http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2011/jun/09/43-minutes-mikel-jollett/
Idling in the Target parking lot, the world dissolved down to the knob on my stereo. A staccato, three-note synth melody threaded with another, then electric guitar tickled the high register before a punch of fat drums and cymbals opened into a sound that made me want to jump around on the pavement, the way I used to dance before I knew how. Then a voice came in, keen and gritty amid clapping, stomping and so much instrumental richness. My hands never left the wheel.
I didn’t know it yet, but I’d just had my first moment with The Airborne Toxic Event, a rock band (indie, alt, folk, post-punk—you name it) from LA’s Hollywood district that I managed to miss for almost three years. The juicy sound of hit song “Changing” was courtesy of bassist Noah Harmon, drummer Daren Taylor, guitarist Steven Chen and multi-threat Anna Bulbrook, who plays viola, keyboards and tambourine. The voice was Mikel Jollett, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking on a recent Monday about his Neil Diamond impression, the books his mom kept next to the government cheese and my dumb notions about the rules of emotional art.
It was an interview tied to TATE’s June 12 show at the House of Blues, but it felt like a real conversation, the spontaneous kind you might have with a cool stranger on a train. He called me man. Twice. I understand that one conversation does not a friendship make, but I can relate to the way other TATE fans feel like they know the band.
“One of the things that our fans sense about the band is that it’s all a true story. And it is,” Jollett says. “That’s part of why they’re so devoted to us. They can sense our devotion to them.”
For those, like me, who are newer to TATE, the story goes something like this: Jollett had a really bad week in 2006 involving illness and heartbreak of the profoundest sort. Despite his considerable success as a freelance journalist and fiction writer with bylines in everything from the LA Times to McSweeney’s, he looked at the stockpile of songs he’d written and played for his own comfort and wondered. One by one his bandmates came serendipitously to the project, which Jollett thought would be a cathartic “detour.”
Two critically acclaimed albums, a documentary film and a global horde of fans later he has finally surrendered to the music. In talking with him about it, I learned that Jollett is gracious and funny, scrappy, homesick, full of trivia and language you’d expect from someone who named his band after a section of a Don DeLillo novel.
I first heard “Changing” while sitting in my car in the parking lot of Target.
Where all great moments in life happen.
I’ve been listening to TATE ever since, and the more I listen the more I hear the Neil Diamond quality in your voice. Is it something you knew you had before reviewers pointed it out?
No not at all. It never once crossed my mind, ever. … I can actually do a really, really spot-on Neil Diamond impression. It’s my embarrassing secret. Please don’t write that.
What song of his is your favorite to do with your spot-on impression?
Maybe “Love on the Rocks,” just because it’s so cheesy, so awesomely cheesy.
Speaking of cheesiness, it’s interesting that when music—even good music—becomes widely appealing it can also become less “cool” to appreciate it. What do you make of that?
Some popular music is really, really bad. Most of it sounds like it was made in a beaker to be appealing to the most number of people as quickly as possible. It has that in common with French fries. You know? Rihanna and French fries have a lot in common.
But why are our musical loves and hates so important to how other people see us, not to mention how we might see ourselves?
There’s something about music and the way people hear music and the way your taste in music is part of what creates your identity as a person in the modern world. Some people are sort of setting up their identity. They like to be the kind of people who like certain bands. … There’s a swath of the population—and I’m guilty of it too—all of us who like to think of ourselves and our musical tastes as being sort of more refined. So I would admit to liking Sonic Youth before I would admit to liking, say, the soundtrack to Rent. Having said that, I really just don’t like most pop music. It’s not like I’m secretly liking it but not admitting it. Some of it’s real and some of it’s not. Like, there’s a big backlash against Mumford & Sons, which I think is really weird because it’s a good record, and just because it’s getting popular with the Dave Matthews crowd doesn’t mean it’s bad.
And what’s so wrong with the Dave Matthews crowd anyway?
I will fight anyone who says “Crash Into Me” isn’t a good song. And yeah, I don’t want to go to the concert. Okay? I’m not going to go. But that is a good song, and it’s really not that different from a Death Cab song.
What do you listen to?
If you were to look at my iTunes playlist, my top six songs are probably all The National and Passion Pit. But I don’t consider myself particularly a National or Passion Pit fan. If you were to say, ‘Who is your seminal group,’ I would say Bruce! Bruce Springsteen. Definitely. Nebraska. So I guess I don’t really form my identity around The National … I just really like their songs.
The video for “Dancing in the Dark,” where Bruce is wearing the tightest jeans in the world and dancing like a white guy would dance at a wedding—he can do that and still be cool. But if you’re in an indie band you just can’t.
I do that every night. I dance around in tight jeans like a white guy at a wedding. If I were in a Native American tribe they’d call me Dances with Overbite. I have no problem whatsoever doing that.
Really?
I just don’t give a f*ck. I also think that the indie rockers of their day didn’t like Bruce Springsteen. They liked the Velvet Underground, they liked Television and Big Star and they thought Bruce was like a pop singer. The elitist snobs weren’t in love with him either. They thought he was a charlatan and a faker; they thought he was trying too hard and that he wasn’t cool because everybody liked him. And what’s interesting is that in retrospect, you look back at what people did years later in a different light than you look at what’s happening contemporarily. There are some people who are going to survive this era, and I don’t think it’s necessarily the people that everyone expects. … Obviously you should respect your audience and you should serve your audience and you should put your heart and soul into your songs. That’s what U2 did; that’s what Bruce did; that’s what Leonard Cohen did; that’s what David Bowie did—all these people who we look back on now and say, these were the giants.
