Karen O, born Karen Lee Orzolek, was twenty-one years old when she took the stage with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time. It was September, 2000, a Sunday night at Mercury Lounge, and they were opening for the White Stripes. The band—Karen, the guitarist Nick Zinner, and the drummer Brian Chase—had practiced together as a trio exactly once. Karen downed four margaritas, drenched herself in olive oil, and stepped into the persona that would catapult the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into the rock pantheon and turn her into a generational icon: a human live wire, snapping and sparking, as acute and raw and responsive as an exposed nerve.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were at the center of the early-two-thousands New York rock revival—a scene, as immortalized by Lizzy Goodman in the book “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” that was dominated by all-male bands like the Strokes and Interpol. The Y.Y.Y.s’ headlong sound—chords as bright and as yearning as the neon tubes in a Dan Flavin installation; precise, explosive drums and guitar; and Karen’s voice, an electric snarl that softens and trembles—has evolved, over four albums, without losing its center. So has Karen’s onstage presence. She became famous for onstage anarchy, swallowing the microphone and spitting full cups of beer into the audience, as captured in “There Is No Modern Romance,” a documentary from 2017. Today, her vibe is less GG Allin, more Freddie Mercury and Debbie Harry.
Karen is now forty-three, married to the British director Barnaby Clay, and the mother of a seven-year-old son. And yet, at heart, she remains a punk with the mannerisms of a restless teen-age boy. She has long talked of a split in her identity, between her shy real-life self and the wild person she becomes onstage. (Goodman has described her as an “exhibitionistic Boo Radley, a warped dervish onstage who disappears after the encore and is rarely seen in real life.”) What connects those two selves is guilelessness, a total reliance on instinct.
When we talked on Zoom, late in the summer, her name popped up as “Karen Clay.” She was wearing a Scorpions T-shirt ripped from shoulder to armpit, and her hair fell across her face in her signature lopsided mullet-shag. She was preparing for the release of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ fifth album, “Cool it Down,” at the end of September, on the indie label Secretly Canadian. Despite clocking in at less than thirty-five minutes, “Cool It Down” has an expansive sweep and is full of a galvanizing mercy. I told her I had spent the previous Saturday on acid in the mountains, listening to the record and crying. We spoke again, at the end of August. These conversations have been condensed and edited.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ last album, “Mosquito,” came out in 2013, ending your contract with Interscope. How did you know it was time to make the new one?
I started to feel itchy to have new material in 2019. We’d been doing these back-catalogue celebratory shows, which were fun—there was no pressure to showcase anything new—but it was feeling a bit like we needed some fresh blood in here. And 2020 was supposed to be a cool year. We were going to headline Pitchfork Festival; we had all these things planned.
Obviously, that and everything else didn’t materialize, and in 2020 we had that shared sense, among other musicians and many other types of artists, of a profound separation from what we do. It dawned on me, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to play live again. I don’t even know when we were going to be able to be in the same room together again. It was sobering, especially because there’ve been times in our career where I was, like, Can I do this anymore? Do I have it in me? Will the muse visit me at all? But, for the first time, this was, Oh, you might not even have the choice.
But then, in 2021, you and Nick got together and started writing.
Once the vaccines were out. I had no idea what was going to happen. We had been through so much emotionally, but we hadn’t processed it. Still, to this day, I haven’t really processed it—this pandemic, and everything that happened before it: having a kid, four years of Trump.
For the first session we usually start with a really innocuous jam session. We, like, go to Nick’s basement and just mess around. You move around the room, play whatever you want—keys, guitar, bass, vocals. You get to twirl around and just tinker on anything. So we were jamming, playing some silly hooks, some super goth stuff, cracking ourselves up. We were giddy to be reconnecting with this process, which is like a lifeline for us. We did a few sessions like that, and pretty soon we decided to break our own rules a little bit. We work with Dave Sitek [of TV on the Radio], who’s produced all of our records, and feels like the fourth member of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I was, like, “I’m going to go through Dave’s folder because he’s got just thousands of pieces of music, and if there’s a piece I like, let’s just write on it.” And one of his pieces turned into “Spitting off the Edge of the World.” We did other new things, too—we’d never sampled anything before, but on “Fleez” we sample the ESG.
