Hard times, no, unusually hard times served to bring the Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett a sense of purpose in life as a singer, songwriter, band leader, author and speaker about childhood trauma. As he acknowledged about hiding trauma, “So you perform, maybe become funny. I better make people like me because they won’t like me for myself.”
Headphones on and allowing myself to be fully ensconced within the world Jollett has built on Airborne Toxic Event’s 2025 record, “Glory,” it is akin to being transported to an alternate dimension. It’s not just an ace title; this record turns you inside out as the band careens into a firewall of riffs and Jollett sings about words you could live by and hide by and die by (on ‘So You Think You Know the Difference’). Or about the man (‘Frank Pigg’) who has known only violence and winds up in the penitentiary, repeating what he learned in childhood. That in no way is meant to imply that Jollett is not taking his upbringing seriously. But being raised in a cult, you either learn to move on or become stuck in a dehumanising cycle.
The album is a meticulous, thoughtful ode to the guitar-forward rock ‘n’ roll that can make Baby Boomers convulse into uncontrollable headbanging. From the very first lick on ‘My Own Thunder Road,’ we are welcomed by a windows-down, empty highway barnburner of a riff. It’s americana and head-swelling, full of poetry and colloquialisms hardwired to curdle the aches of any contemporary dystopia. Ostensibly inspired by Springsteen’s own ‘Thunder Road’ but with a stark contrast: You don’t run away from your troubles because they will eventually find you, and it won’t be pretty.
In a moment where the musical zeitgeist has never needed modern rock ‘n’ roll so deeply, “Glory” heeds the call like a soldier going into battle against injustice. The sonic potential of this band was fully unleashed several albums ago and has yet to be reined in as Jollett continues to gnaw away at demons, personal or impersonal, which are front and centre on ‘It Never Happened at All.’ You learn so young how to put up a wall, like it never happened at all.
Perhaps it was through Jollett’s affinity for the Cure that the music holds true to some semblance of an aching 1980s glam architecture. One of the best parts of the Airborne Toxic Event is how often its songs flirt with pent-up emotions, and the whole of “Glory” fearlessly revels in whatever unorthodox or guiltily pleasurable route it needs to take. ‘Note to Self’ is one of the more crystallized narrative moments across the 9-track record, alluding to the inevitability of life coming with an expiration date when he details: I hate these lonely days, I hate this deep malaise, I hate this time, these sounds, these scenes, these schemes … Soulless and dole-less and pointless and friendless, Pitiful, damnable, horrendous.
But not all that glitters is loud and in your face on “Glory.” In the title track, Jollett takes the role of a conductor, shouldering a sweet, Springsteen-style arrangement into a tender oblivion. When I think about the truth sometimes, while sitting up alone late, listening for my heart at night, just to hear it beat, and it’s got a hole, there’s something wrong, there’s something more, he mournfully croons against a patient, drawn-out set of dampened chords. It’s a true talisman of an aural smorgasbord; every turn changes ever so deliciously into something even more rapturous than the riffs and solos and climbing notes that preceded them.
We all carry some sort of baggage from childhood, some a heavier load than others, but it’s how you carry that weight and ultimately unload some of it, give it to the baggage handler at the airport along with a nice tip. Jollett has learned how to funnel confusing and destabilising events into a full life, which includes a wife and children, bandmates he is close with, and a refreshing take on the cycle of life. This was a fascinating interview from the leader of a superior band.
Americana UK: I’ve been wanting to see Airborne Toxic Event live for years, and it’s just never worked out. This tour, however, I’m going to Chattanooga. What song is the one people expect to hear at your shows?
Mikel Jollett: It depends on the night. Sometimes it’s a big hit; sometimes it’s a song that’s never been played before, or it’s a fan favorite. Sometimes it’s a cover. We started doing a cover of ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ after Kris Kristofferson died. That one went over really good. I feel like a good rock and roll show should be part confessional, part revival, part circus. If you can get each of those elements working together, flirt with disaster a little bit, but then bring it home at the end, you’ve got yourself a rock and roll show. It’s got to flirt with disaster, or it’s not rock and roll; it’s folk music with a drum set.
