By Glen and Julie
As Mikel Jollett’s thoughts turned towards what would become The Airborne Toxic Event’s fourth record, the man who once penned a hit song celebrating a stubborn unwillingness to change came to a stark realization: it was time to blow shit up.
To hear him tell it, the moment of inspiration struck while listening to a couple of the greats.
“I heard this a cappella version of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury singing ‘Under Pressure.’ Do yourself a favor if you have a minute, YouTube that shit. They’re just fucking amazing singers. God damn, Freddie Mercury could sing, and David Bowie’s in the background going ‘do-do-dad-do.’ It’s just so, rhythmic and weird and awesome.[i] It made me want to put on a sequined onesie, grow a thick mustache, stand on the front of the stage and just belt.[ii] I had this moment of clarity where I thought, ‘You know what, I’ve got to change my approach.’[iii] Ergo, this new record.”[iv]
Whether it stemmed from Noah Harmon’s departure or an internal sense that he and the band had gone just about as far as they could go in their current direction (“I felt like we had reached the apotheosis of being a proper rock band,”[v] he confesses), Jollett was ready for a fresh start.
“You ever get to a point in your life where you say: fuck it, burn it down?” he mused one day on Twitter. “It’s time to move, time to change, time to become something new–something you’ve already been for a long time in your heart. And you think: well, people might not understand. So you’re just resigned and content to be just as fucking weird on the outside as you’ve always known you are on the inside.[vi] Bury the past. Bury the future. Bury yourself. Live in the song.”[vii]
“I just wanted to be joyful about it,” he clarifies in hindsight. “I wasn’t going to worry anymore. For the first three records, I thought mostly like writer. My mindset changed. It was about inventing a musical logic that was unabashedly catchy and rhythmic, but way weirder than anything we’ve done in the past.”[viii]
Weird. It’s a word Jollett would reference frequently in his attempts to describe what exactly he was cooking up.
“[It was] all about finding things are just fun to play, things that sound different and weird, things that have a handclap to them and an innate rhythm,” he says. “I ended up making this whole record kind of based on those ideas, which is by far the weirdest record we’ve made.”[ix]
After an album, Such Hot Blood, that was commercially disappointing, cynics wondered aloud if the change was motivated more by the desire for chart success than artistic concerns – a charge that Jollett is quick to deny in no uncertain terms.
“We are not trying to get big. I don’t fucking care if we get big or not.”
Taking a deep breath, he continues in more measured terms. “I don’t really think like that. We are not a franchise. We’re artists. We’re just a group of musicians playing music. Sometimes that music is on acoustic guitars and sometimes it is on a bunch of crazy keyboards.
“You can’t write a radio single. I can’t do that. We’ve never been that kind of band. Our songs that made it on the radio were never really intended that way. You just have to write a lot of music, and sometimes you write something that’s really great. And if something’s really great, people will play it because it’s great. I don’t want to be known for something that’s kind of superfluous. There’s bands now, and I won’t mention them, who are on the radio, and I wouldn’t want to play their songs. It’s not my thing, and I wouldn’t want to be a musician if it meant I’d have to sing their songs. I really believe that great music rises to the top.[x]
“Being an artist – you make stuff that makes the hair on your neck stand up. Sometimes that means a whispering folk song and sometimes that means a bunch of loud dance instruments. I find it really weird that people can’t wrap their head around the fact that as a musician you would want to make more than one type of music.”[xi]
It wasn’t as though The Airborne Toxic Event had been locked into a particular genre during the first eight years of their existence – as Jollett is quick to remind anyone who will listen.
“The first Airborne show ever played was at the Echo in 2006. In addition to drums, bass and guitars, onstage there was a percussive car hood (wrangled from a junkyard, it was banged with a mallet), two keyboards, a viola, a massive number of guitar effects, an electric bass bow, an upright bass and by the final song, roughly 15 singers singing in unison a song titled ‘This Is not the Point of Babette,’ the title of which was taken from a line from the novel White Noise, and the coda of which is a man screaming, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to die.’
“Since then, we have played in punk clubs over thrashing pits, in dance clubs over huge dance floors, in goth clubs, on symphony stages [Red Rocks, Summer Stage at Central Park, the Cali symphony] with 63-piece orchestras, acoustically in moving cars, on moving boats while our drummer drove, in massive cathedrals with string quartets, at Disney Hall with children’s choirs and ballet folklorico dancers, and most recently at the Greek, which was one of the very major shows we’ve ever done with just five people.
“I don’t think anyone would think we fit the typical rock-band sound palette.”[xii]
Even so, the fact that Jollett went to such lengths to explain and defend himself in the months leading up to the release of Dope Machines belies the fact that he was well aware he was pushing the envelope well beyond its previous limits – and, more to the point, that there would be resistance from some quarters.
Not that he paid such matters much mind. It wasn’t about giving others what they wanted, be they critics or fans or programmers. It was about scratching an itch.
“I felt like doing it. That’s what the short answer is, I felt like doing it,” he chuckles. “Now, why am I the type of person that will just do what the fuck I feel like doing? Don’t know. I just felt like doing it, and I don’t have a lot of insight into why.”[xiii]
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“Hell and Back,” The Airborne Toxic Event’s one-off single for Dallas Buyers Club, served as a roadmap to the band’s new direction: sonically, yes, but even more crucially in Jollett’s creative approach. The song was his first official foray as a producer, a role he would reprise for the album that followed. In fact, he would take it to the extreme, not only producing but actually creating most of the sounds himself. If it wasn’t clear already, Dope Machines would remove any doubt: The Airborne Toxic Event is not a democracy. Jollett is firmly in the driver’s seat, setting the artistic agenda.
