Ned Russin
On punk, performance, and piecing it together.
By Liam Curedale and Jack Bradner
Ned Russin, GS ’19, is best known for his time as bassist and co-lead vocalist of the iconic hardcore band, Title Fight. But he’s been busy since the band’s last performance in the 2010s: he graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Columbia’s School of General Studies; released five albums with the band, Glitterer; and published his debut novel, Horizontal Rust. Russin sat down to speak with us shortly after wrapping up Glitterer’s most recent East Coast tour.
As a GS student in the late 2010s, Russin wrote and edited for The Blue and White, covering music, protest history, and his own “stubborn interests.” Horizontal Rust follows a disgruntled Columbia graduate as he navigates post-college life in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—Russin’s hometown. Glitterer, originally a solo project Russin started while at Columbia, evolved into a full band in 2021.
In his own words, he’s a “fairly regular guy.” He’s self-effacing, but his work grapples with questions of power, individualism, and our responsibilities to one another. Through music and literature, Russin used a variety of genres to explore the same themes, continually searching for ways to make sense of the world and his place in it.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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The Blue and White: Why did you choose Columbia, and what was that transition like back into academia after years of touring?
Ned Russin: In 2014, I was already back in school. I was doing community college online. There [was] this feeling like I missed out on something because I dropped out of school when I was nineteen after one semester, and I saw a lot of my peers that I grew up with going a more traditional route. Even though I was very content with where I was at, I applied to finish my undergrad degree and got in. I didn’t really think much of it. I'm not too much of a planner. I try not to get too far ahead of myself.
B&W: Do you have a favorite memory or class from when you were here?
NR: The most important class that I took was Postmodernism with Margaret Vandenberg. I took a couple creative writing classes with Annalise Chen. That was like really, really important. She was a very supportive teacher.
When I was at The Blue and White, I went to one party for an issue release or something. There was a person I was speaking to, and we were talking about Pennsylvania because they said they were from Philadelphia, and they asked what I wrote for The Blue and White.
That month, I wrote about a vending machine that stocked Herr’s chips, which is my favorite Pennsylvania chip brand, and they responded, “why would you write about that?” I’m like, “When you’re from Pennsylvania, you must understand potato chips are very important. Pennsylvania is the most chippingest state in the nation,”—they were really upset I said this. They’re like, “that’s not a word, first off, and what is Herr’s?” You’re from Philadelphia. There’s a Herr’s billboard on 95 right now with an Eagles player. Those are my memories of school: outing myself as being way too old to be there and way too into my own stubborn interests.
B&W: We were really excited when we learned that you wrote and edited for The Blue and White. How did that happen?
NR: I found The Blue and White because I had a story that I wanted to write. There’s this band from DC called Rites of Spring. They were around for a really short period of time, and the amount of shows that they played is contested, but I found out while I was going to school that they played a show at Columbia, I believe in ’85. So I tried to write about researching this Rites of Spring show and comparing it to this ballet choreographer trying to recreate the choreography from the original Rite of Spring ballet—the idea of trying to recreate and recontextualize the past and how that’s essentially a failure. But it also just gave me an excuse to talk about Rites of Spring at Columbia. I pitched the article and it got accepted. They were like, “you should come to our meetings,” and it just turned into something that I did.
B&W: Was that your favorite article that you wrote?
NR: I’d say that’s probably my best one, but I’d still like to rework it. I think part of your role at a place like The Blue and White is to not fully wear your interests on your sleeve. I guess ideally you should be trying to showcase what’s going on on campus. Another thing that I kind of spearheaded was an anniversary article on the ’68 protests. I feel like you should be trying to tell the story of what’s going on at the school, and I’d like to think that the magazine should be a place for holding the institution accountable, while also telling the stories of the people that go there in the community that it exists in. But at the same time, I also want to write about potato chips sometimes, and so, I was trying to find a balance there.
B&W: When you were senior editor, you did an interview with Alex G, the indie rock singer-songwriter, and you asked him a question similar to this: How does playing shows live, or the knowledge that you’re going to play a show live influence your songwriting process, especially with Glitterer?
