Download: Billy Bragg “O Freedom”

(from Mr. Love And Justice out now on Anti)

Billy Bragg has been mixing pop and politics and hoping to save the youth of America since he started out as ‘one-man Clash’ in 1977. After projects with Wilco and Woody Guthrie, he will present the U.S. premiere of his vocal version of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ in Santa Monica. This interview by Dan Collins.

You were one of the first musicians I remember being outspoken about gay rights. The first time I heard your music was 1991—I was really young and I turned on MTV in Oklahoma and saw the video for ‘Sexuality,’ where you had that lyric ‘If you’re gay, I won’t turn you away.’ At the time I thought it was totally icky and gross…
Ha ha—it kind of is icky and gross, but in a nice way! You have to talk about these things, particularly back then when the first notions people had about HIV and AIDS was that you get it from talking to gay people. And it was an awful time when the disease first came to prominence. So that was a message I thought very strongly that I had to put out.
Do you think songs like that actually change people’s minds?
You’ve got to hope. What I’m basically trying to do is give people a different perspective, whether I’m writing a love song or a political song or a song that’s a bit of both. And you’ve got to hope that they will build on that perspective—that the perspective will challenge their own worldview enough to explore a little bit about what you’re talking about. Things that may initially sound a bit icky may years later make sense to them. That’s the way music has affected my life. The music hasn’t itself changed my life, but the ideas it’s given to me have led me to form my own opinions about things.
You seem equally at home writing about the personal and the political. Are there songs where you think you achieved both?
Yeah! There’s a song on my most recent album called ‘I Keep Faith.’ When I perform in front of an audience, I talk to the audience about my faith in their ability to change the world. I feel very strongly that singer/songwriters CAN’T change the world, and that ultimately the responsibility lies with the audience. And ‘I Keep Faith’ allows me to put that idea in front of the audience. But if my son comes to the concert, and while I’m saying this to the audience, he says to my wife—his mum—‘Mum, why doesn’t Dad just tell everybody this is about you?’ Then she has to say to him, ‘Well, it is about me, but it is also about what Dad is talking about. It’s about both of these things.’ I think the best political songs are also love songs, and the best love songs also have that urge to make a difference.
I was thinking about that after the death of Michael Jackson. The Minutemen had a song in the ’80s called ‘Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing.’
A great band! A great band! Much much missed!
Agreed! But in Michael Jackson’s mind, he probably thought of himself as a political songwriter. After all, he did ‘We Are the World’ and ‘Black or White.’
I have no problem with someone like Michael Jackson writing a political song, but they need to then come up with the actions to match that. People have to walk it like they talk it, and that’s the bottom line. Otherwise you’re just exploiting that situation for your own material gain. When I hear a political song, I always look for the actions that go along with that.
Your 2002 album, England, Half-English, is very powerful and one of my favorites. There is that sense of nationalism. But I wonder, isn’t there a danger in nationalism as well? Doesn’t it lead to tariffs and wars and hate?
The reason I made that album is because the far-right were beginning to pick up seats. And for all the worry that we have talking about nationalism, if we don’t talk about it, then we leave it to the fascists and the racists to define who does and who doesn’t belong. For better or for worse, the country I live in is called England. I was born here. I speak English. Why should I have to deny that just because a bunch of racist thugs have abused the name of the country? We need to take these things back, although as you said before, some people may—when they first hear it—find it a bit icky. I’m not joking! Some of my own fans initially didn’t feel comfortable with me talking about these things. But I spent time explaining where I was coming from—in fact, I wrote a book about it, ultimately.
In the United States, a lot of lefties like myself have big problems with the way we have treated African Americans and Native Americans and immigrants in the past. But we do have reverence for our founding fathers, despite their faults. Is there an era of English history where you look back like that?
Same era, really. It’s around that time that we chopped off the king’s head and began to have a different kind of idea about how our country should be governed. The period we refer to as the Civil War in the 1640s was actually a period of revolution. The sort of country the founding fathers were trying to live in, we were trying to create then—but it didn’t quite come off. There was a time when we were getting really near to having a proper democracy—200 years before we really achieved it. And that would be a good time to look back to be inspired. The army in the Civil War actually had a rank that was called ‘Agitator,’ which was someone who went out and agitated for change—for more democracy. That idea of the English Commonwealth—our Civil War was fought about the principal of bringing the King to account. Was the King above the law, or was the King within the law? And that idea of accountability is still a very important concept both in your country and my country.
Is there a way in the U.S. to embrace a leftist nationalism like that?
If you care about your country and want it to be a fairer country, if you share in Martin Luther King’s dream, if you want universal healthcare—you’re a patriot, as far as I’m concerned. Patriotism comes in many types. They’re not all defined by Pat Buchanan. I thought George Bush represented a small clique of people in the United States of America—I think Barack Obama represents a much wider slice of the American people. And there’s a nationalism in that.
Perhaps the problem in America is that we’ve watered down our folk-heroes. We’ve watered down Martin Luther King, we’ve watered down Helen Keller…
Woody Guthrie, we’ve watered down! There are extra verses to ‘This Land Is Your Land’ that they don’t teach you in school.
Have country, folk, and bluegrass musicians pushed aside their rebellious, progressive roots? I interviewed Earl Scruggs a few months back, and he really shied away from talking about his anti-war stance during the sixties.
Well, he wasn’t someone who chose playing bluegrass as a career option out of a career portfolio of things he could do. He was an ordinary working man who happened to play bluegrass, and it worked for him. He was trying to reflect his own experiences, and I have a lot of respect for people who try and do that.
Do you say that because the same thing is not true for you? You do seem to have a large portfolio of things you can do. I was pretty impressed that you’re doing this Beethoven thing in August.
Well, whether collaborating with Woody Guthrie, Wilco, or Beethoven and a symphony orchestra, it’s all the same sort of deal, really. It’s all about doing something that’s more interesting than just working the way you normally work.
You were lucky enough to record some of Woody Guthrie’s unreleased songs a decade ago with Wilco.
To write new music to some songs that he wrote. Because he—like me—doesn’t read music. He’s not musically trained. When he writes a song, he just writes the words and keeps the tune in his head. Which I do. If I died tomorrow, those tunes would be lost forever, but the words would still be there. And that’s what we got from Woody. We got complete lyrics to work with. I did a gig in 1992 in Central Park—an 80th birthday celebration for Woody Guthrie. His daughter Nora was there, and she saw something in the songs I sang and the way I performed them that reminded her of her father. And she began writing to me and sending me lyrics and asking me if I was interested in this project. And eventually, in the late nineties, it all came together rather wonderfully with Wilco.
Supposedly you guys had some creative friction during the making of that album.
We made a film of the whole process called Man in the Sand. And there is part of that film that reflects how Jeff Tweedy and I had differences of opinion about the production of the record. The basic deal was that whoever wrote the song would produce that song. And that was a pretty good deal, I thought. And that’s how we worked. But in the middle of the process, after we’d been in the studio working together really, really well, Wilco sent some mixes of my stuff that they suggested, and I just had to say, ‘Look guys, we have a deal. I’m not going to mix your stuff. I’d rather you didn’t mix my stuff.’ And that’s how we left it. The real proof of our working relationship is that when it came time to release Volume 2, they went back and recorded half a dozen new songs—at their own expense—which made that second album a much more Wilco-like album. If they really had a falling out with me or I had a falling out with them, they wouldn’t have made a contribution. I would work together with them tomorrow at the drop of the hat.
Maybe you can play both albums together at Coachella sometime.
It’s Woody’s Centenary in 2012, and if Nora Guthrie doesn’t manage to get us to play together, I think she’ll be very angry! Both me and Jeff, we do what Nora tells us to do because we’re part of the family now. I hope we can come together to do some shows.
Did you ever write ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on your guitar like Woody did?
When I was in a punk band, I wrote ‘This Guitar Says ‘Sorry.’’
What was it like playing folk to punk audiences?
When I started, it was still punk. It was just one guy with an electric guitar playing punk. It was only when I started coming to America that people compared me to Woody Guthrie. In England, everyone said I was a ‘one man Clash!’ I would still try to live up to that today!
When I created a Billy Bragg Pandora station, it came back and played a lot of Elvis Costello.
Elvis to me was the ultimate singer-songwriter, because it had a backbone to it. It had an edge to it. It wasn’t apologetic like so many of the others. It was hard-edged punk rock singer-songwriter. Elvis kind of makes it okay to get on stage with a symphony orchestra.
Or to play with Burt Bacharach! Or to grow a long beard!
I’m not sure I’ll be singing Burt anytime soon, but I will be singing Beethoven.
I’m looking forward to it. But why the Ninth Symphony?
Well, I was involved in an event to celebrate the reopening of a London concert venue called the Royal Festival Hall. It had been built in the fifties and they refurbished it. And as part of the reopening ceremonies, they were having a weekend of events which culminated in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth—the fourth movement, the final bit. ‘Ode to Joy.’ They asked me to write some lyrics for it. Fortunately, it happens to be one of my favorite pieces of classical music. So I duly wrote a new English-language lyric.
Can you give our audience just a little taste of one of the lyrics to your libretto to ‘Ode to Joy’?
The chorus is ‘Brother, Sister, stand together! Raise your voices now as one—though, by history divided, reconcile in unison.’
Do you think you have a unique gift for delivering lyrics like that un-ironically and unapologetically?
I really took my queue from the line in Beethoven’s original, which is ‘Alle menschen werden brüder…’ ‘All men become brothers.’’ When you see that that was the original intent of the lyrics, that verse to me is a very strong. My lyric is not a translation at all, but I took the original sentiment from Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller.
When you played Beethoven for the first time, you played for the Queen of England!
She came to the gig. I wasn’t playing for her. It was being performed, and she kind of came to the gig and sat in the royal box. And it was very funny, because when we were in a higher box on the other side of the theater, you could kind of see what she was doing. And when they were singing my lyrics, she was kind of following them with her finger in the program! And afterwards, she sent a footman down to ask if she could have a copy of the score signed by Mr. Bragg.
You weren’t tempted to yell at her? ‘Off with her head! Another revolution! I’m an agitator!’
No, I wasn’t really. To be perfectly honest with you, my mum was there! It’s not often you get to do something that impresses your mum in rock ‘n’ roll!

