Lonely Richard

Some songs describe a person. Others seem to be spoken through one. "Lonely Richard" belongs to the second kind: a slow, hypnotic roll of a song in which Damon McMahon, the man behind Amen Dunes, lets a character take over his voice, and in doing so says more about himself than a plain confession could.

It is the second track on Amen Dunes' 2014 album Love, and it was the record's lead single. It sounds like a drifting figure walking through a landscape that keeps rearranging itself. The rhythm is steady and almost forward-leaning, the guitars shimmer and smear, and the voice arrives slurred and strange, as if recalled rather than performed.

Where the song came from

By the time Love appeared on Sacred Bones Records on May 13, 2014,^[5] Amen Dunes had been a New York project for most of a decade. McMahon founded it in 2006,^[6] and the first two records were made largely in isolation, in a murky, reverb-soaked style.^[3] He has said that the lo-fi sound of those years was never a pose. It came from not being able to afford proper studios or gear.^[4]

The path to Love was not smooth. According to Spin, Sub Pop once showed interest in the band after its debut but asked for changes to six songs. Through Donkey Jaw (2011) drew little attention, and his 2013 record Spoiler had to be self-released after Sacred Bones passed on it.^[2] A project that had spent years pushing listeners away was suddenly at a crossroads.

Around the same time, a long relationship ended. McMahon told Interview that much of the album was written during a two-year relationship and that the breakup arrived as recording began, teaching him to depend on himself.^[3] He told Spin that the loss helped him drop his hang-ups and aim for something people could actually enjoy, after a stretch in which Amen Dunes had been, in his own phrase, closer to hate music.^[2] The record took roughly a year and a half to two years to finish.^[2][3]

The sessions were sprawling. Per Wikipedia, the album was recorded across five studios, three in Brooklyn and two in Montreal.^[5] Collaborators included members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the saxophonist Colin Stetson, and Elias Bender Rønnenfelt of the Danish band Iceage, who sings on this track and on "Green Eyes."^[4] In McMahon's own track-by-track notes, Elias contributed the outro vocal on "Lonely Richard," a first-take performance he singled out for praise.^[1]

A song that arrived from elsewhere

The most revealing thing McMahon has said about this song is how it felt to write. He told Spin that it seemed to come from another person, and that he sang it in an unusual voice.^[2] To the Line of Best Fit he added that the original vocal used an invented accent, that he often sings through some other persona, and that the song is about other people and other planets.^[4] In the DIY track-by-track, he called it another self-portrait, an attempt to locate his place in the world, which he framed as somewhere between earth and not-earth.^[1]

Those descriptions are slightly contradictory, and that is the point. The song is a portrait of someone else and a portrait of the singer at once. The title gives the character a name, a plain and slightly old-fashioned one, and attaches a condition to it. The loneliness is not a mood passing through the song. It is part of the figure's identity, the way an epithet clings to a character in an old ballad.

McMahon has described his general approach in similar terms. Amen Dunes material, he has said, is always about the self and about being human or non-human, with its characters serving as extensions of him.^[2] "Lonely Richard" may be the clearest example of that method on the album. The mask is thin, and it is worn precisely because it allows a more honest kind of speech.

Distance, drift, and the not-quite-earthly

If you ask what the lyrics convey, rather than what each line says, the territory is isolation seen from a vantage slightly outside ordinary life. The narration keeps a distance from its subject, observing a person who moves through the world without fully belonging to it. There is warmth in the observation, but no rescue. Nobody arrives to end the solitude, and the song never pretends otherwise.

That outsider feeling connects to McMahon's description of earth and not-earth. The character is not merely sad. He seems displaced, a visitor from another register of experience. This gives the song its odd emotional temperature, which is neither despair nor comfort, but something closer to the calm of someone who has accepted being an observer.

