Graham Reynolds: soundtrack virtuoso takes center stage

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: I like that room. Jeez Louise.

Graham Reynolds: Thanks, this is my studio. I get to be here every day; I love it.

LP: That's incredible. Wow, that's a lot to take in. It's the mad scientist's lair.

Graham Reynolds: I like a room that makes you want to make music.

LP: Along those lines, when did you put that studio together? Because I've read you talking about it in other interviews, but I couldn't quite place it in time.

Graham Reynolds: Seven years ago or so. Pre-pandemic, for sure. A couple of years pre-pandemic.

LP: That's convenient.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah, exactly. I was in a much smaller room that was, at one point, my bedroom, then turned into the studio and eventually built this.

LP: By having that space, as opposed to sort of sleeping with all your equipment, despite the fact that I'm sure it kept you warm, what's the benefit? What has it unlocked for you, if anything?

Graham Reynolds: Kind of everything. The pandemic was the real proof of concept where I could never leave the house and do all my work. I could do a lot in the bedroom studio, but I can do a lot more here. And my partner's in theater. And so she works at the other end of the house. I'm here in the studio. And then, at the end of the day, you stop working and can get together and have a drink on the porch.

LP: There's something very sort of humane about separating your actual workspace from your living space, even if you some kind of, in air quotes, work at home.

Graham Reynolds: I walk down the hall and enter a workspace, but the home is still separate. Exactly.

LP: Given all of the different facets of your career, what's your self-image? Are you workmanlike? Are you a craftsman? Do you have a mental model for when you pick up the tools and go into the salt mine?

Graham Reynolds: I'm a time manager, I suppose, and that is a way to address that question. I keep a giant to-do list that involves all the projects and all the calendars in an attempt not to drop the ball. And I'm pretty good at not dropping balls; it happens sometimes, but I like to do creative work quickly.

And so that's why I like having the studio like this, where it's always ready to go. So I can be ready whenever I have an idea or feel like making something. And in the meantime, I can get the practical work done and create the mental and creative spaces where the ideas will happen.

LP: It's really interesting speaking directly with or reading about creative people and how they approach their work. For a long time, I thought I heard two general ways of being. One is like having the time and doing it every day. It's almost like how a writer sits at the typewriter or what used to be the typewriter. Don't wait for inspiration, do the work and open the channel, and some days it's going to be crap. Then, the other model never gets in the way of a good idea, like dropping everything. If the song lyric comes or the melody comes, drop everything and run to whatever your device is.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah.

LP: I wonder, is it that black and white? Or like, how do you manage in terms of working in your home? Essentially, do you drop everything and work? Or are you good at like, "Oh, I'll deal with that in the morning" or...?

Graham Reynolds: Rather than a dichotomy, I would think of it as a spectrum. On one end, you have a very disciplined artist. Stravinsky was like that. Three hours in the morning, there was a lunch and a walk, then family time and meetings, and then concerts at night. There's that extreme. That's for a disciplined artist who has a defined practice.

And then there's the other extreme of the people who wait for moments of inspiration and then capture those as quickly as possible. I think most of us are somewhere on this spectrum in between. I have too many deadlines to do the wait for the muse approach. And I like deadlines. If I don't have deadlines, then I try to create them.

Either set up a meeting or promise something or set up a concert where I'm going to show ideas or whatever it is. Deadlines are important for setting some parameters and pushing you. And you need, I think you need to be pushed a bit. And since I have all these deadlines, you know, it's a film, it's a ballet, whatever it might be that they're going on and they're going to dance, or they're going to go on, and they're going to put that on the theater, so I have to finish my work.

I don't have a choice. So, the wait-for-the-muse approach doesn't work with that. At the same time, like we were talking about earlier, sort of always being ready to capture an idea. Now, with phones, it's so easy to capture a thought that you barely have to interrupt what you're doing. You can sing a melody into the record app on your phone, take a note, or whatever.

