Interview: Frank Turner on his UNDEFEATED album, being a punk-as-fuck teenager, doing a one-question interview with Bruce Dickinson, and much more

"At a festival, I want to get trench foot and somebody in a giant bunny suit to sell me ecstasy, y'know what I mean?"

A few years ago, I did some interviews that I was really excited about doing at the time, but then they ended up not running for…reasons. If you know me, then you know the reasons, but I’d rather not get into it right now, although you could certainly scroll through the archives of this site and figure it out. Anyway, my point is that I still have these interviews, and I really haven’t done anything with most of them because, well, though it’s no fault of the people I interviewed, the fact that they didn’t run immediately after I conducted them is still a bit of a sore subject. But I’d like to try and get more original content on here so that I can maybe get a few more of you folks to switch things up from free subscriptions to paid subscriptions, so I was thinking that maybe it’s time to finally dip into these conversations and share them with you.

I really, really enjoyed chatting with Frank Turner, an artist whose music - as I freely admitted to him during our chat - I came to a bit later than many of his fans. And after I’d become at least a little bit aware of Frank, I discovered that he and I have a mutual acquaintance, and that acquaintance talked up Frank’s music so much that I made an additional effort to listen to more of it, and…well, here we are, having this very pleasant conversation. Oh, and when I mentioned to this acquaintance that I was going to be talking to Frank, he said, “I’ll drop him a line!” And damned if he didn’t, as you’re about to read…

Frank Turner: Just before we start, funnily enough, I had a message the other day from Tim Omundson. He said that you know each other!

Yeah! I did an interview with him for the AV Club a few years back, and we've stayed in touch. Actually, we were in touch even before then [through Twitter DMs] because he'd been a fan of my interviews for the site.

Oh, cool! Awesome. Yeah, he's such a sweetheart.

He really is. I've never actually had the pleasure of meeting him, but we've been trading messages since before his stroke - and afterwards, thankfully!

Indeed, thankfully. He's one of life's good guys, so...it's a nice little connection there!

Absolutely. Well, it's great to get to talk to you. I was trying to backdate when I actually first discovered you, because it was definitely belatedly compared to most people, but at some point someone played "Build Me Up, Buttercup" for me, because I'm a huge cover songs geek. And that was enough of a selling point for me to steer into the originals from there.

Fair enough! I mean, that was a fun cover to do. I tried to dig it out the other day, that cover, and my voice was higher when I was younger. [Laughs.] I sung that right at the top of my range! I had to modulate the key down a little bit.

Well, I love the new album. I finally had a chance to sit down and actually listen to it start to finish, which is always the preferable way to do it, even if I don't always manage to do it half the time.

Yeah, well, I think you and I are both on the same page. I'm quite old-fashioned. I want to listen to a record as a body of work. You know, you start at the beginning and finish at the end.

I will say that you still very much have your way around the rousing anthem.

Oh, well, that's kind of you to say, thank you.

My favorite of the bunch on this album is "Somewhere In Between."

Oh, you know what? That really... You just made my day. Honestly! At the risk of sounding entirely self-involved, to me that's almost... To me that's the most important song on the record. That's the song that says the most. And it's kind of tucked away at the end there, and it's almost like, "Have you been paying attention?" It's a little bit like... [Hesitates.] Do you know the whole thing about the brown M&Ms?

You're talking about how Van Halen had it on their rider, right?

Exactly! But you know it was for a very good reason.

Maybe I don't know that part of the story.

Okay, so Van Halen did the first ever full production tour, and by "full production tour," I mean they took their own stage and P.A. with them. What that meant was that every single day on the tour, they'd have up to 100 people who didn't work for them coming in as kind of day contractors to set up the staging and the equipment, and it was a dangerous thing. And they put the brown M&Ms thing on the penultimate page of a 70-page rider, and the point was to test whether or not the crew boss had read the entire rider. It then went on to become kind of a joke - or indeed worse, not a joke - but the original thing was there for a solid technical reason. So there you go: "Somewhere In Between" is my brown M&Ms!

So this isn't the first album you've released since the pandemic, but you've got the "Pandemic PTSD" song on here, which certainly makes it feel that way.

