It’s a bittersweet welcome back for . Their new album, , is everything fans could ask for, a wild ride taking in everything from Americana to jazz and beyond. It is also, the band say, the last one they will ever make.
Vocalist Exene Cervenka joins us from her home in Orange, California to talk us through their spectacular swansong. Well, we made a record and we’re going to tour. For us, touring means as many shows as we can string together, so that isn’t a screeching halt.
But studio albums are a whole different thing. It’s a lot of work. I think if John [Doe, bassist and co-vocalist] and I write the most amazing song we’ve ever written, and we knew it could be a great X song, and someone said: “Hey, we need a song for a movie.
” Well, sure. But to go and make an album? Nah. That’s what people are hearing.
But we’re not nostalgic, because we never stopped playing. It’s not like years ago we had this amazing moment in our life, let’s try to recreate it. It’s more like, say, the song , the first words are: ‘ .
’ So you’re already past-tensing. And some of the songs are older lyrics that I wrote a long time ago and recently put together. A lot of it is playing with words and rhymes for me.
I don’t always know when I write a song what it’s about or where it’s going, I just know that those lines sound great together. DJ [Bonebreak, drums] knows a lot about big-band music and jazz. Billy [Zoom, guitar] is into rootsy rock, country, obscure stuff, .