Silver Linings and Second Chances: An Interview with Jordan Galland

Jordan Galland is a creature of collaboration. For more than two decades, the New York City-based singer/songwriter and filmmaker forged a multifaceted career by synthesizing his creative gifts with those of other talents. He played and recorded with such artists as Cibo Matto, Sean Lennon, and Mark Ronson. He wrote and directed 2009’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead and 2015’s Ava’s Possessions, working with a cast and crew numbering upwards of a hundred on each production. 

Yet with his forthcoming LP No More Rockstars (set for release October 13), Galland, 46, goes it alone, having composed, played, sang, and produced all the album’s eight songs.  

Sonically minimalist à la edgy memoir rock and folk, No More Rockstars embraces moments of nostalgia, aging and the passage of time, pensive self-reflection—“I shoulda seen it coming but I treated it like it was nothing,” Galland sings on “It Snuck Up”—and grief. “Trevor Wilson,” in particular, pays posthumous tribute to someone who to millions of Pearl Jam fans is remembered as the adolescent boy in the band’s 1992 video to its smash hit “Jeremy” while to Galland was a childhood friend. Elsewhere are songs with touching depictions of personal resilience, irresistible romance, and bittersweet second chances.

 

You’ve called No More Rockstars your most personal album yet. What compelled you to get so personal and transparent?

Somewhere along the way in the last seven years, there was COVID. I had had a kid; I became a dad.... I hadn’t played live in a very long time, and I didn’t have any new material, really, other than a few singles I put out over the last years.... I got invited to play a few songs at a sort of poetry reading where they wanted musicians as well.... So, I did it and it kind of got me playing live but playing solo. One of the things that occurred to me when I started doing that again—and I just sort of took every opportunity that came along—was playing solo frequently, having to arrange songs, making sure that the dynamics are there and you’re playing well and singing well, putting together a show without older, more experienced or sometimes younger, better musicians propping me up and making it feel really good: I had to do that on my own. I think something about that put me into writing all these new songs, and I wrote 16 new songs. I think it had a lot to do with shedding this light on the areas of myself that [I] had been hiding behind other musicians or, like as a filmmaker, you’re sort of hiding behind the expertise of lots of other talented people. When you’re playing alone on stage, there’s just nowhere to hide. 

 

Does being a filmmaker inform your approach as a songwriter? 

In a funny way I would almost say that being a songwriter helps inform my writing of a script or editing a film. In a sense they feed each other. It’s just getting back to the musicality inside yourself and not being too prescriptive. I want this to be this thing and then writing it, but actually discovering it as you write it, letting it be the tool by which you get to know yourself. It sounds very spiritual or self-healthy, but that was kind of what I was discovering about this process. What’s great about what I learned from making movies, in a sense, was the pressure cooker of how to get audience feedback or producer notes and all kind of annoying notes that you feel like are criticizing you and have a healthy relationship with that and let it inform how to interpret it, digest it, and let you make the piece better. So, when I’m playing, when I’m writing a song now, I think about that. 

 

On the album, did you ever surprise yourself with anything you wrote?

Almost every time. That was the joy of writing these songs, knowing that a surprise would come even when it felt like it wouldn’t. For instance, a song like “The Sequel to My Life” was the first of those songs I wrote but it almost didn’t make it onto the record, but it was the final song that I finished. And by then I was like, Wait, this is maybe my favorite song on here. So, in that sense it was a surprise the whole way through, but there was a point at which I was like, Oh, man this song is just a bummer. I was proud of it once, but now I don’t know.

 

It’s not an altogether weary song. There’s a silver lining. 

Right, yeah, and it’s funny because sometimes you can forget. You’re in one part of the song and you forget that there’s this other part that is the redemption.

 

That’s the silver lining.

Yeah and initially, for instance, that song was kind of making fun of sequel culture, the phenomenon of spin-offs and franchises. I would lean heavily into that because it got very fun for me in a kind of clever way, but it was missing, I guess, the soul. So, that was part of it too. With these songs, things that I think I would have thought were clever when I was younger I was now trying to be open to being vulnerable without being clever.

