Brooklyn drummer, composer, and writer Chase Elodia celebrates the friends who stick around through our strangest moments on “Mushroom Trip” ft. Elora & Hudson Freeman, a lush, dreamy indie folk song whose communal vocals and psychedelic redwood memories carry one gloriously absurd day into an affectionate portrait of enduring friendship.

“Mushroom Trip” – Chase Elodia ft. Elora & Hudson Freeman

Friendship reveals itself in the dumbest possible moments.

It lives in the stories that become funnier with distance, in the embarrassment nobody lets you forget, and in the people who caught you at your least dignified and stayed close enough to laugh with you. Sometimes the proof is embarrassingly simple: you lose the plot, say a bunch of nonsense, and your friends keep you company until you find your way back.

Chase Elodia’s “Mushroom Trip” takes that small proof of devotion into the California redwoods, where a psychedelic misadventure becomes a funny, affectionate portrait of friendship stripped of pretense. Wrapped in lush, dreamy indie folk, the song holds onto the absurdity – crying over the color green, losing all sense of ordinary logic – because those details are what make the memory worth preserving. Beneath the haze and laughter, Elodia celebrates the rare friends who can witness us at our most ridiculous and still choose to stick around.

Aidan never went
Wherever he was told
Wherever he was told
Now he’s microdosing
while we lose control
Lose control
We took too much
from his outstretched hand

Chocolate covered plant
We got from a random man
We should have vetted him
He told us to fast
so the medicine would enter
Our bloodstream quicker
Our stomachs were a furnace
Not a single human near us

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Mushroom Trip,” the lush, dreamlike new single from Brooklyn drummer, composer, and writer Chase Elodia. Featuring Hudson Freeman and Elora alongside Elodia on vocals, the song arrives ahead of his forthcoming album Real Ones, out October 23, 2026 via Long Echo Records, and follows lead single “Baggu Bag Baby.” The eight-song record marks Elodia’s debut as a vocalist and brings his own experiences to the center of his songwriting, grounding its humor and playfulness in the friendships, encounters, and memories that have shaped his life.

The memory behind “Mushroom Trip” dates back to February 2019, when Elodia visited Orr Hot Springs in California with three of his closest college friends. One day in the redwoods, the group took psilocybin mushrooms together – an experience Elodia remembers as equal parts transcendent and completely ridiculous.

Aidan never said there’d be no cell reception
Until we’d abandoned
The nearest population of
Ten half naked people on vacation
There was no way to reach us
We didn’t have a single bar of service
It was Aidan’s job to keep us calm

Chase: But 20 minutes in I was spinning
Elora: And 60 minutes in Matt was droolin’
Hudson: And 80 minutes in Russ was cryin’
Together: but all along Aidan was laughin’

“The experience was everything – miraculously awe-inspiring and mind-altering, utterly cliche and cringe – and we definitely said a lot of dumb shit while we were tripping,” Elodia tells Atwood Magazine. “But friends are those with whom you have experienced precisely this sort of emotional panoply with, and who stay by your side nonetheless. The melody needed a name with two syllables so I changed Zach to Aidan for the purposes of this song, but I sing each name in celebration of relationships that extend far beyond the discrete experience of that day.”

Elodia writes the trip as a slowly escalating comedy. A mysterious chocolate-covered dose enters the picture; cell service disappears; one friend starts spinning, another drools, another cries. “Aidan” becomes the group’s reluctant therapist while everyone else slips further outside ordinary reality. Elodia thinks he is a tree. Matt thinks he is a leaf. Russell hears God in the breeze.

And all along, Aidan keeps laughing.

The song’s dreaminess gives those images room to float, while the arrangement’s defining gesture is the way Elodia, Freeman, and Elora share the telling.

They pass the story among themselves, each singer taking ownership of another fragment before their parts converge. By the time all three arrive together at the refrain, “Mushroom Trip” has stopped sounding like one person recalling an old adventure. It sounds like friends rebuilding a shared memory in real time.

