In Conversation: J. Robbins of Jawbox
In his work with Jawbox, J. Robbins found a way to make "difficult" music almost-easy listening. For his second solo album, he simply wants to show you who he is.
My first interview with J. Robbins, exactly 30 years ago in February of 1994, did not go well. Or at least that’s what I thought when we were in the middle of it: Following an innocent opening question about his first crush, the legendary Jawbox frontman became increasingly defensive and almost gleefully combative. When I got home to transcribe the interview, however, I realized that J.’s honest reaction—as frustrating as it was—also worked to tell us more about who he was and where he was in his life than most interviews ever could with words. It somehow became one of my favorite moments in the history of the zine.
Much has changed since we met on that day: He survived the major label ringer, built a storied career as a producer, found love, and eventually became the proud father of an incredible son named Callum. All of these things have remolded the J. Robbins I reconvene with in 2024, a man who is now open to being vulnerable and willing to get personal. These changes are an integral part of the fabric of Basilisk, his second solo album out this week via Dischord, and they also make for what might be the most radical transformation between two Anti-Matter interviews yet.
Our first interview in 1994 was easily the most memorable interview for me from that era of Anti-Matter because, one, it was very clear to me that I got under your skin. But also, when I realized that I was really getting under your skin, I was actually caught off guard—I was kind of scrambling in retrospect—and that had never happened before. Usually people are willing to walk with me on these things, but you were so fucking resistant [laughs]. But somehow, even after that, there is still a direct line between that interview and me asking you to produce the Texas is the Reason album. So that interview changed both of our lives in some way, and that’s weird, because at the time, it all seemed very random.
J.: I mean, that’s the way things are. If you go back and look at how things develop, it’s all about the way that things lead one to another. You couldn’t plan for it. This is a thing I think about all the time. I have a little corner of my brain that is mildly obsessed with this idea that someone can have a vision of how things are supposed to unfold and go forward, and then pick the best route to fulfill that vision—because I have never ever done that. If I’m being unkind to myself, I would say I have blundered from one happy accident to the next, and maybe I would just give myself credit for being perceptive enough to take hold of an opportunity that looks cool. For me, it’s enough of a struggle to just be; it’s typically enough of a struggle just to be present. That’s what I wanted most: “present” is the best catch-all word for it but, you know, that’s not what I was when we did that interview—my default mode was panic back then. I was trying to be cagey.
So tell me about that for a second. We did that interview pretty much exactly when For Your Own Special Sweetheart came out. Was that where the pressure was coming from? Or was it a general young person’s panic?
J.: I think the context of that moment, where things were sort of snowballing for us, aggravated a thing that is intrinsic to me—which was growing up with an interior life, where I really lived, and with a lot of self-loathing. I was trying to not engage. It could be that I’m just talking about me and my personal experience, but I really feel like your twenties are a time of generalized terror and panic and freaking out. Even in lyric writing, the idea that I would want to reveal something of myself to anyone was completely anathema to me. It wasn’t conscious, but a lot of the lyric writing in Jawbox is word salad. It just is.
For example, the song “Static.” That song is very dear to my heart because it’s about an actual real life experience. It’s about the experience of my sister quitting my family because of her troubled relationship with our mother, who was really fucking nuts. So my sister literally wrote letters to everyone and left the family. And I was in a position where I was trying to think that through. So I can say specifically that this is what that song is about. But whereas someone else, however literate their songwriting might be, might come out and be really direct—they might be like, I don’t know, “You’re my sister and now you’re gone!” [laughs]—I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make the voodoo doll and stick pins in it and have the catharsis of singing about it, knowing that I’m singing about this thing that’s really deep and difficult just to get it out, but I also dreaded the idea that my sister would hear the song and be like, “What’s this about?” That’s the case with a lot of Jawbox songs. It’s a fear of being too easily understood. Part of it is an aesthetic, of course, not a fear; it’s like wanting to have a challenge of putting lyrics together like a puzzle. But 50 percent of it, for me, was also just really trying not to be understood. I always believed that if anyone knew anything about me for real, they would run in terror.
There are some interesting parallels here with things you said in our last interview about your own personal approach. At one point you stop yourself from saying something and you say, “I don’t want to psychoanalyze myself.” I challenged you about that—in parentheses it says you “scratch your head for a minute” [laughs]—and then you say, “I don’t like to draw conclusions. I think that’s the problem. I like to mull things over without drawing conclusions.”
