Tag: music

BENJI LYSAGHT

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

If you’re looking for a live-wire frontman, or a musician who’ll do Townsend windmills while waggling his tongue at the audience, Benji Lysaght is not your guy. In fact, the Los Angeles-based guitarist—who’s made a name for himself as a gun-for-hire session and touring musician—eschews the spotlight pretty strenuously. “I have a lot of ambivalence and anxiety when it comes to performance,” he says, “I love rock and roll, and those extroverted musicians with the bravado and the swagger, they’re so inspiring. But that’s never been a part of my personality, or my emotional constitution. I’ve always gravitated towards performers with a very quiet, understated stage presence, even when there was a great intensity about what they were doing.”

Luckily, bravado’s not a requirement for success, and the 33 year-old’s tremendous musical talent has kept him very busy over the past decade and a half. Lysaght demurs when asked about his career history (“Prepare to be totally bored,” he laughs), then proceeds to list his credits, a process that takes quite a while. Straight out of college, in the early 2000s, he toured with beloved indie-pop group Ambulance Ltd., and after leaving the band, started work as a session player and occasional touring guitarist. Lysaght has since lent his skills to both the first and second solo records from the Killers’ Brandon Flowers, backed Beck at the Hollywood Bowl for a tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, toured with Father John Misty (and played on tracks for his upcoming album), did a stint backing Lauryn Hill in the mid-2000s, recently taped a VH1 performance with pop goddess Sia, worked on tracks for Crystal Skulls’ upcoming album, and played with British songwriter Michael Kiwanuka. And the list goes on. But the self-effacing Lysaght is quick to note that some of these gigs were brief, a matter of one or two days in the studio. “I’m just so self-conscious about seeming like a braggy schmuck,” he says.

Lysaght was born and raised in L.A., the son of a death penalty appellate lawyer and a civil litigator. He started taking guitar lessons at age 10, though certainly not at his parents’ behest. “I think my parents were a little, not quite apprehensive, but neither of them are musicians. They were incredibly encouraging, though.” Lysaght worked for a summer at a local guitar shop, and by 15, he was hooked on the instrument. “I’m trying to edit myself so I don’t say these things that sound like absolute platitudes, like, ‘I fell in love with it,’ but…” he laughs. He played jazz guitar in high school and moved to New York to study jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music before transferring to Columbia. There, he focused on music and art history. But moving from jazz into the rock genre wasn’t a natural fit for him. “A guy who I knew from playing jazz gigs said, ‘Hey, I’m in this rock band Ambulance Ltd.—would you be interested in playing?’ It was a whole musical style that I was pretty unfamiliar with, because I’d done nothing but essentially listen to jazz records for the previous six or seven years.” While his ensuing musical education was a pleasure, he soon realized that life as a permanent member of a touring band wasn’t his destiny. “Those sort of interpersonal dynamics [within bands] are so difficult to negotiate,” he says, “especially for someone like myself who tends to be pretty socially awkward. I really prefer the independence of being a hired gun.”

Asked about his the artists he’d love to collaborate with, living or dead, Lysaght responds excitedly like the music geek he is. “I would’ve loved to have played with Lou Reed. Tom Waits is one of the dream gigs. Then you go to canonical figures like Miles Davis or Johnny Cash. I’d have to throw in Captain Beefheart, and Thelonius Monk would’ve been otherworldly.” He interrupts himself to add, “Oh! Ornette Coleman. And Kurt Vile. I’m gonna reread The Secret and then go put these people on my dream board,” he jokes. It’s a list as eclectic as Lysaght’s own niche, which he describes as “rock and roll, soul, country, folk, some R&B, and pop as well.” But becoming a musical chameleon can have its downsides. “I guess the pitfall is losing a sense of self and identity,” he says, “because you sort of assimilate to the aesthetic ideology of whatever music you’re playing at the time. It’s a thing that I struggle with, just keeping a sense of identity and self. I’m still working on that.” It’s clear he’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.

 

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MIKE D

Posted on by Taylor Norman

CURATOR, FATHER, RAPPER, SURFER— “INTERDISCIPLINARY” IS A GOOD WORD TO USE TO DESCRIBE MICHAEL DIAMOND, A.K.A. MIKE D. GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1970S AND ’80S THE SON OF RENOWNED ART DEALER/ COLLECTORS HAROLD AND HESTER DIAMOND, MIKE EXPERIENCED THE BUBBLING BOUILLABAISSE OF PUNK ROCK AND HIP-HOP AMIDST A CLUB AND GALLERY SCENE THAT RECOMBINED THESE DISTINCTLY DOWNTOWN FLAVORS. BEASTIE BOYS, THE RAP GROUP HE FOUNDED ALONGSIDE CHILDHOOD FRIEND ADAM YAUCH AND ADAM HOROVITZ, EVOLVED FROM BRATTY BEGINNINGS TO DEFINE MUSICAL DIVERSITY AND CONSCIOUS FUN OVER A MULTIDECADE CAREER.

MARRIED TO THE FILMMAKER TAMRA DAVIS, DIAMOND IS A PROUD PARENT OF TWO BOYS, AND THEIR FAMILY LEADS A BICOASTAL LIFESTYLE THAT ALLOWS FOR DIVERSE INTERESTS AND PROJECTS. IN 2012, MIKE CURATED TRANSMISSION L.A.: AV CLUB, A 17-DAY MULTIMEDIA ART FESTIVAL AT MOCA IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES. IN 2013, FOLLOWING THE DEVASTATION OF HURRICANE SANDY, DIAMOND AND VISIONARY RESTAURATEUR ROBERT MCKINLEY DEVELOPED ROCKAWAY PLATE LUNCH, A HEALTHY-EATING FOOD TRUCK THAT SERVED AN ESTIMATED 20,000 FREE MEALS TO RESIDENTS OF QUEENS AND BROOKLYN WHO WERE LEFT WITHOUT POWER.