Yeah, I mean, I made a record during the pandemic. FTHC, my previous record, we recorded a lot of that sort of remotely, as in Rich Costey, who produced it, was in Vermont, and I was with my band in Oxford, and then Ilan Rubin from Nine Inch Nails played the drums, and he was in Los Angeles. So files were being sent and stilted Zoom calls were being had, and...it worked. But, like, on that record, I didn't really talk about the pandemic in and of itself, because it just seemed a bit too ever-present and a bit obvious, you know? And then in a way that was slightly unexpected for me, coming out of it, it was just, like, there was a bit of a sense where quite a lot of people were kind of like, "Well, we've moved on on. Next subject!" You know, the 24-hour news cycle. I think particularly for people who work in the entertainment industry - and I'm sure other industries as well, but that's the one that I know about - it's a little bit like, "Hey, hold on a minute, time out!" Just because we're no longer top of the BBC News page, it doesn't mean that the damage that was done financially, logistically and, of course, psychologically has just sort of gone away because people aren't interested anymore. So it was an odd moment to realize that now I want to talk about it.

It's funny: being a work-at-home writer already, nothing really changed for me. Whereas my wife, she works with autistic kids, she actually ended up with more work as a result of the pandemic, because parents... Their kids couldn't go to school, but they could still go to the clinic, so...

Yeah, sure. That's interesting, actually. There was a moment even as early as around late 2021 here in the UK where my friends who don't work in an industry that involves gathering large numbers of strangers together in confined spaces... [Laughs.] We'd meet up for a beer, and they'd be, like, "Well, everything's pretty much back to normal now!" And I'd go, "My job's illegal! What the fuck, man?" So I do think there are things that we could talk about some, shall we say...

I think my favorite song on the album is "Ceasefire." At least as of today.

Well, again, that's kind of you to say. "Ceasefire" is kind of one of the last remnants of when this album might've been a concept album. We're all quite glad that it's not, I'm sure. [Laughs.] But essentially, I have this kind of bad psychological habit of when I'm going to sleep, I have these hypothetical arguments in my head about everything and anything. And it really stressed me out, and it's sort of a manifestation of anxiety and all that kind of business. And my wife - who is a psychotherapist, I should say - quite perceptively one day said, "Who is it you're arguing with?"

And I hadn't thought to ask myself the question before, and I realized after awhile that I'm arguing most of the time with a hypothetical 15-year-old version of myself. And when I was 15, I was extremely adolescent and cocksure, and the world was black and white, and I was pissed off, and everything was simple, and my ideals were box-fresh and still wrapped in plastic. I mean, the archetypal example of this for me is that my last record went to #1 in the UK, and now in terms of me in the 2020s, I was stoked about this. It was great. We worked very hard to make it happen. But when I was a teenager, my self-definition almost was, I was the kind of person who hated the music that was in the charts. So there's a conflict there.

But then the next side of it is that 15-year-old me was, without being overly melodramatic, was a pretty damaged kid. I got sent away from home when I was 8 years old, I hated everybody I knew, I was angry and alienated and all those kinds of things. And there's a part of me that wants to kind of have that conversation out with that kid and sort of give him a hug and tell him it's going to be all right, and not all of us can be Ian MacKaye. [Laughs.] And there are other remnants of that through the records.

"Show People" is kind of along those lines. "Somewhere In Between" is kind of the companion piece to that song. "Girl from the Record Shop" sort of inhabits that. "East Finchley" is about a girlfriend I had when I was that age. And so on and so on. But I'm glad you picked that song. It's a really important song for me. The title has ended up being slightly unfortunate timing-wise, for obvious reasons, but... Yeah, it's an important song for me.

I'll just say that, knowing that you grew up listening to Iron Maiden, I believe you have a concept album in you yet.

[Bursts out laughing.] You know what? I got into a huge argument the other day about Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, which is a fantastic record, actually, in my opinion. And my friend was saying it was their weak point in their '80s catalog, and I was disdainful of this idea.

My first introduction to them - years and years ago, obviously - was "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." I actually had a teacher who played it in class.

