I Might Just Strangle You, Baby

Richard Edwards’s new solo album emerges from a personal hell of isolation and physical travails.

By Justin GautreauMarch 23, 2026

• Music

RICHARD EDWARDS DIDN’T want to make another album. In the era of streaming, as Edwards often bemoans in his Instagram and Patreon posts, the effort to record and release music for any independent artist can be more trouble than it’s worth—though for Edwards this trouble has been more physical than financial. For over a decade, the singer-songwriter suffered a series of unpredictable and debilitating episodes of abdominal pain in the wake of his battle with Clostridioides difficile (or C. diff), a potentially fatal intestinal infection that forced him to cancel the West Coast leg of what would be his final tour with his band Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s in 2014. The medical emergency would ultimately mark the end of Margot and the beginning of his solo work.

If the story of Edwards’s solo career has inadvertently become inseparable from the story of his health troubles, his new album, nepo babies take manhattan, might be the most poignant chapter to date. More than any of his previous releases, nepo babies feels entirely insular in its exploration of what a mind goes through over a long period of pain and isolation, shut off from the outside world. Stuck in the same place for over half a decade, Edwards felt himself slipping into a kind of dream where time no longer moved in a straight line. The months and years began swirling together. His relationships took a turn. Friends abandoned him. He was left to exist in a fragmented state of being, which finds voice in the album’s conflicting threads of hope and despair, seamlessly woven together to form Edwards’s most complex and intimate album yet.

It was during the recording sessions in Los Angeles for his first solo album, the Rob Schnapf–produced Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset (2017), that Edwards suffered his first major C. diff–related relapse. Back home in Indianapolis, surgeons cut into his abdomen to dig out an excess of scar tissue in an experimental procedure that seemed to do the trick. For the first time since 2014, Edwards had enough energy to play a few shows to promote the album. With the money he earned from the small tour, Edwards bought a house in Indianapolis, where he could raise his young daughter as a newly single parent. Little did he know at the time that his unreliable health and the pandemic on the horizon would confine him to his home indefinitely, unwittingly forcing him to become a recluse for six years and counting.

Still, despite (or perhaps because of) his mysterious illness, Edwards’s creativity somehow flourished in quarantine. He found himself more productive than ever before once he scraped enough money together to buy a microphone, compressor, and preamp—a DIY approach that led to a plethora of home recordings, including The Soft Ache and the Moon (2020), Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw (2022), New Mood! (2022), and his covers album The King of the Spook Workers (2024). In between these projects, he spent time revisiting his favorite songs by Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, rerecording them as his older self and calling the project Richard Edwards Sings the Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s Songbook in Quarantine (2021–22). He also wrote two screenplays in 2024, The Age of Wildness and Permission and Cecil and Adina, and, perhaps to give his vocal cords a break, composed the scores to them.

But unfortunately, he couldn’t write his illness away. No amount of productivity would be enough to cure him. Sometime during 2024, the pain became so severe that Edwards, unable to eat or sleep, wasn’t sure he would live much longer. As his condition worsened and doctors continued to scratch their heads, Edwards decided to take matters into his own hands and, with the help of AI and a little inspiration from viewing Erin Brockovich (2000), cross-referenced thousands of medical papers to diagnose himself based on symptoms his previous doctors had casually ignored. His quest ultimately put him in contact with a handful of university medical researchers who specialized in microbiome science. After sharing with them his own research, which included a mapping of his microbiome from an at-home kit, he was prescribed several rounds of phage therapy, which is designed to target specific overgrowths that rob his gut of probiotics. “Phage has been around for a hundred years,” Edwards explained to me, “and has suddenly come into prominence again because of antibiotic resistance.” Because his health insurance didn’t cover the costly treatment, he launched a GoFundMe page to cover the expenses, with Paris Jackson providing the first donation, $3,000, and an anonymous donor paying as much as $5,000. For the first time in a long time, Edwards felt a glimmer of hope that he might finally defeat whatever was happening inside him.

