This new series highlights on-the-record conversations that didn’t make it into the published feature, with text directly lifted directly from the transcript. Anything off the record remains off the record. 

More from Spin:

• Altin Gün Salutes Neşet Ertaş On New Album
• How a Still-Defiant Shepard Fairey Turned Punk Rock Attitude Into 30 Years of Activist Art
• Repelican’s Jon Ehrens Ponders the Cosmos

By the time I interviewed Ace for his February 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without feature, the weekly series was in its third year. He would have been around my 150th (or so) 5 Albums interview, most of which are completed via template. Ace’s was via phone. And Ace made his own call, no publicists placing the call for him, putting him in an even higher echelon of cool.

There have been so many beautiful tributes to Ace since his passing on October 16, and there’s a good reason why: he was a warm, honest person who had some out-of-this-world stories to tell. In my 2024 end-of-year editorial roundup I pointed to Ace’s conversation as one of my favorites, a career highlight during my time at SPIN.

There are a few things he asked me not to publish, so I’m leaving those out, but throughout his years he’s been open about his close encounters with alien life and uniquely positive perspective on life, and we talked about that.

But what was more remarkable to me was how, after initially discovering that we lived pretty close to one another outside New York City, that Bronx-born Ace was one of the most down-to-earth interviews I’d ever had.

This conversation took place several months before I moved into my new office, which I decorated with SPIN’s ’96 KISS covers (all four members received their own cover, a newsstand revolution). So now, for well over a year, when I sit at my desk, I look to my right and am greeted with Ace’s kind, very wide-eyes, and reminded of the story behind the photo, which he talks about here.

Liza: Bob Guccione, Jr. [SPIN founder] asked me—this has nothing to do with your interview—but he asked me to ask you if you remember doing the SPIN cover. There were four of them. Each one of you guys was on a cover. It was completely revolutionary at the time.

Ace: Yes. I thought I looked stupid in that picture because I looked too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Liza: [laughs]

Ace: Maybe it was because I just did a couple of lines of coke. I don’t know. 

[laughter]

Liza: I’m going to tell him you said that. I don’t know if I agree, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not you, so it’s pretty funny.

Ace: Yes, life is funny.

My whole life has been like a movie. I never know what’s around the corner.

Liza: That’s good, right? 

Ace: Yes. I don’t like repetition. I get bored real easily. Thank God I have so many different hobbies; computer graphics, I like to go fishing, I like to go shooting, I like to drive fast cars.

Liza: Do you have a favorite car?

Ace: Right now, the two fastest ones are the Bentley and Jaguar XK, it’s the one with the long front. The Jaguar is actually more fun to drive because it’s not as insulated as the Bentley. You don’t hear the engine as much, but when you’re driving the Jaguar, you really hear the roar of the engine. I think probably the Jaguar’s more fun.

Liza: I’m learning so much about you.

Firstly, I’m just so excited to have you do this feature. We’re doing 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without. I thought, if you want, we could start off with intro questions. 

Ace: Yes.

Liza: The first one is “best known for.” 

Ace: Personally, I’m known for playing lead guitar, and as a solo artist, but I don’t know. I like coin collections.

Liza: You do?

Ace: I like stamp collecting. I like coin collecting. I like collecting knives.

Liza: Oh. I didn’t know that.

Ace: I have knives that I bought in Paris in the ’70s that are unbelievable.

Liza: Really?

Ace: You can just say I collect knives, but I have a lot of coins. I love collecting coins. It’s amazing that if you really look at the coins you have, just regular change you have in your pocket, sometimes there might be a gem in there that’s worth thousands of dollars and you could just give it away.

Liza: Really? 

Ace: Yes. If you go on the Internet and start checking out valuable coins. I just found the 1911 penny that I have. It’s called the wheat penny because the back of it is different than the more recent pennies. I found some dollar coins that I have that are worth a couple of grand. It’s just crazy. I probably have…I don’t know…250 to 300 silver dollars. I’ve been collecting coins for years.

Liza: Are you one of the people with the metal detectors? 

Ace: No, I don’t have the time for that, walking around the beach. I used to sit in my bedroom, and I had that network on where you could buy coins or buy any crazy stuff. I once bought this whole set of John F. Kennedy 50-cent pieces, and that was like 25 years ago. They’re worth a lot of money now. They’ve quadrupled, at least in value. I don’t know. Before that, it was stamps. Me and my brother used to collect stamps. I’m a collector. [laughs] Right now, I have 120 guitars. Like I need 120 guitars like I need a hole in the head.

[laughs]

I’m insane. People ask me, “What’s your favorite?” How can I have a favorite? I have about a dozen that are probably my favorites that I use mostly to record with. 

I get most of my guitars from pawn shops. I’d say 75% of my collection, I bought in pawn shops. The guys in pawn shops don’t really know what they got. I went to one pawn shop in Chicago, and I bought 15 guitars from them for $125 apiece. Some guitars are worth thousands.

The craziest thing about that day is I bought a Versace diamond watch and nobody believes me, but I have photographic proof. That it was the yellow gold. It was all diamonds and yellow gold. I remember, my bodyguard, he swears to it and I have the photographic proof because we got in the car, I took a video of it. The watch fit me perfectly. It was like it was made for me. I fell asleep with it on. I woke up the next day, and it was white gold.

Liza: What?

Ace: I swear to God.

Liza: That’s pretty trippy. 

Ace: Look, you have no idea what I’ve seen in my lifetime. [laughs]

Liza: I don’t. But I want to know.

Ace: It didn’t freak me out. It’s just, “Hey. Okay.” I’ve seen UFOs. I’ve seen it all.

What are we supposed to talk about, albums?

[Note: We are only one intro question in at this point, so we move through those pretty quickly, chatting about his touring plans, details about his home.]

Ace: I’m psychic. You want me to try to guess your age?

Liza: Yes.

Ace: I’ve never met you, I don’t know you, but I’m listening to your voice and you sound like you’re 27, 28.

Liza: Oh, dear. 

[He is decades off.]

Ace: Wow, well, okay. You’re like me. My voice hasn’t changed, but I’m 72.

Liza: Do you believe in astrology?

Ace: Yes.

Liza: I’m a Taurus like you. 

Ace: April 27th. 27 follows me everywhere I go. Every time I go out driving, I see 27 on license plates. Side of trucks. It doesn’t even phase me anymore. People that know me, that hang out with me, it happens to them, too. There’s something to numerology. I don’t know.

Liza: I think so, too. I think that’s very affirming. 

Ace: Although, the one time I went to jail and spent the weekend in jail, believe it or not, my cell was A27. [laughs] I swear to God. What are the odds of that?

I grew up in a little apartment in the Bronx. I’m probably one of the most famous guitar players in the world.

Liza: Absolutely.

Ace: I just take things in stride. It’s always been crazy. Upside down. 

Liza: You make your own phone calls, which is I think a testament to the coolest people ever.

Ace: I don’t have a manager. I had a manager for several years and he just wasn’t cutting it, and I fired him. Managers take 15%. All of a sudden, I realized I’m getting all this extra money that my manager was taking. I said, “Maybe I can do this without a manager.”

If I don’t make the phone call myself, it usually becomes something misconstrued. I have an assistant that obviously does a lot of my calls for me, but if it’s an important call, a lot of times, I’ll just get on the phone. It’s amazing how the response I get when people know it’s me talking than just somebody else. I dig it. [laughs]

Liza: It just means you’re a regular human being.

Ace: Oh, yes. I’m a street kid from the Bronx. I don’t even think of myself as a celebrity, but everybody else does. I don’t get it.

Playing guitar always came second nature to me. Every one of my family played an instrument. I was the youngest of three kids. It’s just been like this rollercoaster ride. Especially when I joined Kiss, I designed the Kiss logo.

Liza: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Ace: I’m a graphic artist. I would really consider myself a Renaissance guy.

Liza: You are. I didn’t know a lot of this stuff about you.

Ace: The recording studio I’m in right now looks totally built by a professional, but I built the whole thing myself. I’ve built a couple of studios in the past, and I’ve had architects do it. Then I just said, “Hey, I know how to do this now.”

Liza: You’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.

Ace: No. Sometimes, I put sheet rock up. I had a bandsaw here where I can cut two by fours. This basement alone is 3,000 square feet with a nine-foot ceiling, so I got a stage. I got a drum room. I got the studio. Dance room, a foyer—and then there’s another 1,200 square feet or more.

I could live down here. [laughs] Everything I need is right here.

You were going to ask me about five albums.

Liza: Oh, I’m going to do that right now.

Are there any albums that you would say have stories behind them? 

Ace: Are You Experienced, Hendrix’s first record. I used to walk around in high school with that under my arm and stare at it. I don’t know what was so fascinating about that cover, but it’s a pretty interesting cover. Ironically, in 1970, there was a peace concert on Randall’s Island in Manhattan. I snuck backstage, and they put me to work as a roadie. I ended up setting up Mitch Mitchell’s drums from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I know that sounds like bullshit.

I tell people the story and they go, “That’s impossible.”

Liza: It’s impossible, but I guess that’s your life, right?

Ace: My life has always been so fucking weird. Then it was late. It was really late and my friends had left because they couldn’t get backstage. 

Somehow, I looked at the guy and I had hair down to my waist. He figured I was in one of the bands, so he let me go backstage. They were going to throw me out, but the guy goes, “Can you do anything? We’re a little shorthanded.” I said, “Yes, I can set up guitars, change strings, set up amps, set up drums.” He goes, “All right, I got a job for you.” Next thing, I’m setting up Mitch Mitchell’s drums.

I didn’t even know it was Mitch Mitchell. It was right around the time Mitch Mitchell changes his look from the afro to the headband with a beard. I had never seen him in that new look that he had. He walked over and started helping us set up the drums. He’s hands-on guy, too. I heard the English roadie goes, “Hey, Mitch, which snare are you going to use tonight?” I like froze because I had no idea I was setting up Mitch Mitchell’s drums with Mitch Mitchell.

Then at the end of the night, I had no way of getting home, so I just walked to where the car…there was just a few cars left. I put out my thumb, and the first car that stopped, the guy lived five blocks from my house.

The first guy that stopped for me, he goes, “Where are you going?” I go, “I’m going to the Bronx, Bedford Park Boulevard.” He goes, “Oh, that’s where we’re going.”

Liza: That is just insane.

Ace: I think I may have been abducted by aliens, too.

Liza: For real?

Ace: I used to live in Yorktown, which is considered an alien hotspot. One day, I woke up, I had been drinking, but that doesn’t matter. I woke up and I was halfway in my house and halfway outside my house. I’ve never done anything like that. I remember at least I made it into the door [in the past], through the door, and crashed on the couch or something, but laying on the ground, halfway inside and halfway out. It was just mind-boggling to me. Then I looked around the front yard, and there was like a depression, about 30 feet, a circle.

Liza: Wow.

Ace: I don’t know. They had wiped my memory, I think, but a couple of weeks later, I started getting dreams about being inside a UFO.

Liza: Oh, wow.

Ace: Who knows? You see, I take that in stride, like going down and buying a gallon of milk. [laughs]

If it happened, it happened. If it didn’t happen, it might still happen. Who knows? Maybe they’ll come back and visit me again. I don’t know.

When I write song lyrics, sometimes, I feel like they’re being beamed into my head. I can’t write them down fast enough. I can write the lyrics for one of the songs on my new record, I wrote it in 30 minutes.

It’s so easy for me that I start to wonder what the fuck is going on. [laughs]

[We go through his next four albums pretty quickly, most of that text is in the feature so it’s taken out here.]

Ace: I saw Zeppelin a couple of times and was just blown away. Jimmy Page is one of the few guitarists I haven’t met. I met Hendrix. I met Pete Townshend. I met Beck, and who else? I don’t think I’ve ever met Eric Clapton. I should have.

Liza: There’s still time.

