Iggy Pop’s latest album ‘Post Pop Depression’ began with a succinctly worded text from Iggy to Josh Homme and was realised in seclusion with Homme’s enlisted aid of his Queens Of The Stone Age bandmate and Dead Weather-man Dean Fertitia and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders to create one of the best albums of Iggy’s career.
Hamish Mcbain caught up with Iggy to see how it all came about.
So yeah we’re just going to talk about the story of the album basically if that’s alright? I guess a good place to start would be if you just talk about when you first encountered Josh and how you guys’ paths first crossed
I met Josh, I think it was in London at the Kerrang awards in 2001. they asked Josh & I to form a daisy chain with Marilyn Manson for their cover. so, it was a very quick get to know you thing, like “hello, may I grip your love handles?” it was like he seemed like a nice even intelligent person. I bumped into him again years later a couple times on the road and noticed how good he was and that was that for some time until i took some time off to re-evaluate in 2014 and I realised I needed to pull up my trou and make a very good record in English… So i needed help for that and i focused on him and i sent him a text basically saying i thought maybe we could write and record something. That was it. nothing more than that – tried to keep it undefined… this is a creative person – these people are delicate! We went from there basically and, within about 6 months, January of last year rolled around and there we were in the studio – that’s how it went. His big concern was to keep it a secret, keep it out of Rock n Roll and both of us were very concerned to keep it completely independent which meant pay for it ourselves. so it’s kinda like you know some people save up and they buy a pony and some people save up and go see…
Okay so it was you that made the first move then? there was a bit of texting back and forth – so then when did you first go out to Joshua Tree, and how? presumably that was always the way you were going to do it… at Josh’s place out there?
I texted Josh to the effect that I thought maybe we could write more chords? he texted back “that would be wonderful,” I volleyed back “alright, i’ll come to you – and i’m now a baritone!” so that was, i’ll come to you meant; yeah i know you make records out there, I know you have a team and a capability and i was also telling him i’ll come to you stylistically. I’ll hand you the large responsibility and uh, basically it’s you and your team and i’m gonna go get work done on it, sorta like uh, there are a number of hats I asked him to wear in this without spelling it out. He’s a co-writer, he’s a musician, he’s also a producer. With a good producer, there’s one thing they do – it’s like going to a doctor, they check you out and they uh, come up with a diagnosis then an approach. So that was implied in “I’ll Come To You” and uh, we both understood that and we had a phone call in which we discussed secrecy and independence, those were the two big things and at the end of the phone call he told me he needed and I quote “to wrap his mind around the whole thing” which is uh, that’s a way of saying to figure out what the hell, what’s the concept order, what’s going on here and i thought at that point that since he was the person who was very fluent on stringed instruments, fluent as a composer and as a singer and uh, had the means of production, he had good engineers out there, he could find good musicians, what was i going to contribute? And the answer was going to be, I needed to give him a subject and give it to him quickly or the thing wasn’t really gonna flower. So I then went into this little house I keep where I get in touch with myself and I wrote some purpose built poetry for him.
I wrote some technical journals about my time in germany and ‘The Idiot’ and ‘lust for life’ records ‘cause he was interested in those and i sent him some of my other writings from the last 20 years including my romantic life, private liaisons, public lectures, essays, the works. so he got all that in one big gulp – not digitally, i gave it to him warm on paper via fed ex and that gave him something, some imaginary being to focus on. it’s an interesting thing, i was talking about some point or something being with a friend, a very nice person who happens to be my attorney and she said “the Iggy Pop came up”, and she said “well Iggy Pop is a fiction…” Whoa! you know actually everybody is, you know, so I sent him a dossier on this fiction that he was gonna wrap his mind around and then, a few months later, he was done with whatever he was doing and i was done – I think he’d been doing a world tour and i was doing a film in ibiza and we were both done and so it was determined i would come out there in january. I bought my ticket and i still hadn’t heard any music and I was a little nervous about it, but what the hell? I’m an open-minded person… and then he sent me two things, 48 hours before i left they were just marked “shitty demos” and it was him playing ‘break into your heart’ on solo guitar and I thought it was really well constructed piece. he had such a nice touch on the instrument and he sent me what became ‘American Valhalla,’ with the vibraphone and steel drums and I thought that was really wow and I went out, sat in the car, played them over and over and started writing to them so we had a little something to go on other than the mind-wrap and the dossier, and then I went out there and I just told him; give me your address, i’ll come to your door. and so i came to his door with my little roll-bag and we hopped in his Camaro and drove out to the desert and spent two days together, just the two of us with an engineer. he was throwing musical ideas at me very quickly and I was throwing back general approaches very very quickly to try to nail down something quick otherwise if you don’t it’s sort of like a souffle, or Chinese vegetables, or even if you’re cooking a good steak, a high flame helps. So that was the idea. then the guys came in and we started recording – bing bang boom!
