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"ONO Is Gumbo": Chicago Industrial Revolutionaries ONO On Their Latest Release, 'Red Summer'

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The Midwestern rock experimentalists, led by the one-named singer/spoken-word artist travis, also reflect on the last 40 years as a band
Noah Berlatsky
GRAMMYs
May 14, 2020 - 10:59 am

"I become black noise. I become that undesirable force on the landscape." That's what singer/spoken-word artist travis told me when describing his work with 40-year-old Chicago gospel/industrial/experimental band ONO. It makes sense when you listen to a track like "Tar Baby" from their new self-released album Red Summer. A tribute to the Haitian revolution, the song feels like it's composed entirely of echoes and serrated edges. Shannon Rose Riley, who has written a book about the erasure of Haitian culture in the U.S., provides digital saxophones which wail and weep as travis bellows "Toussaint betrayed! Now Half Dead in Jail!" He growls that "in jail" like a feral epitaph before bandleader P. Michael Grego turns the track into a stomping, squalling death march, a tottering blare of grief and defiance, noise and undesirable force.

Travis was born in Mississippi in 1946. He moved to Ohio when he was young and from there enlisted in the Navy during Vietnam over his mother's objections. While in the service, he was subject to racist discrimination, and a superior officer attempted to sexually assault him. The experience forms the background for Red Summer's "I Dream Of Sodomy," a song in which sexual abuse becomes a metaphor for racism, imperialism and colonial genocide.  

After travis emerged from the service in 1969, he moved to Cleveland, where he began studying theater and Kundalini meditation. In 1976, he decided to head to New Mexico to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. 

But the arts scene in Chicago seduced him. He began working at Northwestern and met Hallene Kathy Brooks, a six-foot artist and performer who carried a machete in her purse and would literally cut up the walls when she and travis would go to punk shows. Brooks introduced him to P. Michael, who was a St. Xavier medical student at the time, and the three decided to form a band. Brooks was originally supposed to be the main vocalist. But she moved on to other projects, and Travis reluctantly became the frontman for ONO, amidst a rotating cast of musicians that included Shannon Rose Riley on saxophone and keyboards.

P. Michael led regular practice sessions as well as mandatory excursions to see art films by the likes of Linda Wurtmuller and Pasolini. With roots in spoken-word and avant-garde performance, ONO's live shows were famously unpredictable. travis would sometimes hang a sheet of metal to bang on; he also played lap steel though P. Michael had insisted he play without taking any lessons. "Most musicians can't deal with what I do with music, because it's almost insulting," P. Michael told me cheerfully. "What I'm doing with music, it's very perverse." A video of a 1984 performance confirms that characterization; travis gives a stunning stentorian performance of the National Anthem by candlelight on a dais draped in a reversed flag, as a New Wave beat descends into chaos. In a 1982 show recorded for a promo at Chicago's Metro, travis wears a mask, dress and white gloves while P. Michael rocks out on bass wearing sunglasses and Shannon Rose Riley wanders by in the background playing the children's rhyme "The Animals Went in Two by Two" on her horn.

The group recorded a couple of albums with Thermidor—Machines That Kill People and Ennui—but by the end of the '80s had drifted apart. Their legend lingered, though, and in 2007 Steve Krakow interviewed travis and P. Michael for his Chicago Reader comic "The Secret History of Chicago Music." The experience inspired them to restart the band, and they began playing and recording once more. Red Summer is their fifth album since their hiatus.

The title, Red Summer, refers to the nationwide wave of racist violence in the summer of 1919. The album treats that one period as a metaphor for American history in general; the first track "20th August 1619" refers to the first slave auction of black people in the United States. Other tracks deal with ongoing racist violence.

"Syphillis," for example, is an intense meditation on the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black men in the United States. Rebecca Pavlatos, a keyboardist and singer who backed some of travis' solo spoken-word performances and has been working with ONO since they reconstituted, starts the track with a dour recitation. "1932 to 1972 the U.S. public health service conducted the Tuskegee syphilis experiments." Then P. Michael's bass makes filthy, guttural protests as travis indicts president after president. "In 1932, Herbert Hoover gave me sy-phy-lis. In 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave me sy-phy-lis." The beat drags and thunders on, with feedback and keyboard melodies and Pavlavos' vocals looped and repeating, severed bits of misery, rage, and tragedy sliding through history like sludge.

P.Michael in the studio deliberately tries to create an air of spontaneity and confusion similar to ONO's live shows. He told me he sometimes will have the musicians play without hearing the other performers in their headphones, in order to keep everyone off-balance. In the studio he assembles tracks like collages, altering and layering to create shambling mutant songs. Shannon Rose Riley, who plays everything from candy wrappers to a sucker to percussion and keyboards on the album, said listening to the tracks is always a surprise because, "You never know if it's gotten in or out, the mixing is so overlaid." Pavlavos, who was trained as a classical musician added that, said the experience has been particularly disorienting and freeing for her. "With classical music you're performing within a specific parameter. Whereas with ONO, you have to be ready for anything, and react to it. Sometimes it's improvised, and sometimes there are improvisations within a structure. It's like a gumbo. ONO is gumbo."

Jordan Reyes, a electronic musician andone of the newest members of the band, also says playing with ONO has been transformative. He first performed with them at a New York gig in 2016. He told me that after the set "I was like, oh my god, this is the best I've ever felt in my entire life. This is the greatest high I have ever had.  I've never had more fun. I've never felt more fulfilled."  He also told me about a trip to Philadelphia, when the band was listening to a recording of spirituals. "Travis just started singing along in the back. And I was like, no longer listening to the recording, I was just listening, to travis sing. He has all this tradition inside of him. You really feel this trasference of soul, or of personhood, when he is singing."

Reyes, who was then 24, first met P. Michael and travis at a small show in Chicago in 2014. Reyes was wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and frilled jacket, and travis and P. Michael recognized a fellow eccentric. They ended up talking for hours about Samuel Delany's post-apocalyptic, borderline pornographic infamously avant garde novel Dhalgren. Reyes ended up helping to produce ONO's 2015 record Spooks for the Moniker label where he was working. He joined the band soon thereafter, contributing synths, and processed looped vocals, and becoming the band's point person for marketing and promotion.

Reyes had hoped that the band would be able to release Red Summer on a major indie label. But despite critical enthusiasm for Spooks, they couldn't find anyone to pick up the album.  So the band eventually just decided to self-release it, doing the design work and marketing themselves. The record they ended up with includes an insert with a selection of travis' artwork—arresting, expressionist images of twisted, bodies outlined on deep reds or blues. One painting is of a woman's face in reds, oranges and yellows, with a body in white outline superimposed; it looks like the lines of her tears are turning into a hanging body.

Red Summer is haunted throughout by what P. Michael refers to as "the love that dare not speak its name, which is lyching in America." The first track opens with carnival music, evoking the festival, picnic atmosphere in which black people in the United States were often murdered. The last song, "Sycamore Trees," is a musical pun—the song is by David Lynch and Angela Badalamenti. "Sycamore Trees" was initially performed by Jimmy Scott in a famously surreal and disturbing scene in the television show "Twin Peaks." The slow, sparse decadent cabaret arrangement for the song in show suggested decadent exhaustion, and bleak woods transformed into an abandoned Vegas soundstage. 'll see you in the branches that blow/In the breeze/I'll see you in the trees/I'll see you in the trees."

