By Glen and Julie
Shortly after the 2011 release of All at Once, Mikel Jollett was asked to peer into the future and hazard a guess as to what The Airborne Toxic Event’s third album might hold in store.
“We’re on a rocketship to Mars,” he laughed. “[Or we’ll do it] from our studio on Jupiter. I don’t know. I can’t begin to think about the next one. I’ve been writing songs, some of which I’m very confident will make the next record. Probably it’ll be more organic. It’s just that there were so many ideas for this record, and that was by design. But our next record, we may decide it needs to be nothing but ukuleles. Or that we’ll become a drum ‘n’ bass outfit. I’ve been listening to a lot of Das Racist lately. So maybe it’ll be nothing but Billy Joel samples.”[i]
Clearly, Jollett’s tongue was planted firmly in cheek. Nevertheless, by the time it was finished a year and a half later, Such Hot Blood would indeed represent an intentional step away from what had come before.
“I’m always trying to get rid of any sort of signature sound we have,” explains Jollett. “I want to take that apart and do something different with it. This new record has songs with orchestras on them, and then songs with foot-stomps, hand-claps and melodies. The last record had plenty of keyboards, where the new one barely has any keys on it. I want it to be fresh for me and for the audience. Once you retread ground, you’re not going to be inspired.”[ii]
It started by ditching expectations. On the previous album, he had worried too much about pleasing producers and label bosses and promoters and fans. This time out, it was all about telling the stories he wanted to tell, in the way he wanted to tell them.
“I think on the second record we all felt a tremendous amount of pressure to live up to the first,” he concedes in hindsight.[iii] “The second record is either you’re a blip or you’re a band. And you have to decide what you are. There was a lot of pressure, and for us I feel like there are some things I would change about the second record.[iv]
“We’re really thankful it was a big record for us and everything, but this time we just wanted to make something we love and not care if a (record company) person likes it or some radio programmer likes it or some blogger.[v] I didn’t care if it was weird. I didn’t care if the song structures were weird, not straightforward or obvious.[vi]
“With this record I haven’t thought about that. I honestly just haven’t thought about it this time. I just wanted to make a record that I love. That’s it, there’s no other [thoughts] on if people will like it or hate it; if it’s going to be huge or if it’s going to fail. I haven’t thought about it in those terms. I’ve just literally thought about each song and trying to make things that I love. That’s not to say that I don’t care if there’s an audience but my working hypothesis is that if I love it, other people will too and trying to guess at what’s going to be a hit or what’s going to be popular is just fucking stupid and doesn’t work out.[vii]
“Last time we thought much more about, ‘Oh, these are the rules.’ This time there’s literally not a second thought to anything except, ‘This is cool. I don’t know why this is cool, but let’s go with it.’”[viii]
The Jollett who sat down to work on album three was armed with laser-like focus. Though the songs themselves would lead in all kinds of unexpected directions, there were far fewer of them to begin with than there had been the first two times around.
“The last record I wrote 50 songs,” he recalls. “The first record I wrote 100 songs. I wrote 10 songs this time. That was it. I was talking to my friend Fitz [from Fitz & the Tantrums] about it and he was like ‘so you’re just going to expect that all of them are good?’ And I said ‘I just like the songs.’[ix] I took more time with these 10, since I knew I wanted them to make up the new record.
“The record took a year to make, and I spent a lot of time with the details and the ideas and the melodies. Each song was a real project.[x] I spent countless hours writing and rewriting lyrics; I had notebooks and notebooks filled with lyrics to the same songs. I wrote, rewrote, wrote, rewrote; reworked the arrangements and everything. I’d just be up in the middle of the night, roaming the hallways, music blaring through these huge speakers through the empty house. And I’d stop it and be like, ‘No no, it’s gotta be different!’ And I’d sit down and spend the next eight hours trying to rewrite and change it and rework it, or change the melody or harmony or whatever.”[xi]
Spending a full year working on ten songs meant that each one inevitably went through a number of iterations. Jollett surprised even himself with the final results.
“Looking back on three albums and the live record [2010’s All I Ever Wanted], there are certain decisions I’ve tended to make, and that we as a band have tended to make, where things tend to end up being epic. ‘Timeless’ is the biggest-sounding thing we’ve ever made, and initially, I didn’t want anything like that on this record. At first, I wanted only hand-claps and finger-snaps, but we wrote some songs, and the direction of the record’s story went differently.
“There were a lot of things that we did that weren’t the original intention of the song.[xii] ‘True Love’ and ‘Bride and Groom’ are songs on this record that will sound as I originally had planned. But when I wrote the song, ‘The Fifth Day,’ it had this huge orchestral arrangement and needed big vocals. Then I wrote ‘Timeless’ with a distorted horn sound and some big guitars going on, and those things helped tell the story I wanted to tell in a different way than I had first thought about.”[xiii]
Jollett’s determination to get it right pushed him to hone his natural gifts. He had previously taken vocal lessons to learn to sing in a way that didn’t destroy his most valuable instrument; now, he turned to an instructor to grow as a singer.
“I just wanted to become a better singer. This is the first record that actually has challenging singing on it; it’s actually hard to sing some of these songs. I had written some songs and I knew that in order for some of the keys to work – because some of them are, like, two and a half octaves – I was going to have to add some notes to the top of my range, and support my range at the bottom better. It’s really just like you’re a swimmer working on your stroke. It’s the whole idea of, what happens when you strip away any other priorities? Not when it’s your top priority; it’s your only priority.”[xiv]
That resolve is the heart of Such Hot Blood. “The difficult thing is actually just deciding that you’re willing to go that far,” states Jollett. “You’ve just got to dedicate yourself body and soul to something; you’ve got to see yourself as the embodiment of an idea. That level of dedication is hard because it requires so much effort. I mean, it takes months of vocal lessons, and ten to twenty rewrites of every song, and tons of different arrangements, and three months of preparation with the band, preproduction, and all the recording and all the mixing; it was all such a long and really involved process. To decide to fully dedicate in that way just requires so much work. It’s like writing in that way. You don’t write because you love it; you write because you can’t do anything else.”[xv]
A name that comes up frequently as Jollett discusses the album is Bruce Springsteen, who helped crystallize the approach he needed to bring to Such Hot Blood.