If you have an idea, it's very easy to capture. At the same time, I come down to this studio every day and work. I've tried it, where I've set up, oh, these will be my creative hours or whatever. And I don't find that sort of super-disciplined approach works for me. At the same time, I create music here every day, but I also get my email at zero every day and try to stay organized and keep those other things from running away from me.

LP: Given the diversity of your work and the multiple types of projects and roles you play in all these different contexts, do you work in parallel on projects, or are you linear? Much of your work is context-specific, and you don't seem rigid in your methodology or view. So I'm just curious how one context switches between projects.

Graham Reynolds: I always work in parallel and prefer working in parallel. I find that projects feed each other. What we were talking about with deadlines. And I have no choice but to get things done. Nonetheless, you do get to a point where you're like, I'm not having any good ideas on this project.

The method is to step away. When you come back, your mind is fresh, and you can restart. But if I have five projects, then I don't have to step away and go on a walk. I can switch to another project, which is a different mindset. Different things need to get done. Not everything is writing a melody, filling in harmonies, or orchestrating.

There are also practical things to organize. Okay. How many cues have we done so far for this film? How many are left? Try to do all the practical things until you're just coloring in the line and the creative idea. It comes naturally and easily. And so switching between, I find, is helpful. I also get into the zone pretty quickly. For example, before a show, I can do stuff right up until I have to play.

And I don't have a problem switching into performance, create, and improv modes. Whether it's like pulling out extra chairs because some people came and needed a place to sit or chatting with somebody who showed up. Like many awesome artists I know, they need to be backstage, super focused, get into the zone, apart from people, and then go onto the stage once they've gotten into that place.

I don't mind jumping in and out of it. Switching between contexts is not stressful for me.

LP: Does that imply to a certain extent that you don't have a different persona when you're on stage? It sounds like a very integrated sort of psychology you're walking around in.

Graham Reynolds: I'm sure that when I'm with my family or when I'm with my partner, there are things I would do that are not things I would do on stage, but I do try to treat the audience like I'm in a conversation with the audience and think of them as friends and people. It's just casual, you know, I'm talking with the audience beforehand literally, or I'm talking with the audience playing music for them and feeling the energy they're having, feeding off of it and altering the show depending on what is inspiring them what they seem to respond to.

I'll dress up to a degree for stage, but it's not that different from how I dress up just to go to a restaurant, a bar, or something like that. So, I try not to separate the two too much.

LP: You said staying home and doing scores is simple. And I think it was in the context of why maybe you made this record now or the idea of collaborating with others. And I thought, geez, so it's just so simple to crank out some scores. What a guy. (laughter)

Graham Reynolds: It wasn't meant to be braggadocious in any way. I meant that when I did a score, the pay was higher than going to play a show. It doesn't require rehearsal separate from the show. The rehearsal, when you're making a score, and you rehearse and record for the score at the same time, it's all integrated.

The greater parts of my income are done in this room, not on a stage. If I wanted my life to be simpler, this is what I was getting at: I wouldn't perform. I would stay here at home. And I would make scores, but then I wouldn't get to perform. I would be doing a narrower set of music. I wouldn't get that interaction with the audience.

I wouldn't get the audience's feedback on what was working and what wasn't working. And, of course, it's harder to get more work when you just stay home, but nonetheless. When I have score work, that's the simplest thing to do, and I just stay home. So I make my life a little more complicated by having performances and tours, putting out albums, and this and that.

Everybody knows that Spotify isn't sending me huge checks. I play instrumental music. It's not the most radical music, but it's not mainstream. So performances are going to pay me a limited amount. In this tour coming up, I'm playing solo and love doing that, but sometimes I'll have a 12-piece band, and that's a break-even proposition.

So that's what I was talking about with "simple." Arranging all the rehearsals, arranging the transport, organizing the gear, and doing the sound check. You don't do any of that by staying home and making a TV or a film score.

