By Glen and Julie
After four years of singing about his ex-girlfriend every night, Mikel Jollett was ready to tackle some other subjects – and to explore new musical textures.
“I’m not sick of playing [‘Sometime Around Midnight’], but I definitely want to start playing new material,” said the singer as the second album began to loom in the distance. “[When we started,] we played punk songs, we played mod songs, and the record is the paring down of a much larger set list. It’s funny, I think we get accused of our record having a really broad palette, and to us it feels really narrow. We’ve definitely played ‘Midnight’ a lot though.”[i]
Whereas the first album was insular in its focus, an attempt by Jollett to wrestle his personal demons into submission, the follow-up would find him broadening his scope beyond the confines of his apartment, and asking bigger questions essential to the human condition. The music, by necessity, would expand accordingly.
It wasn’t by design, exactly. Jollett continued to hole himself up in his room and write out of his own experience, just as he had always done. But as he entered the back half of his thirties, Jollett found himself facing issues that put even the shattering events of Hell Week in their place.
“All of the things that I wrote about for this [second] record started to feel like they weren’t just my hopes, aspirations and problems, but part of some larger human narrative, you know what I mean?”[ii] Jollett pauses, seeking confirmation of a shared understanding. “Three of my grandparents and my uncle died [within a year]. I was literally the guy who took the tube out of [my grandmother’s] mouth and we said, ‘she’s dead.’ After that, death was real to me in a way it never had been before.[iii] It kinda elongates your perspective. Suddenly I felt maybe there were bigger issues – things that I once felt were really important didn’t seem so important any more. It all changed very quickly. I came back from touring, and suddenly my whole family is in crisis, and I just locked myself in my room and started writing and writing and writing… then one day I squinted and re-emerged” with the songs that would form the album, and many others besides.[iv]
As had happened with the inaugural record, there was an abundance of riches from which to choose. 50 songs yielded 38 demos; 38 demos became 25 tracks in various stages of production; and those 25 were eventually culled down to the 11 songs that would comprise the record[v] – the ones “that we felt best told the story we wanted to tell on All at Once. It was all very deliberate. We wanted it to be an engrossing experience for people. It’s engrossing for us, we got caught up in this music and we want other people to get caught up in it the same way.”[vi]
Given the deep waters in which The Airborne Toxic Event swam on their debut album, it’s almost hard to conceive that their follow-up could be even weightier – but somehow that’s exactly what occurred. And yet it wasn’t so much a step in a different direction as it was a natural progression. From day one, the band had built its ethos around the notion that “your life becomes more vital when you know you’re going to die;”[vii] in their sophomore effort, this idea came to full fruition.
“[All at Once] is sort of a step in the way of maturity I guess,” acknowledges Daren Taylor. “It’s a step away from what we did on the first album, but still related.”[viii]
“I felt very conscious that this wasn’t going to be some stale second record that isn’t moving,” adds Jollett.[ix] “We didn’t really set out to either sound like or unlike the first record, or to make a concept album about the mating patterns of bees,[x] although in some ways it kind of is. I think the songs fit together as an album much more than with the first record.”[xi]
“It definitely sounds different [from its predecessor],” he continues. “There’s probably a couple songs that could’ve been on the first record. It’s louder than the first record ever was but then it’s quieter than the first record ever was. There’s way more keyboards than there were on the last record, then there are a couple of acoustic songs, and there weren’t any on the last record. It’s got a little bit of a broader range in terms of the instrumentation.”[xii]
Thematically, “if you compare it to the first record, there are only three sad songs about girls,” Jollett says – down from ten. “The entire first record was sad songs about girls, but there are echoes of that idea in every one of the songs except for two.”[xiii]
“There are some very strong ideas and passions to be found in [songs about dying and losing family members], as much as there is in a really tough break-up with a girl. People like Airborne because of that sense of connection and hard times; being honest with yourself about how difficult things were is really refreshing. [This] record does that in spades.”[xiv]
**************
With the finished product being so distinct from that which preceded it, it comes as no surprise that the methodology that spawned it was itself a major step away from the approach The Airborne Toxic Event had taken to crafting their eponymous debut. Whereas the first album emerged from extended, concentrated periods of writing and arranging (starting with Jollett and Taylor jamming in a warehouse for six months), followed by a quick and almost slapdash recording process at a friend’s house, with All at Once it was almost the exact opposite. Lyrics were scribbled on tour buses; arrangements worked out during pre-show soundchecks and perfected on stage. And this time, when the band was ready to record, it would be done in a professional studio, under the guiding hand of a seasoned producer.
