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Just/Talk: Justin Strauss with James Murphy

For as long as he can remember, James Murphy hasn’t played well with others. At least, that’s how the LCD Soundsystem frontman, artist and producer describes himself, having disassembled and reassembled an illustrious career as searing and complex as each of the stories he tells.

There’s James at 10, teaching himself how to play the drums with a makeshift set of coffee cans. The PA system he stole from his grammar school while in a ninja outfit. The email exchange with David Bowie. And through it all, there’s the steady humming in all he’s done and seeks to do, fiercely, religiously guided by sound.

Here, James chats at-length with legendary DJ and longtime Ace friend Justin Strauss for this edition of Just/Talk about all his friends, his self-taught education in sound, the logics of LCD Soundsystem and why he’s the “best in the world at being me.”

Justin Strauss: Do you remember the first piece of music or record that made you feel like this is something for me, and that this is something I want to do, or a path that you might take?

James Murphy: At the risk of sounding like I'm coming with an easy answer or something self-serving, I don't remember a time when I didn't feel that way. It doesn't mean that I always felt that music would be my job. I think what came first, though, is a very visceral reaction to sound — and music is like the ultimate expression of sound. But sound always, always, always.

JS: From early on when you were a kid?

JM: From baby time, like the sound of humming machines and sounds of voices and sounds of hitting things and hearing them. My son does the same stuff. I have much older brothers and sisters — I am what we like to call a “Catholic surprise” — my oldest sister is 11 years older than me, my brother 10 years older than me, my other sister is five years older than me. My parents moved. My dad got a job in New Jersey, everyone else was from Massachusetts and New England. They moved there for my dad's job, and my mother had a sewing room, and she was really excited about it — she was a good seamstress. And then I was born, so I had the sewing room. There's nothing that tells you you weren't in the plan more than there was a room that was used for something else — now that's your room.

JS: Well, at least you had a room.

JM: I think my mother resented me forever for taking her sewing room. But yeah, I had a room.

JS: In New Jersey.

JM: Princeton Junction. I think it's a town that's had a very funny arc. When I was born, it wasn't fully a town. In fact, it wasn't a town for a long time. It was a train station called Princeton Junction.

JS: Home of the famous Princeton Record Exchange?

JM: The Record Exchange is in Princeton, and the distance between Princeton Junction and Princeton is very, very short. It can be traversed by a thing called the dinky, which is a little Princeton shuttle train. It’s a two car train that runs from the train station that meets with Amtrak and the New Jersey Transit and Princeton, so as to not run train tracks through the beautiful hills and battlefields of Princeton, but to run them through our crappy farm town instead.

Dutch Neck, Grover's Mill, they were these little towns... they weren't even towns. Grover's Mill, New Jersey is where the aliens landed in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, and that wasn't really a town. Again, there was a mill, by a family named Grover, on a little tiny river in a pond, Grover's Mill pond. So they built this train station in this nowhere place, which I believe is where the TV show House is set, in my fictitious town.

JS: It's got a lot of history, this little town from nowhere.

JM: Because the director is from my town, or the creator is from it. But it wasn't a town, you have the Trenton zip code on one street, then you have a Princeton zip code on another street. They built this school eventually, because what happened was: farmers started to sell their land to developers because it was by the train station, it was the late 60s, early 70s, into the 80s, and this was during the sprawl boom. Sorry, this is a very long answer.

JS: Go ahead, it’s fine.

JM: And they created a school for these new incoming people, an optimistic sort of 70s school. There was a lot of high taxes, but everybody there had kids. You just didn't move there without kids. The houses were kind of big, they weren't big by modern standards, but they were big by 1960s, 1970s standards. They weren't ranches. They had an upstairs. And a lot of the families didn't have a lot of money, but had a few kids. So, you couldn't live in Princeton — you couldn't afford that — and you wanted to live in a neighborhood… not just farm houses. So, that's what everybody did. Everyone in my neighborhood was from somewhere else. A lot of the things that I didn’t understand about American suburbia, I learned from watching television and movies later.

JS: My parents moved us from Brooklyn to Long Island when I was 9 years old. To Woodmere. Part of what’s called the “five towns” on the South Shore. I never felt like I fit in Long Island. I never felt like I belonged there. Did you feel like you belonged where you grew up?

JM: I didn't feel like I didn't belong there. I felt there might be a fictitious place where I belonged. But I was born and raised in one town — I never moved. And I have a very male fear of change. And so I kind of just thought I would just live there forever. I didn't really think it through. I just was very emotionally attached to my house. And through that town I kind of learned about the passage of time: how a place is not the same place.

I didn't go to college after high school. Everyone in my school for the most part without exception went... it was a very exceptional thing not to go to college. It was just what the school was for. It was a really great public school kicking ass of the private schools. People were really well-prepared for academics. They were not necessarily prepared for college, socially, but they were prepared for academics.

JS: And so, growing up in this town and you're fascinated by sound.

JM: My brother had records, my sister had records. I just always kind of liked what they liked. My brother listened to classic rock with a heavy prog rock leaning. So, if you look up there I have a huge Yes collection. I deeply love Yes.

JS: A lot of kids, including myself were into Yes growing up. I saw them live a few times.

JM: It's a funny thing with Yes... There's always two bands in the world: the kind of psychic image that we've created of a band, that was almost universally shared. Yes is a band where you say it and the people who don't really listen to Yes have the same vision of them in a kind of pompous hyper-ornate bubble. But there's also a different band in there that I think is really great.

JS: They were actually cool at the time when they first came out. Everyone thought it was cool. It wasn't uncool till a bit later on.

JM: Yeah, exactly. It wasn't uncool at all. I think they suffered a punk rock backlash. They definitely got hit.

JS: So, you're listening to your brother's record collection ...

JM: Yeah... But what he also had, was David Live, the David Bowie record. And I thought that cover was really scary, because I remember that age when I was afraid of stuff — I was afraid of Star Trek. The intro to Star Trek just scared me. I didn't want to watch it. I was afraid of the Sleestak from Land of the Lost. And I was afraid of the David Bowie cover.

JS: Did he have other David Bowie albums?

JM: I think he had that and Changesonebowie.

JS: The greatest hits.

JM: Yes. He wasn't buying Ziggy and stuff like that. He was kind of a jock. But I remember because I'm born in 1970, and it was 1977 when punk rock is happening when I'm seven years old, and it's not a thing to me. And my brother is like, "You know people talk about punk rock all the time, well that's the first punk rocker." He’s 16 and sort of angry at punk rock, as of course punk rock is coming to destroy the rest of his records except for David Bowie. And he would say “You know, they could talk all they want, but that guy was doing it before anybody.” And I was very impressed by that, so on my eighth birthday, February 1978, I asked for a stereo. And all I had was an inherited weird mismatch of 45s and stuff, but I got money for Christmas in 1977. I got a couple of dollars, and I went and bought Gilbert O'Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally” on seven inch and “Fame” by Bowie. And those were my two first records.

JS: It explains a lot.

JM: Yeah, I kind of feel like that's a pretty wide swath of self-pity and self-awareness.

JS: It's funny though at the time Gilbert O'Sullivan and Bowie were both having massive hits on English pop charts. Obviously one stuck around and one didn't.

JM: Yeah, but one of them made “Fame”, one of them made “Alone Again, Naturally.”

JS: Not that bad a record.

JM: No, it's not a bad record, but it's akin to that “oh, what a lonely boy,” the 70s self-pitying male… There is a real narcissism to those records. I'm watching this moment in history now when everyone is the wellness millennial. The healthy generation. It's inarguable that it is better to take care of oneself than to not take care of oneself, but I wonder about the obsession with becoming your “best self.” It reminds me of our youth of the 70s, it reminds me of the “me generation,” it reminds of the wide swaths of divorces that kids my age dealt with. When the parents were like, "I got to be me, man." You know, this obsession with health and wellness and the perfect expression of self. Like I have to sleep nine hours a day regardless of how that impacts everyone else, but I wonder if we're just repeating that, you know what I mean? That same cycle... Right now it looks great, like I'm sure it looks great to everyone meditating, in primal scream therapy, finding themselves, and at the end of the day it's like, well, there is not a thing at the middle there.

JS: So, between Gilbert O'Sullivan and David Bowie, where did you find your own path musically? Was it to punk rock?

