with TRAPCRY, IONNA, and Zach Benson

at The Camel

Saturday, March 15th, 2025

Doors at 7, Music at 8

$10 ADV, $15 DOS

Landon Elliott

There’s a lot of symbolism in the act of cutting hair. The haircut Landon Elliott gives himself in the video for “aftermath” – the first release from his new album, also called aftermath - is full of it. On the surface, it’s simply a guy getting busy with the electric clippers, but there’s a good deal more to it. There’s the fact that he does it himself, shaving off his own headful of red-brown waves like an act of defiance. And it’s his first haircut in eight years. All told, something significant is going on here. By the end, as he stares up at the camera, the hair is gone. He looks like a different guy. He is a different guy.

“I was recognized by my long hair - it’s how people knew me,” Elliott says now, in the North Carolina drawl he hasn’t quite lost despite having lived in Richmond, Virginia, since 2013. “I was stuck in an Americana trope, but in some ways I was using it to hide myself – like I was masking who I really was. So cutting it off was a way to show everyone I was changing.” He adds lightly, “And by that point, I was tired of having long hair anyway.” The hair has since

grown into a short, neat enhancement to his open features, and his beard, formerly as long as the hair, is now trimmed.

“I was recognized by my long hair - it’s how people knew me,” Elliott says now, in the North Carolina drawl he hasn’t quite lost despite having lived in Richmond, Virginia, since 2013. “I was stuck in an Americana trope, but in some ways I was using it to hide myself – like I was masking who I really was. So cutting it off was a way to show everyone I was changing.” He adds lightly, “And by that point, I was tired of having long hair anyway.” The hair has since

grown into a short, neat enhancement to his open features, and his beard, formerly as long as the hair, is now trimmed.

Before he came out in 2022 – on March 6, his birthday – Elliott’s life was one of internal conflict and compromise. He’d grown up in an evangelical household in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and believed that his purpose was to serve God and the church. That was how he lived his life –

spending summers at church camp, attending bible college after high school and working as a worship minister.

Though he’d known he was gay since his early teens, telling his family or friends would have been unthinkable at the time. In his hometown, he’d seen what happened to people who were even suspected of being queer. At school, kids thought one particular boy might be gay, and Landon witnessed the bullying dished out to him. Fear of being similarly targeted kept him in the closet.

And he stayed in it. He had to - not just because of potential bullying but because of incidents like the one he writes about on aftermath’s devastating opening track, “the things that change everything.” When he was in middle school, several people close to him became aware of his

sexuality, and the song describes the day one of them confronted him. His filtered, distorted voice conveys the trauma. Elliott now realizes he developed “internalized homophobia” as a way of managing his situation.

Yet he kept exploring his feelings, and quietly fell in love a few times, and quietly got his heart broken. One of aftermath’s standouts, “waters of watauga” - a piano ballad that builds into a Bon Iver-esque stormer - vividly recalls a pivotal college affair and the emotional storm it caused. He’d met a guy and they fell madly in love: “It was the first time there was reciprocity in a romantic relationship,” Elliott says, “but he lived too far away.”

But it wasn’t just the distance: “I was in seminary and it went against the grain of my upbringing and everything I was studying to become.” The song, which he wrote years after it happened (Watauga, to clarify, is a lake in the mountains of Tennessee), conveys the mingled joy and despair of their love: “I remember the night, the shroud of shame for the libel crimes when you don't do what they told you," he sings, as if “the night” had happened yesterday. Its scratched

cymbals and the tom’s massive reverberation “put me back in the forest by that lake” where he experienced profound love and heartbreak.

On the outside, he lived a straight life. He got married, moved to Richmond, had two kids, devoted his life to the ministry. He tried to be the best husband and father possible, but was besieged by memories he couldn’t dislodge.

“strange love” deals with one of them. As a young teen, he was sexually abused by a neighbor, and this song, hushed and tense, is his way of taking stock of the lifelong turbulence it’s caused. “Because what was happening was so insidious, it really messed up how I processed my sexuality. I think it build my internalized homophobia,” he says. On the track, he recalls the abuse with startling openness: "Phantom touch the bruises on my knees, prayed to God that no one would ever see his hand resting there.” He felt unable to talk about it until now, and hopes it offers comfort to anyone else who’s suffering in silence.

Then there’s the brief but shocking “church camp,” about the indoctrination he and his friends underwent at summer bible camp by ministers, one of whom were pedophiles. The main message they preached during those summers was that homosexuality was wrong – the song ends with spoken excerpts of actual scriptures about “perversion.” Almost 20 years later, Landon is still coming to terms with the effects. “So many of my life’s decisions were based on wanting to be forgiven so I wouldn’t go to hell,” he says.

“church camp” is followed in the tracklist by “neon jesus” – Elliott’s new single, and a big, declamatory three-and-a-half minutes. Arranged around a cyclical guitar riff and metronomic drumbeat, it’s about breaking free from the church’s flashy “lights and sound” style of worship. It’s one of aftermath songs he’s most proud of.

After Domino’s 2019 release, things steadily built up in his head. While trying to care and provide for his family, he was coping in the wrong ways: “I was always out, always numbing to

avoid the truth, focusing on everybody else but myself. It was getting unhealthy. I finally reached the boiling-point moment where I couldn’t keep bullshitting.” Several years ago, he slowly began coming out to friends, and was humbled by their loving reaction. Then there was the official coming-out on March 6, 2022.

He’s still sifting through some of the old emotions, but more compassionately now. “Why did I trust the church instead of trusting my intuition?” he asks. “I had to forgive and tell myself that while all of these things were happening I didn’t have the correct tools to work through it all. I’m choosing to give myself a lot of grace - I really do like who I’m becoming.”

Accordingly, he offers a state-of-the-union message on the track “chameleon.” A pulsing synth and beautiful, ornamental guitar line accompany him as he counts the ways he’s now a different person: “Wanna feel again, wanna breathe again, wanna trust again, I can’t hide again.” As it surges toward an explosive finish, he blows his voice out shouting, “Had enough of it! Had enough of it!”

Happier and healthier - and shorter-haired - Elliott is in a completely different place these days. Not only has he peeled away the layers he once hid behind, he’s catching up on things he hadn’t felt able to do until now, like going out and dancing with a hot guy that he’s spotted across the dancefloor. The buoyant, bass-driven “boy, boy” captures moments like that, where Elliott puts himself out there and wonders where the night will lead. Writing and recording a song like this was “a fun and new adventure” he says.

Aftermath isn’t like many other albums you’ll hear this year. It’s a story of growth, forgiveness – and the transformational joy of becoming exactly who you are.

- Caroline Sullivan

TRAPCRY

IONNA

Zach Benson