Gustav “Lil Peep” Åhr: Peep. My mom has been calling me Peep my whole life, that’s how I got the name.… I love the Crybaby tattoo, because it means a lot to me…it keeps me grateful. People complain about a lot of shit. “Ugh, I can’t get no fucking wi-fi”—shit like that. It seems very petty to me. I have good values. I don’t really care about money at all, or a bunch of other shit that most people think is important.… I used to complain a lot then I kind of found myself, and [the tattoo] kind of keeps me grateful for everything that I have.… It’s gonna take a while, it might even take a couple of years, but soon enough everyone’s gonna get it.1
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Lil Peep defined emo rap in the 2010s. He gave the genre a distinct image: pinks and purples and outlandish dress that just felt like the cutting edge of fashion. He injected a playfulness into his persona, despite an even more painfully diaristic approach to lyrics than anyone before him. Peep was an alchemist. He blended punk and rap with an air of nonchalance. Any classic Lil Peep song was built upon a familiar emo rock sample—those needling guitar chords that awakened memories in older fans and captured the hearts of fans Peep’s age and younger.
The community of folks who were attracted to this sound could feel Peep’s organic touch. Brooding accents filled out his production choices to the point where each song was a vibrant haunted house. In tandem, Peep’s most emotional writing was brutally direct. He did not obscure thoughts of suicide or drug use with euphemisms. “I used to wanna kill myself / Came up, still wanna kill myself” from 2016’s “OMFG” is one of the most resonant lines in the emo rap canon.
Lil Peep was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on November 1, 1996. According to the detailed archives posted by Peep’s mother, Liza Womack, Saturdays in Allentown were spent at the local library discovering children’s books. “Sometimes, a book we borrowed or bought would come with a cassette-tape version of the book, so you could listen to it in the car in addition to reading it,” Womack wrote.2 “One such book made a big impact on Gus. The book was put together from a story that Pete Seeger had told, and the story was called Abiyoyo. The story involves a small boy, his father, and an ogre called Abiyoyo.… Gus and Oskar [his older brother] loved to listen to it in the car. Gus’s face was especially solemn and his eyes were especially wide. When the ogre gobbled up the entire sheep, the sound of Pete Seeger’s voice made Gus’s eyes blink. He was very quiet and listened very intently.”
A fierce curiosity bubbled in Gus from a young age. Lil Peep had a penchant for expressing compassion towards himself by digging into his interior life and pulling out whatever mire laid within, lacing it with just enough evocative fiction to create something potent and timeless. He embraced the ugliest parts of life and wrote about them, even in his elementary school work in Long Beach, New York.
“In first grade the teacher gave Gus and his classmates time to write in a journal and also time to write books,” Womack wrote.3 “Gus’s books show knowledge of different genres and styles.… Gus wrote a total of twenty-five books in first grade. Of these twenty-five, seven books could be best described as non-fiction. In his first five books, he taught his reader about a tree, Halloween, the world, the ocean, and bats. Later in the year he wrote non-fiction books about penguins and George Washington.… It is the fantasies that show how Gus began to play with writing. He was experimenting and playing with structure—how a story goes. He was aware of his audience and enjoyed creating a fun story to enjoy. Gus was learning how to write characters, surprise endings, and even dialog.”
Going through Peep’s early written material, readers discover a hugely creative and sensitive artist. Peep was in tune with emotions—his and those of his audience. His grade-school works revealed a level of compassion and care for the craft of storytelling. By sixth grade, Peep was able to write allegory and would start building the blueprint for his songwriting: “This was when Gus capitalized on his ability to communicate something without really saying it. He was expressing his feelings, his situation, and his dreams without having to tell anybody what he was really going through.”
From his original—and now scrubbed from the internet—recordings as Trap Goose to his debut album, Peep’s music was without pretense. It was visceral and eviscerating, but it did not come across as a series of diatribes. Peep floated above any air of severity, even in the whispers of his first songs and projects. He would freestyle rap on the back of the middle-school bus and meet with friends at the local Burger King to rap battle. Music became an even bigger staple of his life when he was living with artist Brennan Savage in the summer of 2014, after finishing high school, to attend Glendale Community College in California.
