GRAMMYs

George Benson

Photo: Tabatha Fireman/Redferns

News

George Benson Talks Tribute Album To Chuck Berry & Fats Domino: "The Songs are Still Ripe"

Facebook Twitter Email
The guitar great discusses his latest project honoring two of rock ‘n roll’s founding fathers by digging into their deep cuts
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Apr 23, 2019 - 5:10 pm

When Provogue Records asked GRAMMY winner George Benson to record a covers album of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, he enthusiastically jumped into what could have been a tired set of oldies -- and recorded a fresh romp through the origins of rock ‘n roll.

Not that the singer, songwriter and guitarist hadn’t tackled standards before. His body of work is filled with renditions of the Beatles, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, and dozens more; his last album, 2013’s Inspiration, paid tribute to Nat King Cole.

Berry and Domino are a heady pair to pay tribute to, but Benson’s masterful touch makes it look like a breeze. Their outsized personalities made them early rock icons -- and much like Benson himself, they transcended musical lines of race, color and genre. And to him, the songs still have “poetic value” in 2019.

“They’re talking about the basics of life,” Benson says with a hint of awe. “Things that people come in contact with every day. And they put those lyrics together in a genius way.”

Berry and Domino are Rock ‘n Roll 101 at this point -- but as he dug deep, Benson found plenty of surprises. Producer Kevin Shirley suggested Berry’s “Havana Moon”; Benson had never previously heard the song. “It sounded very strange to me,” he admitted. “Like something Harry Belafonte would sing.” He let out an irresistible laugh. “But every woman who heard that song loved it!”

His covers of Domino, too, display an affection for the foundations of rock. When the record company asked him to tackle his “Walking to New Orleans,” his ears pricked up; he knew that would be the title.

“It gives them a little hint of what they’re going to be listening to,” he says. “It’s going to have a blues tint.” If you want a fun, breezy crash-course on how that blues sound shaped early rock, Walking to New Orleans is your trusty guide.

Here Benson talks more about about his musical roots, the challenges of covering Berry and Domino and how he balances his music career with being a family man of faith.

What made you want to honor Chuck Berry and Fats Domino in 2019?

The record company are the ones who inspired this record. They’re the ones who made the request for me to do this music. I thought it was strange at first, but after a while, I said, “You know, what a great idea!”

Because these were two icons who crossed over in a day when that was almost impossible. They crossed over in a big way, because they were two very, very strong personalities and their music was highly unique.

These two composers and musicians already had their hands on the vibe. Just to bring that forward is already a big reason why the record is successful so far. I think that’s the main thing. That people think you meant to play this record. You lose that vibe, I think you’ve lost them.

The lyrics to the songs were ripe for the time, and they’re still ripe. Because they’re talking about the basics of life. Things that people come in contact with every day. Their trials and tribulations. And in a genius way, they put those lyrics together. These guys were poets, you know? The stories have a poetic value, and they translate and communicate very well.

Recording Academy Remembers Fats Domino

What inspired you to cut this music in Nashville?

In Nashville, they wouldn’t question what you were doing. You wouldn’t have to make up things like you would in L.A. They know me too well. They know what I can do. And they would want to be on something different in L.A. In Nashville, they never ask one question, except “What are we playing next? What key is it in?” That’s about it.

There’s a crackly energy between you and the players. Were you trying to let your hair down and play some rock ‘n roll this time?

No, that was another decision on the record company’s part. They had heard me in that context. I couldn’t until it came back to me, because I used to play a lot of that type of music way back in the day, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

We had to play a little bit of everything and listen to a little bit of everything, because that was what was on the radio and on the jukebox. I kind of filed that into a bag that I had gone through. I thought that was the end of it!

Do you remember the first time you heard Fats and Chuck? Did you ever come in contact with those guys?

Only once. I came into contact with Chuck Berry at a music store in L.A. I was doing a video interview and he was in there buying some strings or guitar picks or something like that. I went over and I said, “Mr. Berry, my name is George Benson.”  He turned around and shook my hand. “Yeah. Hi.” And then he went right back to what he was doing.

I had to quickly think of something to say. I asked, “Mr. Berry, in my show, I do the duck walk. Do you mind that I do the duck walk in my show?” And he turned around very quickly and said, “Can you?” And then he went right back to buying his guitar picks and his strings. That was the end of that.

Fats Domino, I had the offer to join his band many years ago. I think I was about 16, 17 years old, maybe. One of the guys who was working with him saw me playing somewhere and said, “Man, how’d you like to go on the road?” I never liked that idea, because I never saw anyone on the road who had anything. They all looked like they were tattered and broken-down.

So I said, “No, I never thought about going on the road.” And then he said, “Well, how would you like to gig with Fats Domino?” And I said, “Wow, that’s too heavy for me. I’m not that good a player. No, I couldn’t.” So I didn’t take the gig.

You picked some deeper Chuck Berry cuts, like “Nadine” and “Havana Moon.” Were you trying to honor his more lyrical side?

That might have been the conscious choice by the producer and the record company executive. I think they made a good choice of tunes. I had never heard “Havana Moon” before. It sounded very strange to me. Like a song that maybe Harry Belafonte would do. I didn’t think it particularly meant that much, but every woman who heard that song loved it. So they made good choices!

The title track is a poignant version of Fats’ “Walking to New Orleans.” What struck you about that song?

They had a name for the album. I can’t remember what it was. But when it came around to me, I said, “No, the obvious to me is Walking to New Orleans.” It gives them a little hint about what they’re going to be listening to. It’s going to have a blues tint to it and some very basic ideas. I thought that worked better. And they loved the idea. So that’s what we named it.

You’re a family man and a longtime member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Is music still a big part of your daily life in both respects?

Keeping the balance was, is, difficult. Trying to get to the meetings when I was home. We put in our time every month. In forty years, I missed maybe one or two months, because I was out on the road. But yeah, music in my house every day. I practice almost every day, because it’s been the best way for me to keep abreast of things.

I learn something from every project. But music moves around a lot. You can’t depend on something you did 40 years ago. You’ve gotta keep coming up with something. They’ve already got those albums on their shelves. To try to keep new ideas going forward has been the challenge. We’ve been very successful at that.

Herbie Hancock & Kamasi Washington Announce Joint Tour

GRAMMYs

Robyn Hitchcock

News

Robyn Hitchcock On Nashville Living, His 'Planet England' EP, John Lennon's Legacy & Making "Beatles Music"

Facebook Twitter Email
The delightfully eccentric singer/songwriter also discusses working with XTC's Andy Partridge, his cinematic single "Sunday Never Comes" and what other new projects he's got hidden up his colorful sleeve...
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Dec 8, 2019 - 3:34 pm

Chances are, you've never met anyone quite like Robyn Hitchcock. The beloved British singer/songwriter has spent the better part of the last five decades earning a sort of self-adjudicated PhD in all things rock and roll, poetry, folk, America, philosophy, the human condition, psychedelia and, of course, the Beatles.

"If there was a genre called 'Beatles music' rather than called '60s pop or psychedelia or something, that would be what I play," Hitchcock said. "There are other influences there, but the harmonies, the guitars, the tempos, the sounds, essentially, in my head anyways, [come from the Beatles]."