 

In trying to be yourself and not necessarily trying to be clever, did the process—especially lyrically—come easy for you or was it a slog?

One of the things that happens when you’re patient with the song—because it can feel like it’s not coming quickly—you’re definitely rewarded with a way in which the puzzle starts to come together. There have been a handful of songs I’ve written that have come to me in the middle of the night and I woke up and wrote them down and people liked them. And I was like, Oh, wow, that was a moment. It all kind of came together at once even if I tweaked things later, but for the most part there’s a collage quality to it where I jot ideas down and then combine them with other ideas. I know a lot of songwriters that work this way when they’re working on something personal. If I work with a songwriter and a singer or something it’s rarely like that. It’s usually like you write it all in one session, but when you’re writing something for yourself, you have the luxury of months and months [going] by, and you can revisit it. 

There’s something I wanted to say, because you said, “Is it a slog?” There are so many songwriters that I admire from Leonard Cohen—the pinnacle of it—to Adam Green, who’s a friend of mine and a contemporary and he’s very successful in many ways and he inspires me. All of them, if you hear them talk about music or why they do it, they have this sort of clarity around it even if there’s still a mystery. I always envied what that was, to know why you’re writing, what you’re going for, how it might be resonating with your audience. I was always just like, I don’t know. I’m just sitting down and eventually if I work hard enough the song comes and I don’t know why I’m doing it other than it’s fun and it’s a break from the stress of life. But this time around I think it’s because I really did it alone, because I didn’t have anyone I could blame or anyone to help me make it better without having to do that extra work. I had this feeling of sitting there writing songs over and over, not getting to the end, not being happy, but knowing there was something very healing about doing this process. It’s gonna sound highfalutin maybe, but I really I felt like I discovered a way to articulate why it was important to me: Writing a song is like taking trauma and turning it into something graceful. You can experience that. And so, the act of writing a song—and I’m not religious—felt more like prayer. I’m going to go into this place and sit here and repeat these things over and over with the faith that it will become something, even if it doesn’t happen tonight or tomorrow. That was a whole new thing for me. It made me reflect on what I’ve been doing in the past that was similar to that without knowing it and what I’ve been doing in the past that was maybe completely misguided or for the wrong reasons and why it didn’t feel good.

 

In the title song there are moments where you almost seem to be lamenting the fact that you stepped into this solo spotlight, but there also there are moments where you seem resigned to it.

Something unexpected happened, which was I just realized it was lonelier than I remembered. When you have a wife and kid, there’s always part of you [where] you’re always wishing you were with them. My wife wouldn’t come to shows, she’d stay home with our daughter. And so, I’d go and play and then I’d be alone. I felt it very deeply. I’d be proud of myself for doing it, but I would feel depressed. It was a nostalgic sort of depression, and that’s what made me think of some of those lines in that song. The title lyric just came to me one day from fiddling around and I was like, Oh, this is a little bit of an answer. It’s got some humor to it. It’s a little self-deprecating and—

 

Like the lyric, “No one’s gonna write our memoir...” 

Yeah. I had just been to a friend’s release party for his memoir, and that’s when I started to [realize] this could be a song about this very real experience. My daughter had essentially grown out of her stroller, and I was using it to bring my guitar and amp to the shows—when I could walk there. It was fun; it was like a weird bohemian fantasy. I’m just walking and it’s a little adventure, but then people started to take notice. They thought it was funny or cute or silly or whatever, but it was sort of memorable to some people. That’s when I was like, oh, that’s part of this story. But there’s a sadness to it, there’s a loneliness to it and then there’s also a kind of a liberation to it. 

 

“It Snuck Up” is a love song on its face but there’s a lyric in it where you sing, “who we became versus who we thought we’d be.” There’s more going on lyrically than what’s on the surface of this song and, for that matter, of the album as a whole. When you were writing it did you intend for such layers in these songs?