“Everyone always says that a rock band’s second record is a road record, and there’s a reason for that, cause that’s all you fuckin’ did for two years,” jokes Jollett.[xv]
Writing began as early as 2009. “Numb” was written at Reading and Leeds festival in 2009; “All I Ever Wanted” in Germany during a brief tour break that same year.[xvi] “In Cologne, Germany, we had 36 hours off, so I got a hotel room and sat there playing guitar, reading and writing,” Jollett says.[xvii] “There were all these sights I could have went and seen but instead I got a hotel room and some beers and locked myself in there for 36 hours. It was the best day I’d had in months![xviii] I was so happy just reading… and I wrote this new song, ‘All I Ever Wanted,’ inspired from one of the short stories.”[xix]
On another occasion that summer, Jollett had some spectators looking over his shoulder as he developed a new tune. “I’ve been doing this thing lately where I’ll write in the dressing room,” he said at the time. “We were playing in Germany recently and I just wrote this new song in the dressing room surrounded by the other band, our band and all the crew and everyone. There was just nowhere else to go so I was sitting there with the guitar and some recording equipment just trying to work out parts for a song. We played the show and after the show we got on the bus and stayed up most of the night finishing the lyrics and moving it on.”[xx]
“We definitely are feeling the impulse [to create],” acknowledged Steven Chen in between shows. “Everyone in the band’s minds are racing—everyone’s working on Garage Band on their computers in the van. We found we have no time to rehearse, but we’ve been working on new stuff. We steal rehearsals at soundchecks. Ideally, we need the downtime [to work on new material], but there’s so much going on, it makes it more difficult. It’s a good problem, you can’t really complain. We’re really grateful. We know these things don’t happen easily. We’re trying to do as much as we can without killing ourselves with laryngitis.”[xxi]
Throughout 2009, the group added a few new songs to the setlist most nights, with the goal of playing the entire second record live by the time they finished touring in support of album one.[xxii] The thinking was, by the time they hit the studio in early 2010, they’d have a good feel for the songs and would be able to nail the recording without too much difficulty.
“We’ve got a whole record,” said Jollett in the summer of 2009, “but our overarching theme has been that we’ve been on the road. We haven’t been able to be in one place for long enough to record a record. So as soon as we can, we’re itching to get back into the studio and play new songs. I can’t wait to start doing new material. We do play a lot of stuff live, so I think just like the first record we’ll probably record it live and try and capture what we’ve done live. “[xxiii]
What Jollett may not have fully grasped at the time is that there are certain privileges afforded to a band signed to a major label, with a successful album already under its belt, that were not available to his outfit back when they were doing everything on their own, hustling to get their recordings out to the world as quickly as possible.
“It was a very different experience this time,” Jollett came to realize. “The first record we were just sprinting to try to get it done, and this one, there was definitely more time. Having a record deal and knowing that someone’s going to put it out is sort of not a luxury that we’d ever had.[xxiv] [Island Records] told us to ‘take as much time as we needed, do all the research you have to, and by the way, what producer do we want?’ Straight away, we asked for Dave Sardy so that’s who they got hold of.”[xxv]
Daren Taylor glances at Mikel Jollett’s song cards in search of inspiration during the recording of The Airborne Toxic Event’s second album, All at Once.
Jollett arrived at the initial recording sessions armed with a stack of homemade cards, each representing a song. Some bore a title or key lyric, others featured doodles, notes, or phrases that captured the general character of the song (“Usually I have an image in my head of a story or a feeling, and I’m always trying to narrow in on that image,” Jollett explains).[xxvi] These cards were posted around the room to help Jollett and his partners get their heads around the various pieces on which they were working.[xxvii] It was as much about capturing the right emotion as it was finding the right words.
“In songs, a lot of what you’re doing is describing things, but the music being so emotive that it makes the words seem that much more emotional,” says Jollett. “It might be a product of this era that we live in, but I never think of our songs as being particularly emotional. I’m always surprised. Because someone will be like, hey, you’re really writing a lot of emotional shit here, and I’m like, not really. Look at The Final Cut. That’s a fucking emotional record.”[xxviii]
“A song has a soul, and you have to find the soul of the song and serve it,” he continues. “Sometimes I think songs, when they start, promise a certain story, and you have to deliver that story. The hard part is trying to figure out what story has been promised and deliver upon it – you’ve got to have unexpected turns and moments of catharsis, release and reciprocity, that’s the idea from Greek tragedy. You have to have transition.”[xxix]
The freedom the band enjoyed during the making of their first album meant that the musicians – and Jollett in particular – had the final say in all matters, allowing them to tell the stories exactly as they wanted them told. Working alongside a producer with Dave Sardy’s credentials required some adjustments, not least of which was that the band members were rarely even in the same room as they recorded their parts – a huge departure from the way in which they were accustomed to operating.
