David Bowie -- Hunky Dory

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v--IqqusnNQ

Harry Nilsson -- Nilsson Schmilsson

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3cUcHi97zY

JJ Cale -- Naturally

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kof0SLjSVac

Al Green -- Gets Next to You

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICKToz7BLLA

Roy Harper -- Stormcock

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmA3ZaVS54

Rolling Stones -- Sticky Fingers

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_x6lHCBKc4

Carole King -- Tapestry

www.youtube.com/watch?v=urt2cy7AqFs

Paul McCartney -- Ram

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZT5XeeOOWo

Carpenters -- Carpenters

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHJZDIJu3M

Led Zeppelin -- Led Zeppelin IV

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7Vr3yQYWQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxbTGL25Mwo

There has been a lot of speculation as to what actually would appear on the final tracklist for We Were So Turned On, this year’s Manimal Vinyl tribute album to David Bowie, with proceeds going to War Child. Mysterious, conflicting lineups have toyed with emotions for months, but now deliverance is at eye level. Here is the finally lineup.

Y’all ready for this? (this link is just to psych you up, it does not appear on the album)

Take home Ed Sharpe’s Bowie cover, and the rest can be yours on September 14.

DISC ONE:
EXITMUSIC “SPACE ODDITY”/ DURAN DURAN “BOYS KEEP SWINGING”/ MEGAPUSS “SOUND +VISION”/ WARPAINT “ASHES TO ASHES”/ CORRIDOR “BE MY WIFE”/ CHAIRLIFT “ALWAYS CRASHING
IN THE SAME CAR”/ VIVIAN GIRLS “JOHN, I’M ONLY DANCING”/ ALL LEATHER “FAME”/ WE ARE THE WORLD “AFRAID OF AMERICANS”/ A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS “SUFFRAGETTE CITY”/ TEARIST “REPETITION”/ HALLOWEEN SWIM TEAM “LOOK BACK IN ANGER”/ AFGHAN RAIDERS “FASHION”/ POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR “THEME FROM CAT PEOPLE”/ SWAHILI BLONDE “RED MONEY”/ JESSICA 6 “I’M DERANGED”/ ASKA + BOBBY EVANS (feat. MOON & MOON)
“AFRICAN NIGHT FLIGHT”/ XU XU FANG “CHINA GIRL”

DISC TWO:
VOICESVOICES “HEROES”/ CARLA BRUNI “ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS”/ PAPERCRANES “BLUE JEAN”/KEREN ANN “LIFE ON MARS?”/ LEWIS & CLARKE “CHANGES”/ ZAZA “IT AINT EASY”/ GENUFLEX “SOUL LOVE”/ SISTER CRAYON “BEWLAY BROTHERS”/ MARCO BENEVENTO “ART DECADE”/ MICK KARN “ASHES TO ASHES”/ LIGHTS (NYC) “WORLD FALLS DOWN”/ AQUASERGE “THE  SUPERMEN”/ CAROLINE WEEKS “STARMAN”/ RAINBOW ARABIA “QUICKSAND”/ MECHANICAL  BRIDE “SOUND + VISION”/ EDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS “MEMORY OF A FREE FESTIVAL”

BONUS TRACKS (iTunes Only)
VIV ALBERTINE “LETTER TO HERMOINE”/ ARIANA DELAWARI “ZIGGY STARDUST”/ GANGI “OH YOU PRETTY THINGS”/ AMANDA JO WILLIAMS “THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD”/ LACO$TE “WITHIN YOU”/ UNIVERSE “HEATHEN”/ ST. CLAIR BOARD “SECRET LIFE OF ARABIA”
PIZZA! “MODERN LOVE”

—Daiana Feuer

On January 2nd, Manimal Vinyl announced an upcoming 28-song David Bowie tribute album. The tracklist has since been revised, and will be released as a double-disc release of 32 covers. The album, titled Repetition – A Tribute to David Bowie, features Bowie classics covered by Duran Duran, Warpaint, Carla Bruni, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, Rainbow Arabia, MGMT, among others.

The album is scheduled for release on September 6th as a two-disc set, available as a limited CD, limited double LP, and download with bonus tracks. All the profits from the release will be going to War Child UK — a branch of an international charity for children affected by war. Manimal is now accepting preorders.

Repetition – A Tribute to David Bowie Tracklist:
Disc 1:
01. Exitmusic – “Space Oddity”
02. Duran Duran – “Boys Keep Swinging”
03. Megapuss (Devendra Banhart) – “Sound + Vision” (en espanol)
04. Warpaint – “Ashes to Ashes”
05. Charlift – “Always Crashing in the Same Car”
06. A Place to Bury Strangers – “Suffragette City”
07. All Leather – “Fame”
08. We Are The World – “Afraid of Americans”
09. Carla Bruni – “Absolute Beginners”
10. VOICEsVOICEs – “Heroes”
11. Corridor – “Be My Wife”
12. Vivian Girls – “John, I’m Only Dancing”
13. Lights – “World Falls Down”
14. Keren Ann – “Life on Mars”
15. Genuflex – “Soul Love”
16. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes – “Memory of a Free Festival”

Disc 2:
01. MGMT – “TVC 15″
02. Aska & Bobby Evans (feat. Moon & Moon) – “African Night Flight”
03. Tearist – “Repetition”
04. The Polyamorous Affair – “Theme From Cat People”
05. Halloween Swim Team – “Look Back in Anger”
06. Jessica 6 – “I’m Deranged”
07. Rainbow Arabia – “Quicksand”
08. Swahili Blonde (feat. John Frusciante) – “Red Money”
09. Aquaserge – “The Superman”
10. Sister Crayon – “The Bewlay Brothers”
11. Lewis & Clarke – “Changes”
12. Mechanical Bride – “Sound + Vision”
13. Zaza – “It Ain’t Easy”
14. Ariana Delawari – “Ziggy Stardust”
15. Mick Karn – “Ashes to Ashes”
16. Xu Xu Fang – “China Girl”

Stream: Devo “Planet Earth”

(from Freedom of Choice reissued now on Warner)

The world is now a DEVO song, and so Warner has just reissued two vital early DEVO albums barely containing some of the most annihilating reality ever twined into vinyl. And so L.A. RECORD’s Dan Collins reissues this vintage interview with Mark Mothersbaugh from the archives of the defunct Ostrich Ink. DEVO will perform Freedom Of Choice at the Fonda tonight.

