#BUT the album/tour have the word stardust in the title

[userkoo]

after dressing up for ptd and feeling uncomfy, my next concert outfit is literally going to be comfy to the MAX. idk how everyone does it when they dress up lol

see my last few fits have been ultra comfy and i love that vibe BUT i have the perfect item for this upcoming show that i think it would be actually criminal not to wear… we shall see how i’m feeling the day of the show :)

[badnewswhatsleft]

2023 september - rock sound #300 (fall out boy cover) scans

transcript below cut!

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

With the triumphant ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ capturing a whole new generation of fans, Fall Out Boy are riding high, celebrating their past while looking towards a bright future. Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump reflect on recent successes and the lessons learned from two decades of writing and performing together.

WORDS: James Wilson-Taylor PHOTOS: Elliot Ingham

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show?

PETE: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We’ve been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it.

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

PATRICK: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that. It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There’s a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn’t hear before.

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices?

PETE: There were some lean years where there weren’t a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone’s favourite song makes a lot of sense in this era. PATRICK: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do. And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there. PETE: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now.

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career.

PETE: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. This was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we’ve always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that’s probably the one I would listen to. But I just never want it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally, I think that’s fucking awesome. PATRICK: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something that I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour’, that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do. I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this.’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realised that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them.

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained a part of your process since then?

PETE: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We had very disparate music tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band. PATRICK: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout that record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under The Cork Tree’. So when we talk about what has remained the same… I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing, I wasn’t planning on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the two of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’, I’m always amazed at how much better they are than I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day, and I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’, you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off?

PATRICK: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also the weird aspect where the last time we worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other… as much as we do anyway. We say that and then that myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time has passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal. PETE: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for a holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little but scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit.

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From The Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

PETE: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and that I want to keep shaping and changing. PATRICK: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending to the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everyone liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from ‘Love From The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in ‘Love From The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record.

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’.

PETE: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it on such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And doing that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there.

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise.

PATRICK: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had written called ‘Dark Horse’ and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day. PETE: There’s irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’ I hope if somebody ever chose to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they’ll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool.

It’s also no secret that the sound you became most known for in the mid-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now. But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it.

PATRICK: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other bands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time. And there’s nothing wrong with either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it. PETE: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave that started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I  remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh, you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on, and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. PATRICK: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like, ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else.

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here?

PETE: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are we gonna die?’ because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realise it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you really realise that the fans over there are real fans of music. It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. PATRICK: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavour… PETE: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs).  PATRICK: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UK, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavour of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost more like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?’ But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself.

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen.

[vampylily]

Notes from the new Rolling Stones Japan article with Pete and Patrick Pt.1 :

[WARNING: The article is in Japanese, I'm not a Japanese speaker. I'm machine translating the article from Japanese to Korean & English, and then doing paraphrasing in English. Thus, the wording is not entirely accurate, and may contain errors. Please don't consider this as a proper translation. This is so I can have a reference more than anything. ]

When the interviewer noted Patrick's Los Crudos t-shirt, he responded enthusiastically that it was a Chicago band! Pete was in a Napalm Death t-shirt.

Interviewer asked about how Summer Sonic was, especially since it was their first since 2019. Patrick said the show went like they hoped, which rarely happens (lol). Said Japanese audiences are special. He gets asked about how concerts in Japan are, but it's hard to explain unless you experience it. Said can't explain it well, but there's a lot of give and take of energy.

Interviewer asked about Pete saying there was a song inspired by Japan on the SMFS album. Pete said "The Kintsugi Kid" was the song about how he felt when he was in Japan, it's obvious by the title. "The Kintsugi Kid'' bridges "I Am My Own Muse" and "So Much (For) Stardust." Said Patrick wrote the songs but in his interpretation, the sonic landscape of the song reminds him of Japan.

Patrick said he's always been quite influenced by Japan, especially on this album. Said people might not register it from the sound, but he's been influenced by the Yellow Magic Orchestra & their synthesizer sounds. He didn't use much synthesizer on the album but a lot of the songs started with synthesizers. He got the same synthesizer Yellow Magic Orchestra used and started writing songs from there. He's a big fan of Studio Ghibli movies and loves Joe Hisaishi's music. Said when doing string/orchestra horn arrangements, he wanted to create a sound that was as appealing to the heart/poignant as his. Even though their music/sound was completely different, he wanted to try it. Said he especially tried to evoke the feeling he got on "The Pink Seashell."

Interviewer asked about TTTYG's 20th anniversary and how they could have done an anniversary tour but they didn't and instead released SMFS with gusto.

Pete said the most important thing is that you stick to what you think is right. Said there was a punk band he liked when he was younger, and they didn't change at all. Talked about how artists like David Bowie or the Clash changed their styles to almost unrecognizable lengths and how some fans left because of it. But when he listens to the albums after getting older, he can reflect on his own changes and find new appreciation for songs he might not have liked at the time.

Pete said celebrating the past too much feels patronizing and not very fall out boy-like. They continue making new music, sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don't. Even if something doesn't work out as well, he's like [it is what it is/that happens], and that some people might say they liked it. He's got albums he likes and albums he dislikes from his own favourite artists. Said they always make new albums that challenge their past works. Of course they hope people like it, but getting good reviews/being appreciated isn't the only reason they continue making music.

Patrick said he doesn't like making an album to celebrate the 20th anniversary, or having an anniversary to showcase past songs. Reasons was that first, the past songs are always in rotation in their sets so they don't stop playing them. Second, like Pete said, they prefer to keep pursuing new music and that stance hasn't changed from 20 years ago. Said deviating from that feels dishonest like they're lying to themselves.

Pete was like [it's how Steven Spielberg didn't make E.T. Part 2.] Patrick was like [exactly!] and said that being honest with themselves was their pure form.

also there's a page 2 to the article but i'm tired :[. they talk about "emo" changing from a specific music genre to the word entering the mainstream vernacular, patrick talked about how when they started out they didin't consider themselves "emo," they were a hardcore band. said he liked playing hardcore though when he sang people used to tell him his voice was too cute. they focused on making the music they wanted to, and before they knew it, they were being called "emo." Pete talked about the word, how it encompasses too much, feeling restricted by that in the past, etc. Talked about wanting to become like Metallica in that the word Metallica has becomes its own thing, Metallica doesn't need a description, etc. Patrick talked about perfoming in Japan, from small venues way earlier to now, etc

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I love long FOB articles and I quite liked this one.

Love that Patrick talked about musical inspirations and SMFS. It’s so cool to hear because I love how beautiful and grand the sounds are in SMFS, even with spoken tracks like The Pink Seashell or Baby Annihilation. 

Also him buying the same synthesizers is so real. He’s a music nerd <3 

They’ve been consistently talking about always wanting to make new music and looking to the future instead of the past. And getting questions about their sound changing since forever haha.

It's really cool that they're very self aware and how convinced they are about making new music. Love that Pete can look back at older albums and find new appreciation for them. I’d be down for another half dozen FOB albums if they are, so (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

The new Pete and Patrick photos!!! They've got such pretty eyes <333

[earlgreytea68]

someone posted the new full text interview here tumblr(.)com/nomaptomyowntreasure/730092560973971456/full-rock-sound-issue-300-photos-and-interview they sound so happy :)

THANK YOU for pointing me to this!!!!

Awwww, they really do sound so very happy. I love Patrick saying he's making new memories with the Folie songs, that's just so lovely. I'm also fascinated by what Pete says the song So Much (for) Stardust is about hahahaha because I'm just like, ....what??? But I also kind of get it lol. There is something really atmospheric about SMFS that does feel different from the usual FOB song, and feels even more cinematic than their other stuff, and their other stuff is, as Pete says, always kind of cinematic. But it's always struck me as such a real punctuation mark at the end of the album, and I'm not even sure what kind of punctuation mark. (Aside, but I grew up on the "Eddie and the Cruisers" soundtrack, and it ends with this really moody tour de force song that's a departure from everything that came before and feels like it's painting the way forward and has a really distinctive piano part to it, and anyway, SMFS the song always makes me think of "Season in Hell.")

Also, this made me think how Patrick wrote the song before they knew what the album was going to be called, and it felt meaningful enough that they named the album after it, and it made me wonder if Pete wrote the original lyric with the (for) or if that got added later, Idk, I'm fascinated by the work the parenthetical does in the title, and they almost never bring it up!

I also love them talking about wanting to go deeper instead of wider, like, Idk, there's a real love there for being happy with the audience they have and going all-in with them, and also feeling free to mess up and it would be okay. See, it was a trust fall into us, the whole time. :-)

And Patrick trotting out a Downton Abbey reference for the British interview hahaha well done, Patrick, make sure you speak their language.

Also, Patrick getting upset Katy Perry named a song "Dark Horse" before him hahaha that was LITERALLY what finally motivated me to publish Swan Song, I was like, "Someone's going to hit it big with a boys in bands love story and I'll be upset if I never threw myself into the running."

(Also I am so happy We Didn't Start the Fire turned out to be such a huge radio hit for them. I knew it would be when it was released, and I was really shocked how nasty people were about it, and I shouldn't have been, because that always happens, but I'm glad they got to have the last word. I love Patrick saying, "We actually spent a lot of time on the lyrics," like, good.)

[conceptalbummultiverse]

The first half of Part 4 of Strange Fascination: A Love Story, entitled Our Lives On Holiday, is up on AO3 for reading!! (That sure was a sentence...)

Strange Fascination: A Love Story is a work set in the Concept Album Multiverse, where the plots of several concept albums collide. It tells the story of Pink Floyd and Ziggy Stardust’s growing relationship as they record and tour together in the wake of an ensuing apocalypse. Part 3 ended with Ziggy & Pink finally leaving the community of teenage runaways they ran into on tour, who were under siege by a group of bikers. Though they didn't personally participate in the battle between the runaways and the bikers, they have still seen the Horrors. Unfortunately, their troubles are only just beginning as they return to and resume their tour, with Ziggy desperate to put recent history behind him, and Pink not wanting to let go just yet. Meanwhile, our protagonist from American Idiot, Johnny, finds that his luck is starting to turn around, as he takes on the persona of St. Jimmy and with it, manages to win over the girl of his dreams, as well as expand his drug-dealing business. What will happen between Pink and Ziggy, and can Johnny maintain his winning streak? Click the link to find out...

As stated above, this is only the first half of Part 4. I aim to post at least one more chapter before the end of the year (there are four or five more chapters of Part 4 to go).

Stats below:

Title: Strange Fascination: A Love Story (Part 4, first half)

Fandoms: This section draws most heavily from my personal interpretation of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, with the character of Pink from The Wall (and Pink's tour manager) included. It also incorporates my interpretation of American Idiot in a storyline that runs parallel to Ziggy's.

Rating: M for swearing, drug use, and a very brief sex scene

Word Count: This part alone consists of 37,533 words.

Pairings: Pink/Ziggy, currently in a sort of star-crossed lovers dynamic (except they're the only ones preventing themselves from getting together, instead of outside influences). Also Johnny (AKA The Jesus of Suburbia, AKA St. Jimmy)/Whatsername from American Idiot.

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison, Friar Park, circa 1990; photo by Terry O'Neill.

George's jukebox at Kinfauns has been explored by the Harrison Archive (and is available as a playlist here), thanks in large part to an article about it, published in the Record Mirror's 1 January 1966 issue.