J.: And that sucks! That’s bullshit! Give that guy a smack [laughs].
You also said, “It’s a lot more fun to talk about abstractions.” So again, it was really pushing back against any direct question I gave you. And some of the direct questions I gave you were so innocuous. At one point I asked you something very simple like, “What’s the most meaningful exchange you’ve ever had with someone over your music,” and you were like, “I know the answer to this, but I am not going to tell you.”
J.: I think of it as a very immature time in my life, you know what I mean? I was dying to be taken seriously and struggling to be a “serious person” or something. I took it so seriously that I clammed up. That’s pretty much a snapshot of my vibe back then.
OK, so let’s walk through your evolution a little bit because I do know that in the last few years, you’ve really been talking about a desire to be more direct and less abstract. Is that something that came with age?
J.: That was actually an epiphany. It was somewhere in the course of when Burning Airlines was together. I realized that the songs that really stayed with me, for the most part, or the songwriters whose work I really admired, even if there were degrees of ambiguity in their writing, you always knew what they were getting at. The first thing I think about is John Cale’s “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend.” I’m not sure specifically what situations he’s talking about in the lyrics, but that’s a fucking straight-ahead statement: Fear is a man’s best friend. That’s a powerful hook of a statement. John Cale is maybe a terrible example because a lot of his words can be extremely cryptic, but in that particular case, it’s like wham. It’s just the idea that you’re here to communicate something, and I know I have the need for connection—it’s very real—and music is deeply, inextricably intertwined with that for me. So I don’t want to waste anyone’s time and I don’t want to waste my time.
I feel like there has to be some sort of line we can draw from these ideas to your entry into punk and hardcore, because those genres are arguably based on their directness.
J.: Yes, but at some point in my childhood, long before I ever heard of punk rock, I became this incredibly nebbish, weird, outcast kid who really couldn’t build a bridge to the “normal world.” I was in my head. I lived in the experience of making drawings and playing piano and listening to movie soundtracks and watching movies and analyzing comic books; I lived in an escape world. Maybe it’s thanks to my upbringing, but I just felt like there were so many rules on behavior and how to be. And for whatever reason, I felt like I wasn’t going to learn any of them right. I was going to get them all wrong. The only path forward that I could see when I was a kid and a young teenager was in my inner space and in finding the punk scene.
I think I was mistrustful of things that were too easy. Things that everybody else got. It’s like turn on TV, there’s a football game, everybody gets it, it’s simple. Dudes are bashing into each other, one team wins, the other team loses, everybody fucking loves it. It’s easy. Even when I was so deep into classical music, I was like, everybody loves Mozart and Schubert because it’s just nice and you know where it’s going to go. But I needed to have Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I needed things that were like, “Here’s a melody. Now we’re going to tear it apart. Now we’re going to take it to a place that’s not comfortable.” I got invested in that weirdness, that obscurity. I liked that others feared to tread there. They’re afraid of this world. Good. That was the thing that I saw in the punk scene. I thought, these people don’t give a shit if you like them. They don’t care what the rules are. They don’t need to know the rules. They are just going to do the thing, and they are all fucking into it together. There’s this community here that I didn’t feel elsewhere. That was the main thing. It wasn’t so much about the directness, because it took me a long to like the Ramones—initially I was like, “Duh” [laughs]. But that’s the point of the Ramones! So it’s funny that my mind has expanded to embrace things that are more obvious, instead of going the other way, which I think is a more typical path.
Over the holiday, I made this Anti-Matter: Influences playlist that runs chronologically from 1981 to 1993, and when I got to the late ‘80s, I knew I had to add “Where You Live” [by Government Issue], which is a record you played on. It’s totally my favorite GI song. But it honestly did not occur to me at the time, when I bought this tape at the CBGB Record Canteen, that this song had organs and cowbells and all sorts of weird shit on it. It’s kind of fucking wild for 1989.
J.: I listened to [the album You] not too long ago and certain things about it just completely cracked me up. Like, in the song “Wishing,” there’s an electric sitar solo that comes in so far in front of the mix, I was like, “What were we thinking?” [laughs]. I mean, I was nineteen. I had only started learning to play the bass when I was eighteen. I was just learning shit off records—like Rites of Spring bass lines and Joy Division bass lines. I didn’t understand the concept of a rhythm section, where the drums and bass are interlocking in a more conventional rock way because all my first exposures to rock’n’roll, apart from hearing Black Sabbath when I was little, was punk music made by people who were trying to reinvent what they were even doing. I thought of the bass as primarily a melodic instrument, more so than a rhythmic instrument.
