eMusic’s Tobi Vail caught up with Maricich over the phone to discuss the New York City art mafia, hugging the audience and squeezing her heart into a meat grinder.

What has changed for The Blow since you put out Paper Television in 2006?

[In 2006] I lived in Portland and worked with Jona Bechtolt [of Yacht] and then I moved [to NYC] with Melissa Dyne. Working with Melissa is super different because we’re girlfriends — also because we’re girls, and girls communicate differently on creative projects. We talk about everything. My experience with boys is like, “I’m just gonna do it and it’ll be cool.” At least with us, we like exploring, philosophically and theoretically, all the options of how things could be —we’re as interested in the process as we are in the outcome. [Melissa] hasn’t done albums before. She’s a sound artist and works with physics and sound waves in her installation work, and she used to play cello. We treat it as a total experiment, and sometimes we make one version of a song and go, “Huh, what if we try it completely New Wave this time?” and redo it. So it’s a process of building models. Sometimes we build one model and then we look at it and say, “Let’s completely renovate it and try it in a different way,” as opposed to being like, “OK, we’re gonna make an album and we’re gonna go about it the most direct and businesslike manner.” Our endurance for working with the process and playing around with it is vast.

Can you talk about the technical process of arranging the songs electronically?

We didn’t feel committed to a particular identity as music makers. IYou’re starting with the void. We both really tripped out on that, the fact that you can put any sound from any source anywhere. We knew we didn’t want to take the sounds out of a computer program, so we sampled different live instruments and perfected the samples so they sounded really clean. We would use generic computer sounds to make a beat and then find sounds to replace so that it [sounded] three-dimensional and rich. We inherited a couple of really weird synthesizers and Melissa just played around with them and tried to find the weirdest things she could.

How has your approach to performance changed over the years?

Music audiences can be so unruly, like a mob. We are learning how to sculpt the mob — make connections and take [the audience] to interesting places. During the live show, [Melissa] performs on a riser that’s at the back of the room in front of the sound engineer and I perform on the main stage and we have the crowd in between us. On my stage, there’s generally nothing besides myself and maybe some lights. The live show is us just hugging the audience in between us. We use that as a platform to see what cool stuff we can make happen. Melissa has a really strong role, but doesn’t want to be the one everyone is looking at all the time. We’re both working the room. She is making the room super high-fidelity intimate; she sets it up so it sounds really good. Little modules of sound are penetrating as deep into people’s ears as they can and opening people up a lot — and then she’s playing the electronic instruments — like manipulating samples and fucking with delays.

How would you describe your music to your cool aunt?

I come from a history of being super influenced by Kimya Dawson, but over the years, and in the process of making this record, we’ve both leaned more toward the experimentation of the ’70s — Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Brian Eno are big influences on this album. Also Bjork — she kind of led the way for talking about emotions in abstract and really intimate ways in her lyrics, not even rhyming sometimes, just straight-up describing. But the impetus from where I started from was definitely Kimya Dawson — the idea that you just pick up your guitar and you don’t have any resources and you don’t need any because your emotional honesty is enough to form a bond with the listener. She’s a really awesome songwriter, she can play guitar and she’s really perceptive.

But the swashbuckling adventure story of what it was like for us to make this record is that we basically just decided to squeeze our hearts into a meat grinder and see what came out. It’s still hard for us to describe the music. We didn’t think of about a genre or a style until after we were done. We were [essentially] jumping out of a plane or, like, taking pictures of ourselves falling and then seeing what they looked like. Style-wise we have no idea what this is, but it is emotionally resonant and honest so we feel like we are on track.

Are you still involved in a DIY or any kind of community in New York?

Community is hard to come by in New York. Everybody doesn’t live in the same neighborhood, so you have to unite along events, and the events we found ourselves uniting around are mostly within the queer art scene — what I call the “lesbian mafia of New York,” or I guess the “lesbian-trans-queer art mafia.” They don’t call themselves that, but that’s how I’ve thought about them. It’s a scene where they were like, “We need to make space for ourselves,” and really went about doing it and were successful and smart. To me, that is DIY: They didn’t see themselves represented in the world they were a part of — the art world — and were like, “OK, we’re gonna make ourselves be the people you wanna know.” That is super inspiring.

So what’s next?

The process of how we’ve been able to make sounds has arched through the sky and we’re watching it morph and change and grow. It’s like we wanted to create a planet but then it took massive time and energy and force just to get the materials and raw elements. And then they develop to a certain point and then you stop it and box it up and send it out to people. But that planet is still developing and growing and new things are evolving, because as we play the samples, looping and combining them with sounds from other songs and putting them all together — it’s all still changing. It’s super fertile. After the album was done, we got way better at it. It’s a growing living thing, it’s not a product. Now that things are all greased up and moving, we’re just gonna keep recording and capture more of it.

Which is not to say they’ve forsaken their roots. They’ve still got punk attitude and country hearts, but the music on Blur the Line feels, on the whole, more thoughtful and controlled. The new confidence might explain why they’ve also decided to drop the shared “Darlin’” last name, embracing instead their real identities (Jessi Zazu, Nikki Kvarnes and Lynwood Regensburg) as opposed to the characters that had served as a sort of protection for so long.

While the Darlins were at a tour stop in Florida, eMusic’s Ashley Melzer spoke with founding guitarist Nikki Kvarnes about the Blur the Line and the band’s new attitude of self-acceptance.

How long after Screws Get Loose did you start thinking about the next album?

Immediately, I guess. We’re kind of always working on stuff. We set up a chunk of time over the winter where we were just focusing on that and we weren’t touring. But yeah, that’s something we’re always kind of working on.

Did you go in with certain ideas?

It kind of all just fell into place with what was going on in our lives collectively, me and Jessi especially.

Like what?

Just time to reflect on the past couple of years. Like, actually spend some time with ourselves and dive deep into some stuff that’s really personal. This is the first time — well, not the first time, but it was a different kind of way of writing the album. Jessi would work on her songs and I would work on my songs, lyrically, and then we’d come together and go, “Well, what about changing this?” or, “What do you mean by this?” It was just a different approach than trying to write really personal songs with another songwriter.

There does seem to be a level of patience about this new record. Is this the first work you’ve done with Roger Moutenout?

He was suggested to us by our manager a while ago. We did a 7″ with him and we did a couple other recordings with him. He is just a joy to work with. He’s helped us grow a whole lot. We love the studio. We love working with him. So we were all about working on the album with him and trying something different, working with a different producer, ’cause we’re kind of a different band now too.

What has that transition been like?

It’s been really good. It’s been gradual. Adrian started playing with us right before we went into the studio for a couple months, just fleshing out the songs and trying to tighten things up, talk about all the parts that we’re doing. Also, this is a transition because [in the past] we’ve always switched instruments. It’s always kind of been up in the air who plays what role. This is the first record where Jessi and I are playing guitar, we sing our parts, Lynnwood plays drums and Adrian plays bass. It’s always been kind of a clusterfuck of “Well, what do you want to do?” and on the last album my arm was broken, so I wasn’t able to play on the album.

Is there a reason why you wanted to streamline that way?

Yeah, it’s made us a way more solid band. It’s more defined what everyone does. It gives time to focus on exactly what it is that you’re doing and giving yourself a specific sound.

In looking back at your press over the years, you’re constantly being pigeonholed as “wild women” or reckless. How do you feel about that?

I mean, I understand why, because when we first started out we were really wild and crazy. We were just so excited to be in a band, we were just going all the way, all the time. There was some focus on music, but I think the performance and engaging people was what we were concentrating on, whereas now it’s a little bit more introverted. We still really want to interact with audience members and we want it to be an experience. And, whatever, people can think whatever they want about us, but they’ll know in the future what this album is and what the band is, and that it’s not just, “Let’s get drunk and party. These are a bunch of fun, silly songs.” There’s some depth behind it and we’re exposing ourselves a little bit more instead of these characters we’ve built over the years.

Listening to the record, I almost felt a level of regret in regard to that. Do you think that’s a theme? Like the song “Optimist” seems to have that as a crux of it.

Jessi wrote that, but no, no, not regret. It’s less regret and maybe just more awareness of how people perceive you. It’s not a song about regret at all. It’s about being an optimist and you realize that maybe not everyone’s as optimistic about what you’re endeavors are or, I don’t know, getting a hard time because you’re doing what you want to be doing. This is really broad — I’m being vague about it because I don’t want to describe a song that she wrote, because I’m sure she has way more to say about it than I do.

Well, which of your songs on the album do you think captures that theme of identity most for you?

Each one of the songs are reflections of who we are and sides of ourselves. “In the Wilderness,” that’s this idea of people being wild, but it’s deeper than that. It’s more about struggling to want to be in a mysterious place, or the depths of your subconscious and how hard it is to grasp imagination for this generation. I want people to know there’s this other side of me that’s very in touch with, I don’t know, the animalistic nature of man and woman and the facades that everyone puts up. That’s kind of a representation of the album: the man and woman and the black and white and the opposites of everything, and creating a balance between the two.

Right, I think there’s a part of the album that’s a voice for the misfits, people on the fringe. Or maybe just people who are comfortable with sexuality and vulnerability.

Absolutely, because there has to be a balance. You can’t just be this overly confident person throwing all your ideas out there and being like, “This is the way things are.” You have to be humble and you have to be vulnerable in order to grow and to be optimistic and able to just expose yourself as a whole human being.

Were you worried about the way the cover of the album art would be received at all?

Oh, no. I mean, there’s a reason why we put it out there. We feel like that represents what this album is and who we are and to break down that whole like idea of people pigeonholing us, to just be like, “This is us. This is a part of us and this is us all together and this is what the band is now.”

What do you want a listener to take away, to hear in the difference from Screws Get Loose to Blur the Line?

Maybe just kind of identifying with themselves, being like, “Whoa, I feel that way about myself, and I didn’t even really know I felt that way about myself.” There’s a lot of self-realization in this album on both sides, me and Jessi. The songs we wrote are like, “This is OK. I’m going to show my beauty, all my ugliness and all my fears and all my strengths,” and maybe just for someone to realize that it’s okay to be fucked up, but also be really strong and intelligent, simultaneously. I guess, just self-acceptance.

Moby first broke through in 1991 as a New York club DJ (he’d been a regular at the multi-level space Mars, in the Meatpacking District, where he’d play everything from hip-hop to dancehall reggae as well as house music and early techno) who’d scored a novelty hit: “Go,” which utilized Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme. Within two years of “Go” hitting the UK Top 10, the small, geeky multi-instrumentalist was signed to a major label (Elektra) and issuing critically-acclaimed titles (1993′s Move EP and 1995′s Everything Is Wrong) that bridged the rave underground and the pop mainstream. Dance purists blanched at first (and pop fans shrugged, at least in the States), but by 1999 — after a detour into loud rock with 1997′s divisive Animal Rights — Moby had perfected the amalgam with Play, a warm recasting of downtempo beats, sampled blues vocals, and inviting instrumentation that sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Since Play, Moby has settled into a comfortable niche as both a dance-music forefather (he frequently DJs at festivals around the world) and singer-songwriter whose songs are often sung by others. That’s particularly the case on the songful new Innocents, which pairs Moby not only with his first outside producer — Mark “Spike” Stent, who worked on Massive Attack’s early records as well as, in more recent years, Lady Gaga, Usher and No Doubt — but a half-dozen vocal guests of note: Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, Mark Lanegan, Damien Jurado, Cold Specks, Skylar Grey and Imyang Bassey, Moby’s longtime touring vocalist. eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Moby about the new album, the shrinking of New York studio space, and L.A.’s confusing topography.

Innocents is the first album you’ve made with an outside producer. Did that change how you wrote?

I’ve been working on music the same way for the past 30 years. I go into my studio and I play guitar or play keyboards or play around with different equipment and I just keep writing until I end up with something that I like. Sometimes I’ll read interviews with musicians who will talk about an erratically different way in which they approach making one record different from the next. I wish I had those interesting stories, because it’s really just me alone in my studio with a bunch of weird equipment, and it has been for quite a long time.

Because you were recording with someone else, did you treat your initial recordings as demos?

Yeah. I would go into my studio and spend about six months coming up with a bunch of ideas. When I first started meeting with Spike I had around 200 ideas, but clearly they weren’t 200 good ideas. We focused on probably 30-40 of those ideas and then we started reaching out to people who we thought might be interesting to have on the record. I got really lucky, because only a couple of people didn’t get back to us.

When did you begin to meet with Mark “Spike” Stent?

I think a year ago. To be honest with you, my grasp of time is kind of not that great. Like, the other day I was signing something and I had to put the date in there and I felt like the Absent-Minded Professor because I couldn’t remember what year it was.

[Stent] afforded me a degree of objectivity and perspective that I normally don’t have. Your perspective on what you’ve written really changes qualitatively the moment you share it with someone else. That for me was the main benefit of working with the producer is having this regained objectivity.

What led you to work together? Did you meet socially before this?

I’ve been signed to Mute Records for a while. Daniel Miller [the owner of] Mute Records, kept working with Spike and Alan Moulder, who did a lot of records. I really liked the records that Spike had worked on, some of the early stuff like the KLF and Massive Attack and Björk, which is ironic because a lot of people who want to work with him are interested in more of his pop productions [including Beyoncé and Madonna]. In turn, I think the reason he wanted to work with me is because I wasn’t interested in making a big pop record. I wanted to make something more lo-fi and weird.

You take a couple of guys in their 40s who spent most of their lives in studios, and the first thing they start talking about is their favorite weird old equipment. I have a slightly compulsive collection of tape delays — about eight of them. None of them work particularly well. You end up almost having an orchestra of tape delays. At one point the record was sounding very, very clean. So we ended up spending a couple of days putting the record through some sort of processing that would make these clean recordings sound more grimy and characterly.

The odd thing about…I would almost call it the new way of making records, because in the old days things were more compartmentalized. There was a writing period, followed by a recording period, followed by a tracking period: You’d have the drummer come in and spend a week doing drums, and then the bass, and then the vocals. Now you keep writing and recording and adding things to songs and playing around with stuff until things are done. The mixing process, rather than being a separate, added process, is almost a continuation of the creative process.

What changed the most from your initial idea of what the album might be and what it became?

When I first started thinking about this album I wanted it to be an underground, lo-fi dance record. Spike got me to change the focus to a more lo-fi melodic album. He said that when he listens to my records, what resonates with him is the more melodic music. He is the one who pushed it to become more like a singer-songwriter album. “Don’t Love Me” and “A Long Time” originally were very grimy, minimal dance tracks. He pushed me to give them more an emotional quality and more interesting chord structures. Those are the two holdovers from what the album was originally meant to be.

What lo-fi dance records inspired that initial idea?

Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English; a lot of early electronic music like Silver Apples and Suicide; Manu DiBango; a lot of Jamaican dance music and African dance music; and especially things that Wally Badarou played on. He’s one of my favorite musicians of all time. He’s the unsung hero of so many dance records. And a lot of New York records made in the early ’80s: Liquid Liquid, ESG, the Bush Tetras, Medium Medium, Konk. Just the records I grew up on. I’ve rediscovered them.

It’s funny — one of the people who helped me rediscover them was my old assistant Alex [Frankel]. He’s now in the band the Holy Ghost!, on DFA. When he was working with me, I would hang out with him and his friends, and they were all in their early 20s, and their favorite records were my favorite records when I was in my teens in the early ’80s. They kind of reintroduced me to the kind of music I loved. He was my assistant at the time [of 2008's Last Night]. I was playing the tracks I was working on to him. Every now and then he would get excited about something, and that was when I knew it was probably worth pursuing.

You moved to L.A. three years ago. Do you approach music differently there than you did in New York?

I think so. I have a sort of poetic-philosophical understanding of how living in L.A. has affected how I make music, and also a very practical, direct way. The direct way is college radio. Living in New York, I mainly listened to music that I owned. New York has good college radio, but terrible broadcast signal strength. Whereas in L.A., there’s KCRW and KXLU — really great college radio — and I think that’s affected how this album sounds.

On a more poetic level, L.A. is so vast, so byzantine, so weird and so un-cohesive, so in a way, when you move you have to make this huge effort to try and understand Los Angeles and make sense of it. Most cities are very cohesive: New York, Paris, Frankfurt, San Francisco, D.C., amazing, wonderful cities that are quite small and quite cohesive. Then you come to L.A. and it’s just [got] absolutely no cohesion. It almost makes people who live here search out a degree of smallness and comfort, because the city is so huge and confusing. I feel like this album has a smallness and comfort to it that might, oddly enough, [come from] living in L.A.

I thought I’d live in New York forever. Then I stopped drinking five years ago, and when I got sober I suddenly realized that New York is the single best place to be a drunk and unfortunately not the best place to be sober. The culture in New York revolves around going out and drinking and doing drugs and being degenerate, which is amazing when you can do that, but then you get sober and you feel kind of left out. Everyone in New York is out having the best time of their lives, and I’m at home watching 30 Rock DVDs. Also, I realized I wanted to be warm in the winter, and I wanted to be around nature.

New York, because it’s so affluent, most of the writers and musicians have been pushed out, so I wanted to live in a place that’s got more creative community. At some point I guess four or five years ago I realized that I actually had more friends [in L.A.] than I did in New York, especially when it comes to music. The real estate in New York is too expensive for anyone to have studios anymore. A couple of years ago, some friends of mine in L.A. were looking to record an orchestra in New York. There wasn’t a single recording studio in New York where they could record an orchestra. They ended up having to rent an empty space in a theater — and while they were recording, there was a huge Korean birthday party happening next door. They actually had to cancel [the session], because the Korean dance party music kept coming through the walls. Now, I actually don’t know too many professional musicians who don’t live in L.A.

You’ve been putting out records frequently these past few years. What kind of clock do you work on? Do you write music every day you can?

I don’t know how to do anything else, and it’s what I love to do. When I was 13 or 14, I spent a lot of time reading books, and some of my heroes from back then were Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen and Picasso. I was always impressed by their work ethic, that idea of: When you’re inspired, go into the studio and work. When you’re not inspired, go into the studio and work. If you have success that means you should work more. If you have failure that means you should work more. No matter what’s going on an artist or writer or musician’s life, the only appropriate response is to keep working.

You’ve worked with vocalist Inyang Basey for a while now. How did you meet her?

When I was going on tour with the album Wait For Me I had a singer I was working with in the UK who couldn’t get a work visa to tour in the States, so at the last minute I had to hire a new singer. The very last person I auditioned was Inyang. The moment she started singing I knew she was the one. It turns out she’d never really sung professionally; her day job at the time was working at Carnegie Hall in their 20th Century classical music division. Her background when she was growing up was listening to the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. It’s funny that this skinny white kid was introducing her to older gospel and soul music.

Did Spike suggest any singers for the album?

Yeah. I basically started asking friends of mine whom they would recommend. My criteria were quite specific: I was looking for people who had really interesting emotional voices but who could also write really interesting lyrics. Spike’s one recommendation was Skylar Grey. She’s known more for being a pop person, but her background is more singer-songwriter based and a little more experimental. I asked Daniel Miller, and his one recommendation was Cold Specks. The way it works with all the collaborators is, I sent them about five instrumentals to see if anything resonated with them. Each of them picked one or two that they liked. Once the vocals have been recorded and sent to me I then rewrote the song around the vocals.

Did you resend a track to multiple vocalists before you got a yes?

Oh yeah. I had 10 instrumentals I really loved and really wanted vocals on. I’m kind of mercenary when it comes to trying to get the right vocals on the right track. It’s almost like a weird form of musical promiscuity, where I would sometimes send the same instrumental to three different people to try to see if it resonates with anyone.

Where was the third time the charm?

The song that Mark Lanegan co-wrote, ["The Lonely Night"] — that had been instrumental for a few years. I had never quite felt comfortable with what people had sent back. Then I gave it to him, and all of a sudden it felt like the vocals and the music made sense together. I made the final mix around his vocals. The music is mixed very quietly; the whole intention was to draw attention to his vocals.

Do you end up editing lyrics a lot?

Sometimes. The only person [I did that with] on this record was Skylar Grey. She’d written a line in the song: “Shades of grey.” This was right at the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey popularity. Skylar, because she lives up in the mountains, hadn’t heard about the book. I had to get her to make some suggestions for things that didn’t sound like they were referencing Fifty Shades of Grey. She thought it was funny.

I want to ask you about “Saints”: It’s obviously your instrumental style, but it seems looser and grander than usual — a big sweep with a lot of moving parts. Did it take a long time to put together?

It was supposed to be an instrumental that someone was going to write lyrics to, and I couldn’t find the right person. At some point Spike and I realized it was pretty good as an instrumental, so the focus was to try and finish it. I hired an arranger at the very end — I’d written orchestral parts, and I wanted to know what it would be like if someone came in and wrote orchestral parts. There’s a lot of big, bombastic brass parts. I think there are 300 different string players on it. It’s mixed in a way that the orchestral stuff doesn’t overwhelm the track. It almost makes me want to do a weird orchestral mix of it that strips out the drums.

Were you thinking of how some of these songs might be interpreted live?

No [laughs]. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to go on tour with this record. I’ve had that frustration in the past of recording music, putting it on a record, and then realizing that it’s impossible to play it live in any interesting way.

What led to the decision not to tour?

A lot of it involves aging. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize that life is short, and as much as I like standing on stage and playing music, I love being at home working on music. Of course, it drives my manager crazy, because in 2013 very few people buy records and the only way musicians make money is by touring. Basically, I’m focusing on the one aspect of the music business that’s not at all lucrative, while turning my back on the only lucrative side of the music business.

Well, you’ve always had a contrary streak.

Yeah, I guess so. I appreciate that we all need to eat and need to pay the rent. But if you have a finite amount of time, shouldn’t it be spent on things that you really love and find important? Even if that means making less money and making my business manager and manager very unhappy, I’d still rather be in my studio working on music.

When Moby requested we interview Cold Specks as part of his takeover of eMusic, we were all too happy to oblige. The debut from pseudonymous songwriter Al Spx topped our list of eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012, and her live show had grown more riveting and more assured each time we saw her. Her performance on Moby’s record Innocents contains all of the things that made her first album so stunning — enigmatic lyrics, deeply-felt vocals and a free-floating but undeniable sense of spirituality. eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes caught up with Spx by phone to discuss her new record, her collaboration with Moby and her paralyzing perfectionism.

I’m interviewing you at Moby’s request, because he’s taking over our site for a week, but it’s kind of convenient — your album was our No. 1 record of last year.

I heard about that!

So I thought this would be a good time to see what you’ve been up to since then. Where are you right now?

I’m in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I’m in a studio recording some songs for the next record.

How long have you been working on that?

Well. I don’t know. It’s kind of — [pauses]. Some of the songs have existed for a while, some are brand new. We didn’t start tracking until maybe a month ago.

