Brackbill, Shawn
Ted Leo
Issue #31
Our writer gets deep with the Jersey-grown musician and discusses how he’s become a remedy for today’s political ailments
By Emily Weinstein
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
“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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