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 kn 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.”

“On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual,” singer-songwriter and actor Nat Wolff tells LPTV, as he sits with his bandmate and brother, fellow musician/thespian Alex, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records. “I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. … Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.”

Nat and Alex are at Licorice Pizza — a much more intimate space than the arenas they’ll be playing in May and June with tourmate Alex Warren, or the big stages they graced in 2024 opening for their friend and collaborator Billie Eilish — to play a stripped-down show celebrating their new album. Fittingly and simply Nat & Alex Wolff, the record is one of the best releases of 2026 so far, and certainly the best of their long career — a stunning dreampop opus that evokes everything from ‘70s Laurel Canyon folk, to ‘90s slowcore and shoegaze, to even ‘80’s/’90s Cher. And it’s probably not at all what unfamiliar listeners would expect from child stars of the aughts’ cult Nickelodeon show The Naked Brothers Band.

“I remember someone recently said, ‘Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I was about 11,’” the now 28-year-old Alex chuckles.

But starring on three Naked Brothers Band seasons, for which they performed and composed all the music, actually served as a sort of songwriting/production “bootcamp” for the Wolffs — the sons of Thirtysomething actress Polly Draper, who created and directed the Naked Brothers series, and veteran jazz musician Michael Wolff. And it led them to this full-circle moment with their fourth studio album, as they explore and unpack their complicated and conflicted experiences with, among other things, childhood (and adulthood) fame.

“I read a book, and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships,” says Nat, 31, as he reflects on “Horse,” one of his most raw and confessional contributions to Nat & Alex Wolff. “But it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. …  I thought, like, ‘Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.’ … But now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing.”

Alex feels the same way about his own (no pun intended) naked “Backup Plan,” a song “that felt different and dangerous and strange.” He wrote it in a hotel room in Athens, Greece, while shooting a movie on location and spending an unprecedented amount of time away from Nat, when “there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it,” he explains. “Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all.”

“We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me ‘Backup Plan’ and thinking, like, ‘Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it’ — but also, ‘I gotta check in on him.’ Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way,” Nat muses, remembering the time apart before they reconvened to record Nat & Alex Wolff. “I felt the same way playing ‘Horse’ for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, ‘We’ve got to record that tomorrow.’”

The brothers have had their struggles, both during their Nickelodeon run (when they experienced the double-life whiplash of being bullied at school, yet being worshipped by both teenybopper and “creepy older” fans off-campus) and after the series ended in 2009. “We were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous,” Alex quips. And yet, they’ve managed to avoid the rock-bottom scandals of many former child stars, which they attribute to both their tight sibling bond and to the periods of quiet in their professional lives that allowed them to process and regroup.

“I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became ‘us against the world,’” Nat says. “I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t ‘happening’ or ‘hot,’ when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.”

In the extended LPTV video above and the edited Q&A below — what the brothers sweetly and generously call their “favorite interview ever,” at their “favorite record store” — Nat and Alex open up about the cathartic and rewarding process of crafting their “most collaborative album on every level”; respectively portraying Pavement’s Scott Kannberg and Leonard Cohen onscreen; their “Mount Rushmore” of all-time favorite songwriters; the encouragement they received from family friend Warren Zevon; getting pelted with monkey feces while performing at a rained-out Bronx Zoo; love-bombing; and the very special four-legged guest star on their album, Shark O’Connell.

LPTV: It’s an exciting day. There are already a couple-hundred people lined up outside the store to see you perform. Congratulations! I know this album was made in a different circumstances from previous ones — particularly the one before, Table for Two, when you were literally locked down together during quarantine times. Before this new one, you had spent some time apart. You weren’t estranged, you hadn’t had a feud or anything, but you’d been living in different places. After being in a band together for practically as long as you’d been brothers, I assume it was unprecedented for you to be separated, and that this affected the record.

ALEX: For sure. That was the longest we’d been apart. I was traveling around Europe for a year filming — I was in Norway, I was in Greece, I was in Montreal, I was in Argentina, I was in London. I was really all over the place. And I think that there’s something about writing songs while you’re away and then bringing them back to Nat. It’s like the most amazing, rewarding feeling, because you felt so far away and you’ve sort of been writing to yell out and get back home. And then when you bring it, it feels almost like it was very, very private. But we also did some songs completely together on this album. We did “Tough,” where Nat sings the first verse and I sing the pre-chorus, then we sing the chorus together. I’m really proud of that. I felt like this was the most collaborative album that we made on every level.

NAT: Yeah, there’s something interesting about Alex being far away and me being far away and sending each other songs, almost as a way to check in with each other.

Did you miss each other? Did it feel weird to be apart?

NAT: Oh, yeah! We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me “Backup Plan” and thinking, like, “Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it” — but also, “I gotta check in on him.” Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way. I felt the same way playing “Horse” for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, “We’ve got to record that tomorrow.”

Am I correct that “Backup Plan” was the song that sort of kicked things off for this album? And it’s one of the ones that Alex wrote in a hotel?

ALEX: Yeah, in Athens. Definitely for me, that’s the inciting incident that’s it was time to make a new record. We’d been writing songs, but there was something about that song that felt different and dangerous and strange. It demanded to at least follow something through with it and see how it would come out in the studio. I was very nervous to record it, because it felt like I didn’t know what direction really we wanted to go in, because it was very raw. And I think that we felt the same way about “Horse,” where it was so raw that it was almost like, “OK, what do we do with this song? … I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do with this.”

What were your respective mindsets during “Backup Plan” and “Horse”? What were you each going through when writing two of the most vulnerable songs of your career?

NAT: I read a book and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships. It was just something that I was thinking about a lot. [“Horse”] was just a byproduct of that, but it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. So then, showing the song, I thought, like, “Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.” But then at a certain point of showing people, now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing. And it’s been the one that I’ve gotten the most kind of vulnerable take from people who’ve heard it, sharing stories with me.

ALEX: I feel the same way. I feel like [“Backup Plan”] was written in a state of there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it. Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all. I was playing Leonard Cohen [in the 2024 drama series So Long, Marianne] and I was really entrenched in the work that [Cohen] was inspired by and Herman Hesse and all those people, so I felt, “OK, I have a lot of information that I’ve inhaled. Hopefully when this explosion comes out, there will be pieces of that stuff.” I think that’s how we sort of approached it, like if it’s a raw song, let’s keep it raw. Use the scratch vocal. The vocal doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds true.

I hear a lot of Leonard Cohen’s influence on this album. How daunting was it to play one of the greatest artists of all time, in my opinion?

NAT: My opinion too!

ALEX: Yeah, definitely. Probably for me, the favorite songwriter.

NAT: What about Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon]?

