Ghost’s version of the Albigensian Heresy surfaced in 2010 when the band’s first album, Opus Eponymous, cut through the underworld of the Scandinavian metal scene with a sense of bold purpose. Beyond the psycho-religious trappings, their riffs ‘n rhythms were precise and catapulting, leavened with a sense of harmony as inventive as Blue Oyster Cult and not sparing the crunching horror show of Iron Maiden or Helloween. Their newest release, Infestissumam, brings them to the Jerusalem that is Nashville, where they recorded with producer Nick Raskulinecz; and as the band approached their venue for this night’s human sacrifice in San Francisco, I made contact through the ether with a Nameless Ghoul — who, if I’m not mistaken, did sound a lot like Papa Emeritus II.

If the first record is about prophesizing the Antichrist, and the second heralding arrival, it seems to mirror your own movement as a band, now undertaking your first headlining U.S. tour and a major label album release.

I never thought of it like that, but that would make sense. Obviously for a band that was for quite some time considered a hype, or by many as a fluke, what we have managed to do is announce ourselves to the world with this record.

This may be a chicken-or-egg question, but which came first, the band or the theatrical concept?

Myself and the other guys are musicians, and we’ve been in several groups together in the past. And while being together in another band, Ghost started when I played a riff to everybody else. I said that this is probably the most heavy metal riff that has ever existed. Then I showed them the opening riff to “Stand By Him.” When the chorus came to me, it haunted my dreams. Every time I picked up the guitar, I ended up playing that progression, and when I fit the words in, it seemed to cry out for a Satanically-oriented lyric. This was in 2006. When we came up with the name Ghost, it seemed only natural to build on the foundation of this heavy imagery. Within that concept we were able to combine our love of horror films, and of course, the traditions of Scandinavian metal.

The shock-horror lyrics, the celebration of devil worship, the guttural vocals and massed slabs of guitar — they’re practically part of Swedish folklore now. The complex overlay of vocal harmonies and the predominance of the keyboards seems to broaden your appeal.

I think on the new record we’re not stepping away from it, but trying to expand on the classical themes of where we come from. When we began we were in an embryonic state, without knowing anyone was listening. Now we seem to be growing along with our audience’s expectations of what we are capable of.

There is a definitely a different feel to this new album than the first. It seems more expansive and inclusive. When you went into the studio with producer Nick Raskulinecz, what kinds of goals did you have in mind, ways in which you hoped the music would develop and grow?

All the songs on the new album, with the exception of “Ghuleh,” were written and demoed in 2011. We knew pretty well what we wanted to do, and going to Nashville was a way in which we could feel a sense of dislocation, of being outsiders. It was almost as if you were a Star Wars fanatic going to a Star Trek convention. Being so out of sync with the city left us to our own devices, like we were on an alien planet, and I think in some ways it pushed us farther out, allowed us to take chances we might not otherwise have were we in our homeland. We are certainly not a country band.

I’d surely agree. In fact, one might say you’re the Anticountry. Speaking of which, how much does the religious imagery you use reflect your own beliefs? Is it more of a theatrical concept, or do you spiritually believe in the dark side?

Let’s put it this way. My whole upbringing was within the extreme metal scene, where diabolical imagery is a way of communicating alienation and otherness. I have been a fan of music like that ever since I was 10, 11. That whole language, that whole way of thinking comes very natural to me. You can view it from different angles, and with Ghost we are attempting to fashion an aesthetic work of art, reflecting the artistic entertainment values of a Biblical linear anti-Christian Satanism. From a personal point of view, we are basically making a mockery of linear religion because it’s such a simplified way of looking at divinity. I think of philosophy and theology as so much grander.

It does seem that your staging and presentation is more for spectacle than hardcore devil worship. No one thought that Alice Cooper was really cutting heads off babies after the show; or that Black Sabbath was drinking the blood of virgins. What are some of the bands you take inspiration from?

We’re influenced by everything ranging from classic rock to the extreme underground metal bands of the ’80s to film scores to the grandeur of emotional harmonic music; that combination gives us a lot of freedom to move our music and staging anywhere. We don’t want to be confined to being any one thing.

So can we expect a Papa Emeritus III with the next album?

Well, I can’t reveal the future. Anything can happen in the antichurch, as within the church itself. In the days of the Avignon schism, back in the 14th century, there were once three Popes fighting for the right to lead the church, excommunicating each other. And that was before the Borgias. There may be a bloody war of succession to come.

That explains why guest vocalist Justin Vernon ventures down paths both familiar (the harmonies that carry “And in Truth” to such great heights) and freakish (the guttural agony of “Brute,” which could double as a Pig Destroyer scratch track) on the trilogy’s third and final installment, To See More Light. Meanwhile, the record itself revolves around Stetson’s strictly analog — no overdubs, no loop pedals, nothing — approach to attacking his alto sax. In many ways, it’s not all that different from the devotion he had for a year-round sports regiment in high school.

“Wrestling encapsulates most of my physical discipline,” explains Stetson. “Ultimately, I had to quit the sport because it was so destructive — dropping 12 pounds in water weight before you go in and compete, then competing well [Laughs]. It was extreme, but it was one of the things that made me.”

Speaking of extremes, we asked Stetson to discuss some of his favorite metal songs down below. Sure enough, they’re all about as dizzying and dynamic as Stetson’s own records.

Metallica, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

Why were you drawn to Metallica’s early records? Because they were thrash-y but still had a strong melodic sense to them?

Exactly. It’s such powerful music — angst-ridden, but educated. These are guys who did their homework, and are contextualizing what they learned in the world that they see. So you’ve got all of that youthful rage and aggression, but there’s also a nuance to it. And compositionally, I feel like a lot of that was coming from classical traditions in that it was very symphonic.

So you had this convergence of all these strains of music. Metallica was the first one to bring in a pop sense, in terms of how they delivered vocals. Not how the songs were structured though, because they were still doing things their own way. Because of the age I was and the background I had — largely in melodic music — I latched onto them. In my early teens, there was a lot of gaming with my shop friends, and so we would listen to those records. I remember Ride the Lightning was huge with my wrestling team when I was 12, too.

You used it to psyche you up then?

Oh god yeah. I still do that shit.

Before shows?

Yeah, it depends on what I feel I need before a show. Sometimes I need to be very peaceful and level out feelings, and other times I need to conjure up more of that aggression so that’s something that’s been with me since I was a kid. Like, I remember listening to Tool before I’d compete [in wrestling].

Why did you pick “For Whom the Bell Tolls”?

I was running the other day and listening to that record. When it got to that song, it was as if I was listening to the lyrics for the very first time. It was really crazy realizing that, thematically and image wise, there’s this whole thing in the new record with an eagle that’s basically the angel, or spectre, of death. It has these cracked eyes that prevent it from seeing in the light of day or the dark of night, so it can only hunt at the break of dawn or as the sun sets [Laughs].

There’s this death imagery with the main character in my narrative, and so “Who the Waves Are Roaring For” is really “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” There are a lot of weird parallels to the lyrics of that song, and I did not notice that until now. Which is always interesting to me — how things can be filtered through the creative process.

You mentioned gaming before. What kind of games are you talking about?

Oh, when I say “gaming,” I assume everyone knows I’m talking about role-playing games. This was back in the days of Dungeons & Dragons, before everything got complex. This was the mid-to-late-’80s [Laughs].

Were you hanging out with the jocks just so you wouldn’t get beat up for playing Dungeons & Dragons?

I was never a fighter, but I got bigger and more physically imposing by the time I was 11 or 12. It all happened kinda quickly, so no one fucked with me or my friends after that. I guess if you intimidate the jocks, they’ll leave you alone, no matter how many games you play.

Slayer, “Angel of Death”

So this song makes perfect sense now that you mentioned that storyline with the eagle.

Yep. They were working in broad, archetypal stuff too; they were all drinking from the same fountain.

Slayer was obviously a part of thrash’s Big Four, along with Metallica, but what sets them apart?

The scales are tipped towards the thrash, towards the speed and aggression. It’s, I don’t want to say “messier,” but the edges are definitely frayed and it’s more rooted in punk than rock. I don’t know; they’re extremely similar, yet completely different — worlds, in a way. Back then, and still now, I’ve always been driven and excited by songs with such an impassioned, aggressive delivery of something that’s so immaculately structured and precise. It’s riding the fine line between control and oblivion. I feel like that’s what bands like Slayer are all about.

Did you realize what “Angel of Death” was about Josef Mengele when you were a kid?

I’ve lived my life almost entirely oblivious to words. In music, especially. Not that I’m not a reader; I’ve always read a lot. But I’ve never really focused on the language aspect of music. It’s as if I’ve viewed the lyrics and vocals as shapes rather than delivering language and poetry.

That’s something that’s changed for me over the years. It’s one of the bigger shifts I’ve found as I’ve gotten older. At some point in the past five years, I found myself wondering, “When did I start listening to NPR a lot?” Because when I was in my 20s, I’d listen to music a lot in the car, but I wouldn’t sit and listen to the news or want to hear the language that they’re speaking. It made me wonder if my father experienced the same shift as he got older. Because I remember he always wanted to listen to some form of talk radio when I was a kid. And I kept thinking, “Why the fuck does he want to listen to more people talking?” I could never understand it. There must be something to how our brains intellectually relate to words as we get older. I don’t know if that makes sense, but they get brought into play more over time.

It makes sense; as people get older, they basically find peace in NPR or sitcoms. It’s all about having that sound of voices around. It’s comforting in a way.

Yes! Why is that?

Rainbow, “Man on the Silver Mountain”

So let’s talk Dio…

Oh man, I always wanted there to be a compilation of “castle rock” in the same way there used to be ones for things like ’80s rock ballads. Like there’d be Rush with all of those wizard voices…

And Zeppelin!

In a huge way, yeah. If we expanded what we are talking about here, Zeppelin was definitely a huge influence on me in high school. They just fit seamlessly into what I’d been listening to, particularly because of those elf and magic references.

But yeah, Dio — he was a big one for me.

So if you had to choose between hearing Black Sabbath with Dio or Ozzy, you’d choose Dio?

Oh, I don’t know if I’d do that! They’re two different beasts, and I’ve had much more exposure to the Ozzy Sabbath. I don’t know why that was, but Ozzy Sabbath…it fucking had Ozzy’s voice, in the same that Morrissey only has Morrissey’s voice. There’s something about the timbre, and the color of the vocal chords coming out of his mouth that shifts the space in a way. It’s so unique. I could never disparage Ozzy.

Why did you pick this Rainbow song in particular?

“Man on the Silver Mountain”? There’s some overlap in the imagery of [that song] and this record — something shining on top of this mountain, and we’re in search of it, trying to find our way up to that point. What’s up there is this fortress that’s old and made of mirrors. And there’s a man up there, so [laughs]…

Meshuggah, “Soul Burn”

Meshuggah was very much a “thinking man’s metal band” in the ’90s. Is that how you got into them — through how technical they are? Did Destroy Erase Improve blow your mind?

Blew my mind, yeah. And I came to them late. The mid ’90s was college for me, and I wasn’t doing an enormous amount of metal listening then. I was learning so much about so many different things in music school instead — things like European folk music, minimalist composers, jazz, funk, soul and R&B. It wasn’t a hiatus, but it was definitely a point where I wasn’t keeping up with what was popular in the world of rock.

But in ’99, or maybe it was 2000, a friend gave me that record and it rekindled my love for all of that. Now I listen to Meshuggah almost exclusively when I run. I find the way they write incredibly meditative. No matter how odd and intricate the forms are, everything is driving around that [drummer's] pulse.

Did you pick “Soul Burn” for any reason in particular?

“Soul Burn” is one of the ones I landed on when I was writing “Brute.” I gave it to Justin when he asked me, “Where in metal am I looking for inspiration?” He sent me a “Fuck, yeah” back.

Wolves in the Throne Room, “Dia Artio”

What elements of Wolves in the Throne Room’s music are you most attracted to — the black-metal elements, the ambient ones, or the more operatic?

The black metal thing is something I’ve only had a relationship with over the past few years. They’re one of the ones I gravitated toward immediately, probably because of all the elements you just touched upon. There’s something that’s so gorgeous about the way they write, almost this clichéd longing to all of the chord progressions. And there’s a multiplicity in the way they deliver the music. It’s not just one singular voice or style; it’s more symphonic, at least in terms of the sounds and structures they use. But overall, there’s a beauty to it that’s pretty undeniable.

What’s up with this song?

“Dia Artio” is one of their more ambient songs, with a slower pulse. I could recommend any song on this record, but I thought I’d pick this one to set it apart from the other songs on this list. There’s a real patience in this piece, like there is with Sunn O))) or something. Everything is able to breathe, which is something I tried to explore on this record with pieces like “To See More Light” and “Part of Me Apart From You.” There’s this stasis of forcibly slowed down progressions so you can wander through the minutiae.

Krallice, “The Clearing”

In some ways, Krallice is the total opposite of the Wolves track you picked; they’re both capable of really long songs, but Krallice is much more relentless about it.

I find that density very satisfying, the fact that so much can stimulate your mind within it. A lot of different layers are happening sonically. It is very relentless and exact, and it’s surgical, but it has this thick, dense atmosphere around it. They also juxtapose the super low bark-metal man with the Skeletor voice, which I like [laughs].

What do you get out of a newer band like Krallice that you maybe didn’t get out of Metallica when you were younger? Or do they both provide you with the same thing?

Well they’re doing what Metallica was doing then, now — forging new ground. You almost never hear something like that. Like, the first time I heard Liturgy, everything just stopped. A lot of the black metal bands I’m into are not traditional ones. There’s crossover elements to what they’re doing, and that’s what brought me to have such affection for it. There’s a parallel between what I wanted to do with my music and what they were doing with theirs that almost made me say ‘Eureka!’ the first time I heard it. Here’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and these guys are doing it already. It was inspiring, but it also made me buck up and get back into the game. There’s moments where I hit brick walls and wonder if I can push it much farther. But then, when I hear bands like this, I think I can push it much farther.

Don’t you feel like you’ve pushed things as far as they can go sometimes, especially since you perform in such a physical way, without pedals or overdubbing?

Well I haven’t reached a breaking point yet. That said, I went on vacation for a week in March, and when I got back, the chances of pulling off most of the music I’d normally play were absolutely nil. It goes away in a second — the endurance of face muscles, and the fluidity of the tendons in my hands and arms. When there’s a lack of discernible progress in something, I can get pretty sad, so you just have to turn it up. It’s not like you have to play more and more hours; you just have to push things further and further within those hours.

Liturgy, “Generation”

You already talked about Liturgy a bit. To someone who’s maybe not so familiar with them and Krallice, what are some main differences between the two?

That’s a good question. Shit. There’s something about the way Hunter [Hunt-Hendrix] sings that is melodic in a similar way as to how I used to relate to Metallica. Something about the color and timbre of his voice puts that Skeletor thing into a place that, for me at least, is filled with such longing and beauty. At the same time, there’s this churning, aggressive, Wagnerian density happening through all the guitars and drums. The key difference between any band and Liturgy is that they don’t have [drummer] Greg Fox in it — and now Liturgy doesn’t either, which is fucking tragic. But yeah, sometimes there’s these key combinations of players and personalities that are maybe fleeting, but when they combine, it’s something intangible that no one can replicate.

You’re someone who actually has a classical background, so when Hunter says he’s inspired by someone like, say, Steve Reich, can you actually hear that in the music?

[Laughs] I wouldn’t be surprised if he said that. So much of that is happening in music and art these days — this grand, obvious swipe back at the hyper-paced life we’re all living. Everything’s back to the earth and out of the city, a return to the contemplative and meditation. So you could find your way to Liturgy through something other than musical means.

Before you go, can you explain the notion of “ambient grindcore” that supposedly inspired one song on your album?

[Laughs] In all honesty, that was Ian over at Constellation [Records]. I won’t take credit for that one. But “Hunted” was my attempt at, after hearing Aesthetica specifically, dealing with things…I remember I wrote the song “The End of Your Suffering” because I was going to cover a song from Aesthetica but realized I wanted to do something that was more of a nod to that and went so much further. I did think about how blast beats and that density would relate to the bass, so basically it is taking those textures and that sentiment and slowing it down, filtering it through this other medium. I probably would have called it something a lot less awesome. But in the end, his description was apt [laughs].

Iggy’s subsequent decision to reconvene the band’s second line-up — and coax legendary guitarist James Williamson out of retirement — was less expected. While the original combo had never enjoyed any success during its fleeting existence, the infamous second incarnation of The Stooges, born circa 1972, was doomed from the outset and soon became a byword for druggy self-destruction. Although all just about escaped with their lives, this was the unlikeliest reunion.

Back in the day, The Stooges Mk 2 were augmented by James Williamson, a fabulously talented guitarist, whose savage, mangled riffing on the band’s lone album, 1973′s Raw Power, was a perfect foil for Iggy’s incandescent lyricism. Their brutality was way ahead of its time: only once they’d imploded, and Iggy had checked himself into a Californian psychiatric unit, would both incarnations of the band become a key influence on punk rock.

Their story is singular enough, even without the added spice that Williamson quit music altogether circa 1980, and spent the intervening 30 years working successfully as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in California. His return in 2009 couldn’t have been less foreseeable, but subsequent tours showcasing Raw Power and 1975′s Pop/Williamson collaboration, Kill City, found his playing remarkably unspoiled — and undiluted.

It remains as such on Iggy & The Stooges’ remarkable comeback record, whose title, Ready to Die, is a fittingly gnarly statement from unrepentant rockers in their mid 60s. Its 10 tracks balance swinging riffage with near-the-knuckle balladry, while Iggy holds forth on gun control, underpaid labor, abundant female breasts and, indeed, death. In exclusive conversation with eMusic’s Andrew Perry, these legends are implausibly invigorated.

For a peek into the Stooges’ record collection, click here.

Iggy, how did you persuade James to rejoin the band, after so long out of the game?

Iggy Pop: After Ron Asheton passed away in 2009, I talked to James about possibly coming in for some gigs that we had booked already, and I also talked to a friend of Ron’s who was in a Stooges tribute band, [Radio Birdman's] Deniz Tek. I ended up canceling the gigs, but James and I stayed in touch, and toward the end of that year, I had an offer that was too good to refuse. And James was up for it.

James had to do a lot of rehearsal to relearn how to play the guitar after 37 years, and in the course of doing so he sent me a very nice piece of dobro blues music — he called it “Ron’s Tune.” And he began and ended the tune with a slide-guitar rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which is Ron’s greatest and best known riff.

James, you’d not been playing in public for all that time, but had you been doing music privately, just for your own enjoyment?

James Williamson: Not really, no. I wrote one song when we were doing New Values [Iggy's 1979 solo album], and that was it. After the really bad experience we had on Soldier [Iggy's 1980 solo album], I just said, “Screw this, I’ve gotta focus on technology.” I just put the guitar down. There was the odd time or two, when I’d pull it out and try and impress my son, but by then I was pretty rusty, so he was kinda like, [skeptical] “Really, dad?!” So I just stopped altogether.

But then, about a year and a half before I got the call to rejoin the band, I happened to be at a flea market, and came across this old guitar. I didn’t know what [brand] it was, but it sounded amazing, and I bought it for a song basically, because the guy who was selling it didn’t know what it was either. It turned out to be made by a guy from the 1920s and ’30s, named Hermann Weissenborn. He made Spanish-necked guitars, as well as lap steels, back in the heyday of Hawaian music, and was really a master.

So that inspired me to play a little bit. Granted, that was acoustic, so it was not the same as playing in The Stooges, although I wrote most of the songs [for The Stooges] on acoustic.

So did it take quite a bit of practice to get “match fit” for those first shows in ’09?

Williamson: It’s funny, if you ever could play guitar in the first place, you have the same synapses and muscle memory and all that stuff — it all comes back. I did have to work pretty hard to get it up to a kind of professional level, but I had six months to do it. We rehearsed a lot, and I did one show with a local band, just to get the feel of it. Almost all of our set is my stuff, and then the earlier Stooges stuff is pretty simple.

But in terms of writing, I had not done that at all, so going into this album was a little daunting at first, but then things got going so well, you couldn’t hardly stop it.

Some reactivated bands, like the Pixies, believe that it’s okay for them to play shows for people to enjoy the old material, but that they shouldn’t make new records, because they can never match up — they can only tarnish their own legacy. You obviously disagree…

Pop: My motivation in making any record with a group at this point is no longer personal, it’s just a pigheaded fucking thing I have, that a real fucking group, when they’re an older group, they also make fucking records. They don’t just twiddle around onstage to just make a bunch of money and then go, “Oh, it wouldn’t be as good.” This is not the fucking Smashing Pumpkins, you know? No. So this is the key, the only thing I really have left to say is, The Stooges are a real group.

Williamson: The first priority when we reformed was to get the band cracking, and in tour shape. And I think you saw the results of that. Then after about 2011 or so, we started thinking, Well, you know, shouldn’t we make a record? But we weren’t sure we could do it. The previous album, The Weirdness [released by The Stooges Mk 1 in '07] didn’t come out too well, or at least the critics didn’t like it much, and so I was determined that we would make a record that we felt was really representative of us, and that we liked.

So I started writing with Ig, and that was the first revelation — it’s funny, but we have some kind of chemistry, for lack of a better word, where we can actually write songs fairly quickly. So we started doing that when we had time, and little by little some of them started sounding pretty good. It took quite a long time, because we were still touring, but we made a concerted effort in 2012, and eventually we came up with 15 songs, and then pared them down to 10 that went on the album.

Were there any ground rules for making it? Anything you wanted to avoid? Or was it just the music that came out?

Williamson: It was pretty much just the music that came out. We really were keenly aware that, this being the 40th anniversary of Raw Power, all this stuff would get compared. So we didn’t wanna write in the rearview mirror, if you will. If you fall into that trap, you start to be a caricature of yourself. We wanted to be authentic, as we are now, and that’s what you’ve got — songs about today, and I think it ended up being some very topical material, that covers gun control, immigration, sex, money — you know, all the keen topics. And the music sounds like us. I think we couldn’t help but be us really.

We kinda still maintained the old school way. We used tape on a lot of stuff, and a lot of analogue outboard equipment, like Neave 10-73 pre-amps. That’s the killer sound, maybe a little bit of a throwback to the ’70s, but I think Ig stepped up and really sang his ass off. And I played hard.

Have you felt any obligation maybe to reinhabit your state of mind as you remember it from the early ’70s, to be true to the original Stooges, to be the “streetwalking cheetah” from the classic song “Search & Destroy,” but updated for today? On several songs you actually seem in quite a dark place: on ‘Unfriendly World’, you sing, “Fame and fortune make me sick, and I can’t get out.” In short, not the streetwalking cheetah…

Pop: Well, unfortunately for me, I’ve hit a point in my life where I’m kinda famous, and I’m not used to that, ’cause I couldn’t get arrested my whole fucking life. Nobody knew who I was, except for a few crazy people. So I got to be like 50 and still living like outside of crappy areas in New York City, and nobody knew who I was. I got used to that, so, no, I’m not used to who I am now, and it’s not in my interest to express myself, some days. I’m not like most people, I don’t share the acceptable thoughts on society; mine are unacceptable. So it’s become harder and harder for me to give in a lyric. Also I may just be out of things [to say] — as you get older you notice your vocabulary stays the same.

So I have to be careful because if I say what’s really on my mind I might get laughed at or locked up, or cause other problems around me. And the world has changed and I’m a person who’s very fortunate to be walking around healthy, free, and respectable; in terms of what I did, way back when, and I know it, I have this mentality.

