“You have to destroy things in order to create things. And I did destroy a really beautiful life.” Lucy Dacus announces new album Forever Is A Feeling, shares two new singles and North American tour dates
(Image credit: Andrew Benge/Redferns)
Having conquered the known world as one-third of indie rock supergroup Boygenius, Lucy Dacus has announced a new solo album, Forever Is A Feeling.
The follow-up to 2021’s Home Video, Forever Is A Feeling is set for release on March 28 via Polydor. And as a taste of what’s two come, Dacus has shared two singles from the record, Ankles and Limerence.
Speaking of her mind-set making the album, Dacus says, “I got kicked in the head with emotions. Falling in love, falling out of love. You have to destroy things in order to create things. And I did destroy a really beautiful life.”
“I think with this whole record, I wrote songs as things were happening,” Dacus tells Dazed. “A lot of the time, it’s taken years before I can write about something, but this is the first time I felt like I needed to write about my current emotions, for my own well-being, to express to myself what’s going on.”
“Sometimes I’m in the mood where I’m so happy, I wish I could live forever,” she adds. “But I think it’s silly that these people are trying to live forever, because they’re not going to do it. You have a limited amount of time, which should inspire you to just enjoy things. I see people like that, and I feel bad because they live constantly in fear, and I don’t want to live that way.”
Listen to the album’s first two singles below:
Lucy Dacus – Ankles (Official Music Video) – YouTube
The singer/songwriter has also announced a North American tour. She will play:
Apr 16: Philadelphia The Met, PA Apr 18: Washington, DC The Anthem Apr 21: Boston MGM Music Hall, MA Apr 23: New York Radio City Music Hall, NY Apr 25: Toronto Massey Hall, Canada Apr 29: Nashville Ryman Auditorium, TN
May 01: Chicago Theatre, IL May 05: St. Paul Palace Theatre, MN May 07: Kansas City Midland, MI May 09: Dallas Winspear Opera House, TX May 10: Austin Moody Amphitheatre, TX May 12: Denver Red Rocks Amphitheatre, CO May 14: Los Angeles The Greek Theatre, CA
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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.
In 2015, Baroness released their fourth album, Purple – the last to feature guitarist Peter Adams, who went on to focus on Valkyrie. Before that, though, he told Prog about how he discovered Camel – and the musical ambition Andy Latimer’s band had inspired in him.
“My parents raised me on good music in Virginia. They had a massive vinyl collection that I spent my youth thumbing through, so I got to listen to everything from The Allman Brothers to The Rolling Stones and tons of classic rock and blues.”
But my older brother Jake had the biggest influence on my musical taste. I knew about Pink Floyd when I was a kid, I love Gentle Giant, I’ve always liked Steve Hackett’s solo stuff, and Focus as well – I can really relate to all that – but Jake was the one who turned me on to Camel.
The first thing I heard of theirs was the live version of The Snow Goose, from A Live Record. It was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall; I think it’s an amazing record. It took me a minute to get into it, but once it had clicked, I was a major fan from then on.
Flight Of The Snow Goose (Live At Royal Albert Hall) – YouTube
At first I didn’t realise it was live. When the clapping came in, I was like, ‘This is live? That’s incredible!’ I had to hear the rest of Camel – I had to know what else this band had done, where they were going, what they were doing.
I went straight through their back catalogue. I really love their first self-titled album and a lot of stuff off Rain Dances but if I had to choose one, I’d say Moonmadness is probably my favourite. I love the flow of that album.
Right when people started carrying iPods, I borrowed one for a flight and I put Moonmadness on it. I remember it was a brilliant day, flying through the clouds and it was just the perfect soundtrack. I was listening to Air Born thinking, ‘This is great!’
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With Baroness, we’ve always had proggy bits but I would say it’s less and less these days compared to the past. I’ve thought about composing something on The Snow Goose scale though – I love that idea of taking something like a book, and trying to score it.
I read a lot of Robert Ruark and Peter Capstick, so who knows? Maybe we could do something with Hemingway’s Green Hills Of Africa? That’s the kind of stuff I love. Maybe one day…”
Bob Dylan this, Bob Dylan that. There’s been a lot of talk about Bob Dylan lately.
With the 2024 release — and phenomenal box office success — of A Complete Unknown starring Timothee Chalamet, the undeniably talented singer-songwriter has been at the front of a lot of people’s minds. Dylan is the subject of the film, but other characters, each integral to the American folk music scene of the early ’60s, surround him, including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Woody Gurthrie.
But those names are well-known. The fact of the matter is that “folk” (the genre is not always easy to define) artists like Dylan, Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Judy Collins, Donovan and other musical stars of their day were heavily influenced by a whole host of less famous people.
In the below list, we’re running down 10 Folk Acts That Deserved More Respect. Without these people – and frankly this is just the tip of the iceberg — its possible there may not have been a Dylan or a folk music movement at all.
1. The New Lost City Ramblers
Entire books have been written about the folk revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s, but to briefly summarize: in America in particular, a swath of young musicians began performing and recording songs that were written years before their own birth, often with a political bent to the lyrics, taking elements of country, blues and gospel and turning it into what would ultimately become the foundation of protest music. Put another way, as one of the movement’s chief influencers Woody Guthrie once said: “It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people.”
The New Lost City Ramblers strived for as authentic a sound as possible, recording old-time style music of the ’20s and ’30s with what was then quite new technology — they had one album literally titled Songs From the Depression. This might sound a bit boring to you now, but at the time it was a refreshing change of pace from “classic pop” type music — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, etc.
2. Carolyn Hester
Anybody who was anybody in the folk revival world was in Greenwich Village in the first half of the ’60s. Apart from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it was arguably the epicenter of folk music. That’s how you wound up with recordings like the one below, with Carolyn Hester inviting a very young, barely heard of Bob Dylan to play harmonica on her album. (This session would eventually lead to Dylan getting signed himself to Columbia Records.) In those days, Hester, who hailed from Waco, Texas, was dubbed “The Texas Songbird,” and was a regular performer at venues like the Gaslight Cafe, Gerde’s Folk City and more.
3. Richard Farina and Mimi Baez
We’re grouping Richard Farina and Mimi Baez together here on account of, well, the fact that they were married to one another from 1963 until Farina’s death in a motorcycle accident in 1966. In that time they became an important duo in the folk scene, recording both traditional songs and ones penned by Farina himself. His original works were often political in nature — “Birmingham Sunday,” one of his best known songs, which was later recorded by his wife’s older sister Joan Baez, was about the murder of four children in a bombing orchestrated by white supremacists. But he was also what we might consider now a sort of connecting figure between the beats of the early ’60s and the hippies of the later half. “He was a serial fabulist,” David Hajdu, author of Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, explained to The Guardian in 2016. “He made up wild stories about his life. He created a persona, and in him you can see the mercurial identity we know so well in artists from David Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga.”
4. Phil Ochs
It’s interesting how sometimes the most influential people in a given musical movement are often the ones with such little commercial success. Phil Ochs was that type, a sharp-witted songwriter who wrote some 200 songs in the span of roughly a decade, many of them in opposition to war and in support of civil rights. Among the artists who covered his songs: Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Cher, John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot and more. Ochs was a perfect example of what the folk revival wound up creating: a herd of singer-songwriters who found inspiration in the vein of historical folk music and used it to write material relevant to the present day.