If I look back at it, my favorite Government Issue record is Joyride. It always has been and it always will be. Joyride is a perfect fucking record. That’s a record that is not scratching its head about anything. It’s not stroking its beard and wondering about the ramifications of anything that it’s going to do. It just kicks your fucking ass and it has a lot of heart and it wears it on its sleeve. And then it’s over before you know it and you’re like, “What just happened to me? I better listen to that again.”
I heard a story that you were working at Dischord house when Dave Grohl came by and played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Ian MacKaye for the first time. Is that a fact?
J.: Yeah, I was working in the Dischord office when the whole operation was still in the house. It’s weird when I think about it now because I didn’t really grow up in that scene. I grew up in the suburbs. I came to the scene late, but I just knew all this trivia because I was so interested. So people would sometimes write postcards to Dischord, not mail orders, and they’d be like, “Hey, what ever happened to Fred from Beefeater? What’s he doing now?” And I’d write them back: “Thank you for writing. Fred’s playing guitar in Strange Boutique now,” or whatever. That’s what I did. So one day Dave came in and had a visit with Ian, and I just remember them going into Ian’s room and Dave playing the song. It was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” off a cassette—it may have not even been mixed. But I remember sitting at the desk feeling like, “Wow. Dave’s new band is really good.”
You also played with Dave in Scream for a little while, so I was curious if your proximity to him had any sort of subconscious influence on you in terms of how you perceived your own potential for success as a musician.
J.: No, I don’t think so. Because I never have thought about it in those terms. It’s going back to that thing of, like, what are the steps you take to achieve success? What’s the best route? Also, it took me a long time to even admit any concept of quote-unquote “success” into my worldview. To me, success has always been, “I’m working on a thing. What’s this thing going to be? Let’s see how far we can take it. And now we’ve created a thing.” If you can manage to start with a lump of Play-Doh and end up with a sculpture that you can stand to look at? That’s success. That’s always the way that I’ve thought about it. At the same time, that’s not necessarily a sign of virtue. A lot of it is because I had a fear of just saying, “That’s my goal.” But it’s awesome for Dave. I think a lot of Dave’s story is that he was in the right place at the right time and he made a good decision and has been smart enough to capitalize on that.
It’s funny because the 1989 J. Robbins would have been very critical of even the idea of capitalizing on your successes, but now—and see if this makes sense to you—I feel like whatever you’ve got to do to put yourself in a position to continue to do your art and have some degree of security in life is good. You need to have security in life. Because you want to create something, you want to be able to give something to people, and it’s so much harder to do that if everything is a struggle. And everything is a struggle anyway, because that’s the world. I fucking hate late capitalism with a deep passion, but that is the system we are living under. You have to take that into account. It could be something stupid like, “We sell our t-shirts for five bucks because that’s what we paid for them.” Well, I marked my t-shirts up so that I can buy more t-shirts later so I can put gas in the van and get to the next show. There is a change that happened there, because once upon a time, I would have been squarely in the five-dollar t-shirt camp and I would have been upset that people weren’t starving for their art.
I want to move a little bit further ahead on your journey here, because I know that making solo records has almost made you reconsider your work in this retroactive way of claiming the identity of being a songwriter. Which is something that I think a lot of punk kids, myself included, didn’t really consider or even allow ourselves to be. I think there was a tendency to focus on the collaborative efforts of “being in a band.” So let me ask you a weird question.
J.: OK [laughs].
There’s an interview you did some years ago where you compared the Jawbox writing process to a game of Exquisite Corpse. And now you have a song called “Exquisite Corpse” on the new record where you specifically call it “a game you don’t want to play” [laughs]. Were you throwing shade on that process a little bit?
J.: Well, no… By the end of writing that song, there were a lot of layers to it. Because I’ve been in collaborative situations where people actually have a great facility for listening each other. Like, in the band Channels, which I did with Darren Zentek and [my wife] Janet Morgan. For whatever reason, there was such a tremendous trust. There are some Channels songs that were written so collaboratively that I almost have no idea where they come from. Not every band experience is that way. There are definitely times in Jawbox where the creative process was… at the time I characterized it as competitive, but I think it’s just a result of what people able to do in terms of listening to each other. It was a much more intellectual process and sometimes our greatest successes were the result of just cramming a square peg into a round hole, you know? It was like, “Well, it doesn’t fit.” Tough fucking break. We’re going to make it fit! And it would end up really cool and interesting, so I am not disparaging that.