So there were still some songs from your original batch that didn’t make it on to I Predict a Graceful Expulsion?

There’s just one. It’s existed in many forms, and I finally forced the son of a bitch to give in recently. I won’t tell you which one. It’ll ruin the surprise.

I was going to ask if it was the one you were playing on tour.

Well, actually, OK — I got that wrong. There’s two that have existed in a few different forms. The one that you’re speaking of — where did you see me play?

I saw you at Glasslands, then at Mercury Lounge, then at Piano’s.

OK. So you probably heard a bunch of the new ones. There’s a song… [stops suddenly] I don’t want to say!

You don’t have to!

Oh, I’ll just say it, whatever. There’s a song called “All Flesh is Grass” and a song called “Let Loose the Dogs.” “All Flesh is Grass” is probably written around the same time as “Blank Maps,” but it didn’t make the first record because I hadn’t figured out the arrangement for it, and it’s taken a couple of years to get right. The other one was written when I first started touring.

You talk about these songs existing in a few different forms — how do you know when to say “stop”?

I know it’s done because when I listen to it, I become filled with delight and satisfaction, and I know that I can’t make it any better. My producer, Jim, and the assistant here are probably realizing that I’m incredibly anal when it comes to the studio, but these songs exist forever, so I just want to get them right. I’m kind of a perfectionist. I want and I need for everything to be absolutely as perfect as I can make it.

What was the moment you started becoming aware that the first record was really resonating with people?

I guess when I started to tour the record, I would notice the crowds start to get bigger. We’d be playing tiny shows in small towns in the middle of nowhere — like, say, Denton, Texas — and there would be loads of people who knew and loved the songs. I guess that’s when I started to realize that I was doing something right.

One of the things that really struck me about the record was the way you took Bible verses and either recontextualize them or manipulate them in certain ways. How conscious a choice was that?

Not very conscious. The record is a representation of loss in many forms — mostly just loss of several relationships. I studied English and noticed Bible verses are common in literature. It’s the best piece of fiction in the world as far as I’m concerned. There are some really beautiful lines in it, and some lines really just stuck out to me. I don’t really like to go into detail about what the songs are about. I’m a very private person and my songs are very vague and I really do love it when people interpret it and take it in different ways. I think it’s incredibly fascinating.

A lot of the story around the early record was about the falling out between you and your parents. From what I’ve read, it sounds like things are better now?

It’s all good in the hood. It was kind of blown out of proportion in the early days. It was mostly just growing pains, really. My parents wanted the best for me and they didn’t necessarily believe that music was the best for me at first, but they’ve come around. It’s all love.

Does that mean you’ll start using your real name?

[Laughs.] No, I’m a very private person. I write music and I enjoy doing it, but because I do it, I think it’s completely unnatural to perform day in and day out and give yourself to people — a collection of strangers — every night. I’d much rather have a stage name and remove myself from it all.

So you take on this persona of Al Spx to maintain a sense of self.

That’s exactly what it is. Al Spx is a character, and she exists because I created a project called Cold Specks, and people kept asking me who Cold Specks was. And I thought I’d given enough at first, but evidently I hadn’t [laughs]. So I came up with a stage name, and that’s all I’m willing to give. I just got so uncomfortable attaching my real name and myself to songs that are incredibly personal and have the tendency to be morbid. It’s not a reflection of me, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the songs completely defining me as a human being, because it’s just one side of me. So I have a stage name.

I’d imagine it also allows you a degree of sanity because you can step out of that character when you’re not performing.

Exactly. When I’m not touring, I go back to the girl I am and remember who I am as a human being. It can be incredibly grueling at times. Al Spx is a tough bitch and she can deal with that, but when I’m at home, I want to just be me.

One of my favorite lines is on “Blank Maps,” where you sing “I am a goddamn believer.” What are some things you believe in?

I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out. That particular song is — [pauses]. That particular song is about a boy, and I think I was just trying to let him know some things.

Have any of the people these songs are about heard them?

Probably. [Laughs] I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’d rather not say.

Let’s talk about the new record. Thematically, how do the songs relate to the songs on the first record?

It’s different. They’re louder. There aren’t any acoustic guitars — I’ve been joking that I’ve gone all “Judas” on this record [laughs].

Is this for real, or are you doing that thing you like to do to interviewers where you pull my leg and then I report it?

[Laughs.] I’m not! I’m not. I’ve stopped doing that. It’s more playful this record. The first record was a delicate record, and it was a moment in time and a reflection of a fragile girl. For this record, I’ve grown a lot as a human being. The songs on the first record were written when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, and I’ve grown a lot since then. I think I also got a little tired of being depicted as an “emotional songwriter.” That sort of seeped into my songwriting. So this one’s just playful.

So more major-key songs?

I actually can’t answer that for you, but only because I don’t know anything about music. I play in two tunings, and they’re both, I guess, minor tunings — it’s always gonna be minor with Cold Specks — but I don’t actually know anything about music. I play guitar and write all the songs and I sit down with the boys and tell them what I want. Like I said, I’m incredibly anal in the studio.

I’m curious as to how you think other members of your band would describe working with you.

Chris Cundy, the woodwind player, has a phrase — he says I’m “predictably unpredictable.” And that’s accurate. I’m the most disgustingly indecisive person. I think I know what I want, but I really don’t.

Let’s talk a little bit about the collaboration with Moby — how did that come about?

We’re on the same label, Mute, and I think he was looking for singers and Daniel Miller from Mute mentioned me, so he looked up all my stuff and really liked it, and we just started working together.

Was the song already finished by the time it got to you?

“A Case for Shame,” he sent an instrumental. There’s a studio in London that I work in occasionally and I recorded some vocals and sent them back to him. It was a very creative and collaborative setup. The other song we actually recorded in his home studio. I had a day off on my last North American tour, so we stopped in L.A. and I went over to his house and recorded the second song. Very quickly, actually. He already had the instrumental and I had it for weeks but couldn’t come up with anything. The night before [we were recording] I scribbled some notes on my hotel notepad and went in and we did it in about an hour.

How is his process different from yours?

He’s not an anal piece of shit like I am.

That seems like you’re being pretty hard on yourself!

I like to think I’m funny with my harshness! [Laughs.] He goes with the flow, Moby. He doesn’t overanalyze. It’s something I learned from working with him. I can spend a lot of time just picking at things and just doesn’t do that. He’s a very free and open and creative man and he’s not at all disgustingly over analytical. It’s a really refreshing thing.

I’m sure some of that comes with experience, though.

Yeah, I’m only making my second record now. He’s had a lot of time to grow as an artist, so he knows what he wants and he gets there quickly.

I know you have a lot of influences outside of music. I was curious to know what you’re reading now.

There’s a book by Milan Kundera called Immortality that I just picked up the other day.

What kinds of books do you tend to be attracted to?

I like really descriptive stuff, and I like really short and sweet stuff as well. I like ‘em all.

Are you living in Canada when you’re not on the road?

I don’t live anywhere. I just finished touring. I’ll probably be moving back to London soon. I like it because it’s a very big city — I think it’s the best city in the world. It’s huge — there are cities within the city. So many people, so many things to do. It’s just a wonderful city.

Since Moby asked us to interview you as one of his favorite artists, I was wondering who you’ve been listening to lately and who you admire.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Scott Walker. Michael Gira from Swans. There’s this band from the UK called Savages that I really like.

I could almost hear a collaboration between you and Scott Walker.

Oh God, I would love that. The guy who did our latest music video did the video for that song “Epizootics!” from the last Scott Walker record. That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to Scott Walker.

The Flaming Lips have never shied away from life’s unavoidable existential dramas — Death, Love, Depression, The Afterlife (or lack thereof). But The Lips have never made “depressing” music: Steven Drozd, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and chief sonic architect, has a flair for melodic, rainbow-hued arrangements, and Wayne Coyne, their outsized frontman, plays the role of psychedelic jester, particularly on stage, where he crowd-surfs on inflatable bubbles, pours fake blood on his face, and preaches his deep ruminations to a cult-like fan-base in his cracked warble.

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.

So, it’s no surprise that when Barlow sat down with eMusic’s Robert Ham in the kitchen of Portland’s Bunk Bar recently to go over a handful of songs from his career, the 47-year-old musician didn’t shy away from addressing the tougher aspects of his life — including the subject that dominates Defend Yourself, the first Sebadoh album in more than a decade: the end of his 25-year marriage.

Deep Wound, “Lou’s Anxiety Song”

This is really strong stuff for a band in high school.

Yeah? Really? Huh…I wrote it myself!

Was it weird for your classmates to know someone in a band?

No one knew I was in a band. The only other guy who knew was in the band with me, Scott Helland. Literally, in a school of 500 kids in my class, no one in my graduating class. I could be exaggerating, but I think they had no idea.

There weren’t any other punk kids in school?

I’d say two of us. The other ones really weren’t punk. They dabbled. We were the only ones that were really into it.

You got together to do a one-song reunion back in 2004. How was that experience?

That was pretty special. It was a benefit show that my mother had helped set up. J played a solo set, Sonic Youth played. Sebadoh — Jason and I as a duo. Jay was playing solo came off the stage, and the other three members of Deep Wound came out. We said, “Hey J, get up here and play drums.” So we picked up Sonic Youth’s gear and did “Video Prick,” the slowest song on the record.

Dinosaur Jr., “Poledo”

Was it hard to get the rest of the band to accept the idea of what that song was?

It really wasn’t. I invested a lot of anxiety into it. I went up to J and said, “I really want to put a piece, a tape thing at the end of the record. Are you cool with that?” He said he was. That was that.

When you did the All Tomorrow’s Parties shows where you were playing all of You’re Living All Over Me, how did you present this song?

Just playing ukulele, doing the songs that were in there. I didn’t bring my laptop and blast everybody out.

Sebadoh, “Kath”

What came to mind when I was listening to this recently is that you can almost track the entire arc of your relationship with Kath through your Sebadoh albums.

Yeah. All of my really major relationships. For sure. Definitely my relationship with Kathleen, my relationship with J, my relationship with Eric Gaffney, John Davis.

Is it a version of therapy?

I think it is. My girlfriend now doesn’t really understand this concept. If I wrote songs about difficult times and sing about them continuously, it’s a way of overcoming those. Where she says, “Aren’t you just living through that every time?” I’m not because there’s a logic that goes through those songs. I don’t think that my songs are rooted in self-pity or negativity really.

The sense that I get is that it is very matter-of-fact or a kind of reportage.

I’m kind of explaining it to myself. That’s what it comes down to.

Sebadoh III was your first record with Jason Lowenstein. Why did you decide to add that extra element to the band?

To be a band, to play live. Eric and I experimented as a duo and that was cool but it’s hard for two guys to shut a whole room up or at least be loud enough to go over the talking. Especially with what we were. We weren’t a folk act. If we were punk, we weren’t loud enough. I really liked the concept behind the ukulele and two drums, but it just wasn’t practical for playing live shows. We weren’t self-conscious and arty enough to go, “That’s it. This is our thing.” We weren’t that precious about it. In the end, we just wanted to rock.

How was it going through all that material that you had that ended up on the Sebadoh III reissue?

It was a battle between me and Eric. Eric initially wanted to remix every one of his songs. The worst idea ever. You can’t do that. We fought and we fought about it, then I just said, “Go do it.” I got him the original tapes, sent him to the studio, came up with this mixes, and I said, “Eric, I’ve listened to the mixes. They’re fine. But we cannot under any circumstance replace the original versions on the record. And I will not allow this reissue to happen with those.” I let the conversation happen for a while but then just shut it down.

Was that before or after you did those reunion shows?

It was before. It was at least a two-year e-mail war. He had all of these accusations and ways that I’d fucked him over — I was hell bent on making these reissues happen, I was hell bent on getting him back into the band. We went point by point-by-point for, I swear, two years. And it drove my wife Kathleen crazy. “Why are you doing this? This is insanity!” I said, “No, I’ve gotta do it, and it’s gotta happen. We have to do it in a way where he’s really involved.” And we did and it culminated in the Sebadoh III reissue. It was a considerable amount of negotiations.

Did you foresee that there was going to be an endpoint to it? That Eric would be part of this and then that was going to be the end?

I don’t know what I was hoping for. I just wanted him back. Jason and I had done a bunch of shows as a duo and that was great. But we were missing the element of the drums so we brought Eric back. And by that time, Eric was much more concerned about playing guitar and being the frontman of the band. Which is fine, but his drumming to me was so crucial, his spirited drumming. When he came back, he would barely hit the drums. He’d get up on stage with a polyester jacket and complain about how hot he was. He was not going to throw himself into playing the drums. I needed to know it could never happen again. And I found out. He would never put as much of himself into it ever again. I had to come to terms with that.

The Folk Implosion, “Mechanical Man”

This was your only album on a major label.

Well, The Sebadoh was half Sire, half Sub Pop, but Sire dropped us one week after the record came out.

What was that experience like?

They were cool and totally hands off. I signed with Interscope because John Davis really wanted to sign with them. It was just bizarre. They cared so little about music that it was shocking to me. They had the golden ears, apparently. They were living on that idea. They didn’t give a shit about anything else. There was no love there. They funded us to make a record and we did it, and it ended up selling half as many copies as our last record on Communion did. So, they dropped me when I tried to make another record.

What was it about John that made your creative relationship work so well?

He and I just had this really great connection. He was a bit younger than me. That might have had something to do with it. He came to me as a fan of my early work. But we just had these long conversations. We talked all the times. And our conversations became musical. He was easily the most satisfying [musical partner].

There’s a real sense of playfulness to all of your work with him.

It really mirrored our conversations. He was better educated than I. He went to Brown and read a lot. I was just loved him. I thought he was the funniest and sweetest guy I ever met.

But there was another Folk Implosion record that he wasn’t a part of.

Yeah, he quit pretty much to the day that One Part Lullaby was released. He’s an incredibly sensitive person. And I’m…not. What I realize, in comparison to him, he’s really fragile. And I barely made it out of high school, and have been living on my wits for a long time. I’ve been through so much shit that I’ve let a lot of stuff roll off my back. Even though it doesn’t seem this way, I don’t dwell on things. I just move forward. We were in a really intense situation with Interscope. I was a mess personally. My personal life was on fire at that time. He bailed. I never heard from him again. No fight or falling out. He just said, “I’m out.”

Dinosaur Jr., “Recognition”

Is it a surprise to you that you are still going forward with Dinosaur Jr.?

It’s been eight years [so it's] hard to be a surprise. When we got back together initially it just worked so well. And I’d been through so much weird shit by the time I got back to J Mascis, it was like this is nothing. “At least this guy knows what he wants.” It was a relief — I’m actually working with someone who knows what he wants. With all due respect to everybody I’ve worked with. J is a fucking train on his track, and to come back to that, I’ll just ride. It’s not this emotional thing. It’s pretty easy to handle. Dinosaur’s the only band that I can play with that I can walk on to a festival stage and go, “Fuck yeah. There’s 30,000 people here and who cares?” Because if it’s me just playing a guitar, it’s a nightmare.

On all the three newer records, you only have two songs on them. Is that normal?

I tried three on this last record. J is so funny. He still has his dickish tendencies. He’ll do interviews with people, and say, “I don’t know. Lou really won’t write any more songs for the record.” He has the patience for about two songs on any record. This one, I was like, “I’m doing three songs.” The best of them is not on the record. I got J to improvise guitar on this pretty strong backbone that I’d come up with. And he fucking canned it from the record. Fuck you! I did my three songs. [Laughs.] He is very protective. He does want to keep a grip on that. And I respect that, actually.

When you’re writing Dinosaur stuff, are you specific about what you want from Murph and J?

I wasn’t at first, and then on the second record that we did, it was a nightmare. Both of them just sat there, like, “I don’t know what to do.” “You’re supposed to play the guitar! You’re supposed to play the drums!” They just wouldn’t do anything. I don’t think J’s used to collaborating, really. Murph needs someone to tell him exactly what to do. For one song on the second record, we worked on it for a week and he wrote all these drum parts. But then when we went to record it, he refused to play them. We played it for two days straight, and he refused to play it the way he wrote it. “I don’t know, I’m not really feeling it.” “What does that have to do with anything? We’re professional musicians, my friend. Whether you’re feeling it or not is immaterial.” It went right down to the wire. “I’m literally leaving in two hours I’m going back to L.A. with no songs if you don’t do this.” And he did it. So the last record, I had a whole different game plan. I had a really vivid dream where I walked up to [Melvins drummer] Dale [Crover] and asked him to write songs with Dinosaur. It took him two hours to write drum parts for three songs. “Oh, wow. Dale played on them?” Then they listened to my ideas.

Sebadoh, “Oxygen”

You said this wasn’t an issue playing the songs night after night, but: Was it difficult to write these songs, considering what was happening to you? Or did you just feel like this is what had to be said?

I had made a huge radical change in my life. I left my wife. Up to that point, I couldn’t speak honestly. I didn’t know how to finish those songs. I was dealing with years of repressing so much stuff. Once I made that actual break, all the words just wrote themselves. I don’t think they’re the greatest lyrics I’ve ever written, but they’re all true. I’ve been singing songs about jerking off for ages, so I set the bar pretty fucking low from the very beginning. There’s a part of me that’s so exhibitionist and so self-involved on that level. I don’t think that it’s that unusual or shocking or anything. I cut my teeth on punk rock, and these are people that were saying whatever. It was the truth. They were just laying it out there. That’s the inspiration I took. There were no boundaries. And the more real and uncomfortable it is, the better it is.

Has Kathleen heard the record?

No. No.

Is that something that you worry about at all?

It’s not really a concern. I put her through hell already while we were together. [Pauses.] Hopefully I’m not too mean in the songs. I would worry about that, if I was really calling her out on specific things. But I haven’t thought about it. I just can’t. Even my girlfriend now, she didn’t know anything about Sebadoh at all. She had no idea. She’s really into Ryan Adams, who is someone who writes beautifully poetic songs, my stuff is like, “Whoa…my god, do you really have to put that out?” Well, as a matter of fact, I do. I do need to put that out.

Do you feel like your approach to writing songs has changed?

I don’t know. Now I just have so much other shit going on in my life. Used to be every day I would just do whatever I felt like. Now it’s considerably more complicated. Because I’ve got kids and I’m supporting like five other people right now. My life is so fucked, but in a great way.

How are you kids holding up with everything?

My daughter is rip shit. She’s really mad. My daughter saw a lot of shit going on. She wasn’t spared anything. We had these heartbreaking moments where she would be between us going, “Mommy and daddy, don’t fight.” Fuck…never wanted that to happen! But she loves my girlfriend and is fascinated by this life I’m living. But she’s also rip shit at me. My son’s three years old and he’s just fucking crazy so it doesn’t matter. But it’s funny; he’ll say, “You’ll be nice to momma?” “Yeah, I’ll be nice to momma.”

There’s still no compromise in their unrelenting sound, but the harsher noise has been hammered out in favor of taut funk – the steel of Cabaret Voltaire given a radical modernization in “How You Say” or “Breathe In” and a pop militancy in the dugga-dugga of “Fall Back”. Interspersed throughout the album — which also features a new version of former 12″ “Two Different Ways” — are short sound sketches made by each member of the band. It’s claustrophobic music that, perhaps, gets its power from its extended gestation, and doesn’t sound like anything else released in 2013.

Luke Turner talked with Factory Floor about performance, perfectionism and why the album took two and a half years to make.

Why the decision to record in your own studio in Seven Sisters? Was self-sufficiency important to you?

Gabriel Gurnsey: We made a conscious decision that the album should be written, recorded and produced by us purely because of the fact that we knew how we wanted it to sound, and it saves a lot of hassle laying it on to someone else.

Nik Colk Void: That was partly to do with what the EPs and singles were about, to explore different ways of recording. We actually enjoy that part of the process of playing with our own factions of Factory Floor. You wouldn’t get that if you had someone else doing it for you.

So all the singles and EPs are a document of you learning?

Gurnsey: Yeah definitely, and the album is to a certain extent as well. It’s a document of us learning how to write and record an album. Which turned out to be over quite a lengthy amount of time.

Why did you even bother doing an album? You could have just continued releasing 12″s.

Dominic Butler: There was a point where we discussed that, but I think people want an album, it’s still a way that you can have a piece of a band and get to know it in a certain way. You can build a relationship with an album, look back at it. I’ve got 12″s that I love, but an album is a narrative.

Void: There won’t even be albums soon, it’s nice to have one before they cease to exist.

Are Factory Floor perfectionists?

Void: There are still bits on the record where I think, “That’s not what I was trying to do.” I’ve not been trained, so I get there in my own way. Sometimes I’ve got something in my head and it comes out sounding completely different. But it still works, so I just go with it.

Gurnsey: It’s not going, “Oh I recorded this through a bin in the middle of a field.” We don’t work like that. We just turn to each other and say, “That sounds good.”

Why did it take so long to complete the album? Was perfectionism to blame there?

Gurnsey: It was more about finding what kind of route we were happy with, and developing the sound by playing live — it was a good thing that we played so many shows, [because it helped us] to grow the music. We were essentially getting to know each other during those gigs.

What might have happened if you’d tried to work with a producer?

Void: It wouldn’t have sounded anything like this. I think if we’d gone to a studio and recorded 10 tracks, we’d have taken them away, been really unhappy and butchered them.

Were the collaborations a learning experience, too?

Void: It was treading ground that was a bit risky to us. It keeps your attention on trying to better yourselves as musicians, especially when you’ve got someone coming along who’s established themselves, like Peter Gordon. He occupied a space that was already there, sonically, so that was great. We’ve always invited musicians along who we know there’s a space for. I think the great thing about collaboration is that there’s no room for ego, you have to listen to each other to come up with your own way of replying to what they’re putting into it.

Some cross-generational collaborations can come off a bit back-slappy. Is there a sense that your collaborations are more about sharing ideals, rather than stealing ideas?

Gurnsey: That’s what it was. It wasn’t “Let’s get them in because we want to sound like them” or they wanted to sound like us, it was just sharing a common goal of making music and enjoying it, and not having a fear of a spontaneous, improvisational way of working. Although I was shitting my pants before we played at the ICA.

Void: That was the great thing about those shows, we were knocking ourselves out of our comfort zone, and that’s what Factory Floor always does. If you don’t go down that road, you don’t learn, and you just end up standing still. We’re not in it for love, or money, it’s the learning. [Laughs.]

Do you want to push your audience out of their comfort zones too? Not just in the sonic assault of your earlier gigs, but how this record is quite steely. It’s not what people might expect from a DFA record.

Gurnsey: That’s why I’m excited to see what people are going to say. They’re going to make so many assumptions, based on the Factory Floor name, based on DFA, based on what we’ve done in the past. I’m just happy knowing that it’s not going to be anything like what people think.

Void: I don’t think it sounds different from what I’d expect of a Factory Floor record.