But don't let Hitchcock's reverence for the Fab Four fool you – he's one of the most imaginitive and original artists of his generation, which is saying a lot for someone who came up in the hotbed of '60s rock. From his early–and highly influential–work with the Soft Boys in the mid-'70s to his impressive catalog of 21 albums, either solo or backed by incredible bands such as the Egyptians and the Venus 3, Hitchcock has consistently released records that inspire the imagination, delight the ear and defy the norm.

These days, Hitchcock calls Music City, U.S.A. home, and plays with the aptly named Nashville Fabs. He's also recently diversified his psychedelc folk portfolio, penning the haunting number "Sunday Never Comes" for the remarkable Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke 2018 movie Juliet, Naked, and releasing a new collaboration EP with XTC's Andy Partridge just a few months ago titled Planet England.

The Recording Academy had the surreal honor of speaking with Hitchcock over the phone from his home in Nasvhille to hear about his ongoing project with Partridge, his love for the Beatles debates, John Lennon's looming legacy, and why what he's working on next is keeping him "incrediby busy."

By moving to Nashville, you bring an eclectic flair to its ever-widening creative scene. But what has living there brought to your life?

Well, it's brought great people to play music with. And you can also get anywhere in the bloodstream of the United States and Canada, anywhere east of the Rockies in about two hours by plane, which is fantastic. It's a very good place to tour from. Touring the States is my job, it's what I do for a living.

But I think all of the recent recordings I've done have been here with other people based in Nashville, and it's a joy that a great bunch of people just come around and run through songs in your living room. And then you find some other place to play, and then you can do a show or make the record. I haven't been in a community, such as small local, specific community of people all engaged in the same thing, since I was at what y'all call high school in my teens.

I see, regularly, people that do the same thing as me, and that I work with and play with. There was a little bit of that in the Soft Boy days in Cambridge, which was another small scene, but [Nashville] is bigger than that, much more professional. Very few musicians make it out of Cambridge alive. And Cambridge, U.K., it tends to kind of eat its own sons and daughters. But Nashville, it's a great hive. People are swarming, taking off and landing and get to the airport and it says, "Welcome to music city!" I love that element. It is great.

Being surrounded by songwriters like that, has it changed your writing process?

No. No, not at all. I haven't done that thing of getting into a cage with another songwriter and trying to co-write. Nashville wears a Stetson for publicity purposes, but all kinds of music goes on here. I think the commercial end of it is still quite country-ish. And my connection to country music really doesn't go any further than "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo" by the Byrds, which I love and gave me a crash course in some elements of country, but it doesn't influence me on the whole. Every so often I'll come up with a kind of pastiche country song, but I don't have to be in Nashville to do that. I think the last one I wrote, my last faux country song was written in Norway and probably the one before that, I was living in London. Being out here hasn't made me any more twangy.

"Nashville wears a Stetson for publicity purposes, but all kinds of music goes on here." -Robyn Hitchcock

Yes, I thought I heard it for a couple notes of twang on your new EP with Andy Partridge, Planet England, but I was mistaken. Maybe I was looking a little too hard for the Nashville influence, but I'd love to ask you about that project, too. You've said it could have been made any time in the past 53 years. Why was now the time for you and Andy to do this together?

I think because of the stage in our life cycles that we're at. We actually wrote those songs and did the basic recordings 12 years ago. We were in our early-to-mid-50s, but we didn't finish it off until last year for a whole variety of reasons.

I think Andy and I probably were quite suspicious of each other when we were young indie rockers, and then we were kind of both on the alternative charts in the States in the 1980s. By the time we were over 50, I think we were kind of able to approach each other really. Now we're heading into our late 60s. I go around to his house in Swindon when I'm back in Britain, which is fairly often. It's just down the road from my sister. So I could easily see a day's gone where I can meet him in Swindon and get back to Bath. And I've got country roots anyway, so you know, it's my parallel life. It's two old psychedelic pensioners rocking away in a shed in a back garden. It's just everything that Americans probably dream of, these quaint little Brits in some damp shed in a backyard with primitive equipment.

But actually Andy has the equivalent of the entire firepower of Abbey Road's Studio One in his shed and has always maintained it completely state-of the-art sonic libraries. So he's capable of summoning out any kind of sound that we want for our proto-psychedelic music. We're two guys who had been 17 when the Beatles broke up, still looking for that missing Beatles album. And so we're sort of basically trying to make it ourselves. I mean both of our careers have been that to some extent. And we think that the Dukes of Stratosphear [Partridge's band] really nudged it.

When I make a rock record or I play with a band, it's always some kind of basically playing Beatles music, and there are other influences there, but the harmonies, the guitars, the tempos, the sounds, essentially, in my head anyways is just kind of- If there was a genre called "Beatles music" rather than called '60s pop or psychedelia or something, that would be what I play and largely what Andy plays and, As we're getting the arc of our careers, we're getting to the point where that's what we really like making. So fingers crossed, two songs into another project and I'm supposed to see him in Britain at the end of next month so we'll see what we can do.

The Beatle gene runs deep…

Well you know, again, it's what people have in common. I've got this show tomorrow night with my band the Nashville Fabs. They're all Beatles freaks, and we do a ton of Beatles encores with guest singers, and I'm doing one. Everyone just disappears into the corner of their own mind trying to work out whether something is a major-seventh or a relative minor-third. Is it a minor-sixth or is it actually a seventh of the relative-fourth? I mean, it's fantastic watching people debating and playing. Now they've all got the Beatles on their phones, and they just sort of hold the phone up to the microphone, and we can all hear this transistor radio sound, on whatever it is, "You Won't See Me," or something. "I think it's a minor-" "No, it's not actually, it's-" "Oh, gosh, they're singing a D over B or is it a B over D?" You know, nobody's ever completely sure. I love that, they get excited about defining it.

Yeah, it's like one, big, first chord of "Hard Day's Night." Everybody's going to be debating what it is until the end of time.

It is! It's the library in Alexandria that the Romans burnt down, the repository of all human knowledge, hanging on the first chord of "Hard Day's Night."

Well, we're coming up on the anniversary of John Lennon's death [Dec. 8, 1980]. I thought maybe you could say something about what John, specifically, meant to you.

John Lennon, to myself and probably millions of other kids, including probably Andy Partridge, was a sort of an elder brother, you know, he was the cool, daring, kick-ass, wise-but-foolhardy older brother, the one who took the risks, the one who went out and got hit, the one who challenged authority, but also the one who had success, you know, the trappings of success. You could think, "Oh wow, John Lennon's got a house. John Lennon's got a plane. John Lennon's got a beautiful wife. John Lennon's got a drug habit. John Lennon's paranoid. John Lennon's beautiful. John Lennon's falling out with Paul McCartney. You can look at anyone you admire and the way they are on a pedestal, you can never be them. In another way, they're just like you, if somebody's too alien, they're very hard to kind of connect with, you know?

And I think there's that thing about idols with feet of clay. I think people do want a vulnerable hero, and John was just that. He was vulnerable, and in the end he was killed. How's vulnerable is that? It was awful. I am still grieving Joan Lennon much more than I grieve my parents. And you know both of them lived a natural lifespan. I mean there's so much now for John Lennon to live up to, that if he came back, he couldn't. Since he's died, he's been the good cop. McCartney's had to be the bad guy because he lived on. It's been "St. John" for nearly 40 years and you know, he obviously wasn't.