And “Burning,” the second single, interpolates Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons.
We’d never allowed ourselves this thing that hip-hop artists have been doing since the start—to nod to other artists, incorporate their work in ours. But, this time, we were just, like, “Let’s do whatever feels good.” And then it happened really fast: lyrics coming through and changing, like, the particulate matter in the room. Literally, it feels like a shift in the ions, like there’s another presence all of a sudden. Sometimes we look at each other, like—it almost feels like we’re not alone, like the two of us aren’t alone anymore. Certain songs that we’ve written in the past, including “Maps,” for instance, were like that.
This album feels like a concise roving around a real emotional center—a hard-earned sense of freedom, a sort of jagged desire for catharsis and collective release. The cover photo is of a woman falling across a clear blue sky, above a pit of flames. When did it feel to you that the album was going to be expressing what it does?
Well, the stakes have never felt higher, right? And souls have never felt more lost, you know? And I think that both of those things stoked the flames in my creativity.
I rely on songwriting, on the language of music, to guide me to my higher self. Because I get as lost as everybody else in my day-to-day. Like, as a person, right now, I’m struggling to keep my head above water. But when I make music it feels like I’m really tuning into a deeper truth—some sort of universal truth, something that’s brutal and comforting. I wanted to dive into that more than I ever had in my creative career. It felt for me, like—this might sound really like I’m bullshitting, like I’m full of myself. Like, you might think, She’s lost her fucking mind. . . .
I just told you I wept while listening to this album on acid for hours on Saturday.
O.K. I was, like, It’s time to step up, Karen. It’s time to channel what the David Bowies and the Bob Dylans and the Lou Reeds are channelling. You have to be a container. You have to be a container for the human experience. I felt like pushing myself into big, sweeping themes more than I would normally be comfortable with. I felt that I needed to feel what I was experiencing reflected back to me. I felt like the stakes were high, and I wanted to answer the call.
You’re referring partly, maybe, to how the first two singles are about climate change. The lyrics—“Cowards, here’s the sun, so bow your heads”—are not metaphorical. It’s hard to do this without being too on the nose, but these songs don’t operate in the “raising awareness” realm. They express the feelings that coalesce around the degrading world: anger, despair, desire, distance.
I think I was trying to access something like a mythological perspective. Like when you think about the Greek gods, and their ambivalence about humans.
But then there’s a very human intimacy, too. You sing, “Mama, what have you done?”
It’s personal, too, of course. As a parent, just like all the other parents, I’m thinking about what our children are going to inherit—how this is not the distant future, how it’s happening in real time. California has been so battered by the climate crisis—you feel it so acutely, the wildfires, the heat waves, the drought.
But what makes the songs work for me is that they were written in a spirit of joy, and a desire for transcendence. Not to escape the situation but to let it out, to express it. I think everybody knows that music is one of those inexplicable vehicles where you can deal with really weighty stuff. Any ineffable feeling, whether it be the end-of-the-world ones, or heartbreak—you were dumped by your boyfriend at seventeen—or whether it’s that you just had a perfect day: you drank sangria and went to the zoo. When we were writing, things flooded out of me lyrically that became climate-crisis-related, but the feeling was that of beauty. Of Nick and I returning to each other twenty years after we started, after feeling that we might not ever get to do it again.
You gave birth to your son in 2015. I wondered how the physical ravages of early motherhood felt to you, compared to your years of injuring yourself onstage. You’d already been through a prolonged grind of sleeplessness, pain, not eating properly, all of that. Did those experiences compare to each other?