HERE, DIAMOND SPEAKS WITH HIS FRIEND, LONG BOARDING SURF GODDESS KASSIA MEADOR, ABOUT WAKING UP, WAVES AND THE BENEFITS OF BEING A DAD.

 

Everyone has their different times of day that they get inspired. What are your peak hours of creativity?

In different times in my life it’s been different. For so long I was only a night person. I could only create at night and work until 4 in the morning; that was my zone. Then it totally shifted. I cycled around to the opposite, where now I’m so psyched to get up while it’s still dark and take a shower before it’s hot and know that when I come out the sun is going to just be up and I can really focus. I have all this access to my mind and that’s a really cool free moment.

Do you vibe more when it’s rainy or sunny?

Rainy moments are good for me to focus on music because then I’m less distracted. When it’s sunny I always get a little bit jealous when I’m inside in the studio. You tell yourself, aw it’s so nice outside. Life’s better in the sun—what can I say?

That’s why I love California. So, who are your heroes?

Why are heroes such a big thing? There are so many musicians that I look up to that are incredible artists. Artists that I think are incredible. They’re not necessarily heroes. Gandhi is a hero. Gandhi should inspire my daily life, but maybe he might not inspire my daily life as much as a musician might or a book that I’ve read.

What is your all-time favorite book?

I’m not good with all-time favorites, but there’s a book called Ringolevio that I read when I was a kid, and I’ll still go back and read it. It’s kind of like how Basketball Diaries is a coming-of-age type book. I always related to it. I don’t even know if it’s in print. The title Ringolevio comes from the name of a street game in New York City that you played, like stickball.

Like stickball? Cool. I love that!

Emmett Grogan wrote it. He was a New York City street kid who moved to San Francisco and ended up in this whole movement the Diggers, who were like pre-hippie radicals. And the book is about the Diggers too.

What are the movies that always stick with you?

Probably Wes Anderson’s movies, like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He has this crazy eye for detail that makes his movies real works of art, but then they have this incredible emotional heart to them too.

I just saw his new one, The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

I don’t even want to know if you liked the movie, I just want to see it!

My friend Spike’s new movie Her I really loved. That was incredible. It operated in this surreal circumstance but then all of the issues are just relationship issues that we always have. What’s real, what isn’t real, what’s love, what are the boundaries? Can connections last? Are they meant to just come and go?

And even the connection of the emotional and physical, which is so interesting.

I thought it was really cool that he set it in the future but it wasn’t people in silver spacesuits—it actually seemed plausible. That gave it a surreal edge and added another dimension of meaning to these questions.

In that future, people can’t even connect anymore because they’ve been so virtualized.

But we also have that now. You can have that because of technology, but you can also have that without technology being the factor.

All right, what’s your favorite grub spot in New York? Maybe your favorite spots for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

I would work backwards. For dinner there’s this place called Marco’s in Brooklyn that’s not that far from me. It’s traditional Italian. The same people have this other restaurant called Franny’s that’s also really good. I feel like the trend right now in New York is that everyone’s trying to top each other. There are so many talented chefs and such good food, but everybody’s trying to come up with something that somebody else hasn’t done. Simple is good if you can do it. That’s almost harder to pull off because then you have nothing to hide. Marco’s is like that. There’s a restaurant called Charlie Bird in Manhattan that has super good wine and really good food. And they play good hip-hop so I give them props. Then for breakfast or lunch, it’s Mogador in St. Mark’s Place.

You’ve done so much in your life. With your kids, are you concerned that everything you’ve done is going to overshadow them or make them insecure about their own dreams?

That’s a good question. I get so fueled by my friends that I’m lucky enough to work with, so I just keep my kids incorporated into my world, so they’re exposed to all the same people that I’m excited about. I think that’s a positive thing because what’s normal to my kids is that people create stuff. I mean, we’re all freaks, but they don’t think we’re freaks for doing that!

It’s funny the way things can stick with you from when you’re a kid. I remember when Brittany Leonard would surf in Malibu all the time. Joel Tudor said she’d developed something called Point Break Syndrome because all she ever did was surf a right-hand point break. And I was maybe 15 at the time, and I was like dude, Point Break Syndrome? I don’t wanna get that!

Point Break Syndrome—that’s funny. This morning we surfed Drain Pipes. We looked at the cam online and the surf looked super small so we just grabbed long boards, lines, threw them in the car, went down and surfed. It wasn’t that it wound up being even that big, but I would’ve actually been much better off on a smaller board. Instead I had a long board and no leash, which in a way made it so much more fun because it was so much more challenging.

When you play music, then, do you see the things that you’re playing? Do you see the sound that you’re creating?

Sometimes you’ll make music and you’ll imagine a mood, you know? It’ll be more of a visual mood. As a band we were always super stoked and excited to work on visual stuff because it was another part of the challenge. We were always just as excited to figure out what our record cover was going to be or what the music video would look like as we were making the sounds. Those things went together.

We’d go on tour and talk about what projections we’d use as the backdrop. When I got the opportunity to curate the MOCA show, even though it was completely crazy for me to do it, I was able to because I had had that experience combining visual elements and music. It gave me the tools, I guess.

That was such a great show. It was like you could really feel all these passions together inside the space.