But he, as Richard Lester [director of 'Hard Day's Night' and 'How I Won The War,' both featuring Lennon] said, he made you care about him. I think he's a real emotional touchstone. The Beatles always make me feel very human. A lot of people I like, Captain Beefheart or Syd Barrett, they're kind of elsewhere, or David Bowie, there is more of a kind of, "I'm outside of this human orbit. I'm not down there in the mud with you lot. I'm somewhere apart." And Bob Dylan, you know, they're kind of insightful, mythical creatures on the edges of things. The Beatles are right in the center, and John was right in the center of the Beatles. And then he couldn't keep it together, couldn't keep up with Paul, who was actually probably tougher than him, but didn't get the knocks. John was the ice-breaker, he was the one who started it, but also [got knocked].

But I also don't think John was better than Paul, you know. I think it works because they were so evenly matched. And then George, became as evenly matched as them, and it was too much, a mouth with too many teeth in it, time for them all to leave home. But the tension on that journey is sort of, John starting it, and then Paul coming up, and then George coming up – what that did to them still produced incredible records. I love the Beatles. Really. Lennon could rubbish the myth all he wanted. It doesn't really matter what you are, it's what people think you are, especially once you've gone. It was for him to demolish the Beatles, but even he couldn't really, the myth is as strong as ever. And you know, as you can see, I have a lot to say about John Lennon.

Indeed. It's a tough time every year when this anniversary comes around to remember that loss.

It's awful and I feel for Yoko [Ono], and Julian [Lennon], and Sean [Lennon] because it's a personal loss for them. And for the rest of us, we're all sort of projecting, a person we never knew but had a relationship with.

Absolutely.  I also want to ask you about "Sunday Never Comes," specifically the new video you've made, which leaves you with a very beautiful and disconnected feeling, much the way the song does. You wrote it for a film, but how did it feel to have the song survive that process, and kind of come back to you in this way with the video?

We deliberately decided to do a proper recording of it because the only thing that was out was my demo for the Juliet, Naked movie, and I really liked the way Ethan Hawke sang it, but I wanted to see what it'd be like if I did it properly. So I recorded it with the Nashville Fabs, and then our friend Jeremy [Dylan] actually did that video. He was our roommate for a while, and he very sweetly makes these videos for us. He made that in Sydney. My partner Emma Swift, who sings with me sometimes and is working on her first full-length record here in Nashville – in fact we're doing some recording in LA next week – Emma's in there as my kind of- I'm this artist in an abandoned apartment somewhere. Nobody's decorated since the 1960s. Somehow the electricity is still connected, and I'm watching obsolete programs on dead televisions, and then Emma appears, my muse, but I can't get at her. She's somewhere else across the world looking desolate.

Most of my videos have always had some humor in them. I don't like taking things that seriously, I guess. I just think there's always got to be a laugh in there somewhere, or it's- Life is pretty unbearable [laughs]. And this one, we didn't put any jokes in. There's nothing funny in there at all. It's just me. I start drawing her at one point, and then I see her on the telly, but it's very unresolved. Sunday never comes, and Emma never turns up, whatever Emma represents, my enigma, my muse. But it's quite a sad one for me, but I'm sure whatever I do next will be a million laughs. [laughs]

Robyn Hitchcock performs "Mad Shelley's Letterbox"

Well, you latest LP [2017's self-titled album] was not only your 21st album, it was one of your best. What are you working on next? What are your goals and interests these days?

Well, whatever I put out, if I put out a 22nd one, I want it to be as good as the 21st. So right now I'm rather avoiding that by working with Andy and working on Emma's record, and whatever I've actually written. I never write the songs that I want to write. I write the songs that appear. "Sunday Never Comes" was a commission. But even then I didn't know what I was going to write. They just said, "Write a Robyn Hitchcock song." So that's what popped up. So what I've got lying around or what I'm working on is a collection of piano songs, rather somber piano songs. And I guess when Emma's record is done, because I'm part of that, I'm part of the hive mind working on that, guitar and arrangements. And once Andy and I are well into the Partridge record, hopefully next year, I will start recording these piano songs.

"I never write the songs that I want to write. I write the songs that appear." - Robyn Hitchcock

I bought a four-track cassette machine and a reel-to-reel. I want to do it on hissy, compressed tape with tape delay so it sounds like something that was done years ago. I mean, I know Elliott Smith was doing it 20 years ago, there's nothing new about retro sounding. But kind of how I used to take demos in the 1980s, I want to kind of get a sound that's all my own before I bring anyone else in. And then, you know, it might be a long time before anything comes out, but I'm totally working on it. And I've got lots of other projects, visual stuff. I'm supposed to be doing some paintings, and I'm got a collection of lyrics with illustrations. That's probably going to be the next thing to be "on sale," if you like.

So I'm incredibly busy. You wouldn't think so, but actually there's a hell of a lot going on. Plus, I play a hundred cities a year and I have to get to them all. So I've got L.A., Chicago, New York before New Year's and then it all starts up again.

Robyn Hitchcock will be playing at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles on Friday, Dec. 13, and tickets are available here.

WATCH: Robyn Hitchcock Talks With Portia Sabin About Touring, Songwriting, Rock & Roll And More...

Damian Lazarus at Day Zero

Damian Lazarus at Day Zero Tulum 2019

Photo: Juliana Bernstein

News

Damian Lazarus Discusses Day Zero 2020, Spiritual Awakenings, Meeting Tiesto & '90s London Raves

Facebook Twitter Email
The globetrotting house music wizard dives deep into the beginnings of his magical Tulum event, cutting his teeth in the '90s underground U.K. club scene and his biggest hope for the new year
Ana Yglesias
GRAMMYs
Nov 26, 2019 - 4:53 pm

British DJ/producer/mystical event wizard Damian Lazarus' well-loved sound is much more of a mood than genre. The music he favors is ethereal, emotive and takes the listener on a journey. His parties often take place in awe-inspiring locations, from the expansive dustiness of Burning Man to the jungles of Tulum, Mexico. His DJ sets tend to last for hours, often until the wee hours of the morning.

With his iconic house and techno label Crosstown Rebels, which he founded in 2003, Lazarus has helped catapult the careers of fellow underground game-changing DJ/producers, including Maceo Plex, Jamie Jones and Francesca Lombardo, to name a few.

In addition to throwing down at major electronic music events (Amsterdam Dance Event, Desert Hearts Fest, Lightning In A Bottle, Art Basel Miami) and legendary clubs around the world (Miami's Club Space, Ibiza's DC10, Berlin's Watergate), Lazarus has been carefully curating his own beloved events, namely the Day Zero and Get Lost series.

The Recording Academy caught up with the globetrotting wizard, who called in during a rare moment of downtime in Mexico City, in between debuting a new party to close out ADE and bringing the spooky vibes to Los Angeles' HARD Day of the Dead. He dove deep into the surreal beachside origin story of Day Zero (which returns to Tulum on Jan. 10, 2020), what makes a great DJ set and more. We also revisited his teen and young adult years in London, where he got a healthy dose of club life during the then-burgeoning rave scene.

You were just at ADE not long ago. How was that experience for you?

It was really good, actually. Funnily enough, I was just at lunch here in Mexico City and saw Tiësto. I had to tell him about what I did at ADE because it was because of him that I started something new there this year. Many years ago, I was in Chicago about to play a show and the promoters said, "Oh, do you want to come see Tiësto play? He's doing an early evening thing." I'd never seen him play before, so I was really intrigued.

