Lets Get High in the Evening
Ariel Pink
On Girls’ Life Love and Dream A Billy
Audio Interview Transcription
4.20.08
San Francisco to LA
E – Erik Seidenglanz
A – Ariel pink
phone rings
answering machine picks up, Ariel whistles the melody to “Nu Shooz , I Can't Wait.”
Try Again..
A – hello?
E – hey Ariel it’s Erik
A – hey Erik how you doing?
E – good. Do have a minute?
A – yeah, yeah I suppose I do.
E – rad. Play Play Play inc is following the rise of Girls and I want to ask you all you know if you’re ready.
A – okay.
E – okay will you please introduce yourself.
A – I’m Ariel…pink. I’m a member of my band haunted graffiti, and I am 29 years old, ready to turn 30 in a month.
E – and where do you live?
A – In Highland park, Los angeles, California.
E – okay here’s a difficult question. If you were a guitar and you were suddenly on tons of drugs and it could be any guitar, or anyone’s guitar, what would you be?
A – Wait, say that again…? I suppose I’d like to be…well maybe tiny tim.
E – you want to be tiny tim’s eukelalie?
A – tiny tim’s electric guitar. Or, I don’t know, jimi Hendrix for sure.
E – What is pop music to you?
A – Girls
E – Lets come back to that…What is a west coast calamity?
A – A west coast calamity? Is an expression…is a foreigner’s wet dream (laughs).
E – okay, what is not trying, when writing music?
A – (still laughing) but it’s very difficult?
E – to not try?
A – no, it’s trying in one sense, and it’s…I’m not trying in another sense.
E – is your music serious or not?
A – it’s somewhere in between.
E – Who is the band Girls and what do you know about them?
A – I know that Girls is a band that’s coming up. It’s a band that has transmutated, has made a few mutations, but it’s mostly the work of one Christopher owens. Backed by some surfer girls, as far as I understand right now. I know that it is the one girl in his band claims that she couldn’t have a, she’s happy to…to be in his service more or less. You caught me on the down, the incline. I’m sorry I don’t have more inspired witticisms.
E – how did you meet Christopher owens?
A – I met Christopher owens through Liza Thorn at Courtney Garvin’s old house, after one of my shows, in san Francisco. He was the guy that was wearing my outfit from kate I wait, from the video. Hey can I have a cigarette? (he asks someone on his end).
E – how long have you known each other?
A – I’ve known of him now, I guess really, I’ve gotten to know him over the past 2 years mostly, when he joined holy shit I got to know him substantially more, he’s a very fine fellow and a very, exploding talent. An artist…a current artist who is in the throws of any kind of birthing, or you know a huge possessor, he’s possessed by inspiration right now.
E – is it true you offered to record his early record, or the early recordings in late 2007?
A – yeh, I did offer, and I don’t know what happened with that. I suppose I was encouraging him to move down, to LA, and to do it out here. But I think he opted on staying back in San Francisco.
E – what have you been working on with him in his excursions to los angeles lately, cuz he’s been going to Los Angeles a lot lately?
A – I can’t say that we’ve been able to do much other than the odd holy shit gig. But when he’s been out here, he’s been…I mean I’ve spoken to him occasionally like at, if we both go out, happen to go out to tiny creatures or something, we’ll both see each other. But other than that, I had no idea he was out here as often as you claim. I’d like to do more with him of course. I try to help him in little ways, more in the capacity of friendly advice and that kind of thing.
E – do you think you guys influence each other musically?
A – Absolutely.
E – and would you describe the kinds of songs that he writes?
A – well I’m not going to speak for him, but on that last question. But what kind of music he writes? I think he writes really really…you know there’s something about him that’s a lot, like I think he’s a real song writer you know? That his emotions and his pain are..they’re actually…like his feelings are very, he’s kind of connected in all of his words and his music and his sense of expression and his, it just happens to be something that’s just immaculately conceived, he’s like up there with bob Dylan, you know?
E – totally. How come a band that’s only played 3 shows so far receive so much attention and buzz?
A – he’s totally genuine.
E – you tried to explain
A – I can’t even…it shocked me to hear him, to hear his own voice. Because you don’t know somebody until you hear them play it seems, it’s kinda..so cool. Cuz it’s like a blossoming thing that’s happening for him right now. For the first time, in his life, in our lives.
