Julian Casablancas: Vision of Division

For the last six months or so, Julian Casablancas’ life has been dominated - you might even say defined - by a single question. It’s asked of him everywhere he goes, by almost everyone he meets, and if the people he’s meeting happen to have a dictaphone handy, they’ll tend to ask it two or three times, using different, carefully-worded phrasings.

What’s interesting, though, are his answers, and more specifically, how they’ve changed. Back in late summer, he was full of gung-ho optimism and ready, in his own words, to “Knock it out of the park.” More recently he’s been playing it coy and coming on all wait-and-see. But when our conversation inevitably turns to it today, he simply lets out a long, wistful sigh and shrugs, “I don’t know.”

The question, of course, is what the hell is going on with the fourth Strokes album, and much as Casablancas might be sick of hearing it, he can’t seem to shake it off. It’s been four years of false-starts since First Impressions Of Earth, during which time every band member (with the exception of guitarist Nick Valensi) has released at least one solo album. Space and time are undoubtedly positive things, but The Strokes have appeared in danger of fragmenting totally, from a streetwise, self-contained band of brothers to five old and seemingly-irreconcilable acquaintances. And when their frontman tells interviewers things like “Being in a band is a good way to ruin a friendship,” it doesn’t do much to inspire confidence.

“Well, that’s just an expression,” he argues, in that familiar, viscous New York drawl. “I didn’t make that up. It’s something a lot of people say. I mean, somebody asked me if the band all still hang out and I said, ‘Well, not that much’, and I used that expression to try to explain the dynamic of what it’s like. I mean, we all get along fine. It’s always great when we’re together. But five egos like that, travelling around the world with their own little circle of people telling them that they’re the best thing about the band, and how amazing they are... It’s just gonna cause bad communication. If someone does something that bothers someone else, but they don’t say anything about it, one day they’ll eventually lash out and then the other person thinks they’re being the rude one. Natural communication just gets very strained when you’re in a band.”

Communication, incidentally, is something Julian Casablancas has become better at over the years. His sentences still tend to trail off in a flurry of ‘whatevers’ and ‘you knows’, but he makes for engaging company nonetheless. Press him on matters a little too close to home - for instance, what made the last Strokes tour in 2006 such a nightmare for him - and he’ll reply with a polite, “I’d rather not say,” but generally, he’s an honest and frank interviewee. Some of that is undoubtedly to do with the fact that he’s promoting his solo album and doesn’t have four other voices to fall back on. But at least part of it seems down to his decision, around the time of First Impressions Of Earth, to stop drinking.

“It was just time for me to stop,” he sighs. “I always told myself I’d quit drinking if it started affecting the music, and it had. It was kinda taking me over, you know? I mean, I was in real physical pain if I didn’t drink. I was hungover for like, two or three years! It was literally only a couple of months ago that I started to feel normal again.”

Has it changed the way he writes music now? “Hmmm. Not really, no, because I never wrote stuff when I was intoxicated. Getting intoxicated was more like the immediate response to writing something, the celebration afterwards: “Hey guys, I wrote a part, let’s go get wasted!””

Whatever effect his new-found sobriety has had on him, there’s no doubt that on Phrazes For The Young, Casablancas’ first solo foray, it’s resulted in his most focused and clear-headed collection of songs since Is This It. It’s a confident, vibrant, risk-taking album, whose only fault is that it’s about four tracks too short. But it’s also, ironically enough, an album that Casablancas had no real inclination to make.

“No, It’s not something that I ever wanted to do,” he admits. “It had never crossed my mind to make a solo record but I think... it was kind of made out of necessity, a little bit. Other people seemed to want to leave the circle, and I had to respect that. I was maybe a little disappointed that the other guys felt they couldn’t do their own thing within The Strokes, but I’ve gotta honour their feelings, you know? As lines got drawn and sides got chosen, I started analysing these ideas, these different parts I had floating around. The ideas gradually became more and more complete from there, once I realised I was going to be doing it myself.”