AUK: How would you describe the band to someone who hasn’t heard it?
MJ: Maybe a modern rock band, but obsessed with death, kind of romantically. I used to have a really good canned answer to that question. Flannery O’Connor once said: You can choose what you can write, but you can’t choose what you can write well. You can’t choose what you can make really sink in. I’ve done symphonic music, and I’ve done folk music, and I’ve done rock and roll music, and I’ve done keyboard-driven dance music. I think the common thread through all of it is, I take the role in my life of songwriter very seriously. And if you’re a songwriter, your journey is to be documented through song – your psychological, spiritual, emotional journey through the world. So that’s my covenant with the fans, and I take that part very seriously. So how that comes out sonically, I don’t know. Kind of sounds like Joy Division sometimes. Maybe. Sort of sounds like The Clash sometimes. Alt-something or other. It’s hard to say.
AUK: How did the band get its start?
MJ: It was in 2006, and at the time I was a writer. I was working on a novel, and I’d just gotten into Yaddo, which is a very prestigious writers’ colony in upstate New York, to finish this novel. I was very excited to get in. I had published a short story and done a bunch of columns for All Things Considered on NPR, and I had this kind of writing career that was going places. I’d been moonlighting on my writing career, just writing songs. If I had a free second, just sit and write and sing. And then I met Daren (Taylor), our drummer, and I decided not to go to Yaddo and instead start a band with him. I remember telling my parents, and they were like, What? They said, You’ve been working on this for years. Your career’s taking off. You’ve got a literary agent; you’ve got short stories published; you got into Yaddo. And I was like, yeah, I’m not going. They said, Why not? Like I said, I met a drummer.
It wouldn’t have been any less surprising if I had told them I’m joining the circus. Listen, this lion tamer gig, it’s going to work out for me. They taught me how to use the whip and the chair, and it’s going to happen. But he was serious, and I was serious about starting a band. And I had met a bunch of other people in the prior two years who I didn’t quite click with, or they just seemed kind of, like, didn’t have similar sensibilities with Darren and I. It was like he wanted to be in a band that I wanted to be in, and I wanted to be in a band that he wanted to be in. We both had sort of a similar language about rock and roll, and we were both very serious.
AUK: Were you always the songwriter from the start?
MJ: I’ve always been the songwriter for the band. I’ve been writing songs since I was 15. I’d written maybe a thousand songs, and they weren’t very good. And then I wrote a song called ‘Wishing Well,’ and it was like an eight-month journey where I was sort of working on this one song. I was a music journalist at the time, too. I interviewed David Bowie, and we met at a studio in Soho. I had this kind of oddly paternal moment with him, where I was talking about my life and talking about how it’s hard to write, and there are just too many things going on in my head. I felt like you had to have this gestalt of an idea and put it out there. We had this moment where he looked at me, he paused, and he’s like, how does your generation believe in anything? And I was like, “I don’t know, David Bowie, it’s hard. It’s fucking bizarre. People are just disappointing, and the world’s really confusing, and there’s all these contradictions.” And he was like, Great, Mikel. Write about the contradictions.
AUK: Obviously, you took his advice.
MJ: Robert Smith also gave me some advice, which was just to show people how weird you are. Don’t dress it up; just be exactly as weird as you are. And I took that advice to heart during that eight-month process of writing ‘Wishing Well.’ After I finished it, that was a moment when I thought, That’s how I feel right now. That exactly is how it feels to be me right now at this moment in my life. And that’s when I knew I wanted to start a band. Then I met Darren shortly thereafter.
AUK: It took a long time to finish ‘Wishing Well.’ Has there been a song you’ve been trying to finish but just can’t make it happen?
MJ: There is one called ‘If I Could Only Sleep.’ It’s kind of about insomnia and grief that I started writing after my dad died, and I couldn’t quite get it, but I don’t know, I might actually put that one out. There’s another one called ‘Ballad of a Dancehall Band,’ which is about world events happening around you while you’re locked in this kind of rock and roll bubble of going place to place on a tour bus. It’s both profound and trite, and you feel sort of ridiculous and profoundly serious at the same time.
