One of the best parts of this job is getting paid to babble about stuff I love. Another is the reader comments on this very website–after all nothing says, "Good morning, trooper, rise and shine and let's tackle the world!" more warmly than a dozen people I've never met angrily calling for my termination in public. (Eliot Spitzer, you got any room in that doghouse?) In all seriousness, though, I love this job because A) I get to work alongside writers I've read and admired for years, and B) I get to interview heroes of mine like Dave Pajo.
I spoke with Pajo–one of the founders of the legendary (and recently reformed) Slint and Will Oldham's Palace in addition to being a solo artist (M, Papa M, Aerial M) and a guitarist in Billy Corgan's short-lived Zwan–about his new group Dead Child last week. Despite the reverence and even mystique that still surrounds his early work, Pajo wound up being a strikingly unpretentious guy. In fact, he was downright forthcoming and candid over the phone, considering this was just a Random Rules interview (look for it next month) that only required him to talk about the songs on his iPod. He had lots of great topics to shoot the shit about–loving Jimmy Buffett, hating Deadheads, how Billy Corgan made him laugh (at least for a little while)–but the core of our chat had to do with heavy metal. Dead Child is a full-bore metal band, and all the songs that came up on Pajo's iPod were metal of some sort or another. At the same time, he had this to confess:
"For the last decade… I wanted to start a metal band. No one took me seriously. When I was a kid I learned to shred, but by the time I figured it out no one was playing like that anymore. [Laughs.] Then when I was in New York a few years ago I played bass for Early Man for a couple months. Playing with them made me decide to start Dead Child for real. It reminded me of that enthusiasm I had for playing metal when I was younger. I totally know this is part of my midlife crisis."
Here's a guy who was instrumental in the creation of two entire genres–post-rock and indie-folk–that still cast a huge shadow over today's musical landscape. But he's more or less abandoned his considerable legacy to embrace a new (or is that old?) purpose: In his words, "We just want to play a party and knock the windows out."
Of course, it's nothing new for musicians to scratch odd itches with seemingly uncharacteristic side projects–Ryan Adams' The Finger springs immediately to mind–but I got every impression from Pajo that Dead Child's backward-galloping metal is his true, ardent, overwhelming passion. In fact, he couldn't stop talking about it; by comparison, he barely mentioned Slint at all. I don't have any sweeping conclusion to make here, just a few questions to throw out: Is it annoying or exhilarating when artists flit from style to style over the course of their careers? Conversely, are there any artists you wish were more reckless (or at least restless) about the music they make? What are some musical about-faces, returns to form, and/or midlife crises that actually worked? And in general, is an artist's midlife crisis something we, as fans, should be subjected to? 'Cause seriously, I'm kinda wondering.