“I remember from one of the documentaries where he talks about scoring and viewing it as a cinematic score like you can watch an album,” says Jollett. “And that just hit home to me ‘cause I didn’t do that [on] All at Once, I did that a lot on the first record with like ‘Wishing Well’ and ‘Midnight’ where I was really scoring, and ‘Innocence.’ You’ve got to score your thoughts, you’ve got to put people in your world with you, you’ve got to let them join your world and the only way to do that is to sit in a room and tinker with lots of different sounds until it feels like a mood is happening and then you can sing about it. And that’s a direct lift from Bruce. And it’s something that I was not conscious of the fact that I did and I remember I was like ‘oh I totally used to do that, why’d I stop?’ and then this record I was very conscious of it. The opening to ‘Secret,’ all of ‘The Fifth Day,’ ‘Elizabeth,’ ‘Timeless,’ these are songs that are heavily scored. Like if you could sing them in gibberish you would know what they were about.
“‘This is London,’ that little delayed guitar that kind of repeats. It sounds like the street. Yeah, that was the idea. I wanted to have that feeling. So that’s a direct, thank you Bruce, for taking something I didn’t even realize I was doing and making it very explicit. So it helped me to really be clear about that on this record.”[xvi]
“I really approached things differently for this record from a songwriting perspective than either of the first two records. I thought more about not just the lyrics but how the lyrics fit together and when to let the music change and how to create parts that interlock, and there’s a lot more moving parts on the songs. The last records, a lot of the songs were, ‘there’s two parts and that’s it’, the first record too, it’s just one melody. This record there’s a lot more, a lot of movements. I spent a lot more time thinking about how different pieces fit together and how to let the music lead and not just always have the lyrics lead.”[xvii]
Another idea Jollett borrowed from the Boss was “the idea of struggle, that you don’t present your solutions, you present your struggles. Give people the struggle, don’t give them your answer. Cause you don’t have an answer. Don’t act like you do, asshole. You don’t know. So you don’t want to be like ‘I’m the songwriter I figured out so much truth and here it is! Love is the best thing’—like fuck that, fuck you, shut up.”[xviii]
“There doesn’t need to be some kind of summation,” he elaborates.[xix] “You never know if your conclusions are right, but your struggles are certainly real.[xx] You’re struggling with some kind of idea in your head and listeners are just looking to be in the room with you. You need to put listeners on your shoulder and right in the middle of your skull if you’re struggling with an idea. There’s a bit of a catharsis and a moment of recognition and almost a relief. When I heard ‘The Battle of Hampton Roads’ by Titus Andronicus, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ The song ends with a devastating final line that I totally relate to. That shock of recognition is a relief. It’s empowering and makes you think that what is going with your life is like some kind of big drama or some kind of farce. There’s a common thread between you and your audiences. You’ve been given an opportunity as a storyteller and it’s important to not let that idea go to your head.”[xxi]
In a very real sense, Such Hot Blood is the sound of a songwriter returning to his novelist roots.
“I was really determined on this record to create something that I thought told the story in the way that I wanted to tell it,” says Jollett. “I wanted this record to be almost like a book you could read, like a novella; from start to finish you would listen to it, you could get caught up in the characters and caught up in the story.[xxii] I was trying to think of the record as a movie or something that you could just hear the music and know where you are at all times and know what’s happening around you. The idea is to be able to almost close your eyes and just watch it. I want people to really feel like when they hear it they know where they are.”[xxiii]
To liken it to a book or a movie is not to suggest the material is fiction. Like those that preceded them, Jollett’s Such Hot Blood stories are painfully autobiographical.
“It is a type of haunting. You know as a writer you have to be careful of the ghosts that you choose to haunt you. It’s all very frighteningly real. All this stuff really happened, so knowing that removes the burden of having to suspend disbelief, because it’s fucking true. So there’s something both sort of joyful, and kind of mean, and also kind of terrifying about that idea. You know you’re watching somebody sing about their own life, and dealing with the idea that it really changed them, or fucked with them, or whatever, so being in a room with that… It’s not really acting, because acting you’re playing a role. This is actually stuff that happened to you.
“You end up singing these songs night in, night out, and you’re reliving the moments and the ideas, and it does feel like the people that they’re about kind of have the last laugh, because you’re singing about them every night. And in some ways there’s a romance to that, I guess. But at the same time, when you think about it, I sometimes wish you could just forget. You wish you weren’t so tied to it, and I’ve felt both of those things. But mostly the job is to be a servant to the audience. There’s a shock of recognition that happens when somebody hears something in a song… like it’s happened to me where I hear something and I think, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea anyone ever felt that way!’ And I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ So to see that in someone else is really exciting. So a lot of the times when I write I try to bridge that gap. Because then your life, it seems almost like a big cosmic joke. I don’t mind looking like an idiot, or looking like a fool, or looking lovelorn, or looking overly naive, or whatever it is. Overly hopeful, overly faithful, overly melancholic, you take on the pose of the character and establish a voice, because the point is the story. It’s not me. I’m just like a vehicle. I try to keep myself out of it, in that way. So performing the songs it’s just concentrated on the audience, and the story, and the song itself, almost like you’re writing a play or something like that.”[xxiv]
If there’s a theme to this particular collection of tales, it’s that most cliché of pop tropes: love.