Needless to say, this treatment wouldn’t come without physical costs. While the phages targeted multiple pathogenic overgrowths, Edwards endured the effects of the toxins, something he likens to heroin withdrawal—or at least what he imagines heroin withdrawal to be. His nervous system started playing tricks on him. His heart beat out of order. Despite these travails, and with the encouragement of his longtime collaborator Dave Palmer, he forced himself to rediscover his creativity with the little energy he had, a deliberate effort to take his mind off the crippling effects of phage therapy and the looming depression that came with it. At this point, he hadn’t written anything for over a year.

Steering away from his usual meticulous demoing process, Edwards wrote and recorded nepo babies take manhattan in the span of two months, through November and December 2025. “This album happened so fast, like sleepwalking or like drug sweat,” he says. “I’ve never really worked that way.” Part of the urgency to complete the album was Edwards’s fear that he wouldn’t be around long enough to see the album through. Unlike other records that would consume him for months or years, he didn’t have the luxury of taking his time here. What emerged from this frantic state is a work that feels gritty, honest, and immediate, a mesmerizing album that meditates on the passing of time, the specter of death, and the hesitation to imagine a future—all coming from a body turning on itself. On a more basic level, nepo babies take manhattan might be the first album ever made by someone undergoing intensive phage therapy.

Time and time again, Edwards manages to make lemonade out of his proverbial lemons. What would keep other musicians from working becomes the challenge Edwards always accepts. For instance, with physical limitations leaving him unable to belt or growl as he did during his Margot days, Edwards was forced to develop a tender falsetto that sounds as fragile as glass, though equally as smooth and just as capable of piercing the skin. During the recording of Soft Ache, Edwards placed cinder blocks on his abdomen between vocal takes to help reduce inflammation. Similarly, for nepo babies take manhattan, Edwards recorded most of his vocals while sick in bed as his acoustic guitar was gradually replaced by Palmer’s moody piano.

Though beautiful in its composition, not every track on nepo babies is an easy listen. As Edwards attempts to make meaning of his situation in real time, he doesn’t necessarily invite the listener to take pleasure in his pain. It’s more complicated than that. Instead, he offers catharsis without putting himself on display, well aware that his pain remains outside of representation and beyond the grasp of language (nepo babies includes some French and Portuguese). But such limits won’t stop him from trying to find a new form of expression, a sound that takes on a life of its own—disembodied, bold, and permanent. In nepo babies take manhattan, Edwards renders beauty out of a state of unspeakable despair and uncertainty.

Still, the pain involved in the creative process becomes deliberately inescapable in the finished tracks. “It’s difficult to prolong the act of singing or even speaking,” Edwards explains. The first song written for the album, “Bird Engine,” features a near-whisper from the body of a bedridden Edwards, accompanied by Palmer’s gentle piano. Lyrically, the song is the sparsest thing Edwards has ever written, as though his pain can only be understood in silences, somewhere in between the lines: “Bird Engine / When I wanna die / Bird engine / For saying goodbye / Bird engine / the sun and the sky / Bird Engine / I’m fried.” As a glimpse of his notebook reminds us, the simple act of putting pen to paper can take physical energy, which for Edwards meant fewer words.

One of the hallmarks of Edwards’s songwriting is how his lyrics can’t be fully understood without the beautifully textured melodies that give them life. Following a spoken word intro by Parisian artist m.a.butterfly (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly) that prefaces an instrumental rendition of the French Resistance hymn “Le Chant des Partisans,” the song “baby” kicks off the album with drums, bass, piano, and guitar that evoke the warmth of 1970s analog production, recorded remotely from Treacle Mine Studios in Philadelphia with Palmer, Tom Spiker, Charlie Hall, Aaron Comess, and Kevin Hanson. Accompanied by the harmonies of Ryan Williams and Ali Wadsworth, Edwards enters with a deceptively pop-driven melody that masks the lyrical undercurrents of violence. “I wantchu, baby,” he sings, “like the oak wants the axe.” Halfway through the song, however, the upbeat tempo slides seamlessly into a melancholic longing. For the second half, Edwards repeats, with desperation, “I wantchu, baby,” as the melody knocks itself down. The dreamy hook climbs in a moment of hope (“I want,” Edwards howls over an E-flat major) before coming back down to the reality of his isolation (“you baby”), lower on the scale with a G minor. Measure after measure, the song spirals into a cycle of hopelessness propelled by Palmer’s piano, moving further and further away from its vibrant intro.

