I was pretty pleased with the results, actually, but I did want to hear more from Cass, though.ĪP I’ll try and not hog the conversation.

Hopefully we’ll get it right this time.ĪP I thought we got it right last time, but that’s okay. Let’s call each other again in five minutes.ĪP Hey guys! Sorry it took me so long, sorry. There’s got to be a name for auditory hallucinations, like when you think that someone is texting you or that your phone is ringing. PART II - Phone conversation with Cass McCombs in San Francisco, Ariel Pink in Los Angeles, and Mónica de la Torre in New York City.ĬM I just spoke with him. Maybe it’s a mutation or something like that.ĬM Hormones in ice cream. The Millennials are what I’m talking about-they have no gender. Every girl I’ve ever met who’s under 27: bi. Have you noticed that?ĪP Everybody under 27 years old. Therefore music is targeted to a youth audience. Music provoked me, back in the day.ĪP It’s a good point, so the people that go to action are the kids. Death metal had a good go.ĬM Growing up I felt provoked. It doesn’t tell us anything about ourselves. Like, “Look at the ghost! Look at the shiny spotlights! Look at all of the psychedelic colors!” It’s just a distraction. It’s the sexual dance of the woman and the Dionysian. Music, to me, is a heightened degree of the fantasy. I love that words can provoke people enough to act.ĬM Just not through music, at least not consciously.ĪP Not anymore. And their reaction will be, “How can these people say this to me? I’m a good God-fearing American!” The members of the church want to provoke violence and physical retaliation, because it’s a family of lawyers. You know them?ĪP I love their message: “You’re going to hell, honey!” They’ll say that to people on the street, people driving by. when you act as though you’re going to die tomorrow.ĪP That’s why I love the Westboro Baptist Church. Young Woman People get really upset when you walk down that path. And everyone’s talking about pop, using that word, but I don’t think they know what it means. I’d say in the last five years even it’s gotten a little bit more intense. Everyone wants to emote-maybe the emo stance hasn’t left us yet. I don’t know about you, but I get the feeling that everything is extremely melodious and a little too pretty. I feel lucky to have participated in these talks and hope they do some good for someone somewhere.Īriel Pink Maybe we can take this opportunity to discuss current music and stuff. I relate to his desire to establish new values when consciousness itself seems false, and I’m charmed by his contempt for rhetoric. He is such an intelligent blatherer that I revert to my country-boy aw-shucks put-on to escape dying on the floor of laughter. Every madcap, absurd, intelligent, misguided, generous blathering flows so freely from his whim that I imagine it’s because of this freedom that his music is so great. Nearly every time I see Ariel, I am impressed by his ability to speak his mind. Though McCombs and Pink might appear to speak different languages, they are both writing the same book. A laid-back conversation was followed by a call-in session a few weeks later. Last April, both thirty-something musicians met in Los Angeles while Pink was recording his forthcoming yet untitled album with Haunted Graffiti, his band. The Internet is littered with the corpses of his imitators’ MySpace pages. With last year’s record Before Today , and its hit single “Round and Round,” Pink’s music-the lo-fi product of an imagination in constant motion, frantically picking through the threadbare simulacrum of contemporary Los Angeles-has escaped the bedroom and resonates with a larger audience. As with most things, California or not, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface, dark things as well as light, all precisely etched into the songs by McCombs’s oracular words and trademark croon-as alien, distant, and warm as Dion’s or Merle Haggard’s.Īriel Pink’s special brand of homemade (and, now, studio-processed) psychedelic song has antecedents in the records, tapes, and CD-Rs of outsiders like R. He draws on the history of everything implied by that mossy title-“singer-songwriter”-as well as on traditions more occult and obscured from the golden California afternoon sunshine that suffuses his music. Cass McCombs’s 2011 albums, WIT’S END and Humor Risk , are the work of one of the finest singer-songwriters currently working.

Calexico ryley walker