NR: For me, that has changed significantly over the span of [Glitterer’s career], because when the band started, it was just me, and the way that I played live was essentially just hooking my computer up to a PA and singing over that. The songs themselves weren’t confrontational, but the delivery was. I am a punk, and punk has a very well-established aesthetic, and so to do something in that space where people show up expecting drums, bass, guitar, vocals, and this typical format—though I’m by no means claiming to have invented the setup that I did—I think putting that live setup into that context was a pretty antagonistic idea. And it was intentionally antagonistic. It made people, including myself, very uncomfortable. I really appreciated that.
The goal for me for playing live is always to achieve some sort of state of transcendence that you and the people at the show can enter together and create this superhuman conversation that is beyond language. Now at this point, where it’s returned to a much more traditional setup, I don’t really think about these things.
B&W: When you were performing the Glitterer stuff solo, was that act of performing it with your computer against expectations, from your perspective, something that was necessary? How did that fit in with your vision? It sounds like you were rebelling against the punk aesthetic.
NR: It was more out of necessity. I didn’t have the space or time to do much else. I was also taking influence from bands that were just one person, and I thought that was a really cool and challenging idea.
I don’t want to make things that are rebellious just for the sake of rebellion. I think that’s self-serving. I do like challenging the form and challenging ideas. But I don’t want to do it just to empower myself, to prove that I’m different. In this conversation, we’re getting to something that’s very important to me, and that’s community, you know. I don’t want to alienate myself from my community, but ideally, when you make left turns in a place that is supposed to be full of left turns and there’s still push back, I think you find people who are trying to do something similar, even if it’s not the exact same way that you’re doing it. I didn’t want to stick my nose up at people who are doing something a different way. I was just looking for other people who [were] interested in challenging ideas, and interested in continuing to grow in ways that we don’t fully plan out.
B&W: How did you balance a solo project like that, recording multiple albums and EPs, being a full-time student, writing a novel, and performing live?
NR: The timeline there is slightly hazy because I was a full-time student, but I was still playing shows. I started the novel at the end of my time at school. The major projects didn’t overlap severely. It’s always about making time for the things that you need, and for me, playing music is something that I just have to do. I started playing shows in earnest when I was 13 years old, and so you just figure out: “Okay, if I get all of my tasks done, then I have this allotted amount of time to do the thing that I want to do.” Everything is as important as you make it, and so within your own life and your own time, you just figure out how you can meet your own needs and meet the needs of your life and your community.
B&W: In “Stainless Steel,” which I keep returning to, you repeat, “Now feels like fate / It’s everywhere I turn / I can’t escape.” One of the things that I find kind of funny and ironic is that I don’t know what the it is that you’re escaping from, and that’s a really interesting framing. How do you infuse your songs with intentional ambiguity, and what do you want listeners to take away from it?
NR: My feelings on lyrics and meanings changed a lot around the time that I started Glitterer. In part it stemmed from trying to write lyrics with Title Fight that I found to be extremely specific but at times were completely misinterpreted. The place that I came to is realizing the interpretation that matters the most to me is the interpretation that I can make sense of in my own life.
I try not to talk too much about intention because I think it’s ridiculous. Like it doesn’t really matter what I’m trying to get across to a certain extent. I want there to be a level of ambiguity that allows anybody to put their own life onto something.
The project, in air quotes, of Glitterer, is this idea of trying to take on these big cultural problems that I see. For me, a lot of that starts with this selfish, solipsistic kind of greed, and this focus on power and success. I want to get to the root of that, and I want to find an exit. In large part this solipsism is rooted in our desire to control things and in realizing how impossible that is. There’s this narcissistic apathy that happens when you’re like, “I want to do this thing, but something is standing in my way. But this other person is able to achieve their desires, and they just did it by being a prick. So why can’t I do that too?” Why are we so uncomfortable with uncertainty? Why are we so uncomfortable in not knowing things, and why do we want to control every aspect of things? I feel like I don’t know what’s happening either. I don’t know what’s coming next. I don’t know why anything is the way it is. That doesn’t change the fact that I still have to be a good person, and that I still have to care for people, and that I have to help myself find peace in all of this confusion.
B&W: What does the persisting afterlife of Title Fight mean to you and your artistic trajectory as you look forward to Glitterer’s future? What did it mean as you wrote Horizontal Rust?