AUK: Well, since this is an article for an americana music site, what is one Airborne Toxic Event song that people who like americana could get into?
MJ: Oh, I think we definitely do have some americana elements. But it’s a good question. Maybe ‘Missy,’ from our first record. That one’s got a country shuffle kind of vibe to it. On the new record, there’s a song called ‘Hole in My Heart.’ There are a number of country kind of moments in our songs. I like Jason Isbell and Merle Haggard, and I like Steve Earle. Those are people that I would consider to be very good songwriters.
AUK: What is ‘Hole in My Heart’ about?
MJ: It’s about walking around trying to please people, and you can’t. You’re constantly giving yourself away. It allows room for mistakes to be made when that’s your orientation towards the world.
AUK: The band’s name comes from the Don DeLillo novel, “White Noise.” Have you read his other works, like “Libra,” about the JFK assassination?
MJ: I’ve read “White Noise” ten times, “Underworld,” others. I couldn’t get into “Libra.” I tend to read authors’ catalogues, like I’ve read every word that Philip Roth has ever written. I’ve read every word that F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written. Vonnegut, Nabokov. He wrote like forty novels, including the translations of the early ones when he was writing in Russian. Steinbeck and Milan Kundera. You put all that together. That’s my referential world.
AUK: “Cannery Row” is my favorite of Steinbeck. What is yours?
MJ: That one is great. People think of Steinbeck as everyone has to read him in school, so they’re like, Oh, that’s one of those books I had to read in 10th grade. I have to read “The Pearl”; I have to read “Of Mice and Men.” But “The Grapes of Wrath,” I mean, what a book! “East of Eden.” He just takes these characters through these grand swaths and has these huge arcs. His writing is a little repetitive, and he’s not particularly playful in his voice, but he writes just like a bull. It’s very satisfying. And what he’s good at is something that most writers aren’t good at. I think most very good writers, great writers, they’re just kind of born with a naturally lyrical writing voice. I think that’s true for Kundera, Toni Morrison, although Morrison herself is like LeBron James or Michael Phelps. There’s no hole in her game. She has all of it. She has the voice, she has the arc, she has the gravitas. She’s playful, she’s funny. So many things going on with her. Well, sorry, I get sidetracked on books.
AUK: Sidetracked is not bad. DeLillo was from New York. He was influenced by jazz, actually, Coltrane and Mingus. You can hear jazz in his writing. It’s just so improvisational.
MJ: I particularly like in “White Noise” where it’s first person, then third person, an essay, a novel, and you don’t even notice it as the pages go by. Wait a second, why are we in first person? And then you go back 50 pages, and wait, we were in third person 50 pages ago. When did it change? And then you realize it just kind of changed naturally in the flow of one paragraph. Kundera is the same way, where it’s like we’re telling a story now; we’re just kind of talking about something now. We’re going to spend twenty pages talking about how gestures are inherited through families. And then now, oh, we’re going to get four pages of tight plot. It’s just all over the place. But there’s a rhythm that intuitively makes sense that, as a reader, is very satisfying.
AUK: That sounds to me like you are describing Airborne Toxic Event.
MJ: Well, on our best nights.
AUK: Who were your influences, besides authors?
MJ: Robert Smith, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, The Cure. I’d say that’s probably my Mount Rushmore of people that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and who have written a lot of songs that I wish I’d written.
AUK: On the new record, there is ‘My Own Thunder Road,’ which could be a nod to Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road?’ There’s a line, the ghost in the eyes of the boys who fell. Could you talk a little about this song?