Looking back at Raw Power, it was always doomed to commercial failure, at the time at least. You came in on guitar, James, and Ron Asheton came back in at the last minute, but relegated to bass, with his brother Scott on drums. Any human resources manager would’ve told you, that’s not a band that’s going to thrive and conquer the world, there will be arguments…

Williamson: And that’s exactly what our management thought! [The Stooges were signed up by David Bowie's management company, at the behest of Bowie, who was obsessed with Iggy. —Ed.] Going over to London, just me and Iggy at first, at that particular time — it was sort of ground zero for the glam thing, and here we are, some midwestern US guys who’d never been out of the US before, and we got parachuted in to Bowie’s world, and T Rex’s world — Marc Bolan was on fire when we got there.

We’d never seen anything like that since The Beatles. The girls were flinging themselves against the chain-link fences, and crying and screaming, and we were thinking, “Wow, okay, this is pretty cool,” but when we went to find musicians, it was like we just couldn’t relate to the guys. There was guys ruffled cuffs and collars and flowers and stuff, and it wasn’t us.

Our management wanted us to be like pop stars, like Bowie. That was the model they had, and in fact they didn’t even want me to come over. They just wanted Iggy, so they kind of begrudgingly let this surly-looking, pimply, long-haired guy come along with him, and then pretty soon there were four of us [when the Ashetons arrived], haha! So every time we’d bring a demo to MainMan, the management, they would reject it. “I Got A Right,” “I’m Sick Of You” — all those great songs were done before Raw Power, and they didn’t like them.

So our job was to try to come up with some material that they would like, but the real break we got was that David Bowie suddenly started getting very popular, so that took all the focus off of us, and they just didn’t have time to deal with us. But we owed an album to CBS, so they let us just go in the studio on our own, and make it. I don’t think Raw Power would’ve been made otherwise, or at least it certainly wouldn’t have been the same.

In the end, though, MainMan, took Bowie into the studio to remix the album, in the hope of making something palatable out of it, and the released version came out pretty tinny. Did that upset you?

Williamson: The good news was, we were left alone without any adult supervision. The bad news is, this is my first album, so I assumed Iggy knew what he was doing, but Iggy’s not a technical guy, and so I think we made the engineer do a lot of things he didn’t really wanna do. The basic tracks — bass and drums, and probably some guitar — were all done live in the room together, so the isolation wasn’t very good, so there’s a lot of bass in the drums.

It’s a mess really, in some ways, so I think when David Bowie went to mix it, he didn’t have much to work with. He probably had to take the bass and drums down quite a bit, like he did, in order not to hear all that stuff. But of course he made me sound great, because basically it’s just guitars and vocals — which is what Jack White has made a career out of, by the way! So it’s not all lost.

Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols always says he learnt to play guitar by playing along to Raw Power in his bedroom (on speed!). When you first heard British punk rock, did you think, “Hang on, they’re ripping us off”?

Pop: Williamson has such a strong energy, he’s a Scorpio, and he has powerful waves of negative repellent energy in his playing. So it’s no accident that it was his playing that ignited certain sparks that led to English punk rock, no accident at all.

Williamson: I hear him say that, and I’m like, “Really?! Because I consider myself a positive force.” The only way I can interpret that is he’s saying I’m like a bad-ass guitar player, in which case I consider it a compliment.

Pop: Someone put it this way in a recent book, that the original Stooges with Ron, Scott, myself and Dave, were like lone artisans, working away in isolation, crafting away the templates for the content of punk rock. But nobody knew the tree was falling in the forest. It took a combination of James Williamson and David Bowie. They both served similar roles in my life and it took the platform that we got from Bowie’s people, and the negative waves from Williamson, to put us in touch with the generation that really articulated punk.

So did it feel like a vindication?

Williamson: By the time all that stuff had started happening, I was pretty much out of music, so I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, but of course it was hard to miss The Sex Pistols, so I did notice a kind of similarity, and I thought to myself, “Good for these guys, they were able to put it together, and market it successfully.” They were doing stuff right. That was one of the regrets that I think I’ve always had about the early Stooges — we were just too fucked-up to be successful [laughs]. We just didn’t care about that kind of stuff. In the end it broke up the band, because people just couldn’t go on.

Iggy, your lifestyle problems ran on well into the 1990s, as has been well documented over the years. But James, how did you manage to extricate yourself, straighten up and hold down a challenging, cutting-edge job for so long?

Williamson: I think he has a different kind of vulnerability to these things than I do. I wasn’t as bad as people make me out to be in terms of drug usage and debauchery and all this sort of stuff. I always had girlfriends who were usually pretty clean, and so once I stopped doing music it wasn’t too hard for me to get cleaned up. That’s not the hardest part, though. The hardest part is getting your mind wrapped around different concepts. It was a rather large existential gap, between The Stooges and calculus, for example.

Where exactly did you work? Legend has it you ended up working for Sony in computer programming.

Williamson: No, no, I went back to school, to become an electrical engineer, because I was fascinated by the personal computer. It was the very beginning of that, and it was much more exciting to me than what rock ‘n’ roll had become. It was really tough, but when I was finished, I got hired to a company called Advanced Micro-Devices up in Silicon Valley, which is where I still live, and from there I worked through a succession of jobs. It was a really exciting run — the PC, and eventually the internet, waves and waves of different technology from brilliant people that I got to work with. So I never really regretted any of it.

Is it true you’d been presented with a retirement package just around the time you got the call from Iggy?

Williamson: Yeah, the timing of it was just unbelievable. For all its success, the company was not immune to this current economic situation, so they were handing out those packages. I looked at the package, and at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it, but eventually I thought, “You know what, I can’t actually afford not to take this.” So coincidentally Ig had called, and initially I just told him, “No,” but then a little while went by, and I decided to take the package. I had also given Ig’s call a lot of thought, and soul-searching, and I felt like I kind of owed it to those guys. We went back a long way. They were fresh out of Stooges — I was kind of the only one left, so I called him back and said, “Let’s do it.”

Was there some patching up to do between you? Iggy, you’ve said that you hung up the phone after James accepted your offer, and suddenly panicked, “Hang on, but James is the devil!”

Williamson: I don’t know where all that devil stuff comes from exactly, but yes we did have some patching up to do. The thing is, when people die, there’s also this funny thing that happens, and a lot of stuff suddenly isn’t that important, that has been going on all those years. We didn’t really talk much after Soldier for 20, 25 years. Only the odd phone call for publishing or whatever. After Ron died, we got together down in L.A. when Ig was doing a benefit show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We chewed the fat for a little bit. It was no big deal, but I think it made it easier for both of us to go forward from there.

Your lives have been so different in the intervening years. Does that give an extra frisson to The Stooges now?

Pop: To deal with him, the bar was higher. And it was also higher for me because this has got my name on it — it’s Iggy & the Stooges [just as the band was billed for Raw Power], so I had to live up.

Williamson: The thing is, you can’t help but be who you are. The first two years of touring together, we covered a lot of ground about different experiences we’d had over the years, but basically the two of us know each other since we were in our 20s, and so we go back a long way, and I don’t care what you do in your life, there’s some things that never change about people. That person’s personality was developed early in life, way before your 20s, and they’re pretty much always that same person. When you know somebody for that long, you dial into the commonality, rather than the difference.

Is it an odd feeling to be a celebrated guitar hero now, James, when all you’d ever known before was being in that loser band from Detroit all those years ago?

Williamson: It’s just unbelievable. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like now. The largest show I ever played in the five years I was first in The Stooges was less than 2,000 seats. The first show I played back with The Stooges was 40,000 people in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Just, what?! People are crazy about us. Twenty-somethings are out there in the audience, and we even got in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The last four or five years have been like victory laps. And we’ve made a new album which was really a defining full-circle moment for the band. I’m very proud of it.

So it’s not a surprise that Phoenix took their sweet time crafting an encore. Four long years after Wolfgang, they’ve delivered, Bankrupt!, their fifth studio album that contains a slightly hazier, more impressionistic batch of songs that nonetheless maintains their genial approach and pack epic hooks.

eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with bassist Deck D’Arcy just before the group’s performance at Coachella, discussing their steady career trajectory and to unlock the eclectic influences behind Bankrupt!‘s standout tracks.

On the album’s slightly more experimental vibe:

[The experimentation] was not really conscious. We have a bit of a weird way to write songs — it’s a bit empirical. We basically record everything we are doing and listen to stuff afterward with fresh ears and make a very thorough selection of short bits of music that we then put together, trying to create cool stuff at random. It’s hard to consciously write a proper song from A to Z. What we find attractive at first is something quite predictable, so we kind of have to put together kind of random stuff, and sometimes it ends up being weird.

But what’s weird now is not going to be weird in two weeks or years or whatever. What’s weird is relative to the timeline — it’s not very absolute. It just depends on when you hear stuff. Most of my favorite albums, I didn’t care for on my first listen. I remember the first time I listened to [Beck's 1996 album] Odelay, I didn’t like it, and it ended up being my favorite album of all-time — or in the top three. So for us, this is how we see music anyway. We love “grower” albums.

On the pressures of following Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix:

The thing is we don’t really choose where we’re going, you know? We just make everything ready to capture our inspiration in the studio, but we don’t know where we’re going, and that’s the exciting part of it. If we knew where we were going, it wouldn’t be genuine. We don’t know what we want, but we know what is cool and not cool for us. We just generate as much music as possible and select what’s cool.

Shit, I lost my point [laughs]. The thing is, we did have quite crazy success on the last album from where we were before, but every album has been a relative success. The first album came out of nothing — we were just a Versailles band, and we released an album and ended up touring the world. The album wasn’t a worldwide success, but it was still kind of crazy. We felt like, “Wow, this is amazing!” With the second album, we had success in some other countries. We had an idea of what success is and an idea of how inconsistent it is. This time, [the success] was the U.S., so it had a bigger consequence, of course. But I really think we haven’t been influenced by the success of the previous album.

We did all of our albums in a very selfish way. The only goal is to impress the other band members, not really to impress the audience. We just decided to do it exactly the same way we did Wolfgang — not trying to impress anyone other than ourselves. When we finished Wolfgang, no one really liked it – like, [among] our friends. We had no record company then. We didn’t struggle with it, but it wasn’t easy. People were like, “Yeah, that’s cool, whatever.” It ended up being successful, but that wasn’t really obvious at the time. So we decided to apply exactly the same formula [with Bankrupt!].

“Trying to be Cool”

We found this little melody a long time ago in New York, and we left it aside for like a year. We re-listened to it a year after, and there was something too obvious in it. So we kind of left it. But I remember we started re-trying it a year after with different instruments, and it started to have a new vision. We changed the key and everything. At the time, we were listening to a lot of French artists from our childhood era — the mid ’70s to late ’70s. And we were really inspired by that. And we gave it another try, and it worked. I remember [producer] Phillipe Zdar coming to the studio, saying [uses harsh French accent] “Yeah, yeah, you have to finish that track right now! Just go for it!” It felt like an investigation creatively.

“Chloroform”

While working on “Drakkar Noir,” at some point, we started playing it at half-tempo, and it had this repetitive groove and vibe. “Chloroform” is a loop of “Drakkar Noir” but quite slower — which is a very easy trick — but the music came out of it. We liked the kind of hip-hop quality. We like to explore areas that are far-flung from what we usually do, and we thought this was interesting. It’s very random — it came out of little accidents from “Drakkar Noir.”

“Oblique City”

This song was inspired by another French artist from the same era — early ’80s, before the ’80s became cheesy, kind of French punk. Probably a bit obscure for you, but for us, it means a lot. His name is Jacno. We were really obsessed with this at some point. It wasn’t the easiest one to put together, with all the layers. This one has a lot of key changes, and we were really fascinated by key changes on this album. I think this is what you’re calling “weirdness.” We had to work a lot on that one — it was probably the one we worked the most on.

“Bankrupt!”

The very first stuff we recorded on the album is actually in that track — we did it in Australia. The beginning of the song with the marimba, it’s actually the first take we did for the album. And the very end, the last vocal take we did is on there. So this is the track that followed us throughout the whole process, and it’s a very meaningful track for us. This is neither an introduction nor an outro — it’s a very important part of the album, so that’s why we put it in the middle. Every album we do, we realize it’s not really on purpose, but there’s always an instrumental or maybe two. In the studio, we always do a lot of different things, and we felt like it was totally a part of the album. But it’s not a real instrumental because it’s sung at the end, but three-quarters of it is instrumental. We grew up listening to a lot of soundtracks and instrumental music, so I guess it’s in our DNA to make instrumental tracks as well. Actually, it’s cool live, as well. We’ve started playing it, and it’s really intense.

“Entertainment”

It’s funny because everyone thinks it sounds Asian. It’s true, but the original inspiration was the Éthiopiques compilations. They’re a bunch of compilations of Ethiopian music from the ’60s to the ’80s. We listened to a lot of this. Working with the Ethiopian key, which is a Pentatonic key, it’s very close to the Asian one. We found this melody at the beginning of “Entertainment,” and it ended up sounding very Asian, even though it’s really Ethiopian. Anyway, it’s the Pentatonic key, which has been around for centuries.

It’s the first track on the album because it’s the first track we finished. When we do a new album, we think it could have been made by a whole new band, but maybe this one is the closest to Wolfgang. I’d actually never thought about it, but it’s possible.

On the album’s track sequence:

That’s the specialty of Phillipe Zdar. He’s very good at it. I remember for awhile, we were having arguments, but on this one, he found the perfect order the first time. It took him like two days, and he came back with it, and everyone agreed. Which never happens in Phoenix — we have arguments about everything. But it was just perfect, or we felt it was perfect. Especially on this album, the sequence is quite important. We tried a lot, and we felt, “This is not right.” And Phillipe found a good one, so it’s thanks to him. We grew up with the LP — we are old now, so we’re used to the LP’s A-side, B-side vibe. It’s very important to us, the album format. So it’s something that has to be exactly right.

That, in part, is one of the most bewitching things about Wheel, Stevenson’s third record and first credited solely to her as opposed to “Laura Stevenson & the Cans.” Musically, it’s big and brash and joyous — Crazy Horse by way of the Blackhearts — but tune in to Stevenson’s lyrics and you’ll find California being decimated by an earthquake and fragile, trembling children begging for their mother to notice them. That Stevenson should reach such stunning musical maturation so quickly is, in part, hereditary: Her grandfather, Harry Simeone, was a musical arranger most famous for co-writing the Christmas standard “The Little Drummer Boy” and her grandmother, Margaret McCrae (née McCravy), sang with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. Stevenson’s own music eschews the lush for the ragged — they’re scrappy songs that claw their way forward, bleeding, bruised and determined.

eMusic’s Editor-in-Chief J. Edward Keyes met up with Stevenson at the Grey Dog Café to talk about suicide, nihilism and how America faked the moon landing.

I wanted to start by talking about your grandfather, actually. How did you start to become aware of the fact that he was, you know, kind of a big deal?

My chorus teachers started getting excited about me being in their classes — he was a really important choral arranger. They would ask me questions about him and I would be like, “How do they know about my grandpa?” And then I’d start to see his name on TV — like, when you see the commercials for the compilation CDs of Christmas music — and there would be a blurb about the song with his name on the bottom of the screen.

Did he offer any guidance to you as you were getting started in music?

No, he was scary.

Scary?

He was very stern, a very serious guy. So I was really intimidated by him, basically. He would tell me I was banging on the piano when I would play him something. He’d say, “Stop banging, stop banging.” And I thought I was playing gently. So now I play, like, overly gently because I’m afraid I’m banging. But he did help me a few times. When I was really little, I wrote this song for a nationwide contest, and he helped me notate it.

What was the contest?

It was a contest at the end of the year every year in school — there would be a theme, and it was multimedia, so you could write something or you could draw something, whatever. So I wrote a song called “Dare to Discover,” which was the theme that year. I remember the first part, which was about Christopher Columbus: ‘When Columbus sailed the ocean blue/ he found a great new land for me and you/ he daaaared to discover/ a land for you and me.’ And then the chorus is, “Yes he did,” over and over and over again [laughs]. I was like, six.

You were six? How did you put this together?

Well, I played piano…

Even still, though! I played piano when I was six but —

I don’t know! [Laughs.] I would write little melodies, and I sang in my room. But that was the first time it was written down. I mean, I grew up around music. My parents were divorced, and I’d stay at my dad’s on the weekends, and every morning he’d put records on, and I’d wake up to music. He listened to a lot of Grateful Dead and took me to a lot of Grateful Dead shows — a lot of Grateful Dead shows. He took me to Phish shows. And I was little! I would have wax earplugs in my ears so I couldn’t pull them out. I was really little —

Like four or five?

Littler! My mom was pissed. I mean, people were doing drugs around me. I remember there would be the “spinners” at Dead shows — those people that dance — and [shrugs innocently] I guess they were all on acid! I had no idea, I just thought they were awesome.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a big circle with a bunch of free-spirited 24-year-olds and they were passing around a big jar of water and everybody was drinking out of the same jar, and they were just treating me like I was an adult. They were like, “Here, man,” and I was like “Thanks! OK!” And I was just drinking, catching all the germs of all these weird people. It felt really cool, it felt really communal.

But eventually you started moving away from that music almost in the exact opposite direction, toward punk rock.

Yeah. I didn’t have MTV, so I was pretty isolated. I found out about Nirvana through this kid I was in the gifted program with when I was in fifth grade. There was this one cool kid, and he was like, “Yeah, maaan, fuckin’ Nirvana.” And I was like, “Cool! What’s that?” So I went to this store called Prime Cuts which was down the street from my house and I used my own money and I bought In Utero, because I’d heard “Heart Shaped Box” on the radio. I listened to it non-stop. And then I heard Green Day’s “When I Come Around,” and I was like “OK. More guitars that sound like this. Cool.” And I got into Green Day and then later Operation Ivy.

Something I was wondering about — I grew up on Long Island, too, and at that time, there were just not a lot of punk rock kids on Long Island. At least, not that I could see. How did you start to connect with people who had similar tastes?

Well, I found out about this a big ska fest — there were also hardcore bands and punk bands, but they called it the Ska Fest — at Our Lady of Victory church in Floral Park. And so me and my friend Katie went, and we knew a couple of kids from our school were also going. We just got really tight with those kids and that was like our first show, kind of. And then it just became an every-weekend thing — we’d find out about more bands that lived in the next town, or shows that were happening in our town, and we were like, “What is this?!” We started getting into all the local bands — not so much the hardcore bands, but I liked the bands that sounded like pop punk or ska punk. I mean, Less Than Jake was my favorite band of all time. I bought Hello Rockview for my dad. I was like, “Dad, you gotta hear this record!” After that, we’d all just get together and hang out in my friend Zach’s basement. He was the drummer in a local ska band.

What were they called?

Premarital Sax. We would hang out over there, there was Scotty Dee’s Urban Joe Café in Rockville Centre. When we got a little older and could drive, there was Witch’s Brew. That was the cool place where all the cute boys worked that had tattoos and that you didn’t know how to talk to.

I mean, in a sense, that sort of DIY community vibe is really similar to the ethos that governs [Stevenson's label] Don Giovanni.

Yeah, I mean, our reason for why we’re [making music] and the way we established it is very DIY. We’ve been doing it for a while and it gets frustrating when it’s — “Why can’t I live off this yet? Please, help me, universe!” But at the same time you’re slowly building a thing, and you’re building it based on people falling in love with it. And I think that’s what Don Giovanni does. That’s the biggest thing I learned from being on the label: Play shows in people’s houses, play shows with bands that you’re friends with, go on tour with bands that you’re friends with and who believe in the same shit, even if you don’t sound the same.

This is the first album you’re releasing as just “Laura Stevenson,” as opposed to “Laura Stevenson & the Cans.” My immediate response to seeing that is that this record is somehow more personal. How true is that?

I feel like the lyrics…I feel like I’m being more truthful to myself. I feel like I’m being more honest. Before, I would just tuck things away and be like, “This is what the story [behind this song] is on the surface,” without really getting to the root of it. Now I feel like I’m…dealing with some shit. Hopefully that will be therapeutic thing for me and I can build from there. Either that, or I’ve healed myself and now I won’t be able to write anything ever again.

The album is called Wheel, and wheel imagery turns up throughout the album. What drew you to that as a central metaphor?

I wrote the song “Every Tense,” and I knew that was a song that encapsulated how I felt at the time — which was out of control, needing to figure out my place in the world, to figure “what does it all mean?” I felt like every song kind of dealt with that, whether it was dealing with my own personal existence and nothingness, or my relationships with people and what they mean. It was an exploration of all of that. And I felt like a “wheel” was representative of what I was feeling.

But then that last song, “The Wheel,” I wrote that way after the record had already been written and recorded. I was just like, “This record isn’t making sense to me. I don’t understand how we’re gonna put it in order.” With Sit, Resist, we had figured out track order before we even got in the studio. This record, I was like, “This sucks. I don’t know where these songs are gonna go.” I knew I wanted “Every Tense” to be near the beginning, but I wanted to close it with something that brought it all back around thematically.

Is the mention of “Lucky Strikes” an allusion to your grandmother?

Yeah, she sang [commercial jungles] for Lucky Strikes, and I guess you could say she had a lot of lucky strikes in her life. It was the idea of her being a protectress in my brain, protecting me from things I don’t want to rehash.

Were these things that happened to you growing up?

Yeah, just some weird shit that I wasn’t ready to focus on. Something that I needed to…overcome.

Did you view your grandmother as a “protectress” when she was alive?

Not so much emotionally, but she’s the closest person that I had to me that’s no longer here. Not to be a hippie, but she’s almost some sort of like spiritual presence. And I’m not a spiritual person at all. I see her sometimes in my dreams and she keeps me away from things I don’t want to see. That’s kind of what that song is about.

I don’t know — we were close, she would sleep in my bed when she was in town. We didn’t have a guest room, so it was, “Put grandma in the bed with the kid.” She’d tell me stories. She had a cool life. Her father was a sheriff in South Carolina. He died in 1913 and she was raised by her mother. She had three older brothers, two of which were on the radio. They had this project called the McCravy Brothers — it was like a gospel thing. And that’s how she got into radio. And then she was put on the Hit Parade and that’s when she came to NYC and started working with Benny Goodman, but [her brothers] raised her to be a gospel singer. Like, old-timey gospel, so it sounds spooky. There’s some YouTube videos where you can hear the audio, and it sounds fucking creepy. Creepy dudes with warbly voices. It’s just kind of scary — it sounds like something from a horror movie.

My grandmother and my grandfather both came from very humble beginnings. He was the child of an Italian immigrant living in Newark — basically, he was living in the slums. That neighborhood was where all the Italian people moved that didn’t have any money. He grew up out of nothing and then went to Jiulliard and sounded working for CBS, and that’s where he met my grandmother. By 1933, my grandfather was a working musician. My grandma had glamour shots and all that. Benny Goodman made her lose weight. He was like, “I’ll buy you all new gowns” — she didn’t have any dresses, and she needed these gowns to be the singer in a big band — but he was like, “You have to lose 30 pounds.” And she wasn’t a big lady. I mean, she had meat on her bones, but she wasn’t fat. But then she just never ate again after that. She told me that was when she “quit eating.” She wouldn’t eat a lot at all. She was so thin. She would just, like, drink scotch. She’d be like, “Just make me a scotch.” And we’d say, “Grandma, do you want some food?” and she’d say, “I’ll have some creamed spinach later.” I mean, she never really ate. Ever. My mom called it a “crash diet,” because that’s what they called it at that time. Nowadays, they call it anorexia.

It’s interesting that you mention that about your grandmother, because I feel like there’s a lot of death on this record.

Yeah, I had some issues at a certain point in my life…I’m OK now, but I’m still fixated on death. I have a desire to continue living my life, but you know, I, at a point in my life — like 19, 20, 21, I didn’t think I was gonna live. I had no dreams or anything because I was just, like, really depressed. And so then I was medicated, heavily, and that was frustrating because I felt like I couldn’t concentrate — which was annoying, but I’d rather have that than be depressed. I mean, now I’m fine. I’m not medicated at all. But it was just overcoming that, but still being naturally fixated on the fact that I’m going to die at some point. It may not be self-inflicted, but it’s still actually going to happen and I have no control over it. That’s something that I think about.

