St. Lenox unspools the true tale of his ‘JD Vance Couch’

Columbus expat Andrew Choi, who records and performs under the name St. Lenox, makes it clear from the onset of our conversation that there’s really nothing special about the couch or the story behind how it came into his possession. (It was given to him free of charge roughly eight years ago by a law school friend who was moving and wanted to unload unwanted furniture.)

And yet, in recent months the sofa has dredged up all manner of considerations in Choi, owing to the fact that his friend used to be roommates with Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Since mid-July, Vance has been the subject of myriad couch-related memes stemming from a joke posted by a user on X (formerly Twitter) who claimed Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, contained a passage in which the politician recounted having sex with an “inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.” 

In a matter of weeks, the joke spread from social media to the stage at the Democratic National Convention, where vice presidential candidate Tim Walz cracked, “I gotta tell ya, I can’t wait to debate [Vance]. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up!” (Vance and Walz are set to square off in a televised debate tonight, Tuesday, Oct. 1.)

“Seeing the couch memes come up, it was so random,” said Choi, who described the provenance of the couch as a random bit of trivia that rarely if ever surfaced in the years prior. As the jokes continued to snowball, and aware he was in possession of a suddenly relevant piece of furniture, the musician cracked open a copy of Hillbilly Elegy, quickly confirming his suspicion that the claims of couch humping were indeed false. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is just some made up thing.’”

The couch and the subsequent thoughts it inspired serve as the centerpiece of the St. Lenox video for the song “Courtesan,” from the forthcoming full-length Ten Modern American Work Songs, due October 25 on Don Giovanni Records. Rather than dwelling on the more salacious aspects of the meme – accompanying text in the video notes that Choi is unsure if his friend owned the couch when he roomed with Vance at Yale – the clip allows the musician space to reflect on the reality that his time at Ohio State University overlapped with Vance. And more so that Vance possibly could have taken an introductory ethics course taught by Choi. (Choi taught philosophy classes as an Ohio State graduate student from 2005-11, while Vance majored in philosophy at OSU from 2007-09.)

“There were maybe two dozen graduate students in the program, so the chances he took an intro to ethics class from me are not high, but it’s possible, because the years he was there line up with the years I was teaching,” Choi said. “And that was a reflection moment, because the premise of the course is that we’re literally teaching America’s future leaders, and we’re hoping to impart upon them some basic tools to be able to navigate the world from a moral and ethical standpoint. … If JD Vance becomes the vice president, he will be in a position where he’s making a lot of big decisions. And if I didn’t teach him, one of my colleagues certainly did, and that puts me in this weird position where I really have to think, like, ‘Did I do a good job?’”

“Courtesan” explores similarly related themes, the song centering on the potentially corrupting influence of law school and the different paths available to students who exit programs and are often thrust into situations where they find themselves in the immediate presence of wealth. “And at the time I wrote it, I was thinking about what was going to happen to me as I went into the legal profession. Maybe I’d be put into compromising positions, or maybe not,” said Choi, who currently works as an attorney. “So, in many ways, the story of JD Vance made perfect sense to tell, because … we were both in the same vicinity [at Ohio State] and we both went to law school afterwards. And then we went in very different directions, which I guess is what the song is ultimately about.”

In the aftermath of the couch jokes surfacing and then subsiding, as memes are prone to do, Vance began to spread falsehoods of his own, claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s cats and dogs, along with waterfowl from local lakes. The falsehoods led to more than 30 bomb threats being made against Springfield, closing schools, hospitals and government offices. In more recent weeks, Haitian Bridge Alliance, a San Diego-based nonprofit that works with Haitians in Springfield, filed an affidavit alleging criminal violations by Vance and former president Donald Trump for their repeated lies.

“And the thing that I found very odd about the way he was attacking Haitian immigrants in Ohio is this idea that these people are eating things we think are strange, which are the same stereotypes used against people from Appalachia,” Choi said of the region Vance has claimed as his own. “It’s this idea that the sin isn’t wrong if we use it against the right people. And that seems to be his position. He has no qualms when he uses it against people who he thinks are detestable.”

Though Choi will likely be watching at least part of tonight’s vice-presidential debate from the Vance couch, he said it’s likely not long for this world, owing in large part to the associations now dredged up by what before had been a much more innocuous piece of furniture. Indeed, as the video for “Courtesan” closes, the accompanying text notes that the couch will likely be gone before Choi’s infant daughter “forms her first memory,” a wording deeply suggestive of the musician’s hope that the worldview for which Vance stands will soon join the sofa in the scrapheap.

“As Vance has become more prominent, the couch itself has become more detestable,” Choi said. “So, I think it is something like that, where I hope she’s not going to have any memory of any of this, because we’ll all be in a better place.”