ONO's version is bigger and saturated with a less quirky, more specific trauma. Travis' gigantic, gothic voice, reminiscent of Nick Cave or Screaming Jay Hawkins, provides an operatic anchor around which the rest of ONO pulses. Winds howl, metal scrapes, a disembodied chorus mutters, P. Michael's bass scrapes. It's part ambient soundscape and part lament, as if the agony in "Strange Fruit" were crushed and spindled until it could no longer quite be expressed in music. It's black noise; it's perverse; it's a gumbo of knives and grief and resistance. It's ONO.

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The Jayhawks

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The Jayhawks' "New Day": How The Americana Pioneers Overcame Decades Of Turbulence And Became Full Collaborators

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For the first time in 35 years, the Gary Louris-led rockers pivoted to a full democracy on their new album 'XOXO.' Will it last?
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Jul 9, 2020 - 11:39 am

The Jayhawks are generally seen as the rootsy, easygoing Minneapolis band that helped pioneer alt-country 35 years ago. But their leader Gary Louris hardly touches the stuff.

On his own time, the 65-year-old prefers to zone out to ambient drones by Cluster and Neu!; he's effusive about the hallucinogenic hard rockers Hawkwind. His bandmates, too, don't exclusively sit around listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers. Lately, keyboardist Karen Grotberg has been revisiting the French prog band Magma and German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk. Bassist Marc Perlman cites R.E.M. as a major inspiration. Drummer Tim O'Reagan was partly reared on 1970s power-pop like Badfinger, Cheap Trick and Big Star.

These influences have bubbled up in their music since the 1990s. This has been something of a liability. "A strength of ours is that we’re hard to pin down. We’re eclectic. But it’s also been a hindrance," Louris tells GRAMMY.com. "I don't take it personally, but I feel like it's because we have a little too much of a British pop element that mixes in with the roots. Only in the 1980s — when I was 26 or 27 — did I discover American traditional music. That was added into what was already our DNA and that’s what makes us kind of in-between."

The Jayhawks exist in an awkward limbo — too rootsy for experimental rock fans, too left-field for those with a closetful of Western snap shirts. But that in-betweenness gives them longevity and range. The band has swerved between soothing Americana, morose pop, and art-rock meltdowns over the years, but their new album XOXO (out on July 10 via Sham/Thirty Tigers) marks their most profound shift to date.

For the first time ever, Grotberg, Perlman and O’Reagan, all who have been in the band for decades, contributed their own songs and sang lead vocals throughout a Jayhawks album. When Grotberg's "Ruby," Perlman’s "Down to the Farm" and O'Reagan's "Dogtown Days" ricochet off each other and Louris' contributions like "Living in a Bubble," the effect is of a songwriters' guild a la Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac.

To hear the Jayhawks tell it to GRAMMY.com, they're pleased by this development. "It's fun in a way that wasn't there before," O'Reagan says of the open format. "It gives some variety and depth." Perlman concurs: "It does help to get a band's interest and focus on recording to have them included from the writing stage through the production stage," he says. Most important, "I feel like I had equal opportunity to express myself and to have those expressions heard and respected," Grotberg explains. "Gary opened it up. Wide open."

But when the Jayhawks began, they were anything but.

 

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The Jayhawks perform at The Greek Theatre on October 21, 1992 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Lindsay Brice/Getty Images)

 

Crowded In The Wings

The band was formed in 1985 in Minneapolis by Louris, Perlman, drummer Norm Rogers and their founding co-leader Mark Olson, who has since left the band twice. "Mark had the idea of putting the Jayhawks together because he had songs," Perlman says. "Good songs that he wanted certain musicians to flesh out for him." Their self-titled 1986 debut album and its 1989 follow-up Blue Earth were almost exclusively written by Olson, and on each, he and Louris honked together in ragged, gorgeous harmony.

The cocky pair's breakthrough came in 1992 via Hollywood Town Hall, which was released on Rick Rubin's fledgling label American Recordings. On that album, Louris emerged as Olson's co-writer and competitor. "There was a lot of blood spilled and sweat poured out and feet stepped on," Louris recalled to The Aquarian in 2011. "It was just our transition from being kind of a regional band to being internationally known."

"When we were younger, our edges were sharper," O’Reagan says. "Our egos were bigger."

Hollywood Town Hall featured Benmont Tench and Nicky Hopkins trading off on piano duties. When their mutual friend Mike Russell learned they needed an onstage keyboardist, he referred Grotberg, who lived around the corner from their frequent haunt the 400 Club and had seen the Jayhawks a number of times, She met up with the band at their rehearsal space and had one practice: "I guess it must have gone well, because I got the job!" she says.

But the spotlight unwaveringly remained on Louris and Olson. They got brasher and more ambitious on 1995’s Tomorrow the Green Grass, dabbling in psychedelia and breaking into an exuberant cover of Grand Funk's "Bad Time." "I just remember us all kinda rubbing our hands together going 'I think we’re onto something here,'" Louris told The Aquarian of songs like "I'd Run Away"; "Miss Williams' Guitar" and "Blue," the only Jayhawks song that came within spitting distance of a hit.

"I think we pushed it a little bit more on that one," Louris added. But they might have pushed it over the edge altogether: that Halloween, Olson abruptly left the band.

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The Jayhawks at Farm Aid in Ames, Iowa in 1993. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

 

Olson Leaves The Band

"It wasn’t a joyous ride, man!" Olson told Popmatters in 2011 of being a Jayhawk. "I'd been in the band for quite a while. I'd just got married [to singer-songwriter Victoria Williams, the namesake of 'Miss Williams' Guitar']. I found a house down in Joshua Tree. And I wanted to try something else with my life. I felt like we’d given it 100% on those two records, and we’d landed where we’d landed. And those guys wanted to go on, and I wanted to stop. And they went on."

Louris struggled in his new role as the band's leader. "A concern of Gary's was whether or not he could handle being the frontman himself," Perlman recalls. "He went and did it out of necessity. It’s like second nature to him now." Fearing the end of the band and hitting the bottle hard, Louris let his inner Anglophile take the controls, and he wrote a handful of rattled, despondent pop songs that became their 1997 masterpiece Sound of Lies.

"It is the f**k-you record. It really is the f**k-everybody record," Louris told San Francisco Bay Area Concerts in 2015. "I was going through a divorce, I was a mess, I was drinking too much, I was unhappy… I really felt this was the last Jayhawks record, and why not go out with a bang, so f**k it?" One line from opener "The Man Who Loved Life" predicts how the album would fare commercially: "The traveling band was not well-received."

Still, Olson's absence created a clearing in which the other members could flourish. O'Reagan, who replaced their third drummer Ken Callahan, wrote and sang "Bottomless Cup"; Perlman contributed “I Hear You Cry,” one of the album's B-sides. "I learned how to write songs by being in the Jayhawks," Perlman explains. "I didn’t really have any interest in it in any band I was in before. It kind of took me years to understand the concept of it."

Smile, their 2000 album helmed by star producer Bob Ezrin, was their shot at a full-bore pop record with co-writing credits from all Jayhawks. Sunnier than its predecessor while thrumming with slightly unhinged energy, Smile has aged terrifically, but the slickness of songs like its title track, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and “Queen of the World” came to some fans' chagrin. Louris was unmoved by the pushback: "I get bored easily… I don’t like doing cookie-cutter things," he plainly told Yahoo! in 2014. "I didn't want to blindly follow what we were supposed to do and play country-rock."

Which is ironic in light of its 2003 follow-up Rainy Day Music, which completely abandoned synths and drum machines and took shelter in Americana. "People say that it's a return to our original sound, but sometimes I think of it as a retreat," Louris told City Pages in 2014. "We licked our wounds and said, ‘Well, that didn't work.’ And, I mean, we weren’t going to go in another direction of weird shit and drony music."

