On Interpolation: Heartbreak Beats (Multimedia Essay)
- Sebastian Langdell
- 5 days ago
- 14 min read
Sebastian Langdell
Note: In this piece, all recycled material (all original material being re-used by the artists in question), is rendered in gray, for clarity.
Take One: Interpolation in Passing
When Garbage released their second album, Version 2.0, in 1998, I was 14 years old. As Masooma Hussein notes, lead singer Shirley Manson made waves for interpolating lines from her heroes – as in the song “Special,” where she uses the titular phrase from the Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town” for the outro:
I'm looking for a new
I'm looking for a new
I'm looking for a new
I'm looking for a new
We were the talk of the town
We were the talk of the town
We were the talk of the town
We were the talk of the town
The process of interpolation was, for Garbage, a way of paying tribute to the music that had made them, while also folding that music into something new, reinventing it. Here’s the Beach Boys surfacing in another Garbage hit from 1998, “Push It”:
Don't worry, baby (don't worry, baby)
No need to fight
Don't worry, baby (don't worry, baby)
We'll be alright
This is the noise that keeps me awake
My head explodes and my body aches
Push it
Manson and Butch Vig, the mastermind of the band, described the dynamic in a 1998 Billboard magazine interview as the admixture of “the now sound and golden memories.” Version 2.0. Just as Garbage were attempting to marry an analog core with new digital advancements, they aimed to pair a truly contemporary sound – a sound that could only have been made in 1998 – with the nostalgic pull of a lyric half-remembered, swirled so perfectly into the new song that it never ‘reads’ as quotation.
Take Two: Interpolation in Passing Through
In 2017, when I was 33 years old and my son was newly zero, the artist/filmmaker Mike Mills reached out to The National for a collaboration. The band and Mills entered into a remarkably fruitful two-year gestation, culminating in the album I Am Easy to Find and Mills’ accompanying short film.
The black-and-white film stars Alicia Vikander acting out the life of a woman, from babyhood to death, all in 23 minutes. Strikingly, there is no attempt to age the actress visually – she looks the same throughout, and we only know what life stage she’s interpreting through narration and action. As such, it feels more like a ballet. An interpretive dance. Clips from the album set the scene.
The longest song on the album, “Not In Kansas,” features a large-scale act of interpolation. In contrast to Garbage, for whom interpolated lines or phrases purposefully blend into the song, “Not In Kansas” noticeably sets off – sets apart – verses from the 1994 song, “Noble Experiment” by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282.
The effect is very much one of curtains being drawn back on a new scene. Berninger’s momentous grumbling voice falls away, as does the cyclical electric guitar, replaced by a chorus of women singing, church-like, backed by slow steady piano. And not just any singers: David Bowie’s former bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey, Irish songwriter Lisa Hannigan & Kate Stables of the band This Is The Kit.
The rest of the song features frontman Matt Berninger’s baritone in a hypnotic stream-of-consciousness, processing – it would seem – how it feels to be alive in early 2017, walking around an empty town north of LA, headphones on, listening to the instrumental track your bandmate has sent you, writing lyrics on autopilot. Such is the origin story of the song: Berninger wrote an epic mess of lyrics, then sent the whole draft to Mike Mills, who, in all his multi-hyphenate glory, served as musical as well as visual collaborator on the project. Berninger remembers:
It was a good example of our collaborative process with Mike. I told him, “The thing that’s really good about this is its length—its maximalist approach.” And he said, “Totally, I understand.” And two days later, he sent it back with 17 stanzas cut out and that cover of “Noble Experiment” in the middle. It was an example of him listening and understanding what I wanted and then having a better idea.
Berninger’s surviving stanzas assess the political moment, not with anger so much as an attitude of stunned processing that provokes a looking-back, specifically to the 80s, to the music that inspired him as a teenager – REM, Dylan, Roberta Flack. Memories of his stoic father, of the larger-than-life Neil Armstrong, a family friend, who taught him to play pool before Berninger even knew that he had walked on the moon. There’s “alt-right opium” and a reference to the January 20, 2017 punching of Richard Spencer, just months after Trump had clinched his first presidential victory. There’s the singer’s own worry that he wouldn’t “have the balls to punch a Nazi.” It’s a lot.