E – you talked once about success and your friends achieving a certain level of success and then letting all of that go away and then doing it again I was just wondering if you could comment on what is success to you? Or to what you think it could be or not be…what does it mean as an artist to actually achieve it even temporarily? Like is it important, to Christopher, who’s about to achieve some success that might change things…
A – no, no I don’t think it’s important. I think there’s no artist that’s just…there’s some artists that are careful with the craft that they whip up, behind the scenes, and it kind of shows you something that is more or less like it’s something to dazzle you. It’s more a magician’s tool, like, ‘how did he do that?’ well there’s actually, it’s made up of different components that you don’t see, and then you get to see something and that might be one way that artists’ craft to the universe. They craft things and they make things that seem real. You know? They make things, they breathe life into things that are not real essentially. But they’re real to everyone else and that’s, it’s kind of like an illusion. But then there’s artists that also do the opposite and just…if you know somebody and their artistic process, sometimes that’s the art, sometimes the art is the person’s life and the results. But even with success or failure, there’s something that resonates as being inspiring in their process and in their being and all that kind of stuff. But I think ultimately it’s quite low on the totem pole, success is quite low on the totem pole of virtues for an artist. I think people are going to, in terms of taste and stuff like that, people are going to have periods of inspiration and other periods of masturbation and periods of boredom and uninspiration people are just going to take to certain things and not take to other things so it’s the artist happens as much more of a spiritual, it’s kind of like the life of a monk. It should be a lifelong thing.
E – art is very a monk-like thing for sure. How did Chris end up playing in the holy shit?
A – he ended up playing in holy shit and that’s the way it happened. I suppose we all ended up playing in holy shit and we survived to tell the story
E – he alluded to the fact that he was playing in holy shit up until about a month ago which is sort of saying he’s not in holy shit but he’s said that he could never really quit. What’s going on? What’s the deal man with holy shit?
A – well holy shit is whatever matt decides. I don’t speak for matt and his decisions and I would like to…I like, chris, I share that point of view that as long as we’re not fired from the band, as long as he want us in the band, we’re happy to play the role of side men.
E – do you think chris might ever collaborate on an Ariel pink album?
A – oh sure, yeah, I mean I hopefully, hopefully there will be an Ariel pink album for him to collaborate on. I’m currently working on…I was wondering about that, I don’t know whether I should have a whole slew of guest stuff. I mean right now I need to get my thing out again, you know? Just cuz I’ve been collaborating so, just kind of, I’ve been working with other people so much over the past couple of years that I’m kind of, I need to reflect on what I have to say in the whole thing.
E – yeah. what is dream-a-billy?
A – dream a billy is a brilliant genre description that my drummer, Jimmy Hey dreamt up in describing the music of cat Mccombs (?), basically. I think it’s kind of funny. Dream a billy.
E – are you punk rock? I know that’s a definition but would you confide in it?
A – well I think I’m a pretty lousy punk rocker but sure, there’s bits of me that are punk. There’s bits of me that are much more, I think, I like to think of myself as an idealist. Well scratch that. I want to do interesting things with my life. And they don’t all have to do with the alt. you know? I would say that I would like to be a scientist. Or a lawyer in my lifetime. Cuz I don’t believe in death really, so I just feel like I’m going to be alive for a long time and you only need to be a president for four years. I’d like to do that once. I’d like to be a scientist. I’d like to be an astronaut for sure. I’d like to be an author at some point. If I can ever, if I ever write a book, that will be the biggest feat yet, because I feel sort of like I have the faculties to do that at this moment. I think I’d probably be a president before I ever write a book because it’d have to be a really good book for it to get written, in order for me to not loose interest.
E – Christopher cited Harry Marry as an influence but he first cited you as his number one influence of all time in music but then he cited Harry Marry as his influence in not caring about his vocal stylings and being all over the place. Would you explain what Harry Mary is, a little bit?
