Two Years Ago, James Murphy's LCD Soundsystem Found an Audience and a Grammy Nomination. Can Sound of Silver Carry the Torch?

Published in the May 2007 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 20 - Number 5
By Brian O'Connor

     New York City—Apologies if this seems like a desperate “bleed-to-lead” opening sentence, but there’s no way around it: James Murphy, founder of LCD Soundsystem and chief architect of the DFA rock-meets-disco aesthetic, could unequivocally kick your ass. And that’s not metaphor, like he wants his recent LCD effort, Sound of Silver, to kick your “metaphysical” ass, on your iPod or on the dancefloor. No, James Murphy could enjoy kicking your “real” ass, as in, clutching you with his big paws and delivering a swift kick to your leg, or perhaps an angled punch to the side of your head. And then he’d take great delight in throwing you to the floor for some “ground-and-pound” action.

How did we get here? In the lobby of the Tribeca Grand Hotel in New York City on a cold winter morning, I tell Murphy I’d recently interviewed Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Chuck Lidell. His eyes light up and we are quickly on the Murphy conversational Autobahn. “I was never a really skilled athlete,” he says, talking about his high-school self while growing up in the “farm town” of Princeton Junction, N.J. “In basketball, I was OK, good defensively, but knowing where the ball was without looking, knowing where the other players were without looking and knowing where the hoop is without looking at it, and being able to make your choices, I could never do that. But fighting, when I kick-boxed, it was the first time in my life that I noticed I was in fast motion. I was the one thinking three moves ahead and my opponents were blinking and trying to think. I would kick people in the ribs and by the look in their eyes I knew what they were going to do. It was very natural for me—I was very calm while fighting.”

Of course, “calm” is an adjective not often applied to Murphy’s hyperactive M.O.; “fight,” in the metaphorical sense, is. His favorite word, “staggeringly,” underlines an obsessive nature that borders on evangelical. This quality has bided well for LCD Soundsystem, the band he’s guided since 2003, the band that helped kick-start a post-9/11 sound in New York City that included The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Murphy’s smirky neu-neo-new wave (“Daft Punk Is Playing at My House”) staked common ground between punk rock and disco and found an audience, and garnered a Grammy nomination. More than 200,000 units sold and a vigilant tour later, Murphy returns with Sound of Silver (on DFA, the label he co-operates with Tim Goldsworthy).

As with any artist, the same sophomore-album questions apply to Murphy. Now that he’s staked out an audience, he’ll need to find the common ground between relevant and fun. But after talking with Murphy for an hour or so, you get the sense that anything he applies his manic energy to can be pushed up any sized hill. Ultimately, of course, he wants to kick your metaphorical ass all over the mat. Although your submission will not validate him as a person, per se, it will allow him to continue the extended match, a.k.a. his career. Our conversation went as follows…

DJ Times: You chose an interesting title for the single, “North American Scum.” Where’d it come from?
James Murphy: I’m not really talking to anybody. I’m perspective-based. Usually, I don’t have a theme, it starts from perspective. That’s why I had so much trouble with “Losing My Edge.” People were like, “Are you making fun of other people? Is it self-deprecating?” It’s not really about either one of these things. It’s from my point of view; it’s about being me. If there’s anything to say about what a song is about, it’s about being me at a certain point on a certain topic. I was in a position where I had a quick grasp on being cool for 20 minutes and then it went away.

DJ Times: So “North American Scum” is a song about being James Murphy in 2006…
Murphy: If you want to say “North American Scum” is about anything, it’s about being me at a funny time, being in a funny job, and a funny guy, being a strange person to have this strange job to be a strange nationality. At certain times, there are certain lines that are total lies, just because I think it’s funny, like to say, “We don’t have magazines.” I think it’s funny, although it’s not true. It’s sometimes about stuff in the States that I don’t like—culturally invasive Christians—and also parts of America that I think are misunderstood by other people, like that they assume we’re idiots. It’s not anti-America or pro-America. I’ve been traveling a lot to Europe, and no one’s learning what I think about being American, which is fine, but I’m learning what everybody else thinks by the questions they ask me. They say, “Well, you are not really American because you are from New York.” And I say, “Well, first off, I’m from New Jersey, and being a douchebag from a farm town in New Jersey who thinks he’s too cool for his farm town and hates everybody and wants to get out and his closest port station is New York is about as American as you can get.” There’s nothing more American than being in a restaurant in France and hearing an American couple talking too loud and being embarrassed. Europeans don’t get that. They feel you’re either American in the way that they visualize an American. Anything negative is American, and anything intelligent, positive or varied is this aberration—this “Oh you’re not really American because you’re not some big fat fast-food junkie.” And I say to them, “Actually, watch elections results in America. Presidents and congressman tend to win by small margins, when you consider how enormous this country is.”

