After Mikel Jollett, singer/songwriter/best-selling author, and frontman for L.A. indie rock band The Airborne Toxic Event, finished his memoir, “Hollywood Park,” he didn’t know what he’d write about next.
A lifetime in the making, his book dealt with the death of his father, and his harrowing childhood growing up in the infamous Southern California cult Synanon. It followed his dramatic escape with his mother and brother, fleeing to Oregon, and eventually reconnecting with his former criminal father in L.A., where he started to discover a sense of family, himself, and his talent for turning trauma into art.
Paired with the companion album, also titled Hollywood Park, by his band, the project took up five years of his life, from 2015 until 2020. Now a father of two himself, he promoted both the book and album virtually during the darkest times of the pandemic, debuting the memoir at No. 8 on the New York Times Best Seller List, and earning accolades from NPR, to the Wall Street Journal, to O The Oprah Magazine.
“I wrote my book, and there was all this feeling of accomplishment, and sort of summary of my life, dealing with my dad’s death, and dealing with all this stuff, and then, I kind of figured, well, I don’t know what else I’m going to write about,” Jollett told REVUE. “And then this new record comes, and the story continues. It continues to be about some of the deepest struggles I have, and documenting my journey through the world, my emotional journey, psychological, spiritual, ontological, whatever, as a songwriter. And so the fact that that journey continues to feel so vital and you haven’t heard the record yet, but, you’ll see when you do – it may as well be called ‘Mikel’s Morbid Thoughts on Death,’ but it just continues to be alive, and vital, and in a new way that I’ve found surprising.”
The Airborne Toxic Event will release their new album, Glory, Sept. 6. The band premiered the album this summer releasing the title track as the lead single, and will tour the album this fall, including a stop at The Intersection Sept. 28.
“I thought I was going to make a responsible folk record,” Jollett said. “Like, get my Jeff Tweedy. ‘I am a responsible folk singer now.’ But instead, I just wanted to f*cking scream about stuff. And there’s that kid on the cover of the record, and it’s on the Glory single, so you can see it there. It’ this kid, and he’s running, and it’s the middle of the night. And I love the juxtaposition of that with the word glory. Like the question is asking like, ‘Is this glory? Is this the heart of glory, running from something, a child running from something?”
The band’s seventh studio album since forming in 2006 – and later breaking through with their smash 2008 hit single “Sometime Around Midnight” – Glory follows the band’s stand-alone 2022 single, “Faithless,” and expands on their sonic palette of sounds that stretches from punk to poetry, Springsteen to shoegaze.
In fact, the album opens with a song blatantly titled, “Our Own Thunder Road,” giving more than a direct nod to The Boss himself, and his influence on Jollett’s songwriting.
“I love Bruce Springsteen,” Jollett said. “I think ‘Thunder Road’ is probably the greatest rock song ever written. And I also hate the fact that he’s so perfect at everything... He wrote this song, and it’s always like, ‘You and me are gonna leave this town. We’re gonna go down this road somewhere.’ With Bruce Springsteen, you’re always leaving a town, right? You’re always like, let’s go. And he's, uh. And then to have that romance about the road, you have to really believe the road goes somewhere. And those of us who grew up with heavy trauma, we never believed the f*cking road went anywhere because it didn’t go anywhere. It went to another sh*tty place. And I would sit down and try to write these romantic songs like he does. And I could never do it. I was all thumbs with it, and it’s because I was just too f*cking broken and angry. My punk rock heart was just like, ‘F*ck this, f*ck you. The road doesn’t f*cking go anywhere. It’s bullsh*t, Bruce. The f*ck is that road supposed to go? It never went anywhere for me, you know? And so this song wrestles with that idea.”
Painfully, plaintively open in both his songwriting and his extremely popular Twitter feed, where, like Springsteen, Jollett doesn’t hide his left-leaning political opinions. He said that current Republican Vice Presidential candidate, and fellow best-selling author, J.D. Vance even used to follow him, and DM’d him to talk about being a fan of his band, and trash on former President Donald Trump, before going what Jollett described as full “Handmaid’s Tale.”
“One of the cool things about writing a memoir is when you talk about all the traumas and stuff, you don’t have anything to hide,” Jollett said about his raw sense of candidness and honesty. “So you can just talk about whatever all the time because, ‘Well, everyone knows all my f*cking secrets anyway. I wrote them in a book that was a bestseller. There’s no getting around that.
“And so, yeah, other people, I think, that went through similar things, they let you know and definitely, made me aware of that,” Jollett added about how his songs have connected with people at their emotional core. “You don’t have to have been born in a cult, or lived in an orphanage or whatever, to have trauma. There’s lots of kids in middle class homes with an alcoholic parent, an abusive parent, a parent who died of cancer, depression all around them, super narcissistic people all around them, that are just as lonely as I am, and I see a more universal experience now than I think I realized.”
The Airborne Toxic Event
Wsg Tyler Ramsey
The Intersection, 133 Cesar E. Chavez Ave. SW, Grand Rapids
Sept. 28, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $39.50 advance, $45 day of show, All Ages
Theairbornetoxicevent.com, sectionlive.com
