On Aug. 30, East Hollywood pop/punk teen trio LED are playing the inaugural CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, a festival at Los Angeles’s Underground Museum featuring rock stars of tomorrow like Kim Theory and Japanese viral drumming prodigy Yoyoka. But LED’s wholesome origin story actually plays out a like a real-life version of Camp Rock.

“It was a film camp that we did two summers ago, in 2024,” singer/guitarist Edie Yvonne recalled, during an LPTV interview right before one of LED’s first public gigs at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records last year. At that camp, Yvonne and future LED drummer Lockett Pentz portrayed casino gamers, while singer/guitarist Layne Brisbois (aka Layne Olivia) was cast as an assassin, in an amateur action/mystery caper. And while that short film, The Chain Gang, didn’t even go straight to video — “I don’t even think the movie’s out!” Brisbois laughed — it was a “fun bonding experience.” But more importantly, the song they wrote for the end credits, “Lies All Lies,” became LED’s debut single. And then LED became a real band.

“I actually didn’t think that we would become a band out of it,” admitted Yvonne, who is also an actress (her non-Chain Gang credits include Kitty, Chloe Sevginy’s directorial debut) and had attended the Shanelle Gray Studios Movie Camp to study acting. “I thought it would just be a one-time song. But I was secretly hoping that they’d want to keep collaborating, so I was really happy when we all got together and kept writing.”

Technically, if The Chain Gang even got a brief theatrical release, “Lies All Lies” — named after an Austin Powers catchphrase that Pentz used to randomly shout around the house at age 5, and eventually became his impromptu background vocals on LED’s debut recording — would qualify to be nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Original Song. “Oh, but they had a little mini-Oscars thing [at the camp],” laughed Brisbois. “They would hand out little Oscars.”

“And everyone got Best Something,” Pentz chuckled. “I think I won Best Shoe Game.”

LED at Licorice Pizza Records, Oct. 11, 2025

It makes perfect sense that Pentz had style from a young age, since his father is fashionable superstar DJ/producer Diplo. Pentz and Brisbois have played together in various kiddy bands since they we were age 10, and their first show actually took place about five years ago at one of Diplo’s Halloween house parties. It was on that fateful night that Diplo’s wardrobe malfunction, which nearly sabotaged that living-room gig, ironically might have predicted Pentz’s future band’s name.

“My dad’s LED mask got caught in the speaker, and it was messing with the sound. Everything sounded super-terrible-loud,” Pentz recalled.

“And then everyone thought it was the fire alarm!” laughs Brisbois. “They’re like, ‘What is that? What is happening?’’”

“And we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s your mask. It keeps touching the wires,’” said Pentz.

Pentz acknowledged, “My dad has probably influenced me a lot. … . He’s taken me to some of his shows. I’ve seen him perform. It’s not really my style, but I feel like that really made me think, ‘Oh, I want to be like him and make music.” However, while Pentz has been “kind of learning how to DJ and do tech music” and likes to “dabble in everything,” as he figured out his own musical identity, he and his LED bandmates, who are now all around the ages of 16 and 17, gravitated towards alt-rock.

Pentz said he’s “more of a rock kind of guy” whose drumming style is influenced by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day; Brisbois, who honed her guitar skills during the COVID-19 pandemic, cited Bring Me the Horizon as her favorite band; and Yvonne, who started writing songs during COVID lockdown, loves ‘90s-era indie-pop.

“I feel like a lot of teens our age are really into the ’90s and crave that era or that nostalgia, and maybe don’t resonate with some more modern music,” Yvonne told LPTV.

“In my personal opinion, today’s music doesn’t have that same feel. It’s kind of like, ‘I put this together quickly,’ in a way,” muses Pentz. “With older music, you can feel the work and time put into it.”

“I think the answer [to why teens love classic rock and alternative rock] is because rock is freakin’ amazing, but that’s just my opinion,” Brisbois stated bluntly.

An experience involving a famous ‘90s band, and Diplo, actually inspired “Goodbye Eric,” the second song LED ever wrote. [DJ Eric Hamilton] is one of my dad’s friends,” Pentz revealed. “The story is we went to a Limp Bizkit concert, and he went into the moshpit and we were like, ‘Ohhhh, he’s not coming back! That moshpit is crazy!… Goodbye, Eric. You made it this far. You’re gone.”

“He was gone for 30 minutes!” Brisbois chuckled. [Editor’s note: Hamilton made it out of the pit unscathed. He’s OK!]

Yvonne enjoyed an especially magical moment with two ‘90s rock icons, which set her on her own creative path. In 2018, at the third annual Girlschool festival — the same L.A. fest where another local teen band, the Linda Lindas, made their live debut, and where Garbage’s Shirley Manson was joined by surprise guest Fiona Apple for duet of “You Don’t Own Me” — Yvonne sang in front of a rock audience for the first time. Much like the Next Gen Festival, the Girlschool event was a perfect example of the importance of mentoring young talent.

“It was such an amazing experience,” Yvonne reminisced. “Anna [Bulbrook, founder of the Girlschool organization and a violinist who has played with Beyoncé, the Airborne Toxic Event, and Edward Sharpe] put a group of teens or kids together, including the Linda Lindas. I had never really performed on a stage like that; I came from more of a musical theater background at the time. I got to cover ‘Fade Into You’ by Mazzy Starr, and that was really when I knew I really wanted to do music.”

Along with their Licorice Pizza Records in-store showcase, LED have since played the Whisky a Go-Go, Aviator Nation, and the Hotel Café — “the more we get up there, the more comfortable we get, so we’re trying to play as much as possible,” Yvonne explained — but they confessed that their most daunting gigs, even more daunting than being on the same bill as Shirley Manson and Fiona Apple, have been on L.A.’s battle-of-the-bands circuit, which is “really huge” among local teens.

“I think we’ve done two so far,” Yvonne said. “I feel like those are actually our hardest performances, because there are some really heavy metal bands and it can be very intimidating! There’s a lot of moshing! It encourages me to play better, which always makes me nervous.”

LED did not win those two battles, but they’re clearly winning at life; maybe an Oscar (or Grammy) really is in their future. In the meantime, you can catch LED, plus a solo set by Edie Yvonne and many other future stars, at CAMP — The Next Gen Fest, on Sunday, Aug. 30. Tickets, full lineup, and other details can be found here.

On Aug. 12, National Vinyl Record Day (the anniversary of Thomas Edison inventing the phonograph in 1877), Good Day L.A. chatted live with me from the last standing Licorice Pizza Records, where I talked about the history of the store and why vinyl is still going strong after almost 150 years.

Guitarist-to-the-stars Billy Morrison recently dropped the mini-rockumentary Who the F%@k Is Billy Morrison? ahead of his fourth solo album, Hollow. But a skim of his long list of career credits indicates that plenty of people know who he is, and he knows just about everybody.

In addition to his work with the Cult, Billy Idol, his late best friend Ozzy Osbourne, and the supergroups Camp Freddy, Circus Diablo, and Royal Machines, as well as his concurrent career as an acclaimed fine artist, Morrison has recruited a who’s-who roster for Hollow: Godsmack’s Sully Erna, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels, the Offspring’s Dexter Holland, Cypress Hill’s B-Real, Fuel’s Brett Scallions, and his longtime Billy Idol bandmate, Steve Stevens. He’s well aware that the general public might always know him more for his famous friends than for his own CV — hence his doc’s cheeky title — but after all that he’s been through, he’s just happy to be making art on his own terms.

“I’m not trying to be Taylor Swift here,” he chuckles, speaking via Zoom with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV. “I’m not trying to carve out a huge solo career for myself. I am making music and putting out solo records because I love making music and I am able, luckily, to put them out. I have a record deal that doesn’t force me to be someone I’m not… and if any one person other than me likes the album, I’m a success.”

Ironically, in some ways, it actually is hard to know just who Billy Morrison is. He sometimes plays it close to the vest during his LPTV interview — like when it comes to discussing his friendship with Osbourne, or how he finally got sober in 1995 after a 15-year battle with substance abuse that he began when he was 14 — and he says he has no desire to write a tell-all autobiography like some of his formerly hard-living rock ‘n’ roll peers. He’s also been the subject of a few rumors and urban legends (which is a sure sign that he’s “made it,” right?), some of which amuse him, and one of which is he willing to clear up right now.

“I made the mistake of looking at Reddit the other day,” he laughs. “There was someone who was discussing, ‘Where does Billy Morrison get his money from, because he wears golden diamonds and drives expensive cars?’ And literally, there was a theory on there: In Europe, there is a Morrison Supermarket, and this person was saying, ‘Clearly he’s the heir to the Morrison Supermarket chain, because he has nice jewelry and a nice car.’ I mean, it doesn’t warrant the energy, but I really wanted to go on there and go, ‘Yeah, God forbid it’s about hard work and writing good music and painting good paintings and working hard!’ So yeah, I’m not the heir to the Morrison supermarket chain, just to be clear.”

photo: Jane Stuart

On the contrary, there was a time when Morrison didn’t even have enough money to buy supermarket groceries. He was homeless for two years  — and not “Hollywood homeless,” aka sleeping on friends’ sofas, but actually “sleeping under a piece of metal. It was sheet metal that I’d propped up on the sidewalk on 8th and Burlington, in the Alvarado District of Los Angeles. My only source of income was begging for money on freeway off-ramps, mainly,” he reveals. The harrowing experience inspired Hollow’s “very, very personal” title track.

“I have experienced people stepping over my body on the sidewalk and looking at me with disgust and judgment,” Morrison says flatly; he may be a man of mystery regarding certain subjects, but when it comes to talking about recovery and mental health, he’s an open book. “I have experienced begging for dimes, and not on the odd occasion — I spent years of my life like that, begging on the streets and people stepping over me and crossing the roads, crossing the street so they didn’t have to walk past me, judging me and criticizing me.”

Morrison thankfully got clean by age 29, but he freely admits that at one time, “I absolutely thought I’d be dead before I was 30, 100 percent. I mean, I was shooting heroin in my neck. I’ve been shot; I’ve been stabbed. Of course I thought I was going to die! And I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t care. Or at least I thought I didn’t care. There was absolutely no thought whatsoever of living, let alone having a career, let alone, God forbid, being somewhat happy. … It’s very hard to see that [possibility] when you’re shooting heroin in your neck and you’re homeless and the cops are trying to lock you up every five seconds. It’s not easy, but it is there. And so, my purpose is to try and not worry about talking about it in interviews. I’m not shy about it, because I am living proof that it’s possible.”

Morrison readily acknowledges that he’s unusually fortunate, which is why he has become such a staunch advocate for less fortunate others who are struggling — for instance, organizing regular all-star Above Ground mental health benefit concerts with his friend and fellow recovering addict, Dave Navarro, to raise funds and awareness for MusiCares. (Above Ground is on hiatus this year, but will hopefully be back 2027.)

“I think at some point in anyone’s career, you have to stop and look around and go, ‘I’m really lucky, and I want to give back in some way,’” Morrison muses. “My story is my story, and I think I’ve been put on this Earth to try and help people not die. And if you can hear the message from someone like Navarro or myself that it is OK to ask for help… we get led down this path and they use that expression, ‘You’re a pussy,’ or ‘Throw them in the army, that’ll sort ‘em out!’ And it doesn’t. It just kills people. It kills people, because they just go inwards and feel like they are not able to get the help that is out there. [Above Ground] started because we lost Chester [Bennington] and we lost Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell. They were dropping like flies. Dave and I were like, ‘Enough’s enough. We have to try and at least make a noise.’ We’re not trying to raise millions of dollars, though money is needed in those arenas. We’re just trying to use our voice to say, ‘If you are feeling trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, all of that, you’re not alone. You’re not a weirdo. And there are plenty of resources that we can help you with. Just let us help you.’”

While Morrison was still a young man with many good years ahead of him when he got help and got a new lease on life, he has been a self-declared workaholic ever since. (“I don’t avoid burnout,” he chuckles, when asked about his work/life balance.” It seems he’s still trying to make up for lost time.

photo: Jane Stuart

“I clearly am a creative person that had — or not had his creativity stifled, but chose to stifle his creativity for a couple of decades with heroin and cocaine — and so, I am playing catch-up. I am exorcising the creative demons that most people exorcise when they’re 25,” Morrison explains. “Most of my peers — Nikki Sixx, Dave Navarro, Anthony Kiedis — formed a band in high school, wrote some songs, got signed, sold a few million records, bought the house, put some money in the bank, and then started shooting heroin or smoking cocaine or whatever they did. I’m not minimizing that trauma; that trauma is exactly the same. But the difference when you come out the other side is that you still have a house and some money in the bank. And I couldn’t even get that right! I woke up in my late twenties with nothing, not a dime to my name. So, that is why I’m playing catch-up with life. … I just woke up late and had this fire burning. And [Hollow] is the product, I guess, of that late bloom.”

Morrison is grateful for what he now calls his dream “day job,” which, along with buying all those Reddit-gossip-fueling gold chains and luxury automobiles, “takes me around the world to beautiful places where I can go stroll along the river in Prague or have oysters by the Sydney Opera House in Australia. That’s my job!” But he never expected to have a side job: as a contemporary painter whose works have been exhibited in fine art galleries around the world. And he owes that career to a certain famous friend.

“It absolutely was Ozzy’s fault that I became a proper fine artist! He pushed me into my first painting. I’ve always loved art; I’m surrounded by art in my house. I have an amazing private art collection,” Morrison says, as an original Andy Warhol painting can be seen hanging behind him in his home office. “But I never thought I could do it myself. Ozzy saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself and pushed it, and it came out. …. We were in Argentina and I was having an argument with Ozzy, because he was driving me absolutely crazy, saying, ‘You should paint, you should paint!” And I’m like, ‘Ozzy, I can’t even draw a stick figure!’ But we were in an art supply store and to shut him up, I bought four colors, one brush, and a tiny little canvas.” Morrison ended up creating his first painting, of a skull — “I figured a skull seemed like a good thing to paint while hanging on the Black Sabbath tour!” — which he later gifted to Osbourne and Ozzy’s family. And suddenly, a new creative fire was lit.

“The feeling of putting paint to canvas and creating visual art was exactly as cathartic to me as learning to play ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols for the first time on guitar,” Morrison marvels. “It was absolutely the most incredible, energizing, creative, cathartic experience, and that was all I needed: Here’s another avenue to get the demons out, to express myself.”

Morrison exorcised many demons on Hollow, and enjoyed his hard-earned freedom to “make music in whatever genre I want to make that turns me on.’ That’s especially evident on the Judgment Night soundtrack-meets-Manchester banger “No Suspects,” which features no fewer than three hip-hop legends, all on the same track. It’s the most sociopolitical song on the album, but Morrison once again puts his guard up when asked specifically what it’s about, stressing that the rappers wrote their own lyrics for their respective verses.

“I like not to do things by halves, so just to get B-Real, Chuck D, and DMC on one track together! … Listen, you don’t ask Chuck D or B-Real or DMC to be on a song and then go, ‘But I need you to say this,’” he laughs. “[Chuck and DMC are] in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I let them do what they want!” However, Morrison does feel there are similarities between the protest energy of classic hip-hop and the old-school punk that he cut his teeth on.

“I am hugely influenced by early hip-hop: N.W.A., Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, all of that. Punk rock was not a haircut or a fashion statement. Punk rock was an attitude, and when N.W.A. came out of the gate, it was just a bunch of disenfranchised youths screaming as loud as they could that they had something to say. Well, that is punk rock,” he explains.

Speaking of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Billy Idol will finally be inducted this year (“The fact that it took Billy this long to get in, are you fucking kidding me?” sighs Morrison), and Morrison, who’s been in Idol’s band since 2010, will perform with the new wave legend at the ceremony, because his boss feels it’s crucial to have his crew share the stage and glory that night. “I will be there, yeah. And that encapsulates everything that is wonderful about being in Billy Idol’s band, because Billy is an old punk rocker that comes from the concept of a band. We are a band,” Morrison says proudly. “Billy takes that seriously, and I’m super-grateful.”

As for which songs Idol and his band might play at the Rock Hall’s November ceremony — Stevens has stated that he’d love for them to dust off a Generation X classic like “Kiss Me Deadly” — Morrison once again plays it close to his studded leather vest and quips, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just going to be there. I’m going to be there with my friends, and I’m going to support my friend. Billy and Steve are getting inducted. I don’t give a shit what we’re playing!”

So, now that Morrison is fully embracing and enjoying his second act — and now that plenty of people know his name, despite what his movie’s title sarcastic claims — what else does he want to do with his life? Apparently, he wants to really be in the movies.

“I would love to do a major motion picture. I love acting,” says Morrison, who’s had a few film and TV roles over the years. “Acting is another cathartic experience where you can let go, become someone else, and get the demons out. I would love to do a McG action movie or something like that… I want to be in a Guy Ritchie/Jason Statham movie.”

Watch Billy Morrison’s full LPTV interview in the video player at the top of this page.

At one point during Houston pop-rock band Waterparks’ hilarious interview at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records — right before they autograph their new album, JINX, for a ‘round-the-block line of pink-haired Parxies — frontman Awsten Knight lets his guard down and jokingly lets it slip that he really does enjoy hanging with his bandmates, drummer Otto Wood and guitarist Geoff Wigington.

“Fuck!” he blurts after this cute confession. “Now we’re never going to get a Metallica documentary!”