MJ: I love ‘Thunder Road.’ That’s why I think it’s maybe the best rock and roll song ever written. I used to have a ‘66 Chevelle, beautiful, black and chrome, that I would work on. My dad was a mechanic, so we would work on it together, and I’d take it for these drives. It had this great stereo system, and I would turn up ‘Thunder Road’ and wait for that great line, the one where he’s talking about Mary and trying to get out of the town. You’re always leaving a town with Bruce Springsteen. He’s always like, let’s leave this town. And his game is not good, by the way. The game is like you ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re all right. And she still gets in the car and leaves the town. Come on, Mary. Have a little self-respect. The guy is not saying, Oh, you’re so hot, baby. You’re the most beautiful woman.
He’s like, you’re okay. But anyway, how shitty is this town? It must be the worst town. She’s willing to get in and leave with a guy that thinks she’s just kind of alright. So, he’s telling that story, and in the middle of it he says that great verse: There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away, They haunt this dusty beach road, In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets, They scream your name at night in the street, Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet. What a lyric! Then you wonder who those ghosts are. When you really meditate on that song, I actually think the ghosts are the kids that died in Vietnam. My uncle was in Vietnam, and I had a few other people I’ve known well that were in Vietnam, and there is that feeling that there are these ghosts that haunt this room, and some of them are dead, and some of them came back as ghosts.
Bruce writes about this in a lot of different songs and kind of the Bruce character, which we later learned is him embodying what he thinks his father was, because he’s not really the character of Bruce, but he’s playing a character. He does it so convincingly that you just sort of believe him. But I always loved that song because I grew up feeling a lot like a ghost and on the edge of rooms that were haunted rooms as well. You mentioned the cult. I was born in a cult, and I didn’t choose to join the cult. I was born in it, and I was put in an orphanage at a young age, where I lived until I was five.
And then we escaped from school. We were on the run for six months, and people were trying to harm us. We lived on the run. Then one day they said, Alright, go to first grade, Mikel. Okay? I had just gone through all of this crazy stuff and trying to figure out how to sit in a classroom and learn arithmetic or whatever. I felt like a ghost. I’ve always wanted to write about that. One of my frustrations is, Bruce can write about this stuff so romantically. There’s such a romance to Bruce’s music, you just want to go on that road. You just want to go to the next town with him, even if you’re only alright.
So, my song is about not having that sense of romance about the world. I’m just too angry about the things that happened. I’m too pissed off. And there’s this much more nihilistic, punk rock part of me that’s just pissed off. The song is about me wanting to write ‘Thunder Road.’ But in order to write that, you need to have this hope because there’s a redemptive arc to almost all of Bruce’s songs. And mine don’t typically have a redemptive arc. They’re more cathartic and, as I said, nihilistic. So, the song ends up being about too broken to write something romantic. I don’t believe in the road; the road never went anywhere. I was on that road. I wasn’t playing a character. I was literally on that road. I literally was on the run. I lived on the run. It sucked. We were broke and poor and scared, and people were trying to hurt us, and we watched some pretty horrific violence. Trying then to make sense of it as a songwriter, you just end up screaming into the void about how you’re angry about it, which is not nearly as redemptive and romantic. So, the song is about that idea that we didn’t have a choice but to be the ghosts.
AUK: In your book, you wrote about your mother remarrying an alcoholic man. Your father used to be a heroin addict. That’s pretty rough for paternal figures.
MJ: It was the family business, a family tradition. It skipped me somehow, not sure why.
AUK: Did that cause you to keep far away from substances?
MJ: Oh no. I wouldn’t say it’s that severe. Definitely had some drinks. Sometimes I think about this and think it’s a triumph of will, and I’m proud of myself. At other times, I think I was very lucky to be born with some gifts. I think about my brother, who was an addict by the time he was 13. Alcohol, coke, PCP, my cousins, my uncles, who all were in prison. Some were in Chino; some were in Folsom. I just never wanted to do that stuff. I always wanted to read books and play guitar. I never had that thing. I’m sure my brother, first time he ever had a drink of this rotgut wine at 13 years old, that was it for him. By the next week, he was drinking every day. I was born without that gene or without that need. I think it would be arrogant if I was to say that I triumphed over it by sheer will. Certainly, hardworking willpower somewhere in there for sure, but I was lucky to be born being industrious with a good head on my shoulders. And I was born with some ability to have good relationships in my life and friendships. I also had some wonderful people along the way that helped. I got a full scholarship to college, that helped. I got wonderful college counselors in high school who said I have a ton of potential, but you really need to focus. They really cared. And then, of course, my stepmom, who was just always a believer in me. I got very lucky in a lot of ways.