The first line of “Runner” is “To give yourself a little bit of hope’s a lie.” Do you believe that?

At a certain point in my life, yes. At the end of the day? [pauses] I don’t know. I don’t know. If it’s all going to be over, then what’s the point? For some reason we’re all still here and all still believing that there’s a point, even though we know that there is no point. That’s the whole idea of that song. We’re still going, for some reason, even though we don’t know what it is.

So you reject the idea of an afterlife.

I don’t know. I’m not sure about anything, so I can’t say I’m an atheist. I don’t want to reject it. I just know that I don’t know, and that’s sort of scary. “All I know is that I don’t know nothin’,” as Operation Ivy once said.

There’s a lot of apocalyptic imagery on the record, too. “Sink or Swim” is about California basically being destroyed in a single massive earthquake.

It’s scary. It’s scary thinking about the future of this planet, this country, the future of humanity — anything in the future.

Does uncertainty freak you out?

Yeah. Yeah. But I think that I’m becoming more able to just…I’ve always been really paranoid and scared and neurotic. Meanwhile, my mother is growing more Christian by the day. It’s driving me insane.

Was there something that brought that on?

She joined this one of those megachurches in Florida. I went there and it felt like a casino. There’s no clocks, no windows, you feel like you’re…I think they’re pumping oxygen in there.

You went to a whole service? What was that like?

It’s just so manipulative, financially. They’re just tugging at the heartstrings every five minutes for you to contribute.

Do they do the “modern worship,” with the rock band?

Oh yeah. And the drummer is in one of those plexiglass cages. My mom was like, “You’re gonna love it, because the music is cool, there’s a cool guy playing guitar.” I was like [dryly] “Oh, they have a cool guy?”

So I was there and my mom was, like, crying, and there’s tissue boxes on the back of every chair in front of you. And, you know, I’m trying not to push my nihilism on my mother, but it’s just fucking bullshit. I’ll call her, and she’ll be like, “Give your fear away. Give it away. It doesn’t have to be to God, give it to nature,” and I’m like, “OK, leave me alone.” I don’t wanna “give it away.” Who am I gonna fucking give it to?

How does she feel about your music?

[Pause] She’s coming around.

So there was a point when she wasn’t into it?

She was not supportive in the beginning. She did not want me to do it. I mean, she saw what was happening in the industry, with people unable to make a living…And I totally understand that she wants me to be OK. She doesn’t want to leave this world and be wondering if I’m gonna make it, or If I’m gonna have kids. And she definitely wants me to have kids — I feel like that’s her annoying reason to want me to be successful.

You can do both, if that’s something you want.

If I’m able to make enough money. Right now, that is not in the cards. Life continues this way.

I mean, you’re still very young.

I’m 28. I mean. “Young.” But, you know. These are my “child-bearing years.” [Laughs.] I don’t know. The clock’s not ticking yet, but my mom’s sure calling a lot.

Is your dad on board with your career?

My dad is on board. He comes to all of our shows, he’s totally into it. He’s like, [In a thick, Long Island accent] “I see you’re on tour in April. Were you gonna tell me that?” He’s really supportive, and he has a brother in Austin who we were staying with for South by Southwest who’s also into music. But they’re very Irish Catholic about it [laughs]. Whenever they come to our shows, they can’t just say, “Good job,” they have to say, “This was wrong.” They’re very stoic with their praise.

And then when my mother finally started praising it, she really went over the top. The only song she really knows is “Master of Art” from our last record — but she calls it “Masters of Art,” which drives me fuckin’ crazy. She’s like, [heavy Long Island accent again] “How many times I listened to ‘Masters of Art’ today? Seven. Seven times.” Now she’s like obsessing, but just about one song. I mean, I’ll take what I can get.

Has she heard “L-DOPA” [A song on Wheel that is candidly about a mother who is emotionally unavailable]?

She heard it. She didn’t like it so much.

How autobiographical is that song?

That song definitely has hints of her in it. But she doesn’t know that any song is about her. Like, the song “Caretaker”? It’s about her. And about me taking care of the house on Long Island while she’s living in Florida, and her inability to accept the fact that I want to do this with my life. She’ll be like, “Did you ever write a song about me? You wrote a song about your stepmom” — which is “Renee,” the first song on the new record. She was all pissed about that. And I’m like. “Listen to a different song! Stop listening to ‘Masters of Art!’ Listen to another one. Listen to the words.” I told her “Caretaker” was about her — I wasn’t going to — and she was like “Oh, really? OK, I’ll listen to it again.” I don’t think she did.

What exactly is L-DOPA?

L-DOPA was a medicine they used for people who had encephalitis lethargic. My grandfather’s mother died of encephalitis in the teens in New York, and so she was never able to give him what he needed in terms of nourishing him as a musician, because she wasn’t there. So it was kind of a parallel to my relationship with my mom at the beginning of this whole thing. But she’s really come around. She told me that she was proud of me. But I’m still getting my Masters in art history — and I’m doing that for her. I want to be doing this, but I should have some kind of backup plan.

I like that art history is your backup plan.

I know, it’s so fucking stupid. I’m trying to finish the second edit of my thesis so I can turn it in to my professor. I haven’t spoken to him in two semesters

You can just do that? I thought at a certain point they kinda want to know…

Oh, I think they wanted to know. I think you’re only allowed to do a program for four years, and it’s been four years. He emailed me last semester to check in and I was like, “Fuck, we’re doing the record right now.” So I sent him the YouTube video for “Master of Art” and was like [proudly], “This is what I’ve been up to,” and he was just like, “OK, well, you have to read this and write about…” I was like, “OK, fair enough.” I have no excuse. I’m just, you know — “Playin’ music. With my band. In Brooklyn.” So’s fuckin’ everybody.

I could be mistaken about this, but when I saw you play at South by Southwest, you introduced “Telluride” — which is my favorite song on the record — by saying, “This is a song about how we faked the moon landing.” Is that true?

I guess so! I was really into the conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick helping to fake the moon landing. And I was also listening to a lot of Crazy Horse, so I was like, “OK, I guess I’m gonna write this song, about the moon landing being faked.” It’s more about, if that was true, what he might have felt about everything — about the country believing it and him not being able to express that, and trying to tell people through metaphor, and to give hints through the imagery in his movies. Just the idea of, like, living a lie. Pretending that this thing is true because you can’t say otherwise. And that’s what I did for a lot of my life in certain terms. I felt like I was kindred spirits with Stanley Kubrick. Also, I think I was really stoned for, like, a couple of days.

So you think the moon landing was faked?

Yeah, I think so! I mean, I believe they landed, but I don’t think that’s the footage we saw.

Why would we fake it?

Propaganda. To bolster people’s spirits. It’s really manipulative.

So you just think they didn’t have a camera up there at all?

I don’t think they would have been able to get the shots that they got. Those iconic images? No way. Definitely not.

To wrap up: I know that you’re on the road a lot. I was wondering what some of your more unfortunate tour stops have been.

Oh man. In Bozeman, Montana, we played a show for two people, plus the sound guy. We didn’t know what to expect. We played with this band called Genitaliens — they were, you know, your basic two-piece funk jammer — and the lead singer had been stung by a bee. His eyes were swollen shut. The sound guy was like, “Bro, you need to go to the hospital bro?” And he was like, “No, I’m cool. The show must go on.” Yeah, the show must go on, for no one.

I mean, all of those in-between shows are still hard, the ones in places like Boise, Idaho — even though they should have a good scene, because that’s where Built to Spill is from. We have a manager now who looks out for us, but on the tours we were booking ourselves, we’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll play in this community space at this college we didn’t even know existed,” and then we’d show up and it’s like three kids and they’re like, “Yay! You made it! Um, we can’t pay you, is that OK?”

I get weirdly fascinated with places like that in the middle of the country. I mean, I’d never have any cause to go to Boise. I always just wonder what it’s like there.

I mean, the drive through Idaho was one of the most scenic drives that we did. Wyoming was fucking beautiful. But you’re just bleeding money. Bleeding money.

I mean, on the other hand, it seems like the bands that suffer a lot in the early days and pay dues are the ones that have a longer career arc as opposed to the ones that blow up instantly.

I think so, too. Because you just come across people who love your music, because it’s this little thing that they watched grow. And they know that you care about them, too. So maybe we’re not the coolest band in the world, but, you know…

We have a fan who went through gender transformation, and he got the lyrics to our song “The Pretty Ones” tattooed on his arm during that process, because we helped him go through that. And that was really touching to me, to be able to help someone in a way.

I mean, I don’t want to get too philosophical about it, but to go back to something we talked about earlier — maybe that’s the point of all of this. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing here.

To give back something meaningful. [Pause.] Yeah, I think so.

Taborn’s ways of sounding out acoustic and electric keyboards come together on violist Mat Maneri’s Sustain of 2001, and his own Junk Magic with Maneri, Bad Plus drummer Dave King and tenor saxist Aaron Stewart. The synthetic beats dripping onto the molasses-slow ensemble on the title track provide a window into Taborn’s open mind. The Sustain rhythm section — Taborn, longtime drumming buddy Gerald Cleaver and bass powerhouse William Parker — later became the co-op Farmers by Nature. But first the pianist had another trio with Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap that made the acclaimed Light Made Lighter. (They did a memorable “I Cover the Waterfront.”) Taborn and Cleaver also make a rhythm trio with bassist Michael Formanek, in his quartet.

For all that inventive work and much, much more, it wasn’t till the 2011 release of the solo Avenging Angel that a wider audience noticed how good Craig Taborn is. The music is at once quiet and thrillingly virtuosic; he plumbs the piano’s depths, coaxing out its pure and impure tones. The follow-up, Chants, is for yet another Taborn-Cleaver trio, this one with bassist Thomas Morgan: rollicking music, involved and evolved.

Speaking with eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead in late March, Taborn touched on arcane composing strategies, the influence of electronica on his acoustic music, Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, and the piano sound on old Blue Note records.

You’ve spoken about approaching piano as a “pure sound source.” For all your knowledge of harmony and music history, you’re really most concerned with getting the instrument to sound.

That’s the way I hear all music. My harmonic and melodic sensibilities exist within a larger world of sound. It mitigates how I hear harmony. Timbre, coloration, overtones, they all affect my choices.

That partly comes from my always being involved with electronic music, with synths alongside the piano. I got my first synthesizer within a year of my first piano lesson — a Moog Satellite followed by a Mini-Moog. I was like 12. Around the same time I learned what a triad was, I’m turning the knobs, figuring out how to make synthesizer sound like a trumpet. The Christmas after that I got a Rhodes electric piano. That was the early ’80s, when digital was just coming in and those older keyboards were really affordable. My parents were finding them in newspaper ads for around 100 bucks.

You’re well-versed in a broad range of music. Is it hard to play one kind at a time?

No. I don’t limit my creative choices based on idiom. It’s all available; the fun is to see how to fit things into the specific music I’m playing. It’s what drives me. I feel very free in an acoustic improvised context to think of electronic, non-tonal music: What would happen if I applied some of those strategies? Bringing in ideas from other musics can help move the music forward.

With Chants, you’ve now documented three very different piano trios with Gerald Cleaver.

The history is strong. We have a language. I like making music with Gerald because we address the specific situation or group. We’re looking to really serve the context, and to see how these situations can be different. Without talking about it, those groups each settle into an identity very quickly. The trick is to let it emerge before imposing any limits on it. Thomas Morgan and William Parker have super-strong identities on the instrument, too, and that’s a key factor.

A really wide beat will set William going.

You’re dealing with that wave. William has such breadth, such a long reach I can feel. I think of Farmers by Nature as a more traditional group. I settle into a zone where I think about the jazz piano tradition, and let that operate more. Not that I block other things out, but I’m thinking of Duke, Monk, Fats Waller. It may not sound like it in the end, because I can’t really play like those guys. There’s always that temptation to play in the tradition of the jazz piano trio, but I know William or Thomas won’t make it sound normal. I can open that door, knowing they won’t box me in.

“Saints” and “Future Perfect” on Chants feature one of the signature jazz sounds of our time: ringing unisons from bass and the pianist’s left hand. It’s the piano-trio-as-power-trio sound.

In that context, it’s an easy way to get the bottom end working. It solves lots of problems having to do with how the music projects. It’s tight, it’s heavy, it speaks to precision and cohesion. It brings things into bold relief — like power riffing in rock bands. But then you can put other things over it.

You do like higher metrical games. I can count out a 43-beat Don Ellis pattern, but don’t get far with “Beat the Ground.”

You could find an ultimate pattern that you could count, but it’s not counted through in the Don Ellis sense. None of the music is constructed around metrical cycles. I deal a lot with multiples, multiple meters that make up even larger groupings. It’s more about doing things modularly; the music can go in different directions. “Beat the Ground” has a larger rhythmic cycle, but Gerald might go through it one time playing against everything, and the next time locking it in. It’s like a pyramid. There’s another rhythm strategy underneath.

I’ve been into building up forms for a long time, so a specific piece’s form is not just one thing: There are larger supportive hierarchies of different complexities. I’ll have three or four layers for people to address with different harmonic and rhythmic structures. You can switch from one to another at will and it all fits. “Beat the Ground” has a whole other improvised section we didn’t record because it would have run too long, where we play over the same form, but with chord changes that mark out a different rhythmic cycle.

As far back as the late ’50s, Sun Ra was dealing with multiples like that: one part’s in 13, another’s in 5, and the drummer plays free. He was way ahead in terms of orchestration. The rational and irrational at the same time: that’s something I work with a lot. Different meters, and then a layer that isn’t even in time, floating over all that.

Even in high school I was into writing and playing in polymeters. Sun Ra was definitely one influence. Another big one was Geri Allen — those late ’80s and early ’90s records you can’t find anymore, on Minor Music or JMT, or The Nurturer. She builds these really nice melodic structures; her ostinatos had architectural and melodic intent.

I’m always looking for ways to achieve more speechlike improvisation. A patterned, grid-like way of playing complicated stuff is too diagrammatic for me. I favor ecstatic playing. The model there is Sonny Rollins, the way he played over bebop tunes in the ’50s. What he plays fits, but it’s very loose and creative. How free can you be, and still hold to the structure? Or, if you play an ostinato with one hand, how free can you be with the other?

On Chant, a lot of the time we hold to the form, but it’s not a mandate. On “Saints,” we never break from it; we always come back around, and mark the end of the form. Intense structure and playing free: Gerald shares that interest, and Thomas too. I’ll think we’re playing free as it happens, but when I listen back to a recording, the form is still in the background. We’d internalized it so much, we never left it.

Your solo record Avenging Angel changed the way people look at you. Did it feel like a breakthrough at the time?

It was a happy day in the studio. I approached it as a way to document this solo music I’d been developing for eight years. I had been thinking about doing that before ECM came into the picture. I had already been talking to Manfred [Eicher, label head and producer] about recording the trio but we hadn’t been able to schedule it, everyone’s so busy. Meanwhile in 2010, I did a week-and-a-half solo tour in Europe, and maybe he got wind of that, because a week later he asked me to do a solo record. I was ready at that point: shedding for hours a day, just practicing and playing exercises to prepare.

It was a best-case scenario: We could record anywhere, and he really understands recording solo piano. And it was fantastic piano! But it was an improvised program, so it really came down to the particular day. That’s the crapshoot. We recorded in Lugano, and I’d been teaching that week at a Swiss jazz camp three hours away — teaching kids how to play jazz. One night I played a solo concert, and then I was driven to Lugano, arriving at like 2 a.m. I was tired the next day going into the studio. When I started playing, things seemed to be clicking. After a couple of pieces I thought, “This is going well.”

You recorded many more pieces than are on the album.

Thirty-two, maybe, altogether? It’s possible more will come out. I’ll have to go back and listen. Some pieces go to the same areas; some others I know were pretty cool. Manfred’s been talking to me about another solo project, but I don’t think it’s developed enough since then, yet.

At the beginning of “Forgetful,” you make acoustic piano sound like a Rhodes: a spectral composer’s illusion.

The piano is a pretty subtle instrument. In the right sonic space, and with an instrument that’s willing, you can get that sound. But it’s also about knowing how to record it. Close miking is good for some things. Wide miking reveals others, the overtones reverberating against the body of the instrument itself. The pianoforte was designed as a concert instrument, to project into a room. Miking has a lot to do with how hard you’re hitting the instrument. At this particular volume, 20 feet away may be optimal. You’re also working with the resonance of the room. Manfred knows how to get a good piano sound. He was very hands-on with the miking.

My ideal, when I’m playing straight-ahead jazz, is the Blue Note-in-the-’50s-and-’60s piano. I always liked that sound, but didn’t know why Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor all had it. It was the piano [at engineer Rudy van Gelder's studio] and the way it was miked: That sound projects an identity as much as the player does. That piano had a certain bounce to it. But they got a new one a while ago. Maybe it was beyond its time. (Pianos are like wine: at a certain temperature, they age really well. Then they peak and go down from there.) I hear it’s still in the building, but outside the studio. I’d like to play that once, just to see what the action was like.

Do you hear a relationship between quiet pieces like “This Voice Says So” and ambient music?

That Brian Eno thing is always operating. For me all improvisation is more about paying attention to sound than generating ideas. Attention and manipulation: ambient is one approach to that. It’s the philosophy of John Cage. He was really talking about a way of tending to sound, and I try to give it that level of attention. Morton Feldman always paid attention to decay, to the entire shape of a note. He composed around the idea of what happens after the initiation of events. That gives a different energy to the music.

Lots of jazz improvisation is about always generating ideas: It’s dealing with attacks, always seeking the initiation of events. When you think about Miles, Wayne Shorter, Roscoe Mitchell in the jazz continuum, these deeper guys pay attention to the entire musical event, to the entire shape and bloom of a note — where it’s going and where it ends. When it ceases to be audible and becomes imaginary. That’s the key to a deeper world of music making. The real masters are aware of that, like Gerald, or Thomas, or Mat Maneri. You can tell immediately how aware of that they are. Some musicians don’t pay such close attention — they’re moving on when things are still unfolding.

But unlike most internet provocateurs, Fortune seemed both self-possessed and incredibly smart — the kind of person who pours themselves completely into their work, and who only reacts strongly to criticism because they feel things deeply and passionately. Fortune and I have struck up a loose internet acquaintance over the last few years — we occasionally Tweet at each other or send messages through Facebook — which is how I knew that she had, during the making of her second record, Discipline & Desire, struck up a stormy S&M relationship with Mark Burgess of legendary UK post-punkers the Chameleons and that, after their romance capsized, she’d fallen in love with — and pretty much immediately married — Tim Gick of the band TV Ghost. After several weeks of missed connections, I reached Heather at by phone to talk about true love, global power dynamics and murder/suicides.

So first things first: I wanted to congratulate you on your recent marriage — watching the two of you on Twitter and Facebook has been pretty adorable. I think the thing that kind of surprised me the most was how fast it all happened. What was the story? Was it a “love at first sight” situation?

It was a love-at-first-sight situation, but I met him over a year and a half ago. And I was actually dating someone else at the time, and so was he, and so nothing happened. But it was a very intense interaction. I was obsessed with him immediately. I was at one of his shows, and I was like, “That’s the guy. Right there.” I’ve never been so horny watching someone play. [Laughs]

So we stayed in touch, and I think we were both obsessing over each other secretly from a distance. We finished our records at the same time we exchanged them and found that we had both reached kind of a common middle ground sonically. His band used to be real no wave and crazy whereas I came from a more traditional pop/punk structure and then got weirder. We kind of met in the middle and we were both really intrigued by that. So we started booking a tour together and, like midway through that, he said to me, “I think I’m in love with you,” and I was like, “DITTO.”

How did his parents react to the engagement?

Oh, his mother wanted to kill me. She was not happy at all. [laughs] She’s chilled out a lot now, and I seem to have grown on her rather quickly — I do that — but at first, man, it was rough. I mean, my mom is used to me being unpredictable, so this stuff tends to roll off her like water off a duck’s back. At first, she was kind of dismissive. She kind of thought, “Oh yeah, yet another ridiculous thing that Heather is doing. Whatever.” But I think she realized quickly that I was really serious and really happy and that I was really gonna do it. And when that kinda sunk in, she got on board and was as supportive as she could be.

We were talking about your new record in the office the other day, and the one thing that kept coming up about it, in comparison to No Future, is that this one feels much more you — it’s much more of a natural extension of your personality.

Well, with No Future, what happened was that I had a collection of songs that I’d written over the course of two years. They were all over the place. I’d written some in collaboration with people who were in the band at the time and who were coming from a completely different set of influences. The thing that tied that record together was that all of the songs were more or less written about Jay [Reatard]. Pretty much every song on that record was written in the two-year period right before and right after Jay died. So the common thread was the subject matter. I made that record largely to get those songs out of my system, and also as sort of an homage to Jay. It was very much something that I needed to do as part of my grieving process. His influence is all over that record.

But by the time the record was out, I was already writing a ton of songs that were much truer to who I am, and had less to do with how I was feeling after the death of Jay, and were less informed by other people who were playing with me. Growing up being obsessed with, like, Joy Division and stuff, my whole intent with this project was to try to find myself as a songwriter and find a way to balance my aggression and my attraction to things that are darker with the fact that I am naturally gifted as a pop writer.

In other interviews you’ve talked about being influenced by Daniel Ash and Siouxsie Sioux. I was wondering what, specifically, you learned from them that you incorporated into your own writing process.

Friends of mine who are big music nerds have been telling me since the first Wax Idols 7″ that they can hear that I’m obsessed with Daniel Ash. Which is completely true. Daniel Ash and Wire have been the two strongest influences on me over the last five years or so as a songwriter. With this record, I was just hugely inspired by the first Love & Rockets record in terms of the way it was produced. I borrowed techniques from them all over the place — direct-inputting 12-string guitars, layering harmonies in weird ways, switching up effects on vocals to accentuate different transitions in songs.

Siouxsie Sioux is somebody that helped me find my voice. I identify with her as a singer, because I feel like when she started, it was very punk and she was just yelling in this really powerful weird way. And she probably didn’t think of herself as much of a singer — that’s what my feeling is at least, I could be wrong — but she was a singer. She wanted to front a band, and so she forged a path for herself vocally, and it sounded weird and androgynous, but there was power and passion in her voice. I also identify with her because I think she was really influenced by a lot of Middle Eastern singers, and I was raised in a Lebanese family, so I was raised listening to Middle Eastern music. It’s a huge influence on me. I still listen to a lot of Turkish psych and traditional Lebanese stuff.

So, the album is called Discipline & Desire. And I feel like, anyone who knows anything about you, they know you work as a professional dominatrix. So I think the natural tendency is to interpret that phrase, “discipline and desire,” in a BDSM context. But I actually don’t think that’s what you’re talking about on the record at all. I feel like you’re just using that as a metaphor to explore the power dynamics that come into play in the world at large.

You’re exactly right. Discipline & Desire is the name of an old ’70s fetish mag — that’s where I first stumbled across it. But what struck me about it wasn’t its tie to fetish at all. I immediately knew, upon looking at those words together, that it completely embodied everything this record was to me because of its association with power dynamics — which is a huge subject on this record, and in my life in general. Power is something that I think about all the time. And not in the way where I want power — it’s something that, I don’t know…Often the wrong people have power, and everyone wants it, and you can’t get it if you’re looking for it. It’s a twisted, weird world we live in.

Given that, it’s interesting that you open the record not by seizing power, but by essentially identifying with the metaphorical “sub.” You sing, “I love the sad and the sick of the world.” That’s where you’ve cast your lot — with the outcasts.