A – Harry Marry is a wonderful human being and an amazing revolutionary composer in my opinion. I think he’s in a world where weary, there’s everything that sounds like something else. And there’s, if you’re into finding music, if it gets you off, from things that you haven’t heard. He’s a great modern day example of something that just, you know, can’t happen, couldn’t happen, didn’t happen in ways that we, as it happens. Your life changes an you get to know it. And so, and I have and I’m quite honored to be one of his friends, in addition to being inspired by him. That’s interesting, I didn’t know that about Christopher. That’s really sweet. I can definitely feel him on the Harry marry tip.
E – will you relate a story about MIDI festival two years ago since you guys were both there at the same time and he’s going back there this year to showcase his band.
A – he was a good sport. He got a very healthy crash course in being in holy shit. He managed to actually keep the thing from imploding, he was quite the rock in the whole mess and he… I really can appreciate his sense of being….you know, a very good sport about that kind of stuff. It was a very precarious situation, but he’s great man. He’s very very special and plays guitar amazing. He’s a good singer and a great artist all around.
E – What was cal arts life like for you? Why did you go to cal arts, what was your major, what was the point?
A – I went to cal arts because my dad told me that the only way he would support me for, you know, any more length of… the only way he would pay for rent and stuff like that was if I went to school. So I went to school, kinda, you know, going to cal arts, and I quickly found myself quite…having no…well just going directly from high school, directly into college. First I went to uc santa cruz and then I went to cal arts. I think I managed to probably make very little of the whole opportunity. It was a good learning experience for me in the sense that I just got to do whatever I wanted and I had my rent paid for for a while but it never really, it didn’t do anything for me I never really got into the world that I was being groomed, you know, supposedly to enter. And they really weren’t, by the end, I was quite…I get the sense that it was a mutual sort of split between me and the art world, the politics and the people and all of that kind of stuff. I was just bringing my music, bringing in the doldrums into class, you know , that was my art for the day. And I was into the…I believed in the ‘art of’ you know as in the art of being the best of anything you do like the art of cooking, the art of knowing that when you make something that’s…when you do something as…you know in any other field, that you take it, you actually mastered it, you take it to a new level, you turn it into an art. That was my definition of art, so it had very little to do with what the art world concerns itself in so far as what they’re doing. With the art they’re dealing with, you know? As far as how they relate to art, so they relate to it much more, like it’s a mysterious holy evasive thing, and that’s the whole point, you gotta figure it out. I got the sense that a lot of the art that’s out there actually makes a very similar gesture to harry (?) and the same could be said for music too. But the impression that it conveyed and the message that carried through is one of ambiguity and pondering about where you are and what you’re doing and what it is that you’re looking at or experiencing and how you somehow have to consolidate how you feel about things that don’t have any intrinsic value.
E – this is off topic but who is liza thorn?
A – liza thorn was a member of curls, which was a band that chris was in before girls became…before curls became girls. They became girls when, liza thorn, the girl, left.
E – do you know who liza left for?
A – what was that?
E – do you know why liza left or anything?
A – I think that she…you know…they broke up. They broke up.
E – yeah
A – they were going out. And I think she may have wanted to, needed to carry on with her music or something like that, and told him something like that. I don’t know.
E – I heard you play a three string guitar on your first couple albums. Was that the case?
A - yeah it’s a regular guitar and it happened to have three strings on it. It was a special…I didn’t know how to play guitar with six strings yet so it was a very…I had a very unique approach tuning wise and playing wise that is something I can’t, just seem to have forgotten how to even do it.
E – you still have your own tuning for your three strings, too?
A – and in playing there was a whole kind of flow of writing that just came out of that configuration of specific strings tuned that way and my fingering and my strumming. So it was very much…it was kind of like I worked in tandem with a kind of blind intuition about how I was writing songs and playing the music. So that’s something that does change with experience. The more I play instruments, the more I find myself being hindered by ability in ways that effect everything. The song writing, the playing, creativity. I kind of do believe that restriction is the mother of inventive performance, like Ken would say.
E – is lo-fi a religion, or a religious thing to you, or would you ever record in high-fi? Do plan on recording with your whole band at all? Without the aid-
A – I personally, if you really want to get down to it, I really don’t…I’ve never taken to the term lo-fi, never once thought of myself as lo-fi. Lo-fi to me is something that I…I picture bands from the ‘90s were lo-fi, like Sebadoh, and I they had a certain kind of musical..alternative kind of emoish kind of amateur kind of thing-
E – will you ever move out of the bedroom?
