Pages tagged “issue 23”

You have the most fascinating dreams. Unique, vibrant and random, they clearly reveal your artfulness and intelligence—that is, until you try to tell someone about them. Somehow when you get to that part about the bear and your 6th-grade math teacher on the roller coaster, your listener doesn’t find it half as profound as you’re sure it must be.

“To translate a dream in a really striking way, you don’t give a strict interpretation,” explains Michel Gondry, the director known best for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his Oscar-winning collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. “You want to keep some of that abstraction and you want to convey the emotional effect. If you just recount all the details, it’s boring and it just interests you.”

But if there’s anyone whose dreams would be endlessly fascinating in the retelling it would probably be Gondry, who not only visually conjured Kaufman’s heady, sumptuous exploration of love, loss and memory in Eternal Sunshine, but created groundbreaking music videos like Björk’s “Human Behaviour,” the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” and The White Stripes as LEGOs in “Fell in Love With a Girl.” He’s also the first director to use “morphing” in a music video, and he’s the technical innovator behind filmmaking landmarks like the method of shooting several still cameras in an array to create the illusion of someone hanging frozen in air, as seen in Björk’s “Army of Me” video. (Later this technique was used to stunning effect in The Matrix.)

In The Science of Sleep, the first feature he both wrote and directed, Gondry applies this visionary invention to his longtime fascination with dreams, using plenty of his own subconscious adventures in the process. The story follows the days and (more often) nights of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a twentysomething artist who moves to his mother’s native France after his father’s death in Mexico. When he starts work at a dreary job and meets an intriguing neighbor coincidentally named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his dreams begin wreaking havoc on his waking life, and the line between what’s real and what’s a blip in his nocturnal synapses starts to blur just as much for the audience as it does for Stéphane.

To say the dreamscapes here are fantastical is an understatement; Stéphane’s sleeping world involves, for starters: a talk-show set (for “Stéphane TV”) made of cardboard and egg cartons, machines that take insect form, cities paved with LPs, and a rock band consisting of his coworkers dressed in cat costumes. It’s up to us to guess which of these Gondry dreamed up while sleeping, and which he invented on the page.

“I’ve always been interested in the dream process,” he says, explaining that, even as a child, he tried to make real-world connections with people while in a lucid-dream state—for example, saying something to a family member in a dream and hoping they’d repeat it to him when they were both fully awake. “That was the starting point for the story, connecting [with people] in dreams, but not being able to connect in real life.”

Gondry decided to take that need for connection (referred to, by Stéphane, as “Parallel Synchronized Randomness”) and add the possibly budding romance between Stéphane and Stéphanie, both creative but introverted people who have problems enough communicating without Stephane’s increasingly shaky hold on reality. To make things worse, Spanish-speaking Stéphane’s lack of skill in French forces the two to have limited, often bizarre conversations in English—a screenplay quirk Gondry fully intended. “You use a different part of your brain,” when you have to speak with someone in your non-native language, he says. “It can give you some freedom to interact with people and … you might feel less self-conscious about what you’re saying.” On the other hand, he adds, it can also lead to awkward misunderstandings and the feeling—that Stéphane has—of being an outsider.

Gondry, a Frenchman, has experienced this in the U.S., adding a personal touch to the story. But there’s actually little in the film that doesn’t seem personal. Among much else, Stéphane’s apartment is in a building in Paris where Gondry once lived, and the office where Stéphane works is a piece-by-piece reconstruction—down to the wall hangings and typesetting equipment—of an office Gondry worked in more than 20 years ago. These details provided a sense of familiarity for the director as he took on the challenge of both writing and directing a film, something that was frightening, “especially after having directed scripts by Charlie Kaufman,” he says. “It was very scary, but … I guess I’m going to be scared no matter what, so I might as well be scared doing something I haven’t done before.”

Still, he’s thankful to have worked with the “brilliant and original” Kaufman and says it’s helped his own writing. “I cannot compare,” he laughs, “but I try my best.” It turns out Gondry greatly enjoyed being forced to clearly express himself and to “learn to communicate emotions” to the point that his dreams—quite literally—could become reality. At one point after a party during the film’s shooting, he went back to get a bag from the reinvented office set of the place he once worked, and felt amazed by the point he’d reached in his career. “I sat for awhile and looked around, and I thought it was crazy that I had the opportunity to do this—to take a memory and have a crew of people re-create it. I’m quite lucky to have that.”

Surely people who loved Gondry’s work on Eternal Sunshine—not to mention Dave Chapelle’s Block Party or the 2001 film also written by Kaufman, Human Nature—will be thrilled with his first foray into screenwriting. They’ll also get to see film techniques Gondry says he’s been “cooking” in his head for years, like the blast of “spin art” that starts the film, the illusion of flying created by Bernal swimming through a tank of water with projected animation, or Stéphane’s fantastic invention for Stéphanie, the One-Second Time-Travel Machine. And this is just the beginning: this fall, Gondry will start shooting another film he penned (named, as of press time, Be Kind, Rewind), and he has plans for many more projects, including music videos—something he still likes to do.