Jollett says of Sardy, who had worked previously with Oasis, LCD Soundsystem, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Oasis and Band of Horses: “He’s known as a guy who’s good at getting original sounds and he owns this library of guitars and guitar effects. That wasn’t the main reason [that we chose him] though, it was more about the fact that he has such a classical sense of songwriting. I remember playing him the earliest demo of ‘Strange Girl,’, which was a simple verse-chorus-verse arrangement, and his initial reaction was, ‘I really like this song but I think it needs a middle eight,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck’s a middle eight?!?’ and he told me to go and listen to Elvis Costello because he’s the master of the middle eight.[xxx] It’s this part of the song where there’s this new piece of music and it informs what you’ve been saying in your chorus, so next time you hear the chorus, it’s reinterpreted given these new ideas you’ve introduced. It’s like a minuet in a sonata! Dave’s a rock ‘n’ roll encyclopaedia and his emphasis on classic song structure was new for me, as I write in incomplete sentences and never thought about music that way.”[xxxi]
“He’d also come out with these really sarcastic one-liners, like when we were playing a song in pre-production once he remarked, ‘That was OK but play it again, only this time like a band who’s ever played together before!’ He was very funny with it, but ultimately so ridiculously talented.”
Anna Bulbrook chimes in: “My favourite was when he said ‘You sound like you’re playing in a bar; an EMPTY bar!’”[xxxii]
Jollett’s admiration for Sardy, and his appreciation for all that he brought to the table, does not mean the pair always saw eye to eye. “I would imagine him to have been more polite with Oasis, that would be my guess, but we did spend an awful lot of our time with him taking the piss out of each other,” Jollett admits. “When it came to mixing the record, me and Dave would both be in the studio wrestling over different mixes, which was good because I guess it showed how much we both cared about the way the record eventually turned out.”[xxxiii]
One particularly notable battle – one which Jollett ultimately lost – centered around the song “Numb.”
“I still prefer the demo of this song to the recording,” says Jollett today. “Dave (Sardy) and I had a series of spirited debates about this song which ended with a compromise and a switchblade being pulled (as a joke, I think).”[xxxiv] Jollett’s preferred version, which he later released on Soundcloud, was more fit for a dance club than a rock stage, with its electronic drum beat, spacey, layered vocals, muted guitars and synth flourishes. The album version, by contrast, is one of TATE’s purest rockers.
If it sounds as though Jollett was irritated by the experience, that would probably be a fair assessment. In contrast to the laid back approach of the first album, “It was definitely different. It’s hard to take off the cuff and get lost in making a record when there are too many people, too many steps. A song’s a song. As long as the mikes are on, usually you’re alright.”[xxxv]
Sure, it was nice to have fancier tools at their disposal; more bells and whistles at their fingertips. But there’s a risk, says Jollett. “It’s sort of like, there’s those trappings; you have lots of time and resources, and maybe you just become an overblown caricature of yourself. It’s like, who cares? At the end of the day, either you write songs that mean something to people, or you don’t. The process for us was stressful, and kind of challenging, and sometimes very rewarding, and at other times very frustrating. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, really. What’s going to matter is whether the record captures you in some way.”[xxxvi]
That, of course, is the crux of the matter. And on that score, the All at Once recording sessions were an unbridled success.
**************
All at Once opens with the gentle yet insistent licks of a lone guitar, chugging along like a horse in a steady, distant gallop. One by one, layers are carefully added one on top of another: an unobtrusive organ; an unadorned voice; subdued chimes from a second guitar; backup vocalists purring a wordless chorus.
The title track sets the tone in every conceivable meaning of the phrase. Thematically, it introduces the ideas on which the rest of the record will hang: life and death, love and loss, change in the blink of an eye. Musically, it mirrors the varied tempo of the human lifespan, running the gamut from soft to loud, high to low, patient to frantic, mournful to ecstatic – with the occasional unexpected jolt thrown in for good measure. And right out of the gate, it lays to rest the question that nags at every band as they release their second album: The Airborne Toxic Event is no one hit wonder.
Written directly out of the experience of losing a number of close family members in a short period of time, “All at Once” references the speed at which life can be turned on its head, ready or not. “The song is just about the stages of life, and how you wake up one day and your whole life changes,” says Jollett. “And it tends to happen very quickly; you know, you sort of live in these quiet moments in between these massive moments of change. The change happens all at once, and that’s what the song’s about: just being in that moment – the birth of a child, the death of a parent, or maybe you get diagnosed with a disease or some terrible accident or something awful happens to you… or something wonderful, some great opportunity comes to you. And your life five minutes before that is one way, and five minutes after is another. And you don’t really think of it that way; you think it’s incremental.”[xxxvii]
“This was the first time I ever wrote a song with any idea that someone might hear it,” he adds. “This whole record felt like a love letter to all the deepest things I love about music. I knew I wanted the opening lines of this song to pair up with the closing lines of the last song. Birth and death — and all the love and loss and hope and anguish in between.”[xxxviii]
Musically, “the arrangement is just… we just threw the kitchen sink at that one. It’s just really big; I think there’s 180 tracks on it or something like that,” Jollett jokes. “I wasn’t sure about it at first; I thought maybe it was going to be too busy, but then our producer Dave Sardy, he nailed it.”[xxxix]
The song quickly became a defining piece for the band, alongside “Sometime Around Midnight” – not as well known outside of TATE circles, but every bit as foundational to their identity and mission. “It’s a fun song to play, but it’s also an emotional song to play,” says Chen. “There’s so many dynamics, and it kind of comes in waves; you don’t even realize when the impact is coming, and then it comes.”[xl]
The following track, “Numb,” was one of the longest-baked songs on the album, taking a full two years to attain its final form. Notwithstanding battles with the producer over the mix, it is a signature rock song “about the mind-numbing process of touring: the endless parade of people, places, overwhelming experiences and the quiet observer at the center of your mind growing ever-distant from reality.”[xli] If indeed every second record is a road record, nowhere is that better exemplified than here.
“Mikel and I worked on that song [starting in 2009],” says Noah Harmon. “Obviously being two different people, our head spaces are never at the same place, but it was fun to see how that song in particular kind of evolved over time and then we had a tight arrangement with it. Mikel took into whatever dark lair he goes into to sort of put it under his knife and microscope, and get to what the story and what the music is going to be about. And he comes back with this song about the concept of being lost, and whatever you do to get out of your daily routine, to get out of your life and put yourself in this headspace. And it’s sort of like you’re at a club, and are you the only person who feels this way? Like, why don’t you realize how much fun all these kids are having on ecstasy or whatever, and then hopefully by the end of it you are lost and in the frenzy of music and dance.”
“Like, that sensation of being alone in a crowd,” Jollett reiterates. “You’re surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people but you’re alone inside your own head. That feeling, the song’s kind of about that internal monologue that you have in moments like that. And the disorientation of touring makes you very familiar with that idea. I think that song went through, like, 12 demos or something. We took a long time on that song. Sometimes a song happens in five minutes; you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s a jam, let’s play it like that.’ Sometimes you tweak it for a long time and then finally it comes to life, and you’re like, ‘That’s what we’ve been hunting for.’”[xlii]
The album’s first single, the rollicking “Changing,” would become The Airborne Toxic Event’s biggest radio hit since “Midnight.” Alternatively titled “Something You Own” and “Changing is Strange” at various points in its evolution,[xliii] the song is a little more straightforward than the typical Jollett composition. “I don’t know man; it’s just a fucking jam! It’s a song about being frustrated that everybody wants you to change. You can probably say that it could be about trying to defy fans, critics, labels, publicists if you did a psychoanalysis – there’s a frustration over there I guess too.”[xliv]
“With the massive life changes we’ve gone through in the past couple of years, all five of us, there are suddenly all these people wanting you to do this or do that, be this way, be that way, and it screws with your head,” the singer confesses. “So there’s a little bit of like, ‘Can we please just do what we set out to do?’ I don’t want us to be some precious little indie-rock band; but nor do I want to pretend I’m in some reverb-soaked fucking post-punk act where I have to act like I never smile and stay up late drinking absinthe in my attic, dripping candle wax on my skin. I mean, I want to do music because I want to do music, right? We all do. Because we like to jump around and play songs.”[xlv]
The infectious, guitar driven barroom stomp didn’t start out that way. Originally, “it had no guitar. It sounded kind of like Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective or something with all these harmonies and a sort of ‘umpa’ keyboard line. Then one day I pulled out a guitar and an amp, played the song with a Stones-y beat and thought ‘oh fucking hell yes.’”[xlvi]
“All for a Woman” represented a major departure for Airborne, the first true ballad to appear on a studio album. And it almost didn’t happen.
“It almost didn’t make the record,” confesses Jollett. “It was a folk song that I wrote, and it’s in three, and it’s really weird to have a rock song in three. You don’t really hear that in the modern era; it’s something they used to do a lot in the fifties.
“It’s a ballad about the odd sensation of singing about your ex-girlfriend every night for two years.[xlvii] So much of this record was written about the two and a half years we’d spent on the road after playing shows in Silver Lake, going from living in apartments to living on a bus — and the experience, all of it, was predicated mostly upon the popularity of a record written about a real person whom I’d loved. It was really strange: singing about her every night, as if the whole thing was some kind of bombastic eulogy for a muse that had long-since become a ghost.”[xlviii]
“And it’s also about how, I think women fall in love with men for different reasons than men fall in love with women. You know, you can be with someone and at some point women will be like, ‘Ahh, that’s my guy,’ and they roll their eyes at you but they’re like, ‘He’s okay,’ and that’s alright. But with women, it’s different. There’s always something a little bewitching about a woman. There’s always a power she has; there’s some sort of mystery that you’re drawn to, that is at the center of any love affair, for a man to fall in love with a woman. Women have all these extra layers that we can’t figure out. So I think that idea in the song is right, that there’s something about that mystery and that power. And I think women know it to some extent, and they sense it, and part of the reason they fall in love is because they know that they have the power over you.”[xlix]
Atypically, Chen plays bass on “All for a Woman” while Harmon takes over lead guitar, playing a riff that he had come up with himself. They would maintain the reverse arrangement during live performances of the song.
The tranquility of “All for a Woman” is shattered by the frantic rockabilly of “It Doesn’t Mean a Thing,” a two-minute “Gasoline”-esque ditty in which Jollett imagines his parents’ wedding day. “It’s another song in which I still prefer the demo version,” he claims. “In this case it was kind of Wilco-y with an acoustic guitar and piano harmonies. This is about my dad who met mom when he got out of prison, trying to stay clean, how idealistic they were, how hopeful for a future for all us children not yet born.”[l]
From there, the album takes a dramatic thematic shift with a pair of songs that, uncharacteristically, trade the personal for the political. In the haunting dirge, “The Kids Are Ready to Die,” an angry Jollett takes aim squarely at governments that send young people off to die for a less than noble cause.
“I feel governments take advantage of young people’s misdirected anger and it gets mixed up with nationalism and puts kids in the firing line,” Jollett explains. “The question is not about, are there things worth dying for? Of course, there are, but the question is, are THESE things worth dying for, in the context of Afghanistan where kids and civilians are dying every day? It’s a worthwhile cause to have a more stable Afghanistan, but is it something that you YOURSELF think is worth dying for? I think 99.9% of Americans would say ‘no.’[li] [And I believe] that disrespect for other people’s lives is going to be visited back on you. That a lie can only exist as a lie for so long, and will eventually become known—which is a terrifying idea for governments, but for people, too.”[lii]
Performed live as a balls-to-the-walls punk attack in tandem with its album mate “Welcome to Your Wedding Day,” Jollett maintains that “this whole group of songs (you could include The Winning Side and Neda) stemmed from a desire to tell the stories of people at war that weren’t being told at home. We had a lot of vets at shows on this tour and I wish I could say we did something lofty like start a letter-writing campaign to increase VA funding or something but mostly we just tried to get them laid.”[liii]
“Wedding Day” stems from a tragic incident that Jollett found particularly galling. “It’s about a bombing of a wedding in Afghanistan. I’m really not trying to vilify anyone as the bomb was accidental and they must have felt awful about it and war is horrific and everyone agrees on that. But then that same week, I read an article in the US press asking why we’re not winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan and why these people don’t appreciate our presence, and I was thinking what a fucking idiotic thing to say! Meanwhile you’ve just killed a wedding – you’ve got kids dancing, you’ve got vows being exchanged – people say it’s one of the most beautiful moments in their lives and you’ve just gone and killed their entire family and you wonder why they’re not happy about the American presence! You can subjugate people but you won’t win anyone over with bombs.
“How do you win a war against terrorism?” he continues, picking up speed. “It’s an idea. Are we going to have a war against jealousy? Against bulimia? These are human positions. I’m not saying there are no actions to be taken, but should we take those actions against an entire country! I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this.[liv] No one escapes war — the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders. Everyone is tainted by it. The march to war is the most irresponsible, ridiculous thing our country can do, other than as a last resort.”[lv]
Originally titled “Flight of the Predator Drones,”[lvi] “Wedding Day” was arguably the most aggressive song in the TATE canon to date, both lyrically and musically. “The guy screaming during the bridge is Daren in a drum room with a megaphone,” Jollett shares. “We each auditioned and he had by far the best all-out scream. Double points for him because the drums on this song kick so much ass.”[lvii]
Of course, as anyone who’s brought up touchy political topics at the dinner table knows, there’s no quicker way to get a reaction out of people. The band certainly experienced that as “Wedding Day” became a live centerpiece.
“That song has been one of our biggest songs at shows, and it’s never been a single,” says Jollett. “The reaction at shows, people are fucking into that song. Before I wrote it I was [upset] about the war and about the people who’d been killed and wanted to write a really political anti-war song. But I kind of kept it under wraps, and somewhere between bringing the troops home from Iraq and seeing that we’re like 10 generations into the war in Afghanistan, some of the [more political aspects of the song] are now just day to day fact.
