Transcript of the text under the cut:
Hi folks, you hold in your hand the strangest and most contradictory album I will ever put out. A meticulously odd and messy piece of music that I simultaneously wish I could change everything about, and yet I wouldn't change a thing. A part of me wishes I never put it out and yet a part of me wishes I put out 1,000 albums like this. It's my magnum opus and my regretful half-baked demo. It's my most innovative record and my most derivative. It's the album in which I am most proud and most ashamed. The one I want to talk about for hours but shudder to hear its name spoken aloud. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The little record that couldn't. But please don't misunderstand me: I love self-deprecating. And while I'll gladly continue to do that. This record for all its contradictions is probably too good to deserve me attaching my own self doubt to it.
In 2008 Fall Out Boy released the album Folie à Deux. In some ways the story of Soul Punk might naturally begin there. Folie too was an odd record that attempted to blend a lot of my inner musical influences with the hardcore inflected pop-punk our band had been known for. It was my expectation going into it that no matter what we released at that time, it was not destined for mainstream success. This was simply because of the zeitgeist starting to get tired of emo pop by then. I figured, "Let's just do something weird! Have fun with it!" That idea wasn't met with unanimous support either internally or externally. Fighting for my strange little passion project was an awful experience.
Pete and I have always had a push and pull on the creative force of the band (much to the dismay of such a capable writer as Joe). I tend to write most of the music but there is always something of an assignment from him, a puzzle he can’t put into words. He’ll have a kernel of a thought maybe even something as simple as “What if someone did a song like that one song but maybe faster?” and then I try to actualize that concept. But Folie was different: I had an idea. I knew exactly what I wanted it to sound like. Well Pete still had his ideas. These two visions clashed. At that time it really came to a head. I would work all hours on demos and Pete would come in and sprinkle a genius suggestion here, a confusing criticism there. If Folie has any value it is because of the sound of those conflicts. I’ve heard legends that Pete and I got into physical fights over making records but at the risk of demystifying a colorful story that’s not true. On Folie though I did once throw a drumstick at a wall in exasperation after he demanded I re-record a song for what felt like the thousandth time. We were on completely different pages over the course of that entire recording and the subsequent tour was utterly grueling, exhausting and what’s worse, diminishing in quality. The audiences didn’t seem to want us and while I can’t speak for the rest of the band, I myself had gotten really tired being on a stage every night playing songs people didn’t seem to want to hear.
At the time Pete was more of the touring guy and I was more of the album-making guy. I would say without question the tour was a means to an end for me; I got the touring out of the way so I could get to make another record. I sensed (whether this is correct or not) that Pete felt the inverse. This was a major source of contention for us. It killed me to spend so much of my life performing old songs and so little of it making new ones. So by the time we toured on Folie I had started watching the clock. I checked out. I gave up. I remember actively feeling like “Whatever. I don’t care," and just sort of going through the motions towards the end of that touring cycle. We had all agreed that we needed a little bit of a break following that run of touring but there was some disagreement about what we were going to do during it. Pete and I got into a heated argument one night where I was advocating for making more music, more records more frequently. He wanted to go back on tour. He was dejected at the idea of taking any kind of breather, let alone one to write music. He had argued that we just needed to tour harder, just needed to promote more, and that if the audience could just hear the songs they would connect with the album. Maybe he was even right, but I was too read weary and kept pushing to do more and more music. He leaned down on the table, shook his head, opened his eyes widely and with quiet intensity went “Well, we’re going to take this year or two off and you can make all the music you want.”
Those words reverberated in my mind for weeks. Months. The idea that (as I interpreted it) he didn’t share my need to create, I felt so alone. I went home, upset but also buzzing with the feeling of some shaky uncertain freedom. There I was, in my mid-20’s and for the first time I had the liberty and capacity to make my own music just for me. What would that be? In the words of Tom Petty: The future was wide open.
In private my own personal writing style had developed a signature for years; I was (ironically enough considering I stopped writing lyrics in Fall Out Boy) constantly writing lyrics. I had always loved a certain kind of wordplay that owed a lot to people like Tom Waits or Warren Zevon. I tried desperately to evoke their style. I’m sure my lyrics were amateurish but the point is it was very different than anything that ultimately appeared on Soul Punk. A signature sure, but I didn’t say it was a legible one. Again, a vision if perhaps a blurry one. And musically, I had developed this kind of pop rock that I never really committed to tape and I’ve long since forgotten how to make. I remember a lot of my songs sounding like if a yacht rock band opened for Ted Leo. So I find it so bizarre that, given the moment to finally break out of my shell and make *my* own album, I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even consider it.