So we went and they took me to the green room. When Tiësto arrived, he made a beeline directly to me and was like, "You're Damian Lazarus, right?" I had no idea that I'd be anywhere on his radar. And he said, "I've got to tell you that your name is the best name in dance music. You know what it means, Lazarus, in Dutch?" And I was like, "No, I have no idea." And he says, "Well, when we go out on the weekend and then your friends call you in the week and they're like, 'What did you get up to in the weekend,' you're like, 'I got really lazarus.' It means to get really wasted."

So this year, I decided to create my own event in ADE; of course I just called it "Lazarus." Because people in Amsterdam would totally get it, but anywhere in the rest of the world, it's just my second name. That was on Sunday, so it was an ADE closing party. It started at midnight and I played all night until 7:00 a.m. That was really special. I also played Circoloco as well, which was on a Saturday.

I tend to just go in for a couple of days. I don't really go for the business meetings and stuff. I know it's very worthwhile for promoters and management but I find if I need to talk to someone or have a meeting about something, I can just pick up a phone. I don't need someone to tell me where to go and have a meeting.

I was always curious about that; is it really like the electronic music mecca that it's made out to be, or is it just a cool space to be when everyone's there?

It really is. I mean, first of all, Amsterdam is a really cool city on so many levels. They have more clubs per capita than anywhere else—throughout the year, not just during ADE. While I was there, I was polling quite a few of my friends and people in the industry about how useful it's been for them that week at ADE and everyone loves it as a business opportunity and also as a good chance to go out. It's one of the best places to go and do business but have fun at the same time.

Read More: Damian Lazarus' Day Zero Tulum 2020: &Me, Audiofly, Black Coffee, Dubfire, Ellen Allien & More

Recently, you shared some details for your Day Zero 2020 event, which I think is the seventh iteration of it.

This will be the seventh, yeah, we took one year off.

What are you most looking forward to, especially as we plummet into this new decade?

That's a good point. I just look at it as 2020, I haven't really thought about making a big statement with the new decade. Well, Day Zero began at the end of the Mayan calendar, which I saw as the beginning of a new opportunity as opposed to the end of the world. This time in the world is very difficult, there's a lot of unrest. I think for people in our world to gather together as a community, to celebrate with a backdrop of this beautiful jungle and incredible music—Tulum is a really an incredible place to create a joyful experience for people.

Every year, my mission that I set before my team is to make the next event even more impressive than the last. So we're in the planning stages at the moment and we have a lot of fresh ideas. After every event, we're fine-tuning the minutia of the experience. There's so many things that we plan out at this event. Everywhere you look, everything you smell, everything you touch, everything you do, every place that you go has been well considered by us before you get there, because we want this event to be a full sensory overload. We take pride in it and work very hard on it. So, I'm looking forward to this year.

I would love to hear a little bit more about the origin story of Day Zero and what throwing the party each year means to you, to be able to share it with people.

I had a very spiritual awakening back in 2012 on the beach in Tulum. A medicine man I'd seen earlier that day suggested I stand beneath the moon and stars and raise my arms up towards the moon at a certain hour that night. He wouldn't give me any more information about what I should expect to happen. Fortunately, I remembered to do it later that night and I had the most incredible energy—force field—connection with the universe. It was like a physical being.

You know that feeling when you're young and you try poppers for the first time? Not saying that that's a good thing to do, but imagine that feeling for like 20 minutes; nonstop connecting to the universe. So I had this incredible experience and I took that as a signal to create something that I had rolling around in my head. I'd been going to Tulum for many years; I've been going there for well over 15 years now.

I was playing in Playa del Carmen two years before the BPM festival began there. I'm very connected to that area. But I'd always refrained from DJing in Tulum because it felt like a very beautiful, pristine, secret place that maybe shouldn't open its doors to parties. I knew that the first time I would play music there and bring electronic music to the natural beauty of the area, I wouldn't be able to stop. So I prevented myself from doing it.

And then a couple of people started to come see the area and ask me to play it. But then I had this experience and I could see that I was really fighting against the winds of change. More and more people were discovering Tulum and the hotels, the restaurants and bars were building up. I could feel there was something coming. So, the Armageddon was supposed to be coming on the 21st of Dec., 2012, so I started to plan Day Zero then as a way to reset and recharge, and, like I said, gather people to create a very special experience. 

Sharing the experience means the world to me. This has been by far the most thrilling ride that I've been on in my career creating parties and stuff. And now we just started to open it up outside of Tulum for the first time this year. We just created Day Zero Masada at the Holy Mountain in the Dead Sea area. We had 15,000 people there for an incredible first show, I was very happy with how that went.

So now we're looking up where to go in the future. The idea of Day Zero is to get the best electronic music, forward-thinking, future music with ancient civilization. So we like that juxtaposition of the two things going hand in hand. For seven years now, we've been connecting with the Mayans in the ancient area of the Mayan jungle, complete with the
Cenotes underground. We delve into the Popol Vuh, which is the creation story of the Mayans, and work out performances around these ancient Mayan stories and connect with Mayan spiritual leaders from that come and join us.

We really try to show the new young generation the differences in historical background to how people used to live and the stories and the influence that these people have had on the world. But the thing is to not do too many because each event takes about a year in advance to plan. So yeah, so we have two running now, Masada and Tulum, and we'll see where we go in the future. And the Get Lost events which are really big as well. So yeah, it's a little bit busy.

Damian Lazarus at Day Zero Masada

Damian Lazarus at Day Zero Masada | Photo: Karim Tabar

Your sets are known for having a journey element to them. When you're DJing, say at Day Zero or in other special places, do you feel like you're connecting to something?

Oh yeah, 100 percent. Well, at my events, when I start playing there's an extra buzz around the place because it's like, "What's he going to do? What's he going to bring?"

You've set the bar high for yourself.

Yeah, I do. Every year I try to make it better and I spend a lot of time trying to find some music that is really going to make people go bananas. Of course, over seven years, it's difficult to continue to find those records every time, but I work very hard at that. I never plan a set, I never know what I'm doing from one track to the next, whether it be at Day Zero or anywhere else. When I'm DJing, I kind of tell myself I'm playing Sudoku or chess, so I'm always thinking two, three or four moves in advance.

So, I'm telling a story but I'm thinking about them throughout the whole experience. Of course there's some records that work really well together and you want to throw them together a few times. I like to think that I save my best work live at Day Zero or Get Lost. Of course I love to play at sunsets or sunrises. And the beauty of throwing your own event is you get to choose when you play and work everybody else around you. [Laughs.]

What has been one of the most powerful moments from your Day Zero events?

Oh my god. There's so many. But you've got to remember that I'm the kind of person that can't just rock up an hour before my set. I've got these events that I run from beginning to end every year and I generally am playing at the end. So I'm spending 16 hours running around the festival site showing my friends around, having fun, experiencing it for myself and making sure everything's working properly. And then I have to start playing.

It all kind of blurs into one. I could tell you that the magical moments are many. But I actually take more pride and enjoyment in reading other people's comments and what people react after these events, especially after Day Zero events. People do find them quite life changing. I've had people meet on the dance floor there and they're married within 12 months. There's people that write to me and tell me that they literally had their life changed. They were going through some trauma, and the energy that they felt at Day Zero helped them kind of rearrange and reorganize their life and their thoughts.