For the most part, though, writing films hasn’t changed Gondry’s directing style. He still likes to keep it “loose,” leaving room for “some happy accident,” and he still often lets actors make their own decisions. He says that in a restaurant recently, a waiter asked him if he wanted the food he’d just ordered for a first or second course. “I couldn’t make up my mind,” says Gondry, “so I said something and [the waiter] didn’t really hear me, but he left, and I said to the person with me, ‘That’s how I direct people.’ I knew he didn’t understand what I said, but he made his own decision based on that misunderstanding, and I think that’s as good as any decision I could make.” Often if Gondry gives an actor direction, and the actor asks, “Okay, so should I do this?” and it’s the opposite of what was requested, he still says yes. “It’s not really important,” he says. “It’s just a question of moving forward and conveying the right energy.”

He was very happy with the interpretations his Science of Sleep actors achieved. Bernal, not really known for his comic roles, manages to coax big laughs while also being disarmingly sensitive; Alain Chabat, a popular comedian in France, provides comic relief as Stéphane’s raunchy coworker, Guy; and Gainsbourg—a highly respected French actress who has yet to gain a major following in the U.S.—fully “embodies” Stéphanie, Gondry says, bringing the sweet-yet-strong character beautifully to life.

Though Sleep and Eternal Sunshine are multilayered, Gondry says he doesn’t want to make confusing films (he says he can’t stand overly plotted thrillers), he just wants to make films he’d enjoy watching and create stories people can connect with. He says people probably connected to Sunshine because there was something to it (perhaps in the way its lead—Jim Carrey as Joel—appeared weak and rejected) that resonated with them. This is why he loves Charlie Chaplin films; though some people find them “too sentimental,” Gondry says they touch us because they show that even our heroes can be vulnerable. “I feel like [in films] we need to talk about the little shames we have. Then people can relate and say, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not the only one to be … rejected, to not be strong.’”

At the same time, Gondry says, the best films don’t explain everything to the audience. “I like movies that don’t give away all their keys, because I like to look for them,” he says. Like dreams, perhaps they should be a little abstract, a little more open to interpretation. And, like a dream described to someone else, a film’s strength is all in the way the story is told. “It’s all about figuring out how you’re going to make the story happen,” he says. “It’s [finding] the invisible thing that you have to put in while you are telling your story that will make it special.”

Chris Marker is a dinosaur. This designation has less to do with his age—85 this year—or his longevity as a filmmaker than the fact that he’s an unabashed, unreconstructed, old-guard leftist. In Marker’s brilliant 1992 documentary The Last Bolshevik—about Soviet director Aleksandr Medvedkin—he acknowledges that Medvedkin (and himself by extension) is a dinosaur, a relic of a century and a political ideology that have happily outlived their usefulness. And yet, as Marker notes in one of his typically wry asides, “Look what happened to dinosaurs—kids love them.”

Marker’s name indicates the nature of his artistic project. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, he adopted the name Chris Marker—a generic nom de cinema leeched of gender, ethnicity and nationality. As a global traveler, Marker wandered the world with his camera, stopping in then-exotic locales like Cuba, Israel, Japan and Siberia, and shooting idiosyncratic films about daily life, history, culture and everything in between. Taking his cues from Alexandre Astruc’s notion of le camera stylo (the camera-pen), Marker helped invent a new style of idiosyncratic, highly subjective essay-film.

But Marker’s favorite topic has always been politics. In many ways, Marker is the great poet of the Left’s dream, playing witness to its robust youth, its dissolution and death, now clutching yellowing photographs of the dimly remembered past. It’s curious, though, how Marker’s memory of the 20th century—and he’d be the first to warn us—distorts and jumbles the image.

MOVIES BEAT THE BOOK
Marker is the subject of the latest entry in the University of Illinois Press’ essential Contemporary Film Directors series. Unfortunately, author Nora M. Alter isn’t up to the task of wrestling with Marker’s prodigious output, or the complexity of his politics; her book is an impenetrable jumble of academic pretension and reflexive radicalism (offering such peculiar judgments as “The Cuban revolution advanced a model of political transformation with proven success” without further comment).

Far better to turn to Marker’s films themselves, which have lost none of their potency, wit or vigor. Best known for the futuristic short La Jetée (in which a time traveler is haunted by memories of his own death), Marker’s most deeply felt, impassioned work is his 1977 documentary A Grin Without a Cat. Looking over the fabled history of late-’60s activism from the gloomy perspective of the late ’70s, Grin sees beautiful dreams turn into ugly memories, and leftism grow purposeless and brutal—“a spearhead without a spear.”

