John Gallagher Jr. Explores Digital Anxiety and Modern Bewilderment in New EP

In the summer of 2024, John Gallagher Jr. was having a crisis. Like most people living in the 21st century, the Tony-winner is a social media user, and the joy he was feeling while on tour kept being interrupted by a dread he felt while checking his feed, which was filled with the terrible thing of the day.

“I was feeling that push and pull of like, ‘It’s a beautiful summer day and I’m going on tour with my friends and yet the world seems to be on fire to a certain extent,” Gallagher told BroadwayWorld in a Zoom interview. He wondered: “How am I supposed to position myself in the middle and just go have fun when it feels like there’s atrocity after atrocity knocking at my door through my telephone screen?”

Like many artists, the answer was a creative one, leading Gallagher to write the song “Tough Spit.” The track serves as the opener for his new EP, “Almost OK”, and is a high-energy anthem exploring the paranoid plights of modern life, including the ongoing barrage of conveniently delivered bad news, conspiracy theory-believing relatives, and other assorted misfortunes. 

Marking his first collection of music since his 2024 album Goodbye or Something, other songs on the new five-track record include the Laurel Canyon-esque road anthem, “Mitsuko,” and the nostalgia-tinged “Lido Lane.”

Before hitting the road in support of his new music, the Broadway alum spoke to BroadwayWorld about writing and recording “Almost OK”, sharing why he considers it to be a favorite of his own records, and if he has any plans to bring his songwriting to Broadway. 

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

Because “Tough Spit” opens the EP, I want to start by asking you about that song. It really feels like it encapsulates so well the bewilderment of modern life. What do you find the most bewildering thing about life as a creative person these days, and how does that affect how you approach your creative projects?

I find the most bewildering aspect of trying to navigate the modern world as a creative person to be this notion that you are meant to be terminally online. The algorithm is such that it needs to be fed in a way… where you just have to be posting and posting and posting. And if you don’t post, then the algorithm’s going to forget about you and therefore you have to post every day.

It’s sort of a necessary evil for somebody who’s trying to promote themselves or sort of self-market… My enterprise as a singer-songwriter is still pretty scrappy and DIY. It means that I have to be on my phone and social media a ton to be posting… to sort of cut through the static and say, “I’m over here. My song’s worth listening to.” And I’m very uncomfortable with that. 

I have this sort of classic introverted/extroverted identity crisis that so many performers have. I think everybody expects you to be like a big ham that loves attention and that’s not really true for me. I like being creative. I like performing. I like that aspect of it, but the attention that comes with it is sort of strange.

This is really where “Tough Spit” came from. I kept opening my phone to promote a show and then you just get sucked into the vortex… It’s so jarring and destabilizing and I find myself doomscrolling endlessly and totally forgetting why I picked the thing up, which is, “Oh right, no, this is supposed to be like a tool for my creativity.” 

It can be really difficult to try to cut through that because I’d love to be the kind of person that says, “No, I’m just going to bury my phone in the ground and not look at it and go live in a cabin and write.” But I worry sometimes that if I disconnect too much from the modern atmosphere and temperature, I’ll have less to say, I’ll have less to write about.

How do you find the time and energy for new writing while you’re performing your other work on tour?

It’ll sort of come and go. Sometimes, for me, it comes out of a little bit of a feeling of necessity. For “Tough Spit” specifically, I… was looking at a set list for the songs that I wanted to play and I remember thinking, “Gosh, I wish I had an upbeat, intense sort of song that I could open the show with.”

I was writing a lot of really personal material at the time … and then I thought, “I wonder if I could write something less about me and more about what I’m seeing every day. I feel this insane anxiety of logging on to the hellscape every morning. What if I wrote about that?”… I actually sort of made myself feel at ease by writing a little bit about what I was feeling in those anxious moments.