“It was completely removed from all the troubles of home, and Gus loved California,” Womack shares with me. “And Emma [Gus’s girlfriend] was out there, because her sister was out there.” Being an out-of-state student, Gus was only able to successfully enroll in a single math class, which proved challenging, and, by mid-November of 2014, he had withdrawn. Gus lived in California with Savage, with no car, little money, and a lot of free time. Inspired by everyone from Future and Asher Roth to Speaker Knockerz and early Mac Miller, recording music became a balm for Peep’s loneliness and boredom.
“‘Latitude,’ he made that before he turned eighteen,” Womack says. “He’s seventeen, and that’s right around when he’s going to one class, home alone, no car, no money. I was sending him money for food, and I think he might have been spending that food money buying pot. So, he made ‘Latitude,’ and that was a real song! Then he did ‘Keep My Coo,’ and that was maybe two weeks after he turned eighteen, in November.”
“Latitude” and “Keep My Coo” were two sides of Lil Peep’s burgeoning style, the former a gentle series of flexes. Peep’s writing on “Latitude” was breezy, simple. He relied more on his sweet voice than on his literary merits. By contrast, “Keep My Coo” was Peep’s best impression of a Xavier Wulf–styled rap performance. It had the same notes of boasting as “Latitude,” and was softer still than Xavier’s Memphis flows, but “Keep My Coo” presented Gus as a capable rapper for the internet age. His limited flow was cheeky at best, and overtly rough at its lowest point on the song’s bridge. Yet, it was mesmerizing. Prescient comments on the official “Keep My Coo” video see fans referring to Peep as a “young legend.”
“Gus came home early, at Christmas,” Womack remembers. “Then, he went back to California, and then I had three missed calls from him, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ So, we sat and I’m talking to him and I’m on the JetBlue website. He came home Super Bowl Sunday, February 1, 2015.”
Once home, Gus continued making music and shooting videos—something that felt close to his family history as his grandfather played multiple instruments, wrote, and constantly videotaped Peep and his older brother, Oskar. These early recordings—“feelz” from 2015—had an air of giddiness to them. The lo-fi video for “feelz” was shot in the basement of Gus’s childhood home, a 1920s Spanish-style construction that was potentially haunted, as he’d express on “toxic city.” The “partly truth, partly fiction” nature of Peep’s writing, paired with his already immense charm, helped make it enchanting. Lil Peep’s music did the important work of creating a dedicated space to honor emotions no matter how distressing. He was the architect of a vast room for fans to come in as they wished and experience life’s difficulties with someone who promised to understand in as few words as possible.
“A lot of great writers, over time, are able to write with that kind of economy,” critic Colin Joyce shares. “You’re just saying the thing, you’re not dressing it up. Very plainly, boldly saying how you feel…there’s a risk in doing that. He acknowledged it—there’s a risk of coming off as a crybaby. There’s a risk of people dismissing your experience, but for him it was so honest. That’s what makes great writing for me, in general.”
Most importantly, Peep never tried to impart meaning onto the listener. There was a respect paid to the fan, allowing them to design their own meaning independent of Peep’s intent. Where so many emo rappers could be described as mirrors for fans, this music felt even more active and engaging. Peep’s work is visceral— beguiling in the same way a massive fire hypnotizes despite the destruction it is causing.
“My first reaction wasn’t all positive, and that was true to a lot of people as he was reaching beyond SoundCloud,” Joyce continues. “There’s something that was gut-level revolting at first. It was so—and remained throughout his career—unvarnished. He sings and raps in metaphors, but he was very transparent with his emotions. He was thinking about existence in a direct and uncomfortable way. He was looking you straight in the eyes and telling you he wanted to kill himself. It’s hard to listen to music like that. It was hard to see the art in it, at first. But then, the more and more I listened to it, I realized that was the art in it. That is a big part of what ultimately drew me to his music. I could hear in those early songs he had the making of pop music greatness. You can hear that from the very beginning.”
Peep began to break out nationally in 2016 with a pair of mixtapes—crybaby and HELLBOY—yet critics jabbed at his music, calling it “stupid as shit.”4 The fans didn’t care. They saw the somber angst of suburban malaise in Peep. They saw themselves. “He was great for the same reason his music put people off,” Joyce wrote in 2019.5 “It wasn’t just that it was sad or dark or depressing, but that it was all of those things without apology or pretense. He never pretended that things were going to be ok, or that there was a greener pasture that he could see on the other side. He embraced the darkness, luxuriated in it.”