“Between that and the Arab Spring, [there was] this idea of finding your voice, because this is the song of the killing of an innocent wedding party, including 24 children in 2008. It also happened in Iraq in 2002. And terror drones have been responsible for many incidents of friendly fire, of killing our own soldiers. And I think that’s symbolic of what war does, it destroys victims, it destroys perpetrators and in some ways taints even the bystanders. It’s not anti-America at all. We didn’t have a particular point of view, it’s just tongue firmly planted in cheek, denouncing the machine of war.” [lviii]
Plus… “I get a certain thrill out of how fuckin’ shit-talky it is to write a song like that.”[lix]
Returning to the relatively safer ground of failed relationships, “Half of Something Else” was the first song recorded for the album. Originally incarnated as a spellbinding ballad on the Going the Distance soundtrack, the All at Once version is much more upbeat in comparison, obscuring the fact that, lyrically, it’s a heartbreaker.
The music for the album version was composed by Harmon. “He created this entire landscape that I thought was beautiful. I took it and put a song in that environment,” says Jollett.[lx]
“This was the first song I ever wrote for Anna and I to really sing together. I love the sound of her voice on this recording. When we sing it live we have a kind of game in which we stare intensely as possible at each other, which is super funny to both of us because she’s like a sister… every now and then one of us straight up loses it and laughs.”[lxi]
“Strange Girl” flashes like a bolt from the eighties, an intentional callback to Jollett’s favorite band growing up: The Cure. It’s an homage both in subject matter and in style; sub in Robert Smith’s voice for Jollett’s and you just might think you were listening to a lost tape uncovered in a dusty English attic.
“This song is about the song ‘The Perfect Girl,’ Jollett reveals, “and all those great Cure songs to which I knew every single word — and how much music can mean to you when you’re a kid and how as you get older you hold tighter to ANYTHING that means as much to you as a song did when you were fifteen years old.”[lxii]
The penultimate track was already very familiar to Airborne fans well before its release on All at Once. “All I Ever Wanted” was, of course, the title track of the live album and film released six-plus months prior, and a live staple well before that.
One of the true road songs on the album (the musical structure was developed by Jollett and Chen in a Kansas City hotel room; the lyrics penned on a bus in Germany),[lxiii] the plot of “All I Ever Wanted” is lifted directly from Milan Kundera’s short story “The Hitchhiking Game,” in which a married couple role plays as strangers, with crippling results.
The album version features new pre-choruses and adjusted lyrics throughout – at least some of which Jollett now regrets (“I miss the line about the virgin bride,” he confesses).[lxiv] On stage, he mixes and matches between the two versions; however he chooses to sing it on any given night, it has taken its place near the very top of the TATE pyramid: a shining example of orchestral rock at its finest.
There was strong consideration given to ending the album with “All I Ever Wanted.” “It was tempting. I like the crushing ending about lying in the face of death. It’s desperate and real and something I can very much relate to. I think we saw it actually as the last proper song on the record and Graveyard as a sort of epilogue.”[lxv]
The Graveyard of which he speaks is “The Graveyard Near the House,” a tour de force of poetry that very nearly got excluded from the album, but instead immediately became the quintessential Airborne folk ballad.
“The whole album was done and at the final hour I wanted to add this quiet little acoustic song as a sort of epilogue,” says Jollett. “People were against it. It was really long and wordy and kind of esoteric at times. I never thought it would be something many people would like or understand. Even so, ‘if you die before I die I’ll carve your name out of the sky’ might be my favorite line I’ve ever written. The song is about the idea of love as a choice, the absurdity of people becoming inanimate objects when they die, and a certain mermaid named Elizabeth.”[lxvi]
There could hardly be a more fitting conclusion to the 44-minute rumination on life, love and death that is All at Once. “Graveyard was a kind of lyrical call back to the opening lines of ‘All at Once,’ the writer notes. “We were born without time… The album traces an arc of a life, struggles with challenges, with the questions that ‘All at Once’ (the song) introduces then comes to one humble conclusion. Just one. It’s better to love. Everything else is sketchy.”[lxvii]
**************
Four years later, Mikel Jollett’s eyes light up as he looks back on his band’s hard fought second album. He leaves little doubt as to how much the record means to him personally.
“I love All at Once,” he says. “It was a stubborn record. I was being pushed so hard to write radio-friendly singles but that’s just not really how my head works and anyway I’m crap at that kind of thing. I can never predict what people are going to like. My grandparents had all just died (two grandmas and a grandpa) and it hit me very hard because I come from a close family and there was a feeling that it was shrinking and our world of people and jokes and love was disappearing around us. So that felt like the biggest thing in the world to me. And it was all I wanted to write about. So from the opening line ‘We were born without time…’ to the final one ‘I will love you ’til I die’ I was determined to make a record about what my family was going through.
“It probably would have been better business to try to sound like what was on the radio or something. But I just can’t write that way. I start from the assumption — as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mentor put it in ‘This Side of Paradise’ — that the only difference between a scholastic life (a life in the arts and letters) and a non-scholastic life, is that you leave a record. That is, you have the same highs and lows and joys and setbacks as others. And it’s simply your job to do your best to struggle with it, to think, to work hard at your craft and to write it all down. Now, I realize that’s one hell of an assumption. But I guess I always thought the thing to do was to make something great and if you do, money and fame or whatever will be the side effect.