On that stripped-down album, the other Jayhawks continued to step up in Olson's absence. O’Reagan contributed “Don’t Let the World Get in Your Way” and “Tampa to Tulsa”; Perlman wrote “Will I See You in Heaven,” which the band sang in harmony. While lovely song-for-song, Rainy Day Music was a safe move instead of a surge forward, and it arguably cemented the Jayhawks’ image as an easy-listening band. They wouldn’t release another album for seven years.

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The Jayhawks' Gary Louris and Mark Olson perform onstage at Barbican Centre in 2012 in London. (Photo by Roberta Parkin/Redferns via Getty Images)

An Ill-Fated Reunion

While the Jayhawks quietly puttered along, Olson was engulfed in a tailspin of his own making.

At home in Joshua Tree, he was a full-time caregiver to Williams, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During periods of remission, the couple performed and recorded as the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers. After an exhausting 2004 tour of Europe, Olson decided to clear his head and enroll in a geology course at Barstow Community College. "One day, I drove the half-hour to college, and I kept driving," Olson told The Independent in 2007.

Olson didn’t stop until he arrived back in Minneapolis, where, he told Williams, he was crashing with Louris. In reality, Olson had gotten back with an ex-girlfriend. Williams quickly found out and filed for divorce. "The episode put such a strain on me that when I was in Minnesota my behavior wasn't rational," Olson recalled. "I mean, I was eating and doing normal things, but I was actually insane."

A bright spot emerged soon enough: Olson and Louris had reconnected back in 2001 when they were asked to write a song together for the Dennis Quaid-starring sports drama The Rookie. In 2008, they released Ready for the Flood, a duet album produced by the Black Crowes' Chris Robinson. "I'm willing to play it more by Mark’s rules now," Louris told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that year. "There’s definitely some kind of chemistry between us musically that just seems to pick up wherever it left off."

It worked so well, in fact, that Olson briefly rejoined the Jayhawks for 2012's Mockingbird Time, their first with their old co-leader since 1995. International touring followed. Then it all fell apart that same year after a festival gig in Spain. "In front of a bunch of people, Gary said, 'Why don’t you hit me?'" Olson told Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2014. "I don’t ever want to see Gary Louris again, nor do I want him singing my songs," he added.

Despite strong reviews, Louris has since disowned Mockingbird Time: "I don’t even count [it] as a Jayhawks record," he told Wicked Local Beverly in 2019. "I just kinda skip over it. It was a really bad experience. I was trying to force something that wasn’t there anymore with my relationship with Olson." Plus, "I was in the throes of drug addiction at that time," Louris admitted.

Ever since a heart-related surgery in 2003, Louris had been addicted to painkillers, and his drinking was spiraling out of control. "I found I just felt good on these things," he told MPR News in 2016. "I finally felt not-anxious, which is what I had growing up and all of my life, a low-level depression and anxiety." But Louris' need for pills ballooned over time; on one solo tour, he fell over backstage and repeated songs onstage.

The bottom fell out in downtown Los Angeles, when he stood on a hotel ledge at midnight and thought about jumping. Luckily, a friend from MusiCares got him into treatment: "I was so ready. You have to be ready,” he told The Current in 2016. "And I was so ready, it wasn't even funny."

Read More: Liz Brasher Opens Up About Memphis, Mental Health & Her New "Sad Girl Status" Video

Leaving The Monsters Behind

Sobriety gave Louris a new lease on life. "It’s changed the way I played," he told The Current. "I'm actually much more comfortable on stage straight. I approach the music differently." After spending years blaming music for his problems, he immersed himself in the stuff, writing prolifically in his home studio and twisting found sounds into unrecognizable shapes.

"[I] started dabbling with everything from manipulating radio broadcasts to sampling things off of my vinyl and twisting them into strange compositions," Louris told Courier Journal in 2016. This artistic roll resulted in 2016’s Paging Mr. Proust, which was co-produced by Peter Buck and juxtaposed pop jewels like "Quiet Corners and Empty Spaces" with Krautrock-influenced jams like "Ace" that reflect Louris' outré tastes.

Grotberg had a more hands-on role in Paging Mr. Proust. "I didn’t have any lead vocals that I sang, but there was definitely a lot of prominent piano," she notes. "Also, we started collaborating a little bit [on the writing of 'Lost the Summer,' 'Leaving the Monsters Behind' and 'The Dust of Long-Dead Stars']. There was a lot of freedom on that album. A lot of ‘Let’s get a little jammy and see what happens.'"

Proust’s easy-breezy follow-up, 2018’s Back Roads and Abandoned Motels, was a "cover album" with a twist. Nearly every song had been written by Louris for an outside act, whether it be The Chicks' ("Everybody Knows" and "Bitter End"), the Wild Feathers ("Backwards Women") or Ari Hest ("Need You Tonight"). Grotberg and O’Reagan sang more lead vocal parts than ever — the former on "Come Cryin’ to Me" and "El Dorado," the latter on "Gonna Be a Darkness" and "Long Time Ago."

Back Roads and Abandoned Motels led to a eureka moment for their next album of new material. "It kind of spurred me on… I just start thinking ‘I wish these guys were singing more,'" he says. "I'm singing 95% of the songs, and I have these two other people who sing so well. People love to hear their voices. Not just behind me, but singing lead."

A Full Democracy

In the interest of "opening [the band] up a bit more" and finding a unifying theme for a record, Louris asked Grotberg, Perlman and O'Reagan to write and sing their own compositions for XOXO.

Grotberg contributed two songs that dated back decades. "Ruby," which the Jayhawks occasionally performed live in the 1990s, was written about an elderly woman who cared for her during childhood. "Fast-forward a couple decades, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I found her with one foot in this world and another foot in the next," Grotberg says. "So it’s sort of a transition into death, but I view it more as a love song. I was trying to write about her relationship with her husband, which is a beautiful story."

Her impressionistic ballad "Across My Field" was written while living in the countryside. "I was probably sitting there spacing out with a kerosene lamp on the table and looking out across the gravel driveway to that field," she says. "It’s about trying to move forward out of any situation in life. You have to take a step. It’s not necessarily a large step. But you have to step forward." (Grotberg also wrote and sang "Jewel of the Trimbelle," a piano ballad named after a small Wisconsin town where she once lived, which is included as a vinyl-only bonus track.)

Grotberg's bandmates are ecstatic about the leaps she's taken. "Her lyrics are very poetic. It’s a major step for her to be able to express herself more," Louris says, aglow. Adds Perlman, "Gary and I talk about how enjoyable it is to watch her come out of her shell. He and I have been supporters of her songs for a long time. It’s just a question of finding the right time and place for her to step up."

Perlman, who had never sung a lead vocal on a Jayhawks album, wrote "Down to the Farm" half an hour before a writing/rehearsal session. “"I kind of felt like I wasn’t pulling my weight. I kind of got frustrated," he admits. "You’ve got to step up to the plate a little. So I sat down and just popped that one off." ("I love the dark beauty of that song," Louris says of the Leonard Cohen-esque track, noting its theme of "aging and feeling time pass.")

O’Reagan ramps up the energy on XOXO with "Dogtown Days" and "Society Pages," two hard-charging tracks that hint at his power-pop roots in his old band the Leatherwoods. The album’s closer "Looking Up Your Number," a tender, close-miked ballad he wrote more recently, is something else entirely.