Ace: I don’t like to bother people. I remember seeing Jimmy Page. He was sitting at the bar having a drink with somebody. I didn’t want to bother him. I know how I feel when I’m having a drink with somebody and some fan comes over and wants an autograph or a picture.

Liza: Of course.

Ace: I set my standards high when it comes to others, but I’ve met just about every other band I’ve toured with. Those guys are the top in their fields. They’ll never be another Led Zeppelin. They’ll never be another Jimmy Page.

Liza: No. They’ll never be another Ace Frehley.

Ace: I guess so, but I have a feeling I’m going to be around for a while.

Liza: Oh, me too.

Ace: I have longevity on both sides of my family. My dad lived to be 96. My mom lived to be 86, but she died of a broken heart.

Liza: Oh?

Ace: Her older sister lived to be 99. It’s in the genes. I got it on both sides. If I take care of myself, which I do, I’m good for at least another 10, 15, 20 years.

Liza: Yes. I hope so. Oh, yes. Before I let you go, one of the earlier questions which is quick, I promise, is if you have a preferred format you like to listen to music in? Do you like vinyl? Some people say cassette, believe it or not. Reel-to-reel, could be anything.

Ace: Vinyl sounds the best.

Liza: Yes. It absolutely does.

Ace: I got an acetate of my album a couple of weeks ago and put it on and listened to it through the speakers. It just sounded so much better than the digital version. The nice thing about tape, I really like recording drums on tape.

When you record drums on tape, there’s a bleed-through that happens sometimes. There’s a warmth that the drums get that it doesn’t get when you record them digitally, but it’s such a hassle.

I have a 24-track recorder here, but to set it up and reroute all the wiring, record the drums, and you got to transfer it to digital anyway, it’s just like it becomes a little overbearing, especially when you’re trying to finish something quickly.

Liza: Yes. That makes sense.

Ace: I don’t know [laughter] — I just take life one day at a time. I don’t know.

Liza: I just want to say this was such an absolute delight. You are so much fun and so down to earth. You’ve had such an extraordinary life, really incredible.

Ace: It’s not over yet. [chuckles]

Liza: No. No, not at all.

Ace: This new album I feel like I’m just starting over. It’s crazy.

Liza: That’s so nice. How long have you been playing music?

Ace: I got my first guitar when I was 13. 60 years [ago]. I have this power of foresight. This is going to be my most popular record to date.

I’ve just spoken to too many people that have heard it and they just said there’s no filler on this record. It’s unbelievable.

Liza: Oh, yes. I believe that.

Ace: I’m just hoping you can get an assignment to talk to me about the success of my new album. [chuckles]

Nobody tells stories like me. [chuckles]

Liza: No. People don’t tell stories. Isn’t it weird? 

Ace: You see all these idiots walking around staring at their phones all day. The art of conversation is completely lost.

I enjoy talking.

Liza: Yes. My goodness. I don’t know anybody who’s lived a life quite like you because not only have you had this extraordinary career, but then you have like literal outer space stuff.

Ace: Yes. [chuckles] Go figure.

I just take it one day at a time because you never know what’s going to happen, but the future looks bright at this juncture. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

It’s 8:00 a.m. in Los Angeles and Mark Laita’s already been up for five hours. 

More from Spin:

• Altin Gün Salutes Neşet Ertaş On New Album
• How a Still-Defiant Shepard Fairey Turned Punk Rock Attitude Into 30 Years of Activist Art
• Repelican’s Jon Ehrens Ponders the Cosmos

If you’re one of the over 6.6 million who subscribe to his YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly, you’ve witnessed the heart-wrenching, disconcerting stories he’s captured in nearly 3,000 videos; up-close tales told by real people, many suffering from addiction and homelessness, making ends meet via any and every means, including sex work. Some even return to Soft White Underbelly, allowing viewers to follow their progress, or lack thereof.

By the end of these videos, we feel as though we’ve been taken into their personal darkest corners, a stark contrast to Mark’s brightly perfected studio where these stories are filmed.

And you know Mark. Sort of. Though rarely seen, it’s his low-key, authoritative voice we hear prompting, always starting from early beginnings: “Where are you from? Where did you grow up?”; “Tell me about your family?”; “Are drugs a part of your life?” Some of Mark’s subjects are high profile, including Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, relaying stranger-than-fiction tales about his family, and groupie Alycen Rowse, spilling the dirt on her exploits with famous musicians, including Who bassist John Entwistle, who she was spending time with when he died.

Early on, I offer my condolences. A month and a half before our July interview, Mark made a rare video of himself, where he told us about the tragic death of his girlfriend of more than two years, Kyara, describing pulling her body out of a bathtub after a presumed drug overdose. (At the time of our interview, an exact cause of death was not known.)

On the rare occasion we see Mark, he looks too squeaky clean for the company Soft White Underbelly keeps, and in many ways he is. “Almost every day, every week, I’m doing interviews, and people will leave a bag of fentanyl or cocaine or crystal meth or some pills or whatever, behind in the studio,” he tells me. “The idea of trying that never ever enters my brain. I pick it up with a paper towel, and I’ll throw it in the garbage or in the street, just get it out of my studio, basically. That’s just the way I am. First off, I’m super disciplined, but I’m also not interested in those forms of escape.”

Mark spent his early childhood in Detroit; his family moved to Chicago, where he lived until he was 26. From there, he moved to Los Angeles where he lives now, his blonde hair and tanned skin make him look like a born-and-bred local. His mother, a housewife, was married to his father until her death. He credits “the stability and the consistency of having two parents” as building his solid, grounded foundation. Though Mark is divorced, he says he and his ex-wife and their two adult daughters are all very close. There was no addiction in his family.

Mark says he doesn’t know what makes Soft White Underbelly so well known amongst the literal billions of videos on YouTube, but the fact that it’s crawled into the cultural consciousness seems to speak for itself. In that rote “welcome back to my channel”  world of true crime and closet-cleanout creators, Soft White Underbelly offers a connection to a population many of us may never meet in person. That’s the whole point. Their titles include: “Teenage Male Prostitute Interview-Mario”; “Stripper Interview-Tracy”; “Three Sisters on Heroin-Valeen, Amanda and Tiffany.” While these stories reflect an undeniable dissonance, Mark presents them so vividly, allowing their unique humanness to shine through. Always. And though we may not ever “know” them, Mark makes us feel as though we’re in the room. 

With all of the connectedness technology allows, there’s a definite lack of intimacy in our world. Soft White Underbelly offers something that’s incredibly intimate.

What’s more, Mark has a definite P.O.V. and a goal for his channel. He’s called it a “crash course in empathy” and believes that early trauma, if somehow avoided, could potentially prevent broken paths in adulthood. He wants to do something that “[matters] more in the world.” He believes that “listening, understanding, accepting, and maybe deciding to do something differently might make a difference eventually.” 

The money that he’s personally spent on the people he’s met—clothing, shoes, cell phones—is in the six figures. He’s hoping that by showcasing these stories, we can figure out how to make our country better by starting with its people.

On this day, despite his grief over his recent loss and his unwavering commitment to his channel, he makes time to speak with me.

“I have somebody that wants to do an interview right now, but I can’t do it because I’m talking to you.

“Let’s just do this.”

Why do you think your channel is so popular?

I don’t even know. I try to do things that I find interesting, and I think that’s the best way to go about doing any artistic project. You don’t do it to please your audience, and hopefully, others will find it interesting as well. That’s really all I’m doing. I don’t really think too much about what people want to see. The tendency for human beings to self-destruct is so fascinating to me. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of getting to the bottom of why this happens.

You have a definite goal with this channel.

Yes. I’ve seen people close to me and people that I’ve known that have just destroyed a perfectly good future. It’s never-ending. What makes that happen? 

Let’s take a gambler, for example, a compulsive gambler. Why would you do something that’s going to just take away your income, destroy your family? You lose your house, your car, your entire life, and you’re going to keep on doing it? It’s just insane. A lot of us do these things in different ways. Not necessarily gambling, could be many other things, but it’s just fascinating to me that we’ll become our own worst enemy.

Yes.

My girlfriend, Kyara, just passed away and…she had the brightest future. She had everything going for her, and I made sure of that. I couldn’t love her any more than I did. Somehow…cocaine got a hold of her and took over. It just destroyed her life in a matter of months. We’re still waiting for the autopsy results, but it is probably fentanyl that may have killed her. Certainly, she knew. She had a 3-year-old child. Certainly, you knew there was a risk in doing this drug, that there could be fentanyl mixed in somehow. That’s no surprise to anybody, so what would make somebody do that?

Now she…now she’s gone.

My sincerest condolences.

It’s a real drag and it’s been really difficult for me.

Her son…his life is totally derailed, his future. My life is totally upside down, but I’ll recover because I’m tough, and her life is gone. I don’t think she had any intention on ending her life, but maybe these addicts don’t think about it. I’ve interviewed so many fentanyl addicts who, man, there’s enough information out there now to know that what you’re doing is super risky and very, very self-destructive, but they choose to do it anyway. They’ll OD multiple times, and what do they do? They go back to do it again.

Do you have any thoughts on the root cause of addiction?

I’ve got lots of thoughts on why. Like, in Kyara’s case, her biological parents were not in her life, really. Her mom was a homeless drug addict and had her for two years, but then, eventually, the foster family took her. Her godparents took her in, and that saved her life. Then there was sexual trauma, sexual abuse from age 6 until 12, I think, in her life. It sounds like it was pretty bad. Those two alone will mess up a person’s self-worth, and what they believe they deserve, and their behavior. It did with her.

Prevention is really the answer. That’s what I say with my videos all the time is that trying to fix all these broken people, I don’t know what’s possible there. Maybe there’s a few here and there that might be possible to help, but for the most part, I focus on prevention because prevention is going to do more good than any other solution.

You’ve said that you have a definite goal to showcase what’s wrong with our country. Do you think there is any way that we can solve these problems?

It seems everyone is scrambling to make ends meet and trying to survive financially, and that takes a toll on a family. They’ll end up doing things, especially in the inner-city…The poorer communities, you’ll see people scrambling to make money. Very often, those things are illegal that they’re doing. That takes you down a certain road, and sometimes you end up in prison. Sometimes you end up selling yourself on the streets or whatever it is. That affects your life in a really significant way and your children’s lives.

Making it easier for a person to survive, a family to survive, and stay together, be there, be present for the kids, would be great, but that’s a super simplistic solution for a very complicated problem.

You’ve talked about your channel being a crash course in empathy. Do you feel like if people were more empathetic, that could help?

I think that would help. I could sit there and tell you exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, but I don’t think anyone is going to watch that, and I don’t think it’s going to really do much. I try to just share these stories without being too heavy-handed. I’m just letting the person tell their story. You can gather what information there is to be gathered from watching it. That’s what I’m hoping to do by doing this, by learning how these things came about. I’m interviewing a homeless drug addict, and she’s selling her ass on the street. How the hell did this happen? You watch these interviews, and you’ll find out, well, her childhood trauma was in place, and there were other problems, probably some sexual abuse.

Lo and behold, she ends up dropping out of high school and ends up doing things that most people would never hope to do. That helps you see how it happens, and we can figure out ways to prevent that from happening, hopefully. That’s what I’m hoping to do. By just posting these videos and just showing people how these stories come about, we might be able to gain some information to prevent it, in our own families and our own lives, or just as a society as a whole.

I think the stability and the consistency of having two parents that are there every day of a child’s life creates a stability in that person’s life as they grow into an adult. You’ll end up being a more stable person mentally, and just how you go through your life. You’ll have role models, you’ll have the support you need. You’ll have the consistency that shows you that life isn’t chaotic and dangerous. It can be safe and organized, basically.

In the six years you’ve had your channel, do you feel like it has changed you?