JM: Punk rock was what was left. My brother listened to prog rock, my oldest sister listened to Loggins and Messina and really soft stuff. My other sister was a singer and she listened to songs. She really liked songs, like certain Fleetwood Mac songs and “The Rose” and other songs she could sing and play piano to. But then she also liked the Gap Band and funk. And so, it just seemed the natural thing for me — now it was my turn. I remember sitting solemnly in my bedroom, I was probably 11, listening to the first Clash record in my army pants on the end of my bed. My sister came home and opened the door to my room and she said, "Oh, shit! My brother’s a punk,” and then left the room.

JS: And that record had already been out for a few years.

JM: Oh, yeah. Also records had two lives. If you lived in a city, the records came out, and they were a thing, and then you were like, “I can't believe you're still listening. You're lame.” But if you lived in a fucking farm land… I talk a lot about the Violent Femmes debut LP. That record was a rite of passage for 10 years. Like, for 10 years you went through a period where you listened to that record. It's like The Smiths now. The Smiths is the thing now. But for me I bought the records just as they came out, and they had this meaning for me. But for kids now it's just like, “Wow! I'm going through my Smiths phase!” It's like Zeppelin or something. Like, you go through the phase of it.

So, records just lasted for a long time, and to me punk rock was anything weird. And I remember, okay, even “Fame” was one of the… but also “Love Is Like Oxygen” by Sweet, I loved Sweet. And I didn't own it because I couldn't get a seven inch of it. I couldn't find a seven inch of “Love Is Like Oxygen,” and I couldn't afford albums.

JS: Were you going to the Princeton Record Exchange?

JM: Not yet. The Princeton Record Exchange at that point did exist. I'm not sure when it started but it did exist. It was a tiny store then and it focused on rare classical and rare jazz, and it had a mimeograph machine, a blue paper list of all their rare records which would get sent to Japan and Europe, mostly Germany. Apparently the people that want to buy those records were people who had lost the second world war. That seemed to be the correlation between those things.

And, in the front was just a till, and there was kids there who worked at WPRB — the radio station — who started selling punk records out of crates. There were no Bruce Springsteen records. They had rare pressings of Miles Davis and Brahms, but there was nothing in between.

JS: Being from New Jersey, was Bruce Springsteen someone you were into?

JM: No. I had Darkness on the Edge of Town because my brother had two copies for some reason. So, I had that. And I liked him, but it wasn't really for me. I think I grew to like him more now, but I didn't really like him then, and I despised him around the Born In The U.S.A. period.

JS: So you’re finding and discovering punk in those crates?

JM: But anything weird to me was punk. Like, to me punk was not this, like, brash high energy thing. The B52’s was super punk to me. It was anything not normal. And I met a kid named Erick Daab from Staten Island, who was a metal head. He was a metal guitar player. And he gave me a copy of Kraftwerk’s “Computer World.” That's like in 82 or 83.

To me, punk… if it got too aggressive, I wasn't into it. The most aggressive thing I liked was Black Flag, but they were funny also. I liked Black Flag. I liked the Repo Man soundtrack. That was a big record for me. Black Flag had “TV Party,” which was hilarious. And Dead Kennedys were hilarious, but also had songs like “Holiday in Cambodia”, which was ripping. But on “Holiday in Cambodia”… the guitar playing is what I really loved about that song. It reminded me of Ricky from the B52s’ guitar playing. Like, the guitar playing at the end of “Rock Lobster,” which is I think some of the most searing, ripping guitar playing. So, to me there was always a queerness to punk rock. It was never this macho thing. Like when hardcore came out, I did not understand it. I did not like it because it felt like sports.

JS: I did and found out years later that Jello Biafra, from the Dead Kennedys was a Milk ‘N’ Cookies fan. And the Melvins, and of course The Ramones, who we played with many times. I wouldn’t have expected those bands to be into it really, except The Ramones, who loved glam and bubblegum music.

JM: But if you think about it, glam is a funny thing. Because if you have no social context and heard a glam record, and then a punk record, you'd be like, "Well this does not make any sense." But it does make complete sense.

JS: Total sense. To me.

JM: Yeah.

JS: Those bands like The Damned, they were all influenced by glam.

JM: And also if you're going to form a band around the time of like The Damned, the conversation you wanted to be having with people was, “Do you like T. Rex? Yeah, I do too. Do you like The Stooges? Yeah, I do. You like Roxy Music? Yeah, I do, too.” That's the conversation, all the good bands had that conversation. Almost every band I liked at one point had a couple of members who bonded over those bands. There was always the British bands who liked The Stooges and the MC5, and the American bands who liked Roxy Music and T. Rex and Ziggy. And The Velvet Underground obviously. Every band I liked had that conversation.

JS: Marc Bolan of T. Rex was one of the first established rock stars to really embrace punk. And they all worshiped him. And he was a huge influence on all that.

JM: Which makes perfect sense when you watch the thread, but it is weird. It doesn't seem weird to me because the way I've always viewed punk, or what it always meant to me. I remember the first time I went to like a hardcore show, and I was super bummed. First of all, there are only dudes here, and they all kind of look the same.

JS: Where did you start going to punk and hardcore shows?

JM: City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. Manhattan still intimidated me. I only went to Manhattan with my friend Scott whose dad lived in the Village. So, I would go buy records with him. I'd go in the early 80s, and it was still sketchy.

JS: Did you go to Bleecker Bob’s record store ?

JM: Bleecker Bob’s was where I first got yelled at buying my first Smiths record, because you couldn't get The Smiths in Princeton. I bought the “This Charming Man” 12”. And I had a very funny experience, which it took me until much later in my life to recognize, to really understand my experience. I went in there and I said, "Do you have The Smith Brothers?" And The Smith Brothers is just an old trio. And I'm like, “This Charming Man?” And he goes, "Oh, you mean The Smiths?” He was really dismissive.

And so, he just threw me the “This Charming Man” 12″ and I bought it. I was like 13 and sheepishly bought it, and went back home embarrassed of myself. And now I'm like, I bought, in a pre-internet age, came from my fucking farm town in New Jersey and I took the train to New York to Bleecker Bob's and bought an import only 12 inch of a British band that had no albums out. And I was like, "Man, fuck you."

JS: I think that it was a rite of passage to get yelled at Bleecker Bob’s. It happened quite a lot.

JM: That kind of experience doesn’t really exist anymore. I got turned on to a great record at Princeton Record Exchange by a similar thing. Modern English’s “I Melt With You” had just come out, and I wanted to get that record. “So, do you have the record?" And the guy said, "I found it, but have you heard their first album?” And I was like, "No." He's like, “Let me do you a favor, and do yourself a favor. Get the first record and then come back and see if you want this."

And that first record, “Mesh & Lace,” is to this day one of my all-time favorite records. It's incredible. It's ripping and aggressive and abstract and beautiful and weird. It's not at all like “I Melt With You,” which I like as well, but they were almost making a pop pose... like an art statement: "Oh, let's make a pop record." Whereas with the first album, it was appropriate that they were on a label with The Birthday Party. It was a scary sort of searing record. Much more like Joy Division — really dark and really cavernous. I love that record still. I have a bunch of records like that, that are just not important to the world, but super important to me.

JS: The Trenton venue City Gardens was the place to see punk rock shows?

JM: Huge. There was a documentary about it called Riot on the Dancefloor. John Stewart was a bartender. I wound up being a bouncer. That's where I saw everything the first time. The Ramones was my first show. The second show was Iggy, and then it was just like a million Dead Milkmen shows... I think Fishbone played with everybody. Like, no matter who played, Fishbone also played. It used to be like, "Iggy Pop and Fishbone.” “Black Flag and Fishbone." And the Dirty Dozen Brass Band was always playing for some reason.

JS: I was the DJ at the Ritz, which became Webster Hall and everyone and their mother played at the Ritz.

JM: I still call it the Ritz. I really liked that we were playing the Ritz. In fact, we did a flyer when we came back with LCD. The first show was at Webster Hall, and I made a Ritz flyer.

JS: So you started to work as a bouncer at City Gardens?

JM: Yeah. I didn't work as a bouncer until later, till after high school. So, I was 17 or 18 years old.

JS: When did you start getting involved in doing live sound with bands?

JM: Always.

JS: Were you in a band already?