Butler: I think it’s enquiring, and that’s what we wanted to do with it. We wanted to make our way into our practice as a band and unravel something, and I think that’s what we did. If we hadn’t, I’d have been a bit disappointed.

Was there anything you didn’t want it to be?

Gurnsey: I don’t think we’ve had any influences from what’s going on [in electronic music] at the moment. What’s great about being up here [in Seven Sisters] is you’re outside of what’s going on musically, a “scene,” all that kind of shit.

Now that Nik has moved to Norfolk and Dom lives in the middle of nowhere in Hampshire, will it have an impact on where you go from here?

Void: We’ve all set up our own studios in our new places. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what happens from being separated from each other and then coming together and working on stuff in a bit more concentrated manner, and in a shorter amount of time.

Gurnsey: I think it’ll be a lot less intense next time. It was fucking hell at some points. It was fucking hard work, a lot of frustration, because we took everything on ourselves. It’s been a bit of a mad journey, these past couple of years.

Lenny Kaye caught up with them at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom, a few hours ahead of their opening slot with the Cult.

I’m interested in the process of how a White Hills song comes together in the studio. Is there a lot of prior preparation, writing riffs and beats? How much improvisation is there when you record?

Dave W: Every song is different. This album was very different because we actually had a lot of stuff worked out before going into the studio. But then there were a couple of songs that I brought to the band about a week before we went in.

Ego Sensation: We’ve done a few records that were basically all improvisation, picked out from long jams. That’s how we wrote for a while.

Dave: The last record, Frying On This Rock, we had a very small window between touring and putting that album together. So a lot of that material hadn’t really been worked out. That one had more jam elements on it. For this one, we had an idea of how the songs would be, and then, basically, nuances were added between what I would do, and what Ego would do.

Is there a lot of overdubbing?

Dave: It’s pretty live. I did very few guitar overdubs on this record. I feel like, since I’m the guitarist, and I’m the one mixing and producing it, that I tend to get too heavy on guitar. I wanted to take a step back with this one and not try to fill it up so much. Instead of tracking more guitars, building things that I didn’t feel were full enough, and I wanted it to be more full. I just added more distortion in post-production. But usually we record guitar, bass and drums live. I don’t do a scratch track of vocals because a lot of the times lyrics aren’t really set before we record. Then the synths are done afterwards.

Did you consciously try to skew this record differently? It seems like there’s more dynamics, more light and dark.

Dave: I think this record is a culmination of what I’ve been striving for through the last three or four records. What I wanted to achieve with our first record I finally got with this record. Things flow better, more succinctly. Songs don’t need to go on for so long unless that is what is called for.

You worked at Martin Bisi’s celebrated studio. What input did he bring to the project?

Ego: Martin is really funny. He tends not to give you a lot of input unless you ask for it, but he’s very good at problem-solving and getting very specific sounds.

Dave: He asks what you are looking for, the kind of sound you hear. I would tell him what I was thinking and he would come in and move mics a quarter of an inch, watching out for phasing and frequency overload. For me, it’s great because it’s like going to school. He’s very involved. His studio is a Civil War armory in Gowanus [Brooklyn] and it’s a very large space — cement walls, extremely high ceilings, with two recording rooms. Typically what he does is he puts guitar amps in one room, the bass upstairs in an isolation booth upstairs right off his control room, and drums are in the big room. Everyone stands in the big room. But one of the things we did differently after the first day of recording was to move all the amps into the big room. He said he hadn’t recorded like that for almost 20 years. He was very skeptical about how we would be able to do it; but I think it ended up working out very positively. There was some baffling, but the amps were very close together, in proximity to the drums, and that’s where his knowledge of the mics, how much volume is being pushed out of an amplifier — all of those things helped define the sound on our record.

Let’s go back to the starting point of the band. When you first began, did you have a specific idea on how you wanted things to sound? Any forebears or traditions in which you consciously placed yourself?

Dave: Yes, definitely. Both of us lived in San Francisco before moving to New York. We came to New York because nothing was happening for us in San Francisco musically. We didn’t play together at the time, and we had separate things going on. I was trying to forge a different approach than what I had been doing before, Ego had this one-woman show that was kind of theater and dance and music all in one. I started playing in garage-y punk bands, and though I like that kind of music, I was kind of over it. So I sat down one day and asked myself what I wanted to do, and I decided I want to pursue my love of space rock. I got a version of Pro Tools and sat down and recorded the first record. I took inspiration from bands like Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, but also the Damned, Public Image [Limited]. I wanted to incorporate this essence of rhythm with something heavy. I wanted a power trio, but I wanted there to be synth, and an otherworldly sense of mantra. To make it heavy and brutal, and be a statement of the times: post-9/11, the world falling apart, waking up the senses.

There were bands I can hear within you as well, between Hawkwind and the current moment. I’m thinking of Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, a strange group I once came upon called Farflung…

Dave: My brother’s in Farflung!

Speaking of space travelers, how did your initial relationship with Julian Cope come about?

Dave: [Laughs.] I’ve been a fan of his since I was a teenager. My initial introduction to him was through The Teardrop Explodes. When I recorded the first White Hills record, They’ve Got Blood Like We’ve Got Blood, I thought, “What am I going to do with this?” I wanted to go to Europe and thought he might appreciate this. So I mailed him a copy and he loved it. He wrote about it on his website, and then I started receiving emails from people wondering how to get the album. And then he approached me about being on his label, Fuck Off and Die. So basically because of his interest is why I started putting a full band together. My music might have stayed a bedroom project for me to satisfy my own creative needs. He was very instrumental and helpful for us in the beginning. Having him behind us instantly made people aware of who we were. Our third show we ever played was opening up for him in London.

Do you feel like you’re part of a New York scene?

Ego: There are some great bands that we love to play with. The Psychic Ills, Oneida, Weird Owl.

Dave: We’ve never been a band that’s sat down and said we’re going to do it from the ground up, play a lot of shows in New York, people will find out who we are, and use the city as a launching pad. Our idea was Europe. Do it like Jimi Hendrix did.

You’ve worked with a lot of different drummers. Does it change how the songs come out?

Dave: I think yes and no. I think every drummer adds their flair to what we’re doing. I’m very much a dictator when it comes to the songs [laughs]. Ego and I bring in the riffs, but I have a very distinct idea on how I want it presented, I know where I want the accents to go. When we played with Kid Millions [of Oneida], that time we did way more improvisation.

Ego: He was less of a drummer that could listen to a song and learn that particular beat. He could, but that’s not his style. So we would improvise, spend a lot of time writing new material from the ground up, and so in that way it was more of a collaboration, creating songs on the spot which was really great and liberating for us.

How do the sounds and songs transform when you play live? Obviously there’s a template that you’re beginning from, but is it a vague template, or something more structured?

Dave: Definitely vague. When we go into instrumental breaks, it’s pretty much up to me. I’m not a Tony Iommi guitar player. I don’t play my solos note for note; I don’t play them like the record. I don’t think I could. I’m not concerned with recreating what’s on an album. It’s two completely different things. The recording is that song at that moment at that studio. When we’re on stage the song is it at that time.

What are your thoughts on the term “psychedelic?”

Dave: I think of it as music that is jarring to all of your senses. Overbearing. As much as I love Jefferson Airplane, I don’t consider them to be a psychedelic band, even though they’re seen as the forebears of that movement. On the other hand, a band like Cromagnon — their albums to me are a masterpiece, so strong. The Melvins, I love that band. I think a lot of what gets tagged psychedelic is really just pop music. I think we have done things that are psychedelic, but in my mind we’re a space-rock band. We’re not necessarily about mind-expanding drugs or psychedelics. I never wanted to have a tag, but if you don’t choose your own, someone else will. If a listener thinks of us as psychedelic, for them, that’s fine. Someone else thinks of it as stoner rock, that’s fine. To me, it’s space rock.

But the more people try to box her in, the more Hanna pivots, going from raw punk with Bikini Kill to busted DIY synth pop with Julie Ruin to electroclashy dance-pop with Le Tigre. After taking some time to work on other projects, including a film about her called The Punk Singer, Hanna is back to making music with a new Julie Ruin record, Run Fast. eMusic’s Cortney Harding met up with Hanna to talk about her life in punk through the songs she wrote.

Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl”

I was living in D.C. and spending a lot of time at a house called the Embassy House, where my bandmates and a bunch of other musicians lived. I can say I wrote it there, in the basement, but the song almost wrote itself. It’s like there was something in the air in 1992 in D.C. and I just reached out and grabbed it. In a way, I don’t even feel like I can take credit for it. It was never meant to be a song about “riot grrl,” necessarily; we didn’t use that term, the press named it that. It’s really about this mix of envy and excitement you feel towards certain women.

Bikini Kill, “Thurston Hearts The Who”

There was an incident where a magazine wrote a negative review of our record, then after they heard that Thurston Moore liked us, went back and wrote a different, more positive review. Then there was another situation where we played a show in Hawaii and a woman wrote a terrible review — she said that I was confused and acting out abuse I had suffered on stage and she made us sound really stupid. But one of the points I was trying to make was that you can talk like a Valley Girl and still be a smart person; it’s all about recognizing the contradictions you have to live with if you’re any sort of marginalized person.

I had been wanting to do a more spoken-word-, performance-art-type of piece and doing this was also an opportunity to respond back and take control of this bad review. It was also a way to work through everything that was happening with Sonic Youth — they loved us and supported us and I appreciated the attention and help, because for a while it seemed like everybody hated us and it’s hard to be on stage and just be hated. But there was also the idea that we needed the stamp of male approval to be liked by anyone. The idea that men are the arbiters of taste; I remember for a while in Olympia if Calvin Johnson danced at your show, it meant your band had made it in some way. So while Thurston helped us and we appreciated it, I always wondered why it had to take a man’s approval to change how people thought.

Bikini Kill, “Reject All-American”

I was in Olympia, and it was a really difficult time period for me. I had three deaths in three days, two of which I found out about via my answering machine. So I honestly don’t remember much about writing the lyrics; I had a deadline for going into the studio and I basically just went to a hotel and wrote all the lyrics in 48 hours. This was in 1995 or 1996 and things had just gotten really shitty. And the funniest part of all this was that people hated this record and called us sellouts because we recorded it in a studio and we had gotten better as musicians. It’s like, first we were awful because we weren’t professional enough, and then we were awful because we were too professional.

The Julie Ruin, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”

Julie Ruin overlapped with Bikini Kill; Bikini Kill was coming to a close and around the same time I got a drum machine and Slim Moon gave me a broken sampler. The sampler didn’t have any memory so I couldn’t redo things and it was basically a three-step process to record anything. At the time, I was also dealing with a stalker. It was the end of 1997 and I was living in Olympia, and getting people coming up to me on the street and handing me zines, some of which were about how terrible I was. I would go work in this jock coffee shop because I didn’t know anyone there and the guys at the counter never talked to me and no one bothered me. One day, this guy who worked in a shop across from my apartment came in and asked the owners of this coffee shop if I was a prostitute; the guys at the coffee shop, who had never talked to me before, were so freaked out by it they told me they were worried. This guy would watch me and eventually he moved into the store across from me and would look in my apartment all the time. I was mostly sleeping other places because I felt so unsafe, and I didn’t feel OK wearing headphones to record music because it meant I couldn’t hear if he was coming in the door or the window. One night at 3 a.m., I happened to be in my apartment and I recorded this song, having to take off my headphones every 30 seconds to check the door and the window. Eventually he was arrested for another domestic violence charge and I found another apartment.

Le Tigre, “Bang Bang”

I had moved to New York and I was on Mott Street at the time. I think Moby lived in the same building, because I would see his mail in the lobby sometimes [laughs]. When Amadou Diallo was shot, I wanted to write a song about it, but I felt as a white person I couldn’t speak from a personal point about racism. I remember Fugazi singing “Suggestion” and Ian getting shit for that, but I also wanted to stick my neck out and say something.

Le Tigre, “New Kicks”

I wanted to document everything that was happening around the anti-war protests in 2003, to take a snapshot of that time. I think movements need music. I also remember we got permission from Al Sharpton to use a sample of him speaking in a song, and I was really excited and grateful. A little while later I met him at an event, and went up to him and thanked him and told him how much I appreciated it, and he had no idea what I was talking about. I’m sure our sample request was one of a hundred papers he just signed every day.

The Julie Ruin, “Oh Come On”

The singing style on this was inspired by Lydia Lunch, and I’m talking about being a feminist performer and talking to other feminist performers. There’s a pressure for female performers to be angry and sexy at the same time; you’re also supposed to be some sort of representative of your gender. There’s a feeling that if you make a mistake it’s the wallpaper for the rest of your life and career. I’m just saying, “Oh, come on,” do we really have to keep living like this? Can’t you just represent yourself?

Their first record since 2011′s I Am Very Far, The Silver Gymnasium takes all of Okkervil River’s familiar elements — unapologetically approachable rock, lyrics that touch on universal themes in plain language — and puts them in service of Sheff’s most autobiographical effort to date. The Silver Gymnasium draws directly on Sheff’s memories of growing up in Meriden, New Hampshire.

Hilary Hughes talked with Sheff about the stories behind the album’s creation.

I’m a New Englander myself, so when I found out that you had such a strong tie to New Hampshire and that The Silver Gymnasium draws from your experiences growing up there, I was stoked! I usually associate you with Austin.

It’s kind of funny — people see the word “Texas” and they don’t see anything else after that. I’ve seen all manifestations of us being a country band and Texas boys and all that stuff, which is totally hilarious, because I’m from New Hampshire, and I have no special feeling for Texas, other than the fact that I have lived here for awhile. I was living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the other members of the band were living in Appleton, Wisconsin. We decided Austin would be the easiest place for us to try and do something, but I never realized it would basically categorize us as a country band for 15 years. People will not stop thinking of me as Southern. But the truth is I’m from New Hampshire. [Sheff currently lives in Brooklyn. — Ed.]

I don’t hear a shred of a New England accent on you, though.

There are certain times I have it — if I’m around people from New Hampshire it comes out more. I think that accents are more of a personality type, and some people are more susceptible to accents and some less so. I’ve known people who’ve gone away to another state for a year and they come back and suddenly they have the accent. It’s not a poser thing; it’s like your brain absorbs the accent. My brother has a stronger New England accent than I do, and genetically, we’re pretty darn close, so I just think it’s some kind of combination of how long you’ve lived in a place and the way that your brain soaks up language.

I’m in a really good mood when my accent comes out, but when I’m really inebriated, I suddenly have a Texas accent.

Can you hear any sort of regional discrepancy — accent, colloquialisms or otherwise — on The Silver Gymnasium? Would you say this record sounds like it comes from New Hampshire?

With Okkervil River, I’ve been writing about New Hampshire from the very first record. I was writing about New Hampshire while I was living there, because I was always aware that it was an interesting and special place and that my town was very unique. There aren’t a tremendous amount of regional expressions on the record. I think here and there, there may be a couple. There are definitely a lot of references to very specific places in my town. A lot of this stuff was done out of my belief that when you’re being specific, you’re being universal, and if you’re being really honest about your feelings, even if those feelings are very, very specific to you, other people are going to relate to them because people are very similar. That’s really the only rule that I can just go by and believe, is that it’s okay to get really specific on a record, because the specifics will translate to more people.

What are some of these places that we’re talking about? Which ones conjure up the most visceral experience for you, where you have your strongest connection to a sense of place?

In “Black Nemo,” it starts out when I’m talking about Indian summers in Meriden, and in the third verse, I’m saying “through Bonner Road basements.” I’m thinking about specific friends and their houses that I’d go to. “Black Nemo” is very much a New Hampshire travelogue song for me.

As you share some very specific memories and places on The Silver Gymnasium, would you say you’ve delved into a deeper place, personally, with this record than with previous Okkervil River material? What are some risks you took here that haven’t necessarily encountered before?

That’s a funny thing about me: I very often will write a song that isn’t personal at all and it’ll get taken very personally. I think that’s partially because there’s something about my voice and the way I sing. There’s a feeling that gets mistaken for a deep personal investment in the material. People have a tendency to overanalyze things, like looking for clues about my personal feelings. There’s a kind of a tendency for people to really read into really, squirmy personal stuff, and that makes me kind of uncomfortable, which is a funny position to be in. Sometimes I think my impulses as an artist are at odds with my preferences as a human being. I don’t necessarily try to make a very big deal out of myself; I don’t want people to pay much attention to me in a personal framework. I enjoy the general vibe of my friends and being in a group and not necessarily making the focus come back to me. It makes me feel anxious and embarrassed and awkward. In some way, I guess because I feel a responsibility to bring something that’s real, and emotional, and direct, and genuine into a song, I very often go for something that’s close — but I don’t necessarily love the consequences of my tendency to do that. I didn’t write this record in an attempt to get people to focus on my personal life; I wrote the record because I’ve been chasing down something that I was passionate about, and I felt a responsibility to have some measure of passion in my work and what I was writing about. Right now, in rock ‘n’ roll songwriting, I hear an apathetic disconnection from emotion. It feels very disassociated from emotion and feeling, yet you hear a lot of people using a lot of emotionally charged language. They’re kind of using it in place of having to think about things in novel ways, and for that reason, I felt like it was important to write something that was direct and honest and straightforward and had a little something on the line. I think that was why I went a very personal route.

The Silver Gymnasium is rooted in a certain time period for you. Does its time capsule-like quality make it a timeless or nostalgic record?

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a timeless-sounding record. I think that when a record becomes absorbed into our consciousness enough, it starts to sound timeless to us, because we listen to it so many different times and in so many different situations. I think that every record is dated, and I like that. I think that’s something to be embraced.

Youthful Tennessee native Valerie June plays a crude, but oh so endearing, guitar and banjo and sings in a one-of-a-kind voice with phrasing and intonation that embraces the wrath of Nina Simone, the cheeriness of Dolly Parton and almost everything in between. Her songs sound traditional but with a contemporary twist, and she’s the best thing to happen to Americana and roots music in quite a while. So far she’s better established in Europe than in the USA, but with the release of Pushin’ Against a Stone, her first album to receive national distribution at home, that’s about to change. You’re going to be hearing a lot about Valerie June.

What’s the first music you can remember being really moved by?

Oh, Walt Disney, I had on my Mickey Mouse ears and was going over each lyric. The one that really got me was “Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book; that was incredible. I was about five.

When did you begin writing songs yourself?

When I moved to Memphis. My first husband was a guitar player; he played all around the house and I just made up words to the music he was playing. We split up because we were too young, straight out of high school, 18 years old, graduated and then got in the van and moved the next day. We got about six or seven songs early on in Memphis and then I said I was gonna book a show at the coffee shop where I worked. I knew at least my friends that worked there with me would show up. They’d say, “She’s crazy so at least it’ll be interesting,” and I am crazy to go into music. I did it the same way when I first starting performing alone. I got some songs so I said, “Now you’re gonna go out and play them for your friends.” So I’ve been doing it eight years now, though I never quit my day jobs until now.

For all the talk of your roots leanings, there’s such a strong, and personal, singer-songwriter element in your music.

I love singer-songwriters: Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison…If you’ve got a story to tell I want to hear it. So it’s nice to be in the singer-songwriter world. I consider myself someone who plays an instrument but is not a musician; I’m a songwriter and singer who plays her own songs. I didn’t even realize about the singer-songwriter thing until I got older and thought I should look into it, and that’s what got me moving towards folk music. Old songbooks are a big thing to me; I have endless amounts of folksong books now. And I spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress, just listening to the old songs and all the different ways different people performed them; I really studied those songs. I also learned a lot from older musicians, like Robert Balfour in Memphis. I don’t even have much time for that now, but I love studying, and learning.

But what in particular do you think drew you in that direction?

Through music you get an idea about how it was for people who lived on plantations, or whatever was going on in their time. You hear the voices, listen to the songs and hear their energy; the songs carry the energy of the people at that time. Then you move on into your time. My album is an amalgamation of folk, blues, gospel and country and I really feel like I can sing those songs night after night. But the genre thing just kinda happens when you record them with a producer, and certain instrumentation. I think some of my songs could be done as hip hop songs, but they aren’t. At the same time, the songs are always changing. Like, on “Working Woman Blues” I worked with Hungarian musicians and when I hear it I say, “Wow, how did that happen?” I’ve never done the song anything like that before. I have no idea where this version came from, but I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Stories grow and change, and you can see how; same with my songs. When you record them, they’re like snapshots, and it’s always different no matter who I’m working with. Every time I get in a room with different musicians the songs go different ways. It’s really great.

Of all those traditional songs you studied, which is your absolute favorite?

“The Crawdad Song.” I love it. There’s so many different versions of it. It changes from one part of the world to another. People make it their own, and that’s the way it should be; they sing it their way and make it their song.

“I feel like an alien most of the time,” Wolfe jokes, attempting to skirt an obnoxiously oversized mound of whip cream topping her iced latte at Los Angeles’s Urth Caffe. “But I guess I’m human.”

Laura Studarus joined Wolfe for a conversation in the blistering summer sun about nature vs. nurture, life after death, music as therapy, and how it all fits together on Pain is Beauty.

Do you feel your new album, Pain is Beauty, is dark?

I don’t always think of it as dark. I talk about it as reality music. There’s always two sides to every story. There’s a dark side and a light side, usually. I guess I do tend to focus on the side that’s harsher.

Have people tried to slap the term “Goth” on it?

Not anymore. I actually thought of it as a joke at first. It started to get so widely used. In my mind, Goth is like Siouxsie and the Banshees or Joy Division, the whole ’80s music thing. I don’t consider myself in that category, so I don’t really think of myself as Goth.

It’s like the word “hipster.” The term has been diluted from overuse.

Yeah, it’s in the same family.

Were you always so aware of this idea of the dark and the light?

I definitely knew that I understood sadness and darkness in reality in a certain way, ever since I was really little. I started by writing poems and things like that about it. I knew I needed to channel it into something. It was frustrating and confusing to figure out the world as a young kid. So I started writing poems.

How old were you when you started writing poems?

Six or seven. I started recording music when I was nine. It was because my dad was in a band when I was growing up. So I had access to musical equipment in the studio.

So music was never some kind of foreign language to you.

No. It was just something I started doing organically. As cheesy as that sounds. I hate that word.

Did you show your dad your stuff early? Or was there an intimidation factor there since he was an established musician?

He would help me record and stuff like that. I have a sister and a stepsister, so we formed a little family band. I was having fun. I remember being in fourth grade and wanting to take the songs to show and tell. Just bringing a tape in.

Did you do it?

I don’t remember exactly. I might have. I was always comfortable with the idea of recorded music.

Where do you stand on the idea of nature versus nurture? It seems to be one of the narrative threads of the new album.

For me it’s a little bit of both. A lot of people are born to do something. A lot of times they don’t figure that out. Sometimes they do. From a young age I knew that I understood things in a certain way, and I could put it into words in my own way. I knew I would always do that, whether it was presenting it to the public or not.