“It connected instantly, and when I was reading that Pitchfork profile that called him the ‘Future of Emo.…’ It was interesting, but as a journalist, I was more interested in the way he was upsetting people,” music critic Emma Garland recalls. “As a music fan, I didn’t care. This is really fucking good! I wasn’t thinking about what it meant. [The early criticism] says more about men and masculinity than anything about the artist. The vast majority of criticism or mockery that I saw of him came from men. That’s been the case for any iteration of emo. It’s always men being presented with a different way of being male, and I find it interesting to see them try to reconcile that for themselves. I don’t think he deserved it, but I expected it.”
Like so many artists in the 2010s, Peep’s career was accelerated by the internet. By 2017, he would be a star with glossy productions and a studio album that would help him tour overseas and achieve international acclaim. Before the universal boom of “Awful Things” from Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1, there was a smattering of projects that charted Peep’s growth and an increasing confidence in his own voice. Reaching back to his first full-length releases from 2015, Feelz and LiL PEEP; PART ONE, the music had a quietly solemn touch. Whispering in his bedroom, these songs ached with loneliness, like a wounded outcast’s pleas to be understood.
“Peep pioneered music for a lot of kids,” rapper midwxst shares. “There weren’t really artists who were talking about this as teenagers, living the shit that we were going through. Understanding it, as teenagers. Talking about drugs, being lonely, feeling unwelcome, not feeling like yourself. All of those things—we didn’t have artists we could identify with and look up to.”
“Thinking back to interviewing him, one of the things we talked about is his music being born from a profound loneliness,” Joyce says. “Growing up in the suburbs and just feeling completely isolated—his music captured that feeling in a really deep way.”
Part of the appeal of Peep’s music, and the resonance, came from the way it was created. In 2015, Peep had three pieces of gear: a mic, Beats headphones from a Best Buy near his childhood home, and a laptop his mother gifted him as a high school graduation present. This humble setup carried his early defining works and made him all the more touchable as an artist. “Gus was pleased with what he was able to accomplish on his own, and decided to release Feelz in May, 2015 via his own SoundCloud account and via BandCamp,” Womack wrote.6 “Feelz was the first release Gus uploaded for the public—and kept uploaded for anyone to listen to. It was the first music he made at home in Long Beach. Feelz represents the beginning of Gus’s commitment to writing lyrics and making songs full time.”
Feelz was home to three tracks, each of which helped establish a pillar of Peep’s musical sensibilities. “Toxic city” was rife with the subtle elegance that would mark later songs like “benz truck” and “Problems” from his first studio album. “Feelz,” with its at times humorous writing, revealed the personality beneath the darkness of the music. And the centerpiece, “life,” telegraphed every deep hit Peep would have in the few years to come. “Life” tackled the nuanced complexity of being a person with blunt writing.
Made during Peep’s late teens, these turbulent emotions knot together into a touching offering. Feelz presents Peep before his voice would rise up in the mix, before the wails and blaring guitars. Music that is closer to BONES—TeamSESH has production credits on Feelz and Peep credits them as a major influence—than it is to Peep’s ultimately grandiose and pop-aspiring sound.
“His way of singing, and the way his voice sounds and his use of melody, it’s probably more than any other emo rapper influenced by pop punk and the noughties,” Garland notes.
“He gives you a feeling,” Womack agrees. She also shares that Peep was hugely influenced by the punk bands introduced to him by his brother. He paired that music with being the quiet observer of the family. “‘Toxic city’ is so…I love that! ‘Life in the background, up and down a mountain.’ I know he and his brother, and his father, went to climb Mt. Katahdin. And ‘life in the background,’ he was in the background of his relationship with his brother and father. He was one who watched and noticed certain things.
“And then, in ‘toxic city,’ ‘Shawty say my house is haunted / I say I don’t give a fuck.’ Gus said to me, ‘Emma thinks our house is haunted.’ We moved to that house in May 2012. I didn’t know Emma existed until a friend told me, ‘I think I saw a blonde come out of Gus’s window.’ She had been climbing in and out of the window for I don’t know how long! So, that line is a true thing. There are these true things that, if you know him, you know that little piece is real. But the whole feeling, it doesn’t matter if things are true or not.”