I mean, I remember impressing an English teacher of mine by knowing some of the lines from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I didn't reveal that I knew them because they're quoted in an Iron Maiden song. [Laughs]

As long as I'm running through the album, I think my favorite pairing of title and lyrics is probably "Never Mind the Back Problems," because I'm 53.

And not looking a day over 40. [Laughs.] Thank you. Yeah, that's a fun song, y'know what I mean? And it's worth saying, actually, that when we finished the record, my wife's immediate comment when she listened back to the rough mix was, "It sounds like you're having fun," which...without getting too into the weeds of this album's predecessor, I thought that was kind of a cool comment on the record. It's a fun song. It's inspired by many things, in particular going to see... Do you know Propagandhi?

I do!

Yeah, they're Canadian, one of my all-time favorite bands. There are certain bands from my youth - not many - that I will make a point of still going to see when I can, and Propagandhi are one of them. And they were playing a show in London, and I went down with the two other guys who were in my first touring band, which was called Kneejerk, in the late '90s. And, you know, we're all much older and married and doing other things these days...apart from me. [Laughs.] And Propagandhi came on, and we were so excited, and the three of us went down the front...and then about 40 seconds later, we were, like, "Jesus fucking Christ, get me out of here! This is awful! These kids are way too intense. I should be standing at the back of the pit with my arms folded, singing along strategically." But, you know, still there. Still in the room.

I've got an 18-year-old daughter, and telling her about shows that I went to, like how security almost threw me out of a Public Image Ltd. show because I was at the front of the stage and dancing, and she was, like, "I don't even know you, man!"

[Laughs.] That's cool as fuck, though, man. You know, this is a total sidebar, but...

I love sidebars. Go for it.

I met John Lydon many years ago, and he was a delight, and...I have a bit of a thing how at the moment he keeps saying things that riles Twitter or whatever. And people seem to think that this is somehow out of keeping with his oeuvre, as it were. And it's, like, "He's a fucking Sex Pistol! He's supposed to piss people off! That's the job description!" You can't go, "Oh, I can't believe John Lydon said something that pissed people off." It's, like, "That's his fucking job! What are you talking about?" He's staying true to character. And what would be less punk than being politely applauded by the obvious Twitterati? Fuck that. Anyway...

I've interviewed him twice. The second time was one of the best interviews I've ever done. The first one, I was young and petrified, and I opened by saying, "Well, it's been a long time since you've played here in Norfolk, Virginia." And he said, "Well, not much plays there anyway, does it? 'Cept hurricanes." And I was, like, "Oh, shit, he's going to tear me to pieces." And he proceeded to do so for about 15 minutes.

Well, again, there's a small part of me that sort of thinks that that's kind of what you want out of meeting Johnny Rotten.

Yeah, I didn't feel bad about it. I just had to survive it. And then I was, like, "Badge of honor!"

Right, totally. You know, many years ago... And we've gone off piece again! But many years ago I interviewed Bruce Dickinson for The Guardian, and it was amazing. I'd never interviewed anybody before... Well, that's not strictly true, actually. I did a couple of interviews for my 'zine when I was a teenager. I interviewed Guy Picciotto from Fugazi via email, which was cool. But I'd never done an in-person interview before. And I had this list of questions to ask him, and I asked my first question, which I thought was a humdinger, and he basically shouted at me for an hour and a half...and then that was the end of the interview! [Laughs.] I put it to him that Iron Maiden fulfilled the promise that punk made and didn't keep, as in that they made fashion-proof, working-class, fast, energetic, intense music. And he hates punk. My God, he hates punk. And he told me about it at enormous length.

I will tell you that I spent a surprising amount of time this morning listening to [Turner's early band] Million Dead. I really enjoyed it, actually, but I was just curious how you look back on that era of your career.