Yeah. I think with the heaviest pieces—and this might be corny to say—but it can be a photograph or a painting, or even when you walk into a building, it’s almost like it will create this frequency. It’s a frequency you’ll feel.

Totally, I feel that. It’s like that low hum.

That’s it. And I think what we all chase is that moment when you just connect with something and it really moves you. You can have that in visual art, photography and painting and you can have that in music or while you’re watching a film, where you’re completely inside an experience. And that’s why those things intersect with surfing, and skateboarding too. You’re just completely sucked into that experience.

Growing up, you were definitely in the hype scene in New York in the ’80s when New York was really blowing up. Talk about that and how all the art and the rest of the city influenced you.

Growing up in New York City, I was always around visual art and totally stimulated by it. Art and music always seemed the same to me. Music grabbed me and I went like into it 180 million percent, but visual art was always around me, you know? And it was always super important. I feel grateful to have grown up in New York at that time. First of all, I was a kid running around clubs and doing crazy shit. At that time people moved to New York because they were a writer or a photographer or a musician or maybe they didn’t even know yet. Somehow New York was affordable enough. Now you couldn’t do it because it’s prohibitive. But then, you really could. You had music from all different takes all happening in New York. And now you can get that on your laptop or phone. But back then the only way you could get it is if you were there. I mean, if I were 13 years old now, I would still have that same process of discovery, right? But I could be anywhere. Still, it’s not the same as actual physical proximity to something. I think New York is the same in that it’s still a place where there’s all kinds of rad creative stuff happening, but it’s kind of shifted in that you can’t just move to New York and survive. One of the things that keeps me in New York is that almost every day I’ll see somebody who’s like a walking freak show, and I mean that in a good way! I mean, why do you live in Venice? Because there’s stuff happening that you feed off of probably, right?

Absolutely. And in places it’s quiet as a bell, and you only have yourself to inspire you. Finally, what balances you?

Friends, surfing, breathing. [Laughs.] And more than any of it, my kids, definitely. Because you can be completely frazzled and caught up in your mind, but you have to be present with your kids. It’s great to have people that you just have to be present with, and let all your stuff go.

 

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ISA MACHINE

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Los Angeles is a long way from the English seaside town of Aldeburgh, where ISABELLA “THE MACHINE” SUMMERS, 33, spent her formative years before landing on the West Coast last year, by way of London. “I’ve always been ‘L.A.’ I told my mum when I was 7 that I’d have a house in the Hollywood Hills, and she’d have to visit me there,” says Summers. “She reminds me of that all the time.”

So here she is. It’s a gray and drizzly Sunday morning—the kind of weather English girls know all too well—and Summers is hunkered down in her cozy recording studio on the Eastside of Los Angeles. “Flo calls it my cupboard,” she says. Flo is none other than Florence Welch, with whom Summers founded the hit-making band Florence and the Machine. And the cupboard joke is a nod to her former recording space in London during college—a converted bedroom closet. But the DJ and music producer has come a long way since then, with Grammy nominationsfor the band’s albums Lungs (2009, Island Records) and Ceremonials (2011, Island Records). And currently, her studio is part of Echo Park’s Bedrock complex, home to the likes of fellow musicians Flying Lotus and Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes. A far cry from a cupboard.

Looking back, Summers’ first musical epiphany came to her at 12 years old in Aldeburgh—a coastal destination that bustled with tourists in the summer and dwindled down to the local fishing community in the off-season. “Two older neighborhood boys who lived next door and were kind of intimidating gave me a cassette tape and, in a scary way, said, ‘You gotta listen to it,’” she laughs. The mix contained Snoop Dogg and Gravediggaz. “I was so in awe of the rude boys next door, I listened to it over and over,” adds Summers. From that moment on, she was hooked on hip-hop.

But it was also her actor-turned-fisherman father’s obsession with recording sound bites from the radio since the 1970s—everything from shipping forecasts to Bob Dylan and a Bavarian opera—that turned Summers on to the idea of creating her own sounds. “He has over 150 mix tapes and they are all brilliant,” muses Summers of her dad’s “batshit crazy” works and soundbite mashups. “I think that’s why I got into sampling and hip-hop. Everything can be sampled down to one kick.”

So it’s no surprise that when she turned 18, Summers acquired her first set of decks. “If all the boys are doing it, why the fuck can’t I?” she recalls thinking. And once she was admitted to the prestigious Central Saint Martins to study art—initially part time, then full—she began spending more time in London and focusing her energies on her passion for music.

“I was desperate to be weird and creative,” says Summers, who nabbed herself a DJ residency at a local club under the moniker Laydee Isa. “It would be a challenge to go and DJ at this really scary place called The Jam in Brixton, and I would force myself to go there. It was a real endurance to go and deal with all the thugs, but I loved it.” Summers’ cocky attitude fueled her drive to take her talent to the next level and quickly helped her land a gig spinning on the local radio station’s Saturday night hip-hop show, in between earning a fine art and film degree. Local DJ Dan Greenpeace took her under his wing, and before long Summers found herself hanging out with hip-hop icons such as The Game and the late Guru.

Driven by the desire to become a well-known name in producing, Summers purchased an MPC (Music Production Controller) and spent the next year holed up in her recording space, learning zow to use it. “I was making it up as I went along,” she says. Tired of recording with rappers whom she had encountered during her DJing stint, she approached her friend’s girlfriend, then aspiring singer Welch, about a possible collaboration.

