Julian Casablancas One last stroke
Between a hazy past and hyped-up future, Julian Casablancas steps out alone and finds room to breathe away from The Strokes.
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Many great bands comprise one person who seems to resonate with the masses a little more than the rest. Take The Strokes. Despite the stellar line-up, one figure stands out: Julian Casablancas.
With these guys, it’s all about the big JC. After the New York quintet went on hiatus in 2006, a succession of solo records has confirmed the superiority of Julian Casablancas. The wan soft-rock of guitarist Albert Hammond Jr inspired general indifference, while bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fab Moretti made similarly inoffensive records as, respectively, Nickel Eye and Little Joy.
Always The Strokes’ chief songwriter, Casablancas finally made a solo foray in late 2009 – and delivered a lesson in humility to his moonlighting band mates. Simply, Phrazes for the Young was the best record a Stroke had delivered since Room on Fire in 2003. Opener ‘Out of the Blue’ set the tone. After a burst of sci-fi synths, a Strokes-like jangle of guitar cued a trademark Casablancas vocal: half languid drawl, half anguished croon. The song told a story of soured success and thirst for vengeance, over the sound of various Strokes shifting in their seats.
Over its eight-song span, Phrazes for the Young offered a rich mix of breezy melodies, complex time signatures and eighties-sounding keyboard riffs. Yet lyrically, it was a consistently downcast affair: ‘11th Dimension’, for example, found Casablancas muttering about “bootleggers and vultures” before deciding to “forgive them – even though they are not sorry”. One wondered how happy Casablancas was with life in The Strokes.
The band has since reconvened to start work on a new album ahead of dates in the summer. Phrazes for the Young implied that they may have one or two issues to work through, and an interview with Casablancas ahead of its release deepened that impression. Sure, he was dismissive of questions on intra-band competition or difficulties – but also strikingly enthusiastic about the “freedom” that comes with working solo.
HUCK: This is you putting your own name on the record and being the focal point. How does the song-writing differ from The Strokes? Were there a lot of pent-up ideas awaiting execution?
Julian Casablancas: I didn’t think like that before I started at all, but it was definitely nice to be able to explore any possibilities I desired, y’know? With the band there’s definitely a little more... definitely parameters, whether it be what instruments people play or whether it just be people’s opinions. To be honest it was really fun to be able to follow an idea without being told it’s a bad idea. Not to say that I didn’t have bad ideas that I scratched along the way – probably half of them were. You know what? More than half. Probably eighty percent of what you do is not good. I think editing is probably the biggest part of it...
You’ve always been famously exacting with The Strokes’ records. Did the same obsessive drive kick in with this record or did you feel less pressured?
I would say it’s similar, or maybe even more pressure. You know, I think it’s not just that I’m obsessive... It’s a desire to get everything right, for everything to be perfect, to be ready – yeah, that does take a lot of work. Maybe that’s obsessive, I don’t know. It’s time consuming for sure. But I think it really pays off in the end. Some people say, ‘You’re never happy’ or ‘The record will never be finished until it’s ripped out of his hands’… It’s not like it’s never finished for me. I just think it’s taken a while to finish the ones that I’ve done. I mean, I’m done with it, I’m happy with it. I can’t say that about all the records I’ve done, because we’ve had deadlines and it was ripped out of my hands.
How do you see the future in terms of keeping the two things going? Has the first one whetted your appetite to do more solo records and continue that in parallel with the band?
Possibly. I mean, it could go a few different ways. It might get absorbed in the band – or vice versa! I’m kidding. But I think I’ll always want to play Strokes shows and do Strokes records or whatever, but... it’s not only me in the band.
Looking back, did you find it stressful when The Strokes blew up and became so famous? Did being under such intense scrutiny wear you down after a while?
I wouldn’t say so, no. Sometimes if you’re touring and you do a lot of interviews, it can be psychologically weird. You know that it’s going out to a wider view of people and it’s, like… It’s the questions that state facts to you, over and over. It’s always like, ‘So, this record is so hard – are you aggressive because of this and this and that?’ And about the same record, the next interview will be, ‘This record is so soft. Are you going soft now? Is it because you’re married?’ It’s constantly having to be told what everyone thinks about you. After a while, it’s like the opposite of what I would imagine psychiatry would do. Building up a bunch of ideas…
To be honest, touring – the travelling and the playing and all that, that’s never been a big deal. I always find I don’t mind that. It’s not a big deal. It’s just, sometimes the energy level dips below having that constant drive of wanting to play music all the time, so you just – in your free minutes – start watching TV just to decompress, and you go six months without writing a song… That kind of thing gets me personally frustrated. But… No. Any kind of success you get is great.
For the full interivew, check out HUCK#020, out now.
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Julian Casablancas (text) by Niall O'Keeffe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (6)
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Rodrigo Amarante is just a better musician and singer than casablanca... no ofense
Rodrigo Amarante is just a better musician and singer than casablanca... no ofense
(sarcasm)
Besides, the best part of this band is how talented each member is, and the kind of musical understanding that each one possesses. I'm stoked to see how the new record turns out with Julian taking a step back and the other four working to contribute material.