Oh, with pride. Funnily enough, the drummer from Million Dead is still one of my best friends, and his son is my godson, and I was at his house. Typical adult evening: I sort of went round, and his wife kind of politely retired and let us get unusually shitfaced for our age group. And we were sort of listening back to Million Dead stuff together, and...one of the things that I was both proud and relieved about was the fact that, when we were a band, everybody compared us with Funeral for a Friend, primarily. That's partly contextual: we were around at the same time, and we even toured with them. But there was that kind of early '90s emo thing - Thursday, Hundred Reasons, Funeral for a Friend, all those kinds of bands - and we sort of got lumped in with that lot. And we felt very strong at the time that, as much as we liked a lot of those bands both musically and personally, we didn't have anything in common with them musically as a band. And with the benefit of 20 years now, listening back, I was, like, "Yeah, we didn't sound like them! We were a fucking weird band!"

I think there was a fair amount of Fugazi and At the Drive In in our DNA, but we were pretty out of step with the world around us musically, in a way that I'm very proud of. A lot of my favorite bands are those bands that just don't fit into the easy journalistic weft of music history. A band like the Stooges or Jesus Lizard or someone like that. Just somebody where it's just, like, "What the fuck are they doing there then? That doesn't work!" And I feel like Million Dead had a bit of that. Y'know, there's bits of it... There's a lyric or two here or there which slightly makes my toes curl. There's a song on our first album called "The Kid's Gonna Love It," which is essentially a straight-edge song, which I wrote shortly before developing a drug problem. [Laughs.] You know, like most straight-edge kids! So there's a couple of slightly cringey moments. But overall I think we were a cool band, and I'm proud of what we did.

Were I to embed a song following this portion of the conversation, what would you want me to embed?

Oh, that's a good question. Probably "Breaking the Back." I like that song a lot. That's a cool song.

'How much fun is it putting together the Lost Evenings Festival?

Oh, it's loads of fun. I'm filled with a sense of guilt about it every year, and the reason for that is that essentially the way it works logistically is that I come up with an endless stream of wild ideas and then just sort of hand them off to my crew, who have to make them work. And that's for everything from booking the bill, which...I don't do the actual behind-the-scenes groundwork of booking acts, I just send my agent a long list of bands that I like. Actually, for this year in Toronto, which I'm stoked about... Picking the venue is kind of an interesting thing, because there's a bunch of quite specific requirements we have. We need two rooms, we need hotels nearby, we need a kind of conference room for the panels, all this kind of thing.

So we settled on a casino in Toronto, and my first pick for a band to ask to do it was Propagandhi. And I said to my booking agent, "I am going to message them myself. I want it to come from me and not you guys." And I emailed Chris Hannah, who - God bless him - sent me such a lovely reply that basically said, "We're not gonna play a fucking casino." [Laughs.] But in a really lovely, polite, kind of gentle and - dare I say - Canadian way. Respectful, shall we say. And I kind of knew that was gonna be the answer.

But, yeah, it's loads of fun. It grows every year, and we get better at it every year. The first year that we did it was kind of... I mean, in retrospect, we just had no fucking idea what we were doing, both in terms not really knowing what the concept would be like in execution and also in terms of the fact that, whilst my crew have been and worked at a million festivals, they've never actually run one. And I remember on day one of year one, about an hour before the doors opened, somebody was like, "Wristbands! We haven't got any fucking wristbands!" And some pour soul was sent out to buy something like 10,000 colored wristbands from some party supply shop or whatever. And nowadays... Well, as I say, it's grown over the years, and we have more stuff going on.

For example, there's an open mic now every year, which I think is a very lovely thing. Everyone's very supportive, and quite often I'll play a song there myself. And we have a tattoo parlor involved every year, and so on and so forth. So it's loads of fun. It's a lot of work. We sort of have... Well, two things. First of all, as of the last couple of years, we now have a rule that we go home after Lost Evenings. There were a couple of years where we did Lost Evenings and then started a tour, and everyone was just, like, "Fuck that. Nope!" So now it's always the end of a run. And secondly, no one - and this is aimed at me more than anybody else - is allowed to say the words "Lost Evenings" after Lost Evenings for two months. Everyone's just, like, "Shut the fuck up, man! We'll deal with that later!"

So as far as touring, when you will be embarking on the tour for this new album?

