John Lucas

From the Archives: Tom and Matt Berninger (2014)

November 10, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Matt Berninger is an atypical rock star: a middle-aged dad with a meditative croon and a penchant for elliptical lyrics. Nonetheless, his band, the National, has a track record of top-10 albums, Grammy nominations, and (perhaps most important of all) rave reviews from Pitchfork.

Tom Berninger, Matt’s younger brother, is not a star of any kind, although his directorial debut, Mistaken for Strangers, is threatening to make him one, having garnered its share of glowing critical notices from the likes of Entertainment Weekly and, yes, even Pitchfork. Opening on Saturday (April 12), Mistaken for Strangers is about Tom’s stint working as a roadie for his brother’s band on its 2010-11 tour. Well, working might not be exactly the right word. Much of the film’s drama (and humour) is derived from Tom’s run-ins with tour manager Brandon Reid.

Tom lasted eight-and-a-half months on the road before the inevitable firing, long enough for him to capture his brother and the rest of the National at their best (and occasionally their worst) with the handheld camera he just happened to have with him. At its heart, though, Mistaken for Strangers is about the relationship between two brothers. There’s a sense that the pudgy man-child lives in a completely different world than golden boy Matt. In a conference call with the Straight, Tom says the film’s focus only became clear when he started to edit the footage with Matt’s wife, Carin Besser.

“Very slowly we kept adding more of me and less of the National. And we actually did have test screenings to make sure that, like, ‘Is this the right move? Are we gonna piss anybody off?’ And for the most part, people said, ‘No, this is Tom’s story. This is the good stuff,’ ” he says, noting that things were crystallized in a scene in which he’s “wasted on the bus”.

“I thought it would be cool to have me drinking all the band’s beer on the bus while they all slept in hotels,” he says. “I partied by myself.…I didn’t know if it was ever going to be seen, but I thought it would be funny. When I saw it later in the editing room, with Carin, it wasn’t very funny. It was kind of sad. And we were like, ‘Ooh, that’s even better.’ ”

While Tom admits that the film plays up the bumbling-slacker angle, one suspects there’s more to the man than what we see on the screen. We get a hint of this when the boys’ mother describes Tom as “the most talented” of the two. Joining his brother on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Matt readily agrees.

“Tom swims through the world with a very unique stroke,” the singer tells the Straight. “He’s got a unique taste and a very unique vision and a very unique way that he interacts with the world. And I think that’s what she means when she says he was always the most talented—meaning he had this weirdness about him that was very special. And the truth is, I think the whole family always thought she was kind of right about that. Tom has a weird light inside him that he often doesn’t recognize; some strange green light does glow from within my brother that everyone else can see but sometimes he doesn’t.”

Matt may be the rock star of the Berninger clan, but it’s Tom’s “weird light” that makes Mistaken for Strangers sing.
From the Archives: Chester Brown (2011)

October 6, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straigh t.)

Chester Brown must have known what he was getting himself into. In creating Paying for It, the Toronto-based cartoonist was setting himself up for criticism, not just of his work but of himself and his chosen lifestyle. The graphic novel, published this month by Drawn & Quarterly, documents Brown’s interactions with prostitutes over the course of a decade or so. It also includes notes and appendices in which the author lays out his arguments in favour of the decriminalization of selling sex, and against the notion of romantic love in general.

The book, as you might imagine, has engendered a bit of controversy. Reviewing Paying for It in the Chicago Reader, Noah Berlatsky called Brown’s drawings of the prostitutes “dehumanizing”, and characterized the artist’s libertarian view of sex-as-commodity as “an expression of the individual autonomously pursuing pleasure” and a “soul-crushing sexual ethic”.

“People are taking issue with certain things in there,” Brown admits, speaking to the Straight over the phone from his home. “I certainly think someone who is brighter and more articulate than I am could have expressed things in a better way, but the book came out as well as it could given my limited abilities. No, I wouldn’t change anything.”

As for “dehumanizing” his subjects—Berlatsky pointed out that Brown never shows their faces, “turning them into expressionless ciphers”—the cartoonist had his reasons for drawing the sex workers he visited as uniformly black-haired enigmas. Specifically, he was protecting their identities.

“Yes, I left things out, particularly when it came to matters that might reveal the identities of the prostitutes I saw,” Brown says. “In the very first scene, the first time I see one, in a brothel, she asks me that question about what I do for a living, and I answer that I’m a cartoonist, and that I write and draw comic books. And then she started talking about comic books in her life, and it was very interesting, but that could have been revealing. She had particular experiences with comic books, and maybe she’s talked about those with other people, and so, yeah, I omitted that entirely from that conversation, as if she hadn’t told me any of that stuff. And at every encounter there were things like that, that I left out—things that could have revealed something about a particular woman that might have identified her.”