JM: My first band was in 82 and I have recorded sets of it. I found them recently in a storage space I didn't know about. I was canceling a credit card, I called my business manager and I was like, "Can we just cancel this credit card?" He said, "Sure." Then he called me back, "Okay, what card do you want me to move the storage unit charge?" I was like, "What?" I’d had it since the 90s, and it was like 14 bucks a month. And I went and found it, and it was bunch of miscellaneous crap that I'm sure I paid thousands of dollars over the years just to hold. But it had a box of cassettes and a lot them were my 4-track recordings, and recordings from my childhood. So I want to compile them, and make a little compilation of my 80s stuff. So, I started recording when I was probably 10 years old.

JS: You bought some equipment?

JM: No, I had a little tape recorder, you know the classic school cassette recorder that my family had. And I had a cassette that I taped over and over and over. And I made a drum set out of coffee cans. I had two tape decks. One was in my sister's stereo and the other one was this little tape recorder. And I would make a drum set with coffee cans and the snare drum had rocks in the bottom. And I would play beats and I'd record them on my tape deck. And then I play that tape in the stereo and borrow a guitar and I'd play the bass line on the guitar. And then I put that cassette in ... So, they'd be both playing, and I put that cassette in the stereo, and put that over the speakers and then I'd play guitar and sing, and I'd made these little songs and I was like 10.

JS: And did you teach yourself how to play instruments?

JM: Yeah, I taught myself to play everything.

JS: No piano lessons after school?

JM: I asked for piano lessons, I asked, but we didn't own a piano. I begged for three years straight for piano lessons, which is the weirdest thing a kid can do. My mom would get her haircut by this woman, Fifi, whose husband Eric was a professional musician. He had every instrument imaginable in their house. And I would go with her when I was like six to Fifi's house because what else do you do with a six year old, so of course, me with my mom smoking in the station wagon going to get her hair cut. And I would sit and quietly play piano. Fifi was always saying to my mother, “He's very gentle on piano, not like other six year olds. You should get him lessons.” “I will," she said just to shut her up.

And it never happened. Over the years, finally Fifi made sure her husband was home when my mother came and her husband would work with me. They were really pressuring my mom to give me piano lessons, and she said she definitely would and never did. I asked, I asked, I asked. My mother was finally like, "We're not fancy!" I think somewhere in their mind they thought I was asking for, like, "Can I have a horse?" You know? "Can I have a pony?" "Can I have piano lessons?" They thought there was something quite high-class about it, because in their family the piano playing was bar piano playing, and they didn't want me doing that. They didn't want me to be a circus musician, like some of my family were. And we also were not going to be fancy where I went to a conservatory. So, they didn't understand the idea of just taking piano lessons. They eventually got a piano.

JS: And did you get lessons or taught yourself?

JM: I self-taught everything.

JS: Can you read music?

JM: I can to a certain extent. I was in a choir. My high school had a very excellent choir — we were a gold medal choir, we would go and compete around the world, we would tour. So, we’d raise money, and we wore the worst costumes. Every other school had nice costumes — they had nice tuxedos — and we had these lime green velvet tuxedos. We had really outdated stuff. We had no money — it was a public school — and we raised money to go to Germany and compete in choir competitions and stuff. But it was great. It was a really great music education. Great music program. Big, beautiful orchestra band in my school. It's funny because people talk about music programs disappearing. We had a choir, a chorus, and two different small ensembles. It was a really comprehensive music program. Totally great, and so sad that that's just not what people get anymore.

JS: Tell me about your first band?

JM: We were just a three piece punk rock band.

JS: Doing original songs?

JM: Some original songs. There is a song about The Scarlet Letter — the book we were reading. “Bug In My Beer” was a song when I was 13, and “What Can I Do”. There was just me and this guy Dale Huang who was a drummer and my friend Paul Hurst was the bass player. And I found a cassette of it recently and it's very, very sad, because I'm really not that much fun to play in the band with. I don't compromise well.

JS: Don't play well with others.

JM: I don't play well with others. If I was getting graded on bands it would be like, “Does not play well with others.” And I was so neurotic... I have such a good time playing music when it feels good, and I have such a terrible time playing music when it doesn't feel good. Like, it’s excruciating. There are so many recordings of us working on a song, and instead of being able to chill out like my friends, you can hear them having fun and I'm like, “That's great, let's try it again, let's try and play it right!” You hear me and then you can hear them getting annoyed with me. And you can hear me trying to pretend that I'm laidback about it.

JS: And was the band playing shows out?

JM: No, we just played in the drummer’s or the bass player’s basements. The drummer's basement was fine: it was normal. You could play in drummer's houses because they already had a drum set, so the parents are like “Yeah, whatever.” I mean, it's already a nightmare. But the bass player had a basement that was converted and we kept working on it, we called it the Happy Buddha Club because there was a Chinese restaurant called the Happy Buddha restaurant, and they renovated once and were throwing these red leather booths out. We saw them and called one of the older brothers who had a pick-up truck, and got a couple of the booths. So we had a few red booths and we had beads. You come down the stairs and there’s beads you came through.

And we stole a PA system from the local grammar school by sneaking in at night. We went out in ninja outfits basically and snuck into the school and we would hang there and drink and party in the school all the time at night, in the gymnasium and stuff. We learned from the older brother who would go and play basketball all night. I was like, that’s no fun. But we would sneak in, climb up on the upper window, open the upper window and get in, and then party in the library. And then we found these PA columns and we fucking stole them.

And so we had a little PA and we had broken old turntables with flash lights that we taped to them — one facing either way — and they would rotate, and those were lights on top of the PA columns.

JS: Very creative. And what was your role in the band?

JM: I was a singing guitar player. So, a.k.a., nightmare person.

JS: And did things start happening with the band?

JM: No. The other two guys wanted to be normal high school kids. They played sports and went out to parties, had normal socialization. I did not have a normal socialization. The more I think about it, I have a couple of things I credit that to. My voice changed when I was 10, in the fourth grade. So, I went through a lot of hormone stuff. I went through puberty when I was 10, 11 years old. So, before a lot the girls, which is very backwards. And so, a lot of my world view changed and everyone else was a little kid and I was a grown up person in a weird way. And then when everybody was sort of going through all that stuff a few years later I was like, “What the fuck is wrong with these kids? They are all insane!”

When kids started getting cliquey — and that's a natural thing that happens, it happens in every generation, but I missed it, and I hated it. I thought it was cruel and something weird. I felt like somebody had put something in the water in my town, and kids who used to be friends are not friends anymore because that kid is a jock and that kid is, you know, a weirdo, and that kid plays Dungeons & Dragons. And it's suddenly like watching all that kind of cruelty play out made me very, super, super alienated.

I was a big, socially capable kid. I wasn't an outcast. I was just self-ostracized. But I played sports up until high school. I swam and I played baseball, football, and basketball. But just never in school. Once we hit like 13, I was done with everything. And then I just played music.

JS: And what was the next step after this band broke up?

JM: The next step was doing it all on my own. It was probably 85 and I bought a four track tape recorder. I didn't get a Fostex, I bought a Yamaha. I was always into the other brand.

At first I borrowed a friends Fostex and I started making songs by myself. And then I released a compilation cassette and made up all these fake bands, but it was all me. And I played with other people too, I played in a band and we recorded that live, which I considered the more “serious” thing because it was a band. But I did all the stuff on these tapes, made drum sounds on a synthesizer I borrowed and I borrowed little drum boxes, Casios, and I made all this music. And I would call it different bands, I'd I made up fake members and I just made this compilation.

JS: And what was the musical direction of the music you were making?

JM: Almost industrial. There was like some new wavy stuff, some 4AD Records type stuff… There was some spacey stuff and some alt rock like The Chameleons, and Cure type stuff. I just started making all this music by myself. And then I had to give my friend the Fostex recorder back. But I had enough friends that had equipment. I had a friend who had a Roland Juno-106 (I bought a Roland Juno-1 later on, it was the worst… ) I had a friend whose parents gave him stuff, and he had an Emax sampler eventually in the late 80s.

So, I would just cobble together things to work on for a while. And then eventually saved up some money and went and bought that nice Yamaha 4-track recorder at a super sale the store that my friend worked at had. And I bought it, and I bought a little drum machine and a box of cassettes. And then I realized that what they were doing was checking your receipt on the way out. So, I was like, “Oh, I don't need to carry this around, I’ll just put it down, because I could pick up a different one on the way out,” and then I was like, "Wait a second..."