So how did you find working with Matt and Dean?
Those guys are greaaat…
Presumably it was Josh who brought them in?
Yeah, I left everything to josh. I just was me on this. I just came, I walked in alone, you know, like the man with no name and that’s the way to do that. and he just told me “I’ve got these guys, you know, they’re good.” That was all. It was great and the extra great thing that Matt did for the sessions, besides the drumming? The drumming’s incredible, I could just listen to him play all by himself and we used to – We did on some of the tracks before they came out… We actually had these endings where we would just let him keep playing. We just listened to him play, ‘cause he’s just got this wonderful sound to his playing and he also happens to be a very very very talented candid photographer. So he had a camera with him and I didn’t know and it looked like a pretty good one. So you know, I became aware, little by little, that he was sneaking in a candid shot here and there but what I didn’t find out until the end of the sessions was that very often when nobody knew he was taking a picture or what was going on he was taking a picture and i’ll treasure those forever because they tell the story of what was actually going on there and the interactions, so that was a wonderful thing and he keeps focus on what’s going on. He’s not the kind of drummer who’s also written three songs on guitar and wants you to hear them. He’s focussed on what you’re doing and that’s a great thing. and Dean is a person that has a lot of wisdom, he’s a well-balanced person and he’s got some Italian blood and it shows in his approach to the piano and the guitar. He just plays these very very very good parts – he doesn’t push it on you, he finds a very graceful way to get into an arrangement and has a lot of positive energy.
Describe a typical day in the studio while you were recording this? You were all eating breakfast together then wandering over to the studio…?
Yeah, we were shacking up together too. There’s one of those incredible weird straight American roads, they just built it through the desert because they thought “wow, this is America, this belongs to us we should have a goddamn road here” so they built a road a long time ago and it just looks like a road to nowhere, and then off the road at one point there’s this little dirt track, and it kind of goes up a knoll and it’s just dirty and dusty and there are these odd looking Joshua trees, these curious looking sort of Lewis Carroll kind of trees everywhere. And there’s a compound of tiny little, what I would call ‘Mexican scale houses,’ so Mexican people who are not high born, who don’t have a lot of money, so they can’t afford much concrete to build the walls. these are like that scale, one of them. the first one you come to is like a little, it looks like something where your Kentucky grandparents would live in an old movie – a little dusty, a little porch and firepit to the side and a little shooting gallery to shoot bb guns.
He’s got a potbellied stove and it’s kind of dingey and full of very very old music equipment and old Moog synthesizers and Wurlitzer pianos from the sixties and stuff like that. and then up the hill a little further there’s another little teenie tiny house where Brian from Eagles of Death Metal lives and there’s another little house up the hill, and on that little house there’s a tiny kitchen with mosaic tiles and two little bedrooms and so josh and i camped in that one. we were in those and slept there and shared a bathroom and there’s another one where dean stayed up the hill, and Matt stayed in a tiny motel on the other side of the street so we would all meet at breakfast. Basically I would get up and they taught me how to run their coffee maker and i’d get up right about the crack of dawn, you see the sun comes up over the mountains there, and i’d make some strong coffee. Then, by about 8.30am, everybody shows up for breakfast and Hutch (who’s usually the sound guy for Queens of The Stone Age) made us all breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, him and his wife Amanda, and we just ate really well, it was really good food. And we would eat and shoot the shit, not really too much about what we were going to do that day. We’d just figure out where everybody was and what time we were going to straggle down there, and we’d usually straggle down the hill about 10.30 and start getting into it.
