Julian Casablancas, the main man from the Strokes, walks into an LA diner wearing rock-star shades, a rock-star jacket and a mild case of rock-star swagger. But after he sits down and orders a tuna melt, he turns out to be giggly, spacey, sweet — and endearingly bad at interviews. “This is so weird,” he says, when I try to discuss his new song Ludlow Street and the intriguing way it links the gentrification of his hometown of New York with his own new sobriety. “Because, erm, I never talk about the meanings of the songs with anyone, ever. I should practise. It’s not your questions, it’s my answers — they’re useless.”
We’re trying to discuss his debut solo album, Phrazes for the Young, which he has made after ten years with his band the Strokes, but he’s also having to humour the waitress who keeps barging over and interrupting his train of thought — and that train is hardly a high-speed direct line at the best of times. “I always go nuts when people say that life started in Africa,” he tells me at one point. “That doesn’t make any logical sense to me. At all. I mean, sure, maybe some ... six million years ago an ape-type two-legged creature walked in Africa, sure, but ... you know how the East Coast of America was populated ... and then people just stay on coastlines . . .” There are huge pauses while he mentally travels the world. “You can just see how kind of India, China, all that just seemed to, like ... . just looking at people’s faces and populations and ... I’m totally derailing here.”
The Strokes' groundbreaking debut album Is This It established lead singer Julian Casablancas as a doe-eyed, messed-up, slurring indie god
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The 31-year-old Casablancas is not only the frontman but the songwriter of the Strokes, a band credited with making guitar music sexy and clever again at the turn of the 21st century. Their songs seemed catchy and simple, but only because the parts were packed in so tightly, the compositions so dense. And on Phrazes for the Young he’s been able to let his complicated ideas farther out of the bag.
Take the song River of Brake Lights: it whizzes along like a car chase, with layers of synthesizers and alternating melodies that endlessly change key. It’s a shape more likely to be found in classical music than rock — if the Strokes songs are his piano concertos, these are Casablancas’s symphonies. The whole album is only eight songs long, yet it still weighs in at ten minutes longer than the Strokes’ groundbreaking debut album Is This It.
That was the record that established Casablancas as a doe-eyed, messed-up, slurring indie god, who would of course overdo the drink, drugs and sleeping around. He always had a pact with himself that he would quit when it affected the music. “And the day came when I basically couldn’t really function without alcohol or I would just be in pain. And I was like: ‘S***, it’s affecting the music, dammit.’ So I stopped. I wish I could drink casually, but it leads to bad things.” He married Juliet, who worked for his management company and whom he’d known for years. She is pregnant. They are delighted.
“If I could ask the younger Julian if he was surprised, yes, I think I would be. I wasn’t necessarily ready to settle down but I realised I was never going to meet anyone as perfect, so I couldn’t let her get away. But I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. It’s been amazing, I’m sorry to report! It’s boring!”
Claims that Casablancas had a privileged upbringing because his father, John, ran the Elite modelling agency are only partly true. “My dad had money — has money — but I grew up with my mom so I just didn’t feel it as much. I mean we always had food, but I feel like the perception sometimes is of this life of insane luxury. I would just go to the park and play basketball, that’s just what I did, nobody gave me money. And then when I started getting into trouble at school, they thought something was wrong with me and my mom didn’t know what to do.
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“My dad family’s are from Spain and because of the civil war he had gone to this school in Switzerland, and he loved it, so I was sent there. I was probably the only kid without a trust fund. I was a little bit disgusted by the whole, go to the right school, get your foot in the door vibe — so I just kind of hit the eject button. I left early and studied music at super-cheap colleges.”
The Strokes are still here, working on their fourth album. He is trying to be less controlling. “I still have strong opinions about things, but I think the No 1 goal in the band should be that everyone’s happy. It’s at the point now where we shouldn’t have to be doing it if everyone’s not psyched about doing it, because it’s fun for no one and it doesn’t sound good. I hope we don’t become one of those bands that hate each other and feed off that, and that’s what makes the music so magical, ha-ha.”
But for now it’s all about his solo album, whose title, Phrazes for the Young, is a homage to Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Young. The songs are intended to gently inspire life wisdom. Casablancas feels that all the stuff we need to know has already been written down — Lao-Tzu, Gandhi, Martin Luther King — but that people come across these teachings “as quotes on calendars. So I’m just trying to get it into people’s subconscious a little bit. Nothing ambitious.” It’s a wild plan — but it might just work.