You and the Residents were making videos so early—where do you think the idea came from?
Mark Mothersbaugh (vocals/synthesizers/etc.): A lot of that was owed to the time we grew up. Artists that we were interested in were people like Andy Warhol, who was a multimedia guy. He designed clothes and he silk-screened and he painted and he photographed and he produced bands, and he made movies and put out a magazine—you know, that guy’s so cool. That’s what I want to do. I like it because he’s about ideas rather than just being about an instrument or a technique—rather than an old-time craftsman. We really liked what he was doing. And other people like him that were multimedia artists. Chuck Statler, who Jerry and I had gone to school with at Kent State, had gone to Minneapolis while we were still kinda struggling in Akron. He came back and he had this Popular Science and it said, ‘Laserdiscs: The Wave of the Future.’ It’s 1974. We’re like, ‘Laserdiscs? What are those?’ ‘Well, it looks like a record, but it holds visual and audio information.’ And we thought, ‘Whoa—sound and vision! That’s great! That’s what the future is going to be. And rock ‘n’ roll—we can bury it once and for all!’ We were certain that sound and vision was going to kill rock ‘n’ roll and create a new art form. And the artists that would carry weight in the populace would be artists that thought visually. So he came back and said, ‘Let’s make a film.’ And we said, ‘We don’t have any money—how are we going to handle that?’ ‘I’m working in this company. I’m trying to do commercials now. I can get us free editing time and I can borrow a camera and all we have to do is come up with money for film.’ Our first seven-and-a-half-minute movie took about four months to do because we didn’t have money. But we made it for like three thousand dollars. General Boy was a lucky accident. What happened there was there was this lawyer that was a friend of ours—this young guy that was kind of an asshole yuppie guy.
Is he the one parodied in the in the later videos?
Mark Mothersbaugh: No—that’s other people that we liked much less. But this guy did us a favor because he said, ‘You know, I don’t think it’d be good for my reputation to be in this film you guys are making.’ Oh no—who’s gonna play General Boy? Because we’d written the script. And Jerry goes, ‘Mark, would your dad do it?’ ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him.’ So we went and asked him, and he was like [in bold announcer voice] ‘WHY YEEES!’ At first he didn’t get the idea. But once he saw himself on screen, he like totally got the acting bug.
He’s a magnetic actor. He really is good.
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah—some latent desire to be an artist that was thwarted by World War II and the Depression. He painted a bit and played music a bit, but he never really pursued it because he came from a family of coal miners. The idea of being an artist was like if he would have said, ‘Hey Mom! Dad! I’m gonna be a man from the moon!’ You know—they’d go, ‘Whut? Whut tha fuck yew tawkin’ about?’ He didn’t really pursue that at all. He wasn’t driven enough or obsessed enough to do it and just instead opted for survival. But he did good on his General Boy. Actually I remember on our first tour, we opened at a show in Minneapolis. We were playing at the Walker Arts Center. And one of the roadies—one of the security guards says, ‘There’s an old guy at the back door with an army outfit on and says he’s General Boy, and he wants to talk to you.’ And we’re like—he drove from Akron, Ohio, to Minneapolis? So my dad comes in and he goes, ‘Mark, I’ve got this opening speech I’ve written so I can introduce you boys.’ He was more DEVO than we could ever have been. He had his whole own perception of what DEVO meant—what devolution meant. And it was filtered through the eyes of a guy who’d been in World War II and who was a salesman who sold fire alarms and and vibrating pads and stuff like that. His schooling stopped with the Dale Carnegie book. You know—‘Look ‘em in the eyes! Give ‘em a handshake!’ ‘Make a friend and a sale at the same time.’ He was that kind of guy. So his take on it was kind of interesting. It kind of freaked us out a little bit, but at the same time we kept encouraging him, and he ended up writing lyrics for songs and stuff.
[Mark leaves, and comes back holding a banjo as the interview continues. Imagine the rest of the interview as if it were being accompanied by the strumming of an Appalachian mountain boy.]
Let’s talk about the whole DEVO ethos.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were living in Ohio. From our vantage point, it was like being on a cultural wasteland. We heard about the Village in Manhattan. And we heard about Carnaby Street in London, or things in England and San Francisco and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. We heard about all these places. And there was nothing happening in Ohio. It was the Summer of Hate while everyone else was having the Summer of Love. And we were just watching everything. Also at the time, the economy in Ohio had collapsed. It was one of those areas that got hit really hard during that depression that happened in the seventies and eighties. It was a factory town for the first sixty or seventy years. And then all those factories pulled out and went to Malaysia and South America, so there were these big draconian factories that weren’t employing very many people. Everybody was out of work. Nobody knew what to do. None of them were educated. They made tires, you know? It was a city full of blue-collar tire makers, and it was really a dark time. But yet there was all this promise. I remember going to the Akron Art Institute and I saw laser projected holograms where—for instance—there was a shark that was six feet long in one of the rooms, and you could walk around it. It was like five feet in the air. You could walk around it and look underneath it and look down its mouth and look at it from the back of the tail and look inside the gills. It was totally 3-D, but it was a ghost. You could put your hands through it. And at the time, I said, ‘You know what? I want whatever’s going on in technology. That’s where things are happening.’ And also at the time, there was no voice in music. There wasn’t a Bob Dylan, and there wasn’t a Woody Guthrie or anybody that was a conscience for youth. After they shot kids on different campuses in ’70, it’s like the country went into a big sleep. And all the really politically active people—who were protesting globalization, and America and fucking around with the politics of Southeast Asia, and the Cold War and things—they all stopped. They all just became quiet. And by ’73 or ’74, the, the music that you were hearing was disco and concert rock. The Eagles. Styx. There was nobody talking about the issues. And this was a time when things like the Cuyahoga River, which we lived on—there was all this white foam I remember always floating down. When I was I kid, we’d be swimming around. In the early seventies, the river caught on fire and stayed on fire for days—weeks!—before they got it put out. Because there were so many chemicals that companies all along the Cuyahoga River had been dumping into the river that were going into Lake Erie. And that’s when all the early alarmists were saying, ‘Wait a minute, you know—our ozone’s been fucked up, there’s global warming, you know? We’re drinking and eating chemicals that are poisonous, and nobody’s paying attention to all that.’ There were a few scientists and people that were trying to speak and they were getting shouted down by the same people that are right now building roads through pristine timberland and drilling for oil. We were mesmerized by the choices that humans were making at the time. By what people thought was important or precious. And it was before having a conscience was made almost embarrassing by people like Sting—jumping in a Lear Jet and flying down to the Amazon to tell pygmies that he was there to protect them or something, you know? They’re like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ So that’s part of this whole thing about where DEVO came from—it came from a lot of different sources. We were just looking for a way to describe what we saw going on. We saw this incredible technology fucking everything up. But we saw this stuff that looked and seemed amazing. And it should be doing great things. But the quality of life was deteriorating. So there was like a bunch of things that came together at once. The movie Island of Lost Souls, with the House of Pain—‘What is the Law? Not to walk on all fours, not to spill blood!’ And this Superwoman comic book, where this mad scientist had an evolution-devolution machine. He’d push the lever forward, and there was like this vacuum capsule. And there’d be a guy that was in there. When he pushed it forward, the guy’s head would blow up like a light bulb, and his hair would fall out, and he’d look like a progeria kid. And he’d pull it backwards, and then his brow would drop, and he’d get covered with hair, and he’d be like a caveman.
[Mark gets up out of his seat and grabs a black guitar amplifier nearby. He swings it around to reveal in white letters: ‘DEVOLUTIONARY ARMY.’]
Mark Mothersbaugh: This is an old amp from way back when. We called ourselves ‘The De-evolution Band’ for a while. And then we were the Devolutionary Army, and then we trimmed it down to DEVO. It was just easier to say and it was kind of like ‘Smart Patrol’—the song was originally ‘Smart Proletariats,’ but it just didn’t roll off your tongue. ‘Smart proletariats, nowhere to go!’
You also have a lot of sex imagery—it’s kind of novel in the Hardcore DEVO collections how many of the songs are devoted to really making sex look silly or gooey or messy, and it seems quite the opposite of what was going on in the seventies.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We just felt sex in America was still so Victorian, you know? A Planet of the Apes funky show-your-butt-party is much more interesting than the porno that was around at the time where two people meet on the tennis court. I think porno is like a weathervane for a culture, you know? The more interesting the porno, the more interesting the culture.
What about the covers of the Hardcore DEVO albums? You have some woman with fake breasts over her real breasts, and then they’ve got a picture of you guys.
Mark Mothersbaugh: And we all had fake breasts on, too. We couldn’t afford the real surgery at the time. There was this one photographer out here named Moshe Brakha who really played devil’s advocate—we got some of the best photos of DEVO ever during this photo session. There’s some shots from those photo shoots that nobody’s ever seen. Somewhere near the end of the photo shoot he pulled out this gigantic Nazi flag—I don’t even know where he got it—and he’s got us holding this Nazi flag for a few photos, and we’re like, ‘Whoa, what’s that about?’
How did you meet Brian Eno?
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were playing in New York that summer, and started to get kind of a following and we never got paid. But the shows would be crammed. They’d be totally filled with people. Our guest list would be like sixty or seventy people and they’d have everybody; there’d be like Jack Nicholson and all the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa’s band. ‘It’s alright with you if Frank Zappa listens to you play?’ ‘Sure!’ ‘Alright with you if Candy Clark is on your guest list?’ So Bowie came and saw us one night. We’d done some interviews and people said, ‘Who’d you like to have produce you guys?’ Of all the people I could think of, I thought it would either be David Bowie or Brian Eno. I liked their music, and I thought maybe they would understand what we were trying to do. David Bowie showed up one night and on the second set before we came out, he introduced us,and he goes [in a canned carny voice] ‘This is the band of the future! I am producing them in Tokyo this winter!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, we’re sleeping in a car tonight—that sounds good to us!’ Then afterwards, he said, ‘Yeah, I really want to produce you guys. The only thing is, I’m up for this movie called Just a Gigolo. If I get it, I have to go to Berlin for a couple months. So that would push it off.’ And we go, ‘Well, we don’t even have anywhere to go when we leave here.’ We’re homeless, you know—we don’t know what we’re gonna be doing for those two months. The next week, we played again, and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno came. And they invited us over to Robert Fripp’s house. And he fed us. And they both said, ‘We would want to produce you guys if you were up for it.’ And we said, ‘Well, Brian, David Bowie last week said he was producing us in Tokyo!’ And Brian Eno starts going, ‘He’s full of shit.’ At the time I didn’t know that Brian Eno was kinda pissed at Bowie because he felt he didn’t get credited properly on Heroes. And Low. Brian Eno said, ‘Let’s just go right now. Don’t even worry about a record company. I’ll loan you the money. We’ll go over to Germany, at this studio I work at all the time—Conny Plank Studio.’ It’s the place where bands like Birth Control and Guru Guru and Kraftwerk and you know—Can, Moebius, Roedelius, they all recorded at that studio. ‘Sure, that’s great—you’re gonna pay for us to go to this?’ So he flew us over to Germany. David Bowie of course still wanted to be involved and showed up every day on the weekends and hung out with us, and then bickered with Eno.
What did all the German bands think of you?
Mark Mothersbaugh: While we were in Germany, I got a call from the band Kraftwerk and they said, ‘We’re gonna go on our first tour, and we would like to play your film.’ We only had one film at the time. The Truth About Deevolution. So in the spring of ’78, they took the DEVO movie as their opening act.
When did DEVO officially start?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Jerry and I first started writing music together in 1970. There wasn’t another band we were ever in together. We were only ever in DEVO. And in 1970 we were both Students for a Democratic Society. And my brother Bob, he used to come up to Kenton. At the time Bob and I were in this kind of acid-blues band and Jerry was in kind of a more of a straight-ahead blues band. They shot students at Kent State—we were protestors then—and they shot people. They closed down the school that spring. We were there. Jerry was standing right about ten feet away from one of the girls that got her—got blasted.
Did that change your perspective on what you should do with music?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah, quite a bit.

