Three Bells is the latest epic in his long, varied career
By Jeff McCord
With Ty Segall, we’ve all come to expect one thing from his music – the unexpected.
Except for their scheduling – he’s pretty much released an album a year since he started recording in 2008, and that doesn’t account for his numerous spinoff band projects – there’s not much to connect one of his stylistically varied projects to another.
I try, anyway, suggesting the guitar, specifically his wild abandon on the instrument. Might that be the thread that runs through all his music?
“I guess so. Yeah, yeah.” he says unconvincingly. But…
“I think that I’m a drummer first and foremost. My musical brain thinks like a drummer. I hear drums as voices, you know, like melodies.”
Ty and his band have just blistered the walls in KUTX Studio 1A for the past fifteen minutes, and he’s sitting to talk with me for a few minutes before rushing off to his soundcheck at the Mohawk. He’s on tour for his sprawling new 15-song, sixty-five-minute album, Three Bells, his fifteenth release under his own name, and it turns out the drums played a big part in the album’s genesis.
“I just wanted to focus more on some drum parts,” Ty explains, “that I’ve wanted to be very intentionally parted out, like in ‘The Bell’ and ‘Void’. Those beats are very fundamental to the songs, and in turn informed the other songwriting.”
Those two tracks, both stretching over five minutes each, are the dynamic album openers, boasting a seventies-like rock urgency, swirling instruments and vocals, and prog-like tempo changes. Like a disjointed rock opera with no connecting themes, Ty’s multi-instrumentalist muscles get a workout here. He estimates he recorded about half the album entirely by himself.
“It’s just me or if I invite someone in to collaborate, that’ll be an intentionally specific thing. Like, my wife Denée, who wrote a lot of lyrics. (She also sings lead vocals on one track). The rest of the music was just me writing.”
It sounded like he had a lot of fun making the album, I tell him. When I add that headphones added another dimension, his face lights up.
“That’s great. Yeah, I did [have fun]. And Cooper Crane was co-producer and engineered the bulk of the record, mixed the bulk of the record, too. He’s very heavy handed in all of that. He was behind the boards. I rarely let someone else get behind the board, but he’s amazing.”
Three Bells plays out as a microcosm of Segall’s career, trippy and full of surprises. After years of making music that’s all over the place, I confess it’s hard for me to pinpoint the music of his Laguna Beach youth.
“All over the place,” he says, laughing. “Soul music, rock music, pop music from the 50s and 60s and 70s, when I was young I got more into just hits. The older I got I got more into louder, more aggressive music – Black Sabbath and Zeppelin and AC/DC and all that stuff. Then I got into Alice Cooper and Bowie, then I started skateboarding and got into punk music. I just kept spiralling into weirder things.”
Whatever kind of music Ty is playing, he’s presenting it with flair. He and his boyhood friend, bassist Mikal Cronin, have been making music together for decades. Cronin and the rest of the band are re-creating Segall’s studio wizardry with abandon, allowing ample room for Ty’s wild guitar excursions.
“I think I’ve been faking it for this whole time, and no one’s found me out yet.”
He’s not precious about the studio versions of these songs, either. On the contrary, he loves taking them to new places. I mention he’s like a jazz musician in that regard.
“Yeah. Jazz was a big influence with [the] writing and having that openness and stuff. That’s kind of the coolest part. You get to throw songs at the band and see what happens. It’s a totally different thing, and it should be a different thing. I’m a big fan of a song… in order for it to live, it should have many lives. I think it’s unfair and less fun to have it be played the exact same all the time.”
Ty originally conceived Three Bells not as a double but a triple album, but he discarded eight to ten songs along the way.
“Some of those ideas weren’t finished, but it was obvious that the triple thing was too much. I’m not one of those kinds of writers that keeps going and going and going. I, almost to a fault, would rather stop and leave mistakes, leave things there. If I feel like the energy’s right, the feeling’s right.”
Artist: Ty Segall
Date: 4/22/24
Set List:
“The Bell”
“Void”
“My Best Friend”
Album:
Three Bells (Jan. 26, 2024, Drag City Records)
Musicians:
Ty Segall, lead vocals, guitar; Emmett Kelley: guitar, bv; Ben Boye: piano; Mikal Cronin: bass, bv; Evan Burrows: drums
Credits:
Producer: Deidre Gott; Production Assistant: Diego Artea; Audio Engineer: Jake Perlman; Rene Chavez; Audio Mix: Jake Perlman; Cameras: Michael Manasi, Renee Dominguez, Isak Kotecki; Edit: Renee Dominguez; Host: Laurie Gallardo