Well, that’s perfectly OK, because a JINX documentary — or better yet, some sort of Tommy-style movie musical — would be infinitely more interesting. And it would have (Stefon-from-‘SNL’ voice) everything: key-party-hosting swinger grandparents, a spread-eagle Playmate mannequin, ‘80s beauty salon décor, X-rated green-screens, epic Biblical allegories, a giant Sasquatch, an evil butler, and Donkey Kong murals. And of course, it would feature cameos by Dillon Francis and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus as “purgatory guys,” Danny Elfman as the Devil, and Foxy Shazam’s “unicorn,” aka Eric Nally, perfectly typecast as God.

JINX quite spectacularly opens with “Tell Me Why,” a three-minute, 35-second punk-poperetta with that above-mentioned all-star cast. At first, Knight actually voiced all of the song’s mythical characters — Waterparks exclusively reveal to Licorice Pizza’s LPTV that that alternate, all-Awsten version drops this week — but as Knight recalls, “Everybody was kind of like, ‘This is fucking awesome,’ but nobody understood it on first listen. Which is a problem.”

Yes, even for a band known for switching up not just hair colors but genres from album to album, the original “Tell Me Why” might have been too much of a leap. “I feel like if you go in blind, you’re just like, ‘What the fuck?’” says Knight.

“We needed different voices, different tonalities, and characters to really lock it in and, for a lack of a better term, sell it. Because in the earlier drafts of it, Awsten was doing all the parts,” explains Wood. “It was just him donning all of these different voices — trying to have this booming, holy [character], and then, conversely, this sinister gravelly tonality. For us, we already know the intent there, so it’s easier for us. Anyone hearing it for the first time might be thrown for a loop, and it wouldn’t quite land the same.”

“So, we needed to cast the movie,” adds Knight. “We couldn’t Nutty Professor this shit.”

Knight drops multiple movie references during LPTV’s interview. (The most amusing is when he refuses to believe that Waterparks have actually drawn a huge crowd to the store and mock-worries that this is all a big prank, exclaiming: “You’re going to Carrie me! This is going to be terrible! You’re going to pour blood on me in front of my closest friends and family!”) So, it’s fitting that for Waterparks’ most creatively risky album yet — their first in three years, after they scrapped the LP they’d been working on, Intellectual Property 2 — they’d go totally cinematic, with a statement-making, gauntlet-throwing overture like “Tell Me Why.”

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“That was probably the hardest song I’ve ever written,” Knight confesses. “Honestly, it was going to be a different song entirely. It was called ‘The Trick Is to Stay Alive,’ which was originally how the elevator part ended — like, there’s no escaping, I’ve already tried it. … But the main thing that stayed was the chorus. And when [longtime Waterparks collaborator] Joe [Ragosta] and I did that chorus — ‘If the only point of life is not to die, can you tell me why?’ — it was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is so much bigger than the rest of that demo.’

“It kind of unlocked this whole thing where we had just done ‘Red Guitar’ and it was like, OK, that was such a story. This is an even bigger idea,” Knight continues. “What if it’s actually a full-on narrative, like a linear narrative, and you show both sides of all of it, at least as far as Christian lore goes? Heaven, hell, purgatory, all this stuff, and at the end, you’re still at exactly where the song started, exactly where you began again.”

“None the wiser,” Wigington interjects.

“Yeah, exactly. I felt like that was just the perfect way to start this album, because the next song [“Red Guitar”] is discussing this with your inner child,” says Knight. “And from there, it does feel like a very linear throughline.”

Waterparks don’t consider JINX a proper concept album, but Knight says it’s a “loose concept. It’s not like such a tight story as [Green Day’s] ‘Jesus of Suburbia,’ but it all operates in the same world, and it starts in a particular place and ends where it does make sense to be a story.” And what a wacky world it was created in.

Just when it doesn’t seem like Waterparks’ JINX story could include another plot twist, as their LPTV interview continues, they begin discussing the Long Island funhouse (or swinghouse?) where the album was recorded. The immersive space included playrooms with Barbie, G.I. Joe, Elvis, and Playboy themes — “Playboy is the bathroom, and it scares the shit out of you the first five times you go in there, because there’s a mannequin in the bathtub in a chair, like really aggressively spread out with the ears on,” recalls Knight — but Waterparks recorded in the basement, “which is even weirder,” Knight says.

This extreme but much-needed change of studio scenery came upon the recommendation of Ragosta, who introduced the band to producer/engineer Nick Zinnanti. “I trust Joe. He’s one of the few people. I shouldn’t because he’s a very bad guy, but I trust him. And he was like, ‘We should really try this out.’ I had no idea what I was getting into,” Knight chuckles. “I had no heads up. He was just like, ‘Yeah, it’s just over at Nick’s parents’ house.’ And I get there, and I realize it’s just a full-on swingers’ pad — it’s not confirmed, but it is. His parents were definitely like swingers in the ‘80s, because you go in there and there’s all the weird shit, but then there’s also giant lips on the wall and red leather couches and a big grand piano and checkered stuff. Do you know what Visible Changes is? The haircut place in the mall? Is that just a Texas thing? Well, it looked like that. It’s like the horniest place I’ve ever been.”

Just in case Knight hasn’t painted a vivid enough picture, he animatedly continues. “There’s also a giant Donkey Kong portrait on one of the ceilings. … There’s a Bigfoot predator, like from the movie Predator, not like the president,” he says. (Incidentally, Waterparks released a non-album protest track called “ICE” earlier this year, as seen below.) “There’s giant, life-sized people everywhere. There’s massive silverware. You walk in, and there’s a giant butler and a bear. He looks like a Haunted Manson butler. It’s not like a Bruce Wayne butler, like Alfred. Alfred seemed nice and helpful; this butler was like, ‘I want to drain your life force.’”

It was while Waterparks were exploring the funky funhouse basement that they noticed a “big-ass room” next to the studio’s control room that was “fully green-screened out. The floor is green-screen. There’s pillars that are green-screened. The walls, the ceilings, all green,” laughs Knight. “I had never met Nick before, and I was just like…  ‘Um, Nick, what do they need a full green-screen room for?’ … And he’s the opposite of Joe. He was quiet and kind.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a swinger couple would have a quiet child; Zinnanti probably kept to himself, in his room, a lot when growing up. “He did — and he got really good at recording!” laughs Knight.

So, did the band film anything at the funhouse? Any green-screen music videos? “We did — with Nick’s grandparents,” Knight deadpans. “Maybe I’m coming off as a fun person, but in the studio, I’m not. I’m very locked-in and in mad-scientist mode. … So, I kind of was in a very different space where I wasn’t like, ‘We should go film in that fucking green room.’ Normally I’d be like, ‘We should make 10 videos today! Every song on the album gets a video!’ But no. I went in there, I was like, ‘This is crazy,’ and then I’d go back and keep working. … We’d never made an album anywhere except for one place with Zakk Cervini, so this was the first time trying something new. And I hate trying new things!”

courtesy of BMG

But of course, recording a Biblical fable about life, death, and purgatory in a swingers’ ‘80s party pad was a completely new experience, so it will likely open up the band to even more adventures. For instance, they haven’t attempted to perform “Tell Me Why” live yet, although they’re toying with the idea of doing it with rotating guest stars. “We’ve run through different ideas and logistics where we can pull it off and make it collaborative,” teases Wood.

When it’s suggested that Waterparks recruit all of their fellow acts on the current Warped Tour for a Jesus Christ Superstar-style live staging of “Tell Me Why,” Knight amusingly blurts, “Not everyone!” But then he comes up with a Warped-specific “Tell Me Why” cast that includes Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara, the Used’s Bert McCracken, Motion City Soundtrack’s Justin Pierre, and members of From First to Last — and they’ve also pinky-sweared, on camera, to come back to Licorice Pizza to perform the song live — so watch this space

And watch Waterparks’ entire incredibly entertaining LPTV interview in the video above. It’s clear that these guys really do enjoy hanging out together.

If there’s ever a sure sign that a band has “made it” in show business, it’s getting parodied by the Mighty Boosh.

That’s exactly what happened to Ladytron during the height of electroclash mania, on the cult British comedy duo’s famous “Spirit of Jazz” episode. It was a semi-dubious honor at the time — multi-instrumentalist Daniel Hunt recalls “laughing [his] head off” when he first saw the sketch, but says Noel Fielding’s Hunt-like “asymmetric mustache” felt like a “direct attack!” — because the pioneering Liverpool electronic group had always “very much felt like [they] were observers of someone else’s party,” according to keyboardist/co-vocalist Mira Aroyo.

“It became like our catchphrase: ‘We’re not electroclash!’” Hunt chuckles. “I remember someone saying to me, ‘God, the way that you’re constantly denying you’re electroclash is just soooo electroclash!’ We couldn’t escape it.”

But Ladytron did, in fact, escape it. Unlike many of their electroclash/electroclash-adjacent (or “indie sleaze”) peers, who bore the brunt of the movement’s brutal backlash, Ladytron, who always marched to the beat of their own drum machine, continue to survive, thrive, and reach a diverse audience of fans, 22 years after the Boosh spoof.

For instance, Brian Eno, whose Roxy Music inspired the Ladytron band name, became a major supporter, inviting them to join him at the Sydney Opera House and, on historic day that keyboardist/vocalist Helen Marnie describes as “odd” and “kind of funny,” at the House of Commons for a political conference. Christina Aguilera, who cited Ladytron as one of her favorite artists, recruited them (along with Goldfrapp, Peaches, Santigold, M.I.A., and Le Tigre) for Bionic, her once-misunderstood futurepop album that has since become a cult classic. More recently, the surprise TikTok explosion of Ladytron’s 2002 club hit “Seventeen” has introduced them to a new generation of fans (what Marnie jokingly calls “fresh blood”) — including Addison Rae, who has expressed a desire to work with them.

“It was interesting today that quite a few people who came here for the signing were here because their parents listened to us,” Aroyo tells LPTV, sitting with Hunt and Marnie at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after an in-store event for Ladytron’s critically acclaimed eighth album, Paradises. “It’s a sound that’s maybe come back around in the ether as well. It’s a sound that was alien maybe 20 years ago and was just us, and now it’s kind of almost everywhere, in some shape or form.”

“We’ve never followed any particular trend, or we’ve probably done the opposite of what people expected a few times… and yet, we survived,” declares Hunt, when asked about Ladytron’s longevity. “We’ve survived labels going bankrupt, being shut down, all of this other stuff, and here we are.”

“It’s nice that the music is still relevant to a completely different generation, who’ve grown up in such a different way to the way people were when the songs were written,” adds Aroyo with a smile. “It’s like a Jurassic Era.”

In the deeply entertaining and wide-ranging extended video interview above, and in the edited Q&A below, Ladytron discuss their Liverpool, Eno, Aguilera, and electroclash memories with LPTV, and explain why Paradises is their most creatively inspired album in years.

LPTV: Paradises is your eighth album, your second album as a trio, and your longest album, at 16 songs and 73 minutes. And it’s kind of a full-circle record: Some of it was recorded in your old home city of Liverpool, and it’s your danciest record in a long time, the result of one of your most productive phases since those early Liverpool days. Where did this burst of creativity come from?

HUNT: I think personally, because the last record was made in such difficult circumstances, the previous record — we basically started it just one week before lockdown in 2020, which did complicate things slightly. And so, we went through all that and we still made a good record, but now we to want to have fun mainly. And that was a catalyst. … It was this really intense period where every time we went in the studio, after an hour there was a new tune or a new song. And there were various reasons for that — but fun, principally.

MARNIE: As Danny said, there was maybe a lot of pressure on us before, like 2020 on those kind of years. And so, this time around, it was just freer and no stress. And so, I think that probably the best comes out of you at those periods.

LPTV: Your mixer, Jim Abiss, thinks Paradises is your best album since Witching Hour. Do agree?

MARNIE: I mean, he would say that — because he worked on it!

HUNT: And he produced Witching Hour.

MARNIE: But I think he’s right. The best thing you’ve done is, you would hope, the last thing you’ve done. We always feel that way — that we’ve put out the best thing that we possibly could.

HUNT: The objective of making a new record is you should be aiming to make your best record or it’s pointless. We double down on that because we felt freer and we didn’t have these external circumstances like obstacles. But Jim might be right in some ways. It feels like if not the best, one of the best ones, to me.

AROYO: It’s the longest record.

LPTV: Do you consider Witching Hour and Paradises to be companion pieces? Is there any throughline between the two?

HUNT: I think the connection to Witching Hour for me would be that it feels like a jump — it’s a jump in terms of ambition, and I think it has that in common rather than the aesthetic.

AROYO: If anything, it kind of reminds me actually of the earlier two records, sort of in a state of mind. I don’t know why, but it just kind of takes me back to that era of writing or working on 604 and Light & Magic. There’s an innocence to it, somehow.

LPTV: I mentioned that some of Paradises was recorded in Liverpool, which is where you’re from. A lot of people associate Liverpool with the Beatles, obviously, but there’s a rich electronic and post-punk history there: OMD, Dead or Alive, the KLF, the Farm, the Teardrop Explodes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Big in Japan, A Flock of Seagulls, famous ‘90s clubs like Cream and Voodoo. Was any of that history informing Paradises? I know you’re not especially nostalgic people, but there is some nostalgia to this record.

HUNT: Yeah, it’s subconscious. It’s something that basically forced its way out. … Cream every Saturday, so many people came [to Liverpool] from outside, and me and my friends had this little party on a parallel street, like one block over. Those people would end up coming to our party and dancing to Northern Soul and weird underground records or whatever, but they would be reacting to them as if they were house music.

LPTV: Scouse house? I’ve heard that term.

HUNT: Yes, that’s really a thing. … I had a studio and well; it became a studio because the guy next door was a Scouse house producer. I got talking to him one day and this was just different worlds of music. I felt like we had nothing in common at all, but I saw how easy it was, basically. I went in the studio and I was like, “Wait, you just make records here and just release them and you don’t sit in a rehearsal room with a band four nights a week and doing all these things that really take a lot of time and effort, and you just release records?” That was like an epiphany. He basically taught me how to sequence and program. So, I think Scouse house is actually responsible for Ladytron in some way.

You also recorded Paradises in London at the studio where my favorite David Bowie album, Scary Monsters, was made. I’d love to hear about that experience.

HUNT: I mean, that’s like hallowed ground, Dean Street Studios. .. It was Tony Visconti’s old studio. It was Jim Abiss’s idea to do a week in there of basically just chaos, taking a more or less a finished record and just doing this chaos phase where we experimented and turned things upside down and added textural stuff. And it was really worthwhile. It felt like it felt like we needed that phase before we mix to just see how far we could push it.

AROYO: We do always basically all produce stuff at home to a certain level, and then in various studios, and then we gather around and throw in the unknown elements.

LPTV: I mentioned Bowie, which then takes me to Brian Eno. Obviously, I assume your band is named after the Roxy Music song…

Yeah, it’d be weird if we weren’t!

LPTV: True, true. Well, Eno once said Ladytron were “the best of English pop music.” What an honor. What did that mean to you guys?

AROYO: I think the first time [we met Eno], it was [through] his daughter, actually.

HUNT: His daughter introduced him to us. His daughter played us to him. And that was like, “Oh my God, her dad’s heard of us!”

LPTV: Did Eno ever give you any advice?

HUNT: He did, actually. He put us on at this festival at Sydney Opera House that he curated, and I remember he did give me some advice personally. He said after the gig, “You should sing more.” And I said, “What do you mean? Like Ringo Starr or something, one song per album? And he said, “No, no, you should use your voice as a kind of layer underneath Helen and Mira’s voices.” And I did actually start doing that. That’s really been the way we do things, since he suggested it. So, he’s basically executive producer of our last four albums. Arguably.

AROYO: Now he’s going to want the credit!

HUNT: I’ve really opened a can of worms here, haven’t I? Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that.

LPTV: Do you guys have any other Eno memories?

MARNIE: There was one time when he invited us to the House of Commons for a Lib Dem conference, like a political thing.

AROYO: That was pretty weird.

MARNIE: It was odd. It was kind of funny.

LPTV: What exactly did that entail?

AROYO: Going into room full of men. Like Brian May. Brian May, next to Chris Martin.

MARNIE: And listening to [former Liberal Democrats party leader] Nick Clegg giving a speech…

AROYO: About the power of creativity.

MARNIE: Yes, it was about creativity, so it was all good intentions. But it was very strange that we were there. .. I don’t think any of us were Lib Dem supporters, but it was fine.

AROYO: It was more like a tourist trip, like, “Let’s go inside the House of Commons!”

LPTV: You’ve had many famous supporters. Besides Brian Eno, there’s the Pet Shop Boys, Trent Reznor… but I want to talk about your contributions to Bionic, the very misunderstood 2010 album by Christina Aguilera. No one got it at the time; there was a really bad backlash to it.

HUNT: I think there was a backlash followed by a fore-lash, I think.

LPTV: Yes, kind of like Art Pop by Lady Gaga. Some pop albums don’t get understood at the time, especially by a female pop star who’s expected to do only one thing. You contributed two classic fan-favorite tracks to Bionic, “Birds of Prey” and “Little Dreamer.” And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but “Birds of Prey” was named by Billboard as one of the “Best Deep Cuts by 21st Century Pop Stars.”

