Music
The Voidz leader on life on Mars, cable news, the Strokes' legacy and more
Julian Casablancas is famously press-shy, but the singer agreed to an interview in support of his excellent new album Tyranny with the Voidz. Over several hours on a recent weeknight in New York’s East Village, the singer opened up about everything from his difficult teenage years to why he had a hard time enjoying the Strokes‘ early success to his new obsession with politics. He also explained why he rarely does interviews: “I don’t like exploiting your personal life. You already have to be so vain to perform, to go onstage and say, ‘Look at me!’ But it’s more inspiring, better for your personal business, to keep some [mystery].” Here are 22pieces of info that chip away at the mysterious Casablancas:
While the Velvet Underground and Doors influenced his songwriting, he’s also been trained in classical music theory.
“I wanted to learn the basic rules. If you’re going to be a surgeon, you want the one who studied, you don’t want the one who was the most inspired. Studying four-part harmony and all that stuff, and I wasn’t a master by any stretch, but I think it really helped me understand what all the moves are. Like, you hear a Radiohead song and you know exactly what they’re doing just off the bat, it makes you avoid traps and cliché. It’s important.”
He’s extremely close to his stepfather, the artist and academic Sam Adoquei, who grew up in Ghana and introduced Casablancas to the music of radical Nigerian funk titan Fela Kuti.
“He’s incredible. He taught me you have to have passion and joy and even the practicing of the thing because part of the joy of the fulfillment is in the chore. He has an amazing book, Origin of Inspiration. It’s what I heard every night from him growing up, just talking about art. ”
He’s always had an addictive personality.
“I started drinking early. I mean, I was drinking at school, during school. I was drinking hard liquor. I never drank coffee [until recently] and then I just needed it to help me stay awake and then I was drinking seven coffees a day. I’m an addictive maniac.'”
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His drinking affected how he looks at the Strokes’ early years.
“People look at that time [and say], ‘You made a splash, you made it, everyone loved you.’ I was also drinking a lot, so it really took away the enjoyment. I really regret that. Like, I should do PSAs. I wish I could remember it better. That made it all a vague, hazy memory. So there was never this kind of ‘We won the championship!’ moment, you know what I mean?”
Jim Morrison was not a good role model for him.
“The Doors were terrible role models. Jim Morrison probably worked and read awesome literature and worked on poetry in sobriety for years, and then he finally made it, and he partied and acted like a maniac and people think, ‘OK, if I want to sing cool, I have to drink whiskey.’ But it doesn’t work that way. And then he died at 27. I think I was living that kind of mimicking cliché. . .And I felt kind of really roughed up by it. And so I realized what I really wanted to do was make positive things.”
He prefers Room on Fire to Is This It.
“I wanted to finish the Is This It? thought; even when we were doing it, I always thought it was part two [of Is This It]. I remember when we started ‘Reptilia’ and ‘The End Has No End,’ I was like, ‘This is the new vibe.’ I think we always felt like we were in jeopardy. When we did Room on Fire, things were established, but things were internally, at least from my perspective, not healthy.”
His “iron-fisted” creative control of the Strokes led to a lot of problems.
“[On Comedown Machine] I maybe wasn’t kind of as iron-fisty as I had been in the past, but on purpose, because that created all these issues. I think it’s important for someone to – whether or not I think it’s better – for someone to have their say. I’m still writing a lot of parts and songs and we’re playing together, so it’s not like we’re mailing each other songs and that we never see each other.”
