BIO

Ian McCuen is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer from Buffalo, NY. They specialize in DIY bedroom-folk music featuring delicate and haunting arrangements, lo-fi and unconventional production, and deeply personal and emotive lyricism.

McCuen's breakout series, Songs of Fleeting Permanence, spans three albums and details a period of introspection and existential contemplation across their late teens/early twenties. It involves themes of depression, anxiety, isolation, dependency, paranoia, insecurity, unrequited love, aging, and grappling with death. All three volumes were recorded in late 2016, alone in a bedroom, and using only a laptop, two microphones, and instruments lying around the house. Two supplemental EPs were also recorded and released to round out the project, concluding in 2021.

2022 saw the release of a new record embracing fuller arrangements and a more storyteller approach to songwriting. Combining elements of history, folklore, current events, and personal experience, Westward, to Nowhere is a concept album with a loose narrative that follows a drifter on a futile journey across the country. The story is a depiction of isolation and searching for purpose against the desolate reality of American life.

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Following in 2023, McCuen paired a more electric focused sound with a return to a confessional and diaristic lyricism on What It Means to Be Young, Sad, and Alone. A pseudo-sequel to Fleeting Permanence, it is an exploration of the inherent pressures, countless heartbreaks, and intense vicissitudes we experience while navigating through life in our 20's.