photo by Shawn Brackbill
Ted Leo
Our writer gets deep with the Jersey-grown musician and discusses how he’s become a remedy for today’s political ailments
By Alex Wallace
Published: March 2nd, 2007 | 11:47am
“Shake the Sheets,” my friend Holly said, “was the only source of consolation that I could find in the teeming hub of consumerism that was America on the day after the 2004 election.” When I told Ted Leo that she’d said that about his last album, he said, “Well, if I die tomorrow, I can die a happy man, having heard that quote. I’m done. Wow. That’s really nice.”
That’s the kind of artist Ted Leo is — one who makes music that brings comfort to those suffering in the deepest darkness of political disgust, and one who seems genuinely floored by the force of his fans’ reactions. I actually watched that album, Leo’s fourth with Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, put some light back in Holly’s eyes after we realized Bush had won another term.
Where politics fail us, rock music comes through, easing our pain and saying things no one else will. Living With the Living, the Leo’s latest with the Pharmacists, does just that. It involves the usual Ted Leo themes — the hypocrisy of government, the stupidity of war, the unfairness of capitalism, the redemptive sweetness of friendship and love. Leo was perfectly willing to expound on all of these ideas — where they come from and how they’re evolving — while drinking black coffee (he’s vegan) and unwinding from a seven-week tour in December 2006.
Shake the Sheets was one of the big election-year albums to come out in fall 2004. At that time, it seemed like everybody was making albums to get rid of Bush, and for one incredible moment, it seemed like it was all gonna come together. And then it was pretty disappointing.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, in a lot of ways, though, Shake the Sheets was like an already-disappointed album. I’d already burned myself out on screaming about all of that stuff for so long, and a lot of that record is really about the day after. It’s about waking up in a world of further dejection and still having to get up and walk out the door and do your thing.
You make music that’s about resistance and a kind of purity of ideal, and even if you feel dejected or frustrated, you’re drawing from some kind of well. Is it hope or is it rage? How do you earnestly resist in a world such as this one?
It’s a seesaw between hope and rage, actually. I actively desire to retain hope, but the inability to do so sometimes devolves into rage. And then you can let rage fuel you for a while until you get over it and wake up the next day and realize that, unless you want to, well, this is not even a joke. But unless you wanna, like, go perform a terrorist act and take yourself and a bunch of other people out with you, you gotta live, you gotta live in the world.
So if Shake the Sheets is like a day-after album, is this album like a day-after-the-day-after album?
Yeah, it’s just the ongoing day after. There are a bunch of songs that directly pick up the more immediate topics from before Iraq. But having been two years between records, there’s other stuff that’s not quite so specific to those immediate concerns but that are involved in a larger spectrum.
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WEB EXCLUSIVE: the Ted Leo interview continued from the spring 2007 issue of Venus Zine
How does being from Jersey figure into your oeuvre and mythology?
It certainly created in me a certain underdog mentality. There's a little-guy's-gonna-take-on-the-world mantle that's just there waiting for any Jerseyite to step up and grab it. It's such an archetype, all the way back through history. It's like, “Wow, I've been living an archetype my entire life.” And so you can take off from there and it gives you this weird mythological basis from which to self-create.
You've got so many literary references, particularly biblical references. "Virgin mother, cheatin' whore" from “Annunciation Day" is one that comes to mind.
Oh, yeah, that's the new record. That's a little Feminism 101.
And then there's Cain and sinners and saints and all that stuff. Is that more of a cultural thing, or is that a real engagement with religion for you?
It's a cultural Catholic thing. I went to 17 years of Catholic school, and it was really only in the last few of them that I really moved beyond it all in a real critical way. But every lapsed Catholic knows that you can't ever get their hooks out of you. I'm really at a place in my life where I loathe religion. For all the positive things that people say it's done for them, I think it's a net negative in history.
Yeah!
Yeah. But having said that, I also really am taken by the idea of it as art. If there is any transcendent intangible reality, then certainly it's through "art," — in quotes — that people tend to be able to connect with that. For most of my life, I think it was less about having some kind of faith or actually believing in anything and more about being really affected by the incredible weight. Like a Gothic cathedral, you know, the huge weight but also the vaulting. The whole art of the Catholic church has been really important in my life, and so I still go back to those metaphors and those images, a lot. And also because I want to crush it. I want to comment on it as well.
As iTunes and shuffling moves us away from listening to albums, it's become almost a concerted effort to listen to an album as they intended it to be heard. What's the process of putting songs in an order?
I kind of know from long before we start recording — because I'm so intimate with the songs — what sequence I want them to go in. I still write albums, so there's an emotional if not ideological arc to most of my records. It should feel like: intro, crisis, conflict, resolution, denouement. And, if it works that way for me, then that's the sequence I'm usually happy with. Even putting a set list together, I can get myself actually psyched up by going from song A to song B.
The touring lifestyle is both thrilling and draining, like a physical endurance test. How have you sustained yourself in that lifestyle for so long?
You know, I was always pretty well suited to doing it. I like traveling and I like conversation, and in a lot of ways me onstage is just a big, dumb conversation set to music. I try to balance all my vices with relatively clean living, and I try to get exercise and I'm a smart vegan and I eat well and et cetera. But also it can be like, “Oh, it's 4 in the afternoon, and here's another dumb dark rock club I'm gonna be in all night with the walls covered in drawings of cocks.” It's like, “Great, here's a shitty couch for me to sit on, wow.” You know, really, there are plenty of days where my first instinct in that situation is, “So, where's the bar?”
I've been to shows in New York where you get the twenty/thirty-somethings hipster crowd, but do you have a teenager following?
Yeah, it's been growing. I was really psyched for that because I can talk to other thirtysomethings forever and it's great, but to know that you're actually connecting with teenagers and kids who are considerably younger than you, seemingly in a way that you had that connection with other bands when you were younger is like the greatest, greatest thing. It's so affirming. So if you want to talk about the grind of touring, you know every day at 6 o’clock you hit the wall and then you see the kids at the front of the stage and you're like, “Fuck yeah, let's do this!”
You have a blog on your Web site, and on it you mentioned that Project Runway was dissatisfying to you this season. I'm wondering what was lacking for you?
I think it was a little too character-driven this season. Last season, all the characters had their extreme moments but they were all a little more even-keeled, even in their problem times. I feel like this year it became more of a reality show and pitting these weird people against each other watching the fireworks go off. And I didn't see as many clothes that I liked.
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Issue #31
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