George's jukeboxes at Friar Park, however, are a little more obscure. The following playlist of songs featured on the jukeboxes and mentioned in some way from 1970 onward is an approximate one only, based on doing some digging into print interviews, audio interviews, and written pieces by family and friends. (The tracks include information previously posted on the Harrison Archive. For - hopefully - easier navigation, I've also bolded the artists -- and tracks known for certain to have been either on the jukeboxes or George's favorites.)

"Stardust" (instrumental) - Hoagy Carmichael "Our son, Dhani, and I, like George’s friends, were spoiled by his rich and loving presence: from the morning wake-up call, which could have been (depending on our location and mood) a morning raga, a Vedic chant, a Mozart concerto, Cab Calloway’s ‘Bugle Call Rag,’ or Hoagy’s earliest instrument version of ‘Stardust'..." - Olivia Harrison [read more]

"Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" - The Four Tops "Rescue Me" - Fontella Bass

These tracks receive shoutouts in George's "This Song" (and the Four Tops were Sixties favorites, too, appearing on his Kinfauns jukebox).

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" - Cab Calloway Clearly a favorite by one of his favorite artists, covered by George for Jools Holland's TV show, and also released on his posthumous album Brainwashed.

"When I'm Cleaning Windows" - George Formby "September In The Rain" - Dinah Washington "Dizzy Fingers" - Zez Confrey

George was a member of the George Formby Society (and attended conventions with Olivia and Dhani), and became friends with another attendee, Ray Bernard, who recalled the latter two of the above songs as some of George's favorites. (The Beatles also covered "September In The Rain" for their Decca audition; I'm not sure if George preferred Dinah Washington's version to any other, but its release year is closest to when the Fabs covered it, hence the inclusion on the playlist.)

"A Shine On Your Shoes" - Fred Astaire

Covered by George in a home video shared by the Harrison Family in the Guitar Collection app and the deluxe limited edition of Living In The Material World (and, on 1 February 2020, by Olivia on her Instagram, where she explained that George was playing a Danny Ferrington Keoki ukulele).

"True Love" - Bing Crosby & Grace Kelly

George covered this song as well, for his 1976 album Thirty-Three & 1/3. As Olivia recalled on Dark Horse Radion in 2018: "We'd been watching ‪Bing Crosby‬ and Grace Kelly, watching that movie ['High Society'], and they do a duet, and just that little harmony thing they do, because she wasn’t known as really a singer; he’d play and then we'd sing it." [read more]

"Roll Over Beethoven" - Chuck Berry

A longtime favorite, George covered this with The Beatles, during his 1991 Japan tour, and during his 1992 Natural Law Party concert, where it became the last song he played live onstage at a concert in his lifetime. As George said, "there hasn’t been any rock & roll better than that." [read more]

"Hong Kong Blues" - Hoagy Carmichael

Hoagy Carmichael was a favorite of George's, and he covered this song for his 1981 album Somewhere In England.

"Barnacle Bill the Sailor" - Hoagy Carmichael

A favorite, associated with George by Dhani, and mentioned by Olivia. "He would go up at parties to the DJ and say, ‘I’ve got something really amazing.’ ‘Cause he was who he was, they would listen to him, and then everyone would just be bummed out, it would clear the dance floor. And then he’d come back later - ‘I’ve got something else’ - and he’d put it on again. You know, he would just do this until the DJ was like [exasperated]." - Dhani Harrison, la minute rock, Rolling Stone France, 28 Nov 2017 [read more]

"Midnight Special" - Leadbelly "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" - Hank Williams "The Great Pretender" - The Platters "Words Of Love" - Buddy Holly

The songs themselves might not be George's favorites or jukebox selections -- as yet, I haven't found any mention of actual song titles, so these are just personal choices -- but the artist were mentioned by George and Olivia; and "Words Of Love" was obviously a favorite, having been covered by The Beatles, and, according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle research, initially having been sung by George and John.

"The Ying Tong Song" - The Goons "I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas" - The Goons

Both these tracks were mentioned by Olivia as having been on the Friar Park jukeboxes in December 1974.

"The Lumberjack Song" - Monty Python "Spam Song" - Monty Python "Layla" - Eric Clapton

These tracks were mentioned by Eric Idle as having been on George's jukeboxes at Friar Park. "The Lumberjack Song" was of course also performed at the Concert for George.

"Heartbreak Hotel" - Elvis Presley

Eric Idle also recalled early Elvis being on the jukeboxes; and of course, George named the song as his first musical root.

"Blue Suede Shoes" - Carl Perkins "The Bells of Rhymney" - The Byrds

These two Perkins and Byrds songs were mentioned as favorite songs by George in the March 1997 issue of Guitar World.

"Mauna Loa" - Gabby Pahinui

Another artist loved by George, although again, this track choice is just a haphazard personal one, since there doesn't seem to be any public mention of which of Pahinui's songs were George's preferred ones.

"Ooo Baby Baby" - The Miracles "I'll Try Something New" - The Miracles

George absolutely loved The Miracles, and Smokey Robinson specifically, collecting their records, and writing songs in honor of Smokey ("Ooh Baby (You Know That I Love You) -- a nod to the first of the two Miracles tracks listed here -- on the 1975 album Extra Texture, and "Pure Smokey" on the 1976 album Thirty-Three & 1/3). As Olivia has recalled: "We used to sit around singing a lot of Smokey Robinson songs. That kind of sealed our relationship, I think. [George] said, 'You're the only person I've ever known who sang the high note at the end of "I'll Try Something New."'"

“Back On The Chain Gang” - The Pretenders “Brothers In Arms” - Dire Straits “Cold Day In Hell” - Gary Moore

The three tracks by The Pretenders, Dire Straits and Gary Moore were mentioned as favorites by George in the March 1997 issue of Guitar World.

"Long Tall Sally" - Little Richard

George was a Little Richard all his life, as various comments over the years show.

"Tandoori Chicken" - Ronnie Spector "I Am Missing You" - Lakshmi Shankar "Rebel Music" (live) - Bob Marley & The Wailers

Put down on tape during the "Try Some, Buy Some" sessions, "Tandoori Chicken" was an improvised song, as George recalled: "a 12-bar thing done on the spot with Mal our roadie and Joe the chauffeur." For Dark Horse Records, and featuring Lakshmi Shankar, one of [George's] favorite singers," another song for this playlist is "I Am Missing You." The Marley track was chosen from the setlist of the three 1975 Roxy show attended by George and Olivia, recalled by George as "the best thing I've seen in ten years. [...] I could watch The Wailers all night."

"The Rain Song" - Led Zeppelin "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)" - The Beach Boys

"The Rain Song" was written in response to a comment made by George, and subsequently made it on one of the two jukeboxes. The Beach Boys song was on the jukeboxes, and -- like "The Rain Song" -- played at the wedding of Dhani and Sola, as reported by Vogue in 2012.

"Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" - Stevie Wonder "Telephone Line" - Electric Light Orchestra "Come On In My Kitchen" - Robert Johnson "When The Levee Breaks" - Memphis Minnie

All four of these artists were mentioned as favorites by George in a 1976 interview. (The titles are arbitrary choices, since the interviewer didn't ask George for any further details. However, Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen" was covered by George and band during rehearsals for the Concert for Bangladesh.)

"Maria Elena" - Ry Cooder "Concert in B (live in 1963) - Andrés Segovia

Two artists mentioned frequently by George as being favorites (Segovia first in 1963 -- hence the choice of a live piece from that year -- and up through the 1990s). The Cooder track was specifically mentioned by Olivia in the June 2018 issue of Songlines.

"Piano Concert No. 21" - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Olivia mentioned a Mozart concerto as being something George would play in the mornings as they were starting the day, so this is another random choice of a concerto.

"The Weight" - The Band

The atmosphere of the song inspired the Harrisong "All Things Must Pass," as George recalled in 1987 -- he also named it as a song he admired in that same interview. In a 1974 interview with Capital Radio, George deemed The Band "the best band I've ever seen."

"Farther On Down The Road (You Will Accompany Me)" - Jesse Ed Davis

A Harrisong was given to Jesse by George, and recorded by Jesse before it was released by George himself (but since "Sue Me, Sue You Blues," the song in question, is already on a collaborations playlist....); this Davis selection (written by Jesse and Taj Mahal) was covered live by George and Eric Clapton in December 1978.

"Isn't It A Pity" (cover) - Nina Simone "Backwater Blues" - Big Bill Broonzy "Changes" - Bix 'n' Bing

Nina Simone's cover of the Harrisong "Isn't It A Pity" in turn influenced the mood of another Harrisong; and Dhani recalled listening to Simone, Big Bill Broonzy (who is name-checked in the Harrisong "Wreck Of The Hesperus") and Bix 'n' Bing together with his dad (these tracks are once more personal choices).

"April Kisses" - Eddie Lang

The first song on this playlist, "Stardust," was "one of [George's] favorite songs," as Olivia has recalled; she also named Eddie Lang (though she didn't mention a specific title).

"Kalimankou Denkou" - Le Mystere des voix bulgares

George enthused about this Bulgarian choir in numerous interviews, and introduced this particular song during his interview on Rockline in February 1988.

"Taxes On The Farmer Feeds Us All" - Ry Cooder

"Later, after a lasagna dinner in his ornately paneled kitchen with his wife Olivia, their son Dhani (just home from his school year at Brown University in the States), and Olivia’s sister, Linda, Harrison takes his visitor upstairs to his Friar Park Studio. Picking up a nearby National dobro from the vast array of vintage guitars hanging from the walls, Harrison slips a glass bottleneck on his finger as he seats himself to strum 'The Farmer Is The Man Who Feeds Us All,' the traditional tune of 1860s America made famous in the 1920s by Fiddlin’ John Carson and later popularized on Ry Cooder’s 1971 'Into The Purple Valley” album as 'Taxes On The Farmer Feeds Us All.' 'That’s where I first heard the tune,”'says Harrison of Cooder’s interpretation, before he begins to sing: 'The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man/Buys on credit until the fall/Then they take him by the hand/And they lead him from his land/And the merchant he’s the man who gets it all.'" (Billboard, 19 Jun 1999)

"God's Own Drunk" - Lord Buckley

This particular Buckley piece was mentioned by George in a 1979 radio interview promoting his eponymous album, and the song "If You Believe": "Pray, give up, and it all recedes away from you. I don’t know if you… you must have heard Lord Buckley, you know, well, there is a thing he did called 'God’s Own Drunk.' I think it was that. Anyway, it was one of Lord Buckley’s things and he was talking about love. He said: 'Love is like a beautiful garden, you know, when you use it it spreads, but when you don’t -- it recedes.' And it’s true. It’s really that in its simplest form." [read more]

"Free Fallin'" - Tom Petty

As Dhani has said, he can remember "getting advance copies sent to my dad from Tom. He’d be like, 'You want to hear Tom’s new stuff?' And it would be the first time anyone’s heard 'Free Fallin'." (Premier Guitar, Jan 2018)

"Let It Be Me" - The Everly Brothers

Covered by George in a demo version after seeing the Everly Brothers in concert (George's cover appears on Early Takes Vol. 1).

"Clair de Lune" (cover) - Isao Tomita

One of George's favorites, as Olivia has recalled.

"México Lindo y Querido" - Jorge Negrete

Negrete was mentioned as a favorite by George, and Olivia recalled Negrete being on George's jukebox.

"Bugle Call Rag" - Cab Calloway

Recalled by Olivia in her introduction for Harrison, and as George's school wakeup call for Dhani.

"Cool River" - Maria Muldaur "Fear Of Flying" - Charlie Dore

Two more specific songs mentioned or covered by George.