[chuckles] I’m sure I’m changed. I’ve seen how dishonest people can be. You have to understand, I’m interviewing people from the streets, and they do certain things, certain behaviors. I am a very trusting person. If I’m with a partner, I’m just assuming she’s as honest as I am. I’m not doing things that I’m trying to hide, and I assume you’re not either. I’ve learned now that they’re doing things to hide certain behaviors, or people are just dishonest. They’re just on the take.

It’s changed my view on trust. I’m still very trusting, but I’m aware now that my trust would benefit from having a little due diligence and a little deeper [chuckles] research into who I’m dealing with.

With my channel, so if somebody’s a con artist, it’s pretty easy for me to sidestep that, but if I’m in an intimate relationship with somebody, you have to just be careful who you get involved with.

You talked about how you have to film many, many interviews to get one that you can use.

I don’t have an exact count right now, but it’s roughly around 10,000 interviews I’ve done.

Did you say 10,000?

Yes, in the last six years.

That’s a lot of work.

That’s a lot of work.

What is a great interview? How do you choose out of all those?

Just something that’s interesting, compelling, insightful. It could be for many different reasons. It doesn’t have to be like everyone has to be poignant and deep. Sometimes they’re just silly and ridiculous, and I’m fine with all of it. What I really like in art, if I watch a movie, whatever I’m listening to, or whatever I’m watching or looking at, [is] when it can incorporate all the different emotions. Not just something that’s touching and sad, but something that’s actually funny, or can be interesting, and poignant or whatever.

A mix of all the human emotions into one project is what I look for. That’s why some of my videos are just ridiculous and stupid, and some of them are poignant and beautiful. Others are deeply depressing and sad. I enjoy it all.

I think your audience enjoys it all, too. I don’t think that there’s a lot of interesting stories out there. 

What I see is a lot of people just posting whatever they shoot. What I do by doing 10,000 interviews and only posting 2,000 of them—2,500 roughly—it shows you only a quarter, basically, of what I shoot is what you’ll see. When you watch my channel, when you watch my videos, “Oh, my God, these are great,” and I make it look so easy. It appears very easy, but the actual truth of it is, it’s a lot of work. A lot of work behind the scenes, on the front end, on the back end especially. There’s a lot of headaches and bullshit that I have to deal with in order to get this nice little interview that you saw, that looks really simple and just easy. 

It’s not really easy at all.

Your audience shouldn’t know what goes into it, really. That’s what I always say with editing.

I’m basically just a curator. If I do 10,000 interviews, I will choose the one out of four, roughly, that I think are worth watching. I’m just curating that stuff.

I’m doing this project for myself. I’m not doing it for anybody else. I know what I would like to post and what I wouldn’t. A certain interview you feel, “Oh, it would have been great,” or somebody will come to me. I get these tough guys tell me the most awesome story and they’re the baddest motherfucker that ever walked the earth. I can tell you right now that’s not what I’m looking for.

Those people, I won’t even interview. I’ve learned to not interview these people that tell you they’re going to go viral and all this kind of shit. It’s like, fuck that.

In a world where everybody is so celebrity-driven, too, you are just not interested in that.

No. I’m interested in the opposite of that.

Would you care to comment on the state of America at this time?

Wow. That’s a big question.

It seems like we have our priorities out of whack. Family does not seem to be a big concern for a lot of people. I see that. I do see that it’s difficult for people to make a living and survive. Everyone seems to be scrambling and just very stressed, and that’s not good. It seems like the world is changing. 

Education doesn’t seem to be a big priority for a lot of young people anymore. It probably never was really their first priority, but now it seems to be further down the list. 

Just the fact that drugs are such a big part of so many people’s lives. I’ve done 10,000 interviews. Probably two-thirds of those are involving drugs of some sort. I’ve yet to see a single story where drugs made the person’s life better.

It usually does the exact opposite and does it in a robust way. It just seems like everyone is playing around with these drugs and I just don’t know exactly why everyone is so drawn to that.

You mean recreational drugs.

Yes. I’m talking crystal meth, fentanyl, cocaine, things like that. I don’t see how it benefits. I’ve lost so many people that were close to me because of these drugs. Nobody sees it. It’s almost like we’re blind to it. 

A lot of this crazy behavior that we talked about earlier, like I use the gambling analogy, is just an inability to believe that you deserve a better life. That comes from child abuse or just having a rough childhood. That imprints this belief in a person’s brain that they don’t deserve to succeed or to do great things in life.

I haven’t met a whole lot of people who are hustlers that really made it, and are doing great. I’m sure there’s the one or three of them out there, but for everyone that exists, there seems to be millions that don’t.

What is your average day like? Do you shoot every single day? 

I shoot seven days a week. Sometimes, I’ll do six, seven, eight, nine interviews a day. Some days, I’ll do a lot less. Then I’ll typically edit when I have downtime or in the evening or early morning.

How do you find all of your subjects?

It started out I would just go to Skid Row and just see interesting people and ask them if they would be interested in doing an interview [for] $100 and that was it. That’s turned into where I have people that are living in those communities. Whether it’s South Central or Skid Row or Appalachia or whatever, that know people and they have a feel for what I’m looking for. They’ll contact me and we’ll make the connection and take it from there, so I don’t have to do so much legwork.

Do you do a pre-interview?

I’ll just talk to them for a minute or two on the phone. I’ll get a good feel for how they speak, what their story is in a nutshell.

What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you during one of these interviews?

Oh, man. I tend to not look back, so I have forgotten a lot. If I was documenting everything I did throughout the last six years, it would be a fascinating documentary. I had a guy named Victor pull a gun on me in the middle of an interview. I don’t think his intention was to shoot me, but that was freaky, for one.

Were you scared?

In the moment, I wasn’t and I was as cool as a cucumber. What happened is…three days later — I always wake up in a good mood — I woke up and I was in just the nastiest mood ever.

I’m like, “Why am I waking up so irritable?” I couldn’t figure it out, and I realized it must have been the delayed effect of the PTSD from that.

Having this guy point a gun at me. It seems he was pretty intense about doing something. Three days later, it hit me. It was really strange.

I have this endless reservoir of hope. I really do. Probably to a fault, but I am the most optimistic, hopeful person I’ve ever met.

Without being a Pollyanna, without being delusional, but I believe hard work and perseverance, and determination can get us out of whatever.

All these terribly sad stories that I have put out, I see how they’re just a product of some terrible parenting or some terrible circumstances. It’s handed down generation after generation, but I do see how that chain of dysfunction can get broken. I’ve seen people do it. I’ve seen people that come from shitty, shitty childhoods, and they are choosing to do things differently. They’re changing their lives and their kids’ lives, and it’s a beautiful thing to see.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

You just released Magickal. So many great collabs. The opening track with Jem Cooke sets the tone.

We recorded face to face on this record in Mark Ralph’s studio in London and she’s a proper professional. I like to think that the album will stand the test of time. It’s not going to be something that people listen to once and forget about. 

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What’s your vision for bringing back club culture?

I’ve been a resident at the number one club in the world for the last three years, Hï Ibiza. In the room I run there every Saturday, you close your eyes and think, “what’s the most ideal nightclub space?” I have great lighting and incredible sound. But at various clubs and festivals and stuff online, there’s the phone in the air thing. And I just thought, it’s taking away their energy and the connection that people can make and, well, it’s annoying for other people standing around having their view obstructed by people’s phones. So I just asked people politely to please not use their phone and they started to really respond to it. 

Mythology and ritual are part of your world. Why?

I want people to remember that magic happens. It’s happening around us all the time. And you just have to have your eyes open to notice it. In this album, that was the key thing. How do I express, musically, the idea of magic? My DJ booth at Hï Ibiza is an ancient temple. Day Zero is based in the ancient Mayan civilization with temples up the road. 

You dedicated a stage at Day Zero Festival to local artists. 

One of the most exciting projects to me is Secret Echoes — a three-piece band. It’s almost like a Mexican supergroup. We released a debut single on Crosstown Rebels this year. There’s been a very strong resurgence of Mexican dance music. I hope we’re playing a little part in that.

What’s the state of dance music?
There are some very formulaic areas of electronic music right now. There’s some questionable music at the top of the commercial end and it’s my life-long mission to remind people that there’s something deeper, more wholesome, more challenging, to be found. There is magic in the music.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

On May 21, 1998, I saw Garbage at what used to be The Palace in Hollywood. I wasn’t there for Garbage—I came for the opener, bizarrely, Talvin Singh—but I left singing Garbage songs. I knew all the singles. How could you not in the ’90s, when their music was everywhere?

Even more than the songs was the impact of frontperson Shirley Manson. In a miniskirt, baby T, and tall boots, all black from neck to toe, she looked amazing, aspirational—and we loved her. Twenty-four years later, opening for Tears for Fears, she was even more compelling: theatrical, like a Disney live-action villain, taking up the whole stage.

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Offstage, Manson is equally commanding, confident, and opinionated. Our hour-plus conversation is punctuated with her throaty laugh. One of the many qualities that makes me want to grow up to be her.

Garbage’s eighth album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, came out earlier this year, and on September 3 they begin the extended Happy Endings Tour in support of it. This time, the album creation process was unlike any before. In 2024, Manson was literally knocked off her feet by a performance-related injury, undergoing hip surgery and a painful recovery—followed by another surgery.

The writing and recording of Let All That We Imagine Be the Light was bookended by these surgeries, with Manson physically separated from bandmates Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker. This unusual setup—plus some pain meds (she namechecks Tramadol in the album’s closer)—produced some of her sharpest lyrics yet.

The album has earned thoughtful press, and with her quick, clever answers to both mundane and incisive questions, Manson is effortlessly quotable. Her arsenal of words: “desolate,” “ludicrous,” “tiresome,” makes me want to steal them for my own speech. Sirens and helicopters monitoring DTLA’s unrest underscore our talk, but her points land without interruption.

Was it more, or less freeing working apart from your bandmates?

It was ultimately quite freeing for me—although I definitely wouldn’t want to make another record the way we made this one because it was very alienating for me. But it forced the band to write differently and as a result, the record sounds different. It’s much more cinematic, and I don’t know if we would have necessarily gotten there had we all been in the room together. Without vocals, without any melody to follow, you have to rely upon the music. In a way, it pushes the emphasis on that.

When the band started sending me pieces of music, I was quite taken aback. I wasn’t 100% sure how to delve into it. Initially, I was a bit thrown off by it. One of the songs in particular, I remember turning to my husband and going, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” That ended up turning into “The Day That I Met God,” which is one of the songs that I love the most, and is such a departure from our usual sort of songwriting style.

Isn’t that what you always hope for 30 years into a creative endeavor, to stumble upon something that feels fresh to you? That’s really quite thrilling for us.

“The Day That I Met God” is my favorite on the album—and I’m allergic to Tramadol.

Everybody has responded surprisingly well to that song. I honestly thought people would be like, “What? Huh? Where did this come from?” But the music is quite euphoric with really beautiful chords and it inspired, I would argue, the best chorus of our career. It’s uplifting and really loving and kind. Maybe that’s why people have responded to it so well.

Tramadol is a powerful drug. I threw it in there to be a little wry. To try and describe what God is to you, that’s a large, heavy topic. When I first came up with this chorus, I was on the treadmill, and I was singing it to myself without music. I went into my bedroom and recorded it. When I got to the chorus, I realized I’d hit on something truthful and moving for myself, and it gave me goosebumps. I was fully aware that I was medicated, so I threw the Tramadol part in there, just for fun. But I think it adds a certain gravitas to it too. I thought it’d just be a space saver, but I ended up holding on to it.

Is the album connected to your physical pain?

It was quite a difficult period for me because I required hip surgery at the beginning of making this record, and then I needed another hip surgery on the opposite hip at the end of making this record. I was basically in pain, or struggling to control my pain. That was wild because I was dealing with a lot of brain fog. I was physically depressed, obviously, and became somewhat emotionally depressed. The writing of this record is colored by that.

