Perry Farrell’s got a lot on his mind. We’re at his hotel where he’s just arrived after a 30-minute car ride to the DeLuna Fest in Pensacola, Fla., and he wants to go outside because he spent his day in a stuffy hotel room that was upsettingly close to a train station. So the Jane’s Addiction frontman uncorks a bottle of white wine, steps out to the pool area that overlooks the festival’s main stage and starts asking what the crowd’s looking like that night.
It’s not bad, and a respectable crowd of die-hards are already pooled around DeLuna’s main stage. Before today, the turnout had been sparse, but Farrell doesn’t seem too worried. Instead, he just seems happy to be playing music on a beach.
After all, as one of the creators of Lollapalooza and a guy who’s notorious for his rambling, feel-good on-stage persona, Farrell knows how to throw a party. Maybe it’s all a calculated process—from the way he’s looking down on the festival, you might guess he’s figuring how to amp up the crowd, or maybe he’s just taking in the humid October night. But as he’s sipping his wine and staring out at the whole thing, it’s clear that the 52-year-old singer has something stirring around in his head.
Once he’s done scoping out the main stage, he takes a seat at a plastic pool table. Farrell talks with the coolness of an old buddy, and when I ask how his day is going, he opens up about a select group of angry fans on Facebook, how he thinks that the economy is fueling legions of these internet lurkers, and how a book on libertarianism showed him that the ideology isn’t exactly what he made it out to be. But that’s all part of his charm: Farrell can talk about music, politics, people and experiences all within single sentences, and before you know it, he’s made a solid connection between seemingly random subjects.
Although it’s been decades since Jane’s Addiction was an emerging young band, he’s still looking for ways to keep up with the times. Take his constant tweeting and his enlisting of TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek on bass along with Interpol/Muse-producer Rich Costey for his band’s newest album, The Great Escape Artist.
It’s not that he looks at the changing times or his age as an obstacle, and he’s certainly not trying to escape those things. Instead, the singer embraces it. Sure, it’s something he acknowledges with frustration later that night when an audience member throws a sandal at him, sighing “I’m a 52-year-old man, I shouldn’t have to put up with this shit,” in that high-register mumble of his. But back at the hotel room, before the whole sandal fiasco, Farrell looks at aging as a gift for musicians, an opportunity to join wisdom and experience in place of raw energy.
“We’re understanding music on levels that we were not as young people,” Farrell says. “What you have in favor as a young man is raw energy. It is unwritten and uncolored yet. You get all of these great stories as a young person and you get all that energy. So what do you have as you get older as a musician? You have time under your belt to consider and understand music: music theory, absence of notes, dead space, those things you don’t really understand as a young guy.”
It all makes sense after a listen to Jane’s Addiction’s newest album, The Great Escape Artist, and that’s not to say the thing isn’t energetic. Instead, Farrell approaches the music with all the intensity of a man half his age, and it’s not a coincidence:
“I did have to go and live a wild life while we were writing,” Farrell says. “My stories are always real, and I don’t want to throw anything at someone that’s a made up scenario because you’d be able to hear it in how I sing.”
The album’s filled with new sounds: electronic whirrs and beats, a more subtle, textural approach to guitar by axe-man Dave Navarro, and bassists Dave Sitek and Chris Chaney’s explosive, distorted takes on the instrument. Even the title itself can imply a shift—an escape—away from what the band used to be.
“I just don’t want to be held to repeat myself,” Farrell says about the album. “If I do it accidentally, or if i do it because it’s my nature, then fantastic, that’s great. But there’s so many new toys to play with. There’s too many sounds to design. I don’t want to be tied to the past or the way I made music in the past.”
But it wasn’t only important for Farrell to make the album on his new terms. Instead, he wanted his longtime bandmates to make the record with him.
“They’re amazing musicians. If I could make use of incredible musicians with this concept, it would be Jane’s,” Farrell says, reflecting on making the album. He talks new equipment and experimenting with music for a while, but it’s not long before he’s on this idea of time and what exactly it means to him.
“Today did not make me happy,” Farrell says about the downs of his day — those angry Facebookers, the loud hotel room away from the beach. But it looks like he has a moment of clarity, and he smiles a little when he brings up what’s to come in the future.
“The only thing that made me happy was when I thought about tomorrow,” Farrell says. “My business is developing and evolving. It’s not really tonight that I’m excited about, it’s next year, and then I get excited about tonight because tonight’s a step in that direction. Ask me about making music, and I’ll say it’s tomorrow that makes me happy.”