“This girl is going to be a megastar,” was Summers’ first thought when the duo began recording and writing songs together in her new studio—an upgrade from her previous spaces and “the first place I could actually invite people to that wasn’t in my cupboard or my bedroom,” she jokes. “We’d try to write a hit in half an hour—write the lyrics and record a beat. We’d do whole days like that, making music in our underwear.” The strategy clearly paid off for the best friends, who wrote the hit “Dog Days” during this time period.

By 2008 the fully formed band had a manager and a recording contract and went back to Summers’ studio to revisit some of the earlier material Summers and Welch had created. “I was coming from a hip-hop perspective, she was coming from an indie perspective, and we were making this weird sound together” says Summers—a sound that both rocketed them to fame and launched six years worth of touring around the world with Summers playing keyboards in the band. That ended in 2013 with Summers firmly planting her roots in Los Angeles.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the music-world darling, who is now turning her focus toward producing a slew of artists and re-upping her hip-hop game. In between traveling to London to record Florence and the Machine’s next album, Summers (whose current obsessions include ’60s and ’70s music and rapper 2 Chainz) has worked with everyone from Rita Ora to Juliette Lewis, all while falling for her new hometown. “I fucking love it here,” she says. “The guys are really hot, and there are loads of people to make rap with, which is what I really want to do. I’m going to make it happen.”

 

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LEILA STEINBERG

Posted on by Taylor Norman

It’s a midweek evening inside the Pico Youth & Family Center in Santa Monica. Approximately 40 young people, a combination at-risk youth and teenagers aspiring to careers in the arts, are leaning forward in their seats toward a small stage set with a single microphone. A girl with artfully frizzy hair plays a soul-folk song, her own composition, and her young colleagues applaud and offer commentary and constructive criticism. Over the course of the next couple hours, these youths will take turns performing songs, poems and raps based around a single topic that had been assigned the previous week. Seated left of stage is Leila Steinberg, veteran community activist and the enthusiastic matriarch of this artistic assembly. The thoughtful, beatific Steinberg was Tupac Shakur’s first manager, a fact that secures her credibility in the eyes of the young people around her, many of whom were not born at the time of the hip-hop superstar’s 1996 passing but who still study and revere him as an inspirational icon.

“What is our point of unity?” Steinberg asks the assembly. A boy in a backwards baseball cap calls out: “We all want to express what’s in our hearts.” “That’s right,” Steinberg says, “and we do that by focusing on what we want to say with our voices.” The aim of this weekly workshop is to equip all the attendees with a healthy level of emotional literacy, and develop the most gifted among them as potential world leaders. As Steinberg tells them: “I want to mother you into being everything you can be.”

A mother of four, Steinberg does not use the verb “mother” lightly. The young people in her orbit are participants in a program called AIM (www.aim4theheart.org) that Steinberg founded 17 years ago, its roots dating back to a writers’ workshop she hosted in her Santa Rosa living room in the late 1980s that included a precocious teenage truth-seeker named Tupac Shakur.

A few days later, Steinberg is seated at a Highland Park café for this interview. Though she expresses trepidation that this article will focus on her personal story and not her work, her biographical details illuminate her mission. Her Polish-American father was a criminal defense lawyer working on issues of social inequality, her Mexican mother (who’d come to the United States at age 9) an organizer alongside Cesar Chavez and an activist with Amnesty International. Born in Los Angeles, Leila became an accomplished dancer and a member of the pioneering highlife group O.J. Ekemode and the Nigerian All-Stars, with whom she began to speak out as part of the anti-apartheid movement spearheaded by Amnesty.

“I understood how Amnesty leader Jack Healey built an entire movement with arts,” Steinberg says. “Tracy Chapman and Sting grew his cause, but they also were the work. I had an agenda which at the time I wasn’t able to frame. All my father’s clients were black and brown. My questions started in elementary school. The first placed I lived was 64th and Vermont, then we migrated to the La Cienega area, then migrated to Santa Monica, then Malibu. I was well aware of the privilege I had because my family understood the power of education and we had access. We had upward mobility and access and I knew there was an injustice in that. That drove me.”

When she became a young mother, Steinberg and her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Her husband was a DJ and nightclub promoter, and one night a 17-year-old Tupac came to dance at her husband’s club. That was the first moment Leila Steinberg saw Pac, and by cosmic design the pair ran into each other again the following day. “I was sitting on the grass in a big field in Marin City before starting to teach class,” remembers Steinberg. “I was reading Winnie Mandela’s Part of My Soul Went with Him, and Pac happened to walk by. He said, ‘What are you doing with that book? What do you know about Winnie Mandela?’ I said a lot, actually, that I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. We began talking about issues that interested us, and he became a part of my family from that moment.

“My life became consumed with making Pac matter to everybody. I believed he was the one, like Bob Marley and many before him. It wasn’t just about arts. It was about social, political and educational aspects. It was about everything but entertainment for me. That was a by-product. Of course Pac could be entertaining. His art was, in its inception, for the sake of greater good. How can you raise a generation who are not wanted? Tupac was obsessed with the pain and imbalance in his community—all of the issues that he was born and cultivated to address.”

At Tupac’s behest Steinberg became his first manager, and the two worked closely during Pac’s late teenage years to refine his artistic mission. Steinberg is jointly responsible, along with Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, for putting together Tupac’s best-selling, posthumous book of poetry, The Rose That Grew from Concrete (MTV Books, 1999). Comprised of poetry written during Tupac’s teenage years, the book has influenced subsequent generations worldwide.

