Sitting in his apartment in Stockholm, Adam Olenius is having trouble finding the right word in English to best describe the balancing act of taking on a musical side project. Even the results of an Internet search finds little in terms of a satisfactory suggestion. (“Damn Google translator,” he says with a sigh.)

“It’s [tough] because I like those bands that stay together forever and are almost like a religion,” says Olenius. “But bands can also get stuck. If you’re the lead songwriter, it’s really, really great to share your ideas with someone else or somewhere else.”

The opportunity to do something different, to bounce ideas off someone who wasn’t a longstanding fixture in his musical past is what largely brought the Shout Out Louds frontman to fellow Swedish musical artist Markus Krunegård (of Laakso). Meeting by chance while their respective bands were making a tour-traveling pit stop along the German autobahn, the two became close as they continued to run into one another at various Swedish festival and club performances. When their schedules would allow it, the two inevitably began working on demos together. “We were becoming friends,” says Krunegård. “I don’t know what people do when they become friends, whether they play badminton or drink beer. We both write music so it felt quite natural.”

Dubbing the project “Serenades,” the two eventually committed themselves to making a proper album last fall. The resulting full-length, entitled Criminal Heaven, swells with the kind of happy-go-lucky freedom typically reserved for kids prone to playing with make-believe friends. Taking cues from the likes of The Stone Roses and Panda Bear, the record layers itself in shimmering textures, dual vocal harmonies and lush, simplistic melodies. “We wanted to have a very playful sound,” says Olenius. “Very collage-inspired music.”

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Caroline Polachek is starving. The Chairlift singer has walked into Brooklyn tavern The Pencil Factory on a Friday afternoon, a day serving as a warmish sliver sandwiched between wretched rainy nights and impending fall, and the bar is already filled with locals in T-shirts sipping cloudy beers. She’s a few minutes late, but before we can sit down, she needs something to eat. Pizza from a place across the street will do.  

“Do you want some?” Polachek asks. I say no, and she shuffles back out the door before returning a few minutes later with half a pie and bandmate/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wimberly, whose few-day scruff peeks out from a flop of thick brown hair. Settling into a table, Polachek looks up, her makeup-free face dotted with beauty marks; stunning, all angles, a Greenpoint Audrey Tautou. There’s a reason for the hunger: the band has been in the studio all day working out the video concept for “Sidewalk Safari,” the second single off Chairlift’s sophomore release, Something, and had worked up an appetite. Polachek grabs a slice, her fingernails painted a metallic-green similar to the skintight jumpsuit she wore in the video for the new album’s first single, “Amanaemonesia,” an odd, David Lynchian interpretation of a Maurice Béjart ballet where she performs a modern dance routine, her extremely lithe figure a wiggly metronome for each beat and synth that vacillates between sexy and completely creepy.

The song, full of nonsense lyrics that Polachek describes as “Dr. Seussian,” is an antithesis to “Bruises,” the song that gained Chairlift some mainstream fanfare when it was selected for an iPod commercial with its sticky “I’d like to do handstands for you” refrain. (Note: Polachek can a do a handstand; Wimberly can’t “without a spotter.”) It’s still catchy, but replaces anything that could qualify as cuteness for quirk, blending many octaves of Polachek’s voice with both ’80s electro-pop lines and near-funk guitar. It sets the tone for the record to come. But what is amanaemonesia? “It’s an invented disease,” Polachek says after looking off to the side for a moment, then flashing her eyes up, big and shrouded by thick lashes and supermodel brows. She takes a bite. “It’s caused by overstimulation from online browsing. Resulting in forgetfulness and irresponsibility.”

“Psychological,” Wimberly adds. 

“Do you have it?” I ask.

“It comes and goes,” Polachek replies. 

Of course it does.

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There’s something about Wally De Backer that makes you feel as though you’ve found something you lost when you were 15 but could have never understood you possessed except in hindsight. Teetering on a precarious balance between an innocent wonder with the world and a sturdy pragmatism, the Belgian-Australian known widely to the world as Gotye (or “Gaw-tee-ay”—the French variant of his first name, Wouter) undoubtedly has a bright musical future to which he can look forward. It’s hard to even know where to begin with his musical imagination, which seems to know no ends.