A – what was that?
E - will you ever move out of the bedroom stage, Of production?
A – oh yeah, I’ve already…I moved out of the bedroom already. But I mean that’s what I’m doing now,
A - check my myspace you’ll see. I’m not Ariel pink any more I’m haunted graffiti, the band. And it’s this kind of thing I’m trying to impress upon, I don’t know if it’ll rub people the right way or whatever but for better or for worse, I see myself as merely an instrumentalist in an ensemble. It can’t happen without the other guys.
E – last four questions
A – sure
E – what’s your favorite food treat?
A – my favorite food treat… I really like pan fried dumplings, I like Chinese food. I like meat and I like green vegetable, generally, sauces, and a lot of garlic. And I like coca cola.
E – what do you think about long hair?
A – what do I think about long hair?
E – yeah
A – well it’s..i think it’s more…what you don’t think about hair that’s kind of predicates the question about long hair. I mean you don’t have to do anything with it. If you don’t think about your hair long enough, you’ll grow it out. It’ll just grow. So I think it’s a product of having other priorities. So it’s a good thing.
E – do you have a life expectancy that you’re sort of thinking about?
A – yeah, uh…never. (laughs) I plan on beating parkinson’s, alzheimer’s, cancer, death by chance, and death by murder. I plan on escaping all these things. I plan on escaping the apocalypse. And in that time I’m not even…I plan on living forever, in this incarnation, not even thinking of the afterlife or being reincarnated I’m thinking just of finding awe.
E – Any last words…?
A – girls should…I think chris owens should do whatever he likes and I think that’s it’s really not my…I think whatever he chooses he’ll be okay with. If he’s not sure what to do with girls, then I would say just leave it alone. (laughs) because that’s like, you know…the world of girls, you can’t force it. You gotta wait till the right one, till the right girl…bangs ya. (laughs again) and I kinda think that if you’re a good friend and you love somebody you know, in the real sense of love, not the romantic sense, I think you can over a long period of time you just accept somebody and you’re there for somebody. You can have anything you want. Or you will eventually attract…you might have some girl that doesn’t think she’s in love with you or something like that, but if you just let her do her thing and let her make all the mistakes she needs to make with tons of abusive friends or people that are so much less worthy than your affection, you just need to be there for them. And eventually people slip away because it’s so…if you really love somebody, you’ll be there when they need ya. I think everybody needs. I think in our…you know it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and it might take 80 years, or 100 years to have your lady, to have your girl, to make her yours, but it’ll happen if you are patient, and you…you love her. If you love someone insidiously.
E – would you ever guest for the girls?
A – of course I love, of course yeah. I’d be very honored.
E – they just played with two members of white Williams it was probably one of the best shows I’ve seen yet of any band in a long time
A – I’m sure. Man I wanna…let’s get white Williams to fucking…I wan to have him take Geneva out and some of these Human Ear artists and have them tour, I think it’d be great. I wonder if he’d be into that, but I’m sure he’s got a really busy schedule already and a tour schedule made for him. But there’s no hurry. Everybody’s kind of coming together on their own and it’s good. Now everybody’s having kids this week. All of a sudden it’s just like a whole new can of worms, like okay, that was nice. You gave it a good shot. And now it’s time to grow up. Welcome to the land of no sleep and no drugs.
E – do you ever really grow up though, you know?
A – what was that?
E – I said do you ever really grow up, I mean in the mind the idea is to stay a child forever,
A – well if you have a kid, I think you should be a grown-up. In those matters the dad in me does want to grab Jason by the collar and kick him around the room a few times. But that’s just the dad in me so, I’m probably never going to have kids.
E – can I ask you a question that I was kind of avoiding I guess. How do you feel about writing on drugs or writers or musicians or artists and the relation to using drugs to create.