"The lyrical content is kind of a well-trod area for me, which is regret over a screwed-up relationship and trying to figure out how to make it work again," O'Reagan says. "I seem to keep going back to that subject in my songs. A lot of selfishness and screwed-up relationships and trying to make good on it."

Louris, Grotberg, O'Reagan wrote the winding "Illuminate" in hot-potato fashion by tossing suggestions back and forth — it’s anybody’s guess whose lyrics were actually whose. "It has a variety of styles within," Perlman says, calling it a "process song." "I do remember that Gary and I had kind of rediscovered the Moody Blues at some point in the last year. I think subconsciously I was thinking of the song 'Question,' which is a beautiful song and has really distinct parts to it. It doesn’t barrel through the song from beginning to end."

As for Louris' songs, "Living in a Bubble" is a bouncy rejoinder to data-tracking and the 24-hour news cycle reminiscent of Harry Nilsson and Elliott Smith; "Homecoming" is a climate-change warning that slowly becomes subsumed in a bit-crusher storm; and "Bitter Pill" is an aching story-song that builds on "Lovers of the Sun" from Paging Mr. Proust.

"It’s a theme that hits close to home for me," Louris said in a statement about "Bitter Pill." "Always searching for the next fix of happiness, the missing piece… never being happy with what one has."

A "Shit Show" For Good Causes

While waiting for the COVID-19 pandemic to die down and for concerts to resume, most of the Jayhawks have been at home in Minnesota. "I'm kind of bored, like every musician," Perlman says. While Grotberg, Perlman and O’Reagan have zero desire to live-stream ("I think it would be a challenge for me," O’Reagan says pointedly), Louris has taken to the format like a child clambering on monkey bars.

Every week or so since late April, Louris has hosted "The Sh*t Show," a ramshackle home performance series in which he performs Jayhawks favorites and obscure solo cuts by request. His girlfriend Steph runs point from a second iPad from Canada, and his son Henry, who possesses a dusky tenor like his father, typically joins on-camera to sing backup and cover songs by Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Sean Lennon.

Louris began broadcasting "The Sh*t Show" from his home in West Saugerties, New York; now, it’s live from Minneapolis, where he moved in June just as the George Floyd protests kicked into gear. "We join in with our fellow Twin Citians in expressing our grief over the senseless death of George Floyd," the band wrote in a Facebook statement in June. "Our sympathy [is] with the family and all those affected by the events of the past couple weeks." Given current events, he splits tip jar donations from "The Sh*t Show" between the Navajo Water Project and the GoFundMe for Elijah McClain, who was killed by police in 2019.

Overall, Louris, who has been open about his struggles with depression, looks relaxed hosting his home show — cracking jokes, bantering with the peanut gallery in the comment section, lightheartedly penalizing Henry for sour notes. "He can pull that off. He has the ability to get on a stage," Perlman says of his boss' livestreaming abilities. "I don’t think I’ll ever work with anybody else who is as proficient a songwriter and as talented a singer and as talented a guitar player as he is. People don’t realize what an amazing guitar player he is. You don’t find people with that kind of all-around talent. So he can do that."

"On the other hand," the bassist says, "I would never be caught dead doing something like that."

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Photo Credit: TimGeaney

 

Looking Forward

When the pandemic allows for touring and recording again, will the band continue in this democratic format?

"I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve kind of painted myself in a corner," Louris says with a laugh. "There is no rulebook. I’m always going to feel a little bit like a benevolent dictator and the buck’s got to stop with somebody because it’s really hard to have everyone agree on everything. I’ll always kind of sort of steer the ship a little bit more, but hopefully this continues. I have total faith that this will continue."

"We kind of have similar sensibilities between us about what’s good and what ain’t," O’Reagan says, noting that the process of trimming songs was surprisingly painless. "There were no knock-down drag-out discussions about what would make it and what wouldn’t."

"Who knows?" Perlman asks in response to the question. "The songs decide how the record is going to be produced. The next record we make could be completely acoustic, stripped-down. The next record could be all Karen songs for all I know."

To Grotberg, who has had the longest journey of any Jayhawk to the spotlight, there’s no question that XOXO is the beginning of an era. "I’d have to say yes, I do anticipate that," she responds. "It could be that Gary has such a large volume of songs for the next album, but I can’t imagine him saying ‘Nobody else can have a song.’ I imagine that this is a new day."

To that end, nearly four decades since Louris found American traditional music, the Jayhawks are arguably just getting started.

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Tommy Lee

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Tommy Lee’s Inner Teen Is Always Excited To Try New Things

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The Mötley Crüe drummer talks to GRAMMY.com about genre-hopping on his forthcoming solo work 'Andro', life in lockdown and being "57 going on 15"
Bryan Reesman
GRAMMYs
Jul 8, 2020 - 11:21 am

Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee always exudes the energy of a young man who is eager for a new dare. He has nothing to prove at this point, having conquered the realm of rock decades ago. But he's always curious about exploring new vistas as heard on his forthcoming solo offering, Andro (out October 16 via Better Noise Music). The first two singles, "Tops" (with Push Push) and "Knock Me Down" (with Killvein) dropped in early June.

The original title for the album was Transgenres, but then Lee learned that in French it means transgender. He ultimately picked the title Andro because it is simple and implies androgyny which ties into the fact that the album is split into male and female energies. There are a total of eight male and five female tracks which continues a long tradition of guest vocalists on Lee albums.

For the 13 tracks on Andro (which clocks in around 32 minutes), Lee abstained from vocals altogether and picked from a growing list of dream musical collaborators—rappers and singers who are new people to most but hit his personal radar. Many of them are in the underground and some seem primed to break bigger. "The world needs to hear these people," he declares. "A lot of them are super unknown and hopefully that's about to change for them."

Lee has an affinity for rappers with British accents like Dizzee Rascal and Foreign Beggars, the latter group represented on two Andro tracks by rapper Pavan Mukhi (aka Orifice Vulgatron). "I just f**king love that kind of accent,” gushes Lee. "It just makes hip-hop or rap sound so much f**king cooler. When I heard Push Push's rap and her South African accent, which is even harder, her style and delivery and accent just freaked me out.” Lee and Push Push created the percussive-heavy "Tops," an anthem of sexual bravado.

Brooke Candy’s appearance on "Demon Bitches," along with Moon Bounce, invokes a similar vibe. "I can't even describe it," says Lee of Candy's tune. "It's hard for me to describe music. You'd hear the song and be kind of scared, yet you'd want to either break shit or dance to it. You'd be trying to figure out which one’s first."

Another British collaborator on Andro is Shotty Horroh, a rap battle champion who has collaborated a few times with deadmau5. Lee had been dying to work with him, and "SOMA COMA" combines a cascade of rapping beats, and a sampled female choir during the lead-in. Hailing from this side of the Atlantic, Canadian singer Lukas Rossi of Rock Star: Supernova fame sings on two tracks. One is called "You Dancy," which Lee says is "super, super f**king sexy and funky and heavy,” and the other is a slower, synthy reinvention of Prince’s originally peppy "When You Were Mine."

Lee heard intense American rapper Killvein a couple of years back and thought, "This kid's a f**king beast. He sounds modern but yet he's got this f**king edgy, retro screamo shit and a slightly industrial vibe." The drummer extended the invite, Killvein was down to give it a go, and he journeyed from Sacramento to Lee’s L.A. studio to bang out two tracks. One of them, "Knock Me Down," is guitar-fueled, beat-driven aggro that feels like Methods of Mayhem times three.