“It was a big decision” to produce the album himself, says Jollett. “I’ve always been heavily involved in the production of records. I’d sit there in the booth, working with our producer on compression or reverb or mixes or whatever. And it was Jacquire King who produced our last record in Nashville — he was a friend by the end and an absolute mentor — who pulled me aside when we were finishing and said, ‘You know, I think you’re ready to produce your own records.’ I was nervous at first, especially once I realized just how much technical jargon I had to learn (so much time reading manuals…). But once I got the hang of it, it was thrilling. Because all it meant was that I was better equipped to do what I always wanted to do, which was make the air outside my head sound like the air inside my head. That’s all producing really is.”[xiv]
The record began, as all Airborne records do, with Jollett alone in a room. “I basically just locked myself in a house in Silverlake for a year and wrote and wrote and recorded and recorded,” he recalls.[xv]
“I am kind of an insomniac so I am up in the middle of the night quite a lot,” he divulges. “That’s when I do a lot of my song writing… or first thing in the morning, like 5 am, because I’ve been up most of the night. A lot of the time I am trying to score that moment and create some sort of music approximation of how that felt or what I was thinking about, or what I’d just been dreaming about… [trying to capture] this one idea that just broke my heart, and trying to get a keyboard sound that [represents] how I feel.
“Song writing is tremendously cathartic, so a lot of the time what I am trying to do is not feel so alone with a thought that I am having. There’s something about writing it down and recreating it that has this way of bridging some kind of gap where instead of being alone with it in my head, now the thought itself exists in the world and has its own form. Then, I can digest it and turn it around, listen to it, think about it and share it with others so that they can think about it. Even if I don’t know what they think, even the fact of knowing other people are going to hear it helps me to understand it. Then, I feel less alone with it and like I’ve created something that didn’t exist before.”[xvi]
The big difference this time (as compared to his writing sessions for previous albums) was, when Jollett emerged from his cocoon, the songs he brought with him were more fully formed than they had ever been before.
“This record, my goal is to write 30 songs, but in the process I think I’ve written 50,” he said at one point.[xvii] Such extreme productivity would eventually necessitate some tough decisions. “Each song had a reason where you hear it and you’re like, ‘Yeah we like this song.’ You hear something special in it. Some of them I really loved. You know that expression in writing, ‘Murder your darlings?’ Yeah, there were some that I really worked hard on and I loved and we couldn’t put on the record. It’s always a sad day when you have to murder one of those things.”[xviii]
“[I’ve got] just endless, different types of music that are just instrumentals, where they didn’t quite go anywhere, because I couldn’t quite get the thing to work, and so you get like halfway down the road and you go, ‘This isn’t working,’ so you walk away. Then you come back later and you’re like, ‘You know, that 40 seconds of music is awesome!’ So there’s an insane amount of music. And it’s also way more – I’m loathe to use the word ‘produced’ but let’s say, closer to being something you could actually listen to than I’ve ever done before.
“That’s how I’m doing this record,” he continued. “It’s really close to done. And I don’t want to reproduce it in some expensive, fancy studio in Nashville. I want it to sound like how I want it to sound, ’cause whatever decision I made at 3 am after ten hours of wrestling with how a kick drum should sound at this part of a song, or how much reverb the vocals should have or what the compression rate should be on the fuckin’ keyboard or whatever it is, I trust that decision. I don’t want to redo it later, and I don’t want someone else to redo it.”[xix]
It’s a chicken-and-egg question: Which came first – the lyrical and conceptual theme of Dope Machines, or the means by which it was created? It’s unclear and probably unanswerable, so inextricably interwoven are the record’s subject matter and the high tech methods used to bring it to life.
“The record is an exploration of the sense of being lost in a crowd one gets from the modern digitally interconnected world,” Jollett explains. “Smartphones. Social media. We’ve taken all these things that are central to what it means to be human and digitized them into simple binary equations, algorithms and questions. Things like: Who do I like? Who likes me? What group(s) do I belong to? All these buggy little programs create a digital self that is a (mostly) polished reflection of our actual selves. And they’re addictive because they take the important questions, the ones we obsess over as humans, and quantify them into digestible bytes. Our social instincts, insecurities and ambitions are primed and we are all over that [stuff].[xx]
“It’s about being kind of lost in what I like to think of as this agreed upon intellectual space we’ve developed. And we’ve all decided that we’re going to live part of our lives in this place that only exists in our brains. Like, if aliens came down and just looked at us, they’d be like, ‘What are all these people doing staring at all these boxes all the time? Why are they doing that?’ And it’s because there’s something about our identity, something about the way we interact with each other, our curiosity about one another, our curiosity about how other people feel about us – you know, whether or not we’re liked, whether or not we belong to Group A or Group B or no group at all – these are some of the most important and frightening and vital and exciting and stressful questions that we have as human beings, ’cause it’s just who we are. We’re part of groups, or we’re not. And we have all these little devices that extend that, and enhance that, and in some ways I think actually diminish that.