And I went out. They didn't mark my receipt, and I put in the trunk of my car and then I went and got lunch. Then I came back and went back in the store and waited two more hours and went out again with the same stuff. So, I got two for the sale price of one. And then I sold the other set at once and got most of my money back. I came out way ahead.

And that's when I really started in earnest, because I could use the money from the one I sold to buy a microphone. I bought an SM57 and that was 60 bucks. And I felt pretty proud of myself. And then I just started recording the whole time, figuring out puzzles.

JS: And you were still living at home?

JM: Oh, yeah, I lived at home until I went to college. I didn't leave my home. I was born and raised in one house until I was 19, when I went to live in New York.

JS: And would you send these demos out to record companies?

JM: I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. I didn't do anything. I didn't send it to any record companies. I sold them and gave them away. I just made music. And I didn't understand how any of this worked. I would look at my records and see a lot of people who are on Sire, a couple of people on Elektra, a couple of people on Arista. As far as independent labels, I knew 4AD, and I knew Factory Records as consistent labels, but I didn't think about independent labels versus major labels at all. I didn't think about any of that stuff. And in 87 I pressed and released a goth album.

JS: Under what name?

JM: Falling Man. They're like 500 bucks now on Discogs... not because of me. Because it's a small private-press goth record. And since I threw away 700 of them, there are only 250 of them in the world, I think.

JS: Were you thinking about trying to start your own label at this point?

JM: Well, a lot happened in the intervening years, between the 80s and the 2000s. I moved in New York, and I was listening to all the music I used to listen to, plus bands like Ministry and a lot more industrial stuff.

JS: Dance music, house music, disco music wasn't a part of your life?

JM: Not at all. Even though a lot of stuff I listened to would be dance music, and I did go dancing at City Gardens. And I liked Deee-Lite. Deee-Lite were kind of a universal thing, you couldn’t not like them. To me when I thought about going to a dance music club, I always could only imagine C&C Music Factory, which I did not like.

JS: Was disco a dirty word for you at that point?

JM: It was a non-word. I grew up and I listed to disco because I was six, seven, eight years old, and it was the music on the radio, but I didn't have any deep understanding of it. To me it was like the Bee Gees, and Andrea True Connection’s “More, More, More” (which I still think is amazing), but it wasn't like something that I cared about. A lot of the industrial music I listened to was dance music, like Nitzer Ebb and New Order.

But dance music was a couple of things: one, it's a genre, and the other, it’s a context — a cultural context. And I had no cultural context for it. So, I wasn't listening to it at all. I got to New York and somebody gave me Mudhoney and Galaxie 500. I started listening to Sonic Youth and Sebadoh. And then I went into a giant indie rock detour for the majority of the 90s, in which, again, I didn't fit in at all.

JS: And you were making and producing indie rock at that time?

JM: I was a drummer, I switched to drums. I'd been playing music for my whole life as a singing guitar player. And then went to college after I took a year and a half off.

I took a year and a half off after high school and I kickboxed and was a bouncer and did weird shit. Lived in my fucking town, lived in my parents’ house because I didn't want to go to college, because college was next. It was this sort of de facto thing that everybody did, and that felt too weird. I didn't like the idea that my life was set. So, I was thinking “I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do.” And then after a year and half, my dad was like, “You need to get out of this house. You and your mother are going to kill each other.” And so I went to NYU, largely because I had a couple of friends there, and I'd been going in on the weekends to stay with them and hang out with them.

JS: What were you studying at NYU?

JM: Writing. I kind of gave up on music. I was like, I'm not going to make music because I made my album, which went nowhere… because I realized I didn't know anybody. I was like, okay, I made an album and brought five to sell at the Record Exchange.

JS: So you were ready to give up?

JM: Well, no — I just didn't know what to do. I had a friend whose dad worked at Columbia Records, and I made a little presentation and gave him the cassette and he was just like, “Okayyyy” — he's trying to explain, "I work in sales, but…. there’s nothing here. You don't have a scene. There is no story.” I'm alone in my bedroom making music. I hired a studio and made an album. It didn't matter. My idea was like, “I'll make this thing look like a ‘real record.’ I'll make a record.” Everyone was making CDs... it was the beginning of CDs, and I was like, "No, I'm making a record.” That was worst idea. Then I went to NYU. I quit to be a student.

JS: And how long did that last?

JM: Lasted till my senior year.

JS: And you graduated?

JM: No. I dropped out because I got into a band and went on tour. I became a drummer. And I didn't intend to. I was dating a girl and she wanted to play bass, I was like, “Okay, I'll help you put together a band.” I've always been in bands. And she found a guitar player, and they couldn't find a drummer. “I will play drums. I don't know how to play drums really, but I'll play drums until you find a drummer.” They were rehearsing drummers and they'd be like, “It’s more fun when James plays.” That kept happening. It kept being more fun when I was playing, and so I got better and better at playing drums, and then I became the drummer. So, from 93 to 97, I was a drummer in indie rock bands.

I was in a band called Pony, which had a couple of singles and two albums, and a band called Speed King, which just released seven inches. We were so heads-up-our-own-assess, we refused to release an album. Just singles.

JS: And so is this around the time the idea of DFA starting coming together?

JM: The end of the 90s are coming up. I met a guy who stored his equipment, he moved from Los Angeles, and he had a bunch of gear. He was like, "I had a studio in LA and I want to set up a studio here,” and I'm like, "Well I already have a studio." He's like, "Well, maybe I can give you my stuff and we can put it in there and I can use your studio." I was like, "No, I'll just store your stuff because I have a fully functioning studio."

So, I stored this guy's stuff and let him use it sometimes. And that turned out to be Tyler Brodie who was my partner at DFA. Then I got kicked out of my old studio by my landlord. I had a studio in Dumbo that I paid 350 bucks a month for. It was a giant studio in the building that's now the cornerstone building of Dumbo. I was alone in Dumbo — me and one other guy and a pack of wild dogs. An entire city block building with no one there.

And I’d rehearse with a band called Dungbeetle — one of my favorite bands of all time — and we shared it as a rehearsal space and I had my recording studio. I had a control room and then a big live room. And I couldn't get a job producing. Nobody cared about me. There were studios that weren’t as good as mine and they still got more work than me. But I was a good engineer.

JS: And the idea of the studio was to produce other artists?

JM: To have a rehearsal place for my band, so we didn't have to burn money just renting rehearsal space, and to produce other people. And nobody really wanted to hire me. So, I got kicked out and I called the guy whose stuff I had and I said, "Hey, I'm getting kicked out. You got to take your stuff back." So, I delivered it in my band van to a building he got on West 13th street. I was loading it all in and asked, "Can I now store my stuff in your place?" And he was like, "Yes."

So, we're loading all my stuff in and I said to him, "Hey man, if you know anybody, or a place I can build a studio let me know." And he's like, "Oh, funny I was thinking of asking you, I need somebody to help me design a studio here." And I was just like, "Sounds like you got your chocolate in my peanut butter… You know, I'll build the studio." So, I designed a studio for that space, which took a couple of years to build. It finally got done in the end of 98, and I produced a Trans Am record there, a band from the 90s.

And then immediately David Holmes was the next record, and that's where I met Tim Goldsworthy. I was building a studio to record indie rock bands. And then I met Tim and DFA started because of that. Meeting Tim and David Holmes was the seismic change in my life. Like the big, big, big, big change.

JS: And what was the first thing you and Tim did as DFA?

JM: Well, I kind of think that David Holmes record in a weird way was like the formation of Tim and I as a team. We had nothing in common, on the surface.

He was brought in by David Holmes as a co-producer and technically he was the programmer. He was the guy who sat at the computer. Remember, a computer wasn't something that everybody used. You had to get a guy who was a specialist — who had his own little laptop — and was the programmer. And he would make samples and control the sampler, make your drums. And that was Tim. He was one of the top guys for that.

JS: And he had come from working in the UK with Mo’ Wax Records.