So the tour proper starts about 10 days after the album is out, when I head out with the band and we start doing proper shows...and, my God, do we have a tour schedule ahead of us. In the interim, though, I've spent most of this year so far, and then continuing with this, flying around the world and shaking babies and kissing bands and doing promotional work. So I'm flying to Toronto on Sunday, and I'm doing two days in Toronto and two days in New York and two days in Chicago and two days in L.A, playing the same two songs over and over again and telling everybody about the album.

I'm tired for you already.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about it is that it is tiring, but at the same time it's better than people not wanting to talk to me about my new record, y'know what I mean? I'm aware that this is in the press release, and I'm sort of dubious as to how much anybody really cares, but this is my first record with a new label set-up, having completed a major label deal, which I'm quite proud of. Apparently 5% of bands who sign a major label deal actually do the number of records they signed for. And, indeed, they offered me to do more with them, and I politely turned them down, so that feels like a power move! [Laughs.] But the new label is absolutely fantastic, I'm really stoked about it, and I'm about as busy as I've been since 2013 or whatever. So whilst it is tiring, I've largely stopped drinking while I'm on tour these days, because it's irritatingly true that alcohol just makes everything harder. So, yeah, I have to kind of take better care of myself days than I did in my twenties, to be safe. But it's fun!

Obviously Nigel Powell left the band, but Callum Green seems to be settling in relatively well at this point.

Yeah! I'd credit Callum... It's an odd thing to say, but I'd credit him as a pretty big influencing factor on the record as a whole. Callum didn't play on FTHC - as I mentioned, we had Ilan from Nine Inch Nails - but he was kind of the middle of joining the band when we made that record. And we toured that record with Callum, and he's just phenomenal. He's the best drummer I've ever played with. And he's also 11 years younger than me, and I'm the next youngest guy in the band, which is disgustingly young. [Laughs.] But he's full of vim and vigor, and...he'd not really toured outside the UK before we got him in the band.

I remember the first time we were in New York with him, the night before the show, we were in Brooklyn, and I was, like, "I'm not going into Manhattan tomorrow. I've got press, I'm tired..." But I said, "You, on the other hand, you 30-year-old bastard, I want a selfie of you in Times Square before I have breakfast!" And he obliged. He was, like, "Yes, boss!" And it is rather cool. You get to Sydney, and you think to yourself, "Well, I'm gonna sit in my hotel and watch Netflix," and then Callum says, "Let's go look at stuff! This is such a privilege to be here just purely on the basis that we play music." I mean, Jesus Christ...

But also, I think that in the process of touring FTHC, we've gelled as the new lineup, as it were, and I think we're cooking gas, I'd say. I think that we're at the peak of our powers. And there was a big sense of "I want to write a record that makes use of this tool." Y'know what I mean? I don't want to now suddenly do a purely acoustic album or whatever. That would be cruel, if nothing else. [Laughs.] And I think he kicks the fuck out of the record. I think he's just this absolute powerhouse. I'm excited for him to tour and play parts that he wrote.

Was Mïngle Härde - or Möngöl Hörde, depending on when you're talking about - a cathartic experience for you to be able to record it?

It was until it wasn't, is the 100% honest answer to that. I'm not saying that that band is 100% done necessarily, but it's unlikely that we're going to do anything soon. But essentially we went through one of those internet kerfuffles about our name, which felt pretty bad faith to me. I mean, I'm obviously not trying to belittle or insult anybody in what I do...or at least I'd hope that that would be obvious. But apparently the internet thinks otherwise. The problem with it was that the entire governing ethos of that band was fun. It was supposed to be a laugh. It was supposed to be artistically a bit of my id coming through and just sort of letting loose, and a lot of the lyrics were written very quickly, stream-of-consciousness, just sort of say some ludicrous bullshit over the top of these riffs and see what happens. And it was loads of fun, and it's three old friends just having a laugh. And then suddenly it was part of this politicized debate and all the rest of it.

