The Shifting Pop Sound of Foxygen

Jonathan Rado and Sam France first formed Foxygen in 2005. Back then, the two were just a couple of 15 year-olds growing up in the periphery of Los Angeles, but their youth didn’t prevent them from pursuing a musical vision heavily steeped in ’60s psychedelia and avant-garde pop. Several self-released EPs appeared during the group’s early days, but Foxygen wasn’t truly discovered until 2011, when Rado and France slipped a CD-R copy of Take the Kids Off Broadway to famed producer and outsider pop hero Richard Swift at a show in Brooklyn. To their delight, Swift loved it, and buoyed by his support, the band signed to Jagjaguwar, which reissued the record in 2012 and has since become the group’s steady label home.

That same year, Foxygen traveled to Swift’s National Freedom studio to record We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, an album that exploded upon its release in 2013. The LP’s success led to a heavy slate of touring, but the band’s unhinged live show eventually required an extended break, prompting a retreat to the studio. When the group resurfaced, it had reformed as a deceptively self-described “punk” band called Star Power with an expanded, nine-person line-up and a new album, … And Star Power.

For a recent Fireside Chat with RBMA Radio, band member Sam France sat down with Frosty to narrate Foxygen’s musical ride so far. Read an excerpt below.

Who inspired you in the early days?

I always remember liking Andy Warhol. I like the idea of pop art: that you could literally put something that already exists in a frame, and call that art. It was a cool idea [about] having no boundaries, and stupid things that somehow have a mass appeal. Everybody interprets art differently, and Andy Warhol chose to use the most basic corporate images that most people would be able to understand. That’s why he was able to print so many of these things and make so much money.

When you started making music, was it more with that artistic thought in mind? Of trying to do something that was conceptual?

We were really inspired by a lot of rock and roll, of course. My friend Rado and I started the band when we were teenagers. We were theater kids. Our lyrics didn’t make any sense. It was a lot of rapping and nonsensical stuff, like Beck lyrics. We purposely wanted not to write about love because we didn’t want to be a “normal band.” We were 15 year-old kids. We wanted to write about energy drinks, because that’s what we were doing and we thought that was funny to present our world through that process, as opposed to trying to make something that was good.

When you guys started, were there other bands [like your own]?

We’re from Agoura Hills, California, in the Westlake Village. It’s actually somewhat noted for it’s nu-metal scene: bands like Linkin Park, Hoobastank and Incubus. There was a lot of the aftermath of that around [when we started the band]. We didn’t have any relevant music scene to be inside of. It was like our own community. There weren’t really any other bands that we could have been friends with because it was all screamo, rap, and metal bands. That’s all cool, but it was different from what we were doing.

Rado and I became friends through recording together. We met each other when we were both in this dumb band called The Fionas, and then split off from it because we found that we were the only two that could really relate to each other. We started recording together and playing shows at school - talent shows, tiny venues that no one would know of.

Were there venues in L.A. that you would go out to? Were you guys interested in seeing music and being part of that music community?

We were interested in going to shows in high school, but probably not as much as some other kids. We were obsessed with Brian Jonestown Massacre, so we saw them a few times. We pretty much just saw them or their relatives play live. Our band has grown to have very much the same reputation in doing “throwback” music, but I think it was inspiring to see Anton Newcombe and his band in the ‘90s [be] completely displaced. Having nothing to do with [contemporary] trends was appealing because he was so passionate about it. He seems so cool: the way he dressed, that his music was recorded on analog equipment and sounded bad; we liked that archetype.

Our first show was probably at a school function. I was singing and Rado was on acoustic guitar, doing a folk-rap thing. We had a few different incarnations. We’d have our friends in our band. We put all our friends into the band and call it a show. I think the first songs we ever recorded were garage rock, for an album called Electric Sun Machine. Then it quickly turned into sampling: a lot of piecing together, lyrics that were obscure and nonsensical; classic rock, video game noises, things from movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice; things like that. We’d sample something, Rado would play a drumbeat, and then we’d loop it and I’d lay weird vocals over it. We’d jam on an idea for two minutes, call that the song, and I’d make up the melodies later.

Did you guys decide to record songs first, or did someone hear you guys playing and say, “Hey, you should take this further?”

We’ve known each other since we were kids so we’ve been making music for so long. We’ve been in a band for nine or ten years. Once we were about college age, we made an album called Kill Art. It had fleshed-out songs and I thought the style was more original. It was the first time that we’d taken writing somewhat seriously, and that’s what made us more serious about writing songs, pumping out records and getting more into the technical side of recordings. Whatever comes out somehow comes through us - and at least people say that it seems original.