BILLY BRAGG PERFORMING BEETHOVEN’S NINTH WITH DWIGHT TRIBLE, BANDA PHILHARMONICA, SUZIE GLAZE, ERNEST TROOST, JUSTIN BISCHOF, THE BAKER + TARPAGA DANCE PROJECT AND MORE ON SAT., AUG. 29, AT THE BROAD STAGE, 1310 11TH ST., SANTA MONICA. 7 PM / $55-$100 / ALL AGES. BEETHOVENBRAGG.COM. BILLY BRAGG’S MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BILLY BRAGG AT BILLYBRAGG.CO.UK OR MYSPACE.COM/BILLYBRAGG.

Download: Os Mutantes “Anagrama”

(from Haih out Sept. 8 on Anti-)

Os Mutantes decided everything was possible and tried to prove it across a set of albums that were national classics at home in Brazil but which never even made it to the States until a foreign exchange student accidentally left her copies with the boys in Redd Kross. Low End Theory resident and Blank Blue guitarist Nobody (Elvin Estela) speaks with Mutantes co-founder Sérgio Baptista about helicopters, honesty and the brand-new Mutantes album Haih.

What I love about your new record is that it doesn’t sound like you guys are trying to recreate your old sound—it just sounds like you picked up where you left off.
Sérgio Baptista (guitar/vocals): That’s definitely what I was really wanting to do and I was very happy that I could do it in terms of being able to be faithful and honest to our legacy and not looking back in any way—no way. We are in the 21st century and we are different people now and it’s very important for us to be honest and play what we feel. I think we were very blessed in being able to do something I consider is honorable to our legacy.
That’s an incredible approach to recording, especially for a band that hasn’t put out anything in a while. This is a perfect addition to your discography—it doesn’t stand out as ‘the modern record.’ It’s definitely just a timeless record.
If you don’t put yourself in danger of being spit upon, then you are not really alive. Then it’s just going to be a mock. And we owe so much to the people and the kids and everybody that we have to at least open up our hearts and souls the best way that we can to be naked in front of them and let them look at us. Now we are different—we are fatter, we are older—but that’s who we are. That’s how Mutantes would sound now and I think with all the flaws and wisdoms that came with age—I think that’s the most important thing that you have to do as a producer or artist is basically to just assume all of it and be ready to expose yourself. That’s basically what an artist has to do.
Put their balls on the line.
For sure. That’s what we always did and it’s what we’re doing.
What’s the point of art if there’s no risk involved?
Exactly—it would be sad. I think it would be like spitting in the place where we eat. We are able to see how important these people are and how much we owe them. What we can do is be as completely honest as we could and put our hearts the way they are.
You talk about being a lot older but your voice hasn’t aged a bit—what’s your secret to eternal youth and voice?
I’m not older; I’m younger for a longer time. You cannot lose your child inside. If you let your child die then you are in trouble.
I wanted to ask about this urban myth about your guitars—you had a fuzz guitar with each individual string going to its own fuzz pedal?
Yes. All the electronics are inside of it.
Each string had its own processor?
Yes. When I was with my brother and Rita only, all the job of texture and solos came down to myself. I had to fill in all the sounds and I had a need for sound. We lacked harmonies and I wanted to be able to play chords with fuzz, but if you play a chord with just one fuzz you have intermodulation and you have a bad sound and you cannot get the chord clean. So I spoke to my brother who was building the stuff, and he said the only way I can do this is to do one pickup per string and then through a fuzz individually and mix all of them together and I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ So we did it and it sounded great.
I saw Mutantes in L.A. in July 2007 and my favorite part of the show was when you were pretending there was a helicopter above the audience with the guitar.
All improvisation. It was basically the sewing machine pedal that I used on ‘Bat Macumba’ but in a different manner. It normally was mechanical but then we made it possible to use digitally. It was impossible to use that thing more than five minutes because it was connected to the engine of the sewing machine.
It was actually running through a real sewing machine?
Oh yeah. The guitar was coming in and out of it. With the axis of the engine and how you could vary the speed, he would cut open the sound of the guitar extremely fast and this would create several different harmonics and things that make that crazy sound. It was something that was not practical, so now in the digital era we were able to produce this in a way that it is possible to play with it. So I’m using a lot of it in the record.
Did you ever think of manufacturing and making it widely available to the world?
Yes, definitely. The name is Green Devil. Because the sewing machine was green.
I would definitely use a Green Devil pedal if you ever put one out.
I’ll do my best—definitely. So you think I should go for a helicopter again?
You haven’t done it since that show?
No. Ok—I’ll do it again.
I thought it was hilarious. I kept looking back, I was like, ‘Man, this is the greatest showmanship right there.’ You should have been the guy making guitars for kids in the ‘60s—we’d have a lot cooler stuff like sewing machine effects pedals.
Yeah—twenty years before Ovation we were using a piezo on the bridge. If you hear any of those songs like ‘Dia 36,’ that crazy sound of guitar that sounds a bit like an acoustic—it is a piezo electric.
‘Dia 36’ is one of my favorite songs by you guys.
I think it was one of my best lyrics. It was from an American guy who came here and I made the lyrics.
Who was the American guy?
It was John something—God, I don’t remember. He was a crazy guy—like albino, like the brothers Edgar and Johnny Winter.
And he was the original writer of the song?
He was—when we played, he just entered the stage and he was totally out of his mind and he was screaming and it was great. It was really amazing. I think he wrote the song on a dulcimer and I really loved his song. I got it and I wrote the lyrics for it and it was great.
To me you guys are one of the premier psychedelic bands that ever existed—I really think that it’s amazing that thousands of people today can relate to a psychedelic band from back then. What do you think that says about psychedelic music from that era? In history, it might be seen as a flash in the pan because it was only five years of music. But so much came out.
It’s amazing for us because we didn’t know that we were psychedelic or anything like that. There was no psychedelia at the time, at least not in Brazil. The first album came out in ’68 and there was no drugs involved in any of the albums.
So to you guys, you weren’t making psychedelic rock—you were just making whatever you wanted to make?
Yes. It is amazing that it fell on the slot. The way that we used to gather information was like a kaleidoscope in pieces and then from the flower power, we just got the flower not the power. We didn’t even care about the power—we just loved the flower. You know the girls and the free love and all the beauty and the colors and the music—we didn’t realize it was Vietnam behind it.
In America it was definitely about the protest, but for English bands it was more about the girls and the flowers. What bands from across the world were influencing you guys down in Brazil?
Everybody. Sly and the Family Stone for sure. Beach Boys, Mary Ford and Les Paul, Jimmy Smith, all the operas. We had a huge and very big spectrum of music which we drank from. Like Sarita Montiel from Spain and all the mariachis from Mexico. We were into everything—all the cats, Barney Kessel, the Ventures, the Shadows, all of them.
And it all combined to create what you wanted?
Oh yeah—take my solos. They were very Ventures-oriented at the beginning. I think the great thing about it is that all the record companies and all those people were into the music. The money came much later. Nobody was worried about being a star or selling a billion dollars in records. I think people were just making music from the heart and the honesty that we had in doing this—I think that’s maybe what draws people to listen to us.
Do you think that people can make music from the heart again today?
Oh, for sure. We’re doing it. I think this new album definitely. There is no thought behind it—this is just the music playing the way it came to us in terms of inspiration and everything. There is no gimmick behind it.
You said you always had a need for sound—where did that come from? If you guys weren’t doing psychedelics like the English bands, what drove you?
I think it probably came from NASA. I was raised with like the X-15 and the X-2 and knowing all the names of the cats—like the guy who broke the sound barrier. All those things were so important for us. I heard the Sputnik—we put on the shortwave and listened to the ‘bleep, bleep, bleep’ and it was an amazing era. All of this—the technology were so much in our veins, and all these things were happening so we always were connected to it. Especially because my brother was such a genius and proud of making all this stuff.
So it was space and the technology of the time?
All the science and technology and all the avant-garde things that were going on at the time. There was Picasso and all of this was influencing us a lot. Modern art and all this was a must for us. I think that was translating to sounds.
How long did it take to record this album?
It took about a year. We took our time—we didn’t want to rush everything. Especially because of everybody’s schedule and the bunch of things that everybody was doing and of course the beginning of the year was very had because Arnaldo left the band and we took our time.
What does the name mean?
It’s a Shoshone language. It means ‘raven.’ I was passing this crow in France and trying to get its picture and I got his picture of him looking at me looking like he was saying, ‘Get ready ‘cause you’re next.’ He was pissed with me. And I got the crow photograph and I was watching a movie about the Clark expedition and the Shoshone thing—I’m very involved with this area because it was such a magical place in America. I started to know of Nevada as such a great state. You go to Las Vegas and you forget the Strip and all the mountains are so magical and you have the fantastic lake and you go thirty miles to the other side and there’s snow—then you’re in the desert. You can feel the Indians there. You can feel the energy of America—which was great. I saw the documentary about the Clark expedition and there was this girl who I don’t remember her name—Sacajawea? She was very important symbol for women as an endeavor or entity and she saved the journals of the expedition and she was the one who guided the expedition—which was great. And so I started fooling around trying to get a name in Shoshone and I found a dictionary on the internet of Shoshone. I wanted to do like ‘Lightning Crow’ but the lightning word was like ten words together—it was huge. I couldn’t even pronounce it, so I just had ‘crow.’
You would have had the longest album title ever if you used the whole thing. Almost longer than Devendra Banhart’s first record.
Yeah—probably.
The most amazing thing about your show last year was that it was completely sold out—but your records were never released in America when they came out.
It was something that was really amazing to me, too. When we played in 2006 at the Barbican and one month after playing there we booked about 8 shows in America in the most brilliant places like the Hollywood Bowl and Fillmore and the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago—and we hadn’t played one note. That was really amazing. Now having all these things happening and playing in America and having so many people that are involved with us, it is something that makes you very happy and humble about it because you know that it was so spontaneous—it’s a beautiful thing to see.