"Sweet Leilani" - Bing Crosby

Mentioned as a favorite of George's by Tom Petty, and by Olivia.

"Every Grain Of Sand" - Bob Dylan

Named as one of George's favorite songs in his June 1999 Billboard interview: "I mean, you tell me one person other than Bob Dylan who has a moral message in a tune that's improved upon Bob's words in his song 'Every Grain of Sand.'"

"Kaliyuga Varadan" & "Ragam Tanam Pallavi" & "Gajavadhana" - U. Srinivas

One of George's favorite artists, as he, Dhani and Olivia have recalled; these three particular tracks were singled out by Olivia in the June 2018 issue of Songlines.

"Raga - Manj Khamaj" - Ravi Shankar "Guru Bandana (Prayer)" - Ali Akbar Khan "Abhogi" - Hariprasad Chaurasia "Kafi Holi (Spring Festival Of Color)" - Ravi Shankar "Enna Thavam" - Papanasam Sivan "Thumri - Mishra Tilang Raga - Addha Taal" - Sultan Khan "You And Me" - Zakir Hussain "Raga Chayya Nat" - Kala Ramnath

The eight selections above are mentioned by Olivia in the June 2018 issue of Songlines.

“México” - Mariachi Sol de Mexico

In 1998, George commissioned José Hernández - founder of Mariachi Sol de México - to translate and arrange the Harrisong "Dark Sweet Lady" in Spanish, as a special version for Olivia. While that recording is understandably a private one, mariachi music seems to have been a favorite of the Harrison family and the Arias family, as it's mentioned as having been played at family events held in California. And: "Last year I brought over a mariachi orchestra [Mariachi Sol de México] and we had a private concert at Friar Park because I got tired of waiting 30 years for someone else to do it. It was my way to let my friends experience that music – which was what George was always trying to do. He wanted people to understand and be moved by the music that he loved." - Olivia Harrison, Songlines, Jun 2018

"Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie" - Bob Dylan "Bhoop Ghara" - Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Sharma, Brij Bhushan Kabra

"George used to always say that if ever you are not feeling right, you should listen to Bob Dylan's 'Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie' and 'Call of the Valley.'" (Olivia Harrison) This track from "Call Of The Valley" was mentioned by Olivia in the June 2018 issue of Songlines: "[it was] something George had on our juke box. We played it as a remedy in our home if you were feeling a certain way. Kabra was one of George’' heroes as a slide guitarist, up there with Ry Cooder."

"Sarve Shaam" - Ravi Shankar

From the 1997 album Chants of India (produced by George), the song was also performed at the Concert for George, and was clearly very special to George, as Olivia remembers: "At the end of his life George said to me that all he could listen to was 'Sarve Shaam.' After all the sounds and sights and tastes you experience over a lifetime, it came down to the purity of 'Sarve Shaam.'"

Listen on... YouTube | Spotify

[groovy-egg]

1-30 on that music ask thing

your favorite album openerProbably Magical Mystery Tour from The Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles

a song starting w/ the same first letter of your first nameAll Over the World by Electric Light Orchestra

a song outside of your usual genreBig Iron by Marty Robbins

a song that reminds you of your favorite seasonButterfly on a Wheel by Mission

a song from a lifelong favorite artistI don’t really have a lifelong favorite artist. I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd as a kid, so I guess Learning to Fly by Pink Floyd

your current “on repeat” songBreakdown by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers/Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac

a song your friend introduced you to that you ended up lovingHarmony Hall by Vampire Weekend

a song that speaks the words you couldn’t sayCall it Off by Tegan and Sara

a song that captures your aesthetic (can be ideal!)What is Life by George Harrison

a song about the place where you liveFarewell to Nova Scotia by the Irish Rovers (it’s incredibly Nova Scotian sounding so enjoy)

a song from an international artistVaisnava Bhajan by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt

a song you can scream all the words toRebel Rebel by David Bowie

a reboot of a song/songs you already loved (remix, mashup, acoustic, etc.)Simple Twist of Fate by Bob Dylan (cover by Joan Baez)

a song with the name of a place in the titleGoing to Georgia by The Mountain Goats

a song that reminds you of travelingFree Fallin by Tom Petty

your favorite childhood songI’m Gonna Getcha Good by Shania Twain

a song that reminds you of a good timeRats by Ghost

a song that reminds you of a bad timeDrown by Bring me the Horizon

a song from an artist whose old music you enjoy more than their new musicComin Up by Paul McCartney

a song that empowers youBaba O’Riley by The Who/True Trans Soul Rebel by Against Me!

a song from a local artistOowatanite by April Wine

a song you related to in the past and present, but for different reasonsidk 

your favorite cheesy pop songHey Ya by Outkast

a song from a soundtrack (musical, movie, video game, etc.)Touch-a Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me from Rocky Horror Picture SHow

the song currently stuck in your head OR the song you are listening to right nowBad Romance by Lady Gaga

a song that taught you a lessonAwaiting On You All by George Harrison

an instrumental songA New Career in a New Town by David Bowie

a song you always skipped, but ended up loving once you listened to itZiggy Stardust by David Bowie

your favorite album closerA Day In the Life by The Beatles

your all-time favorite songWhat is Life by George Harrison

[independentartistbuzz]

Star Goes Nova’s Self-Titled Album is Bound to be an EDM Classic

Star Goes Nova finds meaning in time, space, and thought. She takes these ideas and turn it into sonic soundscapes and cinematic drum & bass and EDM songs using her 115 year old piano. She’s more widely known as bassist Christine Law in Southern California. She’s toured and recorded with the famous and the obscure, starting her career touring and recording with Martha Davis during her hiatus from the Motels. She often collaborates with Grammy winner John Baffa and platinum selling songwriters Suzanne Paris and David Holster.  

She just released her new self-titled EDM and chillwave album, Star Goes Nova. It carries a Pink Floyd meets a Illenium feeling with a lot of ambient space sounds. She follows anything Space and often the Falcon 9 rocket or Hubble galaxy sonification are in her music. 

Star Goes Nova features 8 songs: 6 previously released singles and 2 new ones. The 6 previously released singles were all remixed to create a cohesive soundscape of space and sci-fi vibes. “Phat Barbarella,” the first of the new songs, was inspired by Jane Fonda’s 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. She brings it into the electronica realm with sci-fi synth melodies over dubstep vibes and grime bass that release us from gravity as we dance on our starship through outer space.

The other new single on the album is “Words and Stardust,” which has more of a romantic sound to it.  She was inspired by the online romantic connections people were forced to make during the pandemic.  “I imagined each lover thinking ‘You are all my favorite words, but you are stardust, words and stardust. I keep dreaming where we're going, that we have meaning, that we're worth believing. You’re still here and I’m still here and words are everywhere, but it is only stardust,’ she shares. “I wrote this song…. without words, of course, but with lots of stardust.”

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/7jxo9SDN298pnDCnRRPSIR?si=U-Dr12EWQwaS8JFgEGlDlQ

Find and connect with Star Goes Nova via: Website // Instagram // Facebook // Twitter // Spotify // Soundcloud

[popmusicu]

Ziggy Stardust’s impact in pop culture

In 1972 David Bowie released one of the best conceptual albums of all times “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”. It came out only a couple of months after his previous work Hunky Dory (1971), which has one of Bowie’s biggest songs – like Life on Mars? & Changes – but wasn’t appreciated by the public at the time.

Given the circumstances, Bowie decided to take things to another level and created his first alter-ego: Ziggy Stardust, an intergalactic alien who came to Earth and became a rock n’ roll superstar. Bowie’s unique and descriptive lyrics narrate the whole story through the tracks, giving the listener the opportunity to picture the crazy imagery he sings about in that crazy high voice. 

The album starts with Five Years, a track that talks about the Earth only having five years to come to an end. After that, we have some ethereal themed songs like Moonage Daydream that discuss basically being an alien superstar on Earth 

“I’m an alligator I’m a mamma-pappa coming for you I’m a space invader I’ll be a rock n’ rolling bitch for you”.

One of the biggest singles of the album comes next: “Starman” is sung from the perspective of a child watching the aliens arrive to Earth:

“There’s a starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds” 

In “Lady Stardust” the narrator discusses Ziggy’s life and how he was made fun of

“People stared at the make up on his face Laughed at his long black hair”

In “Star”, he talks about everything he’d do if he was a rock n roll superstar and in the next song, he’s already become one and is on a gig with his band: The Spiders from Mars. The climax of the album comes with the self-titled song “Ziggy Stardust” which starts with one of the best guitar riffs of all times and talks about the leader of the band:

“Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with weird ang Gilly, and the Spiders from Mars”. 

By the time the second chorus arrives, Ziggy’s already collapsed because of the fame

“Making love with his ego, Ziggy’s sucked up into his mind Like a lepper Messiah When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band”

He sings before ending with the iconic line “Ziggy played guitar”.

The last song depicts Ziggy giving his last words: with “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide”, the story is closed with the alien singing with an acoustic guitar and screaming “give me your hand cause you’re wonderful” before a very dramatic orchestral outro.

Ziggy Stardust is considered one of the first and most perfectly made conceptual albums of all time. And even though it came out almost 50 years ago, its impact is undeniable and still lives on: Every conceptual album that came after has part of its essence in it. Bowie changed the concept and perception people had about albums – they stopped being just a bunch of songs put together & became this calculated peace of art that could tell a story to the listener – If it wasn’t for Bowie, we would have never gotten to experience Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach, Metallica’s Lepper Mesiah (inspired from the line in the song Ziggy Stardust), Gaga’s ARTPOP, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, Lorde’s critically acclaimed masterpiece Melodrama, or even Madonna at all – Ziggy Stardust’s tour was one of her first concerts and inspired her to become an entertainer – So there really is very much to thank Bowie about.

Ignacio Alarcón

[sinceileftyoublog]

Årabrot Interview: Speaking in Tongues

BY JORDAN MAINZER

On Norwegian Gothic, Kjetil Nernes and Karin Park preach the gospel of Årabrot. The Norwegian band’s 9th full-length is, according to the band, the logical culmination of the noise they’ve been peddling for almost two decades. Recorded and centered around the Swedish church where Nernes and Park live, Norwegian Gothic takes equal thematic influence and reference from Theodore Adorno as it does David Bowie, its aesthetic filled with psychedelic folk and ecstatic rock and roll. 

Just take a look at the two-part video series associated with the record, encompassing three songs. On “Kinks of the Heart”, Nernes, dressed in his suspenders and wide-brimmed hat, and Park, pregnant in a flowing white dress, come to a town with a bible-looking book with the band’s name printed on the cover. They quickly round up a few townsfolk and cause them to reflect and act on their innermost desires, from sexual promiscuity to cross-dressing, over crackly guitar riffs and hard-charging drums. Part II is the sharp dance-punk synth jam “Hailstones For Rain” and washy, saxophone-laden “The Moon is Dead”, where Årabrot and their newfound cabal go to a local church--in actuality, the church where Nernes and Park live--to speak in rock and roll tongues to enrapture the crowd and later celebrate the summer solstice in a haunted-looking mansion, Nernes and Park nude as other folks dance around them.