The day would usually go, with breaks here and there until about 5.30-6.00pm. I found out later that was all in my honour. Because these guys are all kind of, especially the Stone Age people, are kind of reformed you know, wild men. which I can believe too so, they used to stay up all night and do this sort of thing, but in my honour, they went to day times. So it was just great because that’s where i’m at. So we would do that, and then right around the end of the working process for the day, before we went to dinner, usually we’d open a bottle of red wine and a beer, something we all drink – either red wine or beer and listen a little bit to what we’d been doing that day, and then we’d go have dinner and then after dinner, within about an hour and a half, i’d usually be passed out because that’s how I roll. and the rest of them would mess around or whatever, a couple of times they went back down to the studio, but not that often. So it’s kind of like that. and we did that there for a couple of weeks, it might have been three weeks? Nearly three weeks? And then we all went home and kind of took a deep breath. We had some things we’d written that we hadn’t gotten around to recording and we reconvened at the Pink Duck, which is Joshua’s own studio, in the valley, in LA, which is also very ‘homey’ and we finished it off there.
So, of the songs on the album, which ones do you remember taking shape first with the band where you really thought “wow – we’re really on to something here?”
The first one we did was ‘Break Into Your Heart’ and that was the hardest for me because I was not ready to sing it in the upper octave and Josh was saying “do it! do it!” and I was saying “but, but, but…” and finally I sang it in the upper octave and it was cool, then I got to do it once in the lower octave at the very end and that was cool, and the verses we went to a middle octave and the music to that I was really fascinated with, because it seemed so progressive! It’s progressive music, it gets heavy at certain times and in the middle it gets very progressive and that was the first one we did. i’m not sure, i think it was either ‘Gardenia’ or ‘American Valhalla’ we did second and third, but I remember those three being early on, and we took those – those were definitely all done there – and tracked there and then. We also tracked ‘German Days’ there and ‘Vulture’. ‘Vulture’ was tracked, it was just me alone, acoustic live, I sang and played it at the same time, and then they added on that. I think those were the five that we took out of there and then at the duck we did ‘Paraguay’, ‘in the lobby’, ‘Chocolate Drops’ and ‘Sunday’ – that’s how it went.
When you were writing the lyrics to this, how fast did the lyrics come when you were writing to this new music? Was it very fast?
Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick! Quick, but only because of lots of preparation. So, in other words, there was always some preparation on my part before I came in and it went like with ‘break into your heart’, as i said, he’d sent me this shitty demo, 48 hours before i got on the plane, and the shitty demo had the title ‘Break Into Your Heart’ on it so I thought, “i’m gonna break into your heart.” I thought okay, I sensed that he wanted to go with that line, so thought ‘well what would that mean?’ ‘How can that mean something to me?’ And what can I shape around that? So I had written already quite a bit before I got to california and about a third of the lines in there stuck from what I originally wrote.
I would write up the rest sort of both whilst those guys were tuning up or all these things you have to do to get the balances and the sounds right in the studio and then i would sing every time they did a take of the song, learning the song i was singing with it. And every time i sang i would learn something else about the lyric and refine it. So, when it was time to do vocals, I not only had a lyric, but i knew it – i didn’t have to read it. That’s really important; you have to inhabit the thing. ‘Gardenia’ was based on one of the essays i sent him – that essay was called ‘Gardenia’ and it described – she was in it – it described her physically in the essay. The dress was in the essay, the poet, the motel – it was all there. So again, all I had to do was reshape it to rhyme and to fit the music, to fit the melody. But there was something to go on, if you want to climb Everest, you’re going to go down to like h&m and get a jumper and some tennis shoes you know? You have to go with some equipment so you need to be ready. So with ‘American Valhalla’, that was one of the shitty demos that we had and i loved the music and the idea of the xylophone and the vibes and the steel drums and we had had a text exchange about the concept of Valhalla, and whether there was American Valhalla and what it would be and what it would mean if there isn’t, that would be a problem. It may be a problem. So again i had… that one i wrote a whole lot to the demo, in the 48 hours i had it before i flew out.