The record’s about that. It’s about these machines that turn us into dopes, that are like sort of smoking dope ’cause they’re addictive, and they’re really dope, and they’re just good, cool little things, all kind of at the same time. And here we are sort of living in this modern world that exists kind of just in this agreed upon space between our brains. It’s nowhere that’s any place that you can go to; it’s a place that exists in our imaginations.[xxi]
“On balance it’s all pretty stupid, because we know that we are far more complex than these silly little brands we turn ourselves into online. But if you consider for a moment how this entire thing is just a metaphor that we’ve agreed upon: that websites are “places” (which they absolutely are not, they’re programs), that these pictures and quotes are “people” (which they’re not, they’re like little magazines ABOUT people) — it’s fascinating. Two billion (or some number) people have all agreed upon one system of metaphors, these images on screens that we decipher in our brains and codify into massively complex virtual societies.[xxii]
The irony of creating an album about machines using machines was entirely intentional, of course. “We can’t deny all these buggy little machines have changed our lives: heart monitors and laptops and apps and artificial lungs and smart phones and drones. It’s all so terrifying and exhilarating, like we have one foot in the future and one in the deep past, like a billion cavemen standing around an enormous fire as a big as a mountain, trading stories and singing songs.[xxiii] So I guess our tongue-in-cheek commentary involved using these dumb, bad-ass, frustrating and amazing machines to make a record,” says Jollett.[xxiv]
“I made the decision to make the record on these machines, these dope little machines. [xxv] There’s hardly a guitar on the whole thing – there’s a couple guitars, but it’s almost all on machines. And that was by design… the choice was to come with a whole different sound.[xxvi] And so it’s tons of keyboards and beats, and lots of effects that have been processed, and little pieces of music that have sort of been run through various types of effects, and then cut up, and then sort of re-presented to the listener as if the broken up piece of music was the original, and that’ll be the basis for a song – which is a very different approach.[xxvii]
“I fucking started from scratch. I spent months programming beats with CS-80s and Jupiter 8’s and Moogs. I spent a lot of time with beats and keyboard sounds and stacking things together and putting different musical environments side by side.[xxviii] There’s lots of destroyed music that’s been put through a bunch of things, and then cut up, and then put back out as if it’s the thing that made the music. And then there’s lots of weird harmonies, and there’s a voice that comes in from somewhere you don’t expect it to, and there’s instruments that are in different environments. It’s all meant to be cohesive; I’m not trying to be self-consciously weird or anything, it’s just I was really interested in using a different musical vocabulary on this record.[xxix]
“Up till now we’ve been mostly what you’d consider a ‘proper rock band’ in the vein of the Clash or something like that, or maybe the Smiths or the Cure or something. So, I don’t know if it’ll work, and it might be like, massively rejected by the world, I don’t know.[xxx] People might be mad. They might be like, ‘What the hell? You’re not James Murphy.’[xxxi] I don’t really care. As an artist, you just kind of have to follow what makes your skin crawl, makes your hair stand up on your neck, and that’s where I was at. It’s a very different sound.”[xxxii]
The choice of instrumentation fuses with the subject matter of the lyrics to reinforce the message of the album at a visceral level. According to Jollett, that synthesis is the true source of music’s transcendent power, setting it above prose. “Songwriting is kind of like condensed story-writing. It’s sort of like… um… there’s the song ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles right? If you have that same melody, that really intricate melody, but you pick different words so it’s (singing) ‘Yesterday I got out of bed and I went to the store and I bought a cup of tea,’ it would be really weird. Or let’s say you have the same lyrics but you didn’t have that melody. It wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t be as powerful of a song. One or the other on their own isn’t what is telling the story, but together it makes sense. With ‘Yesterday,’ any human being anywhere in the world can hear the melancholy in those words, the sorrow in the melody. There’s something about the two together that makes it really powerful.”[xxxiii]
He gives a glimpse into his process, illustrating how music and lyrics play off each other to create this thing that is bigger than the sum of its parts, as he discusses the creation of the track, “My Childish Bride.”
“For me, (songwriting) is like, I’ll hear something and be like, ‘Oh that’s cool! That makes me think about this, and so today I’m gonna write a song about this idea of how you project your innermost longings onto other people, and how there’s this dance that goes on.’ I’m writing a song right now about this idea called ‘My Childish Bride.’ And how you project what you actually long for onto other people as if they’re real, when they’re really just constructs in your mind; simultaneously they’re doing this with you, and so in a relationship, oftentimes you’re just in this orchestrated dance. And it can be sort of terrifying or it can be really sweet, and at times it’s really fucking sexy… it’s complex, right?
“And so I’m writing this song about this idea, and literally it started with a beat and a thing on an electric piano. And I was like, for some reason that just made me think of that idea. It felt kind of close. And I was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna write about this idea.’ And then I sort of wrote a stanza, and then I edited it, I’m not kidding, ten times. And I’ll just write and rewrite, write and rewrite, sing, sing, sing… ‘Oh that’s how I meant to say that, yeah!’ ‘And we stare at each other like a sister to a brother, like a pusher to a shover, like a secret to a cover, like a lover to a lover, under covers with the stereo on.’”[xxxiv] To sum up, he says, “I think this is the first record where I thought more like a musician and less like a writer.”[xxxv]
For Jollett, the realization that music can communicate with as much force as words – if not more – was as much crisis as revelation. After all, he had built his reputation as a wordsmith, producing some of rock’s most intricately crafted lyric sheets in the process. But in a world of iTunes and Shazam, does that even matter? He’s not so certain anymore.
“I don’t know if lyrics matter,” he admits in a moment of transparency. “I hear that a lot in interviews, and I know our fans feel that way, but then I look around at what’s popular in popular music, and I – I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I think they used to matter, and maybe they will again. I’m not lamenting the past; I think you should burn the past. This isn’t what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, I think there’s something visceral about music, that a melody and a beat paired with a lyric is what makes something so powerful. And you can’t underestimate that melody, and you can’t underestimate that beat. And so, I think that lyrics can be very powerful, but then, complete nonsense can also be very powerful.”[xxxvi]
As dramatic as Jollett’s shift in his approach to writing may have been, and as much as the electronic experimentation may have caught some observers off guard, arguably the most notable aspect of Dope Machines was the extent to which the other members of The Airborne Toxic Event were involved in its creation. Or, rather, were not.
When Jollett claimed that the recordings he made on his own were close to a finished product, and that he didn’t want to recreate them in a studio, he meant it. Though his bandmates are credited in the album notes, and their participation is detectable on some tracks, the level of their involvement remains something of an open question.
On the first half of the record in particular, traditional guitars, violas and drums are shelved in favor of electronic synths, layered Jollett vocals and programmed drum machines. For the first time on an Airborne LP, the credits contain a number of guest musicians. Included in the list of helping hands are John K. Morrical, Jr., Math Bishop and Miguel Devivo, all of whom added keyboards to a number of tracks, as well as guest background vocalists Kenny Soto (“One Time Thing,” “Dope Machines” and “Time to be a Man”), Arnae Batson (“Dope Machines”) and Audra Mae (“California”). In light of these factors, some have suggested that Dope Machines would be better classified as a Jollett solo album.