HUNT: Really? When did they say that? Nobody never told us. Good, good. There you go. I think with that record, we always say that the vision Christina had for it at the beginning, when we started working with her, was quite different to how it ended up. A lot of what she planned ended up being like disc two of the deluxe; that was kind of what she had in mind. And I think it was too weird for her audience, and the label were a bit freaked-out.

LPTV: Oh, so it was going to be even weirder?

HUNT: It was way weirder than what you got! The singles, I think, were added later to be more familiar to her audience. But [the original album] was way weirder. “Birds of Prey” was going to be track 1 on it. She was talking about starting their live sets with it and everything.

LPTV: Wow. It’s a shame it only ended up being a bonus track. If you look at the comments on YouTube for both of your Bionic songs, for “Birds of Prey” people say stuff like, “This should have been the single. History would’ve been different.” And for “Little Dreamer,” there was a comment: “This is how the album should have sounded!” But Christina reached out to you directly, right? It wasn’t like some bandwagon-jumping label person saying, “Let’s try to make her sound indie,” or whatever.

HUNT: It was all from her.

MARNIE: If you think about it, it’s such a shame that an artist of that size and talent can’t do what she wants. It’s pretty shitty, really. … Would that happen now? I mean, Gaga can do a jazz album or an operatic album and that’s cool, but…

HUNT: Yeah, I think [Aguilera] would get away with it now. … It just stuck me as very genuine, because she contacted us through management. You’d assume that this is something set up, but it wasn’t. It was from her. She’d basically got a list of artists that she listened to that she liked and said, “I want to work with them,” rather than asking the producer, “Can you approximate this? Make something that sounds like this? — which is how most people work, if we’re honest.

LPTV: Is it true that you considered giving Christina “Destroy Everything You Touch”?

HUNT: No, that’s not true. She was given an instrumental of “Ace of Hz”! Nobody knows that. But it didn’t get used.

LPTV: I’ve heard that Addison Rae is a Ladytron fan and wants to work with you now.

HUNT: Yeah, she approached us, but nothing happened.

LPTV: Were you surprised that a Gen Z, mainstream pop star like Addison was interested in collaborating?

MARNIE: Not really. [laughs]

HUNT: I mean, of course! But load of younger people got into us because in 2021, “Seventeen” viralized on TikTok. We didn’t lift a finger. It just happened. It was completely organic. We just observed it from afar, and I think that’s how she discovered us.

MARNIE: Basically, nieces and nephews and friends’ nieces or daughters would get in touch and say, “Oh my God, have you seen this??

HUNT: And then Steve, our manager, sent us an email going, “Do you have any idea what this is about? ” And it was just a screengrab of the spins of “Seventeen,” the Spotify streams. It was just tootling along at the bottom, and then it was just this vertical line off the graph. I said, “I think it might be the internet.”

LPTV: Yes, that was an interesting trend where it seemed like a lot of young women and girls were interpreting the “Seventeen” lyrics in a profound way.

HUNT: Yeah, a lot of personal interpretations. It was a medium for them to talk about their own lives. It was really quite serious, quite harrowing, some of it, to be honest.

LPTV: Since we were talking about artists you have worked with or have been approached by, do you guys have any dream collaborations?

HUNT: I feel like if we say it, it will not happen!

LPTV: I feel like if you say it and put it into the universe, it might!

MARNIE: I don’t know, because we’ve had things that were going to happen and I have told one person and it’s always fallen through!

LPTV: You don’t have confirm that’s happening, just if you could work with anyone. Like Cher or whoever.

HUNT: Let’s name someone impossible. Cher. Let’s just go with Cher.

AROYO: Barbra Streisand.

MARNIE: No, I don’t want Barbra Streisand! I don’t think her voice is any good anymore.

HUNT: Debbie Harry. … Actually, Andy Bell from Erasure said he wanted to work with us.

MARNIE: Pet Shop Boys would be cool. Or Chappell Roan.

HUNT: Let’s get a kind of “We Are the World “situation. We’ll just have everyone. Get Springsteen in there, Bob Dylan.

LPTV: You could call it Ladytron Aid.

HUNT: Yeah, it’s just our charity. It just comes to us.

LPTV: This wasn’t really a collaboration per se, but I was a fan of “Kylietron” — the mashup on John Peele’s show that was “Playgirl” with “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”

HUNT: I’d forgotten all about that, because it got a little bit overshadowed by Soulwax’s remix of “Seventeen” when they did a remix of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” like a rock version. We were in the studio in Los Feliz [in L.A.] recording [Light & Magic], and I sent the demo rough mix of “Seventeen” to David from Soulwax/2 Many DJs. And he was like, “Oh, this is an instant classic.” And I was like, “Could you reckon you could do a remix like a kind of rock version like you did with Kylie?” And about 24 hours later he sent it back. He just recorded it all, recorded the drums, everything ,and had this version. It basically sounded like Sonic Youth or something. So, I think all of that kind of erased the Kylietron thing from my memory, in the confusion.

LPTV: That was such a great clubbing era. I don’t know how you feel about this term… you’ve talked in the past about your feelings about Ladytron being lumped in with electroclash, but how do you feel about “indie sleaze”? Now people are calling everything from that era indie sleaze, but that term didn’t exist in the aughts.

HUNT: That’s the key thing. I think it’s good, because it’s reappraised that time. There’s a lot of incongruity, things that were not really related to each other that have actually been put into that. With electroclash, at the time we just hated being told we were something, after we’d been independent and doing things ourselves. … As soon as they said it was electroclash, we’d go, “Hold on, we didn’t agree to this!” It felt like we were being press-ganged onto a sinking ship.

AROYO: At the same time, [then Ladytron member] Reuben [Wu] and I DJed at that festival. [Electroclash] started out as a festival, basically; it was right after 9/11 and there was this kind of crazy, hedonistic atmosphere, and it was quite special, actually. But for us, it just very much felt like we were observers of someone else’s party. We didn’t feel like it was our scene. We were allowed in, but it wasn’t our thing.

HUNT: But we didn’t want [to be part of] someone else’s thing as well. We were pushed to the front of it, like we are the definitive electroclash band. One press trip just after we recorded Light & Magic, we were in the U.S. and every interview we did, we would be asked about this and we would deny that we were part of it. It became like our catchphrase: “We’re not electroclash!” I remember someone saying to me, “God, the way that you’re constantly denying you’re electroclash is just soooo electroclash!” We couldn’t escape it. It was like the Streisand Effect.

LPTV: There you go with another Barbra Streisand mention!

HUNT: But something changed. … What electroclash represented to the kids we met [on tour] was this portal to this imagined New York, this magical Berlin, magical Paris, magical London that they didn’t have access to. Once we started seeing it like that, it was actually a really positive moment. Our opinion of it changed. We never hated it. We just didn’t want to be called it. That was the problem.

AROYO: You look at it now, and I feel like it really did influence a lot of pop culture. It was probably like 10, 15 years ahead of its time. So now it kind of feels nice to be associated with it.

LPTV: I think kids now look at that period and think “Wow, that must have been so fun.” The only phones people had were Razrs, people weren’t filming everything, and everyone was going out of the house…

AROYO: Everyone looked wrecked the whole time!

HUNT: Yeah, it’s nostalgia for this kind of spontaneous, offline existence. There’s also definitely a nostalgia for the ’90s going on, for people who don’t remember it or weren’t born in the same way, just like when we were kids and it was like, “Oh, I wish we grew up in the ‘60s.” I guess it’s no different, but it’s very generationally difficult to perceive how this looks and feels to a younger person, having experienced it.

LPTV: I do think electroclash was an important movement. It was very queer-positive, sex-positive, a lot of women. But the backlash was so brutal. It was almost like what happened with “Disco Sucks” in 1979.

AROYO: I think that there was a little bit of that. I mean, the British press does have quite a sharp edge as well. There was a malice to it. I think that the queer sort of thing, when you look back on it, that was definitely an element. But there were comedy shows that satirized it. … It was an easy thing to satirize. It was perceived to be a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.

HUNT: The Mighty Boosh’s Ladytron satire was a direct one. That was quite fun. When I saw it, I was laughing my head off.

LPTV: I feel like you’ve really made it if The Mighty Boosh parodies you! Where can I see this?

HUNT: I think the episode is called “Jazz.” They form an electro band and their song is” I’m Electro Boy, You’re Electro Girl.” Vince has an asymmetric mustache, and as I’d only just grown a mustache at that point, and said, “This is a direct attack on me!”

LPTV: Were you guys happy about this spoof, or were you insulted?

HUNT: I was just worried that no one would know it was about us. It was a kind of milieu stuff.

LPTV: Well, obviously, despite the electroclash backlash or anyone thinking you were a flash in the pan, that didn’t happen. To what do you attribute Ladytron’s longevity?

MARNIE: I think songwriting.

AROYO: Persistence.

HUNT: Kind of involuntary creativity. What else are you supposed to do? Making albums that are designed to be listened to, because a lot of records are not designed to be listened to anymore.

LPTV: What do you mean by that?

HUNT: Well, just there are records made to monetize social media presence. There’s a lot of that, and we don’t really do any of that. The records are made to be listened to, and I think that counts as something people appreciate. We’ve never followed any particular trend, or we’ve probably done the opposite of what people expected a few times — like Witching Hour, especially — and yet, we survived. We’ve survived labels going bankrupt, being shut down, all of this other stuff, and here we are.

AROYO: Also, it was interesting today that quite a few people who came here for the signing were here because their parents listened to us. It’s a sound that’s maybe come back around in the ether as well. It’s a sound that was alien maybe 20 years ago and was just us, and now it’s kind of almost everywhere, in some shape or form.

HUNT: It’s funny when you describe the sound and just in its raw components in a kind of unscientific way. I was at this bar in Sao Paulo, where I live, and the waiter was asking me what my band sounded like. I started to explain it: “It’s kind of like electronic, female vocals, drum machine,” whatever. And he says, “Oh, like Madonna.” I just kind of went, “Yeah, actually, that’s enough for me. I’m just going to say we sound like Madonna now.” Why not?

LPTV: It’s not a bad description. I’d take it as a compliment.

HUNT: I used to say “New Order with female vocals” to taxi drivers back in the day.

LPTV: Does it trip you out that you guys have been a band for this long?

MARNIE: Yes. But it’s a good thing, because obviously that means you’ve got fresh blood listening to you. On the other hand, it does make you realize how long you’ve been going and you’re no longer [young].

AROYO: To me, it’s nice that the music is still relevant to a completely different generation, who’ve grown up in such a different way to the way people were when the songs were written. It’s like a Jurassic Era.

Six years ago, smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, teen siblings Matt and Issey Cartlidge began busking in London — doing Kinks and Libertines covers “out of necessity,” because there was nowhere else to play due to lockdown restrictions.

“We’d go out to Brixton, Soho, around Oxford Street, and there was a load of protests at the time, either anti-lockdown ones or anti-ID,” Issey, now age 20, tells Licorice Pizza’s LPTV. “We’d go out on the street and play all the rallies, like play ‘I Predict a Riot’ by the Kaiser Chiefs or [the Sex Pistols’] ‘Anarchy in the U.K.,’ things were fitting. And then as soon as everything opened up again, we just said yes to every opportunity. And everything led to something else.”

That journey has ultimately led the Cartlidges, now better known as punk revivalists the Molotovs, from the streets of London Town to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip — where they’ve immediately acclimated to the rock ‘n’ roll city by visiting the Chateau Marmont, Viper Room, and Rainbow Bar & Grill before their big show at the Roxy — and over the hill to Studio City’s famous Licorice Pizza record store, for their big LPTV interview.

And along the way, they’ve won the respect and praise of many of their heroes — including the actual Sex Pistols, with whom they played Royal Albert Hall at a Teen Cancer Trust benefit (the day before Matt’s 17th birthday), and Teen Cancer Trust co-founder Roger Daltrey, who wrote the Molotovs a personal thank-you letter. Later, Pete Townsnend even gave Matt the best birthday present ever: a Rickenbacker guitar.

The massive buzz about the Molotovs being punk’s great blonde hope and Britpop’s new saviors has — as is often the case with the U.K.’s mercurial music press — generated an inevitable backlash. (“Get a Life,” the opening track on the band’s spunky, punky debut album Wasted on Youth, is seemingly an open letter to their haters.) Matt, bristling with all the confidence of a now-18-year-old rock star, claims, “I don’t feel the weight of past heroes on my shoulders” when asked about the pressure that comes with endorsements from rock icons like not only the Pistols and the Who, but also Debbie Harry, Paul Weller, Iggy Pop, Yungblud, and the Damned. However, he admits that a well-meaning Channel 4 feature hyping up the Molotovs as “bringing back gigging in real life” for Generation Z “did loads of bad, actually. People spun it like we’d said that, and they were like, ‘What the fuck do they think they are?’”

photo: Nick Benoy

While Channel 4’s headline was obviously an exaggeration, the Molotovs do deserve some of that credit. In an age of algorithms, they have built their fanbase the good old-fashioned way, through relentless touring, with more than 600 gigs already under their studded belts. And their early busking days helped them hone their live skills. “It was a really good test, because you’ve got to grab people’s attention really quickly; you’ve got maybe about five seconds when they’re walking past,” explains Matt.

“We got rid of a lot of fear as well,” says Issey. “You’re not on a stage, you’re not on a pedestal — you’re at the same physical level with people. To make fools of yourself out on the street, you had to be completely delusional and so into it at the time. And I think that’s kind of translated to how we perform now. There really are no inhibitions when we play.”

“We’re not delusional anymore,” Matt grins.

As London’s stay-at-home orders eased a few years ago, the Molotovs began to build a buzz on the club circuit — Issey smilingly recalls impressionable young fans turning up to their gigs dressed in the band’s signature Mod style, which was a promising sign. Eventually, the siblings used their platform and launched an initiative called Youth Explosion to support struggling post-pandemic venues.

“We wanted to set up these all-ages gigs, really accessible with £3 tickets, just to get a kind of new generation into music, because they weren’t exposed to it. They’d never been to a gig before,” Issey explains. “We’d curate the lineup with other bands on the scene, which there were a lot of and still are; there’s some great guitar bands in London at the moment.”

“We got a lot of younger fans because they were at the right age when lockdown was [happening], where they weren’t doing much anyway. They didn’t go out, and they weren’t of pub-going age,” says Matt. “So, now that they’re out of [lockdown] and they’ve seen us coming up, they’re of that age where they can go see gigs. And I’m really proud of that, because I’ve been in their shoes at that age. … It’s a nice feeling, because I’ve always been the baby of all the bands that I’ve seen or been around or been on a bill with; I’ve always been the youngest one. And for the first time in history, I’m not the youngest one anymore! And I feel like such nonce even being around them.” (Matt, still clearly too young, too stubborn, or too punk-rock to be media-trained, then adds quickly: “I’m not, by the way. I feel a bit weird having to clear that up.”)

“I think part of our success has been because people have really taken to us as individuals, through the gigs and feeling a kind of loyalty, and from the people that they meet in those [rock venues’] rooms. You can’t get that kind of sense of community through online and social media,” says Issey. “And that can’t die, those sort of third spaces.”

It was at one all-ages benefit gig at a historic West London third space, Bush Hall — with all proceeds going to the struggling grassroots music venue, which was in danger of having to close — that the Molotovs made their first connection with the Sex Pistols, when Pistols drummer Paul Cook hopped onstage for an impromptu jam.

“I saw him in the crowd while the support band were playing, and I just said to him, ‘Oh right, Paul, are you getting up for a tune?’” Matt chucklingly recalls. “And he was like, ‘Nah, I’ll leave this to the kids.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, all right, everyone’s got to be a punter sometimes.’ But towards the end of the set… I just saw that he missed it, that he missed this feeling of all these young people jumping and going mad, that excitement and unity in a room of youth and arrogance. And he just went, ‘Yeah, we’ll do “God said the Queen.’” I mean, he knew it!”

The Molotovs’ rise comes at a troubled time in British history, a post-Brexit age, that has obvious parallels to the bleak period of unemployment and unrest that fired up the Pistols in the late 1970s — so the connection between the two bands, despite their generation gap, makes sense. The Molotovs have “a “bit more hope” than the Pistols, who once famously declared that England had no future — “I mean, we think there is a future, and we think we can contribute to that,” Matt stresses — but Matt also acknowledges that “we’re in a sort of weird time in the U.K. at the moment, and I think in the world. … We’re definitely in a decline at the moment, but always in history, I think great art and great music comes out of that.”

When the Cartlidges — who, perhaps unsurprisingly considering their impeccably peroxided style, are the children of hairdressers, and resent how blue-collar jobs are still “frowned upon” and seen as “stupid” and “lesser-than” in Britain’s “entrenched” class system — are asked about the greatest concern about their young fanbase, Issey answers: “Everyone wants the same thing, which is stability. Young people want job stability. They want to be financially independent. They want to have friends and a community identity. This is all the sort of stuff that no matter where you are politically, it rings true. We want to champion that through our songs and through our gigs as well, and give people that kind of space and find something to energize them.”

“I think just money. Money more than anything,” Matt answers more bluntly.

