Del Water Gap, like his music, is tender and joyful. 2023 marks the debut of the musician's second album—a preciously young collection of musings, triumphs and defeats. What keeps him centred as he soars through the indie music industry? Probably, his name.

What’s in a name these days? It’s a curious and conspicuous specificity, a name, imposing itself on our physical and social world. It stands in for a person’s essence: upon meeting them, it gives us a glimpse
of who they are, what makes them whole. What is a name these days? It is not a rite of passage, nor a demarcation of history, nor a classification of class, a nomination of expectation. It’s a second skin. In a world dedicated to the illusion that all humans can reinvent themselves, a name can be a tool to bring about a new life. Just as Robert Zimmerman turned into Bob Dylan and Archy Marshall became King Krule, Holden Jaffe adopted his own moniker, ‘Del Water Gap’, and stepped into another world. The moniker drew inspiration from the geographical landmark the Delaware Water Gap straddling the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The musician recalls stumbling upon the name, handwritten in Sharpie on the rear of a box truck. Eventually marking a new direction, this new name would come to “amplify” and “minimise” certain parts of Jaffe’s “real self, real personality.” His real life.

To finally meet Del Water Gap gives form and fixity to his sensitive allure. Over FaceTime on a Wednesday morning, he rises, through honesty, passion, splendour and wit, from a musician into an artist. “What’s it like being an artist?” I ask. “It’s a very dynamic feeling; it comes and goes,” he replies. “It’s like being on a date. The date version of yourself is really different to the normal version of yourself. The wheels are greased, and the colours are turned up.” He laughs, apparently amused by his comparison. But it’s true: when you are an artist, life feels saturated. Work inspires reflection and mundane tasks stir thought. The familiar can always be seen in a new light. How else to explain Eckhart Tolle’s extraordinary contention that “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” But there have always been those artists for whom their environment facilitates creation and encourages exploration instead. For Gap, it is New York City. “Being a part of the music scene and community in New York was really helpful. You feel things mirrored back at you when you’re around other creatives,” he says. “When I get off the plane in New York, I feel like an artist. I want to run around and meet people, eat pasta, smoke cigarettes. New York is very conducive to wandering into new experiences, wandering into people, new situations. It’s very comforting.

So is the feeling of returning home. For Gap, home is on a mountain in New England, only two hours north of the city. Situated between two dairy farms, home serves as an oasis for the musician to retrieve and reset. “There are a lot of animals there. A lot of bears, coyotes and deer. There’s a little movie theatre. It’s really quaint and beautiful.” What’s it like going from a small town to a big life on stage?
“I really feel at home on stage. I have an easier time feeling like myself in front of five thousand people than I do in a group of three,” he shares. Gap is prone to shyness. “I come from a long line of shy, intellectual men. Generations and generations. My dad is a very quiet, tall, intellectual man. I grew up watching him sit in the corner, observing people as they spoke. When I was six or seven years old, he pulled me aside and said, “It’s okay to be shy. I’m shy too.” Then he proceeded to pull out a Steven Pinker book [probably The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature] and read a passage on how certain personality traits, like bashfulness, are hereditary.

Does forging a connection between your innate qualities and those inherited from your parents come naturally? Do we express anger because we were exposed to anger? Do we display love because we were shown love? As the adage would have it, does our nurture influence the way we see the world, how we exist? What role, then, does our nature play? Shedding our parents’ influence, who are we at the core of our being? How much control do we have over our own identity? Steven Pinker might suggest a great deal. On appearances, Gap seems pretty in control. Self-assured and strikingly confident, the musician takes responsibility for his life’s course.

He’s always learning though. “What we are taught isn’t always our lot in life. I think it’s up to us to decide ... It’s important to try take responsibility and not be led by your feelings all the time”, he reflects. Gap’s anxiety doesn’t have to dictate his outcomes. The reins of control are within his grasp.

When I listen to Gap’s music, I know I am in the presence of beauty. His first namesake album blends fragile vocals with drifting instrumentals. The second, which remains unreleased at the time of writing, intricately entwines cinematic synths, gusty drums, sullen basslines and swoony lyrics. He has been writing since middle school. “I would carry notebooks and journals around, and I would always write. I really wanted to be an author until someone told me that you had to have a publisher ... I started taking some music lessons and pretty quickly started to write songs. I liked that I didn’t have to rely on someone else to get my work out.” With the help of his friends and teachers, Gap then transformed an old storage closet into a recording studio where he first learned how to use compression and microphones. Within the confines of that room, Gap’s debut album was born. At the time, a lot of his early music was formed in a band and things “were a bit more collaborative and democratic.” After graduating high school, Gap was accepted into the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. There he connected with Maggie Rogers, who played in the first carnation of Del Water Gap. In 2020, he continued Del Water Gap as a solo project, eventually signing a record deal with The FADER label and receiving a real budget for the first time. This has been, he shares, “what I’ve wanted all along.”