I have talked a lot about my love of R&B and soul music. I have often credited Saturday Night Live with exposing me to artists like Anita Baker, or the soul-inflected musical chaos of the great Fishbone. Throughout my childhood I had secret love affairs with records like Herbie Hancock’s astoundingly funky album “Head Hunters” or Prince’s landmark “1999.” I would sing Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye to myself while skating around my neighborhood. I would constantly dig crates trying to find the R&B and disco records that produced so many of the samples that typified 90’s hip-hop. But while I said the Soul Punk story could start at Folie, it’s more accurate to say it really started for me when Fall Out Boy played Missoula Montana somewhere around 2004. That’s because the day of that show, I went to a record store and found a cassette tape of The Time’s 1990 reunion album “Pandemonium.” I became so deeply obsessed with The Time that their uptempo tongue-in-cheek Prince-penned funk became the northstar my ship was oriented to. To carry the metaphor, my yacht rock punk songs were Flotsam and Jetsam thrown overboard.
I should talk briefly about the album title. I somewhat regret the name. “Soul music,” as a term really refers to a culture that while I’ve always had a deep admiration for, I think it would be both presumptuous and disingenuous of me to imply I were a part of. In fact that was basically my point in using it; I’m not exactly a proper punk either. I’m into DIY, I very much engage with the progressive politics and protest surrounding punk, I have a pretty extensive collection of punk and hardcore records, but I’m probably equally inspired by The Dead Kennedys and Luther Vandross. Which is to say very. I’m very inspired by artists as disparate as Left For Dead and Bobby Womach. As far apart on a map as All and Eddie Harris. But as a result I’ve never quite felt a total comfort in any genre. I guess I thought by putting those two words together it was like you could find me in the middle there somewhere. But I’ve wondered at times if it were clumsy and insulting. Like perhaps it took too many liberties with a term that I might not be entitled to play around with. So I just wanted to apologize if it has ever rubbed anyone the wrong way that I used the word “soul.” I’d also felt kind of beaten down at that time in my life and there was a little bit of a pun in there that I felt perhaps I’d been for example sort of tricked by the band’s success… that I thought perhaps success would make me feel validated, but it didn’t. in that way I guess I felt like the album had on some level dealt with feeling I had been “punk’d.” Punk’d down to my soul if you will. I loved dad jokes long before I was a dad.
Someone who seemed to thread the needle between the insouciance of punk and the musical humanity of soul a bit more comfortably, someone who had actually worked with Luther Vandross while also directly influencing a lot of punks was David Bowie. Going into Soul Punk, I also had a desire to do something Bowie inspired. I’ve always been a fan of his music and I think the albums that grabbed me the most were his “Berlin,” trilogy, a thoroughly experimental set of albums made with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. The experimentation and the willingness to dive into esoteric recording techniques… I just had to do my version of that. Something about it all felt like the direct refutation of the lack of time spent making records that I’d been lamenting a year into Folie tour.
I feel like my vocal performance on the album also demands I mention that I was obviously a massive fan of Michael Jackson. His influence is readily apparent throughout the record, though I feel perhaps this was the least intentional of the influences. I just really love Thriller and Off The Wall to the point that me trying to do Prince and Bowie came out with a gloss of subconscious Michael Jackson impersonations on top of it.
The final puzzle piece was my insistence that I had to do everything myself. I had wanted to write and perform every note of every instrument myself, if only to say I did it. Now of course I do that all the time in my film and TV scoring day job. Lots of excellent composers do, composers more talented than I. But for some reason at the time I was overcome with this desire to prove that I could. Maybe to myself? Maybe to show the world there was more to me than Warped Tour. And while it occurs to me how utterly demeaning that is of all the bands I’d been comparing myself to, at the time it was my prime directive.
So now I had my self-imposed homework assignment: The Time meets Bowie but I play all the instruments. Cool. So I set about making a weird little art funk record. First I met up with the brilliant producer Raphael Saadiq. My manager apparently had to pull some strings to get me that meeting and I hate to say I let him (and Raphael) down when I realized that it just wasn’t the thing I was wanting to do. He had these more collaborative ideas but I had this vision, and I was compelled to follow it. I wonder sometimes how cool that record with Raphael would have been, what lessons I would have learned from such a brilliant writer/producer/player. But, c’est la vie. I was on a mission.
