End Times Elevator Music is a special record to behold. From the Link Wray fuzz guitar rumbles on opener No Alarm to the title track closer, which arrives like Ben Schneider and Brendan Urie collaborated, there is something on this album for everyone who presses play or shuffle. At eight tracks, it’s all killer, no filler. Even a short track like Waiting, which contains the line “waiting for something that isn’t coming”, is lush and harmonious while delving into the conflicts in Catholicism. The Lives of Famous Men are getting their rocks off on mad-lib verses and crusading backdrops. There is discovery and curiosity at every turn, a swift detour from many of their contemporaries who fall into a lulling sonic familiarity with every new project. The band expels all instances of psych-rock pretentiousness across this delicious album. Here we have an authentic, dexterous, impressionable stroke of brilliance from transplanted Alaskans, who can’t help but make admirable music when in company with each other.
The band is not the party-’til-you-drop type. “We’re all pretty nerdy,” said main songwriter and singer, Dan Hall. “We’re kind of bookish and into sci-fi. And in fact, when we got together to record out in Joshua Tree the past couple times, we’ll get a house. We’ve rented the same house with this movie theater, and we just watch old sci-fi movies every night after our sessions.”
Nearly two decades into their career, Hall and bandmates Dylan Mandel (drums), Andrew Totemoff (bass) and Jason Wahto (guitars, keys) return with their most complete, and perhaps most relevant, artistic statement to date. End Times Elevator Music is an album about anxiety, specifically, the kind inseparable from the present moment. This record is not for the socially unaware in terms of content, taking the measure of political failure, climate catastrophe, culture shaped by algorithms, religion, our collective inability to confront these and other issues, but it also makes room for connection and compassion with a bunch of hook-heavy melodies. They may sing of end times, but this is decidedly not elevator music. Nearly two decades into their career, the Lives of Famous Men have made their most complete, and perhaps most relevant, artistic statement to date. Some bands are famous just for being famous and not much else. TLOFM may not be famous, yet, but they are passionate about music, write terrific songs and have an acronym. Those are the ingredients for an impressive band.
Americana UK: Good morning, Dan. I understand you are in the LA area, sunnier and warmer than where you began in Alaska.
Daniel Hall: Well, I guess now we’re technically in July, but we’re at the tail end of what we call June gloom out here when it’s a little greyer. There’s a marine layer in the morning, but the weather is actually quite nice.
AUK: Your new record End Times Elevator Music was released in April (2026), following your previous album three years ago.
DH: That one was called Greener Pasture Blues, and we also did that with Alex Newport, who is the producer. There were some new songs and others we had written as much as 15 years prior that had been in our repertoire, but we just hadn’t recorded for one reason or another. That album represented our musical journey over the past decade or more. For this new one, it really felt like everything was written within the space of a couple years, and it was very much influenced by the times that we’re living in. It felt present in a way that we hadn’t in a while.
AUK: How would you say these two albums relate to the band’s earlier recordings, given the lengthy gap in between? For example, Marigold Maxixe, which has a different vibe.
DH: That one came out in 2010 and was our last recording before we took a 10-year hiatus. Our sound up until that point had been very pop-heavy. We were working with producers that really brought out that big, bright, boisterous element of our sound. The one you heard was an opportunity for us to experiment. That theme is a recurring one throughout our catalog of not being so present all the time and then looking back at things and taking stock of personal choices.
But I would say for people that have followed our music on and off for almost 20 years now, I think there are touchstones within the new record, especially the more upbeat songs. The lead track, No Alarm, and the latest single, Parallel Lives, have a more upbeat, bright and driving sound juxtaposed with lyrics that tend to be either dark or introspective.
AUK: Considering No Alarm‘s subject matter, are political and corporate leaders disappointing to you?
DH: Largely, yes. I think people in power tend to disappoint, but I think we’re seeing everything right now at its most extreme in all corners of life, whether that’s politics or technology. That’s another theme that runs through these songs. Lost in the Branches talks about algorithmic culture and how everything feels like it’s this invisible thumb that’s putting pressure on you. And I think that’s something that a lot of people feel in all aspects of life. So that was what we tried to bring through not only in the lyrics, but an uneasy feeling that permeates the record.