ALEX: It’s like it’s [Cohen] and Paul and John are on the Mount Rushmore of best songwriters, but definitely lyrically [Cohen] is the king for me. And I still feel that he’s underrated, even though he’s huge and important. You can’t talk about him enough. I think in approaching [the role], I just thought, “Well, there’s going to be a huge chunk of people who really don’t like it no matter what I do,” because it’s almost a betrayal that someone else is not actually Leonard Cohen. So, I just felt like I’m just going to accept that, and [tap into] what he meant to me and what I took from him.

And then Nat played Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs of Pavement, in the recent Pavements movie. I don’t even know how to describe that film. It’s not a documentary, but it’s not a biopic, either.

NAT: Yeah, we didn’t really even know what we were doing when we did it, but they said, “It’s going to be half-biopic, half-you as actors pretending to be like an actor that can’t get out of character.” Like Austin Butler playing Elvis or something. And then it’s a bit of an actual documentary. And then there’s also a musical that they put on Broadway for three days, and they filmed the behind-the-scenes of the musical. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. I saw it in a theater. But then it’s weirdly really moving too. I actually got to sit next to the lead singer of Pavement [Stephen Malkmus] at a fake premiere that we did to make it look like a premiere — they were going to shoot it and then put it in the movie — and he was shaking and crying and stuff, because it’s his life and his legacy. That made me think of how people that have that bratty kind of persona usually are the most sensitive. It’s like a way to block it. I’ve always felt really moved by the Pavement songs and I didn’t know why, and then I was like, “Oh. That’s why.” He’s a really deep-feeling person; he just subverts it in kind of goofiness and wackiness.

I can hear the ‘90s alternative influence in your music too. I hear Elliott Smith, Sebadoh, Beck — but like sad Beck, like Sea Change-era Beck.

ALEX: Oh, we love that! That’s our favorite Beck.

NAT: Nigel Godrich Beck.

There’s also obviously a lot of ‘70 influences on this album.

NAT: Our parents really introduced us to a lot of the late-‘60s and ‘70s music, and then at 12 or 13 I think we rebelled and dove really hard into all the ‘90s grunge — My Bloody Valentine, dreampop, Slowdive. All those kind of bands have meant so much to us, especially production-wise. And lyrically, we love Blur.

ALEX: [Lyndsey] said our clothes look like Oasis!

But unlike the Oasis brothers, you get along.

NAT: Well, we had a couple of fights about the album…

ALEX: I feel with an album, you can hear the compromise if you don’t battle it out a little bit. I feel like when you really love an album between two people, you can tell they both had a point of view.

NAT: The problem was is that one day Alex got the talk-back mic in the studio and I was playing a piano part, and he was giving me notes on the piano part. And as soon as I heard Alex’s voice of God in my ears, in the headphones, I thought, “This is not going to work for me.”

Are there songs that were particularly points of contention?

ALEX: I can’t say that there was one song on the album that while we were in the studio we weren’t getting along making it. I felt like that was the magic. It’s more about after and mixing. I feel like if there was any song that we weren’t both totally 100 percent sold on, it’s just not on the fucking album. That was our rule.

NAT: It was more like, what were the songs that we were going to cut? What were the songs that are going to be on? It’s hard, because there’s a lot of songs that didn’t make it, but it wasn’t even because these songs are better than other songs. It was more like, “This is the most cohesive album.” The album has lots of ups and downs and different colors and isn’t one thing; I’m bothered by a lot of modern music when an album just has a uniform sound. All my favorite albums take lots of journeys, and we wanted to make sure that it has our imprint on it, but that it takes on lots of different shapes.

You mentioned that you rebelled against your parents. But your father is an amazing jazz musician, Michael Wolff, and he was the bandleader and musical director for The Arsenio Hall Show! So, I imagine you met some very cool people as kids. I understand that you sort of grew up with Warren Zevon.

NAT: Oh, yeah, Warren Zevon was my huge influence ,and he was my dad’s best friend. He died when I was probably like 8, but actually for my fifth birthday he gave me a little leather jacket and he said, “You’re going to be a rock star.”

And he was right! Warren was right about a lot of things, actually. What did you think of his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that finally happened last year?

ALEX: So awesome. So great. So moving.

NAT: His last album that he did right before he died [The Wind], where he brought in Bruce Springsteen and all these people and he did “Keep Me In Your Heart” — oh my God, that’s the most beautiful song you ever. My dad used to always say, and he still always says when he’s sick or feeling bad or something, “Oh, my shit’s fucked-up.” And then Warren wrote a song based on my dad saying that. It’s a great one, one of my favorite songs. … He was such an amazing lyricist, it’s crazy.

ALEX: Yeah, he’s on the Mount Rushmore of lyricists, for sure.

So, your Mount Rushmore is Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney? How many are allowed?

ALEX: Neil Young? Can John and Paul be one [spot]? OK, thenalsoBob Dylan…

NAT: And Joni [Mitchell], oh my God!

That’s a pretty solid top five. So yes, you came from a musical family, a showbiz family, growing up with this music, and you weren’t brothers very long before you became a band. And it’s interesting, because we were talking about the Pavements mockumentary, but if people look back at your mockumentary-style Naked Brothers Band show, it was pretty smart for a children’s program. It was pretty meta. I don’t even know how much younger viewers understood how sophisticated it was, especially for the time.

NAT: We didn’t even understand!

ALEX: I don’t think I knew that it was really making fun of us until much later.

NAT: But I did feel when we did an episode where we went to the VMAs, we’re supposed to win the VMA, and we hadn’t even been on TV yet and the music hadn’t even come out yet. We started to leave the VMAs and we got into a car to go home, and [cast member] Qaasim [Middleton] goes, “But what about our award?” And then I was like, “Dude, this is just a show.” That’s when it kind of hit.

ALEX: We met Fergie [at the VMAs] and she said, “I’m a big fan,” but she was just being really nice and polite.

There are other TV shows that began this prefab-band tradition, especially The Monkees. The Monkees were a TV band before they were a “real band,” and some people still don’t take them seriously as a real band, because they still have never been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. You’ve probably dealt with that skepticism yourself, but maybe it’s less of an issue for you guys because you are no longer called “The Naked Brothers Band,” which gives you a clean slate.

NAT: We wanted to break out and just be “Nat & Alex Wolff,” because it wasn’t the Naked Brothers Band. It wasn’t that group. It was us. … And it’s been interesting that ever since we’ve been making music as Nat & Alex, it’s never been an issue for people to wrap their minds around it. We’ve always been really, really lucky with musicians, producers, and people like that who understand where the music’s coming from. But I do remember with press and journalists, having to steer the ship. They were trying to pigeonhole us into a certain thing that we weren’t.