5. The Roches
One thing that is important to understand about folk music is that it has experienced multiple shifts over the course of decades. The Roches, a trio of sisters, arrived during the sort of second wave of folk artists, the ones that followed people like Dylan and Baez by making music more along the lines of folk pop. In fact, the Roches got their break when Paul Simon hired them to sing backing vocals on his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Their self-titled debut album was produced by Robert Fripp — yes, the one from King Crimson. Here was proof that acoustic guitar-based arrangements and rich harmonies had a place in the musical tapestry of the ’70s, even if disco was all the rage.
6. Judee Sill
Judee Sill appeared to have everything going for her. She was the first person signed to David Geffen’s own Asylum record label, which would also release albums by Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and more. Plus, Sill’s first two albums were acclaimed by critics and it was clear she possessed serious songwriting talent. “You could tell that she was taking everything in,” Graham Nashsaid of Sill in 2021. Sill toured with Crosby, Stills & Nash for a time as their opening act, and Nash himself produced Sill’s first single, “Jesus Was a Cross Maker.” “If she saw an old man on a street corner flashing by, you knew that it might end up as a line in one of her songs. Because she didn’t say much, you didn’t really know how bright she was.” For all intents and purposes, she was primed to be one of Los Angeles’ biggest musical stars, right up alongside fellow SoCal dwellers like Neil Young, Cass Elliot and others. And yet, major commercial success evaded the delicate-voiced Sill, who unfortunately never finished her third album, dying of a drug overdose in 1979.
7. Lead Belly
“If there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan,” George Harrison purportedly once said. “No Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore no Lead Belly, no Beatles.” But one could also argue that no Lead Belly, no Bob Dylan either. Dylan was one of many who quite literally discovered various folk song standards through the singer/guitarist. “Transported me into a world I’d never known,” Dylan wrote in his 2016 Nobel Prize speech. “It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.” Lead Belly’s music, like other Black musicians of his era, received the most commercial success via the white artists who covered it, and it wasn’t until after his death that he earned more recognition for his work. But the fact of the matter remains: without Lead Belly, a whole generation of folk singers, rock ‘n’ rollers and blues lovers may not have existed the same way — and a certain someone may not have won a Nobel Prize.
8. Happy Traum
We could come up with a whole separate list titled something along the lines of “Integral Greenwich Village Folk Musicians.” Happy Traum would most definitely be on it, a member of the New World Singers, the group that recorded the first version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Traum was a consistent presence in both the studios of New York City and the local coffee houses, playing guitar with multiple different acts, including a duo with his brother Artie that Rolling Stone once said “defined the Northeast folk music style.” Traum embodied the kind of easy going, blues-adjacent style of finger picking that was then viewed as hip and informed, and could now be considered a building block for all acoustic guitar playing.
9. Jackson C. Frank
To be transparent: this writer has a special affinity for the late Jackson C. Frank since he also hails from Buffalo, New York. But he’s a bit different from the others on this list in that his eponymous debut album, which came out in 1965, was made in the U.K., where a similar folk revival was happening with artists like Donovan, Nick Drake and others. The album was produced by Paul Simon and was received well in England. Unfortunately, Frank’s mental health took a turn for the worse not long after and the remainder of his life was a difficult journey. His music, however, would ultimately be covered by the likes of John Mayer, Counting Crows, Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees and more.
10. David Blue
If you know the name David Blue you’ve probably seen clips from Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, or perhaps you’re a really dedicated Eagles fan. Blue is the writer behind “Outlaw Man,” which appeared on the Eagles’ 1973 album Desperado. Before that though, he was a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene, rubbing shoulders with all the people who would wind up world famous while Blue remained a cult artist of sorts. He’s also the man responsible for introducing Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne early on in their careers. “He knew everybody and he was there at the beginning,” singer/actress Ronee Blakley told Rolling Stone in 2020, “but he didn’t make it to the fullness of his talent and didn’t achieve the degree of success he deserved. It’s a difficult thing to predict. I don’t understand it. I really don’t.”
Top 100 ’60s Rock Albums
Here’s a chronological look at the 100 best rock albums of the ’60s.
According to a report by Forbes, Ozzy Osbourne has returned to the Billboard charts. He has scored a pair of Top 10 hits this month, as two of his most famous tracks have found their way onto the Hard Rock Digital Song Sales chart, which ranks the top-selling tunes in that genre across the US.
“Mama, I’m Coming Home” – originally released in November 1991 – has reappeared at #3, standing out as the loftiest return among all artists on the purchase-centric list. Meanwhile, “Crazy Train” – released in Augist 1980 – has landed at #5. The latter has spent a total of 217 weeks on the charts over the years.
“You’re 17, it’s a normal dumb night, then someone’s screaming, ‘Get on the floor!’ I’m gonna die. This is the end of my life”: The armed hold-up that set the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne on the road to music
(Image credit: Getty Images)
In 2020 the Flaming Lips were on a roll – literally. They’d come up with a plan to observe Covid regulations by performing in bubbles to support the launch of American Head, their second album in 18 months. Band leader Wayne Coyne told Prog its autobiographical nature included memories of an armed hold-up and dreams of living in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I don’t know if this album is prog rock, but it’s certainly in a classic rock style that could easily be considered prog, you know?” Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne is on the phone from a car outside his Oklahoma City home, discussing where his group’s current album, American Head, fits into the musical landscape.
If ever there was a band that made up their own rules, genres and stylistic templates, it’s the shape-shifting, psychedelically charged mavericks he’s fronted through countless experiments, detours, collaborations and reinventions since 1983.
One thing that American Head does have that Prog readers will instinctively understand is an over-arching concept, or at the very least a strong thematic basis knitting its 13 tracks together. And happily, it comes wrapped in some of the strongest, most evocative songs the band have written in years.
The seeds were planted when heartland rock icon Tom Petty passed away in 2017. “It affected us a lot,” says Coyne, “just like when Bowie died. But the thing that got my imagination going was that before the Heartbreakers they were called Mudcrutch, and they recorded sessions in Tulsa in the early 70s, just up the road from where we grew up in Oklahoma City.
The Flaming Lips – Flowers of Neptune 6 [Official Music Video] – YouTube
I would have been 12, 13 or so then, and my older brothers would go back and forth to Tulsa all the time – they knew drug dealers, bikers, all kinds of colourful people. So it’s kind of a fantasy of mine that my older brothers could have run into Mudcrutch. What if they’d stayed in Tulsa, got waylaid by the seedier side of the scene, and never become the Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers that we know. What would that album be like? Then we thought: what if we make it?
“The band already had “a couple of tracks that were like an Eagles record – the kind of gentle classic rock we always liked,” but at the same time they opted not to go fully down the method-acting route, and put some of their own identity in there too. “We wanted to veer away from the macho lyrics of that era,” says Coyne, “and maybe sing sad songs about our fucked-up families, about what might have happened in our own lives if fate had taken different turns, y’know?”
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We asked, ‘Is this really gonna work?’ Then we said, ‘We can do what we want – we’re The Flaming Lips!’
The “we” he speaks of encompasses his long-time lieutenant and co-songwriter Steven Drozd, who has a not dissimilar background to Coyne, with several wayward older siblings involved in countercultural shenanigans as far back as the late 60s. “We asked, ‘Is this really gonna work?’” says Coyne. “But then we said to ourselves, ‘We can do what we want – we’re The Flaming Lips!’”
