Open Mike Eagle has a wildly creative imagination, but even he was stunned by his circumstances last month at the Aut-O-Rama Twin Drive-In in North Ridgeville, Ohio. On his left side, cars and trucks rumbled by on Interstate 80. On his right, noisy trains roared over railroad tracks every 30 minutes. Eagle was on a stage between them, performing his emotionally candid brand of DIY art-rap, as the opening act for his friend, the comedian Hannibal Buress.
“My memory of it is looking out into a dark abyss of car shapes,” he said on the phone, a week later. At another drive-in gig, cars honked their appreciation, and while he enjoyed the feedback, “that’s not the sound your brain associates with approval,” he added. “It sounds like you’re on your phone at the intersection too long and people are angry at you.”
Throughout a week of shows, Eagle performed only one song from his new album, “Anime, Trauma and Divorce,” due Friday: the woozy first single, “Bucciarati,” a startlingly raw accounting of his experiences with the three subjects in the album’s title. “That’s a very vulnerable song in an environment that doesn’t give you the energy back to make something vulnerable more comfortable to do,” he said.
Eagle, 39, has always been an odd bird in the hip-hop cinematic universe — willing to mix his personal insecurities and philosophical inclinations into songs alongside references to Steven Wright, ThunderCats and the Koch Brothers — but the new album is a poignant, heart-rending confessional of another order altogether.
“I’ve listened to a lot of rap and heard deeply vulnerable songs but I ain’t never heard nothing like this,” he said on a Skype call the week before the drive-in tour. He was in his home in Los Angeles, wearing a purple shirt with a caricature of the wrestling icon Ric Flair on it, and a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses. “It’s terrifying because I don’t know if people necessarily want something like this. Rap is such an escape.”
Eagle is from the South Side of Chicago, where he was raised mostly by his grandparents, surrounded by a crack epidemic that was ravaging the neighborhood. “I was a latchkey kid, so I was home all the time,” he said. “All I watched was cartoons, comedy and music videos.” His musical sensibilities began forming around two distinct poles. “On one side was N.W.A. On the other was They Might Be Giants. That’s the two halves of my brain.”
He met Buress at Southern Illinois University, where he was Buress’s resident adviser in a dorm. “Back then, he was known more for battle rapping, being the best freestyler on campus,” Buress said in a phone interview. “We battle-rapped onstage back then. I would’ve been considered a heavy underdog, but I used him being an R.A. against him. I said some bars like, ‘Yo, are you going to give me a noise violation?’ That day, the underdog won. But he’s always been a funny, insightful dude.”
After college, Eagle worked as a schoolteacher, first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles, where he attended open mic nights at Project Blowed, an underground hip-hop workshop in Leimert Park, the artistically fertile neighborhood where he now lives. He connected with like-minded indie rappers including Busdriver, Nocando and Aceyalone, but didn’t begin releasing his own music until he was in his late 20s.
His albums have showcased an agile mind with a gift for punch lines, tight, sing-songy rhymes, and a seemingly bottomless catalog of cultural references. Eagle’s 2017 release, “Brick Body Kids Still Daydream,” a melodic fever dream of a concept album about the destruction of a Chicago housing project, was lauded as one of that year’s best records by Rolling Stone, NPR and Pitchfork.
In 2019, “The New Negroes," a variety show he co-hosted with the comedian Baron Vaughn, premiered on Comedy Central. It mixed performances from Black stand-ups with musical collaborations between Eagle and artists including Lizzo, Method Man and MF Doom, and sported a definitive mission statement. “We felt like showing Black people aren’t monolithic, Black comedy isn’t monolithic, rap music isn’t monolithic,” Eagle said.
The series’s sensibility aligned with a cultural movement afoot showcasing the diversity of Black artistic expression: television shows like “Atlanta” and “Insecure,” films like “Sorry to Bother You” and “Get Out.” As Eagle began to consider his latest album, his ideas were equally lofty. “The original thesis was, Black people need anime the most,” he explained. “A lot of anime is power fantasy stuff. I was about to connect the struggles of marginalized people to these power fantasies. But in the middle of it, life started throwing me haymakers, so I needed the power fantasy for myself.”
In short order last year, “The New Negroes" got canceled, an anticipated musical collaboration with longtime friends called the Hellfyre Club crumbled and, most devastatingly, he and his wife of 14 years, with whom he has a son, divorced. He channeled all that into “Everything Ends Last Year,” an intense, world-weary lament that serves as the new album’s centerpiece.
“That song was me trying to do what my therapist reminded me to do,” he said. “Write your feelings.” It became the album’s guiding philosophy. “I’d never really done that with my music, not in a directly confrontational way.”
The “Trauma” of the album’s title refers to something from Eagle’s childhood he’s not yet comfortable naming publicly but is the root of much of the recent turmoil in his life. “A lot of my therapy has been trying to process the original trauma to avoid making decisions based on not having a balanced sense of self to begin with.” Anime, specifically a long-running Japanese series called “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” still plays an important part in the album’s creative tapestry.
Despite the heavyweight subject matter, Eagle has a light touch when he needs to. The ethereal-sounding “WTF Is Self-Care” is both a pointed skewering of the subculture of kelp smoothies and high-thread count bedsheets often prescribed as emotional comfort items, as well as earnest acknowledgment that he needs that comfort. The eerie “Black Mirror Episode” is a hysterical rant about how a particularly disturbing installment of the Netflix series ruined his marriage.
“It wasn’t like we called it quits that night,” he said, “but we were watching an episode with this couple in it, and I don’t think we were able to come back from that.”
For the album’s slippery, woozy and occasionally frantic beats, Eagle hit up several established underground rap producers, including Caleb Stone and Gold Panda, but turned to a relative outsider, Jacknife Lee, an Irish producer known for his work with rock bands like U2, the Killers and Weezer, to executive produce the whole project.
“I’ve been a fan for a long time,” Lee said. “Modern hip-hop can be a little macho, but his isn’t. It’s almost bragging about honesty as opposed to some fantasy. He has an ability to be truthful, and do it with humor.”
“Anime, Trauma and Divorce” was recorded before the pandemic shut down the Unites States in March, but everything that’s happened since — not just Covid-19, but worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, a presidential campaign that has magnified alarming fissures in the country — has made releasing it weeks before an election that feels like a referendum on all these things incredibly uncomfortable. “An album this personal is difficult to talk about in general, but there’s this other layer of — what am I doing talking about my personal problems when there’s hundreds of thousands of people dying, everybody’s out of work and people can’t go outside?” he said.
Even as he has been praised for his honesty, Eagle admitted he has felt guilty of holding back the whole truth before now. “I feel like I’ve been curating my own existence,” he said. “Every album, there have been three or four songs I’ve ended up pulling because they were too personal. The dark stuff is always hidden out of view.”
In a way, he said, focusing on social justice issues is just “another way to avoid talking about myself. This particular moment, the challenge was to not do that.”
