It’s hard to believe, but it was just one year ago today that Lobes, an album that has come to seem as essential as the very air you breathe, was released into the world by us, onto Spotify, CD, and little cake. It is now an important day, January 20th. If you don’t mind being torn away from your own family’s Lobes celebrations for a few minutes, we thought we’d do a little public reflecting, and maybe share with you a hidden facet or two of this complex, perfect-yet-somehow-human masterwork.
CHRIS: Well, Keith, Lobes turns one today, and what an auspicious year it has had. We Are Scientists’ eighth studio album, our first self-produced, and our first number-one on the US Billboard Top LPs and Tapes chart, where it spent a record 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one, selling an impressive one million copies worldwide per week at its peak. Seven singles were released, and all reached the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and the UK Singles chart. It was, obviously, a global breakthrough, topping the charts in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the US and UK. It has been certified Diamond in Argentina, Canada, Denmark, France, Mexico, the UK, and the US. 😅
Wait! I was looking at the stats for Thriller. Gimme a sec to just pull up… [shuffles papers]… I know it’s around here somewhere… [knocks empty can off desk; a cat yowls irritably]… where are those Lobes stats… [shattering glass]… Aha! Okay, let’s see, so… … … Ah. Hmn. Well, Lobes had some different numbers, compared to Thriller.
God, wow…
Okay, how’s this: Lobes, one year in, though not as commercially successful as Thriller, performed at least as well as we expected, and was, I think, an artistic success. Is that your feeling?
KEITH: Yeah, that FELT right to me, except for the Argentinian part. We’ve been trying to crack Argentina since With Love And Squalor, so I’m keenly — dare I say PAINFULLY — aware of Lobes’ performance, down there.
But other than the whole “still being hated in Bueno Aires” thing, Lobes kicked major ass. If you want to pit it against Thriller, I’m happy to comply. It compares favorably. What a jam-packed little collection we made! Ten taught little tunes crammed tightly onto one little record. Hell, Thriller, with its measly nine songs, cowers before Lobes. I’ll hand it to Jackson for having the self-awareness not to wedge a tenth crummy tune on there, but, honestly, he could have cut “The Lady In My Life” and finally had that “no skip” record that is every earnest musician’s goal. Sure, an eight-song no-skipper is a bit of a cheat — Jackson wouldn’t have been able to show his face in the lobby of the Capitol Records building for a year or two — but it’s better than eight great tunes capped off by a rat turd of a song like the accursed “The Lady In My Life.” So, Lobes has two more good songs than Thriller. It’s true!
Plus, with a crack band like ours, we didn’t need the guys from Toto to come in and make our compositions come to life. All it took was the three of us and like 400 gallons of margarita. Toto did come to the studio, yes, but just to check out our drum microphone set-up and to have us tune a couple of their guitars for them. PLUS, we didn’t need Eddie Van Halen to come in and deliver a song-buoying guitar solo, as Jackson did on “Beat It.” We have ME to do that, even though sometimes, for reasons way beyond me, you ask me to “maybe not wail all over every goddamned song all the time,” and you occasionally hide my guitars. But I’d say that “Here Goes” and “Human Resources” are the better for my guitar wanking, and I truly believe that Eddie was watching from the afterlife while I tracked those blistering solos, smiling up at me.
CHRIS: Whether I believe in it or not, Hell is definitely where Eddie Van Halen has ended up, you’re right about that. And yes, maybe Lobes does take down Thriller on the merits. I guess a big part of MJ’s appeal was his fashion, which we haven’t done a great job of matching? I mean, these two dudes are no slouches, but the Lobes “look” objectively made a smaller splash than did that red leather jacket and the mono-glove.
That said, blaming Thriller’s over-performance on style doesn’t actually line up: apparently Michael Jackson debuted The Glove on a television special (“Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever”) some seven months after Thriller’s release, by which time the album was already well on its way to monolith status. So it’s possible that even if you had agreed to wear the single crocodile boot I was pushing for, Lobes would remain a mere artistic triumph, financially destitute.
The point is that we should subtitle something “Yesterday, Today, Forever.”
Lobes is the first album (along with sibling Huffy) that we produced ourselves. Was that the right move? Would Blake Mills or Danny Harle have made a better Lobes, if, indeed, they had even answered our email inquiries?
And what ever happened to that sign?
KEITH: Damn, yeah, if you had asked me, I would have sworn that MJ was wearing a sparkleglove right there on the cover of the album. But no, his one visible hand is butt-naked. Maybe back then, a friend of mine at Miami Shores Elementary school had some inside dirt and clued me in to the fact that Mikey’s other hand — the one behind his back — did have the glove on, and that’s how I knew that? Probably.
And no no no. Neither of those producers you’ve mentioned would have done anything but sink the project. Blake Mills would have just wanted to put a rubber bridge on every guitar in sight, and then our album would have been sonically INDISTINGUISHABLE from Phoebe Bridgers’ output, which might have been financially lucrative but creatively punishing. And Harle, well, yeah, he would have done a pretty good job. The man is a production genius, probably even a little better at it that we are, but there honestly wasn’t really room for three guys in my office studio, and he couldn’t sit in the adjoining bedroom because my cat Chuck is scared of strangers.