There certainly seems to have been no limits to this band’s sense of adventure in the past. They’ve collaborated with everyone from Miley Cyrus to Yoko Ono, issued experiments such as Two Blobs Fucking – 12 YouTube videos designed to be played simultaneously – and presented The 24 Hour Song Skull, a day-long song on a memory stick presented inside, yes indeed, a skull.
The Flaming Lips – Mother Please Don’t Be Sad [Official Music Video] – YouTube
Last year’s album King’s Mouth was built around the tale, narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones, of a giant monarch who saved his subjects from an avalanche, and whose head was then cut off and cast in steel. Obviously. American Head’s themes are less cerebral and surreal, even if there’s a distinct dreamlike quality to them.
That’s because their lyrics are partly rooted in real events and people from Coyne and Drozd’s lives. Mother Please Don’t Be Sad, for instance, puts us in the place of a teenage Wayne as he apologises to his mum for not dropping by her house… because he’s about to die in an armed robbery. For several years, Coyne worked as a cook in Long John Silver’s fast food takeaway in Oklahoma City, and they were held up several times. The most terrifying incident is recalled on this song.
I was able to think, ‘I’m gonna try to be a musician and if people don’t like it who gives a fuck!’ It’s a very powerful way to be
“So you’re 17, just thinking it’s a normal dumb summer night. Then within a second, adrenaline is flying through you, your heart’s beating out of your chest and someone’s screaming, ‘Get on the floor, motherfuckers, get on the fuckin’ floor!’ And I really did lie on the floor thinking, ‘I’m gonna die. This is the end of my life.’ I thought about my mother – I would stop by on my way to or from work and drop off my uniform there, and she’ll worry where I’m at. And I thought, ‘Oh no, the police are going to show up and say, ‘I’m sorry, he was killed in a robbery.’
“So the song is me letting her know nothing can be done, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time… but of course, then I got to live! Which is the greatest gift you could ever have. And actually I thought anything was possible after that. It exposed me to how fucked up the world could be – but also how wonderful it can be. I think it kind of erased the insecure pettiness of being a teenager and I was able to think, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna try to be a musician, an artist, and if people don’t like it who gives a fuck!’ Which is a very powerful way to be.”
The Flaming Lips – You n Me Sellin’ Weed [Official Video] – YouTube
Other scenarios presented on the album include semi-autobiographical visions such as At The Movies On Quaaludes, Watching The Lightbugs Glow and You N Me Sellin’ Weed, reflecting roads not fully taken by the young Coyne and Drozd, as they grew up viewing early 70s counterculture through very young eyes.
“I clearly remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey was out,” Coyne says. “A couple of years after, it was still playing in movie theatres. I remember my older brothers talking with one of their supposedly wiser druggy friends, and they all dismissed even having a job because in the future we’re just going to live in outer space and listen to The Beatles; and being eight or nine years old, I bought into that utopia!
I’d tell myself, ‘I’m not going to be some street thug and have a fist fight every day. I just wanna play music’
“But while I got more into the music, my brothers got more immersed in the drug culture side of things. The song You N Me Sellin’ Weed is about when I was 16, and everyone was smoking and doing drugs. We knew some of the more organised pot dealers, and it just seemed like this is the way we’re all gonna make money – this isn’t wrong.
“But there’s a whole other side of violence and greed and it’s horrible and destructive. Seeing the effects on some of our brothers and their friends – people dying in motorcycle accidents, put in jail, drug deals gone bad… I would say to myself, ‘I’m just not that tough; I’m not going to be some street thug and have a fist fight every day. I just wanna play music.’”
The Flaming Lips – At The Movies On Quaaludes [Official Video] – YouTube
It’s fair to say that criminality’s loss has been music’s gain, but these visions of an alternate history lend American Head a vivid nostalgic colour, and their roots in real life add emotional weight to some powerful tunes.
Coyne turns 60 in January, but shows no signs of slowing down his and The Lips’ creative output. His latest project is a plan to circumvent the current Covid restrictions on live shows in a style glimpsed in the video to this album’s lead single, Flowers Of Neptune 6, where he walked around in a giant bubble.
“We’ve been thinking about doing shows in space bubbles – Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, where the Sex Pistols once played, is a big venue we were thinking of trying. If we can’t do normal shows for the foreseeable future, could we do them with everyone in sealed bubbles?”
Inspired by their bubbled performance on The Late Show, the band trialled the idea at the Criterion in Oklahoma City in October and, at time of press, had two full concerts scheduled for December at the same venue. If anyone can pull it off, they surely can. For now, though, there seem like few better places to be than inside his uniquely inventive American head.
The Flaming Lips – Brother Eye [Live Video] – YouTube
Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.
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Talking Heads: Remain In Light
(Image credit: Sire Records)
Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) Crosseyed and Painless The Great Curve Once in a Lifetime Houses in Motion Seen and Not Seen Listening Wind The Overload
Talking Heads weren’t very far behind Television when it came to the early pioneering of post-punk aesthetics, and truthfully any of their albums released before this, their fourth record, could represent the band and the history of the genre beautifully.
Remain In Light is different. It’s a truly unique album, with funk, afrobeat and early hip-hop rhythms seamlessly merging with their more abrasive art-rock ideas. It also acted as proof of the band’s ability to crossover to a more mainstream audience, giving them their first US Billboard top 20 album and a worldwide smash hit single in the iconic Once In A Lifetime.
“My favourite album is Remain In Light by Talking Heads,” comedian Bill Bailey told Classic Rock. “It’s one of those that keeps coming round and round. I was in my teens when it came out in 1980. I’d heard Once In A Lifetime and that was it, I got the album, and I’ve been playing it ever since.”
Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.
More George Thorogood and the Destroyers – George Thorogood and the Destroyers
On the Edge – The Babys
Seconds Of Pleasure – Rockpile
Greener Postures – Snakefinger
What they said…
“Polyrhythmic, lyrically cryptic and featuring one of the most awesomely weird guitar solos of all time (Adrien Belew’s blippy genius on Born Under Punches), Remain in Light stands as David Byrne and company’s masterpiece. It’s rooted in tradition, yet it sounds delightfully futuristic – even three decades after its initial release.” (Paste)
“The album presents such a strange artistic vision, foreign to what came before but operating as though it were the culmination of a long tradition, that it seems to declare the power of weirdness itself. To be not just strange but singular, to reinvent a form in a way that you can dance to, to smuggle beer into the museum: This is the visceral thrill of art. We want to deny it on theoretical grounds, but we can’t. So we must revise our theories.” (Pitchfork)
“Remain in Light had more words than any previous Heads record, but they counted for less than ever in the sweep of the music. The album’s single, Once in a Lifetime, flopped upon release, but over the years it became an audience favourite due to a striking video, its inclusion in the band’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, and its second single release (in the live version) because of its use in the 1986 movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills, when it became a minor chart entry.” (AllMusic)
What you said…
Greg Schwepe: The FM rock station I listened to during my formative music-moulding years played pretty much your standard Midwest US rock fare; Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Boston, Pink Floyd, Bob Seger, Aerosmith…you get the picture. But it seems the Program Director also had a little “new wave” streak as this same station also provided me my first listens of The Police, Gary Numan, The Pretenders, Joe Jackson, and yes…Talking Heads. And while it was Take Me To The River that I heard first, something stuck with me about the song and band even though it was not your standard “plug a Les Paul into a Marshall and crank it to 11” type music.