Årabrot have fully embraced the idea of Norwegian Gothic as a statement for a while. The record was written starting in 2017, a year before their last full-length, Who Do You Love, was released. (Earlier this year, they also released an EP from the Who Do You Love sessions.) It was eventually recorded with producer Jaime Gomez Arellano (who Nernes calls “Gomez”) in London last year right before lockdown. There, they tracked drums, bass, and guitar before returning to the church for Park’s synthesizers, Hammond organ, mellotron, vocals, and overdubs. So while the album also features a number of other collaborators, like Jaga Jazzist’s Lars Horntveth, the spookiness of the church contextualizes the drama of the record, from the Kyuss-like opening guitars of “Carnival of Love” to the strings of “The Rule of Silence” and theatrical vocals of “Feel It On”. There’s also a number of spoken interludes, namely “The Voice” and album closer “You’re Not That Special”, that act as not just breaks or a comedown but, as they were culled from real-life thought provoking conversations the band had with friends, gives the album some substantial meat to back its purported philosophical influence.

Årabrot are holding out hope for some festival dates, like ArcTanGent in the UK in August, though I get the sense that, for once, their live streams so far are expertly curated displays of both Norwegian Gothic and Norwegian Gothic. Watching them perform “Hallucinational” from their church, Park’s spiritual singing and organ playing centering the band as much as the skulls that encircle them, I feel like I’m watching a production rather than a live show, yet one distilled to its raw emotion, and not just because it’s acoustic. Dressed in the same outfits as the characters from the short film, I’m unsure what’s an act and what’s not. What could be more gothic?

A couple months ago, I spoke with Nernes over the phone about Norwegian Gothic, which is out this Friday via Pelagic Records. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: You say that Norwegian Gothic represents the culmination or combination of everything you’ve done so far. What about it makes it such a good summation of what you do as a band?

Kjetil Nernes: As a musician and an artist, you might say, I have a pretty specific idea of how I want things to sound and be. Usually, it’s really hard--it’s a goal you have far ahead in front of you, and you just aim to that goal. It’s really hard to get to that goal right away. It’s a process: You need to make a few albums, for example, to come closer to your main goal, and finally, it comes together. I felt like Norwegian Gothic was like that, for the past 10 years, or even for my whole career. We kind of reached that one goal we’ve had for a really long time. It has to do with songwriting, how it actually sounds, the lyrics, a number of factors. It’s also important to reach the next goal, too--it’s a never-ending process, in many ways. It doesn’t stop here.

SILY: What else makes Norwegian Gothic unique as compared to your other records?

KN: The fact that we brought in a producer for the first time made a big difference. We had Gomez. He made a big difference, for sure. Karin’s been a part of the band on and off for 10 years, but she was much more involved here, which made a big difference from the previous ones. When you’ve done as many albums as I’ve done and been involved in as many projects as I have, you get a little feeling for when things turn out slightly different from all the other times. I had that feeling with this one. I also had that feeling with The Gospel that was released some years ago.

SILY: The Gospel is my favorite record of yours, so it’s interesting to hear you compare it to this one...What about the song “Carnival of Love” made you want to open the album with it?

KN: That is an interesting question because me, Karin, and Gomez were debating back and forth about that for a long time. There were a number of different options. Maybe you agree with me: I feel that there a quite a few songs that could have opened the album. We could have chosen a faster and shorter song, and it would have been a little bit of a different vibe to the album. We had a friend who was involved at the time, and he really got a kick out of “Carnival of Love”, and that made us decide to open with it.

SILY: How do you generally approach sequencing, and was there a different way you approached it here?

KN: Usually, you get a feeling. Sometimes, the label or the management comes with a suggestion. They usually decide the singles--which songs to promote. When you pick out the singles, usually you put them very early on, especially these days, even though I personally prefer to put them somewhere else. Back in the day, if you look at David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, all of the hits end the album. Many of the bands in the 60′s did the same thing: The main single was very far out in the album. Nowadays, the attention span is maybe a bit different so they’re usually earlier on. From there, you just listen to the songs and get a feeling, but on this one, it was particularly hard. Doing The Gospel was incredibly easy. This one took days of back and forth, and we had a lot of different ways of approaching it.

SILY: There are a lot of cinematic aspects on this record, from the strings to the spoken word interludes. Do you think about your records in a cinematic sense?

KN: Maybe. I do see a lot of films and am inspired by films and thinking of an album as a way of traveling through something. That may be what you’re referring to, too. I enjoy albums, and I particularly love albums that make you feel like you’re on a journey. That’s very often my starting point for making albums.

SILY: As much genre territory as this album traverses, “Hailstones For Rain” is an aesthetic standout. Can you tell me about the arrangement and instrumentation of that song?

KN: It does stand out. The label saw it as a very psychedelic song. I didn’t think of it that way. It started with me writing this specific rhythm inspired by some of the stuff The Residents were doing in the late 70′s. They had these weird sort of synthesizer rhythms with basslines on top. It just developed when we played it a lot. Karin added the jazzy theme on top of it. Further on, Lars Horntveth from Jaga Jazzist is playing saxophone, and there are two synthesizers going, and later, Anders Møller is playing percussion on it. It just develops. It’s a rhythmical thing. It turned out pretty interesting, that track.

SILY: How did the interludes come about? Who’s speaking, and what’s the inspiration behind the words they’re saying?

KN: Me and Karin had finished a tour with Boris. We did a week of traveling around the UK and visiting friends two years ago. I was interviewing my friend, and it started out with me saying to him, “Why the hell do we do this?” I got some really good conversations out of it. The first one on the record is Karin before “Hallucinational”, talking about her experience before writing it. The second one is with the writer John Doran, the cofounder of The Quietus. The final one is Andrew Liles, who is part of Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. “You’re Not That Special”: That’s his words.

SILY: I really like the panning in the vocals on that last one. It’s a disorienting way to end the album...You mentioned the label thought “Hailstones For Rain” was psychedelic. For me, the true psychedelic song is “Deadlock”.

KN: Yes. Exactly. I would say the same. I agree--the label is German. [laughs] Germans usually have a different way of approaching things.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

KN: I have a good friend who used to be in Chicago; he used to work for Chicago Mastering [Service], Jason Ward. He sent me an email a few years ago where he described our music as Norwegian Gothic, so I wrote it down. Over the years, there have been a lot of questions like, “What is Årabrot? What is it all about?” I came to the conclusion when I started writing the songs for this album that [“Norwegian Gothic”] felt right describing these genres and as a title. He was also being tongue-in-cheek about [Grant Wood’s painting] American Gothic because we live in a church and kind of look like the people in the painting. I forgot to Google the title after we started the whole process of recording, and I discovered my friends in Ulver have a song called “Norwegian Gothic” and had released it as a single or an EP and have released t-shirts for it. I was like, “Oh no!” [laughs] I did talk to them, and they were totally fine with it. Maybe it’s a good reference point, too, Årabrot and Ulver.

SILY: What’s the story behind the album art?

KN: We did a live session in the church on the summer solstice--Midsommar. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the movie Midsommar.

SILY: I have.

KN: So you know it’s quite big in Sweden. It’s a special day in Scandinavia. The sun is out all day. In Norway, not so much, but in Sweden, it’s a big day, and they dance around the maypole, and there are all these parties going around. This year, we did a live stream, and because there were travel restrictions, we did this live acoustic set. By the end of the session, we did some photos, and literally, exactly on the time of the summer solstice at whatever time--2:00 in the morning or something--that photo was taken by this photographer on his iPhone. He was really tired and getting really grumpy and sour, and Karin asked, “Take one more photo!” We just stood there in that circle with the skulls and stuff. There was some magic to that moment, so he took the photo. Karin was also 6 months pregnant at the time, and you can see her holding her belly. 

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

KN: The last two Clipping. albums, the film Corpus Christi, and the book Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Richard Kaczynski. 

[vinylodyssey]

David Bowie: Hunky Dory (180 gram, Parlophone, 2016) ▪︎ ▪︎ Ending the week with Bowie's fourth studio album, Hunky Dory ▪︎ Released on 17 December 1971 (I missed posting this by a day), the album sold poorly despite positive reviews. It wasn't until the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 that Hunky Dory found commercial traction. ▪︎ The album's title can be traced back to Bob Grace (founder of Chrysalis Music who'd signed Bowie) having happened upon an eccentric pub landlord from Esher, England who spoke with a quasi uppercrust vocabulary. ▪︎ One phrase in particular ("everything's hunky dory") got stuck in Grace's head. ▪︎ He floated the phrase to Bowie, and two of those words were used, and it wasn't "everything's" 😉 ▪︎ Hunky Dory revealed an evolution in terms of Bowie's songwriting following his tour of America. It was Quirky, ambitious, instantaneously immediate and gives a glimpse of greater things to come. ▪︎ Where his later albums would see him adopt an alter ego like Ziggy, Alladin Sane, the Thin White Duke & Pierrot. Hunky Dory saw Bowie out of costume and unveiled. In some ways almost vulnerable. ▪︎ This is as real as and as close to Bowie that any fan can get. ▪︎ ▪︎ #davidbowie #bowie #hunkydory #artrock #poprock #vinyl #record #vinylrecord #vinyladdict #vinyljunkie #vinylcollector #vinylycommunity #vinylcollection #instamusic #instavinyl #nowspinning #onmyturntable https://www.instagram.com/p/CI9ApQspX0p/?igshid=a0ce40lwttn9

[vampylily]

Transcription of Fall Out Boy's interview with Rock Sound

Since I was going to read the article anyways, I thought I'd transcribe in case it'll be more accessible to read for others. The interview with Pete and Patrick goes in depth on the topics of tourdust, evolving as a band, So Much (For) Stardust, working with Neal Avron, and more.

Thank you to @nomaptomyowntreasure who kindly shared the photos of the article! Their post is linked here.

PDF link here. (more readable format & font size)

article in text below (and warning for long post.)

Rock Sound Issue #300

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

WITH THE TRIUMPHANT ‘SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST’ CAPTURING A WHOLE NEW GENERATION OF FANS, FALL OUT BOY ARE RIDING HIGH, CELEBRATING THEIR PAST WHILE LOOKING TOWARDS A BRIGHT FUTURE. PETE WENTZ AND PATRICK STUMP REFLECT ON RECENT SUCCESSES AND THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM TWO DECADES OF WRITING AND PERFORMING TOGETHER. 

WORDS: James Wilson-Taylor

PHOTOS: Elliott Ingham

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show? 

PETE: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that  you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We've been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it. 

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

PATRICK: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that. It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There's a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn't hear before. 

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices? 

PETE: There were some lean years where there weren't a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone’s favourite song makes a lot of sense in this era.

PATRICK: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do. And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there. 

PETE: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now. 

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career. 

PETE: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. This was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we’ve always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that's probably the one I would listen to. But I just never wanted it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally. I think that’s fucking awesome. 

PATRICK: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour’, that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. 

One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do, I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this,’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realised that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them. 

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained a part of your process since then? 

PETE: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We had very disparate music tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion, because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band.  

PATRICK: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout the record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under the Cork Tree’’. So when we talk about what has remained the same… I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing, I wasn’t playing on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the tour of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’. I’m always amazed at how much better they are than I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day. I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like, ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’ 

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off? 

PATRICK: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also the weird aspect where the last time we worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other…as much as we do anyway. We say that and then that myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time had passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal. 

PETE: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for the holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. 

He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little bit scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit. 

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From the Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

PETE: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and I want to keep shaping and changing. 

Patrick: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everybody liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from “Love From The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in  ‘Love From The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record. 

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’. 

PETE: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it one such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And going that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there. 

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise. 

PATRICK: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had kind of written called ‘Dark Horse’ and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day. 

PETE: There's irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’  I hope if somebody ever chose to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they’ll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool. 

