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On Trust Me's new album, Why I Like Dead Guys, Lynn Breedlove conjures dead people. Let me explain.

The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove’s father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record. The rest of its songs are elegies that tell vivid stories about people who have died throughout Breedlove's life.

Breedlove, Tribe 8 veteran and queer-punk legend, narrates the resurrection of his characters with an inviting baritone and emotional specificity: A girlfriend who returned to her parents' home when AIDS was a death sentence; a grandmother who took him in when he was strung out on meth; boys from childhood he admired or wanted to become; drug buddies; his mom; a beloved family dog. The tragedy becomes the background for a song cycle focused on the emotional intricacy of relationships. Anger and resentment are part of the story, but so are love, admiration, and wily humor.

The album opens with Breedlove's "love letter to a brother from another mother." On "Incompetent," he addresses his brother directly: "I'd visit you in jail, but I'm busy trying to remember how my dad sounded when I'd ask him to whistle while we counted shooting stars." His anger is magnanimous, his humor cutting, his reflection moving. The song borrows the melody of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust”—most famously performed by Nat King Cole—a tune Breedlove’s father would hum while they hiked. The reference is apt. Carmichael’s love song unites the domestic with the cosmic, the place where Breedlove’s characters seem to live.

A psychoanalyst might describe Breedlove's characters as objects. In 1952, Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn made a claim that revolutionized his field: "psychology may be said to resolve itself into a study of the relationships of the individual to his objects." The idea is that our psychologies are not inherent in our brains, but made through our relationships. The original object is usually a mother or caregiver—somebody an infant cannot live without, quite literally. The infant internalizes the object. The dynamic between infant and caregiver then expresses itself through a lifetime of relationships. Therapy, therefore, becomes about creating possibilities for new dynamics in those relationships. Art, this album suggests, can accomplish something similar.

In the 1980s, another psychoanalyst, Jessica Benjamin, sought a feminist model of object-relations theory. Benjamin expanded the theory by emphasizing "intersubjective relationships." In her 1995 book Like Subjects, Love Objects, she explains:

Intersubjective theory postulates that the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully experience his or her subjectivity in the other's presence. This means that we have a need for recognition and that we have a capacity to recognize others in return, thus making mutual recognition possible.

Intersubjective theory postulates that the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully experience his or her subjectivity in the other's presence. This means that we have a need for recognition and that we have a capacity to recognize others in return, thus making mutual recognition possible.

For Benjamin, mutual recognition is key to both psychotherapy and the formation of identity. And to achieve mutual recognition, you need two subjects—two selves, two people. People in our lives must be understood not simply as objects, but as active subjects, people we relate to dynamically.

Breedlove's song cycle develops through a series of stories about important relationships in his life. You might even say that in each, objects—friends, parents, girlfriends, grandmothers—become a subject through the stories he tells about them.

"Mike Brinson," for example, tells the story of a childhood friendship with a boy who died at 16 when a drunk friend drove a car into a tree. He had a penchant for trouble that Breedlove clearly admires. When Mike learns Breedlove is trans, he puts him in a headlock "in front of the whole school." In a voice that lands somewhere between adult wisdom and adolescent bravado, Breedlove comments, "Mike Brinson made me what I am. Mike Brinson taught me to be a man." Returning squarely to his adult voice, he tells us that every time he passes Mike's house or sees that tree, he says, "Thanks, Mike, for making a man out of me."

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Breedlove's characters don't live through memory alone. The album's metaphysical bent conjures them in other ways, too. "Intact Male" tells the story of his mom and her beloved dog—or her mascot, as he calls her—never neutered "in case you needed to make babies." After her death, Breedlove drives to Big Sur with the dog—"she did love a craggy Cali coast." En route, he finds the dog's collar in the backseat, "moments before you dropped dead, like 'Oh, I gotta go with mom, 'cause taking care of her's our thing and this last trip's a hairy ride to take alone, and you'll be alright, right." Breedlove responds with a breathy, resigned sigh, "Yeah." Up to his waist in Pacific coastal waves, his mom tells him, "Thanks for sendin' him." His reply: "I didn't. He just left. But I'm glad he's with you. Nothing like a small dog to assure you death is perfectly safe."