NR: There is this newfound attention on bands from 10 to 15 years ago that was unprecedented for our scene and very unexpected. In starting Glitterer and in writing the book, these were not things that I thought about at all. I actively try to not let them come into my thought process as I’m doing things now. I don’t want to be beholden to anybody’s expectations for myself. The only things that should dictate what I’m doing are my own expectations for myself and my friends and my own community. The way that I approach things now is the way that I approached it when I was in my early 20s, the way that I approached it when I was in my early teens [and] just starting to play—I want to do things that I care about. I want to create things that I find to be interesting and moving, and ideally you find other people that share that sentiment.
My brother and I started a label called Purple Circle, and that’s who put out the Glitterer record. We reissued the first Title Fight 7-inch because it was going for more money than I thought it should be. If people want it, then it should be accessible.
B&W: Glitterer started as a solo project, and now it’s evolved into a full band. Do you still have any desire for the freedom offered by a solo project?
NR: I don’t really have a desire to do music on my own. When I started the band by myself, I never really wanted to present it as a solo project, so I always called it a band with one member. Having been in a traditional band set up for thirteen or so years, I wanted to prove myself that I could do something on my own. It just further reaffirmed my belief that collaboration is the key thing. Making things with other people, entering into that creative conversation with other people, is just my main interest.
B&W: Have you pursued any more writing projects since you wrote Horizontal Rust, or is that chapter in your life also closed? Pun intended.
NR: It’s not closed, but it’s not something that I have pursued. When I was working on the book, I was touring, and so I’d go on tour for a month, I’d come home for a month, and in that time I’d do another draft for the book. That was actually really helpful because it gave me the space to attempt to look at the draft objectively.
With writing, oftentimes you are reading what you thought you wrote rather than what’s actually on the page, and you have to forget your mindset and your intention, and come back to it and realize oh, “this thing that I thought I was saying is not there at all because it was just in my mind but I didn’t put on the page.” So giving myself that space was actually really helpful. My time that was spent writing is now spent working. Literature is still something that I’m passionate about and interested in, and so it’s not a closed chapter, but it’s just out there, and we’ll just see what happens.
B&W: Your style of autofiction really reminded me of Jack Kerouac. Who were your influences as you wrote Horizontal Rust? Where were you coming from?
NR: When I started trying to write fiction, I tried to think of it in terms of making music, because for me, making music should be in conversation with the world at large, and especially with music at large.
I think eventually I got to the point where I was really into Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Sergio De La Pava, contemporary writers. A lot of them were doing autofiction, and I took a class at Columbia called Contemporary American Fiction. I had already read Lerner at that point, but we read 10:04 in that class, and that was around the time I was like, I need to be in conversation with these people.
It’s obviously important to have your influence, but you can make something worthwhile without knowing what came before you. That being said, I wanted to make something that was a part of that literary scene. The stuff that I was attracted to in writing is the stuff that I was also feeling, and the stuff that I was making in songs. The Catcher in the Rye was a huge book for me when I was a kid, and these books about depressed young kids who were just trying to figure it out and decide what it all means. That stuff was really profound to me as a kid, who was also just angry and depressed and unsure and had low self-esteem.
I wanted to do something in that vein of stuff that I liked reading when I was in high school, stuff that was really important to me, but also that was in conversation with the contemporary autofiction scene. I think autofiction is really interesting because it is a very selfish endeavor, and I’d like to think that is not advocating for that selfishness, but examining it.
I think the stuff that really attracted me when I was in my early 20s was the big postmodern books and the stuff that the insufferable kids in your workshop say that they’re into.
B&W: David Foster Wallace?
NR: He’s great. Glitterer is a David Foster Wallace reference.
B&W: Wait, really?
NR: It’s the rejected title of what became The Pale King. That stuff was really important to me. But at the same time, it’s like, I’m not that intelligent. I’m not that good with words. I’m constantly tripping over myself. I’m just trying to find the right words to say, what seemingly is simple in my head. I think that’s what I found really exciting about that scene of people and really relatable. I was just trying to enter in that conversation, kind of stick my pinky toe in the ring, and see what happened.
