From the archives: John Maus
"When does it become, like, an old man in assless chaps sort of thing?"
My writing efforts have been placed elsewhere over the last couple months, so here’s another one from the Marg-chives, an interview with electro-pop artist John Maus that I did in 2019. Usually my reruns are cynical ploys to capitalize on some related bit of current discourse, and this is no different: Maus is doing a bit of touring, and also Ariel “Pink” Rosenberg has been complaining about him on the internet.
On January 6, 2021, Pink and Maus, longtime friends and collaborators, attended the “Stop the Steal” protest in Washington D.C. which many fans and other indie-rock associated people considered to be an extremely bad look.
I don’t want to get too in the weeds with this: The event is interesting to me only to the extent that it’s a kind of sociological case study, a tale of two cancellations. Pink — here, and probably always, the Goofus to Maus’ Gallant (relatively speaking) — suffered the better part of the career hit and was dropped by his label, and then went to Fox News to complain about it. Maus tweeted some opaque anti-Nazi sentiments, which satisfied some people, but not others. Mostly he’s just laid low, and in a recent interview described himself as anti-Trump, and the whole incident as “extremely embarrassing.”
It’s that low profile that Pink takes issue with. “his silence was key. as was everyone elses” Pink posted in early March. “i never threw him under the bus. he never said anything so he avoided my fate.” Pink is pretty sore about the fact that his career never recovered, meanwhile all the convicted Jan. 6 rioters have been pardoned. And fair enough. Standing around at a protest is not (yet) illegal, and I don’t begrudge a man defending himself, even if it’s via Tucker Carlson, but it’s more than a little tiresome to blame one's long-term problems on the intolerant left, or whatever. Pink’s woes have, arguably, as much to do with his well-documented habit of engaging in aggressively alienating behavior, and being an unpleasant creep. People — audiences and venue employees alike — apparently don’t miss him enough. “But the music industry is full of unpleasant creeps,” you might be thinking. Well, baby, showbiz ain’t fair. But if you can’t get yourself at least semi-uncanceled in 2025, it might be time to look within.
I’ve already said more about this than I meant to. The point is that it got me thinking about this conversation with Maus. Usually when I interview someone who does a lot of press there’s a formality to it: They’re saying things they’ve said many times before. Good journalists are able to push through to something less rehearsed, but it rarely gets weird, or loose, or strays too far from the sanctioned promotional talking points. Maus was, by contrast, open, present and unguarded. It was the kind of conversation you might have with a stranger at an airport bar. Some of the themes seem a little quant in retrospect — 2019 was a different time! — and clearly we were both off on our readings of the “Employee of the Month” episode of The Sopranos.
When we spoke he was touring without a record to promote. He’d last released Addendum in 2018, a companion record to 2017’s Screen Memories. While on the Addendum tour his brother and bandmate Joseph Maus died suddenly. The rest of the tour was canceled, and Maus was left with an ambivalence toward touring in general.
From my original introduction:
“So, if there’s any kind of hook for this current run,” he says,” it’s probably this: ‘It will very likely be the last time, certainly for years, certainly for a year or something.”
I have to take Maus at his word here. His approach to the music business has always seemed a little counter-intuitive. After his critically-beloved third record, We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, for example, he dropped out of the public eye to finish his PhD in political philosophy. And like any philosophically-minded academic who spends a lot of time alone, he’s probably prone to over-thinking.
There’s an underlying sense of apocalypse and doom at the center of much of Maus’ work, but he uses deadpan language and mass-culture signifiers to cut the dread into palatable little bites. He’s intellectual, but unpretentious (TV is his favorite vice, and he claims to watch all of it). Lyrically, he’s often absurdist, and sometimes genuinely subversive. And all with a beat you can dance to.
Are you at home?
I’m in Austin, Minnesota, but the guy I’m going on tour with, he’s coming in tonight so that will be a nice change of pace for me. I've been here alone through the holidays, so it will be nice to have some company.
Have you reached your limit?
My limit…the problem is that you can get used to it. There’s an appeal in the life of the monk, isn’t there?
Yes, definitely.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine?
Is this a creative time for you?
It’s creative, but in a way that I can’t be sure is really creative. For some weird reason … for the first time doing the live show is something that — not that anyone there would realize it — but I start to think about it in terms of: What is there to be mobilized creatively? And not necessarily in terms of the performance, but more specifically in terms of the sound. So that’s why I’m saying there’s some question of whether it’s creative or not, because it’s a technical problem in some sense. But I feel that it’s a dimension that’s neglected. So for example, yes, it’s a lot of work in the last weeks … I’ve been trying to put together some sort of machine that will achieve an effect that maybe will have meant the live concert was done correctly.
You know what I mean? I don’t know …
Well, can you tell me about the tour?