Fast forward a year or two and I’m at college and get involved with our little 10 watt radio station (“WUSO…89.1 commercial free…” went the tagline). I quickly learn what college/indie/alternative radio is and that most of the stuff I hear on the station or see printed on the playlists posted around campus, I’ve never even heard of. But strangely enough… I like it!
Interesting in that before MTV, the internet, and streaming, your musical tastes were shaped by the radio stations you could pick up, what records were stocked at your local record store, and what music magazines were sold at your local newsstand. I can tell you that none of these new wave/alternative bands ever graced the pages of the Circus magazines I used to buy! I show up at college and there’s a whole new world of music now available to me.
Our station had a bunch of favourite bands that the staff, DJs and campus seemed to like. Bands that pretty much got played so much that all their albums were kept in the bin right in the booth, eliminating the need for you to run back to the record library to retrieve them. And you guessed it…Talking Heads were one of those bands (and not surprisingly, the other new wave bands I listed above too). I was now aware that they had even more albums than the one Take Me To The River was on, and one of those was Remain In Light.
Right off the bat, I will call Remain In Light frenetic, busy, and with a lot going on. But somehow, not overwhelming. Sometimes you get stuff that’s “a little weird, quirky, and quiet.” The first half of this album is not quiet by any stretch of the imagination. BOOM, it rattles you right at the start. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) certainly delivers a punch. Beats, beats, and more beats. Busy, busy, busy!
Crosseyed and Painless and The Great Curve follow with more of the same hypnotic groove that keeps you locked in. Then comes Once In a Lifetime with the memorable quotable lyrics. And once MTV came around, you got to see David Byrne do his funky dance and if this song came on during a party you were at… you’d definitely saw one or two people imitating Byrne’s moves. More catchy grooves to keep you attached during Houses In Motion.
The album finally starts to slow down a little with the hypnotic Seen and Not Seen. More repeating beats. Repeating beats. Throughout the album we are also treated to the guitar treatments of Adrian Belew (who, by no surprise became a radio station favourite once he released a solo album).
The final two tracks, Listening Wind and The Overload descend into atmospheric, slightly trippy tracks that are almost opposite bookends to the first two tracks. These final tracks are as low key as the first two are totally jacked up. Lets the listener slowly finish the album out but still stay engaged.
At the end of the day, not everything Talking Heads did is everyone’s cup of tea. The band is either “Weird and quirky, but I like them” or “Weird and quirky, and I don’t like them.” For some, David Byrne’s yips and squawks can be a little much. As I mentioned at the beginning of my review, I was surprised how much I liked Talking Heads, even with them being the total opposite of a lot of other stuff I listened to. 8 out of 10 for me on this one. The first of many college radio finds. “Wait… there’s more new stuff I can listen to?”
Mike Canoe: Let’s answer the primary question up front. Not only do I think Remain In Light is indisputably the best Talking Heads album, it’s one of the best albums by anyone ever. The first time I heard it, to paraphrase The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, my brain grew three sizes that day. It was so innovative and introduced me to things like Afrobeat and polyrhythms – even if I didn’t yet know them by name. Just as importantly, it introduced to Brian Eno in his role as producer.
It’s cliché to say that Remain In Light is an album with no bad songs on it but it’s the exception that proves the rule. It’s also cliché to say that the one hit, Once in a Lifetime, is not even the best song on the album. It’s certainly one of the best songs but an argument could be made for any of the seven others as well.
There’s the insanely danceable, The Great Curve, with its immortal lyric, “the world moves on a woman’s hips...,” the cautionary tale of Seen and Not Seen backed by a gentle humming melody, to Listening Wind, which took me a long time to realize that the titular “wind” was actually a bomb blast. Then there’s the closer, absolutely crushing in every sense of the word, The Overload. “A terrible signal…too weak to even recognize…a gentle collapsing….” Woo! Goosebumps every time.
As alluded to above, the lyrics are a big part of what I love about the album, but now the jittery paranoia found in songs like Animals or Psycho Killer were embedded in a swirling mix of funk, pop, world music, and brilliant noise. David Byrne delivers his lyrics in anything from yips to gasps to shouts to whispers and the musicianship is outstanding. It took me a lot longer to understand and appreciate the contributions of the additional musicians like Adrian Belew and Nona Hendryx but they are essential to the big sound of the album.
A final cliché to wrap things up: Never meet your heroes – or, at least, don’t learn too much about them if you want to appreciate the music unsullied. My love of Remain In Light, and the Talking Heads and Eno, in general, dimmed somewhat when I learned about the egos, power plays, and general acrimony in and around the band. It was good to listen to it again with relatively fresh years this week. It is a truly outstanding album.
John Davidson: Most of the classic rock and prog albums we review are enjoyed by a strange intersection of bikers, potheads, science geeks and old school DnD players. Talking Heads on the other hand is music for art (humanities) students.
I was surprised to see this album was released in 1980. It feels like it’s from a few years later. It tries very hard to be avant garde, with vocal and guitar loops over poly rhythmic percussion. But for the most part I just found it dull. It’s well made for sure, but it’s not for me.
Evan Sanders: Remain In Light is an amazing Talking Heads album, maybe not their best, but certainly the one where they made it clear that they were not a punk-new wave outfit. As a punk fan in the 70s and 80s, I admit I didn’t like this one at first, as it was too much world music for me rather than songs like Psycho Killer.
However, the changes in the band had been quite clear in their earlier efforts, from several of the songs on Fear of Music, e.g. I Zimbra, the gospel-tinged Take Me To The River on their second album, and more. My only complaint about Remain In Ligh, is that the album loses steam in the last three songs, which seem more like demos. Due to that, either Fear of Music or Speaking In Tongues get my vote for best Talking Heads studio album, while Stop Making Sense is my favourite overall.
Mark Herrington: In answer to the question “Is this their best album?“, it very much depends on your taste. My personal favourite is 1979’s Fear Of Music which has a darker, more hypnotic feel throughout. It feels more consistent and thematic than this.
Remain In Light has a number of stand-out classic tracks and some lesser songs – so feels less fluid to me. Even though its highlights are probably better tracks overall, it doesn’t move me and get under my skin the way Fear… does.
Peter Barron: I prefer Fear Of Music, but not by much.
Brian Carr: I never listened to much Talking Heads music – always thought they were outside the realms of what moves me. During a partial spin through Remain In Light this afternoon, it struck me as rather repetitive within each song. That said, it also struck me that, in the right mood, I might actually like it reasonably well.
Adrian Bolster: I walked into a pub in Manchester a few weeks ago, Gullivers in the Northern Quarter, and The Overload was playing on the jukebox. I knew my son had brought me to the right place. £1 for 5 tracks made the afternoon fly by! This is a masterpiece in music, not just for Talking Heads.
Mal Gilliatt: Who would have thought after a lifetime listening to hard rock and heavy metal I would later on discover Talking Heads and realise how good music could really be. Stop Talking Sense has got to be one of the greatest concert movies of all time !
Philip Qvist: I like Speaking In Tongues, I loved their live Stop Making Sense video and there is a lot that I like about Remain In Light and Little Creatures, but Talking Heads is another one of those bands where I would be more than happy to have just a Greatest Hits compilation in my collection.
