Anton Newcombe, frontman for The Brian Jonestown Massacre, has an undeniable gift for creating music. The band’s latest record, The Future Is Your Past, absolutely demonstrates his ability to continually refine his craft. Before getting on stage in Seattle, WA, Newcombe shared with mxdwn how touring has been so far, his incredibly natural process of crafting songs, thought provoking realizations and much more. Not very many people can write a hit song, in entirety and off the cuff while in a hotel room using a suitcase as a drum and acoustic guitar, let alone have it still widely used 27 years later. Newcombe’s knowledge, devotion and fervor for music is what has made him a ground breaker and staple in the industry.
mxdwn: How has the energy of touring been for the band and from the fans so far?
Anton Newcombe: I think it’s the least critical. Like sometimes when you go to shows, it seems like most of the people there are skeptics or something, just standing there, just going, whatever it is, you know what I mean?
mxdwn: Yes.
AN: It doesn’t matter who you are, you know, it doesn’t look like people are really enjoying things, but everybody’s really enthusiastic. I don’t know if it’s just a post COVID world, with the economy and the prices of everything, that the people who are going to fill up your show want to be there…something like that. But there’s a little bit of a sea change, I think, that I’m used to just having to really fight tooth and nail to get people to kind of just, I don’t know.
mxdwn: I get what you’re saying.
AN: You know what I mean?
mxdwn: Yeah, totally.
AN: Like you could feel it. There’s always people that are mad for it, you know? We have people that fly around the world just to see us, but in general, the enthusiasm level is refreshing, hard work, thankful.
mxdwn: That’s awesome. I’m so happy to hear that. In an interview with The Minnesota Daily, you mentioned that these latest albums were made to be played live. Did your songwriting process change at all with this in mind compared to making previous records?
AN: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where – during lockdown, I was paying my mates just to be there, just basically do whatever I say and make it, banging something out every single day. Almost all of the songs were, just off the cuff with three people staying there, where I strum and go, oh, okay, this could be a song in one second. Then just kind of work out the parts, then unplug and track it. It came as organic as some kind of savant, conjuring stuff out of midair, could be. It was really in a live context almost-very quick and interesting that way. Whereas that’s not really a concern if I just go making something up, it’s a little bit different process, when I’m playing all the parts.
mxdwn: That makes sense. That’s definitely super interesting.
AN: Like when I made up something like “Anemone,” I was actually in the bedroom and with my friend Mara. I said I’m just gonna write you a song for your voice and did it in one second.
mxdwn: Wow.
AN: It was like using a suitcase as a drum set and an acoustic guitar, you know, for everything. It’s just like, that’s a different process than something like this, I think.
mxdwn: Yes, I can definitely see that. That’s cool though. I can see you just being able to do that right off the cuff.
AN: It’s like this story in the 60’s. Bob Dylan asked Leonard Cohen, Jesus, you know, how long does it take you to write one of your songs? And he [Cohen] is like, just different times, some ones take ages and ages to work it out and Leonard asked him [Dylan], how long does it take you to write songs? [Dylan] was like oh, less than 15 minutes and Cohen said, sounds like it.
{both laugh}
mxdwn: I really enjoyed that. Thank you. So, I saw that many of the song titles from The Future Is Your Past as well as from Fire Doesn’t Grow on Trees, were some of your son’s ideas. What was that like for you, to share these moments of creativity with him?
AN: Well, you know in your notes, in your phone, I’m constantly writing things down because I know, it’s one of those things, I’m always gonna need to come up with titles. I’m always gonna need graphics, t-shirts or any of these types of things. They don’t have to be last minute like oh, what am I gonna do? Something that I know until I stop playing, I’m always gonna need these things. So, when he was real little, I was jotting that stuff down left and right, just bizarre banana stuff, abstract things that he was saying or questions he was asking me or whatever. One time, I was putting him down to bed and he asked me, dad, what’s inside of cats? I was like oh, that’s a fantastic question. Let’s look it up. Yeah, that’s so funny he’s curious like what’s inside a cat that makes it go [imitates purr], you know?
mxdwn: {laughs} Yeah. Oh my gosh.