ALEX: I remember someone recently said, “Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?” And I was like, “Oh, I was about 11.”

It’s crazy that the show ended more than 20 years ago! I know you had to write several songs for each episode, so it seems like it was a good songwriting bootcamp to help you with the career you have now.

NAT: It was a bootcamp for songwriting, and then it’s how we learned the studio. We started off where we would sing and play our songs, and then we had musicians come in and we’d play with them. But by the end of the show, Alex and I were doing everything in the studio. … We were kind of already writing all the songs, and now recording them basically a duo.

ALEX: I was just a drummer, initially, and then we started to become more of a duo.

When we were talking about the song “Horse,” Nat, you alluded to traumatic experiences in your adolescence. Do you mean the whole child-stardom thing? Unlike some other kid stars or TV stars or Disney stars or Nickelodeon stars of your era, I don’t recall hearing about you two going through any big scandals or struggles.

NAT: I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became “us against the world.” There were times when it was really overwhelming, having a lot of people know who you are and kind of getting bullied at school, but then having crowds of people outside of the school screaming. It was just a really strange time. And then it kind of going away and then touring, and going from playing the Bronx Zoo for 10 people to then playing Madison Square Garden and Irving Plaza…

The Bronx Zoo concert sounds kind of lit, though.

ALEX: Nope! No, bro. We were right by the monkeys — the real monkeys, not the [Monkees] — and they were throwing fecal matter at our guitars.

NAT: We’d learned all these songs because this choir was going to come, and then only two people from the choir showed up.

ALEX: And they didn’t know any of the songs that they told us to learn.

This is like an episode of a TV show, almost.

ALEX: A tragedy. A horror movie.

NAT: I remember turning Alex and being like, “I don’t think it could get worse” than that show. And honestly, and it never did.

That’s like Spinal Tap. It’s maybe even worse than “Puppet Show with Spinal Tap.” Instead, it’s “Monkeys with Nat & Alex Wolff.”

ALEX: I just feel bad for the eight or nine fans who did come to that show and were like, “What the hell?”

Well, I don’t think you should feel bad for them now. Now they’re probably like, “Remember that show at the Bronx Zoo? We were there!”

NAT: Oh — and it was raining so hard that they put up a half a tent just over the stage. But everybody who came was just getting rained on really hard.

I bet the monkeys enjoyed the show, though.

ALEX: Nope, clearly not!

I mean, maybe monkeys throwing feces is like Greeks throwing plates. It’s a sign of affection and applause.

ALEX: Opa!

But at least you don’t have to play zoos anymore.

NAT: Well, maybe we should, A zoo tour could actually be fun.

Anyway, more seriously, your childhood is a recurring theme on this album. I know “Whole Other Life” unpacks some of that. But I don’t know if it is only about being famous at a young age, or if it’s about other stuff.

ALEX: I think that we were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous, and that can come and go. But it’s more about the after-effect. I feel like when it’s happening, all that stuff was great. It was just really complicated after — your feelings of trying to fit in and your relationship with family members. Nat told the story of how we were in school and we would be getting bullied, but then we’d walk outside and there’d be fans there. And there’d be creepy older people. It was just a lot of strange shit for young people to endure. A lot of amazing stuff, and a lot of shitty stuff, especially when you’re a child star and then you move on. I mean, if you can call us child stars; some people like Miley Cyrus or whatever, that was just so insane. But being famous, I think that you want to almost pretend that you get embarrassed by it. You don’t want to even look at it. And then when you get a little bit older, not only are you OK to look at it, you can kind of feel it again and understand what it was that you were going through at the time.

NAT: On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual. … I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. And somehow it does unlock a certain self-consciousness that goes [away], and you have the ability to be free. Maybe it’s because you’re not trying to be good, so you can be free. Then you end up stumbling upon stuff. Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.

Do you think it was a blessing in disguise that there were ebbs and flows to your career? I’ve heard this theory that the age at which someone becomes famous is when their maturity level freezes…

ALEX: People say my maturity level is about 8!

NAT: Something froze there.

Well, I beg to differ. You both seem very mature and grounded to me. But do you think the fact that you had periods of relative normalcy after your TV show ended was a good thing in the long run?

NAT: Totally. Because I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t “happening” or “hot,” when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.

I have a couple of other songs I’d love to discuss. My favorite track on the album is “Candy Speak.” It’s about love-bombing, which has happened to us all. “Forever for about a week” is best line ever. I don’t know if this song is based on a real-life experience or amalgam of experiences, but I can relate.

NAT: It was an amalgamation of a few. It’s definitely that feeling of not just being love-bombed, but buying into the fantasy because it’s nice for that moment. You know somewhere in the back of your head that this isn’t real. If it feels too good to be true, it’s usually too good to be true.

But yes, it feels good to be love-bombed, so you think, “I’m just going to go with it, and worry about that later.”

NAT: It’s like doing a drug or drinking too much. You’re like, “This feels so good! It’s going to last forever!” But the hangover’s comin’, man. It’s comin’.

It’s relatable content, for sure. The other song I wanted to ask more about was “Tough,” which opens the record, because that’s a particularly emotional one.

ALEX: I had listened to Alex G’s new album Headlights and I’d really loved it, and then I’d gone down a really a deep rabbit hole with Cher. I love Cher a lot. … Cher is the greatest chorus-writer ever. So, I just wanted to kind of capture that feeling I had when I listened to Headlights, and then capture the feeling I have when I listen to a Cher chorus. I went in the yard and I wrote that chorus and then kind of wrote a pre-chorus, but I didn’t really know what it was. And then Nat and I went to the studio for the very first time, having sections of the song not written, like writing it on the day. And it was the most thrilling thing in the world.

NAT: All the things we’ve been talking about in this interview — about growing up and that sort of face that you have to put on in order to have that weird childhood that we had — that, I think, came through in those lyrics. “Empty compliments/That’s what I do best/The days just do that/I got no candy left.”

The last song I want to ask about is “Soft Kissing Hour,” because it obviously has a very special guest on it: Billie Eilish’s dog.

NAT: Hey, I was going to make that joke! … Yeah, Shark is on a lot of tracks on that song. … His snoring is kind of comforting. It’s just way in the back, but I remember the mixer being like, “Should I take out all this noise?” I was like, “Nope!” And he said that’s what happened with Carrie & Lowell, the Sufjan Stevens album. He’d spent two weeks taking out all the air-conditioning noise, and Suf said, “What happened to the air-conditioning?”

I guess you kept what some people would call “mistakes” on this record, and you kept it organic and DIY and kind of went back to your roots. And it all worked out. There were no mistakes. So, congratulations again on a fantastic album.