Remain In Light starts off well with Born Under Punches, Crosseyed And Painless and the Great Curve, but the album sort of runs out of steam after Houses In Motion – while I still prefer the single version of Once In A Lifetime. Plenty of percussion was used on the album, while guest guitarist Adrian Belew added some nice touches on the record.
Good production work from Brian Eno (even if he seemed to have ruffled a few feathers in the Talking Heads camp), while David Byrne’s lyrics were wonderfully wacky as usual.
So all in all, a very good album but not a classic for me – and the less said about the cover, the better. It’s pretty bad in my opinion – but hey, others may like it.
Ben L. Connor: This isn’t just Talking Heads’ greatest album, it’s one of the best albums ever made by anyone. I’ve listened to this album dozens of times, and I still find myself discovering new riffs and licks buried amongst the flurry of sounds and ideas.
Gary Claydon: One of those albums that rewards repeated listening. Interesting but no masterpiece. I was a fan of Eno from his Roxy Music days. His introduction threw fuel on the previously smouldering embers of internecine strife between Byrne and his bandmates. Why is it that conflict so often heightens the creative process? Worth the price of admission for The Overload alone, Remain In Light also suffers from trying to be too clever simply for the sake of it. 7/10.
Neil Immerz: I’ll say this about the band (and I’ve wanted to for a long time) – they are not punk. Ok so they played CBGB’s back in the 70s like Blondie did, but that doesn’t make them a punk band. They are a rock/pop band. Ffs, the sex pistols and Ramones were more ‘punk’ than these guys ever could’ve been.
As for this album, Once In A Lifetime is my favourite song off it. Thats it.
Wesley Winegarden: After years of listening to the whole Talking Heads catalogue obsessively, I still put this album at #3 in the band’s recording output, behind Fear Of Music and their best album Speaking In Tongues.
Don’t get me wrong though, this is still a 5-star album, or if we’re doing ½s, a 4½ star album filled with glorious experiments in sound. I still hear new things every time I listen to it. My only gripe, and it is a tiny one, is that some of the experiments sound unfinished, especially in the latter part of the album; my brother used to say (back in the days of vinyl) that Once In A Lifetime was only put on side-two to force people to turn the album over and listen to the second side.
I tend to agree, the first four tracks on this album are amongst the best of the band’s amazing output, but the last four to me, sound like they were “works in progress” that they never finished. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the last half of the album just doesn’t work for me… Maybe, Tina, Jerry and Chris had had enough of Burns and Eno’s collective egos by then and just called it finished.
Chris Elliott: I was 14 in 1980 and this wasn’t Psycho Killer, soit passed me by. It was an album I discovered probably six years later. It’s a thing of rare beauty, and one of those records that opened my ears to a wider palette. It’s been an actual pleasure to hear again.
Final score: 8.50 (38 votes cast, total score 323)
Classic Rock is the online home of the world’s best rock’n’roll magazine. We bring you breaking news, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes features, as well as unrivalled access to the biggest names in rock music; from Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple, Guns N’ Roses to the Rolling Stones, AC/DC to the Sex Pistols, and everything in between. Our expert writers bring you the very best on established and emerging bands plus everything you need to know about the mightiest new music releases.
Professor Of Rock has released the video below, along with the following introduction:
“Today we’ve got a super-sized episode coming your way… featuring Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, a song so epic that it began as 24 separate songs; songs that the band didn’t know what to do with. In fact, they called them ‘Nothing, Parts 1-24’. Well, when Pink Floyd did figure it out, what they had on their hand was a song so monumental that it changed the course of their entire career and rock music, jumpstarting The Dark Side Of The Moon, one of the best-selling and most iconic albums of all time. But the intrigue doesn’t end there. ‘Echoes’ may also have an unexpected connection to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, a two-thousand-year-old volcanic blast, and an anti-Woodstock concert played to an empty stadium. We’ve got an incredible story from one of my all-time favorite bands, coming up… Next on the Professor of Rock.”
Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta will bring Thrash Thursdays to The Cellar in Hamden, CT on January 30th and February 20th. Jasta will perform two different sets with guests and support TBA. Both shows will be filmed for music video shoots. Do not miss these intimate thrash bashes. Tickets and VIP are on sale now, capacity is limited. Go to this location for more information.
Bloodstock TV’s Oran O’Beirne recently sat down with Jasta, who opened up on all the latest Hatebreed news, using Metallica-inspired artwork for his solo album, his new record label, and much more. Watch the video below.
Asked if Hatebreed will be releasing new music in 2025, Jasta answers, “Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, we’re actually free agents right now, so we’re talking to everybody, seeing what the options are. And I’ve been doing my own label, and I have record coming out from Keith Buckley from Many Eyes, he’s doing Many Eyes now. Obviously he had many great records with Every Time I Die, and now this is the new project for him. And I had a Corpsegrinder record come out, and I’ve been working with Ripper, so people said, ‘stop producing all these records and do your own damn record.’ It’s time, yeah.”
Hatebreed are:
Jamey Jasta – Vocals Chris Beattie – Bass Wayne Lozinak – Guitar Frank Novinec – Guitar Matt Byrne – Drums
“It’s only afterwards that you realise, ‘Hey, Kayak could really have been something.’.”; the story of the Dutch proggers and their 2018 album Seventeen
(Image credit: Press)
Dutch proggers Kayak came close to breaking America in the 70s, but a number of factors got in the way. In 2018, when the band released Seventeen, Kayak’s last remaining original member Ton Scherpenzeel looked back over their career and discussed what went wrong, his hopes for the future and his fear of flying…
Nor should there be any, of course. Kayak’s history dates back to 1972, when the teenaged Scherpenzeel and drummer Pim Koopman became friends at a volleyball club in Hilversum. The pair knew their eventual lead vocalist Max Werner as a fellow student at a local music conservatory, completing the team with guitarist Johan Slager and bassist Cees van Leeuwen. The band achieved huge success right off the bat with the following year’s debut album See See The Sun and its hits, Lyrics and Mammoth.
“We were very young then. Too young, in fact,” Scherpenzeel considers. “They called us a supergroup, but we hadn’t even left Holland. All the same, with two Top 20 singles at home, it was as good a start as anyone could have wished for.”
For a period of five albums, Kayak enjoyed stability, until, in a reverse ‘Phil Collins in Genesis’ scenario, Max Werner decided to abandon the mic and become a drummer. The timing of such a switch could not have been any worse, as 1978 had seen their single, Want You To Be Mine, reach Number 55 on America’s Billboard chart and threaten to climb higher still. Forced to seek a replacement singer and unable to tour there thanks to Scherpenzeel’s fear of flying, Kayak’s American dream was abandoned to wither and die.
“Max hated his own voice – he had never wanted to be the lead singer when we started,” Scherpenzeel states. “So he told us, ‘If you want me to remain in the band, I will drum.’ He wasn’t the best drummer in the world, but we rationalised that if he stayed, we’d still have his voice along the drums, and we’d find a new singer. In those days, without the internet, America felt a lot further away than it does now. Everything was done by letters and phone calls but without having to change things around something very big could have happened for Kayak there.”
Decades afterwards, disappointment can still be heard in Scherpenzeel’s voice. To have come within touching distance must have been especially heartbreaking?
“At the time, the full significance didn’t really dawn on me,” he admits. “We had a number one album in Holland and we were busy, but it’s only afterwards when you see the paperwork and statistics, when they’re out there on the internet, that you realise, ‘Hey, Kayak could really have been something.’”
