Ariel Pink will tell you himself: he’s a combination of glam rock, David Bowie, the Cure, R. Stevie Moore, Ethiopian music, My Bloody Valentine, the Beatles–anything but lo-fi. The L.A. native’s been making music since the 90s, recording hundreds of songs on cassette tapes in his bedroom. In 2003, he was picked up by Animal Collective’s label Paw Tracks, and in 2008, he started touring with his band Haunted Graffiti. This past June, 4AD released Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s Before Today, a plush experimental pop album with a timeless yet innovative quality that heeds its name. The band recently launched a tour co-headlining with the celebrated 60s-era Brazilian psychedelic tropicalia rock band, Os Mutantes. The Quad interviewed Ariel Pink over the phone just before his first show of the tour. You can catch this dynamite double bill at Royale on November 14 at 7PM.
Will there be any collaboration between you and Os Mutantes during or after the tour?
In fact, it’s already been discussed. Within the first five minutes, everybody was all in agreement about it at some point, if not the whole tour. I told them I would dance on stage. Between both bands, there’s just so many good players that are capable of just taking on multiple roles, and there’s gotta be something. Sérgio’s going to have his birthday on this tour. Maybe we’ll have a huge international salsa jamboree. That’s my hometown, so maybe I could take him to dinner or something like that.
You must meet a lot of interesting people on tour.
I love meeting people. I meet so many people. It’s really what I love to do most. It’s more than knowing people. I love meeting them and then not ever seeing them ever again. I feel like I’m really good at meeting people but I’m just not really good at being in touch with loved ones and stuff like that. I’m a real social butterfly. I’m good for about the first half-an-hour, I feel like I’m really interesting, maybe, but then I think I really just wear everybody out pretty quickly, so I move on.
Your early recordings were self-produced. For the past few years, you’ve been touring with a band. Do you ever see yourself going solo again?
It takes a lot more growing up to work with people than just be a control freak in your bedroom just kind of having sort of Hitleresque, unquenched total authority. The only person I have to fight with when I’m by myself is me, so there’s no real argument, really. I can’t fight with me, so things work out a lot. It’s way too easy.
Has playing with a band influenced the way you write music?
I think it does, absolutely, in ways that I’m not even aware of. Of course, I don’t even know what influences my music. Whatever I like, whatever I do, whatever I see just kind of gets thrown in there somehow. I don’t really draw the line anywhere, you know what I’m saying? I don’t say, “Oh, I love that” or “I would never do that”. Although, in a sense I really do do that. I certainly do my own thing and not anybody else’s thing, so I draw the line pretty close to the gut. I just think I’m more inspired by life and living, and that takes precedent over song writing in general, and hopefully that can be an influence in writing music in a helpful way. I honestly don’t have a problem writing music. It’s just I don’t need to do it as often or as ferociously as I once did, just dying to be heard, just dying to be acknowledged out of the sea of millions of people just so I could make a loud little splash in my little corner of the universe.
What first inspired you to make music, and now that you are “successful”, what continues your drive to make music?
Well, first of all, I’m not successful in any kind of traditional sense. I’m already too famous for my own brain, and that’s the way it’s always been. If you ask me, I’m perfectly successful and I do interviews and I feel like I’m on top of the world, but if you ask anybody with half-a-brain, they’ll tell you I really need to step it up but that’s because I’m clueless, you know what I’m saying? So I don’t even know what I need to do to be successful, but I have other people that really can gauge that for me and I trust them, so I really kind of appreciate that. Honestly, what I consider to be a success is making it worthwhile for the people I work with and leading the band in a positive direction and getting through red tape that normally kills bands. Conquering these little hurdles that pretty much historically just always butcher bands from the inside out at some point. Everybody just kills bands, I mean, the industry kills bands. The lifespan of a typical band, no matter how good or successful they are, is like ten years. That’s the lifespan of a dog or something like that, or a cat at best. What I consider to be success is me fucking going off into the sunset and building a chemistry of the band that kind of becomes just undeniable and is something that is great, you know, something that everyone enjoys when they come to see it and that surprises people and surprises me and keeps me and everybody happy. I just want to please the world, you know what I’m saying? I just want to please myself. I’m very selfish.