AN: It’s so funny, but that was cool. The main thing about Fire Doesn’t Grow on Trees was that I got him some cutout like art books, so there’s like weird old timey graphics and just stuff for collages. He made that cat city picture and I was like, oh, this would be a cool cover. So, I just nicked it off the wall and scanned it and then put it back. The weird thing was like having to wait months and months for it to be manufactured without him finding out, then just taking him down to a store and showing him that, it’s pretty fun. He was like a little bit puzzled.
mxdwn: Awe.
AN: Yeah. But it was kind of cool having like a seven or eight-year-old graphic artist.
mxdwn: Yeah, definitely. That’s such a good idea though, that you wrote it down in your notes like that. You have a profound way of storytelling through your lyrics and music. The Future Is Your Past contains reflective ballads and ‘fight the power’ energetic anthems. How do you match the theme of the lyrics with the mood of the music?
AN: Well, I don’t really think about it at all. What I do is, most of the time, I just press record. So, even if I made up the basic chord structures, like the solos and the melodies are all part of some gears in my head that I don’t even contemplate. It’s the same with lyrics. It’s kind of like I never worry about the key of the song, I just kind of pressed record and sing through it and it used to be like the scratch tracks I guess is what they would be, nothing’s really a demo in my world and I would leave it. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief, so it wouldn’t even matter if I was mumbling things, all the sounds and stuff, because in my mind, I like a lot of music from around the world, from India or anywhere. I have no idea what they’re saying. That’s not what captivates me. It’s really just the suspension of disbelief.
mxdwn: Gotcha.
AN: And also, I used to be really kind of a little bit paranoid in the sense, back to Bob Dylan, he has a lyric in one of his songs that says, ‘if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head inside a guillotine,’ and there’s something to that, to like a certain level activism of our awareness. Doesn’t matter if it’s a kind of God consciousness or whatever, you do get cut down- the tall blade of grass in certain situations- you do get cut down. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Black Panther, or if it’s just vegan people. It’s like a certain kind of thing that’s like, a little bit too hot to handle. It always begs the question it’s like, where’s this heading? Like, I think when John Lennon started leading anti-war protests and lived in America, the man was just this like God complex, he could just snap his fingers and 10,000 people are marching down the street aggravated. So, I think I used to just sort of shy away from fixing, once I set the lyrics, I would just, even on records, share the mumbling scratch tracks and sing it crazy live. I wasn’t really interested in documenting the kind of seriousness of what I was talking about, in that way, having it so straightforward because it seems like oh, here’s a conspiracy nut or wacko. You know, like the FBI spent months trying to figure out what was being said in “Louie Louie.” You know what I mean?
mxdwn: Completely.
AN: Like, oh, this is a hit. This is brainwashing teenagers. What are they hypnotizing these kids with and couldn’t figure it out, there’s a basis for that. It’s not an unreasonable fear, I think, but now I don’t give a shit. You know what I mean?
mxdwn: Yes.
AN: Depending on how you look at things, it could be deeply offensive or heretical. Like for instance, if you say the Lord’s Prayer and you say, ‘dear Father in Heaven’ in a church, or you’re in a church like, ‘Father I’ve sinned.’ But ‘dear Father in heaven,’ what does that make you? Well, it makes me the son of God. Unless it’s like, dear stepfather in Heaven. Do you see what I’m saying?
mxdwn: Totally.
AN: But if you’re talking to Catholics or something, they’re gonna go, you’re fucking insane.
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: You see what I’m saying? Or sort of orthodox, you’re gonna be like this is madness, but that’s exactly what is applied.
mxdwn: You’re right.
AN: So, I mean, you can really rub people the wrong way. I mean, people get banned, saying there’s no pronouns in the platform. You know what I mean?
mxdwn: Yeah, yeah.
AN: In the second word or in the beginning, you know?
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: But anyways, you know, we live in a wacky time. We do. I was just looking at this clip on the internet, you’re always like coming across somebody’s whatever. You’re not looking for this…it’s full of stuff that you’re not looking for.
mxdwn: Definitely.
