Keith Carne

For two decades, Keith Carne has been an in-demand session musician, hired touring gun, and the drummer for the indie-pop institution, We Are Scientists. Carne estimates that, in the last year alone, he's appeared on something like 60 songs for various artists, but nothing could quite prepare him for the release of his own music under his own name. Ownership, as it turns out, takes things to a whole new level.

Magenta Light is Carne's debut LP and it's a beauty. It's dazzling and inventive. It's thoughtful yet always accessible. For all of the fears that Carne describes about the experience—read on for our meaningful conversation—the truth is that the music showcases a tasteful veteran at work, music that speaks for itself.

We recently sat down with Carne to talk about stepping out from the kit and the internal ups and downs of finally releasing his own work to the wider world.

Analogue: I’ve been reading about the idea of liminal space recently and then I heard your single “Totally Liminal,” so I’d love to start there. What are you wrestling with?

Keith Carne: When you live in New York City, you're smashed up against all kinds of humanity. And there's this amazing thing that every New Yorker has in common, which is that you move through space in the subway. And a lot of my favorite artists, a lot of my favorite writers talk about the transitory space and sort of the transformative space as well—like what happens emotionally and socially, and just creatively, what happens when you move through space.

The subway is one of my favorite places to read, in fact, because reading is this solitary activity, and yet to do it while you're in motion. To find yourself magically transported while you're sort of sitting down, I find that to be an idea with a lot of teeth to it. The idea kind of struck me lyrically while I was in the subway, just watching people sort of move about their day. It all just reminded me of how we move through so much in 2026 and about how very few things are sticky.

We move through obsessions with music, obsessions with cinema. How often is it that a music publication will just heap tons of praise onto a record and then it's utterly forgotten about? ASAP Rocky released this great record earlier this year and really no one's talking about it after he had these crazy Saturday Night Live performances. And you can even go back and think about the Lil Yachty record that came out a couple years ago that everybody was freaking out about—that Magdalena Bay sort of co-produced—and people forget about that.

So I wanted to just write about this idea of elbowing out some room for yourself and thinking about things that stick and thinking about things that are weird and invasive.

Analogue: Is that hard to do with your own work? You’re talking about elbowing out the room for yourself.

Keith: Oh, yeah. That's the perfect way to describe what happened with the impetus to get this project moving. I've worked as a professional musician for like 20 years now and have yet to release a record as a leader. Last year I played on something like 60 songs for different artists, including We Are Scientists and a lot of indie artists and some singer-songwriters. I had already basically finished my project at that point. It wasn’t about finding the time, but creating the time to do it. It took elbowing things out of the way, choosing to maybe not do collaborations that didn't excite me creatively, or just choosing to be a little bit selfish in that way and saying, ‘No, I'm going to create some time for myself.’

Analogue: How much of that was pragmatism—New York rent, the hustle—and how much was fear?

Keith: I was elbowing out practical logistical space. I tour a ton with We Are Scientists, and I was also elbowing out the fear, because with each passing year, egotistically, I was putting more pressure on myself. I felt like, ‘How can I in good conscience tell an artist I'm working with what they need to do with their song if I don't sort of practice what I'm preaching?’ And to some degree, it became intimidating.

Then I was able to take a step back with an experience I had with my wife. I could just feel the burden of the ideas. They were weighing me down. And I just said, ‘I have to stop being so maniacal. I have to just give myself some space to do this and see what happens and take a little bit of the self-applied pressure off and see if ideas develop.’ And then they just felt really, really, really good.

I recorded the stuff and played it for some people and they were very encouraging. I said, ‘Okay. I like it, they like it.' Not that I'm creating music for other people, but when you're in a solo endeavor—you’re a writer, you get it too, this is why writers have editors—it's important to have people to help shape your direction and your work.

So it was multi-pronged: a mix of living in New York City and having to afford that, a mix of being on tour often like 100 to 120 days a year with We Are Scientists and other artists, and transparently, the fear and the intimidation aspect. There's also a fourth prong that sort of encompasses the previous three, which is that I'm a drummer, and melodic and harmonic ideas come naturally but they come slowly for me—having to sit down and figure out how to articulate them on the guitar or the keyboard, or even just in a lead sheet format.

Analogue: How far back does this impulse go to write and record your own songs?

