"1000 TOWNS" flat tire, we’ve had that happen. So you miss your gig, but then you gain life experience. You have a story to tell about it. So I’m trying to keep my eye not just mainly focused on the cloud, but actually the silver lining around it. Some things are out of your control, but then you’re going to gain life experience out of those things and that might inspire your next tune: your Breakup Song, your Workout Song, your Dance Song, Anthem, whatever it is. My favorite stories from tour are always the worst gigs. The best gigs I love, don’t get me wrong, but the funniest stories always come from the worst-case. I remember this one time I was playing and the sound person didn’t speak English. It was in Italy and it was at this arts festival, and he saw that I was a DJ and thought I was just going to play disco dance stuff, but I was actually doing more routines. I had a booth and there’s a smoke machine and strobe lights. Two things that scratch DJs can’t stand. So I get on, I start chopping up two beats and then he’s blasting the smoke machine into the booth. Like, literally, I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face. And I said, please turn off the smoke machine. And he’s like, what? More smoke machine? No! Please, no. I just need the light to be static. And he’s like, what, more light? My eyes start getting drier and drier. And then the next thing you know, my contact lens had dried out and had folded on the bottom part of my eyelid, and I was like, okay I really can’t see right now, but I’m in the middle of a routine. I’m just going to grab this contact and put it back in somehow discreetly. So I grab the contact, and it falls off of my finger, and it lands on the record that I’m playing. Then my contact lens is going around on the turntable, and it’s sort of close to the left of the needle, so it means the needle will eventually hit this contact lens and make a horrible loud noise. So then I’m trying to pick at it every time it goes around but I’m missing, and I’m catching air because there’s all this smoke. I have no depth perception because I only have one contact in. And then he’s hitting the strobe lights. So then you can see my contact just appearing and it’s there! No, it’s there! And it’s one of those moments where I’m like, oh, my god please make this stop. (laughing) It was literally the worst gig. Technically, maybe not the worst, but it was one of those perfect examples. Such a bad time for me as a performer. But then I recounted, and it’s a pretty rich story. All the things that have to fall apart in that moment at the same time makes it really funny to me. So I think just having a sense of humor is very important in this game because, let’s face it. The music industry, and as is indie publishing, is precarious and so people who choose to do it just have that grit. And if you have that grit, then you’ll finish your song and you’ll get it out there. But ah, the adventures and the BS along the way is almost like part and No. 116 parcel of it. Jonny: Your sense of humor, the fun that you have comes out in the game. I mean, sure, you have your heartfelt stuff, obviously. But your sense of fun too is really palpable with everything you do. Kid Koala: It makes the heavier stuff much more bearable. When I look at an album like Music To Draw To: Satellite, lyrically, it was inspired by a lot of things going through my head. But mainly, it was me processing my cousin’s suicide. I didn’t want to just make a record detailing what happened or being very explicit about it. It was just one way of me having to process that in a way that felt comfortable. And it did help because I was able to bring Emilíana [Torrini] on board. We were talking about this Mars mission at the time, when they were recruiting people to go to Mars and the caveat being you can’t come back, which I thought was essentially almost like, not a suicide mission, but you’re basically leaving everything behind forever. So that’s quite interesting in terms of the idea of the people that are choosing to do that. We kind of used that as the gateway concept to write through these characters, to speak to the idea of somebody who wants to leave everything behind. And it really helped. It really was healing for me because, first of all, her voice is just such a comforting voice of an angel to begin with. But the idea of: I’m not over it, but it’s a thing where with given the tools that you have and the time that you have, can you iterate it somehow to just get things off your chest? And I knew it was, from a stylistic standpoint, totally left field. Wait aren’t you the scratch kid from Deltron? What are you doing? But making this ambient record is the record I had to make that. Otherwise, I wasn’t going to be able to go on and understand anything. But even in that process if I think back to those sessions, Emilíana and I had a wonderful time together, just hanging out and laughing. But then when we made the music, it was just what came together, and I’m so thankful for that opportunity. Again, I didn’t really know while it was happening. I was just following that muse or that urgency, that weight that I have to do something to process this, and I need to just do it through music. That’s how I’ll normally try to get stuff out, as I have to. But it wasn’t until we were out touring it that I realized the impact that it had on some people. They were telling me, I’ve been listening to you since Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but this album, and they’re holding up Satellite, and they share some stories. At that point, I was like, okay, this is why that had to happen. I just try to be a conduit somehow, like trying to put it into some form that some people can connect to. And it happens to this day. Even when we do the [Satellite] Turntable Orchestra shows, there are people coming up to me after the shows and
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