I felt like I was discovering it as I went along. I said earlier I was using the songs as a mode of self-discovery, but I think that in the past I would have shied away from certain things that might, for lack of a better word, bum people out too much. I know that when I was younger I really gravitated towards creating a fun, sexy kind of witty persona in the songs, but this time around it was almost like the mask was coming off. I mean, there’s always some level of artifice in making anything, but sharing this sort of heaviness of some of these ideas of the passage of time and grief and disappointment and rejection would actually be a way of connecting and maybe making a listener feel connected to it in a deeper way than just writing something that they could escape into like some of my younger fantasy-type songs. And so, that’s what I did.

 

That makes sense.

I definitely did it with a bit of trepidation at first. That was why it was important to play every song live at least once, to not just be in the bubble of a studio situation. It was my home studio, basically my kitchen, but you can be in a bubble where you’re in your own fantasy. But if you play it for people, especially in kind of an unsexy environment like a bookstore or a place where the lighting doesn’t transport you and people aren’t automatically being quiet... If you play it in that circumstance, you really have a sense of how sharp the knife is that you’re cutting with, or how dull it is, because there’s a lot to cut through and to connect with. That’s part of it. Then I guess I just welcomed the more real and the more, I don't know, not disturbing. I wasn’t going for disturbing songs. 

 

Tell me about the song “Trevor Wilson.” Why was it important for you to write a song about your late friend?

First of all, it was a strange experience to have a friend like him so young. We’re talking kindergarten to fifth grade. It’s partly that we were sort of neighbors. We both went to this school in Manhattan.... It was the ’80s, [our school] was uptown and him and I lived downtown. And so, we would see each other; we were the kids that lived downtown. He was an actor and that was fascinating to me. First, second grade, he’d come and tell us about audition stuff. He was a little older than me. He became famous very quickly. He was the first person I knew like that. We were 12 years old when he starred in the “Jeremy” video. It came out of the blue. I mean, it was summer vacation. I didn’t know—I just didn’t talk to my friends on summer vacation—and then he was in this video.... [Then] Eddie Vedder took Trevor on stage at the MTV Video [Music] Awards, which even more than the video itself made Trevor a celebrity.... Fifth grade started and he wasn’t in class with me—he was in L.A.—and I felt really sad. And so, we just sort of drifted apart. Then he came back to New York [when we were 13] and I partied with him. One of the first times I went out to a nightclub was with him and he had all this attention. It was very strange. He had changed so much. Then we drifted apart [again].

I ran into him once actually when I had a band and I was sort of at the height of my thing. We were in some Italian restaurant, and I looked over at this guy. He had gone bald way before me. We were in our 20s. We talked, and he was a lawyer. He was just like, “Yeah, I stopped acting. I didn’t want to do that.” He kind of briefly told me some stuff that I later read about in an interview. But he was just like, “Becoming famous was bad.” Then we had a couple Facebook interactions, and he remembered [from childhood, playing with] G.I. Joe’s in the microwave. We set off the fire alarm, crazy. The whole place smelled toxic, plastic. And then we just, you know, drifted apart [yet again]. Then I got this notification from my mom; it said he had passed away almost 10 years before and I didn’t know. 

Frankly, that was a song where I was like, I don’t know if I can do this. but I started reading some interviews with him and then he was just on my mind nonstop. And so, I felt like to honor him with a song, and it weirdly fits some of the themes in the No Rockstars stuff. I didn’t want to exploit the memory, but once I wrote this the rhymes just sort of came together. The first verse, “His name was Trevor / And he was on MTV with Eddie Vedder.” I was like, Wait, I have to see if this works. There’s something here. When you’re writing a song about somebody that’s passed away, you really feel like you’re communing with them. You feel like you’re spending some deep time with them somehow.

 

Circling back to what you were saying about the passage of time, did writing about it for this album give you any new or different insight on how to cope with it?

I do feel more at peace with certain things. It made me feel very lucky to be able to make music ... the first time I’ve done it entirely on my own. I would send [or] I would play the songs for different old bandmates and occasionally—not all of them—and get their reaction. And one friend—one of my old collaborators—wrote back and said to me, “You should feel lucky that you can put all this into a song and that you don’t toil away without being able to express it.” It’s called a record, and I feel like when you do create a record of your feelings it’s so cathartic you do feel a little bit like you can step away from it. The other thing I’ll say to finish that thought is a weight does feel slightly lifted—not the full weight, but some of it. 