A – drugs are a private thing and it doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter to them, and if it’s not an issue that somebody has their thing under control and they’re secretly trying to get sober by making a mess of their lives and going crazy so that you’re getting attention doing it. That all mean, in my opinion, those people don’t, they really want to be sober, so they get on drugs and they kind of indulge the petulance the terrible beast in them and then they eventually end up unable to go get sober and then they’ll have to stay away from drugs for the rest of their lives and then they’ll probably attach al these reason to things, kind of opinion about drugs, but the thing about it is that it’s nobody’s business. If it’s nobody’s business if somebody’s on drugs, they just have to…if it doesn’t come up and it’s really not that much of an issue, then I think it’s an indication that it’s their private thing and it work for them. That’s the way I think about that and I certainly don’t think that anything is right or wrong inherently in hat regard.
E – ian savonious once said in a quote that’s cited often that ‘after the mountains there are more mountains’ and he said that in relationship to the whole idea of being involved with rock and roll an playing out. Can you understand that metaphor? after the mountains there are more mountains? Do you feel like rock and roll and the myth of playing is worth it? Are you enjoying yourself, you know, to keep going?
A – I think that they’re two totally different questions. I think what we want are, you know, to get to the streams, right? And then just coast down the valley and into the ocean eventually or something like tat. I think the mountains are all the self-imposed, the obstacles that you see in your way, all the limitations that you could possibly have and basically the sum total of achievement by people that you respect, that you measure your own work up against. I think all that stuff is quite…it could be helpful if that’s your process and that’s something you do, but part of it is the pain that you go through to release o to deal with this stuff and then you come out the other end shining. I mean there’s nothing wrong with being miserable and being an artist if that’s what you…if you know that you’re doing it and you’re aware of it and that’s what you choose to do.
E – are you having a good time?
A – if you can’t help it, that’s the total…you’re being way too hard on yourself and that’s your if you’re just kind of…I think it is an obstacle and my opinion about music is that there’s moments of inspiration and they’re like a dime a dozen in every case and it’s not about the artist it’s about a moment in an artists’ life if he’s lucky and they know it if it happens to them I think. It’s something that is very elusive and you can’t calculate it but you have to actually, I try to head that so I don’t fall into he trap of just doing things that are uninspired because they’re just for me and I am doing them so they’re good enough. I’d rather not do music if it was gonna become stale and bad to everyone else, but I still needed to. you know, do it, like there’s some sort of spiritual urge or something like that. If I’m not doing the art then you know something’s going right because generally I think it’s a means to an end. You do work that kind of does more or less purge certain things. I know for music and me I got off on the totally acquired way to deal with family issues that were bothering me and it happens that i developed early in life and it wasn’t necessarily healthy for me to be doing those things. I mean music was just kind of my escape from all that. It wasn’t all that much of a reckoning with what those things were so I kind of, if I go through, if I’m of the mindset I’ll never stop making music no matter what then that’s the point, I just feel like that’s just not doing it for the right reasons. I always just… I like things of quality and I want to be a distillation of that in my work. I really want people to be able to see that as part and parcel of what I do, as opposed to the lo-fi thing. I’d rather be known for being high quality, not lo-fi, through and through.
E – I don’t think of you as lo-fi, I just use the term flippantly, lo-fidelity,
A – no I know. I don’t really take offense to it, it just describes a type of music, but it doesn’t describe a type of music at the same time. It’s like calling music that you have on cd, compact disc music, like that’s a genre of music. It doesn’t describe the music whatsoever, it just describes the audio quality that is just bad. It’s just bad quality recordings. So in my opinion it’s not really a style, I mean hollywood is lo-fi too, and so is anything that existed prior to 1950, because it’s recorded badly. The old and the bad are the same, that’s the thing, so it’s just ironic.
E – i asked you before what is pop music and you answered girls but I guess I was looking for Ariel rosenberg’s definition of western pop music, or pop music internationally. What is pop music?
A – well pop music is, in my opinion, whatever’s popular right now. Everything else is fringe, alternative, underground, special, whatever you want to call it. Anything that isn’t existing on top, you know, isn’t one of the fourteen songs they’re playing right now like on k-rock over and over again throughout the day. That’s popular music. You know, whatever’s a hit right now. So I mean whatever that’s…there’s no such thing as real pop music. There’s things that have passing stints of being popular but they’re very quickly forgotten. And they become…they reveal themselves to be not so pop when you look back on them because their appeal through the ages after the fact, is just something more, a kind of idiosyncrasy some sort of special quality that is not…it’s like an extinction. It’s like a special thing we don’t experience anymore. The things are very particular feelings that you can arouse, from old pop music, or things that are considered pop music. Pop music is like avant guard, you know, it’s…
E – How is it avant guard to you? What do you mean?
