Young Fenimore Lee: Something ignored in previous interviews are your origins in the Chicago suburbs, which we’re interested in, as we’re from there ourselves. I think to understand this album, The Fool, one has to understand your entire journey. Let’s start from the beginning. Where did you grow up? What was your upbringing like?
John Rossiter: I grew up in Glencoe. I was exposed to music all the time. My mom and I sang in the church choir, and she plays guitar and sings folk songs. She loved The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell. I picked up a violin when I was 5. Turns out my partner, who I met many years later in Los Angeles, had the same violin teacher. I played violin for about 10 years, then I picked up the guitar because my mom had this old Epiphone that she would play, and she taught me “Drive” by Incubus. And that was how I started my career as an alternative rock musician… (laughs)
If we’re talking about the Chicago suburbs, as I reflect on it, there wasn’t a lot of room for emotional expression there and in my family. Music was a huge outlet, even if I didn’t consciously realize it at the time. It became where my sadness and anger went. It’s also what I looked for in music, which is why I found emo, starting with Weezer at age 12. I didn’t have much access to far out music, so when I heard “Only In Dreams”, that Weezer tune that’s like 8 minutes long—I didn’t know that was allowed. When the song kept going on and on, it blew my mind. I was in awe of the possibilities. When I listen to crazy jazz and atonal music today, I’m looking for that same thing. Exploring possibilities.
Ali Saeed: The middle section of “Only In Dreams,” where it strips away, then builds and builds, that sounds like proto–Young Jesus right there to me.
John: 100%. It gave me chills, you just saying that, because, our first guitarist, Cody Kellogg, when we went on drives, he would put on that tune, and he would be like, this is John. All of John’s songs sound like this.
Young: I’m interested in that LA Review of Books interview you did, around the time when S/T (2017) came out. You said that you “spent a lot of time operating within the tradition of Chicago emo music, which is typically very serious and midwestern.” That you “tacitly accepted this as a mode of songwriting.” You went on to say that you found more humor in your songwriting later. So you were consciously saying that to contrast that [Chicago emo] with your newfound artistic MO. So thinking back on that, how do you feel about that “tradition?” Does that mean something different to you now than it did before? Or do you continue to eschew that as a mode of artistic expression?
John: I love that you’re asking that, because I said that 8 years ago now. So I was 27, and very sure of myself, I’d say. You develop theories about the world, and you think they’re true. When I look back on that emo music now – not all of it is that serious. Some of it is just people having fun and being funny, but the chordal and melodic signifiers attach it to emo. So I want to edit that answer a little bit… (laughs) A lot of the music that I loved was actually kinda goofy. I loved this band called Piglet, from Highwood I think? They were all around 17 year olds. Just tappy (gesticulates tapping emo-style on a guitar), amazing musicians. Beautiful arrangements, but also kind of goofy!
I think I hadn’t quite found myself as an artist. With this record, I feel like I took the craft of songwriting seriously; the idea of building something to guide people along towards an emotion, but at the same time, leaving space for people to bring their own emotions into it.
Young: You moved to LA around 2016… I read this interview in The Alternative where you mentioned that you needed to move to LA; you were in a rut in Chicago… but you also felt lonely in LA, at least initially. So when you think back to that move, how do you feel about that? Do you feel like it was a worthwhile change for you?
John: In some ways, it feels weirdly destined because I always said that I would never move to LA. I hated it anytime I visited. But I had only seen a specific kind of LA. LA has a vibrant counterculture in response to the superficiality that everybody talks about. When I moved there, I didn’t know anyone except my friend Jordan, to whom the song Man of the Year (“MOTY”) on this album is dedicated. I found a job at this bookstore called Skylight Books. Everyone there was well-read and knew a ton about art, music and culture. They’re all older too, so they just had more life. I really needed that. Before that, I was just with my high school friends in Chicago. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I was drinking a ton, doing a bunch of drugs, and stuck in confusion as to whom I was.
Bookstores provide a sort of temple of the mind. College for me was just about skating by. I learned how to trick people into thinking I was learning. But when I got to the bookstore, I looked up to my coworkers, and when they recommended something, I took it seriously. It was hard as hell. A lot of that literature, I struggled with. I remember reading things and having no idea what it meant until months later. I felt like I went to college at the bookstore. It helped me develop this cerebral understanding of myself. However, I wasn’t yet connected to my body, so that was the next phase for me, following the bookstore.
Ali: Do you remember any key books that changed your thinking from that period?