The tones on “life” and “toxic city” bled nicely into Lil Peep’s most affecting song, “Star Shopping.” Composed in August 2015, and released the following day, this song was the ultimate tether between Peep and his growing fanbase. “Look at the sky tonight, all of them stars have a reason” became a calling card for Peep, who would perform portions of “Star Shopping” a capella at concerts to add to the gut punch of lines like, “I know that I’m not that important to you, but to me, girl, you’re so much more than gorgeous,” and “This music’s the only thing keeping the peace when I’m falling to pieces.” Here, and perhaps for the first time, allegory was replaced with direct imagery. “Star Shopping” was a beating, bleeding heart of a song that helped fans relate to Peep, and then wrap that emotion back inwards.
“With ‘Star Shopping,’ I sent [the beat] to him,” producer Kryptik said.7 “I was getting fifty plays on my songs, dude.… I didn’t think anything of it. When I made ‘Star Shopping,’ I was proud of the beat. It was the first beat I tried to make for somebody. I made it for him.” Kryptik continued on to explain that the artist who was sampled on the song, Yppah, and his record label, reached out and the song was eventually removed from streaming platforms. “Yppah basically said, ‘If Peep wants to keep it up, he has to pay.’ So, when you see Peep performing the a capella, I’m pretty sure he’s not legally allowed to perform ‘Star Shopping’ because of the record label. But he still did it anyway, which, I support him. I’d probably do the same damn thing.”
Crybaby was made in a handful of days with a similarly humble set up as Feelz. “He did the first six tracks in Pasadena,” Womack shared with Masked Gorilla.8 “Four tracks in Long Beach-slash-Island Park…June 9 he flew back [to California]…then he dropped it the next day, June 10.” Talent and rigor go hand-in-hand. His prolific nature, and the sheer speed at which Gus could make a song, aligned with this essential artist’s truth: mistakes are corrected with subsequent efforts. With that, crybaby built upon the affecting tones of “Star Shopping” and “life.” The familiar samples on crybaby made key songs feel like they had always existed despite being birthed in quick succession in Long Beach. On the tape, Peep appeared to be an excavator of latent emotional truth.
“One of the first things I heard about Lil Peep was that he sampled Brand New [on ‘crybaby’], and I was super impressed by that,” writer Danielle Chelosky shares. “Who expects a Brand New sample and then someone rapping over it!” In 2021, Alt Press shined a light on Peep’s sample usage, connecting him to the indie and punk scenes: “From the early days of his career, his songs featured a diverse array of scene-bred samples mixed with trap beats and loaded with lyrics that solidified him as a genre-melding force.”9
“If you weren’t able to place the samples themselves, you probably still had the associations of them,” Joyce adds. “You may not know who Pierce The Veil is, but you still know, ‘oh, this sounds like what my friends’ angsty bands sound like around town.’ It gave a different frame of reference to everything he was going for.”
Crybaby works well beyond the sampling Peep employed to ground listeners in his influences. The tape is bare, raw, twitching in ways that are unnerving. Closing track “driveway” uses images of guns and shooting himself to an emotional end. For the first time in Peep’s career, he was able to tap into the zen of releasing himself in service of his work. “lil jeep,” where Peep’s directness is matched with veiled specificity (“I see your face when I look out the window”), revealed a sensitive and meticulous young man vying to be heard, but perhaps fearful of being perceived in full. In mixing reality with fiction, but with no clear line between the two, Lil Peep was a writer’s writer with a keen sense of how much of himself to give and how much to chalk up to being an artist.
“His delivery and the distance in his delivery is such an interesting contrast to the way he writes, too,” Joyce explains. “He is spilling himself out, but he’s floating above it in the way that he sings and raps. ‘I feel horrible, but that’s just how it is. This is just what life is like.’ That’s what so many people connected to. His whole public persona is an invitation to people who felt the same as him. Shit’s bad, but that’s just how it is for everybody. It’s a gesture of a lot of emo music. You want to relate to the person at the heart of the song, but aesthetically and in his voice, there was a way of relating that was distinct from his peers.”
Perhaps more groundbreaking than crybaby, though, was the subsequent HELLBOY project, “his most iconic tape,” as producer Nedarb declared.10 The tape was also Garland’s entry point to Lil Peep, and she describes the early impressions as an “immediate attraction.” HELLBOY was recorded between July 31 and September 19, 2016, and released a week later on September 25. This speed was not uncommon for Peep; he was keen on gutting himself daily, letting whatever messy expressions tumble out of him and using them to ascend a spire of potential.