I’ve never been in pain my whole life, which is why it was so shocking to me. I’ll be 60 next year, and I have never broken a limb. I have never had serious surgery. I was such a virgin to the whole process. It changed the way I look at people living with chronic pain. It’s such a torture. Making this record felt like a period of exaggerated growth. I had to learn things about myself, about the world, that I never had to consider before. I’m grateful for that experience, but in the end, even though it was far from fun and extremely unglamorous, I’ve never felt more beaten down in my life, but also, I learned so much.

What were some positives you came away with after going through your physical challenges?

There were a lot of positives. It was really good for me to create by myself, without anyone in the room, which arguably I’ve never really done since probably the first record. Usually everything Garbage does, we’re all together in a room, and fumble through until we find something to grasp that we can all agree on. I had to be the sole decider of whether I thought something was good enough to take to the group. That’s good for the creative process where you’re being the architect, essentially, of your own work. I’ve been in a band with Butch my whole career. Over the years, especially very early on, I depended on his blessing that I’d done a good job. As you grow as an artist, you need less confirmation from other people, and you rely on yourself. That’s a fantastic feeling. It’s really liberating.

When you’re going through physical rehab and learning how to walk again, you have to focus on tiny increments of improvement. That taught me the value of effort and discipline and small strokes as opposed to large, big splashes. I’m such a big personality, and I’ve relied on broad strokes my whole life. This experience has taught me how to focus on the smaller moments and the smaller advances and smaller gestures, that I’m grateful for. That’s been a profound lesson for me in all of this.

Is there a connection between this album and its predecessor, No Gods No Masters?

They do sit together side by side as non-identical twins. On No Gods No Masters, I was very frightened about where I feared the world was headed. You can be outraged or furious about the things that you’re frightened about. No Gods No Masters was quite a political record. It was me tolling a bell of warning. Five years later, I realized there’s no point. There’s no use for my outrage. It’s too late. We’re exactly where I imagined we would end up as a global community, and my outrage was not going to be of any help to anyone, least of all myself.

I realized I had to employ a completely different tack. I had to come at making a record from an entirely different perspective to ensure my own sanity. The world had become so extreme and chaotic and cruel that I wanted to engage with this idea that I was able to infuse my work with love and kindness. It sounds like such an embarrassing cliche, but it’s true. The only thing within my power was to shout and scream and rage and rant, but I already tried that with No Gods No Masters. Nobody listened to what I thought was very clear messaging on that record. So I felt I had to put out into the world the spirit I wanted to see in the world. You know: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Anything I put out into the world from now on has to be dripping with love. It has to be dripping with kindness. That’s a monumental shift in my thinking. I’ve never thought along those lines before.

When I was young, I was contemptuous of love, I made the mistake of thinking that love was some kind of cheesy Hallmark card. As I’ve gotten older and more challenged by circumstance, lost more friends, seen my friends bury their children, I’ve started to become aware of all the different kinds of love, all the different facets of love that exist in the world that I’m able to tap into, and the least of all of that is romantic love. Romantic love is important and wonderful if you’re lucky enough to enjoy it. But so too is the love of your community, the love of nature, the love of animals, the love of your neighbors, your band, the list is endless. I found that very helpful, a spur for me whilst making this record at a time when I was physically and emotionally depressed.

Were mental health issues considered a sign of weakness previously?

Oh, god, yeah. I grew up in the ’70s, and nobody ever talked about mental health, ever. When I first moved to America, I didn’t believe in therapy or psychiatrists or any of that stuff. It was like a foreign language to me, because it hadn’t been part of my upbringing at all. Then I got to Los Angeles, and everybody had a therapist. I was really shocked. As I’ve gotten older, I realize I actually think it’s fantastic that we have developed language surrounding mental health issues. Some of the stigma has been removed from our culture, which is fantastic too.

We all have to be a little careful that we don’t put too much weight on normal levels of sadness, or completely negate the natural fluctuations of the human mind. We have to be careful that we don’t assume that means we are mentally unhealthy. It’s part of a healthy mind to have moments of deep sadness or depression or anger. Negative emotions are necessary and of vital importance to our wellbeing as human beings. If you’re constantly in a state of perpetual happiness, there’s something very wrong.

It’s natural for the mind to wander and flirt with dark ideas and dark thoughts. It’s part of being human and part of helping us understand others and helping us prepare for the inevitable challenges that occur in every lifetime. Nobody is going to be born and die and in between have nothing but great experiences. That’s just ludicrous.

Obviously, extreme depression, that’s something that needs to be medicated. But if you’re just feeling a bit down for a couple of days, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

Where you are now gives a very different perception of you from early Garbage days.

When I emerged in the ’90s, I was painted by the media in such a way that I did not recognize myself—particularly the British music papers. The way I was spoken about was astounding. I feel like I’ve been trapped in that characterization for my whole career. This happens to a lot of women in the music industry. We get characterized and shoved into these little boxes, and we’re never allowed to escape them. I don’t identify with who I was in the ’90s at all, and I’m absolutely uninterested in being that person. 

It’s frustrating to be an artist for 30 years—longer because I was an artist before Garbage. I’ve been in bands for 40 years. To be stuck in this role that has been assigned to me, I find it very frustrating and tiresome. Nothing I can do about it. I just have to keep making music,  be a writer, be a creative. Every now and again I get lucky enough to talk to an amazing journalist who’s willing to let me redefine myself.

From what I understand, it sounds like you have a great support group in “The Coven.”

[The Coven] are a bunch of women who make music and have been very successful at it, and we share a certain life experience that nobody else we know has. We shoulder certain responsibilities and expectations and disappointments that are our common experiences that bind us to one another. We have provided a lot of comfort and support to one another, in an industry that is so unkind to all artists, but particularly to women,

It feels like that for women in the media as well. There is no room for aging.

That is a message broadcast in our society to women to disempower them entirely. Society fears an empowered woman. As women who are past the point of enthralling the male gaze, you’re free to start learning about the world you engage with. I don’t think we’re stupid to think that we might be punished for our age. I think women are continually “punished” for aging in ways that our male contemporaries are not.

The membrane that we imagine exists between our youth and our middle age is paper thin. If women accept their power and accept the fact that they are not objects, they are not things to be looked at, they are not things to be fucked and things to be admired and fetishized, once women accept that’s not their role, you can then accept your power as a human being on Earth.

If you’re not looking for praise for the way you look or your ability, then those things cease to be powerful. They cease to be relevant. The freedom that allows in your thinking and your existence on Earth is astounding, because you’re no longer looking for affirmation. You’re no longer looking for permission. You’re no longer being obedient. You’re no longer keeping yourself small. You can start to spread, take up space, be as loud as you want to be. The more women realize how liberating it is, the better.

I’m at this point in my life where I’ve never felt more free. I’m relieved to be stripped of my so-called physical agency.  The whole concept of our youth is attached to these ideas of “attractiveness,” whatever that fucking means. It means nothing. Some stranger thinks you’re pretty. Who gives a fuck? Who gives a fuck if you walk in a room and nobody’s looking at you, but they’re looking at some young woman in a short skirt. Who really, truly gives a fuck?

It’s based on this idea that, as young women, we think there is only room for one alpha female who will snatch the biggest, strongest warrior, and therefore we will be guaranteed food and shelter for the rest of our lives. Age-old conditioning that we’re still buying into. Those days are long gone. The quicker women realize it, the better, freeing themselves from expectations that somehow we’re supposed to look sexually potent at all times. Our survival depends on that. And if we’re not, we’re practically goners.

You’ve pointed to 9/11 as being a pivot point where strong women in music were silenced. 

This actually fucking happened to us: We were told they would only play one woman on alternative radio at the time, and we were not that band. Whether people want to accept that or not is up to them. But I’m telling you, this is what happened to us. It’s not an observation. It’s not a theory. It’s a fact. If you look back and study that period in music, you will see the statistics speak for themselves.

It seems that’s still the case in alternative rock.

Because pop music has dominated the mainstream, and the mainstream is fixated on the song, the culture seems no longer interested in the artist. They’re interested in the biggest, most powerful, most commercial, mainstream success. What can generate the most money? That’s the fixation on the song and not the artist. It becomes a popularity contest, as opposed to creative perspective or artistic endeavor or artistry.

Musical consumption is defined by algorithms. These algorithms require the music to sound a certain way. The BPMs, the production, the vocal sound, they all have to apply to an algorithm to appear on a playlist in order to reach the listener’s ears. It’s wild and weird.

It’s different for each individual listener, but I think a lot of people make a decision about the kind of sound they like and they like being fed that same sound. I am not that person, and our band is not that way. We want to try different stuff and we don’t want to keep honing the same vein over and over again. We don’t want to keep writing our first record. But that causes complications with the algorithm nonsense. It’s the same for a lot of bands that have more esoteric leanings.

There is a shift toward genuine authenticity rather than contrived, marketable “authenticity.”

Spotify allegedly creates artists and bands themselves to not have to pay any royalties. They can just create songs. Once you start that, then people automatically gravitate towards the authentic. Whenever things start to sound completely homogenized, the desire for authenticity rises. That’s what we’re currently seeing over the last couple of years into 2025. All of a sudden, there is an appetite for the strange and the underground and noise and heaviness again. We’ve been drowned in a certain mainstream pop sound for so long, people are a little tired of that and are suspicious of it too.

In one of the many articles I read to prepare for our interview, you said, “I don’t know if I’ve gotten to the point where I love myself,” which made me a little sad, but then, I thought, “Wait, do I love myself?”

I hate this whole thing about you having to love yourself. I hate it. I’m the last person you should talk to about self-love. I don’t even understand it. I think it’s so dangerous to feel so smug and good about yourself that you’re not going to challenge yourself and criticize yourself, and make room for the fact that you can fucking hurt people and you’ve failed and you make mistakes. This whole idea about loving yourself, I don’t get it. I really don’t. It’s awful. I can’t bear the thought of getting to the point where I say, “I really love myself.” I don’t even understand that statement. I don’t even know what it means. Do I guard myself? Yes. Do I respect myself? Yes. Do I put up with bullshit? No, I do not. There’s boundaries I have to protect myself. But using the phrase, “I love myself,” what kind of statement is that?

I’m not criticizing anyone who does love themselves. I’m just saying I can’t get to that place, and I’m not entirely sure I want to. People would argue you can criticize yourself and still love yourself, and I get that, but I don’t know if I want to say the words out loud: I love myself. That feels weird. It doesn’t feel good to me. I respect myself, and I am grateful I am alive, and I’m aware I’ve enjoyed extraordinary privilege and joy and love and excitement. I’ve had a bountiful life and I love that. But I love myself? I don’t know.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

One evening in the spring of 1985, as we were preparing our second issue (having, initially, seriously, forgotten we had to do that, so were now scrambling), I walked into Art Director George DuBois’s office and he was talking to a skinny, fresh-faced young man. “Look at these,” said George, handing me some paintings. I thought they were fantastic, such cool, colorful visuals of almost ethereal and faceless characters. We bought the rights to one for $50 to illustrate an article in the issue. We were the first magazine to publish Mark Kostabi.

Flash forward 40 years — if one can flash forward 40 years — and Mark is one of the most famous and successful painters on the planet, his big works sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and even small canvases go for tens of thousands. He’s been exhibited in major art museums all over the world, and had countless coffee table books published, some of which you need a really sturdy coffee table for. And he once did a Guns N’ Roses album cover.

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You were one of the bad boys of the art world in the mid-‘80s, along with Keith Haring and Basquiat. Did you know them well? 

I knew them equally well. Maybe Basquiat a little more, though my art was more compared to Haring’s at the time because we both made simple line drawings of faceless figures. 

In 1982, Alex Schwartzman at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery suggested I contact Keith. I visited him in his lower East Side studio. I showed him my line drawings and obviously he liked them because he recommended me to his dealer, Tony Shafrazi. 