“I wanted to get the book published while he was still alive,” says Steinberg. “I’d been reading those poems in classroom workshops for years. I’d open an assembly to 2,000 kids by reading the Tupac poem “Lady Liberty Needs Glasses” and have kids talk about what he meant by that. There are now classes at every Ivy League school on Tupac! Two hundred years from now when people want to understand what was happening in race, politics and music, they will study Tupac.”

With a John Singleton–directed Tupac biopic in production, Steinberg has only recently begun speaking to the press again about Tupac after years of grief-darkened silence. “In a sense I’m doing more work with Tupac today than when he was still here,” she says. “I’m using his poems every day, and I thank him every day. Now, after 25 years of process, I actually feel I can step out into the world and bring something viable to the way we impact our youth. I really want to make a difference, still. I haven’t changed.”

With AIM, Steinberg has created a no-cost curriculum called Heart Education that can be used in any setting where “heart work” is needed. “It works in juvenile halls, in prisons, in thirdrate classrooms,” Steinberg says. Tupac’s poems are an embedded part of that curriculum. Back at the Pico Youth & Family Center, the evening gathering is winding down. Some of the young people speak excitedly about a pending trip to Hawaii, where Steinberg will lead workshops for children on the island, and offer training in her emotional education curriculum. Steinberg announces the topic for the week’s writing assignment: revelation. As hugs and promises of “See you next week!” fill the room, Steinberg offers everyone some parting words of inspiration: “Remember, the reason Tupac is the most studied artist of his generation is because of his heart work.”

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TUNDE ADEBIMPE

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

HUMANITY: What’s the source of your name? Where is it from?

TA: It’s from West Africa. My parents are from Nigeria.

HUMANITY: Your name is so rhythmic—it sounds like music.

TA: That’s good. It’s good that it doesn’t sound unlike music. That’s cool.

HUMANITY: So, listening to your demos, it’s amazing how it’s like night and day from the completed songs. When you come up with your ideas, what’s your process of turning them into songs? And then bringing that to a band, what do they add?

TA: Well, my process isn’t really a process. I often walk around and then I’ll hear a melody in my head and it’ll just get stuck. Now I sing it into my phone notes or something. But before, I would basically be walking around with the song in my head until I got home and then just kind of hummed it into a four track or harmonized with myself in a four track. You know, you get a melody down, and then you just put words on top of it quite randomly, and then … just little by little you shape it, you shape it into something that sounds and feels right to you. It can be narrative storytelling, it can be poetry, or it can be total nonsense. But yeah, my four-track stuff, it was an extension of keeping sketchbooks, you know? Where it’s just kind of like, OK, put this idea down and maybe later you can flesh it out, or maybe this is the final, you know. A lot of the friends I had when I started making music in New York, before TV on the Radio, was like a real kind of low-fi recording community where people who had no business using recording equipment or anything, they barely had any idea. So that kind of made it seem to me like I could do it. But yeah, I have these little sketches or notes on an idea, and when we started TV on the Radio, Dave [Sitek] and I initially kind of became friends over the fact that we had all of these four-track tapes of things we’d made individually. We just sort of traded them and listened. There’s a version of “Young Liars” on one of the demos.

HUMANITY: What was the inspiration for that one?

TA: It’s very different than the final version, but the whole song is pretty much there. Most of the songs that I put on that compilation were things that I felt could exist as vocals alone, like if I wanted to just go into a studio and record them a cappella, that I could do that. But then I met Dave, and it was sort of just like, “Oh, here’s this incredibly talented musician. We can work on stuff together, we can work on each other’s stuff.” It’s really weird—inspiration is a strange thing.

HUMANITY: Those songs are from 2003, right?

TA: Yeah, they came out in 2003, but the sketches—I found a tape that said “Four-Track Dumps 1999.” “Young Liars” was on there.

HUMANITY: Is there something that’s happening in your life that turns into a song for you or where does it come from?

TA: I feel like a lot of that stuff definitely, without sounding too weird and going into too much … I don’t even know if it shows up in the song, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a supernatural experience, and it was focused on a relationship and there was definitely someone or something besides the two of us. I refuse to believe that it’s just us.

HUMANITY: Is that why it’s called “Satellite”?

TA: Oh, no. “Satellite” is different. I think the version I put on there was something where Dave and I played with an idea, and it wasn’t really formed yet so we just kind of went and worked out the nuts and bolts of it, which also will happen sometimes when you have a song and it sounds really big but the internal workings of it don’t really do anything for me, or it doesn’t feel right. It’s like you fucked up a painting or something. I’m just going to sketch it out again and see what it looks like and then I’m going to go back and build up on it again. But sometimes with the things that feel slightly overwhelming, a song is a good way to put it in one place, so it’s not swirling around your head.

HUMANITY: What about some of the other songs you put on the compilation? “DLZ,” “Tonight,” “Reasons.” Is there a story on “DLZ”?

TA: I have no idea where that came from—that’s when it was in a Brooklyn loft with no heat, no nothing, and I feel like I found it. I was scrubbing through it and it’s going on like for 45 minutes, just those three notes. I got out of this crazy zone and then that broke and the second thing that I put on there was like the next layer of it, where I rerecorded something, put another layer on it. I didn’t have Pro Tools or any of that—I was literally recording on the tape, like a drum part and a keyboard part, and then getting another tape player and playing that out, and then getting a mini- disc recorder and playing it, so everything was happening, like a little orchestra with boxes in front of me. But I don’t know, this particular one. It’s hard to process, but the idea that everything we’re doing is destroying the planet. The intense arrogance of someone who thinks that you can win at life by making the most money or by hoarding natural resources for yourself. And again, you can think about these things and have a nervous breakdown, or you can kind of put them into a song and figure it out.