“It’s funny because every time we made a song with him, it was really fast,” producer Yung Cortex explained. “We had made [‘hellboy’] in like a day, pretty much. Peep told me and [producer smokeasac] to finish the beat, so we finished and sent it to him, and he was just sitting there on the couch with his headphones on, pretty much what he did with any song. Then, an hour later, he went and just recorded something real quick. He’d do it extremely fast and quietly, and then he’d have a whole song done.”
HELLBOY was fearsome and intense. A lot of the playfulness of earlier records was shredded and thrown aside, replaced by powerful displays of disconcerting emotion. Here is where his writing truly shined. Peep took a bludgeon to complete sentences, turned them into tortured fragments, and shipped them off to keep himself steady. On “OMFG,” Peep detailed wanting to kill himself no matter his circumstances with a piercing economy of language. The song was recorded during a party with Peep “singing his heart out,” as Nedarb remembered, in the middle of a shared loft in Los Angeles.
“It feels very unfiltered and natural,” Garland says in regards to Peep’s writing. “He says what he needs to say, in the way he needs to say it. He’s not trying to be poetic, it’s more so, ‘Oh, fuck. I miss this girl who had a fat ass.’ It’s very base, but then if you combine that with the way he sings, he weaves these melodies, screams, and yelps, and that hits for me the most. It feels very unforced, and I just believe it.”
In 2018, Pitchfork heralded HELLBOY as the “masterpiece of Lil Peep’s lifetime.”11 In 2022, the review’s author, Matthew Strauss, says, “I still think that. I do think he found his footing with Hellboy in a way he hadn’t found previously, and showed potential, but wasn’t able to [reach it]. What I’m attracted to with Hellboy, in particular, is the hedonism, for lack of a better word. It’s the rawest of his work, as far as being pretty lacerating to himself and others. It’s mixed super loudly and he’s giving it his all, as if it’s the only time he’s going to. That’s what keeps it as his canonical work, for me.
“There’s an attractiveness to that emotional honesty and being that open in songwriting. That’s what a lot of people seek as listeners: I wanna hear what this person is actually feeling. I’m listening to them for a reason. It has a directness, perhaps, that emo previously had in a different way. But I think he unlocked a system that works, of getting rhythmic and melodic parts, and singing very emotionally on top of them.”
In February 2017, though, Peep outdid himself once again with one of his most iconic tracks, “witchblades” with Lil Tracy. This was the perfect distillation of everything Peep got right in his music: the chanting chorus, the dark and drug-laced imagery, and the subtle goofiness that takes just enough of the edge off. Garland describes “witchblades” as the most effective Lil Peep song: “That’s what made a lot of people pay attention. It’s something people could get behind, and it encapsulated almost like a meme version of what he’s all about. It’s a very neat summary of the whole Gothboiclique agenda.”
Lil Peep’s first studio album, Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 1, arrived in August 2017. The record’s seven songs, according to Garland, seemed to reach the “final form” of the breakout tapes. The album reached for big choruses over sweeping guitar riffs and ditched the rough-hewn edges of the mixtapes for glossy finishes that centered Peep’s voice and aesthetic more than ever. “In terms of the artist that he was becoming, it was the starting point of what was going to come,” Garland says. “What was going on for him around that time as well, aesthetically and visually, that album is really his peak.”
The crown jewel came with the massive pop crossover single, “Awful Things.” Recorded in November of 2016 and released in late July 2017, it is the most grandiose piece of music Lil Peep released. “For him, he had some sort of pop ambition,” Joyce says. “‘Awful Things,’ that is a stadium-sized emotion. He was making music that was meant to feel like even if you’re in the rafter seats, he’s talking directly to you. That is affecting in its own right.” “Awful Things” had a lot of the great qualities of “witchblades,” and of “Star Shopping” and “life” before it. In contrast to those early breakout moments, though, there was something even more fulfilling about singing along to “Awful Things,” about belting, “Bother me, tell me awful things.” It felt like the anthem of a generation, written with supreme concision and delivered with a twisting vocal melody.