Exactly. That was intentionally the first lyric of the record — I immediately wanted to spell out who it is that I’m looking to connect with, which demographic I’m a part of and want to speak on behalf of. And that the people who are the “sad” and “twisted” people should have everything they want in life but don’t, and are trying to. Or who are misunderstood, or are being constantly told to go away or shut up, or that they’re weird, or that they’re not good enough.

When did you first start becoming interested in these issues?

Unfortunately, it was something I was raised with. I think I started becoming aware of it when I was pretty young — kind of around the time I started going through puberty. I was raised in an environment where power was unevenly distributed toward men. It was a cultural thing, a lot of it. It was the Middle Eastern family that I was raised in for the first 12 years of my life. Specifically, in my household, it was that we all lived in fear of my first stepfather, who is my brother’s father. It wasn’t the worst it could have been, but it was very much his house, his rules. And I, in particular, was terrified of him. And as I got older, I started seeing how those kinds of power dynamics play out in the world in general. I’ve always had a problem with authority figures, I’ve always had a problem with being told what to do. And it’s not so much because I feel like I’m above authority, it’s just that I disagree with it, largely. I disagree with uneven power distribution and it makes me mad. It’s something that I decided when I was rather young that I would spend my life fighting against, in one way or another.

How do you see that dynamic playing out in the music industry? You don’t have to name names.

[Cracks up laughing] Oh, come on, you know I’m gonna name names! It’s Pitchfork. It’s not the individual writers at Pitchfork that I have a problem with. But Pitchfork itself represents to me an unevenly distributed form of power within the creative world that I think is fucked. They remind me of an overbearing stepfather. That’s why I hate them [laughs]. It’s not personal. It’s not that I think that when they started that they had bad intentions or anything like that. But, unfortunately, it has become a monopoly. And I feel like over time a lot of the people involved with it — this is my feeling — may have subconsciously started wielding that power in a way that is destructive rather than constructive. And is unfair and is less about music and more about who knows who, and who can make who popular, and who’s the favorite. Pitchfork certainly isn’t the only problem by any means. But I think that money and media and all kinds of things have really changed the way the general public is exposed to art and to music, and has changed the value of music and have made artists and musicians feel like they have to change along with that in order to survive. And it’s really fucked up and sad. I don’t like it.

“Dethrone” feels like a rallying cry against that.

All I know how to do is what works for me. Obviously my way is not the way for everyone. I just feel being really honest and self-aware and true to your vision and to what you think is right, or what feels right to you, and not thinking about how well it’s gonna fit in to whatever is cool at the moment is the best way to effectively change things. It comes from within first. I think a lot of times people confuse my passion for art, expression and discussion with being insecure, or with caring too much what other people think. And that kind of makes me sad, because I feel like people are so used to having to play this “Keep Your Mouth Shut and Play it Cool” game in order to survive in this silly, irony-based indie music world. Being really passionate and open and true to yourself is seen as uncool, or the wrong way to do things. And I think it’s the right way to do things.

Things upset me, you know? I’m not made of stone. I am a human being. I’m a weirdo. I am a very passionate person. I’m very outspoken. And when I get pissed about something, I’m pissed, and I don’t feel I should have to keep my mouth shut. Keeping my mouth shut is something I swore that I would never do. I was forced to keep my mouth shut, and to be “seen and not heard,” and to be this little scared, shaking unwanted stepdaughter in the background for most of my childhood. And fuck that. I am not gonna be that in my adult life.

We’ve talked about the “Discipline” part of the record. Let’s talk a little bit about the “Desire.” The last three songs on the record — “The Cartoonist,” “Elegua” and “Stay In” — those are the songs to me that kind of encapsulate this idea of desire and longing.

Well, “The Cartoonist” isn’t about me. It’s about a couple who I became aware of through Mark [Burgess]. The man was a cartoonist, and his wife was diagnosed with a fatal illness — I think it was MS, but I can’t remember — but it was something where she was physically deteriorating. The story was really sad. What happened is that he went mad watching the love of his life die slowly in front of him, and he ended up killing her and then killing himself. It’s really brutal. It’s just really struck a chord with me as a romantic, and as somebody who’s really passionate and also kind of crazy. I wonder, you know, about the possibilities of something like that — love driving somebody to the brink of madness. So the song is written from the perspective of the woman, as if perhaps she wanted him to kill her, because she was in so much pain.

“Elegua” isn’t a love song at all. It’s kind of a weird, dare I say spiritual song. It’s not about a person. It’s more about me looking for an answer within a practice that I am engaged in. I decided to write about it.

What kind of practice?

An occult practice. I don’t like to talk about it. It’s just about a ritual that I was working at and was having problems with. And then “Stay In” is about the deterioration of my relationship with Mark.

I kind of suspected as much.

It’s ironic, because he helped to write that song. When it started, the lyrics I wrote were about being in love with him. And then I rewrote them right before I recorded it, and pretty much had a breakdown while I was recording it. It was pretty terrible.

What exactly happened there? I remember talking to you on Facebook, and I think it was before you even started making this record, or it was in the early stages, and you were joking about how you were going to seek out Mark Burgess and make him produce your record. And then the next thing I knew, it was actually happening, and you had entered a kind of dom/sub relationship with him as well.

Well, I was being kind of facetious about it at first. I can be kind of mischievous I guess. Mark and I were connected because he already knew Keven [Tecon, who played drums on Discipline] and Amy [Rosenoff, bass] from Wax Idols because their other band had opened for The Chameleons before. And also a dominatrix that I work with had known him for 20 years. Mark and I had been friends on Facebook for over a year, but I just never said anything to him, because what am I gonna say to Mark Burgess?

But then I got tipped off that he was a submissive, and also tipped off that he liked the band. So I just started talking to him on Facebook one day just casually to see if he’d be interested in just talking to me. And I had no ulterior motive at all. I kind of had a hint, based on his lyrics, that he was a fetishist, but all I was thinking was maybe we’ll be friends or something. So we started talking and — he is very…let’s see…he’s very accessible, particularly to women, on the internet. I don’t think it’s something he’s a stranger to. I think it’s something he encourages, based on my experiences with him, so it wasn’t difficult to connect with him in that way. But it did feel very genuine, like we had some kind of really intense connection.

So we just started talking all the time. And then I was talking about the new record and he was really curious about it, so I was casually like, “Oh, maybe you can come and help me with my record and that can be a ‘service’ that you can ‘perform’ for me’” [Laughs]. So, you know, I’m domming him a little bit. He just was completely on board with that, and then it just happened. And then the more we talked, it gradually started getting romantic and sexual, which didn’t surprise me. I’m a hypersexual person and a romantic and I found him to be extremely attractive — especially for an older guy. And he’s one of my favorite songwriters of all time! I got totally wrapped up. But it was a disaster [laughs]. Because although he is a fucking genius, he is a diva. A total diva. It’s The Mark Show, and there were many points [in the studio] where I had to be like, “Look, motherfucker, this is my record. Not yours. Shut up!” [laughs]. He drove me fucking insane. If I was in the middle of tracking, he’d cut in over the speaker and try to give me tips that I wasn’t interested in. If I didn’t acknowledge him the way he felt he deserved to be acknowledged, he’d storm out of the room and throw a fit. That happened a lot [laughs]. In our personal relationship, he was my submissive, but he very much actually was not. Really was not. And that played into the record, it played into every aspect of his involvement with me and with the band and it was based on this completely phony power dynamic that he insisted was real but that was not.

So he was essentially “topping from below.”

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He totally tops from the bottom. And I’m sure if he reads this he’s gonna be furious and say it’s not true and he’s a “true submissive.” Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, being someone who genuinely is naturally dominant? That motherfucker does not know how to submit [laughs].

We broke up a million times while the record was being made. I kicked him out of my house, I kicked him out of the studio. He wasn’t around for most of the final vocal tracking, he wasn’t around for mixing, I didn’t want him to come back. And I don’t think he really wanted to come back. Monte [Vallier, producer] was exasperated by the situation toward the end and was just kind of like, “Get him out of here.” It was not just his fault — I’m a tremendously difficult person to deal with in any capacity, and I know that about myself. But it was a fucking disaster, it really was.

What were some of the positive things you learned from working with him?

He did really help me expand as a vocalist. He spent a lot of time singing with me. He really believed in me. He saw — and I think still does — something special in me that maybe I didn’t see in myself yet. And that helped me, to have that kind of encouragement from somebody that I admired so much creatively. He did a lot for me in that way. It also helped me to kind of be around him and watch the way that he writes and thinks and works because he’s a really weird, talented guy. It was really inspiring. Ultimately, all personal things aside, I still really can’t believe that he ever gave a shit enough about me or my band to do the things that he did for this record. And I am and will always be humbled and honored by that experience with him. Because he’s a genius. He’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time — truly one of the most underrated songwriters of all time.

Speaking of tortured geniuses — you wrote “AD RE:IAN” about the suicides of both Ian Curtis and Adrian Borland of The Sound. What attracted you to them as subjects?

I wrote that song on the death anniversary of Ian Curtis, which is always a really sad day for me. As silly as it is, Joy Division was one of the first bands that I ever heard that really moved me when I was a teenager, and I always get kind of sad, because he was so young. He’s become a mythical figure at this point, but I wanted to humanize him and his memory and connect with that feeling in the moment when a person decides to kill themselves

And then Mark told me something I didn’t know. I knew Adrian had also committed suicide about 10 years ago. But I didn’t know that Adrian was a huge fan of Ian Curtis and Joy Division and was really traumatized when Ian killed himself. So it just became this story about suffering artists trusting other suffering artists, and the kind of domino effect people have on each other.

You put yourself in the song. You talk about wishing you could have stopped him.

I do wish I could have stopped him. That’s kind of egocentric of me, but those two people in particular are people I think had more left to give. And I wish that they had found another way to deal with what was going on. It makes me really sad.

There’s also that myth of the tortured artist, where you have to be miserable in order to do good work. Do you worry about that, now that you’re married?

Well, if you’re married to someone who’s boring and stagnant and makes your life comfortable, that might affect you as an artist. But I’m married to someone who’s a fucking nutcase, so — [laughs]. He’s a fantastic person — he’s sweet as hell, he’s wonderful, but he is just as insane as I am and just as twisted as I am. He may be even a bit more so. So being married to him is actually hugely inspiring — it’s opening all kinds of new doors for me. I’m already working on a new Wax Idols record called Loss, so you can tell it’s not exactly a honeymoon record [laughs].

What do you think the biggest misconception about Hether Fortune is?

That I’m mean. I’m really not. I’m mean if you give me reason to be mean, I suppose. But I feel like a lot of people think that I’m this hardened, angry, bitter, mean, selfish asshole and that kind of hurts. Because I’m like, ‘Man, why does it have to be one or the other? Why does being outspoken and being honest and being tough have to automatically equate to my being a bitch?’ Because I’m not. I feel like I’m a total softie in a lot of ways. I’m a very loving person. I’m real sensitive. I cry all the time. I think that’s probably the biggest misconception. I feel like I’m expressing love constantly.

Hatched in near-total isolation, this remarkable combo, who sound very approximately like Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and Slade all at once, have made all the more impact. Word began to spread of their amazing entrail-splattered riffola on the doom metal scene in late 2011, after initial pressings of their second album, Blood Lust, sold out immediately, and began to change hands on eBay for an astonishing £700.

But Uncle Acid’s music is fully deserving of such pecuniary folly. Raunchy and demented, yet deceptively crafted to the point of mastery in their tunes and harmonies, Blood Lust and its newly released sequel Mind Control would already be massive hits in a better world. In hell, they probably already are.

Yet, even as their renown spreads, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats remain shrouded in mystery. Via their new label, Rise Above, eMusic’s Andrew Perry was merely forwarded a mobile number, and a time to call it. Who knew what lurked in the shadows at the end of the telephonic corridor…

Hi there, is that Uncle Acid?

Haha, yeah.

Nobody seems to know if that’s how you want to be addressed, or…

You can call me Kevin if you want.

Kevin, your music has been blowing our minds. When my buddy Todd first put me onto you, I couldn’t quite understand why you’d make music so melodically rich, yet only release it in such tiny quantities. But then obviously its extreme collectability has helped spread a buzz about the band. Was that your master plan?

No, not at all, we didn’t think anybody wanted our stuff, that was the problem, so we just printed as much as we could afford — really small runs, because we could only afford to get booklets printed up in batches of 50 or 25. I thought, have we really got much of a fanbase beyond that?

So that’s how we started, and it built up and up, and we started pressing more CDs, and then it just got to where we couldn’t keep up with it anymore, so luckily at that point, Lee [Dorrian, of Napalm Death] stepped in and Rise Above [Dorrian's label] took over, and they’ve helped push us further. So we didn’t plan it to be like that, we just weren’t aware what kind of audience we had, or might have, so we just did what we thought we could sell, which was not very much.

Have you emerged from a thriving doom-metal subculture in Cambridge?

No, we happened in isolation. There’s not really a music scene in Cambridge. It’s an academic place, there are no real music venues for bands to play. It was a struggle to get any musicians involved, so we started just as a three-piece, then we tried doing a bit of gigging, but it didn’t sound very good with just the three of us, so we decided that we’d just be a studio band, and do albums, but now we’ve got a new line-up, we’re more focused now. Everyone else is in London, and I’m the only one that lives in Cambridge, so it’s a little bit different, but it’s the same idea. We’re still outsiders, wherever we choose to reside.

Your sound is so evocative of vintage Black Sabbath and turn-of-the-1970s heavy rock, it almost seems like an implicit criticism of contemporary metal. Correct?

Yeah, most of our influences are from the ’60s, ’70s and maybe early ’80s, and that’s pretty much it. That’s what we absorb, and it just comes out as whatever. One of the things we took from [Black Sabbath] is the idea of having the riff, and the heaviness, but having a really good melody on top, which is what a lot of the modern metal bands seem to have lost. We’re bringing back melodies. I love Electric Wizard and Blood Ceremony and bands like that, but I don’t really think we have a lot in common with them. I think there’s something else to our sound, we’re not as heavy as that. The Beatles are a big influence on us also, so… How can you compare to that, you know?

You yourself play the same Les Paul Junior guitar as Johnny Thunders. Is he a hero?

I love him. He’s one of my biggest influences, even though you probably can’t hear it in the music. I’m a big fan so I had to get the same guitar as him. It’s just got a very distinct sound to it. It’s just a really raw, rock ‘n’ roll sound.

We heard that your second album, Blood Lust, was supposed to be based on an imaginary horror B-movie. Confirm or deny!

Yeah! The story is supposed to be a long-lost horror film from the early ’70s. The plot follows a Witchfinder General kind of guy, who goes around torturing women — that’s how he gets his thrills. He kills people all around the country, and at the end he meets the Devil. It’s not a great story [unrepentant laugh], but it was kind of good thinking of a B-movie, and what would happen in a really terrible B-movie, which I would love to watch, and basing an album around that. That’s the kind of crap that I watch, rubbish like that with no real plotline.

Are you properly into the occult? Or are you just adopting the language of metal with all the Satanic stuff?

With us, it’s more about the film side. The occult thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. This is just thinking of things like B-movies, or old Hammer Horror films, and just trying to recreate that vibe in the form of music, rather than anything that these occult bands are doing. We’re not taking it too seriously.

Not with a name like Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats…

Exactly!

I’m guessing the new record, Mind Control, is a similar imaginary movie, but one about the Manson Family?

That was the starting point for the concept, which obviously was to do with mind control, and the story narrative is some guy who starts a super-cult out in the desert, and they steal motorcycles, and he’s got all these girls around, and they do drugs — it’s kind of Charles Manson meets Jim Jones — and obviously, there has to be a big murder spree at the end. So it’s more the American exploitation films of the early ’70s. I find writing lyrics hard, so to make things easier for myself, I come up with these stories.

Have you got rooms full of this nonsense at home on VHS?

I do really enjoy terrible movies. Rubbish films are an escape as well, it gets you away from all the bullshit.

Some of Mind Control has a mellower vibe. Was the idea to let some light into the sound this time?

The idea was to mix it up a little, and maybe not give people what they want or expect, which would maybe be Blood Lust Pt 2, because that did so well.

The production is still, um, fairly murky.

Part of that was due to the fact that we didn’t really have any budget to start with. The new record, we got to use more expensive valve mics, but it still sounds raw because there’s not really anything else done with it. It’s us live in the studio, then we just balanced it all in the mix, and that was it. There are no fancy effects on it. Part of our whole thing is small valve amps that don’t really work properly. We just tried to keep it as loud as possible.

The Terror, the band’s 13th studio album, is a bleak — often morbid — change of pace, filled with repetitive synthesizer textures, ghostly choral voices, and dark lyrical mantras. Inspired by a dread of mortality and deep personal turmoil (Coyne’s recent divorce, Drozd’s brief heroin relapse), the duo recorded the album mostly alone, working quickly and spontaneously instead of layering the songs with overdubs. eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with Wayne Coyne about the album’s intimate recording process and complicated themes.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Steven Drozd said: “The Terror is this internal feeling you get that you and everyone you love is going to die. Everything in your life might be good, but there’s still this notion…that there’s more pain and suffering to come down the road.” It’s interesting to compare that quote to “Do You Realize,” which basically says the same thing but puts it in a beautiful, uplifting sense.

I think that’s what optimism is, in the end. You go, “We can’t bear this,” or you go, “We’ll find a way.” Sometimes music tells us so much about how we feel, and I think that’s why we like music so much — because it fills in. We utterly know what it means while it’s playing, but the minute it stops, it’s like, “I don’t know anymore.” I don’t think one way of thinking has to negate another way of thinking. I’m certainly not “Do You Realize.”

It’s a dramatic song, and I think it’s most powerful when it’s used at these dramatic moments. Most people I’ve talked to that have used it have done so at weddings and funerals, even the birth of their children. They see it as the sound of this big moment, where this other sound — this sound that we’re doing on The Terror — it’s this moment that’s with you all the time. It feels depressing and triumphant at the same time. A triumph isn’t “Hey, this is the greatest thing! We’re gonna live!” A triumph is saying, “We’ll just get through this.” We don’t have to make it any more sparkly than that.

When I read about the album’s dark themes, I expected the music to be depressing. And it is in a way, but there’s also a comfort in the sadness. There’s a bleakness to it, but it’s also really beautiful at the same time.

When we were making it, a lot of it reminded us of church music. We don’t go to church now, but when you were young, you’d sit there and try your best, not knowing what the fucking words were, to sing along with these simple mantras that people would sing in church. And it wouldn’t be about a singular singer. I think that’s what a lot of this music feels like as well. It’s not coming from a point of “I’m the singer.” I call it “the voices from beyond.” There are only a couple of songs in which you can hear me trying to sound like to sound like me. It’s just melody and words that are in the cloud of the sound of the song anyway. For me, it’s not meant to be this big statement by this big character.

So from what I’ve read in other interviews, Steven’s dark period was what really set the tone for the album. But I also know you were going through some heavy shit during that time. What was it for you that sparked this mood and the idea of The Terror?

We’ve always hinted at this type of music. But the main difference is: Even five or six years ago, if we were having a semi-big production going on, like some of these songs are, with drums and overdubs and a lot of voices being recorded — in the early stages of a lot of our records, we start early on with really primitive demos. But now we don’t do that anymore. A lot of times we’re just recording, and we’re not really doing a demo of a song. We’re just creating it right there. There isn’t gonna be a second version or a third version — it just is what we create.

And now we can do that without anybody being there. So you really are, in a sense, kind of a painter in a dark corner, painting whatever you want and not always thinking anybody has to see it. It used to be, no matter what we would do, we were surrounded by people who were helping us record — engineers, technicians and producers, and everybody is in there listening to everything you do, and sometimes openly judging us, sometimes not. But you’re not doing it in isolation of your own creation, and I think that’s the main difference.

I think we’ve always been able to do expressionistic, internal music, but it’s very hard to do that sometimes. In the past, we’ve never been alone making it. When you get musicians together, they want to do music. They want to say, “You play that, and I’ll play this.” This wasn’t music like that. It’s simple, repetitive…a lot of it’s even out of tune and out of rhythm with itself — it just happens to be something we liked. If Steven liked it, and I liked it, that’s all that mattered. We don’t care if it’s good or bad. If we’re happy with it, let’s go. So I think that’s really powerful and great luck — this kind of music that we’re drawn to is this cold, distant, unsettled thing.

I’m really curious how you guys were able to sustain this mood throughout the album. Is it a situation where you guys started to capture this mood so you noticed that pattern and said, “Let’s shape the record in this way”? Or did a lot of it just happen subconsciously?

That’s a narrow path to walk. Part of it is you want to stay in this color palette. Not to simplify it, but you have Picasso’s Blue Period, or whatever, they’re all reaching for the same thing. But that can also be limiting because you can start cutting off possibilities, and we don’t like to do that either because sometimes you think, “Oh, it couldn’t possibly be this,” but then you hear it and you say, “Well, it’s absolutely that.”

We really struggled with the song, “Butterfly…How Long it Takes to Die.” We struggled with that one in the beginning, because it felt too snappy. It’s well played, but I think it’s the only song on the record that has this little moment of funk in it. With Embryonic, we were doing that all over the place — being very clumsy and funky and primitive. And this wasn’t doing that. For whatever reason, we were on another trip. And when we were confronted with that song, we thought, “What do we do?” And we just rejected it for the longest time. And I didn’t think about [the lyrics] very much, I just said cosmic shit that you think of with the music. Then we re-looked at it, and we thought, “Why don’t we make it more like what the lyrics are talking about and see if we can make another version of this bleak, un-chromatic landscape.” I think it works — over the last three or four songs, you really feel like you’re no longer looking for the answer. To me, it sort of feels like you’ve found the answer. And sometimes with really distinct rhythms, that’s kind of what it’s saying. You know which path you’re on. Earlier in the record, we begin with a rhythm that isn’t very solid, but kind of dissolves into almost-rhythmless rhythms. They’re rhythms, but they don’t really push forward with a lot of confidence, and none of it rushes ahead. And by the end of the album, we kind of get something back. We know something different. That’s how it feels to me — I don’t know if it really is true, but that’s how it feels to me as a piece of music.

“Try to Explain” is absolutely beautiful, and it epitomizes everything I love about the album. That could be one of my favorite Lips melodies.

It does that thing we talked about, almost being a “voice from beyond.” It never seemed as though it was a singular person singing it. Even though I’m singing it, it’s almost like music that’s always existed, and someone sang it somewhere in time. And I think when we do music like that, where there is no character involved, it allows you to be vulnerable and say things that you probably wouldn’t say if you were being you. You wouldn’t say something so crushing. When that big crescendo of all those harmony voices break into that line, “Try to explain why you’ve changed,” it’s unbearable. It’s as though nature has been split open or something — that’s why I sang that line. It just sounded like that to me. That crescendo really was an accident; we stumbled upon these harmonies just willy-nilly. Steven did one or two, and I did a third one or something, and it really became emotional. We added the lyrics — the music always carried the message, but we just added the lyrics like, “Of course, this is what the music was saying.”

The song is just enough sad, and it’s just enough powerful, but it doesn’t last very long. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do in music because you want to do it again and again and make it bigger — but if you leave just below the hottest temperature, it’s almost like you can have it forever, because you can handle it. The temptation with dumb artists and musicians like us is that you want to go all the way. If it’s big, make it bigger; if it’s loud, make it louder. But if you’re lucky, you don’t do that. When that happens, it can be pretty powerful.