“I wanted to capture the experience of three friends tripping and remembering how their fourth friend looked after them – not just in that fleeting moment of altered consciousness but in all the years before and after,” Elodia explains. “Singing as a group conveyed this better than I could alone. Plus, Elora and Hudson are two of my favorite artists and I wanted their voices to be part of this album.”

The chorus makes the song’s emotional thesis wonderfully plain:

“The real ones are
the ones who stick around
Even when you’re saying
the most unspeakably banal shit
On a mushroom trip
Cryin’ ’bout the color green
while you’re stuck in the redwood forest”

It is an absurdly specific definition of friendship, which is precisely why it lands. Elodia does not need grand declarations of loyalty when he has this memory instead: a friend remaining nearby while everyone else loses their bearings, laughing without abandoning them. The joke and the affection are inseparable.

Comedy and sincerity keep sharing the same space across Real Ones. Elodia has little interest in choosing between them; his songs allow each register to sharpen the other. He describes that balance with the same self-awareness that animates “Mushroom Trip.”

“I’m probably the only m********* at the stand-up comedy show who, by the fifth comedian, thinks: You know, I’d really like to hear a poet read right now….haha,” he says. “I think there is a ‘truth’ that can be uniquely communicated in each of these registers. If you lean into one too heavily, something gets lost – people will either think you take yourself too seriously or that you don’t care about anything at all. Part of honestly attending to these different people and events is to notice the contradictory feeling-tones that are tied up in each of them – gravity & silliness, determination and helplessness, tears of sadness and tears of joy/laughter.”

The broader shift behind Real Ones is personal as well. Elodia’s previous album, Have, Know, Want, emerged during a period when he was struggling with anorexia and increasingly disconnected from his own life. Real Ones moves toward lived experience and community while bringing the artist’s own singing voice to the foreground. Every song comes from events he personally inhabited, from arguments with roommates and encounters with strangers to crushes, friendships, family, and the people who helped pull him back toward the life he wanted to be living.

For Elodia, singing those stories himself became part of reclaiming them.

“I realized I had so much life that I wanted to celebrate, decry, laugh at, pray for, and remember, and that, given that these desires and experiences were my own, it made sense for them to be sung with my mouth,” he shares.

“Mushroom Trip” distills that philosophy into one vivid memory. Its redwoods, bad decisions, lost cell reception, tears, laughter, and psychedelic revelations amount to a love song for the people who have seen the least polished versions of us and remained nearby. Even the song’s strangest image carries its own earnest wisdom: when the world becomes overwhelming enough to make the color green worth crying over, having the right people beside you matters.

Real Ones arrives October 23, 2026 via Long Echo Records. For now, step into the redwoods with Chase Elodia, Hudson Freeman, and Elora – and remember the friends who stayed close enough to laugh.

Atwood Magazine caught up with Elodia to dig deeper into “Mushroom Trip,” his first album as a singer, the friendships at the center of Real Ones, and why it really is okay to cry about the color green.

— —

:: stream/purchase Mushroom Trip here ::

:: connect with Chase Elodia here ::

— —

“Mushroom Trip” – Chase Elodia ft. Elora & Hudson Freeman

A CONVERSATION WITH CHASE ELODIA

Chase Elodia: I’m a drummer, composer, and writer. I’ve been living in Brooklyn since October 2019. “You don’t need the map; you need a map” – Adam Phillips (paraphrased from On Balance). Music and books have always been my maps. I often wonder if they are the right maps – if they are the maps – but they’re the best ones I have, so I keep returning to them.

