Do you put any stock in music-recommendation software? Those remind me of this toy I had when I was a kid called a Magic Robot. You asked it questions and the little robot would swivel round and, because of the magnets in it, fix on an answer. I don’t know how it worked—maybe it really was magic—but to me, the idea that your computer can recommend music for you is the same thing. It’s idiotic. What happens instead is someone you trust tells you, “I’ve got this record by people from the Romanian mountains playing hip-hop” or that one of Congolese street musicians putting kalimbas through sound systems [Konono N° 1]. I was looking at that CD in a shop in Nashville and happened to be standing next to the drummer for Sonic Youth, who said, “Oh, get that.” And I did, loved it, and recommended it to five friends, and then 15 more friends bought it. That’s how it works now.
Clock wise from top left: Schmoozing with Tony Bennett on the set of Spectacle; vamping with smooth operator Burt Bacharach in 1999; eating a meal of some sort, perhaps, with Bruce Springsteen and wife Diana Krall in 2007
You recently released your 27th album, Momofuku, and Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis was among the musicians. On an episode of Spectacle, you mentioned that, prior to working with Lewis on her album Acid Tongue, you had no interest in doing another record. That’s true. Paul McCartney said something after he put out his last record [for EMI]: They always sent him to Cologne to do this press junket, and this time, EMI was gonna do it again. That’s when he realized he was just a piece of the furniture. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the smallest band starting up now or somebody like him. So I thought, “No, it’s just too boring.” I’m very glad to be doing the job I’m doing, which is playing music in front of people, and I can do that in a variety of ways. Just last year, I played MerleFest with bluegrass musicians, then I’m touring with the Police, then I’m playing in Europe with an orchestra, then I’m playing a solo show. It’s the same reason Bob Dylan is on the road—because that’s what he does. He comes from the tradition of people who just play. Making records—it used to be the thing that made the motor go round. Now I sort of just make a record and let it go.
with the CD, and I thought that the tracks all sounded good. I had a song I wrote with Rosanne Cash, a song I’d written with Loretta Lynn, and I wrote another eight in three weeks. And we cut the whole thing in ten days.
The album sounds like a return to the kind of raucous, socially outspoken rock you used to do with the Attractions. The song “American Gangster Time” recalls excoriations like “Pills and Soap” and “Tramp the Dirt Down”—its chorus begins, “It’s a drag / Saluting that starry rag.” It isn’t like a political-slogan song as such. It’s more about a sense of amorality that runs through some of the decision-making now. It’s not a mystery what’s going on. But I’ve never been one for trying to write the obvious political song. My first single [“Less Than Zero”] was about a chance viewing of a 1930s Fascist, Oswald Mosley, being tolerated on late-night television. That started a way of writing about things that happen to us all. Even [Punch the Clock’s] “Shipbuilding” [about shipyard workers during England’s Falklands War] came out of very specific events, but I still sing it, because we still make the same mistake.
a tongue-in-cheek snipe at hippies. It sounds pretty irony-free when you play it, whether on your ’ 79 album Armed Forces or today, five years into the Iraq War. When Nick sang it, it wasn’t long after the idealism of the late ’60s, when people were thinking, “Well, it didn’t work out, did it? We don’t have a dream world where we’re all getting along.” The only thing you can do about that is laugh. At one point we’re singing, “Everybody get together / Smile on your brother,” and the next we’re beating each other to death with billiard cues. But now it is a serious time. You can’t apologize for songs being serious. That’s not a bad thing.
So how did Momofuku come about? I went down to do the [Acid Tongue] song “Carpetbaggers” with Jenny, and they were wondering how to pay me. I said, “Don’t worry about money, let’s just cut something for fun.” And we cut three songs in one afternoon. I went home
For years, one of your calling cards was the bait-and-switch pop song, a sweet melody enclosing a cynical message, like “Oliver’s Army,” a twinkly Abba-esque pop tune assailing British imperialism. Can you think of other recent artists who work that kind of duality? I think there’s a similar juxtaposition in some of the Kurt Cobain songs. You won’t find exactly the same type of juxtaposition of words and music, but there’s almost a romanticism, an extreme vulnerability, in the midst of all that distortion and aggression. And really, when [Nirvana] did Unplugged, it sort of proved that. In a funny sort of way—you talked of James Taylor being antithetical to my presumed sensibility—but really Kurt Cobain at a different time would have been a singer-songwriter, not a rock’n’roll singer.
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