Born in Bruges and raised in Australia, De Backer’s musical career has been running 10 years strong, but it wasn’t a prestigious 2007 ARIA award (the Australian equivalent of a Grammy) that pushed his music past his native continental and Benelux borders. It was a recent YouTube hit.

“I’ve been releasing myself in a very cottage-style, beyond the cusp of being a one-hit wonder,” says De Backer via Skype. “Over the years, there’s been a lot of stamp-licking. But after 10 years working very doggedly and independently by myself, I have a great surprise in a YouTube-fueled, pop crossover song.”

The song he refers to is “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which was a collaboration with fellow Aussie star Kimbra. Most musicians would be enthralled with five-time platinum sales and over 11 million hits on YouTube, but De Backer always keeps a sideways glance in the midst of the fireworks.

“The danger with that is it becomes about the song and not about what I do beyond it,” he says. “There’s more going on than what I do with that song.”

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“It was pretty hyped up—not much happened,” Martin Courtney deadpans over the phone. No, he isn’t talking about Watch the Throne. Just a week earlier, Hurricane Irene tore up the Eastern seaboard, leaving much of the Northeast to deal with prolonged blackouts and high storm surges. Despite a notably grim forecast and evacuation notices, however, Real Estate’s Brooklyn stomping ground was left virtually unscathed. “It was basically an excuse to sit around for two days and drink during the day,” Courtney adds, chuckling. As Greenpoint, Park Slope and Williamsburg managed to find solace notched in the eye of Irene, Real Estate, too, have discovered themselves at the pulse of another, more chilled-out maelstrom.

“Brooklyn is insanely saturated with bands, but it seems like there’s a reason for that,” Courtney says. “If you want to put the time into it, you can play multiple times every weekend, which is what we were doing for awhile.” Indeed, for the better part of a year after college, longtime friends Courtney, guitarist Matt Mondanile, bassist Alex Bleeker and former drummer Etienne Duguay made the weekly trek from their suburban base of Ridgewood, New Jersey, into the city to play shows. The band’s diligence and well-honed approach soon paid off in spades, as 2009’s debut Real Estate emerged on Woodsist to the tune of considerable fanfare. 

By the time their second album, Days, was in the making for Domino, the dudes from Real Estate had already transplanted their roots, and have since become regular fixtures in Brooklyn. Their individual Twitter feeds read collectively like a polygonal game of Ping-Pong. At a recent show for Mondanile’s solo project, Ducktails, it’s commonplace to spot Courtney, Bleeker and touring keyboardist Jonah Maurer all freewheeling through the crowd. Just like the heady fusion of their hypnagogic pop, as people, Real Estate really seem to gel.

Nowhere is this bond on better display than in the smoky afterglow of their post-show trailer. The band has just played a set opening a summer concert series at the Williamsburg Waterfront for Bright Eyes. Several highlights from Days, including “Green Aisles” and “It’s Real,” were met with wide audience approval. The outdoor venue faces a spectacular view of the New York skyline and spirits are understandably high.

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“It just happens that the last year has been a breakthrough year, which is almost the complete opposite of what normally happens to bands. Normally, you break through in the first couple of years and then it’s just a slow decline. Our history’s been a little bit different.”

Pat Carney has already given away the ending, but you’ve got to learn the beginning before you get there.

And so it begins: Take a band and put them in a rubber factory. No. Too soon. Put them underground in a disgusting basement in West Akron and leave them there with nothing but a drum kit, a few guitars, a borrowed Audio-Technica four-track recorder from the 1980s and a ridiculous quarter-inch Tascam 388 that could plug into a mixing deck…if they had one.

