Next up on 5&5 is filmmaker, . Tomas’s films have won multiple awards, played festivals worldwide, and been exhibited at The Guggenheim, The Pompidou Centre and The Tate Modern. His first theatrical feature documentary ‘In No Great Hurry’ - about legendary photographer Saul Leiter - featured on many best of the year lists. His second feature ‘The Lure’ about Forrest Fenn’s wild treasure hunt in the Rocky Mountains was EP’d by Errol Morris and described as “Gorgeous” by Vice. He has made films with gold-medal-winning Olympians, prison baseball teams, and more.

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5 That Shaped Me

The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner – Werner Herzog

When I was just starting to make films, I was obsessed with Werner Herzog. He truly made things differently, in all senses. This fairly short documentary is an amazing example of how he elevates things into the mythic realm. He’s clearly fascinated by the psychology of human beings - that’s the machine that powers all his great works. And that’s what I connected to. With his documentaries like this one, there also just seems to be a curious, truly instinctive way of making them that gets to a depth that not many other filmmakers do.

Protection – Massive Attack

I couldn’t decide which Massive Attack album to choose but Protection is probably the one I’ve listened to most. I think it opened my eyes to how you can be eclectic, have different influences and references, work with all sorts of collaborators and still create something absolutely in your voice. I also once saw Daddy G and Robert Del Naja walking down a street in Bristol humming The Wannadies, which was particularly memorable.

Autoportrait - Édouard Levé

A stunning book that feels like it can’t possibly work. Lists of facts and details about the author presented seemingly without emotion. But then you tumble deeper in and find yourself incredibly engrossed. Much of my work is thinking about how we understand ourselves, and how we present ourselves. How the details all matter. And how observing them portrays someone better than the big statements. This book was pivotal in that.

Sleeping With Ghosts – Don McCullin

I wanted to be a photojournalist for a brief moment before I discovered filmmaking. And McCullin’s work was one of the reasons. So direct and powerful and intimate.

He had this ability to show people in the context of what they were living in searing and open way.

Daniel Kitson’s comedy.

In my teens, I used to listen to comedy tapes to fall asleep. I’m still not really sure why or how that worked but it seared this connection to the form. Daniel Kitson is a British comedian who’s just constantly trying new things and doing things his particular way. A mixture of storytelling, theatre, and stand-up. It’s sentimental, ambitious, pretentious and silly. I feel a deep affinity for it.

5 On My Mind

Telephone Tales - Gianni Rodari

I read a few of these short stories to my daughter’s class the other day and I had to read one of them (Telling Stories Wrong) three times because it had them all cracking up so much. It’s such a brilliant framework for a book: a set of stories that a father (an accountant who often travels for work) calls his daughter with each night at bedtime. They are a mix of imaginary fables and tall tales that sort of sound possible but are also utterly ridiculous and sublime.

The Anthropologists – Ayşegül Savaş

I’ve become a Savaş devotee and I’ve read almost everything that she’s published in book form. This is such a deeply deceptive book. It feels like one of the most insightful and understanding books I’ve read for ages. It feels so tender and observed and funny and right.

The New Eve is Rising – The New Eves

I’m not really sure how you describe this band but they make kind of English folk punk, spoken word, rock magic. The description doesn’t matter anyway. The feeling I get when I listen to their music is this heady blend of inspiration, excitement, and a desire to run through a window and tumble into a timeless wilderness.

Cristina Velásquez - Somos Animales Poéticos

The photographs in this book have all sorts of hidden, sometimes playful depths to them, weaving memory and identity and self-mythology. But the accompanying texts, described as poetic or literary fragments, have a tenderness that show a sensitivity and perception that makes me look at the photographs all over again with brand new eyes, and places me in the heart of them in a genuinely surprising way.

Nest - Hlynur Pálmason

I think Pálmason is one of the great visual and humanist filmmakers currently working today. His new film, “The Love That Remains,” is just exquisite. I love his playful, personal way of not only making the long form films, but everything else. This is a short with his kids building a treehouse. It’s brilliant and funny. It feels real, but can’t all be real, and that’s the kind of combination I love.

is originally from the UK and studied there before working at Fabrica, Benetton’s famous creative institute in Italy.

His films have won multiple awards, played festivals worldwide, and been exhibited at The Guggenheim, The Pompidou Centre and The Tate Modern.