John: Yes. There was this book called Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu. He’s Romanian. It was this psychedelic dream logic writing that was funny and self-deprecating, but also revelatory and beautiful. And then disgusting, like talking about farts, and then he’d be in the body of a bug examining the cells… It’s so hard to explain, but I didn’t know these things were possible. There’s a song on Grow/Decompose called “Milo” that was influenced by Cărtărescu.
I also love this writer named Joy Williams. Then there was this book about farming without pesticides and weed killers called The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. That one was a paradigm shift in my life.
Young: According to the liner notes to this album (The Fool), you left music for a period of time after Shepherd Head to focus on permaculture. Can you speak to your reasons for leaving music? What drew you to gardening? How has this experience developed your relationship to music?
John: When the band split up shortly before Shepherd Head, and Kern, Marcell, Eric, and I all went our separate ways, I questioned, what’s the point of ever playing with other people again? We had it so good. There was a magic between the four of us that took a lot of practice. We just couldn’t get along after a while. I wondered, is that just going to happen with everyone I try to play with? Is there something wrong with me as a bandleader?
I went into gardening after I read that book, The One-Straw Revolution, and realized that it could also be a guide for myself internally. A guide to treat myself and my emotions with the understanding that everything that I need is already there, and it’s just about discovering. That might mean going through pain, just like the natural storms and disease that come into any ecosystem. To be present with them makes you stronger over time. When you’re gardening, you’re viewing this process. You're watching things die and return to the soil, but also feed the soil, so that the death you were so worried about is contextualized as part of this beautiful recycling process.
It helped me develop patience with my emotions, and at the end of the day, with my music. If the song doesn’t come today, that’s okay. It needs time to grow. If I’m not writing right now, or if what I’m doing right now isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t mean that what I’m doing isn’t important. Sitting at a guitar, playing the piano, or showing up to a songwriting session, these actions have unintended consequences that are probably more important than the highly controlled, manufactured moments.
Young: With Shepherd Head, you were beginning this process of opening up your sound, which has culminated in The Fool. Speaking to Shepherd Head for the moment, what did this process feel like?
John: It was hard. (laughs) When you’re alone, it’s a lot of time on a computer to make an album. You go a little crazy because you’re alone with your judgment and your cycles of reasoning. There’s no one to say, this is amazing! Move on! To go from a full band to that was a challenging experience. I’m glad I did it, because I have so much of a better understanding for all that producers and engineers do. But it’s tough, and I don’t think I’d do it the same way again. I did it all on GarageBand, the same version that I had from when I was 24, so, a 10-year-old version with severely limited capabilities.
Ali: Starting with Shepherd Head, and continuing with The Fool, you have incorporated elements of electronic music. Do you have any particular artists or works that inspired you?
John: I have always loved Burial. Love Burial. I also love Stars of the Lid. I really like kranky records, which is a Chicago record label that’s like, Grouper, and ambient stuff that sounds muffled. I love a sound that’s almost underwater. There’s this band I just found called The Spiny Anteaters; they were one of the first kranky records to come out, and they have this one song called “Tripping Girl”. The guitar on that sounds exactly how I’ve always wanted a piano to sound. It’s hard to explain, but that’s the sound I was hoping for in Shepherd Head.
Young: Listening to The Fool, it feels intimate, raw, and direct. This is contrasted in the liner notes with the calculated, controlled arrangements of your previous stuff. It seems like the songs just flowed out of you, unlocked by these improvisational sessions with people that you love. We’re interested in who these collaborators are, and what role they played.
John: They’re far out, and they’re fantastic artists. The first people I met in connection with this project were Alex Lappin and Alex Babbitt, who were people I was gardening with. I just posted on Instagram like, “hey, what’s up, I need help with my garden, I want to build this pathway out of concrete that I broke.” They came through, and we would spend days in the garden. Eventually, we’d sit at my piano and play, sing, and improvise. It was so amazing and special.
We actually all grew up together. They were a few years younger than me, but we all grew up playing music. Alex Lappin is from Glencoe. If you walk across this golf course, you would get to his house from my parents’ house. Alex Babbitt grew up in Wilmette and then moved to Deerfield. We have all these shared histories, and we listened to all the same shit. They liked Young Jesus when I was 20 and they were in high school. Young Jesus was a party band that all the New Trier kids would get blackout drunk to at the shows. (laughs) Part of what this album’s about is revisiting this past, but with all the things we’ve learned since.