AN: But somebody got somebody really good today. They’re like, are you opposed to gay marriage? And the person was like, yes because it says right there in Leviticus in the Bible that you’re not, you’re forbidden, gays are forbidden. Then the guy just asked him, do you like pork? And the guy goes, yeah, I love it. I eat it all the time. He’s like, it’s also in Leviticus that it’s forbidden to eat pork.
mxdwn: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
{both laugh}
AN: I thought it was pretty, pretty clever.
mxdwn: Yes, it is pretty clever. So, a verse from “The Light is About to Change” reads, ‘Everybody seems happy/ everybody lives in fear / everybody likes to talk, talk, talk / very few can hear.’ Which I feel really does capture a lot of the world today. Was there anything in particular that inspired those lyrics?
AN: It’s kind of all just affirmations, you know? I picked up on something when I was really little. The Beatles, like, they’re obviously thinking about girls that they were hot for, or trying to impress and all that stuff, but they always switch it instead of talking about them, they flip the me’s and I’s to you’s. So, they always flip it around to this like, ‘she loves you,’ ‘I wanna hold your hand,’ and all these things to include the listener. Or Jefferson Airplane saying, ‘don’t you want somebody to love?’ It’s probably a really self-realized, self-observation that Grace [Slick] had about people in her own feelings. You see what I’m saying?
mxdwn: Yes.
AN: But it’s completely turned outward, see? So, I really am interested in that approach to doing things.
mxdwn: Yeah, that makes sense.
AN: So, I’ll just be singing songs to empower myself or to remind me to remember, whatever it is, so I stay on track for who I want to be, who I want to stay, the things that I want to maintain; to culture and nurture about me since, I guess, my consciousness turned as a little kid into who I would be and then you also want to grow. There’s a balancing act, you know? A lot of people are constantly doing this drastic thing of like making radical changes. I’m not that person anymore, blah, blah, blah and it’s always kind of a bullshit thing really, when you get down to it. You see it in AA or something where people are like, I just want to get back to the person that I was. You can’t, because if you go back to that person, then you’re just gonna be screwed on the street and in the bottomless pit of your life or whatever, but in that context, you have to become a new person. Unless you just fall into the same thing, if you go back to how you were before, then you just fall in the same pit again.
mxdwn: Yes. Exactly. That’s a very good point. It’s very true.
AN: So, there’s a little bit of finesse in life of not throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak.
mxdwn: Yeah, it’s a good point. You’re full of good points {laughs}. I like that though. That’s awesome, that you know, write it for you.
AN: I’m just like a cactus [full of points].
{both laugh}
mxdwn: Oh man, that’s too good. “Crossed Eyed Gods” has a feeling of relatable longing to it, kind of speaking to the ideas of grief, losing someone and missing them, but with a hopefulness to it that matches that lower register you sing it in. Did you know when writing this song that you wanted to use that deeper tone?
AN: No. I just approach whatever I’m hearing. So, whether it’s at the limit of my range in either direction, I’m just not concerned in transposing something into the safe, strongest range of my voice. I’m going backwards again, but I’m into the suspension of disbelief. So, It’s just the goal of communication, to be understood. It isn’t to be grammatically correct, spelling intact or anything, because what I know about the English language is it’s always been in flux, even within the rules. Ain’t wasn’t a word, but it is now and all this, it’s just like that. The goal is just to be understood, ultimately, in art – it’s that other people can make some meaning out of it. Even though art, like sacred art, always has a rule. You go into the Louvre, every single painting follows these geometrical rules of perspective. Stripped away, you’ll see the same shit going on, infinitely. It’s awareness of that kind of stuff, and music, really good music…the thing that music has is it’s got levels and levels of that. Where it’s like harmonic alignments, I guess, geometrically that are pleasing. Although people break that rule, that’s part of music too, the dissonance and everything.
mxdwn: Yes, I like that. It’s a good way of putting it. Can you tell me where “All the Feels” came from?
AN: I guess they come from everywhere.
{both laugh}
AN: I dunno where anything comes from. I just try, you know? I don’t have an idea and I just, you have to jump in the fire and just go for it.
mxdwn: Yes.
AN: I know more about where it doesn’t come from more than where it does come from.
mxdwn: Okay, well, if you want to get into that, you can.
AN: I don’t want to be on record saying, oh, I just need to become fill in the blank. Like, oh, yeah, I wanna be Gram Parsons, or I wanna be this, I wanna be that, I don’t do that. You know?
mxdwn: Yeah, definitely. What was the process of creating and recording the musical part of “As the Carousel Swings?” What was that like?