And it's just, like, if that was a politicized debate about my "day job," then I would be more inclined to go to bat and to don my armor and enter the fray. But it's just kind of like... [Hesitates.] Certainly for a time, it kind of stopped that band being fun, and it's just, like, "You know what? Fucking whatever, man." Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed that band and the music we made and all the rest of it. And we do have some unfinished stuff on a hard drive somewhere that we might get to one day. But it's not gonna be anytime enormously soon, because my touring plans for this record are so extreme that I'm pretty fucking busy!

And there's nothing wrong with being busy. So how many times a day do you think somebody comes up to you and says, "I listened to such-and-such song, and it's like you know exactly what I'm thinking?"

[Laughs.] Well, when I'm home, not that many, because it's generally just me, my wife, and my cat! But I know what you mean, and...plenty. And it's an odd thing I'd imagine this is true of most people who do what I do for a living, but you sort of come up with a strategy for slightly disengaging from that kind of commentary, because I think if you engage with it fully, it would drive you crazy very quickly. Specifically, I think it would make me scared to write, and writing's my central thing in my life. I want to keep that protected. I want to keep that sacrosanct. So it's an incredible thing if somebody says, "This song saved my life," or it changed their life, or it put their feelings into words, or whatever it might be, I'm so grateful that people would say that, of course. It's an incredible compliment. But to a degree, I slightly retreat into myself and go, "Thanks so much," and then just kind of carry on with my day.

And the thing is, I get it, because that is a sentence that I could say to a number of writers in my own life. I mean, I kind of have said it to John K. Samson of the Weakerthans, because he's basically my favorite writer of all time. And it was awkward as fuck. [Laughs.] Or Craig Finn, or Nick Cave, should I ever meet him properly. I met him very briefly once, and he was very nice, but I was too scared to say anything. So I get the sentiment. I understand where it's coming from and all the rest of it. But to a degree, without wanting to sound entirely self-involved, you write for your own judgement. The most honest audience for a writer is your own best judgement. And I still do that, and I don't want to find myself writing a song thinking, "I hope that guy I met out the back of a venue in Phoenix feels seen by this." Because then the whole thing's false instantaneously.

One of my stock questions, and you may have just answered it incidentally, but do you remember the first person you ever met who you had to fight to keep from going full fanboy on?

Oh, yeah, I do, actually: Barney Greenway from Napalm Death.

Wow.

Well, the thing about... [Starts to laugh.] This is a good story, actually, and it's a true story. I was, like, 14, and I went to a punk show, which - in keeping with you - I was later kicked out of by a bouncer, I think. But I got in there, I was first in queue, and Barney Greenway had clearly been in there for soundcheck or whatever, 'cause he was just sat at the bar. I'm a fucking massive Napalm Death fan, but I was 14, and I had this t-shirt that I was wearing at the time... And this is one of those things where I kind of wonder, "Was I really all that punk when I was a kid?" And then I remember this, and I'm, like, "Fuck, yes, I was!" I had this t-shirt, and I'd cut it in half up the side seams and then safety-pinned the entire thing back together.

Well, that's already punk as fuck.

But check this out: I got a Sharpie, and I wrote on the front of it in Sharpie, and...I don't know where I got this from, but I wrote, "If Elvis isn't dead, let's kill him." Which is pretty fucking punk, right?

It is.

And my hair was all kind of spiked up with Vaseline and shit. And I walked into this venue, and Barney Greenway... I was, like, "Fucking hell, it's Barney Greenway!" And he just burst out laughing and was, like, "You're pretty fucking punk, kid." So that was a pretty big day for me.

That's awesome. So I know that Iron Maiden kind of helped set the stage originally for your music, but was it really an epiphany when you first listened to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. I've read that it was, but the way the story's told, it seems like it was almost a light-shining-down-from-above moment.

Kind of. The problem with that story, which clearly lives on Wikipedia or something...

How. Dare. You.

[Laughs.] Well, it's gotta live somewhere, because it comes up quite often! Nebraska is a shorthand for a slightly larger collection of records. My parents didn't listen to... I had to tell my parents who the Beatles were. They really had no idea. There was no modern music in my house growing up. My older sister listened to some stuff - Counting Crows and Levellers were the two bands that she really got me into, and Tori Amos - but in terms of rock music, my ears were pretty virgin territory, shall we say. As a kid, I got into metal, then I got into Nirvana, then I got into punk, then I got into hardcore. And I reached this point in my early twenties where I knew absolutely everything about Sick of It All, and I'd never listened to Neil Young. Put it this way, and this is true: I was familiar with the song "Bob Dylan Writes Propaganda Songs" by the Minutemen before I'd ever heard a song by Bob Dylan. It was kind of an upside down path through music.