Brown, on the other hand, made a habit of being as open about his own identity as possible in his dealings with prostitutes. He started out using the pseudonym “Steve McDougal” but quickly dropped it, partly because of his relative notoriety—his comic-book biography of the 19th-century Métis leader Louis Riel won the author several awards and was lauded by Time magazine—but mostly because he simply had nothing to hide. “I had been talking with one of the women about what I did [for a living], and she had expressed an interest in seeing something by me, so I brought her one of the comic-book issues, from when Louis Riel was serialized as a comic book,” Brown recalls. “And when she saw my name on that, I explained that I’d been using a fake name. And after that point, I realized that johns who are married might have good reason for using fake names, but I’d been open with all of my friends and most of my family about seeing prostitutes, so it wasn’t any kind of big secret in my life.”

Brown was, in fact, “out of the closet” with his friends right from the beginning, and in Paying for It, he shows himself in conversation with fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, railing against romantic love and “possessive monogamy”. Ironically—and here is where Drawn & Quarterly would probably like me to warn you of a possible spoiler—it was through his venture into the world of paid sex that Brown found love, or something like it. His relationship with “Denise” began as one between client and contractor but has since become monogamous. Mind you, each of their sexual encounters still concludes with a monetary transaction, and things aren’t progressing the way they would in a standard romance. Brown is okay with that, and so is “Denise”.

“In boyfriend-girlfriend relationships,” says Brown, “usually there’s this pressure: ‘Let’s move things to the next step. We should move in together and after that there should be a proposal,’ or whatever. There seem to be these steps, and there’s nothing like that in this relationship, where it feels like we’re supposed to be moving it in a certain direction. The relationship is the way it is, and we both seem to be happy with it the way it is.”

Brown wouldn’t change a thing, in other words, and the same is true for his inevitably controversial book. Well, mostly true. Upon further reflection, Brown allows that he might do one thing differently if given the chance. “There’s a scene in the book where Seth intimates that I’m going through a midlife crisis, and I totally deny it,” he says. “My thinking about that has changed a little bit, in that I think I probably was going through what many men experience as a midlife crisis; it just didn’t feel that way to me because I didn’t experience it as a crisis. A lot of guys might hit middle age and start wanting to have sex with younger women, and might actually do it. If they’re in a relationship—if they’re married, say—they would probably experience that as a negative thing and be down on themselves. They could experience it as a crisis. But because I wasn’t in that type of relationship, it didn’t feel like a negative thing to me. If I was doing it over, I would at least address that in the notes, and say: ‘There might have been something to what Seth was saying.’”
From the Archives: Art Spiegelman (2013)

September 16, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Art Spiegelman has no compunction about admitting that he was probably the last person who wanted to see CO-MIX, a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work, mounted. It’s that word retrospective, you see. The veteran cartoonist turns 65 on Friday (February 15), but he’s clearly not ready for retirement. He’s best known for his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus (a vivid and gripping narrative about his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust), but he has never been one to rest on his well-earned laurels.

“I feel I’m being given my gold watch and put out to pasture,” Spiegelman jokes when the Straight calls him at his studio in Lower Manhattan. “It’s not a pretty place inside my head when I think about this. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t want one. Willem de Kooning said, ‘Never have a retrospective while you’re alive,’ but then I researched it further and found out he did it—but then maybe he was senile already by the time he did it, I’m not sure. So, I don’t know. It’s really not what I would have chosen for myself.”

CO-MIX had its genesis when the organizers of the annual Angoulême International Comics Festival, the largest event of its kind in Europe, gave Spiegelman a lifetime-achievement award (officially called the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême), and along with that honour came a request for a career-spanning gallery show. Spiegelman initially balked at the idea of putting so much work into something that would be shown in a small French town for a few weeks and then taken down. With the help of his friend and curator Rina Zavagli-Mattotti, he was able to get CO-MIX into the Centre Pompidou in Paris, after which it was mounted in Cologne, Germany. It’s about to open at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Still, Spiegelman was hesitant to dig through his own past yet again. “I was kind of dragged kicking and screaming, because I had just finished a large period of retrospection just before this call came,” he says. “I had done a book called MetaMaus, which was sifting through all the Maus material. If you’ve seen the book, that was an intense sifting. Prior to that, I had done a book called Breakdowns, which was a reworking and a rethinking of a book from 1978 which was a seminal book in shaping me as an artist, now coming out again with new material. That was also a big work of retrospection, and now they were going to slam me back into that situation of looking at everything I hadn’t looked at for those other two books.”