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(Image credit: InsideOut Music)
In 1982, the group called it a day due to what Scherpenzeel now describes as “a combination of many different setbacks, including financial issues and personal and musical problems”. The fact that Max Werner had a solo hit in Germany represented an additional hurdle. “There were also difficulties with our manager and we just didn’t function anymore,” Scherpenzeel relates sadly. “The spirit was gone: it was like Spinal Tap all over again.”
Scherpenzeel used Kayak’s absence to join Camel from 1984 onwards. With the two bands sharing a US label, Janus Records, Scherpenzeel was thrilled to hook up with Andy Latimer and company, alternating between full-time band membership and touring muso status and appearing on Stationary Traveller, the live album Pressure Points, Dust And Dreams and Rajaz. It was the keyboardist’s problems with aviation that made it difficult for this relationship to continue. Despite having sought various potential remedies, things haven’t really changed for him.
“If it is not really necessary for me to fly, I won’t do it,” he sighs.
Almost two decades after they broke up, Kayak were invited to appear on a popular Dutch TV show. Things went so well that Scherpenzeel had no qualms with a permanent reunion, though this wasn’t as simple as it sounds.
“I had remained in contact with Pim Koopman, the other important member of the band who, besides drumming, also wrote and produced, and we took things slowly at the start,” he relates.
In fact, Scherpenzeel and Koopman first discussed working together again in 1995, but it would take a further four years for Kayak to be reborn. “We had a manager who forbade us to use the name,” Scherpenzeel explains. “He was a lunatic – a genius, but a lunatic all the same. It took his death in ’98 for us to receive the all-clear.”
Regrettably, Koopman also died unexpectedly in 2009. In 2014, several line-ups later, a further obstacle arose when Kayak lost co-lead singers Edward Reekers and Cindy Oudshoorn before a tour for the rock opera Cleopatra – The Crown Of Isis, a project that the group had spent two years preparing for. Kayak’s current biography pointedly describes those exits as “unexpected and inconvenient”.
“I cannot say it any better than that,” comments Scherpenzeel through gritted teeth. Kayak replaced a man and woman with a solitary male – Bart Schwertmann – and their latest, all-new line-up also includes Kristoffer Gildenlöw, formerly of Pain Of Salvation, though Scherpenzeel played most of the album’s bass parts himself.
So belated was Kayak’s tie-in with InsideOut that, following a Pledge Music campaign, an original pre-sale date was delayed. However, Scherpenzeel is thrilled by the possibilities of association with one of the biggest and most forward-thinking labels of the genre.
“This is the first time in 12 or 13 years that we’ve had a record label,” he chuckles. “Self-releasing your music is fine, but the experience taught us that to take things further you really do need extra support.”
(Image credit: Press)
Kayak’s music is certainly blessed with commercial potential. The tracks Somebody and God On Our Side, for instance, are melodic enough to pass as pop songs, though at 11 and 10 mins respectively the grander pieces La Peregrina and Walk Through Fire really allow them to stretch out.
“For me, music must sound organic – it’s not a matter of how clever it is,” Scherpenzeel stresses. “I love shorter songs just as much as the epic ones. Those are more of an adventure, but the format of verse-chorus-verse-chorus is just as fulfilling. Pop music has been a part of our repertoire: we are a two-sided band and that has sometimes confused our audience, but it’s something that I cannot change.”
Andy Latimer is a guest on Ripples On The Water, a beautiful instrumental piece that Scherpenzeel wrote intentionally for the guitarist.
“Andy has such a style, he plays one note and you know it’s him,” Scherpenzeel smiles. “I’ve always loved Camel’s music. His playing and my own are a good fit, I think. We come from the same soul. Maybe I’ll go back to Camel someday: it’s up to Andy.”
In the meantime, Kayak look set to be busy over the next couple of years. As mentioned above, they last performed in the UK back in March 1977 on a bill with Jan Akkerman and singer Kaz Lux who were promoting their concept album Eli.
“Jan didn’t want to play any Focus material which left the audiences disappointed, so it was cut short,” Scherpenzeel recalls.
Unfortunately, this was the band’s one and only foray to Britain to date. After such a long time, of course Scherpenzeel is anxious to return under more favourable circumstances. And luckily, with just the English Channel between our two nations, transatlantic flights are unnecessary.
“No,” he laughs. “European gigs are always possible – I did some two years ago with Camel. Of course Kayak want to play wherever possible. It’s all down to budgets. If people buy the album, everywhere we can play we will play. After three weeks the bus gets stinky, but I love being on the road.”
Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.
“I like to push some of those buttons. I like the fact that people have a problem with what we’re doing”: How Metallica kicked back against the 1990s haters with Reload
(Image credit: Niels van Iperen/Getty Images)
Thanks to a shift in sound and image, Metallica’s mid-90s period was the most divisive era of their career to that point. But in this classic interview from the Metal Hammer archives, originally published on the eve of the release of 1997’s Reload album, we found drummer Lars Ulrich in defiant mood – and ready to push back against the haters.
To say that life has been pretty hectic for Metallica recently would be something of an understatement. The all too familiar last gasp dash for the finishing line that seems to have accompanied the majority of the band’s recording sessions over the years has been undertaken (and acheived – just_, albeit with the self-imposed hurdles of weekend of festival dates and the small matter of James Hetfield’s wedding, and the band are already behind with the video shoot for new single The Memory Remains.
Thus when, after being asked how he’s doing, Lars Ulrich replies: “I’m still breathing!”, you can almost sense the genuine relief behind the tongue-in-cheek flippancy. “I’m in an airport in LA in the midst of a video shoot,” he continues, battling the combined effects of static interference and a failing transatlantic mobile phone signal. “So if I’m suddenly called away. you’ll have to excuse me…”
Absolutely. The Metallica promotional machine is picking up speed and, like time and tide, it waits for no man…
The reason for all this palaver is Reload, the band’s new album. Now in the general scheme of things, we’re lucky if two new Metallica albums appear in the same decade, but Reload is the second in as many years, following last year’s Load. Was that a pig I just saw flying past the window?
“We went into the studio in the summer of 1995 to record our sixth album as a double album; we had 27 songs that we had written and we recorded all 27 of them in the summer and fall of 1995, around the Donington gig.” explains Lars. “Then in January of 96, Peter and Cliff [Mensch and Burnstein, Metallica’s management duo] came out to San Francisco and told us that Lollapalooza were interested in having us play their festival, and at that time, we’d been in the studio for seven or eight months and we were getting kind of bored and a little restless.
“So we said, ‘Okay, instead of finishing all this material and making it a double album, why don’t we just divide it into two different records, put one out in the summer, go and play Lollapalooza, have a quick nip around the world, go in and finish the rest of the songs, and put another record out next year?’ That was the plan we made in January 1996 and that’s the plan we stuck to, it’s really that simple. Load and Reload, as far as I’m concerned, is just the double album spread out over a year and a half. It is two records of equal weight, of equal substance, of equal importance. It’s not an ‘A’ record and a bunch of leftovers put on a ‘B’ record or anything like that. It’s 14 songs and 13 songs that are all interchangeable with each other. The cover’s interchangeable, the pictures are interchangeable, the whole layout, everything. The best example would be to say if [Guns N’ Roses’] Use Your Illusion II had come out a year after Use Your IllusionI, it would be that type of thing. That’s what it is.”