And then the verses from “Noble Experiment,” sung in harmony by the three female vocalists, arranged and interpolated by Mills, offered as momentary respite to the thoughts outrunning peace in your mind:
If the sadness of life makes you tired
And the failures of man make you sigh
You can look to the time soon arriving
When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day
And later in the song:
Time has come now to stop being human
Time to find a new creature to be
Be a fish or a weed or a sparrow
For the Earth has grown tired and all of your time has expired
Oh, the gardens are sprouting with flowers
All the tree-tops are bursting with birds
And the people all know that it's over
They lay down their airs and they hang up their tiresome words
At the time of deepest listening to this song, I was in Waco, mowing the lot on which sat the first house my wife and I ever bought. The entire neighborhood was built on the site of a former military base, and our yard held layers of broken glass. After a rain, the shards would rise to the surface and I’d go around collecting the pieces in a can. The other debris: rusty nails, old jewelry, sorrow, 19th century horseshoes. There we weathered the pandemic – me, my wife, and our 2-year-old son – while also weathering a high risk pregnancy.
Pregnancy, for us, meant IVF. First in 2017, when my wife successfully interpolated our son, and now in 2020 as we awaited our daughter – and, at first, her twin sister (Untitled). “Multiples” are not uncommon in IVF, sometimes the result of “transferring” two frozen embryos rather than one, to up the chances that one will take. Sometimes because the hormones taken during the process increase the chances of an embryo splitting. (I imagine the embryo getting so jazzed up and splitting into two humans for all its excitement.) For about two months our daughter Penelope had a twin sister, forming alongside her, squished head-to-head in my wife’s womb.
The twin died shortly after the new year, 2020. What was more devastating – terrifying, in fact – is that the twin’s death had left our surviving daughter unwittingly pumping blood into her dead sister, a primal instinct to keep the other alive, a pumping that threatened the integrity of her own miniscule heart.
I ran the Austin Half Marathon that February, weeks before the dawn of Covid: there’s a heartbreak hill towards the end of the course, and I survived that by chanting to myself, over and over, This will not sink us, this will not sink us, this will not sink us
In mid-March, Covid torpedoed reality. Stores and schools shuttered. We locked ourselves indoors. When we ventured outside we were double-masked and distanced, newly leery of stranger breath. My wife and I had already begun the 4-hour car rides between Waco and Houston, to the Children’s Hospital, where she underwent ultrasonic cardiac scans, clear-jellied tummy – the wand beaming through her skin to check in on the viability of that tiny heart. An intervention was planned for the 27-week mark of the pregnancy, at which point survival rates for premature babies rise drastically: the doctor used a laser to sever the living from the dead. The immediate result: Penelope stopped growing.
If the sadness of life makes you tired
And the failures of man make you sigh
She stopped growing for weeks, and then, who knows why, she started growing again. Big time. And she kept it up right through induction at 39 weeks.
You can look to the time soon arriving
When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day
Interesting that the relief offered by Mills, by the song itself, comes in the form of human apocalypse. What is the “noble experiment” winding down? The song gestures to a post-human era (Time has come now to stop being human / Time to find a new creature to be). The world has had it with the species that drained it, sucked it dry, wore it down. Removal of the human means a new era for earth: cut free, replenishing, living at last:
Oh, the gardens are sprouting with flowers
All the tree-tops are bursting with birds
And the people all know that it's over
They lay down their airs and they hang up their tiresome words
But paired with Berninger’s lyrics, the noble experiment winding down feels also like America – America, which our founding president referred to in 1790 as the “last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”
I’m not sure I made either connection at the time. A human apocalypse or the demise of democracy. I’m sure I didn’t. At the time the sound of those voices was a balm for a troubled soul. I was Matt Berninger, my worries on repeat, and here was a cure for what pained me. A calm refrain. A calm refrain that wasn’t lying to you, but also wasn’t bringing you down. And the call to “stop being human” doesn’t feel scary, like you hope it feels at the moment of death: a voice informing you, simply, Time has come now to stop being human. And you obey as you would obey your mother saying, Time to put on your shoes and go now. And you (die and) let the melody take you somewhere else entirely.
Take Three: Interpolation in Passing Away
The Avalanches are known for using hundreds of samples on each record – their first album, Since I Left You (2000), reportedly used 900 samples, an example of what’s called “plunderphonics” – songs so packed with the past that they become “sound collage.” They overflow with others’ sounds.