For many years, we were strictly recording: until 2011 or 2012. When we got Take the Kids Off Broadway released on a label, all of the stuff that comes with promoting records and being in that business came with it, of course. We hit the road having never toured before, so we had to learn how to be a live band.

We had our childhood friend, Sean, who wasn’t even a drummer. We just put him on drums. My friend from college was on bass, and Rado’s girlfriend, Jackie - who’d always kind of been in the band anyways - joined us, and we practiced the songs. We did little tours until We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic came out, and then the show started getting bigger. We’ve adapted and added more people to the band since then – and got better at working on the material, too.

I think the audiences didn’t have any idea what to think [about us]. It was a traumatic period, getting not much reaction from people. Some even heckled and booed us, which seems insane, but I think it was because we were so limited as musicians. We’d play a show and it would sound horrible – fighting with the sound guys, people are getting mad, stuff like that.

I think we were pretty disappointed in ourselves after touring for We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. We wanted to give people a good show, but we were at weird places in our lives emotionally: immature, and not sure what to do. We really saw the value in a live show because of that because I wanted us to feel like a unit. Like when you see a band and it’s like one organism: that they’re from their own world, and are completely in sync with one another. I’ve always admired that about certain bands and I wanted to feel like that. We developed that naturally after a few years, I think.

The shows have become much more organized, too. We do have skits, have props and costumes, and all of our dialogue is written. It’s controlled chaos now: nine people on stage, three ladies and myself singing and dancing; old hits, new hits, balloon animals, skits and wonderful fashion. It’s like an invented Iggy Pop experience.

What is the element that would scare people?

I’m not sure that people are used to seeing a show nowadays. People go and see bands that play their music with guitars, but I don’t know that people are used to seeing a lot of dancing and crowd interaction, like going off the stage and getting in people’s faces. It seems like a basic rock and roll archetype, but it’s been fun to embrace these characters onstage.

Were there shows [by other artists] that inspired that feeling or presentation?

I studied all the old videos of Iggy Pop and The Stooges, and David Bowie. I saw Ariel Pink once and that blew my mind. It was a very strange show. It felt like there was something wrong with the sound. He seems very frustrated and the audience seemed very confused, but I loved the spectacle of it. The character that he put on was fascinating. I could’ve watched him pace around on stage for an hour.

Take the Kids Off Broadway was basically made on a laptop using Garage Band. We ran everything though a four-track into a mixer. That album sounds like a Macbook to me. I really don’t like the sound of that album. I really like the song “Teenage Alien Blues” because it was so long – made with all of these little things that we pieced together. The very beginning is ripped off from a riff in the Talking Heads song “Green Horns.” I’m doing impressions of Jim Morrison, Captain Beefheart, Bruce Springsteen and Alan Vega, then there’s a Funkadelic-inspired breakdown and the end is a Scott Walker vibe, but not necessarily in that order. I don’t know if I can recall everything correctly.

I feel that a lot of record nerds were really into Take the Kids Off Broadway, but the next album - that was when it was like, “Whoa, this is weird.” Once we knew that we were going to have a record deal, we immediately thought of the producer and musician Richard Swift. He’s our hero. We started writing songs knowing that he’d produce it, and with what would be good for all of our sensibilities [in mind]: trying to write the catchiest possible songs that we could.

With …And Star Power - for some reason, and for a long time - we had this vision of creating a bizarre double album that was inspired by the over-budgeted, under-successful albums of the ‘70s. Fleetwood’s Mac’s Tusk, for example, is bizarre in its own way. In our world, that was our pop album, so we were going to make our drugged-out, over-budgeted album. We spent the budget buying old analog and making the studio in Rado’s house. We also had portable [recording] situations where we could record wherever we like, and with whoever we wanted.

Our current plans are to spend our free time in the home studio. We’ve been sampling a lot again, like we originally did, and doing more hip-hop stuff. We’ve also written another album, Hang, which is like an orchestral rock album: more in the vein of what people might expect from us. We’ve got those two things right now in the works. I’m not sure what the live show will look like, but I like the incarnation that we have now. It’s at a nice crossroads. We’ll just be finishing up this stuff and then we’ll see what comes next, but I’d love to work with Kanye West. I think that could be great.

Listen to RBMA Radio’s Fireside Chat with Foxygen here.