From Girl with the Zine

Blake Schwarzenbach of Jets To Brazil
This interview is by Jason Harper with a small bit of help and forward by Jordan Jennings
Abbreviations: JH=Jason Harper, JJ=Jordan Jennings, BS=Blake Schwarzenbach

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Prior to reading this interview I’d recommend that you read Blake Schwarzenbach’s speech given at New York University last March, which is available at www.jetstobrazilonline.com. It’s always beautiful when someone speaks openly about his or her opposition to violence, and this beauty is magnified exponentially when the voice is one of the most eloquent of our time.

JJ: I know you posted something on your website recently the speech that you gave at that (NYU) convention. I was wondering if you had any strong political convictions or if this was something you felt was necessary as a result of the time.

BS: I have begun to have very strong political convictions in the past three years, I would say, more pointed in particular. I’ve always been opposed to abstract authority in a more poetic sense and I just grew up in an insurgent culture, I guess, but I have a friend who’s an activist and I began to think about countries that are affected by foreign policy here so it’s become very particular.

JJ: So it’s thinking outside the boundary, outside the box of the United States is what you’re saying?

BS: Outside the box of my mind, you know it used to be a thing in writing in punk rock about what I call abstract anti-authoritarianism which is well and fine but I would do it poetically and not as pointedly as “let’s look at the middle east right now or throughout history” and now it’s become a more regional thing where I have to do homework and read.

JJ: It seemed that the orange rhyming dictionary seemed to have some political undertones in terms of cultural differences…

JH: In terms of world war II and whatnot.

BS: That’s true and that song that you’re talking about was inspired by a biography of Camus that I read and his work in the resistance and it’s very curious because now I know people who are not big Camus fans who are activists, who are radical people who say that he didn’t support French withdrawal from Algeria, decolonization, he was kind of into synthesis which is a little unrighteous seeming now but back when I read I thought this guy is a hero, I already loved his writing and he was sort of a forerunner existentialist, he’s a troubled guy, he’s a philanderer, I like complex characters and he had all that and he was working with the resistance which is a beautiful thing. But it’s always deeper than that.

JH: In terms of a political effect with your music have you ever wanted to write just a political song, something without having an undertone of a political statement, just brutally straightforward “I’m against this” or whatever else.

BS: Yeah, I think the song “disgrace” on the last album is pretty forthright. I can’t help but get into metaphor because that’s the pleasure of writing for me and I worry about cheapening issues by writing songs. You know when I hear unoriginal political songs I could be totally down with the message it’s pretty sad for me, it’s frustrating because you almost have that feeling of “stay off my side”? Sometimes I feel that with really clumsy political writing where I know the intention and the heart is in the right place but it’s almost giving it a bad name, you know what I mean? Like liberals, middle of the road liberals give liberals, or what used to be liberals, a bad name. I don’t even know that liberalism has a meaning anymore.

JJ: Looking back on the recent events, do you feel as if you’ve done enough as an artist to try and prevent these things?

BS: I do what I can you know, I’m trying to keep myself alive as an artist and as a person even, to keep living. I break for my own survival first and some of the political things have actually kept me going and given me another reason to keep trying. So I’m not worried that I’m not doing enough but I’d like to do something every semester, let’s say, when I can. I find it really exhausting, like the speech that I wrote for this NYU thing, I put a lot of energy into it, it was an incredible day. I loved reading that way for students and being a part of it at a level like that but I felt like I couldn’t write for a month afterwards. It’s very draining.

JJ: Was it twice as rewarding, maybe, as opposed to those songs you would have written in that time because of a different audience?

BS: Yea, it was a new thing, which is always a great thing to do. You know, it was an utterly new kind of performance experience for me and now I have people who were there or who’ve read it who respond to it in some way. So that’s really cool because I’m not communicating on an “indie rock” level, indie rock doesn’t mean anything, it’s a stupid thing. There’s great independent rock but “indie rock” as a culture is totally dead. It’s just fucking outfits.

JJ: Yea, it kind of makes me want to cry.

BS: It’s worth crying about.

JJ: Speaking of indie rock going kind of the mainstream way and getting muddied, how do you feel about the FCC and different things that are going on right now that are making it more difficult for any real independent music to get out there?

BS: It gives me hope for indie rock that it may have to act on its name and be forthright about being independent.

JH: On the same level I heard you on XM radio now, which is really cool and I think that’s a format that is good for a lot of independent or unsigned artists, what do you feel about that? Do you care about radio play?

BS: I don’t, our label does. We differ to them on that level I don’t really want to know about it. I try and… it’s a strange way you work with those groups, the larger groups and corporations. I’m cool with them playing our stuff but I don’t want it used in a manner that I find unsavory. For instance, I learned that with MTV, I just learned this from our label, we’ve had songs on the Real World where they just use a loop, and it’s a weird thing, we never asked for that, they came to our label and said, “Hey, we want to use some of your bands.” What I didn’t know about that was that if MTV buys a song or gets the title of a song from the label they are free to use it in any context that they want. They can use it in an ad for the army apparently or in anything they do.