DEVO PERFORMING FREEDOM OF CHOICE ON WED., NOV. 4, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATER, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $43-$103 / ALL AGES. HENRYFONDATHEATER.COM. DELUXE REISSUES OF Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? AND FREEDOM OF CHOICE ARE AVAILABLE NOW ON RHINO. VISIT DEVO AT CLUBDEVO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DEVO.

Flying Tourbillon Orchestra is looking and sounding better every time I see them. I finally got to see Fol Chen, and I really enjoyed their Prince-tinged take on ‘80s Brit synth-pop. They’re kind of a Los Angeles version of bands that I would find in import copies of Melody Maker in high school. Their song, “Cable TV,” has been stuck in my head for a couple weeks now. Lead singer, the mysterious Samuel Bing, was not really as mysterious as expected, but he is definitely one of the more engaging front-people that I’ve seen in a while, looking like he was having fun to the brink of lunacy. At one point he walked off stage and joined the crowd, allowing the backup vocalist to take lead.

After Fol Chen finished its set on the main stage, I took a lap around the side stages catching a song by The Damselles and one by Les Blanks. It was kind of hard to figure out who was who, because they were all covered with fake facial hair. I went back to the smoker’s patio and the same blogger and singer were sitting in the same spot smoking another joint, so I joined in and we talked about the new Flaming Lips CD and Woodstock’s 45th anniversary. Blogger weed is too strong for me to handle in public settings. I was now officially anti-social stoned, drunk, and ready to watch my favorite local band, the Henry Clay People. They opened in grand style with Claire from The Afternoons soloing the opening to Bowie’s “Life On Mars,” who was then joined by most of the other bands getting wasted side-stage during HCP. I lost track of how long they played, but it was well over an hour. They got most of my favorite originals in, like “Living In Debt” and “Working Part Time,” which is probably the best song to come out of the east-side scene ever. They also broke out polished versions of newer songs like “Switch Kids” and “Taste the Taste of the Tasteless,” which hopefully bodes well for a new CD soon. As is HCP tradition, they closed with intent to blow the tent off the circus, and dozens of local musicians joined the stage. Highlights include Maria of The Damselles getting the raucous, drunken Echoplex crowd to drop on the floor during their cover of “Proud Mary,” “Bang a Gong,” and “All the Young Dudes.” Hopefully, next summer the Circus will return as a three-ring!