LP: What's the repertoire When you play solo or specifically for these upcoming shows? Are you able to present it in a live format? Music For Prophet, how does the rest of your catalog or your repertoire play into it? Have you ever presented your film music live? I'm really curious about what your presentation is.

Graham Reynolds: I've been working on Music For Prophet live. We had a festival here last week where I did a couple of performances trying that material out live. I make a different set list for every show. And so it depends on the venue, the context, and the feel and needs of that performance. I do the film stuff all the time in live performances by all the time.

I don't mean every show. I just mean, it's a regular habit of mine, and when it's in process, I'll try out ideas and develop material through live performance. Then, after something is released, I don't try to replicate exactly anything that's recorded. I like improvising too much. I dislike memorizing enough that each version is different for that particular room for that particular night.

On this tour of the UK, I'm going to have a lot of Music For Prophet for the Fire-focused shows, but there are a couple of shows that are either in film venues or at film festivals where a much greater portion of the music will pull from film and TV music catalog.

LP: Overall, both for you as a performer and as a larger theme in your work, can you articulate how you think about the relationship between composition and improvisation?

Graham Reynolds: They're both slippery words. Composition is extra slippery. One analogy I find helpful is prose or poetry versus conversation. Some people are great conversationalists or extemporaneous speakers, but you wouldn't want to read a book they wrote, and that's not what they do. Some people are great at writing one word after another in a well-constructed book but aren't great conversationalists.

And one skill set is not rated higher than the other or takes any more or less in terms of gifts or talent. Improv, you have to sort of, just like conversation, you sort of prepare all of your life for every conversation you have. You take your experience, knowledge, education, relationships, and people, and that feeds into the conversation.

And if you're talking to your grandmother, you will have one conversation. If you're talking to a collaborator, you will have another conversation. It's all very natural. There's nothing forced about having different conversations because you're talking to a different person with whom you have a different relationship when you have different common interests.

So that's why every set for me is different: every room and audience is different. I don't know them the way I know my mom, and she likes gardening and wine. I don't know them like that. But you can get a sense of whether a room is built for everybody standing up, everybody's drinking.

This is a high-energy room where that will be a little looser a little more rocking. The material will probably play shorter and a little bit louder. That's compressed, but you get a lot of energy from the audience or an intimate room built to be quiet, and everyone's seated, and the lights are dark. There's no alcohol, or you must go to the lobby to get it. Then, you can play much more intimately. You can play quietly and with detail and patience, and you can build ideas over a longer period, but you won't get quite as much of that visceral energy from the audience.

The improvs are conversations. In my mind, the compositions are ideas that are thought out ahead of time. Not necessarily alone in a room, but generally alone in a room how you picture a writer. The reason I think the word composition is more complicated is because it's so powerfully associated with dead white guys.

That's where we use the word composer. And there's still a sort of elevated implication to the word. So it can be, when you get down to it, that anybody who creates musical ideas, especially if they capture them, is composing. And so the word can be used much, much more broadly. For me, it's more like a long list.

You're probably a composer of this, and the more you check these things off, the easier it is to describe someone as a composer. You wouldn't think of, say, John Coltrane not as a composer, but you might think of Duke Ellington as slightly more of a composer because he wrote more notes down. If the word is elevated, we want to make sure that it's generously used for people who are extraordinary artists who, because of the way they practice, generally that word isn't used for them. I don't know. It's just a complicated word, especially in our cultural moment.

LP: It's interesting that composition or composer strikes you as a complicated word because I feel similarly about improvisation. And for some of the mirror reasons, because of improvisation to a certain audience being so associated with jazz, which is ultimately associated with Black American art forms, which automatically, for some segment of the universe, means there's a negative racial connotation.

And so improvisation must be a lower art form because this is the group of people doing it as opposed to elevating into an in-the-moment composition or these very sophisticated dialogues or the understanding that to improvise at a very high level, you have just as much if not more proficiency on your instrument than a composer might and again I don't I'm not trying to elevate the one over the other.