Twenty-five years ago, hip-hop/electroclash baddie Princess Superstar, aka Concetta Kirschner, was the queen of the scene with Princess Superstar Is, the album that AllMusic Guide’s rave review said “should mark her arrival” and spawned the global hit “Bad Babysitter.” But as recently as 2023, after years-long gaps between album releases, lapsed record deals, and diminishing returns — “I put music out, but it would fail. It would literally get a thousand streams,” she recalls — Kirschner assumed her career was pretty much over.

But then “Perfect (Exceeder)” — a 2007 mashup of Dutch dance artist Mason’s instrumental with “Perfect,” a track from Kirschner’s ambitious and prescient but commercially disastrous Princess Superstar Is follow-up, My Machine — appeared on the Saltburn soundtrack. And everything turned around. The song went viral, and Princess finally earned her first gold record in the U.S., 30 years after she started in the business. “I got my career back. It’s kind of like a miracle,” she tells LPTV, during an autograph signing at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records for the 25th-anniversary pink vinyl reissue of Princess Superstar Is.

“I was so grateful to have a second chance at doing music again,” Kirschner says. “When you’re an artist, that’s what you love, and it’s so painful when you don’t get to do it. Or maybe you get to do it, but on a smaller level and you’re just not reaching people really the way you want to. I was so excited to get it back. It was just flabbergasting.”

Princess Superstar has lived several lives, which is why she is currently writing what is sure to be her juicy, compulsively page-turning autobiography. Obviously, she needs save some of her stories for the book, but during her hilarious LPTV interview, she dishes about being labeled “Feminem” by the U.K. music press and winning over the white bros at late-‘90s/early-2000s hip-hop shows; the glory days of electroclash and the current “indie sleaze” revival; the aughts-era NYC rivalry between electroclash fans and followers of more “serious” bands like the Strokes; how her Grimes-approved sci-fi concept album My Machine, on which she worked with Todd Terry, Stuart Price, Armand Van Helden, Felix the Housecat, and Arthur Baker, was supposed to be her Tommy, and her dream to revive My Machine as a theatrical piece; dealing with industry ageism; discovering, mentoring, and producing a young Lizzy Grant, aka Lana Del Rey; opening for Morrissey in Serbia; hanging out in Grandmaster Flash’s supplements-stocked kitchen; wearing full daytime glam at Chipotle; and the plans for her new album, which will be her first since 2013.

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LPTV: It’s crazy that it’s been 25 years since Princess Superstar Is came out.

PRINCESS SUPERSTAR: I know! I can’t even fathom it. I can’t believe it.

But what’s cool is your career is possibly bigger now than it was when that record came out.

It’s kind of true. It’s like one of those wild life stories, right? My career was kicking off back then with “Bad Babysitter.” It was No. 11 on the charts in the U.K., and I was touring in a big tour bus, and I did so much for that whole decade, the 2000s. And then my career sort of died. But then totally it got revived two years ago with the Saltburn soundtrack. “Perfect” was on it and went viral, and I got my career back. It’s kind of like a miracle.

You’ve used that quote before — that you “got your career back.” But I don’t think you ever really stopped grinding or working. There were big gaps between records, but it’s not like you were on hiatus. Or were you?

It was couple things. I mean, I was taking breaks because I was knocking on so many doors and they were just shut. It was really depressing. So, I gave up music for a little while. And then I was like, “OK, I’ll just be a mom,” which is amazing; that’s an incredible job. But inside, I was like, “I just want to do music again. Why is nobody letting me?” And then I was like, “I’m not going to wait for anyone to let me.” I was a scrappy kid in the ‘90s that started their own record label with zero money. So, I was like, “Let me just keep making music and I’ll put it out on Spotify. How do I use this thing now called Spotify?” I was so confused. And then I put music out, but it would fail. It would literally get a thousand streams. But I kept going. And I think that that’s the message I really love to give to artists — and to people. Just keep going. You just never know. Because when opportunity came, I was prepared.

I definitely want to get into that. But it’s interesting that you said you went to No. 11 in the U.K., you sound quintessentially American in the best possible way, like very New York. What do you think it was about British audiences that made them early Princess Superstar adopters?

I think they’re just forward. They’re just cooler. You know what I mean?

Yeah, they are. Obviously you’re not a novelty act, but do you think they were attracted to the novelty of your persona, of you being this street-tough New York broad?

Oh yeah, they loved that. They have such an amazing sense of humor. And yeah, I was this white-girl rapper. They called me “Feminem” or whatever.

There weren’t many female rappers back then, and even fewer white female rappers. Iggy Azalea had some success, but that was later. But you worked with Grandmaster Flash, Kool Keith, and Prince Paul, so obviously you did get taken seriously. What was it like blazing that trail back in 2001?

It was really hard, actually. You don’t, especially in this day and age, want to be like, “Oh, it’s so hard! I was white!” But it was hard being a woman doing this art form. I remember back then I would do these shows opening up for Dilated Peoples and Beanie Sigel and huge hip-hop [acts], because I was squarely in the hip-hop milieu. [The hip-hop audience] was all dudes. There were no women in these audiences, OK? I don’t know why, but it was dudes. … And it was, like primarily white dudes in the audience, too. In the early 2000s, the people going to the hip-hop shows were white dudes. And no girls. It was really weird. … If they liked you and you got a head nod and a shoulder, that was good. That’s why I started rapping over dance music, because electroclash was happening at the same time in Europe, and I was going all the time to Europe because that’s where I was famous. And I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This is gay and sparkly and fun! Oh, fuck these [hip-hop] audiences.” So, I really just went straight into the electro thing because I was like, “I can still rap, but I need a better environment for me.” … And also, if [the white-dude hip-hop crowds] didn’t like you, they’d throw things at you — like dangerous things. This white guy in a Wu-Tang shirt threw a bottle at me.

Did you ever get injured?

No, because I could jump out of the way. I was like, “Nope, I’m not getting fucking hit by a bottle.” It was hard, hard, hard blazing that trail, for sure. But I just knew one thing: I wanted to rap. That was it. I didn’t know the politics. I didn’t know anything about that. I just was like, “This is the art form I want to do.” Because I love that with rap, you can do different things than you can with singing.” So, I was like, “That’s what I want to do.”

What was the first rap music you heard that inspired you?

I remember first hearing Kurtis Blow on the radio. It was like pirate radio. I was really young and I was like, “Why is this guy talking on the record? He’s not singing. He’s talking!” And I was like, “Dad” — because I was brought up on classic rock — “Dad, he’s talking. Why is he talking?” He’s like, “That’s rap,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool!” And my dad was like, “Eh, I don’t really get it.” And I said, “But it’s cool, right?”