—Scott Schultz

Download: Nino Moschella “What U Do 2 Me”

(off Boom Shadow out now on Ubiquity Records)

Nino Moschella started out four-tracking funk-soul that sounded like Sly and Shuggie and Stevie in a mountain shack at midnight and exploded into fidelity once he visited the wider world. His newest Boomshadow is out now on Ubiquity. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

If you were to make a soundtrack for a ’70s crime movie like Superfly or Jackie Brown, who do you want cast in it?
I would make a crime movie that has the Muppets in it. That would be cool. Maybe not Kermit and Miss Piggy but I want to make a gangster crime movie with all Jim Henson-type muppets. That would be silly.
You sort of have an accent from the East Coast.
My dad is from the Bronx. I’m born and raised in California. A lot of people say my accent sounds East Coast. It’s my dad for sure. And my mom’s from Minnesota. My dad’s overbearing. Not really, but he’s very influential, and I guess it comes out. I’m from Cali though. I love it here. I don’t think I’ll ever move. Are you from California?
Florida!
Oh, my grandfolks moved there when they got old. It’s hot and humid. I mean, it’s hot in Fresno—gets 110. But it’s dry heat. When we go to Florida in the middle of the summer, it’s humid and terrible. Man, and big old cockroaches. They’re humongous. Tropical bugs. I couldn’t stand the humidity. You’re always wet.
What kind of bugs are common in Oakland?
No cockroaches. We have mice and flies. I haven’t seen a cockroach. We had mice for a minute but they’re gone now—luckily. I put out some traps. We were expecting our two mice to multiply but they are gone.
It only takes mice two or three weeks to spring babies. In fact, rodents are the most successful mammal on the planet. I guess they didn’t like our house.
Who is the baby chanting on your song ‘I Love Myself?’
That’s my daughter, Stella. Me and my wife and her were in my home studio where I finished the album. Stella was playing the drums. She likes to have a microphone and hear her voice through the speakers. We were asking her questions: ‘What’s your dog’s name? Who are your friends? What do you love?’ That was how the vocals came about. She was like, ‘I love myself! I love the people!’ It was one of those happy accidents that came out. It’s a spoken-word Stella piece. She’s super musical. She’s going to be four in August.
You seem interested in doing things a little bit out of the box. ‘Ok, I am going to stick a song with my baby in between all these funky tracks…’
I am not trying to do anything that is status quo. There’s no point. If I don’t feel like it’s moving things forward, then it’s not worthwhile. Mainstream music might be satisfied with mediocrity and stuff, but for me, if it doesn’t challenge me, then naturally by extension it’s not a challenge. It’s got to perk my ears. But at the same time, I’m not doing it to be like, ‘This song is this type of song and it fits in this type of category and so on.’ When I put a collection of music together, one of my goals is to personally express something I think is fresh. That also lends itself to a flow. The stuff that comes naturally and easily most times is the stuff that is exciting and fresh and new and unexpected. It doesn’t come from a lot of struggle and laboring over it. The stuff you over-think and deliberate is the stuff that can fit into a box—because you have those constraints. Freedom allows you to do things that are fresh as opposed to doing things that have already been done.
Your stuff isn’t hard to take in. It’s digestible but I can pick out the little details happening at once.
I don’t want to create music that’s just heady. ‘Oh my gosh, this is so complicated and out there that it’s inaccessible.’ One of the goals is to make music that you can listen to easily and you don’t have to go to that place where you’re totally listening to every little thing. But if you want to delve into it, it’s there. That’s the challenge as a music maker. Off the bat you don’t have to get theoretical about it to dig, but you want to create something long-lasting so people can come back and hear something new. The music that I love the most is the stuff that originally just struck me and made me feel good. It gives me an emotion or something I can relate to. What I come back to are the intricacies and that brings up feelings too. That’s the beauty of art in general. It’s not a one-shot thing. It’s not just, ‘Alright, listen to this, put it down, you’re done with it.’ I think as a culture in time, that’s naturally what we’re doing. We get something, put it down, and it’s disposable. Good music isn’t supposed to be disposable.
What’s a record you’ve held onto since forever?
There’s so many! That’s a beautiful thing. There’s so much good music and it continues being created. The first record my mom bought me was Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. She bought it for me when I was ten. I listen to that weekly to this day. That’s the best selling jazz record of all time. Thriller, you know—speaking of which, Michael Jackson was the first musician and entertainer that I consciously said, ‘Oh man, I want to do this. I want to dance.’ I was in grade school, and popping and breaking was huge. I heard Michael and I was like, ‘I wanna pop. I want to sing.’ He was an icon. David Bowie, later, Prince. My mom got me the red Thriller jacket. It wasn’t actual leather—that shit ended up falling apart.
Your mom seems pretty cool.
She was totally cool. When I was maybe eleven or twelve, my mom took me—a kid—to Purple Rain, which was very controversial when it came out. It was like, ‘Do you know what this movie is about?’ Prince and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder—and Etta James was a huge influence. This was just the music that was in my house. Along with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix and Coltrane and Miles and Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. My folks were into this stuff. My dad is a musician. They met in Greenwich Village. My dad was a performer at the same time when bop was in the Village. They were seeing Coltrane and Miles. Coltrane kissed my mother’s hand. Bop was huge and folk was huge in their world. That’s what they were digging. It was all going down in the same places. There was a club called the Bitter End that my dad was playing at, and Nina Simone was playing there, and at the same time Bob Dylan was playing there. Music wasn’t, ‘This is folk and this is jazz, and that’s where this goes and that goes there.’ It was all in the same club and area and thriving. Luckily that influence of my folks was accessible to me growing up. I feel blessed for that.
Did your parents give you any advice on what music is all about?
What I’ve learned is that music is about communication. Music is about expressing yourself. My dad didn’t want me to be in the music business. It wasn’t until I started making my own records and putting my stuff on the forefront and him being able to hear it, and that was just a handful of years ago. This was after I became a man—he was like, ‘Alright, you really want to do this? OK, I’m proud of you.’ He always supported me playing music for the sake of playing music but it was clear he didn’t want me to make a living at it because it’s such a hard thing. Very few people actually make it and many of them at the end of it lose everything. It’s not something you get into because you want to make money and be successful. You get into it because you have to. You will do this regardless of what’s happening around you. He knew it was a hard life because he went through it. I mean—now he is a school teacher. He still gigs but he was doing music as a living for twenty years and it was really hard to feed his family. He didn’t want me to live that life. But he realizes I understand that it’s up and down and it’s for the love of it.
Not everyone can articulate their life’s meaning that way.
It’s taken time. When I was a teenager, my idea was, ‘I wanna be famous.’ The important things with time become clear. I know for sure regardless of all the other stuff that exists in this business, I do my thing. I know it’s crucial to my existence to write songs, record them, perform them. That is the stability in it all. Nobody has control of that except for me. Nobody can tell me whether I can do that or not. Regardless of success—and maybe I am not a huge success. This is an underground thing after all. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is you stay focused on the point of it and the point of it is to express it and get it out, and if that’s to 100 people in your immediate community or to a million people globally—the point is that it has to be created for me to feel good about myself and to feel like I’m contributing to the world. I got to make music and that’s how it is. It’s still hard and all that other shit and you can’t ignore that, but when it’s all said and done, I know why I’m doing this. Sorry—this has gotten heavy.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS NINO MOSCHELLA WITH CHIN CHIN AND ARMEN NALBANDIAN PLUS DJs ON FRI., JULY 31, AT THE DAKOTA LOUNGE, 1026 WILSHIRE BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 7 PM / $10 / 21+. DAKOTALOUNGE.COM. NINO MOSCHELLA’S BOOMSHADOW IS OUT NOW ON UBIQUITY. VISIT NINO MOSCHELLA AT NINOMOSCHELLA.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/NINOMOSCHELLA.