It’s almost no secret that the sound you became most known for in the md-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it. 

PATRICK: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other bands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time.  And there’s nothing wrong with either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who also likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it. 

PETE: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave that started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on, and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. 

PATRICK: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else. 

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here? 

PETE: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are we gonna die?’ because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realise it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you realise that the fans over there are real fans of music It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. 

PATRICK: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavour…

PETE: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs). 

PATRICK: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UL, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavour of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. 

Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?’ But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself. 

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen

[weekendwarriorblog]

The ThanksgivingWarrior 11/25/20 – THE CROODS: A NEW AGE, MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, ZAPPA, HAPPIEST SEASON, STARDUST and More!

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and usually I’d be struggling to figure out how much the new movies might make in what is normally one of the most unpredictable weekends at the year. Wait a second. I’m getting déjà vu here. Didn’t I say this exact same thing in the intro for last week’s column? Probably. Let’s face it, kids. I am absolutely losing my mind with how bored I am getting looking at my laptop screen all day long, even though I’ve now set up a pretty sweet new TV system to watch stuff on!

Anyway, there is one family movie coming to theatres this weekend, and in any other Thanksgiving weekend, I’d suggesting getting out and going to theaters, but at this point in the pandemic, with COVID numbers so bad that even I, “Mr. Reopen the Movie Theaters!” can’t recommend going to see a movie in theaters… well, except maybe in New York City, where they’re still closed. Sigh. 

We’re going to do things a little different this week, because I wasn’t able to get to as many movies as I wanted but didn’t want to delay the column to Thanksgiving Day. Instead, I’ll post what I have done on Wednesday, then check back here on Friday when hopefully I’ve added a few more reviews. Cool?

Fortunately, the new animated sequel from DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures, THE CROODS: A NEW AGE, is a lot of fun, and this is from someone who really enjoyed the first movie quite a bit. The sequel’s premise is as simple as you can get: caveman family The Croods (voiced by Nick Cage, Catherine Keener, Emma Stone, Clarke Duke and Cloris Leachman), along with Ryan Reynold’s Guy, are still trying to survive in the wilds until they encounter a beautiful oasis that turns out to be the home of the more-evolved Bettermans, Phil (Peter Dinklage), Hope (Leslie Mann) and Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran).

I really liked the original The Croods quite a bit, so I’ve  been waiting patiently for DreamWorks to figure things out for a sequel. My instincts were definitely spot-on, because even if the original premise sounded a lot like The Flintstones, putting those voice actors together, even if it’s just Ryan Reynolds and Emma Stone proved to be quite prescient. A big part of the sequel is the burgeoning romance between their characters, Guy and Eep, much to the brutish chagrin of Eep’s father Grug (really Cage at his finest). Then along comes the Bettermans, and then it changes into a movie that is constantly showing the differences between the two families in many funny ways.

I’ve long admired Emma Stone as an actress, since she’s no naturally funny, and that’s even more apparent by how much she brings to Eep with merely her voice. Some of the scenes between her and Tran’s Dawn are absolutely hilarious. Cloris Leachman’s Gran also has some absolutely LOL moments later in the film. In some ways, Reynolds while funny, especially when pit against Cage and Dinklage’s characters, takes a back seat to the ladies.

I was equally impressed with the film in terms of its animation and how gorgeous and colorful the whole thing is, but more than that, it thrusts in a zaniness that I’d usually expect from something like Ren and Stimpy or SpongeBob SquarePants. So as much as it’s a kid movie, there’s enough to entertain older kids and even old men like me.

Without having seen Pixar’s Soul yet (this weekend!), Croods: A New Age may be one of the most entertaining animated movies I’ve seen this year, and that’s because it leans so heavily on being so absolutely crazy and zany that you can’t help but have fun.

You can read more about the movie and how it was made in a feature I wrote for Below the Line.

Next up is MA RAINEY’s BLACK BOTTOM, George C. Wilson’s adaptation of the 1982 August Wilson play that preceded Fences, which Netflix will give a theatrical release this week before it goes to streaming in December. Like Fences, this once again stars that film’s Oscar winner, Viola Davis, in the title role of Ma Rainey, a legendary blues and jazz singer in the late ‘20s who has come to a recording studio in Chicago to make a record with her band.  The band’s hotshot trumpet player Levee (the late Chadwick Boseman) is more interested in breaking out on his own, and he does everything to grandstand and try to impress the label guy (Jonny Coyne) even if it means throwing the rest of the band under the bus.

Since I never saw Wilson’s play, I really didn’t know what to expect from this movie, although the fact that most of it takes place in a recording studio definitely had my interest piqued. In case, you’re wondering about that odd title, it’s actually a song in Ma Rainey’s repertoire that she wants to do one way, but her manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) wants to try Levee’s version of the song. Ma’s not having any of it, and a lot of the film involves her

There’s been quite a lot of chatter about Chadwick Boseman getting a posthumous Oscar nomination for his performance in this, and it’s probably well-deserved since he gives quite a showy performance as Levee, giving a couple moving monologues including one about his mother being sexually assaulted by white men.  It’s a very powerful performance indeed.

Rainey is certainly an interesting character for Viola Davis to play, even if she’s not necessarily likable with her obstinate demeanor and the way she gloms over her eye candy Dussie Mae, played by Taylour Paige, and dotes over her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown). As interesting as those relationships are, I probably enjoyed the interaction between the musicians more, because Boseman is working with some greats like Colman Domingo, Michael Potts and Glynn Turman. It’s actually kind of interesting how it switches between Levee and the musicians and Ma dealing with Irving upstairs.  

As much as the Wilsons are exploring some interesting topics about race and the treatment of black people in the times, the movie frequently feels dated and it feels like some of the ideas are never fully revolved, even as it builds up to a fairly shocking climax.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but it’s a perfectly fine dramatic piece, but I didn’t feel that it had the weight of other movies about race I’ve seen, including yes, Green Book (sorry, haters), and a lot of that probably has more to do with George Wilson’s direction than August Wilson’s writing.

Just want to quickly mention a couple movies I’ve already reviewed, which will hit the streamers this week, including Steve McQueen’s LOVERS ROCK on Amazon Prime Video, which I wrote about here, and Ron Howard’s HILLBILLY ELEGY, now on Netflix after a short theatrical release. I reviewed the latter here.

I’ve actually seen Lovers Rock a second time since the New York Film Festival, and I enjoyed it even more, as it’s really a well-crafted film even if it’s not as immediate maybe as Mangrove (now on Amazon Prime) and Red, White and Blue, which will be on Prime Video on December 4. I just love how Steve McQueen created a shorter piece that isn’t quite as deep as some of the others since Lovers Rock isn’t based on history but is just a nice young romance about two young people who meet and fall in love at a “Blues Night” party. It’s not as deep as the other movies I’ve seen, but is still good. Oh, and my interview with Steve McQueen is up at Below the Line finally, and I’m pretty proud of it, so check it out!

I don’t know if I have too much more to say about Hillbilly Elegy, but I hope people will give it a chance because even if it does have problems and isn’t perfect, it’s an interesting story, particularly for Glenn Close’s performance.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Alex Winter’s doc, ZAPPA (Magnolia Pictures), an amazing film that takes a look at the life and career of the late Frank Zappa, best known for his quirky rock tunes but just at proficient at writing jazz and classical musical. I definitely went through a bit of a Zappa phase in my teens, and every once in a while, I would go back and see what had been released since his death in 1993, because his wife and widow Gail did a great job getting a lot of his unreleased music and live shows out there.

What shocked me when I saw Zappa was how little I really knew about the musician, because maybe he was a little bit of an enigma while he was still alive. I enjoyed the other doc, Eat That Question: Zappa In His Own Words, that came out a few years back, which was made up of public interviews Zappa gave, but it doesn’t really give as clear a picture of the man as Winter’s doc does.

For instance, Winter gets a lot of the musicians, including the amazing Ruth Underwood, who played with Zappa in the Mothers. You’d assume those musicians would presumably know the man best having toured with him for years, and yet, even they say that other than when they were rehearsing diligently or playing gigs, Zappa kept to himself. We also get a good sense of what a family man he was, since Winter was able to get Gail to talk to him before she herself passed way in 2015.

Zappa is an absolutely terrific doc that I hope music enthusiasts give a look even if they think they know what Zappa was about or maybe even those who didn’t care for his music. You might be pleasantly surprised by the tremendous amount of depth Winter brings to this talented musician and composer who still had a lot more to say. (And that’s an understatement!)

Incidentally, I’ll have an interview with Winter over at Below the Line very soon.

On the other end of the musical spectrum (more or less) is Gabriel Range’s STARDUST (IFC Films)  -- not to be confused with Matthew Vaughn’s far better Stardust – this one starring Johnny Flynn, who played a young Albert Einstein in Genius: Einstein, this time playing a young David Bowie. Years before breaking it big with his album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, young David just can’t catch a break in the U.S., so he goes on a road trip in 1971 with his Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), the A&R guy from his U.S. label who hopes to get Bowie across to young American audiences.

I’m not quite sure how someone can screw up a movie about Bowie, one of my all-time favorite artists, but making a movie that a.) takes place in the most boring era of Bowie’s career and b.) Not actually being able to use any of Bowie’s beloved tracks, certainly doesn’t help matters. It also doesn’t help that the script just isn’t great, creating a fairly dull biopic that relies more on Maron’s personality basically playing the same character we’ve seen him play so many times before to stay even halfway entertaining.  I couldn’t even get excited by Jena Malone, an actress I generally appreciate, as David’s wife Angie, because she plays her to be such a despicable and unsympathetic character.

If Maron is decent than Johnny Flynn is just plain flaccid as Bowie, playing him so mopey and aloof that when he finally emerges from his chrysalis as Ziggy Stardust – also with little of the flamboyance in his stage shows -- you just don’t give a rat’s ass anymore. Oh, and a lot of the movie is based on the theory that the history of mental issues in his family is what haunts the singer.  Drab and dull, Stardust manages to make the most exciting rock star of the last half century seem like the most boring person on earth. It’s a flat-out failure as a biopic.

Joan Carr-Wiggins’ GETTING TO KNOW YOU (Gravitas Ventures) is a witty Canadian high-concept rom-com, starring Natasha Little and Rupert Penry-Jones as two strangers who have a chance encounter at a hotel in Northern Ontario. The latter plays New Yorker Luke Manning, who is back home for his high school reunion, but when his positively smashed high school girlfriend Kaila (Rachel Blanchard from Peepshow) shows up at the hotel hoping to rekindle their spark, he asks Little’s character Abby to pretend to be his wife.

I don’t have a lot to say about this movie which was a nice surprise and clearly a labor of love for the filmmaker. Honestly, my favorite part of the movie is how hilarious Rachel Blanchard is in it. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me that found her deliriously drunk nightmare of an ex to be kind of sexy, but maybe that’s just me. In fact, the movie might have been even funnier if the rest of the cast were able to keep up with Blanchard, but the connection between the two leads did grow on me as it went along. It definitely has some funnier moments like when Kaila’s bowling husband Kenny shows up, and then some of Luke’s other classmates pop in as well, but it does have to work very hard whenever Blanchard isn’t on screen.  (I also enjoyed watching the soap opera that seemed to be going on between the employees of the hotel, which was perpetually funny.) Otherwise, it does feel a little flat whenever Blanchard is on screen.