As if to bounce to another moment in time, “Swiss Wrist Watch” immediately pivots from the “I want you, baby” of the previous track to “I might just strangle you, baby”—a line that repeats back near the end of “Bird Engine.” Such conflicting images of physical violence and desire underscore Edwards’s fraught relationship with his own body as he sits alone in his house and starts to hear Bob Dylan songs coming from his ceiling fan. In fact, later in “Swiss Wrist Watch,” “baby” and “body” become interchangeable: instead of “I wanna baby who’s borderline satanic,” he sings, “I wanna body that’s totalized the tragic / Eats ‘it was’ for supper / Brutal as a motherfucker.” There’s a heartbreaking facade of bravado at work here as Edwards musters up the energy to sing from his gut. In the emptiness of the present, he projects this future version of himself—bigger, faster, stronger. But imagining a future to escape the painful present can bring its own kind of despair, particularly when it can only ever amount to false hope. Immediately after this moment, Edwards is brought back to the present with a softer and more vulnerable “You know my heart’s been wounded?”

Avoiding the temptation to look to the future, Edwards turns to the past elsewhere on the album, taking comfort in the cinematic nostalgia of a carefree world. On “Hushabye Mountain,” he basks in the shameless sentimental innocence of the 1968 kids’ movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “I wanna live on Hushabye Mountain with you forever,” he sings, “or at least till the end.” In the same song, he vows to go “back to Hollywood with a restless blonde.” Edwards finds solace in a past that isn’t necessarily clean or simple, a pre-code landscape of shadows and darkness where femmes fatales like Jane Greer level guns at his gut.

Of all the tracks, “fuck” feels the most familiar, musically and lyrically, as a Richard Edwards song. It’s a kind of companion piece to “Inchyra Blue” on The Soft Ache and the Moon. Nestled in the middle of nepo babies, “fuck” spends its first half reflecting on a past love: “You call me sometimes / I begin not to love you.” There’s a push and pull in the process of reminiscing, on the one hand cursing the promise of a future but on the other momentarily indulging its possibilities (“Fuck forever / Let it last”). The only space to live out these possibilities, though, remains outside the body, in dreams where this better world “lingers” and “waits.” In the second half of the song, this tension explodes into a cursing fit as Edwards pushes his falsetto into the microphone, ranting about breakups and body parts (“Fuck your fella / Fuck your gig / Fuck your elbows / Fuck your lips”) before widening the lens to the country at large (“Fuck the state”). In this song, accepting the reality of impermanence proves to be less painful than falling for the “false and faithless love” he mourns. It is a muffled scream in the middle of the night, when neither past, present, nor future offers any relief.

At the same time, as the album’s witty title (a throwback to The Muppets Take Manhattan) demonstrates, Edwards mixes in some playful humor to balance out the loneliness. In “Jordan Flu Game,” he embraces his cinephile snobbery as he throws shade on classic Disney cartoons and Francis Ford Coppola. The album’s cover even includes a parental advisory warning for explicit content, a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the moral arbiters of popular music that he proudly evades.

Despite relapse after relapse, setback after setback, detour after detour, and heartbreak after heartbreak, Edwards always finds his way back to music, sometimes as the only way out of his own body. There’s a parallel to be drawn between his struggle to make a living as a songwriter and his struggle to sustain his physical health. Both have become independent endeavors. With someone whose songs have been streamed millions of times on Spotify (Margot’s track “Broadripple Is Burning” currently has 32.7 million listens), it hardly makes sense that his talents fall outside the cultural spotlight. And yet, without the ability to tour, his musical output might very well be coming to an end. Once a twentysomething signed to a major record label, Edwards—now in his early forties—embodies the vanishing figure of the singer-songwriter in the 21st century, though somehow always ahead of his time. Whether arriving a decade too late or a decade too early, he deserves to be seen as one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary music.