Diving back into the Maus material was particularly onerous. As proud as he is of what he accomplished with it—Maus has been published in some 30 languages and has done more than any other single work to elevate the graphic novel into the ranks of serious literature—Spiegelman admits to feeling somewhat shackled by it, knowing that it is what defines him in the minds of many. “With MetaMaus I really felt I had done a major job of excavating and rethinking and reorganizing these things,” he says. “I was hoping that was my jailbreak from Maus—the one that locks my brain down: ‘You made Maus. That makes you a very responsible human; you may not do a graphic novel about a talking penis, okay?’ I just figured MetaMaus was all I could offer to Maus, in service of that work—to just take out all of the rough sketches, the underlying material, sift through it, analyze it as best I could, and presumably then walk away. But instead I felt, when I had to work on the retrospective, that I’d been killed and made the executor of my own estate. And that’s dogging me a little bit. It’s getting a little better as we go from venue to venue. It gets smoother to figure out how to put it together, especially if Rina, as she is, stays involved. But I understand why there’s a lyric in a Bob Dylan song: ‘She’s an artist, she don’t look back.’ It’s not necessarily a good idea.”

VAG visitors will be glad Spiegelman relented: the range and depth of the work that makes up CO-MIX is staggering. In addition to studies for and finished pages from Maus and Breakdowns, the exhibition includes examples of the artist’s underground comics from the late 1960s, some of the covers he created for the New Yorker between 1992 and 2003, and his post-9/11 broadsheet pages, collected as In the Shadow of No Towers. Flipping through the show’s catalogue, one is struck by the scope of Spiegelman’s influences—his drawing makes explicit reference to everyone from Pablo Picasso to Rube Goldberg to Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould—and by his gleeful twisting of the conventions of the comic-book medium.

“He’s an interesting guy,” says Bruce Grenville, senior curator at the VAG and the man responsible for bringing CO-MIX to Vancouver. “There’s just so much in the work. I think that’s what’s so wonderful about the show….You can’t believe the complexity and the density that he puts in there. And yet, at the same time, they’re kind of open and easy as well.”

In 2008, Grenville put together the VAG exhibition Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art, of which Spiegelman was a co-curator. “People still talk about it,” he says of that large and wide-ranging show. “It probably reached to a broader audience than we sometimes get, because traditional visual art has a narrower bandwidth, and this opens it up a bit.”

Spiegelman notes that the barrier between “high art” and “lowbrow” has eroded significantly over the past 20-odd years. More and more, work like his is being taken seriously, for better or worse.

“I think at this point, comics are as capable of making something that you’d want to call art as anything else,” he asserts. “And that’s both a plus and a minus—there’s something great about comics being an outlaw medium. And that’s, of course, getting lost—and I’m even partially to blame, and I apologize. I think it’s been one of the strengths of it as a form, that it doesn’t have to conform to cultural preconceptions.”

Ever the champion of the underground, Spiegelman is understandably most impressed by what’s happening outside the sphere of mainstream comics. As an example, he touts Chris Ware’s groundbreaking Building Stories as “a work of genius. Brilliant. But I’m not as interested in X-Men, or The Archie Wedding. But at this point it’s like any other medium. It’s like if you talk about books, you’ve got 50 Shades of Grey and you’ve got really serious literature sitting in the same shop, you know? And similarly, you go to museums and there’s stuff that’s so clearly a fraud, and there are other things that you’ve got to slow down and attend to. In movies you’ve got the same kind of spectrum, ultimately. What’s really popular isn’t necessarily what’s really great, nor is it a priori a sign that it’s terrible.”

Mind you, even if something is terrible, the odds are good that Spiegelman will find something to like about it regardless. He just loves comics. “I’ve gotten to the point where I even like the stuff that I think sucks,” he admits. “I like the medium, and as a result I’ll look at something and go, ‘God, that’s just impossibly stupid.’ But I say it with a certain kind of admiration.”
From the Archives: Jason Pierce of Spiritualized (2012)

August 22, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

No one has ever accused Jason Pierce of taking shortcuts. The Spiritualized mastermind has been known to take as long as a year to mix an album, even though he admits he doesn’t especially enjoy the painstaking process. He’d rather be on-stage than in the studio. Being detail-oriented usually pays off for Pierce, though, and there may be no better example of this than “Hey Jane”.