AUK: The band has been together eighteen years. Do you think there is a shelf life to a band? Some musicians have stated they think two decades is about it.
MJ: I don’t know. I think that you have to not become a calcified version of who you used to be. And I think that happens to a lot of artists when they don’t continue to challenge themselves, continue to evolve, continue to experiment. What I’ve noticed about music, though, is we’re doing our tours as big as they’ve ever been. This last year was our biggest touring year yet. One of the charming things about the modern music world, as much as I don’t like the landscape of streaming and virality, is this super focus on the numbers. What it should be on is the story and the art and the arc of each song.
There it is in black and white. Spotify’s fine. I don’t like that they just include the numbers so every single person can look, how popular is this song right now? Fuck that. Who cares? This isn’t the NBA finals. Let’s have our art. Let’s have three minutes of art. Let’s have five minutes of a story. Let’s get lost in it. Let’s hear what this person’s talking about. So, I don’t like that. But as much as all that’s true, there is this kind of charming thing where if you just put on good shows, you take that seriously. You do it every night. You put out music that you love and that you care about, and that is saying something meaningful about your life or is an honest thing to wrestle with, an idea that you can keep going.
AUK: One of the things that is very interesting about your work is that every album seems different in a way, whether it’s thematically or the songs. The band’s music, you can recognize that, but it seems like you’re coming from a different place each time.
MJ: Absolutely. That’s what I’m talking about, continuing to wrestle, continuing to evolve, and as a songwriter, continuing to document your journey through the world as opposed to trying to write a hit or trying to write a catchy song. Who cares, man? Leave that to precocious musical people, and they can go sell dog food or something. We have to write about our struggles, and our joys, and our journey. That’s why we’re here as artists.
AUK: Do you have a particular technique for writing songs?
MJ: The old saying of writing is easy, just sit at your keyboard and bleed. Same, sit at your guitar and bleed. I don’t think there are any tricks. I think you just have to spend a lot of your life doing it and care deeply about the outcome. I think it took me a thousand songs to write one good one, and then I could tell you what I think my techniques are, but they won’t be the tricks. These are all innate, and it’s all attitudinal stuff about I really want this moment to capture this feeling. And the feeling for each song is different, but to take that outcome seriously. It’s like you have to just care a lot about outcomes and spend a ton of your time thinking about it, and then also be good at it. I mean, some people are just bad at it, right?
AUK: Let’s leave out the names to protect the innocent. With the albums which have been the most well-received by a large segment of the music world?
MJ: I would say probably our first two and “Hollywood Park” got the most accolades. But then we did an acoustic record called “Songs of God and Whiskey,” and we have fans constantly asking us to play songs from that one. But you meet fans, and they’ll consistently reference songs like ‘Elizabeth,’ the last song on our third record, a huge fan favorite. Everyone in the room knows every single word and intonation, and delivery. As a singer on stage, you just go like, okay, we’re doing something here. There’s a bunch of songs for which that’s true, that I don’t know if they connected as much at the time in the critical sphere or in the press.
AUK: Do you usually agree with what is written about your albums?
MJ: Oh, I don’t know. All I want to hear is you’re a genius. Any songwriter that says they want to read a review that says anything other than he’s a genius is lying. You never go like, Oh, good point.
AUK: You could argue that 99% of the albums reviewed are critically acclaimed.
MJ: Fair enough. I rarely read them. Because then what happens is, even if ten of them say you are a genius, there’ll be one that’s like, this guy sucks. And then all you’ll think about is the one that says, “this guy sucks”. You’ll obsess for years, and you’ll remember the one line; they have one little dig where they’re twisting the knife. So, I learned a long time ago, just don’t read.
AUK: You can’t let a reviewer get in your head, right?