JM: Yeah. Mo’ Wax and Unkle. And what happened was he and I didn't hit it off at first. He wasn't very friendly and I was not cool. And he was cool. And it was the typical, like, you know, he's a cool guy, he was in magazines and stuff. And magazines would write like, "What's Tim Goldsworthy up to? What's he doing?" But nobody was writing, “What's James Murphy doing?” My family was barely wondering what I was doing.

But by virtue of me being the engineer and him being the programmer we wound up spending a lot of time alone. The guys would come in and play some keyboards and Phil Mossman, who wound up being the first guitar player in LCD, was playing guitar and they'd be all just hanging out. And then those three would leave, and Tim and I are stuck in the basement trying to make sense of the stuff.

At which point we both realized that his first show was a Ramones show and my first show was a Ramones show. And then we were like, "Huh." And then — this is something that people don't remember — it was not cool to like The Smiths at this time. There was a period where you didn't want to admit to it, and we both admitted it. “I was really a big Smiths fan.” “Me too, I was a really a big Smiths fan.”

And so, we had a lot more in common than we’d thought. And as we worked, there was sort of a mutuality of what we liked and what we cared about, and what we were angry about, and what we disagreed with, and all that sort of stuff.

JS: You found common ground.

JM: Yeah, we found common ground. And then the Holmes thing went really weird. There were a lot of drugs. But in the middle of that, David was deejaying and I did my first ecstasy while he was deejaying. And he played my favorite song, which is “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. That was like my childhood. That was my song because it hummed. I liked psychedelic things as a kid.

It's also a fucking barn burner of a song. And it also kind of hipped me to the idea of what dance music could be. We started talking about it. We would do a label and it'll be like Factory Records. It will be this thing where everything matters and we could think about everything and we were super high all the time. And by then I didn't smoke pot, I was doing everything else. Just constantly getting into the minutiae of everything. When David left it was like, "Let's do this thing." We didn't have a label name yet.

I had been a live sound engineer in the 90s, that's what I'm forgetting. The big thing about the 90s is I was a live sound engineer. And I was really good at it. I would say it's the thing in my life, if there is anything in my life that if I look at myself in comparison to the rest of the world, it's the thing that I'm the best at, it's the thing that I excel the most at. It's a combination of years of doing it under grueling, awful conditions... doing sound in punk clubs is not like doing sound in my band now.

JS: And you went on the road doing this?

JM: Oh, yeah. Doing sound with my band now is very different. We carry a PA system, it's very technical, like 60 fucking inputs. What our sound guy Steve does is not what I can do. He’s amazing.

What I was doing was showing up, and there was some rickety PA, and I'm like, "I have to rewire this thing and make it work.” It's never going to sound pristine, but I'm going to have to make it blow people's minds. That's all I was about. I need to just fucking rip your head off and make you feel this. I need to make it not hurt, but be scary, and the emotional communication of sound was what I learned in all that.

JS: And how did these clubs react to that?

JM: It went 50/50, because I would make their system sound so much better. So, if they were cool about it, they were like, “It's fucking great.” Or they'd be like, "I don't like that guy, he thinks he's so great." But, that was my real education in engineering. It gave me the advantage that I carried into the recording studio — doing whatever it took to get things to sound right.

And also learning from Bob Weston, because he recorded the band Pony, and he was a real engineer. And having done this all on my own, like, alone just working it out, and then he showed me how gain staging worked and it blew my mind. So, working with Tim we suddenly have this thing where Tim knew all this stuff about programming, stuff that none of the people around me knew, and I knew all this stuff about live sound, which I could translate into dance music, specifically because dance music was body music.

And what I was used to doing was knocking people over, knowing when to compress something and knowing when not to compress something, and that sort of weird shit. So when we started, we were like, we're going to throw a party, we're going to do this, and we were just going to do it all homegrown, do whatever we want, and not care about what anybody else thinks. And we were talking about how we liked the Human League and disco. And I remember we were talking to a friend of Tim's from England who said the same thing. He was like “I know this sounds weird, but I’m really into the Human League and disco.” And we were like, “There’s something in the air.” And we had this big discussion about how many times have you loved something and it's been your thing and then a year and half or two years later everybody is into it, and you're mad.

JS: Right, all the damn time.

JM: And I was like, clearly all we have to do is do the thing we're really into as opposed to bitching about everybody else, or how bad music is or how these people don't really get it. Just do it.

JS: I know. People always ask me or say, “New York was so much better, this is so much better...” I'm like, well, just do something about it, and stop bitching about it.

JM: Right, that's the beauty of New York. I think it's harder… space is hard now. There is a very different thing happening that New York hasn't weathered since the 70s. This is a new challenge, the challenge of wealth and suburbanization. But I remember when we started DFA, New York was not fun. That late 90s, early 2000s period, I found it was hard to find fun. Tim was so devastated. He moved to New York thinking it's going to be people break dancing on the corner, it's just going to be amazing clubs and we would go out and he’d be like, “This sucks.” The music the people are playing was like the seamless, faceless shit that's not even, like, techno.

JS: Was the Plant Bar open then?

JM: The Plant Bar was not open yet. And these things were all things that we co-opted, made our own. Marcus, (Shit Robot) and Dom Keegan, who were Plant, they started deejaying long before The Plant Bar.

JS: You hadn't deejayed yet.

JM: No. I hadn’t deejayed at all. I think my first deejay gig was December 1999, at the DFA Christmas party at DFA. I set up a sound system in there, which was ripping, and we really carefully invited different groups of people. This was really key. We had a bunch of film friends, we had a bunch of the Black Dice and weirdo arty punk kids, we had a gay contingent…

JS: Everything that makes a good club.

JM: Yeah, we had these great breakbeat deejay guys like Bobbito and friends like that.

And then in walks Rosie Perez on crutches. And then the indie rock kids and The Rapture guys. We had this real mix. What we wanted was for nobody to feel like it was theirs, and that the other people didn’t belong. I wanted everybody to feel like they had to make it work. It wasn't like they can sit in the corner and be like, “I don't believe these losers are here. This is our party.” I wanted everyone to feel a little outnumbered and it was fucking amazing.

We had this great party, we had an open bar and massive amounts of E... and I was so nervous about deejaying, and I was so nervous about not being high enough or being too high, that I put quarters of E on the corners of the two turntables so I can work my way through them during the set so I know how much I had done.

JS: Weird thing is I've never done any drugs in my life, and have obviously been around it since growing up. And I don't drink. I’m constantly amazed how people do that and then DJ.

JM: That's probably why you can still do it. I’m a very self-conscious guy, and I was not fun. E was a great thing for me because, when I first did it I was dancing and I came to the realization… I'm like, "Wait a second… this is not the drugs.” I know when I'm drunk, I'm still me, but I'm just a little sloppy. When I was stoned, I was just me but paranoid. But with E, I was just myself, like I was really myself. And it changed me, so that afterwards I would dance without it, I would go out without it. Something had woken up in me. It has since gone back to sleep a bit because I don't do that anymore, because I don't think it works forever.

It was a pretty important thing for me. I would never have stuck myself out like that, just wouldn't have done it. So, yeah, we started the parties, then we wanted a label that was perfect. So, we started it and Death From Above was my live sound name, that's where it came from. It was my nickname because I was so loud. And Tim was like, "I'm into that." So we became Death From Above, DFA.

JS: Did you design the logo?

JM: Well, first we had a little skull, and then 9/11 happened, and we said Death From Above at the moment in New York City might not be the right thing... so we became DFA. And then we had a meeting where we were talking about how we should have a logo. And we were doodling things and I drew a little lightning bolt in ballpoint pen… not big, a tiny, like, one-inch tall. And we were like, "Yeah, that's it." And then we were like, "No, that's it. We'll just never do it again.” It was very funny because people are like, "Can you draw a lightning bolt?" And I'm like, "No." Because I just did it once. And then we scanned that and that's the logo, and that's it forever. I think Jon Galkin still has the original.

JS: And around that time you met The Rapture?

JM: Yeah, through Justin Chearno, who is a partner now at the Four Horsemen.

He was my spy. He was always like, "Hey, you got to see The Rapture." And he brought me down to Brownie’s and I fell in love with them. And Tim was back in England and when he came back, I was like, "You have to hear these guys, you have to see these guys." It seems so perfect, they were perfect. They were a perfect band.

JS: Yeah, they were very inspiring to me as well. I was bored with the dance music scene at the time and what you guys were doing at DFA, and Trevor Jackson at Output Records in the U.K. and Robi Headman and In Flagranti and a few others really excited me again.

