Deerhunter, from left: Josh McKay, Lockett Pundt, Bradford Cox, Moses Archuleta, and Frankie Broyles.Photos by Robert Semmer
Even when there isn't an audience, Bradford Cox is performing. It's an hour and a half before "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" is scheduled to tape, and Cox's band Deerhunter is on stage rehearsing the rattling title track from their new album Monomania. I'm standing in a nearby hallway when a cameraman hurriedly asks me to step out of the way. Cox, who's just stepped off the set mid-song, saunters down the corridor and pretends to drink from an empty cup he snatches from his publicist. "There should be some water in that cup," he playfully tells her afterwards, before immediately turning serious: "Not New York City tap water."
The extended outro is a last-minute addition to the performance. Initially, Cox wanted to sing to a live rat on camera-- "like Hamlet"-- but NBC, fearing backlash from animal-rights groups, balked. By showtime, a few more extra-musical elements have been thrown into the mix, including a heap of gauze and fake blood to make it look as if Cox is missing two fingers (a personal message to his father, who had just lost a pair of digits in a table-saw accident the night before) and a shaggy black wig. During rehearsal, though, he's clad in an army jacket, beige pants, and brown loafers-- or, as Cox refers to it, "My Cape Cod uncle outfit."
Much of Cox's work in Deerhunter, as well as in his Atlas Sound solo project, is loaded with callbacks to the past, from the shoegaze textures of 2008's Microcastle, to the dusky 1970s art-rock of Atlas Sound's Parallax, to Monomania's early rock'n'roll clatter. He's as much about style as he is about substance, so when we enter the tiny "Fallon" dressing room, the singer flips open a suitcase packed with clothes and starts rifling through its contents, throwing on the wig and deciding whether drummer Moses Archuleta should wear a faded Cramps T-shirt.
His main concern is dressing guitarist Lockett Pundt, who, along with Archuleta and new band members Frankie Broyles (guitar) and Josh McKay (bass), remains largely silent during the pre-show hullabaloo. They fiddle with phones and make quiet small talk; they're used to Cox's antics. Surveying Pundt's button-down shirt dotted with dog silhouettes, Cox asks no one in particular, "Is it too Vampire Weekend, or is it James Dean?" A few minutes later, he's dressing himself, commanding the room to avert their eyes as he drops trou. "Everybody wants to hang out backstage, but they don't want to see my cock," he mock-complains.
Fully clothed a few minutes later, he kneels in front of me and unzips a large brown carry-on. "Want to see what's in my bag?" There's Hank Williams' Greatest Hits on cassette, a few tapes of field recordings, homeopathic medicine, a bag of pens, "an antibiotic I refuse to take," a pair of glasses with only one lens, a catalog of light fixtures for his recently purchased house in Atlanta's Grant Park. Cox is easily distracted, so it's not long before he's across the room sitting on McKay's lap, demanding that someone in the room play the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flowers" on guitar and proclaiming that his job is to "create beauty."
Pundt walks back into the room wearing the outfit chosen for him, but Cox isn't happy. "This shirt needs to be pressed!" It's a half-hour before taping, and a "Fallon" staffer enters the room to take care of the request. When the shirt returns, Cox says it's too loose, that it looks like "maternity wear." He disappears and returns with safety pins, which are strategically applied to the back of the shirt. The taping's underway now, and as Cox steps out for a cigarette-- "for my voice, otherwise I'll sing an octave higher than I want to"-- he dictates the exact order in which the rest of the band is to receive makeup.
Eventually, it's showtime. Cox's Evian-gulping finale goes off as planned, and the screeching song leaves a few audience members looking confused. Back in the dressing room, the head of Deerhunter's label 4AD pays compliment to the band, saying their performance was "great."
"I don't care if it was great," Cox exclaims. "Was it punk?"
When I turn that question back around on him during a two-hour phone conversation a couple of weeks later, he clarifies his position:
"The entire point of asking 'what is punk' is, like, 'Nevermind if this performance was good or not-- was it undefinable? Was it slightly unsettling? Was it provocative without being political? Did it smell good?' After that performance, lot of people were scratching their heads, like, 'Who's this fucking lunatic?' It's more interesting that way. I'm not interested in punk as an aesthetic and I certainly don't give a shit what some hardcore kid thinks of our record. It's a fucking arm-wrestling match, and it's pathetic. My idea of punk is not being interested in what other people think of punk."