Keith: It started when I was maybe five years old. I would write music and songs. And then when I was in middle school and high school, I actually did play guitar and sing for my first band, a band called The Venice. You can't find any recordings online. Thank goodness! It's like finding Quentin Tarantino's first movie, he doesn't want that shit out there. We played a lot of shows around the central Jersey area and the VFW scene.

Then I started getting work as a drummer really early. Upperclassmen started asking me to play in their projects because I've just always been really naturally drawn to drums. I started getting work playing community theater musicals and actually making money from it as far back as being a sophomore in high school. My mom and dad had to drive me to my first paid gigs. [Laughs]

That just kind of got in the way of my songwriting. I'd always mess around with guitars in my bedroom, but that's where the ideas were accumulating. Around 2018, I started saying, I really should release something.

Analogue: Does coming up as a drummer change how you approach melody? Like coming in the side door?

Keith: I think it does. Playing drums gives you a very clear-eyed picture about what works in songwriting structure. I like to be clear about it: Keith Murray and Chris Cain are very much the leaders of We Are Scientists, but when we're playing live shows, I a little bit feel like I'm leading the musical aspect from behind. I'm taking cues from them and letting them lead the show, but once the song is starting, it's almost as if I'm conducting from behind.

It's a similar thing when you're a session musician or recording. There's nothing that shows a songwriter quite what their song needs or doesn't need as when they sit down to put drums on it. Applying drums and rhythm and harmonic rhythm to a song has a way of clarifying the structure and showing you what the song wants to be. I've just been paying attention to that stuff.

And then, I don't necessarily think this record is the most harmonically varied—like, you’re not going to find Coltrane matrices of chord changes—but what I can offer is a very varied rhythmic world. There's a single I put out called "37 Hours," and there's what sounds like a very complicated tempo change in the middle of the song. It's actually not a tempo change. It's a modulation of the rhythm. The time continues, but the chords are hitting in different places. It's basically a longer cycle of the harmony happening. I wouldn't understand how to do that if I didn't play drums.

Analogue: Does finishing this bring up a feeling of I wish I'd done this sooner?

Keith: Of course. But a great friend made the point that if you had done it sooner, the record wouldn't sound this way now. And if I had released music in 2018, the influences might not be as varied, or the lyrics might be a little more corny. I think there's something poetic about releasing a solo record on the edge of 40.

Analogue: Could you hear specific things you'd absorbed from other artists in what you were making?

Keith: Oh, yeah. I've learned so much about recording, engineering, and mixing from one of my best friends, this amazing mixer and producer named Brian Bond. I can trace back specific things I've learned from him. Similarly, there are these gushing ambient improvisation passages in the record that are a direct result of my inspiration from Pharoah Sanders—these spiritual jazz luminaries that I've grown to love. And I've taken a ton of influence from electronic music artists like Fred Again and Burial—artists like that that I liked a lot, though I mean, Fred Again wasn't really releasing music when I was in my late 20s. I've just grown to be an even more obsessive music fan in my 30s.

And now I can listen back to the record and hear specific things. I almost used those influences as support. I’m not comparing myself to Pharoah Sanders, but if Pharoah Sanders can make this beautiful five-minute ambient passage, I can take an element of that. It gave me confidence in my own, not to sound too highfalutin about it, but my own curatorial powers and abilities to fit that stuff all together.

Analogue: Now that it exists and you've had your first rehearsals, how does this navigate with everything else you're juggling?

Keith: I guess it remains to be seen. I gotta tell you, it felt fucking amazing to be the person giving creative shape and feedback to the drummer I was rehearsing with or the keyboard player, and to be able to compliment them and say, ‘You sound great here!’, or conversely say,

‘I’m not necessarily feeling this flow. Would you mind if I suggested something?’

Being able to think about the way I would want to be spoken to as a collaborator—I can feel how that becomes addictive. I'm going to want to do it again. I'm just happy that it exists and that I have this thing I can point to as my aesthetic being in the world. It's helpful on many levels: from an emotional, personal perspective, but also just helpful when you're creating and collaborating with other people to just say, ‘This is music that I love and this is kind of how I musically hear the world.’ And I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for the opportunity to share that. It's a very narcissistic thing, considering the state of the world, to think that your music is worth people sitting down and spending their time with. But it is a bright spot in the world for me right now.

VISIT: Keith Carne

*Photo: Guy Eppel