“And isolation as well,” Issey adds, as she and her brother reflect on the challenges that Gen Z, who came of age during COVID, face today. “I think a lot of people are isolated and feel hopeless and helpless. … There is definitely a pessimism at the moment and that kind of same [’70 punk-era] nihilism, and you see that in voter turnout, especially for young people. But I think there’s some great movements at the moment in the U.K., and I think music is driving it forward and providing hope to people that they do have a power. And it’s [up to] them to start enacting it, having agency to go and do things.”

photo: Derek Bremner

“But there is a whole lot of [apathetic young people who think] ‘what’s the point?’ as well. “What’s the point in registering to vote?’ or whatever,” Matt interjects. “My best mate doesn’t vote… and I think that’s such a lazy view to have. It’s like, you might not have much faith in the system, but you’ve gotta have fucking some, because otherwise, what else have you got? What else are you doing to make it better? … At least believe in bad and worse.”

“Totally,” Issey agrees. “That laziness will be the killer of us all.”

Matt and Issey are obviously the polar opposite of lazy. And while not all of Wasted on Youth (which draws from the old-school influences gleaned from their stylish father’s record collection, like the Jam, Boomtown Rats, Buzzcocks, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Specials, and Small Faces, but also brings to mind NME-championed “the” bands of the indie aughts, like the Fratellis, Subways, Futureheads, Wombats, Kooks, and Cribs) is overtly political, they do audaciously describe the album as a “youth manifesto.”

For instance, one Wasted on Youth track, “Daydreaming,” blasts Britain’s education system and the myth being sold to Gen Z that getting a “flashy degree” will guarantee a bright future. (Matt found Career Day “fucking useless” when he was in school, because counselors always advised him to attend university in case his Plan A, music, didn’t work out. “What about all these people that go to university? Do you tell them, ‘Maybe you should learn an instrument, just in fucking case’?”) However, “Newsflash,” a protest song that dates back to the Molotov’s circa-2020 roots, is the album’s boldest statement.

“It’s actually not a song that really gets talked about a lot on the album, so I’m glad you brought it up — a lot of people just talk about the singles and ‘Geraldine’ really, because they go, ‘Who’s Geraldine?’” says Matt, the band’s primary songwriter. “‘Newsflash,’ that’s a sort of anti-lockdown song. … When I was writing it, it was so scary to realize how compliant people were, and how they’ll go forth with anything that the government says.”

“[That song is about] how disproportionate [Britain’s pandemic stay-at-home policies were] on young people,” Issey elaborates. “They were left out of the conversation, and now they’ve been left behind.”

“I mean, in your formative social years, that’s when you learn to actually interact with people,” says Matt. “So many young people are starved of that experience and those teachings, and they won’t recover from that, never will, because they’re too far gone and they’re socially inept now.”

Going back to the Molotovs’ origin story, obviously the COVID-19 pandemic was a creative and productive time for the siblings. But when they took to the streets to perform, Matt recalls, “We had trouble with the police. … We had neighbors calling the police on us for playing music and things like that. Once we got asked [to pay] a 10,000 pound fine by these police officers — they said we were ‘inciting a social gathering.’”

“We showed up and played, but we were going to pack up and go and then we did one last song, and [the cops] got really arsey because we said to the crowd, ‘This is our police! This is what they’re focusing on!’” Issey explains. “And they did the fucking Colombo, came back and were like, “Oh, we’re going to give you a fine.’” (Matt jokes that he instead offered to give the officers the 50 quid’s worth of tips in his guitar case; in true punk-rock style, the Molotovs never actually ponied up the £10,000.)

The Molotovs have maintained that rebellious sprit throughout their burgeoning career. Another track on Wasted on Youth, an album released not on a major label but through Marshall Amplifications’ independently distributed imprint, is “Rhythm of Yourself” — which is about how industry big-wigs once advised the band to tweak their image and sound to better fit in with the pop marketplace.

“It was a medium-wig, I think. …. ‘Cunt’ is a good word for him,” Matt quips of the song’s shady “small man” who tried to sign the Molotovs. “He presented us with a contract which was so fucking insulting and scary; it was like, ‘You’re mad if you ever thought we’d agree to anything like that!’ It was a really eye-opening experience, that this is what the music industry can be like when you’re so young. I must have been 14 or 13 when I wrote that song, and it was like, ‘Is that really what you can do to a pair of kids?’

“The fact that they’d happily tie you off in a contract for 15 years, but they don’t like anything about what you do. They just think you’re good models for it, which I think is so insulting,” Matt continues, getting more riled up. “It was like, ‘Change your clothes, change your face and hair, change the guitars you play and what you sound like.’ They were trying to get us to get all grungy, getting baggy jeans and saying, ‘Oh, we’ll get you a sponsorship with Vans.’ I don’t want a fucking sponsorship with Vans!”

“It’s a song about a personal experience, or inspired by Matthew’s personal experience in the music industry, but it’s also just a wider claim — for people to march the beat of their own drum, dance to the rhythm of yourself,” adds Issey.

And so, the Molotovs have continued to defy expectations and the odds. They’re especially proud that they went to No. 3 in the U.K. charts with a physical, vinyl release. “It just shows that there’s still the consumer base there for this sort of stuff, and people are still very much interested in vinyl; it’s not dead yet, and we should acknowledge that,” Issey declares. “We love to champion physical media. This is what cultivates a scene. This is what brings people together.”

photo: Derek Bremner

The Molotovs have already begun work on their sophomore album, but as they continue to draw accolades from both their peers and predecessors, they have a few dream collaborations in mind. Matt says he’d love to work with fellow bottle-blonde Sabrina Carpenter (with his wry and dry British sense of humor, it’s unclear if he’s joking, but that would probably be awesome), and Issey wants to work with The The’s Matt Johnson, one of her favorite songwriters that she think would be “a very interesting person to just even just talk with.” But the collab that seems most likely to happen one day is with Matt’s early hero, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who is reportedly already a big Molotovs fan.

Matt almost got his chance years ago, when security guards at a Green Day concert almost picked him to come onstage to jam on guitar, but instead invited another audience member with (hard as this may be to believe) a “better haircut.” Matt was “gutted at the time” and found it “hard to enjoy the rest of the gig,” but is now relieved to not be known as the viral kid who “got picked by Billy Joe to come onstage and play one cover song. … I’d never get fucking away from it!” And now, as a rock star in his own right, with a fantastic coiffure, he seems ready for the opportunity.

“The closest we got is [Armstrong] played a pub in Covent Garden called the Marquee, which we’re at all the time. You can see in all the videos, Matt’s bleached-blond head just outside the window, bobbing up and down, just wishing to get in, pressed right up against the glass,” laughs Issey. “And while [Green Day] were coming in, [Armstrong] gave [Matt] a little nod of acknowledgement. He definitely saw him.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. He sort of pointed, like he knew who he were,” Matt chuckles. “If he sees this [interview], hopefully he can make it happen.”

Regardless, the future is obviously bright for the Molotovs, who are going to keep calm and carry on with their vision. “I’m not going to tailor [my music] to an American audience; I can only write about what I see and my environment,” Matt asserts.

“As long as we make something we’re extremely proud of… if we can make something that we think is extremely poignant or touching on our feelings about the times we’re in now, and people relate to that and connect with it, then I think we’ve done our job,” Issey states proudly. “It doesn’t matter what then the press says about it, because we know that we’ve done what we’re here to do.”

Watch Matt and Issey Cartlidge’s full LPTV interview in the video at the top of this page.

Josh Klinghoffer may be best known for as the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers from 2007 to 2019, but he is also singularly known as the one-man band Pluralone. And his career has been (pardon the pun) more red-hot than ever. He’s been on a major creative tear since exiting the Peppers six years ago — touring and/or recording with Pearl Jam, Elton John and Brandi Carlile, Redd Kross, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Morrissey, and Jane’s Addiction, not to mention releasing three new Pluralone albums, including his latest and fourth overall, A Drop in the Ocean.

Even before Klinghoffer broke off on his own in 2019, he’d already accomplished more than most musicians could ever dream of, getting his start at age 17 in Bob Forrest’s band the Bicycle Thief, playing with Sparks and Gnarls Barkley, and becoming the youngest Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee (at the time of the 2012 ceremony) at age 32. But interestingly, as he drops A Drop in the Ocean, he feels like he no longer has all the time in the world to pursue his passion.

“I’m now closer to 50 than I ever have been. And that’s shocking to me,” the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter tells LPTV, sitting at Licorice Pizza Records in the San Fernando Valley where he grew up. “I feel like my life has always just been one upward slant toward creative mania. I beat myself up constantly about not getting enough done or not doing enough or not focusing enough on one thing and sort of diversifying my attention. I feel like it’s just I’m trying to focus and hone myself. I’m hoping it’s just going up and up and up. I hope I haven’t experienced a dip!”

On the contrary, while Klinghoffer still admittedly struggles with self-confidence and even hearing the sound of his own voice despite all his accomplishments, that newfound sense of urgency drove him to make his best and most personal Pluralone album yet — as he returned to his roots for A Drop in the Ocean, just himself and an acoustic guitar. One track on the record, “Give,” even dates way back to a “fork in the road” moment in his life, when he was “still just some kid” and considered pursuing a solo career more proactively, before his life obviously veered in another direction.

“There was a period where I stopped playing with Bob and something happened where I was able to record basically an album’s worth of stuff, uninterrupted. So, I have this [old, unreleased] record that I made on my eight-track, and with that music, I think I was planning on starting a whole new life,” Klinghoffer says of the long-ago sessions from which “Give,” a song he couldn’t “get out of his system” and recorded several times, originated. “If I could go back in time, now that I’ve experienced everything I experienced, I would perhaps go back to that moment and maybe just whisper into the ear of younger me or something. I don’t know. Or maybe I would just watch and get a real complete understanding of exactly why I didn’t pursue that harder, maybe.”

In the wildly entertaining and wide-ranging video above, and the edited-for-brevity-and-clarity Q&A below, Klinghoffer discusses Valley/Hollywood life in the ‘90s; the (unfortunately fleetingly) hopeful time in which A Drop in the Ocean was made; his love for Elliott Smith, T. Rex, and Gorillaz; the new song he wrote for dear departed friend Taylor Hawkins; and his various superstar collaborations, including Bonfire of Teenagers, the mythical lost Morrissey album that still has yet to come out.

LPTV: We’re very excited to have you visit Licorice Pizza Records, because you are L.A. and Valley adjacent royalty! We’re right by Laurel Canyon Blvd., the street that would lead us Valley kids “over the hill” to all the Hollywood clubs where you got your start. I wonder if you feel this way, but when I grew up in the 818, I did not think the Valley was cool. But now I have a bit of Valley pride. Do you feel the same way?

JOSH KLINGHOFFER: Exactly the same way! I certainly didn’t think it was cool growing up there, but mostly just because it was far. There was nothing going on.

How did you used to get over the hill to play your gigs, or shop on Melrose, or do all the other Hollywood fun stuff?

I got my driver’s license the very first second I was legally allowed to do that. I did it on my 16th birthday, the minute the DMV opened… and then I made it home in time on that October morning to see the O.J. verdict read. That was my 16th birthday.

Oh, wow. With your new driver’s license, you could have been on the same freeway next to that white Bronco! Although I guess that was a couple months before.

Yeah, the day [O.J. Simpson] was on that freeway being chased by the police, I had a gig at Mancini’s. Do you remember Mancini’s? There was deep Valley. … And I was late. I was like, “Who cares?” Something in me told myself, “This doesn’t matter. I got to watch this [car chase]. This is history.”

You have deep L.A. roots. I mentioned the Bicycle Thief — you were a teenager when you joined that band with Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster. Was that your first band?

I had a band or two with friends in school or whatever, but they don’t really count. Actually, before that, my first music that I played outside of the Valley going into Hollywood was with Shepherd [Stevenson] from Pigmy Love Circus.

I remember Pigmy Love Circus. Didn’t they become Orgy? [Editor’s note: No, that was Electric Love Hogs.]

They could have been. Danny [Carey] from Tool played drums in Pigmy Love Circus, Green Jelly, and Tool at the time. So, through a friend of mine who was a bit older than me, he went to CSUN film school with Shepherd and he said, “Oh, there’s this guy, Shep.” I think Shepherd was his late thirties at the time. I was 15. I started playing with Bob when I was 17

We don’t need necessarily talk very much about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but what I remember from that era was when bands like Pigmy Love Circus started to become big in Hollywood, I kind of saw the RHCP effect. All the bands that had been dressed all hair-metal before were wearing cargos shorts and no shirts, and were starting to look a little more bro-y. And I remember being like, “They’re all trying to be like the Peppers!”

Yeah, I don’t know if it was one-sided or not, but there was maybe a little animosity between those two bands, anyway. Or there was a rude song written.

You’ve also played in Jane’s Addiction — you filled in for Dave Navarro recently. There was a time in L.A. when Jane’s, RHCP, Thelonious Monster, Fishbone, Mary’s Danish, and other bands were ushering in this changing of the guard. People talk about Nirvana as being the band that made the hair metal go away, but in L.A. it was those bands. Do you remember that transitional time?

Well, I was a little young to watch it happen firsthand, but I watched it happen on MTV and on the radio. Because I when I was younger, I was into some of those bands — Guns N’ Roses being an L.A. band. I was really into them. And then suddenly there was a cultural shift, and Motley Crue suddenly…

…started wearing shorts.

Yeah, I saw it happen sort of overnight. I missed all the amazing stuff that was going on here by a couple years, but I’ve been so lucky in my life to be able to jump on and somehow latch onto a few coattails, to the point where you’re calling me “Valley royalty”!

Since you mentioned Guns N’ Roses, it must have been a cool moment for you when were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the same night as GNR. At that time, you held the record for being the youngest inductee at. You’ve since been usurped.

Yes, by Ilan Rubin with Nine Inch Nails.

How many months or years did Ilan beat your record by?

Not much. I think he was 31 or something. … I think I was 32.

OK. But back to that Rock Hall night when RHCP and GNR got in, Axl Rose didn’t show up. It was before the Guns N’ Roses reunion.

They didn’t know if Axl was going to show right until the last minute. I remember being… somewhere in Cleveland. I went to a theater and watched — they didn’t want anybody to watch it, but we listened to GNR practice, because either they had another singer [Myles Kennedy] for a couple songs, or they thought Axl was going to show up. So, the whole band was ready to go and they were rehearsing, and me and [RHCP drummer] Chad [Smith] were listening.

From all the bands you’ve worked with, whether it’s the Peppers, Jane’s, or even Redd Kross, knowing how brothers be, you know firsthand that band situations can be fraught. It must be kind of nice way to do things on your own as Pluralone.

Yes. I definitely have the tendency sometimes to argue with myself and be indecisive, and then even rude to myself and abusive.

Aw, don’t be so hard on yourself!

Yeah, I know, but people are just completely ridiculous and unreasonable sometimes. But yeah, it’s fun to, at the end of the day, just have something to show for my choices.

The first time I interviewed you was when the 2020 Pluralone record came out. It was an interesting time. It was right before COVID, and very shortly after you had left the Chili Peppers. And you had just joined Pearl Jam and were supposed to go on tour with them, but then the pandemic happened. And Pearl Jam, to their credit, were one of the first bands to realize that touring was not a good idea then. So, then you were in lockdown for a while and you recorded I Don’t Feel Well. And that came out, I believe, during COVID. This is your fourth Pluralone album now, and each album has been made under very circumstances. What was going on during the making of this one? You’ve talked about how you made it during what seemed like a hopeful time, and now maybe it’s..

Less than? [laughs] For this one, a lot of these songs were born or written or begun during that sort of bright time towards right where we are now, spring of 2021, when we were sort of opening again and we thought maybe the pandemic [was over]. It was like pre-Omicron.

What was the other COVD variant? Delta?

Yeah. I think we got up pretty high in that alphabet! But there was this kind of sunny period. I went to New York. and some of the stuff was written there because it was like, “We’re opening again.” And I drove cross-country.

“We’re all vaccinated and the vaccination totally will work!”

Yeah, it was definitely around that time because I remember not being able to leave town until I got my second vaccination. So, there was a bit of a hopeful kind of feeling in the air. And then I flew back from that New York trip to play with Eddie [Vedder] at the “Vax Live” show [at SoFi Stadium on May 2, 2021].

That was the opening of SoFi, and I think one of the first really big shows in L.A., after all the stuff we’d been through.

It was the first live show at SoFi. It was myself and Eddie and these great brothers [White Reaper’s Nick and Sam Wilkerson], and it was like last-minute. I think I knew about it a week before, and I flew out and it was great.

Was it weird to be back onstage in a huge stadium after pretty much being in your house for like a year?

Yes. And everything was still a little funny; there was still probably some testing and some masks and whatever. I can’t remember how long after that everything kind of shut down again. I feel like that autumn, it got really intense again.

It was definitely weird time. So, I guess a lot of A Drop in the Ocean actually predates your second and third albums, in terms of when they were actually written. How does it feel to revisit songs that you made during a time when you were feeling like the world was a compassionate place, and to now release them in 2026?

Well, luckily, I always leave a bit sort of undone or unfinished until I really commit to it, until I put the vocal down. I’m sure I tweaked a little bit of the writing and sort of adapted them to whatever the world feels like now. I don’t know, I think the fact that there’s a hopefulness to these songs… well, I actually don’t know if it sounds like that, because after I played [the album] to someone recently, they were like, “Jesus!” So, I don’t know if it actually sounds hopeful! It was a hopeful time when a lot of the songs were born, but maybe I kind of dressed it up in 2026 clothing. It has my sort of overarching dichotomy, which is: I think this is a shitshow that we’re living amongst, but somehow there’s a hopefulness. Because if not, you can’t get out of bed, really.