Tony liked to talk, a lot, as he still does. He told me art world stories and started to sell my self-published books of line drawings. Keith would show up with a new stack of Sumi ink drawings on large sheets of paper. They were selling for $900 each, the same types of drawings that currently sell for between $250,000 to $500,000 each. 

I never became good friends with Keith. His then-collaborator Angel Ortiz, a.k.a. Little Angel, said it was because I didn’t do drugs and therefore not welcome in the group. Later, when I started getting a lot of press, Keith strangely turned on me. Maybe it’s because he never learned how to blend with oil paints and felt technically insecure as a painter.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was different. He never learned how to blend with oil paints either. But his understanding of mid-century painting was rich, and he knew how to intuitively utilize the composition and experimental techniques of Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, early Larry Rivers and Karel Appel with graffiti sensibilities to create a powerful visual identity. 

In his teenage years, his art was not unlike typical comic book-inspired, high school surrealism, but he transformed into an extremely “art smart” contemporary painter, now considered equal to Picasso and Van Gogh in art market value. 

When I visited his studio in 1986, while I was watching him paint, I made a drawing of him. When he saw my drawing, he asked me if I “always paint baldies” and then proceeded to add dreadlocks to my drawing of his bald head. He had dreadlocks at the time, but, interestingly, he used to be a skinhead.

You’ve always been a firm advocate that Warhol was a great painter, and I’ve never understood why. Why?

Two of my favorite artists, Caravaggio and Andy Warhol, have one thing in common: in a museum, where their work is included with their contemporaries, they always blow away all the other artists. 

For example, go to the Vatican museum and in the large gallery where hangs Caravaggio’s The Raising of Lazarus, no other painting comes close in visual painterly sophistication. Same with Andy Warhol. In an installation along with other mid-century modern greats, Warhol’s wall power immediately dominates and makes everyone else look overworked or too sincere. Plus, as a painter who understands principles of painting, Warhol had a way of incorporating all those principles — chiaroscuro, sfumato, rhythm, surprising variety within rhythm, irony, historical significance and other things that are hard to explain with words, but painters understand. The best of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, De Kooning are equally great but Andy had a genius way of making it look so easy.

How do you see AI impacting the art world? 

I am all for AI. I use it frequently, especially to provide titles for my paintings. The verbal prompts need to be good to get the title. 

I have tried using AI for visual composition, but things usually come out too distorted. This will improve in the future. For now, I’ve learned if I use my imagery and ask AI to generate different backgrounds, it works. 

If AI eventually develops and obliterates the human race, the human race probably deserves it. 

When you started out, did you imagine that one day you’d be one of the most famous artists in the world, (and how much of that do you think is down to our publishing you in 1985?)

Since I was a teenager, I’ve always had as a goal to become a famous artist, so most of my life decisions have been in support of that. Certainly being published in SPIN in 1985 elevated me to a new national level of exposure, and it helped a lot. And I am eternally grateful and glad to be back!

Aren’t you and the [recently deceased] Pope BFFs? You’re like, always with him.

Well, that’s nice of you to say, but it’s not true. I only met him once, but I’m always with him in the photo of us.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

As I pull up to Sunny War’s small, red and black Craftsman bungalow, the last remnants of the 4 inches of snow that fell earlier in the week are melting under the blue, cloudless sky over her historic Glenwood neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

She invites me in to sit at her small dining room table. A record player sits on her filled, two-tiered vinyl cabinet. A spool of Christmas lights are on the desk behind where she sits. An eclectic collection of art and posters hang on what seems like every square inch of wall in the house, along with a banjo. 

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Sunny — born Sydney Lyndella Ward — is shy, soft-spoken, and doesn’t make a lot of eye contact. Which is not what I expected from someone who writes lyrics like: 

All the words I take with a grain of salt / Cos I know you’re fake, but it’s not your fault / Sucking dick for a dollar’s not the only way to hoe

She is wearing black leggings and a black hoodie, sleeves pulled up to reveal several arm tattoos, and a silver chain around her neck. She was born in Nashville, she tells me, but moved to Los Angeles when she was 12 with her mom and stepfather. She moved to Chattanooga almost three Christmases ago. This house belonged to her grandmother, then her father before he passed away. 

“He was a hoarder, so we had to clean really intensely,” she tells me, almost mumbling. “And then there was a lot of water damage, and then I had to replace the roof and I had to start getting the foundation raised.” 

She wrote three of the songs on her new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress, in this house — “Walking Contradiction,” “No One Calls Me Baby,” and “Ghosts.”

The record, which follows her breakout Anarchist Gospel, was released on February 21 and features Valerie June, John Doe of X, Crass’ Steve Ignorant, Tre Burt, and Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs. Her music, as she describes it, is a blend of folk, alternative, and blues.

“Ghosts” has a particularly interesting story behind it. Sunny had been living in her father’s house — which had no power — for about a year and was broke. She was basically squatting, she says. “It was winter time. I didn’t have gigs until spring.” 

She started hearing voices and was convinced she was being haunted by her father. So she wrote a song about it. 

When she finally got the house inspected, she was told it had a gas leak. “I was being gas-poisoned the whole time I was living here,” she says. 

“So, the house wasn’t really haunted?” I say. 

“No, there was just a gas leak and I was going insane. I was chain smoking in here too. So a lot of the songs that I wrote here, I was just in a weird state of mind.”

After hearing about her time in Los Angeles, though, this story was somehow not that surprising. 

As a kid, Sunny loved Mötley Crüe but quickly became obsessed with Bad Brains, Crass, X, and other punk bands. She started running away from home at 14, hanging out with “gutter punks,” as she describes them, on Venice Beach, busking along the boardwalk. Then she discovered alcohol. 

“I would be missing for three days and then my mom would call the cops and say I was a missing child. And then I would end up back home,” she says. “That was the first time I tried crystal meth with some older people in a hotel room and then later, I started doing heroin.”

By the time she moved to San Francisco at 16, she was completely strung out and stayed that way for three years. When she was 19, she was arrested and stayed in jail for a year. “I think that pretty much saved me somehow,” she says. 

After she got clean, she recorded her first album, Worthless, in 2014.

Over the next few years, her following grew as she played shows and released five more independent albums before signing with New West Records and releasing Anarchist Gospel in 2023. Since then, she’s toured with Mitski, Iron & Wine, John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, and — through a special request by Bonnie Raitt — appeared on Austin City Limits. 

Since she’s been in Chattanooga, she’s played around town, testing out the local music scene, playing bluegrass and punk at some open-mic nights at Cherry Street Tavern. 

As I leave, I think about her song, “I Got No Fight” off Anarchist Gospel:

Will I survive the war inside my head? / Tossing and turning in my lonely bed

Been up all night waiting for day to come / I want it over long before it’s done

I got no fight, I got no fight, I got none

I got no fight, no fight, I got no fight, I got none

I see the opposite: Sunny War is a fighter, and I have a feeling she’ll survive whatever comes her way.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Jazz trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire has a recurring theme in his music: owls. In December 2023, he released the Grammy Award-nominated Owl Song, and his latest, just released and extraordinary record, honey from a winter stone, includes a track called “Owled.” His compositions are rich and complex, but the owl thing begs further inquiry… 

“Maybe 15 years ago I was somewhere in Eastern Europe, and we were going to dinner before a gig,” he recalls. “There was this man with an owl on his shoulder, but I didn’t think anything of it. We’re walking and all of a sudden the owl turned its head and looked straight in my eyes.

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“I stopped and we were just staring at each other. From that moment, I said, ‘Oh, whatever that thing is, I’m connected to it.’ From then on, I could feel the owls in nature. I’m really connected to them.” 

Akinmusire built a studio in the back of his house and every once in a while an owl will perch in the tree above it as he records. However, the emotive power behind his music is anything but owl-like still. Beginning with the lead single, “muffled screams,” and ending with “s-/Kinfolks,” honey from a winter stone swells with dark, lingering notes — sometimes loud, sometimes soft — accented by improvised lyrics from fellow Grammy nominee Kokayi, who sprinkles hip-hop prowess across the project. 

For Akinmusire, the album touches on the struggles he faces as a Black man in America and the resilience he has developed as a result. 

“It’s about contrast,” he added. “I imagine that the stone is gray, dewy and wet, and there’s this golden, almost luminescent drop of honey on top. It’s also this idea that I’ve been exploring for a while now in my music and in my art: the middle. I’m always trying to put things that are seemingly polar opposite really close together. 

“In the next few years, I’m going to be part owl and part lion. There’s an urgency building inside of me that I haven’t felt since my teenage years, maybe early 20s. I just feel like roaring.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

In the 1980s, David Lowery co-founded and fronted the alternative band Camper Van Beethoven and composed its best-known song, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” In the ‘90s, he founded and fronted the nearly mainstream Cracker and co-wrote that band’s alternative smash “Low.” Robert Christgau once called him a “major wiseass.”

But in conversation, Lowery comes off more like the 64-year-old, 20-years-sober, rocker-turned-university-music-business-professor (at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business) and longtime, legally savvy musician-rights advocate that he is. 

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Recently, he has overseen the deliberately semi-definitive two-CD (or three-LP) 24-song anthology Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective (Cooking Vinyl), for which he and the band went on a 14-date tour. In 2025, he’ll oversee a similar compilation drawn from the solo catalog he has been amassing on Bandcamp since 2020. If to call him a “Renaissance man” is an exaggeration, it’s not a huge one. 

SPIN: Does Alternative History represent a final word or wiping the slate as preparation for something new?

Well, it’s definitely not a “final word,” but financially it is pretty challenging to make a new Cracker album. 

Why?

It’s not like we can make a laptop record. Cracker needs to go into a studio. So it’s kind of an expensive proposition. I would hope that we make another record. But the current monetization of music doesn’t match the way we work.

“Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself,” is Alternative History’s final track. I read you didn’t complete it until Virgin rejected your Countrysides album.

I had the music, yeah. But I don’t think the song would’ve been called “Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself.” 

It’s like the “My Ding-a-Ling” of Cracker’s oeuvre. 

It’s actually kind of the reverse of that. The double part of the entendre is buried rather than being forward. You’re like “Oh, wow! What’s this song?” And then you listen to it, and it’s like this whole story is about giving somebody a popsicle that’s from the record company (laughs). Anyway, it’s in the tradition of a kiss-off song to a record label, so it requires a certain amount of vulgarity.

Part of Alternative History is to provide a history of the band that goes counter to how most people listen. Most people, if they find Cracker, are just going to go down the rabbit hole of an algorithmic playlist, which is going to be weighted towards the old stuff. So this was sort of a counter-algorithm project.                            

“Almond Grove” you’ve said is the song you’re proudest of having written.

Yeah, I think it tells a story well. It’s kind of a tear jerker. I also think everybody’s parts are damn near perfect, everything from Thayer Sarrano’s backing vocals to the Johnny [Hickman] guitar lick to the weeping pedal-steel solo — when it goes to the B section in the solo — everything’s almost perfect. And it’s very minimalist in a way. Nobody plays more than they need to.           

At the opposite end of the spectrum is “Gimme One More Chance,” which confirms the theory that there has never been a bad rock ‘n roll song whose title begins with “Gimme.”

(Laughs) You know what’s funny about that song? For the original version that’s on Greenland, we had David Immerglück from the Counting Crows, who also played with Camper Van Beethoven, playing some pedal steel and bass. And he’d just found these cassettes of himself when he was like 14 or 15, learning to play guitar. These were guitar riffs. So he’s playing them as a joke and laughing. But we were like “That’s really good!” So the riff to “Gimme One More Chance” is literally a riff from the mid-’70s that resurfaced.

What’s the compilation of your Bandcamp solo albums?