Over the course of Phrazes For The Young’s eight songs, Casablancas finds time to mess around with different genres and build on some of The Strokes’ more underdeveloped ideas, giving 4 Chords Of The Apocalypse the kind of old-school soul bluster Under Control was crying out for, and taking 12:51’s sleek synth-pop to its logical conclusion with the kaleidoscopic lead-off single 11th Dimension. It all makes for some terrific pop music, but there’s substance beneath the not-inconsiderable style, too; lyrically, it’s certainly the most open - and least oblique - he’s ever allowed himself to be.

“That was absolutely intentional,” he says. “I felt the lyrics on this record had to be good, and I definitely tried hard to work on that. I felt pretty confident about my abilities as a songwriter and arranger, but I’ve always felt like lyrics were the one area where I had to pick it up a little.”

Accordingly, Ludlow St. finds him lamenting the gentrification of his beloved Lower East Side, invading yuppie army and all, through the medium of a two-stepping honky-tonk trot, while 11th Dimension is a psychedelic postcard from a post-Obama America. First things first, what’s his relationship with New York nowadays?

“Well, I still live there. I think Nikolai (Fraiture, Strokes bassist) does, too. But the whole of the Lower East Side now is like one big, continuous frat party. There was always an element of that, but it’s slowly spreading to all of New York. The whole place seems like it’s raging on the weekend. It’s going to end up like Tokyo; a city of 20 million people, and every inch of it looks like Times Square.

“With 11th Dimension, though,” he continues, “That song was funny, because I had to change the lyrics after Obama got elected. Originally, the lyrics were way more negative about America. I can’t remember exactly what the line was gonna be, but it was something to the effect of “Nothing righteous happens any more”. And then the election happened and I was like, ‘OK, I guess good things do sometimes happen in America!’”

When we point out that the lyrics to album opener Out Of The Blue - “Somewhere along the way, my hopefulness turned to sadness / Somewhere along the way, my sadness turned to bitterness” - sound a lot like an expression of frustration at the glacial crawl of The Strokes’ later career, however, he’s happy to let us come to our own conclusions. “Well, you said it, not me,” comes the terse reply. So it is or it isn’t? “Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t say. But that song is about how even if a situation seems dire, sometimes good things can come out of it.”

To be fair, The Strokes’ current situation isn’t so much dire as simply incredibly confusing. Everyone seems slightly off-message, a bit unsure of exactly what’s going on, but nonetheless committed to making sure a new album actually happens - Julian perhaps most of all.

Despite his admission that he has no idea where their fourth album is at, a couple of days after we speak it is announced that The Strokes will headline both Rock Ness and the Isle of Wight festivals next summer, where they will presumably debut new material. The wheels are at least in motion.

“You know,” says Julian, when we ask him about the old gang getting back together again, “I’m always the one who - ironically enough - is trying to fight for that image, of five guys together. I guess I’ve been frustrated by it in the past. In terms of friendship, yeah, we were kind of like a gang. Musically, maybe not as much as I would have wanted. But what makes the band work is that we’re a tough musical jury. We’ve taken a lot of time off from each other, but now everyone feels like they have their own outlet of expression. We can be more compromising with each other because of that. I think it’ll make things a lot easier.”

Part of that compromise is the writing process becoming more of a communal task rather than Casablancas - a self-confessed perfectionist - shouldering the burden on his own.

“The stuff I bring to The Strokes now,” he admits, “Is unfinished, simple stuff, like a chord progression, or a melody that I don’t know what to do with, and have all of us work on it.”

As we leave the decade The Strokes helped to define, it’s not nostalgia that has us pining for their return; it’s a sense that this is a band with unfinished business, a band who undoubtedly have great albums left in them. Their frontman has, after all, just released a great album of spare parts he had no intention of even recording just a year ago. Their future may look uncertain, but the presence of Is This It near or at the summit of so many recent album of the decade lists betrays the fact that we want them to - as Julian was prone to saying before being asked that question for the three-thousandth time - knock the next one out of the park.

“It feels like every journalist I talk to recently has been saying ‘You’ve had all this influence over the last ten years’ or whatever,” shrugs Julian insouciantly. “I don’t know how much credit we can actually take. I think the internet probably helped us a lot. If we did anything, maybe in some small way, we helped bring indie music into the mainstream. But other than that? It’s not for me to say.”

He’s selling himself short; a decade on, and Julian Casablancas is still as fascinating, confusing, contradictory and - dammit - hard to explain as he ever was.