A Deep Dive Into Kate Eberstadt’s ‘Timmy Chalamet’

What would you do to take your mind off things after going through a breakup? Kate Eberstadt evoked Call Me By Your Name and Timothée Chalamet to cope with a recent breakup, as her stunning indie pop song “Timmy Chalamet” turns heartbreak into something very beautiful with danceable beats, introspective lyrics, and vivid imagery. 

Debut Solo Track and Upcoming Debut Record

“Timmy Chalamet” is Eberstadt’s first-ever solo song. “I was in a cabin in the woods in Michigan by myself, and I had just turned 30 and was just generally feeling like I wasn’t really recognizing the life I had for myself,” she reflects. “My partner, who I had been with for many years, broke up with me over the phone. The world is in a really weird place, and I’m in a really weird place. So, I went on a walk in the woods, and my producer Jake Crocker had sent me some beats to listen to. I was listening to this beat on repeat, and there’s that dissonant cowbell thing that’s in this beat. It felt very apt, and I was walking by this church, and I just kind of imagined Timothée Chalamet in there and just this desire to escape my problems.”

“Timmy Chalamet” is the first single from Eberstadt’s upcoming debut album Heaven On Earth. “I think the whole project is exploring just being alive in this time and what it means to live a good life and whether it is possible to achieve ‘Heaven on Earth’ in this reality that we’re living in,” reflects Eberstadt. “I was very lost when I started writing it like I was thinking about death all the time. There’s a part of our live show where I’m like, ‘Death and breakup; they go together.’ I think sometimes, when you’re going through massive life changes, mortality just comes to mind a lot, and I was exploring that. I was reading a lot of philosophical and religious texts to find answers—I think a lot of the project is mundane life stuff juxtaposed with big, big questions like how do you find love or start over again when you’re thinking about death all the time.”

Call Me By Your Name and Timothée Chalamet’s Performance

Call Me By Your Name was a huge creative inspiration for “Timmy Chalamet.” “André Aciman, who wrote Call Me By Your Name, is friends with my aunt,” says Eberstadt. “So, Call Me By Your Name was on my mind prior to the movie — The writing in that book is beautiful. His son Alex and I went on a road trip to New Orleans; I met him through school. There’s just a lot of interconnections there.”

At the time of writing, Eberstadt rewatched Call Me By Your Name, and Chalamet’s performance really stuck with her and was on her mind. “He was so unguarded in the movie, and Call Me By Your Name feels like a true expression of teenage heartbreak,” she comments. “I think his performance connected with so many people because it was so real and felt just visceral and, like, we can all recognize ourselves in that moment in our lives in his performance. At that moment in my life, I was 30 and had just been broken up with the person that I thought I was gonna marry, and his performance was on my mind, and I was like, ‘I just think he would understand what I’m going through, like I saw him go through this recently.’

“Also, that feeling of closeness that you can have with a stranger. I find myself having incredibly unguarded and honest conversations with strangers sometimes, which is what is really wonderful about New York. You can have these interactions that feel so real and truthful at, like, two in the morning on the stoop with some random person, and then you never see them again. I think having that feeling with him, like, he’s a celebrity, but he also kind of feels normal. He’s a New York City kid. He feels very grounded and down-to-Earth. Just the idea of telling him what was going on in my life.”

Feeling Like a Cubist Painting

Eberstadt also references Pablo Picasso in “Timmy Chalamet.” “I write from a very subconscious place, like, I’m kind of the opposite of planning out what’s gonna happen,” comments Eberstadt. “I think that with Picasso I felt, like, all mixed up, like a cubist painting. Everything is out of place. Your eyes are in your brain. Your mouth is on the floor.

“Again, I had just entered a stage of my life where I did not recognize the reality that I was in anymore. I’ve been an artist my whole life and always had aspirations of having a big life in the arts and, like, that hadn’t happened for me yet. It’s like you worked so hard toward this thing, and it hasn’t panned out, and it’s like all of the dreams you had from childhood of what’s gonna happen haven’t happened yet—I think that, honestly, my generation has experienced this in so many ways. Growing up in the ’90s and the kind of future that our generation expected to have versus the reality of what’s panned out. So, I think this moment was like a microcosm of what’s happening with my generation at large.”

Creative Process Behind the Outro and Choral Influences

One of the most captivating things instrumentally about “Timmy Chalamet” is the outro. “The outro is dead, like, bring back the outro, it is so important,” laughs Eberstadt. “I think that once we got to that point in the song, like, we had done two choruses, and my imagination just took me to sitting in the church;  it’s a fantasy being in there with Timothée — I imagined hearing a choir in the distance, maybe even hearing them rehearsing. I was a choir kid. I grew up in choir, and the sound that you’re hearing in the outro is my high school choir.