The song starts as a jangly pop number that builds to a psychedelic rave-up before crashing into a wall of dissonance and petering out. Then things pick up again, cruising along to a krautrock beat topped by heaven-sent gospel harmonies. The structure of “Hey Jane” seems to mirror the life of its title character, a journey from desperation and squalor to ultimate redemption. The song takes almost nine minutes to play out. It’s nearly matched by a couple of other tracks (“Headin’ for the Top Now” and “So Long You Pretty Thing”) on the new Spiritualized album Sweet Heart Sweet Light. But “Hey Jane” ultimately takes longest-song honours, so, naturally, Pierce picked it to be the first single, at its full length.

“It wouldn’t work in any other way,” the 46-year-old Englishman says, reached at a tour stop in Austin, Texas. “I mean, people play it on the radio—the first three minutes. I think it’s kind of ludicrous. It doesn’t really make sense like that. That’s what’s weird about music. Everything’s relative. The end of ‘So Long You Pretty Thing’, where that lyric comes out—‘So long you pretty thing/Save your little soul’—they tried to edit that down into a single, so it’s just round the end section. And it’s not that ecstatic; it’s not that great a sound. But it is, comparative to the intro and the way the middle section pans out. It’s a little bit like that with ‘Hey Jane’. No part of it is great, in a kind of pop way, but it makes sense in its entirety. So there’s no way of releasing it any other way.”

That Pierce thinks of his work in pop terms at all is somewhat surprising, given that the oeuvre of Spiritualized ranges from drone-rock bliss-fests (“Electric Mainline”) to 17-minute avant-jazz freakouts (“Cop Shoot Cop”) to lush, symphonic ballads (“Stop Your Crying”). He says, however, that his initial impulse with Sweet Heart Sweet Light—Spiritualized’s seventh studio album and its first since 2008’s Songs in A&E—was to make it a pop record in the vein of the Beatles. When it dawned on him that he wasn’t really all that interested in the Fab Four, his reference points shifted to more esoteric fare, such as albums by Charlie Feathers and Neu!, Captain Beefheart’s Clear Spot, and Kill City by Iggy Pop and James Williamson. Those were his touchstones, at any rate, but it’s not as if he brought a stack of LPs into the studio with him.

“I didn’t listen to them once when I was making this record,” Pierce says. “I wasn’t after copying the sounds or the sonic of those records. It’s just the idea of those records: that they weren’t records that reached for the stars, or that they weren’t written about like pinnacles of rock ’n’ roll history, but they were beautiful collections of songs by people that had soaked up a bit of musical wisdom. They didn’t have that kind of arrogance of youth, where the width of your music is actually very slim.”

Mind you, Sweet Heart Sweet Light does contain some of the most immature songwriting to be found on any Spiritualized effort. That’s not meant as a slight, either; the writing in question came courtesy not of Pierce himself, but of his daughter, Poppy. Nine years old at the time the album was recorded, Poppy contributed lyrics to the intro of “So Long You Pretty Thing”, and she sings the following lines with her father: “If you feel lonely/And the world’s against you/Take the long way home/Past the scary Jesus/And you’ll find my door/With your name in diamonds/And you’ll feel lonely/No more.”

The verse doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but its naiveté is charming, which somehow makes it perfect. That’s a quality that Pierce, who says his best work often emerges from failed attempts at doing something else entirely, relishes.

“It’s like when I write orchestrations,” he says. “I don’t think I’m great at writing orchestrations, but I write orchestrations that kind of horrify the string players that come in to do it, like it’s so wrong. It’s like art, isn’t it? You have to unlearn to be able to find the line that works. You could learn things like a talent, but you have to be able to unlearn how to do it to find something that isn’t just a product of that learning.”

In other words, there’s no shortcut.
ESports, cannabis, and me: welcome to the new normal

July 21, 2020

Four months ago, I was doing pretty much what I had been doing for the two decades leading up to that point. I was working in the editorial department of the Georgia Straight, editing copy and occasionally writing about music or graphic novels as space allowed.

Oh, sure, the paper was under new ownership, but so far that had not affected me much. Then something called COVID-19 happened. And within a few weeks I was no longer working out of Straight HQ, nor really working for the Straight at all.

Like pretty much everyone else with an office job, I now find myself working from home. More specifically, I am working at a little desk tucked underneath a child’s IKEA loft bed. It’s not so bad, actually. I have windows next to my desk, which is more than I can say for my last cubicle in the dungeon known as the Straight editorial floor.

Possibly the biggest difference in my working life, though, is that I’m not an associate editor at the Georgia Straight. I’m not a music journalist anymore, either. I am instead now the Editor (with an uppercase “E” and everything) of two websites: CannCentral.com and ECentralSports.com. Both sites are owned by Media Central Corporation, which also owns the Straight and NOW Toronto.

This is the part where I confess that, before I started this double-barreled new gig, my knowledge of both ESports and cannabis was minimal. Now, however, I find myself becoming something of an expert in the two completely unrelated topics.