I joke about this with my husband because my assumption was, like, I’m a rocker, you know, with this really extreme life style for what, at that point, had been fifteen years. Whatever was going to come with having a child, surely it wouldn’t be as extreme as that. And then it knocked me sideways. I mean, my life had not prepared me in the least. Especially the newborn phase. When you have a child later in life—after you’ve established your career, your relationship—I felt like I was sort of an overachiever in many aspects of my life, and then this seven-pound flesh-thing arrives and I was just, like, I am not passing this with flying colors, man. I really felt like I did not know what I was doing, for the first time in a long time. But that was also the thing that was super cool about it. I was, like, I haven’t had a genuinely, completely new experience in a really long time. Nothing could have prepared me for it.
I’ve always craved maximum-intensity experiences. But then, after having a baby—and I don’t know whether it’s hormonal or circumstantial—the baby has acted as sort of a slow drip of all the dopamine and joy, and the draining difficulty, I used to run after.
How far in are you?
Only two years.
I’d say it’s going to come back. Those cravings. Around age four, and then, especially, when they get close to age six. When they go to school, when they become less dependent on you, those desires for those kinds of highs do return, with a force.
And so, age four, that was 2019 for you—when you started wanting to record new music.
Yeah, man, it’s a process after you have a kid, you know? Just to reclaim your bodily functions, your sense of self. Being a mother, you’re going to be a mother from now on, no matter what happens. You have to reclaim everything else.
When you and Nick and Brian got together to record, did anything feel different?
I would say tears were shed every day that we were together. It felt euphoric, and it felt so, so precious. It was summer, 2021, and there was still so much uncertainty—it felt like you couldn’t grasp it in the way you would’ve before. It felt like it would just slip through your fingers. So, because we were trying to savor the experience, everyone in the band was on best behavior, very much so. We set aside a lot of baggage. I mean, there are moments when it comes up anyway, but there was so much drama in life that we felt that this did not have to include any drama.
And you’re all coming back to this as people who’ve had almost a decade of change in your own lives.
Yeah. Brian’s a father as well. Those guys are incredibly patient with me. If it wasn’t for me, would they be making a record every other year? I think the answer is probably yes. And so, for them, when I do come around, it’s, like, Good things come to those who wait.
This record is the best and possibly the only example of a band that originated in the early-aughts indie-rock scene delivering an exciting record in the current era—iterating their original sound in a genuinely progressive way. I don’t mean to be too essentialist about it, but it doesn’t seem coincidental to me that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the only huge band from that scene fronted by a woman. I wonder if there’s any connection there to you—in the particular kind of humility or bravery or honesty that’s required.
Well, yeah. For one thing, I do not, you know, subscribe to any sense of duty. Which is a thing in the male rock world. It’s like there’s a legacy that’s been established. Even subconsciously, if you’re a dude in a band, you know there’s a map that’s been drawn out by so many rock bands that came before you that you could refer to. You could decide: Which one of those am I? There’s this unspoken—fairly unspoken—expectation, being a dude in a band, that’s, like, you have a good thing going, so keep that good thing going.
But there isn’t a road map for me. Most women in rock bands before me—maybe not even just before me—they were still very much making up the rules as they go along. There’s no net. It does take a lot of defiance. It takes bravery. Sometimes I feel like I’m on the front lines and everyone else is in the barricades being, like, O.K., is it safe to go on yet? Do people like it?
In “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” you talk about an early precursor to Karen O’s emergence being a lip-synch performance of “Wild Thing” at your elementary school, where you dressed up as a boy and put on sunglasses and couldn’t see the crowd, and you just went nuts. I wondered if you remembered being surprised, yourself, by what came out.
It did surprise me, actually. It was so, so out of character. What surprised me the most was probably the adrenaline. It was the first time I experienced that rush, you know? So whatever silly antics I would do for myself, or my parents, or a friend in the privacy and safety of my own home, it just could not compare to the rush of really, really breaking out of your own mold in front of a bunch of classmates that literally—like, their jaws dropped. Like, Who is this person? What is this, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? Like, What happened to Karen?
