Foxygen: Harnessing Star Power
There isn’t very much glamour involved when a star is born. In actuality, the cosmos are cold and dark and dusty, and those spectacular glowing orbs we gaze up at with wonder from lightyears away are little more than the results of molecular clouds collapsing under their own gravitational attraction. To become a star, you must first essentially implode, falling victim to your own forces. Then you shimmer for a few billion years—cruelly, the bigger and brighter you shine, the quicker you burn out—before your energy production slows down and you overheat, collapsing in on yourself again, this time for good.
It’s not the most stable gig in the galaxy, and it’s not always pretty, but it’s never boring.
This is not an article about Foxygen’s implosion. (For that, we’ll point you to The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Foxygen.) Jonathan Rado and Sam France are done talking about last year’s in-fighting and canceled shows, done attempting to extract any kind of meaning from a trying year.
“People are always asking us what kind of lessons we’ve learned,” Rado says, stretching his legs across a couch backstage before the band’s show at The Loft in Atlanta. “It’s always the same thing: ‘Did you learn any lessons last year?’ And it’s kind of like, ‘No, because we didn’t really do that much wrong.’ It was just sort of the way it all unfolded.”
France nods in agreement. “I think we’ve just naturally been in the music business longer now, so it’s just easier to maneuver in it now,” he offers. “But I don’t know looking back exactly literally what we’ve learned, but I just know that now we’re a lot more comfortable as a band, as a live band, we’re a lot happier with the stuff that we’re making and stuff like that. But I think naturally we’ve just progressed.”
It might seem like the natural progression after a year like the one Foxygen had would involve slowing down, taking a bit of a breather, regaining bearings. It would not, one might presume, include recording, releasing and touring behind a double album.
“Double albums always seem like kind of bad ideas,” Rado says, laughing, “but they’re always so great because of that.”
“We wanted to make something that was excessive,” France adds. “Like the White Album or Tusk by Fleetwood Mac. We just wanted a ridiculous, excessive album.”
And so we have …And Star Power, an indulgent, experimental double-LP that clocks in at 82 minutes and gets hijacked by a fictional punk band (the titular Star Power) halfway through, becoming unhinged and collapsing in on itself in the best way possible.
“I think we wanted a record that encapsulated a lot of different sides of our personalities because the album previous to it was just…we liked it, but it felt kind of one-dimensional, and so we kind of wanted to create this idea that maybe it wasn’t even just Foxygen on the album, that maybe we were collaborating with this other entity, like some sort of weird punk band from space or something,” Rado explains.