Marker, great lover of cats, has pointed out that “the cat is never on the side of power.” But Marker’s embrace of Castro’s regime—and relative silence on the horrific crimes of the Soviet and Chinese Communists—indicates a certain willful blindness to the Left’s tyrannies. The intellectual parlor game played with so many Communist-sympathizing artists (what did they know, and when did they know it?) becomes, for Marker, less a repudiation of his work than a reflection of his own tangled allegiances, often torn between truth and the cause. Luckily, the truth, even if occasionally mangled, usually wins out. You call Chris Marker naïve or deluded at your peril—whatever intellectual mountain you may have climbed, it’s likely Marker has already been there, and rolled some footage of it.

Hometown: Stockholm, Sweden
Members: [l-r] Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson
Fun fact: The Knife’s “Heartbeats” was covered by indie-folk singer (and fellow Swede) José Gonzalez and featured in a recent Sony ad.
Why they’re worth watching: The Knife proves there’s more to Swedish pop than ABBA and Roxette—its music pairs catchiness with depth.
For fans of: Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, Annie, Björk

With layers of synthesized atmosphere and drum patches encased in ’80s synth-pop amber, getting to the heart of The Knife’s sound can seem an exercise in spot-the-influence. However, you needn’t engage in such analysis to appreciate the Swedish brother/sister duo. Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer started in 1999, and have emphasized a whimsically classic sense of melody alongside various technological backdrops, be they state-of-the-art or retro-futuristic. Dreijer once described one of the group’s videos as “occult and dark, but at the same time funny,” which is a concise—if not terribly evocative—way to summarize the group.

The Knife’s first two long-players—2001’s The Knife and 2003’s Deep Cuts—achieved modest success in Sweden, and found a small but devoted fan base in the rest of Europe and America. The techno-pop synthesis of the latter album appealed to those enamored with highly stylized, detail-oriented production, though the band’s ace song craft (moments on Silent Shout recall no less an art-song figurehead than Kurt Weill) foreshadowed something altogether weightier.

Silent Shout is The Knife’s third full-length, and the first to land an American release. Andersson’s lyrics detail a sickly, vaguely traumatic buffet of characters: the scared housewife, the hermaphrodite, the media addicts. About the hypnotic, subtly kinetic title track, she says, “it’s like when you dream and really want to scream something, [but] nothing comes out.” Still, Dreijer’s production adds sheen and brilliance to otherwise cold, mechanical parts, and the myriad manipulations of Andersson’s voice—a blue baritone here, a child’s meek cry there— betrays the duo’s fascination with sound, and its willingness to override “dark” tones with purely playful experimentation.

Edward Norton does magic tricks, Jessica Biel swoons

Director/Writer: Neil Burger
Starring: Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti, Jessica Biel
Studio info: Yari Film Group

A love story set in 1900 Vienna, The Illusionist indulges timeless fairytale aesthetics, employing loads of blurry fades and soft, luscious lighting, draping demure, pink-cheeked ladies in elaborate gowns, and slapping ridiculously sinister moustaches on shifty villains. There’s something comforting about reliving the staid imagery of childhood tales but, unfortunately, The Illusionist’s plot feels stale—the film pits Eisenheim, a talented stage magician (Edward Norton, drifting in and out of an Austrian accent) against reigning royal nastyman, the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) as they duel for the affections of the Dutchess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel, at her most mesmerizing). Paul Giamatti—as Eisenheim’s quasi-sympathetic foil, Chief Inspector Uhl—soars, all tight lips and shifty eyes, and Philip Glass’ score is transcendent. Still, while Neil Burger—who wrote and directed the film (his second, following 2002’s confounding Interview with an Assassin)—may have hoped The Illusionist’s closing twist was enough to override its contrived plot, even fairytales require better surprises than this.

Running on Hi-Test: Talking Loud, Saying Something

PJ Harvey wants you to know. Well, she doesn’t really want you to know, but she wants to give you the impression that she’s letting you into her private world and therefore giving you the satisfaction that comes with such knowing. Because—as she admits at the end of this DVD’s interview—she, too, is a curious kitty who, while admiring the shadows and mystique of the past, wants to know the cold hard facts about the people whose art has influenced her. Except Harvey is an artist, too—one whose words are powerful but diminished by literal meaning, whose sexuality is overt yet unconventional and only one small piece of the seductive puzzle, who reaches intimacy with public movements and thrives on jumpcuts and juxtapositions. She isn’t about to give her secrets away. But she’ll let you peek if you’re polite.