OS MUTANTES WITH DJ NOBODY AND BUYEPONGO ON FRI., AUG 28, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD, ECHO PARK. 8PM / $28-$30 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. OS MUTANTES’ HAIH RELEASES TUE., SEPT. 8, ON ANTI-. VISIT OS MUTANTES AT MUTANTES.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/OSMUTANTES.

Download: Busdriver “Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsets)”

(from Jhelli Beam out now on Anti-)

We met up with Busdriver at a coffee shop in Silverlake to discuss the future, the present, and the bits of past that stick around like gum on the bottom of your shoes. His newest Jhelli Beam is out now on Anti-. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

I can’t really kick it in this neighborhood anymore.
In this airport?
In this airport. In this neighborhood. I don’t know. I can’t.
Why can’t you? You get so sensitive.
I’m sensitive?
A little bit.
Probably am. Strike that up as my primary weakness.
What’s new?
I’m weathering the storm. The electrical storm. Meaning, the live form in which music happens. Trying to reform my little show for a tour in the Fall around the U.S.A. Wisconsin. Seattle. Omaha. All the hot spots.
How are you changing the live show?
Just a couple of things. Nothing dramatic.
You’re the dramatic one?
I’m not the dramatic one. What’s dramatic are the songs and the…actually there’s nothing dra-matic about it. It’s all quite tame at the end of the day. Hopefully the live presentation makes it seem other than that. When you’re removed from the receiving end of the music and you add the place where the genesis of the music comes from, it’s a bunch of very practical elements. This has to go here because this means there, and then, ok! When we’re building the show and sound banks and cutting things, we’re pretty conservative.
We is you and Anti MC?
Me and Anti MC and God knows who else. Aside from that, I’m executive producing a rap record for my friends Thirsty Fish. They’re from my open mic—Project Blowed. Three guys, three rapping machines. They will be on Mush. I’m the spewer of cosmic advice. I’m with them every step of the way. I really want to do more stuff like this. To corral and harness other people’s output is strangely satisfying.
How do you feel about Jhelli Beam?
Here’s my purpose of the record. I wanted to reinforce the interest of a base of people who enjoyed my earlier records. That’s probably the last record I am going to make like that. I believe that maybe a lot of my records are anachronistic in that they reference techniques and a time and set of values that are long gone. They had their place in the ‘90s. I don’t think it’s bad, but sometimes I’m really indulgent. There’s a different emphasis that the next records are going to have. The way that I rap and write, it can be interpreted as clusterfuck of wacky ideas and maddening technique and pseudo song writing and that’s fine. But I want to pare it down.
Less syllables?
Rapping less? A variety of things may play into it. I have a whole collection of songs I record that don’t play into the Busdriver records that come out. I want to meet some middle ground. It’s really stressful to make records like Jhelli Beam. I don’t want something easier. I want something genuine in other facets of myself. I don’t want these beat to death ideas I had when I was 14. That’s what Jhelli Beam is. It’s me being 14 and saying, ‘What if I could rap this way?’ And then rapping this way. I need to press the refresh button.
Are you going to make a pop song?
No, that’s the default mode for rap and indie acts. ‘Fuck this shit, I’m making pop records!’ And people are blowing up and making money. I’m already knee deep in the next shit and I haven’t really made pop songs, but I’ve made some kind of songs. I’m having fun. I’m fortunate enough that no one ever pressures me to go a certain way. Not my label. Not my grandmother. I don’t regard my posse’s input as much as I used to. I’ve gotten to the point where I can trust my instincts. I want to indulge that. That’s all that I have. I’m trying to come to terms with being a professional, an auteur, a man of the arts. I have to do things that I think make sense. Too much advice gets factored into rap music. When I read a lot of interviews with rappers, there’s so much emphasis on their careerist aspirations. ‘Hey, man, you feel like you being shorted by the industry?’—‘Yeah! I’m not blowing up! Yada, yada…’ Is that all people think about? Is that all people who ascribe to black culture think about? I don’t think so. This will land where it may, but we’ll keep going. L.A. has changed. There’s other kinds of things to do. The next Michael Jackson could be an architect or a neurosurgeon. The king of pop popularizing neurosurgery. I think I read somewhere that our president is the king of pop. Which he is.
Is that a positive?
Is it? It has sway over millions of people. I’m sure it is positive.
Is there a parallel between the sway of politics and the sway of music over people’s existence?
You can’t deny a cult of personality. You can’t deny a populist slant on good ideas or revisited ideas and I think if you’re a rapper or a politician, there are similar regions you have to thrive in and personal traits you have to exaggerate. Everyone in politics has to have some kind of—aside from good ideas on policy—some personal investment in things. It’s kind of the same with rap music. There aren’t too many rappers out there devoid of personality. Which makes it seem a bit like a minstrel show.
Menstrual?
Minstrel. I actually did say menstrual because of my lisp. But people kind of dance around…
Bleeding all over themselves? Babies coming out of a woman! A sea of red and a killer dance beat.
[He flips through newspaper on the table]
You like that Cirque De Soleil stuff?
Actually I just performed with a circus dance company. They booked me and were dancing all freaky behind us. Contortionists and stripper clowns gyrating. I saw a stripper construct a portable stripper pole right there during sound check.
What do you make of the cross between strippers and clowns and burlesque? It seems somewhat popular.
Burlesque is one thing, but stripper clowns—that’s strippers as clowns, wearing things with the boobies out—that’s kind of different from burlesque. It’s a seedy underbelly of depraved yet very entertaining individuals.
What kind of entertainment do you like?
I like puppies and gumdrops.
How can you have a new puppy and go on tour?
That’s why I have gumdrops.
The puppy eats the gumdrop while you’re away?
The gumdrop eats the puppy. Then when I want the puppy again, the gumdrop regurgitates the puppy.
You like games?
I played Scrabble the other day for the first time. It was fun. I recommend. I don’t like cards.
You ever gamble?
With my life, but that’s about all.
What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever done?
Driving through Montana at 3 in the morning on a snowy night. That was daring. Daedelus was there. I was driving and it was getting slippery. He was playing a game—he’s got various ways of entertaining himself while the down time is being lived through—and he was looking at me and I was looking at him like really intense. He was like [concerned], ‘Are you ok?’ And I said [tense], ‘It’s fine! Just…a little slippery!’ That’s how I get down. That’s a good fun evening to me.
How about the guys you work with—Daedelus, Deerhoof. How does that fit into the Busdriver schema? Is this part of your evolution?
I don’t know if I am evolving. I think I should devolve a bit and set a different trajectory. I like these people. I’m always hungry to spend time and work with Deerhoof. I thought we were plotting a course at some point but we got sidetracked. I want to incorporate more people. I don’t want to get bored or complacent. I want to do things in real time rather than rehashing my old ideas.
There’s not too many other people doing your idea.
I think there’s a reason for that!
What age would you like to go back to?
There’s so many problems at every step. Which set of problems would I prefer over my current bevy of problems? When I was 21, I liked my problems. I didn’t like being 21 but I liked my problems. Hustling, that was problem. Hustling CDs on the street and writing rap songs and raising a newborn baby. Ooh, boy. It was a tough period. My daughter’s about to be 11 next week. She’s a big Jonas Brothers fan and I make fun of her at every twist and turn. I like now, though. I don’t think back, like, ‘I’m old, I need things!’
What is necessary? How do you deal with that?
I perpetuate disorganization. I throw it out into the world and it comes back 10-fold. I haven’t filed my taxes properly. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve got parking tickets from god knows when and where. I have no plan. By the seat of my pants. It works out somehow. I mainly do things out of fear. I make records out of fear.
Fear of what?
Exactly. Fear of what? What the fuck am I afraid of? Myself? Expectations? Lack of expectations? The ability to tour. What people think. Anything. I’m afraid of everything. Try to keep things on an even keel.
Is there fear in performing?
Riddled with fear. Not stage fright but I’m like, ‘I got to blow up! It’s not going well! Do something! Hit a button!’
Have you ever tripped over a mic cord?
Once I fell through a hole in a stage. It was years ago in San Jose. I’m walking off like, yeah, I’m badass, and then hoooo! But no one even saw it or acknowledged and I crawled out and I wasn’t even sure that it really happened. It was a complete hole. I disappeared.
What’s something to laugh at that’s humiliating when it happens to others? Like when they walk into a sliding glass door?
That’s a good one. I like when really confident or attractive looking people fall or trip or get knocked down. That never gets old. That’s what you get! But, what do I do for fun? That’s a good question. I used to go to museums. My daughter doesn’t like museums anymore. I took her to a David Hockney exhibit and she was like, ‘Why is that guy naked? What’s that man’s butt doing?’ I was like, ‘It’s expression. It’s something good? There’s something important in this painting…’
She’s not an L.A. kid that likes art galleries?
Some of her friends are. She’s definitely a child of now. She makes web pages and edits film and writes scripts. So she is kind of an L.A. kid but she’s more goofy. She does impressions and accents. We’ll be talking and she does this Indian accent. I don’t know where she gets it from. But she’s got a prolific mind on top of her for a child.
What’s she think of your albums?
She makes fun of me. ‘Sun showers, beebadeedee, bee ba dee dee…’ I’m like [weak], ‘Shut up?’ It’s all good. She my homie. I’ve been acting very fatherly the last year. Like, ‘Don’t do that thing!’ A lot of finger wagging. I need to ease up on that. More tail wagging. Like, ‘Good job!’ She loves clowning me. That’s her thing.
Has being a dad made you better? Is it a playground in which you can learn about yourself?
Having a child has almost nothing to do with self. It’s not self-fulfilling. It’s fulfilling but it’s not a place where you reassess yourself so much. It’s not like, ‘Oh man, this is so good for my insides! My soul is re-energized via this little exchange.’
Where do you get your clothes? I appreciate your colors.
The Salvation Army. Really? My daughter gets the new clothes. I get the recycled shit. I do like bright colors. I don’t like dark colors. That’s from the ‘90s when Grand Puba came out and he dressed a certain way. We all used to wear Eddie Bauer stuff. All colored shirts and stripes. I don’t necessarily dress like that now but it’s similar to that. But the child. The immediate reward of having a kid is that you become more compassionate, more patient, more sensitive to people’s needs, more cognizant of the underpinnings of people’s personalities, and what kind of upbringing gives way to how people become. How a country’s regional culture melds into people, how it becomes people or how people reject it. Children in France and Norway have different priorities and different levels of xenophobia, different footwear. It’s good to know what that is. Then you understand people more. Or you can act like you understand people more. Kids are fascinating. Kids in the U.S. have so many advantages. It’s bizarre. On one side the educational system in L.A. is kinda bad. My daughter’s about to go into a magnet middle school. It’s good but what’s happening there? I’m wary of teachers when they make too many sweeping hand gestures. ‘Kids have to le-e-e-e-ea-rn to be freeee!’ And I’m like, what are the requirements for mathematics? How are you introducing algebra? ‘Freeeeee!’
My math teacher blew bubbles out of her eyes.
See, I don’t want bubbles—out of her eyes?! That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Daiana. I want regimented education. Not bubble-blowing math teachers. Actually that’s fantastic. That’s crazy.
What subject were you bad at?
Everything.
But you’re good at memorization.
Not really. I don’t memorize lyrics at the time. But if you spend hours with them.
How many times do you do a song before you perform it?
I don’t rehearse.
Then you’re good at memorization.
Ok, fine. But all those details get obscured. You become a creature of habit. I do something a couple of times, I guess I can pull it off live.
Do you think the apocalypse will happen in your lifetime?
If I lived in Iran then I would understand that the apocalypse is happening right now. If some kind of cataclysmic doomsday scenario comes out, the blow will be softened for the USA. No one will know it happened. The rest of the world will be in fucking ashes or a smoldering pile. We’ll be here drinking lattes with HD-TV channels beaming straight to our heads. I don’t know. That’s some conscious rapper disillusionment. Like, ‘Man, they’re going to control our MINDS! We’re never going to be free!’ With Britney Spears break-the-chains hand gestures. I don’t think the world is going to blow up yet. But there are worse things than the world blowing up. Such as not being able to go to school. Did you know they’re going to cut that out? So poor people can’t go to school. This is Schwarzeneger attempting to save a few bucks. If you’re poor and you’re exceptionally talented, you are staying home.
Not that I agree with that, but there are some ideas about civilization not being sustainable, which will require the dying off of a large part of the population.
‘Poor people are going to have to die for the world to keep going.’ Are you predicting a mass-scale holocaust?
Maybe little ones spread about the world.
There aren’t too many people. There’s mismanagement in how these people live. No one has gotten the clue that the paradigm shift doesn’t have to be in 10 years, it has to be now. That takes a lot to do. That’s why Obama can’t do it in his term, or two terms. He’ll probably set it in motion, kind of…there are too many groups he has to appease. He’s not going to do that shit. I don’t know if people are going to die. In the ‘60s they said it—the world’s going to end! But it didn’t. The quality of life is going to become different. Who knows? Americans spend a lot of money they don’t have.
If only the world were different. You can’t make life the way you want it to be entirely. You have to have insurance.
You don’t have to have those things.
They send you letters that say so.
I don’t have healthcare.
What do you do when you’re sick?
I hope that I don’t get sick—that’s what I do.

BUSDRIVER WITH DEERHOOF AND AVOCET ON FRI., JULY 31, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $14 / ALL AGES. ATTHEECHO.COM. BUSDRIVER’S JHELLI BEAM IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BUSDRIVER AT BUSDRIVERSITE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/BUSDRIVER.

Os Mutantes are one of our very favorite bands here at L.A. RECORD, as evidenced by the 150,000-word interview with Sergio Dias we did when they played the El Rey two years ago, which got Sergio reminiscing about how much he loved L.A.:

I remember on Wilshire Boulevard, there was this couple—probably in their forties, a guy and his wife in a beautiful convertible, and it was the first time I ever saw anybody do the peace sign. They did the peace sign to us and we were like, ‘What is this?’ We didn’t speak English then. Everything was so new and so pretty—to see Wilshire Blvd. with such a crowd as it was, everybody dancing and happy and talking to each other and saying hello—it was so beautiful. Something that I miss a lot.

