sole surfer wiping out over and over in the distance.
Lilitri’s third and best Oso Oso album, Basking in the Glow, has only been out for a week when we meet, but already the crowds at his shows are swelling—last night in Boston was their biggest headlining show ever, and tonight will be bigger. After our interview, Lilitri and his band are heading to the city for any Long Island indie musician’s fantasy gig: a sold-out Friday night show at the storied, near-600-capacity Bowery Ballroom. Still, Lilitri exudes chillness, wearing gym shorts, a hoodie, and a snapback depicting the logo of a weed dispensary; his nose is pierced with both a septum ring and a stud.
Before we hit the beach, Lilitri walks me past the Dairy Barn drive-thru where he most recently worked ringing up groceries while blasting his favorite indie bands. Dairy Barn was a step-up from the frozen yogurt shop he co-managed (poorly, he admits) or the Joe’s Crab Shack where he waited tables in a tie-dyed uniform and was required to perform impromptu line dances to songs like the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started.” What does it take to be an indie rock musician today? In Lilitri’s case, cha-cha sliding for seafood lovers in between self-booked tours.
If there is a regional sound for Lilitri’s generation on Long Island, then Oso Oso’s mammoth pop-punk captures it. Long Beach itself has been an emo nexus of sorts for years. Most recently, Lil Peep was from there. Lilitri was a friend of Peep’s brother, and he occasionally crossed paths with the emo rapper before he was famous. He recalls Peep being quiet and friendly: “He would come in and be like, ‘Oh, you play in a band?’ and ask me questions about touring. And I’d be like, ‘You do music? Show me.’ I didn’t understand it at first, but when he put out ‘Beamer Boy,’ it clicked.” One time, Lilitri and Peep’s brother were going to see Mad Max: Fury Road with Peep’s mom, and Peep made weed brownies and gave them some.
During Lilitri’s youth, members of the chart-scaling emo bands Taking Back Sunday and Brand New were locals: Lilitri learned about their sophomore albums Where You Want to Be and Deja Entendu on the bus in elementary school, after members of those bands moved down the block. (“It’s such a hard thing to talk about now,” Lilitri says, regarding the formative influence of Brand New in the wake of the 2017 sexual abuse allegations against the group’s frontman, Jesse Lacey. “I don’t want to support it monetarily.”) Basking in the Glow was recorded with Long Island producer Mike Sapone, who had a hand in many local emo touchstones of that era.
In sheer, reaching melodic force, in its confessional nature and constant singability, Lilitri’s music certainly bares out some influence of his Long Island forebears. But his writing is exceedingly more introspective, and in conversation, he’s as likely to bring up lesser-heard 2000s emo acts like the Early November, the Starting Line, and Hot Rod Circuit as he is the scrappy riffs of ’90s indie rockers Archers of Loaf, the shouty subtleties of New Jersey pop-punk fixtures the Ergs!, or the giant new wave choruses of the Cars. Lilitri credits the enveloping atmospheres of his music—like gauzy early Death Cab for Cutie cut with 3D pop-punk bite—at least in part to “a lot of isolation and weed.”
Lyrically, Lilitri’s emo excavations feel enlightened—more to do with understanding outsized emotions than simply exorcising them—and his observations on relationships are not embittered but zenlike. Lilitri says Basking in the Glow’s “Priority Change” is about “examining monogamy from all sides,” while the doomy dream pop of “Charlie” is a breakup song about “understanding that everyone’s on their own journey.” And the record’s spare, lo-fi centerpiece, “One Sick Plan,” sounds like a rare ode to emotional transparency, marked by a self-awareness that ’00s emo rarely explored.
Long Beach is more walkable than other Long Island towns, but it still contains familiar suburban rhythms: the diners, strip malls, Italian restaurants. We stop by Lilitri’s parents’ place on the way to the beach, but he tells me not to invest too much meaning in the look of the recently redone house: After the catastrophic damage of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, most of the homes here were destroyed, and people received FEMA money to rebuild.
He has been making music in this town for more than half his life. Lilitri played in local garages and clubs as a kid before his pop-punk band State Lines connected with a more inspired Long Island DIY scene of basements and community spaces. State Lines toured early on with Massachusetts emo band the Hotelier—nine musicians, one school bus—and Lilitri eventually joined that band as a touring guitarist. Over the phone, Hotelier singer Christian Holden describes Lilitri as “a Pooh Bear figure in the world—just really sweet, with an accidental wiseness.”