It's a spectrum because it's not like you're not composing when you're improvising. But that wasn't the rabbit hole I necessarily wanted to go down with that question. (laughter) The one I had that was more specific to you was that there does seem to be this element of fusing the two in your work, though. Like you, it does seem, if I can say it this way, important to you to have elements of each reflected in your work.

I would love to get your comments and thoughts on that. But my second question is—if you could draw back the curtain—talk to me about the relationship between composition and improvisation in the context of Music For Prophet. Because as a listener, I feel both, but I don't know if I'm perceiving it correctly.

Graham Reynolds: I appreciate the question because I try to draw from both and layer both. I think the studio art form is very different from the live art form. In the studio, it is sometimes harder to capture those improvisational ideas in a genuine feeling way because there's no audience. It's just very different in a quiet room to improvise.

Music For Prophet is essentially a variation on theme in old-school classical form. So, each of the four tracks is based on a simple musical idea: an ostinato in my left hand and a certain synth patch with a whole note melody in the right hand. And everything's built from there. Everything is turning around, building on top of it, taking things away until you have each one different but still based initially on that same idea. Somebody like Mingus would be an example of someone who tried to strike a balance because he would heavily edit the improvisations of his soloists. Get that vibrancy from an improvised solo, then put on his composer editor brain and chop it up until he was satisfied with it in the context of his album and what he was thinking of the wider scope of the piece he was working on.

Like "Endless Tower," I chopped it up with the bass that he improvised for a long time on the theme. I made it sound like we were playing together, and he was leading me, and we were interacting, but it's constructed, starting with improvised bits that started on a composed theme.

LP: It's interesting that that's the example you used because I remember listening and thinking how I love the bass sound. There's a presence and spaciousness that was very striking as a listener. Um, it stood out in a very positive way.

Graham Reynolds: He's an amazing bass player, Utah Hamrick. I wanted to have a track that showed off his particular skill set. I've had him on the recordings, but this was the one where I got to say no one quite sounds like Utah, and here it is. But yeah, the actual improv is a lot longer. And then the Peter Talisman producers and mixers. They also added their layers to it as well. So there's a whole bunch of construction after the fact of the improvisation.

LP: You mentioned Mingus. It also is reminiscent of what Teo Macero did with many of the Miles Davis stuff.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah.

LP: There's a sonic journey on the record. The Peter Talisman work that opens the album is more rooted or concrete in rhythm, harmony, and song structure. It seems that by the time we get to part four, we will be much more abstract and ambient. There were moments where I was reminiscent of the Bowie, you know, stuff. There was a moment where I was like, Oh, this sounds a lot like Low, or it feels like Low. It doesn't sound like it in terms of cribbing, but just mood. So, the pieces are composed, but the album is also composed. I think it feels as though it's a meta-composition.

Graham Reynolds: It's intended that way, so I appreciate the thought. Because of that variation of the theme, when I first heard something like Bach's variation on a theme, sometimes it was hard to recognize the original material. You're like, wait, how is this connected? How is this a variation? Once I understood that you don't have to recognize that initial theme, it somehow gives some cohesion. You started with a couple of colors of paint, and then you painted everything with those colors. And so even though you may be painting something different with each piece, something still holds it all together. And that's the hope with something like that, with this variation on a theme format. Even though it goes all over the place, there's cohesion at the same time.

LP: What music did you come up with as a kid, the pre-teen or the teenage you? It's not obvious in reflection in your work unless, of course, you were listening to, you know, modern classical music as a 12-year-old. (laughter)

Graham Reynolds: The first things I was listening to were just whatever my parents were listening to, combined with the radio. My brother and I would wake my dad up early on a Saturday morning and ask if we could borrow a record. And the record collection slowly went from the living room to our playroom. And so that was our initial collection of records. My mom was more like Elvis, and my dad was more like Beatles, but Beatles, Stones, sixties stuff, early seventies stuff.