"I know, that kid is on fire," declares Lee. "He just killed it, no pun intended. That's how all the collaborations have gone. There's somebody I've really wanted to work with, and all of a sudden when I write the music, it dictates who should be on it."

The big revelatory moment for Lee came during his session with Julia Sykes from PLYA on the poppy "Make It Back," which he aptly describes as "a super cool EDM sounding track with a shuffle thing going on." He sent her an instrumental version that intrigued her, and when she arrived he asked her if she wanted to hear his idea for the vocal melody. She politely declined because she had some ideas she wanted to test out. Intrigued, Lee gave her free reign.

"So she goes into the studio, and my f**king jaw is on the floor," he recalls. "I got goosebumps because she's singing almost identical what I chopped together with some different acapella [samples]. I’m sitting there flipping the f**k out. We finished doing the work on the track, and I said, ‘Can I play you what I originally had?’ She's like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ We're sitting there listening to it, and now her jaw’s on the ground. ‘How the f**k did that just happen?’ And it'll probably never happen again. But I feel like it's one of those stories I have to share. Because when you're in the studio creating and something like that happens, that never f**king happens like that, it’s just unbelievable, man. I wish that would happen all the time."

Another strong collaborator on the album is King Elle Noir, who Lee proclaims has an "insane beautiful voice" and shows up on on the dreamier pop track "P.R.E.T.T.Y." and the modern R&B-inflected "Make The Storm." "This stuff is super eclectic and hybrid," he says. "I don't think there's one definitive style. It’s hard for me to even categorize this shit. F**k, there's so many genres and sub genres these days."

While Mötley Crüe fans know what to expect from the drummer in the hard rock department, his outside projects have been far less predictable. Methods of Mayhem explored heavy rap-rock sounds. On his two solo releases, Never A Dull Moment (2002) veered into alternative territory, while Tommyland: The Ride (2005) served up classic rock and modern pop influences. He tends to not repeat himself and knows that can drive some fans crazy, particularly dyed in the wool rockers who love the genre that made him famous. But he feels compelled to indulge his creative urges to dive into other genres of music that turn him on.

"I’m really all over the place," confesses Lee. "There's another [Methods of Mayhem] record called Public Disservice Announcement, and I collaborated with actually the entire world with people submitting parts from all over the place online. That was a lot of fun. A lot of work, but a lot of fun. I'm just trying to keep it real, fresh, new, and keep it moving. This is where I'm at right now."

The drummer says he wrestled internally with whether to release Andro under his own name or as another project. "Somebody might see my name on it and go, ‘I know what that's going to be’ and not even give it a shot," he observes. "Or the reverse, ‘Oh, Tommy, that could be cool.’ Or just a random unknown name, and then all of a sudden the shit just blows up because no one knows who the f**k it is. They think it's some new band. You have no idea how much I internally struggle with that, especially for new music."

Despite having worked on his latest project for two years, Lee is not sick of Andro. He feels he has a good handle on the music he is exploring. "I do know what I'm doing when it comes to this stuff, and I know what moves people so hopefully everyone will enjoy it, man," he says.

When speaking with the animated drummer, one can sense that there will always be a part of him that remains a perpetual teenager who does not want to grow up. "God, that's so true," agrees Lee, laughing. "I’m a Toys R Us kid. I’m 57 going on 15. It’s a number, man. None of it matters."

He certainly wants the party to continue with the Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard/Poison/Joan Jett summer stadium tour, which was originally slated to kick off in June 2020 but has been postponed to summer 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 

"I think what will be interesting to see is just how much fun everybody's going to have when it's okay to go out and party,” muses Lee on when the tour actually happens. "Get your dance on and do all that again."

Assuming the 2021 tour does take place, it's possible that some in their audience might be wearing gloves and masks, which will make for a surreal sight and a sign of the times.

"Yeah, that's very possible," says Lee. "We've been touring Japan for years, and as long as we've been going there, the cab drivers wear white gloves. They wear masks when people even have just a little cold. I've seen people in masks and gloves for years, and they just do it on being respectful and clean to their their community. I can't tell you how many thousands of people I've seen in masks, whether they're on planes or cabs or trains. It’s interesting. So maybe some of this rubs off on on the U.S. if somebody does have a little cold or cough, they put a f**king mask on and stop giving it to people. These masks don't prevent you from getting sick. They were designed to stop particles flying out of your mouth to transmit them. They're never designed to stop it coming into your respiratory system. It's for the infected to wear so they don't infect anybody else, and I think a lot of people have that confused.”

With regards to that stadium tour, the quartet is reuniting to do, as Lee remind us, something that they swore they would never do again. After New Year’s Eve on 2015, the foursome agreed to cease performing collectively or under any other configurations using the name of Mötley Crüe. But last year their long-planned Netflix biopic The Dirt became a megahit that reportedly attracted tens of millions of viewers, lured in a younger generation of fans, set off a massive spike in music streams and book sales, and led to a demand for renewed touring.

"We wanted to go out on top," declares Lee of their farewell tour. "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass. We would laugh and get bummed—like, how many more reunion tours are these f**king bands gonna do? We don't want to beat those guys, so we're just going to bounce now and everybody will just do whatever they're going to do musically [outside of Crüe]. I guess the lesson here is just never say never because honestly, if you asked me in in 2018, 2019 if we were going to play again I would have said nope. I wouldn't even even thought about it. All of a sudden, you’ve got Live Nation coming through asking about a stadium tour with us and Def Leppard and we're like, What? I'm sure like myself, the rest of the guys are probably missing it. There's certainly a lot to miss about going out and playing in front of 20,000 people every night, and now in a stadium for 50 or 60,000 a night. We've never done a stadium tour. So we were like, 'F**k it. Let's go play.'"

While the group contemplates hitting the road again, one wonders if there has been time in quarantine to consider new life perspectives.

"I wish I could say that I'm thinking about things differently," admits Lee, turning more serious. "But I just trust that the universe, which is much greater than any of us, has a plan. Somebody online was saying that this is God's way of sending us all to our rooms to go think about what we've done. I thought that's really f**king profound in so many different ways. And so cool. I never thought about it that way. And you know what? Maybe this is just one big way of everybody taking advantage of this time to look within and maybe learn something new, get to know yourself even more, go inside instead of externally for things. Maybe this is really a good thing in the face of what's actually happening. Other than putting on a mask and gloves to bounce out of here for food or what have you, I'm just like the rest of the sheep just trying to follow the rules to do whatever I can to not get it or spread it or be a part of that. Yes, I guess I have made some changes and thoughts towards it, but nothing nothing monumental other than just trying to just be safe."

When asked about the possibility of solo shows supporting his new album, Lee is enthusiastic about the idea. But he recalls the learning experience of doing the first Methods of Mayhem album in 1999, which featured guest appearances from the likes of Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Kim, George Clinton and Mix Master Mike. He soon discovered that organizing a lengthy package tour with such big names was not feasible.

"Everybody's got their own bands and lives, right? I learned a valuable lesson," he recollects. "After the Mötley tour is done, I would love to play some shows. But instead of making a whole tour out of it, just pick seven or eight major cities in the U.S. like New York, L.A., and Chicago. I could easily get a bunch of artists that have collaborated with me to commit to, what, two weeks? But to commit to six months, now that ain't gonna happen."

Of course, if our coronavirus pandemic does not alleviate as expected, perhaps he could just do a concert live from Tommy's living room? "Yeah, dude!” he cheers, laughing heartily, that big kid back again. “F**k, we could go live. That’d be rad too."

