airborne toxic event
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You are browsing the archives of airborne toxic event.
We found out that William Garvey, the man who wrote “Goodbye Horses” (originally performed by Q Lazzarus) died last night.
I’m so fucking sad. I’d heard the rumor from David Hawes from Catherine Wheel who was hanging out with us. So I googled it this morning and I found the death notice online and now I can’t help but be so sad about it. Something about those words: “death notice.”
He wrote a beautiful song. I understand why he wrote it. I know it in and out. Those enigmatic lyrics, the longing of it, the sadness. We’ve played it so much, I feel like it has become part of our lives.
He wrote me an e-mail a few weeks ago to tell me that I’d been singing the lyrics wrong. He’d watched a bunch of YouTube clips of us playing it and said that the line at the ends was “flying over you” not “lying over you.” He was annoyed. I wrote him back, apologized for the mistake (a few lyrics websites have it listed as “lying” and I honestly thought that’s what it sounded like) and told him I would correct the mistake, that I admired him and thought it was a wonderful piece of music.
He perked right up with a few more e-mails and told me he loved our version and that we should...
Good afternoon,
We know we’ve been promising this for a while, so here it is. We couldn’t be more excited and honored to announce that we’ll be headlining a very unique and special show at the beautiful Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles on December 4th.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic Presents:
The Airborne Toxic Event
Friday, December 4, 2009
Walt Disney Concert Hall
With special Guests The Calder Quartet
This performance will be the only L.A. date on our upcoming tour and the only rock show to take place at the concert hall through the end of the year. The event will be a celebration, not just of California, but of the music and culture of East Los Angeles—which we love and are proud to call home—and will feature multiple surprise guests and collaborators to that effect. We’ve never done anything like this before, and we’re hoping it’ll be something special and memorable. It’s, among other things, our thank you to the city of L.A. for the amazing support we’ve received and as a source of inspiration for this...
Hello,
We’re ecstatic to have finally gone to Edinburgh, having taken a day off to explore the city via whiskey sampling, underground ghost tours, and such. It’s seriously an amazing place, and we highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance. It was also great to get back to Dublin, which was bustling and beautiful (despite all the raininess).
Thanks so much to all those who came out to see our sets at both Oxegen and T in the Park. We were truly blown away by the sheer size of these festivals..
We’re very excited to announce that we will be co-headlining two shows during our upcoming Fall tour with Arctic Monkeys:
Tue Sep 22 – Salt Lake City, UT – In The Venue – BUY TIX
Wed Sep 23 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theater – BUY TIX
Also, all of our Australia dates are on sale NOW:
Sat Sep 5 – North Perth, Australia – Rosemount Hotel – BUY TIX
Wed Sep 9 – Melbourne, Australia – East Brunswick Hotel – BUY...
Photo Credit: adelach
Good morning,
It’s funny how traveling makes you see your home in a new way. We’ve been back from tour for two weeks and Los Angeles seems, well, rather sprawl-y. Big. Dusty. Bright. Something of an ethnic stew with all the signs in Thai, Korean, Armenian and Farsi. Most places are just very much themselves: one language, one culture, one type of footwear. This city is a bit of everywhere, a bit of everyone, a bit of everything. And a bit of nothing.
You probably know this.
Speaking of the road, for our North American tour we have asked along the Henry Clay People and Red Cortez, two bands from the neighborhood that we believe in, admire and want to hang out with. You will too.
If you’ve never seen the fistfight between Pavement and Bruce Springsteen that is the Henry Clay People, then you have denied yourself one of the best live experiences a person can see. Somewhere along the way, rock got lost. Or at least that’s the argument. And the Henry Clay People have found it again. Their show is...
stays grounded
Checking off the to-do list: The Airborne Toxic Event has gotten a lot accomplished in the past year. The L.A.-based indie rock quintet’s self-titled album, released in August, has passed 100,000 in sales. Hit single Sometime Around Midnight peaked at No. 4 on USA TODAY’s modern rock airplay chart and is at No. 30 on the hot AC. In March, the band signed with major label Island Def Jam. And on a radio show that month, U2′s Adam Clayton name-checked Sometime Around Midnight as a favorite song of his. “Check that off our list of things to do,” says lead singer/frontman Mikel Jollett, 35. “Now I just have to write a novel and father a child.”