You never know how much of this is actually true. But if someone's going to take the time to write to me and tell me a story like that, then I want to believe it. So I think that's really the best thing that comes out of it for me, the fact that I get to make so many other people happy and that's the main focus.

I love that. What do you think is essential to a great DJ set?

Well, obviously the ability to read the energy in the crowd. Many times I've walked into a room and I feel that there's no vibe, no energy. And I think to myself, it's not that difficult to change this, you just need to be aware of it. Really focus on what music is going to lift people's spirits in time. I think it's important to be innovative but not too overly technical. Of course, it's important to mix and blend your music perfectly, because no one likes to hear dodgy mixing.

And I think there's a very fine line between showboating and really being into what you're doing. I like to think sometimes I'm a performer, but only realize that afterwards, when I let myself go, because I was really feeling the music in the booth.

Last year, you released Heart of Sky with your Damian Lazarus & The Ancient Moons project. Can you talk a little bit about that album and creative group?

Basically what happened was when I first made the first Ancient Moons album back in 2015, Message From The Other Side, I worked with so many different musicians from all over the world. I'd been touring and finding amazing musicians from Egypt, Pakistan, New York. I somehow managed to record all of these amazing people and I was making the new Damian Lazarus album. But once I realized that I had all these incredible other voices and musicians on this record, and it felt very cinematic and it also felt like I could perform this live, I realized that I should create this fake band name, which was The Ancient Moons.

Once I decided to take the project live, I actually had to put The Ancient Moons together. So when it came around to making the second album, I started to work with the band that I found from the first time. So we actually then did become a band making music together. Whereas the first album, I made it with a producer and some guest musicians.

I think that The Ancient Moons project's some of the best creative work I've ever done. But it's not something that I could just knockout every time I'm in the studio. Right now, I'm not working on any new Ancient Moons material but I'm focusing on doing a little bit more kind of straight ahead Damian Lazarus club music right now.

In fact, I've just made this track with Diplo and the band Jungle, which we're still trying to decide what to do with. I've just done a couple of remixes. I just worked on a remix with Teddy Pendergrass. And I did a remix for Art Department. I just did this really killer remix of this Rosalía track. I'm just waiting for her to listen to it and see what she thinks.

But yeah, so that's where we're at. I mean, maybe next year I'm thinking about some Ancient Moons material probably towards the end of the year. I'm already kind of pretty hectic for 2020. I'm already a bit busy for the first half of the year. And I have family at home as well. I need to prioritize my kids right now. So yeah, quite a lot going on.

And then with Heart Of Sky—

Heart Of Sky is actually from the Popol Vuh story. Did you see the film that we made? It's called "Heart Of Sky," by Jessy Moussallem, an amazing film director from Beirut. It's a 15-minute film that we made in the fields of Lebanon where they make Lebanese hash. So it's all the families of the community of people that are making hash. They've never allowed themselves to be filmed before. Obviously, the soundtrack is music from the album.

That's super cool. Zooming out, when did you first start getting into music?

Music was always kind of around in the house. My mother, in the '60s was involved in the the [Rolling] Stones scene, and hanging out in Carnaby Street and stuff like that. And my dad was more kind of into Motown and soul, Isaac Hayes, James Brown. So I had a really good combination there, but my grandfather really was the most influential person for me because he was proper East Londoner, really into the show tunes and musicals. He and I used to have a lot of fun with music together.

But it wasn't really until I was about 11, 12, that I started to buy music and be obsessed with listening to the radio and finding new music that I liked. By the time I was 14, I'd persuaded my parents to let me buy some turntables and a mixer. And I got myself a Saturday job in a very cool record store called Groove Records in SoHo, Central London and then just went on from there.

I did a gig for Pirate Radio, and then went to college and started making parties there. It wasn't really until around 2001 when I had the City Rocker record label that people really started to take notice of me. I always knew I wanted to be a DJ but I wasn't very good at it. It took me ages to work out how to mix properly, but maybe that was because there were so many different styles of music that I was into. So by 2001, I managed to really hone in on and focus on it.

When we were running City Rockers, we started this party called 21st Century Body Rockers in London. We did it for 10 weeks, every month during 2001 or '02. We had DJs like Soulwax and I was the warmup DJ. It was there that my friends said to me, "You're actually getting quite good at this. You should think about it as a career." It wasn't until I got friends and loved ones telling me that that I really thought I could make a go of it. And within a couple of years, I was playing at Circoloco [at DC10 in Ibiza] for the first time, and the Sónar festival [in Barcelona]. I guess the rest is history. [Chuckles.]

I started Crosstown Rebels in 2003 and it was pretty much seen at the forefront of underground electronic music since then. So that always kept me at the front of people's minds, I think, because I was always working with a lot of cool people and discovering new talent and putting on great parties. I guess my DJing skills improved. Things started to get better and better.

Do you have any photos from these 2001 parties? That would be amazing.

I'm not sure they're really for GRAMMY.com. [Laughs.]

Did you have a favorite club or place that you went to when you were younger in London?

There was one club that was really influential for me and helped shape my wide range of appreciation for music. It was called That's How It Is. It was every Monday night at Bar Rumba in London and was run by James Lavelle and Giles Peterson. They were playing anything from all the early Mo Wax stuff to rare groove or funk to jazz to techno. And then they kind of started to discover the jazziest end of the drum and bass sound. It was just this melting pot of all these amazing new, fresh sounds, like Massive Attack, all that stuff coming out at that time. I was on the dancefloor every Monday for a good few years.

But then, you know, I also went to Rage, which was the primary kind of early jungle party in the U.K. There was a couple of things I went to New York as well when I was young. But yeah, so many places have influenced and inspired me. And they still do. I sometimes think back to various places I've been to and I think how I can create something like that.

"One positive thing is that in times of economic hardship, you tend to find that's a really good time for underground music to really come out of the cracks."

Read & Listen: Jayda G Is The Environmental Scientist & House Music DJ/Producer The Planet Needs Right Now

What is your biggest dream that you hope will come true in 2020?

Impeachment.

Which one?

A few. I don't know. The world's f**ked right now really. It's starting to really get people down. But one positive thing is that in times of economic hardship, you tend to find that's a really good time for underground music to really come out of the cracks. I think it's been getting a little stale, a little safe. I think we've lost that kind of punk and DIY attitude in electronic music right now.

As a label owner, I'm finding it really hard to find really unique, new voices in electronic music. I mean, I do have a few people that I've discovered recently that I'm really excited about, but I think that something needs to happen.

I think that maybe the current state of the world and the climate crisis and everything else hopefully will take music more underground because people are struggling, I think, mentally with figuring out how to deal with all the issues that we face. When keeping your eyes open and not walking around with your eyes closed, you can't escape the fact that the world is f**ked. So I'm looking forward to some exciting new musical trends to come through.

Lee Burridge Hopes His New Album With Lost Desert, 'Melt,' Helps You See Passion & Truth In Yourself

Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield

Photo: David Doobinin

News

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Juliana Hatfield Goes Deep On Her New Police Cover Album

Facebook Twitter Email
The alt-rock veteran cleverly balances some of the GRAMMY-winning band's most iconic hits like "Every Breath You Take," "Roxanne" and "Can't Stand Losing You," with some of their deeper album cuts and B-sides on her latest project
Will Hodge
GRAMMYs
Nov 18, 2019 - 4:16 pm

"I'm starting to think I may have finally found my true calling. I think this might be my thing and I'm really enjoying it," Juliana Hatfield mused, with equal parts dry wit and keen self-awareness. This confessional observation comes from the seasoned singer/songwriter/bandleader reflecting on her newest musical endeavor—splitting up her standard album releases with cover albums entirely devoted to a single artist or band.