Chase Elodia: “Have, Know, Want,” the title track from my last album, explores questions of desire and the degree to which we are (il)legible to ourselves. I go back and forth between thinking the song is stupefyingly dumb or acutely perceptive. To be sure, it articulates questions that I still often think about. As my above answer hints at, I spent this past summer inhaling the work of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, which also takes up these questions – of just how sure we can be of what it is that we want, how often our desires change, and how much pleasure and potency we get from being frustrated, from being at a remove from what we want. The song repeats the three main words in a variety of ways, rendering them a bit nonsensical (“I want to want what I want,” for instance). Inhabiting a body that holds contradictory desires feels, of course, quite nonsensical!

I wrote “Tense” for my late grandfather. It was inspired by Victoria Chang’s book of poems Obit. It also plays with the materiality and sounds of language, and thinks through the ways our affective relations are mediated through linguistic markers.

Chase Elodia: Some of my favorite artists include l’Rain, Ethan Gruska, June McDoom, ML Buch, Gabriel Kahane, Arthur Russell, Dirty Protectors, Emma Frank, Will Graefe, and Laura Mvula. Also, Bach; I’ve been singing a lot of his chorales lately.

Chase Elodia: I wrote and recorded my last album (Have, Know, Want) while in the grips of a mental illness, anorexia, that turned me into another person: humorless, lifeless, desire-less. The songs on that album reflect that prolonged period (2022-mid 2023) of experiential impoverishedness: none of them are about my own life, and a lot of their subject matter is quite bleak. Recovering from that illness was a matter of reconnecting with my metaphorical “voice” – asking questions such as who am I, what do I love, what are my strengths and weaknesses as a musician, what do I want – and this translated to a desire to return to my singing voice as well. I sang in a church choir in elementary and middle school but had never dealt with my voice seriously since then, so it felt like a return to a form of musical communication that was quite formative for me. I realized I had so much life that I wanted to celebrate, decry, laugh at, pray for, and remember, and that, given that these desires and experiences were my own, it made sense for them to be sung with my mouth. The process of learning how to sing has been everything – rejuvenating, frustrating, ecstatic, sad, empowering, and, honestly, healing. Here’s a note I shared publicly on my Instagram story the other day that encapsulates it well:

One year ago (September 2025) I sang in public for the first time ever. After that show, a vocalist I hold in the highest regard came up to me and said, in a calm, inquisitive tone, “Is the singing thing new?” This was the most diplomatic way to say I sounded like a complete ass, lol. It was just obvious I had no idea what I was doing.

I’ve made modest strides in the last year. There’s a sadness about learning something later in life. 10 years is 10 years; you wish you had started when you were eight. I’m nowhere near where I want to be.

But! Working on singing has been the most rewarding, (re)enchanting process. I would argue that dealing with one’s voice is just as revealing – if not just as efficacious – as talk therapy. So I’m gonna keep going

“If you don’t believe in your music, I pity you, because it’s the best way to learn about yourself” – Jamey Haddad

Chase Elodia: For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading snippets from Jeremy Denk’s memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine before going to bed. He dedicates the book to his late teacher, Gyorgy Sebők, and “to all the other people who save us from ourselves.” I, like everyone else, suffer from various self-destructive attitudes and behaviors, but I find that my friends and family always help snap me out of these ruminative loops and reconnect me with the life I want to be living. I sing to celebrate those who have seen me through: the people who have put up with me at my worst – whether my most earnestly cringe or my most concerningly ill – and also been by my side in moments of beauty and wonder.

Chase Elodia: “BBB” celebrates a summer evening where a random stranger approached my friends and me at a bar and smoked us all out. While we only shared a single interaction, Apolline’s gregariousness indexed something about how random moments of communion can leave one feeling more hopeful about the world. The song is ironic, playful, and earnest all at once. It’s an emotional cocktail that is present on many of the songs on this album.

Chase Elodia: In February 2019, I visited Orr Hot Springs in California with my friends Zach, Matt, and Russell. These are some of my closest friends; we spent years living together in college. The springs were in a stunning setting, ensconced in the redwood forest, and Zach convinced us all to do psilocybin mushrooms for one day during our stay. The experience was everything – miraculously awe-inspiring and mind-altering, utterly cliche and cringe – and we definitely said a lot of dumb shit while we were tripping. But friends are those with whom you have experienced precisely this sort of emotional panoply with, and who stay by your side nonetheless. The melody needed a name with two syllables so I changed Zach to Aidan for the purposes of this song, but I sing each name in celebration of relationships that extend far beyond the discrete experience of that day.