“There’s a couple straight up, just love songs on this record… I mean, they’re a little dark, because they’re sort of placed in the context of everyone you know dying… but then, that is sort of the nature of love, right?[xxv]
“It’s hard to look at it objectively, but with these characters you sense their longing, and you sense their kinship with one another, and you sense that there’s a real abiding, deep love that exists between them. And I think this sort of voyeuristic look into this relationship that fell apart is what people are drawn to. I mean, this is my guess; this is what I’m getting from what so many fans have been telling me. And it’s the songs about love, which are not the ones that I expected. I’m hearing so much about ‘Elizabeth,’ and ‘Bride and Groom,’ which is a really weird song. It’s been ‘The Storm,’ ‘Elizabeth,’ ‘Bride and Groom,’ and ‘Fifth Day;’ those are the weirdest ones, where I was just like, ‘Fuck it. I don’t even know what this is, I’m just going to make it.’
“Those are the ones that people tend to be really drawn to, and I think it’s that they’re watching this thing unravel, and we’re putting people in a place where they can sort of voyeuristically look at something that’s falling apart, at the same time as you can see there’s real love there. These are characters that love each other so much at the same time as they are conscious of losing one another, at the same time as they romanticize each other, at the same time as there’s a winking, almost, friendship, and all of that nuance. I honestly didn’t know if people would come along with me on the journey; actually I thought maybe they wouldn’t, probably be particularly enamoured with sort of kitschy and disposable ideas about love.”[xxvi]
True, it was hardly the first time Jollett had written about love. But, in comparison to his previous efforts, he found himself approaching the subject from a less cynical angle. Call it maturity.
“There was an intention to write differently on this album. I feel this record had this element of hope, whereas the first record was just desperate and raw, and the second record is a thematic extension. This record sounds more like the first record, but thematically it’s very different. The emotion’s different. There’s a lot more hope; there’s a lot more room for actual love and not just desperation. But there is a real sense of love lost… The struggle has hints of something other than just the world is a hugely dark and big place. Because I don’t really believe that. So it felt weird trying to write that; trying to write how I felt when I was 25 or 26 years old.”[xxvii]
The actual writing of the album happened in typical Jollett fashion – which is to say, in Anna Bulbrook’s words, “We got back to the way we made our first record, which is Mikel went in and locked himself in a room and wrote a bunch of songs, and then we sort of went in and workshopped them as a band, and played them together live a lot, and then went to the studio and recorded them as live as you can in modern recording. It was like just going back to the most basic thing about songwriting. Is this song awesome? Does it have awesome lyrics? Are the melodies awesome? Does this make me feel something? Does it tell the story I want to tell?”[xxviii]
The gestation began in the summer of 2011, much of the writing taking place on the road in between gigs on the All at Once Tour. It was, as always, a deeply introspective process for Jollett.
“That moment of writing, it’s really just me in my room, in my head, with my piano, or guitar, or keyboard, or something. And a lot of it I kind of forget, and that kind of amnesia is very adaptive, but I just forget that there’s ever going to be anyone that’s ever gonna hear. I’m just writing because it’s like in the cosmos or something. It’s hard to explain. I find myself singing stuff sometimes where I can’t even remember – like I forget that other people are gonna hear it.
“I remember reading once where somebody said the reason they wrote the book is because they wanted to figure what they think. I’ve definitely had a few songs like that. There’s a song where I sort of set myself to the task of figuring out how I felt about this idea that a lot of choices we make, because if you’re going to die anyway, why do it? We’ve all obviously wrestled with these questions. So I remember that. And other times I’ll write a song because it’s fun. It’s like a stomp. It’s just nasty, dirty, and fun. There doesn’t always have to be this huge deep concept. Some of them, you just want to write them, because, man, you just like saying it.”[xxix]
When it finally came time to record, the band took an approach that married the spontaneity of their first album with the professionalism of their second.
After coming out of All at Once with the feeling that Dave Sardy had been a little heavy handed on the production, the band found a better fit in Grammy Award winning producer Jacquire King, known for his work with Kings of Leon, Cold War Kids and Tom Waits, among others.[xxx] In the summer of 2012, they holed up for three weeks in Nashville’s Blackbird Studio – their first time recording outside the L.A. area. For Jollett, who had at times butted heads with Sardy, King was a breath of fresh air.
“There’s a song called ‘What’s In A Name’ on the new record; the second I wrote that song I knew Jacquire King was the guy,” says Jollett. “I love Tom Waits, I loved [the King-produced] Good News. I was obsessed with that record, I knew every note. The guy’s great to work with. Best ear I’ve ever been around. He believes in playing live. The whole record is live. I mean the last record we were never in the room the same time together once.[The first record] was live. And this record we’re totally live. And we would ask like ‘oh are you going to track the guitars separately for safety so if you want to re-amp it and change the effect you can?’ and he’s like ‘no, do you like the sound? If you don’t like the sound let’s find the sound. We can spend all day finding the sound but once we get the sound we’re gonna fuckin record it and that’s going to be your sound, so if you don’t like it you better fuckin say something.’
“The vocals are separate. Although on a couple of them we did use the scratch. Just the tracking vocal ended up being used. So that’s what we did, get everything just right. We’re in this beautiful studio and we’d find these tones and hit record and then find the one take that we thought was the magic take, and that’s the one on the record. Sometimes the errors we left in, just because it’s good to have some errors. Sometimes things would be a little blue or a little fast or off but it just works, for whatever reason it just works.”[xxxi]
If it sounds like a simple, back-to-basics process, make no mistake: there is nothing simplistic about the finished product. “It’s just a really grand record,” says Jollett. “Even when I hear it, I’m like, ‘Wow.’ We all got together and there’s this sense of wanting to play some of these songs with an orchestra, on the moon, because there’s just huge stuff that happens. There’s a lot more instrumentation: there’s horns and there’s mandolin and there’s flutes and there’s all different types of keyboards, and we’re just trying not to think about what genre we were or whether we’re an indie rock band or a rock ‘n’ roll band or essentially a folk band that makes rock ‘n’ roll or whatever the heck it is, and just think about, ‘This sounds good, and we want it to sound big in this moment, and at this moment we want it to sound celebratory, and at this moment we want it to sound kind of pensive and dark.’”