Do you find that your physical environment plays into that?

Yeah. Pain is Beauty is a lot about nature and the inspiration that comes from it, like the intensity of a volcano. I was really drawn to stories of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, stories of natural disaster and the way it affects humanity. That’s where a lot of the lyrics came from. Translations from people and what they were saying.

Part of the title Pain is Beauty was inspired by fire ecology. In certain forest environments, fire is necessary to generate growth and cleanse it, so that new ecosystems can survive and thrive. The idea that something terrible can make something beautiful and things like that. At the same time, though it is something that’s semi-natural, when it comes to people’s homes, it’s very scary. The earthquake thing is pretty intense, too. There’s part of that in the album too, this idea that we go about our lives, we do what we do, but the earth is so much more powerful than us and it could shake us up and kill us off if it wanted to. It’s so crazy to have that dynamic constantly in your head.

Do you have a belief or an idea of a higher power? Or is the earth your higher power?

For this album, it definitely is. It’s the idea that nature has control over everything, that it could wipe us out in a second if it wanted to. It does sometimes; it takes out so many people at once. It’s so intense.

How do you feel about the way humans affect nature?

Thinking about clear-cutting forests makes my skin crawl. If you think about the earth as a living being, that’s how we toxify everything. I get overwhelmed, honestly. I do think about the world in the micro and macro sense, the bigness of everything and the smallness of everything. It’s really overwhelming. So both ways, the way we affect nature, the way nature affects us, and when they collide.

The idea of death also appears several times on the album.

In my music, it’s something I approach a lot and explore in different ways. It’s not something I’ve had to deal with, the death of someone that’s close to me, which is pretty rare. I feel lucky for that, but it’s also why it’s so intriguing. What is it like to lose someone? What is it like to die? What’s it like to be dead?

When I was younger, the first film to really impact me was The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman. The visual character of death stuck in my mind. I used to dream about it in a lot of forms. Eventually I started writing about it in different ways. Sometimes it is very much a character. Other times it’s just a theme.

So if something does happen to a friend or loved one, do you feel like you’d be prepared to deal with it?

I don’t think it would make it any easier. I think I would be just as upset as everyone else, even though I’ve focused on it for so long.

What is your concept of life after death? Do you have one?

That’s such a big thing. I’m one of those people that feels like there’s a lot of different possibilities. I feel at peace with that. Not that I’m not scared of death. But I’m not particularly scared of it, either. It doesn’t fill me with a sense of dread. I feel like whoever or whatever put us here is going to put us in a good place. Whether that’s back in the earth or in the spiritual realm, it’s something that I feel okay with. Maybe one day I’ll have a specific vision of what I think it is.

Do you find it more interesting to write about the idea of finding peace, or the conflict leading up to it?

I’m interested in contrasting the two, I guess. There’s often a sense of yearning or questioning or frustration. But it’s contrasted by a sense of hope. For me, at least. Whether it’s in the melody or the lyrics. Sometimes the music can feel really dark, but the lyrics are actually really hopeful. Or vice versa. The song “The Warden,” the music sounds more light and airy than I’m used to. But lyrically it’s a pretty dark song about tormented love. I usually try to put a little bit of contrast in there so it’s not completely dreadful or too bright and happy. There’s got to be a balance.

“The Warden” does seem like it has some tormented love overtones, but that doesn’t seem like a huge part of your songwriting.

I approach it every now and then. That was one of my personal favorites on the album. I put it on the album as a theme.

There’s a beautiful simile on Pain is Beauty, “I carry heaviness like a mountain.” You’ve worked through so much; do you feel like music is a form of therapy for you?

I think it helps me to clarify things. For me it’s like an exultation. Once I understand something, it’s so much more fun to be alive. That’s why music is fun, even though a lot of my music is dark. It’s me coming to understand something or having a revelation about something. Even if it’s small, I really think epiphanies in life are really important. It’s an essential part of growing as a person.

There is no more fitting or hard-earned recipient of the Association of Independent Music’s Outstanding Contribution to Music Award than Billy Bragg. He has ploughed a lone furrow these past three decades, as a songwriter of urgent radical awareness, often in a musical landscape of near-total political apathy.

Along the way, he has worked with many of the independent sector’s leading lights, including Johnny Marr, Jeff Tweedy and California producer Joe Henry, as well as alt-rock icons REM and free spirits like Kirsty MacColl, whose cover of his early classic, “A New England,” first shot the busking East Londoner into the pop charts.

Known as the “Bard of Barking,” after his blue-collar neighbourhood, Billy released his epochal six-track debut, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, exactly 30 years ago, its stark combination of witty lyricism and clanging electric guitar helping him stand out amid the prevailing post-punk and New Romanticism.

Shuttling around on public transport with guitar case and amp, Bragg became British rock’s best-known activist, putting together the Red Wedge collective in opposition to Margaret Thatcher. Though he drew support from luminaries like Paul Weller, Thatcher was re-elected, and many expected Bragg to fall away in her wake.

This, however, was seriously to under-estimate his excellence, musically. He once described himself as “a love songwriter who also does political songs,” and through the remainder of the 1980s and ’90s, hits such as “Sexuality” confirmed his ability to touch on affairs of the heart (and body), while also finding time to hurl polemic boulders where necessary — in later years, online, often within a day or two of a political issue hitting the headlines.

With this year’s Tooth & Nail, he returned to a stripped-down sound, if not quite as bare as when he started out, then very subtly embellished under Joe Henry’s masterful guidance. In conversation, Bragg remains as enthusiastic yet as uncompromised as ever.

Tooth & Nail is your first album in four or five years. How come it’s been so long?

It’s been a very strange time. After my last album, Mr. Love & Justice, in 2008, I was sort of watching what was happening to the music industry, thinking to myself, “Well, is there really a viable place for me in the industry, or should I just put stuff out through mail order myself?” I self-released a compilation of all the topical songs I’d put out in the last 10 years, but there’s only so far you can reach with that, you can’t get beyond the people you know, so you really have to engage again with the music industry.

In the spring of 2011 my mum passed away — that changes your perspective on everything. My dad passed away 35 years ago, but losing my mum brought everything into sharp focus — not least, what was I doing and was there any worth in it? She’d had a lovely life, and it was her time, it wasn’t a terrible shock or anything, but at the end of it I really felt like I needed to do something now to move on. If I was gonna move on, I needed to actually get involved in something, and the elephant in the room at the time was a new Billy Bragg album.

So by the end of 2011 I was ready to record, and I went to see my friend Joe Henry in California. He’s a great songwriter, but the last decade or so he’s turned into an ace producer as well. He told me we could make an album in his basement in five days, and that was where my mind was. I didn’t really wanna do an album that took six weeks stretched over 18 months, which was how we made the last one. I needed to get in and get it done, so I could come away with something. It was most likely that I would come away with the foundations of a new record that I could bring back to England and add to.

There was always a chance I was gonna make the most expensive demos I’d ever made, but what I wasn’t really expecting was to come back with a complete album, that sounded amazing, which is what happened. So then I spent most of 2012 doing gigs, building up some money for a promotional budget, so that I could then in early 2013 get the record out.

In the words of your great heroes, the Clash, you had “complete control”?

Yeah! Which is scary, isn’t it. As long as you plan these things, and don’t just expect to waltz in there, it is possible to take on some of the jobs that the label used to do for you. Cooking Vinyl are great at getting the record out there, both digitally and physically — things I can’t do from where I am — but the crunch comes down to what I wanna do, and what I’m prepared to fund, so it’s a lot more realistic than it used to be. I did notice on the albums of a few people I admired, like Steve Earle and Tom Morello — if you look on the back, they made it in a week.

Funny you should mention Steve Earle, I was going to say your voice has matured into his sort of territory — it’s a bit gruffer, and more lived-in these days. This album really feels like a wise man sharing his wisdom with the listener.

I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One was making the record in California with Joe and his studio guys, and the sympathy that they gave to my songs, around my voice. It just shines through, it was just so easy to sing. And for that I’m hugely thankful. But also I wanted to go back and re-visit that Mermaid Avenue space [his 1997 collaboration with Wilco on unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs], which I hadn’t really been able to do in the UK, for whatever reasons.

With England, Half English [the 2002 album recorded with his band, the Blokes], my head just wasn’t in that space, it was in the “taking on the BNP” space [the far right-wing British National Party had been gaining ground in his native East London constituency], which is why I was making a record about personal identity that sounds like world music.

Then with Mr. Love & Justice, I should’ve been a bit more engaged in the making of that record. I was sort of losing interest in making albums. I started to think, “Is there really any point in this anymore? Are people gonna still make records?” Well, clearly they are, so it behooves me to get back on it again, and that’s what I’ve sought to do with this record, and in doing that, I’ve tried to make a record that hangs together as an idea, and as a sound.

Billy Bragg, of all people, was considering throwing in the towel — that’s inconceivable!

What’s happened — because the internet allows you now to write a song one day and put it up for live download the next — which for a topical songwriter like me is really enticing — I’ve tended to make mine available that way. Take, for instance, “Never By The Sun,” my song about the phone-hacking scandal [in the British tabloid media], I wrote that the week the Millie Dowler story broke, and it was up for a free download before News of the World had even closed [the tabloid paper was forced to close, due to public and political pressure]. So that immediacy…Whereas, to get “There Is Power in a Union” out, I had to wait until 1986 when “Talking to the Taxman about Poetry” came out — a song I wrote in 1984, about the miner’s strike.

So that’s great. But what it means is, when I come to make an album, I’ve used up all my political songs, so the songs on Tooth & Nail tend to be more personal and reflective, and after the year I had in 2011, that’s not a bad thing.

You actually revisit Woody Guthrie’s canon to cover “I Ain’t Got No Home.” Lines like “the gambling man is rich, while the working man is poor” obviously resonate in the wake of the 2010′s banking crisis. In that context, it feels pretty bleak, even despairing, which is rare for you…

I think maybe reflection might be the word. I try not to despair. I’m a “glass half-full” kind of guy. It’s all in there in “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Better Day,” which closes the album, and in opener “January Song,” which says, I’m gonna pick myself up, I’m gonna get through this — this is where the end begins; I’m gonna finish with this, where I am now, and I’m gonna move forward.

Interestingly, the album was recorded in January 2012, and that was the very last song I wrote, on the last day. It was a song that needed to set the tone for the record, because it was a bit weird — by the time we got to Wednesday, we’d recorded 10 songs, and I thought to myself, “If I write another couple of songs, I could walk away with an album here.” So when everyone went home in the evening, I was busily away in Joe’s spare room — I was staying at his house — trying to get a couple of songs finished.

With that one, literally as we were recording it, a couple more verses came through, so I had to run upstairs, while the musicians stood there looking at the wall, and scribble them down. Then I came back down again and sang it. So it was — not an epiphany, but certainly a commitment to myself to move on to whatever comes next, to pick myself up, dust myself down, and get on with it. That’s what I really needed to do.

Did it feel like the right time for you to become the confessional troubadour?

Well, there’s a lot of that about. The sort of artists I’ve been listening to in the last few years have tended to be the more intense, personal singer-songwriter — Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes. I’ve always been a fan of that, ever since Simon & Garfunkel and Dylan, when I was a teenager.

Since 2000 or so, you’ve had a full band at your disposal, the Blokes, with the Faces’ Ian Mclagan on keyboards. Even before that, your oeuvre has been a bit schizo, veering between the stripped-back, often solo sound of you and guitar, and the more full-band stuff — it was even pretty much presented that way on your two career-overview box sets, Volume One and Volume Two, respectively. What was your initial motivation in doing the one man and his guitar act in the early ’80s?

Well, it was to escape. It was pretty risky, but it was hugely exciting. The adrenaline rush was incredible. That’s always been a big part of why I wanna do this, to get that adrenaline buzz, but a lot of the artists I used to listen to as a teenager were singer-songwriters who started out solo — the idea of the single figure alone onstage. That, plugged into the power and velocity of the Clash and the Jam, seemed to me like good wires to cross, to see what sparks flew off.

I initially had difficulty convincing pub guv’nors to put me on. I was just trying to find a way to escape from a world where my choices were getting fewer. The band I’d been in [Riff Raff] had broken up, punk had ended, I joined the army but that didn’t work out — what was I gonna do? This was like my last attempt, almost like a bayonet charge, you could say, and thirty years later I’m amazed I’m still making a living doing it. I feel really fortunate for that.

They called you the “one-man Clash”. I recently saw you defined as “folk punk,” which, if it is indeed a genre, certainly didn’t exist before you came along!

Yeah, but there was a strong connection between Woody Guthrie and the Clash. Joe Strummer used to call himself Woody, before he called himself Joe. The Clash painted slogans on their guitars because Woody did. And in some ways punk was a form of folk music, like skiffle was — a sort of do-it-yourself, get-up-and-play kind of thing that really put more onus on expression than on musicality, which is what folk music does, really. I think folk music really is music that they make for themselves, as opposed to music they buy commercially, to dance to or listen to. It’s a raw definition, but I think it’s as good as any. And punk was like that — music for ourselves.

You’ve always said that seeing the Clash perform in front of 100,000 people at a Rock Against Racism gig in London’s Victoria Park in 1977 changed your life. Why?

It was a huge catalyst, not only in my political development, but also my understanding of how music affects society. It didn’t change things, that gig, but it did send me away with a different perspective, that I hadn’t got before from the media I was taking in — the broadsheet newspapers. I was 20, but I hadn’t made the connection — there were a lot of gay people at that march, partly because Tom Robinson was performing. I hadn’t made that connection — that it was about discrimination, it wasn’t just about black people. So the world didn’t change, it stayed exactly the same, but my perception of it did, to such an extent that I wouldn’t probably being doing this job now, if it hadn’t been for what happened there. So, knowing that there’s the potential to do that every night at a gig, you’re always trying to put out ideas that you think just might send someone away with a different view of the world. You’re bringing the news from one place, like Woody did, and taking it to another.

Because you were active in extreme political times of mid ’80s Thatcherism — and with hindsight, we can definitely say they were extreme times…

Yup, I think that’s fair.

But through all of that, your musicality got a little eclipsed by the urgency of what you were saying. Is that fair, too?

Yup, for sure. The interesting thing was, I’d grown up listening to those singer-songwriters who had engaged in the Civil Rights Movement in America, and in the anti-war movement, who’d stood up and sung a song that somehow defined the moment. I suddenly found myself in a similar position.

You know, can music change the world? Well, I don’t know, but I’m gonna have a damn good go, and see if it does. I’m gonna push it as far as I can, as logically as I can, and taking my cues from the mistakes that I thought that the previous generation had made, and prime to me among that was the failure of the Clash to engage with mainstream politics. That was my analysis at the time — crude though it was.

I thought, the best vehicle, after the miners’ strike didn’t produce a revolution, which everyone promised me it would, rather than just go back to singing songs, it seemed to me we needed to find another vehicle to help defeat Margaret Thatcher, and the most obvious vehicle was Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party at the ’87 Election, and that’s how Red Wedge came into being. In the end, if you’re gonna sing these songs, you’ve gotta do your best to match your actions to that, rather than just observing politics. I’ve always tried to engage. I’m a songwriter, and I’m an activist as well.

When Kirsty MacColl charted with “A New England” in 1985, it put you on the map as a songwriter — like, hang on, this guy’s not just hollering away in a political void, he actually writes good tunes!

Yeah, that changed everything for me. It was a real badge of honor, because I was a huge Kirsty MacColl fan back from the days when I was working in a record shop. She herself had an incredible ear for a tune, and a great voice. And obviously through her dad she had the political chops as well, so for her to come to me and ask if she could record one of my songs was like winning the pools really. When it turned out so fabulous and got in the Top 10, and you could buy my album for the price of her 12-inch, all of a sudden I was reaching people that previously I hadn’t done.

And still that’s the song that most people know. Even David Cameron! When he said he liked the Smiths [in a famous press conference], someone said, “You’ll be saying you like Billy Bragg next, and he said, I do like ‘A New England,’ but I like Kirsty’s version,” which was like a glancing blow — it was close, but I just managed to avoid the full weight of it.

Did Kirsty’s cover open up the idea for you to start putting instrumentation on your records, to make them a bit prettier for people?

I think it was working with Johnny Marr that changed that. “Greetings For The New Brunette” [1986] was great, but the real thing was when he produced “Sexuality” on Don’t Try This At Home [1991], because me and the actual producer of the album, Grant Showbiz — when we got Johnny’s track back, we thought, “Oh fuck [laughs], now we’ve gotta make an album that sounds like that.” He set the bar really high.

I have no qualms about pop music. I love pop music. If I could sing like Marvin Gaye and dance like Fred Astaire, I would totally have gone for it in the ’80s — although it would’ve been political. I always thought my strength lay in what I was writing — content over style, I suppose. But I’ve always liked to think I have enough of a pop sensibility to be able to engage with people.

The thing is, when people talk about writing a political song, they often forget the song bit. People remember a song like “What’s Going On?” because of its great hook, and the orchestration. These things are important. The lyric should be able to deal with the attitude in it. You don’t need the music to do that too. The music should be drawing people in.

2002′s England, Half English, was loosely about Britain’s tradition of multiculturalism, stretching back for centuries. That led you on to writing your book, The Progressive Patriot. What were you able to write there, that you couldn’t in song?

All you can do with your records is send a message from where you are. That’s what Tooth & Nail is, and it’s definitely what England, Half English was. I ended up needing to write the book, because subsequent to England, Half English, the BNP got 12 councillors elected in Barking & Dagenham [Bragg's constituency] in 2006, and I was like, “What can I do? I can’t just write another record. I’m gonna have to engage in this in a much more detailed way. I’m gonna have to go on, in real detail about why I love my country, why I’m not willing to stand by and watch the town I grew up in turn into the racist capital of Britain.” There are different types of patriotism, let’s explore that. All those things, I could’ve done them each in a song. The book allowed me greater scope.

In the late Noughties, a freshly politicized new generation of British artists started name-checking you, including Jamie T, Hard-Fi and Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly. Was that like a final validation for you? Like, your music has endured?

Yeah, that was a welcome surprise. I still feel I have something to say. At the tail end of 2011, I thought to myself, I really need to engage with the industry again, because I haven’t finished. I still have some fight in me. Let’s do this, and see what happens. When this period of touring and promotion is over in about a year’s time, I’ll step back, and hopefully I will be in a different place, both emotionally and career-wise — that Tooth & Nail will have made people look at me in a different perspective. I’m hoping — because I don’t expect to be in the charts and playing Wembley Arena. I don’t think that was ever really in the plan for me, just to carry on making a living, and still having people come along and ask you to play tracks from your newest album. That’s all I can hope for.

On her new album, Loud City Song, Holter also worked in professional studios, and occasionally with a full complement of session musicians on hand to play her own arrangements. While on a ginger-beer break from a recent sound-check, she spoke with eMusic’s Seth Colter Walls about blending home and studio recording practices, as well as her influences, which range from Joni Mitchell to the post-minimalist opera composer Robert Ashley.

How did recording in a “proper” studio setting, with a full backing ensemble, challenge you or change the process?

Recording was actually really great; it wasn’t uncomfortable. A lot of the vocals I recorded in Cole’s [the producer's] studio at home — which was a more comfortable space than like a professional studio. We recorded the instruments in the studio but also recorded a bunch of stuff at home. Also, I spent a year and a half before that writing and recording demos of all the songs. I could try things out. I didn’t have to worry about the demos being perfect, like in the past where the demos were the final recording. So it was really liberating and fun — it was so much more playful, actually. So I guess the best of both worlds!

Previous projects of yours have had literary inspirations, including Greek tragedy. The influence this time is derived from the Colette novella Gigi.

Well, Collette’s text was an influence, for sure, but it was maybe even more the film that came out of the text — the musical that a lot of people know. I grew up watching that musical, and I’m not normally much of a “musicals” person. I just grew up with that particular one. It didn’t occur to me at first to make a record inspired by Gigi. It’s one of those things that you grow up with that you don’t think of making art out of — because it’s just something personal, really. I guess in the end the only things I really can use are the things that I really love or the things that I respond to the most — and I just have to be honest with myself.

You’ve also mentioned Joni Mitchell as an influence on the record. I was thinking of The Hissing of Summer Lawns a bit on “In the Green Wild.”

Yeah, there’s this one song on The Hissing of Summer Lawns called “The Jungle Line” that musically inspired “In the Green Wild.” It’s amazing just for a simple reason: It’s very percussive and cool. She’s another one of those people that I listened to at a very formative age so much — and I don’t listen to as much now — but I have just in my bones or something.

I’ve also heard you mention affection for the American “maverick” composer Robert Ashley. What about him inspires you?

I don’t know how much I am influenced by him, but I’m definitely very inspired by him. I don’t know how much you can tell of that by listening to my music. But [someone else] told me the other day my music reminded them of Robert Ashley, which I thought was interesting.

I really love his “Automatic Writing” piece. I think it’s one of my favorite things ever: just hearing these utterances and not being sure what they mean or what they’re saying — they’re mysterious, they create a mood. You don’t often see music or art dealing with the psychology of utterances that you can’t understand, and that piece just lives in the world, explores it for like twelve minutes. That’s a cinema of sound.

Do you feel like people have a good grip on “your sound” or your project? And does that change as you move from venue to venue — or even from country to country?

I don’t feel like anyone has a good idea of how to describe what I’m doing — which is good news, I think. Because I definitely change what I do a lot. For me, my records are all very different. It’s probably clearer to other people what makes my songs similar than it is to me actually.

So I’ve chosen to keep just my regular my normal name, my birth name, and not make a project name because of this — to maintain independence form some kind of a project that has a specific goal. I started off making music as a composer in school and in a way I still think of myself as a composer who is behind the scenes, building things. As opposed to, like, a performer, or someone who is doing a specific thing and they have this name that people know them as.

Listening to the instrumental passages on Loud City Song made me wonder if you could ever see yourself returning to those conservatory roots, and making an instrumental album of compositions.

Well I have in the past, but for some reason recently I’ve just wanted to make music with singing. But I don’t necessarily know that I always will!

The songs on An Object kick even harder against a variety of pricks, from our failing financial industry (“No Ground”), the mercurial nature of the band’s punk forefathers (“Defector/ed”) and our poisoned consumer culture (“Commerce, Comment, Commence”). For all their rage, however, these 11 tunes are surprisingly restrained. The entire album feels denatured, with guitar tones pixilating apart and drums lost behind a wall of mist.

Naming this collection An Object has a matter-of-fact element to it as well. This is, the band avers, after all, just a thing. And, No Age is emphasizing the album’s object status by handling all of the production of the physical copies — from LP pressing and artwork production to assembly — themselves.

