Mur shows up at the Murray Hill coffee shop in an outfit streaked with multicolored paint and a gift for me still drying in their hand. The performance artist is best known for their musical song cycles – their most recent performances Angels of the Air and Salamanders of the Fire will be combined with two other older works for the operetta Mommy this fall – and their visual flair and playful style make Mur’s work immediately recognizable. Air features actors with white powder on their faces and gauze wrapped around their head singing about cream puffs. Fire embraces the element through a litany of overdrawn lipstick and plastic ball necklaces. Mur’s bold, hyperbolic creativity is instantly evident, and within minutes, they strike you as someone you want to be friends with, speaking with a passionate warmth that feels as genuine as it is fun. While Air and Fire are part of a series of environmental shows the artist has put on – they grew up on a farm and considered animals their best friends – they are also engaged in more personal projects, like their 2019 Requiem, a funeral for their relationship with their ex-husband. Their new autobiographical show, g, plays from July 19th to 21st at Wild Project and centers around the LGBTQ+ community. G, in this case, stands both for ‘gay’ and date rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (known as ‘GHB’ or simply ‘G’). I had the pleasure of sitting down with them to discuss their work, identity, and process. 
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Catherine Sawoski: You are a classically trained singer and pianist. Can you tell me a bit more about how and why you broke away from that for a more experimental style?
Mur: I am a classically trained voice soprano, I studied opera, and I always played piano, because my mom’s a piano teacher…but piano was always secondary. I excelled at singing and was a boy soprano star and doing really well until my voice changed and I had an identity crisis. I felt as if a gift I had was taken away from me. I’m still processing that trauma with my therapist. So, I was still taking piano lessons and decided to focus on that. I started writing songs for a soprano voice because I like the soprano range of voice, and have always preferred female songs and arias and had so many wonderful friends who could sing them. I became anti-classical because I couldn’t do it. I could still sing when my voice was changing, but I couldn’t sing like a boy soprano anymore. And I still can’t sing opera in my lower range. And that’s frustrating. I only listened to classical music and jazz and musical theater as a kid because of my parents, and then when that happened, I felt such hatred towards it, and I started listening to singer-songwriters and alternative musicians. I became like an angry female from the 90s. It was all Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. I had never listened to pop music – and while they’re still not considered pop, at the time they had hits in the late 90s and were pop-like because they broke through – and I thought, ‘Oh songwriting can be like that. Voices can be like that.’ I wouldn’t say Fiona or Tory have the best technical [voices], but they’re expressive and they can use them as a tool. It cracked me open to be like, I don’t have to seem like an opera singer. I can make something totally new. And that’s what led me to want to be more of a writer now.
CS: You’re a multimedia artist working in visual and performing arts and songwriting. Do you think these things affect each other?
M: When I’m not writing music, I’m painting. When I’m not painting, I’m sewing. They help me turn one thing off. I know that they’re interacting and influencing each other. And I’ve heard Joni Mitchell call it crop rotating. She’s a wonderful painter and she talks about how switching art forms is about different thoughts. I think being able to be OCD about a painting or a costume I’m making helps me let go of whatever I was OCD about in music and vice versa. The various mediums help me to let go of all my OCD… I’m not one thing. I probably have some kind of fear, deep down, what if I lose one again? What if I can’t play piano anymore… what if I lose my hearing like Beethoven? I have to express myself creatively, so I’ll do whatever it takes… I was talking with the director of, ‘G,’ my upcoming show, about what I’m gonna leave behind. If I don’t have a kid or a family. As artists, what can we leave behind? Even if it becomes a fossil, I want to leave a fossil. Someone will find it in a million years.
CS: You have a very defined aesthetic across your shows, whether that be with your lettering, or in your vision of the costume design. How would you describe your aesthetic?
M: I would say there’s something childlike, a childlike playful quality. It’s both serious and funny. I think there’s something both polished and gritty. There are these extremes.
CS: It’s about rejecting one thing or another?
M: Yeah. I feel free, too. I didn’t want to go to college for music because I’d studied it my whole life. I wasn’t singing, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a concert pianist, I knew I was going to go an alternative route. So I studied visual art. I was never a great technical painter, but I always loved doing it. I’ve seen so much art that I know good and bad don’t exist. I realized that if you love your art, people will love your art. And if you believe in your art, people will believe your art, whether it’s a piece of poop that you smear, a banana taped to a wall, or if it’s the most incredible technical portrait that someone has the skill to do. It’s art and there is no right or wrong. And I realized that with music too, even with artists like Fiona Apple versus Kathleen Battle the soprano, or listening to Mozart or something more technical, or even a voice, like comparing Audra McDonald to Tom Waits – no one can say what’s good or bad… and so I’ve always tried to be as free as possible.
CS: G is autobiographical, and ‘Requiem’ was as well. But then you also have these very political, esoteric shows (environmental works like Air and Fire). What goes into deciding what you want to write about at any given time?
