Full Interview: Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus
My personal health issues got in the way and I never got around to posting the full interview I did with Patrick Stickles. The guy’s got a lot of ideas and he’s realistic about his position in life (as a 30something, rock band member, music writer, etc.). Interviewing him was fun and I only managed to be halfway awkward.
Patrick Stickles: Hey Lisa, this is Patrick Stickles.
Lisa Mrock: Hey! Super sorry about being so late.
Patrick Stickles: It’s completely alright.
Lisa Mrock: I always get confused about who’s calling who, because half the time it’s one, and the other half of the time it’s the other.
PS: Right, right. It’s no problem. I’m just hanging out anyway. Y’know, it’s Sunday.
LM: Where are you right now? New York?
PS: Yeah, New York City, that’s where I live. Just looking out my window at all the snow. We had quite a big snow storm yesterday. I don’t know if you saw it on the news or anything.
LM: It’s been all over the news.
PS: It’s pretty snowy outside. How’s the weather in Chicago? Pretty cold I’m sure.
LM: We had a few really cold days, but it’s supposed to get up to the 30s this week.
PS: The 30s? Wouldn’t that be a treat.
LM: So, I write for a website called Chicago Innerview. They write about bands that are coming into town doing shows and whatnot.
PS: How perfect, because we got a band that’s coming to town to do a show.
LM: I know! Super convenient!
LM: I think the venue is Thalia Hall.
PS: Thalia Hall, that’s right. We’ve never been there before. Do you know anything about it?
LM: No. It’s a newer venue. It’s only been around for a year or two. But I hear good things about it.
PS: I guess we’re gonna see. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll be great. Chicago is a real rockin’ town. You’ve been real kind to us over the years. Hope to have a good time there. Have some good friends there.
LM: There’s something different about Chicago when it comes to music. The appreciation I see especially when it comes to, well… we’re all just super enthusiastic.
PS: Absolutely. Well, the city has a really rich history, right? Chess Records and stuff.
LM: Yeah, and the venues too. Lincoln Hall I think was voted as one of the best music venues in the country or something, and of course there’s Metro which is legendary.
PS: We’ve played both those places a couple times. I think our last two shows were at Lincoln Hall. It’s a nice place.
LM: I have a few questions about the new album, but the first question is just sort of a general one. A number of your songs reference other songs that you’ve done, and have similar titles, and there’s a feeling for me that every new song or album is a continuation of a song or album before it. Is that intentional or am I reading too much into that?
PS: No, no, it is intentional, and I do want you and all the listeners to read too much into it. I don’t think it’s too much. It’s an attempt to create an immersive sort of universe so that rather than someone getting into one song or one album, they can get into the whole band entity, the whole catalogue, the whole thing that we’re doing. I like to look at it as one piece. It’s one body of work that one thing continues, builds upon the last thing. It’s just something I picked up from our future tourmate Craig Finn, you know, his band The Hold Steady very much did the same thing. I think it encourages a more intense level of commitment and dedication to the project.
LM: So the new album, [The Most Lamentable Tragedy] is a rock opera. What felt right about making a rock opera versus a regular album?
PS: Well, you know, I just had certain intentions, I had things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell a story about my personal struggles, and everything that I wanted to say couldn’t necessarily fit into a three-minute song, so the idea was to break it up into a sequence of feelings and ideas ands string them together in such a way that it would paint a larger, more complete picture. And I’ve always appreciated albums like that, or any kind of work of art that has a certain thematic unity. We see it all the time in books, movies, and things like that, plays, and nobody would think twice about that, like a novel or something would be all different moments, kind of coming together to create one bigger idea, so why not apply the same thing to a record? They’re all just means of communicating ideas, they’re vessels for the author’s message, you know what I’m saying?
LM: Yeah. I do writing on the side so for me it’s like some things need to be five hundred words and some things need to be two thousand.
PS: Yeah, exactly You don’t want to be hemmed in. A lot of these restrictions are just arbitrary, you know – five paragraph essays, 45-minute rock albums. It’s not good to always be trapped by those things. That’s not what’s gonna get your point across. You should just discard it.
LM: Go with wherever the art takes you, basically.
PS: Exactly. That has to come first, rather than some arbitrary rule about the form of it. If it gets the point across, that’s what matters. And also, putting out a record like this one that’s a lot longer than your average rock record, it’s kind of saying to the audience, please don’t come to this with a lot of expectations and predetermined ideas about what something like this is supposed to be, and just take it for what it is, accept it on its own terms. Sometimes it’s not good to go out of your way to fit into the expectations of the audience.
LM: Because then you’re not doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for them.
PS: Yes, because you start to pander that way, and that’s no way to make good art.
LM: Was it intimidating to take on a full rock opera?
PS: Eh, not so much. It got to be a lot of work and it took a really long time, but we’ve made albums that were pretty long before. The second-longest one is sixty-five minutes, so, it’s not such a stretch to do a ninety-three minute one. At the time when we started out doing it, it seemed like there’d be nothing to it. When we got more into it, then it was like, “Oh gee whiz.” In situations like that, you gotta just put your head down, power through, and keep chippin away at it, and when it’s all over, it’ll be hopefully close to what you wanted it to be. It kind of takes on its own life in that process, but the artist just has to have faith. Obviously, there’s always gonna be moments of doubt, but you push through these things and just try your best basically.
LM: When you began writing it, did you already have some of the material written?