You grew up in New Jersey—your dad is Polish, your mom is Korean, and you flew back to Korea every few years. How did you understand your racial identity as a kid? Or how did it figure into any conversations about identity that you were having with yourself?
I’m still kind of processing it all, to be honest. Most of my family was Korean, because my dad had no relatives—so it was my dad and a bunch of Korean Americans. But it was also the eighties and nineties, and my family wasn’t really connected to a Korean American community. Culturally, they were sort of trying to fit into American culture more, you know? So I think that was confusing for me. Like, Well, they eat Korean food, they look Korean, they don’t act like Americans per se, but it also feels disconnected from Korea to a certain degree.
Typically, the people I connected to most deeply, most effortlessly, were other half-Asian kids. But the Korean kids at school, not so much, and the white kids, not so much. I tried. It’s one of those funny things—when you’re a kid, you want to fit in, but it didn’t take me very long to realize—by high school, certainly by college—what an asset it was to be half-Korean. I remember taking an East Asian cinema class, and exploring that aspect of myself culturally, because there was so little in American culture that spoke to the Asian or Asian American experience. It was a fucking desert for so long, and I remember just feeling—just waiting, waiting, year after year, for Korea to be on the map somehow, culturally. And now, holy shit. It wasn’t a thing growing up. I saw nothing, almost nothing, that reflected back what I saw when I looked in the mirror, nothing that looked like me.
And now you’re playing Forest Hills in October, with Japanese Breakfast and the Linda Lindas opening. Three rock bands all fronted by Asian women.
This feels totally unprecedented for me. It feels so new. To me, it feels like the world changed overnight—that we can do this thing that didn’t exist for ninety-five per cent of my career. I don’t even think I fully comprehend it, because I live in such a closed-off little bubble myself. To have started a band twenty-two years ago, and then to have inadvertently paved the way for other bands who look like me. It is incredibly life-affirming, and I am dumbfounded.
What music did you gravitate toward when you were little?
The really, really formative stuff was my dad’s mail-order-CD collection—he would get these pretty obscure compilations from the fifties and sixties, doo-wop and girls’ groups, which had a deep impact on me musically, melodically and lyrically, later in my life. But I went through a lot of phases. I went through a nineties hip-hop phase, an alternative-rock phase, a Grateful Dead and Phish phase. Then I got into indie rock, and that’s when I started seeing shows in New York City, because I was right over the bridge.
You’ve said that you took four guitar lessons when you were eighteen, and from there, you’ve written hundreds of songs.
You’d be surprised what you can do with six chords. Pretty much every great song you’ve ever loved was written with those six chords. And I was kind of lazy, too. I knew that if you add a capo into that mix, the world is your oyster.
“There’s no net,” Karen O says, of being a woman in rock. “It does take a lot of defiance. It takes bravery.”
What did your parents think you were going to do when you grew up?
Oh, my God, I have no idea what they thought I was going to do. But I went to film school—I started at Oberlin and transferred to N.Y.U. for film.
Was that more for the film program or to be in the city?
Well, I’d fallen in love with a boy. But also my big brother had made home movies growing up, and I’d idolized him. And Oberlin didn’t have much of a film program, so I thought I would transfer just for a semester and give it a try. But then the band was happening on the side, and that totally blew up and became my career.
When you think about that stretch in New York—the really early days, and then as everything started happening, really fast—what do you see? What bar are you sitting at, what are you doing? What are you worried about? What do you want?
Most likely Mars Bar, the dive-iest of the dive bars—a friend of ours bartended there, and it was almost like a place for squatters. I’d probably be drinking a whiskey sour or a margarita, which became my main thing. And I was boy-crazy, you know? You hear about guys wanting to be in a band because they want to hook up with chicks. I was a little like that myself—I wanted to be in a band so guys would want to hook up with me. But then I was also a prude. Whatever. I think I just wanted to be adored, to a certain degree.