JH: My friend had heard it on the Real World, it was just the instrumental take and then on something called “Real Life”, but it was the same song. Morning New Disease maybe? I know that with Jawbreaker you did one video for “Fireman” which would have kind of been the necessary evil for a major label, what do you take from that?.

BS: I take the whole thing as experience, more than anything. My whole Geffen experience was a really intense year of something that I never want to do again. I don’t know that I’m grateful for the experience, exactly, because I know it kind of damaged me, but I have to say that in the end I’m glad that I did it and I’m glad for some of the things that happened. So I think it’s a strange two way street where, as an independent artist, you want to use some of those channels. Fine, play our song, I hope it does us well as a band, but you don’t want to do anything for them. It’s a strange relationship. This tour, for instance, we’re not doing any clear channel venues, so we had to rebook a number of gigs that we had scheduled. You don’t even know anymore it’s really insidious how they’re buying up every club. So, a week before the tour started, Bryan our guitarist sent emails to all of us that said, “Look, I found out that these three clubs are clear channel as of last month” or something. So then we went to the booker and said, look, lets get out of these things can we do alternate venues for these cities? And you know they’re Boston or Philadelphia, like major markets. It’s not hard, you can do it. We just kind of do what we can.

JH: When you’re writing music, or playing music, is your main concern, like conveying some sort of message to a member of the audience or is it just trying to get your message out and hope somebody picks it up.

BS: I’m trying to have the spirit move me. That’s the only way I could describe it. I become moved by music or words, then I think that my message is correct and it’s totally instinctual, you know. I don’t even often know what I’m writing, it’s kind of an unconscious writing and then the message comes together in editing later.

JH: Is it some sort of spontaneous prose then?

BS: Yeah.

JH: Does the music come before it?

BS: It happens concurrently a lot. I do typing at home. I get drunk and type sometimes, I’ll be straight and type, wake up, I do lot of early morning writing and then I take sheets over to our rehearsal space and I’ll just play music until something starts to happen.

JH: Do you write on a standard typewriter?

BS: Yeah, an old corona that someone gave me for my birthday. It’s about to die, it’s really getting wobbly.

JJ: On the topic of commercial music, I heard one of Joe Strummer’s songs on a car commercial recently, but you also had some nice things to say on your website about Joe Strummer. Does the loss of someone like that affect the way you write music or perform music?

BS: Um, it only makes me feel that there are very few people like that anymore, so I feel that absence. Being truly eclectic and a pop phenomenon at the same time seems to be very… not happening now. He seemed to embody that this kind of impossible character so I feel sad that that isn’t more in the world these days.

JJ: Do you think it ever will be the way that communications is going these days?

BS: Yeah, one day. You know there’s great artists alive. I have to believe that as shitty as it is above ground it has to exacerbate the underground wherever that is. Now that the underground is above ground there has to be something beneath that that will boil to the surface.

JH: Even the supposed underground kind of makes it to MTV or some of the clear channel stations. So you’re hoping that there’s something even under that?

BS: I mean I’m sort of an outsider in indie rock. I don’t hang out in New York City. I don’t like a lot of the bands there. I don’t like a lot of the people there. I’m kind of an asshole in that sense. I’m actually hostile towards the community.

JH: Well that’s sort of a normal New York City attitude.

BS: Yeah and I think there’s a lot of hostility in the music scene it’s very careerist and like “Fuck you, my band’s beautiful”, you know. In a way it’s kicking my ass into this new weird where I’m further outside and I’ve got this band that works around that system and we’re popular in it to a certain extent. I assume that happens to everyone and if Jets To Brazil is too popular it makes someone angry they do something else.

JH: It’s the same thing that happens with a lot of bands. They say they get too popular or get too much name recognition and then everyone says, “Oh, well that band’s always sucked”. What do you think about that?

BS: I think it goes too far. You miss good work and you don’t appreciate people in their time. Artists lose and bands lose because they might come to like you later. That happened with Jawbreaker in a certain extent.

JH: I thought that “Dear You” was an incredible album. It was more polished than any of the other albums you had done, or course it was on a major label so it sort of had to. The understanding was that you had a polyp removed, did that force you to change your singing style?

BS: I elected to. I felt like I was becoming a different kind of songwriter. I felt like I was using my “voice” voice more and my breath more. It wasn’t a physical physician’s mandate.

Yeah, at this point the opening band, Retisonic, started playing, and we’d already sucked up a lot of Blake’s time so the rest of the interview is a lot of “thank you’s” on our part.