For his part, Jollett contends that too much was made of it. “I’d say it’s more aesthetics,”[xxxvii] he says, noting that it was all done with the blessing of his bandmates.[xxxviii] “I was interested in expanding our musical vocabulary to include things beyond two guitars, a bass, a violin and some drums.”[xxxix]
On that score, mission accomplished.
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The Airborne Toxic Event, circa Dope Machines
When The Airborne Toxic Event unveiled “Wrong,” the lead track from Dope Machines, on the first night of their Fillmore residency, it served as both revelation and relief to a fan base that was openly trepidatious of what was to come, given Mikel Jollett’s persistent warnings that the new record would make them mad. Revelation, in the sense that it was reliably spectacular. Relief, in the sense that it remained recognizably Airborne.
The long-promised synths were prominent, to be sure. But so too were the band’s traditional power chords and humanity, which supplemented rather than surrendered to the electronic elements. The playbook had been expanded, not burned, and the people rejoiced.
All of which only magnified the surprise two weeks later when “Wrong” received its official release as lead single from Dope Machines. The studio cut exposed that the live arrangement of the song was merely a halfway point between the traditional Airborne sound and where they truly intended to push things on the new album. As Jollett notes, “We basically play the folk songs like electronic songs and the electro songs like rock songs.”[xl] This habit makes for a more consistent live show, but in this case it also had the unintentional effect of undercutting some of Jollett’s bolder pre-release statements. The official release of “Wrong” proved that when Jollett said there was hardly a guitar to be found on the album, he actually meant it.
Vocally, “Wrong” proved to be well-polished, with Jollett dabbling in distortion and layering in ways that the band had typically shied away from. The result gives off a sort of an Airborne-meets-Fitz-and-the-Tantrums impression (not surprising, perhaps, given the close relationship between the frontmen of the two bands), though Jollett cites LCD Soundsystem and Blood Orange as comparables.
“‘Wrong’ was the first song I wrote for Dope Machines,” says Jollett. “I wrote it in a very specific situation with a very specific person in mind. I guess I see it as an Ode to Insecurity, though I think the speaker conflates his doubts with his rejection of social mores. Meaning: he chooses to be wrong. He doesn’t care about the values others may want to impose upon him. He makes his own sense of the world, fully aware that it is based upon partial/biased/incorrect information and he’s fine with that, since he’s wrestled with that damaged information and come to an honest conclusion: ‘I don’t care if we’re ‘WRONG.’ We’re staying here together, eyes closed in our ignorant, blissful embrace.’ To put it bluntly: ‘Fuck ‘em. I choose you.’”[xli]
“It’s just about a guy feeling insecure. I wrote it at a time of massive upheaval in my life. We all have that moment. You look over everything and think, ‘I am an idiot!’ It’s not every day, but you wish you could start over. That’s the idea.”[xlii]
The single was a modest radio success, despite the fact that it wasn’t initially tabbed to be the first song released (Jollett had previously indicated that honor would go to either the title track or “California”). Asked the reason for the change of heart, Jollett confesses to some bewilderment. “I don’t know, I’m crappy at choosing singles. Like, the idea of a single, it doesn’t make much sense. Our biggest single (‘Sometime Around Midnight’) is a song that has no chorus and no hook, and then our second-biggest single is a song that is massively hook-y, ‘Changing.’ And then our third biggest hit was the song ‘Hell and Back,’ which was kind of electronic. The whole thing doesn’t make sense to me.”[xliii]
Nevertheless, “Wrong” played its role perfectly: it got people talking and served notice that Dope Machines would not be your father’s Airborne.
On the album, “Wrong” is followed swiftly by the catchiest song on the record – arguably the most infectious in the Airborne catalog. “One Time Thing” opens with what sounds like a crunchy, distorted bassline, a propulsive lead-in to a groovy yet wistful lament over a one night stand that the protagonist wishes could have been something more.
“That’s one of the few songs where I really started with the music,” says Jollett of the song’s genesis. “I started with that bass line and I was like, ‘This is cool!’ It just had like an attitude from the first time I played it. And then I spent six weeks, I’m not joking, on that one track, building beats and then keyboard lines and then harmonies, and I spent some time with friends, like, ‘What about this harmony? What about that harmony?’[xliv]
“This song developed out of two situations: one of which happened to a good friend and one of which happened to me. I love how he’s quite playful in his insouciance about the fling, while acknowledging (later, begrudgingly) what a massive event it actually was in his life. He kids about all this moonshine and cheap ass wine, meanwhile he can’t sleep, laying awake instead, wondering if he’s lost a chance at something great.[xlv]
“But I just like singing it. It’s just got this nastiness to it, you know? I feel like Prince when I sing it, or something. That’s why you’re in a rock band: you want to put on your mother’s dress and hang from the chandelier, or else why do it?”[xlvi]
The story begun in “One Time Thing” finds its resolution in the title track, which follows hot (and loudly) on its heels.
“It’s fair to say [‘Dope Machines’] is a companion piece to ‘One Time Thing,’” says Jollett, “filling in the gaps of a particular kind of fling: so many pictures and texts — the digital detritus of attraction and flirtation in the modern world.”
Thematically, “Dope Machines” – both song and album – is complex. Jollett explains the various levels of symbolism encoded within the title: “Just the term ‘dope machines’ kind of had this double, triple meaning — on the one hand, a lot of the record is these kind of coy songs about what it’s like to be lost in the sea of just fucking social media, endless Internet, all this crap that distracts your attention, so it’s all these dope machines that turn you into a dope. And at the same time, these machines are DOPE![xlvii] You make music with them. They can save you from a heart attack. The machines are all of these things at the same time.[xlviii] And I think that to me is the most poignant thing because these things are addictive, and the reason they’re addictive is because they are sort of extensions of the things that make us humans.”[xlix]
These metaphors come to life visually in the mysterious album artwork, which was publically revealed in the most “Dope Machines” way possible – through a partnership with the ubiquitous music discovery mobile app, Shazam.
