A conversation with Lou Barlow from 2004

The Sebadoh founder talks about falling out of fashion, going Hollywood, and why he had no interest in playing with Dinosaur Jr. again (ha)

Nov 21, 2024

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Notes on this week’s updates to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
- Kim Deal, “Nobody Loves You More”: Yes, the world is free-falling into a doom spiral, but Kim Deal is releasing her debut solo album this week, so take that, dystopia!
- Saint Etienne, “Half Light”: There’s also a new Saint Etienne album coming out in December, so now you have all the more reason to close your eyes and pretend it’s still 1993.
- Ela Minus, “BROKEN”: This Brooklyn-via-Colombia singer/producer’s 2020 album, acts of rebellion, was a blast of frosty post-punk electro perfectly suited to dancing alone in your blacked-out living room with a dollar-store strobe light during COVID lockdowns, but with the lead single from the upcoming DIA, she’s entered her “Ray of Light” phase.
- Robber Robber, “Mouth”: During a recent drive, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” came on Sirius XMU, and my son said, “Oh, I know this song—it’s big on YouTube Shorts right now.” Shortly thereafter, I found myself revisiting this Vermont-based band’s delightfully scrappy debut from earlier this year, Wild Guess, and this tune struck me as a photo-negative complement to “Maps”: If the Yeah Yeah Yeahs classic sounded always sounded like a raucous rock song trying to claw its way out of a ballad (particularly when Nick Zinner drops that neutron-bomb riff after the second chorus), this is more like a ballad concealed inside a gnarly indie-rock jam.
- J Spaceman & John Coxon, “Love for the asking”: In lieu of a new Spiritualized album in 2024, we got the next best thing—i.e., Jason Pierce and long-time accomplice John Coxon’s improvised soundtrack to photographer William Eggleston’s cult-classic documentary Stranded in Canton, a cinema-verite snapshot of mid-’70s Memphis street life cited as a major influence by the likes of Gus Van Zant and Harmony Korine. In Pierce’s case, the film’s gritty urban milieu has prompted a return to the nasty psych-fuzz sound he’s rarely revisited since Spacemen 3’s Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to era.

Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Lou Barlow

The date: March 29, 2004

Location: Phoner—I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto, Lou was in L.A.

Publication: Eye Weekly

Album being promoted: None—the interview was conducted a few weeks before the Toronto stop on Sebadoh’s 2004 reunion tour.

The context: Only four years separated this Sebadoh tour from their previous road campaign, but it may as well have been 40. After enjoying a steady run through the ‘90s as one of America’s most beloved indie-rock bands, Sebadoh capped the decade with their major-label debut The Sebadoh, which shared a certain quirky, post-Beckian production aesthetic with Barlow’s beat-driven, chart-breaching side band The Folk Implosion, but the album ultimately failed to bring the masses onside (at least not in the U.S.) while alienating a sizable chunk of their core fanbase. The Sebadoh wasn’t just a disappointing setback for the band, it practically thrust them into an existential crisis that lasted for years. (For a thorough accounting of this miserable chapter in the Sebadoh saga, check out Gary Suarez’s excellent 20th anniversary retrospective on the record for Vice.)

So the Lou Barlow I spoke with in 2004 didn’t sound like an indie-rock icon ready to conquer the comeback trail, but an artist still reeling from the trauma of getting rejected by his fans, and questioning his place in a 2004-era indie landscape overrun with stylish Strokesy garage bands, DFA dance-punk hipsters, and Broken Social Scene-scaled art-rock collectives. As such, Barlow in conversation came off a lot like he does in a Sebadoh song: humbled and self-deprecating at times, brutally honest and scathingly forthright at others.

So does getting Sebadoh back up and running again require a lot of practice?

Jake [a.k.a. bassist Jason Loewenstein] and I had done a tour late last year for two weeks, and we practiced for a week before that, and the songs came back really quickly. The stuff is pretty simple at its root.

Was that tour an intentional move to get back to your roots?

It’s just about getting back to playing with Jason. The very first tour Sebadoh had ever done outside our home state, it was just Jason and I, because Eric Gaffney had quit the band shortly before the tour, so Jake and I did the very first multi-state Sebadoh tour. He was 16 at the time, he had just dropped out of high school. The core of what became Sebadoh was always he and I. It was Eric Gaffney and I when we first started, but Jason joined pretty soon after that.

It’s been five years since the last Sebadoh album, but did the group ever officially cease to exist in that period?

No, not officially. I never thought, “That’s it, fuck this! This is horrible!” It was like “Whoa, we need to take a break.” We had an intense up-and-down run for years, we had a couple of people coming in and out of the band, we grew up a lot during that period of time and changed a lot—it was a very intense few years.

Did the muted response to The Sebadoh make you want to lay low for a while?

That was part of it. There were tons of other things conspiring against us at that time… if the album had actually done well, I’m sure we would’ve maybe had the money to continue. We live so far apart and there’s so much travelling involved to keep the band together, and then when the bottom fell through, it was like, “Well, we can’t really afford to chase each other around the country and keep this band together.”

It’s interesting how that album now has this reputation of being a career setback, given that “The Flame” actually did pretty well in the UK…

It was a Top 40 hit there—we made it onto Top of the Pops, it was our best-received and best-selling record there for sure. But in the States, we were playing to that audience of indie kids, and it’s a very fickle thing. And we had so many years at the top anyway, we just had to be pulled down at that point. We were the deadwood that had to be removed. There was all kinds of other shit going on then too: All the record companies were collapsing, Sub Pop was in total financial and leadership turmoil—it was a nightmare! A lot of pre-millennium tension going on!