Following 2018's widely celebrated Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John and this year's Weird, she has once again picked an inspirational muse from her early years around which to craft a lovingly loud collection of guitar-graced tributes.

For the second edition in her newfound cover album project, she revisited her formative years' fascination with British rock trio The Police to create Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police. For this engagingly inventive 12-song set, she cleverly balances some of the GRAMMY-winning band's most iconic hits like "Every Breath You Take," "Roxanne" and "Can't Stand Losing You," with some of their lesser known (yet equally emblematic) album cuts and B-sides.

Hatfield has always shown an enthusiast's flair for reinterpretation over the last three decades with Blake Babies, The Juliana Hatfield Three and as a solo artist. Yet the ability to move beyond the single nod of recognition found in a one-off cover song to the full-on deep dive of a full album dedication has allowed the brilliant guitarist and multi-instrumentalist to dismantle and reassemble a legendary songwriting catalog (or two) through her own creative filters.

Read: Nirvana Manager Danny Goldberg Talks 25 Years of 'MTV Unplugged In New York'

Recently, the Recording Academy spoke with the vibrant artist to find out what it was that so deeply drew her to The Police (both as a young fan and as the focus of this album) and how she picked which songs to cover. She also explained what it was like to step into each of the multi-genre musical shoes of Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland—she performed all of the vocals, guitars and keyboards on the album, as well as over half of the bass and drums.          

Juliana Hatfield: Almost immediately after releasing the Olivia Newton-John album, I started thinking about who I should do next. For a while, I was actually thinking of doing Phil Collins, both his solo songs and also his time in Genesis. I had already started to make a list of his songs when one day I was listening to "Long Long Way to Go" from No Jacket Required. Sting sings background vocals on that song and as soon as I heard his voice, I was immediately struck by the thought, "Wait, I should really be doing The Police."

I have much more of a connection to The Police and was a bigger fan of them than I ever was of Phil Collins. Apart from two Genesis albums that I really love, Duke and Abacab, Phil Collins is more of a singles artist to me. But growing up, I was truly fanatical about The Police and had all their albums and knew all the deep cuts. I just switched my brain over to Police mode and that became the new concept.

Once she set her sights on The Police, it might've seemed like the possibilities of whittling down their renowned catalog to just a single LP's worth of cover songs would be a fool's errand. From 1977 to their contentious split in 1986, The Police were regularly atop the singles and albums charts, all five of their studio albums went platinum and they won six GRAMMYs. Their final, 1983 album Synchronicity even knocked Michael Jackson's Thriller out of the top spot on its way to a 17-week stay at No. 1. At the apex of their fame, The Police were often cited as being the biggest band in the world.

However, while Hatfield's song selection process could've been bloated by the riches embodied in The Police's musical successes, she actually had the reverse problem when it came to deciding on the finalized tracklist.

For The Record: The Police 'Synchronicity'

Juliana Hatfield: It was actually a little hard to get the track list up to 12 songs. While there are plenty of great Police songs to choose from, it's kind of intimidating trying to work with most of them. It was hard to get some of those songs to obey me. "It's Alright For You" or "Rehumanize Yourself;" those two were really tricky. The Police versions are so energized and I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to reach the same intensity.

What was created when those three specific guys played together can never be recaptured. With Olivia Newton-John, it was more about highlighting the songwriting and the melodies. With The Police, it's really more about the chemistry between those three guys and that was intimidating to feel like I was never going to capture the right energy.

Since Hatfield played all of the instruments for the majority of the album's tracks, she had a firsthand experience of the interworking of what made The Police's instrumental interplay so unique. Her approach was to sometimes stay true to the eclectic vibrancy of the individual performances and to sometimes completely strip them down to just their essential components.

Other times, as with the case of her punched up, punked out take on the lounge jazz B-side "Murder By Numbers," she reinvented the song completely. It all depended on what the song seemed to be calling for and what performance style rang the truest to her musicianship.

Juliana Hatfield: Sting's basslines are a lot of fun to play. Sometimes they can be very simple, like "Hungry For You," and sometimes they can sound really simple, like "Canary In A Coalmine," but the groove is really tricky to nail. I tried to do that one like a million times but I eventually gave up and asked Ed Valauskas to do it because he's more of a pro bass player than I am. I really love that bassline but it was just too much for me.

Also, some of Andy's guitar parts were challenging because I was playing way out of my comfort zone. Playing the reggae upbeats on "Canary In A Coalmine" or "Rehumanize Yourself"—the rhythm guitar is playing on a syncopated upbeat and that doesn't come naturally to me. Sonically, I also ended up using a cool effect on my guitar that came from a Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier because I was trying to get that signature Andy Summers chorus effect. I'm really into that effect now and I never used to be.

As recognizable as Sting's bass and Summers' guitar work can be, it was Copeland's powerfully distinctive drumming style that imprinted most fully on The Police's overall sound. Dynamic mixed-metered grooves, jazz-infused snare and hi-hat work, punk-fueled fury and syncopated polyrhythms are just a few of the hallmarks of Copeland's wide-ranging skillset that have made him one of the most memorable drummers of the modern rock era—a fact not lost on Hatfield when she was deciding how to approach the drums for each track.

Juliana Hatfield: Starting the whole album off with a drum machine on "Can't Stand Losing You" was my way of saying, "Don't worry. I'm not going to step on your heroes' toes or try to compete with their legacies." It was always weighing on my mind; "How do I interpret Stewart Copeland's beloved, iconoclastic drumming?"

I was worried about pissing off his fans. I knew I was going to have to really strip the drums down and not try to do anything even approaching his style. If you try to mimic him, you'll fail every time.

Along with assessing the notable musical elements of potential songs, she also let the lyrics and subject matter drive the decision for some inclusions. Whether it was the real world, day-to-day themes of systematic oppression and abuses of power or the way that the band dealt with existentialism and romanticism, the longtime alt-rocker picked a few of the songs based on their intense relevancy—both to the current sociopolitical atmosphere and to her individual life.

Juliana Hatfield: I was looking for songs that seemed really relevant and ones that felt current, like "Landlord" and "Murder By Numbers." Those songs spoke to my anger and sense of frustration about how the people with the power and money are totally f***ing everybody over. There are songs about the evils of the ruling elite on here that make me feel murderous and like I just want to punch someone in the face, so I tried to convey that musically.

Also, some of the songs I ended up not doing—"So Lonely' for example—were because I didn't feel like there was enough substance there. "Hole In My Life" is also about being lonely but its way more existential. It's not about missing a specific person, it's about an existential angst. I can still relate to that. The love songs, at this point in my life, I can't relate to them at all. I just don't have those inclinations anymore. I pushed all of those love songs to the side because they weren't speaking to me at this stage in my life.

For the drum and bass duties that she didn't handle herself, she called on Chris Anzalone (Roomful of Blues) and Ed Valauskas (The Gravel Pit) to help her wrangle the right grooves for her reinterpretations. Some of the songs even went through multiple iterations before she achieved exactly what she was looking to accomplish with this musical love letter to her longtime inspirations.