JM: I felt like, we had this advantage. I was watching Marcus and Dom deejay, and Marcus would explain, like, "Well, this is the record you to play to get from one record to another." I was so angry about it. I'm going to die, don't give me seven minutes of filler. Like we're all going to die. And I started thinking and I was looking at my record collection and I was remembering David Holmes playing “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and I was like, what an advantage to be able to play anything from any time. Clearly the quality level is going to be, just the inherent actual quality we're going to play will be higher. Because there is no way you can tell me that in the last nine months there is something critical I have to play... you have to go through phases as a DJ where you play the newest, that’s really important. And there is a value in that currency, but at that moment there was no value in that currency. People were filling genres. They weren't pushing things forward.

And so, I can go play Kraftwerk tonight, then I can play The Fall, I can play anything. I can play Suicide, and I can play the best music of the post-second World War, all of it. I can play anything, and you are only playing something out of eight labels that has come out in the last nine months. I'm clearly going to destroy you. It just seemed like such an obvious win. It's sort of saying, I have an all-star team from the greatest players around the world and you have a high school team and you have to pick from these 300 people. You cannot… there will not be the talent pool to beat my team.

So, I had in my record bag, “Do The Du” by A Certain Ratio and at any point, I can drop that. That's fucking going to rip it. And when we were running out of music… and the whole point of making “House of Jealous Lovers” and things like that, was we needed more of this to play. So, we did the Le Tigre remix, and that was the first DFA thing. And that to me was slowed down to disco tempo. At the time Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, Metro Area, was the other thing we heard and I was like, "Fuck, we have to hurry up."

It was from a different angle, they were coming from much more of a traditional dance music background, and I was coming from a punk rock background. I remember the drums from Loose Joint’s “Is It All Over My Face, that sound and hearing that similar tonality in Metro Area’s records, that was a really big influence. Metro Area and Morgan Geist were a really big influence on us.

So, that was the contemporary thing I can play at any time. But we just wanted to make more music that we could play in that deejay set rather than just playing old records.

JS: And you remember the first time you played “House Of Jealous Lovers,” and the reaction it got on a dance floor, and made you feel that you were onto something?

JM: I don't remember. That's a great question. I can't remember the first time I played it. Because we had it for a year before we put a 12 inch out, and I didn't play CDs, you know what I mean? You couldn't play it until it was pressed.

JS: But you knew this was special?

JM: Oh, yeah. I was like, “This is the best, listen to this, this is fucking amazing.” We wanted it to be like A Certain Ratio and Mr. Ozio, that's what we wanted, and that's why we looped the bass at the beginning and put it through the EMS filter and we were like, "How do we make this compete? Stand up next to...” If somebody plays Mr. Ozio’s “Flat Beat,” we need to be able to play our record next to it, so it needs to compete, can't sound scrawny. Like A Certain Ratio sounded scrawny, so it can't sound like that but at the same time A Certain Ratio has this energy. It had to have both of those things, the thump and the sprawling energy as well.

JS: But still, every now and then I’ll drop “House Of Jealous Lovers” in one of my sets and it still gets a crazy reaction.

JM: It was also a funny time in history when you could play that record for four years and still feel ahead. Like for four years I would go to Winter Music Conference and hear that. Somebody would be like, "What's this?" That's gone, like, you can't hold a record for that long, you know what I mean?

JS: And then DFA was up and running. The Juan Maclean record was next?

JM: Yeah. Juan was from the band Six Finger Satellite. At the time he was living in New Hampshire and kind of isolating himself. And he quit music. We bought him a sampler and couple of machines and got him Logic, or the Cubase program. I started making and sending him these CDs I called “Juan Should Know” and it was stuff like Luke Eargoggle and some Gigolo records. I was like “Hey Juan, this is what's happening. You should know about this stuff and think about it, and make some music.”

And so, he started making music. He would come to New York and finish things off and then we put out the first 12 inch with him. So it was The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” and the second one was Juan. Those were the first two 12 inches and the second two were Juan again and LCD’s “Losing My Edge”, those were the first four releases.

JS: If you were starting out in a band or making records today, would you have a different approach? Does a record company matter anymore, the way it did, in as far as what it meant to have a record on DFA?

JM: By the time people were going to DFA to get their record on there, it didn't mean the same thing. It only meant something as a representation of a scene. It only meant something in my mind during the moment when DFA was a gang. I always saw it as a gang, and it was a gang that didn't just include the label. It was a gang that threw the parties, was a gang that did that art, was a gang that made music. Mike Vadino who's the art director who did all the first posters... I did some of the first posters right out of the gate... some of the first we just did because we didn’t have anybody and we met Mike right in the beginning, and since then, he did everything.

And Justin Chearno, who never worked for the label, had nothing to do with it, played a little guitar on “New York, I Love You” and did a show with us in Philly with us when Phil Mossman couldn't do it. But he was key in finding The Rapture, and finding Black Dice, hipping us to things before anybody. They were as much a part of the gang as anyone. So, if they were deejaying to me, it was like a DFA night and we were all showing up. We were all showing up at Plant Bar. It was like a gang, and as a label representing a gang, I think it was really important.

Once it became a label that you're sending your work to, I think it's less important. I think it's something different, it is important still but it's something different, more of a curatorial thing. I think what's happening now is you're seeing these scenes and that's what's important. And I think it's harder for someone who's isolated, it's much harder. And I got real lucky because that was the first time in my life I was part of something, and not just myself alone trying to do something for myself.

JS: But now is a label still important when there are other ways to get your music released?

JM: People still need something that they trust. Yeah, there’ll be a different outlet, but it'll be because some other artists like it... it's not a democracy, in fact, if anything the lack of hierarchy has created a greater hierarchy. We now can listen to anything, you can pick up that phone and literally listen to the most obscure music that took me years of crate digging to find. And yet most people just end up listening to Beyoncé, you know what I mean. And nothing wrong with Beyoncé. What is our massive pop music is certainly at times pretty interesting. Like our number ones are more interesting than they've been since The Beatles era. But, the rest of the top 20 is more monotonous.

JS: You've had a number one record.

JM: Sort of.

JS: Well, you have, and LCD Soundsystem is one of the biggest bands in the world. Did you ever imagine that? Do you ever stop and think like, "Hey, wow."

JM: I stop and think about it all the time, all the time. The day you stop thinking about it is a very sad thing.

JS: Do you feel more driven or less driven, or do you feel that you’ve done it all now?

JM: I don't know. It's all too under my control in some ways. I'm not inspired to be bigger because it seems not that hard now that we're here, now that we're in this big position where I have like a giant platform. I can choose to make more commercial decisions or more like remarkable decisions.

But I also think that we had a couple of massive advantages. My years of doing live sound, our years collectively as group people in punk bands... I came from that scene and when we went and started playing festivals, that was our radio. We didn't get played on radio, what we did get was blogged about. There were huge things about “Losing My Edge” and “Yeah”... the internet did a lot for us. We played festivals at a time when bands were pretty lame. Bands were not that good to see, not as bad as they are now. Bands were still coming out of the 90s, were still kind of polite like, "I'm sorry," and we were like, "We're going to fucking murder you." We'd be backstage not making friends. We still made our friends, we made friends for sure with some people, but we had our aims of destroying everybody. And we were scared and angry and we knew how to sound good. I knew how to make a band sound good.

JS: For sure. Seeing the band play live over the years, and now the sound you have at your live shows is amazing.

JM: Well, now we're more like hi-fi I think. But I think in the beginning we had a limited amount of gear we could carry, so we had to make it work with what we could check on a plane. I’d have my microKORG which I love, love that fucking machine. And so we would show up and I think, "How do we do as a five-piece ...” All we want to do is rip people’s heads off and we were so fucking loud on stage.

And so what would happen is other bands would come, you go see the other band that you're playing with on your festival stage. And we would just erase the other bands because we were twice as loud. And we were not friendly. And we would play just a short set and play as furiously as we could. And we were starting to get some good press. Lots of little articles all over especially in England and France. So, people would come and if there wasn't something really they wanted to see when we were playing, and usually at that point we were playing on the early side of the festival, they'd be like, "I'm going to check this band out."