MJ: You know, I used to be a critic, and so I know where they’re coming from, and it’s splashy to write about what they think is wrong with your record. Half of it is rhetorical. It just happens to sound good to say a certain thing, and then that rhetorical sort of device lands. But when my book came out, I think people focused a lot on the cult aspect, kind of splashy and sexy to ride. But I was five when we left the cult. My book has 400 pages, and ten are about the cult. The other 390 pages are about my dad and my stepdad, and my mom, and, to some extent, the kind of magical realism of childhood and emotional world and about dealing with events that a child has nowhere near the level of tools or maturity to deal with. And then what that does to a person as they get older, and how you can focus that into art, and how trauma runs in families. You can kind of embrace it or not. And that’s really what the book’s about. But then you’d see cult survivor. I didn’t join the damn thing; my parents did.
AUK: What do you think attracted your parents to the cult?
MJ: I think my dad went there to get clean off heroin. I mean, it was a drug rehab place, and he just thought of it as being like the Bob Dylan song about Synanon, which frames it as this utopian place. It’s where you went to really embrace the kind of new thought, whatever transcendental mishigas movement of the late sixties. My dad OD’d, and when he came to, he was sitting on a porch at this place, and after kicking it, he moved in and was there ten years helping a lot of other people kick heroin. Those people will say to this day, Jim and Julia (his mom) saved my life. If I hadn’t met your dad, I’d be dead. My mom was a free speech activist, and there were a lot of these kinds of people that weren’t addicts that moved in for the utopian vision of it all.
My mom always used to say, “Listen, there were tanks on University Avenue in Berkeley.” I want to build something better, but I’d say I’m Gen-X, so we’re a notoriously sceptical generation. I look at that and go, what the hell did you think was going to happen? Come on. There was a cult leader, and he wanted to have sex with young women and hoard guns, like every cult leader ever. Oh, didn’t see that coming. I’m the opposite of that. I believe in institutions. I want to be on a record label and go to a good school, you know what I mean? I want to succeed within the institutions. My parents were much more anti-institutional, and I don’t think like that at all.
AUK: Hard to imagine. I watched the TV series “The Path.” Cult leaders always seem to evolve into being consumed with power, not unlike our politics.
MJ: I’m kind of indifferent to it. Again, I don’t have a lot of direct experience with it because we were so young when I left. Everything else is growing up in the wreckage of how the cult became violent and paranoid, all these horrible things that have been documented endlessly. So many documentaries have come out about Synanon in the last couple of years. I just knew the wreckage of it, that we moved to Salem, Oregon. We were flat ass broke. My brother and I basically had the emotional world of orphans. We weren’t orphans because we still had our mom and dad, but we’d been raised by strangers. No one knew who’d raised us. There was a lot of abuse, and we were just trying to figure it out.
AUK: There is a song on “Hollywood Park” that describes when they tore it down, there was a wrecking sound. It was about a racetrack.
MJ: That’s what the book was named after, Hollywood Park in Inglewood. It sounds nice if you’re not from LA, right? Must be a beautiful place. I mean, in the thirties, when it opened, it was nice. But it became totally run down. It’s a horse track. My dad was big into betting horses; he used to love going there, and he would take me along. That’s how I learned fractions, sitting on the rail with my dad talking about odds. It was great. My dad was a really socially graceful person. I mean, I talk about how he was in jail, and he was a heroin addict in eighth grade, but he was also just great. He’d seen everything, and he was a good guy to be around. He wasn’t judgmental, and he was very warm, and wanted his boys around.
AUK: Would you say the song was a metaphorical cry? Went out in the streets that night. We knew I’d lost our home.
MJ: Not metaphorical. That literally happened.
AUK: Then the song goes: In the roar of the ghosts as they stood up in the stands.