LP: The good stuff.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah. Columbia Tape Club and stuff like that.

LP: We were talking about that with someone the other day. (laughter)

Graham Reynolds: Then I had a little Radio Shack cassette thing that I would make mixtapes with things like that when I had a bicycle and a little bit of cash babysitting money. I went to the record stores, and I didn't have a lot of money, but there's a whole room at the back of some record stores that would be dollar records. And so, to me, 5 meant five records. And that's the way I calculated any purchase I might make. If I'm going to buy a falafel, that's two or three records. Is that falafel worth two or three records? And so I just started buying everything. And I listened to everything I could get my hands on, from gamelan music to classical to jazz, pop music of various eras, etc. It's just sort of an omnivorous kind of way. My brother and I were taking piano and classical lessons, and once we started making our music, they sent us to a jazz teacher.

This was in junior high school. We weren't playing jazz, but we were choosing our notes. And the only teachers who knew how to teach lessons where you choose your notes were jazz teachers. So, at that point, I also started collecting and listening to a lot of jazz, studying jazz, and mixing that with the other stuff. But it was omnivorous. It's basically whatever I had access to, I would try to listen to.

LP: Where were you when you were that age? What part of the country were you in?

Graham Reynolds: Outside of New Haven.

LP: I grew up outside New Haven.

Graham Reynolds: I'm from Bethany.

LP: I'm from Hampden.

Graham Reynolds: Oh my god, okay, all right. (laughter)

LP: We probably were. I'm sure I ran into you at a record store or two.

Graham Reynolds: Exactly, exactly. So yeah, we had all those resources of Yale. We had good radio too. The University of New Haven had a good radio station. Bridgeport had that public station, too. Yeah. I feel like we had good radio and record stores. We had all the resources of Yale to see classical. We would go to New York to the free concerts in Central Park and see every iconic band you can think of that would play for free every summer. It was amazing.

LP: The Northeast is interesting, especially in the area where we were because the poles would have been New York and Boston. Some people or families were pulled to New York, and some had more kinship in New England and Boston. I always tell people the New Haven area is like the Mason-Dixon line of the Northeast, like families divided over sports teams.

It was a magical area because of those two poles. Everything from the independent TV stations that were around when we were kids in both markets to the radio stations and the plethora of college outlets. I am fortunate to have grown up with access to all that. And then again, the Metro North line to get into New York. That was it for me. That's what cracked my head open: being able to go to New York.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah, exactly. It's just an endless resource of culture. Anthrax was a punk rock club in Stamford. I can't remember where it was. We saw Fugazi and a million of those Northeast hardcore bands there. Sonic Youth kind of came through everybody in that scene. And like Max Roach played on the New Haven Green for free.

LP: Yeah. Yeah. I remember seeing Tito Puente on the green; it was just phenomenal.

Graham Reynolds: I saw Tito too. So see, we shared space before. (laughter)

LP: You know, I don't know if you knew about this or if it was if you had left by then, but in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a music program at Quinnipiac. They had a jazz music series there. The professor was Sonny Costanza. He had a jazz big band. And he would bring in, I saw, Rosemary Clooney. Milt Jackson would do a concert, and his band would back the traveling artists, and everybody came through. Phil Woods, it was phenomenal. It was a great way to see music.

Graham Reynolds: Amazing. Yeah. I don't think I saw that series, but that's the kind of resources we had when I got to Austin in '93. It's like there was none of that. But there was country music at a level I had never experienced and then Mexican music at a level I'd certainly never experienced. And so it was just a very different thing. We're four hours from the border of Mexico, so it was a different kind of immersion. I have learned a lot about the country and Mexican music scenes since I've been here.