Robert Ham spoke with guitarist Randy Randall about how No Age is able to navigate the world of corporate-sponsored music and festivals, punk as an ethos, and the physical construction of An Object.

The title of the album — especially the way it is presented on the cover art — seems like a very pointed one. What was your thinking behind it?

There was a lot of wordplay in the lyrics so we were looking for something that had two or three, if not more, meanings. I think the first word that popped out for me when I was trying to characterize all the songs was “defection.” To be a defect and then also to defect, something that could be a noun and a verb at the same time. An object and to object became a similar sort of wordplay. To object to something, to stand against something and also to just exist as an object.

It seems to speak really well to this concept that you and [drummer/vocalist] Dean [Allen Spunt] have been focusing on with the physical copies of An Object, where you are handling the creation of each one yourselves.

There’s something very real about it. What does a term like DIY mean? For us, it was obvious: No one else was going to do it for us. There wasn’t really a choice. “We’re a do-it-yourself kind of band!” How could you not be? It’s as silly as, “These are the kind of guys who put their own shoes on!” Who else would do that for you? But as we’ve made our way, at some point we allowed other people to do things for us. Sometimes it works out well, and sometimes you start to lose where things are coming from and the message starts to get lost. It’s like a game of telephone. So, the question became, “Why can’t we do it?” Just because we’ve never done it before doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out. We didn’t know how to play our instruments when we started.

So are you really assembling as much of the packaging of the new album as possible yourselves?

This was a huge point for Dean. He runs a record label called Post Present Medium and he’s been getting more and more involved in the physical manufacturing of his releases. So when it came time to do our album, even though we’re doing it through Sub Pop, we wanted to bring in some of these new tools and means of production that he had been working on.

It is unusual in the sense that, as you’ve likely done with other Sub Pop releases, this is all stuff you could fob off on someone else or let them figure out.

This is one of the places where Dean and I disagree. I’m about playing music. I don’t enjoy folding boxes for 20 hours. But Dean’s been assembling a team of friends and well wishers. I don’t think we could fold all 10,000 boxes ourselves. For this first run, we’re doing 5,000 CDs and 5,000 LPs. I’ll come in and help the best I can, but I’ll be the first to tell on myself that I’m not a fan of folding boxes.

Having his own label and having a network of folks willing to step in and help must be great.

I think it almost speaks to more of a Type A, micromanaging kind of thing than an ethos. It goes both ways, too. If you want something done right, do it yourself. And if it comes out wrong, then you have no one to blame but yourself. We use that thinking all the time. We don’t have a manager. We’re pretty easy to get a hold of. It’s just the two of us. If you don’t like something in a song or something happened at a show, you can write us and tell us about it. We don’t have any handlers or anyone to keep those things away from us.

Does Sub Pop balk at this more hands-on approach that you take or the more overt political statements that you make, or are they happy to let you do whatever you feel?

They really support us. I think they kind of get some funny looks at times and we’ll also get some great high fives. I think we’ve definitely pushed some boundaries there. And they’ve taught us a lot about the work they do. We work with each person there so closely. We have to know the guy who does the graphic design layouts to make sure that he knows the color or the font that we need for the cover. It also helps us understand that it’s a huge operation. It’s a big company with a lot of moving parts.

Is that part of what keeps you on the label? You’ve said before that you can put out music anytime you want via Dean’s label and you’re at a point where you could still do well for yourselves, if not better, doing it that way.

Yeah, I think they’ve been awesome to work with and I think as much as we like to do stuff ourselves, it’s good to have an infrastructure there that already has experts or at least professionals that do what they do well. Folding boxes isn’t my favorite thing to do in the same sort of way that scheduling interviews or hounding people at magazines to do my own PR wouldn’t be my favorite thing to do. I can talk once it gets set up. I’ll jump on the phone right at the end and carry the baton across the finish line. One thing we’ve done is to hire an assistant to help us advance shows and book hotels and flights and that kind of stuff. At some point there’s only so much you can do yourself.

Because the physical object of the album is such an important part of this discussion, do you still see the benefit of how music is being distributed digitally?

I really see it both ways. I’m 32, so I’m not so young I don’t remember a time before. But I also don’t think they’re the worst thing in the world. Having access to every bit of recorded music on the planet is just another chapter in this. At the same time you have to have that questioning eye. Not everything you read is true, not everything you hear is great. I think you still have to have a curatorial, analytic mind about it. I think it’s great that our music is out there, and that anybody anywhere with internet access could find out about No Age and listen to our songs. We’ve seen a huge benefit from that.

To look at the other side of the title of the album, I did want to touch on the show you played in Barcelona where you showed a video critical of the sponsors during your set. The reason I bring this up is to ask if it is difficult for a band as politically-minded as you are to navigate this world where there are so many corporations becoming benefactors of music?

I don’t think it’s difficult for us. Dean and I both pretty clear on where we come from and what we believe in. I think it can be difficult for other people, booking agents or promoters. They’re trying to make everybody happy. I think we, for better or worse, occupy a rarified air. A little bit of an elitist nether region of “artists.” I’m fully aware of that. These corporations sell products and they maximize their profits to do it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to employ child labor or pay an unlivable wage in order to make my thing. But I understand that it’s apples and oranges. I also don’t think that you’re a bad band if you play a show like that. I don’t even think they’re a bad company. It’s more of making a statement that this is where we find ourselves today and I feel uncomfortable about it. You can put your head in the sand and go, “Well, I don’t know…” or you can say, “Let’s talk about it.” I don’t know if I’m going to come up with an answer but talking about it isn’t a bad thing.

It has to be tough because you have car companies and energy-drink companies sponsoring some pretty cool events and helping bands make records, but there’s a discomfort to it as well having a huge corporate interest involved in this art.

These companies are here to make money. If supporting the arts helps make them more money, they’ll support the arts. If sponsoring polo matches or dogfights or knitting competitions helped sell more products, they’d do that. I can guarantee you that once they’ve deemed it unprofitable to support your scene they’ll leave. If someone wants to take their money, that’s fine, but I don’t think anyone should fool themselves that these corporations are benevolent.

Do you have a threshold where it becomes not worth it to play shows like the one in Barcelona or doing a festival that is being supported by corporate interests?

Certainly. There are questions to be asked. When we started out, we didn’t have any prior knowledge of how these things work. Then the next day you see this picture of yourself playing in front of a big cartoon character selling a pair of sunglasses or whatever and you think, “Wow, I drove eight hours and slept on a dude’s floor and was up there playing my balls off, sweating, bleeding, giving it everything I can, but I see that photo…” It trivializes all the effort. At the same time, it’s gonna happen. And hopefully we’re going to play more than one show in your town. We’ve done that where we played one big show like that and then drove across town and played another show that felt right. We’re trying to figure out what makes the most sense for us.

Speaking of the fact that you work with a Seattle label that is so connected with that region, have you read the piece that John Roderick wrote for Seattle Weekly where he calls punk a “toxic social movement that has poisoned our culture?”

Wow…no I haven’t. You know what it calls to mind? From the beginning, we got saddled with this “lo-fi” thing. It was never our intention to do it that way, it was just what we had to work with. Once we got more money and learned more about recording, it got better and cleaner. Just because it’s punk, it doesn’t have to be shit. Like with the artwork for the album. If you want it to look good, it should look good. We’re using a local independent business to help with the printing of the covers. I still think that’s punk. Just because we didn’t pull the screen or steal the ink from the shop in our bike messenger bag and rode our fixed gear across the bridge to our punk house where we’re living with 10 other people, doesn’t make it less punk. Punk is what you make it. It’s an idea about being yourself and being out of step. I think punk as a culture can become very dogmatic. “You’re not following the punk rules.” There are no rules. As soon as something has a rule, I’m trapped in that. Don’t tell me there’s a rule. If you can name it, then it’s probably not punk.

Their afro’d leader, Nick Allbrook, has described them, poetically, as “loose as a mother bitch.” Where multi-instrumentalist Parker constructs his music, as per Lonerism‘s title, by stacking up self-played tracks, solo, on his computer, Pond is fundamentally the sound of a wild and profoundly unhinged band rocking out at the same time, in the same room, on another planet.

Their hare-brained but brilliant fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, landed concurrently with Lonerism in 2012, although, less conveniently, it had been shelved for almost two years prior to that, while shared members Allbrook, Jay Watson and Joe Ryan toured its Impala predecessor, Innerspeaker with Parker (who also used to drum for Pond).

That album has widely been hailed as a revelation, but there’s a strong sense that the world may never quite catch up with Pond. Before us already, there’s a fifth album called Hobo Rocket, which runs the gamut from Butthole Surfers/early Flaming Lips punk-psych mania, to George Harrison-in-a-kaftan melodic bliss-out. Incredibly, there’s also a sixth in the can, called Man, It Feels Like Space Again, which Jay Watson, for one, has proclaimed to be their masterpiece.

As if that weren’t enough to take in, Allbrook, who’s since quit touring with Tame, has his finger in a number of other pies including Mink Mussel Creek (with Parker) and Allbrook-Avery (with Pond’s current drummer, Cam Avery). Andrew Perry spoke with Allbrook, 25, to find out more about this inspirational Antipodean psych splurge.

Is the basic difference between Tame Impala and Pond, that Kevin makes his stuff solo, within a computer’s virtual infinity, while Pond happens raw and alive?

Yeah, hopefully there’s a bit of that, although we do our fair share of laptop input. But we do enjoy the explosion that happens with doing something live. Maybe it’s because none of us are as proficient or self-confident as Kevin, so it’s always nice to have comrades to share the blame.

Media pontificators have been coming up with the theories about the sudden explosion of cool music out of Perth, and its comparative remoteness on the West Coast of Australia. Plausible or piffle?

I wouldn’t have a clue. Maybe it stems from isolation. I’ve seen some bands in places like London, Paris and Berlin, that I think start out having a really deep idea of what they wanna be conceived as. They don’t wanna be a dumb rock band, they wanna be an intelligent, post-dubstep psych-shoegaze electro thing, or they wanna be an energetic live band, or be considered more like a bedroom producer. They think about what scene, what record label, and what ad are they gonna try and get put on.

But in Perth — it’s not that everyone’s so pure that they don’t want that, it’s just that no one has any idea that that is possible, or that it even exists. So you’re starting out playing music because you just watched an MC5 documentary and, like, yes, I want to do a big balls-out rock band, so you cobble together some friends and it just seems to make it come from somewhere in between the legs a bit more.

What stuff did you grow up listening to?

Like every kid who doesn’t have any kind of idea about any sort of intellectual property of music, I started listening to Michael Jackson, and that’s all I could listen to, and that’s all I wanted to listen to. I reckon that’s the most viscerally appealing music there is. It’s so danceable, it’s the sort of thing that would make embryos vibrate nicely.

Then I got really into hip-hop and stuff, like Beck, A Tribe Called Quest and Beastie Boys, and then my dad got me some Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and The Who for Christmas, and that put everything into another spin. All of those things are of equal value and spawned their own direction for me — hip-hop, super-pop and ’70s metal!

The Jacko influence shows up in your funky falsetto on tracks like “Elegant Design.”

Yeah, we love that. Every communal trip in a van involves Thriller.

Your first three albums are impossible to find these days, so briefly just talk us through from the conception of the group up to fourth album Beard, Wives, Denim. Did you start out as a pretty noisy, chaotic band?

When we started out, we were just each doing exactly what we wanted to do, and putting it all in one band. Then we figured we could play live shows, with Jay drumming, me playing guitar, and Joe playing bass, and just do a kind of Royal Trux-cum-Cream power trio. Then we decided if we were going to do that, we may as well just get pretty much everyone else we know who can hold a stick to be in the band, and dedicate ourselves to being brain-burrowing, commune-dwelling psychedelic lunatics. Then we decided to start making pop songs, because we really, really like pop music.

Songs like “AloneAFlameAFlower,” off Hobo Rocket, are all about piledriving freak-rock riffage, reminiscent of The Flaming Lips circa 1989′s In A Priest Driven Ambulance, or Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician. When did you get turned onto that stuff?

I really got into it just before we made Hobo Rocket — when I was doing Mink Mussel Creek with Kevin. Then I got more on the doom side of it, listening to bands like Boris and Sleep. So I just got well onto that track, on more of the ’90s punk side — stuff that’s like a strobelight-strapped-to-your-forehead, chained-to-a-bed type psychedelia. I like that kind of ridiculousness.

Are you actually psychedelic in the Jim Morrison sense, of experimenting with hallucinogens, and then reporting back “from the other side” in your music?

Er, I think properly powerful psychedelic experiences, for me, haven’t really informed the music any more than any other emotional or physical or intellectual stimulation. It’s just another interesting facet in life, like reading a book, or having a thought, or meeting a person. But it is interesting, like everything else, and informs the words that you want to listen to, or speak.

What do you write about in your lyrics? Do you have a literary bent?

So many books have given me so much to think about. I’m a compulsive reader, and I try and actually give books my thought. So, if I’m reading all the time, and trying to think about them all the time, it seems like a whole lot of my brain power is dedicated to literature. Reading Kurt Vonnegut and Franz Kafka, you’re getting taken to a really strange dark world, and looking at everything from an odd angle, and seeing the silliness, and the ridiculousness, and the sublime parts of life. And Kurt Vonnegut — being inspired to look at things from this guy’s angle, which is just no angle! I don’t know what angle he looks at the world from, but it’s beyond me, beyond physics! That’s awesome!

So you go from that almost philosophical, heady rumination, to the dementedly physical churning noise that closes out “Midnight Mass (At The Market Street Payphone).” It’s pretty excessive!

Yeah. I try not think about whether something’s considered too far or not.

Who’s the dude mumbling on “Hobo Rocket,” the track?

That’s Cowboy John. He’s a musician, artist, vagabond, eccentric, fucking loon and fashion icon in Perth. I don’t know where he lives or what he does, he’s just this great guy who’ll rock up at the studio, always wearing all his beads and shark’s teeth. Sometimes he’ll just be asleep in the garden when we get there, and he’ll wake up and bum a cigarette off us. Sometimes he just rocks up in a sequined cape. And after he’d been going there for so long, then the guy at this studio somehow got him to make an album there, and it’s fucking cool. You can stream it and have a listen, it’s really bad-ass, really honest — psychedelia from someone who lives in a more psychedelic world than any of us can imagine.

And he asks you in the track, “What kinda drugs are you guys on?”!

We should be asking him! Who knows what…No, actually, I don’t think he’s on any drug, he’s just out there.

Your sidekick Jay Watson has been saying you’ve got a masterpiece already in the can, ready to release after Hobo Rocket. How come?

It was just us being scatter-brained and impulsive, I guess. We wrote lots of songs, and got this really good album together, then went on tour for ages, saying, “We need time, we need to really put in some good concentration for this record, let’s just wait to record it.” Then by the time we were back in Perth, I’d written five more songs, and Jay and Joe had written a bunch of songs, and we started demoing them for fun, and thought, “Let’s make a quick EP so we don’t get bored of these ones, because otherwise we’ll have to do the one we were planning on doing, and then we’ll never get to do these ones, so let’s just make an EP now, and then we’ll still do the next one.” Then the EP expanded out with more new songs into an album, and then it just became the next album.

So Hobo Rocket was just like a vomit that no one was meant to see, but it turned out quite nice, so we took photos, and posted it on the internet and shit. That’s right — Hobo Rocket is vomit. I can’t be offended by any review after that.

And the other record? Is that more of a pop masterpiece?

It’s poppy, I don’t know if it’s a masterpiece. They’re just appealing, well-constructed songs.

Sharing members with Tame, does it become increasingly inconvenient or restrictive, or even a pain in the ass?

No, not at all. It’s fantastic having enforced time off. It’s brilliant. Every band needs it. Every band needs another band.

Has Kevin leaving to do Tame full-time helped to mark off Pond as a bit more separate?

Does it amuse you all that, in Britain and America, Kevin is suddenly being considered as some kind of post-millennial cosmic genius?

Fuck, yeah! It’s as funny as shit, every day. Except, by the same token, he is a cosmic genius, so…

We’re told that onstage, you’re a fairly active showman, hanging from the ceiling, etc. Do you enjoy the live experience?

Yeah, it’s pretty fun. I get some exercise. Try and make some friends for an hour a night. Then go back to being me in a bedroom.

Who are the great showmen, for you?

Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips. It’s just a gigantic idea and experience — the most spectacular live thing I’ve ever seen. Beyoncé. The bloke from Death Grips. Ozzy Osbourne.

Finally, we hear that, for your Allbrook/Avery project, you’ve recorded an album with East London’s coolest group, The Horrors. What happened there?

We had a bunch of songs that me and Cam wrote, and we went down into the studio and had a shitload of fun for a week, and recorded all the songs, and more that weren’t songs. It was with Rhys [Webb, bassist], and Jason Holt from Spectrum, and Coffin Joe played some drums, and Josh [Third, guitar] and Jerome from The History Of Apple Pie were twiddling knobs and playing a bit.

Tom [Furse, keyboards] played a bit of synthesizer, but mainly pointed to gadgets and unlocked little secrets for me and Cam. He’s one of those guys, where you feel like smoking a joint, and then Tom comes in, and one appears before he’s sat down. It’s like making a cup of tea for his grandma, or taking off his shoes. He walks in the door and rolls a big spliff.

This was all in their place in Dalston, it was pretty excessive and fun. Maybe it was for our benefit as tourists. Me and Cam were always writing hyper-crusty crack-addled pop music, like Royal Trux and The Velvet Underground, but they turned it into this musical tourist exploration of London subculture, doing long dub jams, and hyper-fast crack-punk. [Sighs.] We’ll put it out one day.

Copeland’s new album, Joke in the Hole, is the fullest exploration of his aesthetic yet, a riot of screwed dance rhythms and cartoon outbursts; extended listening may require a dose of Dramamine on hand. Fittingly, strange background noises frequently cut through the interview — yelps and squeals that sound like either a horror movie or Ren & Stimpy is playing quietly in a corner of the room (or maybe both at once). “I live in front of a grade school that has a day camp,” Copeland explains, when asked just what the heck all that ruckus is. “It’s a heavy traffic street, and there’s kids on the playground. I’m surprised the ice-cream man hasn’t come by, like the final nail in the sound coffin.”

Philip Sherburne spoke with Copeland about seasick sounds, dance beats and making tape rips off YouTube.

I’ve been listening to your album on constant rotation for the past few hours, and I’m feeling slightly twisted. It’s a strange world to immerse yourself in so deeply — although I suppose maybe it’s not so strange for you.

Welcome, man, welcome.

Did you have a a specific intention going into this record?

I knew I wanted to spend a lot of time on it. I’ve been working really fast for a couple years, and I like that; it’s real satisfying, and a certain kind of result comes of it. But for some reason, the first couple songs I started, I was like, “I’m just going to spend some time with it, take time to get away from it.” And so I spent about a year, which is the longest I’ve ever spent by myself on anything. In one way, that was my intention, just to digest it a couple times over, so there that would be nothing I would want to change, or would feel that I hadn’t thought about a hundred times. Everything on there I feel like I can stand behind. But I finished it a while ago, so it’s strange to listen to it now, because I don’t hear a lot of the decisions I thought I made. In my mind, I thought I was making a bigger decision, and now I realize it was extremely subtle nuances that I probably don’t catch any more.

Did you make any big changes in terms of process on the new album?

This was the first one I recorded entirely on a computer. I don’t really compose on a computer, but it was the first time I had the chance to take it the next step further. Going to the studio and requiring time there kind of puts the pressure on, because you have to plot out those decisions beforehand, and if they don’t work, you’re kind of stuck. But I also was able to take it to a studio that Black Dice had worked in where I really liked the way the guy treated low-end sound. It was nice to take it somewhere and have a kind of dialogue with someone, like, “Make this sound beefy,” and he understood. Where I have holes in my frequencies, he could fill them in for me, which was nice. It felt like the first time I’ve taken something from beginning to end as properly as I know how. Other times I’ve enjoyed it, and I wouldn’t change any of it. But, again, I was working really fast, and that was part of the idea, part of the method at the time.

Did you enjoy working on a computer?

Yeah, totally. I never shied away from it, and as far as I can remember, every recording session I’ve done used the computer at some point. There are things I don’t like about it, but it does make a lot of things easier. Not having to press “rewind” a lot — that sounds stupid, but it takes up a lot of time. Being able to work on multiple things at the same time and change between them really quickly, it felt like a helpful tool for me. I can sort of get, not lost, but stuck if I’m just focusing on one thing. So it was nice to be able to go through and work on multiple songs at the same time. I enjoyed the computer.

The album sounds very spontaneous; I had an idea of you in the studio, just jamming on samplers and loop boxes. So it’s interesting to hear that it’s constructed differently than I imagined.

The computer was really just used for recording and some editing. For the relationships between the parts and how they fit, it’s a very slow process for me, and the tools I use are not sampler-based. The samples, even the drum machines, somehow need to be played into place. It takes a long time to find the sweet spot that can just last a minute or something. The slightest variation starts throwing off the rhythm, the groove of the relationship. In some ways, I think the way you hear it is probably pretty appropriate. There’s things being played at different times, but they have to be played at the right moment, and there’s definitely some, like, jammy spontaneity or some chance in how everything’s going to fit at the end. The computer doesn’t line things up for me or do anything like that, it just takes the sound and puts it with the rest of the sounds.

Are you doing much sampling?

Not as much as I have in the past. There’s some, but it’s scary to admit that you’re doing that, because I feel like it implies you’re taking somebody’s thing and using it in this very direct way. When I’m comfortable with a sample, it’s usually because I’ve taken something that’s really small, like one guitar hit and a drum, and changed the speed, changed the pitch, added something else to it. To me, I’m just taking two sounds, and I try to take it as far away from its origins so I don’t feel like I’m using somebody else’s idea.

The reason I ask is that so many of the rhythms feel to me like African rhythms that have been manipulated and slowed down and layered with something else.

Oh, no. That’s real far from my source. [Chuckles] I have such a stupid process. I work in the Black Dice practice space. We only have a cassette player there, so I have to tape from YouTube onto the tape, and that’s what I use as my source sound. So it’s kind of degraded in a way. I’m trying to think of something that…I don’t know, like that Ting Tings song or something. That’s the type of stuff I’d be into sampling, because it’s so well-recorded that on a cassette it still sounds pretty good, whereas an African record on a cassette just sounds like a bunch of fuckin’ hiss.

How much were you thinking about dance music or hip-hop when you were making this record? Many of the record’s rhythms and tropes seem informed by those genres, albeit loosely. “Grapes,” for instance, sounds a little like the Bomb Squad. How much are those references on your mind, and how much is accidental?