When asked who has helped to conceptualise his music, Gap replies: “One is Ethan Gruska, who is probably the most talented musician I’ve ever worked with. Left to our own devices, we would make
an avant-garde instrumental album. I also worked with Sammy Witte, who became my main partner on the album. He’s incredibly even-keeled and relaxed, and he’s got a really good sense of pop music. A lot of my music in the past had been very spoken and low register, but he really pushed me to sing ... We ended up making this sort of Springsteen- esque album—a lot of big choruses where I belt my face off.” The album he is referring to, titled I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, takes its name from a memento discovered when fossicking through his late grandfather’s books. “I found this William Carlos Williams collection of selected poems,” he tells me. “I flipped to the only poem I know, ‘This Is Just To Say.’” It reads:

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
and which
you were probably saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious so sweet
and so cold¹

“At the top of the poem, my grandfather wrote ‘Dear Patricia’, which is my grandma’s name. Then at the bottom, he signed: ‘Love David. I miss you already, and I haven’t left yet.’ It really shocked me. It felt like such an intimate and private thing to stumble upon. There was so much comedy and sadness tied up in it,” he reflects. “I asked her if I could use it, and she said, ‘Yes, but I think it’s a horrible album title.’ I used it anyway!”

Gap’s music videos, like his words, are tender. ‘Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat’ sees him dancing across rockpools and sandscapes, sun setting in the distance. With close-up camera angles and flashbacks, ‘Perfume’ invites us into the inner machinations of the musician’s life, the illusory moments of love and loss. In the last year, his music videos have become more personal, intimate. His gritty yet enigmatic demeanour has lifted off, as if a rocket ascending into the troposphere. His aesthetic has evolved too. He has quite literally stepped into newer, shinier shoes. His interview attire is a testament to this. Raffishly dressed in a white tank top, three silver charm necklaces and a yellow and black baseball hat, which he acquired with his pizza order the night before, Gap is a vision of charm, bewitching those in range. “Do you like fashion?” I ask, expecting confirmation. “Yes, it changes the way you move,” he replies. “I’ve only recently started getting into clothing and understanding that world a bit more. I’ve picked up a lot from the fashion world.” For the 2022 Governors Ball Festival, Gap graced the stage in a black satin three-piece Yves Saint Laurent suit. “It was the first time I’d worn a real stage outfit ... I remember walking on stage and understanding the power of clothing for the first time.”

Gap drinks the blood of the world. Gleaning references from various facets of culture, he is tuned in, wired up. He holds a surprising admiration for John Williams and Patrick Radden Keefe, Haruki Murakami and Jim Harrison. No wonder he is good with his words. Recently, he’s been watching a lot of films. “My grandma was a filmmaker. She is ninety-eight, and we’re really close. During COVID, we started a film club together. We watch a movie every week with some of our friends. On Sundays, we meet on Zoom and talk about them ... At the end of every meeting, my grandma asks, ‘Was it worth two hours of my time?’ This week [after watching Clarence Brown’s Flesh and Devil] she said, ‘Maybe’,” he shares, gleefully.

Throughout our chat, an obvious theme reveals itself. His ideas, his music, have always been about relationships. “I think romantic relationships are a really good way to learn about yourself and how you really communicate,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot in relationships. I’ve learned a lot about relationships.” His familial, romantic and professional connections have helped him transform into the artist he is. These people, places and moments have made him feel whole. But does Del Water Gap owe this feeling, this sensation, to his title, that name? Without the name, does he still retain our dearest affection? I think so.

Asking why a musician would choose to adopt a new name feels reductive. Being an artist means taking on a new life. It involves building an armour: a shield to prevent destruction. A barricade to forbid chaos.
So, what’s in a name these days? Strength, vitality, bravery. What is a name these days? Identity. A person themselves, of course, is more than their name. Change their name altogether and they will always be who they are. For the ocean would still flow under the night’s sky, ebbing with the moon’s shine. So then, I wonder, right before the interview ends, how much meaning does Del Water Gap project onto this name? “It’s all meaningful. It’s everything I have.”

1 William Carlos Williams, ‘This Is Just to Say,’ in The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1991).