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Sparks' Russell Mael Talks 24th LP, 'A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip,' Adam Driver & That Time They Showed Up On 'Gilmore Girls'

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The Sparks singer speaks to GRAMMY.com about the band's latest LP, their upcoming musical project 'Annette' and Edgar Wright's in-the-works band documentary
Ryan Reed
GRAMMYs
Jul 6, 2020 - 11:08 am

Even the best rock bands follow a sad life cycle seemingly embedded in their DNA: As retirement age approaches, the desire to innovate—and be brazenly weird—often flickers and fades, like a lightbulb on its last legs. But Sparks are not a normal rock band—if they can even be described as "rock," or even a "band."

Since the group's formation in 1967, brothers Ron (keyboards) and Russell Mael (vocals) have followed a non-linear evolution through intricate glam-rock (1974's Kimono My House), electronic disco (1979's No. 1 in Heaven), power pop (1982's Angst in My Pants), house music (1994's Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins), Neo-classical (2002's Lil' Beethoven), operatic radio musical (2009's The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman) and indie-rock (2015's FFS, a collaboration with Franz Ferdinand). Russell is 71. Ron is 74. Sparks have no business being this interesting for this long.

And somehow the duo are deep into one of their most productive years of the last five decades. They just released their 24th LP, a batch of radiant art-pop called A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip; and Annette, an upcoming musical film they wrote and composed, recently wrapped post-production. (The movie was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Festival—then the entertainment industry collapsed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.) Meanwhile, filmmaker Edgar Wright is currently finalizing the first authorized documentary about the band.

Russell spoke with GRAMMY.com about Sparks' sustained productivity amid lockdown, their slate of new projects and how to write a cinematic song about a lawnmower.

This is a frightening time, and the music industry is in a tailspin. But you have several projects in the pipeline, so at least you're staying productive.

That's the main thing: staying productive. That's the one thing we're able to do. Ron is in his place, which is a 10-minute drive from me, and we're trying to keep our self-isolation between us in this immediate period. It hampers some of the workflow we're used to—we're constantly working, and we have a studio in my place. That's been limited during this period, but we're still being really active. We're doing a couple of videos now that we're able to do on our own. We're gonna be having a couple of isolation "live" performance videos that we're able to do with our band. Most of them are in L.A., but a couple are in other states. And Ron is always constantly writing. In a certain way, we're kind of lucky that we have a job that we can continue to do in a slightly altered capacity.

Do you imagine if this continues throughout the year and into next year that you might continue to write songs remotely, swapping files through email?

That's kind of how we're working now, so it's already started. We're working on a video for one of the songs from the album, so it forces you to be creative in different ways than you were before. We're each shooting ourselves for this video, and I'm compiling everything and editing at my place. We've already started that process you mentioned—you're forced to figure out new ways to cope with all this, being a musician. The other thing is what it all means for touring because we have a tour booked for all of Europe, and we're gonna be doing some dates in the States for October. But it's very, very, very questionable whether things are going to, on a live concert front, be able to happen that early. Everyone's making contingency plans if things have to get postponed.

The pandemic has also, sadly, affected your rollout for the Annette musical.

The good news is that it was all shot—the shooting ended at the end of last year. The final editing of it is able to be done remotely, and our musical polish that we've done for the project has been completed. It just remains to be seen what form the distribution of movies will take in the upcoming period too. The film was scheduled to be launched at the Cannes Film Festival this year, so that was a major disappointment for us. We were going to go with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, the two stars of the film, and the director, Leos Carax. It was going to be a big launch for it, but now Cannes has scrapped any idea of doing a traditional film festival, and they may be doing some kind of limited, online version. But we don't really want to launch the film under those circumstances, and I think the producers of the film agree, so everybody's gonna have to go step by step and see how everything progresses. It could also be launched at Toronto and the Venice Film Festival, but those are in September, so no one knows now if that's too soon. It's starts settling in, "God, is that too early?" The film is with Amazon in America, so everybody's having to do a waiting game. It's hard to even plan. The good news is that the film is done, and it's a pretty amazing project. We're just so fortunate that it turned out the way it did. It's something we've worked out for eight years now, and it finally got made.

Obviously film projects can take years to produce, but Annette had an especially long development period. Were you actively involved in trying to get it made this whole time, or did you just kind of move on from it and hope it might work out? 

We initially did this project and thought it was going to be Sparks' next album—a narrative album, which was really intriguing to us. We touched on doing another narrative project, like [the 2009 radio musical] The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, which was commissioned by the Swedish National Radio. That inspired us. We wrote this story, Annette, eight years ago. We went to the Cannes Film Festival and were introduced to Leos, who had used one of Sparks' songs in his [2012] movie, Holy Motors. When we got back to L.A., we said, "We should send this to Leos," not even considering that it was going to be in the form of a movie. We did, and he really flipped out over it and said, "I think this is something I'd really like to direct. It's amazing." Over the eight-year period, we worked with Leos, he'd come to L.A. often, and we'd go to Paris and meet him. It was refining what we had done initially to become a movie as opposed to an album, but he was also really instrumental in putting together the financing side of it with various producers and distributors around the world. It took a long time to do that.

When did Adam Driver come onboard, and how did that change the trajectory of the project?

About four years ago or slightly longer now, it was proposed to Adam Driver to play the lead character. We were so happily surprised that he loved the project and wanted to do it. He'd also been a fan of Leos' films as well, and he was intrigued to do a musical. It's a really non-traditional musical—it's about 95 percent sung or delivered in a musical fashion, so it was a really challenging role for him and for Marion. We were fortunate they came onboard and that Adam's passion for the project was so strong that it withstood him going on to other projects, like [2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens]. He's been in a million movies since that time, so we're wondering, "Is he going to retain his interest for this project of ours?" And he did. He really threw his whole soul into this role. It's tricky acting in a great way but also conveying all your lines in a sung way. It's not traditional, like Broadway in the pejorative sense, like Annie. It's a lot edgier. We were so happy, and we'd love to work with him again. We've already talked about trying to work on something with him again, another musical project.

Was he a Sparks fan when he signed on for the role?

I think he became more versed in Sparks after the fact. We never really had that specific discussion, but my understanding is that he was introduced to us via this. I think he had a lot of friends that were fans of Sparks, so maybe he did his research and now he knows who we are in a cool way. In a certain way, it's even more satisfying that he responded just to the music he heard and the story, rather than it being attached to who we were or our history.

Did you immediately click on this non-traditional approach to a musical? Is that something he'd been wanting to do?

We did discuss, stylistically, how we imagined the singing. He was totally on the same wavelength as us: being more naturalistic singing. At a certain point in the movie, you kind of forget that the characters are all singing. You suspend any disbelief that it's artificial—you get sucked into the whole style of how they're transmitting the dialogue. He hadn't done a musical at all. In Marriage Story, he does one Stephen Sondheim song. But this is a completely different thing. This is a whole other area. [Laughs.]

I assume you demoed these songs by singing them yourself. Was it hard to let go and allow someone else to take ownership of them? Did you get attached to your own performances?

Yeah, actually, if it hadn't been Adam Driver, it would have been more of an issue in that respect. It's true, we heard my voice for eight years as that character. It was all hypothetical until you actually heard what he was doing. You could say, "He's a great actor, but what will that sound like?" And it was such a relief: We couldn't have been happier with what we did. His character is very cool in this. It's a really strange thing: eight years of my voice, and sometimes even Ron playing some of the roles in the initial version we did, and then to hear him take over that character and go, "Wow, this is actually better than I thought it would be." We are very precious about what we do, and I didn't want to sit there and be a vocal coach in a taste sort of way. But he completely nailed it, and his singing technique is exactly what we hoped for. It's not a Broadway singer — it's a real guy who happens to be delivering lines in this stylized way.