“Choral music is a big inspo for me growing up in churches and choirs. Also, my producer, Jake, was a choir kid. We make pop music, but I think our teen and preteen years were very similar going to rehearsal. We both learned music from a choral standpoint. There are a lot of vocal harmonies in our work. Choral music that’s kind of the baseline for both of us.”

Filming the Music Video

Eberstadt had tons of fun filming the Call Me By Your Name coded music video for “Timmy Chalamet.” “I had shot it with my cousin, Maud Oswald and her boyfriend, Robin Giles,” states Eberstadt. “Maud and Robin had never shot any video before, not just a music video; this is their first video, which is nuts. They had bought a Rolex camera a few months prior and started messing around with it. They were intending to shoot a short film. We were like, ‘Why don’t we try and shoot this music video as a warmup to your next piece.’ So, I flew over to France and on the airplane over, I was watching Call Me By Your Name, and I have about 1000 pictures on my phone, just shots that I really like, like, ‘We should copy this.’

“Maud had this really beautiful interpretation of the song itself. We knew we wanted to do Call Me By Your Name, but are we gonna find somebody to play opposite of me and be the Armie Hammer character (Oliver)? Like, how are we gonna do this? Her interpretation was more, like, a lot of the song is about fantasy and imagining this idyllic existence when, in the lyrics, it’s contrasted with clearly needing change and clearly feeling unhappy in your circumstances. So, what better way than to escape into being Timmy rather than being with him and the inevitability of how hard it is to escape femininity, growing up, being sexualized, and religious guilt? There is the tension between trying to become Timothée and just being Ophelia drowning in the river.”

The music video has a handful of homages to Call Me By Your Name. “The peach scene, the infamous peach scene; in our version of it, the peach is rotten, and you just take a bite out of it anyway,” says Eberstadt. “Some of the dancing scenes with the lights, we couldn’t actually copy the party scene, but that’s kind of alluding to the dancing moment. Also, some of those iconic biking shots.”

Creating Music with Children

Eberstadt founded The Hutto Project, a music program aiding children in a Berlin emergency refugee camp, writes music with kids in foster care, creates mixtapes with youth in Rikers Island, and writes heavy metal music with sixth graders in rural Michigan. “When I was a teenager, I had a really great teacher who changed my life by taking me under his wing, my choir director, Mr. Hutto,” she comments. “I was very shy and struggled a lot socially when I was that age. Just making friends and putting myself out there felt really hard. Mr. Hutto really reached out to me and asked me to join the choral, showed me how vocal harmony works, I got leadership positions in that community along the way. It helped change my life.

“A lot of my impetus for doing this with other people is I know what it feels like to have somebody come in and show you the potential of how music can transform your life. I work with kids in very, very different kinds of situations: refugee camp, prison, and foster care. But something a lot of them have in common is that music just provides another avenue to express yourself and self-expression is so important. A lot of kids I work with don’t have other opportunities to do that.”

Eberstadt learns so much from these experiences, including new ways to approach music. “One thing that we usually do when I’m working with people is operating on the premise that you can make a song right now no matter what your musical background is, and by the end of the session, we have something,” she comments. “Every time we do that, I learn so much, learn new music I haven’t heard, and learn why they’re connecting to it. My students in foster care and on Rikers Island keep me current with what’s going on in hip-hop. The kids in Michigan with heavy metal, there was a lot of stuff they introduced me to that I find unconsciously into new music I’m writing. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that bled into the ‘Timmy Chalamet’ song with like the percussion and the way the beat is grooving.”

Concluding Comments and Other News

Heaven On Earth is set to drop in June. Eberstadt is really excited to share the record with the world. “I have been working toward this my whole life, honestly,” she exclaims. “It’s my first time putting out a body of work under my name. I’ve been writing music since I was 15 and have released some music with my sister (Izzi) under the name Delune, but for whatever reason, I was always scared to really put my real thoughts and feelings out there to the public, like I spent so much time sending demos to my best friends, family, or people who I felt were ‘safe people’ without the fear of being criticized essentially and judged. Something just changed in me, and I was like, ‘I’m not gonna live this way anymore. I’m going to really put it out there and be myself in public.’”

Eberstadt has an upcoming show as well. “I am an artist in residence at a theatre in New York called Ars Nova,” she exclaims. “While there, I’m working on a one-woman solo show (“Where We Meet”), which will have a performance on April 23rd. That show is diving into quantum physics and my experiences teaching music in the refugee camp and basically just the question of can we use the music that we connect with people that we’re separated from in space and time.

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Photo Credit: Kieran Behan