I think the biggest anguish and pain people have is when they can’t find the answer. Your mind can’t stop searching, and it keeps you looking and keeps you wondering. And that’s really where your psychic pain is: Knowing the answer may be painful, but I think your imagination is something your worst enemy. Your mind sometimes goes to the worst possible place, and before you know it, you’re living in some unlivable hell. Most people I’ve talked to, without knowing it, have all pointed to that song and said, “I know what you’re talking about there. I can relate to that. There’s something about that piercing thing.” It’ s not demanding an answer — it’s longing for one. It’s crying out for something, saying, “I just wanna know!” It’s powerful, but I don’t know if I have any answers. Sometimes I know I’m singing something that’s trying to channel your subconscious. That’s a hokey thing to say, but for me, it’s not always, “There’s this thing happening in your life, so you sing about it.” Sometimes it’s just there.

When the loud and proud nonet toured the UK for the first time in early 2013, however, founding dhol drummer Sunny Jain says “they thought it was a punk-rock band,” adding, “I’d never heard that one before.”

Formed in 2009, Red Baraat is the happy multicultural outcome of an all-American immigration saga. Sunny Jain was born in 1975 and raised in Rochester, New York. Originally from Pakistan’s Punjab region, his parents were devout Jains, adherents of the Indian religion noted for its commitment to nonviolence. Sunny was raised a strict vegetarian and prayed at pujas, Jain religious ceremonies, where he learned South Asian bhajan, or devotional songs. Outside the house he played ball with his American friends; inside he played “table tabla” with his uncles and father, an amateur harmonium player and Ravi Shankar fan, jamming out to vintage Bollywood hits and bhajan.

Jain’s two worlds didn’t entwine until he began writing jazz tunes while studying drums and composition at Rutgers. Frustrated by the music’s 32-bar AABA form, he yearned to return to the sounds he heard growing up. “They hold a place in my heart,” he says. “I began studying all the Tin Pan Alley standards when I was 10 years old. But when I started writing, I wanted to explore my standards.” As a bandleader, the drummer released three jazz albums — As Is (re-released as Mango Festival), Avaaz and Taboo — that inventively blend Eastern and Western styles no less distinctively than slightly older desi groundbreakers, and sometime-colleagues, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Rez Abbasi. Jain, however, was becoming increasingly ambivalent about the jazz scene; he missed the fellow feeling that connects musicians and audience in a communal moment.

Red Baraat was assembled as the wedding band for Jain’s own ceremony. A few years earlier, he’d pick up the double-head dhol drum, a sticks-struck staple of Punjab’s bhangra beats, and fell in love with it. Playing the dhol in drummer Kenny Wolleson’s Himalayas marching band rejuvenated Jain’s love of performance, and he realized that no one to date had combined Indian music, jazz, and electronic music with dhol. “I wanted to do something that reminded me of being a five-year-old in India watching my uncle getting married, when this brass band ensued, a dhol player showed up, and this cacophonous sound started happpening.”

Jain conceived Red Baraat as “another egg in the basket,” just one project among many. But it took on a life of its own. “I only wanted drums and horns, no electrified instruments,” though Altieri occasionally triggers electronic effects. “I wanted to take to the streets with a big boisterous sound.” Red Baraat joined a robust local brass-band cohort that included Slavic Soul Party!, Brooklyn Qawwali Party and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars. “I wanted a group where I could just play dhol and not drum set. But it’s taken over my life to the point where I hardly ever play drum set nowadays. I knew it was going to be unique, but I didn’t think it would take off like it did.”

Red Baraat’s new Shruggy Ji takes the energy of 2010′s Chaal Baby and 2011′s live Bootleg Bhangra and focuses it in a slightly new direction. As Jain explains, after the India Partition of 1947, “the eastern side gravitated to a rhythm called chaal, which you can hear all over Shruggy Ji. But the western side, and I’m simplifying here, went more to the faster-paced dhamaal, which you hear in ‘Dama Dam Must Qatandar,’ a three-centuries-old Sufi song. The Sufi dhol approach is much more intense.” Jain has been studying that approach on YouTube, picking up licks from the astounding “godfather” of Sufi dhol drumming, Pappu Saeen. “He’ll put the drum strap around his head and start swinging around, playing the most intense stuff and twirling for minutes. It’s ridiculous. I can do it for about 20 seconds before I fall down.”

More recently, after a stint as a professor in Berlin, Bartos revisited archival sounds he made during his Kraftwerk years and refashioned them in the form of Off the Record, an album full of taut, allusive synth-pop songs that signal back to the past while peering toward the future. Over Skype from Berlin, Bartos talked about both with a mix of objective dispassion and palpable excitement — characteristics that play into the music he favors more than 60 years after he was born.

Looking back at your years in Kraftwerk, with so much accomplished and such profound influence put into play, what makes you most proud?

We had so much rejection at the time that there was really no time to be proud. We struggled really. I remember for the first concerts in England, for instance, we had this huge centerfold in the paper New Musical Express, and they made a collage with us sitting in the center of the Nuremberg Trials. We had to face a lot of rejection. Finally, in the end of the ’80s with MTV and especially in the ’90s, it was getting better all the time. But I was not really very proud of it. It was just daily work.

Did you not think the music significant, personally? Did it feel powerful and new to you, or not necessarily?

We felt we were always some sort of pioneers in terms of production. Before the computer arrived in the studio we had good analog machinery working, with sequencers and electronic drum devices. They were custom-made, and we always thought, “When will the black guys from America discover that a drum box can have a really groovy beat?” Finally, they did! I remember, when I visited, going down the streets of Manhattan and seeing a guy with a boombox, or ghetto blaster, and doing some weird dancing. Now I would call it “breakdancing,” but I didn’t know it at the time. They were listening to loops of Trans-Europe Express, a segment from “Metal on Metal,” and they were head-spinning and stuff like that. That made me really happy.

Did you breakdance yourself?

I tried it, once. [Laughs.] When I first came to America, it was 1975, and I remember being in Memphis, Tennessee. After a concert, all four of us — there was a cover band playing some rock ‘n’ roll tunes, and all four of us were dancing. It was a very happy time. It was one of the Elton John hit singles. The covers band played the pop charts, and they were really good players. This was pre-hip-hop, pre-club music, pre-Detroit techno, pre-all that stuff.

In reference to the cover band as good players and musicians, do you think of yourself, as an electronic-musician, as a good player, or is it something else, something different? Do you think of your work more in the language of programming and organizing, or is it all musicianship to you?

If I had to come up with one occupation, I would say “musician.” That’s true. But for the last 10 years or so, I stepped more into the convergence of image and sound. When I was a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, I was free to come up with my own curriculum, so I had a closer look at the history of filmmaking and what role sound played in film. All the theoretical stuff, people like [storied sound-editor] Walter Murch, came up. In terms of music culture, to me at least, it’s much more important how the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is than the latest Lady Gaga record. I think all the intelligence, since the business model is no longer of any interest for a huge industry, the interest of music culture is in filmmaking: music in films and with films. And music is only one part of sound in movies. We have dialogue, we have the sound of the environment, we have the ambience, we have music. So there’s much more to talk about.

What is the earliest interesting use of sound in cinema that you teach?

I look at sound in a broader picture. Beginning of the 19th century, painting was getting abstract. Kandinsky was very jealous of what musicians and composers could do. He was drawing and it was very hard for him to get emotion in a picture. So he thought, “What can I do to bring music into my pictures?” He was desperate with this idea. He called his paintings like “Movement in Blue,” “Composition in Yellow” and so on. At the same time, there was this new medium of film coming up. People who read Kandinsky’s [journal] The Blue Rider had the idea of bringing abstract painting onto a timeline. So suddenly you have on this timeline rectangles, circles and so on, and those geometric pieces started to dance. Doing so, they thought, “OK, we have now what we’ll call Gesamtkunstwerk (translation: “a total work of art”). It’s really interesting how these media are talking to each other and how they complement each other. This tradition brought me into the kind of performance I do nowadays. During the ’90s, we had this movement of VJs — in any club they had VJ putting on the walls of the clubs visual candy, or whatever you want to call it. So I wanted to take early movements, from Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman — these very early ideas of abstraction on a timeline — and treat them visually like music together with the VJ movement. This brought me to the kind of performance I do nowadays.

There was a fantastic exhibition of films by Oscar Fischinger at the Whitney Museum in New York recently.

Fischinger went to Disney and he took part in Fantasia. But he was never happy really in Hollywood.

Your new album draws inspiration from sounds sourced from your past. What motivated you to revisit them?

It was very simple. A guy from the label kept asking me, again and again and again, if I had any old tapes from the ’70s or ’80s when I was in Kraftwerk. I kept saying no, but after I stopped teaching I wanted to do a new record, and he brought me back to this time. Finally I decided to do this marathon effort — it’s nothing you want to do: to clean up your attic. It was all in boxes, huge amounts of material. I always thought, “Oh, maybe later, maybe next year…” But then, being German, I ended up transferring it all into the computer. When I was there in the computer, I only saw the dates — 77-8-2, 76-7-4, and so on. It looked like an auditory diary, and that’s when I thought I could make it concept and make it real. I delved really deep into all this material. I brought together pieces that didn’t belong together and stuck them together and worked them into a collage. Remakes [new simulations of pre-existing sounds] were done with old instruments: an old Moog, an Arp, all this old stuff. I recontextualized. I replayed the instruments, old synthesizers from the ’70s, with their pitch and so on.

The sounds go back to your years in Kraftwerk. Are you in touch with any members of the group still?

I just had a telephone conversation with Wolfgang [Flür]. My other colleague Florian [Schneider] is very happy not to be a robot for the rest of his life. So there is just one person left [Ralf Hütter]. But Florian, Wolfgang, and I are in contact.

Have you talked to Ralf?

[Makes shrugging gesture with his shoulders, beneath a suggestively sly smile.]

A press-release for your new album says “Forget about nostalgia in 3-D.” Have you seen any of the recent Kraftwerk shows?

I got invited by The Guardian to attend the Tate Modern shows [in London] and to write a review, but I turned it down. I don’t have the time. I have so much to do now. This record took me two and half years now, and I’m still working on it, because I’ve made six videos. I’m going to London to do screenings, and I’m going to big cities in Europe. I know all the material of the Kraftwerk concerts, so I’ve been there already, sonically.

In the history of Kraftwerk, you’re credited for making big contributions in terms of melody and in terms of rhythm. Often those are regarded as separate and distinct musical properties. Do they work that way for you, or are melody and rhythm one and the same?

Music is a time-based art, and there are a lot of ways to articulate time. In life, we came up with this concept of dividing time into years, months, weeks, days and so on. In music, we came up with this dimension of meter. We invented bars and can say this bar is 4/4 or 3/4 or 7/4, and within these metric devices we put our rhythms. But the question if I make a distinction between rhythms and melodies or not…Well, first of all, what we think of as rhythm is a formula, because we are used to a drummer playing a rhythmic formula and repeating it. So the “Numbers” beat is a formula. But if I compose a song or a piece of music, rhythm for me is how all the instruments complement each other. It’s very important that the bass line and the melodic line and the chords each all have a rhythmic quality. But in the end, it’s all a line that you can see in a score. The drum beat is just one part of it.

Do you keep up with contemporary electronic music? Do you go to clubs in Berlin?

I had the privilege for about five years to talk to young musicians in Berlin. They had a lot of respect because of my biography, so the first thing I did with them was take them to see the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to attend a rehearsal. Afterward, we talked about scores what [conductor] Simon Rattle does in front of the orchestra. We discovered all the similarities between a score and the timeframe used by a computer. In the end, all these young DJs and musicians got the idea that it’s all the same, and it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. If it’s from someone in front of a computer or 80 people onstage in an orchestra, they have the same blood in their veins. We are all musicians, and we are all doing the same thing. It really doesn’t matter. It’s all about how the recipient receives it.

When you speak of the audio-diary aspect of your new album, do you mean a diary in a soul-baring kind of way or was it more a store of archives?

The intention was not to write a diary — it was just a scrapbook to evaluate ideas. I had no emotional thing going on where I wanted to write down what was going on in my life or how I felt. Years later, when I put it into a computer, I decided to call it a diary because in the end, that is what it is, if I look at it as a whole. It was sort of like meeting myself as a young guy, innocent and naïve, and now, with my experience as a producer, I could speak with myself. I was not trying to patronize that young guy, but it was OK — I think he would have liked it!

In your song “Without a Trace of Emotion, “you sing “I wish I could remix my life to another beat.” What did you mean?

Everybody keeps referring to my former band because it got so important over 40 years of existence. But I’m quite ambivalent about it. Sometimes it’s nice, because people are interested in my work still and I have contributed to some famous songs that became evergreens. But sometimes it’s really annoying that I always have to work so hard to get even close to the same reception for my music now. It’s not that good — a song like “The Model” cannot be that good because “The Model” was written more than 30 years ago, and it has gone through so many filters of time. Maybe in 30 years from now people won’t want to be so picky with my solo stuff. With that song in particular ["Without a Trace of Emotion"], I was trying to work this out. I came up with a story where I meet Herr Karl, which was the name of Kraftwerk showroom dummy, and I start a conversation with him. I talk to him and he talks to me. “I won’t let go, I won’t let go,” he says. And I tell him, “Red shirt, black tie, you’re history, you’re history.” I made a video for it, and it shows Herr Karl in all of his costumes: a red shirt, a Tour de France outfit, acting like a model. It became really funny without being comic. You can see me walking on this famous street in Hamburg where the Beatles used to play — I live very close by. Then suddenly I am passing this Panopticon and see Herr Karl. I had to do it just once in my life, to make it subject of an album and especially one song. “Without a Trace of Emotion” sums it up for me very well.

Emerging from nowhere to deliver his 2011 debut at the ripe age of 62, Charles Bradley has quickly become one of the most talked about and beloved artists of the decade. With a rich, raspy voice fit to compare with the greats of the golden era in the 1960s and early ’70s, Bradley, almost overnight, has become soul’s leading ambassador in the new millennium.

His live performances routinely unfold as touchy-feely love-ins between artist and audience. Behind this in-the-now euphoria is a life story of deprivation, itinerancy and bitter failure. As illustrated in a new documentary about him called Soul Of America, Bradley, like the subject of a Curtis Mayfield song, has lived most of his life beneath the poverty line, relying on charity from soup kitchens, sleeping rough, with no fixed abode.

After settling in Brooklyn, he plied a meager trade for many years as a James Brown impersonator in the Black Velvet revue. His fortunes only began to reverse when he hooked up with Gabe Roth from New York’s R&B imprint, Daptone, who in turn introduced him to aspiring band leader, producer and songwriter, Thomas Brenneck. From unsteady, no-budget beginnings, the duo worked at realizing Bradley’s higher talent.

Backed by Brenneck’s Menahan Street Band, Bradley released “No Time for Dreaming,” about his own private hardships, to huge global acclaim. He duly wowed the world on tour, and now returns with Victim Of Love — a record of exquisite joy, hope and gratitude, which pushes at the boundaries of conventional R&B like some lost treasure of early-’70s psychedelic soul. When eMusic hooks up with him and Brenneck on their latest ambassadorial London visit, Bradley’s voice is hoarse from so much testifying and giving. But now, at last, is the time for dreaming.

Yours is an incredible story, Charles: all that power to move people has been bottled up inside you all these years. Did you always know it was in there?

Charles Bradley: True artists, that sing from their soul and heart — nobody knows the depths they go under for a length of time trying to hold onto the honesty and decency and respect inside them. A person don’t get that easy. They work their asses off. I’m saying if you wanna be a career singer, you gotta take that hurt with ya.

But it was all this guy [pointing at Brenneck], helping me get heard. I say this to all my interviews — he’s gonna get tired of me thanking him. Then I’ll say, he might as well get used to it, because I can’t tell him enough where I would’ve been at right now — calling people and getting nowhere, doing my James Brown show still, keeping alive the dream, hoping it’s not too late.

Did you ever audition for TV talent contests, hoping to become a Susan Boyle-style “senior” success?

Bradley: I tried to get on all those things. Then I saw Jennifer Hudson [low-ranking finalist on the third season of American Idol, who went onto recording and acting mega-success] — I was angry at her! How did she get the chance? Overnight she just flew up, and I’ve been trying to get there for years? I was having doubts about everything. But my time came, in its own way.

The first album, No Time For Dreaming, documents the pain and hardship of your life, in a gritty funk style. Was it a kind of exorcism for you?

Bradley: I say, what is soul? Soul don’t have no creed or color. It’s what you been through, your hardship deep in your soul. You gotta reach down there where people’s never been half as deep, and pull it out. So the more I’m going deep into myself — that’s what soul’s about. Me and Tommy, we didn’t let go, we kept digging at one another, and that turned into that first record.

Was it a DIY effort, between the two of you?

Thomas Brenneck: 100 percent. I wrote all the songs with Charles, produced it, recorded it in my bedroom at the time — our humble beginnings. Gabe actually bought me a half-inch 8-track machine, which I kept right next to my bed, with a little stereo and a piano, and I chipped away, played stuff for Charles, and he loved it.

The years have been nice and we’ve got a recording studio now. We toured the first record, wrote a bunch of other songs, then went to the studio and recorded them with a much bigger sonic palette to choose from.

Did you know Daptone’s stuff before that, Charles?

Bradley: I knew Tom going on a lotta years.

Brenneck: We had recorded two singles, prior to the first album, with a different group. We first got introduced by Gabe from Daptone. I had an instrumental group called Dirt Rifle & The Funky Bullets, based on The Meters, James Brown, Dyke & The Blazers and such. Charles had knocked on Gabe’s door, saying, Hi, I’m a singer, you make records — are you looking for singers?

So Gabe introduced us, and we recorded two singles for Daptone that Gabe produced, as Charles Bradley & The Poets. The two singles were extremely derivative. It took five years after that, I’d say, of growth for myself, maturing in taste of music, for me to record some Menahan Street Band stuff that was much deeper music, it wasn’t just funky on the surface. It was slower and much deeper.

When Charles heard that music, he got inspired, and I think all his inspiration was really coming from all his trials and tribulations, and from living a life of struggle and poverty, and moving around, and not really having a home, and so that first album is really just Charles singing about the darkness, about the world from his perspective.

So that was Ground Zero?

Brenneck: Yeah, exactly, and now he’s felt warmth from people all around the world, and it’s because of those stories that people can relate to Charles — they’re drawn to him, and they love him, and he’s not just an entertainer up there that’s singing somebody else’s songs.

We write these songs together, they come from a really deep place, and now his inspiration is being drawn from some of these positive things that have happened in his life, and it still lends itself to be beautiful, soulful songs. They don’t just have to be tough, gritty and raw, they can be beautiful and psychedelic and soulful at the same time.

Some of your live shows have become the stuff of legend. One that often gets mentioned was at an outdoor festival in Utopia, Texas, where the heavens opened for a biblical downpour, and you went out and hugged crowd members in the rain…

Bradley: Yeah, that was a show! There’s nothing on earth like being on stage. To me, stage is home. If I see the people standing outside in the rain, getting wet, to watch me perform — I said, “Naaah, that not fair!” I had to jump off the stage and get out in the mud and get wet with ‘em! That’s when everybody went crazy. I said, “You gettin’ wet out there watchin’ me perform — can I come out, too?” Yeeah! It was a tear-dropper. There was warmth, kindness, hurt, love, and, in the midst of it, it was beautiful.

Does it feel massively different to you, doing your own show, with your own music, compared to doing your old James Brown show?

Bradley: I think they’re loving me more because I’m singing my song, and I’m singing from the heart, rather than doing James Brown and trying to manifest on his style.

Victim Of Love feels like a watershed record for Daptone. People were sometimes sniffy about it at first, like it was pointless and copyist. Has it all been a process of winning people over?

Brenneck: Yeah, to modern soulful music. With this album, I was really trying to push outside of the boundaries of the normal Daptone production by adding elements that you wouldn’t hear on Sharon Jones records and such. We’re trying to make soul music in 2013, and embrace all our influences that are outside of just directly James Brown or Otis Redding or any Motown Detroit artist. But once he sings on it, it’s impossible to call it anything but a soul record.

Bradley: Tommy said, “You wanna move on from James Brown?” And he’s doing it by putting in that music that I like. Once my spirit gets into the depths of the music when I hear it, it all happens. I don’t wanna do James Brown no more, because I’m feeling that feeling I’ve been wanting for a long time, and the more you put it on me, and when I get into it when you give it to me, the more I want it. That’s just the bottom line.

Now we’re doing funk and rock. We’re gonna find a new mixture. We’re heading into a mixture that nobody’s doin’, our own creation.

Brenneck: It’s not gonna be fresh by doing a hip-hop song. It’s gonna be by him doing his own song, that embraces all that and lots else beside. Bradley could take a Black Sabbath song and turn it into a soul song.

You might go heavy metal next time? Like with Jimmy Page guitar?

Brenneck: Jimmy Page is cool, but that’s not heavy metal, it’s rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s where we’re going. Bradley can do a good Robert Plant impersonation, and he doesn’t even know it!

Bradley: Yeah, and one song we play is Neil Young’s “Heart Of Gold.” I lu-u-urve doing that song. It feels good, it fits right in.

How has your life changed since your upturn in fortunes, Charles? Do you have a decent lifestyle now?

Bradley: Not totally. I’m working on it.

Do you have a family, with kids to provide for?

Bradley: I made a vow to myself when I was 14 years old, and I lived that commitment from that date right up to today: No child of mine is comin’ into this world. I’m gonna keep seeking, but right now at my age, 64, it’s too late for me to have kids.

But surely your story proves that it’s never too late for anything?

Bradley: No, man, it’s best to have kids at Tommy’s age. He can grow up with his kids, be young with ‘em, play with ‘em. My playin’ — I wanna do it onstage. I’m gonna be godfather to a lotta kids [gesturing out into imaginary audience, smiling], and I’m gonna teach them to the best of my ability. Same thing with Oprah [Winfrey]: She never had no kids, but she’s like the motherhood of all kids. So I’m gonna be a godfather!

And you’re going to be a movie star, too, with your own documentary…

Brenneck: That’s not gonna make Bradley a movie star, that’s just gonna make him a topic of conversation. It’s more about his life than his music. Where it ends, another documentary could start, because the last few years have been crazy, successful, amazing — but with that success, after 60 years of being down in the dumps, your shit doesn’t change overnight, even if the money starts coming your way. It’s still hard to change what you’re used to, psychologically, even if physically it’s easier to get material things.

There’s a lot of people around Charles trying to help him out, and Charles is trying to steer on the right path, not listen to people around him who’re trying to just leech onto him. It’s hard.

Bradley: One thing my mother taught me, I won’t forget: Go out and make money, but never let money make you. And I won’t. The only thing material things can do for me, is buy things I don’t have, and get me outta that level that I’m live in.

But this new record is about documenting the changes that are underway, and expressing your hope, love and gratitude?

Bradley: This new record is coming out of the darkness into the light, and meeting new peoples. I’ve been meeting lots of positive people, and they’ve been making me more sure of myself. [smiles] It’s a beautiful thing.

Duncan Wallis, Dutch Uncles’ singer/pianist, has a rep for being both brainy and “sexually interesting,” if a little tetchy on hearing his band being compared to Hot Chip. Andrew Perry tracked him down to see if any of these theories really hold water.

Dutch Uncles hail from Manchester. But rather like New Order, you don’t sound like the classic post-punk “miserable Manc” band…

We’re all originally from Marple [suburb, near Stockport], but I live in Chorlton [trendier hood] now, and will do for the foreseeable future. It’s good here. There are a lot of musicians around — you see Damon Gough [aka Badly Drawn Boy] every now and then. There’s a record shop at the end of my street, which is great because I DJ a lot, and I always do it off vinyl. I spend most of my time in the ’80s section. You can’t beat a bit of Wang Chung — “Dance Hall Days,” what a single!

You can certainly hear such preferences in Dutch Uncles’ sound.