Well, as much of an expert as one can be without being an active participant. I enjoy playing video games, but I’m never going to give Artour “Arteezy” Babaev anything to lose sleep over. As far as cannabis goes, let’s just say I’m not exactly Tommy Chong.

No matter. There’s no rule that says you have to do something in order to cover it effectively. If that were the case, only boxers could write about boxing, and no one wants to read that, do they? Admittedly, this is a different way of doing things for me. My main beat for the entirety of my career up until now has been music. I have also been active as a musician for roughly the same span of time. (Not a successful one, mind you, but I have fun with it.)

I’m grateful for my continued employment in the face of the weirdness of life in 2020. If you would like to help keep me employed, please visit the websites in question and click on as many links as you feel inclined to click.

At the very least, it will give me something to do until someone—anyone!—expresses interest in publishing this book I wrote.
From the Archives: Howard Shore (2010)

May 5, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Many film scores have embedded themselves deeply in popular culture. Who can hear the music from Jaws or Psycho, for example, without instantly being flooded with images from those classic movies? Few scores have become truly iconic as quickly as the ones Canadian composer Howard Shore created for director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, however.

Shore’s music for the series garnered a number of awards, including three Oscars, three Grammys, and two Golden Globes, and it has been showcased in several successful live versions.

One of these, The Lord of the Rings Symphony, will bring followers of Frodo Baggins and company to the Orpheum Theatre for a concert featuring the combined forces of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Bach Choir, and the Vancouver Bach Children’s Chorus. They will be joined by conductor Markus Huber and soprano Kaitlyn Lusk.

The concert version is a symphonic piece that clocks in at just over two hours, with two movements each dedicated to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. This has been condensed from the score’s full length of 10-and-a-half hours. That’s a lot of music, and Shore admits that when he agreed to take his part in bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic to the screen, he did so without first considering the full scope of the project.

“I was a Tolkien fan, but I hadn’t thought about the actual length of time involved in creating a piece that mirrored Tolkien’s story,” the Toronto-born composer says when the Georgia Straight reaches him in New York, where he now lives. “The work that I did on the score took three years and nine months. So I think when I started, somewhere in the back of my mind I realized the time commitment and the work involved, but it was a rather large, daunting task, so I didn’t think about it in too big a picture. I just followed the footprints of the story very carefully and tried to break things into smaller sections. I worked on very small parts of the story—gestures and small scenes—at first.”

By the time he was finished, Shore had created a score that brought Tolkien’s Middle Earth to life in an aptly grand and sweeping fashion, incorporating musical styles spanning centuries and bridging continents. Each of the saga’s cultures was given its own set of leitmotifs, with the orcs assigned harsh and percussive sounds, the humans accompanied by brass flourishes, and the hobbits presented with lilting Celtic tones. Choirs and soloists sing in Modern and Old English, along with languages of Tolkien’s invention, including Quenya, Adí»naic, and Black Speech.

“I worked carefully with the three screenwriters—Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, and Peter Jackson,” Shore recalls. “It was a way to tell the story using Tolkien’s languages to add clarity to the story, so you understood the difference between Rivendell and Lothlórien, and between Rohan and Gondor. And by giving the cultures—and certain objects—themes and motifs, it was a way to tell the story clearly. Lord of the Rings is considered one of the most complex fantasy worlds ever created. And in three films you wanted to tell the story to people who might not have read the book, and they had to understand the story and be brought up to speed on the history of Middle Earth and things like that. The music played that role of being a character in the film that kept you abreast of what was unfolding in the story, and who characters were and how they related to each other, and how the cultures related to each other.”

In recent years, Shore has composed music for such wide-ranging cinematic fare as The Aviator, Doubt, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, but he’s about to find himself immersed in the world of elves, dwarves, and wizards yet again. After years in development hell, Jackson is set to helm a two-part adaptation of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s first published novel.

“The Hobbit is a film we’ve wanted to make for many, many years, and we’ve talked about it going back to 2002, I think,” Shore says. “When we were making The Two Towers, Peter and I talked about making The Hobbit. It’s a story we really love. We’re really happy that it looks like it’s finally getting started in filming. It’s something I’ll be working on over the next three years.”

Sounds as if Shore is quite ready for another adventure.
From the Archives: Father John Misty, Part Two (2015)

April 17, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Josh Tillman isn’t making things easy. For the first four minutes of his interview with the Georgia Straight, the singer and songwriter also known as Father John Misty declines to give a serious answer to any of the questions being tossed his way. When asked why he relocated from Los Angeles to New Orleans, for example, Tillman drolly claims that he has taken a job with ExxonMobil.