LP: I know it's super cliche to talk about the way Austin has changed, and again, it's not, that's not necessarily the can of worms I want to get into with you, but I am curious as to how Austin has changed specifically for you in terms of the career path of what you do, right? If we said to the average music lover, "Austin," they would think of specific things. We could talk about those things: Tejano music, Tex-Mex music, Stevie Ray Vaughan, indie rock, and the sort of positive cliche things that the town's associated with. As someone doing creative music or modern composition and improvisational music, what kept you there, and how has that scene grown to support you? How have you cultivated it? Can you take me through that?

Graham Reynolds: There are some very practical reasons why I wanted to try Austin. One, I'd spend a lot of time in New York, and I felt like I needed horizons, you know, I needed to try something I hadn't tried. Two, I played piano and drums, which were big and heavy, and I wanted to live in the same place as my instruments. So, the idea of being in New York, San Francisco, or any of these places where the practice space is across town is something you share with some other bands. I was cleaning houses for a living.

So you'll clean houses all day and then go across town to practice. I want to live with my music. Austin was a place I'd been through, and the major employers at that time were the government, the state government, and the university. So, there is a lot of intellectual capital and music. But high affordability. And so I could, with friends, rent a whole house and we could practice in the house. We could have shows at the house. We could do all the things and develop our craft. I didn't see that as nearly as easy. Musicians do that all the time in New York, but I want, that's not what I wanted.

Then the other thing I liked about making music for a living was that it was as narrow as I wanted to go in my parameters. I didn't want to be hyper-focused and just be a composer improviser in a niche scene. I like the Knitting Factory stuff and that downtown stuff that was happening. And that's the scene I probably would have plugged into, and not that those artists don't collaborate across spectrums, but here, unless it's a room that's specifically designed for two-stepping, you know, country dancing, I play in every venue in town, with bands of every stripe. Whether it's country, metal, punk, or mariachi, it doesn't matter.

I'm able to have a foot in a whole lot of musical and artistic worlds here. People do that in New York, too. So, I'm not saying it's not possible in New York. It's just comes more organically here. I think that I was able to live here affordably. I've never had a noise complaint like I would the entire time I've been here. And I love to be loud. I built thick walls. I've always been able to make music on my terms, evolve at my own pace, and try as many ideas as I want. Some of them work, and some don't and have permission to fail. And with an audience that knows me and collaborates with artists from every background, it's been good. And I'd still get to go to New York all the time. I still get to travel and all that. It doesn't keep me away from those things.

LP: Especially in the last 15-20 years, it's not like a single runway airstrip. It's a real place.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah. As far as the things that have changed for the positive, there's much more of a film industry here than there was. So that work is easier to get. There were very few of us who sort of called ourselves composers 20 years ago. And now there are a lot of people who are doing that. The new classical music and the modern classical scene are thriving in a way. There's a new festival for it called Here Be Monsters. We've got a new venue at the Classical Radio Station that's hosting new music all the time, and those concerts are packed.

We have a whole venue dedicated to classical guitar. So this stuff is happening in a vibrant, exciting way. What suffered are performing arts. Theaters have closed, and theater companies have stopped making work. I used to have a ton of theater work, but I do very little now. The numbers are a fraction of what they used to be. So that's impacted me directly in that my partner does theater, too, and their company still does work, but it's just so much harder than it was. So my life is slightly easier, hers is harder.

LP: Do you know anything about that? I think you're challenging a supposition I had in a region booming with fresh money the way Austin is. I would assume that a lot of that money would have looked to support the arts and would have viewed it as a status to support a theater company.

Graham Reynolds: It's a very long conversation. So I spent eight years being the previous mayor's appointee to the music commission and having these conversations. Austin is, uh, older money, families, and towns. Dallas and Houston come to mind. There's a tradition of philanthropy and a connection between wealthy families, businesses, and the arts, regardless of political beliefs. This symphony, the ballet, these, the opera, these organizations in Dallas and Houston, and visual arts, robustly funded, and there's a market for expensive visual art, or high-level visual art, in these towns. And new tech money is exciting but has no history of philanthropy.