So I had this moment in time where I started listening to the popular music canon a little more widely and sort of running up and going, like, "Have you heard of the Rolling Stones?" [Laughs.] Or whatever. But in particular, the kind of roots / Americana or whatever you want to call it, that side of things... I'd heard a Springsteen song and not liked it when I was

younger, and I'd had this singing cheeseburger kind of vibe. I still, by the way, maintain that "Born in the U.S.A." is very far from being his best song. I don't like that song, actually.

But there was Nebraska, and then there was also American Recordings, that whole series of Johnny Cash records, and Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams was pretty high up there as well. And, indeed, Harvest by Neil Young was huge for me, and a lot of my acoustic guitar right-hand technique or style or whatever you want to call it is very much taken from Neil Young's right hand, shall we say, because I learned how to play all those songs as fast as I could.

So it was a collection of records, and Nebraska was one of them, for sure. And that was my route into Springsteen, and I've gone on to become a massive Springsteen fan. But it wasn't just that record.

You mentioned a few minutes ago that your wife said you sounded like you were having fun on this record. Would you say that your previous catalog has been notably un-fun?

No, I think the full quote from her might've been, "It sounds like the first time you're having fun in awhile." That might have been what she was saying. Specifically, Be More Kind was kind of an experimental record within my songwriting canon. I was experimenting with loops and beats and all that kind of thing. No Man's Land is...sort of a concept record, actually, going back to what we were chatting about earlier. But it's quite sort of intellectual and - dare I say - wordy. And then FTHC was an angry record, I think. There was a lot of rage and resentment, because I'd decided to finally start to explore some of the stuff from my childhood on that record, and it turns out I'm pissed off! [Laughs.] So, yeah, I do think there's a slight change of pace and tone with this new record. I mean, you mentioned "Somewhere In Between," and that's not really... I wouldn't necessarily describe that as a fun song, per se! But there's a certain kind of joie de vivre running through this record, I think.

Looking at your back catalog, is there any particular album that you view as either being underrated or just didn't get as many ears as you'd wished?

Oh, yeah. Easily No Man's Land. Here we are again, but there was kind of Twitter kerfuffle about that record. Essentially, I sat down to write, and my central idea at the beginning was to write songs that weren't from my perspective, because I've always written autobiographically. And after seven albums in a row of that kind of material, it was, like, "Hmmm, maybe I and everybody else is bored of me moaning about my shit." [Laughs.] "Let's talk about something else!" So that then turned into history songs, because I'm a gigantic history nerd, and...my idea was to kind of write songs about underappreciated historical figures, and I got four or five songs into the record and realized that, thus far, at least one of them was about a female historical figure, and there's obvious politics to that in terms of our history.

So I proceeded with that, and...I'm not going to sit here and say that every part of the rhetoric presented on the record was perfectly framed and all the rest of it. But we made a podcast with actual historians discussing the figures and all the rest of it. And, indeed, I think that there's some really complex songwriting on there. Like, for instance, there's a song about Nica Rothschild, who was a jazz patroness, and she was Thelonious Monk's muse, shall we say. And I wrote a song about her that used some of Thelonious Monk's chords in a certain section of the song, and it was writing a jazz song, which I've never done before or since, and I arranged a jazz horn section for it. Now, of course, all of this is a little bit is like, "It was hard, so you must like it," which isn't true, of course. But nevertheless, there are some songs on that record that I really love, and I put a lot of time and thought into it. And then the NME, in all of their wisdom, put somebody onto it who reviewed the press release, and the review says, "I haven't listened to this album, and I'm not going to," and then just basically calls me an asshole for 500 words. And that was that. And I possibly sound a little stung talking about this now, because I fucking am. It was a shame to me.