PS: When I got the idea to do a rock opera, I didn’t really have any songs in the can at that point. Maybe there were some riffs and stuff, some stuff that was left over from our last record, but I got this idea, when I got the idea to do the record I was in a very dark place, very depressed, not very creative at all, but I said to myself, if I had the will to be creative again, it would be good to make some kind of piece of art about this experience that I’m having, and considering I work in this rock band, a rock album would be the most appropriate medium to tell that story, and because I would need a good amount of time to tell it, a rock opera would be just as appropriate.
So I had the idea and then took that around for a while, and kind of just had it around in my brain. Eventually, I wrote a couple songs that sort of indicated the way forward and then ome day I was able to draft a little story and say, “I’m gonna need this sort of song here to communicate this idea, and this sort of song here to communicate that idea,” and then just plugged away at it for a long time, like a whole year I suppose, and just had to tailor my songwriting around those things. But that made it easier in a lot of ways because when it comes time to write a song, and you pick up a guitar or whatever, there’s a porblem where you can say, “Well I can write about anything in the entire world, and one thing is pretty much as good as the other to write about, so what am I gonna do?” And you’re paralyzed by the limitless options you have, but because I had a certain outline and place and scenes I wanted to address, that narrowed the field down considerably. It made a lot of the decisions for me. That made it easier to be decisive and to move forward instead of ruminating endlessly on all the things in the world I could talk about it.
LM: It gave you more focus.
LM: One of the things talked about in the record is how our main guy in the record hates being awake and hates the arrival of dawn, and when talking with people with depression, and from my own personal experiences, one of things all of us have in common is that we sleep all day and stay awake all night.
LM: I guess my main question is what do you think makes the night more bearable than the day? Why is it more bearable to be awake at night than in the daytime?
PS: That’s a good question. I guess, right now, I’m looking out the window, I see all these people going about their day, the sun is out. I guess there’s a certain impetus to go out and do something, but when you’re depressed and not motivated and you don’t really wanna do anything, you wanna defy that impetus. There’s also the element of dreams, the peace we find in dreams, maybe because they’re not real. You can float in there and be free from responsibility, you know, rather than feel like you’re getting dragged through life. You know what I’m saying?
LM: Yeah, I do. And there’s also less people around at night. I always find myself at my most alone and solitary.
PS: Yeah of course. That’s part of it too. The character in the record starts out in a very antisocial place, and maybe that’s because having other people around kind of holds up a mirror to ourselves in a way, and depending on how we feel at the time, that can force us to confront what we perceive as our flaws and faults, stuff like that.
LM: Do you do most of your writing at night?
PS: Um, it depends on when I get my alone time. It can be hard to write at night in the city because you don’t wanna wake the neighbors up. I guess I’d say it’s easier to write the lyrics at night after everybody’s gone to bed, and write music in the daytime when everybody else is at work or something.
LM: What was your main goal in writing The Most Lamentable Tragedy, and do you think you achieved it?
PS: Well, I guess my main goal was to just articulate a certain part of my earthly experience in the hopes that it could reach other people that have gone through similar experiences. This is something that lots of different pieces of art, especially rock n roll, have done for me.
At times when I was feeling very alone and alienated, and misunderstood, certain artists were able to tell me that I wasn’t completely alone in the world, that there were other people in the world who felt what I did, even if they weren’t right in front of me in my personal life. It’s why I hoped I would be able to do version of that and put out the truest most honest expression of my feelings, not 100% self-obsessed, but working with a knowledge that there would be people out there who felt the same way, and in articulating my feelings, I could somewhat articulate their feelings too, just like those other artists did for me. And I feel like I achieved that because I’ve heard from a lot of people since the record came out that the songs on the record and stuff discussed on the record does reflect the way that they feel in a way that other records or pieces of art haven’t, and that it gave them some kind of strength, or made them feel better and a little less alone. In that regard I feel it was a pretty big success. It would’ve been cool if it made me a million dollars also. That’s a lot harder it turns out.
But I hear from people that they feel the same way and they appreciate it, so it’s kind of a mutual validation exercise from the audience you know, that’s really what I’m after more than any kind of commercial success or building any kind of critical consensus, which is a tough thing for a rock and roll band to do nowadays.
PS: Just the times in which we live. Rock n roll isn’t the dominant culture anymore. It isn’t really what the kids are into. People my age, I’m 30 years old, so a lot of people who are maybe into the band or into the whole rock and roll scene when we were starting out at the age of 22 or something, have very possibly gone onto other stages of their lives.
Maybe they’re not going out to the shows as much as they used, maybe they’re not buying every new record that comes out anymore, but I gotta stick with it. It’s my life’s work, so to speak. But we’re fortunate that a lot of people are sticking with us, and even if we’re not the cool new thing whatever that is, people still care about the band and have stuck with us through all these years. It’s a good thing. But, they’re just not making that many rock stars anymore. Now it’s rap musicians. Too many stars. It’s kind of becomes like jazz. It’s an academic art form now. You don’t get into it because you’re gonna make bundle a money or be super famous.
When we started out, back in 2005, there was still an inkling that you could make a bunch of money and be super famous, bands like The Arcade Fire, and the White Stripes, and whatever, who were big things at that point, but there don’t seem to be too many bands like that anymore. But that’s alright because it creates less temptation for the rock musician to try to pander to a supposed mass audience, saying like, “That feels a certain way in my heart about how I wanna do things, but, I really would rather be rich and famous, so I’ll do something else that isn’t necessarily what my heart wants.” It’s more pointless now to do that because you can hardly get to be rich and famous to do anything.