Yeah, it’s just some sort of, I don’t quite understand it. I’m happy to do it cause — with all that’s been going on with me — it was nice to sort of have this [out] but I think …it comes at a weird time, it’s not on the heels of any release.
A lot of it was put into play when the situation with the live show was different. And to not beat around the bush, when my brother was playing with me, when there was a whole band there. I think some things were put into place in those days that were just kind of left on the table after the fact. [This tour] became the next logical step.
But I get worried, I get worried. Cause when I first went out at the beginning of last year, I hadn’t been out for, like, five, six years. So, a lot of people turned out just because …. Now I feel like I might have worn out that welcome just cause, like I said, I’ve started to divest [from] the live performance
So, you’re at a point where you’re like, why am I doing this, what’s the function of performing live?
No, no, no! I’m strangely at a point where the function of it has become more clear than ever to me. But paradoxically it seems to come precisely when it’s [of the] least use, from the standpoint of the situation. Like ['30s gangster voice] ‘you already had ya chaaaance,’ you know?
It seems like it would be… well, after touring as a band with your brother and then going through the experience of his death, would it be painful or a relief?
Well I gotta tell ya, I mean, I always felt like a … like I understood how it would come across if one were to complain about the woes of how difficult touring is. It’s not selling your labor on the market for pennies. So, who are you to complain? I understand all that, but it’s not without it’s … especially at this shoestring level, I’m not in a coach, I’m driving myself, this sort of thing, and then I get really nervous. So, long story short, it isn’t something I particularly found, uh, like it was fun, or something. But now, in the wake of this thing, it was very much a strange relief. Just to have something to do, you know what I mean?
Thinking of touring as labor, it’s really like being at work 24-hours a day.
The average day is that you wake up at seven in the morning and you drive all day and then you load in all the gear and you set it up, and you’re stressed because you got there late and things aren’t working, and you sit there nervously, sick-to-your-stomach nervous as you watch the room fill up with people, just, why isn’t it already 11 so we can do this, and god forbid it IS 11 because I’m going to have to do this, and then you have your 30 minutes of bliss because it's accomplished and you get back to the hotel at one or two and then you get up at seven. And it’s not like you get to see any of the places you’re at, ever. You’re always in a rush. And there’s always cool people who want to hang out, but you’re in a rush so you can’t visit or see anything, usually.
You’re just out with one person on this tour?
Yeah, that’s what I did on the first half … When I first started, that's what I did and people were outraged sometimes, so I was worried that it was going to come across as some kind of joke, but I was happy that… I think it’s a thing that’s more familiar to people now than I think it was in 2007, or something.
What do you mean outraged?
I mean, like, one time in Madrid they all started throwing beer at me. Because I didn’t have a band. They thought it was some kind of, like I was taking the piss or something.
Like you were ripping them off?
Yeah, I don’t know. There is a real question — just as there always is with everything — about, what is the live concert about? There’s all sorts of ways you can go with this. And I guess the most appealing one—and I haven’t pursued the question at all, I mean intellectually — I mean, everybody everybody takes [it] for granted that they come in and do the songs well and sound like the album. It’s something that …it’s more problematic than it would seem, isn’t it? It’s like, like, what’s it for? Is it amusement? A diversion? Is it all those things? It's none of those things?
There’s something liturgical about it. This idea that it’s …but again, I haven’t pursued it, I’m not sure I understand the meaning of that word as I’m using it here. Which wouldn’t be necessarily in a religious sense. But I would imagine it ties in with the seasons, and the hours of the day, the ritual of things. So that’s always an opportunity for something to happen. I mean, I’ve always suspected as much as that. So, I don’t know, I’m rambling.
I’ve thought about this a lot too, the nature and function of performance, and sometimes I think, well the artist doesn’t owe the audience anything because they’re putting their art out there and it doesn’t matter that people have paid for it. But, well, I don’t know!
And it gets even more complicated… because I’ll go see, like, a friend of mine, and he’ll just start giving the audience the finger and calling them all losers and they all cheer when he does it. Like, “You’re all losers,” and they all cheer. Or, the person who can just walk off if it's not going well. Like, it’s not about them disrespecting the audience, but … I could never pull it off, is I guess the way I would say it. In other words, the most important thing is doing it correctly. And I guess that means that if walking off is the right thing, then that’s the thing. That’s the thing to do if that’s the true thing, is to give everybody the finger and walk off. There’s no formula.
I guess with certain artists it’s so part of the performance that they get a pass.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Your music is very “churched,” the way it sounds, and in the way you deal with scary ideas using the language and slogans of mass culture … so I’m curious if that’s informed by a church experience of your own, or if that’s accidental?