In doing it over, I might possibly rephrase some of the press release or whatever it might be, but I spent a lot of time and love on that record, and it's a slight shame to me that it kind of... [Pauses.] I mean, it was always slightly a side project record. It was slightly outside the normal bounds of songwriting and all that kind of thing. But nevertheless, I feel could like it could bear a little bit of reappraisal. I'm hoping that - in the same way that people have reevaluated various Lou Reed records and stuff many years after - somebody somewhere might decide to be contrarian enough to write a piece saying that that record's my best, or something like that. I would enjoy that.

And I'll wrap up with this last one, which is another question that I like to ask everyone: what would you say is the most proper pop star or rock star moment in your career? Whether ridiculous or wonderful.

You know, funnily enough... First of all, that's a very good question, and not one that I've been asked before as far as I can remember, which is an interesting thing. Okay, you will have noticed by now that I talk a lot, so forgive me that. But we all signed up. [Laughs.] But there was a moment in my career around the album Tape Deck Heart where I kind of... Essentially, one of my feet slid over the line into what you might call the mainstream for a short period of time. And it was an interesting moment for me philosophically, because it makes one ask the question, "Well, what defines 'mainstream' in music?" Or culture, more broadly. And I think my answer to that would be that "mainstream" means that your art is presented to an undifferentiated audience. No matter how big you are, if you're an "underground" band, your music tends to go out to people who either already like you or who already like the kind of thing that you do. If you become mainstream... I mean, we had a song on that record that was #1 on AAA Radio in the States, so all of a sudden a lot of people who don't know anything about where I come from - or about Black Flag, or about the Weakerthans, or whatever - are checking out my stuff. And some of them like what I do, and some of them absolutely don't. And it puts you occasionally in some pretty weird spaces. And I had this moment...

This isn't really my biggest rock star moment, but it certainly was a moment where I was thinking, like, "What the fuck is happening in my life?" I was at Coachella, which is not my favorite festival for a whole host of different reasons, chief among which, by the way, is... I mean, God bless America, I love America, and you do lots of things very well, but you really haven't nailed festivals yet. And Coachella... There's, like, Astroturf and misting stations, and you can walk around barefoot. And it's, like, at a festival, I want to get trench foot and somebody in a giant bunny suit to sell me ecstasy, y'know what I mean? That's the fucking vibe here.

I'll thank you for that pull quote right now.

Yes, you're welcome. [Laughs.] So we were at Coachella, and we had a good show, we had a cool slot and everything. But at one point I got picked up by this car and taken to this area that was called the Gifting Area. And it was basically just corporate brands giving you shit...all of which, I might add, I sold on eBay. Because I was fucking broke at the time! And it was just, like, "Another pair of headphones? Don't mind if I fucking do!"

And I did this interview at the Gifting Area with this guy, and God bless him, no disrespect to this guy, but... Essentially, he had no fucking idea who I was, but...possibly thought I was someone else or something. I don't really know. But his questions started kind of bland. And I'm well practiced enough at this now to kind of thread my way through these things. But then they just got more and more obscure, and...he basically just started asking me, like, what my opinion of mumble rap was and this kind of thing, and how I felt that I fit into that scene and all of this kind of shit.

And this is pretty much the only time I've ever done this in my life, but I was, like, "I need to stop you. Do you know who I am? Not as in, 'I'm a massive deal,' but...it just feels like you absolutely have the wrong end of the fucking stick here." And he looked at me like I just kind of pissed in his mouth. He looked really sour about it was just kind of, like, "Guess you don't care about little people," or...I don't even fucking know. But I was just, like, "You might as well be speaking Swahili to me right now. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about." And we sort of parted on bad terms!

And I got into this Hummer or whatever they sent over, and I got taken back to the backstage area with a bunch of free headphones, but...it was just a moment of kind of sitting there and just thinking, "What the fuck am I doing here?" And it may be that that is more the world that the Black Eyed Peas exist in, or whoever, and at this point I'm confident in saying that they're welcome to it! It's not really where I belong, and that's okay. I've got my furrow, I'm very pleased with my furrow, and I'll stick to it.