“We’re just trying not try to think too much about what kind of sound we’re putting out there,” confirms Steven Chen. “We’re just getting in a room and then playing honestly.”[xxxii]
“I think in the past we’ve been very focused on rock rhythms with electronic sounds, and this one was just sort of massively organic,” Jollett elaborates.[xxxiii] “It doesn’t feel produced, it doesn’t feel heavy; it just sounds like people playing music in a room. And it’s weird how that works. You speed it up, you slow it down, all together, and there’s something about it that’s exciting.”[xxxiv]
That said, he admits, “You still over-think everything. The word obsessed gets thrown around. A lot. And it may not be the right word, because obsession is almost like inappropriately focused on something, like something that doesn’t need to be focused on. In this case it feels appropriate, because it means so much to me for this to turn out right, and there really are a lot of things to think about. But yeah, it’s a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of concentration, and it’s fun too. I mean, you get to play in a rock band.”[xxxv]
**********************
There’s an asterisk attached to Mikel Jollett’s persistent claim that he wrote only the ten songs that ultimately comprised Such Hot Blood.
In July 2012, in the midst of recording the album, Jollett told an interviewer, “The first song on the record is actually a song from six years [ago]. It’s actually the title track of the record.”[xxxvi]
By the time the album was released, the title track was conspicuously absent.
“Oh yeah,” recalls Jollett. “It got cut. It just wasn’t happening. It felt six years old to me.” He turns to his guitarist for confirmation. “What did you think, Cheny?”
“I liked it,” replies Steven Chen. “We had a good time recording it. I think as a piece for the album, for all the other songs on the record, they maybe felt more cohesive.”[xxxvii]
“That one kind of just didn’t quite fit in,” explains Jollett of the song he wrote about Catherine, the girl from early tunes like “Happiness is Overrated” and “Missy.”[xxxviii]
Nevertheless, the feeling was the title still fit the collection. “We were trying to figure out what was the thing that connected the songs,” says Jollett. “What I like about it is that it connects the dots between the songs. There’s some songs that are slightly electronic and sometimes folky. What do they have in common? They’re all hot-blooded. There’s anger and lust and lots of passion and sex and loneliness that accompanies loss. These are hot-blooded songs and themes and it made sense to give it a title that exemplifies that. It’s a way of formalizing that idea. We’re hot-blooded people making hot-blooded music.”[xxxix]
Given Jollett’s stated objective of allowing listeners into his head, it’s entirely appropriate that the album opens with a song called “The Secret.”
“Everybody is walking around with a secret,” he explains, “and the big secret is that they have a secret, and they think that nobody knows, and they’re terrified that people are going to find out… and they will be exposed for being the fraud they are. And everybody thinks they’re walking around with these big secrets, but they’re not. ‘Cause we all share ’em.”[xl]
The song grew out of a track called “The Way Home,” which would eventually surface as a bonus cut on the European edition of the album.
“We had a song called ‘The Way Home,’ which we were trying to find an arrangement for, as I recall,” says Jollett.
“Yeah, Mikel had a great sort of campfire-style, guitar singalong that wasn’t really popping with the band,” confirms Noah Harmon. “So we were trying a bunch of different stuff, and kind of came up with a little riff that was different than ‘The Way Home’ was working.”
“It was cool, and I really liked this piece of music and it didn’t work for ‘The Way Home,’ but I was like, ‘This is rad,’” adds Jollett. “So I was trying to write the lyrics because I thought the music was really good and I was trying to write a song to it, again and again. I was pacing it and trying it these different ways, and then, for this record I remember thinking a lot about, you don’t hand people your conclusions, you hand them your struggle. That was always something I had in mind when I was writing this.[xli]
“So, there I was, struggling with the lyrics to this song, and I was in my house and one day I was like, ‘Fuck this!’ I got in my car – I had this old ’66 Chevy Malibu – and I was driving my car around Los Angeles when everything felt like some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland,[xlii] and then it occurred to me: the song is about this. It’s about this drive, right now, being here, being frustrated, not knowing what the hell to do with my life or my time or whatever. So I pulled over to the bar and I ordered a warm whiskey, and one became three, and three became five, and five became a taxi home. But then I started writing the lyrics, and the song that came out the next day when I looked back at everything I wrote was ‘The Secret.’[xliii] Something about imagining people somewhere else, carefree and dancing… and the first of many ghosts just beyond the headlights.”[xliv]
Early live performances of the song were significantly longer than the tight, three-and-a-half minute arrangement that appeared on the label, with some of Jollett’s most evocative lyrics having fallen by the wayside.
Somewhere they’re dancing the night away madly
They clutch each other tight, as they’re swaying sadly
So you drink to forget, or you drink to remember
But the smoke fills your eyes from the ashes and embers
It’s a decision that still rankles the writer. “This song was originally much longer. Cutting it down was the first and last time I ever took advice from a label,” he declares in no uncertain terms.[xlv]
The lead track transitions seamlessly into the second, the closing hum of “The Secret” morphing into the opening bass notes of “Timeless” – a song Jollett wrote more for himself than anybody.