The Avalanches took a 16-year hiatus between their first and second albums (2000-2016), which made it all the more surprising that their third album was released a mere four years later, in 2020. That album, We Will Always Love You, takes its inspiration from the afterlife, celestial beings, the supernatural, the beyond. In an interview with the BBC, bandleader Robbie Chater offered:
When we're sampling very, very old recorded music, the singer may have long passed so it's almost like summoning spirits [...] If we sample a record from the 40s, someone else has owned that record for maybe 50 years and played it a million times, and so they've added to the crackles on the vinyl. Then that record has come into my life and we've sampled it and made a song out of it. [...] It's just a beautiful flow of energy, that we're only a small part of…
This meditation on life, death, and afterlife is ubiquitous on the album – from the opening track (Ghost Story) meant to evoke the feeling of a saved voicemail from a departed friend, to the song titles (Interstellar Love, Carrier Waves, The Divine Chord, Reflecting Light), to the cover art:
This spectral image is of Ann Druyan, creative director of the Voyager Golden Record Project. The image feels spectral because it was turned into sound before being turned back into image. The Avalanches explain:
In keeping with the album’s theme of everlasting love as an undying vibration, Ann’s image was run through a spectrograph, turned into sound, and back again. The image remains hidden, deep within in the grooves of the music, for you to discover if you wish.
They note that Druyan’s “cosmic love story inspired this music.” I’ll explain: in 1977, the Voyager Golden Record Project sent two identical golden phonograph records into space, aboard the Voyager spacecraft. The sounds included on the records were meant to portray life on earth to alien species – whale sounds, the wind, thunder, spoken greetings in multiple languages, music by Bach, Stravinksy, Chuck Berry, and others. The interstellar playlist was curated by Carl Sagan, who Druyan ended up marrying after the Voyager’s launch. Here’s where the love story comes in: Sagan recorded Druyan’s heart beating on the day after he asked her to marry him. That heartbeat recording is included on the Golden Records, still hurtling through space.
For me, the heart of We Will Always Love You is the song “Running Red Lights.” It also features the album’s most heartrending (and death-transcending) instance of interpolation. The song is dedicated to David Berman – bandleader of The Silver Jews and (more recently) Purple Mountains – who died by suicide in August 2019, just months before “Running Red Lights” was released. The song is mostly up-tempo, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer singing lead on a California bopper. At first it sounds like a love song: I been running red lights to get to you…
But there’s a downtempo swerve midway: rapper Pink Siifu takes the mic for a bridge that interpolates Berman’s “Darkness and Cold” – a cut from the Purple Mountains record that Berman released just a week before his suicide:
The light of my life is going out tonight
In a pink champagne Corvette
The light in my life is going out tonight
Without a flicker of regret
I sleep three feet above the street
In a pink champagne Corvette
Fly out into space
Listen to the music
The stars are making
Without a flicker of regret
Berman’s original verse differs in subtle ways:
The light of my life is going out tonight
In a pink champagne Corvette
I sleep three feet above the street
In a band-aid pink Chevette
The light of my life is going out tonight
Without a flicker of regret
A Chevette is a dumpy affair, the ugliest car you can imagine. The Chevette becomes a drab casket, his final resting place. But the Avalanches aren’t about to leave him lying there.
The music video opens on a psychic and a client. In a voice that suggests she’s already clocked out, the psychic tells a balding, hefty, sad-looking man: “Oh yes, you are headed in exactly the right direction. You are coming full circle. You lead yourself with your heart and you’re going to end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.” She takes a deep breath and then announces, “Time’s up.”
The news evidently affords the man some added spring in his step. He buys the flowers off the psychic’s table, and proceeds to dance his way across town. We have hope for him. He has hope for himself! By the time the lamentable bridge hits, however, he’s stopped outside an apartment, dialing her number, then staring up through the window: a woman dances in silhouette with a guy. Our guy – he of the psychic reading – lip-sync’s Siifu’s part (which is really Berman’s part): The light of my life is going out tonight in a pink champagne Corvette…”
But wait! There’s the Corvette idling behind him – the driver has hopped out to use the ATM and left the engine running – and our hero seizes the moment: he steals the ‘Vette and joyrides through LA. The police on his tail. Running red lights.
In this alternate reality, the Rivers Cuomo refrain that follows this sad interlude – California life is alright with me – emerges as a different song: it’s pumping through the speakers in the policewoman’s patrol car, she’s rocking out to it before she sees the Corvette tear down the wide California boulevard in a blaze. She flips on the emergency lights.
In this alternate reality, seeing your ex dance with a stranger is (yes) the worst possible feeling. But also: there’s a path past it, and it has something to do with music, joy, riding free for the hell of it. Letting loose and staying alive.