Do you keep tabs on what’s happening in indie rock right now?

I like so many new bands now, I think they’re way better than Sebadoh and Pavement! I think music has vastly improved over the past couple of years, especially what’s considered indie rock. At this point, I feel hopelessly out of date and out of touch, as far as the kind of music I play. But I actually buy more new records that I actually listen to now than I did in 2000 or ’99 or ’98.

Do you hear yourself in the music being made by younger artists?

No, they’re just songs I really like. I’m not so much thinking, “How did I influence this!” That’s totally secondary to the rush of enjoying someone’s songs.

Well, there’s a case to be made that you’re the godfather of emo.

In some ways, that’s not a total stretch, everyone talks about it. I personally don’t understand it entirely, but in some ways I guess I do.

You were sort of the OG of sincere, confessional songwriting in indie rock…

That’s probably true, because everything back then was heavily steeped in irony, and it was also really dark as well. Music was different.

Would you say the internet has made it easier to exist now as an indie artist?

Once the internet picked up, that really helped us quite a bit. Discussion groups and mailing lists started popping up—we totally benefited from that. It was an excellent way for people who liked our music to keep up with us. When I first started my website, I was just throwing songs up. Now I don’t really do that as much. I’m more concerned with finishing songs… you can write them, but finishing them in an interesting way is something else entirely. So now, I’m concentrating on the textural side of filling out songs I’ve already written, and it’s an incredibly laborious process! I’m not very prolific—I’m extremely slow these days. The rush of youth definitely helped [in the ‘90s]. I was throwing songs everywhere, in every direction.

Do you feel more settled now?

I’m not settled! The angst is coming back, which is probably a good thing.

I saw you in that movie Laurel Canyon—at the time you took that role, were you thinking it’d be more fun to play in a fake band than a real one?

No, it was horrible! The experience of being filmed was really terrible. We went into one of the nicest studios I’ve ever been to in my life, this huge place called Sunset Sound, and we had to go in and record these Sparklehorse songs. While we were actually recording, all of the people from the film came down, like Frances McDormand, and then outside it was, like, Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow having lunch, and I’m in there recording this god-awful Sparklehorse song that I hated so much, and it only had two chords and I couldn’t even play that.bI felt so constricted, and I was so nervous. And it was right when we first met the people that were in the movie, like Frances. It was totally surreal. One of the first days we were on the set, Allesandro Nivola picked up a guitar and did this fuckin’ perfect note-for-note version of “Ride My Llama” by Neil Young, and he sang it like Jeff Buckley. I was just out of my element entirely—it was terrifying! I mean, the experience of being on a movie set was cool, and I got really good clothes out of it, too, like great jeans and t-shirts that I still wear. And all of the people that worked on the film were incredibly kind. Everybody was there to make us feel really good, so that whole experience was great. But being filmed and playing these horrible Sparklehorse songs… it was musically, extremely humbling, to the point of being crippling. But when I saw it, I was relieved—every line I had to say, they never showed my face while I was saying it.

Do those sorts of opportunities come up a lot when you’re living in L.A.?

It’s nothing you can rely on, living here is kind of terrifying, because you always get just enough money to keep you going for a little while. You can’t really come to expect these weird cosmic things to happen. That [film experience] was just bizarre—being hooked up with all that was just all pure luck and circumstance. I wasn’t out there trying to get that to happen. It literally fell into our laps, and I just go through life so passively, I just wait for things to drop in my lap, and because of that, it can be really terrifying. This city is lousy with actor/musicians looking to get by.

You put out a new Folk Implosion album last year, and now Sebadoh are back. What are the chances of an old-school Dinosaur Jr. reunion happening?

I don’t know. We live very far apart. J plays really loud. I was onstage with him about a year ago when he was doing the Stooges songs with Mike Watt and the Asheton brothers, and it was still unbelievably loud, and he was still totally wearing earplugs when he was doing it. I remember after I got out of Dinosaur, I ran totally in the opposite direction. It was so horrible back then, and I still can’t handle that kind of volume onstage—it’s just so unmusical to me. But he’s a brilliant player.

ENCORES

So, as you’re no doubt well aware, within a year of doing this interview, Lou had a change of heart about rejoining Dinosaur Jr. And presumably, he’s since invested in some high-quality ear plugs, because, nearly 20 years later, Dino are still at it—here they are opening for Weezer in Toronto back in September.
With all due respect to the late Mark Linkous, Lou was right: The tune he had to perform in Laurel Canyon, “Someday I Will Treat You Good,” is probably the weakest—and least-representative—song in the Sparklehorse canon, an atypically slick, Gin Blossoms-type alt-pop number that disrupts the homespun, front-porch-psych vibe of the otherwise wonderful Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot.
Lou went into much deeper detail about his Laurel Canyon experience in a recent episode of RAW Impressions, his highly entertaining podcast with his wife Adelle Burda. But his stance on Sparklehorse appears to have softened considerably: Partway through the conversation, he performs an off-the-cuff acoustic cover of “Shade and Honey,” another Linkous song featured prominently in the film. (To keep tabs on all things Lou, be sure to subscribe to his Substack.)
With Christmas fast approaching, and the 20th-anniversary of Barlow’s winsome 2005 solo release Emoh coming up right behind it this January, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that the album features the greatest song ever written about Jesus: