The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger
Midnight Sun
cards and Greg just flipping out on drums. If you saw those shows I’m obviously having fun in a way I normally don’t. I have trouble letting go. There’s always a huge part of my brain that’s worried about what I’m doing. I’m not the wildest or freest of individuals. I have trouble with the ‘having fun’ bit and improvised music is the one situation where I can do that.
The music you make with GOASTT is very different. Do you think something special came together for that project?
Yeah, it’s really because I met Charlotte, my girlfriend. She’s got an amazing vision, aesthetically and artistically. It was a real awakening for me, meeting her and writing with her. She has an amazing work ethic. Often I would just write the first thing that came to me lyrically and be like, “That’s fine,” and she’d say, “No, you’ve got to keep working on it.” I was always kind of embarrassed to try to write good lyrics because my dad was so good at it, so I think I hid behind that by not thinking about it enough. She pushed me to really focus on that. She’s arguably the most gifted musician I’ve ever met. People don’t believe me when I say that, so whatever. She has this prejudice from being a pretty girl and I have this prejudice from being John’s son, so I think we relate in that way. It was kind of a double load for that band in terms of people’s cynicism. How did you and Les Claypool get together?
GOASTT was wrapping up two and a half years of touring, and we got this offer from Primus and we decided to do it because we’re all such fans. And Les and I wound up really getting along – we share a lot of the same quirky aesthetic. We even have a lot of the same clothes, weird jackets. We jammed on the tour bus, just on acoustics, and wound up writing a song immediately. I was nervous at first, because he’s such a renowned player and I don’t consider myself to be a player in that way. Then he asked me up on stage and right before we went on, I asked him what he wanted me to do and he said, “Whale sounds!” And I was like, “Awesome, I know exactly how to do that.” My mum groomed me well to make those kinds of noises. He was like, “You gotta come do something with me.” So I went out to his place in Sonoma, with no preparation and no expectations, and 10 or 12 days later, we had six or seven songs.
You’re currently doing production work with Black Lips, Fat White Family, and you produced you mum’s last two albums. Is that a world you feel comfortable in?
That’s a good question. I’d always felt like, “I know what a producer does.” But it’s only A break-up record par excellence, Friendly Fire was Lennon Jr’s own Sea Change, a lush introspective dissection of a failed relationship that lifts from Gainsbourg and Goraguer, with additional melodic touches reminiscent both of solo Robin Gibb and fellow NYC baroque poppers The Left Banke. Abandoning the twee folk intimacy of their debut, Lennon and his partner/ inspiration/muse Charlotte Kemp Muhl suck up Pink Floyd and Flaming Lips influences and lose themselves in a rich psychedelic groove of joyful oddity, spiked with an ever-present microdot creep of dune-buggy kill-kult weirdness. “Producing my mum [is] almost like [being] a nature photographer,” says Sean Lennon. “Things happen and you’ll want to catch them before they fly away.” Best evidence for this production philosophy is Yoko’s most recent full-length album, which moves from bright pop to tender ballads and ferocious avant-funk in a permanent mood of high-windowed brightness.