Thickfreakness, The Black Keys’ second album, starts with a big come up (though it came a year after The Big Come Up, their 2002 debut) thusly: a single held-out note extension on an electric guitar that could be leading you towards Jimi Hendrix or maybe Eddie Van Halen. Or, maybe… But the rise collapses under its own weight into a drop-beat blues riff and then Pat Carney’s drums come barreling in. Dan Auerbach’s voice appears, moaning unintelligibly, wonderfully. It’s just the two of them. It sounds like shit. The recording warbles inconsistently, fading in and out, changing the composition and rhythms entirely. The musicians miss notes from time to time, or sound like they do. They drop a tempo, and it’s only slightly noticeable before they rush a beat to catch it again. Who knows what it actually sounded like when they laid down the tracks. “Fuzzed out” does it a disservice because it’s so much worse than that.

But it cooks.

On the liner notes for Thickfreakness, a curious mention is made under the brief recording history of the album: “All songs recorded and mixed in December 2002 by Patrick Carney in Akron, Ohio, at Studio 45 using his patented recording technique called ‘medium fidelity.’”

“That’s because we were stupid,” says Carney matter-of-factly, speaking from Nashville. “I was, like, 22, and didn’t know shit. There was no way to learn how to do stuff unless you taught yourself. I assumed it would sound best if I took the tape and dumped it into this really cheap digital recorder I had and mixed it on that, and I thought, at the time, it was really fancy shit. I think it ended up making it sound worse in a good way.” He’s not practicing any particular brand of “aw, shucks” self-deprecation. The recordings speak for themselves; the band had no money, no savvy—at least when it came to recording—but they did have drive.

“Worse in a good way” was never touted as “lo-fi” or “D.I.Y.” even though that’s exactly the environment Auerbach and Carney were dealing with in that disgusting basement during the recording of The Black Keys’ first records. 2004’s Rubber Factory was named for the recording space the duo inhabited for their third LP, and it’s not an amusing nickname for a studio in Akron. It was a coal-burning power plant.

For what little money they did collect in record advances from their indie label, Fat Possum, Auerbach and Carney bought secondhand, unreliable recording equipment and paid out their landlords so they could tour the country, crisscrossing the landscape in a beat-up van. With each subsequent record, more recording junk was accumulated (“a mass destruction of crap, basically,” Carney clarifies), but the sound was becoming clearer; not hi-fi, oh no—the guitars crunched just as rough as ever, the drums still sounded tinny and muted—but The Black Keys were coming into focus.

“The whole mentality with the band is always to make the most out of what we have,” Carney says. “Accidentally, we didn’t really have much.”

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Illustrations by Albert Herter

Carmine itched his temple in the direction of the anxiety-producing event, a man in spandex stretching his crotch in a beam of sunlight. A dog howled, the honk of a horn. He who tamed the insects. Carmine was waiting for the main capital woman, who said she’d be wearing pearl glasses on a chain. He crossed his legs to produce a pain in his hip, which usually grounded him for 10 minutes. The trees were a mixture of margarita, neon lime and paradise green. Bullies on bicycles, dolls pushing strollers of dolls pushing strollers of...suddenly, the puncture of high heels.

Scenery bushes rattling fever again. She was his scenery, no, programmer. Feeding him new formulas, after the expiration date, sucked dry. Algorithms get juiced, around the block, worn out, like book hookers. She sat on the bench next to him, an envelope tickling his eye.

She made her fingers dance up his arm like a spider, which, upon reaching his shoulder, slowly rested one black-tipped foot on his antitragus. He unfolded his legs. She lowered her glasses to reveal two cold black caves emanating vapors.

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“I think that’s a really understandable question,” says Lana Del Rey, when asked if she is real. “It’s an interesting story—where the original star began, and what she turned into.”

The 25-year-old singer who has wrought the scrutiny of discerning audiences—and the publications who love to tell them what to listen to—is trying to address the issue that lays at the center of her ascent and the response to it: Where does the persona stop and the person start? “I’m interested in those stories,” Del Rey says, by way of understanding the curiosity that has been heaped on her, but also perhaps as some sort of admission. “They’re some of my favorite reads.”