And now we are very excited to learn that Mutantes have signed with L.A.’s Anti- label—home of Nick Cave, Jason Lytle, Bob Mould and more—for a new album called Haih to release on September 8! (They’ll also being playing the Echoplex in what will surely be one of the shows of the year!) More info from Anti- below:

Os Mutantes were formed in Sao Paolo Brazil in 1966 by Sergio Dias and his brother Arnaldo, who blended their love of English rock n roll, culled from shortwave radio broadcasts, with American psychedelic in the spirit of Jimi Hendrix and traditional Brazilian music to create an entirely new sound to match an equally turbulent time in Brazilian history. While Os Mutantes were leading a growing youth mobilization as part of the Tropicalia movement alongside the likes of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, their country was reeling in the midst of a military coup and ensuing artistic crackdown which eventually left Gil and Veloso imprisoned and exiled.

In the short years they were active, Os Mutantes crafted a distinctive, riotous and modern sound, experimenting with homemade instruments studio effects, traditional forms of Brazilian music, field recordings, unorthodox song structures and time signatures — and combining those with international influences in the form of pop music being exported out of England and the US in the late 1960s. Coupled with an overt political message embracing libertarian expression and artistic freedom, the few records Os Mutantes recorded have become enduringly influential. In the mid 1990s, 20 years after their last recording, Kurt Cobain famously issued a plea, begging for a reunited Os Mutantes to open for Nirvana. Since then, the band’s importance has been cited by current alternative superstars ranging from the Flaming Lips and of Montreal to Devendra Banhart to Beck, who wrote “for years it [Os Mutantes] was pretty much the only thing I listened to.”

Now Os Mutantes have found a home with other likeminded provocateurs such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Mavis Staples and Billy Bragg on the Los Angeles independent label ANTI- Records. 2006 saw a reunion of sorts, with the band playing a handful of shows in London, New York, the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, San Francisco and supporting the Flaming Lips at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, but it is the release of Haih in September that will mark the band’s first recorded material since 1974 and their very first album to receive a worldwide release. Conceived by Sergio Dias with collaborations with other Brazilian legends Tom Ze (lyrics) and Jorge Ben (who wrote the song “Minha Menina”), Haih is a vibrant and timely return from one of world music’s most important bands.

Download: Busdriver “Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsets)”

(from Jhelli Beam out now on Anti-)

Stream: Jason Lytle “Yours Truly, The Commuter”

(from Yours Truly, The Commuter out now on Anti-)

Fans of Grandaddy probably sensed they would one day hear again from Jason Lytle, the band’s former singer/songrwriter/reluctant leader, for despite its well-documented struggles, Grandaddy proved to be resilient. In fifteen years together, the band produced five critically acclaimed albums. However, while their peers—bands like Coldplay and Bright Eyes—went on to achieve commercial success, Grandaddy, whether by design or by the luck of the draw, found that type of success elusive. Now, Jason Lytle is back. Though he’s relocated from Modesto, Calif. to Bozeman, the fifth-largest city in Montana, his distinctive sound is unchanged. This interview by Nina Gregory.

You’re in London right now. How does it feel to be back on tour?
It’s fine—it’s still an experiment, though. I quit doing all this stuff, and I’m seeing little glimpses of why I quit—and I’m still at the front end of what appears to be a number of months of touring. So I’m having to make sure that I deal with it however I can. I’m a loner… and all of a sudden I’m always around people. Always. Always. The shows are good, though, and Europe’s pretty, but I do like my privacy. The tour just started and we sold out of all our merchandise a few days ago. We had no merchandise, so I got what I thought was a good idea. I know this good artist in London—Daryl Waller. I really like his art. So, I went to his studio and hung out… and I said, ‘Hey, let’s create a bunch of merchandise.’ We went to some dollar stores and bought mousetraps and pillowcases. We’ve been downstairs in the dressing room like two kids customizing this stuff. All these people keep walking in—and I just want to be that six-year-old kid playing with my coloring book. I do have that to look forward to when I get off the phone with you. I’m not good with too much stimulation. I need silence and you don’t get that on tour.
The artwork on your new album is really lovely. It’s like a children’s book with a little twisted take on typography, with branches for your initials. Do you design your album covers yourself?
Yeah—all of the full-length stuff was either designed by me or created by me. I get a lot of enjoyment out of that. It’s not a weird power or control thing—I just like to do art. I have an art table all set up in the studio with my musical equipment. In my world all that stuff blends together.
Your songs often have a melancholy feel—the last Grandaddy album was like a sad farewell. But now your first solo album opens with, ‘Last thing I heard I was left for dead… I may be limpin’, but I’m coming home.’ What are you coming home to?
I’m coming home to that thing that I mentioned before: the little kid sitting in the middle of the room with coloring book and crayons. That’s sort of me in the studio. I enjoy getting to that point where I get lost in the whole process of making songs, and over the years it seems that my medium for artwork has shifted—for me, making records is really like painting pictures. It’s kind of a celebration for me, getting back to that point. I had almost given up on my ability to get to that point.
Your music tends to be very personal—writing from experience and observation. In the past, one subject that arose in your music was life in and around Modesto—the tech bubble, relationships, isolation, the landscape. Even though you no longer live in the Central Valley, do you think about things there—like, say, the housing crisis, which has devastated the area?
I have always made what I feel to be a concerted effort into pursuing the escapist aspects of making art. I tend to shy away from politics. I like to keep music separate from those things and give you a break for four minutes—maybe even as long as an hour. I always felt I needed to be someplace like Montana. Even in California I always gravitated to places where I had space and there wasn’t constant audible and visual clutter. I like to feel as if I have a grasp of what’s going on around me, but it takes awhile for me to figure those things out. I can’t be always going. I can’t deal with constant stimulation.
So it’s safe to say you’re not Twittering.
There’s just no depth. It’s a big waste to see how much you can cram in. It’s just going to end up bad. It has to be up to the individual to say, ‘That’s enough.’ But, at that point, your ability to know how to get away from it—you’ve lost this. It’s shrunken—this little something that should have been exercised all those years while keeping up with the race.
With all the constant, intrusive forms of communication, do you think the ability to have some intimacy has been lost? Do you have to fight for that in your music or is it just your sound?
There is a craft to what I do. I refuse to let a song leave the house until it feels right. Even if it’s a stupid joke, it has to be structured and constructed, but it usually comes down to a balance, some discernable form, some human connection. It just happens the smaller and more mellow stuff starts to make me feel a certain way—I come up with lyrics after that, then you come up with this thing that feels like a human made it. I will fly that flag proudly as long as I can.
You seem painfully shy. Do you get any joy from performing?
It’s a weird contrast, performing versus being alone. I grew up around crazy skateboarders, going to parties, getting into fights—there’s that whole part of my upbringing. But there’s also the part—the introvert kid who can get lost in pages and get lost in the world of headphones… and at this point I’m just trying to reserve my strength. Because I’ve narrowed it down to the things that I’m pretty good at. And I don’t like spending too much energy or time on things that I’m not good at. I’m saving my energy for the good stuff at this point. And if that comes off as shyness, so be it. I’ve got a crazy sense of humor and don’t mind hanging out.
I want to go back to your Grandaddy days for a moment. You toured with Elliott Smith. What did you learn from him?
He had a really good sense of humor. Elliott was a really funny guy, which a lot people don’t know. He kind of had that thing I was just talking about—reserving your strength. At some point, you realize you’re just giving it out, giving it out, giving it out. Then, when it comes time to drive home and get through a hard day, you got 20 minutes left in the show and it’s not going the right way and you have to pull out the stops, and you dip into those reserves, I picked up a bit from him. Other than that, I’ve had a few friends that took this tragic route. He did. I realized that I don’t want to be like that. I love being alive and I love having these moments of beauty and experiencing things. It really sucks when you have friends that have died and you realize every time you’re having a happy moment—it just makes me wonder why they ended up taking such a tragic route.
David Bowie was a big fan of Grandaddy. Do you hear from him? What was it like to have Bowie as a fan?
It was pretty neat. More surreal than anything. He was really, really sweet. And oddly enough he was very informed of the albums and the music and songs, specifically. We have a few pictures of the band standing next to him. It doesn’t seem real—it just seems like us standing next to a cardboard cutout.

JASON LYTLE WITH TWO GUNS AND O’S AND THE OCULISTS ON THUR., JUNE 11, AT THE ART THEATRE, 2025 4TH ST., LONG BEACH. 7:30 PM / $16-$20 / ALL AGES. ARTTHEATRELONGBEACH.COM. AND WITH NEKO CASE ON FRI., JUNE 12, AT THE GREEK THEATRE, 2700 N. VERMONT AVE., HOLLYWOOD. 7:30 PM / $35-$40 / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE.COM. JASON LYTLE’S YOURS TRULY, THE COMMUTER IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT JASON LYTLE AT JASONLYTLE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/JASONLYTLE.