“The cover image features a photograph entitled ‘Nude on White’” by innovative Mid century photographer Paul Himmel,” Jollett divulges. “I saw his work and immediately was drawn to his use of grain and high contrast to create images that were simultaneously foreign, clearly altered but unmistakably human. I felt it captured the tone of Dope Machines. Himmel was married to another highly influential mid-century photographer named Lillian Bassman. Her work echoed similar ideas: obscured but iconically human.”[l]
The title track is the shortest on the album, but it packs a ton of noise into its 3:17. A wicked combination of screechy guitar and shrill synths, “Dope Machines” rocks harder than any TATE release since “Welcome to Your Wedding Day.” There are so many competing elements going on at once that it seems like it shouldn’t work – and yet it does, marking it as the arguable apex of Jollett’s electro-rock vision.
Amongst the many diverse styles in which The Airborne Toxic Event had dabbled through their evolution, pure radio pop was one of the few that they had really never touched. That embargo, whether intentional or not, came to an emphatic end with “California.”
The band is Californian to its core; its Eastside L.A. roots integral to the group’s identity. However, TATE’s California is very different from the highly polished image that has been force-fed to outsiders. “California” is Jollett’s attempt to reclaim his home state and show the world its true face.
“I don’t know what an LA Band is,” he confesses. “There are so many clichés about this place that are simply false. It’s because of Hollywood. The only culture California really exports is that of privileged white people who moved here to make it in film. That covers maybe half a million people in a 10 square mile area in the center of Los Angeles.
“The other 35 million Californians go about their lives, generally struggling to make a better life for themselves and their families. People think we’re simple and white. And we’re not. We’re complicated. And Mexican. And Taiwanese and Ethiopian and Laotian and Armenian and Korean and African American and… you get the idea.
“The most unappreciated part of Los Angeles (outside of Los Angeles, anyway) is its legit cultural diversity. I don’t know why everyone thinks we’re surfers and starlets. We’re not. It’s more like Hong Kong or London — in that it’s a place on the border between many cultures, bustling with activity and the smell of spicy food. You can go to a liquor store in Little Tokyo and buy Santeria artifacts, a bucket of kim-chi, Jerry curl spray, matzoh ball soup and a side of carne asada. Plus a guy in the back room will do your taxes if you want. That’s L.A.”[li]
Jollett’s personal history is intrinsically tied to this place. “I grew up here,” he reminds us. “My folks were big hippies. I was born on a commune in California and raised by very idealistic people who didn’t have a penny to their names but believed strongly in their children, you might even say their country. I feel very tied to this place and very resistant to its clichés. The SNL skit on Californians is funny and I wonder sometimes if that’s what the rest of the world thinks of us: dithering, spoiled people obsessed with their appearance. I understand it because most of what California exports (besides food) is the culture of white people who moved to Hollywood to get into films and yes many of those people are dithering, spoiled and obsessed with their appearance.
“People have always moved to California to find a new life. And always they have run up against a hard reality. The idea of Utopia always begs the question of Dystopia. Whether it was migrant workers in the 30s escaping the Dust Bowl only to find a harsh world of shanty towns and corporate farms completely disinterested in their well-being… Or Berkeley hippies (like my folks) in the 60s protesting the war and Governor Reagan (until I was 12, I thought Reagan’s first name was ‘That Bastard’ since that is the ONLY way he was ever referred to in my house) who found that dropping out of society only created new, sometimes harsher societies as communes became cults and high ideals failed under the weight of so many corruptible human impulses.
“People still move here to find a better life. And it only takes one look into a migrant shantytown outside the polluted fields of the San Joaquin Valley to know it is still a harsh life. Of course California is also the stuff of dreams, of aspirations, an oasis for high-minded people who live in a multi-cultural soup on the borderlands of the future.
“So I guess I could just say, as Jackson Brown once said of America: I love it here because my family is here and because it’s all I know.”[lii]
The poppy flavor of the ode to Jollett’s home is due in large part to an unlikely collaboration. “California” is the only Airborne song to date that Jollett co-wrote with someone outside of the band – Linda Perry, a hitmaker whose credits include smash singles by the likes of Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Adam Lambert and James Blunt.
“I wrote it with Linda one afternoon in her studio in the Valley,” recalls Jollett. “She was super cool and very talented. We talked about Betty (my ’66 Chevelle) and Rhonda (the ’74 Honda CB 750 — she was into old bikes and muscle cars too). Then we went inside and started working on other things in the big room: songs that had parts she would sing and I would sort of sing back and we tossed ideas around but nothing really came of it. I got dizzy so we went to the kitchen. She said, I have this little idea and she sang a piece of a melody about California and I thought, ‘whoa there. That is something.’ So we spent the rest of the afternoon writing the song. She mostly wrote the melodies (though I had some ideas). I mostly wrote the words (though she had some ideas) and we both walked away feeling like we had captured something about the state where we live[liii] – a song that kind of dealt with this daydream of a place that kind of turned into a nightmare, then existed simultaneously as both.”[liv]
The resulting song is extremely personal to Jollett. He likens it to an anthem by one of his musical heroes. “‘Born in the USA’ is like a huge pop song but if you have ever seen [Springsteen] play it live, it’s like a protest song with two chords,” he says. “‘California’ meant something similar to me. It’s a song about this destination where people come and have come for years now, usually to escape something or try to find something. They hope to find something different and better. It’s a place that doesn’t have a memory of itself. Every year, everyone is surprised when it starts raining. There’s mudslides and canyons that fall apart and some dog gets swept up in the L.A. River and it’s all very sad. Then everyone forgets.”[lv]
The curveballs continue with “Time to be a Man,” a song with a direct lineage back to that Mercury/Bowie performance that Jollett cites as his eureka moment for the album.