HUMANITY: It reminded me of Massive Attack.

TA: Very cool. I love that. Those guys are good friends—they’re really awesome.

HUMANITY: And then I was listening to “Tonight,” which is so completely different. Compared to how it turned into a song, I feel like your demos are darker, and when you bring it to TV on the Radio, it lightens up. How does your solo stuff differ versus TV on the Radio?

TA: I write all the time—well, a little bit. Since I moved, like a little bit less than I have for a while, but I’ll write, and something can sound like it could be a TV on the Radio song. Especially after being with the band for so long, I’ll just hear something and think, Oh, OK, I can bring this to a stopping point, and it’s a very concise song that I know the band could do justice to. If we don’t, then I’ll put it with the 200 other things that I’m never going to get to. I feel like with my solo stuff, and I feel weird even calling it “solo stuff,” because I just haven’t had time to put it out. I’ve performed by myself, just with some of those things, like a lot of improvisational vocal stuff. I have a couple of sets of songs that I’d like to do with just mostly voice and very minimal instrumentation, which I’d like to actually get to doing this year, because I’ll have some time. But now I’ll write a schedule. If I know that we’re planning on making a record, I’ll write in that direction. I feel like with my own stuff, it’s not as concise. I guess for better or worse, it’s not anything I can see being pop music.

HUMANITY: Do you think your solo stuff is going to be more in the realm of the demos on this record?

TA: Some of it, yeah. That’ll definitely be one of the textures. I was thinking of doing a 15-song set, five songs apiece. And I always think of things in terms of a complete art piece. One will be songs that are basically voice, guitar and drum—very, very raw. And five songs that are vocals with minimal electronic and then five will be completely a cappella.

HUMANITY: Do you think you’ll be releasing your solo record anytime soon?

TA: Yeah, I think later this year. We’re going to be touring until October. But realistically probably very early next year. If I can get something out this year, that’d be great.

HUMANITY: What’s your musical background? Did you play an instrument?

TA: No, I had very minimal piano training. When I was young, I was the least musical member of my family.

HUMANITY: That’s hard to believe.

TA: I know, but it’s true. My dad played the piano, my mom sings, my brother was an excellent piano player, my sister sings opera. I was terrible at piano—I couldn’t stick with it. So I started taking drum lessons when I was 12. I took two lessons and my drum teacher quit, because he got a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. But I was convinced it was because I was terrible, which shows you what a completely spineless, whiny child I was. But I sang in the choir in high school, things like that, but I never thought music would be how I spend most of my time.

HUMANITY: Did you listen to all sorts of music? Who influenced you musically?

TA: That’s a ton, a ton, a ton of people. There was always a lot of jazz in our house and classical music playing. My dad really liked Thelonious Monk a lot. We’d play Chopin and things like that. But I think that the first time I really started thinking about writing songs was when I listened to Nat King Cole and old rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry. My dad would find dollar tapes and just be like, “This is what you should listen to, don’t listen to any of that crap you’re listening to.” Trying to think of what else. As a teenager, Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Nirvana. I was a huge Nirvana fan. There was a period of time that I felt like, “I hope no one else ever finds out about this band,” you know. It was like 1990, ’92. And then people find out, and you’re like, “OK, cool, people found out, but they’re making good records,” and then it’s the cliché where the football captain or whatever is wearing a flannel, and he’s still a dick, but he’s dressed like someone who’s not a dick, and then the whole world … going on for 15 years, I still am sort of in denial that that band or his songwriting had such a huge effect on me, but it totally did. Nirvana and the Pixies and …

HUMANITY: What ignites you to keep on making music?

TA: I have the most boring answer, which is, “I’m lucky enough that it’s my job right now.” I should probably pay that luck back by doing it. It’s strange, because I’ll go through some periods of time where I really don’t feel like making music, and I used to feel really worried about that, but now I think it’s really healthy. I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do something. Whatever allows you to create; I just like making stuff.

HUMANITY: You guys have a huge fan base, and you have an effect on people as musicians. Are there messages or things that you intentionally try to share through your music?

TA: I’ve always just liked the idea of hearing something really personal, that seems to only mean something to you and then you can hand it off and you discover that someone else can use it in a way that you didn’t intend for them to use it. But I think of how much music and art literally changed the course of my life, you know. When I look at it now I’m really grateful. I just like the sort of message-in-a-bottle idea of it—not the Sting song, but the idea of putting something out to the world. You don’t really know who it’s for; it’s kind of for you, but it might be more valuable to someone else, like once you get through whatever you’re trying to do. But I don’t think there are any direct messages, except maybe we’re all on the ship together.
 

 

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DAVID MUSHEGAIN

Posted on by Courtney Ngo

Fashion photographer, world traveler and former street performer David Mushegain had been friends with Anthony Kiedis for some years, surfing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman on a regular basis. When they realized they would both be in Japan at the same time, they thought it would be cool if Mushegain took some photos of the show, the second stop on the band’s I’m With You tour. So Mushegain took his camera and stood in front of the stage, but instead of training his lens on the musicians, he found himself intrigued by the fans. After the show, Mushegain sat down with the band and showed them his photos—an homage to the faces that stared back at the band night after night on the road. The band members were fascinated and invited Mushegain to compile a book of photos just like that, focusing entirely on the fans.

 

 

Soon enough, Mushegain found himself on the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Four years, 130 shows and 100,000 photos later, the book Fandemonium would be born, featuring Mushegain’s anthropological approach to rock concert photography, a document of the passion that orbits one group of California musicians as they travel the globe.