His first theatrical feature documentary ‘In No Great Hurry’ - about legendary photographer Saul Leiter - featured on best of the year lists and was described as “A beautiful film about a lovely man” by The Guardian and “Neon Poetry” by The New York Times. His second feature ‘The Lure’ about Forrest Fenn’s wild treasure hunt in the Rocky Mountains was EP’d by Errol Morris and described as “A fascinating portrait of their enduring appeal, and this country’s inexhaustible possibilities” by Indiewire.

He has made films with gold-medal-winning Olympians, prison baseball teams and Trevor Noah and have also directed commercial work for clients such as Adidas, IBM, Ikea, NASA and more.

Tomas is currently preparing two fiction features from his own screenplays, and is in production on a non-fiction feature about the language of birds.

He is also relaunching his short film series Little Scraps of Paper, about artists and how and where they keep ideas.

is a Californian-based author whose debut short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye, was published in July, 2025. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The International Times, Huck, and others.

He serves as an editor for the Ginosko Literary Journal , is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, teaches at California College of the Arts, and is the co-founder and director of Studio Luce, a Guatemalan writing retreat and artist residency.

For our new 5&5, we welcome Laura Quirke, singer-songwriter and one half of Irish folk band , whose new album Perfect Place pushes their sound into exciting new places.

From her collaborations with Joshua Burnside to Lemoncello’s excellent self-titled debut album, Laura’s work has always been evolving: you enter a record expecting one thing, only for something brilliantly unexpected to emerge.

Their latest album is a perfect example. A warm blend of electronic textures, synths, and layered production woven through their folk roots.

We were delighted to host Laura and talk about the work that has shaped her, along with the artists and ideas continuing to influence her today.

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5 That Shaped Me

The Morbegs

This was an Irish TV show that was half in English, half in Irish. It was quite surreal and dreamlike in a very particular Irish way. It’s magical and weird and funny but also it’s really cute and wise in dealing with all the emotions that humans go through day to day. And it has an iconic theme song.

Lisa Hannigan - Home

This album was the soundtrack to my late teenage years. I was blown away by the way the lines were phrased, how normal everyday feelings and interactions between people were articulated. It hit a place in me at that coming of age time in my life and really got under my skin.

Barbara

I had a period of my life where I was obsessed with French language culture - the food, the art, the clothes in all the old black and white movies. I fancied myself living in Paris, writing in cafes with a cigarette out of my mouth. I got really into learning and translating the songs of French language singer-songwriters from the 60s, 70s, 80s time and came across the work of Barbara. Her songs are all stories, little monologue plays and the intensity and dynamic of the way she sings it, really spoke to me. With French chanson there’s often a twist in the tale - with this song ‘La Solitude’ she describes somebody following her around all the time and at the end of the song reveals that it is Loneliness that is following her. I live for the drama.

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

This was one of the first big hefty books I read the whole way through. I remember finishing it and just sitting there staring into space on a train taking it all in. It felt like someone had lifted a curtain on how people could be so good and so evil, as if through feeling what happened to the characters in the book, I really understood that intimately - rather than it just being something I was told. It’s such a bleak story in so many ways, but there’s hope in the characters and how they keep going. The friendship between Lee and Will Hamilton especially really moved me.

Gerald Manly Hopkins

We’re back with the drama. Gerald Manly Hopkins was a very angsty Jesuit priest. From his poems it seems like he really struggled to believe in God. Or that God was breaking his heart. It is very odd that as a 16 year old girl I couldn’t get enough of Gerald Manly Hopkins but I think it was something to do with the musicality of his poetry, how he made up words and how he used the sound and rhythm of words to describe things. Not sure what else do a teenage girl in the 2010’s and a desperately depressed Jesuit priest from the 1800s have in common.

5 On My Mind

Nala Sinephro – Space 8.1

This album is medicine. Harp, horns, saxophone, synths, layered electronics. Ooh my my it’s so good for the soul. I probably should be paying Nala Sinephro a wage for the amount of times I’ve played this album and used it to calm myself down.

Perfect Days - Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasi

This film about a Japanese toilet cleaner and the day to day simple routines of his life is so beautiful and inspiring. I haven’t seen a film that has struck me as much since.

