Editor’s Note: This interview was 
conducted as a conversation between 
friends 
and 
does 
not 
intend 
to 
present an objective viewpoint or the 
perspective of The Michigan Daily.
Ever since I heard Lily Talmers 
sing “Hope, You Whore” live at 707 
Lawrence St. in March of 2021, I have 
counted down the days until I could 
hear it again. Still a socially distanced 
and masked show, the song made all 
barriers fall and removed inhibitions; 
people began dancing — in their 
squares, mostly, but I recall about 
five attendees who linked hands 
and started turning in a manner 
resemblant 
of 
Matisse’s 
iconic 
painting, “Dance.” The melody of that 
song would be stuck in my head for 
weeks. 
I had met Talmers previously that 
semester when I interviewed her 
on the release of her debut album 
Remember Me As Holy, and I grew 
enamored with everything she made — 
her heartbreakingly beautiful lyrics, 
the curation behind every melody 
and the wisdom behind every silence. 
Since, Talmers has become my most 
listened to artist on the 2021 Spotify 
Wrapped, a music collaborator and a 
good friend. 
It only made sense for me to 

follow up on the recent release of 
her sophomore album, one I had 
been waiting for since I heard that 
hypnotizing melody on a still-too-
cold 
Saturday 
afternoon. 
From 
her apartment in Brooklyn, New 
York, Talmers revealed in a virtual 
interview with The Michigan Daily 
the ins and outs of her latest record, 
Hope is The Whore I Go To, which 
she released on July 29. I asked her 
about the recording process, where 
she 
found 
inspiration 
and 
most 
importantly: Why hope, and why is 
she a whore? 
She explained that there is a Balkan 
saying that describes the state of mind 
in which people wait passively and 
continuously for something better — 
longing for a different job, a problem 
to be solved, a lover to love more 
strongly. The saying, “hope is the 
greatest whore,” refers to the human 
condition in which one waits for the 
world to change — nothing but a futile 
attitude that leads to frustration and 
wasted time. 
Talmers, a Michigander herself, 
said the concept for the album 
happened naturally, as a result of the 
effects of the pandemic on her life. 
She said, “(The album) is like, spurts 
of hope and spurts of something 
getting better or even being better 
finally, and then a sort of eventual 
letdown or realization that what you 
idealize is not coming to fruition.” 

In 
those 
years 
of 
global 
unprecedented 
changes, 
Talmers 
resolved to channel all her emotions 
into 
music. 
While 
studying 
at 
the University of Michigan, the 
Birmingham-born 
singer 
recorded 
and released two EPs. Her first 
studio record, Remember Me As 
Holy was released in March of 2021 
and was composed of songs such as 
“Maybe It’s Madness,” “No Woman” 
and “Middle of America,” where she 
writes about the throes of living in the 
Midwest, feeling small in the vastness 
of it all and the itching desire to be 
remembered as something good. 
I knew that whatever Lily Talmers 
released next was going to surprise 
me, and she did not disappoint. 
Her latest record is a mélange of 
impulses. One couldn’t pin it down 
in a genre, an era or a region. It is as 
cosmopolitan as it is crude — lyrics 
unfold 
like 
honeysuckle 
flowers, 
while the sound of drums faintly 
resembles the stomping of feet on 
a wooden floor in Greece. It is the 
world in the palm of her hand. Hints 
of L.A. Americana — the Blake Mills 
and Madison Cunningham type — of 
Brazilian Bossa Nova and of French 
Cabaret abound. 
She 
said, 
“There’s 
a 
sort 
of 
reductionist 
view 
(that) 
folk 
music or indie music is like being 
indiscriminately 
sad, 
and 
I 
like 
the way that this music is deeply 
sorrowful and grieving and disturbed 
in certain moments. But it’s also 
driving and groovy and exciting. I feel 
proud of this music because it’s not 
like a sort of simplification of itself, or 
like, you can’t pin it down in a certain 
way. And I think that represents my 
life, my inner life as a musician and 
as someone who is moved by music, 
and it represents what I listened to 
in a different way than the stuff I’ve 
written before.”
Composed of 10 songs, Hope is the 
Whore I Go To is a perfect voyage of 
emotions. One can sway with “Hope, 
You Whore” and forget the weight of 
every word, every silence, every jolt. 
She sings: “To the rhythm of your 
interest, I will easily unfold / And 
make you promise to remember me 
as good” — in a nod to her incessant 