Lilitri once played Bowery Ballroom with Hotelier. Back then, he thought, “Bowery Ballroom is my dream. I’ll probably never get to play here with Oso, so this counts. Dream done.” But it is sometimes worth it to dream on further. When Oso Oso finally take the Bowery stage, the young audience summons the erupting, communal energy of a basement show, pogoing and crowd surfing and shouting through every rollercoaster hook. He’s home.
Jade Lilitri: I always had a love for really poppy stuff—something about the emotion was just very relatable. When I was little, all I listened to was Blink-182 and Ja Rule, and my mom listened to Third Eye Blind and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
With Brand New and Taking Back Sunday, I still can’t even properly put into context how huge it felt to me and my friends in fifth and sixth grade. I would see their videos on Fuse and know these big concerts were happening, and I wasn’t at any of them.
My first concert ever [April 8, 2006] was actually Bayside with the Sleeping at this place called Club Ritual in Levittown, maybe 200 capacity. And the main support was Paramore. It was insane. That show felt important, but it also was intimate. At that point Taking Back Sunday was playing Nassau Coliseum, and I thought, Well that seems impossible. But then seeing that Bayside show in a small club felt like: Oh wow. You can be a band and it doesn’t have to be this massive thing.
In the mid-to-early-2000s, so much of that music was ridiculous, singing about love from such a selfish perspective—it could be super misogynistic. It’s not an honest assessment of what goes on. I want my music to be introspective, and when I get introspective, I never feel like, “Oh, I was so wronged by these people.” Whether it’s an intimate relationship or friendship, you have to examine what you did wrong. I always wanted that to be a conscious thing in my music, because it’s how I think.
That just comes from life. I’ve been blessed to have a lot of people who have checked me on my shit and been honest enough with me to point out my faults, which has definitely inspired my music and how I think. With keeping open lines of communication, you have to be prepared to hear stuff you don’t always want to hear. You have to surrender your point of view for a second.
Also, I don’t really smoke weed too much anymore—I’ll smoke every now and then—but I used to smoke it a ridiculous amount from 2008 to 2018. I feel like weed helped make me introspective. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.
Sick is, like, “dope” or “cool.” That line is a little bit hopeless-romantic. In January, a new friend asked me, “How would you define your identity outside of music?” And it kind of blew my mind. I had no idea how to answer it. I’ve been so caught up in touring and trying to do this for so long that it’s actually something I should ask myself. Music really does take up so much of my mental space, and not always in a positive way. The “sick plan” is just having a loving support system, or being in a loving relationship, and knowing that it wouldn’t matter if music went away tomorrow. And to me that’s a super unfamiliar feeling, because I haven’t really been able to shake off being a musician since I was like 13.
Yeah. I had the lyrics to that song in my head, and my girlfriend loves the Mountain Goats, so I was like, “I kind of want to make this sound like a Mountain Goats song.”
Something I definitely realized is: Don’t ever think, OK, we just need to get this tour and then we’ll be happy or I need to make this much money and then I’ll be happy. I try not to think of it as an endgame, because it’s impossible. Something’s always going to complicate that. DIY taught me to just do what you set out to do, and when a wrench gets thrown into that, figure it out. I can relate that to everything in my life: music, relationships, my happiness—just never thinking there’s going to be this point or pinnacle you are going to reach where everything will be OK.
It feels like a lot of isolation and weed, periods of my life where I was really trying to think about stuff and communicate through my music. I would go to guitar lessons at this Long Beach music shop when I was younger. There was this drum teacher there that I would talk to when I was 12, and he had a ska reggae-ish band. On his band’s Myspace it said that they were signed to this label, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I was asking him about his band and he was like, “I don’t like playing in my band, because I know the dude who writes songs as a person, and he doesn’t write like the person that he is.” For some reason that comment always stuck with me. I thought, I want people to listen to my music and feel, not like they know me, but that they could get a vibe of what’s going on in my head.
That line is about instilling a little bit of belief in yourself, or in the fact that good things can happen to you. And just believing that there is good in you. If you don’t believe that, you’re going to affect the people around you negatively. And there’s nothing more important to me than affecting the people I care about positively, and giving back to what they give me.
A huge part of this album is about being able to change the cynicism in myself. It’d be a little bit of a front for me to say that I’m this positive person now, but I feel like I’m more proactive in trying to learn about ways of becoming more accepting of the moment and knowing my fears and why they affect me. “Dreaming so small” is a way of saying, “Expecting the worst is affecting how you outwardly react to life, and that’s why you can’t enjoy these moments,” as opposed to just being like, “Fuck it. Right now is great. This second is great.”