A – Well I think it’s…do you ever hear the visionaries in hip hop nowadays? It’s always been…it’s a western, pop music as I’ve known it in the past 50 years, it’s all quite about rebelling and it is to classical music and you know the long lineage of European aristocracy in progress and the creating of the hundred year old dream that began with Handel or Bach, that project was a utopian and a progressive ideal that took us about 3 and a half, a hundred years to get to the point where we were really kind of doing the most appropriate…the only thing that could follow, the progress, the next utopian steps in that project was that it culminates into Schoenberg, you know? That’s where serious music got to and it became just that it became serious music. That was..even though it was almost a serious albeit tongue in cheek kind of approach to the masters, the natural follow-up to that was bound to be something that was totally irreverent, totally disposable and totally repeatable. Where every ideal was flying in the face of progress and all that kind of stuff and that’s what rock and roll and American music is really all about. It’s just that…it’s dumb, it’s dumb and somehow more legitimate in many respects and more of a new paradigm than classical music. And it’s more, a lot like the new testament’s relationship to the old testament, you know?
E – it’s interesting that you said shoenberg because that’s where john cage comes out of being the opposition to and that’s also where brian Wilson comes out of being on the same side of and it’s like the avant guard and then the pop music coming out of the incarnations of classical music is what you’re saying, like late classical music?
A – well what I’m saying is you know, like how can you rebel against john cage?
E – I don’t know
A – the only way to do it is to disregard t completely. To not be engaged in the ongoing progress and this hundred year old…dogmatic tradition that took itself very seriously and was obviously suffering some pangs of being snuffed out. Like it must have had an inkling that it was going to be snuffed out, it actually snuffed itself out, quite literally, john cage, for instance. But john cage is very serious, I mean very funny in an aristocratic kind of way too,
E – he’s playfully serious
A – yeah, he’s a great guy, I mean, he…rock and roll is so good and rap is the same, it’s just, it’s much more of a…it’s kind of like we’re talking about a whole bunch of things. The recording medium changed the whole face of classical music, basically, the whole progress. Recorded music just happened to take rock and roll at it’s…deface it with Bach, you know, deface it with Madonna, it doesn’t matter, it’s just recorded artifacts, you know, it’s recorded phenomenon that you can play over and over again. It introduced a whole new medium, much like film did. It doesn’t really matter, in the same tradition…Bach was…Beethoven… Bach was really the first rock and roll star, for real. Basically the idea of music legacy came from him. It came from Beethoven, being so into Bach and by Mozart, both of them being so into Bach. They found each other by being fans of Bach, they were, you tied yourself to the idea that there was an ongoing legacy to be had. There’s plenty of other American composers, but they didn’t…Beethoven was just like ‘ no, that’s the true shit right there.’ And then wagner was like’ no I like Beethoven and I like Bach,’ up to the ages. And Schoenberg was like ‘Bach, beethoven’ I mean these were a hundred years apart, but you know what they’re saying is the idea of a lineage in progress is what you’re signing up for when you’re essentially innovated and you made some sort of deal with the devil to create a real piece of music that people had to deal with. You know what I mean
A – I hope you can find something in there. Don’t let it all be about me man, just put a little couple quotes from me but I certainly didn’t mean to..i’m just the…land doesn’t need to be about me man, it’s all about chris.
He deserves all the love. Christopher’s just solid solid dude. You can’t say a bad thing about him.
E – I really think his band’s fucking incredible
A – it’s so hard to actually find people, in my opinion, where there’s no silver lining, he’s a beautiful person.
E – the show up in Mendocino had nobody there but it was like a theater that coulda held 1000 and he was like ‘ I just wish this place was filled,’ and that’s kind of why were trying to write an article just so we can
A – well of course man. You’re on the dream a billy…monorail tramway whatever. You’re kind of like, you’re really…I saw your website for fast friends by the way, great job,
E – it’s coming together, he needs to keep