The filmmaker’s lack of experience is sometimes obvious, because there are things like the repetitive music that I wasn’t so crazy about. Otherwise, this is a light and quaint indie that’s a little off the beaten track, but you won’t have any regrets if you make the effort to go looking for it.

I’m thrilled to see actor Clea Duvall back behind the camera for her second film as a director, HAPPIEST SEASON, which was going to get a theatrical release through Sony’s TriStar Pictures at one point. Instead, it’s now going to be on Hulu starting Wednesday. (Today!) It’s a high-concept rom-com starring Mackenzie Davis and Kristen Stewart with Davis playing Harper, a woman who has not come out of her closet to her family, which makes it that much more awkward when she brings her girlfriend Abby (Stewart) home for the holidays.

As mentioned, this is a fairly high-concept comedy that uses the idea of someone coming out to their disapproving family we’ve seen in many movies, but does it in a way that can take it seriously but still allow for some funny moments. In fact, there are times when the comedy even goes into Meet the Parents territory in terms of the character humor.

I really enjoyed Duvall’s previous film, The Intervention, and once again, she has put together such as great cast to realize the script that she wrote with Mary Holland. In fact, Holland has a great role, playing Harper’s bubbly sister Jane, who steals so many scenes in terms of the humor that I was shocked that I only realized later she co-wrote the script with Duvall.

Mackenzie Davis continues to be every director’s secret weapon, because like in Jason Reitman’s Tully, she can literally deliver on every aspect of the movie, keeping the comedy aspects grounded but also deliver a really poignant performance. She also works really well with Kristen Stewart, maybe bringing out things in Stewart we just haven’t been able to see before.

Besides having Alison Brie play Harper’s older sister and Aubrey Plaza as an old flame, Duvall also had the foresight to get the amazing Dan Levy, recent multi-Emmy winner for Schitt’s Creek, to play Abby’s best friend, who is constantly there for her to kvetch and who shows up to pretend to be her boyfriend. (Oddly, there’s a lot of that sort of thing going on in movies this week.)

Happiest Season works as a perfectly fine albeit fairly traditional holiday rom-com in a similar way as The Family Stone. More than anything, Duvall continually proves her abilities as a filmmaker that can handle comedy and drama equally well.

Next up, is Alan Ball’s UNCLE FRANK (Amazon), the Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty, directing only his second movie after 2007’s Towelhead – you might remember his HBO shows Six Feet Under and True Blood. This one, set in the ‘70s, stars Paul Bettany as the title character with Sophia Lillis from It Chapter One and Two playing his niece Beth, a teen from Creekville, South Carolina who worships her New York-based professor uncle. When she goes to college in New York, she attends one of Frank’s parties with her pseudo-boyfriend and ends up learning that Frank’s “roommate” Wally (Peter Macdissi) is actually his boyfriend. When Frank and Beth return to South Carolina for his father’s funeral, he has to try to keep his sexuality and relationship with Wally a secret from his family. Yeah, this does sound a little like Happiest Season, doesn’t it? It is, but only to a point.

At first, Uncle Frank is a cute but not-particularly-deep coming-of-age story about Lillis’ character as a fish out of water in New York City. Once Wally is introduced, he seems to be there just to make jokes and lighten the mood as it turns into a road trip. From his previous work, I’ve grown to enjoy Ball’s unconventional storytelling, but by comparison, this movie is very by-the-books, so it never really grabs the viewer.

The biggest problem with Ball’s latest--and it’s one that I see in a lot of movies these days--is that it doesn’t know whether it should be a comedy or a drama, and because it isn’t particularly funny, you expect it to fare better as a drama and yet, it doesn’t.

Ball has such a great cast including Judy Greer, Margo Martindale, Stevens Root and Zahn, all playing the duo’s racist Southern family, but they disappear for long sections of the movie, and then don’t do much when they return for the more dramatic last act where it turns into such a maudlin melodrama once Frank and Beth get back to South Carolina.  As they mourn the dead patriarch, Frank keeps reflecting back on what drove him to New York in the first place, and we’re pummelled with so many flashbacks. Lillis’ character almost gets lost at this point, even this story is supposed to be told from her point of view.

Essentially, Uncle Frank falls somewhere quite literally between Hillbilly Elegy and Happiest Season but not being as good as either. It’s just disappointing that Ball didn’t have someone offering good advice on handling material that will constantly have you groaning, “What was the point?”

Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom, State of Play, 21 Bridges makes his directorial debut with MOSUL, which will debut on Netflix this Thursday. As you can figure out from the title, this takes place in Iraq in the fall of 2016 where an army of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and militia men mobilize to liberate Iraq’s second largest city from ISIS along with the embedded journalist Ali Maula. Surprise, surprise, this is another movie from last year’s September festival season, too, and there also was a documentary from last year with the same name about the same story, too.

I’ve been a fan of some of the films Carnahan has written over the years, some mentioned above, but his directorial debut certainly sounds ambitious, since he’s working with an all-Arab cast. I look forward to watching and reviewing this one, hopefully before Friday.

Premiering on Disney+ this Friday after losing its theatrical release – this is becoming the norm for Disney, huh? – is Ashley Avis’ adaptation of Anna Sewell’s classic piece of literature, BLACK BEAUTY about a girl and her horse. The girl is played by Mackenzie Foy from Interstellar and The Conjuring, and Black Beauty the horse is voiced by Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet. No, I did not make that up, and I can’t wait to watch this, to see how that works exactly. Look for my review later this week… hopefully.

On top of that, those Trixie Pixies at Disney+ have somehow managed to secretly pull together a Taylor Swift concert called folkore: the long pond studio sessions, which will premiere exclusively on Disney+ November 25. Oh, that’s today!

Debuting on Showtime this Sunday is Errol Morris’ new doc MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY, which takes a look at the Acid King Timothy Leary through the eyes of his lover, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, trying to figure out her part in his turn into a narc for the CIA. Another one I hope to get to soon because while I like Morris’ political films like The Fog of War and even the Steve Bannon doc American Dharma, this seems more in the vein of Tabloid, which I also enjoyed. Will try to watch this over the weekend and report back.

Also of note is that the doc She is the Ocean (Blue Fox Entertainment) will be hitting On Demand this week. I guess I never got around to reviewing it.

So, let’s see. We’ve had some good movies, we’ve had some not great movies, and we’ve had a few movies that I just didn’t get around to watching yet. What does that leave? How about two of the worst movies I’ve seen this year? Are you ready?

SUPERINTELLIGENCE (HBO Max) is the latest comedy from Melissa McCarthy and hubby director Ben Falcone, and boy, it won’t take you long to realize why New Line decided LONG before COVID not to give it a theatrical release, instead handing it over to its new streamer HBO Max. 

In this, McCarthy plays Carol Peters, an average Seattle woman, who – I mean, honestly, does it even matter what she does? It’s irrelevant. Carol encounters an artificial intelligence being with the voice of James Corden that has just achieved self-awareness and wants to study Carol in order to understand humanity. But what are its plans… to save humanity or destroy it? Only Carol has the power to keep the world from finding out. 

I honestly don’t even know where to begin except that I was a Melissa McCarthy stan for a long time before Bridesmaids;  Superintelligence makes it all-too-obvious that she needs to stop making movies with Falcone. It’s not that he’s an incapable director, but he just doesn’t give her the actual direction she needs. The movie is just all over the place, starting with the physical comedy McCarthy has done so much in her movies, but then turning into a romantic comedy as the AI tries to reunite Carol with her college boyfriend George, played by Bobby Cannavale. Apparently, making The Heat with Sandra Bullock has made Falcone think his wife could or should be Sandra Bullock. No, she can’t. Throwing her into a ridiculous concept like this one that isn’t very solid does little to endear McCarthy to the fans she keeps driving away with bad movies like this.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that I really hate James Corden and hearing his voice over the course of the movie while also acting very META by referencing the ACTUAL James Corden, Carpool Karaoke, etc. Just none of it is very funny. Oddly, this is written by the same guy who wrote the duo’s earlier movie, The Boss, which I didn’t think was that bad, but mainly because McCarthy was paired with Kristen Bell for a lot of the movie.

On top of that, Superintelligence wastes its entire supporting cast from Brian Tyree Henry to Sam Richardson (from Veep) but also has Karan Son from Deadpool playing the EXACT SAME CHARACTER he played in Like A Boss, but only for a few minutes then he’s gone. At least it had the forethought to cast Jean Smart as the President, but the fact that I didn’t even like Bobby Cannavale in this might be the biggest sign of how much I absolutely detested Superintelligence.

There are movies you might hate when you see them in theaters but later realize that they’re probably funny enough cable. That is Superintelligence, except for the funny part. What else can I say except that “Superintelligence” is not a term I'd use for whoever greenlit this piece of crap.

Also debuting on HBO Max this week is the new thriller series The Flight Attendant (HBO MAX), starring Kaley Cuoco, who really hasn’t been doing much outside The Big Bang Theory, so this should give her a chance to show how funny she is. She plays a woman who wakes up in the wrong hotel and wrong bed with a dead man, so it already sounds like a great premise right there. I guess the entire first season will debut on Thanksgiving.

And yet, believe it or not, Superintelligence isn’t even the worst movie of the week! Nope.

Apparently, Josh Duhamel’s new comedy, BUDDY GAMES (Saban Films/Paramount), played in some theaters over the weekend, but it’s now available on digital and On Demand. It’s Duhamel’s directorial debut, and it’s about as dude-bro as you can possibly get, as it has Duhamel, Dax Sheppard, Kevin Dillon, Nick Swardson, Jensen Ackles and Dan Bakkedahl as a group man-children friends who regroup five years after going their separate ways to bring back their “Buddy Games,” a series of obstacle and endurance tests that end up reviving ill feelings between a few of them.

I’m not sure how quickly I knew I was in trouble with this one, because at first, I thought that maybe Duhamel made a fun indie comedy about friendship ala the underrated A Good Old Fashioned Orgy. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was wrong as wrong could be, since by the halfway point it turned into something as innately immature as Jackass.

The general idea is that Duhamel plays Bob, the guy who found enormous success after splitting from his friends, marrying Olivia Munn’s Tiffany, but then he finds out that his old friend Shelly (Bakkedahl) has been put in rehab for a drug overdose. Turns out that at the last Buddy Game, Swardson’s character shot Shelly in the nuts with a BB gun, and he eventually lost his other testicle as well. That’s about the level of this low-brow comedy that rarely fails to grab the lowest hanging…um… fruit.

As it goes along, it just gets worse and worse to the point where there was one scene where the guys are at a bar while trying to get girls to buy them drinks that just got so disgusting, I almost turned it off. If I did, I would have missed the scene with a gila monster going after steaks strapped to the heads in another lame competition.

I can go on and on about how Buddy Games is but probably the worst infraction is that it does the most sexist thing possible by basically putting having women for a few moments and none that particularly advance anything.

Duhamel isn’t a bad director, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he got hired to direct another comedy someday soon, but this movie just very bad, very gross and almost excruciating to sit through at times. To call Buddy Games moronic, idiotic or even asinine, would be an insult to the morons, idiots or asses, who are likely to be the movie’s target audience.

On Friday, New York’s Metrograph is bringing back the 2017 4k restoration of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong as a ticketed screening running from Friday through December 3. You can also still catch Shalini Kantaya’s Coded Bias and the French New Wave anthology Six In Paris as ticketed screenings through December 3.

Up at New York’s Lincoln Center, you can catch its World of Wong Kar Wai with a couple films available this Wednesday, including his fantastic drama In the Mood for Love, but you can also get the 7-film Janus Bundle for $70 which is a saving over the individual movie cost of $12 apiece. Those seven films and five more will be shown over the course of December.