The way I’ve tried to approach the, at least from a musical standpoint what’s being spoken of here, is I think — and I think this goes as deep as music in the west in general—any time a flavor is brought out in our music, in our popular music, that’s harmonically suggestive of precisely the corpus of music that you’re talking about here, from plain chant to the Renaissance and all that, they’re suggestive of those church modes.
I mean, it could be a cynical answer, for instance I remember seeing a paper years ago about affect in cinema, so there are certain modes that John Williams will utilize for ‘the dream’ and things like this. And for something sacred it would always be these sorts of harmonies that I’m working with in my music, and it’s intentional in as much as that was the space musically and harmonically that I always felt drawn to dig at, that held the most promise. But it wasn’t there in my youth. I mean, from a musical standpoint, the lip service that my middle class family here in the Midwest paid to the middle class duty of religion on Sundays
It was after the second Vatican council so it was all this lukewarm pop, like, people with guitars and stuff singing really bad, really, really, really, famously terrible songs, famously uninspired, that would do the very opposite of raising anybody’s heart to the mystery.
So I mean, this spiritual invocation now, that’s very much, ‘If I can bear witness to the light, I will not have died [in vain],’ because what else are we supposed to do? Please tell me, if you have a better idea than that I’d love to hear it. [Laughs] Cause I have to think about it, you know, especially when I’m playing. Cause that’s what I’m looking at out there, I mean, I’m too much of a coward to look into anybody’s eyes, so I’m looking up at the light
I think there’s something interesting about the middle-class American religious experience that you’re describing, and people’s experiences of the mystical: It’s all kind of flattened out with this Wonder Bread music.
Maybe people think of more traditional church music as cold, in the way they think of synth based music as cold, and maybe some people would listen to your music and sense a coldness.
I really think there’s an argument to be made that plain chant, you know, just the minute one goes into that space harmonically, [it’s] cold. [It’s] suggesting this space of the hallowed. The space of, exactly the doughy fatness of the Wonder Bread is the furthest removed from.
I think it gets into what we were saying about the appeal of monastic life, it’s so contrary to our lives in the US.
Yeah but the irony is that everyone but the nun and the monk, they’re further from each other, they’re more distant. I mean, I wonder if people know that there are really cloistered monasteries [in the United States] that still get up every morning at five am and they go and sing a psalm in Latin in plain chant, they don’t talk, they go to duties, they go and do that four more times without talking and then they go to bed. And they do that for their whole lives because they see it as a devotion to something.
I mean, if and when something like that is acknowledged it’s almost certain to be held up to ridicule in our, in whatever, in the media. Which used to bother me more but I’m crossing the hurdle of now I kind of feel sorry for the mockers. But it used to raise fury up my spine. … It’s all a part of that thing, isn’t it? Music and science and theology and poetry and… We gotta be suspicious when [people] want to start re-thinking all of that.
I’m interested in your thoughts on what seems to be an abandonment of the humanities. The result seems to be that broadly the understanding of human nature has been diminished.
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t.. It seems to go more and more in that direction so it’s difficult not to give over to cynicism in relation to the whole thing. But that’s why they’re more necessary than ever, on either side, nobody has approached it correctly. There is a reality that the management technocrat mindset has already won the day, that’s an accomplished fact.
I didn’t really read till I was much older, it was really hard for me to read. I think it is, maybe, for people who came up with television. If I read a book which, I hadn’t really done, I was really impressed [with myself], I would look at how many pages I’d read. That’s what you’d do in elementary school. I did that in undergrad!
And mainly all that I’ve read is just philosophy anyway. I wish I’d read, like my brothers have read lots of literature, everybody’s read a lot of literature, I haven’t read much of that at all. But I like, I’d always say, Karamazov …the Russian book, that’s a good one, there’s something in there for everything….
I’ve read that you like TV.
I always kind of regarded it as my worst opiate. But on the other side, [TV] is something that people talk about, you know what I mean? So that can’t be taken away from it.
But I just mean the hours of my life! I mean, we all joke about binge watching and things like this, but especially when you don’t have a day job it becomes really easy to get …I mean, we all have some sense that in the final milliseconds we’re going to look back at that very moment we were sitting there and ask ourselves, why? Why did you waste your life? Why did you do it?
But in terms of what’s taken away my life, you name it, all of it, I’ve done all of them. I mean, what [shows] do people talk about? I’ve done it, I did it, I watched it, and then I watched some other ones, I did ‘em all. But then you start to see, maybe I was the only one that didn’t realize it, but what a soap opera it inevitably is, so you just start to get impatient, like, why haven’t they told the other person the secret yet, how many more episodes do I have to wait? And you get TOO impatient and you get on Wikipedia and look up the season outline, but then you just keep going and going, and then in the next season they’re doing this, and you’re like, what’s this? And then you realize it's just the Young and the Restless.