AN: Well, I make music every day, so I mean I really like when strangers are around to see it because it really is like it’s some kind of magic mystical thing, you know?
mxdwn: I bet.
AN: Because it happens really quick. It’s the opposite of sitting around. It can take a while. It’s kind of like if you’re in a sailboat and there’s no wind, the wind stops, you just sit there and it can be like that sometimes. You’re just sitting on the ocean waiting for a wind and a little bit desperate because you know you’re gonna like die of thirst if you don’t get to where you’re going eventually, but then when it happens, it’s like, wow and it goes pretty quickly. I just have to get into the mindset. If I’m not writing individual songs, I go in and just make music for no reason every day, six days a week. When I’m trying to do a project, then the nature of it will change, you know? Sometimes I’ll have to sit there for a little bit until something comes out that I like. Once that barrier is broken, it’s like it keeps coming and then I just put it down after a while and then start from scratch again, the process. Because I’ll make up 70-80 songs in a row, just nonstop, like every three hours. It takes me about three hours to record one, because I think that’s part of the process. That the thing that’s gonna make you really real is that you’re not afraid to fail. That you have, you should have, the same desires that you started out with in learning music prior to starting a group or doing anything. It should be 100% full on commitment to what you’re doing.
mxdwn: Definitely. I just really liked the music part of that song a lot. It kind of fits the title of it, it sort of swings in and out, but I really liked it.
AN: Thank you.
mxdwn: Of course. With all the different genres you’ve explored, which one would you say you connect with the most, or maybe one that has taught you the most?
AN: Well, I mean, all sort of nuts and bolts as is. It sounds like there’s elements of…it’s definitely aware of the ’60s, but to me, I’m from the 60s. I was born in the 1960s, the music I grew up with, from square one. I was born at the same time as Sgt. Peppers and all that. So, for me, it’s something different I think, than somebody that wasn’t exposed to it, that just decided like, Levitation kicks ass and this is a cool genre, I like a lot of these bands, I wanna do it too. I think the way that their window, maybe as a 21-year-old now, a 22-year-old or something, a 25-year-old, is a little bit different because it was a little bit removed. Every commercial and every cartoon had psychedelic music when I was a kid. Doesn’t matter what you’re buying or selling, Coca-Cola, cereal, ice cream or anything, all of it. That’s what was happening. I don’t think it was fully explored. I think the clichés completely ran their course. Whether it was like, oh, look at me in a paisley shirt, groovy with the camera going in and out, wearing all this shit. Basically, most people weren’t that innovative. I mean, the studio people were and there was so much innovative stuff, but I don’t think that most people really wrote a shitload of innovative music. You could see by watching Get Back, the Beatles movie, that they were completely out of ideas, had nothing. They’re all playing, you know, “Get Back” is like a Chuck Berry song and they’re whipping out songs from ’67 and all this shit and it’s just so, you can really see the process there, how just exhausted they were creatively.
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: Which I’m not.
mxdwn: No, you’re definitely not.
AN: It’s different. It’s apples and oranges or apples and cherries or something. Apples and beef jerky. I don’t know.
mxdwn: As someone who is a ground breaker and able to continually polish your craft and achieve new highs, the passion inside of you clearly hasn’t faded as we were just kind of talking about. What keeps that alive, what keeps it going for you?
AN: Well, I enjoy playing music and I really enjoy live when it’s working well, but it’s hard work. Right now, I mean, it’s not a joke. This like, new COVID wave is just gonna waste people. You’d be surprised how many people cancel shows. I don’t know anybody who could power through, but we’re just like, alright, we’ll do this. I mean, this is exhausting, you know?
mxdwn: Yeah, I bet.
AN: But I still enjoy playing music, I think, which is different. I don’t reference this all the time, but a good portion, a good 20 or 30 minutes of Dig!, in that movie, everybody in the industry, in my band and everybody who knew me was talking about how I was flushing my career down the toilet. The whole industry flushed their career down the toilet. They flushed the whole music business and the model and everything down the toilet. MTV doesn’t play music.
mxdwn: No, they do not.