I don’t think the record sounds hopeless. But there is a certain melancholy to it.

It’s a bit more direct. It’s a lot of acoustic songs. I think it’s just overall hard for me to sound happy and hopeful, really. But I think there’s a sweetness to some of it.

I assume you’re like a big Elliott Smith fan? Because I hear a lot of Elliott influence on this record.

Yeah. That’s very apparent on this. Sometimes I can’t even listen to him. I’ll have to go through long periods of not even putting him on, because it’ll just come out in my [music]. Like, everything I’m playing sounds like him.

I’m not saying in a way you’re ripping Elliott off or anything, just that I pick up on that vibe. Have you ever been told that your vocals sound like Marc Bolan, particularly In his Tyrannosaurus Rex folky era?

No, but that’s lovely. Chad and I made a T. Rex cover 7-inch where we did “Jeepster” for Record Store Day.

I’d never noticed it until this record, for some reason. There’s a certain trebly quality to your voice.

Well, I love that you caught that. I love [Bolan] and I love his singing. When we did that 7-inch, I was actually free to completely impersonate him. I’ve always had a hard time with my voice. There’s a lot of the times I can’t stand it, but I have a good ear and I’m a good mimic, so I can sound like lots of different people. But when it comes to sounding like myself, maybe this is a deeper personal philosophical kind of gap that I have, but sounding like myself sometimes is hard — and especially then liking what I hear back. I just sang karaoke the other night with some friends at a friend’s house. I went from Geto Boys to Nick Cave to Radiohead to the Beastie Boys. I was just doing impressions of all these people.

Did you ever play with Elliott Smith, by the way? He used to live in L.A.

Now that I think of it, this was a very Guinness-heavy time for me, but I think I played drums once at Largo with Jon Brion — I used to sort of weasel my way into Jon’s live shows once in a while — and I think Elliott was onstage with us once when I was playing drums. Did I make that up?

It’s kind of cool that you’ve had such a storied career that you can barely recall that. For some people being onstage with Elliott Smith would the highlight of their life, but for you, it’s just another night in L.A.! But to go back to something you just said, why don’t you like your voice?

It’s just always been the case.

Is that why you normally aren’t the frontman?

No, I think that’s just … Maybe, yeah. I mean, probably.

So, going back to this album, in your press release you said that for the first time in your life, you feel like you don’t have all the time in the world to make a record — that there was a sense of urgency to this.

Oh, I think I’m referring to the fact that I’m now closer to 50 than I ever have been. And that’s shocking to me. I mean, I still look like a child a lot of the time. And I still live very much like a child. So, for the first time, I’m sort of thinking about how many more records or how many more songs I get to record and release, and how much more of this I get to do. It’s the first time I ever thought of that.

Did that mindset affect any lyrics on A Drop in the Ocean?

Well, there’s one song where I’m talking about this very nostalgic lyrical content, “I Don’t Want to Let You Go.” And there’s many things that I don’t want to let go. The  last time I think you and spoke… I ran into you at a Gorillaz show. Thet played their full record [The Mountain] that night. I did a complete 180 on that record, and it was from how much I loved that show. And I listened to it nonstop for a couple weeks after that. I watched a bunch of press that [Gorillaz founders] Damon [Albarn] and Jamie [Hewlett] did, and they were talking about being anti-nostalgists or something like that. I can’t help a lot of time be nostalgic for a different time when life was less shit. And I mean that generally, just like when there was less social media and less distance between people, I think.

I think it’s OK to be nostalgic, as long as it doesn’t go to the extremes of that Boomer mentality, thinking everything sucks now and everything was better back in the day.

Which I’m guilty of, very much! [laughs]

If you could go back in a time machine to any year or age, any point within your lifetime, and freeze yourself in that halcyon era, what you would do?

It’s not even halcyon. There was a period where I stopped playing with Bob and something happened where I was able to record basically an album’s worth of stuff, uninterrupted. So, I have this record that I made on my eight-track, and with that music, I think I was planning on starting a whole new life. And it didn’t happen, because I started going on tour with people, which was an amazing experience. I can’t say that it’s something that I would’ve preferred to have done, but to answer your question, if I could go back in time, now that I’ve experienced everything I experienced, I would perhaps go back to that moment and maybe just whisper into the ear of younger me or something. I don’t know. Or maybe I would just watch and get a real complete understanding of exactly why I didn’t pursue that harder, maybe.

But you have your own thing now, so you did get to do it eventually.

Yes. And one of the songs on this album, “Give,” dates back to kind of that era. I mean, it’s so old. Every record I’ve made, I’ve always snuck one song on that’s just ancient for me that stuck around, that I can’t get out of my system. And this one was a funny one, because I recorded it four or five times — just made different demos of it, sang it with different lyrics. And finally, it exists.

Do you still have those eight-track recordings? Why not just put them out?

Well, they’re a little underconfident. When I hear them, I hear the potential. But especially vocally, I was really just being very un-enunciative, if that’s a word.

You had diction issues?

No, just confidence. It just sounds very underconfident. It was August of 2001 that I think I recorded this stuff. It was right before 9/11, because I had some lyric on there that was like “The towers you built, knocked over with pride,” or something like that. And I remember a couple of months after that, I was like, “Whoa.” … If I would’ve released my song in August of 2001 with that lyric, I would’ve seemed like a poetic genius.

Or conspiracy theorists might’ve had their way with you! Who knows? But I think it’s interesting that when I asked the time-machine question that there was this whole sliding-door thing — that maybe you could have had a different life. But because you didn’t do that, and you went on to have all these amazing adventures playing with not only the Chili Peppers, but with Pearl Jam, Elton John, Sparks, Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop. You’ve played with the biggest of the big, entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, played the world’s biggest stages. So, I am surprised that was your answer, because then none of that would’ve happened.

And it’s only because of that, because when one looks at their life and wonders if anything could have been different, I sort of pinpoint it to that moment, because I still have those recordings. That was the real fork in the road for me. None of the things you just mentioned had transpired. I was still just some kid.

We were talking about Gorillaz’ The Mountain, and that whole album is about loss and death. There’s a song on A Drop in the Ocean about Taylor Hawkins, who died in 2022. I know that Chad was very good friends with Taylor. I assume you knew him too.

I wouldn’t say I knew him well, but I knew him. I just realized when he left us that I had known him for a long time, because I met him in 2000 when I was playing in the Bicycle Thief and then the Foo Fighters were playing next and then the Chili Peppers. I did three weeks of touring like that, and I was around him every day on that tour and we would just always talk in the hall and stuff like that. Then as the years went on, and in particular the last couple of weeks before he died, Eddie Vedder’s band the Earthlings were on tour… the last show of our tour with Eddie in San Diego, Taylor was on FaceTime backstage and kind of laughing and joking with everybody. And that was not very long before [he died]. I had a couple of long phone conversations with him in the year or two before. Once he was gone, I just saw a lot of kind of weird stuff floating around, just like lots of accusations or darkness around something that was already kind of heartbreaking. … There was just a cloud around the whole thing. It kept amplifying the sadness around it. Obviously, when someone has such an ending, I just can’t help but wonder or hope beyond hope that they knew how much they were loved. So, I was sitting with the guitar one day, and it’s not like me to write a song so specifically about a person or about a topical thing that’s just happened. … Writing a song about a person that had just died felt kind of like new territory for me. But I kept on with it, and those lyrics kind of came pretty quickly.

The title of that song is “I Hope You Knew.” I assume you mean, “I hope you knew you were loved.” I think Taylor knew.

I hope so. I mean, it’s more for just that idea. I hope everybody knows that they’re loved in general, because they most likely are by someone. I mean, I hope he knew, but more broadly, I hope everyone knows that they’re loved by someone, and if they’re not, or if they don’t know, that they either learn that they are or find love. … That was my hope with the song. No matter how much you might be told that you are loved or experience warmth and love in your day-to-day, you may forget it briefly. I feel like if you know that and you really know that all the time, hopefully you don’t put yourself in those situations. Hopefully.

Do you believe in some kind of afterlife?

I would say probably not, because I feel like at the end of the day, once our brain shuts off, the whole system shuts down. But at the same time, our body and the impact that we’ve left on other people, or the work we’ve left behind or the music or anything, that lives on. I’m not sure if the dead live on in any way or come back in any way; if they did, I would love it, but I have no idea. But again, people really leave their mark on the people around them.

You were talking about feeling like you don’t have all the time in the world, but you’ve been on a real creative tear in the past six years. You’ve put out multiple Pluralone albums. You’ve played with so many big artists. Have you been feeling an artistic resurgence now that you’re kind of a free agent? You can play by yourself, you can play with whoever you want, and it seems like there’s a huge demand for your talents.

I hope so! … I feel like my life has always just been one upward kind of slant toward creative mania. I beat myself up constantly about not getting enough done or not doing enough or not focusing enough on one thing and sort of diversifying my attention. I feel like it’s just I’m trying to focus and hone myself. I’m hoping it’s just going up and up and up. I hope I haven’t experienced a dip!

Oh, I don’t think you are.

OK, good. Yeah, I’m trying to just do it nonstop. That’s all I do.

I’d love to do a little lightning round of all the other projects you’ve been a part of. You’re part of an unofficial new “Wrecking Crew” with Chad Smith, Duff McKagan, and Andrew Watt. This wrecking crew played on the last two Ozzy Osbourne records. I want to know about that experience, because when Ozzy passed last year, we all were devastated, but what a way to go — because that guy, unlike most rock stars, got his flowers. He got to perform for beloved fans in his hometown of Birmingham one last time, just 17 days before he died.

See, that song that I kind of wrote for Taylor [Hawkins], I wouldn’t necessarily write that song for Ozzy. Because he strikes me as someone who knew. ….Chad always just had new recordings from those sessions and he would them and he seemed very excited. That was when I was just getting to know Andrew, and I was just really excited for all those guys. There seemed to be a real energy to what they were doing. And then 2021 rolls around and I’m sure we could talk about it a little bit, but as you well know, the world hasn’t heard the Morrissey album that we did…

Oh, of course I was going to ask about that!

That was the first record that I did with Andrew and Chad.

You’re talking about the Morrissey album that still hasn’t come out, Bonfire of Teenagers. Morrissey skipped straight to Makeup Is a Lie and did not put out Bonfire of Teenagers. But there was a lot of hype about the Bonfire record because it had you, Flea, Chad, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Pop. I’ve heard snippets of it, and it was very rockin’, much more rockin’ than you would expect from him. Why was it shelved?

Well, you know the way the world is now. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say anything, but he has just begun a relationship with Sire Records and put out the Makeup Is a Lie album. And since he has a label now, we’ll see.

What was it like working with him?

He would come in at the end of the night. It was incredible for all of us, an incredible process, because we were sort of giving carte blanche to do with his songs whatever we wanted. He had demo versions, and because that was sort of during COVID still, no one was traveling to studios or flying in band members or whatever. So, it was this weird moment where him and Andrew sort of got together and he said, “OK, well, just see what you can do.” And basically, we started one by one recording these songs that he had demoed, and he would show up at sort of dinnertime, 6 or 7PM, and he would, for the first time, hear his songs kind of a different way than he had left them. He had a demo and we would sort of make the song.

I’m surprised by this, because I would imagine Morrissey to be a control freak.

He may very well be, I’m not sure, but because of how odd the world was at this time and because of how fast Andrew particularly works, this was the way this album happened. And because [Morrissey] liked the results, it just carried on happening like that, day after day. I remember Jan. 6, and we all know what happened that day — that was the day that we did the title track. I remember doing the piano to that song and someone coming down the stairs saying, “Sorry, but you guys have got to see what’s going on. This is insane.”

It’s very interesting to me that you have these references, like “that was the day of the OJ chase,” or 9/11, or Jan. 6. It’s interesting how you associate moments in your career with various shitshows that were going on in the world at the time.

Yeah, I’m kind of date-y. I’m good with dates. I think I’ve freaked the Pearl Jam guys out a little bit, because they’ll start talking about something or mention a gig or a story, and because when I was a kid I memorized their tour dates. I’ll be like, “Oh, that was June 24, 1995.” I think they’re a little worried.

Well, Pearl Jam have kept you around, so I guess they’ve gotten over that! But back to Bonfire of Teenagers, you say that was the first time that your “wrecking crew” worked together, but I guess Morrissey liked what he heard, because you made a whole album.

Yeah, and it was only after the album was finished that he was just between labels at that point. So, that was the reason it never came out, because he just had a hard time securing a deal.

Why didn’t he put it out himself?

That’s a good question.

Like I said, I’ve only heard snippets of it, but it was a surprising sound from him. It was a rock record. It still sounded like Morrissey, but there was an oomph to it.

Well, there was also an oomph to it because we literally were doing a song a day and we were like, “Let’s just throw it down.” I mean, working with Andrew, especially in the studio he had at the time, which was the basement to a house in Benedict Canyon, for a couple of those songs in particular, I played bass, and I was this far from the drums. I was this far from Chad. I would feel the wind of the symbol. One of the greatest things about working with Andrew is that he really prizes live playing, and especially since I have such a relationship with Chad, it was so second- nature for me to be right there. I think my hearing has suffered from standing so close to Chad Smith, just because it’s almost like I can’t get close enough, because he’s so much fun to play with. And onstage we had such a jovial kind of smiley relationship, because Chad never plays the same thing twice. There’s always a new accent or fill. I started as a drummer, so I can’t stop looking at him and giving him winks and smiles.

I’m glad that the two of you have kept up not just your friendship, but also your working relationship. Was Morrissey nice, by the way?

Oh yeah, he was great. He was fantastic. He’s always been such a hero of mine, so at first I would just kind of hang in the back. He came in one time when I was in the vocal booth doing an acoustic guitar part, so we needed isolation — so I’m in there and from the vantage point I had, I could see that there was a new entry, and I go, “Shit! I’m not done yet! He’s going to be here when I’m throwing this down!” It was just an amazing moment to be working with him like that.

You worked on Elton John’s Who Believes in Angels? record last year that he did with Brandi Carlile. That was another surprising album. It was a very funky and skronky. The opening song was so glam-rock. A lot of that album hearkened back to what people think of as classic ’70s Elton. It had a lot of oomph to it too.

And the intro of the album is supposed to be kind of “Funeral for a Friend”-y, like the beginning of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. … I was given the task to make an intro, and I took a couple days and I wrote something that was like five minutes long. And then suddenly out of blue, Andrew said, “Oh, we’re coming over. Elton wants to hear what you’re doing.” I was like, “It’s not done. It’s not done!” And we listened to it and then [Elton] walked out and he told Andrew, “Oh, it’s great, but it’s too long” — which is like, of course it is! But I was given the assignment to do a “Funeral for a Friend” thing. … The experience doing that record was, again, was sort of a last-minute thing. Andrew said, “Hey, come down, bring your synth stuff.” Little did I know that I’d be doing it for a month, or however long we worked on it. It was such an incredible experience.

Your wrecking crew also worked on Iggy Pop’s Every Loser.

I can’t remember whose idea it was, but I know that I helped get Iggy’s contact info through a friend of mine who had worked with him. The idea came up to have Iggy’s voice on a song or at the end of a song, and it worked out perfectly. But in doing so, Andrew and Iggy developed a quick friendship over the phone and then he sent him some music. And then before you know it, we were doing an Iggy record, or Andrew’s doing one.

Did you tour in the band with Andrew, Chad, and Duff for the Iggy tour?

I was working with Pearl Jam, so I couldn’t do the tour, but I was able to do Jimmy Kimmel. And then we had a sort of celebration dinner at Andrew’s house.

Was Iggy wearing a shirt?

I don’t remember. But he was certainly not wearing a shirt when he came barreling onto the stage for the Jimmy Kimmel performance and he was like, “Fucking go!” He psyches everyone out for the song as it’s counted off, and it was incredible. He’s so rabid. But I gave his manager a note. I wrote [Iggy] a real sweet note, because he’s the hero of mine and I didn’t get a ton of time with him, because I couldn’t do the tour. I felt badly that I couldn’t give the tour. I don’t even know if he knows who I am or if he gives a shit … I don’t know if he knew like, “Oh, the guitar player over there can’t do it. ” But I wrote a note. It was heartbreaking to me that I couldn’t do the tour.

I have to ask what the note said!

I could actually pull it up. I could read it to you. I’m sure I could find it in my phone. But it just basically said, “It’s beyond an honor to be involved in this record. And luckily I’ve gotten to play with you today. I’m so sorry I can’t tour. You mean a lot to me.”

That’s very wholesome.

And that day and the previous night at dinner, he was just so genuinely sweet and kind of open. He seems like a real, special person. He has a very hard past, but I think a lot of people that I am drawn to, you can really tell that there’s a really big heart there and a really deep sort of human feeling.

I think Iggy is an amazing example of aging in rock, gracefully or ungracefully. Proudly ungracefully! You’ve worked with Sparks, who are on that new Gorillaz record, and they’re in their eighties. And they’re having the biggest moment of their career in decades. You played with Sparks for a couple years.