Here are the facts of Lana Del Rey. Born Elizabeth Grant in tourist mecca Lake Placid, New York, Del Rey started singing at an early age. She sang in school. She sang in church. She turned 18 and moved downstate, and began singing at open mic nights, still under the name Lizzy Grant. From the start, Del Rey maintains, her plan was to build a world around a name, a complete sensory immersion under the heading of the luxe, silver-screen-tinted alias. “It could have been anything,” Del Rey says when asked about the specific choice, evocative of Hollywood glamour, ’50s beach clubs and anesthetized ethnicity. “It could have been anything. Just something beautiful.” She began to work on the songs that would comprise her debut, sweeping orchestral arrangements anchored by beats. In addition to the songs themselves, Del Rey made videos to accompany the tracks. “I was making even fucking creepier versions of music videos than I am now, making videos for every song with less of a narrative than I have now,” she says of her earlier visual works. That debut, lacking money and interest, sat shelved for two years, was released for two months, then returned to the ether from which it had come.



To understand Del Rey’s next step, it’s important to recognize she is as much a visual artist as she is a sonic one. “I love to write and sing, but I’m usually struck by something—if I see something beautiful, I internalize it. It usually makes more of an impact on me than something I feel.” With no clear intention in mind, Del Rey set to work putting together a visual complement to “Video Games,” a woozy, five-minute love song wherein she sounds like a vampier Cat Power, or a less-tranquilized Hope Sandoval. It tells the tale of a past relationship of Del Rey’s, told in the present tense and yet laden with nostalgia as it is happening. “I’d get home, he’d get home, too, and he’d play video games,” she says of that time in her life. “And nothing was wrong, and that made it right. It felt romantic to not have any severe ambitions, to just enjoy being in someone’s company.”

The video itself is a series of people hurtling and falling—in love, to the ground, through the air. “I didn’t really think it would be the one to help things,” says Del Rey of what happened next. In short order, she found herself with a following, a record deal and a level of analysis she could never have anticipated. Her statement of the song being about a time that lacked ambition is interesting; she is becoming aware, with every interview and interaction, that what started as an art project could read as just that. Interviewers have latched on to the outlandish facts of her life that she seems to love to give: she had lived in a trailer park; she is the “gangsta Nancy Sinatra.” Del Rey’s name change seemed central to the question of her authenticity: Was she person or persona? Solid or vapor?



“People just assumed that there was a jump from 2008 to now, that I assumed a different identity and character. It was more like an art project to me, not a shift in persona,” says Del Rey. What has been misconstrued as a calculated ploy might be the furthest thing from it: an artistic expression. She has decided to use herself as an extension of her music, choosing a name thick with nostalgia and an image that seems shot through a Vaselined lens. Maybe it is because of the pillowy lips and saucer-sized eyes, maybe it is because there is too much space left on the canvas that Del Rey had only started to fill in, maybe it’s because she has a penchant for sound bites, but people have struggled to place and solve her.

With the release of her album Born To Die, Del Rey hopes to settle such questions. Written over the past two years, Del Rey describes the album as representative of her twin polarities: Hollywood beauty shot through with emcee swag. “I’ve always naturally seen the beauty in everything. I think that’s where my sweeping cinematic influence comes from. But also, it hasn’t been easy, and I relate to certain emcees—the way they tell their stories over a heavy beat. I relate to having to fend for yourself, and that’s where I need the support of a heavy street beat, to stay underneath me and support the beauty. Something strong and really hard—it’s an important juxtaposition for me.”

With the release of an entire album, there will be even more scrutiny, more trading on the currency of Lana Del Rey’s origin story, a further winnowing down to sound bites, less space for grand art projects. But at this point, Del Rey isn’t concerned. “I know everything’s going to be fine,” she says. And as for where the original star began, and what she’s turned into, Del Rey has already answered that question, even if no one else has. “I’m exactly the same person. I take myself wherever I go. It doesn’t really change.” F

If you were asked to pair two people together for a conversation about music, film and their lives on stage, you might not immediately come up with Jonah Hill and Zach Condon. On the surface, the two entertainers seem almost diametrically opposed. Hill is best known as Michael Cera’s hilariously boorish other half in Superbad and as the passive-aggressive man-child with a serious Oedipal complex in Cyrus, while Condon, fronting his band Beirut with his world-weary crooning and fondness for European folk music, just might be this generation’s most hopeless romantic.