Download: Sunset Rubdown “Idiot Heart”

(from Dragonslayer out Tue., June 23, on Jagjaguwar)

Sunset Rubdown began as a solo project for Wolf Parade‘s Spencer Krug but quickly evolved into a full band . The music veers from carnival-esque grandeur to pin-drop-quiet beauty, centered around Krug’s recurring lyrical themes of myth, legend and fantasy. They are currently touring in support of their newest album, Dragonslayer. Tom Child interviews multi-instrumentalist Michael Doerksen.

When you go into the studio to record with Spencer, are the songs pretty fully worked out at that point? Do you all have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to sound or do you improvise in the studio at all?
Michael Doerksen (guitar/drums): Well, with Dragonslayer, we knew most of the songs. We were playing them live. That was the idea for this record. We’ve worked other ways before and on Dragonslayer there are a few songs that were put together in the studio. The ones we were playing live, they weren’t working without us toying with them a little bit. So it really depends on what we plan to do. We’ve done a little bit of everything. I don’t think we cut anything. There are certain songs we do live that are different from the recording, like “For the Pier” or “Three Colours.” But no, we didn’t cut anything from this. We basically went in with what we had.
How much of a collaboration is it when you all work together? Does Spencer provide a basic framework and you all bring in your own ideas to structure around that?
Yeah, he has the basic framework in mind and we throw ideas on top of that and explore different avenues of where we can take the song. Everyone is working at their limits, musically. Everyone’s really challenged in this band to work and push themselves to grow and to have it be collaborative. I mean, Spencer has a few things in mind like a key melody or a hook, but the rest of it is kind of filled up by the rest of us, and I think what makes it fun for the band is that it’s sometimes hard for the listener to discern how it’s been made. We all switch instruments sometimes so you’re not sure who’s playing what on each song.
How do you view the progression of Sunset Rubdown from album to album? Is Dragonslayer a completely new direction or are you basically building on what has come before?
It’s a little bit of both, in a way. Sometimes I feel like it’s our first record as a band. There was always sort of a discontinuity between how our records sounded and how we sounded as a band, live. We started doing both of those things at the same time. We made a record very early into our playing together. So people come to see us play live and find that it sounds a little bit different from the record because it’s a live band. I think that’s how we all envisioned this project. That’s how bands should work. We’ve gotten closer on this record to presenting what we’re really like as something to come and watch, as a band. Most of the songs are live off the floor, cut a few days after our last show in Chicago. So they’re really fresh and honest and we didn’t really have time to think about the logistics of adding other things. Like on Random Spirit Lover, there are certain songs that we find difficult to play live because we maybe put a little too much into it and we can’t pull it off live. We just can’t get into it because it was cut in the studio. We’re open to all kinds of different ways of working, but this one definitely feels like a more honest representation of how we sound live.
Everyone always talks about how abstract the lyrics are and how hard it is to grasp onto a literal meaning, which is part of what makes the band so fascinating to listen to. But as someone who knows Spencer personally, do you feel like you know what kinds of real-life circumstances his lyrics actually reference, or is it as much a mystery to you as it is for the average listener?
There are certain things in songs where I might know what he’s talking about, or it might reference something that I know, but other times, like you say, he does use a lot of props, with mythology or… That’s one reason why I was really keen to work with him, because his lyrics are so interesting and strong. That’s kind of the best kind of poetry; that kind of work that puts more in your hands to struggle with and wrestle with the meaning, as opposed to it being flat out. But his lyrics are changing too. The lyrics… that’s his domain, for sure.
Spencer has talked about how, despite the fantastic sweep of the lyrics, the band doesn’t care to employ a lot of theatricality onstage. He likes that you all kind of come onstage wearing whatever you’d wear in your daily lives and just play the music. Is that something you enjoy too or is there a part of you that would like to give in to the excesses of bombastic stagecraft?
That’s an interesting question. We had a discussion when we first started the band about that kind of thing. We’d see other bands out there doing very elaborate, uniform kinds of performances, which were cool and some of it has been really interesting, even if it’s just a prop like Deerhoof using that spinning light wheel… the magic rainbow wheel or whatever it is. So there are certain things that are cool about that. We like to put lamps onstage. But as far as dressing up… maybe we’re old fashioned, but that’s not a big concern. The surface level appearance of the band doesn’t really enter into our equation. But there are certain things… like I’ve worn a cape during a show once… for fun. We were in Sweden or something and I just wore a cape onstage. We’re not really strict about it. It could be interesting to wear a certain t-shirt or put a sign up. We’ve toyed with these kinds of ideas, but when it comes down to it, when you’re on the road, you don’t really want to think about that stuff. Just getting through a song is complicated enough and is a challenge, so to think about how you’re coming across on another level visually is a whole other thing. Like Bowie pulled it off brilliantly and he had one of the best guitar players in the world who could don a crazy costume and play to that theatrical model, but we’re not really like that.
What’s it like touring with Sunset Rubdown? 24-hour party or do you keep it pretty serious?
Serious. No, we don’t really fancy ourselves partiers or anything like that. We’re pretty mellow—we like to get a good night’s sleep usually. We have the usual entertainment in the van or we like to sleep during the day. Pretty humdrum, when it comes down to it. Read a book or listen to music or talk. Play a game. No video games though. Actually, we did have a video game in Europe. We had a machine in the van that they rented for us. It was like you were Hercules or someone, fighting Zeus? It was pretty epic.
That seems pretty appropriate.
Actually—you’re right.
If you can think of your favorite Sunset Rubdown show that you’ve played—where was the show and what made it so great for you?
We’ve had some pretty good times in a lot of places, but one time in particular…I think it was our first tour out by ourselves…we had gone out with Frog Eyes and then we were out again just by ourselves which was new to us. It was a memorable tour in that way. But we played in Atlanta at a place called Lenny’s, and the crowd was so incredible. It was a small kind of old man’s bar. They had just got a brand new PA and it sounded amazing and the crowd was incredible. It was the kind of crowd where they’re right in your face and you’re clinking your beers together with them. There’s no stage. It was incredible and we played an incredible show. It was one of our tightest sets. Just because of the energy in that room, I couldn’t forget it.
As a guitar player, who has most influenced your style?
There are a number of players that I’ve been listening to. Neil Young, even John Fahey. Thurston Moore—as a younger guitar player growing up—was a big influence on me. That kind of dirty playing. But I also really like Queen. Brian May’s playing was incredible. Jimmy Page, for how many styles he touched and for how risky his playing was. I think between Jordan and I, we can get a little flashy sometimes. It’s fun. You don’t get a chance to write that kind of solo everyday. And Spencer’s music can really lend itself to complicated playing and really complicated musicianship. It’s a challenge. That’s precisely what I liked about his songwriting. When I saw him play with Wolf Parade when they first started, I thought, ‘I’d really like to play with this guy.’ It’s certainly a challenge. I’d been playing with other bands where the themes were good, the lyrics were strong and the music had a lot of emotion to it, but the music was kind of a Nick Cave orchestra kind of thing. Or I’ve played in completely improvised noise bands. But I came from a blues background—kind of a classic rock background in terms of my guitar playing. So finding someone to write these great pop tunes—it’s definitely fun.
How did you and Spencer meet each other?
Through a friend of a friend; that friend being Arlen from Wolf Parade. I’d been playing in bands with him since I was about 18 in Victoria. We came out here together the same year. We were playing in bands before Wolf Parade formed. I was in a rock band where he was the drummer and Dan and Spencer came to town and formed a band and wanted Arlen. Arlen was quite a sought-after drummer in Victoria. He played in many, many bands, so I didn’t hold it against him. It was a great opportunity. The band I was in folded, but before that we shared the same jam space—this rock band and the newly formed Wolf Parade—and at one point we were switching up and this kind of a jam session—which might arise when musicians get together in the same room and the instruments are on—happened between Spencer and I. We started jamming out on something and he always remembered that. We saw each other around and eventually, when Sunset Rubdown’s first record got some attention and he planned on touring with it, he asked me since we were familiar with each other and he liked my playing. It was kind of a perfect match.
If you had to pick a favorite Sunset Rubdown song, what would it be?
Woah. Um… geez, it’s such a hard question. I’ve never been asked that before. Haven’t even thought about it because they’re all like children. They’ve all got certain characteristics that you enjoy while you’re playing it. And I’ve never gone through a set feeling bored. Some things get me more excited on certain nights, like “The Taming of the Hands.” That’s a really fun one to play. Ferocious. But I like getting on the drum kit and playing “Stadiums and Shrines.” The drums on “The Men Are Called Horsemen…” We haven’t played that in a while. We’ve talked about really redoing it. But yeah, I can’t really… What’s your favorite?
“The Men Are Called Horsemen…” Where do you think you’ll be headed after this, creatively?
Well, I suppose we will put out another record. I don’t know, I can’t say. We definitely haven’t spoken about too much. Actually just today, Spencer told me he wanted to start putting out singles and EPs only strictly. No more records. It seems that putting together an album is quite a task and you can fail and people will still maybe see something that you didn’t see in how it works perfectly as this record in some way that you didn’t even intend or think about. But getting back to the idea of singles and just pumping out songs… it’s an interesting model. I don’t know.
What do you think has inspired him to think about doing that?
I think it’s kind of a practical thing. Like when the song’s finished, you can just get it out there right away instead of having to perform it and sit on it for two years and then put it on a record. Like “Idiot Heart,” for example—we’ve been playing that since we recorded Random Spirit Lover but we decided not to put it on that record. And it’s actually based on one of our very first songs which became “Q-Chord” on the first record. We stripped everything else that we had done on that song and just left Camilla’s playing on the QChord and we came back to it again a year and a half later. So it’s kind of like if a song is ready, you can just get it out. That’s why we recorded that for Daytrotter—just to get it out there so people know it and can enjoy it at the show when they come hear it. It’s nice to be familiar with it.
Wasn’t there a plan to put out a 7″ that had some kind of photography component?
That’s come out already. And I think it came out and sold out. It was a very small pressing…the “Moonface” thing.
So is that the direction you’re heading? That kind of limited-run thing?
I don’t know about limited-run. That was an opportunity that came to us to do that sort of thing. But we’d probably like to see a little more than… what did they print? Like 1500? 500? I forget the number. Or even digitally release things, just pump them out online. We’ve been talking about getting a little more active on the internet on our own terms. None of us are on Facebook or anything. We’re not really that savvy. We don’t have a MySpace for Sunset Rubdown. But we’ve talked about having a little more control over our website, which has been pretty dull. We just post things occasionally. But you know, like Bradford Cox from Deerhunter, he pumps singles out for his Atlas Sound project and that’s a really interesting model. I think it’s really effective and practical for your audience, that kind of interaction. And 7″s and vinyl especially are becoming more and more important, ironically or unexpectedly, and I think that’s going to become a real driving force in the economy of the music industry, as far as making some kind of return for your music. Vinyl is a really good way to go.