Chase Elodia: I wanted to capture the experience of three friends tripping and remembering how their fourth friend looked after them – not just in that fleeting moment of altered consciousness but in all the years before and after. Singing as a group conveyed this better than I could alone. Plus, Elora and Hudson are two of my favorite artists and I wanted their voices to be part of this album.

Chase Elodia: I’m probably the only m********* at the stand-up comedy show who, by the fifth comedian, thinks: you know, I’d really like to hear a poet read right now….haha. I think there is a “truth” that can be uniquely communicated in each of these registers. If you lean into one too heavily, something gets lost – people will either think you take yourself too seriously or that you don’t care about anything at all. Part of honestly attending to these different people and events is to notice the contradictory feeling-tones that are tied up in each of them – gravity & silliness, determination and helplessness, tears of sadness and tears of joy/laughter.

Chase Elodia: I wrote these eight songs on various keyboards/pianos – most on the keyboard in my apartment’s basement – so it felt natural to play some of those parts for the recording. I never write out drum parts for myself; I just follow my ear based on what I write at the keyboard. I want to thank my collaborators, who brought so much richness – sonic & emotional! – to this album, and helped me balance all of these elements. Producer Jack Broza was an indispensable sound-sculptor and sounding board from the very beginning of this project. He helped me realize many of the sounds I had in my head – and many of which I had never even imagined! – on all of the parts (voice, drums, percussion, synth, piano) I played on this record. His guitar playing is also a defining part of nearly every track. Recording engineers Aaron Holthus and Francesca Lanier provided crucial vocal advice, including some ostensibly minute but actually-really-important stuff like how to sing the vowel “A.” Alejandra Sofia and Christian Li helped to create mind-bending piano and synth parts that ended up defining the entire character of songs like Ava’s Tongue Was a Knife and Dima Might Have Been The Best Man. Paul Pandit contributed earthy, gnarly accompaniment on both electric and upright on various songs. Finally, my fellow vocalists – Alex Koi, Elora, Hudson Freeman, and Alejandra Sofia – are just all f****** awesome; I look up to them in every way. Their vocal ability, artistry, and humanity all helped to make this album what it is.

Chase Elodia: I wanted to share the songs that felt most honest, vivid, and true to me; this was the only criteria. Most of these songs were inspired by a particular event, ones so vivid that I couldn’t help but write about it: A gut-wrenching conversation with a friend (“Ava’s”), an argument with a roommate (LL17T outlines the antithesis of a Real One!), sitting across the table from a crush in a bizarre dive and looking up to see an ’80s porno playing on their TV (“Run Around”). The vehicle of the song and the mobilization of the events and people they describe allowed me to outline the anxieties, triumphs, lamentations, and celebrations that have organized my thinking for the past few years.

Chase Elodia: I hope they take away that it’s ok to cry about the color green. It is beautiful!

Chase Elodia: Some of my favorite composers, musicians, and people are the bandleaders I perform and record with as a side person: Anjoli Simone, Kaamya Sharma (Chammeili), Hudson Freeman, and Matei Predescu. Check out their music! Anjoli just put out a single, Kaamya put out an album last fall, and Hudson and Matei are releasing new albums this fall. All kiiiiiiiilers!!!!

— —

:: stream/purchase Mushroom Trip here ::

:: connect with Chase Elodia here ::

— —

“Mushroom Trip” – Chase Elodia ft. Elora & Hudson Freeman

— — — —

Connect to Chase Elodia on
Substack, Instagram

Discover new music on Atwood Magazine

 © 2026

:: Stream Chase Elodia ::