A POP DEPARTURE JANE STEVENSON
Godfather of punk discusses new album, singing like Bowie and having a ‘foot in the future’
The Godfather of Punk goes jazz? Well, not entirely.
But on Free, Iggy Pop’s latest album, the 72-year-old Rock & Roll Hall of Famer admits the sound is unlike anything he’s done before.the typically feral and ferocious rocker dabbles in spoken word — setting music to both Lou Reed and Dylan Thomas’ poems — and deeply croons alongside ambient guitar player Noveller, a.k.a. Brooklyn musician Sarah Lipstate, and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas, the latter of whom wrote or co-wrote most of the tracks. In addition to Free, Pop has released a photo-and-reflection based lyrics collection, ’Til Wrong Feels Right. We recently caught up with the Miami-based musician, down line from New York City.
Q I read after touring your last album, 2016’s Post Pop Depression, you wanted to walk away and be free. Free from what?
A The whole thing. I wanted to walk away from my music career, from Canada, from America, from Europe, and looking to maybe go somewhere like Paraguay. You know, somewhere obscure where I could go and turn off the stream of whatever you want to call our current lifestyle.
Q Did you do that?
A No, I didn’t do it. I just wanted to. (Laughs.) I get away here and there in my own way. I was just kind of drained. The whole thing starts to feel like the beat goes on and on and on and on. After a while you seem to meet the same people every 20 years and they just have a new face and a different name. You get a little jaded at some point.
Q Has making Free changed your disposition?
A It has refreshed me absolutely.
Q Does that mean more touring in your future?
A You mean am I going to go out and do 70 concerts? F--- no. I’ll do some. I did 12 this year. My book is filling up already for next year. I’ve accepted a couple of things. If I got a good offer I’d love to come to Canada.
Q I understand your BBC 6 radio hosting gig (for the last five years) inspired this experimentation in sound on Free?
A Yeah, I was listening to newer stuff and I was also listening to strange stuff.
Q And the material followed?
A I started doing this stuff as sort of a vacation from all the worka-day things I do. It was such a release for me playing with good jazz players and also doing stuff that was more experimental and I could, especially on the spoken word, I could get things across that you can’t get across on verse-chorus. The first (title) track warns you: ‘Beware: You’re entering a possible poetry song here!’ (Laughs.) ‘If it’s too arty, run away!’
Q How would you describe the sound following that?
A Those five songs (after Free) are more reassuring — they’re song form. They’re strange song form, some of them dark, but it’s more normal than the last half. And what I really worked on those was trying to enunciate the songs really well and bring across the feeling of the lyric — that was what I thought my big job was. I wanted to sing in what they used to call a bel canto style. And then, on the second half, I wanted to talk to you, in your bedroom, at 2 a.m. And if you’re somebody who doesn’t want Iggy Pop whispering in your ear at 2 a.m. in your bedroom about complex subjects, then I understand that. You can always just play the first five and press repeat.
Q Did the new song, James Bond, about a female version of the British spy, come along when everyone was talking about that very thing?
A We had no idea. This was all way before (the discussion). It’s just one of those things. It was written in 2017. I’m kind of magic that way, Jane. I’ve always had one foot in the future.
Q Your voice reminds me a bit of David Bowie on some of these new tracks. Would you agree?
A Well, people have mentioned that. I looked at the comments when the things come out on Youtube, and I was surprised. But I shouldn’t really be. Because basically my encounters with David were from the years ’71 to ’77. Life tends to go in seven year cycles, and there was a seven-year cycle there where he and I were really batting the ball. So a lot of that seeped in, and it’s been there ever since. So it probably just popped out here in ways that I really wasn’t aware of at the time. Q Did you and Bowie talk about your mutual new work as it was released over the years?
A We commented and traded thoughts up through ’89 and then in the ’90s, he went in another direction and I had my hands full doing what I was doing. So I didn’t talk to him for about a dozen years, and then he called me in 2003 about doing (London’s annual) Meltdown (Festival, which he was curating). He wanted me to some stories.and he had another idea, I can’t remember what it was. We had a cordial conversation, but I couldn’t do the work. I had a conflict. And that was the last time I spoke to him (before he died in 2016).
Q Are you unusually prolific right now with both a new album and a book?
A I wanted the lyrics out there where people could read them, and it ended up being very visual because there was a film editor who worked on it for a long, long time and passed away before the book came out. It was a labour of love for him apparently. But there was a lot of shots in there that I didn’t know existed, so it’s kind of a little bit of “this is your life.”