Ty Segall - The Stool Pigeon
Ty Segall, a misfit rock maestro with a rapid-fire output, is sitting in his car in San Francisco, sounding bored and bummed out. In a month he’ll turn 24 and release his fourth solo album but, beyond that, he just hopes he won’t go crazy. “That’s my long-term goal,” he says, chuckling quietly, “…to not turn into a psycho.”
The way his brain bubbles with idiosyncrasies scares him, he says, and music helps bring it into focus. Maybe that’s why his back catalogue has whizzed by like a shower of sparks (there has already been a live album, an EP and a 45 this year), but things are changing. He’s growing up, slowing down, planning carefully. For anyone trying to keep pace with Segall’s career so far, this may take some adjusting.
The momentum began when John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees spotted Segall drumming — with a fractured arm — for garage band The Traditional Fools, a drumstick shoved inside his cast. Later, when the group couldn’t play a date they had committed to, Segall took the opportunity to perform his own material as a one-man band, taping himself to a drum kit and letting rip on guitar.
The sight was arresting — a bratty figure pounding out searing surf rock in two-minute bursts — and Dwyer offered to put out a record for him. The resulting 2008 self-titled album — something Segall now regards, a hint dismissively, as a party record made in a hurry — erupts like a fevered mutation of Them, The Troggs and Link Wray: twelve tracks of infectious, bruised-up pop stomped over in 23 minutes.
Crunching follow-ups in Lemons (2009) and Melted (2010), both on Memphis-based Goner Records, honed Segall’s ability to sculpt the sounds of psychosis into power pop. But while the records captured a certain “mental estrangement”, he admits that ferociousness didn’t quite add up to something meaningful.
With that in mind, Segall spent six months shaping new album Goodbye Bread so that the usual 30-minute bang was loaded behind one motif: digging beneath the surface of California cool.
“I mean I’m definitely very Californian,” he says. “I grew up on the beach, surfing, next to a sunny desert surrounded by artists in a wealthy area. But there’s this weird vibe or feeling that comes with that, too: an emotional disconnection I see in a lot of people, families and lifestyles I grew up with.” The sound of pages being flipped through in the background blithely illustrates the point.
“I’m fully part of that thing and I definitely have a problem with it,” he goes on. “But to me it’s strange how specific that hazy apathy is to California, given the imagery and notions people associate with it as a dreamy beach paradise: Disneyland, surfing, psychedelic music, drugs, hippies, the need to get famous.”
This sounds remarkably like Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel Less Than Zero, though Segall says he’s never heard of it. Ellis, like Segall, made his debut as a 21-year-old Californian hotshot still in college. The characters, too, were blue-eyed, blonde rich kids slipping helplessly into disaffected nihilism; shades hiding their emptiness, a coked-up fog clouding the void within.
Segall grew up in Orange County’s Laguna Beach to an artist mother and drummer father (they divorced when he was two, he points out). By the time he was 17, the self-described class weirdo was fronting scuzzy punk group Epsilons, though Segall cringes over the material’s naivety now.
“Every song on our first record had the world ‘girl’ in it – every one,” he says. “I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t know what was up. It was all just a fake 17-year-old thing. That’s why I was like, ‘Wow, I’m a scumbag. This isn’t right. I don’t know what love is. I can’t sing about it. I never want to do that again.’”
Segall seems prone to abrupt resolutions. The release of Epsilons’ well-received second album, Killed ’Em Deader ’N A Six Card Poker Hand was punctuated with his decision to leave for the University of San Francisco in 2007, enrolling in a media studies degree that he regularly bunked off from to tour across America.
“I needed to figure myself out. I don’t think I would have done that as well if I was only an hour away from my family. I wanted to be fully self-sufficient or at least cut-off in that I can’t get home right now. I’m here. I have to make this work.”
He has given up the internet (“not a healthy place to exist in”), veered away from any association with garage music (“I don’t want to do that anymore”) and has vowed never to settle down to a normal life. Goodbye Bread — a cleaner, carefully measured set with enough breathing room for guitar solos — is a note of acceptance, he says, in choosing the frugal lifestyle of an artist over joining the rat race.
“When you die, all you have are your decisions and the people you love and the places you’ve been. You don’t have your fucking car and your fucking job. You just have your experiences. That’s why I love making music because when I die, there’s a song that’s goin’ to be on a record that someone’s goin’ to have somewhere. That’s cool to me; not my fucking shoes. This is my opportunity to say something, to affect people, and it’s way better than working at a clothing store… Like, whatever!”