Marina Abramović ‘ Walk Through Walls’

I’m really loving Marina Abramović’s memoir. This was gifted to me by a friend. I was telling her I needed a sense of perspective and to be inside someone else’s world for a while and she got me just the thing to do that. Her life story is absolutely jaw dropping - both with such painful tragedies and triumphant achievements - and through it all her sense of possibility, adventure and incessant need to create.

Miranda July - It Chooses You

I read this book on the way home from LA recently and it was a very fitting book to read after being in the United States for a few weeks. In it, Miranda July goes around interviewing people who are advertising things for sale on the Penny Saver- a classifieds booklet that came around by post in the late 2000s. Most of the people interviewed hadn’t adapted to the world of the internet yet. They are all selling objects as random as the next - Care Bears, tadpoles, Christmas cards, baby leopards and hair dryers.

July has the most amazing talent for getting right down to the heart of it with each person and finding the truth about what brings each person joy, disillusionment and loneliness. It really reveals the vast differences and isolation of class in a place like LA. Her questions are laden with her weird disarming sense of humour and honesty throughout. I was so moved by it. It’s a brilliant thing.

Ode to Final Fantasy - The White Mages/Peter Broderick

A beautiful album. An ode to the music of the Final Fantasy video game series for lovers of the games and people who don’t know anything about them. The music was originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu and written on early midi instruments for the games. Peter puts his own uniquely brilliant spin on the pieces with piano, synthesizers, voices, violin, percussion. My favourites are Eternity, Memory of Lightwaves and Atonement. Half of the proceeds of this record go to Doctors Without Borders as well which is cool, bringing the whole fantasy thing into the real world a small bit.

It’s hard not to feel seen by Lemoncello, a band whose live performances and recordings shimmer with the tones of modern Ireland. Their upcoming release, Perfect Place, evolves from the band’s folk-soaked roots and confidently explores intricate new shapes. Marking a bold new chapter for singer-songwriter Laura Quirke & cellist-arranger Claire Kinsella, Perfect Place is imbued with assuredness, encompassing full band recordings that weave synths and electronic percussion into the band’s staple organic sound.

Through an intimate and devastatingly personal style of storytelling, the new album reflects upon the modern tension between togetherness and alienation & the chaos of human nature with radical acceptance and compassion.

Perfect Place follows on from the band’s debut self-titled record, which received critical acclaim from BBC Radio 6 Music, Clash, The Line Of Best Fit. Described as “direct and refreshing”, “cathartic” by critics at Mojo and RNR, the duo speak to listeners in the way that an ex or an old friend might- cultivating a sense of consolation that leaves audiences forgetting there’s a world outside of the venue. Lemoncello’s body of work is equally familiar and confronting, driven by the palpable chemistry of a long-term friendship.

Words by Kelly Earley

Ben C. Davies is a Californian-based author whose debut short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye, was published in July, 2025. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The International Times, Huck, and others.

He serves as an editor for the Ginosko Literary Journal , is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, teaches at California College of the Arts, and is the co-founder and director of Studio Luce, a Guatemalan writing retreat and artist residency.

For our third edition of 5 & 5, we’re delighted to welcome recent PEN America winner and former Studio Luce resident, Jared Lemus. His 2025 collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody runs across Guatemala and the US diaspora. It’s a kaleidoscope of voices, narrative styles, places, backgrounds, and experiences. “Rhapsody” describes it perfectly. Short stories doing what they do best: whole worlds in a few thousand words, pulling you in and keeping you there, everything echoing after you close the book. There’s a reason it won a PEN.

We were thrilled to speak with him for 5&5 and learn more about the art, music, TV and films that have shaped him, both in his younger years and what continues to inspire him today.

Curated by Ben C. Davies.

Five That Shaped Me

Jesus' Son by Dennis Johnson

It showed me how sparse writing could pack a punch. It also taught me how to write substance abuse in a realistic way. I think there are writers who think shock and awe is the way to go when writing things like this (think Requiem for a Dream, Chuck Palahniuk, and Irvine Welsh--all of whom I love) but Johnson does it more subtly, leaving the reader to imagine--and nothing is more gruesome than that.

Drown by Junot Diaz

It was the first time I'd seen shirts off, no shoes, bare knuckle literary writing. It reflected pieces of the life I knew growing up, pieces I hadn't seen in other "canonized" writing before. It felt good to see the portrayal of lives closer to the ones I know.