There were the new fans, the lifers, the 8-year-old kids at their first concert. And the woman whose husband had died the day before, who flew six hours to see her favorite band nonetheless because she knew the music would ease her pain. Sometimes Mushegain went to the fans’ homes and peeked inside their world, stepping out of the heightened concert experience. Until embarking on the project, Mushegain had no idea the band had such a massive, cult-like following around the world, stretching from Argentina and Brazil to Eastern Europe. “We talked to so many people in so many cultures,” says Mushegain. “It was such a big thing to put your arms around, documenting a group of fans that numbers in the millions.”

One fan who stood out was Julia, a girl from Madrid who seemed to be at every single show on the tour. One night in Ukraine they saw a female figure curled up on a bench … it was Julia. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And she said she was lost because she couldn’t understand the road signs.” They found her a place to sleep. “Her whole life is based around this band, and that kind of blew my mind,” says Mushegain, who is a musician and a music fan, but, alas, never with the quasi-religious fervor he saw on the road with the Chili Peppers.

 

 

 

Raised in an Armenian family in Los Angeles, Mushegain grew up playing the drums, and in the ’90s he took off around the world with his hand drums, playing on the streets in Ibiza, Peru, India, Brazil, Iran, Pakistan and Prague. After riding horses deep into the Amazon jungle to track down a shaman, a trip that resulted in many of his fellow travelers falling ill, he returned to New York, planning to take a break. A few weeks later 9/11 happened, altering the possibilities for travelers and forcing Mushegain to choose a new life path.

A lifelong fan of photographers Yousuf Karsh, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, he had already been experimenting with various cameras, shooting shop mannequins around the world. When Johnson Hartig invited him to travel to Paris with him for Fashion Week, Mushegain found his new calling in the world of fashion. Vogue Italia published some of his mannequin shots, and soon Mushegain was in demand as a fashion photographer, particularly for the various editions of Vogue magazine. Unlike most fashion photographers, he always prefers to shoot his subjects (whether they be models, musicians or his friends) in their own environments, creating a highly personal body of work that he hopes will resonate for many years to come.

“When I approach work, I approach it with the idea that it will mature over time,” he explains. “Like with the Red Hot Chili Peppers project—I almost think they will have more pertinence 50 years from now, as people look at them and ask, ‘Remember when they were alive?’ That is fascinating to me.”

 

 

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SEAN LENNON

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ASKA MATSUMIYA: I imagine you must have had a really stimulating childhood, being around lots of artists and musicians. Who were some that really influenced you?

SEAN LENNON: Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, I wonder if that’s really true. Because my dad wasn’t around, you know, when I was young, and my mom is a musician. I did see her make records, but she’s not intrinsically a musician; she sort of thinks about art as conceptual, so the medium, whether it’s music or film or sculpture or painting, is sort of secondary and the concept of the art is first. And so I was kind of raised around her ideas of art being conceptual and so I don’t know—it’s not like I had the Beatles hanging out jamming in my house. I was actually living alone with my mom and sort of watching her make art from her perspective, and I wouldn’t really say that I was brought up around a lot of musicians. I wasn’t, really. However, we did have pianos in the house, and that’s how I came to music. Just playing the piano.

AM: What’s some of the music or even projects of your parents that were most formative? What were the different things that you think really helped you develop as an artist?

SL: I feel like what initially got me into playing music was, you know, the fact that my dad was a musician and he was in the Beatles, and I listened to that music a lot when I was a kid. So I think when he died I remember feeling like there was sort of a vacuum that had been left, and I used to just try to play the piano to kind of connect with my idea of what I thought he was, being a musician and stuff. I think at first my inspiration came from just wanting to find some connection to my dad.

AM: So music was almost a way for you to get to know your father?

SL: Yeah, and I would say it still is.

AM: What are some of your favorite songs of his?

SL: I tend to like the more elaborate stuff. I like the period between Revolver and The White Album; that period is my favorite. So, Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery and then the more psychedelic stuff; that’s just where my taste is, because I like the more experimental songwriting, more progressive songwriting. It seems a lot more ambitious, you know, very orchestral and sort of experimental recording techniques, so my favorite songs are like “Strawberry Fields” and “I Am the Walrus.” The stuff that’s really more out there

AM: What about your mom’s music? What are some of your favorites? I love her lyrics.

SL: Her lyrics are really great. Actually I got to produce her last two records, which were really some of my favorites, and Plastic Ono Band.

AM: What’s your process of working with her when you’re producing her records?

SL: She’s very spontaneous, so she writes really quickly—she’s very different from me in that. I sort of belabor the lyrics. It really takes time to figure out what I want the song to be, whereas she just doesn’t hesitate. She writes really quickly, so often we’ll just be kind of jamming in the studio and she’ll start writing lyrics and she’ll be done with the song within a few minutes. She doesn’t like to keep working on it over and over again. She gets kind of bored, I think. I feel like she thinks that the magic is the spontaneity; she likes to work really fast, and she kind of gets disinterested in something that’s too prolonged. She’s incredible in terms of her lyrical capability. I mean, she’ll write like three or four songs a day in the studio. That makes it really fun, so often we’ll make it up as we go along.

AM: How did she go about introducing or even teaching music and art to you?

SL: She’s not really that kind of parent. She never really went out of her way to introduce me to anything. She just sort of does her thing. She led by example. She would be making records, I would often be just sort of hanging out in the studio because I was a kid and that’s where she was, so I would just sit around and hear her record or watch her. I feel very comfortable in the studio because I spent a lot of time in the studio as a kid. She wasn’t that kind of person to sort of force anything on me; she’s not one of these people who’ll sit you down and say like, “Learn this and this is what you have to know and not know.” She has a pretty laissez-faire attitude.