Download: Busdriver “Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsets)”

(from Jhelli Beam out Tue., June 9, on Anti-)

When Busdriver describes his “haircut like a pineapple” or his “Zaxxon joystick that pokes at his glitter spackled tight jump suit,” language gets so excited it sucks its own unwashed toes. I formed a symbolic crush on Busdriver three Coachellas ago when I intercepted an interview with him—without much of an idea who he was beyond “Imaginary Places.” He seemed like a library-in-the-afternoon guy: soft and slow-speaking, pushing up his dirty glasses on his nose, a nerd in the atlas section counting how many more islands have been added to the Pacific Ocean since the 1700s.

Later, at his performance, he was tangling himself in his mic cord as if it were ivy crawling around his body. Seven shuffling decks of playing cards cascaded from his mouth to be absorbed by the emptiness of outer space. Busdriver’s hand in the air: his fingers disjointed to capsize little boatfuls of lyrics into oblivion one after the other. He is his own doppelganger, I noted, scooping my drool off the railing.

His mustard-and-ketchup color-coordinated outfits are a treat to behold—and I don’t mean to objectify the rapper—not in a tasteless way. We can talk smart about his wordplay, how he can “make sheet music leak coolant when [he] speak to it,” weaving kaleidoscopic images and ideas, diamonds upon rainbow diamonds clicking together through that little eyehole of his mind—he says he usually juggles three new songs at once in his head, more letters than coins in his fanny pack—and his frustration, how he owns the underdog position.

Everything on Jhelli Beam makes sense. Every word is a picture. Every sentence pushes over the one before it the way dominos fall when they’re lined up in a row. The music badmintons with his cadence, provided by some of Busdriver’s far-out friends Daedelus and Nobody, as well as Nosaj Thing, Free the Robots, Omid, and Greg Saunier and John Dietrich from Deerhoof. Opening track “Split Seconds (Between Nannies and Swamis)” may be my favorite. An invitation to dip into Busdriver’s “saffron soy dip.” Are you dressed for the occasion? Then take off your clothes and relish in call and response chorus: “(call) Be yourself—(response) But I’m too embarrassed!” Hello, Existential Crisis Thesis. Welcome to your life.

Track two, my second favorite, “Me Time…with the Pulmonary Palimpsest” is so fast, it’s hilarious and absurd, with a Music Hum piano concerto in the background you recognize but dang, got a C+ in that class and can’t name so Busdriver ushers us into “Me time…me time…me time…”—I love that. Point at yourself and dig, this is Busdriver time, but we are all the Busdriver of this rap song, looking in the mirror with a shoe as a microphone. Toe-lickers. Don’t deny it. Sometimes you smell your own socks and underwear to see if they’re clean, measuring how close or far to godliness you really are.

Another stand-out song is “Least Favorite Rapper,” featuring youngster Nocando sharing the mic. Here is where they play that game with the tab on a soda can, where you each take turns flicking it back and forth and whoever knocks it off, is going to get asked on a date by their crush—though in this case perhaps they’ll win some record sales. “Do The Wop” has a perfect refrain: “Me, I do the wop with no dance license,” but you won’t be able to twist or Charlie to this one. Busdriver can’t help but pull the rug out from under us. Now we’re “softer than egg McMuffins” and fuck us if we are looking for something on this album that isn’t there. This is not a cause for separation. Bus is with us on this: “The fact I’m on the shitty end of this ampersand/Makes me want to do the Roger Rabbit in a bomber jacket/To the polyrhythm of the soda pop fizz cuz still…”

Does anyone have an answer to this question: “Oh what to do when the world we service is a whirling dervish?” I’d like to know. Bus asks in “World Agape.” It seems his answer is to point at things and try to describe the itness of IT with as many syllables as he is allowed. He is a sword fighter cutting his way through a muddy bog: flowers poison his ankles and snakes perk up and bloom in his wake as he journeys forth, seeking a princess in a leather bikini with a taste for “spooning and spoonerisms.” We can talk the quantum wave forms of his “diary diahrrea” and how the musical accompaniment is an orchestra for [un]silent film rather than the makings of a dancefloor banger—it may be danceable in wild bursts (“Manchuria” with its handclaps and man-sighs can get your booty dropping) but this is music for that cauliflower attached to your neck—it’s the surreal squirrel-cheeks-full-of-nuts intensity of the over-saturated subconscious mind. Busdriver’s opened a mainline to that weird place and must constantly feed its appetite for perception. This is creativity—this is the reason for being: to perceive/ingest, and digest, and poop it out.

There’s an oasis. Bubbling beneath the oasis is a volcano. The vitamin-rich volcanic soil makes the landscape gorgeous and strange, full of smells and textures and we must do our part to touch and taste and look at everything that comes in our path and what we can’t physically interact with we must imagine, and there, in imagination land, is where we are held by time. Busdriver proves once again with his latest album Jhelli Beam that he is the poster boy for reality—a perfect truth that seems dressed up in nonsense.

—Daiana Feuer

Download: Bob Mould “I’m Sorry, Baby, But You Can’t Stand In My Light Any More”

(from Nouns out now on Sub Pop)

Bob Mould was the guitarist and singer of Hüsker Dü and Sugar before striking out on his own solo career and Dean Spunt and Randy Randall are the L.A. duo No Age. We asked them to interview each other after they played NoisePop together and before they both played Coachella. This is the complete version of this interview.