Hopefully we'll see that project soon. In the meantime, let's talk about A Steady, Steady Drip, which includes some of the most vivid Sparks songs in years. "The Existential Threat" couldn't be a more timely song, given the assorted crises we're all dealing with right now, but it's also set to this bouncy melody.

When it was written, there were existential threats to everything in our world. But now it's taken on some extra resonance, sadly. This [character] in the song is just citing all the various things that are bombarding him. The song is so hyper in its nature, too, that we thought it was really fitting with the melody and the tempo and the urgency helping to emphasize that everything around us now is becoming more and more of an existential threat. There's going to be a video for it too, that we're really excited about, from a director and animator. It'll be coming out in early July. It's an English director named Cyriak—he's taken the song to another level as far as the fear and dread surrounding everybody in an animated [way].

"Please Don't F**k Up My World" couldn't be a more appropriate song for our times. I love how it isn't preachy or grandiose in protesting environmental destruction—it's this sort of simple, human-to-human plea: "Please, stop screwing everything up. I love my planet."

That's a really nice comment. That's so much what we wanted the song to be. Just like you said: It's a fine line between making a statement like that but not being preachy about it—to even use the colloquial expressions, like, "Come on, don't f**k up my world." What you said is so spot-on—I'll mention it to Ron because he'd really appreciate it. Sometimes things get misinterpreted, like you're jumping on the ecological bandwagon. We kind of don't see it that way. There's a general statement to it. We didn't want it to be this heavy-handed thing: "Oh, isn't everything so screwed up?" That's what Ron's really conscious of too with the lyrics: He spends a lot of time and care with them, to do something that isn't preachy but just talking like a human being—"Please don't mess things up." There are obviously environmental specifics within the song, but you can also take it as a relationship song in a certain way—somebody telling his partner, "Please don't f**k up my world with our relationship. Thing are not going well. Can we work for that to not be the case?"

"Lawnmower" is another essential track on this album, a very quintessential Sparks song. I love the idea of writing a grand tribute to to this trivial element of everyday American life. You can picture the green grass and picket fences like out of a 1950s sitcom. The Beach Boys wrote about surf boards, but Sparks can find a cinematic angle into a lawnmower.

Your observations have cut right to the heart. We think of it too as an iconic American image. We know that lawnmowers exist around the world, but the image of an American out on their lawn, with their potbelly in their wife-beater shirt, mowing the lawn is such an iconic, suburban thing. This guy in the song is taking so much pride in his lawn, and specifically his lawnmower, that it's almost going to be a deal-breaker in his relationship with his partner, his woman. Like you said, [the amount of] detail elevates it into something bigger than would normally be justified—speaking in such glowing terms about what this object means to this guy in the song. Even The Beach Boys reference you mentioned is very fitting as well.

Your songwriting collaboration with Ron has really evolved a lot over the years. In the beginning, you both wrote a lot—and often together—but Ron sort of took over as the primary writer for a long time. And then you returned to full co-writing for the bulk of the last few decades. Does that just come down to inspiration—who's feeling they have more material to contribute at a particular time?

He's doing the bulk of the songwriting now, and it varies as to what form that takes. Sometimes he'll have a really fully fleshed-out song that he'll bring over to my place in the studio. Then another way is that we'll start working here just in the studio, having no idea of what we're doing, and Ron will just start playing. My role in recent years has been engineering the albums, doing the recording with him playing. [Sometimes we don't have] any kind of goal in mind about what the specific song will be because there's nothing there. Maybe Ron will take away the track from that day and see if he can come up with some melody line on top of that. Or maybe there's a lyric idea, or a title, that gets imposed on that piece of music that hasn't been fully developed. Those are the basic ways that things get written.

Ron said you've been approached before about doing a Sparks documentary but weren't interested. Did those filmmakers just not have the right approach? Did they not seem like authentic fans?

It was a combination of things. When Edgar approached us after one of our shows in L.A. to propose this idea of doing a documentary on Sparks, [he had this] passion and enthusiasm for the band. It was like, "Wow, he's really well-versed in Sparks, and he's effervescent in his love for the band." There was that on one level, but even that's not enough if you're not also convinced the director is able to convey the spirit of Sparks visually and make it into a movie. In the past, we hadn't been convinced that some directors, even though they liked Sparks, were actually on the same wavelength as us—that the ultimate film would be a visual equivalent of what Sparks is musically, in the same spirit and tone. We were also concerned because people don't know much about us personally, and obviously you have to open up and give some of that information. But you [want it to] be done in a way that isn't exposing every little wart on you, that it would be done in a way that still guarded some of the mystique and mystery. Edgar was on the same wavelength. He said, "I promise you—if anything, you'll have more mystique after this film is out." At some point you just have to throw yourself into it.

Were you fans of his previous films?

That was a major, major thing. Anybody whose done The World's End and Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver has a pop sensibility, and he usually incorporates some musical elements. He's so animated in his excitement when you're with him. He's so upbeat: "We're gonna do this, and it's gonna be amazing!" We thought, "We can't go wrong." He's finished a three-hour version fo the film, but he's trying to edit it down somewhat for other venues that need a shorter version. He said the film needs to be three hours to even begin to touch on the whole story of Sparks. He's done an amazing job. He followed us all around the world to Japan and Mexico City and London and L.A., just filming concerts and around the cities in various [situations] that have been close to us personally. And he's unearthed tons of archival stuff from all around the world, like TV performances from early on in our career. He also managed to gather together an amazing amount of musicians, actors, and authors to speak about their passion for Sparks. There will be some surprises of people you wouldn't necessarily expect to like Sparks—like, "Wow, that band likes Sparks? I never would have thought that in a million years." That was what Ron and I said when these people were enlisted by Edgar to take part. It was a nice outpouring of people in the documentary. We won't divulge the names, but I think people will be happily surprised to hear what they have to say.

For a band that has built such a compelling mystique, you're also very active on social media—that's a delicate balance to maintain: being accessible to fans and not stuffy but also filtering out the parts of your personal lives that aren't relevant to the artist-listener relationship.

That's really important, and what you said is really accurate. Our music speaks better for us than us speaking about us, and that's always first and foremost with us—we'd rather have people, if we had a choice, listen to our music and from that gather what you want about how we are personally. We're accessible in a certain way, but we do it on our own terms where we don't give away too much of who we are. I think the people who are really into Sparks also like not knowing every little bit of minutiae. You know more about us if you know we did a song called "Lawnmower"—that says a lot about our sensibility.

You've been maintaining that fan connection by posting these silly Facebook videos: you stretching at home, Ron showing off his collection of hand sanitizer. In one clip, a commenter wrote that your face mask has the Korean word for "laughing" on it. Is that accurate?

 Yeah, it is! I think it's literally "ha ha ha," the characters repeated.

I don't know if this is a stretch, but I find that idea sort of inspiring: Despite how awful things are, maybe we should put on a mask of playfulness and laugh through the surreality of this insane time.

I think that's accurate. I knew what the mask meant because I bought it in Korea around Christmastime. When I started to do the video, I didn't have the connection in mind, but I think it's really apt. In a general way, we're hoping those videos make people happier or interested to see how we're coping with this whole situation—but we also want to do things that are not heavy-handed and pompous in what they're conveying. Now the whole idea of a self-isolation video is becoming a cliche. It's amazing how fast something becomes a cliche. So you have to fight to do something within that genre that's fresh. Now it's like, "How many ways can I film my little living room? You only have so many angles." We also want to something in the spirit of what Sparks is.