Most of what i wrote stuck as correct for the song, and the lobby song was written quick, that was one where he just threw it at me and he had the line about following his shadow but what i thought, what occurred to me, is that if you’re following your shadow, there is a light in the past, there is a light behind you which precedes you, so i started from there and then i tried to put it into somewhere, i wanted to put it into a club atmosphere, into a social atmosphere that described – i wanted current hipsterism to come into it and, since a lot of that sort of thing is taking place lately in the ace hotel type of atmosphere or the vegan atmosphere, i thought that was more legitimate than the club atmosphere, so i set it there. ‘Sunday’ we texted back and forth for quite a while; and then many of the words on ‘Sunday’, the verses are of my invention and the hook outro is of my invention, but on the chorus only the first line is my own, and the rest of it Josh came up with that. I think he summed up the character in a way that everbody can understand – a guy who is beat up and tired at the end of the week who just doesn’t want to move or prove anything and yet has these kind of dreams in his head which are tangled. I thought it was beautiful imagery. By that time that was one of the last things written and we were getting better at lobbing the ball. ‘Vulture’ is just something i brought in. ‘German Days’ came from a piece of poetry i sent him, i called it ‘German Trivia.’ I sent that to him before we started up. ‘Chocolate Drops’ is a piece of music he’d had for a long time and i wanted to sing a song about transcendence and perserverance and about holding on until whatever it is people don’t like about you suddenly becomes your best feature, that’s the idea! And finally ‘paraguay’ was… i had the verse and chorus of that, something that meant a lot to me – i just sang in a moment of personal desolation on an acoustic guitar knowing that i’ll never actually walk away and disappear in paraguay but i sure liked the idea and then he helped me develop it up.
That kind of rant right at the end of ‘paraguay’ – is there a bit of a story behind that?
Hamish, Hamish, Hamish, Hamish! I will allow the sort of journalist i don’t like to go ahead to call it a rant, but i will not allow you to do so – you’re supposed to be working!
I’m sorry, i’m sorry i was trying to think of another word for ‘rant’, but i couldn’t think of one quickly…
I’ll tell you what it is, i’ll tell you what happened there… It is an exposition at the end of what is bothering this guy that would make him want to walk away in the first place. What is bugging this guy and the way that came about was simply that i tried to write a very polite and articulate description of why i felt i wanted to check out in Paraguay, and err there wasn’t enough song there. And Josh understood where i was coming from and he wrote the bridge for me, and he wrote the bridge with a lovely melody and he wrote the words in the bridge ‘cause he understood what i was trying to get at… to basically just be so far from here you know you don’t want to live in constant fear, constant fear and errr which is the key, i think it’s the key motivating human factor lately that seems to be promoted, ‘hey! Heres something new today to be scared of! And what we’re gonna do about it and what we’re gonna do is make them even more scared than we are!’ Bada bing bada boom! You hear that and…. Every different way, this party ‘x’ against party ‘y’, army ‘x’ against guerilla ‘y’ etc etc, old against young, err rich against poor. So he developed to that point, and we get to this outro, and he wrote this massively heavy outro, and in the studio, as i told ya, i track with them. He put me on the spot, because Matt Helders asked him ‘how soon do you want me to begin the process of, sort of err bashing this into, you know into super heaviness? How do you want me to do the build?’ And he just kinda waved a hand in my general direction and said ‘i don’t know – the only thing that’s really important about this whole thing, whatever he does *pointing my way* just follow him.
So i suddenly realised i was on the spot, to take the song another step, take it somewhere it hadnt been. And i tried once just to make a bunch of sorta, i just made jungle noises and it was stupid and it didn’t work and i realised i was holding back. So what i did was, i had to reach in and, without text and with reference to what i’d already sung, give voice to the tortured feelings and pain that led the person, the character (who is not exactly me – its close but not exactly me) to want to walk away. So that’s what you have there. And it’s not supposed to, it’s not supposed to be, it’s… if anyone can politely articulate all their feelings to you in a civilised manner, there’s a lie in there somewhere. So in this part of this song, to give a little more truth, i had to use that form. And the form is, i would call it a, i would say it’s more of a spew *laughter* than a ‘rant’. That’s what i would say. If you actually listen to what the guy is saying, and its not just all against, against, against, he also refers to this dream he has and, yes, of course the dream is silly, yeah of course, especially the line about “servants and bodyguards who love me”. *Laughter* that’s funny too! And i know that, you know… but, you know, there’s something to that. And there are, actually, the woods of south america are full of clods who have made good, and a lot of them are from the u.S. It’s a common thing – they make a couple million in some strange pursuit and go down there and go off. And that bit at the end it’s the guy says, he says he’s gonna go heal himself. That’s a positive thing.