Bob Mould : How do you guys make your records? How did you make Nouns?
Dean Spunt (drums/vocals in No Age): We recorded some of at Southern Studios in London. I guess we did five songs.
Randy Randall (guitar in No Age): Only three or four made it on there.
DS: And then we did everything without vocals. This is before we even had a label or anything, so we were doing a tour out there already and our friend was like, ‘Hey, his label goes through Southern for distribution—I can get you guys to record at basically Southern Studios.’ And we were like, ‘OK, lets do it.’ Psychocandy was recorded there, you know, so we went there, did a few songs, and we when we got home we have those and that’s kind of when we decided what label we were gonna be on and then we recorded stuff on our own and went to a studio out here in the East L.A. area. That’s where we did more recording and all the vocals.
BM: So when you record you go instrumental and then sing later? Or sometimes you sing with?
DS: Like always later. When we write stuff—we were talking about this the other day—usually the first kind of stuff we’re writing we just kind of come up with samples or guitar stuff and I would just sit there and hear it played over and over and I just sing. That’s when I come up with a melody, and it’s rare that I come up with a vocal melody. Actually, I do it a lot but I never remember it. Like I’ll come up with it while I’m driving and I’ll try to write notes down, but it’s rare that I’ll remember it.
BM: I was doing a gig last July at Maxwell’s—a solo gig in a sound check—and I started coming up with this idea and I freaked because I didn’t have anything. So I went on the app store and bought a little audio recorder on the spot and two minutes later I was recording it into the phone. I was just like, ‘Phew!’
DS: That’s awesome.
RR: On tour I’ll just use my Garage Band. Just for when I wake up in the morning and I’ll just try and catch that little something.
BM: When I’m home, that’s how I make records now. Like the newer record—so much of that stuff—everything—is just composition stuff. Like I’m not recording anymore. I just turn it on and I’ve got a click and I just start recording and singing and I try to keep as much of the first time as possible.
DS: Then you kind of listen to it and you’re like, ‘Oh, that part’s good.’
BM: Yeah, and I’ve got it all at home on the computer and it’s in time, so I just snip it out and then cross fade the thing back together and then I start to make this arrangement—if I wanted a double at the end, I just clip that one and put it there as a placeholder until I get ready.
DS: I think that’s where we wanna kind of be, but we’re sort of like, ‘We have a practice place…’ But its shared and nothing can be set up all the time.
RR: We have to break down after everything so I leave the computers and recording stuff at home and then try to bring it in—try to make it mobile—but I think what we’re gonna try to do is have a set space where we can go and its mic’d up and we can play.
BM: Yeah, all you have to do is just reach over and go ‘boink’ and it’s ready—that’s so important.
RR: We’ve done some songs—like the instrumental songs, we’d be at home with practice amps and its kind of like layer, layer, layer, remove, go back and take it out, kind of much more like a collage idea. But the more structured songs we have to do the live take with it.
BM: You guys have such a visceral thing, too, you know—the process you got going right now is really good.
RR: Yeah, but over time it would be nice to shift into many different places.
BM: For me everything is about composition right now, so performance is touring and that’s just like giving people a song to learn—so for me to just have it at home to hit record and keep it is great.
RR: Do you still find that there are still things that are inspiring?
BM: The things that really dictate the writing process is if I have a DJ gig on Saturday and it’s Tuesday, and I haven’t got any new music and I have to spend days listening to stuff, I’ll get up in the morning and listen for hours to other peoples stuff. And if it’s dance stuff, then I’m in beat mode. So when I sit down and I wanna write something I go for Reason—I try to make a mangled-up loop and then I start putting something on that. But on days when I don’t need to do that, I’ll pick up the guitar and just start with an idea. So it’s really environmental. It’s what I’m listening to that gets me there. The good days are the ones that I just wake up and I got something buzzing in my head when I’m in the shower or I hear a sound or a ringing and it gets me thinking about stuff. So that’s at least in music terms. The words are always coming.
DS: You’re constantly writing words and stuff?
BM: Yeah, either that or just going through old emails. You know, I have a life and my life is filled with all these people and I’m juggling these things. I try to take care of people and have people take care of me and those are the best stories because those are the ones that are happening as we speak.
DS: I think for us this is really a new process of us recording and then touring and that sort of cycles. Now we’re expected to write and record again and its this new sort of space where we’re like, ‘Well, usually we would work our jobs and then after the jobs come to the practice space and just get everything out and off our chests and that would be the next record.’ At least that’s how it had always been. But now we’re in a position that is insulated when it’s not those other jobs. We have a job now—it’s the band—but we’re trying to figure out how to do it. In your writing cycle, do you experience that sort of thing? Or is it linear from one record to the other?
BM: Well, I mean—I remember when I was more where you guys are at—I sent you an email about that. Just don’t listen to what people are saying and don’t stop writing. All that stuff people say—just forget about it. You know—‘It’s good, it’s bad, you’re the best, you’re the worst.’ You know who your friends are—your friends are the ones who are gonna be there no matter what. But like everybody else—it’s great, but the more you listen the harder it gets.
DS: Yeah, I’ve tried to stop reading reviews and stuff because it’s like—I don’t care either way. Interviews are just like generally—it’s what we said most of the time or you feel like, ‘Oh, I wanna see how it came out, if it came out correctly.’ But reviews—it’s like there’s no point in reading that shit.
BM: When you guys played on Sunday and about three from the end you rolled out a new song, it was amazing. I was just like, ‘Oh my God, wow.’ It really upped the game. And you’ll be able to look out and see when you’re playing a new song you probably gotta think about it a little bit, you can feel it. If you get done and you’re getting a golf clap, you sorta know.
DS: I remember that song—we actually played two new ones. After the second new one, people were like… [claps] ‘Yeah.’
RR: That’s always how it was, though—in the beginning when we were writing songs before anyone knew any of our records, that would always be how you could tell if the song was good or not. No one knew the names or anything and that was the best thing because everything was fresh and we really got to read it.
DS: We play ‘Everybody’s Down’ and that was a good song—everybody went nuts.
BM: That was the thing with Hüsker—we were always an album ahead. We were trying new stuff when were touring a record. When we toured New Day Rising, we were already playing Flip Your Wig.
DS: That was the thing I wanted to ask you about Hüsker because bands generally don’t do that anymore—except Animal Collective. The last time we saw them they were playing—except for like one new song—their Merriweather Post Pavillion stuff. But they’ve been known for like putting out a record and then tour just playing all new stuff and people are like, ‘Oh, this is so weird.’ But I remember reading that and you guys would always do that just play the new stuff and when you’re done, you’d go record with Spot.
BM: Yeah, or we’d do whatever. We’d always work the stuff out live so that by the time we got ready to record it was first take. We already knew what we wanted it to be. And you know, Spot was an engineer—he wasn’t producing anything. He wasn’t making executive decisions like, ‘Let’s go back and do that.’ It was like, ‘No, that’s already done.’
DS: That was you and Grant.
RR: What about in terms of overdubs and studio work?
BM: I sort of laid out all the stuff in my head. I was like, ‘OK, this is the part I’m gonna play first, and this is what I was gonna play second, and this is the solo.’ So it was just like playing the thing that would keep the bass and drums in place, and then play like the fun stuff and do the solo and vocals and we’d be done. Grant would play keyboards, I’d play keyboards.
DS: You try stuff and maybe not use it. Like keyboards—‘Oh, keyboards didn’t work.’
BM: Yeah, that stuff is a little bit more—I have this thing with overdubs being like a house of cards. You put one card too many and the whole thing falls and you’re looking at it going, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ Or you start over, or you just have to leave the pile there.
RR: And in terms of that stuff translating live would there be…
BM: That was the hard part because then we started to dig ourselves into a hole.
DS: Because you never had a second guitar player.
BM: Or a keyboard player, which I found out is the right answer.
DS: Right—like in your band now.
BM: Yeah—nobody wants to see another guy playing guitar with me. [laughs] Every time I’ve tried it they’re like, ‘What’s that other thing over there making noise?’ With keys it’s awesome because it’s all the strings and it’s like dirty Hammond—it really fills that space and it eases it back for me. So when Rich is doing that stuff—adding all that thick mid—I can just play what I’m feeling. I don’t have to play three chords at once anymore.
DS: Was there a second guitar player in Sugar?
BM: Nope. Three-piece. The stuff went across well that way.
DS: It’s weird because I feel since there’s only two of us playing live there’s a lot of tightening in the stomach whenever we play live because there’s so much shit to do. Like—I have pedals and Randy has pedals and samplers and stuff.
BM: Yeah, you guys are doing a lot up there. I see what’s going on.
DS: There’s something really awesome about it that I really enjoy, but there’s another part that I wonder if… Like we played a show in Australia recently where I didn’t bring a sampler. I just had a mic and played drums and I was like, ‘Fucking easy. Wow, I’m just sitting here playing.’ But in relation to just—bringing it back to overdubbing and playing guitar only and playing live and then feeling like it doesn’t sound right, or something.