This is totally unrelated, but what do you remember about appearing in an episode of Gilmore Girls? How did those two worlds converge?

We were approached by writer-director Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, [executive producer] Dan Palladino. They'd used a few Sparks songs—oddly, to our mind, but happily—in a few episodes. We thought, "That's an interesting show, but we wonder what the connection is?" But nothing was pursued. Then one day we were asked to if we wanted to take part in an episode, and we did a stripped-down version of that song "Perfume" in some town square. We were really excited to do that. It was really interesting that they were even fans of Sparks. I'm telling you now, but the Palladinos are two of the spokespeople for Sparks in the documentary. That kind of makes the story full-circle.

That just goes to show there are a lot of people out there with surprising taste. Were the Palladinos big fans of any particular Sparks era?

I think at the time they might have really been into the '80s stuff, the Angst in My Pants period. I think that was their initial entry point, and they now obviously fully-versed Sparks people. I believe the songs they used were part of the '80s period.

The benefit of being a band with a huge, varied catalog is that fans can worm their way into the catalog slowly—and then discover this enormous body of work.

Edgar Wright is English, but he wasn't there for the initial Kimono My House stuff. He picked up on Sparks starting with the No. 1 in Heaven album, which was huge for him growing up in England. It is funny how the entry place is always different. Now people can obviously pick up on all the eras—people will pick up on our latest stuff, and then there are a lot of young people who go back and are so shocked to [realize] it's a band with a 24-album history.

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Bright Eyes Usher In A New Apocalypse

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After a nine-year hiatus, Bright Eyes' new album, 'Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was,' hinges on apocalyptic imagery, desire and loss
Caitlin Wolper
GRAMMYs
Jul 1, 2020 - 8:49 am

An announcement cuts through barroom chatter. In Spanish, a woman welcomes the crowd warmly, preparing them for the song ahead—at the end of a hallway, they’ll open the door of forgotten memory. If you don’t speak Spanish, you’ll still catch when she names the composition’s theme: "Your most vivid nightmares."

From there, "Pageturner’s Rag" dissolves into a ragtime overlapped with conversations; at first, it feels like you're sitting in the crowd.

But of course, the song is far stranger than that. Recorded primarily in Pageturner's Lounge, an Omaha bar co-owned by Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst, every line is deliberate. The bar "audience" received pre-written potential topics, phrases, or conversations on cue cards; you can hear those recordings throughout as Pageturner pianist Dan McCarthy plays and Bright Eyes member Nate Walcott joins on trumpet.

These conversations are spliced with snippets of a recording from Oberst's home, a three-hour conversation between him, his mother and his ex-wife Corina Figueroa Escamilla (the Spanish-speaking announcer) after they all took psychedelic mushrooms.

Oberst and his bandmates consider the dissonant opening track to be "what makes a Bright Eyes album a Bright Eyes album," calling it a "pay-at-the-door situation": if you’re willing to step through the oddities, then you make it to the songs. ("We’re kind of shitheads like that," he laughs.)

"I’ve always loved the idea of putting the music in a world that is outside of a sterile, cold, studio sonic environment, so the little sound collages and all the field recordings and bits of sound, that’s all throughout the record," Oberst says. "It creates a world for the songs to live in that isn’t just a straitlaced studio situation."

After a nine-year hiatus, Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott have returned with a new Bright Eyes album. Named after a now-abandoned poem/flipbook that Oberst was making after his brother’s death, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was finds them searching for what’s left among ruins.

Long considered eerie, surreal, or apocalyptic, Bright Eyes' wary-eyed paranoia is discomfittingly prescient for a COVID-era listener. Whether it’s capitalistic reanimation ("This old town looks empty but we knew it wouldn’t last/Behind bulletproof windows they’re still wiring the cash"), or more literal apocalypse ("This world went down in flames and man-made caves"), we’re in a strange world, made all the more disorienting by sudden, interruptive conversations and Mogis’ producing. The band wanted to ensure that after their time away, Down in the Weeds fit seamlessly into the Bright Eyes catalogue—as it stands, it could easily be a marriage between Fevers and Mirrors and Cassadaga.

Read More: I Love You Far Too Much: Bright Eyes' 'Fevers And Mirrors' Turns 20

While the album was recorded pre-COVID, its dystopian bend aligns uncannily with our present. A number of lines now feel eerie. Saying he’s "obviously not the only one with these ideas on my mind," Oberst believes he’s tapped into a collective consciousness "where maybe because of certain advances of the world, we’re all kind of dreaming the same dreams and having the same thoughts to some degree."

Reckoning with lost love, new love, endings, illness, and death, massive abstractions are cut with quotidian action—after all, even in the face of apocalypse, someone still needs to cut celery for soup.

"That approach of blending mundane things with more fantastical or supermacro broad philosophical concepts is interesting to me," Oberst says. "That's honestly the way I feel in my life: like most of life is routine and boring, but then I go to sleep and I have very wild nightmares or nice dreams, or during the day I’m preoccupied with some sort of gigantic thought that really has nothing to do with my life."

He says that, to some degree, he thinks of all his albums as concept albums because the songs come in waves and hinge on a specific set of obsessions. At the forefront on Down in the Weeds? Dissociation; paranoia; questioned faith; resurrection.

"To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)" is the most outright search for meaning, broken up by the words of a lover (who calls him exhausting), the words of the pope (benedictions) and the last words of Parisians who died in the Bataclan (ephemeralness). The song ends with a distorted, spoken exchange between Oberst and another, where Oberst interrogates: "What I'm wondering is, do you believe in god, champ?" "I believe that, uh…" "But you’re the champ, right?" The next track, "Calais to Dover," opens with a narrator who can’t recognize himself.

And as the songs' narrators (all composites) look for and lose themselves, paranoia furthers that divide, pulling harder on the tether to reality. "Mariana Trench" captures an entire world, pointing listeners to extreme highs and lows while warning of what lies between them: "Look out for the plainclothes/Look out for what the wiretap knows/Look out on the ever-widening money trail and where it goes."

It’s an ever-running current of love that keeps the album from giving in to its dread. While “Just in the World” starts by affirming that humans either discover or destroy, it leads into a narrator facing storms with his love and concludes: “If it ever occurred/just once in the world/a love as absurd/as ours I would scream what we lost/From the mountaintop.” Down in the Weeds never loses its sense of the world at large even as the individual loves and loses.

“I feel like some of my songs come across as a little schizophrenic: one verse will be about one thing or situation or person and the next verse will be about a totally different person and situation and they’re connected,” Oberst says. “They connect perfectly, logically in my mind, but they don’t necessarily come across as clearly to a listener, which I think is OK. I appreciate that in other people's music, a more surreal logical line.”

Oberst loves records that unravel and reveal themselves upon repeat listenings. He credits Mogis’ production style for Bright Eyes’ ability to do so: “every little sonic taster, little delay or weird effect — all that stuff might blow by you the first time you hear it, but if you listen on headphones enough times you start picking out more things.”

Bookended with subterranean vignettes, Down in the Weeds offers us a world uncannily similar to our own, where conspiracies intermingle with heartbreak.

"I’ve always been a pessimist and I think there’s been a slightly dystopian, apocalyptic bend to my songs and words for a long time, so it’s nothing new to me," Oberst says. He adds wryly: "I take no joy in being right about all this stuff."

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