MJ: Of course, that’s a metaphor. By the end of the book, Hollywood Park becomes this symbol of really great parts of my childhood, growing up amid all this chaos, danger, and poverty. There was always the racetrack, though. Half the time, we didn’t really talk much; we just sat in the stands and rooted for the horses. But the only time I think as a kid that I felt really safe was when I was with my dad. So that became this sort of metaphor for the comfort, and warmth, and trust in families. We meet a thousand people, and it becomes this place that’s tied to my family’s story that I literally just visited in my head. And then my father died, and three weeks later they tore down the racetrack. In my mind, it was like, did this place even exist? Is this real? It couldn’t exist without my dad.
AUK: How did he do playing the ponies?
MJ: He was a pretty good handicapper. I don’t know if you’ve dealt with serious grief before, but serious grief feels like there’s a hole in the sky. Reality goes away. When my dad died, I remember the feeling, as if you’re looking at the same sky you’ve been looking at your whole life, but now there’s just a tear in it, and it’s been revealed that sky wasn’t what you thought it was, and the world is different. You’ve lost this person that meant so much to you. And so, yeah, the tearing down of the racetrack was very much a metaphor.
AUK: I read that in order to hide your trauma from everyone, you perform.
MJ: That’s right. Some people become really funny. Some become good at tasks. I better make people like me, because they’re not going to like me for myself. It’s like tap dancing if you’re an orphan. And again, I’m not an orphan because that is a very important distinction. It’s just that you create this emotional world that’s very similar to that which orphans have. Have you ever seen when they go into an orphanage in Africa, and there’ll be some white lady standing there, and all these kids run out so happy. That’s not normal; that’s a bad thing that happens. That’s a traumatized child. Kids are naturally leery and suspicious of strangers, or at least a bit guarded. That is a natural attachment to be like, I have my people and then here’s all these people that aren’t my people. I will happily greet the savior white lady, but I’m not going to run out with a big smile and give her a hug.
That’s a person who’s seeking external validation. That’s a person who thinks they have to perform. I’m the cutest one here. I’m the smartest one here. I’m the best one here. This is widely studied stuff in orphanages: this feeling of having to be in competition for basic things. We didn’t have birthdays; we didn’t have holidays. We get sick. You internalize that, and children experience loneliness like it’s shame. They just feel like they’re too gross to be touched. And then you become a performer because you think, I can make people like me. I can be super charming. I can be super talented. I can be super attractive. All the things that you do as a human being to try and get others to like you. And for some artists, it’s sort of your trick, which is that you’re good at performing because you’ve been performing every second of your life.
AUK: You mentioned the Cure in that article, talked about their album “Pornography” and the song ‘One Hundred Years’ where Robert Smith says, doesn’t matter if we all die, a prayer for something better, waiting for the death blow. Isn’t that the alienation and being misunderstood?
MJ: It’s that nihilistic streak I was talking about, where you’re like, I don’t have this romantic feeling about the world. I have this feeling the world is a fucked-up place, and I’m mad about it. I don’t know if I always feel that way as a parent. I don’t think I come off that way to my children. I do believe strongly in communities, and I’m involved in lots of community organizations. But as a writer, I’ll sit in that room in my head that feels very nihilistic. I don’t want that to be my orientation to the world, but it ends up going into my heart, so I have a place to put it and also externalize it and then kind of look at it and get into it, understand where it’s coming from and feel like, okay, I see what this thing is and what it isn’t. The process of writing in that way helps me to understand what’s going on in my own head.
AUK: I hear a lot of death in your songs, end of life, end of existence. Is that something that’s on your mind a lot?
MJ: I’d say less so now than it was ten or twenty years ago. It was very much like this morose cameo, like, we’re all going to die, and what’s the point? Ten years ago, there was a lot of death in my family. All my uncles died, all my grandparents died, my aunts died, and then my father died. They all died around the same general time period. So, I came at it from where the practical reality of death was just about grief and sadness and transience, and how we only have so much time. I’d say I’m on the other side of that now, and I spend less time thinking about death. Having kids, I spend a lot of time thinking about life, about my kids’ future, as most parents do, wanting to make sure that I’m setting a good example. That’s the most important thing in the world to me.