When the Straight attempts a change of tack and queries Tillman about the significance to his career of his recent appearance on the cover of Billboard, he replies with “I wasn’t aware that it was gonna have to mean something when I agreed to it. If that’s the case, then maybe I wouldn’t have done it. But I thought it was just gonna be a big old stupid nothing.”

At this point, your panicked correspondent is feeling beads of flop sweat form on his brow, as he watches his hopes of establishing a rapport with his circumspect subject slowly sink into a quagmire of flippant indifference and hears his carefully wrought questions leave his mouth as a flailing sputter of gibberish.

Tillman then either takes pity on his hapless interrogator or he figures out that he’s dealing with someone who has given more than a merely cursory listen to the latest Father John Misty album, I Love You, Honeybear.

Released in February, that album is Tillman’s attempt at responding in song to the events of the past few years that have shaped him the most, namely falling in love and getting married. His challenge was to do so without resorting to either cheap sentiment or cynicism. Irony, on the other hand, was definitely not off the table.

“I use satire or irony or whatever as a way of resolving certain obsessions that I have,” Tillman says. “With me, a lot of the time contempt turns into obsession very quickly, and the only way for me to resolve that is to render it meaningless by virtue of irony or satire or something. And so I think within the context of my album, there was some contempt-based obsession over the whole enterprise of love songs.”

For someone who professes to hate love songs, Tillman sure can write a beautiful one. Take “I Went to the Store One Day”, which closes Honeybear with a hush of strings and acoustic guitar, atop which the singer implores his new bride, “Don’t let me die in a hospital/I’ll save the big one for the last time we make love.” He follows that with a self-referential line that could be read as a somewhat snarky dismissal of the whole business of writing such a song in the first place. Tillman argues otherwise.

“It’s very sincere for me to include a lyric in a song that’s like, ‘Insert here a sentiment re: our golden years,’ which, yeah, is ironic in a technical sense, but that’s the most sincere thing that I could say, because I was really at a loss for words,” he says. “And this experience that I had in that moment left me at a loss for words, because in that moment, as a writer, I was terrified of marginalizing this experience, or turning it into some kind of schlocky bullshit.”

Schlocky bullshit has never been the man’s stock-in-trade. After recording a bunch of folk-rock albums under the J. Tillman moniker, the singer reinvented himself as Father John Misty for 2012’s Fear Fun. That record was written in the wake of Tillman abandoning his former life—he quit a lucrative gig as Fleet Foxes’ drummer—and driving from Seattle to L.A.

Fear Fun was very much about Tillman’s self-discovery, but it was heavily informed by both mind-expanding drugs and geography, with locales like Laurel Canyon, Hollywood, and Malibu serving as settings for Misty’s psilocybin- and ayahuasca-fuelled misadventures. It was a Day-Glo map of Los Angeles County drawn on blotter paper.

Tillman, who notes that his use of psychedelic drugs still has an impact on his work, says, “I think that part of the reason why psychedelics have long been so taboo in the culture is that the psychedelic experience violently throws into question just about all of the conventions that we’re taught to respect and internalize, whether it’s money or duty or debt or ownership—these ideas that, through that lens, are stripped of whatever value that culture imbues them with.”

And that helps explain one of the other themes that run through I Love You, Honeybear. It’s romantic, sure, but it’s about lovers in a dangerous time, finding solace in each other despite living in a world that is truly, deeply fucked. As Tillman sings, beautifully, on the album’s title track, “My love, you’re the one I want to watch the ship go down with” and “Everything is doomed/And nothing will be spared/But I love you, honeybear.”

Consider also “Holy Shit”, a stream of lyrical imagery that includes “dead religions, holocausts”, “infotainment” and “consumer slaves”, with its narrator weighing the notion that romantic love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity” but accepting that he’s already soaking in it.

Even more pointed is “Bored in the USA”, a ’70s-style piano ballad that pokes at the bloated corpse of the American Dream. In a particularly cutting passage punctuated by canned sitcom laughter, Tillman sings, “Oh, they gave me a useless education/And a subprime loan/On a craftsman home/Keep my prescriptions filled/And now I can’t get off/But I can kind of deal,” before entreating “President Jesus” to save him from his soul-destroying ennui.

“Those songs are sort of like where my work is going,” the tunesmith says. “And I feel very emboldened by the fact that those tunes, and themes that are just starting to crest in those songs, seem to be the things that people are the most interested in, or respond to the most.

