Exene Cervenka is far from Somewhere Gone on the eve of her latest solo release

The legendary singer talks about health crises, Christmas songs, and how art is like pulling weeds

By Selena Fragassi
Published: September 29th, 2009 | 12:00am

As one of the founding members of punk pioneers X, who came to be in the thriving, L.A. punk scene of the late ‘70s, you might think Exene Cervenka would have spools of inspiring thread to weave her songs — but when it comes right down to it, there’s only one muse for this musician. “Love,” says Cervenka from her home in L.A., while awaiting the arrival of her X cohort, and ex-husband, John Doe. “Love is all that matters in the end.”

The duo are getting ready to record, of all things, Christmas songs and also browse artwork for the upcoming Porterhouse Records re-release of X’s 1981 record, Wild Gift (Slash), which comes out on October 6 — the same day as Cervenka’s latest solo effort, Somewhere Gone (Bloodshot).

“I wrote all the songs while I was living in Missouri, and most of them are love songs,” says the Chicago-born songstress. She clears her throat with uncomfortable hesitation before divulging that her recent departure from the countryside for L.A. came after a split with her musician husband, Jason Edge.

“After we split up, I decided that I wanted to come here, where my friends are and where there’s people I can play music with. Four years of isolation living in the country was great, but at some point, I was done with it and wanted to come back.”

It was a similar exodus back in ‘76 when Cervenka first found L.A. by way of Tallahassee, Florida. “I had no job, no money, no future, and a friend of mine called and said he was moving to California and he needed someone to help pay for gas and did I want to come with?” she recalls. “I think I had $180 when I got here, but I picked up my life, got a job, and met John. From there, I started playing music and pretty quickly got involved with the punk scene.”

It was Doe who stood out from the other burgeoning musicians and early on struck a chord with Cervenka. “John and I are soulmates. We were instantly connected,” she says, adding that the pair didn’t bond over any sort of political agenda or music icons, but rather poetry. “We were sitting down next to each other at a poetry workshop, and then went out to drink wine afterward and spent four hours talking.”

For Cervenka, L.A. in the ‘70s was one of the defining periods of her life, as she nostalgically describes it, “a commingling of so many different types of people from so many different places of all different ages and all different backgrounds. With that mixture, it had to be explosive, great, and amazing.”

It’s also a time that Cervenka regrets not chronicling herself (although she does warn about the influx of photographic journalism from the scene that is soon to appear in a number of books). Her extensive collection of more than 100 journals from the past 30 years began far after the punk heyday. And although the written pages are not for public consumption, her visual art is — providing a unique glimpse into Cervenka’s experiences as a traveling musician, starting with the 2005 America the Beautiful exhibit at the Santa Monica Museum Of Art, a show that compiled scrapbooks of Cervenka’s time spent on the road. It will be followed up by new exhibitions this fall in New York, L.A., and Miami, in conjunction with the Bloodshot Records tour.

“I love making art and how it’s completely different from music. People could be standing right next to you and not realize you’re the artist as opposed to being onstage, where everyone is staring and you and judging you,” explains Cervenka, who also credits spoken word as another of her artistic leanings. “Making art is much more intuitive and childlike, whereas in songwriting, your brain has to be on, your fingers have to keep going. But when you’re just cutting up little pictures and little pieces of words and gluing them down, you get really lost in it, and your brain kind of shuts off. It’s very Zen, like gardening. Like pulling weeds.”

It’s also a dependable creative outlet should the singer be forced to stop touring someday because of health problems. Cervenka recently came out with the fact that she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis — a disease she coincidentally studied years ago when X worked with the charity Sweet Relief to raise funds for singer Victoria Williams after she was afflicted with the same illness.

So far, Cervenka’s daily life hasn’t been impaired, in large part due to her positive attitude. “When I first found out, I was like ‘Could you attack something else besides my brain? Do I have to get a brain-attacking disease of all people?’ But I’m taking good care of myself and I’m really happy and I think that’s the most important thing I can do for myself.”

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