So instead, I met up with my great friends Manny Sanchez and Bill Lefler who would engineer most of the album. Everyday was joy and experimentation (except for the one day I ate some bad egg salad at a breakfast place and was violently ill in Bill’s studio… sorry Bill). We experimented and constantly played around. I remember I wanted to evoke drum machines without using a drum machine, so many of the songs feature me playing one drum at a time to get a disjointed, overly dry groove. Or songs would have like 3 different drum hits at different spots. I remember discovering the reverb chamber at East West Studios and just running anything and everything into that because it sounded so incredible to me.
While that recording was percolating, I pulled together an EP of more collaborative recordings I ended up calling “Truant Wave.” I was much less meticulous with that record and I think it benefits from the spontaneity. For example, an emcee named Alph-A-Bit performs a verse on the song “Porcelain.” He was a guy who handed me his demo while I was getting coffee before going in to the studio that day. I liked it, asked him to do a verse. I’d read Idris Elba was a singer as well as an actor, so totally out of the blue I tweeted him to see if he’d want to sing on something. That song became “Big Hype.” Still never met him (loved you in The Wire). And most fruitfully I reached out to my friend Matt Rubano to play bass also on “Porcelain.” This would begin the assembly of my regretfully nameless live band.
Matt played bass. Good lord did he play bass (still does matter of fact). And after his appearance on the EP, he introduced me to his friends from jazz and session work. It was through him that I made some of my dearest friends: Michael Day (guitar/vocals), Skoota Warner (drums), and the supernatural Casey Benjamin (saxophone, keyboards, cooler than you, gone from this world too soon). I was still recording the album as I was putting this band together and holy smokes what a band. They could play. That made me want to really shred every instrument I could just to feel like I was worthy of their caliber. I re-recorded the drum filled in “Allie,” a million times (I’m still not happy with them and if I weren’t so stubborn I would have just had Skoota do it), I threw out every bass trick I know in anticipation of bringing them to watch Matt crush them. It was a little slice of heaven and Soul Punk absolutely took on a lot of the life of the expectations that I’d get to play with this band. Eventually we added the brilliant Max Drummey (keyboards, guitar) to complete the lineup. I don’t have enough time or space here to rant enough about how good that band was. It was one of the highlights of my life to get to stand mere feet away from them every night while they played my ideas better than I ever could. But I should get back to the album you’re actually holding, the album of songs I tricked those geniuses into playing.
While I worked on Soul Punk, Truant Wave was released to iTunes and to the shock of just about everyone it charted. It performed quite well actually. We’ve pinpointed the beginning of Soul Punk but if I had to pinpoint the beginning of the end for Soul Punk, it was the success of Truant Wave. Once Truant Wave became a surprise (if minor) hit on its zero budget and zero promotion, I was forced into a dilemma. For starters, Truant Wave didn’t really sound all that much like Soul Punk. For example, the version of “Spotlight,” included on Truant Wave was much more I don’t even know… indie rock or something? I’m not sure what kind of music it is but it’s not funky. I think this primed the audience for an album that wasn’t going to be what they wanted. It also got me signed to a major label as a solo artist which was amazing but also (in retrospect) the wrong choice. Major labels need hits, that’s their business. I was trying to make my weird little art project. Those two goals were incompatible.
Another major turning point was after having recorded the bulk of a non-commercially viable political art-funk album, I experienced a family tragedy. I still don’t feel comfortable discussing it publicly, but that forced me not only to channel my hurt into something artistic but also to do so in as vague a way as possible. So suddenly I had to rework all my largely political lyrics to also become a sounding board for my grief and do so in metaphors within metaphors that couldn’t possibly dive into what I was going through. While also being hit radio singles. It was impossible and in a fun bit of trivia: it failed spectacularly. At least at being a hit.
But the resultant record with its jumbled fraught goals, unintentional homages, failed radio hits, and vague lyrics bleached of most meaning is still something I love dearly. I think if I wanted to make another one I wouldn’t know how to. It is too necessarily a snapshot of a weird little nerd in his mid 20’s following his muse like Richard Dreyfus building a mountain out of mashed potatoes. I could never recreate it.
I could not be more grateful that this weird little album with all its contradictions, its fraught history, its weird title, its need to (ironically) “prove,” itself to you, has found an audience and that you are a part of it. It means so much to me and if you weren’t there to see us live, I really wish I had a DeLorean with a flux capacitor so you could see that incomparable band.