Do you have a favorite show?
Well, you know, I think that — and this isn’t normally a thing that people would consider part and parcel with binge watching — but Star Trek: the Next Generation, if you extrapolate it from the quant '90s production design and all that, there’s some interesting ideas in there that would stand up.
I watch a lot of TV but find most of it very tedious.
What’s the good one? The Wire, right? But what are some of the others?
The Sopranos?
I did the Sopranos before binge watching was a thing, I had the DVDs. I think about sometimes, what’s the psychiatrist's name again, I’m sorry …
Melfi?
Yeah, she never told Tony she got raped, did you realize that? We were always hoping she’d tell him because you knew he’d take care of it.
It was frustrating but she had that, like, moral center that no one else in the show had.
I haven’t watched that one for years and years, but it set the precedent …its funny if you go back and watch again, there is some fat on the seasons, like they were obliged to fill a certain number of episodes and drag their feet a tiny bit with the arc because they have to spread it over so many episodes ….
Lost had it down to a science man, but their big mistake was answering questions instead of making more and more questions. As if there was some sort of answer to it all, and I was like, [whispers] noo, noo there’s no answer. There’s no answer to why there’s a metal hatch on this island with polar bears. Don’t give an answer to that!
Game of Thrones?
The pornography of it all is a little cynical to me. I’m just always put off by the cynical moves, like when it's clearly some kind of calculous about some kind of unfulfilled, unsatisfied fantasies of the primary demo …like, in the Hollywood movie where the scientist comes out and it’s a supermodel and you’re like “come onnnnn”
Do you listen to much music?
No! It's kind of a tragedy … I have to do a bit of digging, especially because I am pretty secluded, the millisecond I get around my friends and there’s different stuff moving around I’ve been finding some things. …
There’s a romance of being able to put on an LP and just sit on a couch and listen. I would listen to whatever, a Mahler symphony or whatever, I would sit and listen to it, but I find myself a little too pushed around to do any serious listening these days. But in the van and stuff, yeah. ..Greg [War]’s coming on this tour … He’s a vinyl-diver so it’s always a trade in the obscure. I mean, for the old folks, I think that’s a lost art, being a [record] trader used to be more of a valued trade, before it was there for all of us, before everybody could read the synopsis of krautrock in ten minutes. When I went out to LA in 1999 that was the capital — and not necessarily in a purely cynical way — that was the capital that a lot of people traded in. Like, trading in the obscurity, and that’s generally where most of the more interesting things are found, isn’t it? Under rocks.
A lot of people feel like having Spotify, having everything right there, devalues the music.
Some of my favorite records are what we would have called growers, and I don’t think that’s possible today. You don’t have to FINISH listening to a song let alone play the album 40 times because it was the one that you bought. You know what I mean? ‘I’ll give it ONE more try.’ There’s an upside and a downside … but it’s so up in the air. … [music] will have to become a little bit quicker, and a little bit shorter, almost like commercials. I don’t mean that as an insult, some of that stuff that was made for just a Saturday morning cartoon toy commercial or whatever, some of that music is far out.
Do you have anything in the works for release?
Yeah.. I mean, oh no .. I mean, I don’t know…
I’m not sure anybody is going to come [to this tour]. I’m doing it at a really weird time in terms of release cycles, but at least that will add some weight to it, it will very likely be the last time, certainly for years, certainly for a year or something, a couple years before I do something, and then I’ll be older [than] what the cutoff date was in my head. But when does it become, like, an old man in assless chaps sort of thing? I’m right on that edge right now.
But I’ll keep up. I think I’ll start working on something, but it might be that I get some work for incidental stuff, that sort of thing, because unless you can still cause problems with what you’re doing …
I feel like I lost the thread, or the world passed me by, or something like that. … and I think too — I don’t have to speak for myself, I can speak for friends of mine — but the influence was never acknowledged, which is really strange. I mean, it's there as a matter of fact, no matter how you cut it.
Your influence, you mean?
I mean my circle. I mean, if you look at Top 40 and you look at it after we had been doing certain things for [years] … some of those ideas found their way into the [zeitgeist] in a much more polished and in a certain sense arguably more effective way.
Maybe I’m just an egomaniac. But they were ideas I was working with.
Speaking of TV, the kind of music that came out of your artistic circle, I feel there’s something that sounds like it on the soundtrack of every Netflix original.
Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s a part of it too. I was thinking of it in terms of what we were talking about earlier, in terms of harmonics.
But then, if you get down to the retro synth sound, then I’ll take the gloves off. I’m just like, why didn’t they call my ass? You can buy me a Moog one and I’ll make it really warm and analog and real, you know?
But I don’t know, there’s worlds that I don’t even know about … It's hard to keep track of it all. Isn’t it?