Filmed during her 2004 tour in support of her seventh album, Uh Huh Her, Please Leave Quietly is an artfully constructed look at Harvey’s stage show. Longtime collaborator and director Maria Mochnacz seamlessly weaves a multitude of textures and performances together without losing a beat or lip-synch, reaching beyond the performance at hand and turning the video document into an artistic statement of its own. It helps that Harvey is a telegenic presence throughout. Besides a playful wardrobe that takes bohemian, thrift-store chic to an absurd, cheeky level, Harvey accentuates her songs with floating yet spastic movements that bring a heightened sense of drama to songs already teetering on the precipice.

Harvey is both an active and reactive artist. Or is it coincidence that at one point it’s as if she’s co-opted the look of Karen O’s PJ Harvey homage? Who can define the real deal? Harvey likes turning things on their heads, finding the scream in the silence, the point of vulnerability in the toughest shriek. “You think you know me? Think again,” she seems to say. It’s in that voice, however, that it all comes together. If you’ve ever doubted Harvey’s ability as a performer, or thought that perhaps she’s been given a wee too much critical leeway, listen to those seismic vocal jumps in “Big Exit” or immerse yourself in the subtle grace she sprinkles on “The Darker Days of Me & Him” and tell yourself what you’re hearing isn’t there.

Her bandmates—longtime drummer/keyboardist Rob Ellis, bassist Dingo and guitarist Josh Klinghoffer—provide merciless backing, attacking each song as if for the first time, while toiling behind her backstage, making the usual jokes, small talk and group drinking sessions that dull the pain of too much waiting around. The camera dutifully captures these moments without dwelling on them. Harvey wished to capture the “ramshackledness” of life on the road. Any incompetent could’ve caught that. Please Leave Quietly entertains much more, though it offers no real insights. Despite her public displays of affection, Harvey is still a very private person. But there are enough glimpses—and some awe-inspiring performances—to make you feel as if you were given a limited-access pass to a day in the life.

Daniel Levitin - This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Why we prefer one song to another—like so much else—is pretty damn complicated

For Daniel Levitin, the complex relationship between music and the mind has been a lifelong obsession.

Levitin started as a music fan, then joined a rock band, later became a successful producer and ?nally made himself into a world-renowned neuroscientist. In all these roles, Levitin has asked a simple question: “Why do some songs move us so and others leave us cold?”

The answer leads Levitin to explore what music is, and how it gets processed in the human mind. Our reactions to songs, Levitin summarizes, are the result of an amazingly intricate relationship between nature (how our brains are hard-wired) and nurture (the musical culture we absorb). We approach songs with a set of expectations, says Levitin, and “songs that we keep coming back to for years play around with [these] expectations.”

In a book brimming with scienti?c research and musical references, Levitin skillfully investigates our profoundly human love of music.

Doug Hoekstra - Bothering the Coffee Drinkers

Tales of the touring life, served up with a crooked grin

Few understand the road-warrior life better than Doug Hoekstra, a well-respected Americana picker since the late ’80s. His stories in this new volume re?ect a life spent earning one’s daily bread in cafés and European speakeasies.

With a lyricist’s deep, sharp tang, he pours an overabundance of stray musings into a mug, and he keeps re?lling it with a weary smile for kudzu-cutting sax men and guys who talk about Miles but secretly love Van Morrison.

Music runs like a liquid vein through these 80-proof experiences. Hoekstra pours it out with a Dylan-esque fervor, giving us a sputtering catalog of beauties and terrors. He’s most effective in bookend personal essays, where he makes dandelion “weeshes” with his toddler and evokes Berlin’s chilly charms.

While a colorful ?ction writer, Hoekstra’s story—his song—compels the most. It hints at a monster autobiographer in the wings.

The animated paint onscreen dazzles us into forgetting: fairy tales can be scary as hell. Even Walt Disney’s bowdlerized versions of the Grimm Brothers’ classic gore-fests routinely give kids nightmares. For every addictive heroine in a billowing yellow gown, there’s a witch whose bent back and gnarled fingers inspire dread in preschool audiences. The two basic ingredients for a gripping fairy tale are, after all, death and magic.

By this criteria, Lisa Germano—the acclaimed singer/songwriter who got her start in the late ’80s playing ?ddle in John Mellencamp’s band before releasing solo albums for both Capitol and 4AD—has composed a fairy tale of the highest order. The material on her newest record, In The Maybe World, displays a fascination with both death and magic. But, in Germano’s mind, they are one and the same.

“I didn’t say to myself, ‘I’m going to make a sad record about death.’ It was more like, you know, nobody has any idea what death is. It’s just sad for those of us who miss the people who died. But how do we know it’s not the most amazing, magical thing?”

If Enya’s lilting New Age ballads are the aural equivalent of Disney’s G-rated fairytale epics, Germano’s equally ethereal tunes feel more like their Grimm sources, full of shadowy, nail-chewing conflict and occasionally PG-13 musings. Her sensually breathy vocals drift atop sparse piano and guitar lines in a perpetually dream-drunk stupor while synthetic textures heighten the arrangements’ already-otherworldly tenor.