As far as the sign goes, we left it in the care of the great photographer Dan Monick as a thanks for his incredible work not just on Lobes but throughout our career. Did I want it? Yeah, I wanted it REALLY badly, and there probably was just enough room for it in my office studio (it’s like a quarter-Harle-sized), but Dan is a legend and a friend and it’s an honor that he even wants our signage ablaze in his photo studio. He reported to me maybe six months ago that the sign was dying — that the last couple of letters were flickering and about to cease shining entirely. I came to peace with the loss, and accepted that even a hot blue neon sign that says “LOB” is pretty wicked. But then when we played in LA last November, Dan came out, and when I soberly began to eulogize the withering sign, he pretended(?) to have no idea what I was talking about and assured me that the sign glows as robustly as ever. So either I like dreamt it or Dan Monick is lying filth. I dunno which!
CHRIS: I like to think that both those things can be true. Anyway, what discussion of Lobes would be complete without diving into those visualizers? I had kind of forgotten they existed, but then I just ambled over to Youtube on my web browsing software window, and yeah, there they are, and they look great. What a smooth, pleasant way to enjoy an album. Are other people doing this? It seems like one of the great new ideas in music, and yet I didn’t read about it in the New York Times’s year-end wrap-up. Perhaps the Grammys will do a bit on it?
One thing I notice is that the visualizer playlist has an extra copy of “Dispense With Sentiment” tacked on to the end, but this copy has no video, just a static shot of the album cover — and it has way more streams than any of the other tracks 😢. Like 50% more. Maybe people don’t actually want beautiful, calm, unedited footage accompanying their listening experience? It’s… what, too distracting?? That can’t be, since the full, fx-laden music vid for Turn It Up has ten times more streams than even the second copy of “Dispense.”
I guess maybe visualizers as a genre still have some growing up to do. Or maybe their time just hasn’t come — audiences don’t know how to watch them yet. I bet if Jackie Brown had been released in the ‘30s, it would have been a flop. (Oppenheimer would have done fine.)
KEITH: I’m wondering if maybe people have rejected these beautiful visualizers because, everywhere but in NYC, people do the bulk of their music-listening in their cars. So, they’re like, “Hey, We Are Scientists, yes, you have provided some of the most beautifully-shot visual accompaniment in modern videography, but honestly, I just finished making the two-hour commute from my job in the de-lousing station at the state prison, and I listened to Lobes the whole way, and now that I’m home and cracking a 40oz Molson’s Ice to relax, you want me to listen to the record while “driving“ for ANOTHER half-hour? Gimme a break. I’m just gonna drink this Molson’s in my bathroom, instead.”
Anyway, it’s a fool’s game, trying to prognosticate about the public’s appetites in the arts. All we know is what’s worked for, like, Blink 182 (fart jokes) and Beyoncé (fart jokes) in the past. I’m currently in the middle of screenwriting legend William Goldman’s industry bible, Adventures in the Screen Trade, and, no shit, he could have saved a ton of trees if he had just summed up his message as “Nobody can anticipate what is going to work, ever,” printed it on fortune cookie paper strips and dropped them from a plane over Hollywood.
Under the section, “How Do Stars Happen?,” Goldman offers this helpful insight: “Invariably, by mistake.” In his chapter on what makes a person an effective studio executive, there’s a sub-heading, delivered in all caps: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. He later tries to explain the specific qualities that allow those few rare stars with multi-decade careers to pull that feat off: “Well…it’s…it’s something. I mean it’s there, it’s just hard to isolate. And ‘something’ may be about as close as I’m going to come.” And this guy was the premiere wordsmith in Hollywood!
An example: almost any of the following magnificent outtakes from the Los Angeles Lobes shoot could have made us MILLIONS. Or they could have done absolutely nothing. We bet on them probably ruining our careers and so we shelved them. Who knows what Paramount CEO Brian Robbins would have done? He probably would have put Timotheé Chalamet in them, which might have been a good call, in retrospect.
But let’s not kill ourselves trying to make predictions on what content will or won’t work when even the head of Paramount Fucking Pictures can’t do that job. All we can do is make the best crud, the most self-gratifying sludge, the most indulgent slime. Like this raw little demo of “Operator Error.” Based upon this early draft (the first draft?) of the song, who could have guessed that we’d ultimately turn it into an anthem that would thrill the masses, permanently alter the rules for cursing on British pop radio, and compel Sir Elton John to remark “If I had written this song, I might not retire in shame this year.”
Special shout-out to the marvelous Dan Monick for all the beautiful Lobes photos & video, and for letting us sleep in his house, and sit around in his back yard, and use his car on the album cover, and hang out in his office, and drink so, so much of his espresso.
And thanks to all of you for listening to Lobes. If you haven’t heard it yet, and you just spent ten minutes reading this email, that’s weird! You should definitely go check it out. We made it for you!
Keep boppin.
💝,
Kanga & Redge
I know you guys are being facetious with the perfect masterwork thing, but it is a seriously brilliant album. Couldn’t imagine a better combination of the newer synth and classic-er guitar driven WAS sounds.
Lobes is certainly certified diamond in my heart, guys.