Yeah, it’s a really amazing way to end the album i think, a perfect way. It’s so good because ‘Break Into Your Heart’ is such a perfect way to start it and then it finishes with that really nice build at the end. It’s a really well-rounded album.
It managed to have an arc.
So once you’d finished, you’d wrapped the record, how long did it take? Did you kind of live with it for a bit and then go back and revisit it and start visiting the idea of playing it live or was there a break between finishing the recording?
Absolutely… the recording was done in January. I believe it was early January to early March of last year. We all just sat on it and Josh began to remix, remaster, add strings, added the ladies that sang on a couple of the songs, re-did a couple of guitar parts, things like that. Bit by bit he developed certain parts on his own. And i think it was sort of, hmmm… i remember it was warm, but its always warm down here. When i got the string parts, which were so beautiful, one sunday, i think it was the summer. But basically, it took a long time to finish the whole thing. It took a long time and there was remastering and remixing, and a lot of work and effort went into it.
Especially later on his part, as at that point my part was: don’t accept. My role was almost to react and also to just stay out of the way, you know? Don’t be one of those “wah i don’t like this, what about that.” I tried to keep that to a minimum. Because i’ve been around and that never helps. So that was about it really. It wasn’t clear at the end of the record – he was still trying to talk me into doing a tour. And then finally i realised that he’s right and im not gonna turn him down. Anyway it was really his enthusiasm to do a tour and now i’m starting to kinda get into it. You know, so what happened was, we did have one rehearsal, it was about a month ago and for some reason i had to jump out to the west coast quick and so there i was – we did one long rehearsal and it sounded so good live. I felt a big large warm sound, with a hell of a bottom, but then it’s got a very lyrical romantic quality to it. It’s a hell of a thing… So i’m excited.
And the album title ‘Post-Pop Depression’, who did that come from? Did that come from you or from josh?
Dean… that was Dean.
Dean! Oh okay
Dean Fertita. It was his commentary on his sadness at ending the sessions.
I was just on the phone with him yesterday and he was like “well i heard maybe we could do some more gigs?” So, you know, they want more! *Laughter*. I’m kinda like in the”you know, cant you kids go play with somebody else?” But no, not at all – i’m happy about it, so we’re talking about doing some sort of some extra work after the nominative tour is done. And Dean came up with the title – Josh recognised it as a title, threw it at me and i really loved it. I thought it was fresh and there are two other common ‘ppds’ – one is Post-Partum Depression and there’s something called post-performance depression, which had been making the rounds for the last year or so. So the idea that performers get burned out doing this stuff all the time. Which is absolutely true, but then i’m sure so do bricklayers, you know, and everybody else. Balloon manufacturers! Everybody talks about that, how balloon manufacturers experience an incredible fatigue!
You were keeping the album a secret whilst you were doing it. Was there anyone in your close cirlce of friends or whatever that you wanted to play some songs to? Or was it kind of a band thing to say we’re not telling anyone about this at all?
Well, once you get home from the desert you’re gonna play everything to your wife aren’t you? At least my wife, she likes music and she’s interested. So she heard it all once I got home. But whilst i was there, one of the beautiful things about working with me is that i don’t know how to send any emails, i don’t know how to send an mp3 and i only learnt to text because i had to text Josh to reach out to him – he doesn’t use voicemail. He has a rock star voicemail which is just a voice that tells you: ‘I’m sorry, there has been no mailbox set up for this account. So my ways of sneaking and leaking are zero. The reason I haven’t learnt how to do those things is because if you were Iggy Pop, you wouldn’t let yourself do those things either. I can read one but i scare myself so i try to keep a lid on them.
I think it’s one of the great things about the record – literally no one knew about it and it just kind of arrived, fully formed, and it was announced and it’s nice to have that air of surprise and mystery about Rock’n’Roll music, I think it’s really important…
Hats off to Josh for that – it was his doing and his idea.
To just completely keep it secret?
And i think you’re right – it’s a hell of a lot of fun
Especially in this age where there’s information all the time and you’re kind of being barraged by promotions and information, to have something that just arrives and pops up, it’s just a really nice feeling.
Yep
Hamish Mcbain
‘Post Pop Depression’ is out now