Sure! I love a lot of stuff that came out in the ’80s. We’re definitely influenced by the xylophone sounds of Japan’s Tin Drum, and the string presence on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. One track on the album, “Flexxin,” sounds like Prince. We wrote it after we played on the same day as him at a festival. I don’t mind people saying we sound like him, ’cause he’s a genius. It’s not so good when people say we sound like Hot Chip. I actually really like Hot Chip, but it’s gone way too far now, it’s just become what everybody says. It’s made me scared to look on Twitter.

In the past, you’ve said Talking Heads are your favorite band. Why them?

The first five albums just show the most brilliant progression, especially through their relationship with Eno. Then Eno left the mix, and they did Speaking In Tongues and, that could be their best album actually, with the complete pop sensibility they brought to it — the whole “Stop Making Sense” aesthetic. After that it kind of veers off, but Talking Heads were always the band to look back on for us, because they had five completely different albums there, each one flawless in its own respect. Such an artistic variety coming out of one band. Ridiculous!

Have you tried to replicate that restless spirit in Dutch Uncles, to keep moving from album to album?

Yes, and they’re definitely all different. The first one, self-titled, was literally a live album slated up in two weeks in Germany, completely minimal. The second, Cadenza was us first beginning to realize the idea of instrumentation. It was the first time we had a producer, who unfortunately stepped in too late in the mix, because all the tracks had been pretty much road-tested by that point.

This time round we had our producer, Brendan, with us from the very first notes. We always knew that we wanted the album to be a complete surprise to people who already knew us — a surprise to them and us, really. You increasingly realise with pop music that everything’s been done, so you have to just have fun with it. So this album feels like less of a statement than the last two did, for me. It feels like, Look, this is something we’ve done in a year. Give us another year, we’ll do something else. These are all just parts of the story now. It’s not trying to make a full stop on anything.

You’ve said that the lyrics on Out Of Touch, In The Wild are loosely themed around addiction and friendship…

I’m not sure that’s quite right, on reflection. An album of bad habits — that would be a more accurate generalisation. “Nometo” is about an old guy who regrets the habits he had earlier in his life. But it’s not a drugs album — it’s a third of a drugs album, perhaps. It gets a bit psychedelic in the production side, and lyrically it gets more abstract the more psychedelic it gets.

It’s focused more on negative ways of thinking, but there are some upsides. The last song, ‘Brio’ is all about the naughty excitement of getting caught with pornography, and building a habit round that. But that’s not based on personal experience! It’s been said that a lot of our older material was about porn. I wanted to make a nod to the older songs — to the history of Dutch Uncles.

Do you crave chart success?

All bands do. It’s not like you’re gonna put a gun to anyone’s head for it. It’s just, “We want it, now how are we gonna get it?” “I don’t know, I guess we’ll have to be really lucky.” It’s hopeless to focus on it, so we just keep going, and try to get better. Every time, we want to make the listener’s first listen with us better.

Rock and pop typically divides along the means of production: Rock is largely made whole cloth by self-sufficient bands, whereas pop is usually crafted by hired songwriters and players. Leon Russell is a renegade in that regard. The 71-year-old Lawton, Oklahoma-born pianist launched his career as a session musician the week of his 21st birthday, then won acclaim in the rock world by writing, co-producing and playing on Joe Cocker’s successful second and third albums of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

After starting up his own label, Shelter Records, in 1969, Russell morphed into a solo act, releasing albums that were beloved by rock radio while also crossing him back over into pop, both as a singer (“Tight Rope,” “Lady Blue”) and a songwriter (“This Masquerade,” famously covered by George Benson). “Superstar,” one of his earlier compositions with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, was both a pop smash for the Carpenters in 1971, and a 1984 R&B hit for Luther Vandross. Russell’s other well-known tune, “A Song for You,” never performed particularly well on any chart, but has been interpreted by everyone from Donny Hathaway to Willie Nelson. Russell’s fame faded when the ’80s arrived, but in 2010, Elton John enlisted him for a collaborative album, The Union.

At the behest of Daptone soul superstar Charles Bradley, eMusic’s Barry Walters spoke with Russell, who put his astonishing career in characteristically humble perspective.

How did your career as a session musician in Los Angeles take off the way it did?

I played with bands starting when I was 14, and went out there [on my own] when I was 17, but I couldn’t play in nightclubs in California because I wasn’t 21; they didn’t have much sense of humor about that. My first adventure in recording was playing on demo sessions for Jackie DeShannon and Sharon Sheeley [her songwriting partner] at Metric Music, which was a division of Liberty. She met Jack Nitzsche and introduced me to him. I started out playing on all of his record dates, one the first week and two the second week and four the third week and exponentially up from there. I never did play any clubs again until later.

At a certain point, you and several other L.A. session musicians became known as “the Wrecking Crew.” Was that something you called yourself, or did that name come much later?

That came out when [session drummer] Hal Blaine and whoever his ghostwriter was wrote his book made that up. I never heard it in my life until his book. [Session bassist] Carol Kaye said the same thing. It’s actually the title of a Dean Martin movie that perhaps they played on; I didn’t. I always thought it was not particularly a good name for a rhythm section.

Were you typically told what to play, or did you come up with your parts yourself, or a combination of the two?

I suppose it was a combination. Most of the writers who hired me, they hired me because they didn’t want to write the piano part, Don Costa [the late guitarist/arranger/producer/songwriter father of singer Nikka Costa] in particular. He would write a melody line and chord changes, and he’d say, “Play blues here, play classical here” and he didn’t have to write the piano part; he actually told me that’s why he hired me. It’s complicated to actually write those parts. Even more complicated than that is to find somebody who can actually read ‘em. The guy who read that stuff, his name is Lincoln Mayorga; he can read and play anything. But myself, I’m not much of a reader.

Was it important to think fast in those situations?

I had a birth injury that caused me to be slightly paralyzed on the right side of my body. I took piano lessons for 10 years, and I didn’t seem to be getting any better. I was better off figuring out stuff that I could play, so that’s what I did primarily — figure out something that could give the illusion that I was a piano player. I’m primarily left-handed, so with my right hand I had to be careful. I was always thinking a bar ahead about what I could play and analyzing whether or not I was going to be able to play it. I’ve had to do that most of my life.

Where there times when you knew a song could be better than it was, but you just had to go ahead with what you were told to play?

A lot of times we would get our music, or chord sheets or whatever, and we’d rehearse the track 15 or 20 times before the singer even started singing the song. And just out of boredom, I would sometimes write melodies and words to those tracks as were rehearsing ‘em, and when the real song came on, I sometimes didn’t like it as well as the one I’d written in my mind. But I don’t want to give the impression that I know what I’m doing all the time.

Did you ever bring these alternate versions to the table, or did you need to keep them to yourself?

Unless I was working for a very good friend, I would never say anything about the records at all. Herb Alpert called me up one day, he was a good friend of mine, and said, “I want you to help me. I’m cutting this country singer from Phoenix and I want you to help me with the rhythm section.” I went down there and said, “I think it would be better if you’d do this with the drums and the bass.” And he didn’t use that idea, and I told him a couple more ideas, and he didn’t use those. Herb is a genius. He’s made millions of dollars making beautiful records, and I can understand: He likes to do it the way he likes to do it. I’ve learned a lot from him, but after I made two or three suggestions, I didn’t make anymore because I could see he was gonna do whatever he was wanted to do. That guy from Phoenix, his name is Waylon Jennings. [Jennings originally hails from Texas, but had moved from Phoenix to L.A. to work with Alpert. — Ed.]

How did your experiences as a session musician help create opportunities as a songwriter?

I was partners with a guy [Thomas Leslie]. With him I wrote for Gary Lewis [comedian Jerry Lewis's son, who had a teen-pop group Gary Lewis & the Playboys; Russell co-wrote their Top 10 1965 hits "Everybody Loves a Clown" and "She's Just My Style"]. That was not really my kinda music. But my partner who I formed Shelter Records with [Denny Cordell], he had some hits over in England, and came over to make a distribution deal with A&M. He hired me to play on some Joe Cocker records. I figured as long as I was doing that, I would try to write some songs for Joe. When I was in a session, I always had a very sort of quiet demeanor. I didn’t want to get in the way. So we did the session and after the session I played these songs for Denny and he was kinda floored. I wasn’t aware that I turned into a rock ‘n’ roll maniac, but that’s what he said.

How did you come to write “A Song for You”?

I was in a relationship at one time, and the need for that song came up. I wrote it so I could sing it at the time.

Did you have the sense that you’d written a standard?

When I wrote “This Masquerade” and “A Song for You” and maybe a couple more, I was trying to write standards. “This Masquerade” had been cut over 40 times before George Benson [who had the biggest hit with it] ever cut it. And “A Song for You” has been cut over 125 times. I’m not sure if it was ever a hit exactly, but a lot of people cut it, and that’s what my goal was; I was trying to write songs that a lot of people would cut.

Was there an “a-ha” moment when you realized you’d cracked the code to writing a classic song?

No, there wasn’t. “A Song for You” I wrote in 10 minutes, and the same thing for “This Masquerade.” I don’t know anything about “a-ha.” These songs, some of them seem to have a life of their own, but I don’t have the ability to spot that.

When you did get your solo career going, was it what you expected?

I didn’t have any expectations at all about that, because I didn’t think I was good enough. My first show was at Anaheim Stadium with the Who. I was the opening band and they were selling out the stadiums pretty regularly. I don’t remember much about it except that I went up on stage, sang the songs, and came off the stage. I was pretty rattled the whole time.

Did you ever think, “I don’t have the kind of voice to have a solo career”?

There you go. That’s exactly what I thought. I still don’t understand it. [Laughs.] I sounded a bit like Moms Mabley, no reflection on Moms. [Mabley was a pioneering African-American comedian. — Ed.]

You had a very successful run in the ’70s. How did you deal with it winding down in the following decades?

The venues got smaller and the crowds got smaller. Like I told you, I didn’t have any expectation from the top. I thought I was extremely lucky to get where I got, so I avoided the press and did all the stuff that was wrong and kind of walked away from it.

So what was it like joining up with Elton John and playing to big crowds again?

Elton did a great deal for me. He spent a lot of money on me, on PR. A lot of people don’t know about stuff until somebody who they admire and trust comes up and says, “This is great” He did that for me, and I’m very grateful for it. When I was doing the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour [with Joe Cocker], I knew the audience didn’t know who some of these other singers on stage were, so I had all these girls with empty cameras pretend to take photographs so the audience would get the impression they were somebody worth photographing. People listen with their eyes, the main audience, so they have to be guided in some ways. [One then-unknown singer on the tour was Rita Coolidge, the inspiration for "Delta Lady," Russell's song for Joe Cocker. — Ed.]

What kind of advice would you give to musicians who want to make records like yours?

Once again, you’re under the impression that I know what I’m doing, and that’s not really the case. I do what I do and I’ve had studios in my houses for the last 40 years ’cause I like to make records. But as far as telling you the secret to them, I’m not sure that I know that. If I did, I’d have more houses. [Laughs.]

What are you doing these days?

I was writing some lyrics to some tracks that a friend of mine from California sent me. He’s trying to make an album for me, and I was trying to write some lyrics for the songs I’d be singing. I’m having a little bit of difficulty with my bipolar disorder today and the last few days and I haven’t been able to really do anything, but some days are better than others, you know?

On Marnia, Stern wrote songs about how stress resurfaces and tests her belief in herself — and, as she realizes in “Proof,” how rewarding it feels to ride that stress out (“I am something, I am someone”).

eMusic’s Christina Lee spoke with Stern about Marnia, her latest influences and how her new job as a guitar teacher has shaped her views on modern-day music consumption.

You’ve mentioned not feeling inspired when it came time to write this record. What did you do to overcome that?

Well, it’s an interesting battle, to continue to dig deep inside of yourself, to try to find new places, because you only have so many resources in your arsenal. So I spent a lot of time trying to reference different standpoints, finding new things to write and also looking up other classic artists and [trying to] just move like them. That’s a lot of what I’m still doing. I feel like artists in general find their voice, and then they either keep repeating it or they grow. But it’s different for me, just trying to find different resources and be inspired, and just still loving music so much and finding a connection to it and feeling grateful for it.

What were some of your new sources of inspiration?

Well, it’s more like — the way I used to write songs would be, “OK, I’m going to put this kind of riff here, and then layer some voices here.” This time I really got into sort of the Chuck Berry-vibe riffs — like, ’50s guitar styles. I was more interested in things sounding pretty as opposed to banging you over the head.

Chuck Berry?

I don’t mean Chuck Berry in particular. In the car my mother plays this ’50s SiriusXM radio station, so it was just a lot of hearing that style on the radio and thinking about it, and thinking about how a lot of the Rolling Stones and the rock generation of the ’60s was inspired by those guys, and also just about how young rock ‘n’ roll really is — and just things like that.

I was just trying to invest myself in different ways of playing — different styles, things I had never done before in my life. Like, “OK, let me hear this Jimi Hendrix song,” just to learn different stuff. I ended up stripping down most of the songs, taking away a lot of parts. That’s basically how I approached the record.

Who are some of your other favorite writers?

I’ve listened to a lot of David Bowie. When I was writing these songs, I listened to a lot of things that normally I would not, like Tom Petty. There’s something very poignant and beautiful — and I don’t mean that in a patronizing way — about Tom Petty’s songs. I’ve also been reading a bunch of rock biographies like Slash. It was crazy thinking about [Guns 'N Roses'] time, and how there will never be a time of that — full of money and gluttony. They would have a backstage show after their concert, and it cost $10,000 at least, and they rarely ever went to it. It was just so dumb — so fun to read, but certainly not enviable in any way.

I have a similar relationship to reality shows — just seeing the level of preposterousness there and being amazed that it exists.

The difference is, because of the lack of internet [back then], once [a band became popular] they held on for a lot longer in the consciousness. Now with everything being a quick sound byte, things are just so different. What I mean is, it seems like with young people now, the cool thing is just to like and to know about everything, as opposed to having a few favorites that you really like. That’s very uncool now. But you know — I don’t know. I give guitar lessons and [my students] don’t feel that way.

Maybe it depends on the role that music plays in someone’s life. Maybe the difference with your students is that they’re interested in clicking through YouTube as research.

Which is good. And obviously it’s a good resource. The internet was just coming up when I started to make music, and I remember [before that], you had to dig to find what you were looking for. When you found it, it was so rewarding. That’s kind of gone now. I remember at one of my lessons, this girl was looking for some ’90s seminal band, and she couldn’t find anything. It was driving me crazy, because that never happens.

Even with, like, the [early] Mountain Goats [cassettes] — only [a few] people really had access to them.

And that used to be a normal concept. Now it’s a very strange concept. That’s what so weird – it used to be you would only be exposed to certain stuff, and that was it. It was rare, and that was it, so you had it and you appreciated it. And I guess I haven’t embraced any of the positive parts of all the changes, and I feel like that’s the thing to do, because there’s nothing you can do about it. So I sort of got over my frustrations with that stuff. There’s always been commercial music and less-popular music, and that will just continue to evolve.

[Giving guitar] lessons has been good, because I’ve been meeting real people in their late teens, early 20s, and some a little older. Some of them have a more removed relationship to music. They want to learn to play the guitar, they have a job, but they like music. It’s obvious their relationship is different than someone who’s like, “I want to get a record deal, and I’m working so hard.” [Meeting them has made them] real, as opposed to me thinking, “I wonder what the kids are doing these days. They seem so dumb.”

You’re seeing it for yourself.

And that’s real life – where every teenager is different. And there are some similarities, but it’s not the generalization thing that I was doing before. Each person is different, and each person brings their different experiences to it and that affects how they play, and what they listen to and what they like. And that’s what’s cool about music. There was this thing that was going around the internet and it said that the thing about [when you're] starting out [in the arts], you’re usually not really good at all —

He was talking about the process of being a writer, how he had to increasingly learn to vouch for his good taste.

Right, you have your taste, and it’s good to trust your taste — you like what you like. I think that’s really neat. If you’re not, then no personality comes across in your stuff. I think it’s really all about your taste, and it’s cool to hear people’s taste and [realizing] there’s no right and wrong. I’m always disagreeing with friends. They’ll like something and I can’t stand it, and no one person is right or wrong.

And at times it can be very frustrating, being like, “Ah, I like all of this awesome stuff, I want to make stuff that’s just like this awesome shit,” and then it comes out like garbage. And we were just talking about being uninspired — that [lack of inspiration] is largely my fault, because I don’t search for music actively, just because I feel turned off by everything I click on to listen to. I’m not into it, and I’m just giving up really quickly, and that stinks.

It’s tough. And I think it’s much easier to “move on,” now. Years ago, even if your primary mode of discovery was radio, and even if it was that same Top 40 hit, you had a chance to reconsider it, without ever asking for it — even if it was, like, Britney Spears, because you hate it the first five times they play it but, for whatever reason, the sixth time wins you over.

Absolutely. Where do you live?

I’m in Atlanta.

I’m in New York – I just got here. I was visiting Florida, and I basically flew from 75-degree weather to nine degrees. It’s terrible.

The photo on the album cover — was that taken in Florida?

No, I was on tour at a rest stop. I don’t know where we were, but we were somewhere, and we just got out for some reason and took that picture.

I had a horrible experience in Florida. My mother’s dog bit my dog, and she almost died. Three bites and they pierced her jugular. There was blood everywhere. We rushed to the hospital and it was so horrifying; I’ve never seen anything so violent. I love my dog, and she almost died. I thought it was so crazy that I brought that dog on every tour — she’s been everywhere — then I take her the sanctuary that is my mother’s house, and she almost died.

Her name’s Fig, right? How would you describe her personality?

She’s not spoiled, even though I give her so much attention. That’s why she’s so loveable. She’s the sweetest girl. I’m way too attached to her, but there’s no way to get unattached because you have to love them while they’re here. I’ve got to say that 10 years ago when I got her, I did not expect I was going to be [living] in the same apartment with just her.

As opposed to…?

Getting married, having kids or just even relocating. I remember when I got her I didn’t think that I would get this attached to her. She’s ended up being my whole world. She’s worth it.

Whose idea was the dating contest?

Not mine!

How did that come about?

A friend is friends with my publicist and we were chatting, and my boyfriend had just moved out, so she’s like, “You’re single,” and I was like, “Yeah,” and she came up with this whole thing. And I was so in the throes of all the stress with the dog and all things happening that I said, “Yeah, sure.” I really don’t need anyone, ever, because I’m always such a homebody. But maybe I will. I don’t know. It’s just for fun.

I hope it pans out.

I’m sure it won’t, but I’m sure it will be funny, and that’s worth it. It’s for a fun story, like the kissing booth. There were only five people over the whole tour that I wanted to kiss…

What was on your mind when you wrote “Proof of Life”?

I started that before the third [self-titled] record…I was talking to somebody, and we were talking about apprehension and feeling like I live in a bubble of just me and the dog: “Am I missing out in life, just doing this all the time?” That’s kind of what that song was about, wanting to feel like there’s no right or wrong decision — when you put all of your eggs in one basket and then things aren’t working as well as you’d like. All of my joy comes from when I feel like I’ve written something that I like, and when that’s not happening, there’s not much else going on in my life.

We live in a very immediate, “now” world, so when you’re immersed in one thing, you can’t ever remember a time when life wasn’t like that. When I’m on tour and hanging out with people, I’m like, “This is so fun!” Then two weeks into being back home it’s like, “Oh my god, I’ve always been alone.”

Now, he has two matching new records out, for complementary quintets. Both albums feature Goldberg’s writing, improvised counterpoint, tenor saxophone, and drummer Ches Smith, and both begin with a little Bach-inspired chorale. On Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, recorded in 2008, Goldberg shares the front line with trumpeter Ron Miles and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman. (Devin Hoff’s on bass; Scott Amendola replaces Smith on “The Because Of” and “Possible.”) The 2012 recording Unfold Ordinary Mind has Wilco’s Nels Cline on guitar, and contrasting tenor players in hard-toned Rob Sudduth and furry-sounding Ellery Eskelin. In that quintet Ben takes the bassist’s role, playing the low contra-alto clarinet.

In between those two, Goldberg recorded Go Home with Miles, Amendola and guitarist Charlie Hunter, which came out in 2009. eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead spoke with Goldberg about Bob Dylan, working with new collaborators, and his new records.

You recently posted an article about the development of the New Klezmer Trio, a band where you took old techniques and came up with new music based on the same principles. Your later Steve Lacy tribute did something like that too: took some of his ideas about instrumentation and cuckoo-clockwork tunes, and made them your own.

We’re all drawn to certain things very strongly; they wake up something in you. Then we try to find out what’s at the heart of it. As much as you’re moving toward something else, you’re also moving toward your own heart. What energizes me is never knowing how it’s all going to turn out. The best we can do is put the best ingredients in, and work with them to create something tasty. For the last eight years, Bach chorales have been a big ingredient.

You’ve said they’re a big influence on Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, but the counterpoint often smacks of old New Orleans jazz more than Bach.

Yeah, isn’t that funny? It just felt like so much fun to have the three horns going at it like that. The opening piece, “Evolution,” starts with that little hymn, but then where do you go? Did it need a B section? Instead I wrote out a roadmap: saxophone with rhythm, then a clarinet and trumpet duet, everybody plays together then the rhythm section drops out, whatever. Most of the actual content on that one was spontaneous, but “Asterisk” and “Possible” have composed counterpoint. That was the beginning of working with that for me. Now I’m committed to it. My earlier music was more like, play the melody and then blow.

“Who Died and Where I Moved To,” where you solo on contra alto clarinet, has a 1960s boogaloo beat.

I spent a lot of time listening to Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” at an early age, mostly because of Joe Henderson. Things get in your mind at an early age, and are always sitting there.

Your arrangement of the country/folk tune “Satisfied Mind” sounds almost like a field holler; I don’t recognize the melody.

It’s a transcription of Bob Dylan’s version from Saved. For me, that period gets to the heart of Dylan; it’s so stark. Everything’s so heartfelt and full of yearning.

Did you know Joshua Redman when he was coming up in San Francisco?

No, we only met not long before we recorded. He’d gone to a concert I’d played on, and I heard later that he’d liked it, so I invited him to play a concert together. After that I said, let’s make a record, and he said yes. I met Devin Hoff and Ches Smith through pianist Graham Connah, playing in his sextet. He always had great rhythm sections — like Trevor Dunn and Kenny Wollesen who were in Junk Genius. Graham’s totally nuts, but his big band arrangements are unbelievably great.

Ron Miles I’d only met around 2007, the first time I heard him in person. He’s the world’s greatest melodist: When he plays a melody, it’s always perfect. I can’t get over it, or get enough of it. Sometime after we’d made that quintet record, I was set to record Go Home as a trio with Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola in New York. When we found out Ron was going to be at the Village Vanguard with Bill Frisell that week, we asked him to join us.

Playing with Charlie Hunter made me confront deficiencies in my own playing I needed to work on. He has such a strong groove, especially when playing with Scott; they have a strong hookup. In my clarinet playing, I always wanted to cut across the groove, but in relation to it. I wasn’t sure how strong I was at holding up my own end of the groove itself.

Charlie and I were doing a clinic once, where he told all the guitarists in the room to put down the guitar for a year to play the drums. Then they’d understand the groove as the most important part of guitar playing. After that, I began practicing clarinet while playing drums with my feet. The idea being, the groove comes first. Then when I played clarinet on a gig, it would still be present.

I think of Subatomic Particle and Unfold Ordinary Mind as your before-and-after-Charlie records. On the first you’re in the front line, on the second you’ve switched over to the rhythm section, playing contra-alto clarinet.

That role is still pretty new to me. I knew I wanted to be the bass player in a band, but what did I know about that? I got the contra alto in 1997, and played it right after on one track from the album Twelve Minor, but then it sat in the closet for a long time. Later when I joined Tin Hat, they suggested I play bass on the contra-alto. It took awhile to gain facility on it, but then all of a sudden it opened up, and I fell in love with the sound. Between you and me, it looks hard, but it’s easy to play, the one I have at least.