AUK: Don DeLillo wrote: “If you don’t have the grace and wit to die early, you’re forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame.” The quote comes from the context of a discussion about celebrity and public life, suggesting that those who do not exit the public eye at their peak are forced to fade away, much like a star whose fame has diminished.
MJ: What would Kurt Cobain have looked like at 60, right? I mean, that’s the idea here. We get old, and we fall apart, and get scared. Our bodies start to fail us, and it’s just a slow tragedy, and there’s no way around that. We can be graceful about it. The thing to do is to have wisdom and to, frankly, have some disconnection. But you can’t have that until you acknowledge the tragedy at the heart of it, which is you’re waiting on a cliff, and there’s a storm coming, and there’s nothing you can do to get out of that storm. It’s coming no matter what. And all you can do is stand there and wait. That’s life. That’s the human life cycle. So, if you die early, you don’t have to go through all of that. You avoid all this crap about getting old and weaker.
Who wants that? Or we romanticize it, like, oh, you get older, and you get wiser. I mean, sure, there’s some of that, but then a lot of times your body gets weaker, and your brain doesn’t work as well, and it sucks, and you’re scared because you’re going to fucking die. The only way to be at peace with it is to really embrace the sadness and tragedy of that. I understand what DeLillo is saying there, and I think he’s being kind of tongue-in-cheek, obviously. Nobody wants that for real. Again, it’s a rhetorical strategy. It’s a fun thing to say. It’s kind of punk rock, right? Is that graceful, dying young? No, it’s fucking horseshit. Let’s grow old, and let’s do it.
AUK: Being in motorsports for most of my life, I’ve been around and written about drivers who ended up losing their lives in a wreck. One of them said to never feel sorry for me if I crash and die because I’ve lived a good life and done many of the things I wanted to do.
MJ: I think that’s a healthy attitude, if you mean it. A lot of people will say that, but they don’t mean it. You have to be honest with yourself as to where you really are. I want to die at 120 years old, surrounded by the people who love me most, and have my health until I’m 119 and a half or until the day before. That’s what I want. I want a full life that doesn’t end for a long, long time, but I don’t want to spend a lot of it being sick or filled with regret.
That’s what the last song (‘True’) on “Hollywood Park” is about. It’s about deciding. I always tell my wife that I don’t want to be hooked up to tubes. I’m going to go and die in the forest by myself because I don’t want to burden other people with that. It is very sort of pissed off, this walk where I’m going to be alone. And then halfway through, the actual reality of death hits, and it’s super violent. The song gets really loud and crazy and screaming at the end, and you realize, oh my God, this is horrible. I’m going to die. This is violent. My body’s on fire, and what? This is awful. And then somewhere is baked in the realization that it’s actually doing them a disservice to not allow the people that you love to be there for you, being cowboy-like, I’m going to walk off to die. My wife has told me many times, That’s horrible. I want to be there with you, and I don’t want that to ever happen, but if it does happen, I want to comfort you. And if you took that away from me, I’d be very angry.
AUK: A guy who used to work for me said you never know what you’ll do when the end is near, “until you look that booger in the eye.” He had a way with southern-style expressions.
MJ: I think that’s right. Look, I have to go in a minute. I’m really enjoying this talk about death, though, so I appreciate that you let the conversation kind of go where it was going to go rather than asking the same ten canned questions. This is way more fun to just have a real discussion about these things.
AUK: Right back at you. I appreciate your thoughtful responses and not getting the same ten canned answers. It’s been a lot of fun, and speaking of fun, here is one last question. What would you say was the best moment in your musical career?
MJ: The single best moment of my musical career was probably early on, our first headlining show at Koko in London. We sold it out, and we burned it down that night. The band was so close; we were all such good friends, and we had made this record we were so proud of and played it thousands of miles from home. Afterwards, we went up to the balcony and had a drink, and we were all just like arm-in-arm, looking at what we’d accomplished. This dream growing up of these misfit kids who used music as our outlet, and a lot of it was British music. Suddenly, being somewhere where, together, we had accomplished this dream, and at the moment, we realized that we were going to make it as a band. I’ll remember that feeling forever.
