Foxygen is a band on the rise, with its new album We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, making waves from Pitchfork to NPR.
The band, consisting of vocalist Sam France and guitarist Jonathan Rado, creates multi-layered psychedelic pieces in a signature chaotic, yet organized fashion that thrills listeners. Just getting back to the United States after the European leg of Foxygen’s tour, guitarist Rado spoke to staff writer Bo McMillan about the band’s creative process, current tour and recent accolades.
Diversions: You guys got the title Best New Music from Pitchfork for We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, and they can be pretty stingy with ratings. What was your reaction to that?
Jonathan Rado: It’s fucking awesome, man. I try not to look too far into reviews or read too much into them, it freaks me out a little bit and makes me feel weird, but Pitchfork is a great thing. I can’t really feel upset about that, you know?
Dive: When I listen to songs like “Take the Kids Off Broadway” and “Shuggie” and they hit these left turns so quickly — I wonder, how exactly do you guys figure out how to do that on stage?
JR: Everyone picked it up pretty quickly. When we write that shit it’s because we have a bunch of different song ideas and piece them together. It’s sort of like how William S. Burroughs used to take a bunch of sentences and scatter them on the floor, then stitch them together.
We’ll do this thing where I’ll be like “Oh, I have this verse — then nothing” and Sam will have the chorus and then we’ll just piece it together.
Dive: Any interesting tour stories so far?
JR: Yesterday dude, we had a horrible day. We were playing at Santa Ana, and our van broke down, something happened with the killswitch of the car so it got stuck in park which means that they couldn’t tow it because they couldn’t put it in neutral ‘cause the brakes ceased up. We had to get two tow trucks to come and get it somehow on this lift. I don’t even know where the van is right now. Yeah.
We had a friend drive us to the show in Santa Ana [Calif.], played it, it was okay, and then we went home with his friends. This dude is like the nicest, best dude in the world, but the shocks on his car weren’t working right, so the cops pulled us over and they gave him a field sobriety test for like an hour. Then we got back to my house and I lost my keys, so I had to break into my house. It was kind of a pretty off day, I’d say.
Dive: You and Sam are headquartered across the country from one another, how exactly does that work?
JR: Sam kind of lives in Olympia, Wash. and I kind of live in New York — when we record, we record in the same place, wherever that is, always. We don’t postal service it across the world. When we’re not doing that or touring we live separately, just because we need that to get along with each other.
We’ll e-mail little demos sometimes, but we do write together. A lot of our stuff comes together when we bring it to the table and record it.
Dive: I noticed that there’s kind of a time-like regression from your last album to the new one. Most artists, as their albums go on, will focus more on mainstream music, but you guys seem to go out further into psychedelia. Could you explain that?
JR: I think when we were making Take the Kids Off Broadway we were really into glam rock. It’s not like we weren’t into psychedelic music during Broadway or anything, but for this one we really got into a Rolling Stone’s record called Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. It’s a lot of ‘60s psychedelia and stuff and that was really what we got into. We decided that we wanted to do a record like that. If it gets any bigger, our next record will be a ‘50s record. Then somewhere down the line it’ll be a bop record or something, ’20s big band or jazz.
Foxygen plays the Local 506 on Sunday, Feb. 24 and the show is sold out.
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