What got me started in the first place was more something like oh, the world sucks, I’m going to close the door and just commit suicide privately to myself on tape. And I’ll be the winner, even though everybody will think I’m the loser because they don’t even know I exist. That kind of thing. It was a very, very, very juvenile impulse. So I’ve had the past ten years to figure that out. Once I got over my childish hang-ups and I kind of got okay with my family and stuff like that, I was really left very little desire or impulse to make music, you know what I’m saying? It’s like oh, well, great, that was too easy, now what? Now is the hard part, because the hard part is not sucking from that moment onwards. I struggled with artist block for quite a while, but it’s not so much artist block, I think. It’s just I’m not so desperate to get every last nuance on tape and capture it like a diarist. I want to make things that sound good now, and back then I was just like the worse the better. I wanted people not to like anything that I did. I wanted people that liked bad music to not like it. I wanted it to be mediocre. I wanted it to be that perfect thing that everybody no matter what hated. That was a good place to start from, but it was a little bit too ambitious in my opinion because it didn’t work out that way. Ultimately, I just wanted to fucking be a rock star when I was a kid, long story short.
Teenage years are the toughest.
No, the 20s are the toughest. 20s mania is the first type, like a kid out of the crib for the first time. You make all the mistakes that actually have an impact, whereas in your teen years, you’re just stifling. You’re basically like you’re mom drinking alcohol while she’s pregnant. You’re just kind of retarding yourself before you’re even yourself in your 20s. So, I pretty much retarded myself pretty intensely before I was in my 20s. And then in my 20s, everything was so extreme, every feeling, every thought was just an explosion of intensity, and it was just do or die. And then, you know, things happen. I’m just happy I didn’t muck it up. I must have been not that fucked up because now I’m in my 30s, and I feel pretty happy about life, and I feel like oh, okay, well I’ve been doing this too long now to just quit, just do something else. I don’t know anything else. I’ve also been doing it too long to not want to take it further than where it is. It’s a new birth for me. I feel like this is a self-help seminar.
Speaking of new births, what new material are you working on?
Nothing. I’m touring right now. I’ll get around to writing new stuff in the spring. Just touring, touring intensely. It’s the opposite of birthing new things. It’s really just chiseling at a sculpture and perfecting it kind of thing. Operating on auto-pilot, really.
What can concert-goers expect from your live show on this tour?
We’ll be focusing mostly on new material. I have a feeling a lot of our audience is brand new. I want to entertain them and play the hits and maybe enlighten them to what’s really going on in music. It will become 3-D to them in the best circumstances. We want to put on a great show. And the double bill, both bands are sort of different yet maybe compatible, and we might be able to cross generational divides and create a whole new market, you know, a transatlantic listenership. Maybe we’ll start our own festival.
How would you describe your music?
I would just mention a bunch of bands that I think we sounded like at any given moment in time. It’s a little glam-rocky, a bit of David Bowie mixed with the Cure mixed with R. Stevie Moore mixed with a little bit of Ethiopian music mixed with a little bit of Roxy Music mixed with, you know, a little bit of the Beatles. Kind of what they say within their review, after they have the lo-fi headline, you know what I’m saying? I would just say it sounds like My Bloody Valentine mixed with a touch of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, if that’s what I felt, you know what I’m saying? That gives you a more accurate description of what we sound like, not lo-fi. Lo-fi sounds like I’m Wavves, or like, whatever people think of when they think of lo-fi now. Hopefully they don’t think of me. I call it retrolicious, actually, or hipster garbage. I’m not good at labeling things, apparently. I would say it’s just really a little bit more guitar rock. It’s not sampler-based music. It’s not electronica. It’s not disco or ambient or dubstep or any of those things. It’s probably more psychedelic rock influenced, a little bit retro with kind of a little wink-wink or something like that. A little bit of Frank Zappa, a little bit of yacht rock, basically everything that aspires to be everything and it’s really nothing. It’s just bad. It’s just bad music. It’s a hack version of avante-garde music. It’s the opposite of genius.
What’s the meaning behind the name of your band, Haunted Graffiti?
It’s just a word idea. It’s like those fridge magnets with the words. You know, just take two random words and put them together and you get yourself an image in your mind, and whatever that is, that’s what it is. Haunted graffiti. Think about it. You could think about it for ages. Maybe you don’t picture anything. It’s not really quite poetry, is it? Maybe it’s like graffiti that’s been painted over by union workers, but it’s still there. The spirit of that debasement lives beyond the facade of loneliness, the ghost of a spirit. I don’t know, man. It’s just a fucking name. It’s so stupid.
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