SUNSET RUBDOWN WITH ELFIN SADDLE AND WITCHIES ON TUES., JUNE 23, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $13-$15 / ALL AGES. ATTHEECHO.COM. SUNSET RUBDOWN’S DRAGONSLAYER RELEASES TUES., JUNE 23, ON JAGJAGUWAR. VISIT SUNSET RUBDOWN AT SUNSETRUBDOWN.NET.

Shellac of North America record when they want and tour when they want and defuse all hecklers with the confidence and acumen of thirty-year bomb squad vets. Guitarist/vocalist (and engineer) Steve Albini speaks now 36 hours after returning to America. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

In an interview you had with the Boston Phoenix, you explained how Shellac gets caught in these conversational ‘loops,’ like fake Italian or ventriloquism—what’s the current loop?
Steve Albini (guitar/vocals): Just recently I discovered that a Canadian hockey fan used the word ‘pylon’ as an insult. It’s a derogatory term for a bad defenseman—‘He’s a pylon,’ meaning you just have to skate around him. I’ve taken to calling just about any idiot a pylon. I think that might develop into other traffic control devices that show up in the lexicon before long.
What was your former go-to term for ‘idiot’?
Wow, there have been so many. In Chicago there’s a particular kind of asshole wearing cargo shorts and generally a white baseball cap and those guys are just called ‘white caps.’ But the thing is that when you run into one of those you really can’t call them anything else.
The trick those guys have is that when they buy the white hats, they run it over a few times with their raised pick-up truck so it looks respectably old and legitimate.
I did not know that. I believe you.
You also said in that interview that you hoped Shellac would be able to insert an insult into the American language—do you think you’ve come close?
Probably not. Those things take so much popular momentum that we don’t really have. We don’t really have that kind of juice in the culture.
But the Internet is designed to propagate this exact kind of thing.
Right, but you need an adorable kitten video to go along with it and we don’t really have that.
What baby animal do you find the most cute?
Oh, there’s just so many—basically any baby animal is adorable.
How about baby humans?
Ah, not so much, but whatever. Whenever one of your friends has a baby, they are always so in awe of this thing that they made that they think it’s adorable and you have to go along because it’s kind of a big deal to make another person. But objectively, all babies look the same.
Is there such thing as an ugly baby?
The ‘baby’ aspect sort of overwhelms anything else.
What’s something that instantly turns you off about a band?
It’s hard to say—there’s so many little intricacies to it. There’s some YouTube clips of a band called Brokencyde and they’re kind of a compendium of all the things that instantly make me hate someone or a band. So basically if you share any trait—apart from something like cell mitosis—if you share any similarity with a band like Brokencyde you’re almost guaranteed to have me not like your band.
What has disappeared from the world in your lifetime that you’re glad to see gone?
There’s currently a kind of nostalgia for a kind of corporate disco music which I thought we were finally done with, but I guess the kitsch engine has to run on something. So a few year ago you might have been able to say that. That kind of bouncy European music they called house—that music disappeared finally. It lasted for a while in a kind of bastardized version in things like NBA trailers and perfume commercials, but it kind of disappeared. That was the only music that was capable of annoying me in the last twenty years. You know how a guy that works in a kitchen develops really leathery hands from handling hot pans and sharp knives? Or carpenters have really calloused hands?
Are you saying you have really leathery taste?
Yeah—my attention span and my hearing. I have developed callouses on my hearing and my sensibilities. A lot of stuff that would have driven me absolutely crazy when I was a teenager, I don’t even hear it. It doesn’t even register. The scar tissue that forms is infinitely tougher than the original mind.
How would you rate your ability to judge a stranger’s character on first meeting?
I’ve gotten a lot better at it since I started doing it every day. Meeting someone in person—it’s a little bit easier than speaking to them over the phone or corresponding with them but there are always some clues in any kind of interaction about whether or not somebody is reliable, honorable or on the level.
What are some of the universal indicators of trouble in the human character?
When you ask someone a direct question and they look upward and to the left or upward and to the right before they formulate their answer, that indicates that they are inventing part of the answer. That means that the answer is not something they know but rather something that they are having to create.
Is this something that you apply at poker games?
Only in the conversational parts—what’s called ‘the meta game.’ The great majority of poker is not the daring psychological battle it’s sometimes presented to be. Most of poker is just counting, simple math, and knowing probabilities of certain situations. But there is a psychological aspect to it. That’s a pretty good example. Another one is when someone is overly specific about trivial details and then unnecessarily general about fundamental elements of a deal. When a promoter tells you that you will be given a certain hotel room and certain kind of catering and that you’ll have this many towels backstage, but then can’t tell you the capacity of the venue or can’t tell you the size of the PA or how many stage hands he’s hired, then you can tell that someone is not speaking from a base of knowledge but is inventing a story that he wants you to go along with.
Has there ever been a show when Shellac was caught at a loss for words by a heckle?
I’m sure there has been. But I’m not super good at everything. That might be one thing that I’m not that good at sometimes. Don’t get me wrong—I’m super good at most things. I tend to not to embark on things where I’m an underdog to be competent. A friend of mine put it much more simply—he said, ‘He’s only interested in doing things that he’s instantly great at.’ I don’t know if this qualifies as great but I’ve hit golf balls three times in my life and the guy that I was walking along with on the golf course—I can’t really say that I was playing golf, but the three times that I’ve hit golf balls, the person that I was with said that I had a good natural swing. So there’s that. And snorkeling.
How does one become super good at snorkeling?
You enjoy it. My girlfriend was born in Honolulu and we go back to Hawaii pretty regularly—I want to say at least once a year. Well, that’s not true. We go there often—I don’t know how many times. A lot of places in Hawaii, you can rent snorkeling gear and the first couple times we went I didn’t rent snorkeling gear because I assumed that you had to learn how to do it and you could drown and die and that sort of stuff. It turns out that no, you don’t. You just stick the thing in your mouth and you’re fine. And also swim around for a while and you’ll realize that fish in their natural environment are fucking amazing.
How so?
They’re just super great. They look like they’re having the best fucking time. I’m really captivated by the notion that I’m looking at the fish and he’s hanging out by his house—this is his normal fish environment. And if he wanted to he could just fuck off to China. Start that way and if he didn’t wear out, he would end up in China—how cool would that be?
Does this ruin the experience of going to the aquarium for you—fish prison?
Yeah—I don’t really enjoy aquariums or zoos.
You’ve got kind of a soft spot for animals.
Who doesn’t? Come on. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t have any problem eating them or having them enslaved for farm labor. None of that stuff bothers me in the slightest.
What’s the cutest animal you ever ate?
Squirrels.
Did you shoot them yourself?
Yeah.
Are you a good shot? Deadeye Albini?
Not so great. My dad is a fantastic shot.
And he’s a rocket scientist?
Well, he worked in the aerospace industry for years and in that regard you could call him a rocket scientist, but his major contribution in the last third of his life—he worked in the science of forest fires. He and a very small number of people developed the science out of nothing and he’s the most published scientist in the field. He died a few years ago and there was an award named after him. He was the first recipient of this award called the Ember Award which was for contributions to the science of forest fires, and that award was then named after him. That’s probably what he’s most known for in the scientific community—his work on the incredibly and almost impossibly complex paradigm of forest fires.
What is the crucial conundrum of forest fire behavior?
Well, it was described to me once as a house fire on a freight train in a hurricane. There are so many things going on. There are things happening in forest fires that occur literally nowhere else on Earth. Imagine a fire so big that it creates its own weather and that’s what we’re talking about. And as a result of creating its own weather it can prolong itself or it can germinate by hurling pieces of itself into the rest of the world. It’s incredible. And when you take into consideration all the complexities of just the fuel matter—all the different things, what different things is it burning, how wet are they, what’s the ambient temperature—the forest fire changes all of that as well. It’s almost like a living thing, a forest fire.
Have you ever planned to incorporate or maybe already incorporated the science of forest fires into Shellac’s music?