You spent a lot of your youth in New York, which was the perfect place to be raised on rap.

Yeah, late ’80s — it was so amazing. A Tribe Called Quest and all that. There was cyphers in Union Square and stuff like that. And then there was this record store called Fat Beats, which was the quintessential hip-hop store. … And yeah, so that’s how I got into it.

You mentioned electroclash. It was a short-lived movement in the aughts, but I think it’s coming back. Now people call it “indie sleaze.” You hear it in what Charli XCX is doing…

Or the Dare.

Yeah, I love the Dare. “I like the girls who do drugs”… the minute I heard that, I was like, OK, fun is back. And even though electroclash was short-lived and maybe not taken seriously by music critics at the time, I think it was very important. It was actually dominated by a lot of women, like Chicks on Speed, Peaches, and yourself, and it was very sex-positive and queer-positive. I’d love to hear your memories of that era. I think it was a lightning bolt in time.

It really was. It was so amazing. What I really loved the most about it was that you had all the music genres blending, and that’s something that I was always super-into anyway. You had punk with techno, hip-hop, classic rock. That was really when mashups started happening, like here in the U.S. with Z-Trip, and over [in Europe and the U.K.] with Too Many DJs. I remember hearing Missy Elliott rapping over AC/DC and I was like, “What the fuck is that? What is that?” Because that was really my childhood: I had the AC/DC, but I was also into hip-hop. And that’s part of why I wanted to become a DJ, which I did too, because I was so influenced by that. I loved that you could mash up everything. It was wild and free and fun, and it was a real kind of nod also to ’80s new wave, which I grew up on as well. It was just really queer and sparkles and fun, and not taking it too seriously.

Do you think there’s this “indie sleaze” revival because young people weren’t around for that era, and since they came of age during COVID and glued to their phones, they long for that sort of mindless, debauched fun they never got to enjoy?

Yeah, I think so. It was a really super-fun, amazing era. We didn’t have phones!

Well, we had Razrs.

Yeah, we had Razrs, but we were just more present, and they feel that. And I think nostalgia is always a thing. In the 2000s, we were nostalgic for the ’80s. But yeah, I think the [electroclash] fashion was sick, though.

And it was also not expensive. The fashion looked cheap, but in a good way.

We made things. We cut things up. We were wearing American Apparel.

I almost felt like the electroclash backlash was similar to the “disco sucks” backlash of 1979. Disco also was powered by a lot of women, queer artists, and people of color, and it got dismissed as cheesy and vapid. But now everybody loves disco. Maybe that is also why electroclash is getting its due now.

It’s funny you say that, that because there was like a kind of seriousness coming out of New York, which was like LCD Soundsystem and the Strokes — that kind of crowd looked down on us, like electroclash was embarrassing, that it wasn’t music of substance. They were like the cool kids, and we weren’t as cool. It’s funny, I forgot about that.

Everything was more compartmentalized then. Now no one cares about genre loyalty and tribalism. Kids today will like Doja Cat and Geese, or whatever.

Exactly. I wasn’t really in the New York scene too much. I was in Europe a lot. I’m writing this song with Digitalism called “I Was in Berlin” and it’s about what we’re talking about now. I wasn’t even in New York. If you read that book Meet Me in the Bathroom, I’m not even in it.

I guess you never really fit neatly into any genre.

I know. I do sit in a funny place, because I come from hip-hop and then I went over into dance, and I became a DJ. People don’t really know where to put me.

Well, now is a good time for you to be back, because everything’s a little more genre-fluid now. Let’s talk about your career timeline. Princess Superstar Is got a lot of attention, but then four years passed before you released another album. And then it was like another five years until the next one. Why did your momentum slow?

That’s a great fucking question. Basically, after the success of “Bad Babysitter,” we’re like, “OK, we need the next single.” Everybody thought it was going to be “Keith ‘n Me.” We made a really funny video, and it was with Kool Keith, who’s like a legend. I was so excited to work with him, especially because us kids loved “Blue Flowers” and Dr. Octagonecologyst. I was like, “This is going to be huge!” But then it didn’t pop off. We’re like, “Oh shit, what are we going to do?” And I was like, “Well, the next thing I really want to make is like a science-fiction concept record.” And everyone was like, “Oh no, don’t do that.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Right? And I was like, “I’m going to make my Tommy.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, God…”

I still want you to make an electroclash musical, with the electroclash kids and the Strokes kids having a fight, like the Jets versus the Sharks.

Well, that would be sick. [Singing West Side Story-style] “When you’re a Stroke, you’re a Stroke all the way…” But anyway. I decided I’m going to make this crazy-ass record. I was just then transitioning from hip-hop into electroclash, so I was like, “Let me work with all the best producers.” And I could, because everyone loved “Bad Babysitter.” I got Todd Terry, Stuart Price, Armand Van Helden, Felix the Housecat. And I got Arthur Baker to be the executive producer — who did “Blue Monday,” for crying out loud! And I’m like, “OK, it’ll be a concept record, but it’s going to be the shit.” I made My Machine and it was so many tracks [25], and it took me so long because it was a story. I did that in London with Arthur and everybody, and by the time that it came out, nobody really cared about me anymore.

But then we put out “Perfect” as the single, right? Basically, we put the a capella of “Perfect” on the vinyl, because that’s what you did as a hip-hop person — you put your a capella on your single vinyl. And thank God I did, because that album totally flopped. It flopped so bad that I was on tour and I had this really cool live show that I actually did at the Echo here in L.A. in 2005; it was one of the last few places I did it. It was a theatrical thing that I totally envisioned, and the label pulled out their tour support in the middle of tour. They’re like, “This record’s not selling, so that’s it, we’re canceling all the dates.” That was devastating. But two years later, they called me up and said, “Somebody put the a capella of ‘Perfect’ over [Mason’s] ‘Exceeder’ and it’s blowing the fuck up in England. It’s now No. 3 on the U.K. charts.” This was 2007, two years after the album, and that catapulted me back into the spotlight again. But it was a really weird thing because the label, Ministry of Sound, didn’t put me in the video. People were like, “Wait, the ‘Bad Babysitter’ girl is the ‘Perfect’ girl?” I don’t know, my branding got all fucked-up.

Wasn’t your last album released in 2013?