“There was a song on that record called ‘The Graveyard Near the House.’ It’s just a folk song really about treating love like a choice in the face of death, about which there is no choice. It was a massive struggle to even get the song on the record. People were against it. There was no hook, no chorus. There were like 500 words or something. Some thought it was a waste of time, that we were flushing our career down the toilet.
“That song ended up becoming the biggest song on the record. Our final show of that record cycle, we played Gibson Amphitheatre, which was twice as big as any show we’d played on our first record. This happened in every city we played. Meaning that the choice to just write and not try to write singles was one that actually led to a much larger audience. So by the time we got to ‘Graveyard’ at the Gibson, I remember being floored as I heard the entire place quietly sing along to every word.”[lxviii]
All at Once was released to widespread critical acclaim on April 26, 2011. Peaking at number 17 on the Billboard Top 200, it engendered superlatives from the likes of the BBC (“A crushing classic”), Spin (“The rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of a tear-soaked novella”), The Guardian (“Instant, stadium-size anthems”), London Times (“The grandeur and ambition of TATE’s music and lyrics seem to be from another time. All at Once demands to be listened to”), Q (“Combines U2-esque balladry, glam stomps, rabble-rousing folk and soaring FM pop… it’s just about perfect”), Huffington Post (“A gorgeous, expansive album. Just when you think stadium bands are dead, here comes The Airborne Toxic Event to make you reach for your lighter”) and the Los Angeles Times (“This is the sound of a band willing itself into stadiums and Grammy nominations”), among others too numerous to count.[lxix] It was, in short, a triumph.
Not that any of that is what it was about; not really. All the applause in the world didn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, Jollett was just a guy alone in his apartment, wrestling his demons and inscribing his soul on the page.
“Fear and uncertainty are my way of dealing with songwriting,” he says. “For me, the ideas that are compelling are the ones about being afraid to die, the way that being afraid to die makes you more excited about being alive. [lxx] Life scars you. These scars aren’t a bad thing. They’re the entry point to having some sort of wisdom, some sort of perspective. You acknowledge them and something about abandoning the very idea of innocence is freeing. [lxxi] And knowing that the clock is ticking has the effect of forcing you to make decisions. Having the realization that your life is short makes you make some decisions not to waste that time and that’s a good thing.[lxxii] We’re flawed, we’re damaged, we’re laughing about it and happy to be alive.”[lxxiii]
< Previous (Chapter 22: The Bombastic)
Notes:
[i] Jeff Miller, “The Airborne Toxic Event: ‘Midnight’ massive,” Metromix, (August 3, 2009).
[ii] Dom Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event,” Drowned in Sound Interview, (Mar. 14, 2011), http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4142108-one-night-in-paris-with-the-airborne-toxic-event.
[iii] Cornel Bonca, “The Sob in the Spine: Mikel Jollett’s Rock ’n’ Roll Alchemy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, (October 24, 2014), http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/sob-spine.
[iv] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[v] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[vi] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[vii] Bonca, “The Sob in the Spine.”
[viii] Nick Eardley, “Laying it bare: The Airborne Toxic Event,” Nick’s Blog, (October 10, 2010), https://nickeardley.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/laying-it-bare-the-airborne-toxic-event/.
[ix] Eardley, “Laying it bare.”
[x] Dan Reilly, “Airborne Toxic Event Get ‘Louder’ on Second Album,” AOL Original, (Sept. 17, 2010).
[xi] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xii] Reilly, “Airborne Toxic Event Get ‘Louder’ on Second Album.”
[xiii] Reilly, “Airborne Toxic Event Get ‘Louder’ on Second Album.”
[xiv] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xv] Anne Stewart, “Songwriting Series: The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollet,” Sonic Weekly, (Dec. 6, 2011).
[xvi] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xvii] Kellie Hwang, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” The Arizona Republic, (May. 12, 2009).
[xviii] “The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollet,” Gobshout, (May 29, 2009).
[xix] Hwang, “The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xx] “Mikel Jollett Interview,” The Music Fix, (June 7, 2009).
[xxi] Tom Lynch, “High on Dylar: LA’s The Airborne Toxic Event takes flight,” NewCity Music, (Feb. 24, 2009), http://music.newcity.com/2009/02/24/high-on-dylar-las-the-airborne-toxic-event-takes-flight/.
[xxii] Alan Sculley, “Nothing stops the Airborne Toxic Event,” Idaho Statesman, (Apr. 10, 2009).