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Metallica in 1997: (from left) Jason Newsted, Kirk Hammett, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich (Image credit: Michel Linssen/Redferns)
Was there any pressure for the band to write a new set of material altogether, due to the fact that although Load sold a very healthy seven million records, it was still only half that of the Black Album?
“Yeah, but here’s my theory: if Reload sells the same as Load, then we’ve pretty much done much the same as the Black Album on the Load records! That was kinda always what I was hoping.”
That’s easy to say now, Lars!
“No, I expected Load to do about half of the Black Album,” he replies sincerely. “I think if the Black Album came out today, I don’t think it would do as well as Load did, I don’t t think there’s as many people that listen to rock music as in 1991, 1992, 1993. That’s a fact. Rock music is a dying breed, it’s that simple. All in all, about a year ago, I know I sat there and said that I expected it to do about half of what the “Black Album’ did, and it did. There was no pressure from anybody – we don’t get pressure from anybody.”
With hindsight, did you make the right choice splitting the material into two albums? How do you think the last year and a half would have gone if you had released Load as a double album?
“That’s a very interesting question -I’ve never really thought about that. Probably another reason that we wanted to split the records up is that we wanted to try to get away from the trap we felt stuck in, which was that we would put out these records and then we would go on these never-ending tours.
“What we wanted to try and do, to save Metallica and continue Metallica for a long time, was try and make more records more often and less touring less often. More records and shorter tours, trying to put a record out every year and only going on the road for eight or ten months or whatever to give us a better sense of balance, instead of making a record every five years and then trying to go out and survive a three year tour. It was a good thing to do, because that way, we make all the portions smaller and they become easier to digest.”
Realistically, given Metallica’s track record, do you think you’ll be able to do an album a year?
“Realistically? We’ll have a shot at it! We’re gonna try!”
Metallica: The Memory Remains (Official Music Video) – YouTube
But to be fair, you were under pressure finishing Reload on time and you’d written most of the songs on it two years ago anyway!
“What we do is, we sit down and figure out how much time we need and execute it, it’s that simple. We made a decision to finish this record at home – and That’s the first time we’ve ever finished a record at home – and there was a bit of slacking off which kind of caught up with us the last couple of weeks. But we’ve been through this circus before of trying to finish records and all that shit, and I think we’re fairly good at it. Admittedly, this time it was pretty fucking close and there were actually one or two times where I was getting ready to call Peter and Cliff and say, ‘Errr… missed it!’, but we pulled it together.
“I’d say we have a fair shot at putting a record out next year – it doesn’t necessarily need to be new material, if you catch my drift. There are certain projects and certain things we have that are waiting in the wings, so we will kind of see what happens. But my goal is to put out one project, one idea, one type of something every year, and I think that we have a good chance of making that happen.”
Did you ever consider just halving the amount of songs that you recorded in the Load sessions and putting them out on the one record? A best of the session as it were, ensuring quality control.
“I’m an artist, I don’t write shitty songs-remember that, okay?” replies Lars with a hearty chuckle. “It’s the syndrome all artists suffer from, we will never cop to that, okay? No, we don’t write bad songs. All our songs are good and all those songs will be released – whether you like it or not! We’re very full of ourselves, but at least we know that up ahead of everybody else! And I want those sarcastic overtones translated across 9,000 miles,” he adds.
Metallica’s James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich onstage in 1997 (Image credit: George De Sota/Redferns)
This sarcastic overtones have suffered somewhat in translation recently. In the wake of Load. The drummer’s sometimes facetious replies to the constant barrage of questions regarding haircut, image, clothing, etc have got him into a fair amount of trouble.
“I’m kind of surprised at how much all this stuff still matters,” he sighs. “Il cover both sides when I do interviews, I sort of take the piss sometimes and say these really stupid things. Then I’ll sort of go into these somewhat semi-serious explanations and it seems that no matter which position I take, people still get very wound up about it.
“It is actually kinda funny that the press, especially in England, say all these things and get everybody really wound up, cos it just proves how silly everything is. I said something in Melody Maker a few months ago that the new album will sound like the Spice Girls and I’ve heard about that quote in about 25 different interviews since. The only reason I say bullshit like that is to fuck with people and obviously, it does fuck with them, and That’s why I say it. If nobody took notice of it, then it wouldn’t be any fun.”
You’re obviously just too good at taking the piss, Lars.
“If you want to be serious about it for a second, if anything, what it does is kind of give you a little bit of an idea of how meaningless I consider a lot of this stuff is. You have a bunch of music and, at the end of the day, that is all that you’re gonna stand and fall on, the music. Everything else, whether it’s videos, photographs, what you wear, how you look, how long your fucking hair is or the fucking thickness of your penis or whatever, all those things are completely irrelevant or should be completely irrelevant- to the one main thing, which is the music.”
How thick is your penis, by the way?
“It ranks about second in Metallica.”
Uh-huh.
“I just find it so peculiar that hard rock is the one world where all that matters,” he continues, “and that is what I have such problems with, That’s why it’s really fun to push those envelopes. Of course I know we’re a hard rock band and we make heavy music and I’m really fucking proud of that, nobody questions that, but it’s all the other stereotypical things that I can’t deal with as a person. I hate to be boxed into any areas or parameters of what anybody else wants from me or the music – and I’m so proud of that, cos I know what it is that we do. But everything else that comes in the keel of the music can be, should be and will be fucked with [laughs].”
Had you hoped that all the fuss surrounding the band’s image change would have died down by now?
“I’ve stopped calculating anything,” he says resignedly. “I can’t predict or hope or wish any more for anything. I don’t know what anybody else is thinking about anything! I think the only difference between me now and me a few years ago is that I’m a lot less concerned with what people think and I’m also a lot less interested in defending Metallica or trying to get people to understand my way of looking at it. I used to, as you probably know, spend a great deal of time explaining the way we looked at certain things and all this type of stuff, and I am not so bothered about doing that anymore.”
Ina recent biography, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher expressed a concern that the fame game and his band’s offstage antics were in danger of over shadowing or trivialising the thing that really matters, the music. Is that also a concern for Metallica?
“Umm, no,” considers Lars. “We’ve been around 16 years, Noel Gallagher’s been around for three. I think that our history and all our accomplishments, whether good, bad or indifferent, speak for themselves. I’ve been doing Metallica since I was 18 and we’ve grown up in public, if you know what I mean. When you go through all those years in public, especially the younger ones, there’s two ways you can choose to go: you can guard yourself against everything and pretend that things are a different way, or you can be as naked and as pure as possible, and make sure that everything that happens inside you is not fucked with and is shared with everybody around you.
“We’ve chosen the latter path, which is that everything is pure, everything is open, all the changes that happened to us as people happen and continue through our music and everything That’s going on. I think that if anything, hopefully Metallica will be looked upon and remembered as a band that didn’t have the same kind of guard up as a lot of the other hard rock bands and that we went through all these different metamorphoses, whether people liked it or not, but that it was pure and it was natural, it was the really honest thing to do.