But it was also just, you know, getting free. Getting as free as I could. I knew that music was a pathway to that. Once I started performing live with our band, it surprised me again, just like it did the first time I got onstage. I was pretty unaware of myself up there. My main incentive, I think, was to free myself and everyone else in the room. Because New York, even though it’s one of the greatest cultural cities in the world, it was pretty fucking conservative at that point, man. Going to a show, it was people standing there with their arms crossed, wondering: Are you up to snuff? And I was kind of on this warpath—to just set them free of self-consciousness, and myself as well. To lose ourselves in reverie and sexuality and rage and emotional transcendence and all that stuff.
What you did onstage meant, and required, a refusal of self-consciousness. But then the paradigm you were working in essentially invites and produces self-consciousness—the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were near-instantly under so much scrutiny and getting a lot of hype.
I struggled a lot with that. It burst the bubble, you know? I was making shit in a very naïve way, like, in a genuine, playful, emotionally honest way. And then the industry starts shining its light on you, and you have to reframe this experience of making shit as something that makes money and is commercially viable and gets sucked into the grinder of capitalism. Our conception of the band coincided so quickly with the commercialization of the music we were making.
The plus side of that—it’s so insane that we were in the right place at the right time so that what we were doing was actually on the radar. It was a fever pitch. Being courted by labels, being put up in penthouse suites at South by Southwest. It kind of felt like comedy to us—we could not even comprehend it. But we weren’t really cut out for the mainstream in a lot of ways.
That hype also gave you the power to write creative control into the contract with your label. But, at the same time, there’s commercial pressure. How have you held onto what feels meaningful to you in the midst of that pressure?
Well, that’s why it took nine years to put out this album. We were out of our record contract, out of the expectation that you put out a record every two or three years.
But, as far as holding onto the innocence, onto the goal of being able to make pure art—I think it’s a complicated process. My thing was: don’t buy into the attention we’re getting. At one point, they wanted me to be on the cover of Vanity Fair, to stand around with a bunch of people, you know, and I thought that was the cheesiest thing ever. My manager got a call from the head of our label, like, “Why the fuck is she not going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair?” And I get it, man! But there were things we could have done that would have felt like we were pandering. I don’t think of our audience as consumers, you know? I think of them as sensitive people who need music to keep them going, just like me. And I think it’s nonsensical for me to make art unless it feels incredibly meaningful. Deeply valuable for myself. And I think a lot of people get pressured, like, If you’re on a roll, you’ve gotta keep that roll going. I hate that thing—I think it’s bullshit. If the iron’s hot and you keep that fire on, you’re gonna burn out, man, and when you get burned out terrible things happen. Your confidence plummets.
So I realized early on that I had to stand up for how I felt. It felt like exposing weakness to say, “I’m not cut from the same cloth as you guys.” And in those days it was such a male-dominated genre. All the guys were, like, “What are you doing? You just keep going, man, you power through it, it doesn’t matter how sick you are, how fucked-up you are, and if you don’t keep going, it’s a sign of weakness.” But I was, like, “No! It’s a sign of strength.” To be true to that—cancelling shows, saying no to things—was painful and hard, and I disappointed a lot of people, but I saved myself and the band in the process.
You’ve talked about bringing a lot of angst to your performances—channelling it and expunging it onstage. What was the wellspring of that angst?
Circling back to my Asian American or biracial roots, I think, you know, I was pretty repressed. I was certainly sexually repressed. I was so shy, so full of social anxiety. I struggled to, like, be seen. I think a lot of that repression is quite common in Asian culture—it’s this conservative thing where what’s on the outside is more valuable than your feelings. So I had these big feelings that I’d been bottling up for all those years, and when they found the outlet to come out, they were, like—Hello!