Take Four: Interpolation in mourning (and moving on)
Every October we place a sonogram image of the other twin on our Dia de los Muertos altar. She sits alongside our grandparents, my wife’s little brother, our dog Sadie. It took a while not to hate her. How could we? What was she at that time but a trick of biology who led to a serious impediment, who seriously risked the life of our daughter? We would say “the zombie twin” or “the evil twin” because hating her gave us agency in the moment. Now some days when I see my daughter in a mirror, or reflected in a window, I miss her.
Not her exactly, but who she might have been. (Our daughter is left-handed. I wonder, would her sister have been right-handed?)
A couple years ago two of our dearest friends were going through the IVF process. Like us they were college sweethearts, let’s call them Kate and Caleb, and as with us IVF presented the only viable path to parenthood. Their chances were even slimmer than ours, however: The opening salvo of lab experiments had resulted in only one fertilized embryo. They had exactly one shot. Kate walked the streets after the “transfer,” and listened (she told me) to a Spotify playlist I had sent her, in an impotent attempt to cheer her up. In the middle was the Cassandra Jenkins song “Hard Drive” from her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, the album she made in the months following the news of her bandmate’s suicide:
In summer 2019, she was prepared to join David Berman on his comeback tour as Purple Mountains when, just before opening night, she received news that he had died by suicide. Throughout these songs, she guides us through the immediate aftermath—grief, helplessness, canceled flights—along with a more imagistic fog of loneliness and confusion… (Pitchfork)
But the song “Hard Drive” isn’t foggy or confused or overladen with grief or helplessness. This song reflects not the moment of despair after the news of death, but rather the strange euphoric feeling of reaching out to the world (and its people!) after losing a friend. In January 2024 I lost a close friend to suicide and the revelation that it had been suicide provoked a similar urge in me: to reach out. Almost at random. An urge, specifically, to reach out to strangers.
So when Cassandra interpolates in “Hard Drive,” she interpolates not lyrics from other songs, but rather the voices of the people she encounters. We begin with a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a recording of her voice, saying,
So these are real things that happened
Where you can apply these, these, um, important concepts
And understand that
When we lose our connection to nature
We lose our spirit, our humanity, our sense of self
Then Cassandra narrates:
A security guard
Stopped me to offer an overview on Phenomenal Nature.
She said, "Sculpture is not just formed from penetration.
You see, men have lost touch with the feminine."
A saxophone eases onto the scene. The song takes off, andante. The museum show in question is Mrinalini Mukherjee’s exhibition at the Met, called Phenomenal Nature. So when the guard is giving an “overview on Phenomenal Nature,” she’s literally giving an overview on the show.
The phrase ‘phenomenal nature’ in the album title (as in the exhibit title) is doing double duty: this is nature perceptible through the senses, palpable nature (from the Greek word phainomenon, "that which is seen”) – but it is also phenomenal in the sense of extraordinary, wondrous. Awesome.
Later Cassandra runs into a psychic named Peri “at Lola’s house.” The use of first names lends a journal-like feeling to the song. And the work the psychic does on her – “Oh, I can see it’s been a hard year… I’m gonna put your heart back together” – becomes part of the song. Which is to say that the listener joins in. Any listener who feels like they need their heart put back together can join in.
Which is why I wanted my friend Kate to hear the song. I wanted her to hear it because of what happens in this final movement. Cassandra interpolates the work that Peri does to heal her as she grieves the loss of Berman, and that act of interpolation in the song becomes a gift to the listener. Who doesn’t want the acknowledgement that you’ve had a rough few months, that it’s time to put your heart back together, and that all those pieces they took from you are gonna return to you now?
In sending the song to Kate I intended to interpolate Cassandra’s interpolation. By which I mean that I wanted to communicate the words to her directly:
Oh, dear, I can see you've had a rough few months
But this year
It's gonna be a good one
I'll count to three and tap your shoulder
We're gonna put your heart back together
So all those little pieces they took from you
They're coming back now
They'll miss 'em too
So close your eyes
I'll count to three
Take a deep breath
Count with me
And now I realize that every time I was imagining her playing it, I was playing it too, and I was doing the work on myself. I was counting to three, imagining my heart being put back together. I was asking to be healed.
She said, "one, two, three
Oh, like
One, two, three
One, two, three
Just breathe
One, two, three
Count with me
One, two, three
All those little pieces
One, two, three
We're gonna put 'em back together now
Are you ready?
Sebastian J. Langdell is the author of two books & the recipient of fellowships from the James A. Michener Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Witness, and the LA Review of Books. He teaches music and literature at Baylor University.