As the record came together, death loitered about, cueing Germano’s pen at numerous turns. One of the album’s most endearing cuts, the lullaby-ish “Golden Cities,” sprang to Germano’s lips as she cradled her dying cat (“I would just start singing this song without even thinking about it. It was very magical.”) Then her other cats began bringing her dead birds from the roof as goodwill offerings, which inspired “In The Maybe World.” “It was like, ‘God, this is so sad, you guys,’ but they’d be looking at me like, ‘Hey, look what we got you!’”

While her dad underwent a major surgery, Germano wrote “Too Much Space,” about how she imagined life might feel with him gone. Fortunately the surgery was successful and she isn’t bothered that most people will assume it’s just another break-up tune.

Having spent many difficult years in therapy fending off both clinical depression and near-paralyzing agoraphobia, Germano knows her demons well and sings about them with unsettling candor. “In The Land of Fairies,” offers a prime example: “Narcissistic little fairy / Why do I feel dead / Who was that stupid ogre / Messing with my head / Somebody saw a monster / It was real mean / Every little soul has / Sides you’ve never seen.”

Even in the original Grimm fairy tales—where Cinderella’s stepsisters have to carve off hunks of their feet to remove the ill-fitting slipper and Snow White’s evil stepmother eagerly gobbles up what she believes is her stepdaughter’s lung and liver—the happy ending remains miraculously intact (at least for the story’s protagonist). Happy endings are derided for being too contrived, too easy, but still we hold our breath as comatose Beauty’s eyes flutter open and squint in the sunlight. We like to see the Reaper stymied. And, on an emotional level, Germano’s doing just that.

“Some of the songs are just about feeling dead inside, which is such a waste when life is so beautiful, you know? It’s because you’re being so self-focused and narcissistic. It’s like, ‘Get out of your head.’ You know you don’t need to feel dead. Just go outside, there’s lots of life around.”

Savy producer helps previously out-there hand draw inside the lines

For Gomez’s fifth and most coherent studio album, veteran producer Gil Norton had a handy template—not his celebrated recordings with the Pixies and Foo Fighters, but rather the several engaging LPs he made with Scottish roots-pop band Del Amitri, starting with 1989’s Waking Hours. Like that breakthrough, How We Operate presents crisply constructed, frequently hooky tunes as if they were cut from traditional fabric, carried along by earnest, gritty vocals (split among three strong singers in Gomez’s case) and acoustic guitars, with conventional rock instrumentation providing an unobtrusive foundation and bringing dynamism to the occasional explosive transitions. The treatments bring credibility to the unabashed sentiment of “See the World,” while the plunking of a solitary banjo plays against the lush arrangement of the title song and first single, lending it dramatic contrast and a hint of authenticity. Thus, through Norton’s expert ministrations, Gomez has been transformed from a likable but shambling outfit into a focused pop-rock group while retaining the iconoclastic character that made it intriguing to begin with.

Talk about precocious. As a gradeschooler, Jemina Pearl Abegg crisscrossed the country on summer vacation, on tour with her father Jimmy’s outfit, Vector. With dad’s encouragement she formed her own awkwardly tagged band, Be Your Own Pet, three years ago (the whim hit while bouncing around on a backyard trampoline, she swears) and she’s since gone on to:

1. Climb BBC Radio charts with her very first single “Damn Damn Leash”
2. Tour the U.K., continental Europe and even a curiously BYOP- obsessed Japan
3. Release a brilliant, eponymous full-length debut on Ecstatic Peace, the Universal-distributed imprint of BYOP booster, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

And all before Abegg turned 19. Why so serious about music so young? “We’re not really serious about it yet,” giggles the blonde lead singer, adjusting the strap on her George Romero/Land Of The Dead baseball cap (she composed an ode to zombies called “Ouch” on Be Your Own Pet, alongside other snarled/crooned anthems like “Wildcat!,” “Bunk Trunk Skunk” and “Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle.”)

“Well, I guess we’re serious about it,” she clarifies, “but we don’t take things very seriously. And we still live with our parents—we don’t really have a reason to move out, just ’cause I’m always on tour, and I’m not gonna be home that often anyway.” Drummer Jamin Orrall is the son of folk-pop musician Robert Ellis Orrall, who co-produced BYOP’s early demos. Did the industry-steeped folks warn their kids to stay away from shady showbiz or offer tips and encouragement? “Neither, really,” says Abegg. “We make our own decisions, and we make mistakes like they made mistakes. But our parents are there if we ever need ’em, and if I want advice I can always go ask.”

