On Obsessing With Nation of Language
The album itself embarks on a similar thematic journey, delving into the peculiar ways we change when we become passionately fixated on something — whether it's another person, the latest news, or those perennial, unanswered questions about life that we all contemplate.
Last month, office stopped by their Brooklyn-based studio to talk about yearning, hobbies, Shakers, and the divine.
What have you been up to?
Aidan Noell— We played some festivals and shows on the West Coast and Europe, which feels like a lifetime ago.
Ian Devaney— We were in Germany, then Poland, flew from there to San Francisco and did some West Coast festivals. There's this Baltimore show, then we have iNDIEPLAZA at Rockefeller Center put on by Rough Trade, the record shop. It’s an outdoor show, there’s a ton of bands, it’s going to be fun.
When you're not on the road, is there something you all love to do together? Aside from making music...
ID— I feel like as soon as we get off the road, we're all just pedal to the metal, always working or mixing something new. But when we're on the road...
AN— We really like eating, going to restaurants together, shopping together
Alex MacKay— We have a lot of common interests. We share music, podcasts, books, all that stuff.
Being on the road is sort of a liminal space in and of itself — you spend a lot of time in-between destinations. Does that allow you any creative freedom?
AN— We try to make the most out of the time that we have on the road, seeing things in-between cities or exploring the town we’re in. I always bring two books and say that I’m finally going to read, and then I get in the van and immediately I’m just sleeping, listening to music, and zoning out for hours at a time.
AM— Yeah, I like to tell myself that I can focus in the van to a similar degree, but it's definitely not true. I've been trying to crack that code a little bit, because we've been on the road around four months a year, and that's like — a third of my waking hours. So if I have other interests or relationships, I need to find a way to actively nurture those while I'm on tour.
ID— I kind of look forward to letting my brain brain off on the road. Because this time when we’re working on new songs — it feels like the busiest and hardest work — making sure the songs are fully thought out the first time you hit the stage with them.
AM— There’s the writing stage, when you’re in the world of ideas, which is fun. Although, if you have choice anxiety, like I do, there’s something very challenging about that sometimes. But then you’re in the recording phase, the world of technology. And finally, you're on the road, back in the physical world and its straightforwardness.
ID— At that point, you get to achieve the flow state in the live performance. That’s the ideal each night, to lose yourself in it.
AM— That's what I think is somewhat liberating when you’ve been stuck in the other two phases for a long time. Now, all we have to do is the thing. We know what the songs are. The real magic of performing — if there is such a thing — takes place when you've internalized everything, and then you start to focus what's happening energetically in the room.
AN— The goal really is to lock in with eachother — become the machine together, let yourself give up all of the thoughts going through your head.
Totally. That makes me think of bands like the Ramones — even if you don't listen to or understand the lyrics, you're still experiencing a profound rush of energy when you see them live together.
ID— They’re also a great example of a band that practiced so much. They would play their whole set backstage before they went on stage, so that when they went on, it was like they'd already done it.
I really love the imagery that’s been a part of the Strange Disciple lead up; it's so absurd, very in tune with our day-to-day. How did you figure out how you wanted to visually translate the sonic message of the record?
ID— Up until this record, all of the design work has just been me, even though I have no training in it. Thankfully, I knew that I wanted the vibe of the band to be rooted in a kind of minimalism — which was convenient because I couldn't do anything more than that. For this record, I wrote the song “Sole Obsession” and there was this line about a strange disciple in it, which felt like a title that could unite the project. Because so much of it is about obsession. It felt like a strange disciple represented what we become when we’re infatuated with someone and tie ourselves in knots.
A friend of ours connected us with the artist Christian Little, who collaborated with us on the painting on the album cover. It came together in a very cool and natural way.
AN— It’s also funny because the disciple's pose on the cover — it's basically an exact outline of Ian's hands. Ian had this very specific vision of the person in the house, so we took a picture of his hands and sent it to Christian. It's his hands, and several people have gotten them tattooed on their bodies.
The record makes me think about a book I've read a few times, Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. She talks about desire and infatuation as a circumstance of proximity. Obsession as the distance between yourself and the thing you desire, and how shortening that distance until it’s gone depletes the initial infatuation — she paints obsession as a feeling that always exists outside of and adjacent to you.
AM— Yeah, she talks about the ice that melts in your hand.
Exactly. So, how did obsession become the thematic element of the project? Was it something realized subconsciously?
ID— When I sit down to write, I want to take myself to places where I have been feeling the most, in my own life and what I’ve witnessed in my friends’ lives. And I guess I must have really been on a mental kick about the times in life when you want something so bad — whether or not it's good for you to want it. Basically being between agony and ecstasy...
It's like you exist between death and salvation when you’re obsessed with something. It’ll either kill you or fulfill you.
ID— Yeah, exactly.
AM— That’s what I should've gotten you for your birthday, Eros the Bittersweet.
Aidan Noell— I did just get an Anne book because I'm obsessed with volcanoes.
Autobiography of Red?
AN— Yes, and I’m also reading a Susan Sontag book called The Volcano Lover, which is a historical fiction book, which is not something I’ve ever read by her — any fiction at all. It’s this beautiful love story that gets twisted in all directions around Mount Etna in the 1700s. It feels so much about yearning, love and these intense, fiery emotions, which aligns perfectly with the phase that we’re currently in.
ID— The thing that I like about yearning, and in particular, unrequited yearning — is that there’s almost a joy in the pain. It's the most alive you can feel because you’re feeling so much and that in itself is such a beautiful thing — to know that you are so alive, even if you’re also having an intense emotional experience. It makes you realize how profoundly you exist.