“A number of people in my family passed away and I was really pissed off about it. I didn’t quite know what to do, so the song helped me make sense of the loss,” he says.[xlvi]
“I wrote it for Juliette, my grandmother. It was a kind of angry elegy for the five family members we’d lost in a very short amount of time. Nothing prepares you for it. I think I realized I had spent 10 years writing about death as a concept to be devoured or explored or exploded — without really experiencing it. Up close it wasn’t interesting at all. Just horrible and draining and very very sad. The song is about that grief — mostly for them, for the fact that they don’t get to be alive anymore, for how boring and predictable the world seems without them. And also how after they’re gone, you can still hear them in your head: talking to you, persuading you, sharing a laugh— and you want so badly to make them proud, to become the person they imagined you to be.”[xlvii]
Reflecting on his grandmother, Jollett remembers her characteristic humor. “She was funny, and she’d tell all these great jokes, and it was like the world just got more boring. Like, the world was more exciting with her in it. We had so many great times. She would tell off color jokes in mixed company; she just swore like a sailor. She was a little 92-year-old woman and she swore like a sailor, with her little red boots. Oh, she was so cute.”[xlviii]
“When I sat down to write [the song],” he reminisces, “I was in Cincinnati and I was running across some bridge, cause I like to go running on tour just to get the fuck away from everything. And I was just like singing the song, cause I’ll just sing all day long in my head trying to get it down. And I was singing all these different lines, and I was like ‘She disappeared alone in the dark…’ and I was like ‘Ah!’ and I stopped, and I borrowed like a pen from someone and a piece of paper and I wrote down the opening line. And I knew once I wrote that line that the rest of the song would present itself. It was like, you gotta start with one true thing. Phillip Roth talks about this, when he starts a novel he’ll write a hundred pages in like three months until something feels alive. And he’s just searching for something that’s alive. And then he’ll write one paragraph and that one paragraph is alive. And he goes ‘There’s my book.’ In this one paragraph. And then you take that, and it may not be the first paragraph of the book, but that’s when the book presents itself, that’s when the story presents itself. And with that line, that’s when the whole song, I got it. And then it was just a matter of the craft of creating a song about that idea. But just having craft isn’t enough, cause you have to have your imagination captured by an idea large enough to write about.”[xlix]
For someone who has written so much about death, you might think it gets easier over time. It doesn’t. Jollett is as uncomfortable with the concept as ever.
“It’s awful. It’s hard to talk about things that are terrible. It’s terrible, people dying. I don’t want to die, I want to live to be a thousand. I want to be one of those brains floating inside a robot body that gets shot into space and spends like a hundred years contemplating existence, flying around in orbit, then come back and, like, pitch for the Yankees, as a robot, in the robot leagues of 2420, or whatever, and I’ll be the robot MVP of that year. And then I want to run for mayor of Washington DC, which will be under water or whatever the hell it is.
“I don’t want to die. I’m not even joking. I’m like a hundred percent serious about this. I don’t want to die, and I want to be the first brain floating in goo inside a robot that lives a thousand years. And I want to write a book about it, and I want to live another thousand years and write another book. It’s possible, so I just want to do it. I don’t want to die. It’s awful. I hate it. It sucks so much. There’s all these wonderful things in life, and those are very cool. Sitting there cold, under the ground, and decomposing slowly with no consciousness, sounds awful.”[l]
Things take a turn for the cheerier, thankfully, on the nostalgic rocker “What’s in a Name?” It was the first song written for the album, back in 2011, and it led directly to the choice of Jacquire King as producer of the album. “He’s a great rock ‘n’ roll guy, and it was a big rock ‘n’ roll song,” explains Jollett.[li] “It just felt like one of those great early 80s rock songs that the Heartbreakers would do or T-Rex or Thin Lizzy or something, and he just seemed like the one to capture it. He heard the demo and wanted in on the record, with one stipulation: that we all go to Nashville to make it at Blackbird studios. Which we did, renting a house, inviting friends (the Drowning Men, Mona, etc…), wreaking havoc at Five Points and Santa’s Pub-even taking a three day motorcycle trip to Memphis to pay homage at Graceland. Good times.”[lii]
“We got super excited about the song just because it’s this big rock ‘n’ roll, anthemic thing that you imagine playing at festivals,” adds Harmon enthusiastically. “Of course, you know, we had to go through 20 more steps to record the song, change keys, I think you changed the lyrics up a little bit…”
“It’s a song about lost youth,” offers Jollett, before getting more blunt: “It’s about a 15-year-old kid trying to get laid. I usually write very autobiographically, and that one isn’t so much that; that one’s kind of just a story about what those ideas mean to you when you’re 15.”[liii]
“The Storm” was the unofficial second single from the album. Though there was never a formal announcement or a video to support it, it nevertheless received a decent amount of radio play.
“I love this song,” declares Jollett in no uncertain terms. “This might be my favorite on the record. Well, maybe ‘Bride and Groom.’ But Noah had written this piece of music that I just fell in love with. Noah makes all these great soundscapes; just at home, he’ll play all the instruments and he’ll send them to me and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ And I just thought it was a gorgeous piece of music, all these great delayed guitars and the beat that’s sort of this jumpy kind of thing.[liv] I didn’t even know what to do with it when I first heard it; I just thought it was really pretty and I wanted to make it into a song.”[lv]
“We took it apart a couple different ways,” Harmon reminds Jollett. “What I had sent you had a lot of different places open for lyrics and stuff like that, and a lot of the time when I’ll do tracks, sometimes it comes out of here and it comes out of there. And I think for that track, I really had you in mind for doing it. I was really thinking about how you would do it.”
“I remember that,” says the singer. “I remember you being like, ‘I know your style.’ He even wrote it in a key – C-sharp – that is good for me. He was like, ’No, I’ve got it.’ So between the two of us we kind of mapped this song out.