Yeah, I was always really kind of slow on the making of records, which in retrospect I wish I wasn’t, but it is what it is. What’s really cool is now I’m working on my next record, my first full-length in 13 years. … I’m working with amazing producers like Oscar Scheller, who produced Pink Pantheress; he’s got a No. 1 right now with Pink Pantheress and Zara Larsson. I also have a song with Hervé who made Princess Superstar’s song] “Licky” and [worked with] Rye Rye. Laidback Luke is one of the producers, and also Konstantin who produced [Tones and I’s] “Dance Monkey,” which was a global No. 1 in 40 countries. I’m trying to mix up the old-school and the new. Let’s see what it does. It’s a really fucking amazing record. I’m so grateful for it. I don’t know what it’s called yet, but I’m toying with Her Magnum Opuss, spelled O-P-U-S-S.

I feel now that you said it on camera, now that it’s out there, that has to happen! That’s a pretty great title. But I know you’re playing May 30 at the Echoplex with Lords of Acid and Mz Neon/a>, but can you do please another sci-fi one-off show at the Echo, so I can see it? I missed that Echo show in 2005.

My dream is to revive My Machine as a theatrical piece! That is one of my dreams. I do love the story, and I think it actually was kind of a little psychic. I mean, even Grimes tweeted that. I forget what she said in the tweet, but it was something like, “My Machine is totally today.”

What was the My Machine storyline?

It was about a megalomanic artist who wants every single position on the chart — of the book chart, the music chart — wants to win all the Grammys, all the Academy Awards. And so, she makes clones of herself so that she can have all of that. It’s really about artistic ego, but it’s also more than that. It’s about ego and the death of the ego, and also a lot about corporate branding.

You basically predicted the future. It’s your fault!

Yeah. I predicted the future. Sorry. Sorry.

I am kidding, but seriously, did you see something on the horizon that pop culture was going in that direction?

I could already see that it was already happening!

Well, I would absolutely love to see a production of My Machine in 2026. But since everything’s coming together for you with the past and the present, I have to ask, how exactly did the whole Saltburn thing come about? From what I’ve seen on your social media, you were not expecting it.

It’s a Cinderella story, for sure. Basically, they emailed and asked me to use it. I had no idea what it was. People ask me all the time to use “Perfect (Exceeder),” so I didn’t think anything of it. I basically always say yes. They used it and I didn’t hear anything, and then it was Christmastime and my daughter was scrolling on TikTok and she’s like, “Mom, your voice is all over my feed and it’s so annoying!” I was like, “Is it that pigeon thing?” Because previously there was a pigeon filter and everyone was dancing to “Perfect.”

@therealprincesssuperstar I am absolutely loving that this pigeon filter is trending to the song i wrote in 2005. As an artist, you hope to create deep and meaningful music that will last for generations. I see that i have achieved that -now with this pigeon meme I can die knowing i did everything i needed to do on this earthly plane #pigeonfilteristrending #pigeonfilter #perfectexceeder #perfectexceederpigeon #2000sthrowbacks #2000sdance #2000skids #hitrecord #onehitwonders #pigeonlovers ♬ Perfect (Exceeder) – Vocal Club Mix – Mason & Princess Superstar

That sounds like some feelgood, wholesome content.

It was! I’m proud of my pigeon filter. But no, it was Saltburn. Everyone was obsessed with Saltburn. and then it just snowballed. And then the label reached out — the label that never talks to me. I was like, “Why are they emailing me?” And then I got a booking agent, I got a manager, I got signed to Universal Publishing. It was crazy.

And I loved how on social media you were not shy when expressing your joy about this, and how you were really milking and embracing moment. You were so excited.

That was because I was so grateful to have a second chance at doing music again. When you’re an artist, that’s what you love, and it’s so painful when you don’t get to do it. Or maybe you get to do it, but on a smaller level and you’re just not reaching people really the way you want to. I was so excited to get it back. It was just flabbergasting.

Your social media in general is so entertaining. I recall around the time when Saltburn was blowing up, some tabloid like the Daily Mail ran a clickbait article saying you were “unrecognizable” — when, by the way, you were completely recognizable, you pretty much looked the same — and you called out their stupid ageism in the funniest way.

Yeah, with the [fake] rotted teeth and stuff. That was fun. I actually love all that; I think it’s so hilarious. I forget what famous person said this, like Mae West maybe, but the saying is: It’s bad when they’re not talking about you.

But that sort of ageism is so lame…

Right? What am I supposed to look like? I’m older!

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Have you had to deal with ageism a lot in your career?

A little bit. I mean, I think no matter how you slice it, music is hard. So, if you add aging onto it, yeah, for sure. But what am I going to do? I’m not going to complain, because again, that’s like complaining about being a white person in hip-hop or whatever. You can’t really complain. This is the way the world is. I’m going to fucking keep doing my thing and either bust through or not. I have a new single, the one with Konstantin, called “Tough Titties.” That’s the name of it. So, it’s like, tough titties, dude. You gotta just show up. Who cares what the world is doing? You’ve got to follow your passion.

I love that you released a song called “Gettin’ Older (Pussy Still Pop)” for your 50th birthday. That’s the best way to celebrate.

And that was one of the ones I put out that got zero response!

Well, maybe now it will finally get a big response. I feel like anyone who’s unhappy about turning older needs to make that their anthem. It needs to be the new birthday song that people do at karaoke or whatever. Celebrate that your pussy still pops even though you’re 50!

There is no expiration date! There’s no pussy-pop cutoff date!

You are the queen, or the princess, of reinvention. You have always been a visionary. Weren’t you also instrumental in Lana Del Rey’s career when she was Lizzy Grant?

Yeah. My husband actually found her. I was producing artists at the time. It was like 2007 and he’s like, “You should produce her.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, she’s amazing.” And I was like, “You should do a vintage thing, like a James Bond girl thing,” and I slid her in that direction. And then I introduced her to her manager, who’s still her manager to this day, Ben [Mawson]

Do you still produce other artists, or would you like to?

Well, I’m a lyricist. I like to write melodies and words, and that’s what I really love to do more than produce. I actually did just take on this artist to produce him [Moses Thee Artist], but in general, no, I don’t really feel like it.

Speaking of writing, is it true you’re working on your autobiography?

Yeah! I just got a little, tiny book deal with this U.K. publishing house. … I’m actually nervous about it.

It’s going to be great. I think during this interview we’ve only scratched the surface of the stories you could tell. What’s the biggest pinch-me moment of your career? What’s like the biggest “Holy shit, I can’t believe that was my life” moment?