The reading also fits the album's larger concerns. In Interview, McMahon framed love as a form of devotion that involves a loss of self, and said the project concerned time, memory, and connection.^[3] If love dissolves the self, then the lonely figure is its mirror image: a self that has been left whole, with nothing to dissolve into. Placed second on the record, right after the opener, the song sets the emotional stakes before the music turns warmer and more communal.

The sound of the portrait

The arrangement does a great deal of the interpretive work. McMahon told the Line of Best Fit that he dislikes reverb and pedals, and that he admires how Alice Coltrane produced a cosmic, druggy atmosphere through playing alone.^[4] On Love he moved from the claustrophobic haze of his earlier work toward a more direct 1960s folk structure, citing Tim Hardin and Jackson C. Frank.^[2] He also named Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, and the late records of Talk Talk as touchstones.^[3][4]

In practice, that means a song whose pulse is crisp even as its surface blurs. McMahon stressed the tempo and feel of this track in particular.^[1] The motion keeps the character from collapsing into self-pity. He is always going somewhere, even if the destination is vague. The drone and the shimmer make the walk feel endless, and the slurred delivery suggests a speaker half-lost in thought.

McMahon has said he strips songs back toward piano, drums, and voice because he prefers an uncluttered sound, even when the recordings involve many overdubs and guests.^[4] You can hear that discipline here. Beneath the haze there is a simple spine, and the character is carried on it like a figure in a procession.

The video and the visual world

The song also received an official video, which Stereogum reported was shot on 16mm film by Kenneth Zoran Curwood and pairs slow-motion footage of New York with its surrounding nature.^[7] That choice suits the track. Slowed images of a city and the countryside around it echo the sense of moving through a place without belonging to it, a lonely traveler drifting between built and natural worlds.

Alternative readings

One reading treats the song as a breakup document in disguise. Given the timing, with a long relationship ending as the record took shape, it is tempting to hear the lonely figure as McMahon in the aftermath, speaking at one remove because direct speech would be too raw. The invented accent then becomes a form of protection, a way to say the unsayable while keeping some distance.

A second reading is spiritual or cosmic. McMahon's talk of other planets and the line between earth and not-earth invites a mystical interpretation, in which loneliness is the cost of a kind of receptivity. This fits his account of inspiration arriving in sudden bursts, which he compared to an animal sensing a storm.^[2] The song becomes an attempt to describe what it is like to be the antenna.

A third reading is more modest. The song could simply be a character study, a folk-style sketch of a person on the margins in the tradition of songwriters who invent a name and let it carry a life. McMahon has said, after all, that the song concerns other people. These readings do not cancel each other out. The track holds all three, and the haze of the performance is what allows it to.

Reception and place in the catalogue

Love landed well. It holds a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100, with Pitchfork at 7.8, NME at 8, and AllMusic at four stars out of five.^[5] It also marked a shift in how McMahon was perceived. He told Spin that he saw the album as his own Astral Weeks and wanted it to feel large in scale.^[2] The ambition shows, and "Lonely Richard" is its quietest declaration: a first act of opening up that still keeps a mask on.

In hindsight the song reads as a hinge. The method of speaking through another figure was established here and carried forward on Freedom (2018) and Death Jokes (2024). When McMahon ended the project in December 2024 with the remix album Death Jokes II, the catalogue behind it was one of steady transformation, from private murk to open-handed psychedelic folk.^[6]

Why it endures

The song lasts because it refuses to explain itself. It offers a mood of solitude without a story to resolve it, and a voice that feels borrowed and sincere at the same time. Listeners who have felt like observers of their own lives tend to recognize it immediately.

It also demonstrates something about writing from heartbreak. McMahon did not make a record that wallows. He made one that turns toward other people and other worlds, and in the process found a bigger, kinder sound. The lonely man in this song is not a cautionary figure. He is a companion for the stretch of time after something ends, when you are still moving but have not yet decided where.

Hear it that way, and the title stops being a label and becomes an invitation. Somewhere in the song's slow, shimmering walk is a person who is alone and, strangely, in good company.