AM: I understand you recently played with Paul McCartney. I was wondering what your relationship is with him, and what you thought about his recent collaboration with Kanye West.

SL: I actually haven’t heard the music he did with Kanye, but I thought it was really funny that people didn’t know who he was and all the Kanye fans were like, “Man, that Paul is going to be really famous after Kanye worked with him.”

AM: Yeah, that was the best.

SL: That was really funny. I haven’t heard what they are doing together, but I’ll definitely check it out. I think it’s cool that Paul wants to work with Kanye. It’s kind of fun—it makes the world more interesting that those two people want to collaborate. But I don’t really know; I haven’t heard the music yet. Kanye often seems silly but I think he is a real artist and I do like his music.

AM: Do you feel writing music comes really naturally to you?

SL: Yeah, I would say that it does. You know, I don’t know why that is, but it does come pretty naturally. I don’t know if it’s something that I learned or if it’s something that I was born with, but I always hear music really easily. But it takes me a lot longer to write the words.

AM: What ignites you to make music?

SL: It’s hard to say. I find everything pretty inspiring. I get really inspired by films, and other people’s music and, yeah, the world can be such an overwhelming place, you know. Violence, American and European international policy, the Middle East—I find myself always driven to write music as a way of processing all the stuff that’s going on. I feel like that’s why I end up making music or making art, as a way of venting frustration. You just have to let it out somehow.

AM: Your parents definitely expressed their political and worldviews in their music.

SL: Yeah, they definitely did, and you know I think they were probably some of the best at doing that, at sort of merging their political philosophies with their art. I don’t think everybody’s that good at doing that, you know. I think it often comes off as pedantic or heavy-handed or preachy, you know, when artists try to tell you how they feel politically, but I think my parents were very adept at merging their spiritual and philosophical views with their music, their art—they were uniquely fitted for that. When somebody tries being political they can sound condescending or something, but I think when they did it, it was really inspiring and it made you want to jump on the train, you know.
AM: Is there anything of theirs in particular that really made an impact on you?

SL: I think it’s different for me. It’s like somebody might be a fan, like I’m a fan of Jimi Hendrix, you know. There is a performance that he did of the song “Machine Gun” that sort of represents a period of my life in a certain way that’s really important to me, but when it’s your parents it doesn’t really feel the same way. It’s not like you stumble upon some aspect of their work and it resonates with you the way you would with your favorite musician or your favorite film. With your parents it’s like everything they are is a part of you, you know, it’s in your cellular structure. So it’s harder to identify or pinpoint certain ideas or certain lyrics or certain pieces of work that might represent something to you, because everything they did is inside you. It’s like trying to identify your face from your mouth and your heart. I think that with my parents they’re sort of the baseline of all of my views of the world and my perspective on everything in the world. I mean, I learned how to pee in a toilet from them, so it’s a little hard to distinguish the lyrics from how to use a knife and fork, and I know that everything that I am, from learning how to walk on the right side of the street or cross the street when the light changes, I learned everything from them, so I really couldn’t distinguish any specific piece of work that I resonate with more or less because it would almost be silly. They actually taught me everything.

AM: How do you create your own identity working in a field where your parents are both such icons? How do you distinguish yourself?

SL: It’s sort of interesting. I think it’s going to take me a lifetime to come to grips with the degree of their influence and their presence in the world. It’s so strong, and I think ultimately it’s impossible for most people to perceive my personality, my characteristics independently from my parents, which actually took me a long time to understand. I think I’m still trying to understand it, because for me, I’ve never struggled with trying to identify or distinguish myself from my parents. I think people who are close to me don’t have any trouble distinguishing me from them. But I think the world at large still does, and most people will never be able to distinguish me from my parents. It’s complicated, but let’s put it this way: It’s just never been a great motivator for me, this idea of trying to separate myself from them, because I never really felt that I wasn’t my own person; it never occurred to me that I might not be. I guess I never really felt responsible for other people’s struggle with figuring out who I was.

AM: Does it affect your approach to creating music? Like, I would imagine that maybe you’d be a little nervous to share your music with the world.

SL: Well, I think in the beginning I was less nervous, because I didn’t really have any idea of what people were like; I didn’t realize that people were only seeing me through the lens of my dad. I had never encountered that kind of distortion before. My friends and family never presented their views through John Lennon’s ideas. So when I first started music I wasn’t worried at all. I just thought everyone was going to see my music the way I saw it, so it was sort of like a shell-shock, going out to the world and realizing that no one really was going to look at me, that I was only going to trigger a memory of someone else. I realized my dad is so universal that I was almost invisible; it was impossible for people to see me as anything other than a trigger for the memories and ideas of him, and I think that made it more and more daunting to make music, but at the same time I think that my personal relationship to music was really evolving.

AM: My last question is what do you think our generation is going to be remembered for musically—what’s our contribution to music history?

SL: It’s an interesting question. I think it’s a very exciting period, an innovative time, you know; music is in an interesting place. I mean, I’m feeling very hopeful. The kids I meet today, they know so much about music history because of the Internet, and they’re able to listen to every record that’s ever been made and a thousand times if they want, and so they become experts and sort of scholars in the history of music. Maybe in a few generations who knows where that’s going to lead to. I mean, it could lead to a total renaissance in music, and there is going to be some artist coming up in the next 10, 20 years that leads to some sort of golden era of creativity that’s going to be birthed out of all of the things that are available now.
 

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