 

In what sense?

It occurs to me it’s almost like a sacrifice. This was weighing so heavily on me, and I gave it my full attention. Now there’s this thing that exists that can be shared and dedicated to these heavy feelings and so I don’t have to feel as crushed by it. The other thing that’s interesting is, since we’re all getting older, anything we create I think of as like a gesture to our future self. I do feel that with songs, especially, I’m very grateful to my past self for writing certain songs that I can still play. And so, there is part of that where I’m like, Okay, these songs are here. I can play them. If I never write songs again like these, there’s a way in which I feel at ease that there’s something that I feel is worthwhile playing that’s mine. Leonard Cohen, for instance, wrote enough songs, I could sing those forever and be perfectly happy on a desert island. But it’s a different feeling when you write a song.

Photos by Karla Moheno

Jordan Galland · The Sequel to My Life

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EP Review: Al Green - To Love Somebody

On this four-track set of covers, Green edges away from the sensuous grooves of his signature hits—the ones Willie Mitchell produced in the ‘70s at Hi Records—to express a more reflective mood. His voice is a bit softer now yet viscerally sincere, as if each of these songs is the most important thing in his world in the moments he sings it. On “I Found a Reason,” for instance, Green renders Lou Reed’s lyrics with expected tenderness while, at times, surprising pathos. On another Reed composition, “Perfect Day,” which Green previously released in 2003 as a solo single, he duets with British pop star Raye, yielding a sumptuous, low-key love song. Green also previously released his included version of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts,” this one in 2024, but he summons such righteousness it makes sense to include it in this modest collection. The crown jewel here however is the title track, the Bee Gees classic which was originally written for Otis Redding to record. Green speeds it up somewhat, turning out a gospel sensibility that never falters, much like the talent of the great man himself.

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Rolling Stones Raw and Rocking on Voodoo Lounge Uncut

Not for the first time in their fabled history, the Rolling Stones faced a dire moment of truth. Such was first the case in 1969 when, on the eve of an anticipated U.S. tour, the band effectively fired its drug-addled founding member, Brian Jones—he was soon found dead in his swimming pool—in favor of lead guitarist Mick Taylor, arguably the most proficient guitarist the Stones had ever held in their ranks. Six years later, Taylor quit, leaving the door open for the Faces’ amiable Ronnie Wood to pick up the slack. Finally, after the Stones finished their round-the-world tour in support of their 1989 LP Steel Wheels, original bassist Bill Wyman retired, leaving an unenviable space to fill. A lesser band would have called it quits.

Rather than packing it in, however, the Stones still continued to roll, recruiting bassist Darryl Jones—the formidable musician’s credentials included live and session work with the likes of Miles Davis, Eric Clapton, Sting, and Madonna—to round out the lineup (though, unfortunately, not as an official member). With Jones in tow, the Stones suitably stepped up their game on their subsequent album, 1994’s Voodoo Lounge, arguably their strongest since 1978’s Some Girls. Perhaps the acquisition of Jones inspired this improvement, or maybe the band’s thirtieth anniversary compelled the remaining members to harken back to former glories; regardless, Voodoo Lounge represented a solid step up for the “world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.” 

Road tested on the concert stage is where such efforts live or die, though, and with a massive tour in support of Voodoo Lounge, the Stones—including their latest recruit in Jones—laid it on the line. 

On a late-November night at Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium, the band more than demonstrated its mettle, the chemistry between the old guard and the new blood coming across with fearsome, raw power. Voodoo Lounge songs like the seething sleaze of “Sparks Will Fly,” the punk-like punch of “You Got Me. Rocking,” and the achingly forlorn Keith Richards ballad “The Worst” are indeed redeemed here, summoning both potency and edge. Mick Jagger flits, slithers, and struts across the end-zone-wide stage, proving why he is rock’s most charismatic frontman. Other highlights include both rarities (“Rocks Off” “Monkey Man”) and ballads (“Beast of Burden,” “Angie”), not to mention the usual warhorses (“Sympathy for the Devil,” “Miss You,” “Brown Sugar,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” etc.), making for an ecstatically fantastic performance and an overall searing document of a stellar Rolling Stones tour.