BM: But that’s part of the ride. That’s what the ride is when you’re on it. That’s what you’re used to. You do it live and you know that’s what your job is and you gotta get it across.
RR: Was there that sense of urgency in Hüsker Dü? Because sometimes there’d be like two records a year.
BM: Well with two guys writing non-stop…
RR: So the material was there—it wasn’t like you felt like you had to have it there. It was just coming.
BM: We didn’t have jobs—it’s all we did. We toured, we made records on all the tour, and we went home and wrote more records.
RR: That’s amazing.
BM: It just didn’t stop.
RR: Was it a different time then? Did if feel like it was isolated? When you were touring the world with Hüsker Dü, it was still the same stuff?
BM: Yeah, when we started adding Europe into the loop because we always used to go west, then we added east and then we added Europe.
RR: It never became too much?
BM: No, I mean we had one big break towards the end. Like after we toured Candy Apple Grey for Warner just as it was coming out and we got ahead on the touring so then after we got done with that, there was this big stretch for the last six months of ’86 that was down time.
RR: And you wrote a lot of Warehouse?
BM: That was Warehouse plus the slow dissolve started.
RR: Now Dean’s said this in interviews and I know we’ve talked about this a lot but I think Warehouse—you go between different songs, but Warehouse always comes back as your favorite record. As the artist writing it, did you know it was going to be the last record? How do you feel the songs went into that? Or when you look back on the catalogue and hear somebody say that’s their favorite record how does that…
BM: No, it’s great—everybody’s got a different place. I think a lot of people get on their first and then go backwards and I’m always curious to see how far back they can go.
DS: Well, actually I’ve kind of done the opposite—started with Zen Arcade and even Land Speed and then kind of went like, pop—like, ‘Whoa pop.’
BM: It’s funny, if you think about it like refinishing furniture or something. Warehouse is like the finest grit and then you get back to Land Speed and its like there’s a chainsaw on the table. It’s like reverse finessing—it’s more destructive. So I know Zen is, you know, the one people always hold up. It was cool, everything was fucked right then so it was good. That was when everybody had these really crazy ideas in their head. I think Flip Your Wig was the best because that’s when we got rid of Spot. And Spot did a great job but Grant and I did it—that’s when we took charge of everything.
RR: You engineered it?
BM: Yeah, we mixed it. We had an engineer in there with us but we mixed it.
RR: Where did you record?
BM: We had our own studio. We had built our own.
RR: Wow, that’s amazing. ‘Baby Song.’
BM: Yeah, ‘Baby Song.’
DS: What is that instrument in there, by the way?
BM: It’s a kazoo.
DS: That’s also in another part in Candy Apple Grey.
BM: Yeah, it reappears—I think Grant may have brought it back on one of his songs.
DS: So that’s when you guys got rid of Spot?
BM: Yeah, I mean—the Spot era was great, but we had an idea what we wanted and we knew we were a pop band by that point, so that’s what we wanted to focus on and not so much the punk rock. And we really spent time on that record and really tried some different things. So that to me was like the peak cause after that everything got funky. Yea—Warehouse, that was a tough stretch. But it’s a good record. Had it been pared back to a single record it might have had more impact, but we were already loggerheads at that point.
DS: Were you trying to redo Zen Arcade in that concept?
BM: If we did, we failed. There was no grand scheme there. It was just a battle of the writers.
DS: I think that’s why—being a musician and listening to all your records and listening to Warehouse—I think that’s why it hits me the hardest because it seems like the darkest and it seems heavy and I think it comes through and it’s kind of an incredible moment.
BM: Yeah, you see the last side—you can see people saying goodbye and I think that’s where…
DS: I think that’s why I’ve really come to like it because it’s really dark and heavy and cool and awesome. But the songs are incredible, too.
BM: Yeah, there’s fun tunes on there—there’s a few real shining moments.
DS: Did you guys produce that, too?
BM: Yeah, Grant and I did the last three.
DS: Was that hard going from SST to Warner Brothers world?
BM: No. I mean, there was stuff, but no.
DS: Back then it seems like the expectations were maybe lower even.
BM: You gotta remember that’s when 120 was really on fire and MTV and that was the ramp-up for everything that happened in ’91. That’s really the groundwork for everything. So there wasn’t much pressure cause we sold enough records to recoup a way, so it wasn’t like we were fighting from underneath to do things. We set up a deal where we knew we would keep charge of it.
DS: Being able to produce your own record seems kind of uncommon today. In the major label world if you said, ‘We’re gonna produce it,’ they’d be like…
BM: Not unless you’re like Radiohead or Beck or something—somebody that’s really earned that spot. And maybe look at it that way. Radiohead spent how many years to get to that spot? That’s like Husker, that’s like Beck, you know.
RR: I did a little Internet research and you also ran a label as well.
BM: Singles Only Label—that was after Hüsker when I was living up on the farm in Minnesota. We had a generic cutout sleeve that sort of looked like the old Sun Records sleeve so we tried not to do picture sleeves. We tried to do it where everything looked the same. That was fun—that was me and Steve Fallon and Nick Hill who was a DJ at FMU who more or less laid the groundwork for Brooklyn to be what it is. You know we all lived in Williamsburg together in the early ‘90s and it was like They Might Be Giants was getting started, too, and Jeff Buckley. We were just hanging out doing stuff, too.
RR: That was your second label though, right?
BM: Yeah, Reflex was the first. SOL and then Granary Music is my imprint for stuff since.
DS: The first Reflex thing was Hüsker right?
BM: Yup.
DS: You started it basically to put out stuff because no one else would. I mean, the first 7” I ever put out was this band from Portland and then I put out a 7” and I was like I don’t want to do a label anymore. And then when we started our old band, Wives, we were recording and I was like, “I have a label—I could do a 7”.” You know, nobody else wanted to—sort of that necessity.
BM: And now you see the value of it, probably. It really means people look forward to 7”s—they look forward to releases because the label is a brand and it’s a thing where they know what to expect. Or at least they know that it’s being vetted properly.
RR: Is that something you’re still involved in?
BM: Labels? Not so much. That would be a stretch right now. It’s a full-time gig and people are dependent on you. I’d like to do something like that but not another label specifically.
RR: I love the story of the making of the Warehouse cover.
BM: Yeah, we built that set in the big live room in the recording studio in Minneapolis and it was going out and gathering all the debris and stuff and setting up that—staging it like that, painting things in Day-Glo, and going in and using a multi-minute exposure but we were walking through this staged area with black lights and painting stuff with light by hand and moving so we didn’t show up in the shot.
RR: We talked with Todd Trainer from Shellac and he was going on about Minneapolis and Mats versus the Du and what was really happening. But the idea of a scene or a city being built around a band—how did that feel? Because we sometimes get that like, ‘You’re the L.A. band.’ It’s a big city but I’m proud of where we’re from. Was it your purpose?
BM: We were just trying to be the best band in the world—that’s pretty much it. I think the difference between the Replacements and Hüsker Dü is the Replacements never started a label to help out the other bands. So let’s boil it down to what it is—the Replacements were good at being the Replacements, but we saw the value of giving back. So there’s your difference. No disrespect to them but they were about the Replacements and we were about making a scene.
RR: What about Prince?
BM: Northside, southside. It was like Detroit in the ‘60s—Motown and MC5 and Stooges. It was not a racially divided town but you know—Prince and Terry and Jimmy, that was northside Minneapolis. Hüskers, Replacements and Soul Asylum was in south Minneapolis and everybody played at First Avenue, which was right in the middle of town. It was the old Greyhound Bus depot.
RR: So you would see them play?
BM: Yeah, I’ve seen Prince plenty of times.
DS: But you guys wouldn’t play together?
BM: No, not a terrible amount. I mean, you’d see people in the studio, like the Jets would be working in the front room of our place—but does that count?
DS: Here’s a funny story. The last Wives tour, we played First Avenue. We played Seventh Street Entry. We played and then after the show we were looking out and Prince came in. He walked in with one big bodyguard and two little women. We’re like, ‘Dude, Prince just came in!’ We were like, ‘Gimme a CD, gimme a CD!’ ‘Hello, Mr. Prince, we want to give you a CD.’ And the bodyguard takes it and just goes, ‘Mmm-hmm.’
BM: Yeah, you don’t get to him.
RR: But it was nice. We were literally there but he wasn’t talking to us. He didn’t acknowledge our existence. But it was just rad that he even came to the show or came to the place. Does he own it?
BM: No, no, he has a little private area on the side.
DS: Right next to your private area?
BM: Not so much. I can do pretty much what I want there but not like Prince. But, yeah I mean it was a great time and there was a lot of stuff happening—it was a great music town. There were a lot of people there that had to do with it. It’s like building things. Seriously, with the Replacements, that’s really the difference. They’re great guys, and they were a great band, sometimes—like one in ten they were brilliant, and the other nine it was Faces covers or whatever. You never knew what you were gonna get because they drank so much. Those shows when they were on, it was the best thing in the world—but all the rest it was like if Paul gave up halfway with the set, then it was just like, ‘Fuck, not another one of these.’
DS: Did you guys play together quite a bit?
BM: We played enough together. We took them out of town on their first shows. We took them to Chicago to play punk rock shows. But yeah—it would be so frustrating.