Paying dues: “Journalists have asked us how we feel about our ‘meteoric rise,’ ” says bassist Noah Harmon, 27. “There’s been nothing meteoric about it. We’ve played...
Momentum, World Tour
By Jason LipshutzJune 27, 2009
Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde
The trouble with fronting a constantly touring rock outfit is that it leaves little time to finish a novel. That’s what Mikel Jollett singer/guitarist of the Airborne Toxic Event, came to realize as the momentum behind his band’s self-titled debut album stalled his prose output.
“I want to finish it, but I keep going on tour,” he says. “I like writing at home late at night, when I’ve just finished reading a good book. It’s hard to write on a bus: it’s a whole other lifestyle.”
Jollett probably won’t finish his novel anytime soon. The Los ANgeles group has announced an 11-country...
LA band battle on after singer loses his voice
By Avril CaddenJune 7, 2009
Photo Credit: Kristy Sparow
When Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett’s voice was ravaged by disease, he would have been forgiven for quitting music.
Instead he and his band simply reworked their songs to suit—and they’ve never looked back.
Mikel said: “Autoimmune disease attacked the nerve that controls my vocal cords, so one is partially paralysed.
“It takes about six months to a year for that to heal so that we had to lower all the keys and redo everything.
“I’d usually just scream through the set but I have to lower everything and sing.
“It’s really just a way of getting sympathy. I figure if I tell everyone they’ll let me get...
February 2009
Ask most musicians what aspirations they have for their band and they’ll share grand desires for Almost Famous-esque success and seminal accomplishments. But not for The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett, as he solemnly reveals his wishes to The Fly: “I hope nobody gets sick. I hope nobody catches a horrid disease. I hope nobody gets in a car wreck. If somebody goes to a bar, I hope they get back home safe. I only worry about keeping everyone together.” His fretfulness isn’t surprising when you hear the emotional carnage the frontman has battled, though, and, after a few minutes on the phone to Jollett, The Fly realises his ominous approach to life was instrumental in the formation of the band. “I’d taken a year off to write a book [about, umm, 4 friends who must confront their terminal illnesses] and then my mum got cancer,” Mikel explains in his reposeful lilt. “I’d been dating this girl for a long time and we broke up. Then I went and saw a doctor and he told me I had Vitiligo...
Self-publishing, self-financing indie outfit TATE bring their literary-minded indie-punk-folk-klezmer-whatever to the 100 Club on Monday.
By Eddy LawrenceJanuary 29 – February 4, 2009
They’re actually already… well up.
We have to admit, it’s a bit rich giving them an On The Up, given that their EP came out more than a year ago and they’ve already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already starting to happen for TATE. Radio has picked up on ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, the lead single from their forthcoming debut LP, with a vengeance. Not bad for a band who are still, technically speaking, unsigned.
‘In the States now, we’re at No 8,’ boggles frontperson Mikel Jollett. ‘We’re the only indie rock band in the chart. We don’t understand it, because it’s a song that has no chorus, that’s just a story about a bad night. It’s very sad, and there’s no little thing you can bop your head to. There’s like...
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Bitter exes, desperate housewives and dead dog’s ashes won’t stop LA troubadours The Airborne Toxic Event spreading their love. Martin Robinson joins their crazy Californian road trip.
By Martin RobinsonJanuary 24, 2009
Photo Credit: Andy Willsher
Bill Hicks called it “turd city”, Woody Allen said its only cultural advantage is “being able to turn right at a red light”, and Larry David fans will know Los Angeles as plastic and preening to the point of insanity. Imagine our surprise, then, to find in the suburb of Silver Lake, a warm-blooded indie scene bubbling dirtily underneath the shiny Hollywood machine. The Spaceland club is the meeting point for the city’s struggling artists, writers and especially musicians; its tin foil-clad stage has raised the likes of Cold War Kids and Silversun Pickups, but tonight NME...