It’s called Fathers Sons & Brothers, and we’re shooting for May. It’s going to come out the same way that Alternative History did: a three-LP, two-CD set, and it’s going to go up on streaming services. It’s 28 tracks. And some of the stuff is re-recorded and fleshed out with a full band.                                                                       

The most recent of those albums is 2023’s Vending Machine, the title track of which begins with you “passed out underneath the desk of the publisher of SPIN magazine.” 

That’s right. We went to some SPIN after-party on the [2005] Modest Mouse/Camper Van Beethoven tour, which was pretty drunken and debauched, a lot of drugs, stuff like that. I remember it being like four or five in the morning and the band guys getting me. They were like “We couldn’t find you!” I had gone in the office of SPIN magazine’s publisher and gone to sleep under the desk. 

In the rest of the song, you describe immersing yourself in what sounds like Alcoholics Anonymous.   

I was like “All right. I have kids. I really don’t want to be this guy and live that way anymore.” So I go to the AA meeting that’s behind my studio in Richmond. It’s like “How do I get started?” And the first thing — it’s largely a black AA meeting, which I didn’t realize, but nobody seemed to care — and they were like “Well, do you believe in God?” And I was like “I don’t know.” And they go “OK.O.K. Well, your higher power is the vending machine then. You’re going to pray to the vending machine. You’re going to ask all these things from the vending machine.” What I didn’t realize was that this was a way that the old-timers would identify people privately and quietly to the other members, the other old-timers who were non-believers. 

Another Vending Machine song is “Fat Little Babies.” How many of those have you and your wife brought forth?

Two, although they’re young men now. Being a father is one of the best things in my life, although it’s not without its challenges, especially when you’re raising teenage boys and on the road so much. They’re like race cars with no brakes, impulse wise. I talk about that in “The Giving Tree Father,” which is another song on Vending Machine. But, yeah, it all worked out the way it was supposed to.            

Did their musical interests have any noticeable influence on you or yours on them?

Well, for young men, Green Day is some sort of a gateway drug into rock music. They went directly from Green Day into indie garage rock. My older son is into really edgy underground music that spans everything from the ’50s to now. He listens to the avant-garde shit. Recently, I found my old Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica. I go “You know what? You’re the one who’s going to understand this record, so I’m giving it to you.” He was like “I can’t believe you have an original vinyl copy of Trout Mask Replica!” Of course, he knew it, right?

Does your Camper Van Beethoven or Cracker status earn you any cred in your sons’ eyes?

What’s funny is I know a lot of the people that they’re listening to. And at one point, when my younger son was probably about 11, I started to tell a story about somebody that they were listening to — my personal story of interaction with them or something that we’d done together — and he cuts me off and goes “Dad! These stories that you have, these are very important stories, and I’m sure these are things that you should be proud of. But it kind of takes the magic away for us” (laughs). I was like “You fucking little hipster!” I didn’t say that to him, but you know what I mean? I was just like “God! This is what I get!”

Has being a rock star made it easier for you in the classroom?

No. Most of my students don’t know anything about the bands that I was in. And when they do know, it’s because their parents are big fans.        

You say that you’re “liberal, not progressive.” What’s the difference?

I think I’m more centrist than a lot of people. Sometime over the last eight or 10 years, a lot of people I’m around — you know, the entertainment circles and academia — lost the thread on what the Democratic Party did really well, which was support a robust safety net and have free markets providing a lot of our wealth. And I also think we — the Democratic Party — made a mistake being sort of the anti-free-speech party, being so statist, and not appreciating the things that free markets have given us. 

But I’m also not as political as I used to be.

What in your background prepared you to lecture on the music business?

My training was math and a little bit of computer stuff, and that kind of overlaps with science and some economics and finance. So I had some sort of chops to teach these classes, but mostly I learned a bunch of things about business, accounting, net present value, and risk-and-rewards stuff in the music business. So there was a class that came open at the University of Georgia, and I’d done a couple of guest lectures in it, and they literally needed, at a few months notice, to get a new teacher for this class. So they gave it to me, and I redesigned it. And then they kept giving me more classes, so I became a professor.         

What long-term threats or benefits do you see AI posing in music and education? 

When my students turn in something that they used AI for, it stands out like a sore thumb, especially if you know your students. So they don’t really get away with it with me. And I think that it’s going to harm a bunch of students who are not autodidacts and are not curious about learning about the world. 

What about music?
It’s like a friend of mine said, “Every song I hear written by AI sounds like it was written by my neighbor’s golden retriever” (laughs). It’s pleasant to look at, you know? It’s kind of nice. But there’s nothing there.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

I met Nile Rodgers as we were putting the first issue of SPIN together. We were introduced by our mutual (and still) friend Robert Drake, the great sound engineer. We became instant buddies. We later discovered we were born on the same day, in the same hospital, St. Vincent’s in lower Manhattan. Three years apart, but, still… 

Nile is that rare musical genius who never stops creating, innovating, never resting on his now considerable pile of laurels. When he’s not making his own music, he’s producing others and half his credits would be double almost anyone else’s. He’s produced hit records for a Pantheon of greats from Diana Ross, David Bowie and Madonna to Sister Sledge, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, Laurie Anderson, The Thompson Twins, and Southside Johnny. 

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Take a dart and throw it at music history and you’ll probably hit an album, or chart topping song, produced or written by Nile. And it’ll be great.

He is not a formula guy. He has the best ears (and probably, depending on how one might be able to classify this) the best fingers in music, from his distinctive bass playing to working the mixing board.

He grew up in a racially mixed and intellectually charged home in New York’s Greenwich Village in the ‘50s, in the neighborhood and time of the Beat Generation, Bob Dylan playing on Bleecker Street, and rock ‘n roll and hippiedom flowering simultaneously in that uniquely progressive, nourishing environment. 

In 1972, at 20 years old, he co-founded, with Bernard Edwards, The Big Apple Band, which you haven’t heard of but which became Chic, which you very much have heard of. Chic defined the sophisticated side of disco but it’s a testament to their musical excellence that they are not defined by disco, despite having one of the ultimate hits, “Le Freak”, that was number one on the disco charts — and the R&B and pop charts at the same time.

Recently Nile hooked up with the luxury group Aman to create Amanyara, a villa resort in Turks and Caicos that is an exquisite accommodation and state-of-the-art recording studio.

“I went to Amanpuri, the one in the horrible disaster with the tsunami, in the early days. As soon as I walk onto the property, I see David Bowie and Michael Hutchence. I’m like, OK, I guess I can get into this. After three or four days, I’m bored to tears. All of our girlfriends were having the time of their lives.

“I said to Adrian Zecha, who started Aman, can I build an Aman with a recording studio? The people who can afford it are typically rock stars. He went, ‘No, don’t you understand? The word Aman means peace. You’re not supposed to come and work.’ I was like, ‘Adrian, we can’t help it.’ You say to yourself, I got to work to keep affording this. It’s just our work ethic. Anyway, it’s taken me 21 years to finally finish this.”

Morgan Freeman once said on 60 Minutes, “I don’t want Black History Month. You don’t have a White History Month.” He felt Black History was being ghettoized. How do you feel?

I sort of agree with him because the fact is that, to me, history is history. Black history is just history. 

A year ago, I was in Davos, and I heard people talk about the relevance of indigenous wisdom. It was really interesting because the hundreds or thousands of years of doing things a certain way was knowledge that hadn’t necessarily migrated to the classrooms. I think that Black History Month is weird. It sort of makes it like we should only talk about our achievements for 28 days and, leap year, 29 days. 

The Irish stole the banjo. The banjo is an African instrument, but when the slave ships came to Ireland, because that was part of the triangle, they would take the banjo, so Irish people knew how to play the banjo.

It’s just human history.

Why is America still racist?

It’s a very difficult question to answer because I come from a family where, basically, in my immediate family, I’m the only one who’s chocolate-colored. My mom called me Pudding Pie, like chocolate pudding. It got contracted to Pud. 

When we used to take family pictures, they would see me. I would stand out, and they would say, he’s the only spot in the lot. Some of the people in my family were passing for white, even wrote white on job applications.

The slave owners that owned my family on my mother’s side were Irish and had plantations in Georgia. Of course, they have sex with the slaves. As you know, sometimes certain genes are dominant. Many of my family members really look white. 

My great-grandmother always told her children to marry light because you’d be more accepted, not only by whites but by Blacks. When I was at the top of my career in the early part of my career and Chic was really happening, I remember going to parties on Martha’s Vineyard and people would stop me at the door just because of my color. I was like, whoa, what’s this? Then, thank God, some girl that I was dating would say, “He’s the guy from Chic, let him in.”

When I finally signed my deal with Diana Ross and Berry Gordy, Gordy initially did not believe in my work. I thought, finally, I’m with a Black company. This is going to be awesome. Berry was like, “This is not a Motown record. This is not a Diana Ross record.”

I said, “But Mr. Gordy, it’s just not an old Diana Ross record. It’s a new Diana Ross record.” 

My attorney and my two brothers, who don’t look super Black, and I were telling stories of how many times either cops or random white guys with guns would stop us and ask us questions that we knew our lives depended upon. 

I was producing a jam band around the time Phish and all those guys were becoming popular. Their headquarters was in Vermont, a big college town. They gave me directions, this is before GPS. After driving for hours, the road signs started coming up in French. I said, I’m going to Quebec or Montreal. What’s happening here? I must have missed a turn. I was running out of gas, and I see the picture of the pump the next exit. 

I go into this gas station. Now, my car is $100,000. It’s ridiculous. It’s yellow. I put my credit card in and the truck was filling up. As soon as I walked into this convenience store, obviously the woman pushed the panic button. I never even said a word to her because I was tired and I have diabetes. I was going back to the refrigerated section to figure out which soft drink I was going to get.

I got this huge, 28-gallon gas tank. I’m just taking my time looking at the stuff and these two cops walk in guns drawn, and they’re telling me to get on the ground. 

I don’t steal, I don’t rob. I don’t hurt people. That’s just not who I am. My parents socialized me to be a nice guy, to care about people. I’m a grunge hippie. I’m a tree hugger. I’m thinking, they can’t possibly be talking to me. I look to the back to see who they’re telling to get on the ground.

All of a sudden, I realize they’re talking to me. The last thing I’m going to do is get on the ground. I’m thinking, if I’m going to get shot, they’re going to shoot me anyway. If I get on the ground, I’m really at their mercy. I calculate this all in a microsecond, because this kind of thing has happened to me many times in my life. The way that I usually get out of it is I use some absurd polysyllabic word that they have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. They think, oh, we don’t know what we’re getting into. I say something to make them laugh.

I turned around and I said, “Officers, you want me to get on the ground?” I was not drunk or high. I put on my best New York accent. I says, “So before I do so, would you like me to drop” — I knew this would get them — “the Diet Mountain Dew or the Diet Dr. Pepper?” 

As soon as they heard the words diet, OK, he’s conscientious. He’s not eating pork chops or watermelon or whatever. Just whatever stereotypical thing they had in their head when they just saw a Black man. Now, they didn’t take into consideration that the car that was filling up was $100,000. They didn’t take into consideration that the only way it could be being filled up is either I had to put in a credit card or pay the woman.

Time they got there, she clearly wasn’t afraid. So the temperature started to normalize, and they started to get cool. They gave me a police escort to the town and to the college all the way there.

Why is America racist? I don’t know. I think you would be better off asking a white person.

The kids who are bullies, tougher than you, pick on you, those same guys, when I made it and became the local hero in Little Italy, [in New York City], they’re all like my boys now. They’re like, “Man, how you doing?” I’m like, “What? You’re the guy who used to chase me every day.”

They never caught me. They never beat me up. They tried, but they just couldn’t. I was a very fast runner.

I think it’s the fading sunset of white dominance in America. When we were growing up, it was white America and everybody else was a minority. Today, white people are either statistically or very close to statistically the minority.