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Book Review: Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of the Moon

For more than half a century Pink Floyd produced some of the most fabled and successful albums in popular music history yet the singular British band has nevertheless remained, at least in some respects, an enigma. 

Much of that enigma surrounds Syd Barrett, the Floyd’s principal songwriter and eccentric visionary behind the band’s earliest efforts. The music he created with Pink Floyd in the mid-to-late sixties—enriched by his distinctly puerile songwriting style and psychedelic eccentricities—contrasts so boldly from the music the Floyd made following his termination from the lineup in 1968 so as to sound like a different band altogether. Even still, Barrett’s legacy loomed over the band (bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Richard Wright, drummer Nick Mason, and Barrett’s replacement, guitarist David Gilmour) for decades thereafter.

In Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of the Moon, author Bill Kopp reframes the band’s legendary oeuvre by surveying those earliest efforts to illustrate how they presaged and ultimately informed the Floyd’s most celebrated subsequent discography beginning with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. He delves deep, for instance, into the band’s nascent recording sessions and performances, including early studio albums like 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets as well as experimental forays into film-soundtrack recordings. 

Kopp exerts a keen perspective throughout, contextualizing each project by dissecting each one’s artistic direction with the knowledge of one who is not only intimately familiar with the band’s expansive output but with rudimentary music principles as well. Such explanations never succumb to sounding too technical or abstract for casual fans to appreciate, thankfully, as Kopp offers just enough expert analysis to enlighten—rather than overwhelm—the reader. Overall, Reinventing Pink Floyd sheds light on a pivotal and all-too-often overlooked era of one of the all-time great bands just as it was evolving into an undisputed commercial hit-making  behemoth of progressive rock. Highly recommended. 

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An Interview with Tom Paxton

In a career spanning more than half a century, GRAMMY®-winning folk legend Tom Paxton has composed a veritable goldmine of American music. Instilled with an activist’s passion and a storyteller’s finesse, his songs—which have been covered by the likes of Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Willie Nelson—resonate with melodies as endearing as nursery rhymes and narratives affirming an intimate conscience.

With his latest album, Boat in the Water, Paxton, 79, continues to articulate his craft in such inimitably empathetic ways.

Can you sense how your songwriting has evolved over the years?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I’ve always likened myself to a farmer with a field, and each year he plants a crop in that field and with luck harvests it in the fall. In my case, I plant different crops but it’s in the same field and it’s the same farmer. So I don’t find that I write different songs from the ones I wrote at the age of twenty-five, but I hope that now and then I write a song that I was not capable of writing at the age of twenty-five. But they’re not that different. They’re still the same sound to them, people tell me.

The writer is the last one to be able to identify his own songs, but they tell me that a song can be recognized as being likely from me. I accept that’s true because I can certainly identify a song as probably written by Dylan or probably written by Leonard Cohen. There’s a style, there’s a sense to it. So, I don’t think I write differently—it’s the same brain, the same right hand—but perhaps there might be a depth to the songs now that there wasn’t then. I don’t know. I certainly don’t try to write differently than I wrote [back then]. I don’t know what that would sound like.

When you’re writing a song, do you have any audience in mind?

Oh, sure. Without being able to put a face to it, it’s the same group of people I’ve sung to for fifty-six years. They’re good people and we see a lot of things through the same lenses, and it’s really primarily for myself as a singer that I write the songs. But it’s also [for] the people that have been with me for years and years and years that I write. If not for them I might just keep it to myself and say, “I don’t have to write it. I already know that.” It is for the people who come to my shows that I write the songs.

Is it disillusioning if the audience doesn’t quote, unquote “get it”?

No, it does not. I feel like I’m responsible for what I do and what I release and I’m not responsible for how it’s received or poorly received. And so, I don’t worry about that. I just worry about getting it right for myself, to make sure it’s clear and musical and I hope entertaining, but at least engrossing; that people know that it’s sincere, that it’s a deliberate work of art. It’s not the work of a dilettante. It’s the work of someone who’s been doing it a long time and cares very much about doing it well.