“I once wrote a song about Lady Gaga and Freddy Mercury entitled, ‘Stefani, I’m Tired of Taking Chances,’” he remembers. “It was a kind of torch song with lines like:
And some day, they would all go rather gaga, as you danced on the stage without clothes,
so much like Old Madonna, With that crimson in your cheeks and that nose.
So I know you love David Bowie, because you told me one night in my dreams,
And I wished someday you could know me, we would stay up and listen to Queen.
“That was before I heard the a cappella version of ‘Under Pressure’ that changed my life (at least for a while) and made me want to make big music about big populist ideas and abandon any pretense that I too didn’t love ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ or ‘We Will Rock You’ or like 10 Billy Joel songs that you’re supposed to hate if you’re a Serious Artist (‘Summer Highland Falls,’ anyone?) in favor of obscure tracks by Townes van Zandt or Neutral Milk Hotel.
“But I do. I love them. (I mean, I love ‘Colorado Girl’ too but I’m just saying) I love those big pop songs. I probably don’t love the modern equivalents much (except Adele, of course. Anyone who says they don’t like Adele is lying). Most other modern pop sounds like soda commercials to me. That’s another rant.
“The point is I wanted to make some music that was more spiritually similar to Freddy Mercury than Robert Smith or Bruce Springsteen. It’s fun. It sounds huge. It’s catchy and a little weird and there is a sense of abandonment to it. You get to have samples of choirs and you get to equate manhood with honesty and the ability to see past the darkness that can envelope your life in favor of the light you can bring others. And then when you sing it, you feel like Freddy and you can embrace your inner Freddy-ness and God Damn this song makes me want to stand on stage in a skin-tight onesie with a thick-ass mustache and just belt.
“I’m not saying that will happen. All I’m saying is the trappings of pop music are no better or worse than the trappings of ‘art’ music and the main thing is to not feel trapped. I think Freddy could get behind that.”[lvi]
Like much of the first half of the record, “Time to be a Man” makes liberal use of guest musicians. Even the background vocals, which one could be forgiven for assuming they were emitted by Anna Bulbrook, are not what they seem. “It’s actually a man,” Jollett clarifies. “A very talented singer named Kenny Soto. He also sang on a few other tracks. Love that dude!”[lvii]
Some were surprised by the inclusion of the 2013-released “Hell and Back” on the 2015 album, but to the extent that the single established the musical blueprint for what would become Dope Machines, it made perfect sense.
Jollett explains:
“I wrote this song for Dallas Buyer’s Club. At the time, I’d only heard a description of the plot and watched a trailer. But the melody and general idea for the song had been stuck in my head since I’d taken a motorcycle trip (on the Lucy, the Harley, not Rhonda the vintage Honda — that would’ve just been dangerous) from Eastern Nebraska to Los Angeles. I’d camped along the way with an old Mexican blanket and a $30 tent from K-Mart strapped to the sissy bar. I would sit there in my helmet humming the nah nah nah’s and painting a picture of a journey involving damsels and devils and angels and tears — it was all very relevant at the time.
“I decided to put the song on Dope Machines because I like to think of records as collections of music that is either thematically or temporally similar — that is, music about a set of ideas generally made in the same time period. In a way, this was the first song I wrote for Dope Machines since it was a kind hybrid (never say mash-up, never) of a country swing and something sinister and electro. This aesthetic contrast went on to infect the entire next record. You know: left hand electronic, right hand rock and roll. Or something.
“Thematically, the idea of a journey that changes you was laced throughout the record. And, as it turned out, the people from Dallas Buyer’s Club thought it worked for them too and they used it as the single for the entire soundtrack. This song and experience was one of the most surprising and just downright pleasant moments in the entirety of the band’s existence for me.”[lviii]
When “Hell and Back” first made its unexpected appearance, it was a tad jarring to long-time listeners. It was a major departure for the band, with its synth underbelly and electronic drumbeats. However, a year and a half later, now presented within the context of an album that pushes the boundaries ever outwards, it actually comes across as something of a throwback to old-time TATE.
The tone of the album shifts dramatically from the opening drone of “My Childish Bride,” the first in a trilogy of downbeat, introspective numbers with subtle instrumentation (electronic and otherwise). “Bride” is set against a crisp background of what sounds like hand claps, which interestingly fits with Jollett’s original (and ultimately abandoned) vision for Airborne’s previous album, Such Hot Blood. Steven Chen is credited as a co-writer, and the writers’ lyrical proficiency steps to the forefront with clever, clipped phrasing.
Says Jollett of his collaboration with his guitarist: “I’ve always liked working on songs with Steven. He has great ideas and more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, walks in the door with a very complete idea of how he wants something to sound. Plus it’s just cool to do something you are proud of with a friend. This is how we wrote the music for ‘All I Ever Wanted’ and most of ‘All at Once’ — we’d both have ideas then we’d sit in a room with guitars throwing riffs at each other, or bits of keyboards or harmonies or whatever—until one or the other of us would say, ‘Oh hell yeah…’ Then we’d be off to the races.
“So on this particular day, Steven walked in with about five pieces of through-composed music with keyboards and drums and whatnot. It was really cool stuff — sounding to my ear something like LCD Soundsystem or Pulp (Steven is a massive Jarvis Cocker fan). And then there was this one weird little track that had some hand claps on it and some simple chords and maybe one little melody line and I thought, ‘Now we’re talking.’ It sounded like a song to me — as if the lyrics and vocal melody were aching to be written. So we spent some time locking in the music together and then I got down to writing lyrics.
