Scott Klein Addiction: A Journey Through Music

“Hey Lady” dives deep into themes of addiction and isolation through a Southern Gothic lens—what inspired you to tell this particular story?

That song came from a place I don’t visit often but always carries me when I fall. “Hey Lady” is about someone disappearing in plain sight. Addiction isolates in ways that even language struggles to touch—it frays your connection to the world, to people, to yourself. I wasn’t trying to write a message, just trying to paint the feeling of watching someone vanish while still breathing. It’s lonely music. Not about the party, but the silence afterward.

Your music feels like it comes from a very visceral, raw place. Can you walk us through your songwriting process—are these characters drawn from real life, or more symbolic representations of emotion?

They’re not really characters to me—they’re shadows I’ve known, or that have passed through me. I write from the images that stick behind my eyes. It always starts with a picture: a woman standing alone at a payphone, a man asleep in a car with the radio on. I see the scene before I hear the chord. Sometimes it’s real, sometimes it isn’t—but the emotion has to be. That’s the compass.

You’re working with Chris “Boo” Boosahda and Jonathan Tyler on this record—what has their influence brought to your sound, and how did those collaborations come about?

Boo and Jonathan are both people who understand the space between notes—the ache in the quiet. Boo knows how to hold a moment, (like he did with Shaky Graves )let it breathe instead of filling it up. Jonathan brought that edge, that desert rock gospel feel, but never pushed it too far. We all met through the strange gravitational pull of music—one song led to a conversation, a session led to a record. We weren’t chasing anything but the truth.

How does this new record compare to your debut, Jesse’s Hotel, in terms of tone and production? Did you approach the studio differently this time around?

Jesse’s Hotel was written in motion. This record was written in stillness. The tone is colder, sharper—more alone. I used to want to fill every space in the song. Now I let the silence speak. We tracked to tape, kept things raw, left in the rough edges. This one feels like walking through an empty house with no furniture and hearing your own steps echo back.

There’s a sense of myth and mysticism woven into your lyrics—how much does storytelling, folklore, or the landscape itself shape the way you write songs?

It shapes everything. Where I come from, stories were how people survived. Not by telling the truth exactly, but by telling it sideways—through parables, through whispers. The land carries weight too. I write songs like you’d sketch a map to a place that may not exist anymore. Sometimes I think I’m just trying to find my way back to something I lost.

The imagery in your songs is incredibly cinematic. Do visuals play a role in your writing process, or do they come afterward as a reflection of the music?

The songs come from the pictures in my eyes. I don’t write from sound—I write from vision. There’s a reel playing in my head: headlights flickering down a dirt road, someone smoking on a balcony at 3am, a motel sign blinking “VACANCY” into the void. The music’s just the frame I put around the scene.

“Hey Lady” feels like a deeply compassionate portrayal of someone in pain—how do you navigate writing about such heavy topics without romanticizing or simplifying them?

Pain doesn’t need polish—it needs presence. I try to write from that place where it still hurts, not from the other side of it. I’m not interested in tragedy porn or glorifying collapse. I’m interested in that quiet moment when someone is still fighting, even if no one sees it. That’s where the real beauty is. Not in the fall, but between the cracks.

How has being a Canadian in the heart of Texas influenced your artistic voice? Do you feel like an outsider looking in, or have you found a home in the Southern Americana sound?

I feel like a guest in someone else’s dream. Texas is vast, mythic, and strange—it welcomes you but never fully explains itself. That’s what I love about it. Being Canadian in this landscape keeps me aware of my own edges. I don’t try to fit in. I let the contrast work for me. The loneliness I carry from the North just found a different echo here in the South.

What have you learned about yourself through the making of this new record, especially in exploring such emotionally raw territory?

That I’m more fragile than I thought, and stronger than I believed. Writing this record didn’t save me, but it helped me sit with the things I couldn’t fix. I’ve learned to stop running from the quiet. Sometimes the loneliness has something to say.

With this record already shaping up to be darker and sharper, what do you hope listeners walk away with after hearing it from start to finish?

I hope it feels like someone sat beside them in the dark and didn’t try to fix anything—just stayed. I hope the songs feel like photographs of feelings you thought no one else remembered. If it leaves a mark, a stillness, a question—that’s enough.