Bonus Q&A with Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event about his new album and memoir, 'Hollywood Park'

Since "Hollywood Park," the new memoir by Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett, is available in stores, I thought I'd share some bonus material from our interview earlier this month about it and the band's album that didn't make my original feature.

That piece can be viewed here:
https://www.pe.com/2020/05/15/before-he-was-a-rock-star-hollywood-park-author-spent-his-youth-in-a-cult-and-at-the-racetrack/

Q: How have you been managing the quarantine over the past couple months? I'll bet you are anxious to perform a real concert again.

A: Yeah, that’s one of the disappointing things about all of this right now. People have it much worse than we do, so you can’t really complain about it. But it really would have been nice to tour right now.

Q: You’ve been really active with social media events lately. Has that helped take the place of live performances for you?

A: I guess, a little. It’s just a way to try and stay connected. There’s no perfect way. It’s the world we’re living in right now to try and find a way to remain connected to people. Just by the fact that we’re living through this crazy pandemic. Yeah, I’d say so.

Q: Many musicians who previously weren’t too active on social media are putting themselves out there more now because they can’t tour. From the fans’ perspective, there’s even more of a personal connection now.

A: I’ve heard people say that. It feels like less of a connection. There’s nothing like getting in a room with people for those of us performing. You’re still in your own room with your computer and a camera. And when it’s over, you’re like, ‘Well...[that’s it].’ There’s something about meeting and gathering in a live setting. I feel like there’s something instinctual for human beings about using music as a celebration, a meeting point for groups of people. I think it has something to do with traditional storytelling and the fact that the human voice works in song. That’s how we understand emotion: the sound of our voices. I think getting together in these mass gatherings is really rejuvenating. It really is for me - whether I’m going to a show or performing at a show. There’s just nothing like being in a room of people singing a song.

Q: The memoir was a compelling read. I read past interviews where you said you’d always wanted to write a book even before the band started. Despite the intensely personal subject matter, will the book’s release serve as the culmination of a dream for you?

A: Absolutely. The book took three years to write and the album, which is the soundtrack to the book, took two years to make. I just locked myself in a room and I started writing. I didn’t have any sense of how long it was going to take. It ended up taking much longer.

I knew I wanted to read about people like me. I wanted to read about people who had buried histories and people who had to slowly discover their truths over time after being fed a false narrative. I think memoir is [too] often [strictly] autobiography, which is really dry. The irony is that all the numbing effects of dates and degrees and jobs and awards make it inaccurate because it fails to capture the character of the people or the time it concerns itself with.

On the other hand, there’s this notion of memoir as being emotional disaster porn with all the fucked up things that happen. I wanted to challenge that. I was interested in a narrator who was unreliable. I was interested in a narrator who said things that were patently untrue because he was told things that were patently untrue. Because that’s what it means to live in the world of emotionally traumatized children.

Then I wanted to watch the perspective change as the child got older and he started to unpack the lies that he once believed. Because that’s also what happens as emotionally traumatized children get older. We slowly learn we were told a lie and then there’s the process of unpacking of imagination and perspective that doing that would better capture the reality of the journey and the way it felt as opposed to just describing it.

Q: You went through therapy years ago to try and resolve many of these issues. When it came to writing the book, did that process make it easier to remember some details from when you were a child?

A: Yeah, I think writing ordered the chaos I was living through. The death of family, grief, depression - that’s all attempts at making sense of the past. Communing with people that I had lost. Yeah, I think therapy helped with that and the writing helped order it.

The book concerns itself a lot with ghosts. Therapy is a way of unearthing all your ghosts. For me, there were the initial ghosts of our parents, because they came and went from our lives when we were in the orphanage. This was a type of haunting, like an intermittent intimacy. They were sort of familiar and far away at the same time. Then they left and came back like ghosts do. In their absence, we deepened our impressions of them. The same way you do with ghosts. I think with therapy, what you’re doing is getting to know your ghosts.

Q: Did you have an goals in writing the book?

A: It’s a memoir, but I also wanted there to be some mystery - to be mystical and vexing. To leave questions unanswered, to not be so straight. I think things that involve symbolism and metaphor happen in fiction, but they don’t generally happen in memoir. I think people have this sense that somehow complex novels are that way because fiction is more multi-varied than we are when in fact it’s the opposite. We write complex novels in an attempt to capture the multitudes of emotion and the universal ideas we can as people. It’s an imperfect way. I think memoir can be that at its best. The only thing that it removes is the invention of events. You can’t invent anything. You still live your life with mystery. You live your life with confusion. You live your life with symbolism and metaphor. Sometimes metaphors rule the world.

We’re kind of living through a crazy metaphor right now. We’re living in a world where a bunch of people believe in something symbolic which isn’t true at all in the Trump presidency. I feel like to act like that shouldn’t also be the province of a lived event, of true events, is silly. So I wanted to write a book that understood and thought about and dealt in, dwelled in this idea of the world as metaphorical, symbolic, mysterious and not just ‘this happened and this happened.’ Although that was important too: getting the details right.

Q: The new album "Hollywood Park" is quite different than your last one, the more experimental "Dope Machines."

A: I’d say it is kind of a return to our first record - the way we went about it, which was done in a similar way, where we were just like, ‘Let’s just rehearse the hell out of it and play it live.’

Q: Producer Mark Needham had mixed some songs for the last album, but handled all the production this time. What did he bring to the process?

A: He’s an auteur and great at empowering artists’ ideas. Some producers come in with a really strong idea of what they want and it ends up being a fight between them and the artist. I’ve had that experience in the past. Or they just let the artist run everything, which is not a good idea, because producers are better at making records.

Generally speaking, there are some exceptions to that. Finneas O’Connell is a genius producer in his own right. For me, Mark really empowered the vision we had and ran with it. We started off saying, ‘Here’s what we want to do’ and he said, 'OK.' He wanted us to rehearse and change arrangements and he wanted us to play live and get into the weeds. In the studio, everything with that guy was about capturing energy. He’s amazing. I’m really grateful to him.

Q: Looking at the new album credits, I noticed that you got your wife and brother in to do backing vocals on a couple songs. How did that come about?

A: My wife can sing her ass off. I was demoing the songs and I needed a female vocalist. Anna [Bulbrook, previous violinist/backing vocalist] had already left the band. I was like, ‘Babe, can you come here and sing?’ She would sing on the demo and then I was like, ‘That sounded great. Why don’t we just have you do it for the record?’ My brother: That song is about the death of my father and the confusion and bafflement and grief we felt was created in his absence. It was a really sacred thing. I wanted him to be involved in that. Almost like two brothers in this primal scream of losing something.