Luckily, after all of the instrumental elements were sorted out, Hatfield was able to focus on the fun of recording the vocal parts that she had been committing to heart-memory since her youth. She even got to whip out some of her high school French for "Hungry For You (J'aurais Toujours Faim De Toi)."

Juliana Hatfield: When I look back at the whole project, it was really fun. However, when I try to analyze the individual tracks, I realize that it was all pretty tricky. A couple of the songs I had to start over after I already had the basic tracks recorded. For "Can't Stand Losing You" and "Next to You," I already had the live drums, bass and guitar recorded and I had to scrap it all and start over with just a drum machine and my own drumming.

I redid all the bass for those as well because something just wasn't working with the original tracks. It was like a puzzle trying to get everything to fit together. Singing them was second nature though. That was the fun part. I have such an affinity for those melodies and know them all by heart. Most of them were even in the range I like singing in.  

With an album concept like Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police, there are immediate "who will be next" questions that naturally follow. While there are always interesting contenders that easily bubble to the surface of conversations with Hatfield, flipping the question inside out—"What band would you like to record a cover album of Juliana Hatfield songs?"—prompted a wonderfully reflective pause and gleefully wishful response.  

Juliana Hatfield: I think it would be R.E.M., yeah definitely them. I would want them to do it. In fact, I dare them to do it. They wouldn't, of course, but that would be an absolute dream come true. I would love to hear that in my lifetime.

Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police is currently available on CD, cassette and multiple vinyl variants from American Laundromat Records.

Bad Bunny, Rosalia, Juanes & More: 5 Unforgettable Moments From The 2019 Latin GRAMMYs

GRAMMYs

Azar Swan

Photo: Angelle-Leigh Breaux

News

Exclusive: Azar Swan Dissect Their Spooky New Album 'The Hissing Of A Paper Crane'

Facebook Twitter Email
The experimental duo talk collaborating between New York and New Orleans, ASMR, climate change and anecdotes for the dark side
Stephanie Dubick
GRAMMYs
Oct 29, 2019 - 1:10 pm

For Brooklyn's Azar Swan, getting spooky has never been an issue. From their debut album, Dance Before the War, in 2013, to their sophomore album, And Blow Us a Kiss, in 2015, the fun, dance-friendly synth-pop duo of Zohra Atash and Josh Strawn have embraced the darker side of life, touching on themes of war and death all within the constructs of traditional pop music.

But on their latest album, The Hissing of a Paper Crane, Atash and Strawn relinquish tight orchestration and melody for a looser, more collaborative songwriting approach. Deconstructing their previous work down to its very essence, as they did on their subsequent album, Savage Exile, they create a sonic landscape this time around that is a freewheeling journey both beautiful and terrifying. The title song, which clocks in at nearly eight minutes, is an industrial meld of experimental noise. "I am the beggar of the world," Atash croons. "A wounded animal on the river of memory." It's a far departure from Azar Swan's previous albums, but collaboration with musicians like Paige A. Flash from Cult of Youth, and Thomas Boettner of Straight Panic, and the improvisational nature of the writing process was a healing act for the band.

"Our first record took four years from start to finish," Atash recently told the Recording Academy over the phone. "To widdle this approach down to just doing the music was cathartic. We're having a much better time with this music, and there's a beauty in it. I used to try and make things pretty to offset what I was feeling, but this creates a joy within myself that maybe sounds darker."

On the heel of their release party at Trans-Pecos in Queens, N.Y., which benefited migrant organizations, El Comedor and Contra Viento y Marea, Azar Swan spoke with the Recording Academy about the process of collaboration, the effects of climate change and healing during difficult times.

How was the release party?

Zohra: We had a great time. We saw old faces, new folks. We hadn't played here in a year or so. New York is where we play our community shows for the most part, so it felt like coming home even though it is my home. When Josh isn't here I don't play live without him anymore.

Josh, being that you live in New Orleans, are you constantly travelling back and forth to New York?

Josh: I've actually been here a lot in the last couple of months. My band, Blacklist, reunited for the first time in almost 10 years and we did a show in late August. Then I did a show with an industrial side-project of mine in late September, and then we had this show, so I've been up here a lot. But prior to that, for the earlier part of this year, especially in the winter and spring, Zohra was actually in New Orleans a lot. We've been working on stuff together, but I've been in New York more in the last couple of months.

Does living in different places as a band make it difficult to make music? Are you constantly emailing each other music?

Zohra: Not really. That stopped working for us, to be honest. I don't spend a lot of time online at all. I just showed Josh how many unread emails I have. It's up to 71,000. But band-wise, I would say I'm not the best person to be in a band in terms of the logistic stuff, but the writing and the music part I love. It felt like it would be more industrious if I spent more time in New Orleans because we have a makeshift studio there.

Josh: Our process has changed a lot, too. We used to do a lot of composing on a computer. As we started to use more hardware, and as we started to get more into the process and experimentation of governing sounds, the writing process became a different thing for us.

Zohra: In our first band, Religious to Damn, I used to write on a piano or on my Telecaster. But then as we transitioned into Azar Swan, I wrote a lot of the demos and Josh would help me with production right within Logic and GarageBand in 2012. That's when I started playing around with more electronic music. As we progressed, our writing process changed to where, with Savage Exile, I would send him the beginnings of the stuff I was writing and it was the first time he felt the writing was in a particular space that didn't need his output as much. With Azar Swan, it really is about our collaborative energy together. Josh had his own music, and I would contribute a bit to that, and I wanted him to sing on my parts, so Savage Exile became the first intersection of his output and mine in a band.

And then the next step for us was to be more present within the writing process and jam together. With this new record, I wanted to do this crazy drone and cacophonous, extended vocal technique, and then Josh spearheaded bringing some more musicians together from different camps from New Orleans and New York…

Josh: ...Chicago, Baltimore, all over the place.

Zohra: It was almost a surrealist approach of not over-composing and getting to know the music as it was being finalized. I would put some things down and then it would go into someone else's hands and then come back. The thing about The Hissing of a Paper Crane is that the chaos that we were shipping within Savage Exile, and the stuff in between what will be in the next record and the solo stuff we plan on releasing, is a marriage of all of these ideas, but we finally have more outlets for it.

Josh: With the way we've been working and creating so much stuff, that's kind of why The Hissing of a Paper Crane came about. We had all of this material; some of it being really hooky and dance-y and groovy, like (the 2019 Adult Swim single) "Empire Grave," and some of it being really crazy and experimental. We can put this out now and then we can work on tailoring these other projects. I'm excited about the idea of going into the music this time with more of a live energy.

The new album reminds me a lot of (Japanese experimental noise band) Boris. I saw them live a few years ago and they played for two or three hours. Similar to The Hissing of a Paper Crane, they really take you on this sonic journey. It felt like experimental theater almost.

Zohra: With The Hissing of a Paper Crane, the way that the first couple of verses were delivered in the title track, we were calling it nightmarish ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). I've been an ASMR aficionado since it started because I'm an anxious sleeper. I needed to find something online that would be healthy to fall asleep to and I found this community of people with the same issues who talked about ASMR and different noises, or "hissing." With The Hissing of a Paper Crane, the lyrics were written years ago but we didn't have any output within the constructs of a pop song to put some of those words and sounds in. It's a strange intersection of white noise, chaos and cacophony and it also feels very hypnotic; like you're slipping into a different realm.