Selfish Machines by Pierce the Veil

I was a lost kid wandering around Little Rock in my Converse and blasting this album on repeat on my MP3 player. It spoke to me about heartbreak and hoping and creativity. Vic Fuentes, the lead singer, has a beautiful voice and I still listen to him occasionally, when I'm writing.

A Fever You Can't Sweat Out by Panic! at the Disco

I'd never heard anything like it before. It was so weird. It was, as some of my friends dubbed it, "clown music," but I thought it was super cool. I was also a mime in highschool, so the videos piqued my interest. Not to mention it was difficult to make out the lyrics, which taught me that sometimes the melody is enough to carry a good line, you just have to find the right words.

Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the RHCP.

I could get stoned and lie on the floor and just listen to these bass lines that rocked my bone marrow with these lyrics I didn't fully understand but could groove to in my head. It also taught me the opposite of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out in that sometimes the rhythm and undercurrent of feeling/the atmosphere can propel narratives as well.

Five On My Mind

Breaking Bad

I love less-than-likeable characters and how the audience is manipulated into, if not siding with them, at least rooting for them for some unexplainable reason. Plus, it really is one of the best examples I can think of that shows escalation in story-telling; you overcome one thing and all of a sudden something worse happens because you avoided the last thing that tried to kill you. It's the opposite of "you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." It's my favorite show of all time.

Surrealism Paintings (Specifically by Dali and Magritte)

They make the familiar unfamiliar; and that's what good art should do. If I could go back and see Dali's painting for the first time, I would view them one square inch at a time because you think you know what's coming next, and then it's not that thing but it somehow is the only thing that makes sense for the painting.

Kendrick Lamar

He's a lyrical genius and his voice is magic. He's one of the GOAT's but he's grounded and talks about things that actually matter: racism, parental trauma, poverty, etc. DAMN will be forever on repeat in my headphones.

JID

Oh my god, he can rap his ass off, and I aspire to write my ass off in the same way. You can tell he shows up to write something good and scraps anything that isn't. I work the same way: Kill your darlings.

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto '“Che” Guevara

He did for South America what I hope to do for Central America: a project in epistolary form about my travels from the bottom of Panama to the top of Belize. One of the people’s heroes. He’s what Anthony Bourdain would consider a traveler, not a tourist. And that’s my goal in the world and in literature as a whole.

Jared Lemus is a Guatemalan-American author and winner of the 2026 PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection for his book, “Guatemalan Rhapsody.” His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Story, and elsewhere, and his debut novel, “Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring,” is forthcoming with Ecco-HarperCollins in the Spring of ’27.

He holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Ben C. Davies is a Californian-based author whose debut short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye, was published in July, 2025. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The International Times, Huck, and others.

He serves as an editor for the Ginosko Literary Journal , is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, teaches at California College of the Arts, and is the co-founder and director of Studio Luce, a Guatemalan writing retreat and artist residency.

For our second edition of 5&5, we spoke with Luke Goebel, author of the new literary thriller Kill Dick, and screenwriter of films including Eileen and Causeway.

Kill Dick () , Luke’s new book, is exactly the kind of fiction that feels necessary right now, given the state of the U.S. On paper, it’s a story about the opioid crisis, about Los Angeles, about the bleed of a country hooked on its own contradictions. In reality, it’s bigger, darker, and more unsettling than that. Kill Dick drags its fingernails across the American psyche, through inequality, hypocrisy, and all that violence humming just beneath the surface, and refuses to look away. It’s a book everyone is talking about. Seek it out.

We loved talking to Luke for 5&5, digging into the art that shaped him, the work that rattles around in his head, and the pieces that keep pushing him forward.

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Curated by Ben C. Davies.

5 That Shaped Me

Less Than Zero — Bret Easton Ellis
I didn’t understand Los Angeles until I understood that nobody was really there. Just surfaces, transactions, a kind of spiritual vacancy that somehow felt like freedom. This book gave me permission to look at beauty and rot at the same time and not resolve it. That’s basically everything I do.

Play It As It Lays — Joan Didion
The coldest book I’ve ever loved. It’s like being handed a scalpel and told: don’t flinch. The rhythm, the blankness, the refusal to explain—this is where I learned that withholding is a form of power.

Body Double — Brian De Palma
Pure sleaze as high art. Voyeurism, artifice, sex, panic—everything staged and fake and somehow more real because of it. This movie taught me that style isn’t decoration. Style is the thing. If it doesn’t have a pulse, it’s dead.

Eyes Wide Shut — Stanley Kubrick
The dream logic of power. Sex as ritual. Wealth as a closed system you can glimpse but never enter. This movie rewired how I think about scenes—less about plot, more about atmosphere and dread and the feeling that something is always happening just off-screen.

The Bible — God
I love God. I am shitty and good. It’s complicated. I wrote a book about killing my enemy, but I’m supposed to forgive. Is this all a metaphor for myself?

5 On My Mind

The Shards — Bret Easton Ellis
This book unlocked something structural for me. The way it moves—memory, paranoia, time folding in on itself—it made me rethink how to tell a story without pretending control. It’s less about what happened and more about how it feels to remember what happened.

Sturgill “Johnny Blue Skies” Simpson

The city when it empties out is the real version. You see the seams. You feel the loneliness. Everything I’m writing right now comes out of that—just moving through it, watching it perform itself; all while listening to a Sailor’s Guide to Earth by our main man Sturgill “Johnny Blue Skies” Simpson or his new dash at Eddie Murphy’s hit single “Party All The Time,” recorded on a bet with the help of Rick James who produced and helped Eddie Murphy with the 1985 hit song. James wrote, produced, and sang backing vocals on the track, recorded at a home office studio up in Buffalo, New York, for Murphy’s album How Could It Be.

Los Angeles at Night
Not a work, but it might as well be. The city when it empties out is the real version. You see the seams. You feel the loneliness. Everything I’m writing right now comes out of that—just moving through it, watching it perform itself.

The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler
I keep coming back to how little the plot actually matters. It’s all tone, rhythm, attitude. Confusion as texture. I’m interested in that right now—stories that don’t hold your hand but pull you through anyway. I’m adapting this book into a movie right now.

Driving through Joshua Tree National Park (at dark with my lights off beneath a moon.)

My Co-Writer and Anna Delvey and I went driving in my 1994 Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer through Joshua Tree, under a large enough moon to drive with my headlights off for an hour and a half, through the Cholla Gardens through Jumbo Rocks and the park. I no longer ever want to drive with my lights on in the dark. I know this is a very bad idea.

Luke Goebel is an American novelist, screenwriter, producer, and publisher.

He is the author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and the new novel Kill Dick.

He co-wrote the films Causeway and Eileen, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway; for Causeway, Brian Tyree Henry received an Academy Award nomination.

Goebel is co-owner and president of Tyrant Books and lives in Los Angeles.

Subscribe to Luke’s Substack here:

Luke Likes Glue

Luke Likes Glue is Luke Goebel's Substack in which he interviews crazy people. And geniuses. And his sane friends occasionally. All two of them.

By luke goebel

Ben C. Davies is a Californian-based author whose debut short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye, was published in July, 2025. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The International Times, Huck, and others.

He serves as an editor for the Ginosko Literary Journal, is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, teaches at California College of the Arts, and is the co-founder and director of Studio Luce, a Guatemalan writing retreat and artist residency.

For our first edition of 5&5, we couldn’t be more excited to feature musician and artist, .

Lael has released three in the last five years with producer Guy Blakeslee. Each album builds upon the last, deepening her singular sound and producing some of the most interesting, creative music around.

It was a treat to have her take part in 5&5, exploring the art that helped shape her, and that continues to influence her today.

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Curated by .

5 That Shaped Me

Harold & Maude
My mom rented this for me and my brother when I was about 14 & I became completely obsessed with it. I loved its dark humor mixed with deep emotionality. And what made it so emotional to me was Cat Stevens’ music. It was the first time I had the thought, wouldn’t it be incredible to make music specifically for a great film.

The Carrot Seed – Ruth Krauss
This was the first book I remember reading - a board book. About a little boy who plants a carrot seed & despite everyone saying it wouldn’t sprout, he held fast to faith that it would grow & he watered & weeded the soil until one day a massive carrot grew. Perfect analogy for the life of an artist. A story that’s kept me going for many years for little outside validation to show for it.

Blood On the Tracks (Bootleg Version) - Bob Dylan
This I discovered in my early 20s. I don’t even know how to find this exact bootleg version anywhere. I had it on a CD & listened to it over and over and over. It wasn’t about what he was saying in the songs, but the ineffable feeling of those specific versions. It made me want to create worlds people could retreat into through the album format.

Brave New World
I read this in High School because a guy I had a crush on recommended it to me. I feel it is single-handedly responsible for my current values: individual expression over collective compliance, distrust of scientific advancement (because it can be used as means of control), and an understanding that technology & consumerism can be used to anesthetize people & make us surrender our freedoms for the sake of the short-lived pleasure of things.

Steve Keene
My parents aren’t aesthetes, per se, but our house was filled with paintings by a local artist named Steve Keene. I didn’t understand who he was until much later when I learned he did artwork for bands such as Pavement, Silver Jews, etc. His work was influential because even from an early age I got the feeling he kind of dashed the paintings off without being too precious about them. He also sold them cheaply, thus the reason my parents had so many. His approach informed the way I paint & sell my work.

5 On My Mind

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office Documentary
I saw this a few days ago & it has really stuck with me. It explores the life of John Lilly - neuroscientist turned countercultural mystic who studied dolphins to understand consciousness. While it was difficult to see the dehumanized way he experimented on dolphins early on in his career, the work led to mass movements of people protecting whales and dolphins because he showed the world they are advanced, conscious, communicative beings.

Seth Speaks – Jane Roberts
I read a lot of “channeled” material, but my favorite books are the Seth series. In the 1960s Jane Roberts began channeling an entity who called himself Seth. The core message is that you create your own reality & are an author, not a victim, of your life. It addresses subjects from non-linear time, reincarnation, & utilizing the inner senses to perceive deeper layers of reality. Reading it reminds me to question the beliefs I have that may not be helping me & to work to re-write the story of my life each day.

West with the Night – Beryl Markham
I found this book in the airport before tour. It is a memoir by Beryl Markham who was an incredibly inspiring woman born in Africa at the turn of the century. The fact that she was the first woman to fly a plane from England to North America is almost the least interesting part of her story. She raised and trained racehorses & led safaris for rich men in the uncharted country, now known as Kenya. Her life was wild and vivid and her writing is some of the best I’ve ever encountered. She stands as a muse for me now - motivating me to live with more courage & a sense of adventure... and to write.

Lord Can You Hear Me - Spacemen 3
This song has been looping in my mind. I’ve been listening to a lot of work by Sonic Boom (1/2 of Spacemen 3) because I’ll be recording with him in Portugal this summer. I love it because it marries American gospel/traditional with their signature spacious, hypnotic soundscape.

Madge Gill
A friend just shared the artwork of Madge Gill with me because he thought I’d appreciate it. It seems we’re both into the checkerboard pattern. She was born in the late 1880s and made these incredible intricate ink pieces that she says were created in a mediumistic way, channeled by a spirit named “Myrninerest” (my inner rest).

Lael Neale is an American musician from Virginia.

Neale has released three albums in the last five years. In 2022, she released the single “Hotline,” which was named one of Paste magazine’s “Best New Songs.” Her third album, Star Eaters Delight, was released in April 2023, followed by her fourth studio album, Altogether Stranger, on May 2, 2025.

Neale’s minimalist drone pop draws inspiration from the Transcendentalists, the alienation of modern life, and a rich array of musical influences—ranging from Dionne Warwick and John Lennon to primitive American gospel and Spacemen 3.

Ben C. Davies is a Californian-based author whose debut short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye, was published in July, 2025. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The International Times, Huck, and others.

He serves as an editor for the Ginosko Literary Journal, is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, teaches at California College of the Arts, and is the co-founder and director of Studio Luce, a Guatemalan writing retreat and artist residency.

Our new series, 5&5, is an extension of that idea.

It is a way of speaking with creatives we admire–artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers–and asking them about what has shaped them and what shapes them now.

Where their taste comes from. What they return to. What continues to guide their work. What art has had a lasting influence on their life…

We are interested in the architecture behind their creative life. The films, records, books, shows and images that formed someone early on, and the things they keep close today.

The concept is simple. Each time, we ask two questions:

5 That Shaped Me
Five cultural works that had a lasting influence on your taste and how you see the world. These can be films, albums, books, TV, photographer, art, that felt important early on or changed the way you think or create.

5 On My Mind
Five things you’re currently drawn to now or can’t stop returning to. Recent or ongoing, across film, music, books, TV, and the arts.

More coming soon.

From the team at Studio Luce

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