Even though it’s obviously about a sad state of affairs, it comes across as sort of a tragicomic, rather humorous tongue-in-cheek song, because I think I was trying to make myself laugh as sort of a defense mechanism… I open a lot of shows with it because it’s just a fun sort of raucous energy. 

When you’re writing music and performing your own stuff, does it feel like you’re flexing a different muscle than when you’re performing in a musical?

Absolutely. I love interpreting someone else’s work. I find that to be a wonderful puzzle and challenge. [It is] liberating to have a set of parameters that I have to adhere to and also sort of push myself to tell the story or make somebody else’s language pass through me. But when I’m writing and performing music, there is a clarity and a purity that I feel. Just the knowledge that “This is all really stemming from me… and now here I am giving that to an audience to take on and interpret it however they see fit.” 

I know you’ve talked about how you’ve dealt with stage fright when you’re in musicals. Is that something that you’re not as prone to feel when you are doing music like this?

It’s a very funny thing because I can go out on stage at a Broadway theater that has a pretty sizable capacity for ticket sales. But when I go on tour… the venues I’m playing are 500-seat theaters or less — usually closer to 100 to 200 capacity standing room. There’s something to me that feels like the stakes are a lot lower. There’s less money on the line for everybody… It’s a very homegrown sort of thing.

You’re… beholden to a lot when you’re performing in a musical with a lot of capital behind it. But when I go out and play my own music, I’m like, “Okay, well, I tried to sell 150 tickets, only 60 tickets got sold. It’s totally okay.” 

I think if I woke up tomorrow and had Sabrina Carpenter’s job and I was playing for thousands of people at Coachella and it was being live-streamed into every home around the world, I would struggle with some massive stage fright. But when I’m walking out on stage at Joe’s Pub to play an hour and 15 minutes of my own songs, I feel pretty much at home.

Would you talk a little bit about your band and how they worked with you to bring this EP to life?

This was the first time that my core main backing band, who I play with live, all played together in the studio. We started playing shows together in the summer of 2022 and built up a shorthand and a rapport playing live for a couple of years. Then last summer, we felt like… we should go in and record a couple singles. That was really how this EP started; it was going to be something very small.

We went into the studio at the end of August and we just put down two tracks. We recorded “Lido Lane” and “Mitsuko,” which are both on the record… We knew “Mitsuko” really well because we’d been playing it live for about a year and so that was sort of dialed in. “Lido Lane,” we’d never played together—the band just had an acoustic demo of me playing it. We sat down and I started playing [and] everybody else started chiming in and… we had the tracks recorded in a few takes. It was… [a] “first idea, best idea” sort of mentality, just trying not to overthink it and just go with what you got. 

We listened to it the following week and we were like, “Wow, this sounds really great. We should probably go in and do some more.” First week of January, we all reconvened and went back in and recorded the next three songs using the same template. It was really relaxed, which is something that I’ve really grown into. I think I used to be pretty obsessive about recording and a little bit of a perfectionist, which really only got in my way. 

This is, I would say, probably my favorite of the records I’ve made so far, just because I feel that there’s an organic quality to it that is something I’ve been striving for for many years as a recording artist. But that’s sort of what happens when you get your uber-talented friends to be your backing band. They just can’t help but make what I do sound better by the benefit of their abilities being included on the tracks.

There is such a diversity of musical styles and genres on Broadway. I’m curious if you’re interested in bringing your songwriting into the world of musical theater.

That’s interesting. I’ve never really thought about it. Some of the songs I write can be a bit theatrical in the way that I like telling stories and involving multiple characters and narrative structure. But I’ve never really aspired [to write songs for theater.] I think it’s because I have been on the inside of too many musicals and seen how unbelievably stressful it is to put them together. I don’t know if I’ve got the tenacity that’s required to sort of see that through. I feel much more comfortable, like I said, in the lower stakes where all I got to do is convince a hundred people to come out on a Friday night to see this show and stream my music. 

Photo Credit: Regina Strayhorn