While “Awful Things” reached for pop stardom, other songs on the album revealed Peep perfecting his more ominous sensibilities. “Benz truck” and “Problems,” the bookends of the album, played with pained purplish chords and sounded heftier than any of the other doomsday records Peep had released. “Save That Shit” featured the most satisfying flex of his career: “Nothin’ like them other motherfuckers / I can make you rich.”
“The true tragedy of Lil Peep as a listener is that, to me, it felt like he was about to become the biggest thing in the world,” Joyce says. “I buy into his whole thing that he was trying to help people who felt like shit. Even though his music was maybe an over-the-top version of emotion, at least in terms of how I experience emotion, it still was affecting. If he was making a version of that music that could reach more people, as in ‘Awful Things,’ there’s a lot of power to it.”
Peep did not live to see the vast impact he had on the music industry—his life was cut short on November 15, 2017, just days after his twenty-first birthday, due to an accidental overdose of fentanyl-laced Xanax. The night of his death, there were videos of his body shutting down on his tour bus posted to social media. It was impossible to stomach.
When thinking of his legacy, Peep’s fingerprints appear all over new and tired acts alike. “I certainly don’t think that mainstream pop or rap would look the same without him,” Garland says. “I don’t think we’d have Machine Gun Kelly doing what he’s doing without Peep. Absolutely not. For better or worse.”
The cult acclaim, certainly on the cusp of sustained mainstream success, didn’t entirely mesh with the softness of Peep’s interior life. “Having met him and interviewed him, and having seen him perform, he really shrinks behind his music,” Garland remarks. “He really shrinks behind fame. It seemed very reluctant—he wants to do music for a living but didn’t want any of the repercussions that came about. I always think his artistry, in the sense of his actual essence…I absolutely think that’s at odds with the vehicle of emo rap, with the energy of the shows and the intense fandom. The noise around the whole thing just seemed very at odds with him as a person. That’s my impression. It might be projection, but it felt like there was a real split.”
Peep’s quiet charm did not always jibe seamlessly with the enormous attention he was receiving. “I’m not sure music is what Gus wanted for his life, because he was so young and got swept up in this,” Womack says. “He was good at it, but he was also doing a job with touring. He was, as you can imagine, somebody who felt uncomfortable. He was never out, and liked to have his room full of all his friends. He talked quietly and didn’t yell. He came home again in the summer of 2017—he’d been in England—he asked if he could come home to New York. It was right after his friend had a seizure and Gus called me, completely freaked out. He just wanted to come home.
“He was furious, when I finally got him home, because of the snafu of the release of Come Over When You’re Sober. He had not been allowed to release it for months. He always just made something and released it—then the album leaked. He was furious, and then the people he was working for, they said he couldn’t have fire in the ‘Awful Things’ video. He was fed up. He didn’t want to do more music. He said, ‘I’ll just do fashion, or design clothes. I don’t want to be Lil Peep anymore. I’m done.’ He was just twenty! I don’t think we could say music was what he wanted to do.”
Losing Lil Peep was painful. In the five-plus years since his untimely passing, there have been a bevy of online fan pages dedicated to Peep’s legacy. The collective mourning around Peep has evolved into a consistent and mindful adoration. These folks come together to celebrate Peep’s life and his impact through anniversary posts, studio photos, emotional outcries missing his presence, and historical recountings of his music and videos. Every detail of his legacy, as upheld by these online spaces, feels precious.
“The community matters so much to me, because I’m so proud of him for what he’s done,” Womack concludes, through tears. “There’s a thread of what people say, which is he’s able to express for them things they haven’t even thought of, that they felt. He’s expressed that feeling for them…and allowed them to find their own feelings. That’s what the youth are saying to me. The older people, in their forties or fifties, they appreciate that same quality, because they’re also appreciating that their kids are sharing that with them. It’s giving them an avenue to communicate with their children.
“My therapist recommended a book called When Your Child Dies. Nobody should ever have to read a book called that, but it is very, very good. So, I say to people, ‘When your child dies, you die, too.’ The person who you were is now gone. There’s another version of you and you’re living in a nightmare. But you get used to it. I’m lucky in that you don’t want your child to die, so you’re going to hang on to every single thing. So, all the people who know, at least, that there is a person named Gus Åhr, it helps. I’m very grateful—it keeps him alive.”