It’s interesting to realize that duality of existence, how you can be obsessed with the shadow of yourself — what you want to become part of you. Then, when it does, if you do get what you desire, the intensity dies out and you're out searching again.
AN— It’s a different state of being.
ID— I’ve been reading the book, I Love Dick, by Chris Cross. In it, this woman and her husband meet this man, become obsessed and start furiously writing him letters that they never send. So he becomes part of this bizarre love triangle that he has no idea about. But to them it’s this raging, passionate thing. They have these stacks of letters piling up and they’re contemplating ever even sending them to him.
AM— It’s that triangle of desire: you, the beloved, and the idea of yourself with them. When you meet them, you recognize that there’s a part of you missing, but in trying to fill that space with the beloved, it’s like they dissolve right in front of you.
AN— Because the reality will never be the same as the expectation. It might be better, but it's still never going to be what you perceive it would be, which awakens a void within you where you're like, "I thought I knew what I was, but now I don't." It's insatiable.
As if the hunger remains because you need your expectation of your existence validation? I didn’t think about it like that before.
AN— Yeah, I think it’s really interesting when people don’t let themselves experience those feelings, like people who marry their high school sweetheart. They just decide to be in a monogamous relationship and never allow themselves to experience those feelings as an adult.
AM— Or people channel it into something else. We were just at the Shaker Village yesterday, which is an intentional society that is completely celibate and doesn't allow marriage, don't allow sex or having children. The only way they continue their community is by fostering orphans, giving them the choice to remain in this very specific Protestant Christian sect.
ID— No kidding, like, “Hey, do you want to stay here or do you want to get laid?”
AM— Not an easy sell for a 15-year-old who has only known a life of labor. But yeah, I was just thinking about that a lot yesterday because they must have had to channel their desire towards their relationship with God and spirituality. There's probably some people who can do that and others who really struggle with that. I would say that I’m part of the latter, but it's a really amazing thing to think about.
AN— Yeah, there’s also those therapists or friends or family members that are like, "Try to watch a show, or why don’t you try knitting?" And that’s just not going to change my thought process. I can't funnel my energy that way.
There’s this need for us to categorize things and to interpret. There’s also this idea of human choices, creation and destruction — or destrudo and libido, the urge to create, the energy that arises from the Eros (or “life”) drive. Or to Freud’s point that all humans are driven toward death and destruction; self-sabotage is that, but so is something like marrying young and accepting that this is the life you’ve chosen to die with.
AM— There’s the religious urge to save yourself from certain things because they’re labeled as demonic or devil-work, which is understandable. Those things can destroy you. The highs can be high, the lows can be lows, but people also don’t talk about how cool the Devil is [laughs].
ID— He’s a good hang!
[Laughs] I mean yeah, it also feels like a commentary on the never-ending cycles we find ourselves in, an exaggeration of the masked life we've adopted as humans.
ID— Christian Little had used and iteration of the mask in one of his older paintings.
[Alex brings down the record for reference]
ID— Previous to that, I had all of these images of monks and other things, but once I saw the way he used these masks in his paintings, something seemed to click for me. A monk felt a little too serious, it just didn’t achieve this sort of absurd levity — the absurd places you find yourself emotionally when you feel so dedicated to something…
AM— A little bit like a clown.
ID— It’s what you were saying before that as soon as you sort of have this feeling once, it’s something you’re always seeking. I feel like, in the sequence of the album, the first song “Weak in Your Light” is pretty much the purest sort of love song that the band has ever written. Then the album ends with the song “I Will Never Learn.” In my mind, the record is a sort of roller coaster of highs and lows. There’s a sense of self-doubt and then an acceptance that you’re never going to stop doing this, so it loops back into the purest giving of yourself to something else, upon which everything begins again.
AN— In terms of the videos thematically, exposing the absurd nature of these obsessions in our video for “Too Much, Enough”, is much more heavy-handed in its absurdity than the “Soul Obsession” music video. It’s a song about the 24-hour news cycle and people who become obsessed with the rush of watching the news and want that feeling all the time. They seek out bad news to be pissed off about.
There’s the familiarity of an obsession. Sometimes you’re not chasing the beloved, but the feeling that you’re used to — of desiring something.
ID— Yeah, if you ask most people, they’re not going to say that they want to be pissed off about what some Congressmen did yesterday.
Sometimes it feels like I need something to do because I know I’m dying one day, so how do I pass the time while I’m here? Do I fill it with nothingness or some drama fed to me through this screen?
AN— [Laughs] Yeah, I know people who have MSNBC on all day long.
ID— Fox is what directly inspired the song, but then I did start to see a similar obsession on the left with Democrats. You kind of associate this mindset with Fox, but this is not a both-sides-ism, because Fox news is definitely, definitely worse —
AN— But the point is that we can all fall prey to being obsessed with bad news. During the election cycle, it was all anyone could talk about and that’s coming again, but I think we’re going to be better this time and learn from our social criticism.
AM— I think a lot of people are running from personal despair and it’s easier to move from that towards outrage. Outrage can feel more righteous, which I think is a much safer space away from yourself.
AN— In the Susan Sontag book, there’s a lot of this talk about the mob coming after French revolutionaries that were in Italy, and all the lower class people of the town who were coming to kill or steal shit from the bourgeoisie who were either for or against the Republic — they didn't actually want any social change, or the positive that could come of the Republic. They just got into the mob mentality and became addicted to coming together and screaming and putting someone on stake.
AM— People like to feel a part of something.
That's true, so they don’t have to feel so alone maybe.
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