DJ Times: If you haven’t been to the U.S. and traveled around, it’s hard to understand all of that.
Murphy: It’s a deeply varied country—it’s getting more and more monochromatic, with suburban sprawl, but still, in every Orange Country gated community some weirdo will be produced who will move out…and that weirdo is not someone who doesn’t make sense coming from Orange Country. He makes perfect sense coming from Orange County. Like I make perfect sense coming from a farm town in New Jersey, even in the fact that I don’t fit. I’m tired of hearing from Europeans that New York is a European city. I’m like, “You don’t have a city like this. I’m sorry, I like Europe. It’s a nice place. You have great bread, but go fuck yourselves if you think New York is a European city. You don’t have that. You don’t have anybody who’s gonna stick his neck out like Warhol, you don’t have the Velvet Underground. You’d still be painting like abstract expressionists in the ’50s…that’s the States.” It’s been a funny experience. I was an American on tour around 9/11, and I’d be in Europe and people were like, “Are you OK?” I was like, “New York is New York—it just coldly moves on.” And I think that’s the best part about the place. The rest of the world went bananas, the people in the boonies were wearing “Remember 9/11” shirts, and I was like, “Fuck you—you hate New York! It’s where all the queers live! That’s why I moved here, because you hate it. Don’t pretend you care now when you’ve referred to New York as a homo den.”

DJ Times: Have you played “North American Scum” out live?
Murphy: No. I wrote it because I thought it’d be fun to play live, sonically and musically. The drummer and I have this way of talking about stuff where we know exactly what we each mean. He gets what I’m saying; he gets the layers of what I’m saying. So I just wrote the song from that perspective. He and I and my other friends know what that means and what it doesn’t. None of my friends are going to be like, “What are you—some kind of American apologist?” But it was the last song I wrote. I listened to the whole album and I thought, “I need a live thing, a ‘Movement’ or a ‘Daft Punk.’ I need another really good song that will have a lot of power live that we can play well.” I had a list of song titles and that was one that kept repeating in my head, the hook. I built the song around the hook. Originally, the bassline was a synth, but I replaced that with our bass player Tyler Pope—actually there are two basses on that song, there’s one that sounds like a guitar and there’s one that sounds like a bass. Tyler played the bass that sounds like a bass. We just went into it until it sounded right. It ain’t a hard science. I never even thought of it as a song that would give me any trouble. Maybe that’s just being naïve. I just thought of it as a song that had a funny title and funny lyrics.

DJ Times: There’s a little bit of the barroom piano crooner in you, on “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.”
Murphy: That was the last song I recorded. It was the first one written. It had been in my head for three years.

DJ Times: Can you play the piano?
Murphy: No, I can write it, and I can talk about what I want it to feel like. So I can say, “Here are the chord structures.” To this guy Morgan—he’s an amazing classic and jazz piano player—I said, “OK, don’t deviate from the tonal structures. Don’t add any sevenths. Don’t add any tonic density, but play like a barroom style. I played him Hunky Dory, Rick Wakeman playing these really simple tonic structures that Bowie writes. That’s what I wanted, Rick Wakeman playing Bowie piano. And the little melody at the end, I write the melody and I pick it out, and I’m like, “That’s it.” The basslines I write, then I tell Tyler…it’s almost like acting, “This is your motivation. This is your character. It’s 1972. You’re a session bass player, but you’ve only played on good records. You don’t have a five-string bass with seven pickups in it. You’re a coked-up session weirdo who’s gonna leave this studio and play on a Stevie Wonder record and then go play on a Frank Zappa record.” Pat Mahoney understands the drumming. At the end of a song, I can say, “Do the man-falling-down-the-stairs drum fill. Before the coda, where you’re playing and the guy playing the drums falls down the stairs, cartoon style, and then we’ll come back into it”…I play the guitars and have other people play them for fun, my friend Justin played a solo…it’s a fun, old-fashioned way of doing things.