"And I'd rather be Tiny Tim singing 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' on national TV than just another indie rocker going through the motions of trying to look really detached: 'I was going to go out and get some chicken wings, but I ended up on 'Jimmy Fallon', so I thought I'd play a song, so I'm just gonna show up in a hoodie and some fucking jeans. No big deal, guys!' Actually, fuck it-- it is a big deal. If you told me when I was 19 that I'd be playing on shows like 'Letterman' and 'Fallon', I'd think, 'Man, I hope I don't fuck this up and do something boring or predictable.'"
"Indie rock is such a bratty culture, and I don't see a lot of ugly people in it, either. I feel very proud to be hideous. Thank God I don't look like every other fucking dude wearing their girlfriend's fucking jeans out there on stage. That's weak and emasculated-- and I don't think masculinity is equivalent to misogyny. It just seems like everything is like a cat that's been declawed-- it still tries to fight with you, but it's harmless. Nobody wants to get scratched."
Anyone who's heard a lick of Bradford Cox's music knows that he's an extreme personality. At once extroverted and incredibly sensitive, he possesses a canny flair for attracting notoriety that's arguably bolstered his career even as it has negatively affected his band's dynamic, with several members coming and going over the last decade. Attempting to have a linear conversation with him is tough, as he often talks circles around a single topic until you're left exasperatedly trying to remember where you started. Cox possesses a Courtney Love-like ability to craft brilliant bullshit, as well as a tendency to overshare even while claiming to do the exact opposite. And yet, despite his reputation as a diaristic chatterbox, the 30-year-old claims he's misunderstood. "I've come to accept that people have no idea what I'm like," he says. "If they knew, they'd feel like they were being fooled."
Cox is a friendly person-- almost aggressively so-- but his occasional propensity to completely dominate a conversation can leave one feeling drained. There's part of him that clearly relishes being the center of attention, which ironically drove him to recede from the press' eye following the release of 2011's Parallax. (When I spoke with him around that time, his behavior was more erratic than normal, which he now credits to being in a state of "mental and physical illness." He also claims not to remember the interview itself taking place at all.)
The day after "Fallon", I sit down with Cox for a one-on-one interview in person. Overall, his demeanor is lucid-- a near-180 from the previous evening-- as we discuss the dangers of reading too much into his lyrics ("I write under a stream of consciousness-- I don't sit there and think, 'I'm going to express this'") and, despite Monomania's ultra-scuzzed rock vibes, the album's surprising musical inspirations: Hank Williams, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker.
"They're absolute artists," he tells me, taking sips from an oversized bottle of aloe vera water. "I can't hold a match to that stuff and I never will. I'll never be black, I'll never have that experience. That's what's missing from indie culture, though: Bo Diddley and blackness. There's a struggle that exists in black music and hillbilly music from a certain era. Old music resonates with me, new music doesn't."
If it seemed like the "The Bradford Show" went on hiatus during our relatively calm and focused sit-down chat, it comes back on later that day, when a smattering of journalists file into a room at Manhattan's Ace Hotel for a full-band Q&A session. The as-advertised hour-long quasi-press conference will eventually double in length, as Cox holds court on what looks like a therapist's couch. As he goes on, he continually folds his hands and feet between themselves in a fidgety manner, like human origami.
Meanwhile, the rest of the band reclines on a circular couch that lines a corner of the suite. McKay occasionally cracks a joke, while the jean-jacketed Broyles sits stoically. Archuleta and Pundt end up with not much to say at all-- although, to their credit, the few queries directed their way are immediately intercepted by Cox. At several points, they both fall asleep with their heads tilted back to the ceiling.
Cox is sitting several feet in front of the band, at times with his back to them. During the first hour, Cox's performance is intermittently amusing and annoying. (At one point, he asks someone to Google facts about giant rats.) As ever, punchlines come to him quick and easy-- but these outbursts become far less amusing when presented as a never-ending flow of words. As the second hour hits, very few journalists in the room are even attempting to ask him questions of substance. They laugh when he says something audacious, they attempt to engage him in some short-term rapport that he largely rejects, they ask him about his feelings towards Vampire Weekend and Spring Breakers.
Granted, Cox is extremely complicit in this low-stakes chit-chat, and he's clearly having a good time. But as the whole thing trudges on, it's hard to tell if anyone here is interested in taking him-- and, by extension, Deerhunter-- seriously.