“And then lyrically, I was going through a lot of heavy stuff at this point in my life when I wrote this song. I wrote it about a year before the record came out, and the idea of the song is somebody witnessing your struggles. You go through these private struggles in your life, and in some cases you feel like you’ve been just barely getting through for a very long time. And the idea is that somebody comes in and just sees it, and is like, ‘Oh my God!’ And that moment of sympathy and empathy, and that sense that somebody can witness who you are and want to help you in your life when you’re just kind of laid bare was really powerful for me at the time.[lvi]
“I guess I wanted it to be a song about being on the road. The music had this real sense of reflection about it, so it starts in this very reflective place. We’ve been on the road for five of the last six years, and played about 800 shows or something like that at this point as a band, so when you’re on the road you definitely feel such an incredible longing for home.[lvii] There’s a sense of home that’s kind of the heart of love; that sense of homeness that you can just be yourself with someone, they can see your struggles, and they can see what’s good and bad about you and love you for it. And the minute you recognize that is actually when you know that you have love in your life. Plus it’s got a catchy part in the middle.”[lviii]
“Like all the songs on this record, it was recorded completely live. Even the vocals were only slightly overdubbed. We played the song five times and chose the one we liked and that’s it.”[lix]
“Safe” is one of the most musically exquisite pieces in the Airborne catalog – so much so that it’s almost hard to believe the story of how it came to be. As Jollett and Harmon tell it:
Harmon: We’re in the studio in Nashville, Tennessee – Blackbird Studios – and IDJ, our fair record label –we had sort of a miscommunication where at the last second, the eleventh hour, they were like, “Oh, well you need another song on your record.”
Jollett: We thought by contract we needed another song. We only had nine, and so we were like, “I guess we’ve gotta do a tenth song.”
Harmon: I don’t know how other people do it, but for us, we had spent months preparing for this; Mikel had spent untold hours and years writing songs for it, and we were in the studio…
Jollett: And we had, like, three days to come up with another song. “What are we going to do?”
Harmon: And you were digging through your laptop and you found some old riff from a sound check somewhere.
Jollett: I think Steven had written that opening piano lick on guitar, and we were like, “That’s pretty cool.” And then Anna added this thing and Noah added this bass line, and we were like, “This is a cool piece of music! Where the hell did this come from?”
Harmon: And so we just jam it; it’s like all day, and we’re in the studio, and we finally get sort of an arrangement together and we’re like, “Alright, let’s go for this.” And we record it.
Jollett: One time. We recorded it one time.
Harmon: We figured out the arrangement, played it the whole way through, got it recorded, and we’re like, “This was an amazing take.” It was phenomenal.
Jollett: So we played it for Jacquire; he came in on Monday and he was like, “Okay, cool, that sounds done.” We thought it was a demo and he’s like, “Okay. Done.” And we were like, “Awesome.” And I went home, because I had two more weeks in Nashville, and I wrote a song to the arrangement that we had recorded.
Harmon: It’s the first time Daren played drums the whole way through; it was the first time a lot of stuff was played the whole way through on that song.[lx]
Years later, Jollett is less charitable about the mix-up that led to the creation of “Safe” – but no less bullish on the song. “Because of an arcane music industry practice, we were told we needed one more track for the record than we had. At the time we were already in Nashville, long since done with all of our pre-production rehearsals, already halfway through the recording process… So we got in a room and started playing something from an old ‘jam’ session (we rarely ‘jam,’ I kind of hate the idea actually). In about five hours we had something basic worked out. We pressed record. I spent two days locked in a room writing lyrics and that became ‘Safe.’ I love Anna’s violin on the breakdown.”[lxi]
Musically, “Bride and Groom” is what Jollett expected the whole album would be: a folksy, hand-clapping campfire tune. But it’s the story, even more than the arrangement, that he so cherishes.
“‘Bride and Groom’ might be my favorite song I’ve ever written. I like the line, ‘This city is haunted by the ghosts of failure.’ I have a house up in the hills and I wrote that looking out over [L.A.] People are just obsessed with success, and just the idea of being haunted by these ghosts of failure. And just accepting that I’m one too, like, it’s liberating.[lxii] And I can’t explain why the idea of identifying with failure makes so much sense to me, and feels like such a relief to me, but it does. And I guess I had that idea in mind.
“I love all the little stories,” he continues: “The broken hands, and the girl singing and the girl suddenly taking her dress off and dancing around. There was something about it – it felt like a novel to me. And I like the imagery of the sea, and mermaids and sirens that kind of runs through the song as well.[lxiii] And yes, this song is about Elizabeth. Yes, the events are real. Yes, I have a thing for mermaids.[lxiv]
“It’s like you sort of identify with these characters who are sort of simultaneously nostalgic and just bitter, and they’re kind of romanticizing their past even though they’ve come to terms with it. There’s a really great narrative at the center of it. It all just feels like I know these two people and I feel for them both. They’re kind of recognizing that what they had is over, but at the same time it’s such a part of them.[lxv] I like to imagine this song as a celebration (rather like a wake) of something broken and lost and ending and hopeless and nonetheless stunning in the beautiful ruins it left behind.[lxvi]
Jollett concludes with a shrug. “I don’t know, with certain songs it’s hard to explain; I don’t think it will ever be a single or anything like that, but I just love this song and I’m very proud of it. I feel like it’s nuanced in a way that I wanted to capture. And when it was done, that last line where it turns on the groom, it’s like the bride is so sad and she’s lamenting this idea that she’ll never get married or something like that, and then suddenly he realizes, ‘Oh wait, me too. Fuck!’ That moment I feel is kind of like the clincher of the whole thing.”[lxvii]
The rockabilly “True Love,” which features a hair-raising mandolin solo by Harmon, has one of Airborne’s more unique origins stories.
