"Somebody Spoke, and I Went Into a (Phosphene) Dream": Part Two of an Interview with The Black Angels

Yeah. Well, just to go to the “hallelujah” thing first, I always think it’s an interesting thing when you see leaders use religion as a means to conquer others. And I’m talking specifically about George Bush here, when I say “Our President then was dead to us, Hallelujah.” It definitely was a very personal song, but I think it’s the type of thing that a lot of people can relate to, thought I didn’t think too much about it until after the album was done and recorded. Y’know, the lines “Mom and dad look old again, where am I heading?” - that kind of a confused, almost paranoid expression of where your life may be heading, and am I spending enough time with my family? And then what the hell is going on with our country?

Y’know, our country is being lead by these people who feed us false information and then use religion as a factor to justify it, to say, “This is OK - it’s God’s will.” That’s very fucking scary to me, a very scary thing. And I think “Phosphene Dream” is kind of - and I have to say, I don’t often think about these things until they’re brought up to me, kind of how it is now - but I do feel that song consists of these highlights of the major things I was thinking about in my life at the time. And I don’t even think I realized they were major things until they came out in the song, like, “Wow - I just said that.” Like, sometimes you may be talking to your wife or your loved ones and you’re talking about your feelings and you say something that makes you stop for a moment and say, “Wow, I didn’t realize I felt that way.”

We surprise ourselves when we express our emotions.

Right, especially about ourselves. I think it’s hard especially when we’re talking about ourselves, because it’s hardest to understand yourself. It’s easy for me to understand you, or for me to come up with an interpretation of something you’re doing and why you’re doing it - whether it’s true or not, it’s easy for me to come up with that interpretation. But it’s much harder to understand ourselves.

The line that says, “praise the bible” - do you think of that line as standing in contrast to the later line of “raise the rifle”? Or are they two sides of the same coin?

They’re kind of two sides of the same coin. But I’m not like … It’s a good question again, and I do think it’s both things - the religion is the rifle. Consider the NRA, y’know - essentially backed by people who hold popular Christian beliefs, for the most part. But you can look at it in so many different ways. But I felt those were two things that went hand-in-hand in the context, at the time. Yeah. But I do like that people can say, “So, does he mean that he likes the bible, that he praises the bible? What does he mean by that?”

Oh, yeah. On one hand it’s very succinct, short and to the point, these two sets of three words apiece - “praise the bible” and “raise the rifle.” But there’s a lot of ambiguity in there. It could be, like, “choose your weapon.” Or maybe scoff at these weapons, or …

Yeah, exactly.

But there’s biblical imagery all over the album, all over your music - not only the lines we’ve been discussing, but other places as well, and kind of through the entirety of “True Believers.” Do you enjoy the idea that these things can be misconstrued, misinterpreted or otherwise alternately defined?

Well, yeah. I guess to answer that question I would refer back to how The Beatles wrote music. The Beatles would write music that had so many different interpretations. For example, think of a song like [sings opening to “All You Need Is Love”], “love, love, love” - if you were to ask John Lennon, he might say, “Yeah, that was a protest song,” or “It’s about how little love there is in the world,” or “It’s about how to achieve more love in our world.”

Lyrically, I really like ambiguity, because it provides for more personification on behalf of the listener. And sometimes I don’t even know what the meaning is and maybe someone else can better describe what the meaning is. Because I’m usually describing how the music makes me feel and … I mean, I’m not going to say, “George Bush then was dead to us.” I’m going to say, “The President then was dead to us” - which could have been true for the past four years, which could have been true for the past forty years, who knows? I’m never trying to be sneaky or anything like that, but it is about leaving it up to the listener, which is one of the main things about the band and our music. We encourage people to think for themselves, we encourage people to seek out truths for themselves, to always be educating themselves, and I think the writing just goes hand in hand with that. We encourage people to question authority - including us, including our authority.

But in music, I’ve always liked … for example, if you were listening to The Velvet Underground, and a song like “Waiting for the Man.” Well, obviously it has drug connotations, but you can also read into it whatever you want, you can read into it perhaps Lou Reed having a slight attraction to men - it could be anything. But I think I’m just drawn to people who have come before me who’ve done that.

Thinking about “True Believers” specifically now, where you mention the falling walls of Jericho - is there anything particularly significant about the Battle of Jericho as it relates to the song?

The idea for that specific theme was that a lot of things will happen to you in your life, regardless of your religious beliefs. If you’re a devout Christian, bad things are going to happen to you. If you’re into Theravada, bad things are going to happen to you. For me, personally, I find all religions to be the same to some degree, or at least they all have commonalities. And I think religion was definitely needed in society, or at least certain areas of society, in order to reach a certain level of social evolution.

And whether we still need religion or not, I don’t know, but I definitely think we’ve reached a point where social evolution can be attained largely through education, with the internet being a part of that, and the fastest, easiest way to do that, I believe. I was always fascinated by the Baha’i religion, the Baha’i faith, which took all these different parts of all these different religions and put them together in one religion, which says that all religions are equal or all religions have something good to offer us, and if we can just get past the disagreements and begin to understand that, there wouldn’t be any more religious wars. These are just abstract ideas that don’t have any concrete thought behind them - we make them concrete, humans make them concrete by their actions and their defense of their beliefs. Yet all of these people consider themselves to be true believers - they believe their religion to be the one. I could probably talk to you about this for a long time, talking about the impact of religion on society.

I could probably do the same and it’s interesting to me to see how society evolves with religion and also apart from religion, and how religion does the same, sometimes evolving along with the society, but also without, to the point where it becomes marginalized. But it always springs up! It is a constant in our lives, in our world - y’know, man’s search for “the other” or meaning or salvation or whatever, and whether we define that as Christianity, as Buddhism, as Baha’i, as whatever. But it’s all coming from a similar place. And the concept of Christianity today, in 2011, in America, is vastly different than the concept of what Christianity was in Roman times.

Yeah, exactly. I love thinking about that stuff, reading about that stuff, definitely from when I was in college, but after college as well. I don’t know if you read this book called “The Spirit Molecule”?

No, but I’ve read about it. The scientist who studied DMT, right?

Right. That was a very interesting book for me, and in some ways it points to the cause of why people look to religion, or look for religion, and the idea that DMT is produced by the pineal gland, and it’s a chemical that makes people see things and have these spiritual experiences, these near-death experiences, and the idea that DMT is produced at the time death, and we get these visions of white light and looking over your entire life, and all of these repeated patterns with religious or spiritual significance. And anyone who has done DMT knows that it does create these vivid religious experiences.

There’s another book that you would like called “The Evolution of God,” which really does just that - tracking the evolution of the concept of God through history, through the evolutions of society. It’s fascinating - and this quest for a messiah or a savior and the willingness to be subservient to that force, whether from a personal standpoint or from a purely religious standpoint, it’s a constant in society, in human behavior. So, what does that mean? We could talk about that forever.

Right, right. And it’s just, I mean … when you’re down here for Austin Psych Fest, we could just sit around and talk about this stuff the whole time.

Yeah, we might, we might.

You don’t think there’ll be too much else going on?

I think there may be too much going on, so let me end by asking you this about Austin Psych Fest 4 before I steal any more of your time. Which bands that you have not seen before are you most excited to see?

Oh, man … yeah. A lot. There are a lot of bands this year that I haven’t actually seen. I’m really looking forward to seeing Beaches, from Australia. I’m looking forward to seeing Black Ryder, who we’ve been in contact with, really since the conception of our band, before they were even really Black Ryder. I’m looking forward to seeing … oh, man. So many. God, there’s so many bands. There’s gonna be so many great bands.