Right, but Bob, let me just stop you for a second. That may be true as far as numbers are concerned. Every single time I go to a new city and I see skyscrapers, I go, is there one building in this town that’s owned by a Black person or a woman? Every city has skyscrapers. Maybe white people at some point will be outnumbered, but as Chris Rock pointed out, white people are going, “We’re losing the country. We’re losing the country,” — then who the hell is winning?

My biological father is obviously Black, but the father who raised me was Jewish. He was a heroin addict and a beatnik, and he was cultured and he was brilliant and he was loving. He wanted to adopt all my mom’s children — all my brothers are half brothers. They all come from different men. I call it variation on a Mormon theme, because she’s the woman with all the guys.

All of my stepfathers are all buddies. They all like each other, but they were all madly in love with my mom. They were sophisticated. They were cool. They were hip. Being a Greenwich Village kid, I feel one of the luckiest guys in the world 

My stepfather was white so they called him White Bobby because, obviously, there were a bunch of Black Bobbys in town. Everybody was cool. There were tons and tons of queer people, and they were all just cool. It was all part of the Village. It was all part of that tribe. That tribalism was wonderful. They all had different jobs but somehow they would come together and be cool. 

Your lifetime has spanned the life of rock and roll and its music offshoots. When was richest in that span artistically? 

When I came home from school the day that my parents were playing A Love Supreme, and I heard John Coltrane’s voice for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. Coltrane was on this pedestal in my young life, not just because of Giant Steps but “Lazy Bird” and all these incredible tunes. 

When I heard that album, it just knocked me out of my chair. That album was spiritual. It was clever. If I live to be 100, I could listen to that every day.

That’s not me being an intellectual. That’s me being a teenager. That’s me growing up in a household loaded with bebop. My mom loved vocal music, Nancy Wilson, Tina Turner. She loved Nina Simone. She loved Mel Tormé. She used to sit around and go, “God, listen to his intonation. It’s perfect.” She loved Tony Bennett. 

When I was a kid and we’d have show and tell, everybody else would come to school with their GI Joe or whatever. I’d play Nancy Wilson. Kids would look at me, where’s this kid from, Mars? [laughs] 

I grew up with some of the most innovative music and musicians that you could imagine. My love for Eric Dolphy is just unbelievable. I have transcribed Eric Dolphy stuff and played it on guitar, and it never does what Dolphy does, even though I have the notes right. 

I think we all tend to relate to a period in our lives where it had the greatest impression on us. The feelings it brought us into contact with and also the romance around us, be it sexual or whatever. I talk to people that are really young. They feel that same way about hip-hop when they first heard somebody.

It wasn’t like Coltrane had the absolute greatest technical facility because I know other musicians that their chops were ridiculous. Coltrane’s interpretation, his spirituality, that thing, it just got to me. It spoke to my heart.

I felt similarly about the Doors song “The End.” I thought “The End” was the most incredible thing when I heard that. Now, yes, I was on acid. Yes, I get it. When I heard it after I wasn’t on acid, it still was amazing. 

Do you remember John McLaughlin’s version of A Love Supreme?

Oh, come on. John McLaughlin is my man. I played with him quite a few times.

He and I have this sort of thing for each other that we really respect. He understands my harmonic knowledge, and his is probably just as great, if not better, but he understands how I apply it to pop music. 

I was with John Mayer one day, and we decided, OK, you give me a record that changed your life, and I’ll give you a record that changed my life. He gave me Coldplay, and I gave him the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. I never knew that people think that record sucks. I’m like, are you kidding me? It is amazing.

That’s one of my two favorite Stones albums, and maybe my favorite. I thought it was actually way above their level.

It’s way beyond what normal Stones’ records are like.

You’ve said that you welcome new technology after initially having resisted it. You’re very supportive of AI. Having said that, does music made with autotune, or even samplers back in the day, have the same soul as the music made without it?

It does if you’re of the age that that touches your heart. 

To this day, we’re still a live band. I found out from friends who are front-of-house engineers, that probably 95% if not more of all artists [use click tracks], and I’m talking great players, great musicians, people who are my friends that I love, I’ve gone on stage with them, and I couldn’t believe I heard a click track in my head. I was like, “Dude, what’s going on here?” “Well, yes, because the strings and the horns are synced to this and that, and we need that for the bass and the subwoofer.” Wow, if I have a subwoofer, my man’s playing it.

That’s what we do, that’s just who I am. I won’t feel comfortable unless I’m doing that. I’m not saying that I’ve never lip-synced because that was the absolute restriction to be on a television show. They didn’t take a chance and blah, blah, blah. I’m not saying that I haven’t played parties where they want us to be in and out in 15 minutes, so we played a track, but still, guess what? We play live to the track. I actually just invent another part. Because we will never ever not play.

I put a record out with Kygo and I said, “You know what I want to do?” — because he had the EDM lick — “what if I played the same lick but on guitar, and it was all funky sounding. It was my tight bumpy thing and I do it twice, so I’m stereo wide, and you’re in the middle. I think that on an EDM record, no one’s ever heard that before.”

He said, “That sounds cool, let’s try it,” so I played it, and the next day, all I heard was, “That shit is great.” [laughs]

What I appreciate about drum machines and sampling — I love Prince, I couldn’t believe that he could have a hit record and not have bass on it. And he did it twice. The drum machine is an instrument. I wrote a song for Carly Simon, the first time I ever used a drum machine, a song called “Why”. My band was furious, so angry with me, and I said, “Listen to what I did. I turned the whole groove around.” The backbeat is in a different place, and Carly Simon sounds cool on it.

It’s an innovative record, it’s new. It was a way that I could have never made Tony [Thompson] play that, and I only thought of it because I had some new gadget to fool around with. It’s a musical record. It didn’t do anything in America, but in the UK, we play “Why” people completely go bananas. 

I always believe that an artist should have the most colors on their palette that they could possibly have, that’s how I look at technology. 

Did you know that there was a time that every time we made a record, we went out and bought a new piece of gear?

We didn’t even care what it was, or how it worked, we just bought one just because we wanted to see what it could do with our music. The other day I bought a loop machine, which I’ve always thought was ridiculous. I can’t figure out how to use it, it’s killing me. When I finally figured out a little bit of using it, I saw this thing that said reverse and I went, “Reverse?” I turned the loop around, and I went, “Oh shit. Oh my God.”

Then I started playing to it, and it was cool because it was this short backwards thing, like when you hear Hendrix take a solo, and it’s like the whole solo is back but it was just this one little backwards thing in the middle of me playing this funky chuck. I was like, “how cool is that?” 

It was discovery. I was blown away because this was something new that I could make music with. When I first heard “Rapper’s Delight” and them ripping off our song [“Good Times”], I was upset. Then after I sat down with the Shockley brothers, who did Public Enemy, they said to me, “Nile, music is part of us. It’s part of our soul, but we don’t know music the way you know music. We can’t write a symphony. We can’t write charts. We don’t know what the chord changes are, but we got this drum machine that can sample and we can create music with it, even though we don’t know technically what we’re doing. We know it sounds good, and we fool around with it until it sounds good.”

I said, “Oh my God,” and that’s when I started calling it collage art.

Do you feel it’s an honor that people sample your music?

Now, I think it’s a huge, huge honor. I think that because I look at them as artists, that I have to respect their interpretation. Just because it’s not what I would do, doesn’t mean that it’s any less artistic because times change. When I was a kid, I loved Cab Calloway, most of my friends didn’t, but I loved it. Did that make me smarter? No, that’s what I heard. I liked it. It was great. I loved him talking about reefer, man, and my family were heroin addicts, so I got it, and was like, “Whoa, this is awesome.”

Man, you couldn’t do that on a pop record. Let me hear The Temptations sing about reefer, that record will never come out.

They couldn’t talk about smoking weed until maybe a certain time had passed. The thing is that art changes and artists change because the influences around them are different. I played Coachella with Debbie Harry. We had this new collective. It wasn’t the old bebop jazz guys that I grew up with. There were these new people that were using the colors on their palette in a different way, this thing that was called punk rock. Well, I was in a punk band. We were playing punk music before there was something called punk rock. 

We were called Street Punk. It was me, a guy named Charlie Davidmann. I remember going to his house — he lived in a private house, so we could practice. Most musicians in Manhattan, we’d have to go to schools or find some centers. We used to pay off a guy at Brandeis High School so we could play and practice in the high school after the kids were dismissed. 

Everything had to be muted. I used to play underneath my bed. I was playing a flute, and that was loud. That’s how artists develop, which goes back to the beginning of this series of questions, that’s why there shouldn’t be Black Music Month or Black History Month because you’re creating your history all your life, all year long. Based on where you live, based on what the conditions are, if you’re an artist, and it’s inside you, if you’re a writer, and it’s inside you, you’ll be under the covers writing in the dark.

I love it when I’m playing guitar and people think that I’m just playing the same thing over and over again. I remember the first time I heard “Get Lucky” after I played on it. I was in Ibiza, and this DJ said, “Hey, I have the new Daft Punk record. Have you heard it?” I said, “No, I haven’t heard the record finished, but I had a great time playing on it.”

He plays “Get Lucky”. He gives me a guitar and says, “Hey, do you want to play along?” I’m in a room full of people. It could have been embarrassing, but it wasn’t because I loved hearing the finished product, I thought it was great, but everybody kept wondering why I wasn’t playing along. Somebody yelled from the back of the room, “It’s only four chords,” and I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s what you hear, huh?” [laughter]

I always say that my guitar playing is like the right hand of the piano, that’s how I play guitar, so when these guys scream that from the back of the room, I couldn’t help but say, “That’s what the fuck you hear?” You just hear [vocalizing the guitar riff], you don’t hear me going [vocalizing].

That’s on the Daft Punk record?

Random Access Memories, their last record. I’m the only composer who’s got three songs on the album. That’s something I’m pretty proud of.

You said you got so many gold and platinum records you started leaving them at the office.

I honestly say that with a huge amount of humility, and shock, and awe, because I promise you when I was sitting on my bed writing “Everybody Dance”, all I wanted to have was one hit record, and I thought that that would be it. I was so proud because it has jazz chord changes, but the melody is so simple. “Everybody dance doo, doo, doo, doo, clap your hands, clap your hands.” 

I remember when I first started composing for Chic, and I was going and hanging in the old jazz clubs that I used to work in, and Harold Mabern walked up to me one day, great jazz pianist, after I wrote the song “I Want Your Love”, and he patted me on the back. He said, “I hear what you’re doing, brother. I hear what you’re doing.” I felt like I’d arrived.

Can there ever be another Bowie now, a genius like him who had to have such an arc of a musical journey?

Of course. I was in Costa Rica with Deepak Chopra. We were having lunch, and I’m with his whole family, and then he just gets serious for a moment. Deepak says something to me that may be the last thing I think of on my deathbed: “Technology can be beautiful and diabolical, just like people.”

I thought to myself, “He’s absolutely right. I love technology because it does so much.” 

What I meant was, David Bowie paid his dues. He played the pubs, the bars, the clubs, he opened for people, and he developed musically. Today, so much music is subsumed by technology, it starts and ends with technology. 

Once again, art is, I won’t say a victim of time, but a forge of time and the current zeitgeist. 

Who was the most exciting, brilliant, and inventive musician you have ever worked with, and who was second?

The most brilliant musician I ever worked with was my partner, Bernard Edwards, not only because he was such an amazing player, his instincts were incredible. It was unbelievable. He changed my life entirely, changed me from a snobbish jazz guy into a person who wanted to make music for the masses and make people happy. I was just listening to some score I’d written. It’s big orchestral stuff, and I noticed that I write scores like I’m writing songs. I want you to remember them. I want you to be able to sing it. [laughs]

I was listening to this piece of music and honestly, this is not egotistical, this is just factual, I went, “Wow, that’s really good.” [laughs] I had a great experience with this brilliant director, Matthew Vaughn, and we were talking about how films have rhythm, they have timing. 