Maybe as much as you hear. I think those styles do things I’m trying to do, like maintain one thing for a long time. I think they both succeed in throwing a beat unchanged for two and a half minutes, but they also have a location that they exist [in], or someone singing or rapping or something over the top. I don’t do either of those things. I think of those styles as successfully doing what I want to do, but I know that my ingredients are really different. I think sometimes there’s a reference to them, really just like a drumbeat that goes on a long time, but I definitely don’t feel like I’m contributing to those conversations directly. I feel like they’re kind of like a tangent, where they both meet. I feel like I’m from a live music mentality.

You’ve talked about the way that Black Dice is a touring band, which means you need to be able to play your songs live. Does your solo work give you the freedom to experiment in the studio without having to worry about being able to reproduce it on stage?

Yeah, for sure. I grew up with a four-track, which Bjorn from Black Dice didn’t, and it’s always kind of been a point of departure for us. I enjoy spending my days doing what I’ve done since I was 13 or 14, just sitting with whatever crap you have around and making something you like. Sometimes it goes nowhere, and sometimes you’re able to share it, and sometimes you figure out how to play it live. Black Dice, we jam it out, and that’s how we write. But by myself, I like making records. It’s kind of how I think of my ideas, you know. And for a live representation I try to add something different, make it a little bit more than the changes in the recording. Just take a little part and play around with it in a different way.

When did you start working with a four-track, and what attracted you to being able to do audio collage?

I didn’t start doing stuff like that until I was in my 20s, I bet. I think my mom got me [a four-track] for my birthday when I was 13 or 14. It was a two-input, Fostex cassette one. It was real basic, I don’t even know if there was an EQ on it. I had used one at a friend’s house. I’d spent the night there, and we’d spent most of the night playing around. I didn’t know anything about them before that. So I started doing that, and I had one until I was maybe 21, and then I didn’t really record anything for five or six years, for whatever reason. I came back to it maybe five or six years ago, when I was like, “Aw, I miss this.” And then I started doing more.

A lot of your music has a very tape-heavy aesthetic — lots of fuzzy, warped sounds, like a cassette that’s been melting in the sun. What attracts you to that effect?

Maybe it came about just trying to figure out how to make things last a long time. I think Daft Punk’s an easy example where they’ll have this one sound going, but do these filter sweeps so that it feels like it builds for a minute. It’s really just one sound going, but they’re turning this knob, and dropping this beat at the end of it, and it’s really satisfying. I think that’s sort of their tool for making repetition have some movement. There are a lot of ways to do it. The drum machine, you don’t just put on a certain BPM, you sort of have to play between two BPMs. So that, for a second, you’re a tiny bit ahead of the beat, and for a second you’re a tiny bit behind the beat, and you also kind of have that moment where everything hits at the same time. Also a lot of samples are detuned in a way, so it sounds sort of sickly to a lot of people. I don’t think I do it any more, but I know what you mean. It’s sort of like playing a detuned guitar.

There also seems to be a kind of cartoon sensibility in your music — bright colors and bold, exaggerated lines.

I definitely try to have a sense of humor with it. I see a lot of one-person electronic bands, and it’s very sample-based and everything locked in this one way, and I think the presentation comes off really slick. I don’t really meditate on these ideas, but coming from a punk rock culture: that’s the straight world and this is the fuckin’ cool world. I think it’s cool that people are doing what they do, but sometimes the result feels really straight to me. I want to have some seriousness, and demonstrate some things I think are really important and maybe hidden in it, but then I want it to be attractive in a stupid way. I don’t think there’s something bad about having something be dumb or idiotic or really basic. I don’t know if that’s cartoony, but I think it share a cultural space with it.

Is it kind of a trash-culture thing? Finding redemption in cultural castoffs?

I think that’s definitely part of it. Not the entire thing, but part of my intention. I think there’s a lot of everything right now. There’s a lot of music and movies and people and horrible stories, and it sounds really basic, but this is what I do with it all. I’m not political, but this is my way of dealing with that stuff, in some ways. It’s not my entire M.O., but I like to think that what I don’t like, I try to work with instead of being a bummer about it. If I don’t like something, I feel like I can add something to it to bring it back to a place where I like it.

That kind of trash-culture utopianism played a big part in a lot of the underground music from Providence, where Black Dice got their start — bands like Lightning Bolt and Force Field, and the Fort Thunder space.

I was really young, so I have a hard time even now — there’s a big separation because of my age and what was going on there. They all seemed very adult and smart to me, and I was living with my parents a lot of the time. I’m sure it has an influence, but I’ve never really given it much consideration. But I definitely think of [that scene] as being kind of fine-art in a way that I flirt with, but that’s not where my head is. That’s a world that Black Dice can play around in, but Bjorn exists there much more. They all seemed like fine artists to me, just living, like, kind of extreme.

But again, Bjorn was going to school there and was more part of that conversation and brought it to Black Dice. I feel like there’s one degree of remove from my approach to that, just because I took it from Black Dice’s aesthetic rather than coming upon it [for myself], because I was just a kid.

Your work has such a murky, gnarled aesthetic; have you ever wanted to do something clean and hi-fi?

Yeah, I’ve tried to do things like that; there’s smaller projects I’ve done that were more traditional sounding. I’m trying to say “yes” to things [like that] because in some ways, you sort of paint yourself into a corner at a certain point. I like the idea, but I’d want to find somebody who could do it with me, instead of figuring it out right now. I have a way of working that I like, and it changes based on really basic things like a new piece of equipment. I’m not like chasing that sound. I think it’d be a curious sort of addition to the story, but that’s not the direction I’m heading. Just, sometimes I want to get in that orbit and take off again.

When you’re working in the studio, is part of the creative process in the way that you wire the studio? I’m imagining you in there routing machines through lots of obscure hardware boxes and seeing what comes out.

Barely any. It’s like, I use two effects: I use a pitch-shifter and a delay unit that has another sound on it. Sometimes I’ll use a phase box. But for the most part, my tools are really basic. Gear guys have no interest in my tools. I’m not part of that scene. I actually think you could probably have done what I did 30 years ago. They’re that primitive. It’s not longer ago, it’s not early ’70s; this shit’s really stupid. There’s nothing cool about my gear.

Who did the record cover?

You know, I did. I was kind of under the gun. I like it; the criteria I wanted for this one was just that you could see it on a computer screen really small and it would communicate big colors. But then after I turned it in, I was like, “Aw, this just looks like a really B-rate Broken Ear Record.” It’s just stripes and an ass. Too late; that doesn’t matter any more. I think it’s cool. It does what I wanted it to.

Since forming his first band, TV21, in 1977, Childish has released records by a slew of bands, namely Thee Milkshakes, The Del Monas, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, The Buff Medways, The Chatham Singers, Vermin Poets, The Spartan Dreggs, CTMF and The Musicians of the British Empire. Although he claims to “not work if I can help it,” this prince of immediate creativity has released around 150 albums, published 45 books and produced thousands of drawings, woodcuts and paintings. His latest album, recorded as Wild Billy Chyldish is All Our Forts Are With You, a blistering and vitriolic affirmation of his existence, recorded with the band CTMF.

Childish was born Steven John Hamper in 1959 in Chatham, England, and as an 18-year-old stonemason in Chatham dockyard made the decision to smash his own hand with a hammer in order to avoid a lifetime spent chiselling blocks of stone. He has returned to a difficult childhood in his art: His father was a commercial artist-turned-drug smuggler who Childish once punched down the stairs, and he was sexually abused aged nine by a friend of the family, a man whose photo he later stuck on the sleeve of his 1992 single titled “Pedophile.”

Childish had a relationship with artist Tracey Emin from 1982-86 and she remains a muse: His 2004 novel Sex Crimes of the Futcher was influenced by their time together. In return, Emin has acknowledged Childish’s influence. Her tent installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, for Charles Saatchi’s 1997 Sensation exhibition, featured 102 embroidered names — “Billy Childish” was the largest.

Fans include PJ Harvey, Beck, Blur, REM, Kurt Cobain and Jack White, who once appeared on British TV’s Top Of The Pops with “B Childish” scrawled on his arm in pen (they fell out in 2006 after White strangely accused him of plagiarism). Kylie Minogue was so enamoured of one of Childish’s books, Poems to Break the Harts of Impossible Princesses, she named an album after it.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Damaged Goods, the revered punk label that has worked with Childish in all his musical guises since 1990, eMusic’s Stuart Turnbull was invited to interview their most prolific signing at his painting studio above a Victorian rope factory in Chatham dockyard in Kent. (We also have 25 Damaged Goods titles on sale for $4.99 or less.) Childish greeted Turnbull with the words, “Watcha, charvo!” (Local slang for “hello boy”), before donning a brown boiler suit and pair of paint-splattered moccasins to start work on a new 8-foot canvas while holding forth on art, music and, er, yoga.

You can see the painting he produced below. And Billy rifles through eMusic’s vaults to share his favorite albums on Damaged Goods.

Billy, your musical output is off the scale compared to other artists; you even make The Fall seem sloth-like. Where does your massive drive for self-expression come from?

My idea is that when we make a recording it should have spontaneity and life and not be tortured into some kind of faux perfection. Music is inherently conservative in its attitude to recording, there’s a real hierarchy and snobbishness in it. I ignore that. I’m looking for the song to be elemental and express itself.

This has been misunderstood many times as me not caring and having a throwaway or what they call “lo-fi” attitude. I’ve no interest in being cast stylistically as that. I very much treat music like art, which might sound a bit poncey but actually it’s the opposite — it’s gritty and straightforward.

Do you always record in a studio or do you have a set-up at home?

At home I record ideas on a portable cassette-tape recorder. I put down a couple of chords then write a few lyrics, and then we record the songs in a small studio down the road.

You used to use the strictly analog Toe Rag Studios in London, run by Liam Watson (used by the White Stripes to record Elephant). Is your local studio similarly old school?

It’s partly analog, we use tape. But I’m not against digital per se, as long as you can get enough analog between you and it. A lot of people have come round to that view, but it used to be a real fight for me. The things that we actually fought for have now become their own snob value — analogue recording and old ribbon microphones.

At Toe Rag Studios the main thing was the filth button, a switch on this ancient old mixing desk that Liam had there. You had three tones on it — one noisy, one noisier and the other noisier still. The filth button liked what was happening to it. That’s the great thing about those old valve desks. Old gear likes being agitated; it soothes out agitation as well as agitating. A great combination; it mediates itself.

The whole hum-and-crackle of analog rock ‘n’ roll seems to have become an aspiration of digital music software — computers imitating ancient transistor valve equipment.

The new height of digital technology is to emulate analog technology, whereas the whole point of digital technology, originally, was to eliminate analog. And this shows how perverse humans are, because when they first brought in this digital gear I was told how fantastic it was — that you could hear Ringo’s bass pedal on the Beatles’ such and such track. And everyone was getting rid of their vinyl collections, because everybody’s a sucker for the salesman. They wanna sell you this crap because mugs will buy it — and I’ve refused to join in and be a mug, and that’s why I’ve been cast as an idiot.

You’ve got a 1960s Dansette record player here in your painting studio. Is it in use?

Yeah, there’s nothing in here for aesthetic reasons. Not even the paintings. I’ve had that Dansette for about 35 years. I used to have two but one of them gave up the ghost completely.

So no Bang & Olufsen in a listening room for you?

Well, my older brother had a stereo that my Nan bought for him in 1969, and it was quite thrilling to hear Hendrix and The Beatles on it. But I quickly learned that the stereo system meant that I was only hearing partially what was going on depending what part of the room I was in. I learned that the best way to listen was to put the two speakers together on top of each other so that you could hear it from one place. Two speakers instead of one — it’s just marketing.

How do you maintain an authentic voice when working across different mediums – music, words and painting?

By allowing whatever medium you’re working in to dictate to you, so the work is in charge of you, and you’re not in charge of the work. So you’re eliminating the amount of ego you put into it. I want the music and the records and the paintings to be in charge. When people dictate to the medium they’re working in it becomes worried, anal and clinical, which is what’s happened with rock ‘n’ roll. The whole thing has become homogenized. That doesn’t mean that the music we’ve got in the world isn’t full of immensely talented people, it’s just proof that talent doesn’t amount to much. Talent is nowhere near as valuable as people believe it is. Things like The X-Factor prove that the world is inundated with talent, and it’s not helping.

You were kicked out of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London in 1981. Was that ultimately a good thing?

It was inevitable. They were against me playing music; they were against creativity and expression. Art schools don’t like creative people, because creative people are awkward. The music industry doesn’t like creative people either. In a way our culture abhors creativity, because creativity means you’ve got an awkward person with opinions that might not make the best commercial decision.

You’ve been releasing records on the independent punk label Damaged Goods for 23 years. There’s clearly room for creativity there?

Without Damaged Goods, I would be nothing. All life began with Damaged Goods, and all life will cease with its demise [There are no plans for the label to close — Ed.]. I find it easy to work with Ian [Ballard], who runs the label, because he gets behind my ideas and helps me realize them. There’s no other label that would understand that I’m not interested in the commercial outcome but the fun of the idea: like, releasing two LPs and one for free if you cut coupons off the corners of the sleeves and post them in with a postal order, as we did with The Spartan Dreggs; or the Spartan Dreggs singles club we did; or LPs that have a mysterious third side. Of course, it would be great to receive royalties as well, but you can’t have everything.

Have you ever been approached by a major label?

Although I’m very friendly and easygoing and happy to compromise in many areas, I’m not prepared to in the essential ones — music and painting. And because the world is full of talent, they can get any number of people to do what I do. So why would they bother with a creative person? Commercially, creativity is a nuisance. Unfortunately, they do want to market it as rebellion; that’s where the lie is.

Your new album as Wild Billy Chyldish/CTMF, All Our Forts Are With You, makes numerous references to the punk scene of 1977, in songs such as “36 Years Later” and “The Second Generation Punks.” Are you nostalgic for that time?

No. It’s about yesterday’s sound for tomorrow. That’s our catchphrase. It uses a few lyrics I had from 1976, but it’s completely current to what I’m interested in now. It’s what I’m doing.
I’m also writing a novel, based in 1977, and a friend asked, “Is it very nostalgic?” I said, “Well not with my type of mind” — because my mind is raw and open to things and I remember things in intense detail. There’s no nostalgia because 1977 was a great time — kind of pleasant and unpleasant.

What was it about punk that hooked you in?

It was sex, electrifying your blood stream. I came from a rock ‘n’ roll tradition, I’d been listening to Gene Vincent and Bill Haley; some of us punks were on that rock ‘n’ roll trip. But a lot of punks were really glam rock boys; they’d been through the filter of David Bowie. That’s why punk had this very short hiccup of spontaneous life then lurched back into some kind of ABBA cum Bowie new romanticism.

There’s a track on the new album called “Musical Knaves.” What sort of musicians get your goat?

I’m irritated by over-identification of audiences with the personal drama of a performance. It shows a distinct lack of maturity. A lot of people like faux intensity. On the track “The Musical Knaves,” when I mention Nick Cave — and he seems an okay fellow to me — it’s because he takes the worst aspect of Jim Morrison. Morrison was not a good poet, Jim Morrison was a fantastic crooner and a great pop artist, but people never celebrate what they think is too naive. Nick Cave focuses on the worst aspect of Jim Morrison — the ridiculous, verbose, adolescent imagery of sex and death.

“I Validate Myself” is a rousing rallying cry. Is it something you play loud when you want to give yourself a kick up the rear?

No, I never kick myself up the rear to anything. And I record when I want to. But, strangely, I have rules. My life is incredibly rule bound. I paint on Sundays and I paint on Mondays. I’ve got a very immoderate nature, so to counteract that I insert structures of working and eating.
I haven’t drunk for 20 years; I’ve never been into hard drugs; none of this is moral, this is to do with whether things work. The alcohol I was addicted to but I managed to get myself out of that. And for the last 20 years I’ve been practicing Vedanta yoga, an ancient Indian discipline, the study of truth and knowledge.

Are you self-taught at yoga?

No, none of these things are a good idea to be self-taught at. Everything should be done through tradition, and should be from lineage. You’ve got to have all your bullshit detectors on. As far as all my spiritual endeavours go, lineage is everything, bullshit detectors are everything.

On “I Validate Myself,” you sing, “I don’t need you to approve,” and “I love myself, and don’t ask why.” Really?

What I’m interested in is true statements, and the validation of the self is the truth. Validation comes from the self, but people are always looking for validation from the world or from pop or from art or from the boss or from the wife. I’ve pissed everyone off royally, because I don’t look for validation in music, I don’t look for validation in art, and not looking for validation is incredibly arrogant, and gets people’s backs up. Pronto. I mean, even with this article you’ll have people saying, “That bloke is complete fucking arsehole,” because I’ve just said that I don’t need your validation.

Do you put a lot of anger into your work?

There is a lot of emotional charge, and the reason for music and art is to provide a safe place for emotional charge. And also, for it to be theatre, because theatre is cathartic. When these things are allowed, they’re very healthy. When they’re manufactured, or directed, or have an agenda, the more twisted and out of alignment with their real nature it becomes.

How has your dyslexia contributed to your creativity?

It probably set me up against authority slightly because I found myself being judged unjustly on my intellect and intelligence as a kid, and that probably made me less deferential towards establishment structures imposed by other people.

You are known for dressing in vintage military attire, with Word War One-era facial hair. What’s the fascination with military history?

Well, apart from my lazy fearfulness I’ve got quite a martial nature. When I was 14 I was involved in Roman archaeology and studied the local fortifications. It’s called having interests and projects.

Look, the world supplies everything that you need — you don’t need to have an agenda, the world will give you one. The things that interest you are the things you should do because they’re the things that are reflective of your nature. Your nature expressing itself is the reason why you’ve been born; it’s your duty. Duty is to do your stuff the way you do it.

There’s a track on the new LP titled “Musical Tribalist.” What you mean by that?

My wife said to me that it sounded like it was some world music thing. Of course, it’s the total opposite. It’s a celebration of regionalism and opinion. If you set your own parameter you can flourish within that. What we’ve got now are people who like everything and know nothing. It’s all part of globalization; you know, “I’m a fan of everything,” but that means that you are not then accessing your nature and your passion. [With tribalism] what you are doing is putting a discipline into your life. This is what I do. I’m the world’s worst fan, I don’t bother liking things I don’t need to. I leave that to someone else.

So it’s about celebrating the constraints of taste?

My friend said, “Oh you should listen to Pulp. They’ve got a good sound, they’re sort of realistic…” I said, if there’s 2 million people that like Pulp, then Pulp don’t need me. And he said, “You can’t just decide not to like it.” I said, “I certainly can.”

How did things change after The White Stripes lauded you?

Previous to the garage-rock explosion or whatever you’d call it, we used to play to an audience in North London where I knew 50 percent of the people there. Once the White Stripes came we were playing to larger audiences and we knew 10 percent, because Jack’s input opened things up to the tourists. So he’s like The Sunday Times writing about a fishing village in Cornwall and saying it’s so unspoilt and really nice — and of course that means it becomes the big tourist attraction. The essence of what it was has just been desecrated. So we had that.

Do you try to be obvious and ordinary with your music and painting?

I don’t try. But obvious is okay, and ordinary is okay. I mean “obvious” in the sense that don’t you need great concepts. What you need is to find out what your duty is and find constraints that give freedom. Like with painting. You don’t need to have conceptual art because painting is fantastic constraint that makes you focus where you wouldn’t, whereas conceptual art is fantastic liberation but its only liberation for that day — it doesn’t have any life-giving qualities. So although it can be a great vomit, it can’t be a great meaning. And vomiting is great. I’m not against vomiting. One thing’s vomiting, but the art is shitting, and shitting you need to do all the time.

After releasing a tribute to Johnson in 2006, she decided to cut similar albums of the bluesmen she met and learned from in her early days. She calls it the Mentor Series, and so far it includes tributes to Son House, the Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi Fred McDowell and, most recently, Mississippi John Hurt. She has a couple more in mind — though she’s not yet ready to name names — and when the series is finished she plans to put them all together into a box set. Here’s the story so far.

What inspired the Mentor Series?

I just wanted to do a tribute to the country blues masters. Many of them were rediscovered during the ’60s and brought to New York, where I was growing up. There was an in-crowd of blues players and collectors who got to meet them, and one of them was my boyfriend Stefan Grossman. I was in the right place at the right time. Many years later I did a Robert Johnson tribute, and after that it made sense to do Son House; unlike Johnson, he’d survived and was still playing in the ’60s. The Mentor Series was born with Son House; these are tributes to the country bluesmen I actually met and had the amazing good fortune to play with.

Why’d Son House seem the logical one to start with?

He was probably most influential to me. I’d always considered Robert Johnson to be the top of the tower. But Son was playing the same material, he’d mentored Robert Johnson, so he was very powerful as a direct inspiration.

And the other three?

Fred McDowell was slightly younger. He came to a house in Berkeley where Stefan and I were staying when I ran away from home. Fred was still very energetic, at the top of his game; he had a great groove, you could put drums to his music, where earlier country bluesmen often used irregular measures. Reverend Gary Davis, Stefan and I had been to his house in the Bronx on multiple occasions. He had a very strong sense of who he was, and he represented the gospel side of blues. Mississippi John Hurt, Stefan and I went to see him play in a theater and went into the backstage; Stefan knew everyone in the blues revival and I was just tagging along. We later went to his house in Washington, D.C., and played music together. These were powerful times, powerful influences. Mississippi John Hurt was hard-driving fingerpicking, he took fingerpicking to a new level. He was laid back, but his guitar playing wasn’t.

Do these four have anything in common that was especially attractive to you?

That’s a tough question, not something I can say intellectually. Country blues is a very unique acoustic style unto itself, with many different players within the style. I pretty much loved ‘em all; there was something mystical, something powerful, about them and their music that resonated in my heart. To me country blues said everything, and I had no choice but to follow.

How do you make these albums in a way that leaves some of yourself in them?

I start by getting the exact arrangement, note for note, measure for measure, to the best of my ability. That’s the hard part, the scholastic part. Then I put on overdubs, and that’s when it gets fun. So on the Reverend Gary Davis album, as an example, if you took off the overdubs you’d hear his exact arrangement. But for the first overdub I use a different tuning, put the capo in a different place, and just start playing on top of the Reverend Gary Davis tracks. It’s still country blues, which is all I’ve ever played, and it’s from the same time period, and that’s why it works. Put Tommy Johnson on top of Reverend Gary Davis and it really cooks. Then for the next overdub, I put on a slide style and that really fills the track out.

What would you say to someone who’s maybe intrigued by country blues but doesn’t know anything and doesn’t know where to start?

Go back and listen to the original recordings. That’s where the spirit is, where the mysticism resides. When I play a song in concert I always say who wrote it and tell people to go back and hear that. We have access to so much of the original music today. When I was starting out we didn’t have that; we were listening to tapes somebody had of the original 78s. Now music of all kinds is reissued. You can not only hear the music pretty easily, you can look stuff up and educate yourself about this music and Appalachian music and almost anything else.

eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes caught up with the sisters by phone a few hours before a show in Wisconsin.