M: Something tells me to write – something will tell me, you should write, and then I get on it. I have a lot of projects also, where I’ll start writing things and then it will only be three songs, and then some things will be 13 songs. Something will happen in my life that will tell me what to write about. The Requiem’ was a result of my friend telling me I was grieving and needed to do a funeral for my ex-husband, who is alive, but for me, it, the marriage is dead. And so I was like, all right, I’ll perform about it, and it’ll make me feel better. And it did it. I wasn’t healed, but it helped. And then, the political pieces come from all that’s going on around me… at any given moment, I’ll see something or I’ll hear something that will inspire me to write about it.
CS: What have you been inspired by recently?
M: I have a show opening in September. It’s called Mommy. I’ve done these element shows over the past three years. I did an earth show, and then a water show. And then I did air and fire last year, and they’re all coming together to be one show. It’s called Mommy. It’s about Mother Earth, our one mommy. And there’s a character, kind of the antagonist, that goes through the story and is this Blue. It’s just the abstract concept of all of the dark, heavy things in life. I’ll be walking down the street, and I’ll see someone homeless, which is common here, and I’ll be like, it’s the Blue. It’s the Blue… I’m not always writing specifically about something, and sometimes I’m writing about it more abstractly or broadly and trying to hide the message, like hiding vegetables in the meal. But yeah, I’m inspired by this city, everywhere I go. The subway! I take one trip on the subway, and oh my gosh, there’s so much. But then, beautiful things like a butterfly flying through the air. I love rats and pigeons…I have a group of characters in Mommy that are inspired by New York City pigeons. There’s inspiration everywhere in this city, from relationships to things I see. I love New York.
CS: I love New York! It’s amazing you’re inspired by rats.
M: I mean they’re here! And there are as many of them as there are of us.
CS: Walk me through the process of how you go about a project. You have a moment of inspiration or an idea, and then do you start with a song? Do you have an idea for a plot or characters?
M: I’ll talk specifically about G. At my last show, I looked into the audience and there were all of these gay men there. And I asked, Who are these gay men? So I thought about writing something for the gay community. You’re taught to write what you know and even though I don’t identify as a gay man – I’m surely nonbinary, no matter what I present as – I have the experience of a gay man. I didn’t know the word non-binary until people started saying it. I didn’t know it was an option to be both. So I always thought I was a gay man. I knew I felt comfortable in my body, but I always knew I felt different. So, even looking into the audience, seeing all those gay men, I felt like they weren’t me, but at the same time, I knew what they were like. That’s where G comes from, it stands for the G in LGBTQIA. It kind of stands for a couple of things. But it started as I’m gonna write a series of songs that are all gay.
I remember when I first started writing songs, like when I was 13 and 14, and I started becoming more alternative, I would write songs about boys and my parents would discourage me. People around me would be like, Oh, if you write it about ‘she,’ it could be more commercial. I was so upset about it. And I think when I started writing G I was like, I’m gonna write about gay stuff, like explicit gay things. Because there’s no shame in it. And I see an audience, and I feel more than ever, we need to be talking about this. Violent attacks in the gay community are up, even within the city.
So I knew it was going to be called G and it was going to be all gay songs. But it was going to be abstract, it was going to be weird, it was going to be funny, it was going to be dark. And it led me to write the first song, which is, about a steam room, which is where it takes place. I was inspired by the idea of gay men in a Steam Room, each gay having a different story like in Cats…I started thinking about all the different gay situations I’ve been in, relationships I’ve been in, types of guys I’ve dated, friends that I know, different things, and choosing which ones I want to put in this song cycle. So I kind of made the list of the songs first before I even wrote the songs.
CS: How do you write the songs? The tone of it is inspired by the subject?
M: Yeah, like how I’m feeling about that. Do you know what a demon twink is?
CS: No, actually!
M: I recently learned this, a demon twink is a kind of a bitchy twink. ‘Demon Twink’ was already kind of fun to me, it’s ridiculous, but also dark. I’m a very spiritual person, so I started thinking, what is a demon? And where does that meanness of that gay guy come from? Usually, a mean girl, even if they’re a beautiful mean girl, comes from their own insecurity. So where did it come from for me when I was being a young bitchy twink? It was from my insecurity. And so that’s actually kind of heavy, and sad and real. The genre that came from matters, and I think in the end, the song is sad, but beautiful and ridiculous. And then there’s a nonbinary song. And the mood of that is much happier, an angelic and positive song, ‘Let’s heal the world, hold hands and rejoice’ kind of song. And so that had a really positive, still funny, but upbeat and light-heartedness to it.
CS: Why should people see G?
M: Because it’s so important for people to look through windows. We’ll never get the full story by looking through a window, but we can catch a glimpse. It’s important, especially for people who are not gay, to keep looking through gay windows. Gay people need to do it too, so we can accept ourselves because we just generally have shame and fear for being who we are. It’s important to go so we can step outside of ourselves, or step into ourselves a little bit deeper.
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