Other stuff out this week that I wasn’t able to get to include:

The Christmas Chronicles 2 (Netflix) Last Call (K Street Pictures) Faith (Vertical) Saul and Ruby’s Holocaust Survivor Band (Samuel Goldwyn) The Walrus and the Whistle Blower (Gravitas Ventures) Life in a Year (Amazon Prime) 32 Weeks

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

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2Through Every Mirror in the World: Lacan's Mirror Stage as Mutual Reference in the Works of Neil Gaiman and Tori Amos009년 10월 2일 오전 5시 11분에 저장한 글입니다.

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2Through Every Mirror in the World: Lacan's Mirror Stage as Mutual Reference in the Works of Neil Gaiman and Tori Amos009년 10월 2일 오전 5시 11분에 저장한 글입니다.

  Through Every Mirror in the World: Lacan’s Mirror Stage as Mutual Reference in the Works of Neil Gaiman and Tori Amos

    1

There are remarkably numerous textual cross-pollinations and direct references that writer Neil Gaiman and musician Tori Amos make to one another’s creative efforts and friendship in their own works. One ought not take this connection as chiefly intertextual in the Kristevan sense of the word, however, for when not writing expressly for each other, the artists’ references to one another are generally explicit and are scattered among other promiscuously frequent allusions to and quotations from fairy tales, pop music, novels and inside jokes from the artists’ individual personal lives. Instead, directly aware of but not in responsive literary dialogue with one another, the authors Gaiman and Amos and their texts communicate through an ideal audience, familiar with both, through whom reflections of authorial and audiencial identity are mediated.

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Through pervasive mutual allusion over many years and across many texts (see Appendix 1 for a detailed if possibly incomplete list), Gaiman and Amos serve to advertise each other; each presents the other’s work such that to an audience the references are a game of self-reward upon their recognition, their regularity calling the consumer of one author’s work to consume the other’s. The first part of this reward in recognition is the move from the outside of a social network, real or imagined, to its inside, where familiarity with (and presumably the purchase of) one of the mutually-referenced texts (Gaiman’s, for example) is admission, while a fuller, more multitextual understanding of the other text (Amos’s in this case) is receipt. Important to this particular pairing of mutual artistic allusion is that, mythic and biblical citation aside, across Amos’s works, no other author appears so frequently as Gaiman, and across Gaiman’s works, the same holds true of Amos (though he certainly demonstrates an affinity for Elvis Costello). This allows one to make the case that Gaiman and Amos, via one another, each have a multitextual referential thread connecting his or her own works together with regard to the other, meaning that fans of these corpora are also fans of the authors as the texts construe him or her to be – a subtle but important point, as the aforementioned network is a social one and as the actual Gaiman/Amos connection is (presumably) as much social as it is textual.

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The importance of this is that by understanding Amos’s texts (for example) more fully by way of Gaiman (and by presumably liking “Neil,” just as “Tori” does), an audience gains insider knowledge, fictive society with one author and a personal identification with the other. Equal knowledge and fandom of each author produces kinship and identification with the other in turn. This is the identity of the ideal reader – one who is on the inside of the bi-authorial network that identifies socially on the basis of its purchased and studied knowledge. The second reward then of understanding the mutual reference is that these textual moments of reference are interpellations to this ideal reader, who is unexpectedly called not by her or his own name but by membership in this knowledge-network – often thus by Amos’s or Gaiman’s name or image – and is thereby ushered into a self-congratulatory subjectivity. The reader recognizes her- or himself by “catching” the reference in an “aha” moment.

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This is an enactment through literary reference of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage: the mediatization of one’s subjecthood through a “body,” and the understanding that the body as perceived through a mirror’s reflection in a whole and ideal form is separate from (and thus fragments one’s perception of) the self, heretofore unreflected; the reflection is a representation of self just as all other bodies one perceives are merely representations of others’ selves, connected to but semiotically distinct from the “I.” Lacan recognizes that this central act of identification manifests both in the real actions of individual development and metaphorically in the “ontological structure of the human world” (2), thus through breadth providing for the critical value and longevity of his theory.

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Although Gaiman and Amos are not unique in the capacity for their mutually referential relationship to congratulate a reader upon recognition – indeed the possession of any knowledge necessarily can define a network to which some belong and others do not – the evenness and consistency of such reward to this (very real) ideal audience throughout comics, short stories, concerts, and albums connects an audience’s identity-as-subject more feudally to the looking glass of the Gaiman/Amos oeuvre, while also effectively equating the works of the two authors as interchangeably able to reflect a Lacanian Ideal-I in the form of one another. The intricacy worth exploring here, then, is how each of these authorial figures differently reflects identity back through the other. Consider first Amos’s incantation of Gaiman. To illustrate Gaiman’s role in Amos’s songs, some melodic and harmonic analysis is necessary.

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“Space Dog” is an unsteady song whose surreality is woven as much from the dual narrative of the lyrics as from the ambiguity of its verses’ c-minor tonality against interludes that sway between harmonic groundings of A-major and c#-minor. Amos interleaves a quirky lemon pie-filled ode to the mysterious title character with wistful nostalgia for female companionship and hypotheses on Virginia Woolf’s death, all bound by meandering half-step descents. In the verse melody, the path is from G to F# to F:

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Figure 1. “Space Dog” verse.

The resolution to F as the goal of the section is solidified in verse two on its final lyric, the musical double entendre “Lines secure, Space Dog,” which firmly intones F over the first and only F-major plagal cadence of the song.

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The song’s recurring B section, notated in A-major, melodically concerns the half-step motion from A to G# (which is directly adjacent in pitch to the verses’ notes):

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Figure 2. “Space Dog” B section.

Despite the contrast in mood and key between these sections, their reduced vocal lines insist upon their consistency from one to the next by way of their common half-step descent. Although an eight-measure bridge diverts “Space Dog”‘s second verse, the only time at which these main sections allow their melodic outline to grow beyond half-step increments is in the push toward the song’s final coda, chordally framed in the B section’s vocabulary. Beginning on the lyric “Deck the halls,” Amos’s descent is no longer A to G#, but now begins on B, moving thus by whole step to A and then with familiarity to G#. It is in this structurally significant section that Gaiman enters the song:

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Figure 3. “Space Dog” pre-coda.

and the words continue, “Somewhere someone must know the ending.”

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Amos places Gaiman at the moment of musical expansion, where the melody’s skeletal range peaks. This is important because it illustrates that Gaiman either catalyzes or necessitates the crossing of preset boundaries, depending on what one takes the song’s goals to be. Certainly one of Amos’s own goals lyrically is to “untwist” the story that weaves “centuries and secret societies,” with the sacrifice of Andromeda.

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Amos’s mention of Gaiman in her song “Horses” is remarkably similar. Again, a brief musical analysis illuminates this claim. The song’s five verses stem from the following sung melody. The line diagram shows the consistent return to middle C amid the rising interspersed notes.

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Figure 4. “Horses” first verse.

The insistent melody is identical in four of the five total verses, but immediately following the song’s bridge, the fourth verse offers a subtle change both in melody and in underlying chords, softening the song with the calmer and brighter relative major of E.

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Figure 5. “Horses” fourth verse.

Shown above, the ascending outline where a static C had once been is another breaking free of a constrictive musical pattern. The appearance of “Neil” in this verse again aligns Gaiman with the possibility of greater mobility and freedom within the song. The E chord underlying his name illustrates that the ascending outline a moment earlier was no musically unrelated fluke, as it differs from the inverted c-minor chord that one might expect based on the three previous verses. In this case, Gaiman empowers the musical shift as he acts out his agency by “making me a tree.” In this song and in “Space Dog” (as well as in “Hotel”), he is consistently a freer and a marker of or impetus toward change and growth.

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This particular allusion in “Horses” concerns the character of the tree in Gaiman’s Stardust, acknowledged by the author, in his own contribution to Amos’s 1998 tour program, to be based on her (4). It is a convenient doorway to the converse reading of Amos’s appearances in Gaiman’s work.

getShim(‘http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_1/reed/’,’4010206′, ‘6’, ‘296’,’398′,’jpg’,’1′,”, ”);

Figure 6. Tori Amos as a tree in Stardust, p. 130.

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Midway through the serialized graphic novel, the “copper beech tree” – redheaded, just like Amos – strikes up a conversation with the protagonist Tristran. The tree’s speech is filled with playful and oddball Amosesque turns of phrase, but its chief role is one of twisting and locally distorting time’s linearity.

“Somebody – maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie – told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall around it – “ “Or cut down the trees,” said Tristran helpfully. There was a silence. He wondered where the girl had gone. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”… “You shouldn’t say things like that,” she said. “Sorry,” said Tristran, not entirely sure what he was apologising for. “But you were telling me that Pan owned the forest…” “Of course he does,” said the voice…. “And in my dream he came over to me. You were in my dream, too, leading a sad girl by a chain. She was a very sad girl. Pan told me to help you…. So I woke up, and there you were, fast asleep with your head by my trunk, snoring like a pigwiggin.”… “You are a tree,” said Tristran, putting his thoughts into words. “I didn’t always used to be a tree,” said the voice in the rustling of the copper beech leaves. “A magician made me a tree.” “What were you before?” asked Tristran. “Do you think he likes me?” “Who?” “Pan. If you were the Lord of the Forest, you wouldn’t give a job to someone, tell them to give all possible aid and succour, unless you liked them, would you?” “Well…” said Tristran, but before he had decided on the politic answer, the tree had already said, “A nymph. I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn’t you?” “You would?” “Exactly what I think.”… “What kind of aid and succour, exactly,” asked Tristran. (Gaiman and Vess, 129-131)

The leapfrogging of the tree’s conversation with Tristran is dizzying to him, knotting the linear flow of conversational time into more of a crocheted chain than a yarn. New lines of conversation consistently interrupt the expected flow of questions and responses.

12

At the end of their encounter, the tree gives Tristran a copper leaf, instructing him to “listen to it, when you need it most” (132). When he finally does listen to leaf, in the stable at an inn after a unicorn bursts in, “clattering” (144), Gaiman’s narrative immediately rewinds a moment and picks up in the inn’s main room, where after a moment of conversation between Primus, the innkeepers, and their guests, “there was a loud clattering from the stables next door.” (145) A moment later Tristran dashes into the room, presumably having either retroactively heard all the dialogue of the scene through the leaf or having otherwise through the leaf’s words – hidden from the audience – learned that he must go immediately into the tavern. In either event, the last vestige of Amos as the tree once again locally disrupts the story’s linearity, perhaps as perceived by its characters, depending on one’s reading of it, but certainly as told through Gaiman’s chronology. In Stardust, Amos is an agent of disrupting the expectations and temporal grounds upon which the tale occurs.