John Landis did the Michael Jackson Thriller stuff and American Werewolf in London and Blues Brothers and all sorts of great films, and he said to me, “Nile, I always hate it when people say ‘silent movies’. There was never a silent movie.” Whenever you went to see the cinema in the old days, there was somebody in the front of the theater playing music to go with the film. Movies need music, music helps the movie move along.

So who’s the second most inventive and brilliant musician?

Wow, so I just have to say the way they made me feel. 

I used to call Bowie — and he hated this — the Picasso of music. I said, “You don’t look at the world like I do.” But the person who made me feel the most artistic was Peter Gabriel.

We’ve never actually had a real hit together, but everything that we did together was awesome. The first thing was called “Walk Through The Fire” for a film, Against All Odds. It was smoking. Then we did another movie called Gremlins, and I was setting up the microphone and trying to capture the spirit of an album that he had done, take some of that vibe and go to another level. I said, “Hey, Peter, how did you get that vocal sound?” He said, “I just turned on everything in the room.” 

“What do you mean?” 

He says, “Every piece of outboard gear, just turn it all on at one time.” He started singing, and I said, “It sounds like Peter Gabriel!” 

Steve Winwood is another one. I have a series of photos [of] me, Steve Winwood and Todd Rundgren, who’s a damn genius by the way. Unsung hero of rock and roll music and technology, a brilliant, brilliant man. We were doing an album for the photographer, Lynn Goldsmith. It was very arty and really cool, and I loved making records like that. I love making these avant-garde records that actually made a lot of sense. 

I love artists like St. Vincent. Like Bowie. I love people who make records like that. I love Kendrick Lamar. I think he’s amazing. That level of genius, I just adore. 

I remember when I first heard Maxwell singing “This Woman’s Work”, to this day it makes me cry. Two songs that make me cry every time I hear them are “This Woman’s Work” and Luther [Vandross] singing “A House Is Not a Home”. 

I went to Luther’s last concert. I went to ask him to sing on my charity record, which he did.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Earlier this month at the airport, Erasure’s irresistible earworm “A Little Respect” drifted through the departure lounge, subtly lifting the mood of weary travelers. I mention this to Andy Bell, the synth-pop duo’s magnetic frontman, whose third solo album Ten Crowns arrives May 2. He isn’t surprised. After decades of success, Bell is used to hearing his music piped into all kinds of spaces. The joyous spirit of Erasure’s synth-pop has long made it a fixture in the sonic wallpaper of public life.

Bell’s solo work radiates a similar energy, and Ten Crowns is no exception. Recorded in Nashville with producer, remixer, and DJ Dave Audé, the album leans into their shared flair for filling dancefloors. Together they have already notched two No. 1s on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart with “True Original” and “Aftermath (Here We Go).” Ten Crowns builds on that momentum. It’s a high-voltage record shot through with hints of gospel, perhaps absorbed from its Southern surroundings, and from Bell’s own roots.

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Freshly bleached and lipsticked, Bell radiates positivity when we connect. His arms are dotted with sticker-style tattoos, and his mood is as buoyant as his new music. The last time we spoke, it was early in the pandemic and tension hung in the air. (Not between us but everywhere.) Now, the vibe is lighter. Bell knows he’s made a strong album, and it shows.

Bell has been on my mind recently, especially after a visit to the Chateau Marmont to interview Greg Gonzalez of Cigarettes After Sex for SPIN’s March 2025 digital cover story. It brought back memories of my first visit there in the early ’90s, when I interviewed Erasure—wide-eyed, inexperienced, and starstruck. I remember wandering the site, stunned that I was in a place where “real” stars stayed. I tell Bell this, and he laughs: “I didn’t realize what a big deal it was to stay at the Chateau Marmont. We weren’t in the penthouse or anything, but we were there quite a while. I just took it as another hotel.”

He’ll be seeing more hotels soon when the Ten Crowns U.K./Europe tour kicks off May 1. Just before diving into the press and travel whirlwind, Bell and I catch up to talk about the new album and passing the gay icon torch to the next generation.

What makes a song an Andy Bell song versus an Erasure song?

To be honest, I don’t really know. Because [fellow Erasure bandmate Vince Clarke and I have] been going for so long, our 40th next year, we’re symbiotic. Working with Vince, the character has been formed already. In some ways, I’m very open with Vince as far as you can be, but with other people, I feel a bit freer. Because Vince and I are so close, it’s almost like it’s one person writing the songs.

When you’re one-on-one with a producer, it’s like a seductive technique. I feel like you always fall in love with the person you’re working with. But with Dave, because he was a fan as well, I didn’t feel like I had to be on my best behavior and be all correct in the studio. In some ways, I found it easier because it was like a pressure lid was taken off. I’d be sitting on the sofa writing the words after doing the melody, and they flowed quite easily.

How was working in Nashville different for you?

I was a bit scared because of all the churches everywhere. You feel like—not that you’re under surveillance—but you have this feeling of when you’re a kid and you have to go to Sunday school, and that kind of thing. That comes into the music. At that time the elections were underway in the U.S., warming up to it. There was all this vitriol flying around. One of the drag artists had been banned. I was feeling pretty pissed about it, so I just wanted to make a circle for all the people, to be all-inclusive.

Did you have references for the album?

Not really. One of the first songs, “Lies So Deep,” was written as a Whitney Houston–type verse when she made her comeback. I always imagine how other people would sing them. The chorus is what Stevie Nicks might like. Then I thought we really need a ballsy woman to sing on the song with us. We asked Beth Ditto, and she couldn’t do it. We can’t get Alison Moyet because we’d have to write from scratch together. Then Dave suggested Sarah [Potenza]. When she did it, I was like, “Wow, it fits really well.” It’s a song about people getting married. Because you wear a veil when you get married, people are going on about, “They shouldn’t dress up like that, Muslim ladies, because they’re hiding their face and stuff like that.” It’s all these stupid rules everywhere. On the chorus, it’s about getting heart broken and you’ve put this varnish around your heart, and it’s time to crack the varnish off. The heart is part of your breathing apparatus going underneath the sea. I just take things from everywhere and just stitch it up.

You just referenced all female artists.

I was thinking about that last night as well, because I did a playlist for Sirius and it was all female. I’ve always loved female singers. Because I think my own voice is neither male nor female. I’ve been aware of that because we had this class in school where we had to pretend we were being questioned by detectives. It was on those old cassette recorders. When they played the voices back in the classroom, I didn’t even recognize my own voice. I thought, “Who’s that? That sounds like a girl,” and it was me. I had this thing that I was never going to sing male or female, or black or white. I don’t know if that’s true.

I always rehearsed to female singers when I was younger. I had that higher register. My falsetto was never as good as Jimmy’s (Somerville) or nowhere near Sylvester so I’ll sing with Alison Moyet. The female singers just had much more of an influence on me. From the beginning I was in love with the Ronettes, totally head over heels, which led to the Supremes, which led to “Denis” by Blondie, because they were very much that girl band before they had girl bands choruses.

You have a song with Debbie Harry on Ten Crowns. How did that come about?

She had the Hollywood glam look without copying anyone. I would say the only person she was anywhere near was Marilyn [Monroe], which she kind of developed into her backstory a little bit anyway. But I was just totally enamored, which is maybe a gay man’s rite of passage. I bought a packet of hair bleach after seeing her, and bleached my hair all white and went to school with “Debbie” emblazoned across my chest. She’s such a great artist. Another person who I feel like I’ve been listening to my whole life.

I’ve met her quite a few times. The first time she came to see us was on the Red Hot + Blue video set when Vince and I were doing “Too Darn Hot.” She did the track with Iggy Pop [“Well, Did You Evah!”], and David Byrne’s wife was directing our video. They said, “Oh, someone’s come to see you.” I looked around, and it was her coming through the lights. I could not believe that this lady had deigned to come and say hello to this little boy. For me, that’s how she’s been ever since. To have someone like that in music is so refreshing. I don’t have that many friends in music. I would have counted Kirsty MacColl among pals back then, maybe Paul from OMD, but not really that many. We weren’t that close with other musicians.

Why do you think that was?

Maybe you’re too immature and too full of yourself when you’re young. Jealousy is so ugly, and I can’t help myself sometimes. I hate it if ever I see or feel that emotion come over me, because you cannot control it. You can be aware of it, but once as they say it “rears its ugly head”—because it is ugly—you can tame it and you can learn. As your ego gets more under control, hopefully it goes away and you become less concerned. It’s only about comparing yourself to other people. But I was terrible.

We have evolved because there is less emphasis on “winning.” Again, it comes down to jealousy and competitiveness and of course we all want to win. We all want to be the best. But if you’re not the best at something, just admit it. You can’t be the best at everything. Why have you got to be the best? We all have ambition. We all want to be good at doing stuff, but we should be allowed to fail and help people that fail. Don’t demonize them.

I saw on a documentary recently that gay musicians in the ’80s didn’t acknowledge their sexuality or create a community with their peers. What are your thoughts on that?

The ones that hid are the ones that made it. It doesn’t send a very good message to people, because that’s what we do all the time. We reward the people that follow the rules. We reward the people that bow to the authorities. It’s really funny how [trans people] are not allowed to have [their trans gender] on your passport, then here in the U.K. there’s this whole system of names like Lord, Duke, Duchess, Marquess, Viscount, and they’re all made up. It’s not to do with gender, but it’s to do with rank.

I was brought up in a Christian school. Once a term, you went to the cathedral, which was actually really beautiful, the second oldest in the U.K. I loved the hymns. I loved the ceremony. I always go there when I go home. But at the end of the prayer, in the Anglican Church, you always say “Amen,” which means “unto all men.” If you’re not addressing everyone, if it’s not “unto all men and everybody,” then you can’t say “Amen” at the end of a prayer anymore. So don’t say it.

Considering how far gay rights have come, what do you think about the regression we’re experiencing?

It’s all bizarre. The whole thing is bizarre. We’ve already played our part. I’m getting on as well. You want to pass the torch. The torch has already been passed without them even knowing who I am. The kids don’t know who I am, because it’s a generation removed, or two generations removed. I’m not going to go there again and be this frontline person. But at the same time, you want to remind people of historical references and let them know it was a struggle. It always will be a struggle for somebody somewhere. You can’t take things for granted, because your medicine can be taken away overnight.

I asked Olly Alexander how he felt about being a figurehead for the queer community and he said he had a “complicated” relationship with it.

It is a lot to take on. For us, because it was new, it was uncharted territory. For them, the territory has already been charted. We’ve sailed a course. In some ways, it’s a bit more dangerous because they’re sailing without a compass. Or they’ve got a compass, but the storm is such an intentional thing that’s being thrown at them. 

The thing that riles me the most is they’re doing it just for point scoring, whipping up hysteria. To them, it’s a game. To other people, that’s their life.

People certainly remember you. I received a ton of positive feedback when I sent out a newsletter with my 1994 Erasure interview.

In some ways it played into our hands. Because we didn’t get the maximum publicity, because we weren’t played on all the radio stations because of our stance, or because of being out there—for me anyway, that helped us, because it made you more precious. It was word of mouth. It was from nightclubs, which I used to love going to after a show and being in the DJ booth and getting in with the dancers. It was such a great time. Music was more homemade. The fashions were homemade. It wasn’t all branded. By not having the machine totally work, being a cog in there, we were very independent. That made people want to lift you up. That’s what I always want to do with the music and with the shows, is lift people up. With this new record, it’s doing that as well.

When I was a student, I used to work in a retail store with a five-disc CD changer. We always had an Erasure album in there and it used to really liven up the place.

Fantastic! I still get blown away. I live in America part-time. I hear Erasure in the store sometimes, or at the airport, like you said. I think they must have done tests where this music calms people down or puts them in a good mood. They do have it at Whole Foods in Atlanta on a Friday night, which is full of gay people doing their shopping.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.