Despite their differences, these two combine to rather accurately represent the elements we often associate with youth: eagerness, melodrama, naiveté, romanticism, coarseness and earnestness. Hill, his ideas bursting out in rapid sentences of excitement, humor and sarcasm, is the raging yang; Condon, the sensitive and soft-spoken soul of few words, fills the yin with his brooding emotion. It might still be a little early for a This Is Your Life montage for either (Hill is 27; Condon, 25), but both achieved success and notoriety at a tender age and have been growing up in public ever since.

Illustration by Michael Kupperman

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Calgary-based artist Chad Van Gaalen grapples with the dark voids of the mind’s eye through his strangely beautiful art and music. He’s a dude who likes to rock, as his latest album Diaper Island can attest, but he also is one to peer under the hood of an instrument to see how things tick. “I try to look at origins, the pointlessness of life and the possibility of an afterlife through my music and art,” says Van Gaalen.

In the past, he’s been into circuit-bending and collecting various found sounds and gadgetries. He’s a father of two daughters, does fix-up jobs around the house and possesses an empathetic soul to go along with his tinkerer’s philosophy: “I think empathy is the main function of the human mind. I think that’s what separates us from other organisms.” Van Gaalen’s self-taught, D.I.Y. spirit extends to his phantasmagoric drawings for every album cover and music video he produces via the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, through which he funds all of his art projects, including Diaper Island—making all artists in the United States extremely jealous.

Sub Pop picked up Flemish Eye, the Calgary “micro-indie” label Van Gaalen calls home, for distribution in 2005; meanwhile, Van Gaalen began working with a fellow Flemish Eye artist, the Calgary art-rock band Women, producing the band’s self-titled debut as well as 2010’s Public Strain. The latter album’s production work proved a big transition for Van Gaalen as it marked the first use of his new studio space, Yoko Eno, after years of working like a mad scientist in his own basement. This new setting hugely influenced the sound and art of Diaper Island. “My new studio space is much larger than my basement where we recorded the first Women record,” says Van Gaalen. “We were kind of soundproofing the place as we were recording Public Strain—totally experimenting, hacking stuff apart and gluing it back together. So, a lot of the engineering for that record seeped over into my record.”

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photos from Habibi courtesy of Pantheon Books

Craig Thompson is altering the parameters of what we expect from a graphic novel. From the snow-weighted landscapes of Wisconsin, as illustrated in Blankets (which established him as a vanguard in the format), to the fictional Middle Eastern land of Wanatolia, an Islamic desert kingdom in his latest opus, Habibi, Thompson erases the lines that have framed the borders of the comic book, pushing it into the realm of the traditional, epic-length book. At a hefty 592 pages, Blankets broke ground not only due to its size, but also its scope; here was a fully illustrated novel detailing Thompson’s complicated relationships with family, love and religion. There are no superheroes; it is not fantasy. It exists as something deeper: a literary autobiography—albeit a somewhat emo account.

In Habibi, Thompson moves away from personal experience to create a sprawling epic inspired by tales from 1,001 Nights, the Quran and Islamic history, complete with virtual lessons on Arabic language and lettering. The protagonists, Dodola and Zam, are a pair of outcasts—escaped child slaves who wander deserts, kingdoms and cities while their relationship zigzags across the lines of mother and child, sister and brother and, ultimately, lovers. As Thompson explores new realms in story, the author himself is reflected in the characters as they struggle with words, religion, sexuality and family; a quest perhaps to make sense of the confusing aspects of male and female relationships, the power of language, the purpose of art and the importance of environment. 

Thompson is a powerful storyteller and a skilled artist. As such, it wouldn’t matter his chosen format, but having picked the graphic novel, which exhibits his gifts both with words and illustration, he is helping to transform the medium.  ››

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