AUK: Don’t you think Lost in the Branches would have been perfect synced into the new Avatar movie? Anyway, we’ve been hearing the world is going to end for decades, and we’re still alive and kicking. Do you think humanity and the earth are in imminent danger of destruction?
DH: I don’t think there’s going to be an extinction-level event, but I do feel like we are in this moment where a lot of people are experiencing the things that you mentioned earlier: wildfires, political turmoil. It is a scary time. We are entering a new period in which our values are changing. I think the pendulum swings back and forth, but when you think about the speed of technology, it can be a scary thing. Hopefully, we will find a way to muddle through it, but at least in my lifetime, the extremes haven’t felt as pronounced as they do right now.
AUK: Speaking of technology, everything in our lives, including music, is about to take a quantum leap with AI.
DH: Yeah, you can definitely doomscroll your way through some sleepless nights. Looking at AI as a tool is a helpful framing, just like any new technology. We actually used AI to create our music video for Parallel Lives by working with a team – we had a director, cinematographers, art directors – and they were using AI tools to generate the content. It was sort of this hybrid analog approach to using AI, which, to me, is a more fulfilling way. I could sit there with the tools and do it myself, but I find the most rewarding part of any creative project, whether that’s making music or collaborating on a video, is talking to people, working things out, getting their perspectives. By each person thinking differently, this brings out something that neither one of us or myself and a machine may have come up with on our own.
AUK: So, for the recording you’re using Pro-Tools and other technology. Is it a little messier playing live?
DH: We haven’t played a live show in around 15 years, and part of that is because we took this long hiatus. The other part of it is that we all live in different cities, so there’s the logistical aspect of finding the time, taking off work, getting together, buying the plane ticket, and then blocking out time to rehearse. I’m always thinking about the next batch of songs, though. We were even writing stuff in the studio for our next whatever it is, EP or album.
AUK: Where does Portland fit in? You’re all from Alaska and then wound up in Oregon.
DH: Some of us played in the same band, and some of us just knew each other from our bands playing together at shows. We all moved down to Portland around the same time because for most Alaskan artists, the go-to cities are Seattle or Portland. It’s still close to home, relatively, still feels somewhat familiar being in the Northwest, and there’s an Alaskan diaspora in both of those cities.
AUK: So, was it all of you piling into a van with “Portland or Bust” written on the side?
DH: Not exactly. A couple of us were actually in the car together, moving down, and then the others moved within a couple months. We all found each other there and were ready to start writing a different style of music.
AUK: I understand the band’s name came from a poem by Jack Gilbert. Care to explain?
DH: I have read it hundreds of times and probably couldn’t tell you exactly what it’s about. It’s one of the things that I like about this poet and about poetry in general is so much of it is open to interpretation. The title and the content of the poem don’t naturally go together, but the feeling that you get from reading it is that there is an emptiness to fame, I suppose, and a loneliness as well. There’s something intriguing to me about that, but I also just liked the name. It sounds cool.
AUK: Is your song Wish I Was Here a play on the Pink Floyd title?
DH: There are two ways of reading that. One is I wish I were more present. Being a ball of anxiety or just feeling the weight of everything, you miss out on seeing the beauty that’s immediately around you. But there’s also a line in the song about doing this exercise of writing a postcard from somewhere you’ve never been, just a creative exercise to break you out of a funk. And I was thinking about how postcards often say wish you were here.
AUK: In the lyrics, you write about feeding the dogs, watering the plants, watching the Criterion Collection. It makes me think of college students today, how sometimes they’re so unprepared for life, which causes them anxiety. I mean, you go through college and get a gender studies or psych degree, and what do you get for a job?