Back on "Incompetent," Breedlove quotes his father, after the step-brother was arrested for another offense well before the murders: "At least he's got a place to live now." The line returns, like Breedlove's characters, on "Don't Take It Personal," the song's penultimate song. It recreates a phone call between father and son. Ominously, his dad tells him that his stepson is angry and at the door. They hang up. This turns out to be the day of the murders. The following day, after county officials deliver the news, Breedlove tells us, "They left, and I called the lesbian psychic channeler, and she said that you said, 'Well, at least he's got a place to live now.' I knew right then it was you, and psychics were real." Breedlove's relationship to his dead loved ones takes many forms.

Throughout, Breedlove relates—intersubjectively—to the dead people whose stories make his musical autobiography, as Benjamin would have him do. Each song on the album chronicles a relationship that makes him who he is, including his father and stepmother. The music, composed and performed with longtime collaborators Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews, is spare—a departure from the trio’s nü metal collective COMMANDO or the raucous dyke-punk of Tribe 8. Here, guitars and synths propel Breedlove’s voice–a mostly gentle ride that revs up or becomes bumpy when necessary.

Fairbairn and Benjamin write mainly for other psychologists. Breedlove, on the other hand, writes for anybody who's experienced grief—or love or admiration, for that matter. Why I Like Dead Guys suggests that art—in this case, storytelling and music—has the power to perform the psychological reorientation therapy is designed to accomplish. By conjuring the dead, he creates a musical autobiography defined by relationships. He does so communally, or intersubjectively, with musicians he's collaborated with for years. We don't get an explicit story of healing. We get a series of stories that add up to who Breedlove is now.

"Why I Like Dead Guys" is a literary record, belonging to a tradition of queer outlaw writers like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Dorothy Allison, and Dennis Cooper—whose work represents human experience outside received norms. You get the feeling that Breedlove came by his insights through this tradition. Breedlove is a novelist and spoken word artist, after all. He narrates these vignettes in a variety of voices, sometimes speaking directly to his audience, often to his characters—especially his father. He also ventriloquizes the voices of those characters. He adopts the personae of his cast. Those insights are strikingly similar to those of psychoanalytic theorists—and, who knows, perhaps Breedlove knows all about them. But he lives among the artists more than the theorists.

On the final track, Breedlove explains why he likes dead guys: "They're safe to approach. You can tell them anything, and they don't give you any backyack or take offense. Such good listeners. If you ever need anything, always available to help when you call. Never leave unless asked. Unobtrusive. They've evolved, have a bird's eye view. The ego's been let go, and they can see where they went wrong. They can forgive you, guide you, because they can see where all their mistakes now. They can be like, 'Look out, a semi!'" I wanna love like that." Object relations therapy is all about letting go of ego and loving in the nurturing ways Breedlove describes.

But Breedlove doesn't claim to have perfected his psyche, or his relationships. Psychoanalysts will also tell you this is impossible. A lifetime of therapy can only help you get better at taming the ego and loving other people. He is clear-eyed about his emotional limitations and those of others. "I never can tell 'em I love 'em when they're around because I'm too busy flinching and defending, and calming myself down, armoring up. They're an army of triggers in the flesh." It may be easier to love the dead, but it's necessary to live among the living—a subject among subjects.

By the end, "Why I Like Dead Guys" feels like one queer punk's autobiographical lesson in revolutionary grief. You'll find no templates for mourning here—no seven stages of grief. Breedlove's grief, and his love, are more searching and expansive than standard cultural narratives allow. With this record, he and his bandmates are expanding those narratives for the rest of us.

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