Shahzad Ismaily just emailed me out-of-the-blue one day about Milford Graves. He is what pulled me back into music. When I first got that email, I was just like, “oh, I don’t care. Milford died, there’s no chance of me meeting him, I don’t know who Shahzad is, so whatever.” Then he got my phone number and texted me, “I’m in LA right now.” So I said, “okay, I’ll make you lunch, come over,” and we really hit it off. Unbeknownst to me then, Shahzad is one of the greatest backing musicians in the world right now. He plays with Laurie Anderson, Arooj Aftab, Moor Mother, and so many other amazing artists.
I recorded about half the tunes with Shahzad. Shahzad’s daughter sang on the end of the song “Rich”, along with Alex Lappin’s uncle and wife. It was an amazing moment—his uncle’s in his 80s, and his daughter’s, what, 9? 8 now? 6 at the time? After we recorded that, Alex Lappin’s uncle said, “have you ever thought about seeing a therapist?” (laughs) So that’s kind of The Fool.
The Fool is this embrace of coincidence and synchronicity, and trusting that there are non-cerebral intelligences that are trying to lead you to beautiful things. I went to this one shop and saw a tarot card deck, which I bought for Alex Lappin as a gift for recording these songs. I’m not that into tarot, but I thought, why don’t we draw one? And The Fool is what came up.
Ali: Obviously, this album is the product of a unique confluence of people, instruments, and spaces at a particular moment in time, but I’m interested in what artistic references you had in mind when it came time to assemble the music. For example, when I started the album, I was kind of shocked listening to “Brenda & Diane”. I thought “woah, I’m listening to Thunder Road here. This is like an old emo guy, and now it feels like I’ve turned on Born to Run.” Another reference that I got throughout the album was fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy. He also started in a more experimental way and now makes these minimalist, cerebral, mature, laid-back compositions.
John: Yeah, this one was interesting because I went in really open minded. I wrote the lyrics and the shells of the tunes on guitar and piano, but I went into the sessions thinking, “let’s see what happens.”
I really love Meatloaf, tunes like “I Would Do Anything for Love” and “Bat Out of Hell”. Also love cheesy Bruce Springsteen. I wanted to embrace some of that theatricality and bombast. “Born to Run” is one of my favorite songs of all-time. “Born to Run” to me is kind of like emo.
“Brenda & Diane” definitely has that going on. I don’t know how to describe the rest of the album because it kind of just happened. What I can tell you is, while I was writing the lyrics and the songs, I kept thinking “Janis Joplin”, even though I’ve never listened to Janis Joplin. I also totally understand Jeff Tweedy. The first music I heard outside of The Beatles when I was young was my sister playing “Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)”. I was like… “Is this Paul McCartney?” And she said, “no, this is this band called Wilco.”
Young: I keep returning to that LARB interview, where you said about the S/T album, “this is the first time I get to talk about I. My family and my emotions.” Now, it seems like you’ve gone back to character studies, like of Eloise and David, these two brothers who wake up in the night to help their dad use the bathroom. However, you’re still using these as a way to talk about yourself, and also a greater poetic truth. There’s these themes of change and transformation. But also, that such ideas are almost falsehoods. That we’re not really changing, but we desire it so deeply. I’m interested in how this all relates to your personal philosophy… I realize that’s a big question. (laughs)
John: Huge question. (laughs) It does make sense… I think that’s a beautiful observation, because when you say that, I do feel some resonance. At the same time, when I was writing these songs, I was going line-by-line. I didn’t feel as in control of it as I have with other music I’ve written.
I don’t know why I wrote about “Brenda & Diane”. I don’t know why David and Eloise came back, which are people I wrote about 12-to-15 years ago. I don’t know why I wrote so much about God’s plan, like a tune about being at the gates of heaven with a priest who is not actually that stoked about being there. I don’t know why “Sunrise” happened, which explores this kind of rambling, partying character?
On past records, I had specific ideas I wanted to communicate, but on this record, I used the opportunity to transcribe specific moments. From these moments, to me, came a more resonant emotional truth than past records. I’ve heard the idea before that, “the more specific you get, the more universal it can become,” but I never really experienced that until this album. Where it’s like, in the song “Moonlight”, the moment of someone posting a weird picture on Instagram, and you having a crush on them and liking that picture accidentally. That was a more powerful image to me than anything I’ve written that directly talks about love or longing.
I don’t know why this album happened. But it did, and I’m happy with it. I love the music. I’ve learned so much about songwriting from it.