It is kind of scary, situating myself in the rhythm section between Ches and Nels Cline, two very strong musicians. Now it was sink-or-swim time. When we recorded Unfold Ordinary Mind, we hadn’t played together before, and I wasn’t even sure we were making a record: Let’s just go into the studio and see what happens. Unexpected things started happening, like at the end of “xcpf,” where Nels goes into his looping thing, and Ches and I bring the groove in and out. That wasn’t planned.

Do you ever feel constrained, playing bass parts instead of soaring over the top on clarinet?

Not at all. It’s all I want to do now. Playing the same figure for seven minutes is a different kind of challenge: Am I nailing it, am I putting it in the right place, am I working with Ches? It’s a wonderful opportunity to do my best.

Certain ideas have become attached to improvised music that are a little oppressive: “Don’t ever repeat yourself, or be too melodic.” But think of Louis Armstrong and the old cats. Every time he improvises, he kills me. But he also kills me when he plays a melody he’s played a thousand times.

The quintet’s non-California ringer is New York tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin.

The first time I heard him play one note on record, I thought, “This is someone I have to get close to.” That one note contained everything: the most beautiful and ridiculous thing I ever heard. I think I wrote him a letter after that. We had done a few things over the years — a 1997 quartet record that never came out, and later some Go Home gigs where he replaced Ron. I could hear how Ellery and Rob Sudduth would fit together. They’re both strong and kinda ornery. I knew it wasn’t going to be like, “After you” — “No, after you.”

One more thing: It was only around the time we played some gigs in December that I made a connection to an unbelievably important record for me, Paul Motian’s The Story of Maryam. It has the same lineup but with a different bass instrument: two tenor saxophones sometimes playing at the same time, with guitar and drums. Maybe subconsciously I was moving toward completing a circle, returning to a record that was a model for how I wanted to play.

The pristine sound is made from little more than guitar, soft drums, bass and a prominent but unintrusive piano presence that backs the album’s most soulful moments, songs like “Holy Ghost, “Waiting” and “Just Make it Stop.” Sparhawk’s and Parker’s voices create some of the fullest sounds on the record, and the scope of their lyrics is wider than Low’s past few collections: In “Plastic Cup,” they imagine people in the future digging up artifacts from today; “Holy Ghost” is about having faith that a higher power will “keep me hangin’ on”; and “Mother” is about teaching reality to future generations.

eMusic’s Laura Leebove spoke with Sparhawk about Parker’s growth as a songwriter, using nonsensical names in songs, and Jeff Tweedy’s hands-off approach to producing.

You’re celebrating 20 years as a band this year. If you could go back to when you started and give yourself career advice, what would it be?

I don’t know. I think I’d be cautious about that because a lot of what helped develop us over the years, or maybe contributed to the fact that we’re still around, is not knowing that we can’t do that or it would be this hard. I think I look back sometimes at how frustrating and sort of demoralizing sometimes it is to try to write songs. Sometimes it’s kind of depressing, when you work for a while and don’t come up with anything. It can be frustrating. I think some of that’s gotten better over the years because I tell myself, ‘It’s OK, I’ve tried this before.’ So maybe a little bit of that. Some of that frustration, years ago might have actually made for better material and made me work so much harder.

Your kids [Hollis, 12, and Cyrus, 8] have had a pretty unique experience being born into the touring-band lifestyle — are they interested in what you and Mimi do for a living?

Yeah, more or less. They kinda grew up around it, came on tour with us, so they’re sort of used to it now. They come with us from time to time.

What do they listen to?

Hollis seems to like the Beatles and some of those kinds of things. And the boy likes pop radio, I’m afraid.

When you’re all able to tour together, what music can you all agree on?

They’re always pretty tolerant of whatever. Mimi usually puts up with a little bit of reggae from me and then after an hour gets tired and puts up stuff that she likes. We usually agree on most everything.

I think “Mother” is one of the prettiest songs on the new record. Is it autobiographical?

Yeah, more or less, inspired by [my mom].

There’s a line there about holding you to the fire; were your parents strict with you growing up?

Yeah, actually, my mom was pretty strict. A little bit of strict and it also kinda evokes showing a kid the truth, showing them the way as harsh as it is sometimes.

You’ve said that part of what keeps you making music is the thought of “Can we do this?” while you’re making a record — whether or not you’re able to pull something off. Where was that moment in recording The Invisible Way?

I guess there’s sort of the “throw caution to the wind” or “OK, let’s jump in” kind of moment. I guess we just visited the studio and [thought it was] pretty cool. I think when we first started doing our takes and started listening, we realized that we were on the right side of the fence that day and things were going better. Sometimes [it helps] just having the right person there to reassure you that you’re not completely in the dark. There’s a little bit of mystery, I guess, not knowing how it’s gonna sound when it comes out the other end. I think when I sort of realized that Jeff Tweedy might be an option, that was the perfect mystery. I don’t know what that’s gonna sound like, but I feel like I could trust that process enough to jump in.

What was it that made you finally commit to doing this record with him? You’ve known him for a while and the offer to record with him had been on the table.

Last year we stopped in to check out the studio, we were on our way through town. I guess it took actually checking the place out and then hearing some stuff they were working on with someone else at the time. It had a really good sound and [we got] a great vibe…that’s when it kind of dawned on me that that was the way to go.

Did anything surprise you about working with him?

Well, I think there’s a little part of me that felt, “OK, Jeff’s a songwriter, he’s really into tunes and I was curious as to whether he was gonna go a little more surgically in and go, “OK, let’s move this around, maybe change this song.” I was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t do that. Early on just said, “Well, you guys already have your songs, you know what you’re doing, it’s good, you already know how to make those decisions.” It’s more trying to make sure we get a good sound. I guess part of me deep down kinda knew that he would be cool and he wouldn’t do that, but it was a mystery at the time. After the first day I didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do.

You already had these songs written and demoed before going in, but even though Jeff was hands off with the actual songs, was there anything that happened in the studio that wasn’t planned ahead of time?

Not too much. I think we were trying to stay to a certain aesthetic, a little minimalism, but I don’t know, yeah, I mean, I was surprised that Jeff helped us stick to that more so than I thought, which was a nice surprise. He helped us when we were second-guessing that, that was really key [with him] keeping us on task and sticking to our own rules, so to speak.

There are a few spots on this record where there’s a lot of soul and some places musically that seem like there was some kind of gospel inspiration. I’m particularly thinking of “Just Make It Stop” and “Holy Ghost” and “Waiting.” Was that in your mind at all while you were working on those songs?

Well, yeah, those are things just in the songs. That kind of stuff is just the heart of the tune, or emotionally the weight of it. I don’t know if you want to call it the drama or whatever, but that’s pretty much inherent in the songs. That’s always been something that’s there from time to time with us. Different songs kind of enhance it more, for sure, but that’s the songs, we don’t have to overthink that.

What’s the story behind “Clarence White”?

Well, there’s someone who played guitar in the Byrds named Clarence White, and the song is not about that person. Both those names in that song are more meant to be random, and not necessarily a reference to him. Those were the first few words that came out…and sometimes the first few words are sort of nonsensical…and you try to go back and fix them and sometimes those initial phrases end up becoming vital so you have to leave them. We couldn’t think of a better one.

Mimi sings lead on more songs here than most of your previous albums. Did anything change in the writing process to create that?

Yeah, she wrote more. In the last couple years with the kids going to school she’s had a little more time to write, and we’ve been encouraging her a lot the last few years to write more. Maybe someday she’ll do the whole record, but it’s a pretty good start so far.

I imagine sometimes when you write a song it’s obvious to her what it’s about and vice versa, especially with C’mon where it seemed like a lot of the songs had a back and forth between you. To what extent do you actually share with each other where the lyrics are coming from?

Probably never. I don’t think we ever… we don’t really talk too much about what songs are about until people ask us, I guess. We don’t really feel like we have to explain what the song’s about to each other.

Because you assume that she knows what it’s about?

Yeah. Or she knows about it as much as anybody’s gonna know about it. One person’s interpretation is [as valid] as anybody else.

eMusic’s Laura Studarus caught up with Shapiro and Agebjörn, and the two joined her in a conversation about their new album Somewhere Else, the power of nostalgia, and the cinematic possibilities of their back catalog.

Being film fans, do you ever picture how your music might be used in movies?

Agebjörn: On “Sundown” on Somewhere Else, we tried to recreate the sound of a certain type of ’80s ballads, or maybe not exactly ballads, but some kind of slower 80s pop. With the saxophone solo at the end it sounds (especially on the vinyl version of the album) very much like something played in a cheap bar in the ’80s — for example, in the bars on the Viking Line ferries between Sweden and Finland. The lyrics are about having lost your love, so we imagine a scene in a movie taking place in the ’80s, where someone has just lost her/his love and is sitting in a bar, drinking in order to forget, while the live band is playing this song.

Shapiro: Our track “Casablanca Nights” [from Agebjörn's album with the same name] was originally inspired by the film Love Actually, and all the complicated love stories in there. The writing of the song started with the phrase “Since when did love get uncomplicated?” However, if we got to set one of our tracks to that movie, we would choose the last minutes of our first track, “I’ll Be By Your Side,” to the happy ending scene with people hugging each other.

Agebjörn: When we made “Swimming Through The Blue Lagoon” [from the album My Guilty Pleasure], we didn’t have the film The Blue Lagoon from 1980 in mind, but we had watched the film many years ago, so probably it was a subconscious influence. Our track would suit pretty well, we think, to the scenes where they are swimming in the lagoon, obviously.

With love as a running them throughout your music, do you consider yourselves to be romantics?

Shapiro: [Laughs.] Yes, I would really say so!

Agebjörn: Music is a good way to express that. Because I don’t think we are more romantic than everyday people in our ordinary, day-to-day actions. But inside, yeah.

What’s more fun for you, to create a tragic love song? Or one that’s a bit happier?

Shapiro: I think a tragic one is better. Or funnier, in a way. It feels more real, even though there are happy love stories also. But it feels more strong.

Agebjörn: Maybe you have a need to express it more.

Shapiro: Happy love, it feels like it should happen more with a different sound than [ours]. Happy love songs have to be good — at least if you’re going to bother to make a whole album of them.

Agebjörn: I think it can be some kind of therapy for yourself, to express melancholic feelings in the music.

Who brings most of these themes to the table?

Shapiro: I don’t really know who does the most. It feels like we both do. But I can’t really say. I think it’s quite equal.

Agebjörn: In the beginning it felt a bit more like my project than it does now. At least the first few songs.

Shapiro: Yes. I feel more a part of it now. Not that I didn’t have a chance to be more a part of it before, but it feels like I’m taking a bigger part in it.

Agebjörn: I don’t have to convince Sally as much as I did in the beginning. So that’s good.

Shapiro: No [laughs]. In the beginning it was more like my saying “yes” or “no” to the things that Johan wrote for me. But now I’m more in the process.

How important is it to you that your personality comes through in these songs?

Shapiro: It is important that it’s not a total other personality. There is more to both me and Johan’s personality than we express in the songs, but it’s important that it feels like us. Or at least one of us.

Agebjörn: I remember you weren’t too fond of “Space Woman From Mars.”

Shapiro: No. Exactly. Because that’s not something I can really identify with. But I can identify with most of the other songs. Therefore the lyrics are very important for me.

Do you see music as an escape from your day-to-day life? Or is it an expression of it?

Shapiro: A tough question!

Agebjörn: Maybe it’s an escape if you look at what you do. We both have other occupations.

Shapiro: But not in a feelings way. It makes feelings get stronger.

Agebjörn: You feel like you’re more of yourself. I didn’t realize when we first made Disco Romance, but when I thought about the songs, I was just thinking that, “OK, let’s do this the Italo disco way.” I didn’t realize until afterwards that there was a lot of my personality in it as well.

I think that that could be hard to escape, not putting your personality into a project, even when you’re working in a frame like Italo disco.

Shapiro: [Laughs.] Yeah. It would probably not be very good either. Maybe it depends on the artist.

Agebjörn: when I look back at the different types of music that I tried to create back in 2005 or 2006, the songs that were most successful were probably the songs where I expressed my personality. I also made French Filter House music, which was popular about 10 years ago. I tried to do some of that. When I listen to it today, it sounds pathetic, since I was just copying things. Where as Sally Shapiro and my own music, there’s more of myself in it.

Do you find that now you’re taking even more ownership of your music, Somewhere Else expresses who you are maybe more than Disco Romance did?

Shapiro: Maybe in some way, with some of the songs.

Agebjörn: On the other hand, “Find My Soul” from Disco Romance, it’s a song about having a boyfriend who doesn’t understand you, which was a theme in your life.

Shapiro: Yeah, yeah! That’s true. [Laughs.]

Is it easier for you to be vulnerable about things like a boyfriend that doesn’t understand you in song than, say, discussing them with a friend?

Shapiro: Absolutely. Yeah.

Agebjörn: That’s something we’ve talked about. Sally sometimes says if everyone knew her name and who she was, she wouldn’t be able to do this in the same intimate way.

Shapiro: Yeah. I don’t think so. I think that’s also important. You are more free in this way. Some of it can sound very intimate. And that’s a frightening feeling if you’re called out. But I think many people feel that but can’t express that, because it’s been expressed so many ways before. But doing it this way, it feels like you can do it, and not think about that all the time. In that way it’s better.

Was music a major part of both of your childhoods?

Agebjörn: Yes. I recorded stuff to tape when I was five or six years old. I still have some of those tapes. It’s fun to listen to them. I recorded myself singing and making sounds and things.

Shapiro: We both — like most people in Sweden, really — went to this music school in our spare time where we learned to play piano.

Agebjörn: My strongest musical memories are all from the time I was a teenager. It seems like that’s pretty common.

Shapiro: It’s also a period when you start to build up an identity. What kind of music you listen to becomes part of your identity.

Agebjörn: What’s funny with Sally Shapiro is that I didn’t listen to disco so much when I was in my late teenage years. I listened to disco when I was 12. Electronica was part of my later teenage period. Then I returned to my love from childhood.

It’s amazing how we do return to things we loved as children.

Shapiro: Yeah. It’s hard to say if we really do still like them.

Agebjörn: We are very nostalgic people, both me and Sally.

Is there a song or a band that reminds you of the first time you fell in love?

Agebjörn: I remember I was listening to an album by Erasure when I was in a period of unhappy love when I was 17 years old. It was the album I Say I Say I Say that contains the song “Always” [sings], “Always, always, do do do.”

In the past, your music has been called a “guilty pleasure.” What do you think would be the greatest compliment that someone could say about your music?

Agebjörn: Sometimes we get emails from people who tell us stories, personal stories about our music and how it has affected them. That’s the best thing that can happen in terms of feedback. Someone told us our music helped them start a relationship — that’s really fantastic.

Shapiro: It is fun when people feel that they can identify, that it expresses their feelings. I like that.

Or maybe not: From the opening moments of Phosphorescent’s new Muchacho, it becomes clear that Houck is as unalterably weird as ever. Muchacho is a fusion of everything Phosphorescent has been over the course of the last several unpredictable years: It is an ethereal meditation on fate and the limits of free will delivered by a sadly broken soul. It is a record full of beautiful, inscrutably poetic language — koans, charms, blades, invocations. And all those horn charts and pedal steel guitars are still here, but they’ve been put to a larger task than ever before: Houck is contemplating his place in the universe, and ours.

At a bar in Greenpoint, over afternoon beers and shots of Jack, Houck talked with eMusic’s Jayson Greene about the time he almost killed Phosphorescent, the damage inflicted by life on the road, and the mind-clearing trip that brought Muchacho into the world.

This album is framed by two pieces called “Sun Arise.” On Pride, you had a song called “Be Dark Night.” Were you trying to draw a specific contrast there?

I would like to lay claim to that much control over what I was doing. The “Sun Arise” thing was a very conscious decision, but not in reference to other work. I knew I had this piece, which is that synthesizer piece you hear in the opening, and I thought I thought it was going to be a recurring theme that goes in and out of the record. When I realized it was going to bookend the record, it seemed like the logical thing would be to have a sunrise and a sunset. But then I realized I didn’t want a sunset! Because it’s a relatively heavy record, and I think it needed some focusing on the brighter aspects of things, the ascension, as opposed to the downward spiral.

Your music always seems pretty heavy to me — what about this record feels particularly so to you?

There are parts here where feel revealed. I call this thing I do Phosphorescent as opposed to just Matthew Houck to have a degree of separation there, and keeping that is still pretty important to me. There’s a lot of fiction blended in with truths, but to me, I can hear some stuff on here that is heavy to me on a personal level. I don’t know if other people can pick up on that or if that’s just in my head. Which parts those are I think is for you, the reader, to decide.

What was the first thing you wrote for this album?

“Muchacho’s Tune.” And that one just kinda just came. We had gotten off the road after the last record, Here’s To Taking It Easy, and had been on the road really hard — both in length of time and the way we were traveling were pretty brutal. I came back really fried. There’s way worse ways of making a living, obviously, so you don’t want to bitch, but honestly it can be a very damaging way of life.

During that time, I was making these little ambient sound pieces and playing around with them, and was thinking about maybe not making another Phosphorescent record. Maybe I’d call my next thing something else. At the very beginning, I had Brian Eno’s first ambient record, Another Green World, and his last one that was a little more songwriter — Before And After Science — in my head. I went deep into those, where I wasn’t really listening to much of anything. There was about a year there where I was figuring out if I was going to keep doing Phosphorescent or not.

What helped change your mind?

I ended up going down to Mexico. I sort of checked out of my life for awhile — well, for a week — and went down there and the rest of the little fragments started to assemble themselves into something that I would consider to be a Phosphorescent record. It was a real spur-of-the-moment thing; I had some points on a credit card and jumped on a flight early one morning. I was in this place called Tulum. It’s this place that’s kind of off the grid — like, it’s literally off the electric or water grid. They run generators for water and power for a few hours during the day and then at some point everything shuts down. They have these little huts, like haciendas that you can just rent. People who are checked out of society a little bit, I think, tend to gravitate there, and there’s definitely a contingent of people who exist on that frequency at all times, and they live there year-round. Other people like me just stay for a while.

My friend had gotten a van to tour through mainland Mexico just for kicks, so I went down there to rendezvous with them for a night, but for the rest of the time I was completely alone. I’m sure there were people gathering together at night over the fire or something like that, but I was really on my own tip. I did a lot of walking, and swimming, and then a few hours every day of getting the guitar out and trying to do something concrete. I didn’t talk to many other people much. I think it gave me a chance to just write, just to focus, which I don’t always do. I’ve never really had a great work ethic about writing, as far as putting my ass in the chair and writing goes. It goes in spurts.

For that reason, I kind of like deadlines, how they force things into being. Like with the country records in the ’60s and ’70s — the reason they were so prolific was that their record company was bearing down on them, like, “You’ve gotta do this,” cracking the whip. I kind of like that notion that you can be pushed to do something that you wouldn’t ordinarily do if you were just treating it as your sort of whimsy.

This album sounds quite a bit unlike your last two records…

For me, Here’s To Taking It Easy and To Willie were these little detours, but I think for many people, it was the first thing they heard, so they assume this is what Phosphorescent sounds like, and this is somehow a departure. I really loved making those records, but for me, those were the departures and this is kind of the core. I had put that band together to tour for To Willie, and just realized how goddamned good they were. I was like, “I really just need to try to make a record while all these people are in one place.” It was my only time making a record for a band, instead of making a record and then finding the band for it.

I made a concerted effort to have the pedal steel not be a signifier for “country.” It’s a beautiful instrument, but I think by and large, the first time you hear pedal steel come in on a song, people are like, “Ah, country.” The pedal steel baffles me, honestly. I look at people who play it the way I look at people who are heart surgeons.

On that song, “Muchacho’s Tune,” you wrote “Fix myself up/ come and be with you,” which feels like an interesting sentiment: It’s oddly hopeful, even as it acknowledges that the narrator is in a bad place. Was that a personal sentiment for you?

If you’re asking me the specific “you” that I would have been writing that for, I don’t think I’d be able to give you one. To me, that song is about something higher than that; it’s aiming for a real redemption of sorts, I think. I think that’s what music does, or hopefully that’s what it does. And the theme for that song, and for this whole record is one of redemption.

eMusic’s Nick Murray spoke with Monroe about her shelved debut, calling together Miranda Lambert and Angeleena Presley to form the Annies, and what the sound of the album reveals about her Tennessee roots.

Can you tell me a little bit about your first album, Satisfied? What was the original plan for that, and what ended up happening?

I was 17 when I made it. I was on Sony and I was in the middle of a radio tour, and I got a call that the labels [Sony and Columbia] had merged, and when companies merge everything goes awry. People get fired, you know, everything just kind of goes crazy. Long story short, it just didn’t get released until after I was already off Sony. They just put it up on iTunes.

How was it different making an album when you were that young, as opposed to making an album at your current age?

Well you know, it was my first time in a big studio and getting to see how it was done. But my passion for it hasn’t changed, this time I just kind of knew. I didn’t ask so many questions — where do I go, what do I sing now? I had a little bit of experience this time, but they both were very special in different ways.

Between those albums, how did you meet Angeleena and Miranda, and when did you decide to record together?

I met Miranda right after I made Satisfied. We were both on Sony. She sent me a text saying that she heard that record and that we need to write, we need to get together. Two weeks later I was at her farm in Texas, and we’ve been really close ever since. And then Angeleena I met a few years after Satisfied. Our publisher set us up to write. So we were friends separately and then one night I said, hey I think we all should know each other together.

What is like when the three of you are collaborating together?

It’s amazing. It’s magical every time we’re around each other. I hope it never stops.

I read that you guys agree on something like 98 percent of the decisions.

We really do, thank god. We’re three very opinionated women.

That makes me curious what the other two percent are.

Well, I don’t know. It depends on the day and the mood. It’s never consistent, and we get it figured out pretty quick.

Moving from one partnership to another, how did you come to work with Vince Gill on your new album?

I knew Vince when I first moved here. He had heard some of my demos and we had written a couple of songs, some that were on his last record. Obviously, he’s been a hero of mine since I was born, so when it came around that we were gonna make another record I said, “I want Vince.” Everything just made sense about it — his country roots, he gets me, he gets my voice, he gets my music. So thank god he said yes.

What was it like working with him in the studio?

He’s just so easy and kind, and when he wants something he knows how to get it. We recorded it at his house — he has a studio at his house — and he and I would just play the musicians the songs were about to cut, just him playing guitar and me singing. They would sit around in a circle, then we’d go into the vocal both and we’d cut them live.

You open the record with a line about being 13 when your dad died. When did you realize that’s how you wanted to start it off?

It’s the truth, and that’s when I started writing. That’s the beginning of my long story and all the stories on the album. I just wanted to get that in there first and say, “All right, here’s your journey.”

Can you talk a little about the sound of the record? Aside from maybe Kellie Pickler’s last album, there isn’t much on country radio that sounds similar.

I’m from East Tennessee, and that type of music is just in my soul. So I didn’t really try to overthink it, like, “Well, are there singles on here?” I didn’t overthink it at all, I just said, “Country music runs through my veins, so it makes sense that I make a record of country songs I’ve written and just do it.” That’s what I want to get heard.

Right. So then the record ends with another collaboration, the very funny “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter).” How did you and Blake connect for that one?

Blake and I are buddies. We do that back-and-forth to each other all the time — we have that very jokey, back-and-forth relationships and always have. And I think he’s one of the best country music singers ever. So Vince and I were writing that song, and it was very clear that we both wanted him, and Blake’s been very good to me, so he said of course.

How excited are you for the album to finally come out?

Oh my god, I’m so excited. I held a physical copy yesterday for the first time. And I just held it and stared at. Like, it really is happening.