And then there was tragedy. One of my best friends died in 2001, took their own life. That was in February, and 9/11 was September, and it felt like we had grown up without religion and we were being completely torn apart by grief and loss with no direction of how to get through it. We were faced with terror and mortality, and Western culture has so little to offer people in terms of how to navigate that. Here we want to sweep death under the rug, not integrate it into our lives.
So I was totally reeling, and I was a girl in a boy’s world, you know? I was empowered by that, but I was very lonely and isolated, also.
And you were the target of a kind of attention the boys weren’t. I just watched the forthcoming “Meet Me in the Bathroom” documentary, and there’s this shot of a male photographer eagerly upskirting you at a show. A lot of the early Yeah Yeah Yeahs coverage is a little gross to read now—a lot of “Karen O is one excitable girl!” kind of thing.
I was definitely very much aware of the predatory gaze. But I think I refused to feel victimized by it. I like antagonism, I like being up against stuff, I like feeling like the underdog. And one of the things that saved me in that respect was that half of our audience was women. That was really unusual and unique about Yeah Yeah Yeahs—the audiences were quite diverse, in the places they could be. And so when I’m sexy up there, when I’m exploring, having fun with sexuality and desire—I’m probably thinking about the women, not the men. I wanted to represent for them. I wanted them to feel as defiant as I did onstage.
I did, watching you perform. And when I think about how that inevitable aspect of being a young woman felt to me then—pursuing liberation, and finding yourself trapped in other people’s framing of that liberation—I remember mostly thinking, like, Yeah, well, joke’s on you, you idiots. You have no idea what you actually have on your hands here.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Like, now I see pictures of weird middle-aged dudes taking crotch shots of me, and my stomach turns a little bit, but I feel like—if I’d started performing differently, changing myself, for you? No fucking way. For these losers, no fucking way.
So many of my friends, girls especially, felt and feel intensely connected to you and the way you expressed that project of getting free—a project that we shared in, and a project that, for a while, involved a lot of self-obliteration. You’ve talked about watching “The Wrestler,” with Mickey Rourke, and identifying with the symbiotic, dangerous relationship between audience and performer, in which the more Rourke’s character hurt himself, the more ravenous his audience became, and the more he felt that he needed to provide that for them.
“There Is No Modern Romance,” the documentary, captures this in a pretty raw way. You’re at an edge, you’re strung out, you’re needing to drink more to get onstage. You screened it as part of your 2017 tour, and I remember watching it and thinking that it was remarkable that you weren’t shying away from what it was actually like.
The demand for us was so extreme, so early, that it put us in the position of having to tour all of a sudden, and I had no concept of what the process of touring entailed. So the stage became a place where I unleashed all the messiness that I was feeling, and it was highly self-destructive. I remember in college, at Oberlin, talking about GG Allin, and the extent to which he harmed himself as a kind of spectacle, and in my head, I was, like, Cool, man. You know? That was what punk rockers do—roll around in glass, that kind of thing.
But, really, what it was, I found, when we started performing—it was self-destruction, but in a mystical sense. I think I would just enter another plane, and I’d just be done. Whatever was coming out, it was really uncensored, really unhinged. And I was hurting myself more and more. I was spiralling out of control. It crescendoed until I fell off the stage.
This happened in Australia, in 2003.
Yeah. I slipped off the monitor, then I fell off the stage, and my back hit the guardrail—you know, the one holding all the kids back. It was a six-foot drop, and the monitor followed me down and hit me on the head. It was, like, what—eighty pounds? And because I had so much alcohol in me, I was just, like, a noodle. As limp as a noodle. I was so lucky to not get a concussion, not to snap my neck or my back.
You got back onstage, somehow, and sang “Maps.”
And then I ended the set and went to the hospital. It was super traumatic for me, and then two or three days later I had to get back onstage. I was terrified, and I felt like I’d been in a car crash. My boyfriend [Angus Andrew, the lead singer of Liars] wheeled me onstage in a wheelchair, and I couldn’t move because it hurt so bad—I had to just stand there and sing.
