Jesus Christ, where do you even start with a guy who calls himself Beautiful Existential Love? I mean, come on—that’s either the most pretentious stage name in the history of rock and roll or the most honest thing anyone’s ever said about why we pick up guitars in the first place. After spending an afternoon with Rick DeChurch in his suburban kitchen that looks like every other suburban kitchen in America except for the beat-to-hell electric guitar leaning against the refrigerator like some kind of wooden prophet, I’m leaning toward honest.

And that’s the problem with honest, isn’t it? Nobody wants to hear it. We want our rock stars to lie to us, to tell us everything’s gonna be alright, that love conquers all, that if we just buy the right records and wear the right clothes we’ll somehow transcend the cosmic joke of being conscious meat stumbling around on a spinning rock in space. But Rick DeChurch—Beautiful Existential Love, if you’re nasty—he’s not selling that particular brand of snake oil.

“I don’t write happy songs,” he tells me, and I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him because OF COURSE you don’t write happy songs, nobody who’s paying attention writes happy songs, but somehow he says it like it’s a confession instead of the most obvious statement since “water is wet.”

This is a guy who taught himself guitar because his parents forbid him to play, which is like forbidding someone to breathe or masturbate—it’s gonna happen anyway, and now you’ve just made it rebellious. He mowed lawns all summer to buy his first electric guitar, probably some piece of Japanese plywood that sounded like a dying cat but felt like freedom in his sweaty ten-year-old hands.

But here’s where it gets interesting, where DeChurch accidentally stumbled onto something that every music teacher and guitar magazine and YouTube tutorial completely misses: he never learned to play anyone else’s songs. While kids across America were torturing their neighbors with butchered versions of “Smoke on the Water,” Rick was listening to Led Zeppelin and writing BACK to them, having conversations with Jimmy Page’s ghost through his amplifier

And this, friends and neighbors, is how you accidentally become an artist instead of just another tribute band casualty. Because when you don’t know the rules, you can’t break them—you just ignore them completely and build your own universe out of whatever sounds make sense to your particular brand of madness.

For thirty-eight years, this magnificent bastard wrote songs he couldn’t sing, crafting little symphonies of desperation for other people’s voices while hiding behind his guitar like some kind of six-string wizard of Oz. Then life did what life does—it cornered him, forced him out from behind the curtain, made him sing his own goddamn songs at the ripe old age of forty-eight.

Most people learn to sing when they’re teenagers, when their voices are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. DeChurch learned to sing when his voice already knew exactly who it was—weathered, unpolished, scarred by decades of unsung songs finally demanding to be heard. It’s like learning to walk after you’ve already spent your whole life crawling, except somehow it works because the crawling gave him something to say about standing up.

And what does he have to say? Well, that’s where Beautiful Existential Love stops being a joke and starts being the most brutally accurate band name since The Dead Boys. This is music about the spaces between things—between love and hate, hope and despair, the person you thought you were and the person you actually are when the lights go out and nobody’s watching.

He writes about “the mother who can’t let go, the lover who can’t stay, those moments when we’re most desperately ourselves,” and if that doesn’t make you want to either hug him or punch him in the face, you’re probably already dead and just haven’t noticed yet.

See, here’s the thing about authenticity—and I know, I know, that word gets thrown around like confetti at a New Year’s Eve party for tone-deaf assholes—but real authenticity isn’t about being genuine, it’s about being willing to be ugly. It’s about admitting that most of life is not a rock and roll fantasy but a series of small defeats interrupted by brief moments of something that might be beauty if you squint hard enough and don’t think about it too much.

DeChurch’s guitar playing is atypical because atypical is what happens when you learn music from records instead of teachers, when you develop technique through necessity instead of theory. It’s not progressive, it’s not virtuosic, it’s not anything except exactly what it needs to be to carry the weight of whatever he’s trying to say at any given moment.

This is folk music for people who hate folk music, blues for people who are bored by the blues, rock and roll for people who think rock and roll died with Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry or whoever the hell you think killed it. It’s music made by someone who understands that the best songs aren’t about transcending the human condition but about diving headfirst into the messy, contradictory, beautiful disaster of being alive and conscious and stupid enough to think that making noise with pieces of wood and wire might somehow make it all make sense.

“I write because I have to,” he says, “it often feels almost involuntary. I have tried to stop playing guitar and writing several times. It takes up a lot of my time and energy and sometimes I wish I’d do something else. But I always find my self writing again.”

And there it is—the reason anyone picks up a guitar in the first place, before the record deals and the groupies and the magazine interviews and all the other nonsense that turns music into career instead of compulsion. The feelings demand to be heard. Not because they’re beautiful or meaningful or profound, but because they’re there, burning a hole in your chest, and the only way to get them out is to push them through your fingers and into strings and out into the air where maybe, just maybe, someone else will recognize their own private hell and feel a little less alone.

Beautiful Existential Love. Christ, what a name. What a magnificent, terrible, perfect name for someone who’s figured out that the only honest response to existence is to love it anyway, especially when—especially because—it doesn’t make any goddamn sense at all.

–Mike Strassburger

Rick DeChurch performs as Beautiful Existential Love at small venues where people still remember that music is supposed to make you feel something, even if that something is uncomfortable. His songs are available wherever people go to confront their own mortality set to three chords and the truth.