It's not something that's passed down through the generations. It's been very slow for those connections to be made, partly because the people don't know each other. There may be some will, but how they find themselves in the room is not always obvious, but there may not be as much interest. Also, it's just not happening in nearly the same way. You know, our most famous tech person is Elon Musk, and his project is space, and he's got a lot of projects, but the one that he's just more philanthropic with is the investment in space technology, and then they're just a million miles away from the arts.

So that's not happening. The theater just requires a lot of resources for very little to no pay, especially for a complete ecosystem of theaters where you have scrappy experimental theaters and semi-mainstream, and real estate is at such a premium here that it's just not viable. Maintaining space is cost-prohibitive, and they turn into something else regularly, condos or whatever it might be.

LP: Thanks for going there and breaking that down for me. I do agree with you. It's a much longer conversation about the tech wealth and the route it took place. But it's also interesting, though, there does seem to be, I don't want to overstate it, but a little bit of a generational element because I know just visiting Austin, you can't throw a rock without hitting Michael Dell's name on a building or a wing or a thing. I think a lot of the tech figures right now, even though they're around our age, they're still in that acquisition mode. They're not focused on that other part.

Graham Reynolds: There's no Carnegie Hall here. There's Dell Hall. There is literally Dell Hall, but there's nothing from the newer tech people. Dell has a children's hospital. Dell has all sorts of things, but it's a different mindset. And there is no Musk Hospital. There's no Musk Performing Arts Center. None of that is happening.

LP: There will be one on Mars.

Graham Reynolds: There will be on Mars for sure. (laughter)

LP: Talk to me a little bit about the role of humor because it's there. And the work at Golden Harvest, even how you describe the string quartet.

Graham Reynolds: Smackdown. (laughter)

LP: Yeah, Smackdown. Fun, right? And your Ruins the Holidays project, even the Music For Prophet, you know, it was so funny when This is how dense I am. When I first listened to it, I was like, Music For Prophet. I wonder what that means. And when I was first listening to it, maybe this was like an old Prophet synth. This sounds like one of those old synths. And then I sat there and read the words, Music For Prophet. And I was like, Oh, yeah. And profit.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah. The 20th century was a great but weird time for composed music, especially if we're talking about coming from the Western European tradition of composers, where it went from being super mainstream, which sort of had its finale in Bernstein, to being obscure. No one listens to it, the tiniest fraction of what the music industry is. Plenty of exciting and interesting music was made, and plenty of music I liked was in those niche fringes, but it reached a peak with Milton Babbitt's Who Cares If You Listen if you know that essay. He made the case, and I understand it, like, if you're working at the highest level of a field, let's say you're a physicist. You're working on a set of equations for your physics thing; no one expects you to be able to go to the public and demonstrate that equation in a compelling, entertaining way.

The only people you can talk about that physics problem with are other physicists. And that's the way Milton Babbitt viewed his music. I'm an advanced composer, so I'm making music essentially for other composers, and that's okay. That's what we do. We are at the edge, the groundbreaking edge of our field.

So I get the argument; at the same time, it's off-putting to audiences, and we didn't care about you before; we don't care about you now. So, audiences were just lost. I think it's not just me, but I think in the 21st century, we've seen a pretty dramatic turn where people who went to conservatories are more interested in playing clubs than they are in recital halls. Kronos Quartet is an early groundbreaker in that way. Bang on a Can, where acknowledging the audience is okay, thinking about what the audience's needs are is OK, and being interested in interacting with the audience is okay.

And return to melody. We had a return to tonality with Philip Glass but a full-on return to the melody for some players. Caroline Shaw or these other composers are making some very experimental music, but also some very accessible music. So I think somebody like Milton Babbitt, there is just no humor in the music, in the presentation of the music. I guess there's a sass to who cares if you listen. So there's some fun in that, but it got very serious. Jazz concerts too, where you'd go and especially free jazz, they would come and say not a word to the audience, improvise, then leave the stage. It was so self-serious, so for me, just being a little more light-hearted about it doesn't mean we can't make some serious art. Still, we can also have some fun in the meantime and balance. Do you think it was normal for the third movement and symphony to be the scarecrow to have through Shostakovich to it to have a lightness and a playfulness to it?

