Feature by Caroline Nieto
Photos by Natasha Last-Bernal, Sophia Lopez, and Sophia Zhu
Federico Stock (CC’26) is studying philosophy and history.
His music can be found at this Spotify link or this Soundcloud link for his unreleased music.
When I sit down to talk to Federico, it is the sunny final day of September, where the “summer’s still struggling to live,” a description I’ve pulled from his song, “Anything.” We perch on the steps of St Paul’s Chapel, in full view of the swath of students rushing to class during a passing period. We’ve chosen the location because Fed has a class in Philosophy Hall in an hour, and I can’t help thinking we’re in a corner of campus that’s been engineered to represent the musical catalog of Federico Stock. Religion and philosophy are tenements of Fed’s psyche as a songwriter, which is clear not only in the imagery he employs, but in his deliberate, thoughtful approach to writing as a whole. “I really like the Platonic idea in Symposium about seeing something beautiful and realizing, ‘I saw that before I was in a body, and I need to see that again,’” he says. “That feeling leads you to practicing philosophy, but I also think it leads you to make music, because you’re trying to translate it.”
The first time Fed recalls trying to translate a feeling was during a school break in high school. He had recorded a guitar part on Logic, and played it over and over again while he jotted down lyrics that he didn’t want to sing, "because I was shit at singing,” he says. These early teenage years were naturally a time of transition for Fed, and the changes he weathered coincided with his taking music more seriously. Growing up, music was merely a casual interest for Fed. “My music taste was pretty bad until I was like fourteen,” he claims. “I listened to a lot of pop music, mixed with the Beatles, mixed with random songs that I knew from my parents.” He names a tradition of his youth that informed his taste the most—“I would be playing Minecraft on the family Mac and I would press play on the keyboard and it would just play the first album in alphabetical order on iTunes, which was The Beatles’ single album, One.” If you listen to Fed’s music, it certainly sounds like he’s been fed Beatles songs through subliminal messages. His songs are evocative of McCartney’s tender melodies and the guitar parts of the band’s acoustic tracks. But it took Fed a while to render his musical influences into polished songs. “As a kid, I didn't know anything about theory—I mostly still don’t—but I would be thinking, ‘Wow, in these songs there’s just these moments of really intense feeling. There’s just chords that people play that make me want to start crying. How do I do that?’”
Fed claims he still hasn’t learned music theory. There was a period in middle school where he took guitar lessons, but “It was mostly classical,” he says. “I never practiced.” His musical education was much more successful when it took the form of collecting inspirations. He remembers playing The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californiacation” at a middle school talent show with his friends. “That was the band that most people knew was my favorite band up until I was eighteen.” At this moment, he finds himself a bigger fan of the likes of Christian Lee Hutson and Elliott Smith—of the latter, Fed says, “he just succeeds more than anyone else in making me feel a way that enhances an experience.” The Smith comparison is a no-brainer when you hear Fed’s music. His first single, “Half-Man,” is a touching folk track that could slot neatly into place on Smith’s New Moon. It’s composed merely of Fed’s wispy vocals and the light, soft strum of his guitar. “Half-Man” exemplifies Fed’s tendency towards the clean, candid lyricism of his stream of consciousness. He explains that the first lyric of the song, “I feel uneasy between my shoulders” is a real description of a physical sensation he felt when he couldn’t sleep one night. Fed often writes down little phrases or feelings that inspire him in the notes app on his phone. Another resonant lyric of “Half-Man”—“Nostalgiamania is in my bloodstream/and in this river/and I am drowning”—is also the product of this ongoing list. “I’d written down this word, ‘nostalgiamania,’ because I thought it described my most common state of being,” he says. “Half-Man” certainly depicts nostalgia from top to bottom, even in places where Fed didn’t intend it to. His grandmother had died a year prior to writing the song, and while the peak of his grief had mostly settled, Fed found himself evoking her in the lyric that holds the song’s title: “a half-man/that’s what my Grandma called me.” “I always thought I couldn’t write a song about the death of my grandmother because it was too real to write about. But now every time I play it, it is about that.”
Almost every song of Fed’s is tinged with a childhood memory in one way or another. “Paper Plate” recounts the first time he questioned his belief in God. “When I was ten, I was driving to my grandma’s house and stuck in traffic. It was completely dark, and I thought, ‘what if I die and there’s nothing?’ And then I felt so fucking awful. And that still happens to me sometimes.” As the song progresses, Fed traverses his relationship with faith as he’s grown up—oftentimes, he feels that same pang of doubt he felt when he was ten. But he finds solace in these spaces of uncertainty, allowing his questions to linger in the in-between. Take the premise of his song “Little Cross,” which is inspired by a real moment of ambiguity. While on a ski trip in the Alps, Fed recalls driving around the and seeing crosses on the mountain peaks. “A lot of the peaks in the mountains will have crosses on them, because people will mark them to say they’ve been there. But they also have crosses where people have died in mountain climbing incidents, so it’s a little vague.” This lack of clarity was eye-opening, and Fed began to wonder the meaning of each new cross he passed. As he sings in “Little Cross,” “did somebody die there?/or did somebody climb there?” The song eventually becomes a meditation on leaving things behind, a concept that permeates all of Fed’s songs.
Fed’s music is certainly introspective across the board, and it may seem that each song is steeped in some kind of melancholy. But Fed rejects the popular tendency to reduce artists to people that make “sad music.” “It’s really a positive thing to hope someone will know how you feel,” he says, “even if that emotion is sad.” Part of this idea of Fed’s lies in his conception of these emotions altogether: “Happiness as an emotion is like laughing at a joke. It’s different from sadness, which is an emotion that is very physical for me. Happiness, for me, is kind of the absence of any of that.” While sadness, grief, and nostalgia have all colored the themes of Fed’s songs, happiness exists in smaller, simpler doses. It’s the moment in “Anything” where Fed describes “light in the palm of my hand.” It’s the moment when “the rain is louder than the cars” in “What I Want.” For Fed, happiness feels like “right after I’ve woken up when I’ve slept well.” An infinitesimal, fleeting moment that will inevitably be clouded by the day. But it’s a moment, nonetheless.