AN: There are no radio stations now. I mean, everything is just a giant joke, but I don’t think those people saw that. So all my peers, they all signed the same deals that I was aware of, they all took the same trajectory where when people stopped paying for promotion and the album wasn’t selling enough to recoup, they were dropped. Then they couldn’t even be called their things. I think that those people all stopped playing music because either that was what they wanted, the accolades and the validation, the fake validation, from whatever. Right?
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: And somebody paying their way. I think just, that’s never what I was into and that’s why I’ve always said no to all of that stuff. The reverse of it is like, I can do anything I want because it pays for itself because I own it. Which also, my peers, that never happened. They might’ve been incredibly successful for a moment, but I think, for guys especially, if you put a down payment on a house and you get divorced, Mr. Rockstar, you don’t have a house anymore.
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: That’s like everybody’s story, I guess, in the whole business too. They just go hide off and I think that they’re really, all these people, they really loved playing music then. You would see ’em, but I don’t always get it. I guess people have their drug problems in the industry, so it’s two things, but now the breeders are back or something. It’s like, cool but we could’ve used it 20 years ago. Things were getting a little bit just monochromatic with The Strokes, or whatever, and The White Stripes. It would’ve been great if you just kicked people’s ass then or something. But most people, they do that-they don’t own their name, so they disappear for that magic 20 years where they’re not allowed to do anything and they all of a sudden have the rights to do it now. It doesn’t matter who it is, the reason why you see any band come back up for 20 years, which is all of ’em. Even the Talking Heads or whoever now, I’ll call this – they’re probably gonna go on tour. I’m sure it’s not just the movie they’re supporting. They’re everywhere right now. I could smell it, you know?
mxdwn: Yes, you are probably right. Definitely.
AN: David announced that they’re building up, but they’re everywhere you turn.
mxdwn: Yes.
AN: Oh, here they are, you know what I mean?
mxdwn: You’re so right. You’re definitely doing what you’re born to do, so it’s amazing. How does it feel to look back at your first albums and EPs now after so many years?
AN: Oh, I don’t know. I only revisit all that stuff occasionally after some drinks or something. Sometimes I get mad. There’s a lot of stuff that really, the one thing that I couldn’t get is like our first practice, we wrote. I made up six songs and all those ended up on records, but that was like the first time ever in a rehearsal space with it, as the project. It was crazy just the whole time. I used to think like, well, people are gonna go crazy over this, this is nuts, people are gonna freak out in England and people that understand are gonna freak out on this. They never really materialized that way. I learned later that, certain things, whether it was England- had no use for American bands because they were exporting music at that time. That was their whole thing, right?
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: You know, stealing people’s sound, then pushing it and some things were just way too big, you know? The phenomena’s like Nirvana or something but then it becomes this spectacle that was too big. But it never materialized in the sense of people freaking out over a song. What did happen was that the music, a lot of it is really timeless. So, if I play one of the songs from 1990, it fits seamlessly with the stuff that I’m making up now, that style. Sometimes I switch gears and go purely developmental instead of what I would call my traditional style.
mxdwn: Yeah, I noticed that.
AN: So, I mean, just the basic nuts and bolts felt like playing in a garage kind of music. The thing that happened though is, it retained its form in a way that other things don’t always. It’s had a timeless aspect and that allowed things like “Anemone” to have hundreds of millions of spins digitally. Then selling it, just bucket loads of stuff, like more than “Light My Fire” in the ’60’s, a lot more copies. So, that’s something that I could never really… I don’t know what registers with people, but the way that people have accepted that song to where it’s on 20 movies or TV shows a year around the world. It’s something I couldn’t have predicted if I would’ve tried. You know what I mean?
mxdwn: Yeah.
AN: Like in the way Jack Antonoff or whoever could sit down and just take everybody’s stupid non-song and make it this thing. Every one of these producers, it doesn’t matter if it’s Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or whoever they hire, it has nothing to do with their song. Their songs are just nothing. It’s just this sound that these people can cultivate that has its finger on the pulse of whatever.
mxdwn: I know what you mean.
AN: I don’t need a corporate support, but also people who will buy anything, love it. I’m not necessarily putting down those people to pick myself up.
mxdwn: No, I get what you mean.
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