Songs for people who don't sleep

This record is what you want to be listening to when you wake up in the middle of the night feeling disoriented and confused about why you can’t sleep. Nashville-underground VIPs Neilson Hubbard and Matthew Ryan have been in the business long enough to know how to eliminate filler and strip a song to its core. They share singing and writing duties in Strays Don’t Sleep, creating cohesive, image-filled songs and a moody vocal combination of soft (Hubbard) and smoky (Ryan). From its dark, understated melodies and instrumentation to its elegant production, this record is an archetype for urban folk music.

It’s 4 p.m. the day after a late-night Chicago gig, and Twilight Singers frontman Greg Dulli still hasn’t peeled himself from the previous night’s floor.

Dulli’s appetite for self-destruction is legendary, and not long ago, one might’ve concluded he was sleeping off a coke/smack ménage-á-trois. But sobriety has given him a new sense of clarity. “Did I have a drug problem? Absolutely,” the former Afghan Whigs frontman drowsily rasps. “Sometimes, by the end of a gig, I needed subtitles so people could understand what the f— was going on. But I’m two years down the line from all that now.”

The Twilight Singers’ fourth LP, Powder Burns, was forged from the pain of Dulli’s confrontation with his demons and the sorrow of post-Katrina New Orleans, where most of the album was recorded.

“[Though] what I saw in New Orleans had much more impact on what this album sounds like,” says Dulli of his former home. “You could walk for miles and not see another human being; there were animal carcasses on the road, boats in the trees, cars inside of houses. It smelled like death. And the ghostly absence of life weirded me out—I’ve learned I don’t like that kind of quiet. I don’t know any other town that could take a bigger whipping and still remain standing. It was like the f—ing Twilight Zone.”

(The Long Winters [L-R]: Jonathan Rothman (guitar, keys), Eric Corson (bass), John Roderick (guitar, vocals, piano), Nabil Ayers (drums).)

“Listen,” Gilles said, “you can do this only so long through ignorance. Reality comes to everybody if they stay long enough… Learn that every day will be different; some days you will be ‘brave,’ and some days you cannot. Don’t punish yourself with it. It’s normal. Cut down your emotional output. You can carry on indefinitely if you stop thinking so much…” His advice was to come back to me many times and I see that day now without any sense of shame. It was as if a door had opened, slowly at first, to a new understanding… So began the long winter retreat of emotion.”

—British war correspondent Anthony Loyd on surviving the war in Bosnia, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999)

One fine summer day in 2004, John Roderick—singer, primary songwriter, founder and agitator-in-chief for the Seattle, Wash., arts/rock collective The Long Winters—put himself to bed. And he rarely ventured beyond its cozy confines for the next nine months.

The punchline to this seemingly abstruse joke? He’d barely even taken notice of the unavoidable fact that he’d fallen but couldn’t get up.

“By March 2005, I realized that more or less I had been in bed the entire time,” Roderick recalls over lunch one afternoon at an out-of-the-way French bistro in Seattle’s Belltown district. “I’d been working, mind you—I had all these workbooks piled up around me, I’d been writing, reading all these books I’d been meaning to get to. I got a book about the Hundred Years’ War: it was 900 pages long, and in June of 2004 I said to myself ‘I’m gonna start reading that book.’ And it’s one of those books that makes you start reading other books, so I eventually had four more books on the subject going at the same time. And, honestly, I looked around one day and couldn’t understand how it had gotten to be 2005.”

Given Roderick’s headfirst approach to life and tendency to occasionally stretch a metaphor to make a point, it’s tempting to believe he’s exaggerated the state of his circumstances for dramatic effect. But a dinner in Seattle with Brit-rock up-and-comers Keane evidently served as Roderick’s wakeup call, jolting him back to life over the course of a single night away from the house.

“That meal was pretty formative,” Roderick chuckles as if to himself. “These guys were young, coming through town on tour, having a ‘major label’ kind of experience—limo rides everywhere—and I was sitting down at the table with them like Will Oldham if he had weighed 220 pounds! My beard was down to here”—Roderick points emphatically to his chest—“there were swallows living in it, and everyone was suddenly solicitous when they’d call me on the phone. ‘How you doing, John, everything OK?’” he imitates in an overly bright voice, the air around him ringing with mock concern. “And I was pretty cheery; it wasn’t like I was hiding under the covers or anything. But that dinner made me think ‘Whoa! Time to take a bath! Time to cut my hair!’”