I think it was when I got to open up for Morrissey. I was like, “Dude, I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” Because I was like a little like 16-year-old emo kid listening to Meat Is Murder and crying. That was crazy. It was in Serbia. And I’m opening for Morrissey. I’m like, “What is even happening?” I really don’t remember much from that day except for the fact that I was DJing and I forgot to paint my nails, and the jumbotron kept showing my hand. And I was like, “Morrissey, Morrissey.” I couldn’t even be present because I was just so in love with Morrissey. So, that was something special. And then working with Grandmaster Flash was also a pinch-me moment, because this is the godfather of hip-hop. I was so nervous. And his studio was below his kitchen, so you have to walk through the kitchen, and it was just supplements everywhere. He doesn’t age. He’s very healthy. I saw all of his supplements, and I was like, “I can’t believe I’m in Grandmaster Flash’s kitchen. What am I doing here?”

So, you have the memoir, the science-fiction musical revival, the electroclash Sharks/Jets musical, the Her Magnum Opuss album, and also your tour with Lords of Acid and Mz Neon. That’s a lot, but do you have anything else going on?

Just trying to take care of myself, and take care of my daughter.

How does your daughter now feel everything going on with your career right now?

She loves it, but also she’s 14, so it’s also somewhat cringe. Even coming over here [to Licorice Pizza Records], there’s a Chipotle right near here and she was like, “Mom, that’s an embarrassing outfit for Chipotle.” And I’m like, “OK, that’s going to be the name of my new record!” Embarrassing for Chipotle.

Well, you’re not regular a mom, you’re a cool mom. And I’m sure she realizes that.

“I’ve seen arenas my whole life, which is a blessing and a curse,” Griffin McIntyre tells LPTV. “Because I have high standards — and I want to get there.”

Griffin is sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where he’s about to play his first official live show in the intimate space to celebrate the release of his debut single and video, “Risk It All.” He may be a new kid on the pop block, at age 18, but he has actually grown up around music and on arena stages his entire life — because his father is an actual New Kid on the Block, Joey McIntyre.

New Kids on the Block sensationally got back together just one year after Griffin was born, so Griffin grew up accompanying Joey on various NKOTB reunion tours. But he “never really thought about” his father being a former teen idol (“I just always kind of knew he’s a singer, but he’s a very normal guy; he’s just my dad,” he shrugs), and it took him a while grasp the concept of fame in general (or realize that a breakout pop diva named Lady Gaga was opening for his dad’s band on tour).

However, it was always clear that Griffin was destined to become a performer himself. As an infant, he was literally humming before he could talk, and he caught the dancing/musical theater bug not long after that.

“Gene Kelly was a big thing for me,” Griffin recalls. “I asked a balloon guy once [at a children’s party]… everyone asked the balloon guys, ‘Hey, can you make Spider-Man?’ But I asked him to make Gene Kelly. And he made a [balloon] dude in a suit, and I carried it around.” Griffin later studied various dance disciplines — “ballet, tap, African, hip-hop, modern, all of that stuff” — with none other than Fame icon Debbie, who, much like her tough onscreen character, taught him that if he had big dreams and wanted fame, he’d have to start paying in sweat.

“I owe a lot of my performance vibe to [Allen]. She’s just a role model to me, and definitely a teacher and a mentor,” Griffin says. “It started at Dance Debbie Allen Academy, and that mindset, I feel, is still in me.”

His work ethic paid off. Griffin was just 12 when he got first big showbiz break, on only his second-ever audition, landing a role in the Netflix musical sitcom Country Comfort (which also starred American Idol‘s Katharine McPhee). But he waited until now to properly launch his pop career — because before, no music opportunities came his way that ever felt quite right.

“In these past couple years, you might know, there’s a boy band frenzy right now,” Griffin chuckles. “Companies and record labels are putting together boy bands, and it’s very bright and shiny. And I tried to go down that route. But no, I’m not doing it. … I saw the industry on that side, and I am so grateful for that journey. It taught me a lot — and it taught me what I don’t want. I’m a solo artist. No boy band.”

Griffin says he “had to say no to a lot of cool things,” admitting, “That’s what keeps you up at night. But I knew. It’s like, ‘Hey, does this feel right?’ And if you can’t go to bed many nights in a row, maybe you should just do the thing that you want to do.”

The solo route was by default the best option for Griffin, because while some skeptics might assume that he’s some “nepo baby” taking advantage of his family’s industry connections, he actually had to hustle — just like any other unknown up-and-comer living in competitive Los Angeles and recording self-produced music in his bedroom. “I used to be like, ‘Hey, can we do a session?’ But people [in the music business] are very bougie, and they don’t want you. They’re like, ‘How many followers do you have?’ So, I had to do it on my own,” says the singer-songwriter/guitarist/pianist. “But I like proving myself to people.”

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Griffin did have a little help from another famous mentor, super-producer Linda Perry, who he’s known his “whole life” and with whom he has “a special relationship.” He and Perry co-wrote one track, “Shadows,” that will come out eventually, possibly as the follow-up to “Risk It All.” But the biggest lesson Griffin learned from Perry was how to stay true to his own vision, because most of their collaborations ended up being shelved — which was Griffin’s surprising decision.

“I learned that if you want something to sound a certain way, you are the person who knows what it should sound like,” Griffin says. “I went in with [Perry] and we wrote a bunch of songs — songs that I didn’t really like, to be honest. And she knows that. She respected that. She was like, ‘You need to do this on your own. You need to produce your stuff on your own.’ So, I went home and did my stuff. … I had to really step up in the writing process. I wasn’t as good of a writer as I am now. I definitely was not the best; now, I’m all right. But I think [the Perry sessions were] just a different vibe, and I had to step up to get what I want.”

However, Griffin has learned the most from his proud and supportive dad, who was only 13 when he began his only career with NKOTB, but at age 53 remains humble and grounded.

“He’s always a practice guy — just ‘practice, practice, practice,’” Griffin says of Joey’s own work ethic. “One thing I respect about my parents is they kind of let me figure a lot of stuff out on my own. … They’re always telling me, ‘Go to dance class. Try to make a song.’ If I was playing soccer, it’d be the same thing: ‘You’ve got to go to practice. You’ve got to shoot your shots, kick the ball.’ … And I like being a student. I think people take me seriously because they see that I really care.”

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While there will always be a number of curious New Kids fans who’ll follow whatever Griffin does simply because of his lineage, he’s already building his own devoted fanbase. That’s very evident from the audience at his Licorice Pizza in-store, which is almost entirely composed of excited Gen Z and Gen Alpha girls. And while Griffin is “very grateful” for any attention he gets as a young new artist — “This is where I started. My dad is a singer, and I grew up with his fans. He did too,” he explains — he’s happy that he “risked it all” professionally, and that he didn’t join a boy band or do anything else that his gut told him not to do. And he hopes to one day grace arena stages on his own.

“I’ve made the right decision,” he smiles. “I’m in the right place.”