[xxiii] John Benson, “Airborne Toxic Event Debut New Songs On Tour,” Billboard Magazine, (Jul. 29, 2009).
[xxiv] The Airborne Toxic Event, “hello (from) TOKYO,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqbbHmb3p-o.
[xxv] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xxvi] Stewart, “Songwriting Series.”
[xxvii] The Airborne Toxic Event, “hello (from) TOKYO.”
[xxviii] Erin Ryan, “43 Minutes with Mikel Jollett,” Las Vegas Weekly, (Jun. 9, 2011).
[xxix] Stewart, “Songwriting Series.”
[xxx] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xxxi] Alexia Kapranos, “The Airborne Toxic Event: A Voyage Into Political Songwriting: Mikel gives us the lowdown,” This Is Fake DIY, (Mar. 14, 2011).
[xxxii] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xxxiii] Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event.”
[xxxiv] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[xxxv] Reilly, “Airborne Toxic Event Get ‘Louder’ on Second Album.”
[xxxvi] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All I Ever Wanted Band Q&A,” (after Euro premiere at Raindance Film Festival, 2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZHGx5pxm4I
[xxxvii] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary,” Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/All-Once-Airborne-Toxic-Event/dp/B004MUD790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442374929&sr=8-1&keywords=airborne+toxic+all+at+once.
[xxxviii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[xxxix] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary.”
[xl] The Airborne Toxic Event, “Interview for City Fm89 Radio Pakistan,” (2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHnGCua98E.
[xli] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary.”
[xlii] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary.”
[xliii] Jed, “Live Review: The Airborne Toxic Event at The Social in London, September 30, 2010,” Radio Free Silver Lake, (Oct. 5, 2010), http://radiofreesilverlake.typepad.com/rfsl/2010/10/by-jed-on-december-4-2009-los-angeles-quintet-the-airborne-toxic-event-performed-a-live-sold-out-show-at-the.html.
[xliv] Kapranos, “The Airborne Toxic Event: A Voyage Into Political Songwriting.”
[xlv] The Airborne Toxic Event, “A Biography of Sorts,” http://www.theairbornetoxicevent.com/a-biography-of-sorts.
[xlvi] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[xlvii] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary.”
[xlviii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[xlix] The Airborne Toxic Event, “All at Once Commentary.”
[l] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[li] Kapranos, “The Airborne Toxic Event: A Voyage Into Political Songwriting.”
[lii] The Airborne Toxic Event, “A Biography of Sorts.”
[liii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[liv] Kapranos, “The Airborne Toxic Event: A Voyage Into Political Songwriting.”
[lv] Susan Thurston, “Mikel Jollett finding his voice with Airborne Toxic Event,” Toledo Blade, (Dec. 5, 2011).
[lvi] Jed, “Live Review.”
[lvii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lviii] Allison Stewart, “Airborne Toxic Event on war, touring and blowing things up,” The Washington Post, (Nov. 16, 2011).
[lix] Andrea Domanick, “Airborne Toxic Event Want You On the Edge of Their Seat,” LA Weekly, (Oct. 20, 2011),
http://www.laweekly.com/2011-10-20/music/airborne-toxic-event-want-you-on-the-edge-of-their-seat/.
[lx] Stewart, “Songwriting Series.”
[lxi] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lxii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lxiii] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lxiv] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lxv] “Interview :: Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event,” 32 Ft / Second, (May 3, 2011).
[lxvi] Mikel Jollett on The Airborne Toxic Event’s Facebook page, August 2014.
[lxvii] “Interview :: Mikel Jollett.”
[lxviii] August Brown, “Q&A: The Airborne Toxic Event renovates, recharges on ‘Dope Machines,’” Pop & Hiss: The LA Times Music Blog, (Mar. 20, 2015), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-the-airborne-toxic-event-renovates-dope-machines-20150320-story.html#page=1.
[lxix] The Airborne Toxic Event band e-mail, “ALL AT ONCE OUT NOW, KROQ Weenie Roast, T in the Park/Oxegen,” (May 4, 2011).
[lxx] Chrisanne Grise, “Interview: Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett,” Blast Magazine, (Oct. 17, 2011).
[lxxi] “Interview :: Mikel Jollett.”
[lxxii] Grise, “Interview: Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett.”
[lxxiii] Interview :: Mikel Jollett.”
Julie publishes musingsfromboston.com, a music blog with the bipolar personality of wannabe philosopher and charlatan music critic, where she is just as likely to review the audience as she is the band. Her first Airborne show was at a lingerie party hosted by WFNX at an Irish-Mexican bar in Boston’s financial district. She does her best to live by the motto “only one who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
Glen is the founder and editor of This Is Nowhere. He’s grateful for an understanding wife and kids who indulge his silly compulsion to chase a band all over the Pacific Northwest (and occasionally beyond) every time the opportunity arises.