13

Amos’s role in Gaiman’s short story “December 7, 1995” is less concerned with time, but still disruptive of the scene’s basic properties. The piece opens with a bare setting, described only as “dark” three times:

It began in darkness; the little girl hesitantly touching the piano-key. She made up a song to sing to the darkness. She sang about the big girls, the pretty ones. She sang all her fear of growing up, all her fear of what she knew she would never be. When the song was done she lay down, beneath the piano, in the dark. (10)

14

With the grounds quickly and bleakly established, Gaiman uses Amos once again to disrupt the reality of darkness with an enchanted cavalcade of bright light pouring onto uncanny celebrants, spawned from nowhere. She incites the piano’s keys

to grow, and twine, and blossom… And by then the party was underway… Each of the people had a shadow, and the little sleeping girl found herself staring not at the people but at their flickering shadow party on the floor and on the walls and ceiling, as they caressed and fought and fucked and died in their silent shadow carnival…. The floor juddered and trembled. The moon shone through the window, past the volcano, through every mirror in the world. (10-11)

In Gaiman’s works, Amos sends ripples through the reality that surrounds her. This is not unlike Gaiman’s coinciding with a breaking free of patterns in Amos’s songs, but the difference is that, while in Gaiman’s writing Amos is scarcely in control of her own power to distort her surroundings, when Tori Amos mentions Neil Gaiman in her music, it is frequently an affirmation of his control and his power to grant freedom – usually to Amos herself. Lyrically, she needs him to finish her stories, asks where he is, where his characters are, and allows him to transform her into a tree or to offer comfort by reading to her.

15

The comparative imbalance of power between the authors’ mutual reference has its seeds in the contrasting media in which they operate. First-person poetics are the lingua franca of popular music, in which a cohesive narrative is not expected (and which in Amos’s case, is almost never given). One of the primary currencies of the pop/rock/folk musical territory that Amos navigates is authenticity, which manifests in perceived sincerity of composition and performance. Amos is particularly often cited – for example by Whiteley (197) and Burns and Woods – for her musical authenticity and the autobiographical transparency of her performative voice. This authenticity borne of a conversational and confessional lyric style and a perceived lack of emotional mediation found in more coherent and traditional pop songcraft casts Tori Amos the individual as a necessary part of her songs’ and performances’ identities. On the other hand, Neil Gaiman the person, who claims in his blog that “Stories may well be lies” is at least superficially unconcerned with authenticity, mediating what may or may not have begun as autobiographical emotional outpourings through what are nearly always structured third-person narratives rooted in a fascination with storytelling over catharsis. In his own stories, Gaiman’s presence is typically deeply submerged, if textually extant at all. The power imbalance then may reflect less on Amos and Gaiman’s friendship than on the comparative vulnerability of each artist’s public discourse, but because of these numerous possible factors in differing how Gaiman and Amos treat one another artistically – to say nothing yet of gender’s role in their mutual portrayal – it is both easier and more practical to speak of the effects of these differing reflections than of their causes.

16

Returning to Lacan, the space between the perceiver and her or his reflection – the difference between the real I and the Ideal-I – is the imaginary. In this case, it refers to the unbridgeable gap between a reader/listener and her or his perception of Tori Amos and/or Neil Gaiman. Lacan, in his 1949 essay on the mirror stage, writes of “the lure of spatial identification” (4), which Slavoj Žižek further specifies as a trigonometry of the I and the reflection, writing that

imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every “playing a role,” the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image? (106)

The mirror stage into which a song or comic book propels a subject is a temporary and repeatable experience: a moment of “losing oneself” – or more to the point, finding oneself – in the textual encounter. In being interpellated through one of these authors in the others’ work, a reader is plugging into a role for the gaze of the author of the text in question, as by definition Gaiman appears in Amos’s songs as she perceives him, and vice-versa. This means that, for example, an ideal listener to Amos’s music identifies Gaiman as her or his own reflection, and the temporary act of aspiration to this Ideal-I (Gaiman as seen and indeed presented by Amos) is a performative one for Amos’s gaze. It is part of bringing oneself fully in synch with the text and its author. Žižek says of identification,

Our predominant, spontaneous idea of identification is that of imitating models, ideals, image-makers: it is noted (usually from the condescending “mature” perspective) how young people identify with popular heroes, pop singers, film stars, sportsmen…. This spontaneous notion is doubly misleading. First, the feature, the trait on the basis of which we identify with someone, is usually hidden – it is by no means necessarily a glamorous feature. (105)

From this point we may better understand Amos’s instability and flightiness revealed by a deep reading of Gaiman’s oeuvre to be the features by which a reader might be interpellated to identify with her, despite the questionability of one’s conscious desire to be ideally disruptive. Within Gaiman’s gaze, the identification with Amos through his work is the desire to disrupt the order of a detached, calculated, male-driven narrative (and very probably similar metanarratives). A mirror-stage identification with Amos via Gaiman’s mention of her is thus a highly subversive one. Despite Gaiman’s insistence that his character of Delirium in the Sandman series was not based on Amos (Rogers 51), Delirium’s refusal to accept an ordered consensus reality bound by laws taps into the same subversion, making her a fan favorite as she namelessly interpellates Amos’s audience, and often uncannily, her appearance:

  getShim(‘http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_1/reed/’,’4010207′, ‘7’, ‘539’,’541′,’jpg’,’1′,”, ”);

    Figure 7. Publicity photographs of Tori Amos juxtaposed with Delirium from Sandman, issue 47, p. 19, 15, and Sandman: Endless Nights, p. 119. (The second photograph has been reversed.)

17

That fact that Delirium is at other times drawn without Amos-esque features and that Gaiman himself insists that the character is not, in fact, based on Amos (Rogers 51) serve to underscore interpellation as audiencial; we still turn around when a name only similar to ours is shouted.

18

In contrast to this rewarding of humanist, feminist, and mischievous features, when a listener is called into identification with Gaiman in the music and to the gaze of Amos, it is through his ability to provide climactic change, to move along the narrative (as shown musically) and to resolve it (as shown lyrically) that she or he identifies. The Ideal-I here is one who brings structure and narrative as a performative act for the “authentic” and female Other. This identification is with an embodiment that filters raw and unresolved source material, allowing it to grow beyond its own stasis, or even amorphism.

19

The role that listeners assume here is one whose power grows by further empowering the Other in whose gaze it performs, while the role that readers assume upon “catching” Amos in Gaiman is one whose power comes from disrupting the Other’s power. Therein is the essential difference between the mutual reference that Gaiman and Amos make gamelike.

20

The economic qualification of this entire system of interpellation and reflection has been noted earlier; it is through familiarity with (and very probably ownership of) these texts that consumers are drawn into personal connection with the artists and into social connection with one another – a self-perceived elite to whom the texts “speak.” This ideal audience is then the hub of Gaiman and Amos’s remarkable dialogue of personality, exploding the role of alternating identification into a collective imaginary in which real economic multitudes – Gaiman’s last novel was a New York Times #1 bestseller and Amos has sold 15 million albums – buy into a shared navigation between the disrupting and granting of social and structural power.

21

Between Neil Gaiman’s flirtations with the mythic and Tori Amos’s impressionistic self-portraiture, their friendship as presented in their public works is an encoded one that inspires curiosity and devotion in audiences, drawing them in with sincere advertisement. Within the social and economic operations of textual mediation through such individuals, the variable that allows the authors’ commentary on one another to have difference and thereby to take meaning is revealed to us in the ways that readers and listeners take on the name, image, and idealized reflection of each author, searching to bridge the imaginary in the give and take of words and song.

The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Christina Berry, Leslie Polzien, and “Navi” in tracking down tour pro

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Appendix 1: Partial list of mutual Gaiman/Amos references

1991: Amos sings, “If you need me, me and Neil will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says hi, by the way,” on “Tear In Your Hand,” from Little Earthquakes.

1992: In her sheet music book of Little Earthquakes, Amos positions the writing of “Precious Things” in the context of her having been “Heavily into the sandman comics by now” (40).

1992: In Sandman issue #41, Gaiman quotes “Tear In Your Hand” as playing in a bondage club in which Delirium is lost (9).

1994: Amos sings, “Seems I keep getting this story twisted, so where’s Neil when you need him?” on “Space Dog,” from Under the Pink.

1994: Gaiman writes a piece called “Hi, by the way” in Amos’s concert program for her tour in support of Under the Pink.

1994: In Sandman issue #60, Gaiman shows a Tori Amos poster in Rose Walker’s room (12).

1994: In Sandman issue #67, Gaiman has Rose identify herself as “more of a cornflakes girl,” referencing Amos’s 1994 single “Cornflake Girl” (22).

1994: Amos writes the introduction to the collected edition of Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living.

1994: Gaiman places a poster for Under the Pink in a scene in issue #2 of Death: The Time of Your Life (18).

1996: Amos sings, “I will find you, but will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?” on “Horses,” from Boys for Pele.

1996: Gaiman writes a piece called “December 7, 1995” in Amos’s concert program for the Dew Drop Inn tour in support of Boys for Pele. The piece is about a piano-playing girl and contains numerous references to the album.

1997: Amos contributes a review of Gaiman’s Neverwhere for quotation on the book’s back cover.

1998: Gaiman “casts Tori Amos as a talking tree” in Stardust (Amos and Gaiman 83).

1998: Amos releases “Sister Desire,” whose possible reference to the Gaiman character of Desire is bolstered with its inclusion on the 2006 compilation Where’s Neil When You Need Him?, an authorized collection of various artists’ songs based on Gaiman’s works, and to which Gaiman himself contributes liner notes.

1998: Amos sings, “Where are the Velvets?” on “Hotel,” from From the Choirgirl Hotel, a reference to characters from Neverwhere.

2001: Gaiman writes companion pieces (published on Amos’s web site) for each of Amos’s cover songs on Strange Little Girls. These were later republished in his 2006 anthology Fragile Things.

2002: Amos sings “Get me Neil on the line… have him read ‘Snow, Glass, Apples,'” on “Carbon,” from Scarlet’s Walk, referencing by name Gaiman’s short story.

2002: Gaiman writes “Pages Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky” for Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour program. It is republished in Fragile Things.

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References

Amos, Tori. “Beauty Queen/Horses.” Boys for Pele. New York: Atlantic Records, 1996.

—. “Carbon.” Scarlet’s Walk. New York: Sony, 1998.

—. “Tear In Your Hand.” Little Earthquakes. New York: Atlantic Records, 1991.

—. “Hotel.” From the Choirgirl Hotel. New York: Atlantic Records, 1998.

—. Introduction. Death: The High Cost of Living. By Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo et al. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

—. Little Earthquakes sheet music. New York: Amsco Music, 1992.

—. “Space Dog.” Under the Pink. New York: Atlantic Records, 1994.

Amos, Tori and Neil Gaiman. “How We Met.” The Independent. October 10, 1999.

Burns, Lori and Alyssa Woods. “Authenticity, Appropriation, Signification: Tori Amos on Gender, Race, and Violence in Covers of Billie Holiday and Eminem.” Music Theory Online, 10.2 (1994). <Gaiman, Neil. “Hi, by the way.” Tori Amos: Under the Pink Tour Program. New York: Atlantic Records, 1994.

—. “December 7, 1995.” Tori Amos: The Dew Drop Inn Tour Program. New York: Atlantic Records, 1996.

—. “Politics, Portugal, and no gumbo-limbo trees.” <

// “>http://www.neil…no-gumbo-limbo.asp

>.

Gaiman, Neil, Chris Bachalo et al. Death: The Time of Your Life, #2. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

Gaiman, Neil, Marc Hempel et al. Sandman, #60. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

—. Sandman, #67. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

Gaiman, Neil, Bill Sienkiewicz et al. Sandman: Endless Nights. New York: DC Comics, 2003.

Gaiman, Neil, Jill Thompson et al. Sandman, #41. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

—. Sandman, #47. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

Gaiman, Neil and Charles Vess. Stardust. New York: DC Comics, 1998.

Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” in Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.

Rogers, Kalen. Tori Amos: All These Years. New York: Omnibus, 1994.

Whiteley, Sheila. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.