What I will say is that “Exquisite Corpse” is more about the frustrations of writing collaboratively when everyone isn’t on the same page. It’s sort of letting off a little steam about that. But then the more I dug into the idea of the “exquisite corpse”… you know, that’s a Surrealist game. I love the Surrealists. And one of the things that was always true in the Surrealist movement is that they prized that mode of creativity—putting together things that don’t belong. That’s what the Exquisite Corpse is. That’s why it’s a fun game and why it occasionally renders amazing results, because it’s a mechanism for putting things together that don’t go together, and yet, here it is in totality. Right? I thought about that because there are some people who I admire greatly that really love that technique and that approach, and there isn’t anything to get mad about if you’re not being heard. So there’s two sides of this story. I mean, I never want to write a song that’s just bitching either, you know?
But part of the “songwriter” thing for me is getting older and realizing that I have songs in me, and I have directions that I want to go in and things I want to explore and find out and do. I want things to be getting better and more interesting, and there are challenges I want to pursue. And I’m 56 fucking years old. Geordie Walker from Killing Joke, he died recently and he was 64. It’s not like being in your twenties where there’s an endless ribbon of time going out in front of you. For me, I know mortality is a very real thing—for a lot of reasons. So part of it is just like, if I have finite energy and finite time, I need to prioritize things that are clearly fulfilling. Because sometimes when you try to write collaboratively, it’s like going on a fishing trip: Sometimes you don’t catch anything.
It’s funny because I probably wouldn’t have read “Exquisite Corpse” in that way were it not for the underlying knowledge of that sea change you’ve been going through in terms of your feelings with being direct. So with that in mind, I feel like it’s impossible not to talk about “Old Soul” [a song about his fourteen-year-old son Callum, who passed away in 2020 after living with Type-1 Spinal Muscular Atrophy since infancy].
J.: Right.
So I think we can start by going back to our history, and where we started our relationship, and how you came to that interview in 1994 being like, “No. No personal things”—and yet this song is quite possibly the most personal thing. How much did writing a song like “Old Soul,” to you, feel like a way to heal and how much of it felt like opening a wound?
J.: I mean, in a way it’s more like opening a wound. But my thing is, I haven’t wanted to talk to anybody in a public way like this about Callum’s death because it’s never not going to be raw. But at the same time, it’s the kind of thing that people need to talk about more, right? Like, death is real. Loss is real. I’m sorry… [cries softly]. He was the most important person ever in my life, and I want to express that.
I wrote the music for that song in 2012. It was one of the last Office of Future Plans songs, and I had the melody, but I could just never get to the words. I loved that song so much. I was so proud of it because it was not an intellectual exercise. I just started playing guitar one day and this song just fell out. It was one of my favorite things that I ever wrote, and in my mind, it was dedicated to Callum. I just thought if I could write this song, while he was alive, that expresses to some degree just how much this kid kicks ass… [pauses, chokes up]… and what a fucking hero he is to me, that’s the song that I want to write. But I kept faltering. I was never able to do him justice. And that’s why it never got finished. I mean, Callum knew very well how much we loved him, you know. But creatively, when he died, with this song, I felt a little bit like that feeling when people say that they didn’t get a chance to tell them how they really felt about them. This song was not supposed to be a eulogy. And the lyrics don’t live up to what they should be for being a song about him; they’re not one-tenth of what they should be to be a proper tribute. But I felt like, just fucking do something.
That’s much more of what I realize needs to happen. Like, instead of worrying about outwitting myself or outwitting a listener or giving you a surprise or making someone go, “What does he mean by that weird lyric?” and being caught up in trying to live up to something that, half the time, I don’t even know what it is. Everybody that I admire in the world, every creative person I admire, they just fucking do it. So that’s where I got to with that song. I was like, finish the song. Say something. Even though he’s not here to hear it.
It’s interesting because writing the song is one thing, but releasing the song is another because it puts you in a position of… Well, it puts you in the position that you’re in now, where you are exposed. You’re a little bit vulnerable.
J.: Right.
Obviously, we’ve been talking about how different the 1994 J. Robbins is from the 2024 J. Robbins but this song stands out in a particularly stark contrast. It almost feels like you’re putting your stake into the ground for vulnerability with it.