Yes, that was an amazing experience. And that was sort of [Redd Kross’s] Steve McDonald’s fault. He pulled me into that, and that was the universe opening up in this crazy way. They had a guitar player, Dean Menta, who played with Faith No More for a while. He was the guitar player, but they wanted a rhythm player. And Steve said, “Come on, you don’t have to learn. Just do the rhythm. It’ll be easy for you.”

I can’t imagine playing Sparks songs is easy, though!

No, not easy, but I didn’t have to learn solos. It was just the chords. And I think I knew most of the songs already! That’s what I mean by easy. I didn’t have a lot of responsibility.

Why weren’t you in the Sparks Brothers documentary?

That was pure scheduling. I was back and forth with [director] Edgar Wright’s team about that a few times, and it was just from my touring schedule. It was heartbreaking to me that I missed it.

So many people were in that doc — from Beck to Jack Antonoff off to Vince Clarke to Duran Duran to Weird Al — all talking about how great Sparks are. What would you have said if you’d been in the film?

That they’re the sort of epitome of creative dedication and nonstop drive and a sort of beautifully obsessive, uncompromising work ethic. And that is above all, to me, just the greatest thing. They’re clearly driven by a passion for what they do, and you just can’t say that about everybody. And it’s is own thing with the love between brothers. I mean, for people to do the amount of great work that they’ve done, over the span of time that they’ve done it, it’s unrivaled.

And there are the Red Kross brothers. They also had a great documentary, Born Innocent, and you are in that one, billed as their “82nd drummer” or something like that.

It’s some unrealistic number.

They’ve had a lot of drummers, and you drummed on their The Redd Album, the self-titled double-album they put out in 2024. You produced it too. You have a friendship that obviously goes way back, particularly with Steve, but how did that collaboration come about?

That came about at a Sparks show, actually! I went with Steve to see Sparks at the Hollywood Bowl. Steve bought tickets because we were convinced their guest list would be nuts. And then somehow we were sat right behind their manager and their close friends, so it was like this very sweet, loving, familial experience. And then [Redd Kross’s] Jeff [McDonald] came. ,,, Once we were there together, me and Jeff and Steve together, in Steve’s mind it was solidified. I actually had to push them back two weeks because of the Elton record. I didn’t trust anybody with all the synthesizer equipment I’d brought to that [Elton] session, so I was loading it, let’s say, on a Tuesday —I spent the whole day moving out of Sunset Sound where we did [Elton’s album] back to my space —and we started [the Redd Kross album] on a Wednesday. Literally the next day, I started with Redd Kross. And as I have said to them and to anyone who brings it up, it was the easiest production job probably on Earth or in the history of music, because the songs were so damn good. … It was so much fun to do and just so easy to do. Just the amount of brilliance in those songs was unquestionable. I didn’t have to do anything.

What would be your dream collaboration, someone you have not worked with yet?

Let’s put it out there. Since we talked about him… come on, Damon! Let’s do this!

Damon Albarn?

Yes. I went to Ethiopia with him. Right when I joined the Chili Peppers, Flea was asked to go to Ethiopia because he had done one of their Africa Express trips already and Chad and Anthony couldn’t just drop everything on a dime. I was like, “Let’s go!” So, Flea and I went. I think three days after he got the call, we were on a plane to London to meet up with the Africa Express [musical collective] group, which is an amazing thing that Damon and a couple other guys started. And next thing you know, we were in Addis Ababa and basically on a sort of a musical field trip. Every day, we had a new musical excursion. … And then on the last night, we all had a big jam at a bar. It was amazing.

Wow. What a life you’ve led!

One of my greatest talents has been weaseling my way into different things. But for some reason, [Damon] hasn’t taken the bait.

Well, I’m glad you weaseled your way into Licorice Pizza for this fascinating conversation. But in terms of Pluralone and whatever else you have planned for your career, what’s next for you?

Well, I started album number five last week. [A Drop in the Ocean] is 2022, all the stuff I started to record in 2022, and then there is the pile from 2023. I was trying to get them both out this year, because I need to empty the bin.

Will your new stuff be more reflective of the shitshow of our current dark times?

Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s mostly about the darkest of the dark.

You can take the girl out of Saudi Arabia, but you can’t take Saudi Arabia out of the girl.

Syrian-born singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian — better known by her stage name, Bedouine, which loosely means “desert dweller” in Arabic — blissfully lived in a gated American compound in Saudi Arabia until she was age 10. Then her family won a green card lottery, and they abruptly uprooted and moved to the United States. Three decades later, as she discusses her fifth album, Neon Summer Skin, it’s clear that she’s still trying to find her way back home, if only metaphorically… and that maybe, this album got her a little bit closer.

“That was life-shattering for me,” Bedouine confesses to Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV, semi-joking that her childhood relocation to America is “mostly what I’ve discussed in therapy! … My world was literally turned upside-down.”

Neon Summer Skin, Bedouine’s first album since 2021, was inspired by a recent bittersweet trip to see her family in Saudi Arabia, and it explores themes of displacement and belonging, or longing to belong; it is even described in a press release as “mourning the end of her childhood.” Bedouine recalls: “I was feeling a lot of things and I was really emotional about it, and I just thought that I better sit down with this and try to understand what it is and unpack it. And that’s when the songwriting started.”

photo: Janell Shirtcliff

At the heart of that creative process, and of the album itself, was a stunningly candid conversation Korkejian had with her mother — recorded audio of which Bedouine later incorporated into Neon Summer Skin’s centerpiece, “Canopies” — about her mom’s harrowing childhood in a Syrian orphanage. That track, which Bedouine made available for early purchase on her Bandcamp page in April for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, is followed on the LP by only the second Armenian-language song Korkejian has ever recorded, “Deghma Cheega,” which is about “the resilience of immigrants and coming to terms with the fact that you might not find a place to call home in the same way, but you just accept it and keep moving,” she explains.  “There’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance… the placement in the record, it being right after my mom’s interview at the end of ‘Canopies,’ where it’s just like, ‘That’s life. We’re doing our best.’”

Korkejian tells LPTV that she now realizes that “belonging to a diaspora… having had an American education in an Arabic country, having an Arabic background or Western Asian background in an American country,” and her nomadic existence in general, ultimately “primed” her for a life as an artist and musician. “I think that my initial move from Saudi Arabia was so jarring that I was like, ‘Well, now it doesn’t matter where I go.’ So, it gave me a sense of freedom, like, ‘OK, nothing’s going to be worse than that, so I may as well just have fun with this.’ So, I just kind of went where life was taking me.”

However, after living in Los Angeles for 15 years (the longest she’s ever stayed in one city); becoming a mother herself (she and her longtime romantic and creative partner, record producer Gus Seyffert, welcomed their daughter Vera in 2024); and processing her family trauma on her most personal album yet, Korkejian does finally feel more grounded. “I’m slightly less nostalgic than I used to be — but still nostalgic,” she smiles.

In the extended LPTV video above and the edited Q&A below, Bedouine sheds some light on Neon Summer Skin.

LPTV: Neon Summer Skin is your first album in five years. You don’t normally take such long breaks between albums.

BEDOUINE: Well, a lot of life has happened since my last record, and a lot of pandemic too. It’s just a lot of rebuilding and it took time, so it’s been a while.

Yes, a lot has happened since 2021! And that’s what this whole record’s about. So, you took this trip to Saudi Arabia to see your family. I know you’ve lived all over the world and you live in L.A. now, but you grew up in Saudi Arabia until you were 10. The whole theme of childhood, and revisiting your childhood and the pain that can come with that, is at the core of this record. Tell me about this trip, and how and why it inspired you.

Well, I didn’t expect to visit my parents so much in Saudi Arabia when they moved back from the States, but unexpectedly, I started to tour Europe every year or so. And every time I toured Europe, I tried to stay behind and tag on a visit to them, so it became kind of a regular thing. I would go see them and spend more time on my old stomping grounds than I ever expected to as an adult, and it rekindled this relationship with the place where I grew up, which I already had such a soft spot for because I’m such a nostalgic person to begin with. Every time I went back to visit my parents, I’d basically revert to my childhood. My parents are very old-school, doting, immigrant parents where they’re doing my laundry, they’re bringing me lunch — they’re offended if you do your own laundry. And I’m fine with that! I actually really like spending time with them.  So, I felt at a huge loss when I came back, and it slowly dawned on me that it might have been my last visit, because my dad was going to retire and they would no longer be living there.

Both of my parents were born in Syria, and my dad was just an immigrant worker. He took a job as an electrician in Saudi Arabia and stayed there and kind of worked his way up with this company, and he was essentially given room and board for his family at what was an American compound when we were living there. We all grew up in this really sheltered environment, and that’s where I got to go back to, because he was still working with that company. When it was coming time to retire, we were kind of folding it all up, our whole everything, the whole childhood, and I had really big feelings about that. It dawned on me that I might not ever go back, because even though I’m really sentimental about those places, it’s really the people, just as much as the places, that make them what they are. I was feeling a lot of things and really I was emotional about it, and I just thought that I better sit down with this and try to understand what it is and unpack it. And that’s when the songwriting started.

You’re of Syrian descent and were born in Syria, and your early childhood was in Saudi Arabia, but you were living on this American compound and even went to an American school. And then your family eventually moved to America. It seems you had your foot in two different worlds.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I was kind of primed for this experience because it dawned on me also the other day that was like belonging to a diaspora: You always kind of feel in between. It dawned on me that I was kind of primed for [this life], having had an American education in an Arabic country, having an Arabic background or Western Asian background in an American country. It’d always been a blend. This is all I know.

There’s a feeling throughout this album of displacement or not really having a home. I know that even though you were young when you left Saudi Arabia, you’re still nostalgic for it, and you were really sad about leaving. You’re maybe still a little sad about it.

I mean… [laughs]

Not in a bad way!

Absolutely. No, no, no, I don’t think it’s bad to be sad. I fully believe in leaning into your sadness and trying to understand it and not distracting yourself from those kinds of feelings. I’m just laughing because it’s like, you don’t have to give me a disclaimer. I’m fully on board. I’m OK with that. Yeah, that was life-shattering for me. Like, mostly what I’ve discussed in therapy is leaving Saudi Arabia when I was 10 years old, because my world was literally turned upside-down.

Your parents entered and won a green card lottery to come to the U.S., so obviously they wanted to come here..

Ish?

So, my dad actually was trying to get us Canadian citizenship.

That’s the green card lottery I’m trying to get in on!

Exactly! He was trying to get us there, and there were a few reasons for that. … We were in Saudi Arabia and the politics were starting to get a little funny; we lived there for the Gulf War, and I think he was just feeling like it’s time to get out. He couldn’t get us Canadian citizenship, and his friend just made an off-the cuff-suggestion, like, “Why don’t you try to get American citizenship?” And he was like, “Oh, I don’t want to go to America. That place is a business, not a country.”

That’s a good line. That’s a lyric, almost.

Exactly. I mean, I thought that was a really profound thing to hear as an adult. And so, his friend was like, “Just try, you won’t get in anyway.” And he did, and we did. And thank God we did. I’m very grateful for it. But we made our way to America after going through this really rigorous process and vetting and all this stuff, and ended up moving when I was 10.

Even in the U.S, you didn’t stay put — you live in Los Angeles now, but you’ve lived in Texas, Georgia, Boston, Kentucky, all very different parts of America. Are you still searching for a sense of home? Did making this record maybe make you get there, or closer to that?

I think that my initial move from Saudi Arabia was so jarring that I was like, “Well, now it doesn’t matter where I go.” So, it gave me a sense of freedom, like, “OK, nothing’s going to be worse than that, so I may as well just have fun with this.” So, I just kind of went where life was taking me and I kind of used school as a way to bounce around, follow where I could get scholarships or grants and things like that and have fun with it, while I discovered what I wanted to study. I was just kind of pulling threads and trying to figure out where to go. This is the longest I’ve stayed put since then; I think I’m going on 15 years now in L.A.

You’re an L.A. native now!

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don’t know. I definitely have slowed down. I’m not like I was in my twenties or early thirties, when I was kind of restless and wanted to stay light on my feet. A sense of home is really important to me, and it’s not maybe as heavy as it was before, but a place to be comfortable or hang your hat for a while. But I don’t think I would be as attached to any place like I was to Saudi. So, it’s in a sense liberating.

I found it really interesting and surprising to find out that you didn’t really start playing music or writing music until you were about college-aged. And it was relatively late in your life that you actually started releasing solo music. You were doing stuff behind the scenes in film and video games, but in terms of being “Bedouine,” you were in your thirties.

Yeah, I was 32 for the first record. … I never once expected for this to be realistic, like a realistic ambition, so I wasn’t actively pursuing it. But I feel in the back of my head, I always thought if the opportunity ever presents itself, I want to be prepared. You know how they say “luck is opportunity meets preparation,” or something like that? I always kind of wrote and played and just did this thing for myself, and I thought if I ever met someone that wanted to put my record out, I would have something to share. And in the meantime, this is just how I express myself, which I think is very important. I think everyone should figure out how to express themselves, so they don’t bottle up their feelings. But no, I moved here to be in post-production. I studied sound design, like sound-editing essentially for film and TV, and I moved here for an internship actually just down the street [from Licorice Pizza]. I’d come to Studio City every day, got my hours to get into the union, and then I pivoted to music-editing for film. And I was just getting my footing there when I met someone that wanted to put my record out. It was a very, very gradual development.

I wonder if that gradual development had anything to do with the fact that your first introduction to playing music was strict, militant piano lesson as a kid, which kind of soured you on playing music.

Well, when your mom forces you to do something, it’s a very easy thing to rebel against, right? She made it too obvious that that’s what she wanted me to do; if she had played it cool a little bit, I probably would not have quit. And I wish I didn’t, but she had me practicing piano so strictly that when we did make the move to Saudi Arabia, I was so just emotionally wounded that I was like, “This is how I get them back. I’m going to quit the piano! I’m not going to continue my piano education!” Boy, did I show them [laughs].

Well, that brings me to the final track on Neon Summer Skin. There are two versions of “Canopies” on the album, but the last song is an instrumental piano version [played by Drew Erickson, who’s worked with Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty]. Was there some kind of full-circle meaningfulness to doing that, especially since it ends the album?

That’s a really good observation. … Some of that was just a sonic curiosity, and then otherwise, there was an emotional meaning to it too, returning back to my first instrument, the relationship that alludes to with my mom and just the coming-of-age of it all. It felt like a really nice nod, like a ribbon to tie the whole record with.

But the other version of “Canopies” is the real centerpiece of the record, because of the story behind it. You a recorded conversation with your mom when she was living in Texas at that time, and used that audio on this song.

Yeah, we were just running an errand, going to get some food or something, and I caught myself asking her the same kind of questions I did about her past or upbringing. And I just thought, “I better record this, because I want to remember the details.” I’m not so good at that to begin with. And you get to an age where you’re also more aware of your parents’ mortality, so it felt like something important I should have.

Your mom went through some pretty traumatic stuff in her own childhood. Sometimes you’ll talk to a parent or a grandparent and they’ll start telling you something about their childhood and you’re like, “I never knew all this. How am I just finding this out now that you went through this?” So, how much did you know about her story about being in an orphanage?

I vaguely knew that she was put in an orphanage. In Lebanon, your custody defaults to your mother until you’re age 7, and after that the father has some rights to basically just kind of pluck them out of their household. And my mom’s dad was abusive and her mom was trying to protect her from him, so she decided the safest place to put her was in this orphanage in Lebanon. They fled Syria and she put her there and she stayed close by, and it was like the ultimate sacrifice she made for her [daughter’s] own safety. [My grandmother] stayed close by at a relative’s house and would visit [my mom] during visiting hours. I vaguely knew because when we visited Syria as a kid every year, we’d sometimes take this overnight bus to Lebanon, and my mom would go visit the orphanage and sometimes donate it to it when she could. So, I had been there, but I think I was too young to really appreciate the gravity of it. This felt like the first time that I was really, really hearing it. And she opened up in ways she hadn’t before and shared details with me that she hadn’t before; those really struck me, and that’s what inspired the song.

What specific details surprised you?

Namely, it was really that phrase that her mom would say. Her mom would sit at this balcony nearby and say something that translated to “the waves of Beirut flutter and blow my daughter’s scent to me, her essence to me.” She would sit there and just take in the air and just think of her daughter. [My mother] says it in Armenian on that recording, and it sounds so beautiful and so poetic that I knew at some point that I would have to build a song around that. And it eventually became basically the heart of that song.

What does your mom think of “Canopies,” and how did she feel about the fact that you wanted to put her actual voice on it?

My parents, they’re so subtle. I imagine a lot of musicians’ parents are like this — they’re just not ever sure what we’re up to.

They don’t really get it. You could win a Grammy and they’re like, “Oh, good for you.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” [laughs] I think that I was fortunate enough to have a TV performance with my first record on Seth Meyers’s show, and that was maybe the first time they were like, “Oh, OK.” But I think it’s still relatively unclear to them, which I don’t blame them; I hardly know what I’m doing half the time! I think she’s delighted, but it’s like pulling teeth getting them to talk about themselves. It’s like this immigrant survivalist thing, where you have to really take some pulling to get at some heavier stuff.