Well, there’s a book by Norman Maclean called Young Men and Fire which is about the Mann Gulch fire in Montana, which he witnessed when he was a teenager. There was an incident that happened in the Mann Gulch fire where some expert smoke jumpers—outdoor fire fighters who parachute into the middle of a fire to put it out—some smoke jumpers burned to death on a ridge and one of the party survived. The way he survived was that they were part way up a hill in the middle of a draw—a shallow one-ended valley—and they saw the fire break around the base of the hill and they could see the fire coming up the hill at them. All but one of the firefighters tore ass up the hill and tried to outrun the fire and crest the hill. One of the guys stopped, opened his pack, pulled out some matches and set fire to the grass in front of him, creating a large fire which he then jumped into so he was in the middle of this grass fire as the grass fire was burning around him. He just curled up into a ball in the middle of this fire that he just started. His intuition was that if he burned out the fuel in the immediate area, then the big fire would go around that area because it would already be burned. He survived the fire and the guys who tried to outrun the fire didn’t—they all got burned to death. And when somebody burns to death it isn’t like, ‘Boom! You’re dead.’ What happens is your flesh cooks and your blood curdles and the fat in your body renders and your skin breaks and all these things happen and it takes a very long time to die.
Do you think that’s one of the worst ways to go?
Oh hell yeah. That would be number one of how not to die.
What do you think is number two?
I don’t know—maybe being thrown into a very slow woodchipper. Anyway, the long and the short of it was—this fire and this single event made a very deep impression on Norman Maclean and he wrote a book about it called Young Men and Fire and there’s a line in a Shellac song called ‘The Guy Who Invented Fire’ that says, ‘I’m going to invent a fire / I’m going to lay down in it’ and that’s directly stolen from Norman Maclean’s book. The reason that I mention that book and Norman Maclean is that he was a friend of my father and he was a scientific consultant on that book and he actually is mentioned in the book because the book is about Norman Maclean as an old man, revisiting this fire and his memory. He goes back to the location of the Mann Gulch fire and he retraces his steps of these guys that went up the hill and burned to death and he actually finds little artifacts. There’s kind of a touching scene where one of the guys is really badly roasted. One of the things that happens when you’re roasted is you get an insatiable thirst. They had packed their provisions with them and one of the things that they packed in their provisions were cans of potatoes that were packed in brine. At one point this guy is doomed and dying and cooked but he’s beseeching the other guys that he is with to give him something to drink because he just can’t take it anymore. So this guy opens a can of potatoes and lets him drink the brine out of the can of potatoes. And Norman Maclean finds this fucking rusted can in precisely the spot where that must have happened and it’s a really chilling moment in the book. So anyway—I don’t know what we were just talking about to bring me to the potatoes but it’s an incredible book and Norman Maclean was an old man trying to make some sense of this thing that’s been haunting him his whole life. My dad kind of helped out with his understanding the general behavior of forest fires. I came to Chicago at the same time that came out—to go to school at Northwestern and at the time Norman Maclean was the head of the English Department a the University of Chicago.
What’s the most affecting historical site you’ve ever visited?
Maybe Wounded Knee. I’m trying to remember if I’ve actually been to Wounded Knee. I want to say Wounded Knee.
Nothing in Eastern Europe?
I have to say, it’s weird driving through some place like Zagreb and seeing buildings with the corners blown off. Or like you realize that you’re at this nightclub in Serbia and that big burly motherfucker at the door probably did some shit during the war. Shit like that. I think that has more of an effect on me than the location. Yeah, like you see somebody and you’re like… you know? Or for example—being somewhere inland in Germany—and this was more true in the ‘80s when the Wall was still up—and you’d see a guy old enough that he must have been of fighting age during World War II. So then you have to wonder, ‘All right—were you a Nazi? Were you a soldier? Were you some kind of apparatchik? During the most important period in history, what was your role? What did you do? What did you see?’ That kind of shit.
If you ever got time to write a book, what would be worth exploring at length?
I don’t think I have a novel in me. I have written short fiction for my whole life, as a diversion. I have a feeling I would probably just carry on doing that. I have written some technical articles about the recording scene and I write pretty regularly on the forum for the studio and I think that satisfies my writing impulse. I’m a terrible correspondent otherwise so I guess that must satisfy me. At any rate, I don’t subscribe to the David Bowie school of creativity where because I’ve made records I am therefore also an actor and a poet and a painter. I think that’s hubristic, if I may use a word that I may have invented. But I really don’t feel like that’s necessary. I have a perfectly satisfying outlet for my creative impulse—the band is perfectly satisfying to me. So I don’t feel like I need to do anything else. And also—I don’t like admitting this because I think all musicians are generally intelligent people and well-spoken and in coversation are even articulate—but I think almost all of the books that I’ve read by musicians and all of those that I’ve even flipped through at the book store, whether it be one of Jimmy Buffett’s novels or one of Nick Cave’s or Lydia Lunch’s or Henry Rollins’—virtually all of them have been atrocious. Just embarrassing writing. I think the one exception is the stuff I’ve read that Eugene Robinson has written. He’s writing about fighting—I’m not a fighter. I don’t have any interest in fighting. I don’t think that it’s a noble or worthwhile or rewarding pursuit. I’m not entertained by it. I think it’s in every sense barbaric and I’m not interested in it, whether it’s dogs fighting or people fighting—I’m not interested in it. But his writing about fighting is so matter-of-fact and so self-aware that you can’t help but be completely charmed by it and I think he’s great. I also think his sensibilities and sense of humor are akin to mine and I enjoy reading stuff like that. He’s written a bunch of articles, some of which have been collected and expanded in a book called Fight. The hardcover of it is kind of hard to read because it was made as sort of a coffee-table item rather than a piece of literature, but it’s a great book—a great read. And also his band blog for Oxbow is great reading because he gets into some stuff on tour. It’s kind of weird that he does inspire this kind of challenge-match mentality with the bigger lunkheads in his audience.
What do you think is your great topic—something you’re endlessly fascinated by?
There’s like a half a dozen things. Generally my areas of interest outside of being in a band are probably cooking, billiards, poker, general superficial scientific interest—nothing academic but at the speed of the Discovery Channel.
Have you ever been to El Bulli?
No, although I have to say—intuitively I’m kind of grossed out by molecular gastronomy. There’s something about the industrial-process element of it that I have a hard time embracing. A lot of the sensations and a lot of the things that happen in molecular gastronomy are inevitably unique because it’s never occurred to anybody to put sea urchin pureé inside of a caramel shell. So of course they’re going to be unique experiences and as an eater, I enjoy unique experiences—I have a very expansive palate. But something about the amount of effort and convolution of the processes that need to occur in order to get to the finished product makes it seem unsatisfying. It makes it seem like that one bite of frozen carrot foam can’t possibly have been worth the three days of preparation and the team of assistants. There is something about that fundamental inefficiency that galls me. It makes it seem grotesque and indulgent and like a gilded toilet or something. I’m in this weird quandary. I would very much like to have that experience—I would very much like to respect it, but it is so indulgent and so reserved for the truly decadent that it’s like boutique heroin. It makes me hate the people who are into it. If there was like a DIY version where people could do it without wasting 90% of the ingredient to get the two drops of salmon essence—if there was a way that it could be made more like normal eating, but still have these unique sensational experiences… If there was a way that it could be made more normal so that it wouldn’t seem so indulgent and pampered and fucking Monopoly money, then I would be into it.
How much of that is what exactly people are paying for?
I don’t know. There are a couple of restaurants like that in Chicago that have these things like laser-grilled packing peanuts, but I’ve never eaten at any of them. I have friends who have and they truly enjoy the experience and say that they were breathtaking, memorable, life-changing meals. I believe them, but there’s something grotesque about it that makes me—in the weakest part of my personality, the reactionary part of my personality—makes me hate my friends a little bit for that. It makes me think that they’re creepy and I don’t like feeling that way about my friends. Because these are the same friends that can go to the ballpark with me and have some churros and a hot dog and enjoy that. They’re the same friends that appreciate the things that I do, like a fresh peach. What the hell is wrong with a fresh peach? It’s thirty cents and it’s awesome. So I don’t like feeling that way about them, but I can’t help myself.
Is this because you’re worried that there’s some tiny chance that you could become some totally decadent hedonist?
You know what? I thank Christ—assuming that He existed and was not a historical metaphor—that I have never had money. Because if I ever had money I would do stupid shit like that. I would come to think of private jet travel as normal. I’m that lazy and that weak. I’m pretty sure that it’s a normal human failing that I would fall victim to.
So you’ve been forced into principle by financial circumstance?
Exactly. When you’re dead broke, you can’t help but be honorable.

SHELLAC WITH ARCWELDER ON SAT., JUNE 20, AND SUN., JUNE 21, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 4 PM SAT. / 8 PM SUN. / $13-$15 / ALL AGES. ATTHEECHO.COM. SHELLAC’S EXCELLENT ITALIAN GREYHOUND IS OUT NOW ON TOUCH AND GO. VISIT SHELLAC AT TOUCHANDGORECORDS.COM.

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.