BOB MOULD’S LIFE AND TIMES IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BOB MOULD AT MODULATE.BLOGSPOT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/BOBMOULD. VISIT NO AGE AT NOAGELA.BLOGSPOT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/NONOAGE.COM.

L.A. RECORD cover alum Busdriver—interviewed here, and also playing our SXSW showcase Thursday at the Independent!—has just announced the release of his newest album Jhelli Beam on June 9 on Anti, which will feature Nocando, Mykah 9 and members of Deerhoof and Islands. Expect something pretty spectactular to coincide with Low End Theory around that time. More info via Anti below:

Los Angeles MC Busdriver (born Regan Farquhar) is set to release his follow-up to 2007′s RoadKillOvercoat this summer and has tapped friends, tourmates and fellow wordsmiths to lend a hand on the ambitious new record. Legendary underground battle rapper Nocando guests on a classically witty Busdriver track “Least Favorite Rapper” while Islands’ precocious Nick Thorburn’s influence can be heard on an almost ELO-flavored song “Happy Insider,” and many more.

Busdriver explained the recording process for Jhelli Beam, which was whittled from 30 songs to 13 while he was making the rounds of local Los Angeles home recording studios: “A bulk of the songs were written on planes somehow. I listened to Sublime Frequencies records, Bollywood soundtracks and electronic music rather than indie rock and rap. I was able to shed a good amount of self-awareness that way. Still, this was definitely the most grueling stint of recording that I’ve undergone…I nearly quit doing music twice.”

Lucky for us he didn’t, for Jhelli Beam is both smart and smart-ass, theatrical without being pompous, and, as always, funny as hell. Busdriver’s legendary breath-defying flow teeters precariously on top of samples of classical music, jazz drumming and proggy guitar parts, without ever losing sight of the electronic music that helped define BD’s sound, enthralled fans and stood out from the soggy beats that weighed down much of his contemporaries’ work. Sound schizophrenic? It’s not. The sum of Jhelli Beam‘s seemingly disparate parts creates a record that is mindfully engaging and physically palpable at the same time – a wholly unique take on what an underground hip hop album should be.

Jhelli Beam tracklisting:

Split Seconds (Between Nannies and Swamis)
Me-Time (with The Pulmonary Palimpsets)
Handfuls Of Sky
Scoliosis Jones
Least Favorite Rapper (featuring Nocando)
Quebec And Back
Do The Wop
World Agape
Manchuria (featuring Mikah-9)
Unsafe Sextet/Gilded Hearts of Booklovers
Happy Insider (featuring Nick Thorburn)
I’ve Always Known
13. Fishy Face (featuring John Dietrich)