“I am a little miffed at the fact that there were so many people that looked at the pictures of Load and did not give the music a chance. Did it really make a difference in my life? Not really, but I’m surprised at that narrow-mindedness, That’s all. I’m not hurt by it, cos the record’s sold about as many copies as I thought it would, and the state of Metallica internally is stronger than at any point after the Black Album, so none of those things really matter that much to me. I am surprised at that type of attitude and I am surprised at people’s surprise over some of the things that happened to us over the last couple of years, because I thought we always wore all those potential changes and that stuff on our sleeves. Us going away for five years – what the fuck did they expect?”
Metallica’s James Hetfield in 1998 (Image credit: George Wolf/Tri-Valley Herald)
So can we take it from your indifference at people’s reactions that you won’t lose any sleep if Reload gets a slagging in the press?
“That’s a really difficult question to answer 100 per cent pure. I walk a thin line on that. I gotta tell you that the days of me sitting down and reading every interview and wondering what so and so was saying about me and what so and so was writing about me do not exist for me anymore. Like anybody who does any kind of creative work, I’m always curious to see how people react to it, mostly cos I want to see if it’s how I feel about it.
“I gotta tell you that I do actually kind of dwell on all people’s hatred of what we’re going through, because it is making us internally stronger and I kind of like it. I kind of like to push some of those buttons anyway, I like to incite that. I like the fact that people have a problem with what we’re doing, because it causes debate, and when debate starts, then people sit and talk about all different types of things and then hopefully, something good will come out of that
“I kind of welcome that and I think is really healthy in an incredibly stagnant hard rock scene in 1997, and if we’re the ones that end up pushing those envelopes and get people to look at some of these things – not necessarily agree with some of those points, but at least respecting or acknowledging different points of view, then I think tat’s really healthy.”
With reference to the post Load feeling in the media, James said in a recent interview that “it’s nice to be hated again”. Has that helped you combat complacency? Has it instilled a new fighting spirit in Metallica?
“There’s definitely a sense that, compared to those years of the Black Album, where we could definitely do it all wrong, there’s a good energy that comes from this type of thing. The main difference is that in the past, when we said, ‘Oh, we don’t give a fuck’ or ‘it’s nice to be hated’, I’m not sure that that was a 100 per cent pure statement, because before the Black Album, there was a little bit still of a wanting or chasing of a kind of acceptance
“Now there isn’t that anymore, because with the Black Album, all that just happened to be fucking abandoned – I’m happy to be alive and happy to have survived that whole thing! Now I don’t think I’ve ever felt this thick skinned before, and there definitely is some kind of cool energy that comes from being at the centre of a shitstorm! I actually kind of like that part of it.”
Metallica – The Unforgiven II (Official Music Video) – YouTube
So, getting back to the music, is this Load era sound the one you’d ideally like for Metallica at the moment or are there other directions that you’d like to have seen it develop in?
“The best thing about this record, as far as I’m concerned, is that when we came back to these songs, they sounded very fresh and very relevant. We were afraid that if we left them for years and years, they might start getting dated, so we got back to them as quick as we could, we finished them off and made them sound as relevant and strong as we could in 1997, and I love it.
“My favourite record by far that Metallica have done is Load and this is the other 13 songs, so the Load years are complete now. The 27 songs we wrote, the vision that we had, is out of our systems and is now yours to dissect and do whatever you want with. There’s this great sense of relief to have it all out, I’ve been waiting for a long time to get the rest of these songs out.
“All the feedback I’ve had from people who have heard the record say it’s equal to, and in some cases better than, Load. I won’t pass judgement – I think the two records are equal, but there’s nobody That’s heard this material as scraps and B level material, and That’s important for me.”
It’s funny you should say you made the songs sound as relevant to 1997 as you could, because to me, you seem to be hitting almost a retro sound, a really classic, bluesy, hard-edged rock band vibe.
“That’s fair, yeah,” agrees Lars. “I gotta tell you, I mastered the record in New York last week and it’s not quite out of my system yet, I don’t quite know what to think yet. I haven’t sat back and heard the record with neutral ears yet, but I think that what you’re saying fits in with the whole Load package.
“The only major difference that I’m aware of is that James is a little more experimental with his vocals on Reload, he was trying different microphones, trying some different techniques, effects and stuff like that. Maybe that makes it a bit more melodic. Everybody’s got a different opinion, what the fuck do people care what I think?”
Metallica at the 1997 Billboard Awards (Image credit: S Granitz/WireImage))
Does it bother you that you’re quite a way away from what passes for cutting edge music these days?
“That is a very fair thing to say.”
In the 80s, Metallica was a state of the art band. Now you’re well removed from that status. Does that bother you? Is it an intentional move?
“It doesn’t bother me, cos I think it’s very true. All I think about is just being comfortable where we are in our own little bubble; how we relate to everybody else is pretty irrelevant to me: When you put us down next to Sepultura or something like that, I know we sound like old men, but if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that live, we can wipe the fucking floor with any of these bands. I know that for a fact. But the way we should make records and stuff like that? How they compare is irrelevant to me, because we just make records the way we hear them. But live, I’ll take on anybody, cos I know we can fucking wipe the floor with them.”
At this point, Lars is called away to film a sequence for the video. The phone rings again a short while afterwards, Metallica’s publicist informs me that we can grab a few more minutes with Lars while he’s in make-up.
“I’m not having my make-up done! Real men don’t wear make-up!” burbles Lars, aping Korn singer Jonathan Davis’ controversial sentiments in the Hammer last year. “I’m having purple eyeliner put on. I think James and Jason are wearing all the make-up!”
Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that the spirit in Metallica was stronger than it had been for years. Does this put an end to all the rumours concerning Jason’s predicament then?
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here,” replies Lars with a giggle, “but I think he might actually be enjoying himself! Reload was probably the least we’ve ever argued. The vibe there was better creatively than I think it’s ever been. Jason seems to have gotten his head out of his ass and he’s like a normal person now – I’m sure he would say the same about me – and we came through this record with an incredibly respectful working relationship. We never really argued, we’d sit and talk with Bob Rock and balance things out. Me and Kirk are just me and Kirk. It’s very solid at the moment.”
So now that Metallica are so mind-numbingly huge, do you have any more ambitions left to fulfil as a band?
“Nope. It just becomes a state, like a fly. Like, ‘Now I’ve achieved my goals, I’m just gonna fly around here and buzz until I just don’t wanna buzz any more. I’ll make you aware that I’m here and you can choose to ignore me if you want to.’
Metallica: No Leaf Clover (Official Music Video) – YouTube
“But in terms of goals, no, there are no more goals left. The last goal was to survive the Black Album and stay alive through all that. We survived that and everything from now on out is easy street. Now it’s just about us and the music, and as long as we get along and we have fun, then we’ll go along forever. When it stops being fun, we’ll knock it on the head, it’s that simple.
“Touring is gonna be scaled down a lot, because touring isn’t as much fun as it used to be, but I think we still have quite a few records in us and we’re really starting to enjoy making records a lot more. Financially, I’m set for two lifetimes and now it’s just about being content inwardly, and as long as we get along and make good records and have fun with it, then fine, and if we don’t, then fuck it, there’s too many other things.”
Do we still need Metallica, though?
“You fucking need Metallica more than ever!” replies Lars in quickfire fashion, barely able to contain his laughter. “That’s the answer.”
So what do you need out of it? Why aren’t you just sitting at home counting your money?
“That’s what I should be doing, instead of talking to you! God knows there’s a lot to count!”
And with that, we leave Lars, safe in the knowledge that Metallica will be fucking with us for a good while to come yet.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 45, September 2007
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