Death, sex and getting dumped shape anthemic US indie rockers.
By Mic WrightMarch 2009
Photo Credit: Nick Wilson
WHO? Epic indie rockers founded by former journalist and up-and-coming novelist Mikel Jollett after the worst week of his life. During seven days in March 2006, Jollett’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, he learnt he was suffering from a potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease, and his long-term girlfriend left him. He says, “I just didn’t care anymore. I thought, maybe I’ll pay my rent, maybe I won’t, but what I am going to do is start a fucking rock band.”
DOOM BUT NO GLOOM: Jollett’s tales of death, depression and being dumped might suggest melancholy music, but the band write...
After a ‘week from hell’ in which his life fell apart, music was the best medicine for Mikel Jollett. He tells Dave Simpson about the Airborne Toxic Event’s euphoric sound of recovery
By Dave SimpsonJanuary 23, 2009
Photo Credit: Martin Godwin
Mikel Jollett suffers from autoimmune disorder, a genetic condition that can affect sufferers in all sorts of strange ways. They can be struck down with terrible illnesses, or lose all their body hair. However, the condition is easily manageable with a healthy lifestyle. Doctors recommend plenty of sleep, fruit and vegetables and...
Originally aired on January 16, 2009.
Fave
By Larry GetlenIndie band the Airborne Toxic Event shocked the music industry when major LA radio stations began playing the song “Sometime Around Midnight,” which the band had hastily recorded and distributed via MP3. Now the song, which describes the heartbreak of running into an ex, has been named the top Alternative Song of 2008 by iTunes. We spoke to singer Mikel Jollett.
The iTunes thing is nice, but . . . “Music is three or four minutes of art where you tell a story and have a melody. The idea of ranking it the way you would the NBA is a little silly. But it was really flattering.”
Events depicted in “Sometime Around Midnight” are true. “That whole thing happened. That was a few months after we had broken up. I got up the next morning, shook off the hangover, and started writing. I didn’t leave the house for three days. I just walked around in my boxers with the acoustic guitar,...
The Airborne Toxic Event rose to notoriety in near-record time: Hometown station KROQ began spinning the L.A. band’s first single, “Sometime Around Midnight,” in January, three weeks after the unsigned quintet finished recording it at a friend’s house.
But frontman Mikel Jollett, 34, and guitarist Steven Chen, 30, of the band— which plays the Blank Club on Wednesday — put in years of struggle first. In the literary world, not the musical one.
After Chen graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000, a mutual friend suggested he speak to Jollett, a 1996 Stanford alum, for advice on making it as a writer in San Francisco. At the time, Jollett didn’t even know Chen played guitar, and Jollett “had no ambition to be a musician, none whatsoever.
“I wanted to be a writer. And then this whole music thing just happened. It’s a little absurd.”
In 2006, after years of scuffling, Jollett finally was getting...
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From NME.com.
As we close in on our last few shows here in the UK, we’re struck by the sheer volume of bands we’ve played with this month (around 80). The new friends we’ve kidnapped in a whiskey-fueled haze and brought to our next gig in the van. The omnipresent line-drawings of dicks on the wall of every green room at every club. The ubiquitous light rain. The superiority of English bacon… and footwear.
We’re immune to the beauty of English landscape—the sheep, the hedges, the stone and brick houses in quaint constellations. Our conversation has devolved into endless jokes about crying, punching, freaking out, screaming.
But we still look forward to the point each night when the sound has been checked, the tuning pedals clicked off, and we start the set. There’s really nothing like it.
And every night, the faint blue glow of the Travelodge sign…
Our last night at Dublin Castle in London was a rollicking, boozy and crowded finale to the residency. Mikel jumped off the stage and Anna’s viola got a new scar. We drank, sweated, swore and danced.
We think we may miss this place of numberless buildings and unnamed streets that lead nowhere…