“This song probably has my favorite line in the whole record: ‘Now we stare at each other…’ I love the stereo, the sheets, the intimacy between the people. It’s something like a shared secret, this love they have, as if nobody else was in on some breathtaking elaborate joke. Which is the best way I can describe true love. A secret joke two people share, a knowledge that somewhere in this very hard world there can be true comfort, warmth, belonging, friendship — a gentle sharing of burdens, secrets and sweat — that no one else could imagine except the person under the covers with you listening to the stereo.
“I love the idea of the map, with every detail, every signpost laid out: you know, life is supposed to go like this. You’re supposed to fall in love with someone like X. And we’ve all been told our whole lives that this certain X has certain attributes and those are the ones we’re supposed to want. But then love comes along it surprises you. The map fails because in reality, you fall for Y or Q or Z — and X seems like something from a fucking magazine: an airbrushed, two-dimensional version of love that has nothing to do with the shocking reality of falling for someone flawed and exciting and cool as shit. Because that’s love: something cool as shit and scary that you just can’t stay away from.
“And everyone wanted you to fall for X. And here you are with Y (or Q or Z) and maybe nobody gets it, maybe you don’t even get it. So you’re forced to change, to soften your position, to feel around for a new self— because you are never going to end up with X and let’s face it, you can’t wait to jump under the covers with Q.”[lix]
One track flows seamlessly into the next with the opening notes of “The Thing About Dreams,” an otherworldly tune whose spacey falsettos and esoteric lyrics are so far afield from traditional Airborne territory as to render it scarcely recognizable – so much so that it leaves even the writer himself scratching his head in wonder.
“I have no idea what the deal is with this song,” Jollett acknowledges. “I never planned to put it on a record. I liked the Wurlitzer and the beat and that moment when the beat stopped and the piano came in.
“Dreams don’t follow any sort of logical pattern (it’s more of an attempt by your brain to create something logical out your spinning stream of unconscious emotions and images, short and long term memories — or so I’m told by the New York Times).
“I had a recurring dream when I was kid about flying. I would be standing on the sidewalk with huge ears, like an elephant— and simply flap them and I’d be airborne. I remember thinking ‘Why do I keep forgetting that I can fly? This is so easy. I have to remember this when I wake up.’ As if the only thing stopping me from flying in reality was a mental block I’d acquired from living too long on a planet that told me I couldn’t.
“So many dreams are like that: memories of a time when you didn’t so thoroughly know the limitations that life imposes on you. That’s probably why they’re important. Because unlike flying, many of those limitations don’t actually exist.
“This song was just a way to wave across the abyss to a memory of something that once made me feel limitless.”[lx]
The emotional core of the record finds its fullest expression in the penultimate track, “Something You Lost,” a song that Jollett identifies as his personal favorite on Dope Machines.[lxi] Beyond that, he is reticent to reveal too much about one of The Airborne Toxic Event’s most affecting pieces, preferring instead to let it speak for itself.
“It’s just this big, super sad ballad about kind of the ontological state of longing… when you sort of love someone and you don’t want them to ever die. To some extent I think it’s about this personal journey I went on to arrive at that point because at some point, if your life’s not working for you, you have to make a lot of changes and there’s a lot of sacrifice that goes into that for the sake of even having that love in the first place.”[lxii]
“There are a lot of big ideas in this song about isolation and fear, about connection and distance, mortality and fate,” he says. “But if you’re reading this, it probably means you have already figured that out for yourself and with any luck the song has already taken on a life of its own in your own mind. I’d rather my thoughts remain anonymous behind the veil of the song itself here and wish only for you that if you get this song that you are able to hold on tight to what you have and maybe someday a million trillion heartbreakingly endless amount of time in the future—our ashes will commingle on some distant star and we can both know that for a very brief time we were the luckiest bits of dust in all creation.”[lxiii]
The record – and indeed, Jollett’s entire journey through the wide world of electronica – comes full circle with the closing track, “Chains.” The song serves wonderful reassurance that everything fans had come to love about the band remains alive and well amongst the new dimensions that have been added to their sound. After nine songs devoid of most classic TATE fundamentals, the grand finale rings in with the familiar chime of Chen’s guitar, channeling the Edge in all his reverb glory. Daren Taylor’s drums thump loud and pure. And then, with barely two minutes to go, Bulbrook’s breathless viola finally shows its face, almost as if to say with a wink, “You didn’t think we’d forgotten about her, did you?” And so this chapter comes to an end with an exquisite blend of old and new.
“I wrote the song on one of the 400 days I spent locked inside working on the record,” says Jollett. “It’s sort of Los Angeles, about the idea of sprawl, how the great expanse of interconnectivity (physical, digital, social) can make you feel so alone when there’s no center and no edge and no end.”[lxiv]
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Given the lengths to which Mikel Jollett went to prepare listeners for the left turn that is Dope Machines, it was inevitable that it would become The Airborne Toxic Event’s most hotly debated, even divisive, album. As he sees it, the depth of feeling on both sides says more about how the pundits view themselves as it does about the music.
“There’s something about music and the way people hear music and the way your taste in music is part of what creates your identity as a person in the modern world,” he posits. “Some people are sort of setting up their identity. They like to be the kind of people who like certain bands. There’s a swath of the population—and I’m guilty of it too—all of us who like to think of ourselves and our musical tastes as being sort of more refined. So I would admit to liking Sonic Youth before I would admit to liking, say, the soundtrack to Rent. Having said that, I really just don’t like most pop music. It’s not like I’m secretly liking it but not admitting it. Some of it’s real and some of it’s not. Like, there’s a big backlash against Mumford & Sons, which I think is really weird because it’s a good record, and just because it’s getting popular with the Dave Matthews crowd doesn’t mean it’s bad.