The title to his group’s first full-length in more than three years—the much-anticipated third CD Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk)—at least partially acknowledges the cost of Roderick’s retreat from reality. Brimming with short bursts of power-pop energy, but spiced with the residue of resentment due to the loss of time and opportunity, the album is a grande-sized mug of the smart-assed synthesis of sweet and sour that characterizes Roderick’s best songwriting. Whether taking the shape of the band’s indie-meets-classic-rock mash-ups (the propulsive opener, “Pushover,” is the best Big Star song released in this decade; “Teaspoon” could be vintage Soul Asylum if that group’s maudlin melodrama was surgically removed and replaced by a corrosive self-awareness) or passing as a deceptively simple, artfully wrought brand of faux-folk (“Clouds,” the wistful refrain of “Seven”), there’s craftsmanship to burn throughout Days and a breezy confidence about the affair that’s eluded Roderick until now. Despite lineup shifts that’ve seen a dozen different musicians shuffle through the group’s ranks in only five years (including multiple members of The Posies, Death Cab for Cutie and Harvey Danger), it appears that a periodic dunk in the hermetic isolation tank nonetheless suits Roderick’s muse just fine.

“I think my native musical tendency is to make mid-tempo, seven-and-a-half-minute-long songs about Ulysses and the polar explorers with 70 keyboard overdubs that are ultimately beholden to no one in terms of whether they can be recreated live or if the musicians involved will stand around with hands in pockets saying, ‘Roderick’s been in a room with six keyboards for four days, and I can’t see through the smoke,’” he laughs, alluding to the layered sounds constituting the Ultimatum EP that appeared at the tail end of 2005. “But eventually some instinct kicks in and says, ‘Strip it all down!’ Every Long Winters disc has that dichotomy at its heart—the lyrics of the songs aren’t hopeful, but they are funny. This one is definitely angrier than the first two—and the musical expression has to compensate for that by sounding fun. I’m trying to make it sonically charismatic enough to compensate for the Sad Bastard at the heart of these songs.”

“Sleep delays my life (get up, get up)
Where does time go? (get up, get up, get up)
I don’t know
Dreams, they complicate my life (dreams, they complement my life)”—“Get Up,” R.E.M.

By various means, John Roderick has been attempting to rouse himself from a self-imposed slumber for most of his life.

Born in Seattle to an attorney father and what he calls a “formidable” mother, Roderick eventually moved to Anchorage, Alaska, after his parents split while he was still in preschool. He attended high school there and then, at 17, lit out for parts unknown, riding the rails like Kerouac before him and hitchhiking across the continental U.S. for the next several years. At 22, Roderick returned to Seattle, studying Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington (and ultimately teaching a seminar on the subject), while holding down a variety of odd jobs and scratching his musical itch in a number of go-nowhere bands. It was a tumultuous time—the Grunge Years, redolent of flannel shirts and angst for sale—equally freighted with possibilities and potholes. “There are musicians who emerge fully formed at 22. I wasn’t one of those,” Roderick explains. “I wasn’t even one of those 29-year-olds! For some reason, I really needed to get chopped down to size by a lot of years before I was able to create anything that was useful to anyone.”

By the time Roderick located a lineup that suited his developing narrative style—the four-piece Western State Hurricanes—the group imploded before it could be signed (the story goes that Roderick put his feet up on the desk of Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman during a negotiating session only to find himself on the wrong end of the bargaining). Confused by the experience and fractured by the tour that preceded the split, Roderick legged it to Europe and kick-started a five-month hiking odyssey that began at the gateway to Old Europe (Amsterdam) and came to a halt on the doorstep of Asia (Istanbul).

“I’ve said that I didn’t learn anything from that experience except what it was like to walk for five months, and that’s ridiculously flippant, of course,” Roderick apologizes. “I’m actually trying to write a book about the walk so that, once and for all, I can describe what happened and the ways in which it was a transformative experience. I’ve been working on it for five years; it’s over 450 pages long and only two-thirds finished. I’ve considered calling it SXSE and [I] write in it all the time; in fact, it was something I was working on during the year I was lying in bed. I found that when I began seriously writing every day, I didn’t have any energy left over for music—I got so absorbed in the writing to the exclusion of everything else. Looking back, it seems like a response to the idea that modern life is rubbish; I just wanted to walk completely off the grid, like, ‘My blob of royal jelly is a righteous blob, and I’m not part of the Borg.’ But to think that I was somehow more ‘authentic’ because I was sleeping under a bush somewhere in Bulgaria is total bullshit. So the book is an attempt to retain that childlike whimsy we have when we’re younger—looking under rocks, amazed at what’s under them, and aiming for a certain ‘Oh my God’ effect, as opposed to intellectualizing it all.”

Europe recently became the backdrop for another bit of enlightenment for Roderick, having just returned from a four-week solo tour of the continent, his first since deciding to pursue a career in music. The nerve required to ascend the stage each night alone—rather than from behind the protective safety afforded by the aircover of a full band—has revealed some unexpected and surprising insights about his craft.