You are revisiting some of your older songs on Boat in the Water. What was the reason behind that? What did you think you could bring to them at this stage in your life that maybe you didn’t the first time around?

Well, part of it was a conversation I had with producer, Cathy Fink, who’s an old, old friend. She said, “I’d like to hear these songs again.” She’d been listening to a bunch of my old records and she said, “You know, that song ‘Life’ is a wonderful song and I’d like to hear it again. Let’s put it on here.” I said, “Sure.” And I did the same thing with “Evry Time,” [which] is a song I think I wrote in 1962. It’s certainly one of the oldest recordable songs that I have, and I’ve sung it in a lot of soundchecks and a lot of dressing rooms. So I said, “Let’s take another shot at this one.”

Did it resonate any different with you?

Oh, I love the song. To me the song is really an evocation of my early love for the songs that Burl Ives used to sing. He used to sing lots of songs that did not have a steady beat to them, a lot of the old Appalachian songs that he used to sing. It was just kind of my homage to that kind of song and I’ve always loved it. It’s just a very simple song. It only has two verses to it, but it seems like a complete song to me.

In light of some of the songs you write that are critical of certain social or political ills, how do you manage to salvage the compassion and sense of grace and beauty that comes through in some of the other songs you write?

That’s not too difficult, actually. Each song is its own message. Each song has its own parameters. I don’t bring a political sense to a personal song. I also write songs that I hope will amuse a seven-year-old child. You bring the tools to the project that the project requires. And if you’re writing a song to amuse a seven-year-old boy, you include irreverence and a sense of fun, a sense of the ridiculous. You don’t bring a sharply tuned social mind whereas, if you’re writing a song satirizing a president who is an egregious liar, you don’t bring the same vocabulary that you use with the seven-year-old boy’s song. You bring a different vocabulary, a different sensibility. They’re all different songs and I tend to take them as the ideas come to me. The idea will come to me of something ridiculous and fun and rather innocent and I’ll go ahead and write that song and hope that it finds that seven-year-old boy or girl and amuses them. If I’m satirizing the president, I’ll use a different box of tools. Each song has its own perfection that you strive for.

So, writing a song in which you would satirize the president or critique certain social ills doesn’t compromise the compassion that is required to write the other songs?

No, I never write a song that denies the other songs I write. There’s no underlying similarity. I mean, they all come from the same fella, and I’m not going to write a song that directly contradicts any other song I’ve written. There’s got to be a consistency. Even if I’m writing a funny song for kids, I’m not going to say something in that song that I don’t believe.

Is songwriting a discipline that you return to all the time? Are you always receptive to new ideas?  

Yeah, I find the ideas come pretty regularly. There’s a kind of a receptive frame of mind that I seem to be a little more able to slip into now than maybe I used to be. I know that working with [co-songwriters] Jon Vezner and Don Henry is good for me. We just finished four dates out in the West and shortly before those dates I heard a melody from Jon. I said, “Give me a tape of that.” And I turned it into a song which we put in the shows out in California and it really went down beautifully. And while we were sitting in a dressing room in Berkeley, he was doodling around on the ukulele and he struck a chord and I said, “Whoa, what was that?” He played it again, and I sang a silly little phrase that is turning into a delightful little ukulele song. I’m always on the lookout, so to speak.

Do you ever fear giving too much of yourself away in what you write?

Oh, no. No, I don’t feel that at all. I do write personally but it’s usually not as Tom Paxton. I use the first-person singular a lot because it’s more suitable for songs, I think, to be personal like that. But it’s very seldom that it’s Tom Paxton who’s being personal. It is the narrator in the song who’s sharing, but of course it’s always the writer who is easily identifiable. But I think I just kind of shrink from making Tom Paxton the subject of Tom Paxton’s song. It seems to me to be such an egotistical thing to do. I just thought of a way of putting it: I’m a ham, but I’m not a show-off.

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