And so, we were there to make sure you remembered us. And I think that was the best thing for us, people sampling us at a festival after reading an article about us in iD Magazine or something. And when you look at the songs that are our biggest songs, they are not the singles, but the songs we played live the best. The singles didn’t matter, but it's what we play live that translates to people most.

JS: Now that you're headlining festivals, and you step out there and you know everyone is there to see you and they know the songs. What are you feeling when you step out on stage?

JM: I go on stage worrying about the sound mostly. Does my mic sound okay, is Pat tired, or is the bass amp too loud. Mostly just technical stuff.

JS: But does it ever overwhelm you... when you look out and see thousands of people singing along to “All My Friends”?

JM: Sometimes, it sounds corny but that doesn't mean as much to me as the sound. If it sounds right and I'm being caught in a wave of sound, and nobody is reacting, I almost don't care. And if it sounds like something is wrong and it's not really working, I feel alone.

I need it to feel good to me because then I'll be able to appreciate it, you know what I mean? It's like what you don't want to do is play piano and fuck it up and then have someone say, "Oh, my God, you're amazing" — you just feel lonely. Yeah, it wasn't amazing but now I just feel alone because you don't understand.

JS: Does that stem from being a perfectionist?

JM: Not even, it's not out of perfectionism, I don't mind if there are millions of mistakes, as long as it feels good. It's more that if I feel like we're distracted and people aren’t paying attention, and we're not connecting to one another, and sonically I can't hear Al’s guitar very well, it's that type of stuff. Because we were designed to be a little ball, and as we have expanded, we have to do a lot of work to maintain that ball, and it's much harder, you know what I mean. It's like being a friend group when you all live in a house together, and then suddenly people get married and move away. It's just harder to maintain that.

JS: When you guys got back together after the break, was it like let's try this and see if it's going to work again, or did you know immediately?

JM: I wouldn't have tried a show. We were going to be better, I knew we had to be better than ever. We had to sound better, we had to play better. Before that, we had a great sounding band, and then we completely redid the entire fucking thing. With all new microphones, new equipment, new sounds, everything. 15 years into the band and I'm like, we've always had the same exact guitar amp. I'm like let’s just rebuild the guitar amp. A totally new thing. We just started over. I was like, "What's the best way to do this?"

I knew, the thing is for anyone to feel like it was half as good as it used to, it had to be twice as good. You always have the, “Oh, it was better before.” Like, "Oh, you should have seen them with Ron Ashton before James Williamson.” There is a mythology always.

JS: So, are you still the guy that doesn't play well with others, hard to be in a band with or has that changed?

JM: Oh, no I don't play well with others. But it depends on what you choose. No secrets about it, the thing I've always said is like, if somebody says to me, "Oh, I think this is better, I'm like, "I'm not trying to make better.” My goal isn't to make the best, my goal is to make the thing that is the closest to what I envision. So, the specificity of my want is what I want LCD to be. Because if I wanted the best, I wouldn't sing, I’d just hire someone... there are millions of better singers, there are millions of better people at each instrument.

I will play the instruments a lot of times, I know what I want out of it, and despite any technical lacking or whatever else is going wrong, I can get it to do what I want it to do and I'm the best in the world at being me.

JS: And what’s the difference of it being LCD Soundsystem rather than James Murphy?

JM: It is a band, it’s not Prince. In the studio, people play in the studio, but it's a thing... it is sort of me doing what I want to do to a certain degree, and so I surround myself with people who have enough in common with me that they get it, and they can embrace that as, I know what LCD is about, I can do this, and they can add things and contribute, write, and do all sorts of stuff. And then we go on tour and we're a band. I don't ride my little bus and have my dressing room and be like, “Who are these guys,?” We're a band and we've been playing together for 15 years. Some of us like Tyler, Nancy, Pat, and I have been playing together since the first show in November 2002.

JS: I mean, was there a moment before you got the band back together that you thought you might do this as a solo thing?

JM: No. What happened was I just knew I was going to start making music. And I knew I had made a pretty big ending, and I just asked them if I'm making music again — is this LCD or is this me? Do you guys want to do this again? Because I'm not going to exclude my best friends, you know what I mean, because I made a selfish decision to stop. And Pat and Nancy said we're in, and Al said I'm in, and everybody was like, we're in. And that was great, it was going to be LCD.

And that changes what I decide to do to a certain degree. Because there is some indefinable set of rules that makes it LCD versus just me making music. Me making music is I do whatever. I mean, I made music for play that just had piano and cello. I made music for film that's all acoustic guitar. But making LCD music has like a set of logics to it, not rules but logics.

JS: I wanted to talk a little about David Bowie. He was a huge influence on me, and of course you as well. I remember hearing the remix you did for him maybe the first time you played it at Output and I though "Wow, this is what David Bowie should sound like now." And was hoping you would do more with him.

JM: In the back of my mind making that remix was my, was my way of trying to say, "Hey."

JS: And had you met him before?

JM: I'm trying to think when I met him. I did meet him before, when I was working on The Arcade Fire record and he came in to do guest vocals.

JS: I had met him briefly around that time as well, and was impressed at how friendly and nice he was.

JM: He’s possibly the best. He made me feel like I need to be less grumpy. Because he was really open and really engaged.

I think that was his great skill. My experience was that he knows the effect to a certain degree that he has on people. He knows that you're going to fucking lose it when you meet him. So, he's very good at filling that space for the minute while you adjust. He'd be like, "Oh, how are you?" You know put you totally backwards, and then while you're recovering make you feel comfortable and calm everything down. And I've heard that from a lot of different people. He had a great memory as well. Like a social memory. He'd be like, "How is your girlfriend?” And you’d be like, “What!?” I met him at the Arcade Fire session, and he didn't recognize me, because, why would he? And I was like, "Hi." And then he did a vocal and then he came back like a week later to do something else, and he walked in and he went straight to me and said, "I'm so sorry. I didn't realize it was you, I just didn't put two and two together. Of course, I'm a huge fan,” and I was like, “I can't...” You know, it totally put me on my back foot.

JS: How did the remix come about?

JM: I don't know the sequence of whether I did the remix before or after we met, I can't remember. And I was just asked by the label and I was terrified. It took me a really long time to do it. I knew I'd been listening to Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” and I wanted to make an edit of it, instead I just got people in and made new clapping patterns and used that as inspiration. People wrote that it's a sample. It's not a sample. I wanted a very specific recording of that, which was a performance that’s on video, which was the first performance of it with Reich and someone else clapping in a gallery. You see a white sheet rock wall and the sound was the sound which the video camera microphone gets. So, I did it in the hallway, not in one in the live rooms, with Hisham from Black Dice and a couple of people. We made these patterns and played them all together. And we would play for a while and I'd like shift the pattern around, they'd all follow and then I’d shift again so I could layer this thing out.

And I was really obsessed with it being as good as I possibly could make it, because I was terrified to do a half-assed job. And then also people think there’s a sample of “Ashes to Ashes” in it, but it's not. It's just me trying to reverse engineer how it was done. I was like, "I know Tony Visconti had the Eventide Harmonizer 910,” so I made a wobbling effect with the 910 and did it on an electric piano and acoustic piano and blended it together, trying to figure out the techniques.

JS: It was beautiful and it was a great homage to him.

JM: And what I really wanted is for him to say was, "This sounds better than the album, I should get him to make the next record."

JS: But something along those lines did happen?

JM: I think that's kind of what was beginning, but nobody really informed me what was going on. I was moving around, and doing stuff, I think I was finishing work with Arcade Fire and I was doing a variety of things, making a film. And we became e-mail pals. That's what happened. We had become email buddies, which I’ve heard from other people is a thing that would happen.

JM: So then we started communicating. I was on a family vacation with my wife and her parents. We were on a sailboat in the Caribbean. And we were coming upon Mystique, and I looked up Mustique and saw that David Bowie had a house on Mustique. It was Christmas Eve, and I was like, what are the chances... and I just wrote him an email like, “I know this sounds weird, but I'm arriving to Mustique, do you still have a place there?” And he wrote back immediately, like, “Oh, no. I don't anymore, but that’s so funny. Say hi to everyone.” And we were emailing back and forth. He was a real quick responder, which made feel like, “Hey, David Bowie is writing me right back!”