“Prior to the psychedelic experiences, my impulse was very much to alienate people with my music, and I think that that was palpable on a subatomic level; I think that anyone who heard it could feel that intention, that the music was engineered to alienate. And for some reason the shedding of certain layers of ego and fear and whatever else through the psychedelic stuff did put me in a position where I was far more apt to write material for the function of communicating and creating commonality.”

Those are ambitious goals, especially when you remember that Tillman is otherwise engaged in the full-time pursuit of draining the Gulf of Mexico of its last remaining drops of petroleum.

In and Out

Josh Tillman sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On finding truth via irony: “The nature of truth is a violent contradiction. I think certainty, a lot of the time, is the antithesis of discerning some meaningful truth. That’s the beautiful thing about irony. The function that I think irony serves in my work is that sometimes there’s a question that answers a question better than some kind of grotesquely certain answer could.”

On his inspiration: “I had a whole album’s worth of material prior to the album as it exists today, and it was really shitty because I was asking really shitty questions. Or I’d sort of stopped asking questions or something, and was kind of self-satisfied. I think I kind of got myself into a revelation-themed malaise shortly after the events that predicated the Fear Fun experience. And then I met Emma. And meeting Emma, and following a very nonintellectual impulse to pursue things with her with the intensity that we have, made for far more interesting work.”

On second-guessing himself: “It’s not even album to album, it’s like verse to verse. It’s like, ‘Is this song going to get finished? Is this line going to get finished?’ I can’t even think of it in terms of a life’s work. And then you get halfway through an album and you’re like, ‘I will whore myself out in any way necessary just to make it through this experience without killing myself.’ ”
From the Archives: Father John Misty, Part One (2012)

April 17, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Josh Tillman is probably already weary of talking about it, but when you pack up your drum kit and quit a band as successful as Fleet Foxes, people are going to ask questions. Tillman did just that, announcing his departure this past January, after a 2011 that had seen the Seattle folk-rock act release its universally acclaimed sophomore album, Helplessness Blues, and garner a Grammy nomination.

When the Straight reaches him on the road in Ohio, Tillman is battling what he calls “a rare bout of intense, earth-shattering nausea”, a consequence of consuming too much alcohol and too little food the night before. Even so, he seems happy to talk, noting that, even though he found being a supporting player in Fleet Foxes unfulfilling, he had a hard time admitting it, even to himself.

“My sense of propriety was telling me that any decent person would be happy in my position, and that since I am unhappy, ergo I’m an ingrate, or some sort of terrible person, for not being able to enjoy that,” Tillman says. “But I had some moment of clarity within the last year, where I just realized that it’s as simple as, ‘The reason you’re not happy is because you’re not doing what you want to do.’ ”

The 31-year-old musician, who had already released seven albums of his own songs under the name J. Tillman, decided to leave the Pacific Northwest altogether. He eventually ended up in Los Angeles, where he currently lives. Along the way, he started writing—not songs, but a novel. That exercise, he says, helped him find his true voice. When he returned to music, he realized he couldn’t just make another J. Tillman record, so he adopted the name Father John Misty, which adorns his latest outing.

The 12-song Fear Fun is, without a doubt, the best work of Tillman’s career to date. Musically, it bounces giddily from the high-in-the-’70s coke-mirror lounge pastiche of “Nancy From Now On” to the rollicking cosmic country-rock of “Tee Pees 1-12” and the dark but tuneful dirge-grunge of “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”. Tillman’s voice is a revelation, sometimes cracking like a shroom-addled street preacher’s, sometimes calling up the ghost of Roy Orbison. The lyrics are sardonic and sometimes hilarious, which makes Fear Fun a very different listening experience than any of Tillman’s studiously earnest earlier work.

“I think for a long time I was really under the impression that nothing valid creatively came out of anything other than fear and trembling—you know, darkness and whatever,” he admits. “I understand why I thought that way at the time, but I don’t see things that way anymore.”

Tillman says his new record represents his emergence from behind the manufactured persona that he cultivated on his previous releases. Although it’s evident that he experienced profound growth as an artist in between abandoning his post with Fleet Foxes and crafting the excellent Fear Fun, Tillman has a pragmatic take on the whole thing.

“I got bored, I blew up my life, and then, lo and behold, I made an album,” he states matter-of-factly. “It’s just really satisfying to have a handle on my own narrative voice, my own creative voice. Ultimately, I’m just excited to be able to continue to use that. Because it doesn’t feel like a dead end in the way that the music I was making previously felt like a dead end, because there was so much fantasy involved in it. There isn’t much fantasy in this music. It’s like, now I know how to talk about myself no matter what stage of life I’m in.”
Follow me on SoundCloud

April 15, 2020

I just created a page on SoundCloud where I will posting tracks I have created at home by myself, some new and some old. These are all things that don’t generally fit into my current musical project, the Starling Effect. But, who knows, they might morph into Starling Effect songs somehow.
From the Archives: Martin Amis, Part Two (2018)

April 15, 2020

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

Martin Amis has never been just one sort of writer. He’s arguably most recognized as the masterful novelist behind Money and London Fields, but he’s adept at nonfiction as well. His most recent book, The Rub of Time, is a collection of essays, literary criticism, and reportage published in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere between 1986 and 2017.