It was a wake-up call, and after that, I had to basically reinvent the way that I performed.
Can you tell me about figuring out how to channel that wildness onstage in a way that wasn’t self-destructive?
I had to plan to keep violence out of the equation, you know? I think it was the difference between being, like, Either this thing controls you, or you control this thing. Or maybe you don’t control it—whatever force moves through me onstage—but I had to experiment with not completely losing myself in it. I had to make myself part of the conversation.
And I think, in those early years, I had a real love-hate relationship with the audience. In my head I was, like, You love the violence that I’m doing here, you expect this spectacle of me, and I might have to return the favor, so fuck you guys—you guys suck. I love you, but I hate you. So after that, for the second record, I could look my audience in the eye. I could start to have a more meaningful rapport with them. I went from a raging, out-of-control, unhinged thing to something that echoed that but was more joyful. A lot more joyful.
The party aesthetic of the aughts—the messy, smeary, mismatched, American Apparel thing; ripped tights and dirty shoes and everyone looking drunk or hungover all the time—has recently been discovered and repopularized by young people on TikTok and Instagram. What do you make of the Gen Z interest in so-called indie sleaze?
It’s all news to me, but I get it. There’s parallels to what they’re going through and what we were going through. The world feels so out of control. And, like, millennials were so put together in so many ways. A lot of the millennials I know, at least—they hardly touch alcohol, they eat beet salads and stuff. And that little window of time was so hedonistic and Dionysian. There was less policing of culture. I think that there’s really a kind of honesty to not worrying about saying the wrong thing or facing some kind of retribution. You felt like pushing the envelope. There was this freedom we had—before everything turned, you know. . . .
Into an optimized Sweetgreen mail-order mattress. Well, people are smoking cigarettes and taking bad pictures again, at least, it seems. I want to ask you about “Maps.” I would love to know what it felt like to write a perfect song—one of the perfect records of the decade.
Well. Wow, it was a long time ago. Twenty years ago. Let me think.
I remember sitting on Nick’s incredibly dirty loft floor. I was passing by his room when I heard the drum machine hit that pattern, and so I came in, and sat on the floor, and said, “Let me try something.” Oh, God, it just felt like a New York moment. Anyone who lives in New York understands what that means. It was really innocent and pure, too. Like, I was in love, you know? And I had just written Angus an e-mail, because he was on tour. I missed him sorely. Part of that was, “Why do they get to be with you? They don’t love you like I love you. You should be here with me.” And it seemed like a pretty fucking good lyric.
So we tried it on that drum machine, Nick’s little blue machine, and we recorded it into a four-track, which was what we did with everything. It’s such a simple song—super pure, super simple. And it didn’t evolve much from that original demo. It’s really hard to take credit for it. It’s one of the great mysteries of being alive for me, being able to write a song like “Maps.”
I want to go back to something you said when you were talking about 2001, the year your friend died, and the year of 9/11, and the way that Western culture doesn’t offer a road map through grief. Did you find your direction, and, if you did, how did you find it?
This was Peter, my friend who died. My friend, and Brian’s close friend, too—he was our college friend. He was our age. So young. It was totally unexpected. And no one knew how to help me, and I didn’t know how to help myself. There was tons of self-destruction, self-medication, drinking too much, all of that kind of thing.
But the band did save my life. And I started to realize how much when someone dies, they don’t really go away. They live through you. The thing I was angriest about was that people were going to forget about him, and that felt like a huge betrayal to me—a huge betrayal on the part of the world. But then my idea was to just bring him into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music. Bring him into the way I perform, into the way I express myself, tune into him when I need to access deeper emotions onstage. And I realized that when people die they continue to live through the people that love them. That I’m a mosaic of all these people I’ve loved. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