You may think you know all there is to know about Robyn Hitchcock, but Victoria Segal uncovered 10 little-known facts about the iconic singer-songwriter.

He is available for weddings.

“I’m a minister of the Universal Life Church of Arizona: I can marry people in the States, although I’m not sure I can do it in Britain. I married Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and his wife [artist] Carson Ellis five years ago. I haven’t done a marriage recently, though.”

He likes a birthday party.

“There’s nothing more significant in your life than your birth. I’ve signed on for the long haul, like John Lee Hooker or Bob Dylan or Martin Carthy. You no longer have to knock off when you hit 30. As far as I’m concerned, the songs aren’t necessarily better now, any more than they were at 40 or 50, they’re just expressing different things and reacting to different things as your metabolism changes. But I’m really happy to put flags in the map of my life and anyone who is interested can come along and celebrate with me.”
　
He was born with trousers on.

This is a line from my song ‘Birds In Perspex’ (1991). It’s a very British angle. You are born already embarrassed, concealed, shamed by emotions and your physical existence. I came from a very squeamish kind of middle-class background — we were all born with trousers on. But I don’t necessarily think the Brits have a monopoly on it — I think it can be universal.”

He played at Yoko Ono’s 80th birthday show.

“It was a complete accident. I was in Berlin, visiting my daughter. I knew Michael Stipe was also there, and we were going to meet up. We attempted to get tickets to Yoko Ono’s show, but it didn’t happen so we went to get coffee and then Michael rang up and said, ‘You’ve got tickets.’ So we bolted down some prawns, hopped on the U-Bahn, then Michael texted and said, ‘You’ve got front-row seats.’ We squeezed past everyone and sat down. And then Yoko and Sean appeared. I’d never seen either of them before. Legend central, really. They did an amazing show. Sean’s a great bandleader, I’ve never seen a mother-son thing like it — I tried to imagine my mother and me doing a similar thing and I couldn’t at all.

Then Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We’re on in the encores.’ I didn’t even have a shirt on — I was wearing a V-necked sweater, and was basically dressed for coffee on a chilly Berlin night. Thank God I was wearing trousers! So these encores came and we were duly hauled up to sing ‘Give Peace A Chance.’ Then they gave us some birthday cake.”
　
He’s not prone to Soft Boys nostalgia.

“The Soft Boys didn’t have any fun. I hadn’t really learned how to write songs — I’d bring in all these lines and the other guys would play them back like a very mild version of Captain Beefheart. Then we’d try to play in bars but often I’d have drunk too much to be able to play — I hadn’t worked out the alcohol-to-performance ratio at that point. What we left behind was better than how it was at the time. I like to meet up with Morris [Windsor, drums] and Kimberley [Rew, guitar] and talk about who’s alive and who’s dead , but it’s not something I pine for at all.”

The Soft Boys played at The Mudd Club and Danceteria, bringing neurotic British rock to the epicentre of NYC grooviness.

“We were very excited to be in America. Lenny Kaye always says how he saw us at the Mudd Club. It had a garage door — you’d stand on stage and this garage door would just roll up and reveal you. I don’t know if anyone ever went on stage naked to play with that. It wouldn’t have happened with us — we all had our trousers on.”

Arthur Lee wanted to kill him.

“I’d written this song, ‘The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee’ [on 1993's Respect]. Arthur hadn’t taken this very well and had issued various threats to kill me in interviews after which he was put away for waving a gun in a supermarket. I was then invited to be a guest on stage when they did Forever Changes [at London's Royal Festival Hall, 2003]. It was very odd. Arthur invited me up on stage a song early so I had to play something I’d never played before, introduced me as ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ and mimed shooting me with a gun. After that, he was very friendly.”

He suspects cats may one day rule the Earth.

“The dinosaurs ruled for something like 100 million years and we’ve been here 30,000 years. I don’t know if we’re going to outdo the run of the dinosaurs. Will a feline dynasty in 5 million years be looking back at us, the super-cyber cats who survived the next apocalypse? Have you seen those Bengal cats with silver skins? I can imagine them walking around museums that have our iPhones in, looking in wonder.”
　　
He doesn’t like “schlepping electric guitars around.”

“I prefer playing acoustic. Electricity is a barrier. Jonathan Richman said the fewer plugs and wires between you and the audience the closer you can be. I’m not really drawn to widescreen gestures — I don’t make widescreen records either which may be the limit of my appeal. I’m not like a hoarding or a poster, I’m more like something in an antique shop next to the stuffed owl.”

He isn’t giving in to despair.

“My elegiac records were when I was much younger. Things like I Often Dream Of Trains, I wrote that sort of stuff in my 30s. Love From London is celebration — we may be having a party on the Titanic but it’s still a party. Time is finite for all of us, whether one of us goes or everybody goes, each of us only dies once. Look on the label, it never said we were going to last too long.”

What exactly makes the Rockies so beautiful, though, is hard to say. The source of Powers’s muse isn’t always apparent even to him, but on Wondrous Bughouse he has a way of channeling it into expansive, magnificently warped dream-pop that can be breathtaking. Chatting on Kurt Cobain’s birthday from Boise, where he’s relaxing before a tour that will take him as far a Brooklyn arena gig opening for the National, Powers discusses the subconscious, the ineffable and, inevitably, Nirvana.

How was it different writing this album knowing people would actually hear it?

As soon as The Year of Hibernation was done and it started getting a little bit of attention, it kind of psyched me out. But as time went on, I just went back to the mentality that I’ve always had ever since I started doing music, just doing it for myself. Once I got back into that mindset it was easy to zone out and create whatever I want to create. As long as I do that then I’m happy.

On the last album, you compared some of the songs to entries in a journal, but on Wondrous Bughouse the song titles have less obvious connection to everyday life. What were some of the inspirations this time around?

Especially lyrically, this record is a lot more across-the-board. It’s mainly idea-based. I oftentimes write in a stream-of-consciousness type of way to start off songs. So a lot of stuff was just coming out of my system. It would be common themes I didn’t know I was dwelling on that much and I’d just go back and shape them.

Mortality seems like one of these themes. But it goes from “you’ll never die” to “here’s to death, drink up.” Is there a thread running through?

It’s always the type of thing where certain songs just play out different ideas. You mentioned some lyrics from “Raspberry Cane.” That’s kind of about, I got obsessed with this idea of just picturing what it would be like to stumble on this being that was by water, and all these crowds, they want this thing to come back to life, but they don’t always know what it is. And it could be something that’s dangerous, it could be something that’s very kind, but just the idea of something dying all the sudden makes it bad. Like, “Oh, this thing shouldn’t have died.” But maybe it should have died, you know? Sometimes death — I don’t know how to phrase it.

Children come up at least a couple of times: “Couldn’t have babies” on “Attic Doctor,” and then on “Daisyphobia,” there’s something about “and children are…”

That’s what I was saying as far as the subconscious stuff. A lot of it I was just writing. With this record I was trying to approach it in a way that’s very free and not agenda-driven, not trying to be like, “OK, here’s an idea that I’m going to write a song about.” It was more like, “OK, let me start writing and see what’s inside of me that wants to come out.”

That’s something Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox has talked about doing. I know you’ve mentioned Deerhunter before. Has that been kind of an inspiration, or what were some of the inspirations musically for the album?

One of my biggest inspirations musically for this record was the band This Heat. Just how at times it’s very, very minimal — it’ll be certain things that just keep going and it’s hypnotizing — and then at times it would be really chaotic. And that sense of freedom in music to where it’s really just letting your — back to subconscious — letting your subconscious guide what you’re doing. Letting the song take you where it wants.

I’ve always been a fan of A.R. Kane and a lot of early, early dream-pop stuff. Just that similar mindset of taking you to a different place. You turn on a record and you’re instantly someplace that’s unfamiliar and at the same time there’s a certain sense of familiarity to it.

The album cover last time came out of a vacation with your family to Hawaii. This time it’s art by a teenage drug-abuse patient in West Germany in the ’70s named Marcia Blaessle. What about the art connected with what you were feeling with the record?

I can’t put my finger on it. I saw it as I was closing the writing process, and I stumbled on this stuff, and there was something about it that really connected to what I was trying to say. I don’t even know what it was. There was just this sort of mental connection where it just felt right. I almost got into panic mode because I tried to track her down, track down the publishing rights, all that kind of stuff. And for a while there was nothing. The publishing company that released the book way back in the day folded, and they passed on the rights to another company. And it got to the point where I was like, “This needs to be the art,” because it was so connected with what I was trying to say. But I don’t know exactly what it is. It kind of just was, you know?

You’re hitting on a theme that I’ve seen in your interviews, that I love and think is interesting to talk about, because it makes sense with your music: You’ve said before maybe you can’t explain too much about the songs. But can you explain a little bit about that, about why sometimes it’s hard for you to put in words too much about your songs, or about the connection between the art and your songs?

I think it’s just because music for me is almost like this bubble that I live in. When I’m writing, I’ll just close myself off. It’s almost like transportive, like taking you to that other place. And when you come back, like say I’m done writing a song and I come back to reality or whatever you want to call it, it’s just hard to explain your visit to that other place when you’re writing it. Do you know what I mean? It really does suck though from my vantage point because then you have people asking questions about your mindset. It just kind of is.

Today’s Kurt Cobain’s birthday. What did he mean to you, if anything?

On Netflix, I found the documentary on the making of Nevermind. I happened to just watch that a couple of days ago. And I was just so, so fascinated with it, because I’ve always loved Nirvana. People like Kurt have left such an impact. It’s funny because, back to the idea of mortality and stuff: Certain people die at a younger age, and for a lot of people it’s really sad, but at the same time he lived so much more than most people do if they grow to be 85 years old. He experienced so much stuff. It’s so beautiful if someone can leave that kind of footprint at such a young age.

Kid Face is arguably Crain’s most sophisticated album to date, and certainly her most revealing. Featuring spare arrangements that highlight her voice and words, it’s a collection of conversations with herself, songs full of accusations and ruminations on past transgressions and present regrets. Her lyrics are evocative yet evasive, often obscuring as much as they reveal; her vocals bend words into unexpected shapes and sounds, as though each syllable holds endless musical possibilities. In some respect, perhaps her breakneck recording process allows Crain to get her ideas and emotions down on tape while they’re at their rawest and their most exposed.

As she prepares to hit the road to tour behind Kid Face, Crain spoke with eMusic’s Stephen Deusner about being mistaken for a teenager, working with Vanderslice, talking to herself, and writing a song about burying something mysterious behind the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road.

Is there a story behind the album title? Why did that phrase resonate with you?

On a frequent basis most people think I am a teenager, probably because I’m short and I’ve got a round face and I’m generally not that put-together in my appearance. So I get this sneak peek into how people would treat me when they think I’m 17 or 18, and whenever they do find out how old I am, they treat me in a different way. It’s not that they’re treating me bad, but there’s a distinct difference in the way people talk to me before they know how old I am. It’s given me a very interesting second look into people, which is interesting for a songwriter who observes society and writes about it. I thought it was a really good descriptive moniker for myself. I did not give it to myself. My bass player Penny [Hill] and I were joking around one day and giving each other rapper names, and that was what she bestowed upon me. I just got attached to it. As for the song “Kid Face,” it was the first song that I started for the album, but it actually took me the longest. It took me until I was completely done with the whole album to finish the song. I thought it was a good beginning and end point to everything that I had written in between.

What made that song so difficult to write?

Usually I have a very focused subject for a song, but “Kid Face” was all over the place. I had been thinking about a trip I had taken to Mexico a couple of years ago, and I was constantly noticing the differences between the country I was in and the country I was from. At the same time, I was thinking about these differences between the age I look, the age I am and the age I feel. It was a whole lot of thoughts that didn’t have a whole lot to do with each other. I took me a long time to hammer out all those ideas into something that would actually make sense for someone to listen to. It had to seem like it was a cohesive thought process even though there were a lot of thoughts going on.

Compared to your last album, You (Understood), which you’ve described as being about very specific moments with very specific people, Kid Face sounds like it’s more about you.

This is the first album that I’ve written that is completely autobiographical. There’s no fiction dust sprinkled on any of the songs, and that’s something that has taken me a while to get to. Before I was writing songs, I was a fiction writer. I was writing short stories and things like that. I’ve always erred on the side of fiction, because I was a very fanciful kid. I was not super happy with how normal my life was. I always used fiction to cover that up. It’s just taken me getting older and becoming more comfortable with myself to get to the point where I feel like my own life is worth attaching poetics to and turning into songs. I don’t think I wasn’t really doing it on purpose, but the first couple of songs I wrote for the album were autobiographical and very personal, and I got really excited about them, because I hadn’t really been able to access that. It was exciting, like I had entered a new area as a songwriter. That became my focus for the album — staying in that area and making something that would be completely autobiographical.

Several of these new songs sound like conversations with yourself, almost like you’re addressing them to some future version of you.

You’re right. I’m one of those people who talks to myself a lot, to the point of being the crazy person on the bench talking to themselves. That is something that has developed over the past couple of years. I think it might have a lot to do with traveling alone more than I ever have. I used to always travel with a band, but I’ve been doing a lot more solo stuff and traveling alone, so you get to be a little in your own headspace. And you do end up talking to yourself a lot and working things out in your head — figuring out what you believe about certain things and hammering out different ideas. So yeah, I think the shape the songs ended up taking was these solitary conversations with myself. They say you don’t really know what you believe until you’ve said it out loud, and you don’t really know how you feel about what you believe until you’ve said it out loud. I always feel like if you say it out loud, it makes it more comprehensible. So I end up doing that a lot.

Songs like “Ax” and “Taught to Lie” almost sound like you’re trying to persuade yourself of something, or maybe hold yourself accountable.

When you’re traveling to a different town every day for a number of years, when you’re around the same people all the time, you don’t have the basic accountability or the rules that you abide by with the rest of the world. You can choose to take that and use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, like I did for a while. I did a real disservice to the people around me. I got away with a lot of things, and acted in ways that I’m not proud of. So after a while, you have to create some moral accountability for yourself. You have to create some rules of integrity. If nobody else is around to do it for you — if you don’t have a community to do that — you have to become that community for yourself. And I feel like that’s what “Taught to Lie” is about. It’s about me wanting to be that accountability for myself through singing that song. “Ax” is in that vein as well. It’s really just trying to find out my own way to become a decent human being.

Does that make performing these new songs more intense or emotional for you?

I can’t speak too much to that because I haven’t performed a lot of them too much yet. But there are songs that I have written in the past that have been very personal — there was a song off my album Songs in the Night called “The Dam Song” — that I can sing night after night for years, and it’s still a very affecting experience, just like the first time. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that with a lot of these songs, I think I’m going to be realizing new things every time I sing them. The meanings are going to change. It’ll be like looking back on an old diary.

Did that change the way you recorded these songs?

I think I was pretty comfortable with these songs. I didn’t feel like I had to cover anything up or everything had to sound perfect or there had to be a cool element to everything. So that helped. Whenever you can get yourself out of that mindset and just focus on making a good record, it creates a mood that I can’t quite explain. Sometimes you can hear the tensions and attitudes on a record, but everything was easygoing and comfortable during the recording process. I think the mood of the album picks up on that.

Did John Vanderslice help set that tone in the studio? How did you end up working with him?

I had sent him a couple of demos and asked him to help with a 7-inch single I did last year. I wanted to record at Chinese Telephone. We really clicked, and at one point I just said, “You’re producing my next record.” He’s a musician in his own right, and I think that’s what makes him such a good producer. He knows how protective and selfish musicians can be with their work, such that by the time you get into the studio and are ready to record a song, you’ve spent so much time with it and you think you know exactly how you want it to sound. John has a good way of working you out of that headspace without making you feel like you’re compromising your vision. He’s really good at making you focus on the album as a whole and not make each song sound so labored over. Because of that, this album has ended up sounding…it’s a very easy album. We recorded it in a week, and I feel like it’s a very natural and easy-sounding album.

That sound seems to reinforce one of the album’s major themes: this compulsion to travel, to always be on the move. It’s most obvious on “Somewhere All the Time,” but seems to inform every song.

I’m asked a lot if traveling so much and being away from home is hard, and I think for many musicians it is. A lot of bands love to write and record, and traveling is the part they have to accept as part of the whole thing. They have to tour. For me, it’s not like that. I’m obsessed with moving around and traveling. It’s just as much an important to me as writing and recording. I’m not sure why that is. It’s just my element. I do think it’s helped me to appreciate where I am from a little more. It gives me a better bird’s-eye view of what’s going on here. I can write my state and my people a little better when I do get back here, because I’ve been so removed from it for a while. It’s like an anthropologist’s point of view. It’s a lot easier to write about things that you aren’t in the middle of all the time. It’s easier to see patterns of human interaction when you are looking at it from the outside.

There’s one place in particular that plays a crucial role on the album — the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road. Did you really bury something there, as you describe on “Taught to Lie”?

Ha. There used to be a box, but I have since moved it. The point of it being there was for someone to find it, and then I didn’t want them to find it anymore. So I moved it.

I imagine there will be some fans digging around that area trying to find it.

Anderson Road is a long-ass road, so it would take anybody a long time to figure out where I was talking about.

As the group was preparing for an in-store at a London record shop, eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes talked with drummer Grant Hutchison about scaling up, staying grounded and learning from your mistakes.

Reading a few interviews with you guys in advance of this record, it seems like every single one of them opens with someone asking you about signing to a major label. Why do you think that idea continues to be such a big deal to people?

Well, I think, we reached a certain level on an independent — we grew up a fanbase ourselves, with help from the label. And I think [as a result] a lot of people feel like we’re they’re secret, and that they don’t really want to share us with the masses — which I guess a lot of people were afraid of happening. So signing to a major, I guess, has been a talking point for that reason. I mean, we felt that Atlantic were the right choice, we felt that their ethos is quite indie for a major label, but at the same time, you’re always kind of waiting for a fight, almost. We were expecting them to swoop in at any point and say, “Where are the singles?” or “We need more hits.” But that moment never came. I mean, we were definitely ready for it — and maybe even tried to pick a fight without them even wanting it.

[Laughs] How did you do that?

Well, it’s been quite a long process from the last record and we, at certain points, got a little bit worried that they were never going to release the album. But really, all they were doing was giving us the time to write what they wanted to be the best Frightened Rabbit record to date. But there were occasions where we did get a bit frustrated and a bit concerned that it was taking too long, and that maybe that was all some sort of plan. But as it turned out they, more than anyone, recognized what we’d done and the fanbase that we’d built up, and they were more aware than anyone of [the danger of] ruining that. They don’t want to be blamed by all of our fans for ruining the band.

The fact that you are on a major, and now potentially have a platform to reach a much larger audience — how did that impact the way you approached this record?

Actually, [the way we approached this] had a lot to do with the last record more than anything, and how that came out — the process of making that record and the outcome not being what we wanted. We looked back at ourselves and what we’d done in the past and thought about how we could improve on that, rather than thinking, “Well, now we’re on a major label, things are gonna have to be different.” We wrote the songs together as a group this time, rather than Scott coming to us with fully-formed songs and saying, “This is it, these are the parts.” That, from the outset, made a big difference.

I want to back up for a second — you said the last record [The Winter of Mixed Drinks] didn’t come out the way you had intended. What were some ways you thought it fell short?

It’s kind of weird, because I feel like we were trying to achieve a major label sound on an indie label — which we now realize was not the right thing to do. We realized with the recording of this record, which is on a major label, that you don’t need to push yourself to achieve that. You don’t have to force it or write in a style you feel is more “major label” or more “mainstream.” It’s really just, this time, we just wrote the record. We wrote the songs we wanted to write. With Winter of Mixed Drinks, we tried to make it sound big, and the way we tried to make it sound big was by adding layer upon layer of guitars and keyboard, because we thought that would give it more strength. We’ve come to realize that there really is no quick fix or easy way to do that — it has to start with the songs.

That’s really tough to do, though. Bands tend to get praised for writing these big, ornate, anthemic songs, but it’s always seemed harder, to me, to exercise restraint and to know how to scale back.

That’s exactly it. We didn’t have that when we recorded the last one. We didn’t work with a producer until we got to the mixing stage, so there wasn’t anyone controlling what we were doing. It was basically just kids in a sweet shop: “Let’s add this and add this and add this!” [Laughs.] And it is more of an art form to know when not to put something in. With the last record [producer] Peter Katis surmised that at the mixing stage. That’s one of his great talents — knowing when to pull back. But I think by the time it got to the mixing stage, it was a little too late. So this time around, from the very beginning, that mindset was there, and Leo Abrahams, who produced it, that’s something he’s very good at as well. He knows how to make the more subtle changes that have a greater impact.

You mentioned earlier that this record was more collaborative than your past records. What were some songs that changed the most as a result of you guys working on them together?

Well, we went away two or three times to write. We went to a couple of different houses just to get away and spend time together. A few days ago, we went back and listened to some early versions of the song “Nitrous Gas,” which started out with this weird Western sort of thing to it. I have no idea where that came from. That one really didn’t have a structure — there was no direction, really. But when we came back to it and stripped it way back, that’s when we realized, “Wow, there’s a beautiful song in here that doesn’t actually need a lot added to it.” We re-did “Woodpile” four or five times from the beginning to the end. “Woodpile,” we actually went a bit too far with trying to make it sparse. When we presented that to the label, they said, “Well, you actually might have taken too much away. You can put a few of those guitars back on.” Because it was collaborative, it took us a while to figure out where we all sat in the writing process. Scott was unsure as to how much he did want to hand over responsibilities. I personally thought, “In theory, it’s nice of Scott to say this, but when it comes to actually doing it, whether or not he’ll actually let go remains to be seen.” But he did, and it was a really great experience for all of us.

You talk about redoing “The Woodpile” four or five times. Is there a point, after you’ve reworked a song so many times, that you can’t even see straight anymore and you begin to lose perspective on it altogether?

The last recording we did of “Woodpile,” we said, “This is the last one. If you don’t like this one, that’s it!” You get to that stage and it gets to be like flogging a dead horse. We knew the right version wasn’t far away — and that’s the point where it almost becomes more frustrating. If you know something’s completely wrong, you can scrap a lot of it. This, though, every time we did another version we were like, “We’re getting closer, but I don’t know what it is that’s going to make this song finally right.”

Did the collaborative process extend to the lyrics, too?

No, we stayed away from the lyrics [laughs]. I mean, we weren’t looking to completely change direction. We weren’t looking to change the sound or the lyrical content, and I think it’s important that there’ll always will be that thread, that spine of it, lyrically, that belongs to Scott, because his lyrics are unlike anyone else’s, and it’s something that people, in the past, have really made a huge difference between us being a band they liked and us being their favorite band. So for us to come in and start trying to write lyrics, it wouldn’t add anything. If anything, it would take away. I think with the last record, Scott masked his lyrics a little bit too much to avoid directly referencing points in his life that might upset people that were involved. The lyrics last time were a bit clumsier, if you like. This time, he made a conscious decision to go back to the kind of honesty that he wrote on Midnight Organ Fight, which I think is a brave decision, but a necessary one, because the lyrics are a lot of the reason that people fell in love with the band. The name of the album alone, Pedestrian Verse, Scott had that written on his notepad from the very beginning, and he saw that as a sort of challenge, almost, to avoid writing lyrics that anyone listening could describe as “pedestrian.” In my opinion, it’s the strongest lyrics that he’s done to date.

One last thing I wanted to ask you: I know you guys spend a lot of time on the road. What are some things you do to help you maintain your sanity?

It’s funny, we’re about to embark tomorrow on tour, actually. I think it’s important to keep in touch with people back home so you’re not completely stranded. Because you are in a bit of a bubble and you’re not really aware of what’s happening in the real world. Phone Mom, I think, is probably the best idea. Mom will always bring you back to reality.