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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Do you find it hard not to use those protective devices?
It's become pretty apparent that no matter what I really do or say, there are certain ways that people are going to perceive me. And it's just gotten to the point where I can't do anything about it, so I don't worry about it that much. I just make up songs that to me feel human. And they're bound to be seen by some people as confessional or depressing, some sort of real one-way assessment that is not how they are to me. I don't worry as much as I did before. There's no point in me trying to control stuff like that.
To be able to not worry about that must be incredibly liberating.
Yeah. And it's really easy not to worry about all that, except for the persistent questions that come up. Maybe not in this interview, but in a lot of them. "Why are you so sad?"
Well, I think that's also a result of sincerity making people uncomfortable. They struggle for a way to label things, especially things that really maybe touch them. There's a fear of someone who has allowed himself to convey feelings that may feel too intimate to some people.
Some people are afraid that if they don't seem like some sort of perpetual winner all the time, if they don't make a lot of money and wear expensive cologne and go to all the right places, that then people are going to think that they're some sort of loser. But just because people have a range of emotions and thoughts which can coexist at the same time and at times sometimes they get ecstatically happy about something and at others times ridiculously depressed, doesn't mean that there's something wrong with them when they're sad and that they are only successful, good Americans when they're happy, when everything's going right for them. The media is always telling people to look better and go shopping more and present an image of prosperity and you can only do that so much before you're presenting that even to yourself all the time. So if you do go see a movie and the ending isn't happy, it may be a great movie, but you end up feeling inordinately depressed because you've been blocking out your own feelings. There must be some reason why I always get these questions, which to me seem like totally surface things about my music. There's a lot in my music that I find happy and optimistic, in both the melody and the lyrics.
I think it has elements of both happiness and sadness, which to me is part of that honesty. If you were happy all the time or sad all the time --
It would be boring! There's a few bands that just do one thing all the time, that I like. Like the Ramones. You know how they do that thing? And it's really cool. But for me the more emotions you can put on a record, without making it such a weird roller coaster that it's hard to listen to, the better.
You haven't filmed many videos at all, but you just completed one for the new album. In your analogy you referred to your songs as films. How was it translating music into image?
The first thing I noticed was that it's a lot more fun when there's not some big, pushy production company getting in the director's way, trying to dumb it down so that it is as much like already existing videos as possible. It was mainly just fun for me to run around. And there was a tiny little aspect of acting in it that I really enjoyed. There's a story in the video that Autumn De Wilde (the video's director) made up, that I really like. It's almost like her interpretation of the song was better than mine. Sometimes it seems like because I'm the one that made it up, it makes me kind of a bad person to ask what the songs are about. But the video has some happiness and sadness and some comical aspects, too. The only video that wasn't fun was "Ms. Misery," and that was because there was a team of people who really couldn't give a shit that it was my song. It was just kind of negative. It was being directed by a friend of mine and they ended up just stepping on his toes all the way through it and the result was that it satisfied no one. Videos can be pretty cool, but most of the time, it's just an ad.
Have you ever thought of making films yourself?
No, not really. I kind of feel like I'm doing pretty good to have whatever get-up-and-go I have for music. I also have the energy to be interested in other things beside music, but I don't know if I have enough energy on a day-to-day basis to launch into a whole sort of complicated project. It seems like there's so many more people involved. I can't marshal a whole group of people.