“I wrote this song while drunk in an airplane bathroom flying over a summer storm in Kansas,” admits Jollett.[lxviii] “As he does, Noah had made this cool piece of music. We were flying along, and he was sitting there mixing it on an airplane. And he said, ‘Check this out,’ and he put some headphones on my head. And I was like, ‘Oh this is cool,’ but I was, like, wasted. So I took the laptop…”
“Yeah, he takes my laptop into the bathroom of the airplane,” interjects the bassist. “He’s totally wasted in the bathroom, singing, and it was the opening line, it was the, ‘My heart, my head’ part.”[lxix]
“I kept hitting my head on the door when the plane would dip,” Jollett explains. “Something about airplanes makes you think about all the angels falling around your head.”[lxx]
Why not wait till he was sober? “‘Cause I didn’t want to lose it,” he reasons. “I really believe that when you have a moment of inspiration and it strikes, you’ve gotta go for it, and don’t put it off for an hour or a day or something. So I was like, ‘Fuck this,’ and I went into the bathroom and I just started singing. And then we sat together, and we kind of moved things around, and then we added that little jam at the center and we added all the guitars and the horns and everything, and then we brought it to the band.”[lxxi]
Hidden away inside the recording is a cameo from a couple of friends. “If you listen closely to the chorus, you can hear Michael Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs from Fitz and the Tantrums contributing guest vocals,” reveals Jollett.
The pair waxes nostalgic for the days of their psychotically-paced European tours as they recount the development of the eighth track, “This is London.”
Harmon: So, Mikel has this guitar riff that he’s playing a little bit, and he’s got a sort of melody that he’s working from.
Jollett: We’re on the bus in London.
Harmon: We’re on the tour bus in the middle of London.
Jollett: And we hadn’t been in London for a while; it was our first time back there in a long time.
Harmon: And we know London and the UK super well; we spent a whole lot of time there.
Jollett: We played something like 70 shows in the UK before our record even came out.
Harmon: Yeah, and some of you who are familiar with some of our history and mythology, we did the stupidest tour ever. We played 30 nights in a row throughout the UK.
Jollett: At every batshit toilet bar in the UK. We played for, like, 5 kids…
Harmon: Towns you’ve never heard of.
Jollett: We’ve been to every shithole in the UK and played a show on that tour.[lxxii] We broke in the UK before the states which meant we were out playing for larger crowds in London when we were still playing small clubs in Silver Lake. It was an amazing experience. To be there, playing shows, meeting fans, dealing with the British press, running wildly through the night from pub to pub was like standing on the edge of something. It felt new and endless, overwhelming, exhausting, amazing.[lxxiii] So, we had gone back to the UK and I was sitting on the bus, and suddenly I was nostalgic for this time when we were just this wide-eyed new band, and not like a proper rock band.
Harmon: And your first big tour when you really go overseas and you’re flying, the UK seems so exotic. It really is a foreign country, and so different from what you’re used to as just a bunch of idiots from Southern California.
Jollett: And plus just the history of rock ‘n’ roll there.[lxxiv] I’m an anglophile and grew up listening to, and to some extent, emulating British bands. They were all so smart and sort of tongue-in-cheek coy, pissed off and romantic all at the same time.[lxxv] Like, something about the British and the way they approach rock ‘n’ roll: there’s an anger and a desperation and there’s a kind of winkingness to it, and it’s sort of weird and that’s sort of part of it – I love that, and I always was in love with it growing up in California, and I’d hear these faraway British bands like the Stone Roses. ‘What the fuck is this?’ Or the Smiths. And it blew my mind. It was just so different from whatever bullshit hip hop they were playing at my high school. And so, going there was like going to Mecca. It’s just about running wildly through the nights. We would finish the gig and we’d go out to the pubs with the fans, and we’d drink till morning – just craziness and feeling like a rock star. And then the depression of the endless lack of sunny days. It gets dark at four, and it’s raining all the time and you’re far from home and you’re starving…
Harmon: And you drink so much in the UK. You just go to the pub.
Jollett: ‘Cause that’s what you do.[lxxvi]
“London” leads into a veritable masterpiece. “The Fifth Day” is a rapturous fusion of love and loss, passion and despair, wrapped in swirling strings, mournful whistles, sharp cries and the weighty power of wordless silence.
“‘The Fifth Day’ is a song that I didn’t originally think was going to go on the Airborne record,” says Jollett in a startling admission. “I’d spend a lot of time alone in my house, and I’d written this song – it was almost incantatory; it almost felt like it was something out of the bible or something. I don’t mean it was a biblical reference or anything; what I mean is that there was something about the structure of the song. And I became obsessed with this song. There was a few weeks there where I’d be pacing the halls of my house; I have these hugely loud speakers and I’d turn it up, it’d be, like, four in the morning and I’d be blaring all these different parts, walking around my house just trying to think about what the song was about.[lxxvii] It became a snowball with strings and weird piano sounds, growing into this symphony of voices and trumpets, whistling, screaming.[lxxviii]
“The first half of the song is about this sense of loss, and the kind of feeling you have, you don’t even know how you got so wrapped up in something, you can’t even remember who you were because you’ve come so far with it. And it’s both the male and the female figure – both the man and the woman are singing.” [Note: Jollett and Bulbrook sing every word of the song in perfect harmony.]