Back when Australian garage-rockers Jet were dominating aughts FM radio with their attitudinal, riffage-heavy bangers “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” and “Cold Hard Bitch,” drummer Chris Cester was sort of the Tommy Lee of the alt-rock scene — in the sense that his huge rock-star personality (which has not diminished even slightly over the past two decades, judging from his boldly hilarious new interview for Licorice Pizza’s LPTV) often outshone his big brother Nic Cester, Jet’s lead singer.

“Honestly, a lot of people in the past have said, ‘He leads from the back,’ that kind of thing. And the truth is, I’m pretty vain. I always enjoyed the show part of the show, really selling the show and going for it.” So states Chris as he sits with his new-ish band, the ferocious and swaggering Mystic Knights, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where they’re celebrating the 7-inch vinyl release of their second single, “Count.”

“I’ve never really said this before, but it often bothered me, because I’m a songwriter, that I would write these [Jet] songs and I’d play them in front of thousands of people, and it would be my brother singing them, not me,” admits Chris (whose many Jet co-writes include “Cold Hard Bitch,” “Rollover DJ,” “Get What You Need,” “Move On,” and “Take It or Leave It”). “When I was in my mid-twenties, I probably selfishly thought, ‘Nobody even knows it’s me,’ all the time. … It was a little bit frustrating to have done the work and not get the rewards, the recognition. … I have no qualms with that now; it was what it was, is what it is. But now I get to perform all the songs that I write myself. It’s been a long time coming, and yeah, I enjoy it!”

Mystic Knights is a supergroup featuring the Soft White Sixties’ Aaron Eisenberg and film composer/self-described “road dog” Manny Castro, and originally known as Mystic Knights of Amnesia. (There’s no connection to the Danny Elfman-fronted new wave band once fully called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo; the name was actually a “smart-ass” suggestion from Chris’s pal Noel Gallagher.) “I met Chris out one night and I gave him a ride home from somewhere and we were talking, and he’s like, ‘Dude, your girl’s older than you. You must have a big dick,’” Castro laughingly recalls. “And I was like, ‘This guy’s my new best friend.’”

That was obviously an auspicious (and for Cester, on-brand) start, and Mystic Knights’ early L.A. show were packed. Cester opted not to do the Phil Collins/Don Henley/Andy Sturmer-from-Jellyfish schtick (meaning, he didn’t sing while playing drums, although he and his bandmates joke that they might “still get him a headset” in the future). But despite having all the bravado and bluster that would make him a natural frontman, he surprisingly confesses, “To be honest, the first show Mystic Knights ever played, I was really nervous. I know I’m not very shy, but I remember going to, um, extreme lengths to overcome my shyness that night — let’s just put it that way.”

Manny Castro, Chris Cester, Aaron Eisenberg

However, this actually wasn’t the first time Chris had been up in front. His centerstage debut technically took place in 2017, when another supergroup he was involved with, the Jaded Hearts Club (a rotating-member, all-star Beatles cover band also featuring Muse’s Matt Bellamy, the Last Shadow Puppets’ Miles Kane, the Zutons’ Sean Payne, and occasionally Nic Cester, Blur’s Graham Coxon, and Ilan Rubin of Nine Nails/Foo Fighters) played a party for their musician friend Jamie Davis.

Chris confesses again, “I was so nervous. I’d never felt nervous like that before. I’d been so lucky in my career up until that point, to be able to be in the back. It actually gave me a lot of respect for what my brother does for a living, being the frontman. I always just sort of took it for granted when you go onstage every night, and we had a pretty lucky quick road to success with Jet. It gave me a lot of respect for him because I went onstage, I was like, ‘Oh damn, this is a whole different ballgame.’ But something happened after that. It was just fun. We’d gotten together because it was a friend’s birthday, like, ‘Let’s just do some Beatles covers,’ and we just had such a good time. … So, I got to go onstage and really learn how to perform.”

The next year, Jaded Hearts Club performed at Rachael Ray’s outdoor Feedback party at South by Southwest. (“We had a bet of who could keep their leather jacket on for the longest. And I won. Of course I won. I always win,” Chris quips). And  even more intimidatingly, they played a Stella McCartney event where her father, an actual Beatle, showed up and surprise-jammed with them. By this point, Chris was feeling more confident behind the mic, but as he recalls, “It was intense, because there’s fame, and then there’s the Beatles! It was amazing, because I know a few famous people, but it’s a different kind of level when it’s someone like him. … We were just halfway through and I was singing, ‘She was just 17…’ It was a foot-high stage and then [Sir Paul McCartney] just stepped on there. I looked over to my right and I was like [jaw drops]. … I got offstage and there was like 48 missed text messages. Everyone knew about it within 20 minutes. My mom had called me three times!”

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All of this set up Chris for sure success as a cocksure frontman, but only a few weeks after Mystic Knights’ above-mentioned first Los Angeles shows, the COVID-19 lockdown put their live plans on hold. So, the band shifted their focus to writing and recording, and it was a prolific time: While Mystic Knights have only released two singles so far (the other one being “This High Up”), they estimate that they have at least 250 songs in their arsenal.

“Chris has an old G3 tower computer full of unreleased songs,” Eisenberg laughs.

“And there’s like a hundred songs labeled ‘Tuesday,’ and then a hundred more labeled ‘Wednesday,’ and a hundred more labeled ‘Thursday,’ or something like that. So, it’s hard to find them,” adds Castro.

Jet have enjoyed a resurgence as of late — they were inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 2023 ARIA Music Awards (Australia’s equivalent to the Grammys), where Chris and his Jet bandmates performed a medley of hits, and then officially “reunited” in 2024, although Chris has not been part of that reunion, with Peter Marin playing drums instead. When asked about the possibility of him returning to Jet to appear on their long-rumored comeback album (which would be Jet’s first since 2009), he bristles a bit and answers with his usual sauciness, “Well, if you were Jet, and the drummer in Jet had 250 songs on the boil, what would you do?”

Fair enough. Chris is instead excitedly prepping Mystic Knights’ debut full-length album, whittling down those 250 songs. “Oh yeah, we’re making a record. It’s going to be out this year,” reveals Castro. “We went to EastWest [Studios] the other day. We finished recording the whole thing, and now we’re just in the final mixing and getting all the final vocals and overdubs done.”

Watch Mystic Knights’ full LPTV interview in the video at the top of this article, where they discuss tricking Chris’s friend, Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon, into saying the C-word on live radio; their surprising desert-island-disc picks; their unexpected (and awesome) live Kasabian cover; the story behind Jet’s bloody and murderous seldom-aired “K.I.A.” music video; and Chris’s love for under-appreciated (on this side of the equator) Australian power-trio You Am I.