Karen O and Julian Casablancas Interview Each Other
As veterans of the early-2000s New York rock scene, Karen O and Julian Casablancas have run in the same circles for awhile. With both singers releasing solo albums this month (and Casablancas putting out O’s album on his label), Time Out New York asked them to interview each other. In the interview, O and Casablancas talk about Radiohead and Lou Reed, their songwriting process, and what it was like for Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes at the beginning of their careers. You can read excerpts below, via Consequence of Sound. Update: Read the entire thing here.
At the start of the interview, Casablancas asks O if she likes Radiohead. She responds:
Thom Yorke is very special. He fucks me up with his vocals, for one. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a singer, because I write music, too, but I tend to gravitate toward the voice more than anything else in music. And Thom Yorke’s got a whopper of one. The rest of it is…
Casablancas then cuts her off with, “Total bullshit? No, I’m kidding.”
Casablancas said his new album with the Voidz, Tyranny, was inspired by a bunch of “cool, weird” movies that were playing while the band was recording. One of them was 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s, a documentary about Bronx gangs in the 1970s.
O also compliments him as “one of the greatest lyric writers since we’ve been around,” to which he replies, “That’s not true.” After a quick exchange about the economy of lyrics, he then relates a story about the first time he met Lou Reed:
When I was probably 19, he was doing a book signing at Barnes & Noble, and we went. He was walking away; we almost missed it. So I just grabbed one of the books — I didn’t even know if I had the money to pay for it — just to stop him, you know what I mean? And he was totally weird and awesomely insane.
They spend some time talking about the start of their careers, and the difference between then and now. “I think being in New York at a time when New York was not on the map, it was real easy to make music just because you wanted to, without any expectation,” O says. “But now, it’s impossible, almost anywhere, to not have the expectation.”
O also says she saw the Strokes as rivals, and says they were “ruling the school.” (To Casablancas, Guided by Voices was the biggest band around.) “It was kind of like a boys’ club around that time, so I always felt a little bit like a black sheep, but in a good way,” she says. “I used that to rev me up.”
The whole interview appears in this week’s issue of Time Out New York.
Read our 5-10-15-20 with O.
Watch the video for “Rapt” from O’s Crush Songs:
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