“When I first started the tour, I was just getting up there and playing my parts, performing the songs with an imaginary band that no one else could hear,” Roderick relates thoughtfully, staring from behind a pair of impossibly thick, so-unfashionable-they’re-hip large-framed eyeglasses, cradling what’s left of his double Americano in a bleary-eyed attempt to keep his eyes pried open a mere two days removed from his final European tour date in Barcelona. “But as time went on, I realized that not only did I have the power to vary the tempos and the chords I’d written, but that I could be more theatrical and play with the music a lot more. As a songwriter, it’s really easy to hide behind the arrangement of the song—if it’s sacrosanct, then you’re powerless to f— it up. Going out on a limb and playing your songs as if for the first time every night is a lot riskier—and ultimately more interesting, since I would basically be phoning it in after three days if I wasn’t working hard to get my ideas over somehow.”

Roderick even spent some time while in Europe plying an altogether different sort of trade, serving as something of a glorified babysitter for the so-called “Undertow Orchestra”—Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, Vic Chesnutt, American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel and Centro-Matic’s Will Johnnson, all of whom banded together and were playing shows across the continent during Roderick’s last week there. Forming what amounted to a mutual-admiration society and last-chance roving rehab clinic, the quintet blundered from one catastrophe to another during its time together. “Here we are: The Christian, the Cripple, the Queer and the Country-Rocker—everyone’s shitfaced but me [Roderick hasn’t had a drink in 10 years]. And I’m thinking to myself ‘What egg did I fall off of to get into this scene?’” he laughs. “They just kind of tumbled from thing to thing while I stood there and herded them around for a while. I suggested they do a tour of America and hire me as tour manager; I won’t perform at all, just drive them around and have a rew take footage. It’s too great to last.”

Peppy Le Pew: Four Parisians travel to Berlin to record platter of blatantly American guitar pop

The lyrics of “Napoleon Says” (from Phoenix's third LP, It’s Never Been Like That) are mostly just bubblegum for vocalist Thomas Mars to chew, but lines like “You know your French well” and “You want to be European” make it seem like a sly sendup of Yankee Francophiles. If so, it’s an odd sentiment coming from a quartet of Parisians whose summery English-language guitar pop straddles the line between Strokes/Killers bombast and Rogue Wave/Mazarin delicacy with nary a whiff of its Gallic origin intact. Not to mention that the staccato, twitchy guitars and moaning vocals of “Courtesy Laughs” are a dead ringer for the French Kicks. Who are, of course, American. (Ouch, my mind!)

Whatever cultural tensions the song tries to embody founder in the music’s bright, affable haze, as do all of Phoenix’s stabs at ’tude. “Napoleon Says” strives for danger and comes up empty-handed—the ringing one-note guitar line flecked with compressed chords attempts anxiety but settles for tautness, the jovial choruses and Caucasoid-funk breakdowns jollying away any potential menace.

Trying to rumple the clean, crisp linens of the band’s prior work, particularly the hermetically-sealed Alphabetical, Phoenix decamped from its Versailles digs and landed in a Berlin studio without having written a note of music. And it has to be said that this attempt at recording a more spontaneous, chaotic record ended in abject failure—on It’s Never Been Like That, they sound as fastidious and polished as ever. But we’ve got plenty of sloppy iconoclasts half-assing their way through rock already, so Phoenix’s inability to come unbuttoned is no problem—it’s produced a lively album with a strong melodic sense that’s as hard to quantify as it is to refute. Plenty of guitar pop sounds pretty piece-by-piece, but the nice moments don’t add up to melodies you can hold onto. Phoenix’s, though, are simple and inspired, delivered with Mars’ confident drift, particularly on the syrupy acoustic lope of “One Time Too Many” and the gently circular swirl of “Lost & Found.”

Throughout, there are flashes of the more hazardous album Phoenix wanted to make. “Consolation Prizes” opens with a few seconds of bracingly metallic rhythm guitar, but quickly eases into a bubbly acoustic progression more representative of the album’s genial temperament. “Rally” soon quits its vaguely dubby opening in favor of a lilting shuffle, all perky bass, tenderly chiming guitars and giddily rattling verses. “Long Distance Call” starts with a shaggy rumble that soon vanishes, leaving behind little breaths of organ and typically crisp percussion. The lovely instrumental “North” feels like it’s aiming for a grand climax as its thick bass, brisk drums and silvery guitar line gradually intensify, but the closest it comes is the distorted yet mild riffing near the end. And “Sometimes In The Fall” sustains its wild drum fills for only a couple seconds before falling into a decorous fuzz march, garage-y but squeaky clean. Phoenix just doesn’t do wanton, but it’s great fun to watch them try and still turn out winning FM-friendly pop ditties.

Dusted Off: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

Red Planet, dead planet: A trip down memory lane: Fifty-six years after publication, Ray Bradbury’s seminal science-fiction work retains its topical immediacy and barbed social critique

Let me get the glib part out of the way: Ray Bradbury’s best-known work, The Martian Chronicles, takes place in a strange no-man’s land where there aren’t enough Martians to suit a teenage boy, and too many Martians for a grown man.