J.: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it’s necessary… for humanity [laughs]. Vulnerability is vitally necessary. I know a lot about my inner life and what a fucking minefield it is to even navigate the world from that place. My whole life has been a project to overcome that. So Callum taught me a lot of things, but one of them is that the practical reality of living with a child with such a severe disability is that you don’t have the opportunity to um and ahh about things. Sometimes you just have to fucking step up and be present. I’m trying to make sure that I never lose sight of that, because that’s one of the most valuable lessons that he gave me.
There’s another level of vulnerability attached to all this as well. Like, when Callum was first diagnosed, this was around the time that the Anti-Matter book came out, when I knew I was putting on a couple of shows for the book release, so I decided to make them benefit shows to help with Callum’s healthcare. I remember at the time, obviously, I knew you were grateful, but there was also a level of vulnerability there that I’m not sure you were fully comfortable with yet—because you have make yourself a little vulnerable to accept help.
J.: Right.
And I think one of the amazing things that happened at that time was how much the community in general—not just me, but everyone—really came together to provide as much help as possible.
J.: It was fucking incredible. I mean, it was overwhelming emotionally.
Do you feel like accepting help and support is easier for you now because you’re in such a different place?
J.: I hope so. At the time of Callum’s diagnosis, his neurologist—who is a specialist in Spinal Muscular Atrophy—one of the very first things he said to us was, “This condition will bankrupt you.” Right off the bat we didn’t know what we were going to do. So the fact that so many people were willing to throw us a lifeline and make some things possible for him and just give us a little breathing room, that’s nothing that I would dream of taking for granted. I don’t know if that’s an answer or not.
I just think that, obviously, as a friend, I always want to make sure that you get the support you need. And honestly, when I first saw this song on the record there was a part of me that was very proud of you. Because I felt like this is really putting yourself out there in a way where you are allowing yourself to receive love.
J.: It’s funny. I had not thought of it in that regard. I always just thought that song is a combination of talking to Callum a little bit, and also taking a snapshot of my frame of mind. I’ve only ever thought about it in the sense of what needs to come out, coming out from inside to outward, not thinking about what, if anything, would come back from putting it out into the world. I was just trying to make an honest expression.
OK. We started this conversation talking about our interview from 30 years ago, but I was able to find this Channels interview from 20 years ago where you made this comment about how, you know, “I’m going to keep doing this until I’m 65 years old.” Obviously, 20 years ago, you were much further away from being 65 than you are now [laughs].
J.: You’ve got to rage against the dying of the light!
Exactly [laughs]. So in that spirit, I was just wondering if there is anything you can think of in your life that feels like unfinished business at this point.
J.: Well, I did have a childhood dream of scoring films and that’s never come to fruition. That’s still a dream of mine. I don’t know if I’d call it unfinished business or if it just goes back to thing of not knowing the steps because I kind of follow one happy accident to the next. But there are also personal things. Like, I’m working on, and somewhat succeeding with, the idea that downtime is OK. But it’s only a little bit OK because I still think it’s just better to be creating things. Even if it’s just reading books—that’s not relaxation for me. That’s an active, enjoyable, participatory thing. It’s not just floating downstream.
The project has always been to just write a good song, and when you get one finished, you’re like, OK. I made it to the finish line, but the next one should be better. I invoke Stephen Sondheim a lot because I think he’s just incredible, an all-rounder. The dude was a total genius. I read this book of Sondheim lyrics and I was reading interviews with him and his process is just so intellectual. This is someone who could envision not just a lyric, not just a good turn of phrase, but a ton of great turns of phrase that all cascade into each other to serve a bigger meaning that both stands alone as a song and also contributes to the greater meaning of a whole project that has a dramatic structure with ebbs and flows. It’s incredibly sophisticated music, right? If it’s an unconscious project, then it must be an unconscious project born of constant practice. So to have that kind of totality of vision is awe-inspiring to me, because my process has always been to dive into the mud and swim around and see what kind of shit is in there and then put it together and stand back and say, “What does that look like? Where is that going to lead?”
So maybe that’s a long-winded way of saying that I am always wondering if there is a way for me to get a bigger vision. To work on having a process that’s more about envisioning a goal and fulfilling it, as opposed to the process that I’m used to—which is more about just making a lot of stuff. Otherwise, it’s all unfinished business. I just want to keep going.
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Such a sweet and thoughtful interview. Thank you J and Norman!
One of your best interviews ever. I'm feeling so many things right now. Thank you Norman and J.