Amelita is the second record you guys have made as Court Yard Hounds. I know the first time out, there were a lot of hurdles you had to clear, recording in this new configuration. How did your experience last time inform your work on this record?

Martie Maguire: I think we were conscious of keeping some things the same, but breaking out and trying to evolve as well. The things we kept the same were a lot of our favorite musicians that were on the first record. And as far as the songwriting, we just wrote a ton more, and we wrote together more. We also did some songwriting with other people — we were opening to broadening the songwriting pool. I think it was important for us to keep the Court Yard Hounds sound — to really solidify that on the sophomore album, but also to try some experimental sounds a little bit.

Emily Robison: It let us relax a little more, having one album under our belt. I know I felt more at ease and relaxed. And just getting to work with Jim Scott again — there’s a lot of things that you know work and you go with them.

You worked on the first record in relative secrecy. Did you feel any need to preserve that when you started working on Amelita?

Robison: Oh, not at all. We were tweeting and letting people know all the time. And I think the secrecy the first time around was borne out of the fact that we didn’t really know what it was going to be. We didn’t know if we were going to release it, we didn’t know what it was, so we didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag for many reasons. Having that veil of secrecy allowed us to tinker a little more on the first record. Now, I think, we just feel like a band. We’re not a side project or a vanity project anymore. I mean, we never felt like we were, but people put us in that category.

You can hear that on the record. One of the things I keep coming back to as I listen to the record is the fact that a lot of the songs are centered on the idea of positivity. On the opening track, you take down someone who’s relentlessly negative. The chorus of “The World Smiles” is kind of about focusing on the positive things in life and reaping the rewards of that. I was wondering why you kept returning to those themes?

Maguire: I think in general Emily and I are really happy people. We’ve got children and they’re happy and healthy. There are things that bring us down — I was going through a divorce on this record like Emily was going through a divorce on the last record — but we have different ways of dealing with that, and I think we were just in a really good place when we were writing these songs. It’s easy sometimes to write about traumatic things or sad things — maybe it’s the same when you make a movie: if you’ve got something heart-wrenching going on, it’s easier to pull the watcher in. I think we make a conscious effort to challenge ourselves to write happy, upbeat music, because that’s how we feel. The songs are harder to come by for sure, though.

It’s funny that you used the movie analogy. One of the other things I noticed was that most of the songs on the record are written about specific characters, rather than being first-person.

Robison: I just felt like between the first album and this album I came out up from underneath the water a little bit, and I was able to look at other people’s lives and be an observer of life instead of just looking inward all the time — which is where I was four or five years ago. It was refreshing for me to be able to either live vicariously through other people or notice other people’s lives and still relate them to my own but not be so egocentric about writing. It’s a little bit broader view. It’s not that it was necessarily conscious, it’s just where we were.

The more I started living with the record, the more it started feeling like Spoon River Anthology, or something, where all of these characters were coexisting in this very specific world. I really liked the way you were able to create that sense of place. I wanted to ask about “Sunshine,” specifically — which is kind of a kiss-off to someone who is just cynical and down about everything all the time (“Tonight you’ll grace us with all your inner presence/ While your back-handed compliments let the air out of the room”). Was that based on a specific person?

[Both laugh loudly]

Maguire: We both always say that everybody knows this [kind of] person. For us, it was several different people. There might be a line that made us think of one person or a line that made us think of another. What came first was that Emily just kept hearing, “We call you Sunshine.” That part came first. I don’t think we knew we were going to be tongue-in-cheek about it until the words started coming out in the verses. But it’s not any one person in particular. We each have different people in mind. [Both laugh again.]

You’ve got that great line in there: “The world will pass you over while you’re waiting for a crown.”

Maguire: Wait, how does it go again? [Laughs.] I think I was picturing the singer, Emily, being like, “I’m trying to help you be positive, I want you to see the world in a positive way and I’m worried that you’re gonna miss it if you don’t open your eyes and see all the good there is.” It’s one of those people who are a little entitled — things come easy to them. They’re gonna miss the day-to-day, living in the moment type things while they’re waiting for the big stuff to happen.

I think that line brings an element of hope into the song, too. I wanted to ask about the title track, “Amelita.” A few of the lines seem to me to be about someone who gets led astray by some of the temptations of fame, or someone who got sidetracked on their way to fame.

Robison: [Pauses.] It’s interesting that you read it that way. That song is more about the title character — it was actually inspired by a time we were shooting a video for “Long Time Gone” in this little border town in South Texas. We were in the market square and we come out of our trailers with our makeup on and our hair done and our nice clothes that our stylist picked out for us, and we realized within 10 minutes that we were in the middle of Boys’ Town and we looked over and there was a small, run-down motel and these girls are standing out there on the porch, these teenage prostitutes. That dichotomy was so condemning to us, realizing that we put ourselves right in the middle of a very, very different reality from other people. That stuck with me for a really long time. And then slowly the words started coming to me. I just was painting a picture of this person, and I kept hearkening back to that time. You could have picked any one of those girls and the song is about her.

That’s a really harrowing story. Did you find yourselves in situations like that often?

Robison: I think it’s more that, especially as women, you observe other women who make those kind of choices in an entertainment career that they hope will get them where they’re going faster or get discovered. We’ve never personally come across that or had to deal with, like, the director’s couch, but you do observe it and you do ask yourself, “Why? Why would someone do this? Why would you do that, as a woman?”

Another song with really evocative imagery is “Rock All Night” — you keep coming back to this central metaphor of the Himalaya Ride Is that borne out of a childhood spent going to carnivals?

Robison: Martie and I grew up going to the Texas State Fair every year. And I think it’s called different things in different parts of the world, depending on which carnie group comes through your town, but I always remembered it as the Himalaya Ride. There’s other ones, called the “Rockin’” something-or-other. But having that in our past — I remember always wanting to sit next to the cute boy on the Himalaya Ride because you’d get pushed into him once it got going. Those sort of memories. We had the music for that song for a while, and while we were on tour I took my kids down to Santa Cruz and we went on the boardwalk and that ride was there, and it just brought back all of those memories.

Sharon O’Connell sat down with the musical Olympians, now based in London, to talk about big sounds, big sentiments and why their name hasn’t held them back from big things.

How was it to have your tracks “Surf Solar” and “Olympians” chosen to soundtrack the London 2012 opening ceremony?

Benjamin John Power: It was Rick Smith [of Underworld] who approached us in the first instance and we didn’t even know in what capacity our music was going to be used until quite late on, so it was pretty surprising. But it was very flattering. Obviously we play live in places with professional PAs, but with something like that, there’s a curiosity that means you don’t want to miss the opportunity. And it was a real privilege to be asked.

Andrew Hung: How can you not say yes to having your music played on such a big stage? We’re interested in people listening to our music; we’re not particularly interested in people liking it, but they’re different things. In a physical respect it hasn’t changed anything for us, but it has provided a hope that we can make people listen to our music.

How did you approach the making of Slow Focus?

Power: A big part of what we’ve done since the beginning of the band is experimenting with whatever instrumentation we have at the time, and that’s constantly changing. What comes into play is mine and Andy’s tastes, and the filtration system all the ideas go through to actually form a track. We did start with a blank canvas for Slow Focus; we had no idea that it was going to evoke any particular sentiment, nor did we set out to make the record sound like it actually does. I think it’s detrimental to have a preconceived notion, because then you’ve already boxed the whole thing in. It’s nice to see it grow limbs in front of you.

Since there are none of the lyrical or vocal cues that usually indicate what a record is “about,” can you explain what’s at the core of Slow Focus?

Hung: It’s big sentiments — our songs aren’t usually about breakups or any kind of “human” issues — and awe. There’s so much music about love and relationships out there that has zero interest to me. Even though it’s something we all experience and it interests us in our day-to-day lives, it’s personally not something I want to hear about in music.

Power: It’s about things outside of that, or an amplification of those human sentiments, perhaps. I quite like the idea that an emotion might be on such a scale that you can’t imagine how a human might deal with it, and any idea of the cosmic in our music maybe stems from something along those lines.

When you’re building new tracks, is one of you on beats duty, the other melody — or do you mix it up?

Hung: It’s a Venn diagram; something has to satisfy both our tastes. There are plenty of things we’re both interested in outside of Fuck Buttons, but what is Fuck Buttons is our relationship.

Power: The things we decide are Fuck Buttons are just things that we agree sound good when we’re in the same room together — that’s pretty much the foundation for everything. We have similar taste when it comes to texture and odd sounds, so a lot of time we don’t even have to discuss them. We’ve been friends for a long time and have been playing together for 10 years now, so without even communicating verbally, we know whether we’re heading down the right track.

The new record seems to pack extra doses of menace and anxiety. How did that develop?

Power: What’s happening externally or even internally for us both doesn’t necessarily inform how we got to that place. It’s more about experimenting and maybe when we were jamming, that feeling just happened and it wasn’t one that we’d really delved so deeply into before, so we decided it was something we’d embrace a bit more, track by track.

Hung: Even if music conjures up feelings you don’t necessarily want in your life, like fear or menace or whatever, those things are fun to interact with if they have no bearing on you in the long term. That’s why discomfort is cool in music. Lately, Ben has described a few tracks as making him feel nauseous, and I think that’s great. I like feeling disoriented by music, too.

Was there any new gear that made a distinct impact on your aesthetic tack, this time around?

Power: There were a couple of things, but to name them would probably be irrelevant, because when I get a new piece of equipment, it’s more a case not of looking at the manual, but rather just seeing what I can do. I think that’s a nice way of using something, because then it doesn’t necessarily sound how it’s supposed to sound, and you’ve put your own stamp on it. That’s something we’ve always been very interested in. I’ve played guitar, bass and keyboards in rock-based bands and I’ve never had anybody teach me how to play anything. I’ve always just picked it up and taught myself.

Have you ever regretted choosing the name Fuck Buttons?

Hung: No. Initially, it might repulse someone, but I’d like to think that once they’ve got over that it becomes a symbol of individualism, of doing your own thing.

Power: Obviously, we understand the implications every time we put a record out, but we haven’t changed it. It’s something we have to figure our way around — or other people figure out their way of dealing with it. When we first started out, we didn’t think we’d need to even consider this “barrier,” because we didn’t ever think we’d be playing our music out live. We really had no idea we’d be playing outside of the venue down the road from the pub Andy worked in.

Diane’s relocation is really the final step in a long process that resulted in her fourth album About Farewell. The album is a gripping, beautiful and often painful exploration of the struggle that went on between the artist and her then-husband and -bandmate Tom Bevitori (he’s also a member of Blitzen Trapper side project Denver).

Farewell is an appropriately stark and raw album, relying heavily on Diane’s delicate guitar lines and knee-buckling vocals and augmented tastefully by the occasional string section, percussion and keyboards. Lyrically, she avoids metaphor almost entirely, bringing up the painful details of her marriage’s troubled start (“Hazel Street”), the realization that it was a lost cause (the devastating title track), and trying to maintain a delicate peace while on the road (“Before The Leaving”).

Diane invited eMusic contributor Robert Ham to sit at her dining room table and discuss the creation of this album, making art out of difficult circumstances, and her changing view of love and relationships as a result of her divorce.

As I was preparing for this interview, I realized that so many of the albums I’ve been covering lately have been about difficult breakups.

[Laughs] Amazing. It’s a good excuse to make an album.

There’s so many examples of these types of records, too. Relationships end and…

Things come out of us. That’s what happened to me!

Were you at all familiar with some of the more famous breakup records?

Joni Mitchell’s Blue is an example of a really dark, personal album. I’ve heard a lot of those really, really heart-wrenching records and they’re really good usually.

How was it for you using the music as a way to process all that went on with you and your ex-husband?

I think it was just how it went down. I wrote all these songs right on the brink of making my decision to leave. The songs told me what I had to do. I wrote them all and I think I had gone to record some demos because I thought it would feel therapeutic to just get them out of me. At this point, I was just really on the brink of splitting up with Tom, and I was sitting upstairs practicing, and I was, like, “There’s no way that I can release any of these songs as a record or sing them in front of anyone unless I actually get a divorce.” They were so personal and cathartic for me that once I was saying this stuff out loud, stuff that I think I had been holding inside for quite some time, I knew I had to follow through with what I was truly feeling. So I did. We separated and we were divorced six months later.

Did the lyrics come out first?

Yeah, I wrote of the words on tour, while touring with my husband. I came home and I wrote all of the music for these songs within a week. I came back from the tour and wrote the songs super quickly. It was sort of shocking and then there they were telling me things that maybe I didn’t want to hear.

Wow…while you were on tour with him?

Not all of them. A few were written after he left, but a lot of them, the lyrics were written then. I write a lot when I’m on tour because you’re isolated. You’re in a van and there’s not really anything to do, so you get your laptop and you start…thinking [laughs].

Was it a difficult time being on tour with your husband and having this stuff coming out of you?

At that time everything was at the point where it was on the brink but nothing was being said. Because if anything was said, the bomb would go off. So nothing was said until after we got home. So the tour we actually existed pretty peacefully and calmly because you’re pretending that everything is fine.

How was it for the rest of your band?

I don’t think that they really knew the depth of it. I think a lot of it had to do with his drinking problem and I think all of them saw my frustration with that. But I don’t think any of them realized the extent to which that wasn’t the way that I wanted to continue living my life. They all totally understood once they found out. When you’re on tour, you really have to keep your cool. You have to exist and you have to go day by day. The important things are eating food, getting to the venue on time, sound-checking, and playing your show, and then going to bed. And that’s really all you can worry about.

That’s your job.

That’s your job and what you’re doing so I think I’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining composure when in situations like that. And then the bomb can go off after a year of touring!

Was this situation a wake-up call for Tom about his drinking?

I wish I could say it was. And I hope that someday it will be. I think in ways, yes, but I don’t know…he’s still going through his deal on his own.

Are there parts of the album that look back at other relationships?

It’s not all directly about what just happened. A lot of the songs were reflecting back on past relationships and I think were me sort of attempting to process leaving…the concept of leaving and being left and ending something. There I was writing about someone who I don’t have any feelings for at all but thinking back on it, like the song “Colorado Blue,” that’s about my high school boyfriend. And when I sing it, I get sort of emotional. I remember how much it hurt at the time. I feel like in the song I was able to convey that experience. In that case, I was the one that was left. He broke up with me and it was devastating.

It’s also very empathetic of you to think about how you felt being left and relating it to what was just about to happen.

Totally, and remembering how much pain there was in that, and knowing I was about to do that to someone else, and that I’d never really done that to some one else. I still don’t know if it’s easier to leave or be left. It’s really terrible either way [laughs].

“I Thought I Knew” is a very interesting song. When I listen to it, it almost seems like you’re admitting you’re complicit in a way, or trying to understand what your role was in the ending of this relationship.

It was me being aware that I led someone on and made a mistake. Whoops. Sorry about that [laughs].

There are notes of hope on the record, though. “Lost Land” in particular.

That one is a surrender, but in a way, that is hopeful. I knew I was in something that I needed to get out of. I knew deep within myself that I’d be fine at the end of it. And I am. So the outro of that song is totally my vision of myself being okay once I got through with what I needed to go through with. It is hopeful and it worked out!

Were there times when you were writing or recording these songs where you doubted what you were doing and what you were expressing?

I don’t think so. I felt like I needed to get those songs out of my system. Making this record was doing that. It was also very liberating. The last record was much more of a band collaborative effort. This time because I was essentially divorcing everything in my life, band included, it felt really good to come back to myself and to remember the original root core of where my music comes from. It really comes down to me, and my guitar.

Has Tom heard the record?

He has. It was hard for him to hear, but it’s nothing that he was unaware of. And it’s really nice to be on the other side of it now. We’ve been divorced now for over a year. It’s totally friendly. I’m very grateful for that. I shared the record with him. He shared the new Denver record with me.

Are there any songs on his album about the divorce?

There are, yeah. We’ve been joking about doing a split 7-inch [laughs].

How do you think your understanding of relationships and love has evolved over the years?

I think in every relationship you learn more. When you get into relationships really young, you don’t necessarily know who you are and you don’t know what you want, either. It can be very challenging to navigate that and to grow together when really you’re still developing as your own person. Tom and I were together for seven years, since he was 19, and I was 21. That was long enough to figure that as growing into adulthood together, we were going different routes. That really paved the road to know exactly what I’m not looking for. I have a very clear picture of what I want in my life, and I’m not willing to settle for anything else.

Cartwright bought the entire trove of records at a mom-and-pop store in Athens, Ohio, where he has arrived to play a late set at the Nelsonville Music Festival. It turns out there are some treasures in the haul, and he produces a travel turntable and plays an early Conway Twitty single called “I Hope I Think I Wish.” “This is the best part,” Cartwright says, and sings along with Twitty’s aching vocals. Then he spins a few promo spots from obscure flicks from the 1960s: “Do you remember your first time?” “The feds want him alive; the Hells Angels aren’t that particular.” “We have your daughter…” He tosses the last one into his personal pile.

As a record collector, Cartwright has a vast and seemingly endless knowledge of American country, soul, R&B, blues, rockabilly, pop and everything in between. As a musician, he has found ways to integrate these various traditions without sounding beholden to them. With the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers in the 1990s, he developed a potent brand of R&B-inspired punk that breathed new life into the Bluff City’s long and thorny musical history. With the Reigning Sound — his most popular outfit — Cartwright has refined his songwriting to balance raw emotions with raw energy. His output at times seems inhuman: In addition to releasing a handful of solo albums, he has worked with the Reatards and the Detroit Cobras, has produced albums by Mr. Airplane Man and the Ettes, and has formed the Parting Gifts with two-thirds of the Ettes and about half of Nashville.

Cartwright could have spent the afternoon spinning one 45 after another — a haphazard course on rock history for whoever is in the hotel rooms on either side of his. It was only reluctantly that I pulled him away from his stash to get him talking about a few of his own classic cuts.

Oblivians, “I’ll Be Gone”

I heard a rumor that this song is about Jay Reatard.

It’s one of two or three songs where his passing was in my mind. None of the songs are directly about him, but they’re kind of the result of me thinking about his death. Not long after Jay passed, my best friend for years passed away of cancer and then right after that my mother-in-law died. And it really hasn’t stopped since then. You live with blinders on when you’re young, and death and all that shit is just old people stuff. And then all of a sudden you hit this magic age and it’s not later. It’s now. All your friends are dying. And so that’s what this song is about. One thing I was thinking about is how much you miss all these people when they pass. Sometimes I wonder if there is some place after this life, if it’s possible for them to look at us still running in the same circles and doing the same stupid shit and they can see it for how silly it all is. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who’s not here anymore: I’ll be gone, so I don’t have to watch you do blow. I don’t have to watch you fuck up your life. I’m done with all that.

Is it difficult to sing that song every night as opposed to others songs? Those are some heavy ideas.

They’re heavy ideas, but to me it’s almost easier. The heavier the subject matter, the easier it is to get right where I want to be. I’m a pretty emotional singer because I’m trying to get into a trance state when I’m doing it. If a song can be built in such a way that it makes it easier for me to get there, then that’s good.

Did you write this song with the Oblivians in mind?

I didn’t. I have written songs with people in mind, but it’s not the norm. Sometimes I’ll write a song and think, this will be perfect for this or that. Or, “I wish I had Dolly Parton’s number. I’d send her this.” But I almost never actually go in with an idea for writing for one particular band. I just have an idea for a song and just try to get the song finished.

Greg Cartwright, “Stop and Think It Over”

The Compulsive Gamblers folded in less than a month after recording this song, so I almost never played it with them. What happened was, we recorded that Gamblers record in Detroit, and from there we started to tour. That tour was jinxed. The van broke down every night. We missed show after show trying to repair it. I had sunk all my money into buying the van because nobody else had any money. And then we were in the middle of nowhere, and the other guys were like, “Hey man we’re just going to get a rental and go home.” Okay, I guess I’m going to get this van that was breaking down with all my equipment in it home. The next project to come along was the Reigning Sound, so that was the first band that ever tightened the song up and played it live. Even though it’s a Gamblers song to most people, to me it’s a Reigning Sound song. I’ve played it in almost every incarnation of Reigning Sound. It’s become a staple.

It seems to work so well in so many settings, even a solo acoustic setting like this version.

I find that it works almost anywhere. You could play it several different ways and it still works. Some songs are like that. A really good song shines almost any way you play it. I’m no great judge of what my good songs are and what my bad songs are, but I know that that is a song that people always want to hear. I think it’s probably one of the strongest songs I ever wrote. I don’t know if it’s one of the best. But it has the strongest appeal for the audience than almost any other song in my catalog.

What did you think of Sarah Borges’s cover?

Oh yeah, she does almost a rockabilly thing. I first heard it in a movie theater. I was waiting with my daughter to see a movie and it came on, and my daughter was like, “Hey dad, this is your song! But this isn’t you!” I thought she handled it in a really cool way. And then the Hives did it. I’ve heard a lot of people do it, mainly in a live context. There was a band the Sights from Michigan. They did a 45 of it. And then I did it with Mary Weiss. That was one of the first things she said to me: “I wanna do the record with you guys and I wanna do this song.”

Greg Oblivian & the Tip-Tops, “Bad Man”

This actually predates the Oblivians’ version. This is the original, which I wrote on my son’s toy piano. It wasn’t even a piano. It was a xylophone. I was sitting in the floor with him, and I started playing around with it and I wrote the song while he played. I came up with the lyrics and put it all together very quickly. I don’t know why it occurred to me to try this with the Oblivians, especially when you hear this version. There’s nothing you would really think would work, but it did work out okay. This one has stayed in the set, too. A lot of people have covered it, and people still want to hear it. Any band I play a show with has to know how to play this song. It’s a good one to have in the wings.

Your setlist seems to be comprised of things you don’t necessarily pick out yourself.

It’s really about what the fans want to hear. That’s how things stay in the set. People ask for things. And it changes over time. As I’ve gotten older, my audience has grown. There are young people and old people, people who knew the records and people who are just discovering something I’ve done. They’ve dug out the back catalog and found some song that nobody ever asks for. And they want to hear it. If I get that request a couple of times, I sit down with the band and learn the song. It’s good to listen to the fans, because they know what moves them. And I like to be the person who will go out and play what they want. I always appreciate that when I go see somebody. I went to see Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham one time, and they were in between songs and tuning their guitars, and Dan said, “Is there anything anybody wants to hear?” I yelled, “Tear Joint!” And he goes, “‘Tear Joint’? We haven’t played that one in 30 years, but we’ll try. And they did. At one point he forgot some of the lyrics, but still he tried.