desire to remain kindly thought of. 
One is placed in a climactic movie 
scene with “Hope is a Human” — the 
strings vacillating, as if someone 
was making you spin until your 
surroundings became blurry. One can 
dance with “Life’s So Fun” while the 
world goes up in flames. It is ironic, 
satirical. It is the epitome of life. 
She encounters hope again in “Hope 
at Table, Talking Shop (La Solitude),” 
and she addresses her as a loving 
whore. Talmers describes hope as “a 
mirror of versions of yourself that 
you want to inhabit.” Throughout the 
album, her conception of hope ebbs 
and flows, but ultimately, like the 
human she is, remains unpredictable. 
In the aforementioned song she sings: 
“She’ll embrace you for a moment, 
then she’ll turn and kill the mood / 
With some heinous imposition, like 
‘I thought you understood’.” And 
yet, like in her song, “Saudades (Over 
Now)”, she says that “she doesn’t mind 
at all to hear about the lonely troubles 
I run into.” Talmers confesses that 
she always returns to hope at the end 
of the day, in hopes of being told that 
it will be alright. 
“I’m really propelled by my hope in 
and love for other people, and that I’m 
always in cycles of being disappointed 
and that there’s a resilience that you 
develop in going on that journey, but 
sometimes it’s too much and you have 
to write about your grief,” she stated. 
The 
pandemic 
propelled 
these 
thoughts that she turned into poetry. 
This period of time, nonetheless, 
also played a part in the magnitude 
with 
which 
her 
sound 
matured 
from her first album to the second. 
She mentioned that Remember Me 
as Holy was recorded in the midst 
of the pandemic, at a time when 
performing the songs live was almost 
inconceivable — making it a much 
more stripped-down and intimate 
album than her latest one. 
Yearning for performance, Talmers 
and her incredible band recorded 
Hope is the Whore I Go To fully 
live. 
Composed 
of 
various 
U-M 
alumni, including Geoffrey Brown, 
Ian Eylanbekov, David Ward, Aidan 
Cafferty and Ben Green, Lily Talmers 
brought music to life, literally — “I 

trusted that impulse and kind of 
wrote down exactly what I thought 
should happen in the song.” 
Photos courtesy of Lily Talmers
“I’m kind of against perfectionism. 
Like, if a record is a remnant of my 
life as a musician, then it should be 
authentic to that and then willing to 
like, if there’s like a vocal mistake, 
then that’s what happened. It’s fine.”
Most of these musicians contributed 
to her previous record, which has 
resulted in a conjunct sonic growth 
that is clearly palpable in every song. 
These one-take songs reflect a mode 
of songwriting and producing that 
clearly enlightens the talent of each 
and every person involved in the 
project. “We didn’t make a lot of those 
very sterile momentary decisions. It 
was much more holistic as a whole, 
which is kind of the best way, I find, 
to do music, and also the best way that 
I can think about what I want from a 
song,” Talmers said. She mentioned 
that she felt “much more righteous 
and free” with songs being “more 
technically demanding of me as a 
musician.” 
With this record, Lily Talmers 
leaves the Midwest and makes the 
world her backyard, in what feels like 
the homiest and most intimate patch 
of earth. There’s no room in this 
record for monotony. It will make you 
celebrate that you’re alive, and then 
make you cry for just the same reason. 
It is not anonymous. It is grandiose 
but not brutalist; it is frustrated but 
not self-deprecating. It’s a cinematic 
opening, a folkloric village scene, a 
sweet lullaby, a soulfully defeated 
chant. 
Hope is the Whore I Go to 
is 
exquisite 
storytelling; 
a 
live 
performance; 
a 
one-on-one; 
a 
confessional; the things we cling 
to; the search for answers; solace 
in solitude; the life of the party. Yet 
another incredible album by an artist 
whose trajectory will flourish like 
the spring, persevere like perennial 
trees, age like fine wine and become, 
at every stage of one’s life, a hand to 
hold onto. And I can’t wait to follow 
along — like a dog on a leash, like the 
moon to the sun, like an encore to a 
good thing. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts

A human, a whore, all that and more: Lily Talmers releases her 
latest album

CECELIA DURAN
Daily Arts Writer

Content warning: This article contains 
cartoon 
mentions 
and 
philosophical 
discussions of suicide.
“Smiling Friends” is an Adult Swim 
cartoon that is insanely absurd on every 
level, and it potentially holds the secret of 
happiness. The animated comedy is about 
colorful cartoon characters operating a 
hotline whose sole purpose is to make their 
customers smile. It has made the Internet 
more than just smile, however: So far it’s 
garnered massive amounts of positive 
reception and earned plenty of memes, a 
full-length fan animatic and even a video 
satirizing praise of the show. As the show 
becomes the target of my weekly obsession, 
I find it important to discuss the impact of 
absurdism — both in comedy and by French 
philosopher Albert Camus — and therefore, 
the impact of the Internet on the show, 
starting with its creators.
“Smiling Friends” is made by YouTube/
NewGrounds creators Zach Hadel, an 
Internet-identified online goblin (known 
as psychicpebbles on the site) and Michael 
Cusack. Hadel is primarily known for 
his unique animations but has also made 
his way into other corners of the Internet 
in podcasts, Let’s Play channels and an 
uncannily accurate Trump impersonation 
beating the likes of late-night TV hosts 
everywhere. On the other hand, Cusack 
has his Internet animations in addition to 
more mainstream success with his Adult 
Swim show “YOLO: Crystal Fantasy,” 
Australian ABC Comedy pilot “Koala 
Man” and an absurd Australian “Rick and 
Morty” special. Hadel and Cusack uniting 
to animate a show together was a feat given 
the contrast in their styles — the former 
employs 
stylized 
smoothly-animated 
cartoonish characters in amusing and often 
hyper-violent situations, while the latter 
uses sketchy, often-jerky reflections of real 
life, deriving more humor from everyday 
awkwardness.
The visual resolution of this conflict is 
“Smiling Friends”, a combination of the 
two creators’ character styles into a cast 
that makes the cartoon’s world as chaotic 
as possible, mixing media styles on top of 
the hand-drawn 2D animation, such as 3D 
animation, live-action and rotoscoping. 
Hadel and Cusack get their giggles from a 
variety of different jokes: conversational 
dialogue that is both manufactured and 
improvised, constant background gags that 
contribute to the show’s liveliness and the 
creators’ philosophy that the funniest thing 

for their cartoon characters to do is to exist 
how humans do. Hadel elaborates on that 
last part best: “… they’re just real. That’s 
the joke. They blink and they have heart 
problems … these characters don’t hit a 
wall and flatten out. If you hit a character in 
the head with a hammer, they would have 
like (sic) a seizure.” Unlike the invincible 
creatures stemming from the rubber hose 
animation era, the “Smiling Friends” cast 
holds up a chaotically cartoonish mirror to 
reality. 
This execution of the creators’ vision 
and transition to a mainstream format 
is believed to be attributed to their top-
down management of the project. Part of 
most YouTubers’ unsuccessful transition 
to traditional media is due to going from 
an online site where they have total 
control over every aspect of production 
to the restrictions by traditional rules of 
TV and film teams. On the other hand, 
Hadel and Cusack — who had already 
been animating, writing and voicing 
their shorts successfully for years — were 
involved with every step of the cartoons’ 
production. Hadel commented, “… we’re 
probably one of the few rare shows where 
the creators are literally going through and 
like, approving every prop, every fucking 
finger on every character, like I say, we’re 
really getting a bang for our buck.” Unsure 
if the show would be greenlit, the creators 
gave the pilot their all. However, “their all” 
includes humor to the absurdest extent 
when the cartoonish main characters 
— Charlie and Pim, voiced by Hadel and 
Cusack, respectively — are assigned to a 
client named Desmond who holds a gun 
to his head, threatening to kill himself in 
front of them if they can’t make him smile. 
Yes, this show is a comedy. In order to make 
light of a threat against one’s own life, we 
can talk about Albert Camus and, in the 
philosopher’s words, “broach the notion of 
suicide.”
To discuss the topic on Camus’ terms, we 
have to “purge it of its emotional content and 
know its logic and integrity.” The previous 
two quotations come from The Myth of 
Sisyphus, Camus’ essay conceptualizing 
“the absurd” as the chaotic consequences 
of everyday existence — that is, the vast 
amount of contradictions in rational layers 
of irrational modern life as we know it. 
Camus rejects suicide as an answer to the 
agony of this absurdity because he sees it as 
a contradictory assertion of life’s meaning. 
To end your own life means that you can’t 
find the truth of life and you’ve decided 
that the truth is that you must end it. That 
very same contradiction is what defines 
absurdity — learning to find joy in these 