In a telephone interview with the Straight, Amis reveals that his next work will be an autobiographical novel. It won’t be a memoir—he has already written one of those, called Experience, which was published in 2000. No, what Amis is working on now falls under the broad umbrella of “life writing”. And it’s not coming easily to him.

“I’ve been trying to write this book for about 15 years,” he explains, speaking from a Toronto hotel room. “It’s mostly about other people, other writers. I’m finding it more and more unsatisfactory, the idea of life writing, and I say so in the course of the novel. There’s quite a lot of lit crit in it, and I found a sort of pretext for the whole project by realizing that, in a way, it’s a novel that combines the essay-writing part of me with the fiction-writing.

“But it’s not fictional enough,” Amis continues. “There’s not enough freedom, because you’re writing about real events, and the subconscious doesn’t seem to have much to do in this project, as it doesn’t have much to do when you’re writing an essay. I’m gonna finish it, and it’s long, so I’m not really expecting it to be very popular or well-received. But I’ve got to get it done, and then I can get on with writing a novel about race in America, which is more exciting to me.”

That, indeed, is a topic that seems to animate the 68-year-old British author. For the past eight or so years, Amis has lived in Brooklyn, and it was with some horror that he witnessed the political ascent of Donald J. Trump (as documented in a pair of biting pieces in The Rub of Time), first to the head of the pack of Republican Party nominees, and then to the White House.

Like anyone possessed of a sense of decency, Amis was appalled by Trump’s courting of the more extreme elements of the American right, including the unapologetic white supremacists he notoriously described as “very fine people”.

“That’s an amazing thing to have done, to do it do so brazenly, to reopen the wound in American history that will never heal,” Amis says. “The central hypocrisy of the whole American idea—you know, committed to the proposition ‘that all men are created equal’, said in 1776, when there were five million Africans under chattel slavery in the South. Absolute hypocritical rubbish. And he [Trump] thought, ‘I’ll prise that wound open, because there is advantage.’ ”

Trump and his ilk are on the wrong side of history, a point Amis makes by invoking some of the more indelible images from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Specifically, he cites the example of then-six-year-old New Orleans schoolgirl Ruby Bridges—the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in 1960. Photos taken on her first day of school show Bridges, accompanied by four federal marshals, walking bravely past an angry white mob.

“And the side you’re on is of the hate-contorted faces, and not of the dignity of that little girl, the honour of that little girl?” Amis says. “What a shameless thing to do. And that footage of the young men at a lunch counter in a department store—four black men surrounded again by those hideous faces. And that’s the side you’re on. The outrageousness of that has taken a long time to sink in.”

(A relevant aside: in the wake of 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings, Amis found himself branded a racist, or at least an Islamophobe, for his views on Islamist terrorism. Amis took pains to clarify that what he opposed was not Islam itself, but the violence carried out in its name by radicalized fanatics. Answering readers’ queries in the Independent in 2007—included in The Rub of Time as “You Ask the Questions 2”—he wrote “The form that vigilante xenophobia is now taking—the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street—disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any stratum feels under threat.”)

Amis says of the legacy of racism in the still-divided United States, “I can imagine the black population of America getting over it in about half a century, if all the institutional biases are removed. What I can’t imagine—what I think is inconceivable—is that the white population will ever, can ever, should ever, begin to forgive itself for what it’s done. How do you reconcile yourself with that repetitive cruelty of two-and-a-half centuries of slavery and a hundred years of Jim Crow?”

How indeed. And how does one go about writing a novel that addresses such questions? It would seem to demand a writer who is still in full possession of his powers. The theme of the aging wordsmith, of losing one’s original voice and vision in the face of advancing years, is a thread that connects several of the essays in The Rub of Time. Amis admits that he can already feel his own stamina diminishing slightly, but he won’t let that slow him down or—god forbid—stop him writing altogether.

“It’s your life,” he says. “It’s everything to you, apart from your family. But, you know, Philip Roth has done it. You just say, ‘That’s enough’, and I’m sure it’s because you’re feeling those powers slipping away. It’s very tragic, but I think that’s a dignified response to it rather than toiling on…I find it hard to imagine me doing that—but it’s an option.”