Oblivians, “Viet Nam War Blues”

Sometimes I just get totally obsessed with a certain kind of record, and I try to get as many of them as I can. For a while I was all about Lightnin’ Hopkins. I just love this song. People think San Francisco hippie bands were the only people talking about all this topical stuff like Vietnam. Everybody was talking about it. Nobody’s got dibs on that stuff. When we put that record out, people liked it but were like, “Why is he singing about Vietnam?” There were wars going on that I could have transplanted. I could’ve said “Iraq” or whatever, but I didn’t feel there was anything that needed to be changed.

Reigning Sound, “Goodbye”

I almost never play this song with Reigning Sound, but I do it whenever I do solo shows. And sometimes I’ll get together with friends in Ashville and play sometimes. We just do it for fun — just buddies playing in a bar. And this is one that I always bring to play. It’s a fun melody, and I’ve never written anything with a chord structure that does what this does.

I’ve always associated this song with Memphis, partly because you moved away from that city not too long after this record came out.

It did have to do with that a little bit. The city was a metaphor. It’s really about leaving a part of my life behind. But it became a very physical reality because I did leave. It had become too hard living in the shadow of the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers. At that point the original version of the Reigning Sound was folding. Memphis can be such a petty town. There’s so much gossip and there’s so much backstabbing. It’s a small town with small-town rivalries, and I had made my share of enemies. I had to shrug that shit off and go somewhere else. It was a game changer. I didn’t realize how much it would change my outlook on life.

It seems like a huge jump to go from that rawer Gamblers sound to the slightly more melancholy vibe of Break Up Break Down.

It was a big change. My idea for Reigning Sound was for it to be my all-purpose unit. With Reigning Sound, I could do anything. I could do bombastic and loud and nasty, and I could do pretty and sad. The Gamblers and the Oblivians tried to be live entities. They were touring bands, and that lends itself to being fast and loud because it keeps you working. The problem is getting people in the door to see a band that plays sad songs. Maybe if they came in and sat around for a while they’d probably enjoy it, but they don’t want to take the night off work to go watch it. It’s too heavy, so it took a while for the Reigning Sound to click with people outside of Memphis, mainly because people wanted one thing and I wasn’t prepared to give it to them.

Reigning Sound, “Mind Over Matter”

This is one of my favorite Nolan Strong and the Diablos songs. I just love him. Detroit has always been a second home to me. Nothing is more Detroit than Fortune Records, and nothing says Fortune Records more than Nolan Strong & the Diablos. His voice is so incredible, and the recordings are so terrible. These smaller labels were just people with little record stores and radio shops who just said, “Hey I can just buy a tape recorder and we can make records here in the back room.” They didn’t know anything about mic placement. They weren’t engineers. They just saw an opportunity to make an extra bit of money and they learned as they went along. Some of the charm of the early Diablos stuff is just how raw it is. It doesn’t sound like the Platters. It sounds like the Platters in a gutter. But it has character, which makes it stand out from the pack. And that’s Fortune Records. What’s the other big soul label in Detroit that everybody knows? Motown. I love some Motown stuff, but for the most part the production style gets so samey after a while. Most of it doesn’t do anything for me. I love Smokey Robinson. He’s one of the greatest singers in the world, and pretty much everything on the Going to a Go-Go album is fantastic. But some of his other albums, it’s just song after song with no character. So Fortune is the anti-Motown. Everything sounds bizarre. There’s no set style from record to record.

The Parting Gifts, “Keep Walkin’”

I can’t remember when I wrote this. Sometimes when I write songs, I make a little four-track demo, and when the cassette gets full, I just throw it on the pile. When we were doing this Parting Gifts record, I was going back through some old tapes looking for another song, but I found this one. It’s a good fuck-you song, and I thought it would be a good song to play with the Parting Gifts. Whenever we do Parting Gifts shows, this one always gets played. We’re about to do a new record. In fact, I really should already be working on it, but things got put on hold.

The liners for that album reads like a who’s who of Nashville musicians.

We were making the record in Nashville, where the Ettes live. That was the easiest place for us to work. The great thing about Nashville is that there are players everywhere. One day I said, this song could really use strings, and the engineer was like, I know some girls who play strings. Ten minutes later, these three girls on mopeds show up with a cello and violins. Dan Auerbach was just in town with his wife and daughter, driving around looking at houses. He was thinking about moving there. We called him and said, “Hey come by the studio.” He came by and we said, “Hey play on this record!” It’s a weird record in that no two songs feature the same group of people. It’s three main collaborators and whoever might be there at that time. There’s one song that’s just me. “Don’t Wanna Hurt Me Now.” I got to the studio really early one morning, like 10 o’clock or so. And I thought, “I’m going to go ahead and put the drum track on this.” I finished it really quickly and thought, “I’m going to put the guitar in. And now I’m going to put the bass down. Now the vocal. Okay, we’re done with this thing.”

Reigning Sound, “Drowning”

Did you ever go to Channel 3 Drive in Memphis? That was part of the imagery that was in my head when I wrote the song. That’s what I’m talking about — “under the bridge to Arkansas.” I was always loved that bridge. We would go down there when I was in high school. From the time I knew anybody who had a car, that’s where we went. We’d sit and watch the river, drink beer, screw around, whatever. It was like a lovers’ lane. Anything that you weren’t supposed to be doing, you could do it there in the safety of Channel 3 Drive. Channel 3 is down there, and that’s it really. There’s nothing else down there. The song is about a girl I knew in high school, but it’s not just a straight story of who you were in high school. I’m not sure what it’s about. I know what it started off being about, but then it took some twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, you say in the song “let me tell you what I saw.” But you never really say what you saw. Well, I don’t know what I saw. It’s a mystery.

One of the lines that sticks out to me is, “She’s only 17, but she knows talk is cheap.” That’s a great line, but it comes from a much older point of view, one that can appreciate this kind of no-bullshit youth.

That’s what it’s about. You become so jaded as you get older, and you think you know everything, but kids can sniff out bullshit. They haven’t been trained to believe certain thing or follow certain ideals. They can see things in that immediate moment.

Oblivians, “Live the Life”

I don’t know whatever possessed me to sing like that, because it’s not something that I’m very good at. I wanted to sing really high and let my voice crack. This song has been done a million times by gospel people. Every version is good. But there’s one in particular…I wish I could tell you who it is. The name escapes me. She does a killer version that’s just vocal and piano, and that was what I was trying to imitate.

Do you still sing it that way?

Pretty much. It’s the only way I can sing it. If I try to sing it any other way, then I just think it’s boring. There’s definitely something unhinged about it, and that makes it exciting. When we called up Quintron and asked him to play on the record, he was a little cautious. He said, “I know you want to do gospel songs and stuff, but are you doing it to be corny or funny?” No, no, no. This is all I’ve been listening to for the last four or five months. My head is in it, and this is what I want to do. He was down with that. I started playing the songs I wanted to do, and “Live the Life” was the only one he knew. He had always wanted to do that song. He’s got a couple of versions, and there was one that’s an organ version that’s really strange. I think his organ part may have something to do with that version that he had in mind. But yeah, it’s one of my favorite organ moments on that record.

Hood’s last few releases have been concept albums that expanded techno’s limits while honing in on its Detroit origins. Omega and Omega: Alive loosely applied the narrative of the 1971 film The Omega Man to Detroit’s ongoing saga of depopulation and urban decay; Motor: Nighttime World 3 was inspired by Julian Temple’s 2010 documentary Requiem for Detroit?, which examined the socioeconomic factors behind the city’s decline (and which also dared to dream of a post-industrial future for the city — hence the question mark in the title). But with a new album under his Floorplan alias, Paradise, Hood returns to the raw, no-frills house and techno of his most functional, club-centric project.

The album’s title is a reference to New York’s legendary Paradise Garage, the discotheque where Larry Levan held his residency from 1977 until the club’s closure in 1987, and the epicenter of much of the house, garage and disco that influenced Hood’s own album. But the title also refers to Biblical interpretations of Paradise. The latter is a nod to Hood’s own deep religious faith, which is manifested in the music via heavy gospel undertones. We spoke with Hood about his return to Floorplan, his move from Detroit to Alabama, and his dual roles as techno legend and Christian minister.

To start out, let’s go back to the rebirth of Floorplan, which you resurrected in 2011. What made you decide to bring that alias back?

I just wanted to take it back to the essence of dance and the floor and raw, stripped-down house and techno, but also with gospel this time. My vision has been reinvigorated with the word of God, and being in the ministry and everything, so gospel and disco and all that — it’s just connecting and reconnecting the dots: house, disco, techno and gospel and so forth. Just stripping it down and getting back to the human dimension of dancing and taking it back to the floor. Not so much experimentation, just jack tracks and bass lines — just rhythm tracks.

Most people wouldn’t think of dance music and gospel as being compatible.

Right. Back in the days of disco and Studio 54, Detroit had the Clark Sisters. They came out with a song…what was the name of that song? Let me ask my wife real quick. That’s real important. [Hood calls into the other room: "That Clark Sisters song that came out years ago…" His wife answers immediately.] “You Brought the Sunshine.” That received a lot of radio play and it became a huge dance record. And this is from a group that came up strictly in the church. Their mother, Mattie Moss Clark, was a legendary and very well-known and prominent figure in the church circuit in Detroit. I thought it would be interesting to revisit those days, but update it. I felt like that’s something that has been missing and that’s needed in the clubs, for people to hear a different message. We’ve heard that “Love Is the Message,” M.S.F.B., we’ve done that, and we’ve revisited that, but let’s talk about what is paradise, what is love, and peace, and what is this all about, truly all about.

The first impression I got of the album, especially compared to Nighttime World Volume 3, is a sense of urgency and even joy.

Yeah, that’s it. Exactly. You talk about Paradise Garage, but I wanted to go deeper than the club and sort of delve into what is paradise all about. Typically we think of heaven and salvation, but what about heaven right here on earth, in your heart? That tranquil state of mind that surpasses all understanding, amidst all of the chaos and adversity in the world.

Is that something you found on the dance floor when you were younger, back in Detroit?

It was. You know, at the Music Institute, at Underground Nation, there wasn’t any alcohol, there wasn’t any drinkin’ and druggin’, that was not the order of the day. It was about the music. And that escapism, just for a moment, at the Music Institute at 1515 Broadway in Detroit, it was just — the music took you to heavenly places. We have to understand that the music emanates from God. It’s God’s vision. And it’s about, what are we saying with the music? The music was speaking to me and saying, “There is hope. You can have peace within yourself. You can have peace with God.” I really didn’t know it as much as I do now, at that time, but stuff that was coming out, Lil’ Louis and Strictly Rhythm, “Afterhours” and “Waterfalls” and Larry Heard and “The Warning” and stuff like that — a lot of that stuff was being played on JZZ, which was a jazz station in Detroit, which played mostly the Crusaders and Jean Luc Ponty. But they also played some stuff like Larry Heard. Those records reminded me of a peaceful place within your heart. Also with Frankie Knuckles, that “Whistle Song.” I remember hearing that for the first time at the Limelight in New York. That was the first time I’d been to New York, I was doing the Music Seminar, and it was just, wow, a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this chaos.

You mention a lot of house artists. Nowadays, a lot of people tend to think of Chicago house and Detroit techno as opposing scenes; was there a lot of mixing of those two musics going on back in Detroit?

Yeah. I remember listening to D. Wynn, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and absolutely, there was plenty of mixing — Chip E alongside Jay Denham, DJ Pierre and Phuture all mixed up with Todd Terry, and all mixed up with progressive imports from France and whatnot. It was just like everything went. We came from the school of the Electrifying Mojo, where you just take all of it, all of this eclectic music and forward-thinking, progressive music, and just mix it all up. I think it was at the Majestic Theater, I remember going to see Marshall Jefferson and Tyree Cooper, Chip E and all of those guys, Steve Silk Hurley I believe it was, [who] came to Detroit for one blowout concert. It was just amazing. I wasn’t DJing at that time, but I certainly heard a mix of all of these elements. Through Jeff Mills, when he had his Wizard show, he played a lot of Detroit and Chicago and New York stuff. It was just all over the place.

How did you approach making the new Floorplan album?

My manager sent me a book chronicling the Paradise Garage days and the days of disco. Reading through it and listening to old disco records, some gospel records, I remember being asleep, and something just woke me up. My eyes just opened wide, and God specifically spoke to me and said, “I want you to do something with lyrics, and get my message out through this music.” So between reading that book and harkening back to the days when disco was on top — the days when heavy metal heads and rock heads were against disco, and disco was just destroyed overnight, literally destroyed overnight — and bringing that gospel element and that hope to it, that was the idea. Like I said, listening to artists like Phyllis Hyman, the O’Jays, Chic, Gino Soccio, it just all made sense that I would do this Floorplan album based on what the meaning of heaven is, and what salvation is, and God’s covering and what his peace is, and start to get that message out there. I think it’s so important that people hear this message and get that message, man. Again, all of the problems in the world we’re facing, we’re trying to find our way and get an understanding of just what it is that’s going on. We don’t have the answers, but God has the answers. It was just a confirmation to me, through the visions that I had, through God talking to me and my manager sending me this book, that it had all come together in this way. And the listener is taken in completely by this sense of hope and urgency for peace. That’s what you’re feeling, what you’re experiencing from listening to the album, is the manifestation of those visions all coming together.

My favorite track on the album is “Never Grow Old.” Which came first on that — the beat or the sample? And how did you put them together?

I think the drums, just the drum patterns, came first, and then I was thumbing through some records, and I pulled out this Aretha Franklin gospel recording, I think it was from ’73, ’75, something like that. I just put the needle on, and immediately, the vocal just — it just played on top while the beat pattern was playing, and the vocal immediately went with the groove, and it started to all come together, and I said, “I’ve gotta hurry up and sample this and start laying it down right now.” Just marrying the vocals and the groove and the feeling with the beat and the rhythm. It was the perfect match. It was just such a spiritual theme coming together. That sort of set the tone for the entire album.

Is gospel something you’ve gotten more interested in since you moved to the South, or was it always a part of your musical upbringing?

I was raised in the church through my grandparents, and they’ve always instilled in me the urgency to know God for myself. In my teen years and my rebellious years I went astray from that, but I came back to that. I guess moving to the South, going to church here, going to school in the ministry and becoming a minister, it all just came full circle. But it all started with my experiences as a young child, through my grandparents. I can remember being four, five, six years old, and seeing people in church catching the Holy Ghost and shouting and praising God. So those experiences are embedded in my heart, in my soul. Like I said, it all came into these visions and what was prophesied and spoken over my life is now coming to pass.

Your grandfather’s cousin was Barry Gordy, correct?

That’s right. Barry Gordy is my grandfather’s first cousin. My grandfather’s mother and Barry Gordy’s mother are sisters.

So I’m guessing that music played a big role in your family.

Oh yeah, definitely. My father was a jazz musician, my uncle managed jazz bands, my mother sang in R&B groups in Detroit. So yeah, music was a huge part of my life growing up. Motown’s definitely a part of my life. My uncle recently retired from running the Motown museum. We’ve been deeply embedded in music.

Do you sing gospel?

Do I sing gospel? Oh no, you don’t want to hear me sing. I’d run everybody out of the church. I can’t carry a tune! I’m tone deaf in that sense. It’s tragic, I’m gonna tell you that straight up.

Let’s talk about Nighttime World 3, your last album. That was based on the documentary Requiem for Detroit?

That’s right. The thing was, when black people migrated from the South to Detroit in search of better opportunities, facing adversity along the way, and the struggle they had with racism and everything, they hoped for a better life for their children. For themselves and for their children and generations to come. I’m sure most of our parents expected us to go to college, go into the military and become professionals, doctors, lawyers, teachers and whatnot. But little did they know they were paving the way for us to afford to dream, and to travel and invent this progressive music and sound. They didn’t see that coming. Again, they may have expected us to be professionals in one sense, but they really afforded us the luxury of becoming astronomers, so to speak, scientists and inventors. And through this progressive music, we were able to build. Not only did we come to a new place, Detroit, but we were able to go from Detroit and build new worlds, through Juan Atkins and Derrick and Carl and Underground Resistance and so on and so forth. Nighttime World Volume 3, to me, chronicles all of that, the exodus out of places like Alabama to Detroit and Chicago and to the Midwest in search of a better life. But also, using that as sort of the catalyst, [using] the automotive industry and Motown and all of those experiences to invent something out of nothing. You know what I mean? That was the whole idea of Requiem for Detroit?. I thought was an amazing documentary. Talking about the struggle of black people just searching for a better life. Really, it’s ours to be obtained. Not just Detroiters, but for everybody. This is a story of struggle and survival in the midst of chaos, sort of like Omega Man. In this city full of decay, there’s a seed of hope. With any seed that’s planted, there’s gonna be a harvest. But there’s a seed there. And Detroiters, and everybody else in the world, has to realize that out of this seed you can expect a harvest, but we’ve gotta receive it. It’s there to be obtained, but if you don’t reach out and take it, a lot of people will miss this important opportunity for victory over the adversity that we’re facing.

That’s interesting, because your own story is a case of things coming full circle, in a sense. Your grandparents migrated to Detroit, where you grew up, and then you ended up moving back down to Alabama. But you return to a very different place to the one that they left, and the kind of success that you’ve achieved along the way would have been almost unthinkable for your grandparents’ generation.

To me, that’s it exactly, just coming back full circle into this land where slaves were murdered and severely subjected to cruelty, inhumanity and injustice. But now, like you said, this is a different South. There’s still elements of hatred here, but there’s seeds of change. I consider myself to be an agent of change. So there’s work to be done here. My wife and I, we prayed about moving here. We didn’t know if it would be best for our family, but through prayer and consulting God, he said, definitely, this is where I want to put you guys. I’m moving you out of your box into a place you don’t know anything about. She knows more about it than I do, a little bit more, but we were both born and raised in Detroit. All I knew was Detroit and being a city kid. So this is a strange new atmosphere, where people think differently — politically and racially. But God says this is where I want you to be, and where I want you to learn and also teach. We’ve been transplanted here to receive a message and to give a message. Talking with my pastor, we constantly thank him for what he’s teaching us, and there’s times where he says, “No, thank you guys for what you’re teaching us.” But it’s not really us, it’s the God in us. And so, being in a place that’s mysterious to us, where we’re out of our box, it shows us another dimension of ourselves and who we are, and who we need to be. Then we can take that message to the world and share that with the world.

Do you still go back to Detroit?

Oh, absolutely. Love Detroit, man. Any time I can get back — family, friends, the food. We go back and there’s certain places we eat; there’s a place called Dot and Etta’s Shrimp Shack. The best jumbo fried shrimp on planet earth. Any true Detroiter knows about Dot and Etta’s, man. We love Detroit. Love the people and always are glad to get back whenever we can.

Were you there for the festival this year?

No, I was in Milan and Brussels at the time, on a 10-day tour through Zurich and Paris and Brussels and Milan. Then, after that, Montreal.

You played at MUTEK, right? How was that?

That was really amazing. It seemed like it was a whole ‘nother techno universe. Sort of almost untapped, but educated at the same time. The set at MUTEK itself and then at the Boiler Room specifically, man, we had church on Sunday evening! It was just amazing. It was spiritual at times. I ended up doing, like, two unexpected encores. I didn’t even have anything else planned, so I just had to improvise towards the end, because the space was still available for another 30 minutes. So I had to dig deep and try to come up with something. But it was great. Again, that mystery of not knowing, and the uncertainty of, what’s going to happen, just do this…I played some beats and played around with my Kaossilator pad and just winged it, and it was great. Because I think that’s also missing, that’s needed, just to experiment right there, improvise right there on the spot.

Are you mostly playing in Europe these days?

Yeah, primarily.

Given your message, is it strange to be playing for crowds where a lot of the audience is drunk or on drugs? Because a lot of European techno clubs aren’t exactly church.

Right, right. I like to look at it in the sense of one spirit connecting to another spirit. When we can get past the drugs, and get past the hype and the alcohol, just spirit to spirit, connecting, then it’s real. But again, if you’re high on something and you’re not really tuning your heart into what’s happening, it will get lost in translation. But when you can really connect, from one heart to another, through electrical wires, through the speakers, through the emotions and the feeling, and you connect with people, it’s a spiritual uplifting. There’s a spiritual connection. And it knocks down those walls and those borders of being high. Just getting to the true essence of music and what this is all about.

Are you an ordained minister now?

I am.

Do you have a congregation?

No, I’m not a pastor. My wife and I have a ministry through the church where we’re members. I get a chance, every now and then, to stand before a congregation and deliver a message, yeah. I’ll be doing that in Detroit in October for a few nights during the revival coming up. I’m not the pastor over a congregation or a flock, but yeah, I am an ordained and licensed minister of the gospel. It’s great. I never saw that coming, to be completely honest with you. But it was prophesied and spoken over me some years ago while I was in Detroit. A minister there was preaching at our church and turned around all of a sudden and said, “You’re going to preach.” And I’m looking behind me, like, “Who’s he talking to? He can’t be talking to me.” And I said, “OK.” I received it. “If that’s what you say, then that’s what it is.” And lo and behold. But it hasn’t been easy. It’s never easy. It’s a balance, balancing being a DJ and being a minister. But I consider my music career and this artistry a ministry. To me it’s like when I go out overseas to Europe, I’m going on a mission trip. I’m going to spread the gospel. Not necessarily to go and just play records and make money and be some kind of a techno legend and all that stuff, but just so people can see the example of what God is doing in my life. It’s not about me. It’s about Jesus and delivering His message. This music is a catalyst and it allows me a platform to speak to you about the good news. That’s all. It’s good news. It’s not to condemn people, it’s not to point my finger and look down my nose at anybody; it’s just to spread the good news.

You mentioned balance. You’ve had so many different aliases over the years; are there any others that you’ll be bringing back, like Monobox?

Yeah, you just said it. Monobox. I’ve been sort of experimenting with sound and looking for the right time and the right opportunity, just that right moment in time where Monobox is going to come back and say something new. For right now, I’m just experimenting with new sounds. Because you know, the Monobox idea is sort of an alien type of deal, sort of an unearthly type of entity, and I have to approach that with a whole ‘nother aesthetic. But that’s in the works.

Monobox came from a comic book, right?

Yeah, it was a paperback I read. I think I might have been 14, 15 years old, just bored at the library one time. Just this ominous box hanging in the sky is what this book was all about. The people of earth wondered what is this and what does it mean, and it hung there for days and days and days, and then other boxes appeared. I don’t think I ever really finished the book.

It’s probably not a happy ending.

Yeah, I filled in the blanks. I can discern how it turns out, it ain’t good. Again, an alien concept and how earth people are interacting with these unforeseen events that take place.

So you’re going from Floorplan, which is this very earthy, soulful project, to its diametrical opposite.

[Laughing] Right, right, right. The mystery of it all — I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but that’s the good thing about it. It’s like Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, faith is taking that first step, even if you can’t see the rest of the staircase, but you go anyway.