“The indie rockers of their day didn’t like Bruce Springsteen. They liked the Velvet Underground, they liked Television and Big Star and they thought Bruce was like a pop singer. The elitist snobs weren’t in love with him either. They thought he was a charlatan and a faker; they thought he was trying too hard and that he wasn’t cool because everybody liked him. And what’s interesting is that in retrospect, you look back at what people did years later in a different light than you look at what’s happening contemporarily. There are some people who are going to survive this era, and I don’t think it’s necessarily the people that everyone expects. Obviously you should respect your audience and you should serve your audience and you should put your heart and soul into your songs. That’s what U2 did; that’s what Bruce did; that’s what Leonard Cohen did; that’s what David Bowie did—all these people who we look back on now and say, these were the giants.
“The point is, who cares. The most important thing that happens in music is what happens between the ears of somebody hearing a song; it’s what happens in their own mind. It’s what happens when you hear a song and go, I love this song! Love it. That’s the important moment, and the rest is just window dressing.”[lxv]
That philosophy extends to genre. “Music is not a party trick,” says Jollett pointedly. “Genres don’t matter. We all just want a story. A connection. For example: Paul Simon didn’t become Paul Simon because he was into folk in the 60’s or African rhythms in the 90s. He’s Paul Simon because of lines like ‘losing love is like a window in your heart, everyone can see you’re torn apart, everyone sees the wind blow.’ You hear that line and you think ‘My God, I have felt that way.’ And it’s a relief to know someone else has too. It’s fascinating to feel the vicarious poetry of this writer’s perspective. And despite whatever vulgar tag some vulgar critic wants to put on him – it’s those lines and that feeling that make people understand themselves better and feel more alive. Same with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie.
“And if you ever want to know what drives us – it is not the dictates of some silly genre (indie rock, say or ‘alternative’ rock) or whatever collection of ephemeral attitudes and dopey-eyed aesthetics count for the canon of modern music. We literally don’t think about it. [lxvi] We’re musicians in the purest sense in that we’re not stuck to a genre. We just like music. If we liked polka, we’d probably play polka.[lxvii]
“It’s ‘the way she brushed her hair from her forehead,’ and ‘Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river…’ and ‘There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away…’”[lxviii]
Admittedly, there’s a part of Jollett that wants success. Every artist wants their work to connect with an audience. But when the size of the audience becomes more important than the integrity of the work, the plot has clearly been lost.
“As an artist it’s like, you just do the thing you want to do, and if you’re just trying to please an audience for its own sake, you’re not an artist,” he says emphatically. “At that point you’re just a corporation, and if you’re a corporation and you want to make money, you really should be an investment banker, ’cause it’s way more efficient – it’s a much more efficient way of making money. So if you’re gonna be an artist, just be an artist.”[lxix]
Jollett fully expected mixed reviews for Dope Machines and, not surprisingly, that’s exactly what he got. Response to the album, which peaked at number 56 on the Billboard 200, number 14 on the Top Rock Albums chart, and number 8 on the Top Alternative Albums,[lxx] ran the gamut. A brief sampling of critical takes puts the wide diversity of opinion on full display:
AXS: “Dope Machines, the fourth album from the seasoned LA quintet, is an endeavor that artistically surpasses the group’s previously praised material. It sheds a light on the human spirit in more ways than one, which translates to a listening experience that is as irrefutably enjoyable as it is entirely moving.”
Planit Sauk Valley: “Give credit to The Airborne Toxic Event for the change of direction. But with “Dope Machines” the band has plotted a safe course that doesn’t take the listener anywhere truly awful, but doesn’t take them anywhere particularly interesting, either.”
Substream: “Many may view the group’s abandonment of their indie-rock swagger and layered strings with disdain, but truth be told, the group had worn the sound out. While the TATE of old will be missed, it’s hard to imagine them improving that sound much after Such Hot Blood. The band should be praised for not producing a hollow imitation of their first two albums. After all, what TATE fan didn’t at one point wish the band could take over writing pop songs? Dope Machines may not be quite novel, but when viewed independently of expectations from previous releases the album showcases some decent pop songwriting.”
Zachary Houle: “Already, if you were to look at the Amazon reviews for Dope Machines, fans of the band are crowing about the fact that the formerly orchestral group has moved in a much more electronic and synth-pop direction. I suppose it’s like watching your favourite drama suddenly become a comedy. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that Dope Machines pretty acutely rotoscopes the sound of the early ‘80s a la Depeche Mode, and just updates it to current pop standards a la a Katy Perry. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’ll concede that this stuff is pretty damn catchy.”
Cityview: “The 2015 version of events falls flat because the band’s heart does not seem to be into it.”
Badger Herald: “By deviating from their previously indie rock style, the L.A. foursome resorts to music made for the masses, perfectly average and altogether lacking in any notable qualities. While past albums have an unrefined, raw sound, Dope Machines is 10 tracks of refined mush — lacking in originality, creativeness or notability.”
Officially a Yuppie: “Four records in and California’s Airborne Toxic Event are still making solid records. Dope Machines hears the band depart from the orchestral rock sound they were known for and hears them venture into more electronic stadium-style hooks and with enough power that will get any crowd chanting along.”
Hit the Floor: “Dope Machines still sounds like a TATE record. The distinct vocal talents of Mikel Jollett and Anna Bulbrook make sure that even if the band chose to record a skiffle album, it would still sound like a TATE album, in the same way that anyone and Mark E Smith would produce a Fall album. The album could easily be a Jollett solo outing than an actual band project. Were the other members of the band sat drinking coffee waiting to be called in when needed by their master? The rich string laden sound from their previous work, has been replaced by drum machines and studio trickery.”
Jollett’s response is to shrug his shoulders. “I never read reviews or comments on websites or anything like that. The reason is that I don’t want to invite the world into my brain. There’s too much of a din, and it’s hard to hear the music. Having said that, yes, [the release] was a moment pregnant with meaning. [The record] represents anywhere between a year and 10 years of my life, so it’s hard to not have a strong reaction when you know that suddenly all these people are going to hear your innermost thoughts, longings, fears, frustrations, joys, and loves.”[lxxi]