And I got my gumption up, and wrote, “I would love, if you're interested at all, I would love to make some music with you. In any capacity, and I don't care if it comes out. If you have any interest in just trying something I would love to.” My vision was, what I wanted was to make a record with him my way. And I said, “You and me we're going to go to the studio and we're going to talk about some music. And we can do everything ourselves or you can bring people in. Your call. Between the two of us we can play any instrument, so let's just do it,” that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to make it along the style of the remix I did, him being like, "Well, here is my song," I'm like, "Great, let's break it apart and let's do what we want." He said, “Funny you mention it. Let's have a chat when you get back."

So, I get back and I go to have a meeting with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement, which was based upon people not knowing he was making records at the time. And he played me a bunch of demos, and the things he was working on, he's like, "Do you hear anything?" I was like, "I hear a lot." And I'm like, “Yeah, we're going to make this record, it's going to be great”. And he was like, "That's great." And I had to go do something, I had to go to Japan and make a film. And then I'd come back.

And he said, "Well, that's good because I'm going to do some little things I'm working with this jazz band, and Tony Visconti.” I said, “Okay.” He said "Come back on this date, come to Magic Shop studio." So, I show up, unfortunately or fortunately, it is quite in-progress already. I walk in and there is this drummer, Mark and the bass player, Tim, a keyboard player, and saxophone player. Okay, that’s the band. And there is an engineer and a computer operator. There is Tony Visconti, sitting at the desk and David. And no chair is up there where I would normally go. What the fuck am I doing here? I'm like, "What ..."

JS: It didn't feel right?

JM: What am I doing? What's my job? And no one's told me what my job is. It's like, ”Do you have any things you want to suggest?” And I'm like, "Ohhhh, I'm supposed to play well with others.” And I'm listening and all I'm hearing is “I think the drums are too busy,” etc... But this was a room full of positivity for the most part. Meaning like everyone loves what's going on, and I'm not going to be like, "Hey Tony, move over, let's change the way these drums sound." That's not going to happen. So, I'm kind of like, okay, maybe I'll just go get some synths… I'll go get some things and see if there is some stuff I can do. And I did. I put a keyboard through my EMS and I'm like playing a little percussion here and there.

But then, I'm so frustrated because I want to dig in, and having members of the band be like, “Is this good?” And I'm like, "I think it's good.” Them — “Are you going to take the stuff back to the studio?" I'm like, "I don't know." And they were like, "We want you to..." It sounded great but there wasn't a space for me to do anything. Because what I do is play instruments, arrange, edit, engineer. And all of those roles are filled. So, I helped out where I could.

JS: Was it heartbreaking for you?

JM: Yeah. And then I went back to the studio, but it started becoming clear to me that, okay, I'm supposed to “Eno.” You know what I mean?

JS: Yeah.

JM: And I'm not. I think someone like Eno has a different kind of ego than I do.

Regardless of who is in the room, Eno is quite flexible. On the one hand lets things happen, on the other hand end tells the rest of The Talking Heads to go, that he is bringing in Fripp and Belew. I'm certainly not going to do that. Eno can walk in, look at Tony Visconti and say, "Hello Tony, I'm going to do this," and Tony will be like, "Okay, make room for Eno." Of course I walk in and I'm like, "Hello, Tony?" and he’s like, "And you are...?" And I'm like, right — that is an appropriate reaction.

I'm not that personality, I'm not that bold, I'm not that challenging, I make music alone because I don't want to hurt people's feelings. I become negative, I'm like, "Let's get rid of all this, and start with just that." And it is hard to tell someone, "What you're playing, stop. Stop playing it, do this instead."

JS: I personally would have loved to hear the record you and David Bowie might have made together.

JM: Well, I think it wound up being a fucking great record in the end. I did take two songs away and I was supposed to make my own versions, and I did. And I never really got to play them for him, because I was now out. Tony came by and he wasn't super psyched on them. But I changed drums and I had the drummer come in and play a part. I was doing what I would do, which is disassemble and reassemble, but it wasn't going to make the record that was being made, it was not going to do that. And it was deeply saddening. I would have had to be somebody else, I would have to be a different person, but I'm not capable of that. It is a regret though.

JS: You're not really active on social media, do you hate all that?

JM: No. I don't hate it, it just doesn't resonate with me. I don't hate Instagram, I just don't have Instagram, because I looked at it and I don't need more things to look at. But I have a lot of friends who are very active on it... But the best excuse for being active isn't that they like it, is that they have to do it. It's like they got to do it, and that just makes me sad. You got to do that or nobody will come to your gig.

JS: Actually no one's going to come anyway.

JM: That's not my situation, so I don't like feel the need to engage in more stuff. Facebook is where I stopped. I don't have Twitter, I mean we, the band have it, but I don't to have to get everything because always somebody else gets it. So, we have LCD Soundsystem Twitter, an LCD Soundsystem Instagram. Facebook I only use because I follow people who do things that I don't know anything about. I don't have friends. Three pictures of your kids and I don't follow you anymore. It's just gone.

JS: Two is okay?

JM: You get away with two, and then I'm out. I don't want to know, that's not how I want to know about people's families, it's not how I want to know about people's personal lives, it's not how I want to know about political views. My stream includes Trevor Jackson because he's doggedly pursuing new music in a way that I'm not willing to or energized enough to do. I have friends who know a lot about dance, I have friends who know a lot about art, I follow a person who digs for African music.

There is really specific stuff that I use as input. Or people who barely do anything, like someone who like, once a year is like, “This is a really good restaurant.” Great. Thank you. But anybody who is like, "Here is my cat, this is what me and my friends did on vacation...” Not that I'm against it, I just want to look quickly and I get my equivalent of the arts section or going to the coffee shop where I know interesting people are and I can chat with them and see what they're reading. That's what I want from Facebook.

JS: How do you deal with celebrity? Did you pick up any pointers from Bowie on that?

JM: No, that's not a thing I can learn. I can't learn to be taller. He had a grace and nobility to chill you out. If somebody was talking to him he didn't want to talk to I think he could fucking ice you like nobody's business. I probably learned more from Adam Horovitz. We recorded a BS 2000 record together. I spend a decent amount of time with him and I'd walk around the city with him and people would come up to him, "Yo, you're the Beastie Boys, I got your cassette. What are you guys doing now?" And he would just be friendly and be like, "Hi, nice to meet you but I'm talking to my friend right now." And humanize the situation so much that you'd be like, "Oh, I'm talking to a person who's just on the street talking to his friend and walking his dogs”.

He was great at reminding people that he was a person, and he was doing a person thing right now. And this wasn't a press opportunity. So, that I learned to be a little like that... I've been walking with my son and someone comes up to ask, “Can I take a picture?” I'm like, "No, nice to meet you, but this is family time, and I don't do that." And someone else would be like, "Do you mind if I take a picture?" I'm like, do you want an honest answer, I would tell them, I don't like it.

I have nothing against this person asking for a picture, and I totally understand the impulse, but, you're documenting meeting me, but you haven't told me your name." Like it's replaced meeting someone. You just document the thing that actually didn't happen — you didn't meet. So I try to encourage people instead to tell me your name, shake my hand, tell me something.

JS: Do you engage with random people that approach you on the street?

JM: Sure. I like people, I'm totally fine with humans. I don't get annoyed, I mean there are times when I'm not in a good mood...

JS: Do you ride the subway still?

JM: I ride the subway all the time. And New York is a great place, because New Yorkers don’t care. Also what I like to remind people is like Jay-Z lives here, who fucking cares about me? Real famous people live here. I'm a niche famous person. But also what I found, mostly what happens in New York is I'll go on a subway and I'll sit there and then as I get to Union Square or something, someone on the way out, as they are leaving the subway will be like, "I really like your band, man," and then leaves, that's it.

The worst is what someone did to me once on a subway. And as soon as I got on, he's real loud, "Hey man, LCD Soundsystem! I love your band, man!" And then I was like, now we have to stand next to each other for the rest of the subway ride. Like you save that for when you’re getting off, because the rest of this is awkward. And then people around me were like, "Yeah dude, that's not how you do that, you do that when you're leaving."

But I love New York. People are just like, “Yeah man, come on! You do that at the end!” Because now we're just awkwardly on the subway. And if I look on my phone or my book, it looks like I'm purposely avoiding you, which I'm not. I'm just trying to read my book.

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