DJ Times: Growing up, did you think your band would sound like this band?
Murphy: Nope. I was 12 and I was in new wave bands, when the “new” in new wave had some non-ironic significance. I was really into Violent Femmes and The B-52’s. I just wanted to be a rock star and get out of Dodge. I was a terrible guitar player, and I had no voice, and I had no perspective at all, and I didn’t know I needed one. I absorbed music pretty complexly, but wasn’t able to get my head wrapped around what that meant as an artist. So I failed—which is the best thing that ever happens to anybody, repeated and prolonged failure.

DJ Times: What kind of failure?
Murphy: I wanted to be a rock star and I wasn’t. I wasn’t even making demos. I was in bands and recording four-tracks, and luckily I became an obsessive who was really interested in the process and that held me in good stead for the rest of my life.

DJ Times: You’re out of Dodge now, is it like anything you’d imagine it would be?
Murphy: Of course not. I had no perspective. I was living in a small town surrounded by people who didn’t like the music I liked. There’s nothing that can actually prepare you for life. I didn’t know what New York was going to be like. I didn’t know what being in a band was going to be like. People ask me if I knew what I was creating when we did DFA, and I was like, “Yes and no.” I thought, “Man, we’re going to change the world and this is going to be this and this and this.” It wasn’t like we made these songs and we were surprised. We had set out to make a difference…but the difference between imagining making a difference and actually having some success is a huge chasm. Also, the funny thing is that people ask, “What’s it like?” The big difference for me was before the first record came out and I was getting a DJ gig, and people are like, “Hey, there’s that guy!” I was like, “What do you mean? I’ve been like the nebbish-New York-douchebag-miscellaneous-miserable dude my entire adult life and all of a sudden I’m like getting free into a club, “Hey James, welcome, if you want anything to drink...” It was all about New York for me, the first 12-inch being liked in New York, that was a big moment for me…and now, although the band is bigger, I feel significantly quieter in New York, like the band is smaller, and I know it makes no sense. I don’t go out as much. In Williamsburg, where I live, that’s my meat and potatoes, no one’s going to say anything to me. That’s why I live in New York. I saw a guy in the subway with a DFA record and he hid it, or another guy with a DFA T-shirt and he zips up his jacket when he sees me on the subway—that’s why I love this city. The closest I ever got to anyone saying anything to me was a guy on the subway who was playing a song of mine on his iPod, he just turned the screen to me and nodded.

DJ Times: Your typical day has changed?
Murphy: I used to have free time. I no longer have free time. I toured for three years, and in the last year of touring I did more remixes than any year previous—eight remixes, each one takes a week to two weeks. And that’s no joke, that’s a full-time job; running a label is a full-time job; being in a band is a full-time job, and people who do those things usually have drug problems and have to get exhausted and go for relaxation. So any one of these jobs is enough to develop a pretty staggering coke habit. I’m married; I have a dog; I have an apartment. I didn’t have a home for two and half years.

DJ Times: You were homeless?
Murphy: I lived here, in the Tribeca Grand—I didn’t have a place to live, and I would DJ here on New Year’s Eves and not get paid cash, and stay here for a couple months, which was good for both of us. The hotel usually lays out a ton of cash for a New Year’s Eve party, and I didn’t have a place to live. The hotel didn’t pay anything, just to wash the sheets, in that couple of months the hotel was sold out maybe 10 nights—it worked out for them. Two years in a row I did that, and then moved out, and I slept on an inflatable mattress in my office, which was not conducive to having a serious relationship with my [now wife] girlfriend. I wake up and make the best coffee in Williamsburg, walk the dog and get working.

DJ Times: Describe your job.
Murphy: So much of my job is coordination. Being me involves a lot of checking the album artwork, going over liner notes. I kind of micro-manage everything…the industry is not really set up for that. They want you to let go of shit and let someone else do it, and I’m not into that. When we directed the video, I make the videos. With this last one, I had to find a video guy, write the treatment with him, set up how it’s going to happen with him, go over the budget with the producer. I like it, I kind of co-directed it. After all, it should come from me—they’re not coming to see what the band wants to say with the cover art and stuff. I’ll pick venues, too. I don’t want to play that venue in Amsterdam—I want to play the Paradiso. I don’t let the ticket prices go over a certain amount of money—cities where we’re playing the first time I don’t want to be expensive. The problem is, New York is typically a cash cow for bands, but it’s my hometown, so I can’t let the tickets go over $20. But that means you get killed. You lose money in three cities before you get to New York, and I get here and get killed again.

Murphy micro-manages LCD & the DFA label.