Later on, I tell him his amped-up behavior during the press conference came off like a self-defense mechanism. "It wasn't," he argues, talking on the phone from Deerhunter's tour van. "I try to keep myself entertained. Otherwise, I would jump out of the window from boredom. I've always been a cut-up, ever since I was a kid. I just like comedy."
Another recent bit had him complaining about Morrissey and the Smiths for the better part of a Buzzfeed interview. "That was clearly a performance piece-- stand-up comedy," he says. "I don't dislike the Smiths-- I don't even think about them. They're not on my syllabus. The goal of entertainment is to entertain, and the goal of rock'n'roll is to rock. It's cartoonish and silly. Don't we have enough earnest people already? Weren't the 90s filled with people pretending to be precious about everything, and holding everything up to be so sacred? I'm very bored with all of that."
Does he ever think his personality threatens to overshadow his art?
"No."
Indeed, Cox's current outlook when it comes to Deerhunter is upbeat. "Since we started working on Monomania, things have been better than they've been in years," he says. "I feel young again." Despite the claims of renewed camaraderie, Monomania began as something of a solo endeavor. The bulk of its songs were conceived around the time Parallax was released, as Cox house-sat for Eleanor Friedberger in Brooklyn for several months to clear his head. "There was some bad, personal shit happening that really set me back," he says, declining to go into specifics. "I learned the lesson that most teenage girls learn in eighth grade, which is that there's a lot of selfish, dishonest, opportunistic people."
While squatting in New York, Cox entered into a routine of drinking heavily (Jamaican rum, mostly), hanging out late into the night with MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, taking a cab back to Friedberger's place before dawn, and recording what he calls "emotionally crippling, drunken late-night stuff. I made a lot of music that year, but I stopped caring if it was ever heard-- I was perfectly ready to hide these songs in a private shoebox labeled 'Shit Era. Do Not Revisit.'"
The songs were shelved for the time being, as Deerhunter spent the better half of 2012 on extended hiatus while Cox toured behind Parallax. Eventually, he put the bottle down. "I have friends who have really battled with the horrors of addiction, but I was just drinking because of depression," he says. "When I was done feeling sorry for myself, I quit. I'm back to my asexual monk lifestyle-- although I take Advil and smoke cigarettes."
Cox continued to write and record back in Atlanta at his personal Notown Sound studio, with little intention of refining the "Shit Era" material. As summer approached, he prepared to reunite with his band to record their next album: "I wanted all of us to be in the same room and make a total rock group album with six really long songs and an American flag floating in the background in slow motion." However, fate had other plans. Bassist Josh Fauver left the band with little warning via an e-mail at the end of the summer. "One day he's talking about how excited he is to make new stuff," remembers Cox, "the next day, he quits."
"There was never a fight, nothing acrimonious," he continues. "He’s a very private person. I've known him for 10 years, and I don't even know where he lives. I respected him for leaving, though, because there’s nothing worse than a half-assed performer. My audience is like the child in a divorce-- whatever’s best for the child is what I want."
Cox played his bandmates some of the "Do Not Revisit" tracks he'd been working on-- "I wouldn't be lying if I said I had about three or four hundred songs"-- and they liked what they heard. Broyles joined the band last September as an intended replacement for Fauver, but Cox was reluctant to make that decision official. "I was still holding out that Josh would reconsider," he says. "I briefly considered playing bass myself, too, since I wrote all the basslines on the album."
Shortly before the band entered producer Nicolas Vernhes' Brooklyn-based Rare Book Room studio at the top of 2013, McKay was added as bassist, and Deerhunter's current incarnation bashed out Monomania over a few weeks, recording straight to Tascam eight-track recorders (hence the album's bruised, brutally lo-fi feel). Although Cox describes the leadup to the record's creation as "stressful," he concedes that recording Monomania was the band's most positive studio experience yet.
And while Cox is quick to point out that he harbors no ill will towards Fauver following his departure, he allows that the band dynamic has been better without him. "The change in the band has been so radical, it’s like being in a real band now," he says. "We call each other after the shows and hang out together. This is the band I’ve always wanted to be in." Near the end of our marathon phone conversation, Cox yells across the tour van and asks Archuleta why he thinks they get along better now. The drummer's answer is succinct: "We grew up."
Archuleta might be onto something. After all, Cox admits that, when he's not onstage while on tour, he's now thinking about lighting fixtures or floor covering for his new house. "You can’t be sitting there focused on one thing, because that would be monomania, which is a terrible disaster," he says. Naturally, the final word is his: "I just wrote the last line of your article." Reported by Pitchfork 6 minutes ago.