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By Tom Lanham
photos by Fox Beach
ries for help don’t come much more
urgently. Last month, brash
youngSaturday Night Live comedian
Pete Davidson — who had joked for
months in sketches about being diagnosed
with borderline personality disorder —
lost any remaining shreds of humor about
his often-debilitating condition when he
posted an alarming message on Instagram,
right before he deleted his account. It read,
“I really don’t want to be on this Earth any-
more. I’ve done my best to stay here for
you, but I actually don’t know how much
longer I can last. All I’ve ever tried to do
was help people. Remember I told you so.”
The finality of it was so frightening that
even Texas Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw — a
former Navy SEAL who Davidson had
mocked a month earlier for wearing an
ominous eye patch — phoned his antago-
nist to check on him and offer helpful
advice.
For celebrities these days, mental ill-
ness is no laughing matter. But not every-
one relies on — or trusts — social media to
communicate their turbulent changes of
mood. Some, like the Vermont-and-
Massachusetts-reared rap-rocker Joe
Mulherin, who writes and performs under
the lower-case moniker nothing, nowhere,
don’t bother firing any online warning
shots about what they’re experiencing.
They let it all out in cathartic songs, like
this artist’s new stand-alone military
march of a single, “Dread,” one of the most
squeamishly uncomfortable anthems ever
penned. And if it feels like it was torn from
a private diary, that’s because it essentially
was. Yet it’s every bit as compelling as
Davidson’s faux-farewell note.
“I look into the mirror, all I’m seeing is
a skeleton,” the artist rhythmically mutters
in “Dread.” “I keep losing weight, so
they’ve got me taking medicine/ I can’t go
a day without relying on these sedatives/
Therapy and doctors, I feel like a speci-
men.” And with that haunted verse, he
takes off the gloves and really comes out
swinging, “Every fucking night that I’ve
been laying in my bed/ Doing all I can to
fight the certain sense of dread/ Feeling
like this panic that I have will never end/
And so I fantasize about that gun up to my
head, yeah.” And the sinister, but sing-
song chorus hammers it all home: “I
wanna know when the pain stops/
Walking around with the same thoughts/
Face down, fucked up with the door
locked.”
Nope. No laughing matter, indeed.The
genesis of “Dread” was simple, its com-
poser relates offhandedly. When panic
attacks and their attendant jagged lashes of
depression began mounting on him last
spring, he made a startling decision that’s
anathema to these greedy, Gordon Gekko-
ish times — virtually, overnight he nixed
his entire summer tour with a posting on
Instagram that declared “Our tour is can-
celled. I’ve been battling severe anxiety
and depression and decided the best
option is to leave for a while and seek pro-
fessional help. I’m sorry. See you again
when I’m feeling better.” Then? The line
went dead as he squealed his career to a
halt, signed off of a juggernaut that would
have taken him to Britain’s Leeds and
Reading Festivals, and delved into various
treatments for his disorder. No daily status
updates on what mood he was currently in
(‘Gasp! Can you imagine?’ Some of you
device-dependent whelps out there are
probably recoiling in horror at the idea of
not alerting the world to every last minute
of your Walter Mitty existence, but it’s
doable. Totally doable. And the world will
get along just fine without all those bloated
bulletins, thank you very much — nobody
gives a shit what you had for brunch today
or how poorly it was undercooked.) “So
after I had to cancel the tour last summer
and seek therapy, I decided to just put it in
a song instead of offering a statement of
some sort,” he says. He didn’t feel it could
easily be condensed into a press release.
The similarly-shrewd Davidson will
most likely bow out of the rest of this sea-
son on that potentially crippling SNL pres-
sure — his future, like Mulherin’s, is that
blindingly bright that its’ worth a small
sacrifice early on to maintain proper
propulsion. What solution did he settle on?
Not merely one, but several, says the
straight-edge 26 year old, who has never
been tempted by the smoking, drinking,
and drug use that most kids his age have
lived through by his age. “I had a vast
array of options, and I wanted to attack it
from all angles,” he recalls.”So I took the
traditional route of psychiatrist/therapist,
and my mom’s a nurse, so she guided me
through that whole thing. But I also took
the whole traditional Eastern route. I’m
really into Buddhism and Taoism, and
meditation has been instrumental in my
recovery, and in my everyday life now. So
I sort of tried everything out and figured
out what works for me, which is a little bit
of everything.” There used to be a stigma
surrounding one's need for therapy — an
admision of frailty, powerlessness that was
more feminine than masculine. But
Imagine Dragons' Dan Reynolds — front-
man for a band that continued to top
Spotify playlists and Billboard charts with
its fourth album Origins last year — open-
ly swears by cognitive therapy, which
helped him machete his way out of a
kudzued mental funk. “So the stigma is
being lifted a little bit,” Mulherin adds.
“And therapy is important — you just
can’t keep these things inside. But I do
think, in some ways, there’s a sort of men-
tal health awareness revolution going on.
And that’s a big step in the right direc-
tion.”
Long before he began uploading
acoustic originals on SoundCloud in 2015
under the anonymous banner of nothing,
nowhere (leading to his DIY debut that
same year, The nothing, nowhere LP, then
2017’s Reaper and a coveted contract with
Fueled By Ramen for last year’s Ruiner)
was battling childhood demons that few
outsiders could comprehend. “I’ve had
anxiety since about second grade, and I
remember finally going to therapists,
where I was diagnosed with anxiety and
panic attacks, and it’s been something
that’s come and gone throughout my life
ever since. And unfortunately, this past
summer. It came back really, really strong-
ly, so I decided to take the time that I need-
ed. The time I needed to recover. And
hopefully, it will set an example for other
people within music and the arts to show
that if you’re overwhelmed or you’re
struggling, you need to take the time for
yourself, because you are not going to be
functioning at your best abilities if you
don’t address that.”
Anyone paying close attention to
Mulherin’s career should have been wor-
ried a long time ago. First, there’s that
moniker, which alone suggests a long
exhalation of futile ennui — a general sur-
render to malevolent forces beyond your
control. Kind of in a post-ironic, self-depre-
cating sense, but kind of not. Nothing,
nowhere has a distinct style now, consist-
continues on page 26
22 illinoisentertainer.com january 2019