And you will fight anyone who says otherwise.
The point is, who cares. The most important thing that happens in music is what happens between the ears of somebody hearing a song; it’s what happens in their own mind. It’s what happens when you hear a song and go, I love this song! Love it. That’s the important moment, and the rest is just window dressing.
I read an interview where you said there are a lot of questions you’d like to ask Leonard Cohen. Like what?
I think I would want to know more about the song “Suzanne.” I think I’d want to know why he wrote it. That song in particular is one of the best songs anyone’s ever written, and it really walks the line between being explicit and being extremely understated, and in doing so ends up saying a lot more. And I guess I’d want to know more about his process in songwriting, what he thinks about when he’s writing a song and how he goes about it. I know he struggles with it, and we’re similar in that way. Some people just write songs and that’s the song, and some people go back and edit and revise and think forever about what’s the right word, and they know that word is out there but they don’t know it yet, and they’re just trying to find that word that goes with that melody that goes in that place to create the song. I do that a lot. So I guess I’d want to know more about that. His process.
In fiction writing you’re almost not allowed to put emotions on the page in a really explosive way. Like if a character feels grief, it has to be as subtle as possible. But in a song, you’re allowed to let it rip, and you have to, and it has to rhyme too.
I don’t know about that. I don’t know if that’s true. In songs, a lot of what you’re doing is describing things, but the music is being so emotive that it makes the words seem that much more emotional. If you’re ever writing a song and the lyric is “I’m sad” you’re just not a good songwriter. Show me don’t tell me. It’s the golden rule of fiction and songwriting. … It might be a product of this era that we live in, but I never think of our songs as being particularly emotional. I’m always surprised. Because someone will be like, hey, you’re really writing a lot of emotional sh*t here, and I’m like, not really. Look at The Final Cut. That’s a f*cking emotional record.
In watching the Bombastic video series on TATE’s website, I noticed there’s this moment at the beginning of almost every song where you’re smiling to yourself, like it’s the greatest thing just listening to your band play.
I do like listening to them play. They’re really good. They can really whale. We are very much like siblings, and we do really care about each other. We truly do. We’ve been a band five years now and we’ve just toured and toured and toured. So there’s been this kind of incremental thing that’s happened with us. We never had some big moment. And you can get really lost in the wash and blur of modern music. You’re listening to the radio and they’re playing Sublime and then they’re playing Florence and the Machine and then they’re playing f*cking Linkin Park and then there’s your song. And you’re like, what? You wonder in this din if it really even mattered that you spent months trying to get the metaphors right or trying to get the story arc of the record right. So you stick close with the people near you. … You and me, kid. There’s a lot of that in this band. You and me, kid, we’re going to do this thing together. At times that means the next thing you do is walk on stage for a few thousand people who are all screaming to see your face or whatever, and sometimes you do that and you’re talking to someone about someone in their family dying. Or you’re just talking about being far away from home, because so much of this is about being away from the people you care about. So there’s a lot of you and me, kid. Sticking together.
And backing each other up in Atlanta bars, apparently.
One hundred percent, man. F*cking redneck ass, dickhead cop. Not all cops, by the way, there are good cops out there, but that guy was a f*cking dick.
He really hit you in the head with a nightstick, out of nowhere?
Oh yeah, like a bunch of times and then cuffed me and kept doing it. That’s why Noah got arrested, for trying to stop the cop from beating me with a club while I was handcuffed on the curb.
I read that you and Noah often work on songs together, but what does the dynamic look like?
In terms of the lyrics and the melodies of the songs that’s just me alone in a room. I’m probably your basic songwriter in that way. Musically there’s a lot of collaboration and back and forth. The band tends to collaborate on arrangements all together. I write a ton of music; Noah writes a ton of music. Somewhere between all of that we come up with a record. That’s kind of how it was on All at Once. We all worked really hard on the arrangements and production of it.
Do your guitars have names?
No. But Noah’s do. He calls his white bass Sarah Jessica Parker. And then the brown Gretsch is called Brown Brown. … He likes to give nicknames to everyone and everything.
Has he given you any nicknames you can share?
I think when I’m drunk they call me Chip because I have a chip on my shoulder. I come from a pretty scrappy background, and I think it tends to come out when I’m really drunk. There’s a lot of “What the f*ck are you looking at?” I was a little brother, and I went to a fancy college but I was on the white trash scholarship. … You’d think after being so fortunate in my career in writing and in music that it would go away. But nope. Always have a bit of my chip on my shoulder.
What was the first concert you ever went to?
When I was a kid my mom used to take me to dress rehearsals for the symphony. We didn’t have a lot of money so we couldn’t afford tickets, but my mom always thought it was really important to have some culture in our little white trash world that we were in. There were always a lot of books next to the government cheese.
On the subject of books, you once compared working on your novel to shoveling manure. But I have to ask—are you still shoveling?
Not really. I can’t say that I’ve abandoned it, but the writing projects I tend to think about these days are all around songwriting. And it’s only really since this record came out that I realized that I was a musician first. I think even up until this tour I still felt like, yeah, I’m a writer. This is a nice little detour. It’ll only be temporary.
Is it ever difficult to take yourself seriously or summon the energy onstage?
Some days you really just don’t feel like screaming into a microphone about an ex-girlfriend. And you have to get into character. Any good performer does that. If the character is really good, if it’s sincere, if there’s an emotional truth to it, then it doesn’t matter if it isn’t really happening. It’s like magical realism.
Is there anything really distinct about TATE’s stage show?
Of course. Absolutely. But you’re going to have to come and see it. My job is to stand up there and dance like a monkey. It’s your job to figure out what it means.
