Anyway, he asked me to sing on this other project, and he took leftover stuff and made a loop out of it with a cool drum beat, sort of trashy and punky sounding. That became "Murdered Out." He was like, if you ever want to do a solo record or whatever, we should do more. It just kind of happened gradually.
What is a place in L.A. that you found changed the most since you lived there as a child?When I was growing up in the seventies, there were more open spaces. There weren't McMansions really. L.A. always had an interesting array of architecture in the houses. Like one would be a ranch house, another could be a Tudor house. It is fitting that there are all these different styles that almost were predetermined by L.A. being a place where different people moved.
So when you moved back to L.A., you were living in an Airbnb for a while?Yeah. This one was cool. I had rented it for a month when I was working on my book. It was a great Airbnb. Because it was actually pretty bare bones. It was nice. It had a great view, but it was just good enough. It was minimal. It didn't have any affected sloganeering about how great life is and joy.
Live, laugh, love, and all that.
Yeah, like those things they sell at Michaels arts and crafts. But I like looking at that stuff, it's funny.
What's the funniest one of those you think you've seen?We did the promo pictures in one. Then she discovered they had another place on their site [ Pulling up photo] It just says, "wish it, dream it, do it."
It's really funny. And then, they have all this French stuff and they're like, "Paris!"... I just find it interesting, the lifestyle branding of it.
Have you heard about the concept of AirSpace?Oh no, what's that?
A friend of mine wrote an article coining the term a few years ago. It's about how whether you go to a coffee shop in New York or Berlin or Seoul, they're all using the same aesthetics. Airbnbs are like that too. And it's disconcerting because no matter where you are in the world, you feel like you're in the same place.Yeah. And, a lot of them, I noticed have pictures of other cities. We stayed in one in Austin. It had pictures of the Eiffel Tower, all these black and white. We're international, we're global! The idea of globalization ... it's used to legitimize who you are through the aesthetics or something, that you're connected and plugged in.
How did it make you feel? A lot of the album is about transience and feeling disconnected.It's strange to me. I grew up in L.A. and it's weird to move back to a place that's familiar and yet not. I live in a different part of the city. I'm not a different person. But places that I heard when I was growing up and seemed so far away are now super close to me and they've been gentrified-hipsters live there now. I live in Los Feliz, but places like Eagle Rock or Highland Park, that just seemed so far away to me from West L.A. I don't know, it's just like the world's smaller. It's all smaller.
Are there any pieces of decor you feel like you've seen over and over?Well, the black and white photos seem to be big with international sites. And those printed script paintings on canvas that are words that say "joy" or slogans about pleasure. I haven't looked at ones in Europe and individual cities. I feel like the real designed art branding thing is maybe more L.A., more in the U.S., I don't know.
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