“The song is sort of like the re-imagining of kind of sadness. Like the majesty of sadness, this whole second half. And there are the two voices at the start, and they’re both almost like two bubbles saying kind of the same thing but from different perspectives, and then the end is the kind of imagined dream-life that they share.[lxxix] Like these two people are in separate rooms, and they join in the same sort of dream world. Like they both fall asleep and they’re far apart and they’re missing each other or something, or dealing with this thing that happened. And only when they fall asleep can they actually share the same space – and that space, it’s almost like they’re in awe of how sad they are and are overcome with emotion. It’s almost like there’s an awe-inspired feeling of it[lxxx] – as if the narrator tells his neatly-wrapped story, turns off the light and proceeds to fall headlong into a cacophonous, almost childlike awe at the devastation he’s witnessed.[lxxxi]
“And I remember writing it and it was just weird; I thought it was a weird song and I wasn’t going to do it, and then I played it for the band, and everyone in the band was very, very supportive and they wanted to do it. And then when we recorded it, we added all kinds of horn players, and Noah and Anna added an entire string symphony for it – so everything you’re hearing that sounds like an entire symphony is actually just Noah and Anna, and we really tried to bring to life this very large idea: almost this child-like fascination with sadness that the song was really about at the end.”[lxxxii]
The album could very easily have ended there, but that would have robbed the world of one of Airborne’s most cherished songs, a quirky little self-referential ballad that ties up the mythology of the album and finally gives the lost lover a name: “Elizabeth.”
“This is a song… it’s kind of winking,” explains Jollett. “You know, we ended the first record with ‘Innocence,’ and I thought about ending the record with ‘Fifth Day;’ I feel like ‘Fifth Day’ is kind of the apex of the record, or the climax as it were of the record, but I wanted to have almost like an epilogue that was a little bit more tongue-in-cheek. I felt like the heaviness of those prior tracks, I wanted to have a song that I felt was almost like you could laugh at yourself, where you see yourself almost as a cliché – like, ‘God, I’m writing another sad song.’ I thought there was something very human about that.[lxxxiii]
“The song came out of a real conversation. Elizabeth is a true story. She was my girlfriend for a very long time. She used to say to me, ‘I want you to write one of those fucking sad songs about me. You write all these songs, and they’re always torturous… I don’t want that bullshit. Write a happy song. If you’re gonna write about me, you’d better write a fucking happy song. She was kind of this weirdly siren-like figure in my life. The weird thing is, she wasn’t really a muse for a long time. It wasn’t until after things ended that she sort of became one I guess. Actually, she’s like a mermaid or something. I got a tattoo for her on my arm.[lxxxiv]
The song references the white dress of “Sometime Around Midnight” fame. Jollett explains: “That line was a joke… The two characters are talking to each other, and she’s sort of taking the piss. She’s kind of making fun of him; that’s why she mentions the white dress from ‘Midnight.’ She’s kind of in on the joke, and she’s kind of playfully poking fun at him.”[lxxxv]
“I remember feeling like that last line just kind of devastated (‘I’ve never known love, this is just my best guess’). That is the gnarliest line on the entire record.[lxxxvi] Whenever I heard that line, just like, ‘Oh God, that’s so fucking true!’ So to put it as the last line of the record felt almost like the ending of a book, sort of like, okay, we’ve come to the end of the story. And then the band comes in with these great strings, and this little xylophone part, and it’s just really pretty. And then it just ends. And I remember thinking, ‘What if the record just fucking ended like that, and you have to just spend your time with just those ideas hanging in the air and have to think about what they mean?’ And I wanted that, like the way a good book ends in that way.”[lxxxvii]
Like several other songs on the album, Jollett seems genuinely surprised by how taken his audience is with “Elizabeth.” “It’s sad,” he says. “I don’t understand why people are so drawn to that song. I actually wasn’t going to put it on the record – that, or ‘Fifth Day.’ Or ‘Bride and Groom,’ actually, all three of those songs. And then I played them for some friends and they were like, ‘No, you’ve got to put those on the record,’ and I thought they were so weird. And I don’t know why people are so drawn to that song; I don’t get it.”[lxxxviii]
Whether or not he gets it, “Elizabeth” has taken its rightful place among his band’s classics.
**********************
After a year of hard labor and a teaser E.P., Such Hot Blood finally landed in North America on April 30, 2013. It peaked early, briefly occupying top spot on the iTunes U.S. Alternative chart[lxxxix] and maxing out at number 27 on the Billboard rankings.[xc] By the lofty standards The Airborne Toxic Event had established with their first two albums, it was only a modest success. And yet, in the matters that really count, it was a homerun.
“I didn’t know if anyone would get it, honestly,” Jollett reminds us. “And it wasn’t until [after the release] that I actually realized anyone would get it, because the outpouring from fans has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s incredibly gratifying and humbling.”
There were dissenting opinions, of course, as there always are. Not that Jollett is losing any sleep over it. “I know that we made something, and I don’t really care [what the critics say]. I honestly feel like, I don’t even know what they’re listening for. I don’t understand it at all. You know what? I don’t give a shit.”[xci]
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Notes:
[i] Allison Stewart, “Airborne Toxic Event on war, touring and blowing things up,” The Washington Post, (Nov. 16, 2011).
[ii] Kelly Dearmore, “The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett on insecurity and rocking like it’s the end of the world,” Dallas Culture Map, (Mar. 4, 2013), http://dallas.culturemap.com/news/entertainment/03-04-13-the-airborne-toxic-event-mikel-jollett-interview-such-hot-blood/.
[iii] Gary Graff, “Sound Check: The Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t need rules anymore,” Oakland Press, (July 12, 2012).
[iv] Matt Schichter, “Airborne Toxic Event ready new record,” MSN Entertainment, (July 27, 2012).
[v] Graff, “Sound Check.”
[vi] Mikel Jollett, Boston Rock Talk Podcast, https://soundcloud.com/bostonrocktalk/podcast-15-the-airborne-toxic-event.
[vii] Schichter, “Airborne Toxic Event ready new record.”
[viii] Graff, “Sound Check.”
[ix] Schichter, “Airborne Toxic Event ready new record.”
[x] Dearmore, “The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett on insecurity and rocking like it’s the end of the world.”
[xi] Mikel Jollett, Boston Rock Talk Podcast.
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