. . . I think most people can relate to wanting to do something yet feeling like you can’t do anything due to lack of money, time, feeling like one person can’t make that big of a difference or whatever. So getting to sit down with an artist like Perry Farrell, who’s as much an activist as he is a musician, is an amazing relief to talk to one person who has consistently been making a difference. Whether he’s freeing slaves in Sudan, helping preserve the rainforest in Costa Rica, or trying to help stop global warming, Perry Farrell is making music that matters. Like his new band Satellite Party and their new album Ultra Payloaded, a concept album on global warming, he’s willing to throw himself out there, both trying to come up with solutions to saving the world and celebrating it in a way that only a true rock star, icon, and activist can.
Thanks so much for having this.
I didn’t set it all up but I was pretty excited that it was set up because people have been asking me what I think about bloggers in all the interviews. You have to realize, the record [Satellite Party] took me three and a half years to make, and in that time, I didn’t deal with bloggers the same way that I deal with bloggers today. The last record I did was Jane’s back in 2003. Back then, blogging was here and there. A couple of people did it. You know, famous people did it. But it didn’t reach the importance it did in the last few years. It’s just incredible.
For the album, why did you decide to enlist such an eclectic group of musicians?
Well, I didn’t actually enlist them. They came to me. They were interested in having me perform for them on their records. Each time, and you can use this as a great excuse if you want to get people to work for you on this scale. I just said, my head is into this great project, Satellite Party, so let’s do something unique. Let’s split the publishing. Give me your tracks and I’ll write lyrics for them and sing for you, but you’ve just got to leave your tracks with me, and we’ll see what happens. The reason I was confident something good was going to happen was because we all come from slightly different worlds. So with Hybrid using my voice, it ended up being more of a remix of what I do, and what I did for their tracks, was I gave them a more radio friendly sound. It’s going to get played on rock radio stations, where their music wouldn’t have ever gotten on before. So, it worked out really well for us all. Now "Wish Apon a Dogstar" is in clubs and it’s charting on billboard’s club charts, and then I’ve got my thing going on the rock and pop charts. So it’s cool.
Do you have any funny studio stories to share from working with such a large and diverse group of musicians on this album?
Jim Morrison’s track was a bitch man. What happened was a lot of times the power would go out on us. I swear. Etty’s my wife. She can tell you right now. The house would go down. Only our house would go black.
He looks over to Etty, who’s sitting near him on the couch: “It happened a few times in the studio,” she says nodding.
Yeah, It happened a few times. That’s why I had a 100 copies of that track all over the place. Because I was afraid it would just get destroyed. I kept thinking to myself, is this a spirit sign that you shouldn’t work on the track or that if you want to work on my track you’ve got to bust your ass? I took it as a sign that you’ve got to bust your ass.
Jim Morrison was a bit of an anarchist though, so that makes sense.
Totally!
Can you tell me about the Costa Rican Rainforest project you worked on?
I did it in 1993 or 1994. What I did was I found out about a deal the Costa Rican government had, where if you purchased rain forest, they would match you. Let’s say you buy a half million dollars worth of rain forest. Then they will match you to preserve it. All included it would be a million dollars worth of rain forest. So, we bought a half million dollars worth and ended up with a million dollars worth of rain forest that we preserved for posterity. It’s a great idea to revisit again.
It’s still untouched?
Yeah. Unless we want to sell it to McDonald’s, who I’m sure would be interested. But that’s not going to happen.
With all of the global changes going on in the last few years, have they affected which causes you are involved with now and the music you write?
Yeah. You know, I like to look at myself as an artist that mixes mediums. I got this idea from my mom, who when I was a little kid, we would go through the trash on Monday morning in our neighborhood, and we would grab really cool furniture, clocks, even paintings. People throw out great stuff that just needs a little bit of rework or retouching. So I got it in my mind that you can grab things around your neighborhood or your experience and make art with it and they go together. Because if it’s something you’re interested in, if you’re interested in something like the environment and if you’re interested in something like music, you have to just think about it a little bit, how to put them together. How I seem to have done it is I’ve written this story. It’s a revolutionary story and the music is powerful, but it touches upon these issues. In other words, I’m grabbing from my collective consciousness of the things that are important to me in my life and then mixing them in, weaving them in and into the fabric of the story.
Do you find any difference in the number and kinds of people ready to listen to what you are saying since global warming has made such a big impact?
Yeah. I think if someone said they didn’t know about global warming at this point, I’d say that they were kind of crazy. So it’s easier for me to discuss global warming with anybody, however I’m not simply going out there and saying that there is global warming. I’m on to the next thing, asking what are we going to do about it, and even past that, I’ve got a solution.
And that is?
The solution is we’re going to reduce carbon emissions by reaching one billion people by using blogs, using festival, using event, using connection, allies, word-of-mouth and we’re going to get together and reduce carbon emissions by any means necessary. If we have to throw a boycott, we’ll throw a boycott. If we have to bring new power stations into cities, work with city officials, like we have in Chicago where we’ve donated one million dollars to the city of Chicago from Lollapalooza, and planted rooftop gardens and beautified their parks, we will. Why not bring in power stations? Why not bring in windmills and hydrogen fuel cells, attach them to the buildings, federal buildings, the museums, to the colleges, and really get this thing going? You know what I mean? It’s action. It’s being proactive. We need it now, So let’s be proactive. Let’s go out there and do it!
Watch the interview on video here. |