DH: As someone who got a degree in Spanish a long time ago, yeah, there was that specific anxiety. But I actually find one way to snap myself out of a funk is just to do things that feel somehow useful or productive. Whatever it is, to feel like I’m getting some sort of enrichment from it. What are the things that you can do to keep going?
AUK: Do you have a particular director or film from the Criterion Collection that really resonates for you?
DH: Michel Gondry is one of my all-time favorite directors. You see a little bit of that influence in the Parallel Lives video with the surrealism. There’s a nod to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
AUK: Do the two characters in Parallel Lives ever meet? It has some similarity to the idea Richard Linklater had for Before Sunrise and the two other films in the trilogy.
DH: They do meet, though not in the song, but that’s what I thought was interesting about it is we’re looking at the story of two people before they ever meet – who they are, the things that make them the people that they are and that make them compatible, getting to know those aspects of them before we ever know them together. It was an intentional choice that they haven’t met, but to feel like it was somehow inevitable.
AUK: Outside of music, what is one thing you couldn’t do without?
DH: Travel. My parents are big travelers, and so I grew up getting to see other parts of the US and the world, which I think was important for a kid growing up in Alaska, where, for all intents and purposes, you feel like you’re living on an island. That was an exciting aspect of touring, initially, to get in a van and go see all these places and getting to know the textures of the country. I always find that travel gives me the space to think, to see things through different perspectives. Song ideas come to me while I’m traveling or on long hikes.
AUK: In It Stays with You, are you writing about someone in the military?
DH: That song is about my little brother who is a Marine. We took very different paths, but we have a good relationship. But this is about a period of time when our relationship was strained, and understanding that I wasn’t always there for him when he needed me because he wasn’t saying it out loud. It was understanding the things that he’s been through in his life experience and how I exist in relative comfort comparably, realizing this late in our relationship, but better late than never, and wanting to be closer with him and make the most of that relationship even though we do live in such different worlds.
AUK: Thinking about your song The Imposter, have you ever tried to convince people of something, and they won’t believe you?
DH: I’m a pretty terrible liar. This probably goes back to the rule-following and some of the latent Catholic guilt. In my day job, I’m trying to convince people of things all the time, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
AUK: The album title song, End Times Elevator Music – it seems there is the illusion of control, over our lives and the world.
DH: I have a little bit of a controlling personality and perfectionism that I can’t ever seem to fully shake. I reference the Let It Go refrain, which comes from a documentary that I saw called How to Let Go of the World and Love the Things Climate Can’t Change, about the inevitability of where that takes us. There’s still beauty in people, and places to admire that heavily influenced this song. Also, there were things that I was going through that were out of my control, and it was just a mantra that was like, okay, you can try and control the things that you can but know that you won’t control everything, so try and be a little bit zen about it and focus your energy where you can and appreciate the positive aspects of life, even if it does feel like we’re barreling towards something pretty dire.
AUK: There is the lyric: It’s a different world than the one whose days we burned in Marigold. What is it about marigold, which is also part of the EP title?
DH: Maybe not the most poetic answer, but Marigold was the name of the street that I lived on in Portland during the time that album was written. There were a lot of important life changes, finding the person who would become my wife, so that period of life is bound up with that apartment and that street. And so, the idea of the days we’ve burned in Marigold is at a time when things were slower, easier; you could burn a day, quote unquote waste it, just doing nothing but being present. I also just liked the sound of the word, and in the context of LA’s wildfires, the burning and flames and the color of marigold felt like a rich visual.
AUK: Elevator music is notable for something in the background that no one pays attention to. Are you relating that to end times? We don’t notice it’s coming?
DH: From where I’m sitting in Los Angeles, where my country is going through these wars that it’s starting for no discernible reason, it’s having real impact. People are dying, and at the same time you have the effects of climate change that are very real and present no matter where you are. There’s a lot of scary stuff going on, and we just tune it out. That is where the elevator-music aspect becomes normalized. You learn to live with it as a coping/survival mechanism. It doesn’t make things that are happening any less threatening; it is the way we tend to compartmentalize things, with the elevator music tuning it all out.
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