I think a lot of Boomers and members of the Silent Generation have that suck-it-up mentality. Like, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. Yeah, I was in a soup kitchen with no shoes, but it was fine. No big whoop.” Anyway, it’s cool that they’ve supported your career, even if they don’t quite grasp what you’re doing. When you initially wanted to go into music, whether it was behind or in front of the scenes, were they cool about it? Because a lot of parents, of any background, would be like, “That’s not a stable career. You’re not going to make money doing that. You should go to law school, or marry a rich man, or become a doctor” — literally anything besides becoming an artist.

There was a little bit of that. They were like, “What are you doing? Does it pay?” I think there was a certain amount of trust involved, because they did see me get my degree and maybe that was just enough for them. … They definitely want the best for me and want stability for me, but I think that they were also dealing with so much of a culture shock moving to America that they were still learning English. So, maybe part of them was just trusting that [their kids] would find our way.

Is the song “Always on Time” about that cultural or generational gap?

I think it’s more about personal milestones or starting a family, feeling like you’re behind in general or feeling like you should be further along and the tendency to compare yourself to other people. It’s just a reminder that there’s no right or wrong way. It was a reminder to myself, at least, that there’s no right or wrong way to go about anything, and that you can only really compare yourself to yourself. It was just a cathartic thing to write.

How many siblings do you have?

Two. And they’re both brothers. I’m the youngest.

What are the dynamics of being the baby of the family and the only girl?

I mean, I don’t know any other way, so it is what it is, but I probably was toughened up a bit as a kid. I saw how they operated, and maybe it calloused me a little. … I think maybe I was a little bit boyish growing up because of them.

I assume your family has heard this record…

Actually, no! I don’t think they’ve heard this whole record! They’ve heard the singles. Actually, my mom’s heard the song in Armenian because she asked me, “Have you been writing in Armenian again?” She was kind of tickled by that, because I only have one other song in Armenian.

Has she actually heard “Canopies,” though?

Yes. And actually, it occurred to me that for “Always on “Time,” I made a music video that kind of alludes to “Canopies” by having a locket — like, the focal point of this video is this locket where I lose the photos that are supposed to go inside of it, and the photos are my mom and her mom. So, it kind of alludes to “Canopies.” I watched it [with my mom] the morning the video came out. I was video-chatting with her, just catching up, and she said, “I saw you have a new video out. I’m going to watch it as soon as we get off the phone.” I said, “You know what? Can you watch it while I’m on the phone with you?” … It occurred to me that it actually might have some weight to it for her. I even recorded a screenshot video of her watching it, and I saw it affect her. And that’s a pretty rare moment. It doesn’t always occur to me to share things with them.

I feel you and your mom need to perform “Canopies” together on a late-night talk show, like Seth Meyers again.

I would love to involve her. I would love to do something like having a little cooking segment where she teaches us her Armenian dishes or whatever. Actually, she’s making some merch for me because she loves to crochet, so she’s crocheting these coasters and these scrunchies and stuff.

That’s really wholesome. Tell me about the song in Armenian that is on the album.

It’s called “Deghma Cheega.” It’s a track about, I guess you could say, the resilience of immigrants and coming to terms with the fact that you might not find a place to call home in the same way, but you just accept it and keep moving. There’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance between the tone of the track and the lyrics, and I think that rub is very intentional. And also, the placement in the record, it being right after my mom’s interview at the end of “Canopies” where it’s just like, “That’s life. What do you do? That’s life. We’re doing our best.”

Was doing a song with that kind of theme, or this album in general, in any way inspired by what’s going on in our country right now with immigrants and ICE?

It’s really difficult to separate the two. I feel like there’s some awkward shapeshifting that happens when you don’t have any reflection on what’s happening in the world. But I will say that this album was so deeply personal; I think it’s easy to apply it to things that are happening right now, but it’s really, deeply personal. I wasn’t quite thinking about things like that. And also, it was written years ago, maybe like three years ago. I’ve been sitting on it for a while. So, it’s not super-topical, but I still think it applies, absolutely.

Well, what’s happening with ICE is terrible, so I think it’s good timing that a song with that kind of perspective is coming out now, even if it’s coincidental.

For sure. And I think those things, they don’t expire, sadly. They seem to be cyclical or something.

So, you have only ever done one other Armenian-language song in the past?

Just the one other called “Louise,” which has a similar subject matter as well. I didn’t expect to do another one… It kind of feels like the cousin to this song.

It seems a lot of Armenian or Armenian-American artists who usually primarily sing in English — System of a Down probably being the most high-profile one — tend to cover Armenian songs in concert, but they don’t do many studio recordings in Armenian. Do you ever cover classic Armenian songs?

I don’t, but I would love to, actually. That’s something I thought about doing, like having an album’s worth of older Armenian songs. I hope that’s something I actually get to do, but I haven’t done it. The singing is quite different, so it would be a very different challenge.

How is it different? How is it challenging?

Just the kind of vamping that goes on in the vocal lines and stuff. It’s just very different muscularly and it would take some practice, but I’m down. I’m down to try. The songs are beautiful.

I understand that you speak in the Western Armenian dialect, but even though L.A. has the world’s biggest Armenian population outside of Armenia itself, that dialect has been an obstacle for you here.

Yeah, for sure. It’s very different, and sometimes there’s a language barrier when you come across someone that assumes that you’re Armenian, because my name is very Armenian. So, when they try to open up a conversation, there’s like a little bit of hanging on for dear life and then you’re kind of like, “Oh, I don’t really understand. I’m from this place.” And there’s a little bit of, like, shaming that’ll happen sometimes.

Is there a stigma if you’re speaking the Western Armenian dialect?

I have experienced it, yeah, which is frustrating because we’ve had very different trajectories, Western Armenians and Eastern Armenians, but we can both celebrate Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day — like, that’s the reason our dialects are so different! It’s a tricky one, because there is the biggest population here, but I don’t necessarily always feel connected to it. It’s a very different culture.

I guess that sort of ties into a lot of the themes we’re talking about with this album, of never fitting into one place or one community.

What kind of music did you grow up with? Obviously you had an Americanized/Westernized upbringing, but what types of music from around the world were you listening to?

Really, it was very Americanized, my exposure to music, because of the time difference. Like, we would come home and watch The Simpsons and The David Letterman Show and wake up to MTV music videos. I would wake up early and have my little handheld tape recorder and tape the music videos’ sound. It was a lot of Nirvana around then. And then I would go to school with my little tape recorder and play it back during recess and walk around the soccer field like an angsty teen, when I was just like 8 or 9. I remember also my first records were Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey’s Music Box, and I had some Michael Jackson and whatever was on MTV at the time.

That’s interesting, because a lot of music critics reviewing your records namecheck all these ’60s and ’70s folk artists, like Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake. Were you into that music too?

I wasn’t at all! I don’t think I even knew Nick Drake until after my first record was out and people were saying I sounded like Nick Drake. Now he’s one of my favorite songwriters and I consider it an honor to be compared to that.

 How do you think that classic folk sound got in there, then, if you were raised on Nirvana and Boyz II Men? And how did you react when those comparisons started happening?

My reaction was just, I don’t know, I felt kind of detached from it, because there was a lot of really great, positive feedback and I just didn’t really want to feel too reactive to it or affected by it. … It’s super-flattering, but I don’t know if I always heard the references myself. I think probably my producer had a lot to do with it, Gus Seyffert and his method of recording, which was on tape and keeping things pretty minimal and stoic. But also, I think the format — just the way that I gravitated to guitar was finger-picking, for some reason, and so everything kind of had inherently this very simple, throwback folk thing to it.

How did you and Gus meet?

When I started working from home doing sound editing, I all of a sudden had more time on my hands, and I started picking up the guitar more often. I started writing a lot. … I was doing more and more voice memos on my phone, and around this time I was listening to Sybil Byers’s records, and it was a ’60s record of basically her on, I believe, a nylon string [guitar], on like a reel-to-reel tape machine. And I really liked that idea. I knew of Gus, I didn’t know him very well, but he was “the analog guy” in Echo Park. And so, I just hounded him and asked if I could maybe borrow his TASCAM machine. I finally got over there and asked him a bunch of questions, and he was running this small house in Echo Park which he’d essentially turned into a studio where there’s pedals in the kitchen drawers — there’s no food anywhere, but there’s guitar pedals in the cabinets and there’s an amp in the bathroom, one of those kind of places. … All of his stuff was set up and we did a song called “Solitary Daughter”; we did two takes of it, and that ended up on [my debut album in 2017]. And so, the first song we did together ended up on the record, and we kind of had an understanding that we would continue to work together.

The last song on Neon Summer Skin that I want to ask about is “One Thing Right.” We’ve talked a lot about family in this interview, but that song is about chosen family. And that’s a big thing, particularly in Los Angeles. There are so many people who live here who were not born here, weren’t raised here, have no family here. I was wondering if there was any L.A. inspiration behind that song.

Yeah, totally. When I do feel at a loss with my family or they just feel so far away, I try to remember that I have a few friends really close by that do feel like family, and that we do have that in our control. Because as close as I am to my family, not everyone has that sort of relationship, and chosen family is just as important, if not more important, to a lot of people. [That track] is a bit of an outlier [on the album], but I think it still works.

Your Neon Summer Skin press release says this album mourns the end of your childhood. That statement jumped out at me. So, what kind of closure or understanding or processing, that you maybe you didn’t have before, did you come to have while making this record, or when you listen back now?

I think just working through it long enough to write all these songs was really cathartic. I think any time you write something, you get to put away the feeling. It’s like seasonal clothing, like putting your sweaters away. Not that it’s gone completely, but I think that there’s something to compartmentalizing things like that, and also facing them long enough in order to do that, like sifting through it. I’m a big believer in sitting down with your feelings. So, I think just sitting down with it was a huge help. I’m slightly less nostalgic than I used to be — but still nostalgic.

I think nostalgia is a good thing, as long as you don’t fall prey to the mindset that everything was better in the past.

Yeah. I don’t think everything was necessarily better then. I just feel like a kid and honestly, it connects me more to my parents. … It’s that realization that everyone has at one point or another: that their parents were just people, and maybe they felt like kids once, and maybe they still do. Because I always feel like a kid, and maybe in a way that just connects me to everyone.

Deb Never is living the dream — even if it’s a dream that she never imagined when she was growing up all over the world, from America’s Pacific Northwest to East Asia, as Deborah Jung, the shy but rebellious youngest child of a pastor and a nurse. The indie-rock/alt-R&B singer-songwriter is at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records celebrating the release of her much-anticipated stellar debut album, Arcade, and like many things in her career, the day hasn’t gone as planned… but in the best possible way.

Deb had intended to perform at the store acoustically, but then someone unexpectedly handed her one of Prince’s guitars, so she of course had no choice but to go electric. Sitting with LPTV after her Prince-ly performance and fan autograph signing, Deb is still in awe, as she gazes down at the (no pun intended) symbolic instrument.

“All I know is, nobody has played this [guitar] except for Prince, Billy Corgan… and now me, which is crazy,” she marvels. “I felt a little the star power from it. But yeah, honestly, I was holding it and like, I felt not worthy of playing it.”

photo courtesy of Giant Music

Deb is in good company and is indeed worthy. And she doesn’t need any superstar’s borrowed guitar to radiate star power on her own — even if she once suffered from such extreme stage fright that at her first gig at a Spokane coffee shop, at age 19, she froze mid-song and “just literally walked off and then walked home.” (She only very recently returned to doing intimate stripped-back or acoustic shows, like the rare one she just played at Licorice Pizza.)

Incredibly, there was a time when Deb “didn’t really see a career in music.” In fact, she only moved to Los Angeles as “kind of an accident” and as a “very last minute, on-the-win decision” when, during a summer vacation before returning to college, she made some new friends who hooked her up with work as a session guitarist. (This eventually led to her collaborating with the likes of Brockhampton, Dominic Fike, Tommy Genesis, and Omar Apollo.) And even when she began to realize that a career in music actually “could be a thing” for her, she still expected to remain mostly behind the scenes, writing songs for other artists, before a music manager that knew her then-girlfriend discovered Deb’s home recordings via SoundCloud.

“I didn’t have it in my mind to put out music as an artist at first, and then I worked with him and he kind of uploaded a song for the first time on Spotify. And it just kind of snowballed from there,” Deb shrugs.

But there’s one endearing, amusing story that Deb shares, about her religious upbringing, that proves that even from an early age, despite any shyness or social anxiety, she knew who she was, she had a specific point of view, and she was always in control of her own destiny — and that the Arcade singer was always going to play the game of life her way.

“I remember when I was 13, I made a whole presentation [for my parents] for some reason. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore, and here’s why,’” she laughs.

So, was this a PowerPoint? A diorama?

“Basically,” she chuckles. (Sadly, Deb doesn’t have this audiovisual display anymore, otherwise it could be an awesome stage prop during her more elaborate concerts.) “I got really into Greek mythology, and I would just be online just researching a bunch of other stories. Everyone has their own beliefs, but I came to my own conclusion of why I didn’t believe in the same thing as my parents, and I feel I had to present that to them, to have a valid argument and be like: ‘This is why.’”

Deb says her family — even her pastor father, with whom she had traveled throughout China, Malaysia, and South Korea when he was doing missionary work — were quite understanding and accepting. But perhaps they weren’t surprised, since Deb had already “gotten in trouble a lot in church as a kid” for always questioning what she was taught in youth group.

“I told my mom one day, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe in the same thing that you believe,’” she recalls. “And then there’s just a conversation, like: ‘Why?’ And I was like, ‘From what I’ve researched, there’s all these different stories or mythology or whatever that all feel similar, so I don’t believe in one thing. I feel like there is maybe something, but I don’t believe in the one specific thing that you do.’ And it was valid enough that they were like, ‘OK.’”

It was actually two years earlier, while an 11-year-old Deb was living with her father in Korea for a full year, that these rebellious seeds were planted — when, after watching videos online by “one of the biggest inspirations,” her Seattle hero Kurt Cobain — she taught herself how to play a guitar that she’d stolen from the local church. “It had a missing high E-string,” she laughs, only realizing literally in the middle of her LPTV interview that that five-string setup might have influenced her unique playing style, “because I do have a habit of playing a lot on the top four, and I think it maybe comes from that! … I initially wanted to play drums, but then I saw the guitar. It was kind of janky. There were multiple guitars, and I took the one that was broken because I was like, ‘No one’s going to miss this.’ And I took it home with me and taught myself how to play.”

That broken guitar was Deb’s salvation, so to speak, during a difficult year of isolation abroad. “I didn’t know how to speak the language; I am Korean, but I grew up mostly in Seattle and Spokane, so I didn’t know the language. I got thrown into a Korean school in not even a main city,” she explains. “So, [playing music] was kind of my way to feel some type of ‘home’ or comfort. I kind of used the guitar to be able to express, I guess, a lot of the feelings that I had, because I couldn’t speak and I didn’t know what was going on.”

Deb Never poses next to Prince’s guitar

Deb admits that she still deals with imposter syndrome, saying, “I just feel inadequate. … One of my biggest insecurities is playing guitar because I don’t think I’m a good guitar player, since I was a kid.” And she still describes her playing style as “self-taught,” after all this time, because, as she chucklingly explains, “I don’t know chords. I technically don’t know keys. I don’t know notes. I don’t know shit! I’m just playing by ear. So, when someone’s like, ‘Oh, can you play the C-sharp’ or whatever, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is. But play it for me, and I’ll figure it out.’”

When Deb decided to stay in L.A. to pursue studio work — it should be pointed out that if other artists were so willing to hire her for their sessions, then she’s absolutely not an “inadequate” guitarist — her parents harbored even more doubts than she once had about music becoming her full-time career. But just like that time at age 13, when she convinced them that organized religion wasn’t for her, they let her find her own way, and she feels “very, very lucky for that. … It was mostly my mom a lot of my life, but she was very understanding of me and what I wanted to do or what I believed in. She was just kind of like, ‘Whatever, OK. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.’ … My parents for some reason have been very lenient. I think in the beginning they didn’t understand — same as me. ‘What are you doing with music? How are you going to survive?’ But I was just like, ‘I’m going to figure it out.’”

That whole “figuring it out” attitude obviously figures heavily in Deb’s story. Looking back on working for two years — a much longer creative process than usual for her — on Arcade, and the whirlwind of four EP releases and nomad living that led up to the album, including spending five months in her “second home” of London during the COVID-19 pandemic, she muses: “I feel like it’s one of those things where you just have to jump into it. You know when you learn how to swim and your parents just push you, and you sink or swim and survive? That’s kind of how it felt when I got pushed into [music]. And then I just had to survive. I think I was on this snowball of constantly having to release music and not having really any time to think about what I wanted to make, so for the album I kind of disappeared for a couple years. I needed that time to catch up with myself, because it had been nonstop.”

Deb approached making Arcade with “intentionally less production,” going back in some full-circle ways to her stage fright-stricken coffee shop roots as she placed her vocals more front-and-center than ever. “It was really vulnerable and exposing for me. But I wanted that,” she asserts. “I wanted it to feel like you’re in the room with me when you listen to these songs.”

One Arcade track, “Deign,” was so vulnerable, however, that Deb actually considered taking it off the album. While she’s reluctant to get too in-depth regarding the song’s backstory, she notes, “I think you could probably pick up from lyrics what I’m talking about.” Some of the most telling lines include: “Remove the pressure from the room/One hit could knock the wind out/Too young to notice that my lips are turning blue/Laying with my face down/Think I finally found some peace that afternoon/Didn’t want it to end/If I ever come down, will I feel this good again?”