Josh: People make the joke about noise music sounding like a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. And then there's also the joke that you have kids and the kids end up falling asleep to the vacuum cleaner. These sounds that we think of, they should be loud and obtrusive. There's ways of contextualizing them and complicating that simplicity.

Zohra: The ASMR community, and people who listen to noise machines, has really grown. You'd think that a lot of these noises would be intense and that you'd need earplugs, but it's more trance without the techno beat. Trance is definitely what I feel when I listen to these types of frequencies. I went deep into that world and listened to the types of sounds and words you could get.

What hand did improvisation play on the album?

Zohra: It was almost entirely improvisation.

Josh: Except for the first half. A lot of it grew out of the fact that our friend in the Berlin techno scene was putting together a record where he was going to take a vocalist and use their voice to build these dance tracks. He invited Zohra to participate in that. I thought she was going to sing a couple of hooks, but she played me what she was going to send him and it was this massive orchestration that reminded me of everything from Diamanda Galas to the Suspiria soundtrack.

Zohra: Michael Wollenhaupt of Ancient Methods invited a few vocalists to basically do what I call an alientoric approach to music. Whatever I decided to give him he would compose around that. I thought it would be easy just to give him something, but it took me like three or four months to come up with material. I wanted to collaborate with him, it was an honor to be asked, but I could not take heed of what I could give him. I wanted to soundtrack a moment through voice by using an extended vocal technique. I've always been big into horror---we're both huge film fans---so soundtracking a moment that was a bit terrifying using breath and sounds was really interesting. The only words I gave him were "swallow the screw." He took it and he made this wonderful track and he told me he could have made a whole record out of everything I sent him.

Josh: I thought people should hear this. It was so intensely orchestrated already. You could just add some drums and drones to certain sections to make it even more interesting. And then we almost started reversing the process where I reached out to friends who were really talented who sent us textures and drones and then we would build off of that. We would go and make whatever noise over it with either our own voice or synthesizers. It was fun to change up the process that way and to focus on the process. Aside from the first track, which Zohra composed, it's not a meticulous composition album. It's very expressive.

Zohra: There was an improvisational aspect of not knowing where the next person was going to take it. I'm used to knowing the structure of a song. We used a lot of this drum machine that a friend of mine put me onto called the Lyra, which has its own unique story, and we used that to compose the bedrock of the album.

Josh: We also have to give credit where credit's due to our mixed engineer, Kris Lapke. I gave him a rough mix of where I thought things could drop out and come back in. We love what he does as a musician, so if he needed to add or change anything, he got that producer license. He had a big hand in arranging the music.

Zohra: It's a small team and Kris has been a huge part of the last three or four years of our lives as a band. He's been really valuable and we can't thank him enough.

Did you both go into this project wanting to collaborate with other musicians?

Josh: It really snowballed. I think the first person I asked was Mark Solotroff in Chicago who does the projects, Bloodyminded and Anatomy of a Habit. We wanted to work with Mark for a long time. We've been friends for a while but most of the music I've done has been in the realm of more traditional song structure, melodies and vocals. This was the first time where I thought Mark's sensibility would contribute a lot to what's going on. I know that this isn't my fortay. I'm not hugely experienced with speaking in these textural terms. One thing would come back and it would be so good and then I would get an idea to ask somebody else.

Zohra: We have a rotating cast of people we love collaborating with, especially people who really know their instruments. I only wanted to ask musicians to be a part of something so that that energy was there. I wanted this built on creating music and having it not take as long.

Josh: With collaboration, there's this omen of security. You don't have to feel like, ‘Oh, I did everything.' You have a lot of talented people around you that it would be really great to bring those talents together. There's been a huge sense of camaraderie and joy in creating something that we deeply care about.

You mentioned in the description of the album that it touches upon "explorations of a scorched earth." Immediately my mind went to climate change. Is that what you meant?

Josh: When you're making records and the Mississippi River is literally yards away from your house, it's impossible not to have that on your mind to some extent when that's your environment. Oftentimes, with noise records, or songs with fewer vocals, the song titles are kind of an interesting way to add context to the song. I've been reading Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton and The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, so that's where my headspace is in. But we didn't sit down and say, ‘We're going to make a record about climate change.' When Doug (Moore, of Pyrrhon) passed over his vocals and lyrics for 'The Vengeful Sun,' we were like, ‘OK, let's roll with this.'

Zohra: What he gave us was just a shoe in for what was already happening with the direction of the album. But the thing about New Orleans is that it's one of those cities where it may not exist in 100 years. It might be under water. Living close to the river here in New York, for me, it's hard not to think of surges happening. It's a strange thing to wrap your mind around the fact that the ocean might eat up where you're currently living and breathing. It's hard to think about on top of all the other chaos going on, but it's scary, especially with all the fires in California right now.

Josh: It was definitely on our minds, even to the point where the beginning of ‘Accelerant' actually has this drone introduction that uses a sample of this family who were driving out of the Paradise fires in California last year. This guy is reassuring his kids the whole time that everything is going to be okay and you can tell that he's saying it because that's what he has to say, but you don't know if he believes it. You're watching this video and you're like, ‘I don't know how these people got out alive.' Also, when you're making records that are inspired by current events, you have to be careful about being too on the nose.

Zohra: We're very careful about the energy that goes into the stuff we make. I one hundred percent believe that the place you're in has to be from a place where you want to give something positive. Even if the subject matter is verboten, it should still lead to something that pushes for change. No one makes art that's worth anything without coming from that place, in my opinion. The goal for us is to always leave people with something positive.

I think especially now with everything that's going on politically, environmentally, an album like this is nice to get lost in. So, where do yourselves going at this point, as a band and individually?

Josh: 'Empire Grave' would be the best indication of where our music is going to go. It's groovy, it's aggro, but we're also doing this weird thing where it's kind of a dance-y song, but it also has elements of prog-pop where for like seven minutes you're getting a new hook and a new verse. It's almost like the attention span of dance music but trying to draw that out to make it work the way that pop music works.

Zohra: It has a lot of techno aspects, but there's proggish elements as well. In terms of the solo stuff I'm doing, it's an in-between. I didn't want to do something completely on my own until I felt like it was ready and it was something I was really proud of. We're on an upswing, creatively, so we're definitely really psyched on what the next record is going to be. It will be finished and come out sometime next year. We had a lull for a little while just because of what was going on politically. It was difficult to finish making music.

Josh: It was hard to finish and process stuff. It was more intense.

Zohra: I wasn't really inspired to put anything out. I was in more of a misanthropic mindset than I've ever been in my life and I didn't want to share anything. I've always been terminally optimistic, just hoping that things would get better. I believe that being creative and putting art out there can change people's mindsets. It certainly has for me.

But at that time between 2015 in 2017, it was like, 'let it all burn, f**k it, I don't care.' When Betsy Devos became the Secretary of Education, I just lost it. I didn't have any hope left and I thought it was all going to s**t. Josh really helped in nursing my wounds at that point. Going online into ASMR communities was helpful, too. It's been such a positive thing in my life for healing. How can the world not be a beautiful place? These are perfect strangers and they're helping me heal. It's a beautiful thing. And if we can soundtrack the way people are feeling and give them some amount of feeling like their barometer is at normal, that's all I can hope for.

Hold The Wheel And Drive: Incubus Look Back On Their Alt-Metal Classic 'Make Yourself' 20 Years Later