I'm Afraid It's Nut-Cutting Time

You are paying only 90 cents a song when you purchase this music collection!

Dear Friends,

It is upon us. No more sense in pulling punches, sandbagging, laying in the weeds or the hapless employ of “clever” evasive tactics. All of the preamble is now just so much speechifying and grandstanding — the stuff of carnival promoters and bilious politicians. The time for the tea parties and tumbleweeds of distraction has passed. We are shifting into the next gear — the last in the shaft, overdrive, sampling the big bottle between rounds — the one we mixed ourselves, and keep for special occasions. 

Last week the world met The Interrogator. Or is it the other way around? In any case, there will be no half measures, no equivocation or apologies, no room for squeamishness when it comes to the nut-cutting. Grab an oar and start rowing. 

What can I tell you about my new album? Certainly, it's my favorite I've ever made. They say choosing your favorite record is like choosing between your children: how could you ever decide on one over the other? Well, I don’t have any children yet, and I do love all of my records, but I choose The Interrogator. I choose it because it is the truest.

There are obviously questions, which I will do my best to address now. But first the regulatory rumba. Believe me, I’m just as frustrated as you are (and then some): 

Please Take My Advice Does Not “Mirror the American Experience.” Any claim to that effect is in no way legally actionable. The situational occurrence of Please Take My Advice in certain “global hotspots” is neither an endorsement or an act possessing any agenda. Any complaints or critiques should be addressed to Bar/None Records, Hoboken, New Jersey. 

When and where did you track The Interrogator?

Tracking for The Interrogator began roughly this time last year, and took place at Overdub Lane in Durham, North Carolina. The album was engineered and mixed by Jason Richmond, who also co-produced it with me. I liked Jason for this project, because he is a stout-hearted man. I like his work producing the Avett Brothers. I knew he wouldn’t turn green in the gills. I knew that what we were doing was going to be different from past Paranoid Style projects — I was writing a new kind of song that would require power and finesse at once. I was thinking about ZZ Top. He and I talked about it, and he said yeah it could be done, though not easily. 

No sense to sugarcoat it: I was going to need some big swinging dicks to get the sound. They would have to be knowledgeable about the world as well as music — there could be no substitute for lived experience. I had my usual crew — Langmead, Corrin, Matheny, Bracy — I knew they’d give no quarter nor accept any. But we’d need to add to the equation to pencil out in the black. Everyone agreed and there was one man who was suited. Truth be told, I had been watching him and listening to him since I was a teenager. I knew he had what it took, I just wasn’t sure if I could get him.

Is that Peter Holsapple? From the dB’s and the Continental Drifters? What the fuck?

It had to be him, I was sure. He had shown up — somewhat mysteriously — to a previous Paranoid Style session for the 2017 EP Underworld USA — a “friend of Bruce Bennett.” So I asked around, I got a number that led to another number — musician stuff. You are probably thinking: “having a guy like that in the studio is like Albert Brooks on your film set when you’re making a movie. He can write, he can act, he can direct, he’s the funniest person in the room and the most talented. That’s got to be pretty useful!” You are correct in this surmise. Peter’s guitar playing is incredible — I mean, check it out for yourself — but his astonishing skills at piano, organ, lap steel and a handful of other instruments is evident on many other tracks. 

Interesting. 

I think so!

Let’s level with one another: Is The Interrogator a bleakly funny meditation on the irreconcilable conflict of achieving a tenable morality within the constraints of the apocalyptic, world-suffocating stronghold of the current corporate-tech duopoly?

Is that another of your famous “gotcha questions?” Trying to make a name for yourself?

No ma’am, just here trying to get some answers. 

If it’s information you want, you can get it from the police.

Tough but fair. Did I hear a rave review of The Paranoid Style’s The Interrogator aired on NPR’s Fresh Air last week? 

Great thanks to Ken Tucker for bringing The Interrogator to Fresh Air. Here’s some but not all of the things he had to say:

“You could hear much of ‘The Interrogator’ as an album-length justification for believing that an artist can put anything she thinks about, believes in and desires into the lyric and melody of a three-minute rock song without sacrificing any degree of complexity or emotion. To listen to Nelson and The Paranoid Style work out such an argument over the course of 13 compositions is what makes spending a lot of time with this album so rewarding.”

Also:

The Vinyl District

“It helps that Nelson sings like a cross between Mekon Sally Timms and Lucinda Williams, nowhere more so than in ‘The Ballad of Pertinent Information (Turn It On).’ Her delivery is clean and direct, important qualities as her songs are full of syllables, all of them necessary. And to return to the subject of lyrics, it’s clear Nelson has been inspired by songwriters ranging from Warren Zevon to Randy Newman, but with each passing album, The Paranoid Style’s sound is increasingly their own.”

Grade: A 

Also: 

Charles Hughes/ No Fences Review

“It’s a fitting thesis for The Interrogator, a rock ‘n’ roll party that doubles as a collection of portraits of characters at the end of their ropes and reaching for new ones. Blending the textured precision of Nelson’s lyrics with the band’s melodic rumble, The Interrogator is a full-on blast, with track after track of power-drive words and arrangements that leap out of the mix and stick to the wall like a pinned-up flyer or graffiti scrawl. Elsewhere in that same song Nelson also claims “I’m not in the pleasure business.” That may be true in the specific context, but – in the larger meta-context of The Interrogator’s joyous racket – it seems almost absurd. But that’s surely the point: Even as it wrestles with themes of edgy ambivalence, this is a deeply pleasurable rock ‘n’ roll record.”

NPR’s All Songs Considered

“Hyper-literate, highly-quotable, very clever and also very catchy.”

Clever, quotable and catchy. 

Folks, what else can I say? I love and appreciate every last one of you and I do hope you will do yourself a favor and go see The Interrogator. You walk in, you tell the truth, you come out, you feel great. What could be better?

Love,

Elizabeth