“It was purely just like, oof. You could hear everything that I’m saying about a certain thing, and I’m like, ‘Eh, I don’t know…’” Deb says, when asked why she considered leaving “Deign” off Arcade. “I think that was the most exposing for me, because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my past, whether it was drugs or life experience. That was the first song where I didn’t talk about love or relationships. It was just a very specific moment of something that happened in my life.”

Deb also tapped into her long-held agnosticism on “Deign,” contemplating at one point, “If there’s a God, why does He only talk to me when I’m high?” But she says it’s Arcade’s slightly “Purple Rain”-esque heartbreak ballad “Heavensake” that has garnered the most fan feedback. “It’s a yearning song about somebody. And, oh — actually the chorus has to do with maybe the God thing!” she points out. “The chorus is literally: ‘Heaven’s so far away/I don’t believe in a god/But tonight I think I’ll pray.’”

Deb says she’s “more like spiritual” these days, but whether it was kismet, divine intervention, luck, talent, hard work, or a combination of any of the above, it seems Deb’s prayers (or dreams) have been answered when it comes to her blossoming career. Besides releasing a critically acclaimed album (which will later come out as a deluxe edition, featuring all-star collaborations to be announced), she has mostly conquered her shyness through music, she has her own Arcade-themed video game, and now she can even add “played Prince’s guitar” to her ever-lengthening list of accomplishments. So, now there’s only one (game-related) prayer that needs to be answered.

“My favorite video game right now is Fortnite,” Deb says. “I would always make a joke. It’s not a joke, though! I’m so serious about this: Once I get a Fortnite skin is when I’ll know I’ve made it, literally. That’s when I’ll stop.”

The Eldest Daughter, the debut album by Florida-born indie-folk artist Gatlin that sees its deluxe reissue this week, might have been ever-so-slightly overshadowed by Taylor Swift’s The Life of Showgirl, which coincidentally featured a song called “Eldest Daughter” and was released on the same day last year. But rest assured, this fearless (no pun intended) singer-songwriter very much has her own unique voice.

Inspired by her conservative Christian upbringing in Florida (as, you guessed it, the oldest of three children), and how she has processed and made peace with her childhood trauma since coming out eight years ago (she even re-read her teenage diaries during the recording process), Gatlin Thornton’s album is heavy at times. “I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up,” she explains, sitting with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV in Studio City right before her in-store performance. “I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good.”

But The Eldest Daughter is also laced with wry humor, whether it’s the clever play on words in “Florida Man” (the comma is silent); the diaristic, nostalgic memories of Gatlin’s first girl-crush in “If She Was a Boy”; the rebellious declaration in “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs” when she sings, “I’m going to hell because girls are fun”; or that moment in “Man of the House” when she proclaims, “My cats can be gay if they want to!”

And that humor definitely comes through in Gatlin’s charming and candid LPTV interview (as seen in the video above and Q&A below), in which she opens up about undergoing ketamine therapy; dissociating during interviews (thankfully she didn’t during this one!); the whole “Florida Man” viral phenomenon; going (temporarily) no-contact with her family; donning empowering male drag in her music video; her ever-shifting relationship with spirituality; and, yes, gay cats.

LPTV: I’d love to start by asking about the significance of the title The Eldest Daughter, because I know you grew up in a conservative, religious family.

GATLIN: I think I was in this process of really doing a lot of healing with my family dynamic, and really a lot of things were coming to light. And so, naturally, I’m going to write about it.. And everything I was writing about was pointing towards being an eldest daughter and all of the pressures that come along with that.

What was your family’s dynamic, in terms the pressures you felt as the oldest of three kids?

I felt like in a lot of ways the truth-teller, the protector, another parent.

Did you feel you had more expectations placed on you, because you were the leader of the pack? When you’re the eldest, you’re the kid that does everything first.

Or you’re the guinea pig!

Yes! And also, parents are usually much harder and stricter with the oldest child. By the time the later kids come around, they’re much more chill.

It is crazy, the difference. I think also because when [the oldest is] female and the baby [of the family] is male, the gender of it all… yeah, there was a big difference. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers, or what I was consuming in media was just very strict, versus with the baby it was free reign.

I do want to get into specific songs on the record that address your childhood, but in general, what were you revisiting or maybe even reinterpreting when you were making this album?

I think it really started with my queerness and figuring that out. And then it was not only an issue with my family, my queerness, but then to talk about it publicly. It was almost more of a big deal when I decided I wanted to start talking about it and letting other people know! Because I think that’s a Southern culture thing: having this presentation of being perfect and everything is all put together, and not wanting the judgment from other people. So, it felt like I had to just full send it and go all the way there, of being honest and being open publicly in my art and my songs.

When did you come out?

When I was 19. Now I’m 27.

(photo: Dualtone Music Group)

So, it was relatively later in life for you.

Yeah. And it was bisexual. I came out as, “Oh, I have a crush on this girl.” But even at the time, I was like, “But I’m not going to do anything about it,” because I was still in the church. And so, it was very interesting, the way that I even presented it to my family and my community. It was like, “Everyone start praying for me! I have feelings for a girl!” It took me a really long time to process it and be OK with it myself. And then I was still dating men, so I think maybe my family would view it as I only came out two years ago, because that was when I was really [started] dating women.

Did they think it was a phase?

Yes. And obviously it wasn’t a phase!

Where do they stand with all this now?

It’s a process. I think they’ve come a long way from when it started. The song on my album “Love Me” is a song to my mom, kind of about right when I came out and she was saying extremely hurtful things. It has come a long way since then, but I still am struggling with it, because I do think that there is a difference between tolerating something and celebrating something about someone. I want this part of me to be celebrated.

How did your mother react to “Love Me”? I assume she’s heard it and knows it’s about her?

Yeah, I did show [my family] all of the music before it came out. It’s a hard thing that we’ve been having to navigate, because for me, this is my story and I’m just trying to be honest and it’s my way to process. I was like, “I’m not trying to hurt you through this!” But I think she did take it as hard to hear.

You mentioned this crush that you had on a girl, which was sort of your sexual awakening. The song “If She Was a Boy” is about that. Tell me about that real-life experience.

I wrote that [two years] ago, but from the perspective of 19-year-old me, when I was in that place of “I have feelings for a girl, everyone start praying.”

Did you really want to “pray the gay way”?

Oh, man. Yeah. I truly believed that if I acted on that [crush], I would go to hell. And so, it was a product of the environment I grew up in, and was in. I was living in Nashville [at that point]. I was at a Christian school and surrounded by other Christian kids and deep in the church. I grew up Baptist, and then we went to an evangelical Presbyterian church. It was very much: “Go spread the word of God, go convert everyone.” It was fear-based. I didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

This seems like it was traumatic, and yet you seem very untraumatized. You’re sort of laughing and joking as you talk about it.

I think maybe that’s just my way of coping with it. I’ve done a lot of work about all of this. I’m currently doing ketamine therapy. It’s really rocking my world.

I don’t know if you ever acted upon that crush at age 19, or if that woman knows about it. But I do believe I’ve read that you wrote about her in your diaries, and it was finding and re-reading those diaries — and in the process rediscovering your 19-year-old self — that spurred much of this album.

Yeah, because that was kind of the first moment when I began to really question. Maybe it was because I wasn’t living in Florida anymore; I was in Nashville. I felt in the space to start questioning. Before I was like, “Well, I’m as religious as it comes,” but I finally had the space to start questioning these feelings, and then that just stirred up kind of an entire deconstruction of faith, of politics, of what my family dynamic was, of gender. That was the catalyst.

Is it weird when you visit home? Is it one of those cliché situations of awkwardly being at the dinner table with people who don’t share the same beliefs you have now?

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are having a hard time because of the political climate right now. [I didn’t go] home for the holidays [last] year. It’s my first time not going home for the holidays, but the beautiful thing about it is I have this chosen family and a beautiful community of friends and the queer community. I had a wonderful Friendsgiving and there was just so much love and acceptance.

I do think the whole notion of chosen family is very important. I assume you’re not religious anymore, at least not the religion you were raised in, but are you still spiritual, or do you still have some kind of faith in your own way? How do you define your faith, or are you just completely agnostic or atheist now?

Thank you for asking that! I love talking about it! I’m definitely very spiritual. I’m kind of like, re-finding God. For a while I had to separate from it, because there was a lot of pain attached to God. But it wasn’t God — it was people and humans that would corrupt it. I’m kind of in my journey of finding out what [faith] looks like. I’ve been in a lot of discovery, looking into different religions, reading the Bible again and seeing what I feel about this, now that things have kind of calmed. I think I’m just searching right now.

Is ketamine helping with that? I don’t know much about ketamine therapy.

I’ve been seeing this therapist for like eight months. I went to this place, got prescribed the medicine. We refer to it as “medicine.” It’s been very helpful for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but she had suggested it. I think it’s just been a way for me to reprocess things or create new neural pathways, because I can logically know something so well, but my body would still react. Even this process of doing interviews for the record and talking about the way that I grew up and family things… I was doing a podcast [recently] and I fully dissociated mid-podcast. And so, it’s just like, “Oh, there’s still work to do.”

I hope you don’t dissociate during this interview! Actually, you’re welcome to dissociate if that’s what you want to do, but hopefully you’re OK with how this interview is going so far. Do you mind me asking what the podcast question was that triggered that response?

I think it was just something about my parents and what they thought about me. And I just was like, “Annnnnd… I’m now no longer in my body.” It’s a body-keeps-score thing. The body remembers.

Well, if anything I ask bothers you to the point that it would make you disassociate, please let me know.

It would have a few months ago, but I have done a lot of work and I’m much better.

I’m glad to hear that, because as I get into asking about specific track, we’re obviously going to get deeper into this. I did want to ask about “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs,” because I love the line :“I’m going to hell because girls are fun.” That’s a great line.

I think that song is more me being a little bit angry. Growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to feel anger, or I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be angry. It felt good to get some of that out. It’s about hypocritical Christianity, like MAGA Christianity, and how the Jesus I knew wouldn’t be acting like this. It was really therapeutic for me to write that and to feel angry about it.

Which song on the record is the most therapeutic for you to perform live?

That one’s really fun. I feel like at shows, that’s the one that people really respond to and get excited about. “Love Me” is one that I have not been able to sing live without crying. I’m very deeply uncomfortable, but I think that is a good thing. It also has allowed for people who are there at the show to make me feel safe and make me feel seen. And I think it makes the space feel very safe.

Another track, “The Hill,” is about religion as well. There’s a line in it about how walking away from Christianity was the greatest loss of your life and the hardest thing you ever had to do. I imagine that’s another cathartic and/or difficult song to perform live.

Yeah. I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up. And so, leaving that, I had to relearn… not relearn, but I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good. All of these things that were very difficult to do. It felt like I was completely losing myself. And I think for a lot of people who grew up in Christianity, that’s why it’s so hard to question it or to walk away from it, because you have grown up thinking that’s how life is. And then, also, my whole family is in it. And church is also such a wonderful place for community; I had so many friends and I felt so loved. So, it was a really hard thing to walk away from. And yeah, that was a painful song to write, but I think a good one. It phrases it almost in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

https://youtu.be/O_Mpp3qR6hw?si=yqep6nBamGo2ST8M

When you talk about the community, did you lose a lot of friends or family members when you came out and changed the way you were living? Did you lose a lot of support? Did you have to make new friends?

It was a process, like a year’s process. I was living in Nashville at the time and a lot of my friends were all kind of coming out of it at the same time, which was really nice and felt less isolating. Family relationships changed, definitely. And that’s sad and heartbreaking, but also OK.

You do approach all this with a bit of humor, like I said before. You have a song called “Florida Man,” which I love because if you ever read The Onion or even the real news, there’s always a headline along the lines of, “Florida Man Does Some Crazy Shit.”

Have you done the thing where you put your birthday and then “Florida Man”? Google your birthday and “Florida Man,” and there’s always going to be something!

Ha! So yes, Florida has a bit of a reputation that’s probably somewhat deserved. But there’s a comma, at least an implied comma, in your song title, because you basically say, “I’m never going back to Florida, man!” It’s a fun play on words. So, tell me about this song, because there’s a lot of humor, but also a lot of anger in this too. It’s kind of like an F-U Florida, or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

I think now, retrospectively, I view “Florida Man” as this metaphor of almost who I was when I was living there, playing my role in my family dynamic and not being who I was and not questioning and being in the closet and all of these things, I kind of view it as, “OK, I’m never going back to that.” Through honestly writing this album, I kind of got to reclaim Florida as mine.

I hope anyone reading or watching this interview who’s unfamiliar with your music doesn’t think The Eldest Daughter is an entirely a sad, mopey, angry record! So, I’ll cite another example of your lyrical humor, in “Man of the House.” My favorite line in the album is from that song: “My cats can be gay if they want to.” I’m all for gay cats. I’m all for cats living their truth.

Let the cats be gay!

Yes! But what is “Man of the House” really about? Because that’s a loaded term — patriarchy, gender roles, all that.

Yeah, I was kind of claiming that for myself. In the visualizer I did, I was in male drag. I had a beard and the camo and I felt awesome; I feel like it unlocked something in me. When I wrote it, I was living in an apartment by my own, by myself, and paying the bills from my music, which was wild. And at the time I wasn’t talking to my parents, because you go through breaks, or at least I do with them.

Are you talking to them now?

No, not right now.

Oh, I’m sorry.

It’s OK. So yeah, I think it was the first time that I was like, “OK, I’m a little bit on my own. Let me figure this out.” I just felt powerful. It was a time of my life when I was like, “I’m a strong person!” So, I wrote “Man of the House” and I was like, “I get to live by my rules. My cats, if they want to be gay, can be gay!”

Are your cats gay?

One of them definitely is gay. For sure, gay. My partner says that I project a little bit. Like, I’m almost forcing them to be gay, when they might not be.

You’ve just got to let your kids, even your furry kids, be who they want to be, whether they’re gay or not. That’s one thing we’ve learned one thing from this interview! I also want to ask about “Soho House Valet,” because your press release called it the “north star” of The Eldest Daughter. It’s about a very specific conversation you had with a family member, I assume at Soho House…

I wrote that a week after I had this f fight with my dad walking into Soho House Warehouse in Downtown L.A., and I wrote it to process that. I was very honest in a way that I hadn’t in my writing before. I viewed the song as, “Well, this is for me. No one else is going to hear it. So, who cares? I’ll just say everything.” And then I sat with it for a while and I was like, “You know what? I think I do want to put this out. And I want to make an entire album that is this honest and is for myself.” I guess why it’s the north star. It was like the catalyst of, “OK, I want to start making music in this way.”

Do you mind me asking why you’re not speaking with your parents right now?

I think it’s a rollercoaster. Relationships change. And right now for me, as this album’s coming out and I’m talking about it, and there’s been fights, and the political climate… it’s just a lot. And I’m kind of like, one thing at a time. Sometimes space is good for healing as well. When things are really emotionally charged, sometimes it’s OK to say, “Everyone needs to take a break. Take a break and breathe for a second.”

But even though you have differences of opinion, different political beliefs, different religious beliefs, I understand that your parents always been very supportive of you of being an artist from very young age. And that’s interesting. Maybe some people would assume they’d be like, “Be a housewife! Don’t pursue a career!”  But they always encouraged you to be musician.

Yes, and I feel like that’s such a gift, because I’ve had so many friends who parents were like, “OK, be practical.” And doing music is not practical. It’s a hard thing to go out and pursue. And especially my parents are not creatives and not in this world, so they didn’t really understand it, but they were willing to learn with me and figure it out. So, I’m like, “OK, see? If you can do that with music, then you can do that with me being gay, too!”

Did you always want to play music?

Yeah, when I was young, it was always, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say: “A singer! I want to be a singer. I want to write my songs.” Maybe in middle school I thought I would do something practical, but then in high school I got diagnosed with an anxiety and depressive disorder and I was like, “Music is the only thing that makes me happy.” And I was really supported in that.

So, your parents supported you in your mental health journey and got you help, et cetera?

Yes, they did. So, you see, they’re not… there’s so many redeeming qualities. I had a lot of great things in my childhood.

I’m glad to hear that. So, let’s end things on that positive note. You were obviously unpacking a lot of stuff from your adolescence when making this record that was painful or dark, but there’s nostalgia on The Eldest Daughter too. What did you revisit that was nice to remember?

I think the last track, “Kissimmee,” which is where I was born. I had gone back to Florida and was able to go out with some queer people and discover so many beautiful people in Florida and be with family in a really positive way. And I was like, “Oh, I have this nostalgia for childhood again!” Coming back and being able to be who I am and really love who I am in Florida, I think was really good for me — because I’d kind of had this view of loving a place so much, but not really being loved by it. Maybe that’s a generalization, but you can find pockets and find people anywhere.

My last question is, what advice do you have for people who are going through something similar — whether it’s coming out, or just in some way breaking away from their upbringing — about they can be as grounded as you seem to be now?

Oh, wow, thank you! … I think being honest with yourself and learning how to love yourself is such an important thing. And I think I was able to do that by spending a lot of time by myself and doing a lot of work, but also finding community and finding people who celebrate you for exactly who you are. And it doesn’t need to be a lot. I think that has made all the difference with me — just having my few friends who are like, “I see you. I love you. And I’m here for you no matter what.”