contradictions and an unreachable journey 
toward the truth can give life meaning. 
The essay presents the Greek myth of 
Sisyphus — a mortal king who was punished 
for cheating Death by being forced to push 
a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to have 
the boulder always fall back down just as 
the peak is reached — as the absurd hero. 
Camus uses this as an allegory for the 
contradictory insanity and mundanity 
of everyday life but subverts Sisyphus’ 
suffering: “One always finds one’s burden 
again … this universe henceforth without 
a master seems to him neither sterile nor 
futile. Each atom of that stone … forms 
a world. The struggle itself toward the 
heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One 
must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Perhaps we can do more than just 
imagine when we look at the Eastern 
version of Sisyphus — Malayalam folklore 
figure Naranath Bhranthan, who pushed 
boulders up hills of his own volition to laugh 
wholeheartedly at the sight of them falling 
back to the ground. Interpretations of this 
particular version of the myth include the 
journey towards detachment due to any 
efforts toward materialistic happiness 
ultimately being in vain. However, we can 
stay at the surface and respond to absurdity 
the same way Naranath does — with 
laughter. 
It is true that the looming suicide of 
“Smiling Friends” is a plot point that is 

used to create comedy, but contrary to this 
infamous review, suicide is not the joke. 
Not only is the absurdism of the show not 
used to mock suicide, but it also teaches 
us one of our only ways to cope with such 
subjects. Suicide in its contradictions is 
absurd, and so is living. However, Sisyphus 
keeps pushing, and Naranath keeps 
laughing. At the end of the pilot, Desmond 
finds a purpose for himself and motivates 
the “Smiling Friends” employees to keep 
going on with their jobs. Hadel and Cusack, 
in the contradiction of combining their 
comedic and visual styles together to create 
their own absurd universe, put everything 
they had into their pilot and their response 
to the premise of suicide, what Camus 
referred to as “the fundamental question 
of philosophy.” However, in succeeding to 
air such a dense and well-received pilot and 
then being commissioned for a season, how 
did the two motivate themselves and find 
more to put into the show? What would 
Sisyphus do if he finally made it up the 
mountain, only to see a new peak emerge?
Their attention to detail is in itself 
absurd — every layer of animation is 
checked repeatedly to maximize its 
comedy. Hadel has discussed many driving 
factors of making the show at length, 
but the two major components are his 
personal philosophy of always being goal-
oriented and the need to leave behind a 
legacy. “Humans need to have goals or else 

you go insane. It’s better to be miserable 
and fulfilled than content but listless.” 
While you can disagree with the goals 
of humanity in his own philosophy, the 
display of his drive cannot be disputed, 
nor can the success of his show. From his 
failures, his friends, his fixation — Hadel 
has unceasingly marched his way upward. 
He and Cusack created something that 
is not only adored by the Internet — a 
refreshing dose of absurdism in the face 
of existentialist cartoons like “Rick and 
Morty” and “BoJack Horseman” — but has 
infinite reinterpretations. 
Doing research for this article was 
the first time in my life I enjoyed reading 
YouTube comment sections, as everyone 
gives specific bits of what they liked 
on clips and compilations of the show. 
In their monotonous work, Hadel and 
Cusack gave the Internet a show that 
has absurdly enjoyable repetition, as 
I myself have watched the pilot seven 
times and the entire season three times. 
Let’s go back to Sisyphus left at the foot 
of the hill. Sisyphus strives to push the 
boulder and gets stronger. If Sisyphus and 
Naranath knew of each other, they could 
share laughs over their struggles. In the 
seemingly unrelenting absurd repetition of 
everything, “Smiling Friends” finds a way 
to make you laugh — and for a kid raised 
by the Age of the Internet and its artists, it 
always makes me smile. 

‘Smiling Friends,’ psychicpebbles and Sisyphus

Design by Madison Grosvenor

Wednesday, September 7, 2022 — 3

Photo courtesy of Lily Talmers

SAARTHAK JOHRI
Daily Arts Writer