And that just went away. And so reintroducing, like, yeah, it's okay. You can be a serious artist and also have some fun sometimes within the context of the art.

LP: I think about that period of—just rooting it in time—maybe not necessarily the individual, you know, you mentioned Bernstein, maybe going back to Liszt or Wagner, like this sort of superstar era of composers. It seems, given what the technology and the way the commercial market's changing, we may end up looking at the mid-early, mid-20th century till now as that same era in popular music where these mainstream, ubiquitous, I guess what everybody would, we hear a lot about around like shared culture or common culture. Those moments are just fewer and farther between. It will be very interesting to have the benefit of some more time to look back and say, was the superstar era more of an anomaly? To get this fusing of what came from the popular music world with, in air quotes, the serious music world, to get a new type of composer, a new type of performer, it's exciting to think that you can draw from both those wells.

Graham Reynolds: Those two siloed from each other was, I don't know, sad, maybe too simple, but it is exciting. You're exactly right. And you see the most mainstream of artists pushing each other. Beyoncé's new album, she's pushing in ways that directions she's never gone in. And I think that drawing from across lines that people didn't think she would draw from culturally and musically. So I'd love to see just more and more of that.

LP: Yeah, I wanted to ask just because you have such knowledge and facility in this area, given some of the things we talked about today, might there be a book or two that you would recommend our listeners to check out that might explore more of the ideas we've talked about or even just a book that you return to that you happen to like?

Graham Reynolds: I've got a lot of books in here, and I love two very different books. One is obvious: Silence, the John Cage book. I mean, just that was the 20th century. Some of those 20th-century ideas have gone to their extremes, but it makes you listen differently. There were downsides to Duchamp and John Cage's ideas of everything as art and every sound as music. But it also makes so much sense, with what happened later, from heavy metal and punk to sample music.

It gives you this context and this sort of joy of just listening. And it's in a series of essays, so you don't have to read it straight through, but it's really fun. It's how prescient it was; some are just a joy. I haven't read it in a few years, but part of the 33 1/3 series was Journey to the End of Taste, which is about Celine Dion. It was an examination of our snobbery and an artist that was so popular yet critically unappreciated. And so this writer is like, I will try to figure out what people love about Celine Dion. And I'm going to go to concerts. I'm going to do the research. I will write the book and examine why we hold her lower than other artists.

And then, of course, he gets swept up and starts getting emotional at the concerts, appreciating the depth and contradictions. So that was a fun one. I'm very critical but also very omnivorous at the same time, and I try to listen as broadly as possible while having very strong opinions. I try to judge things in their context and not let the artists define their terms because we don't get to define all our terms of judgment, but Let's try to accept, okay, why are they making it, why are they making it this way, and why do people love it, and maybe there's a way for me to connect to those who love it and find what they love about it.

So, it allows me to be more omnivorous and a little less snooty, but at the same time, someone plays the Beethoven Sonata, and I will listen critically. If anybody makes anything, I will listen critically, but that might include me. The most mainstream of mainstream artists as well.

LP: I love that. Thank you so much. It describes the sort of contradiction. And I feel it a lot, and I like to think of myself as open-minded. And as you said, I am omnivorous with music. Yet when somebody else tells me some of the stuff they listen to, I can be very judgmental, but I find they're all strong opinions lightly held.

Graham Reynolds: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. For me, that's finding that balance was strong but light. It's good.

LP: You just gave me some summer reading. I'm going to pick up the 33 1/3. Graham, thank you so much. It was lovely talking with you, and I enjoyed listening to the new music. So thank you so much.

Graham Reynolds: Thank you so much for having me. Fun conversation.