John Lurie is an artist in crisis: “You’re going to be putting out a record while all this suffering is going on?”
“Why don’t you move from Newcastle to somewhere warmer,” John Lurie asks me as rain streaks the apartment window. I gaze out at the bleak northernmost outpost of England, its lustre struggling against the grey. Given that roughly 95% of the inhabited world is warmer, it seems like a fair point. The renaissance man, who first rose to relative fame with The Lounge Lizards and earned himself the esteemed but none too lucrative title of being a musician’s musician, has a habit of making fair points.
I try to tune back into what he’s saying about his forthcoming new soundtrack album, Painting with John, but I’m still dazed by the Newcastle comment. I realise that I live here because it’s my home and I love it. Lurie is a few steps ahead of me. He’s so accustomed to making fair points that he realises you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. “If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain,” the yodelling philosopher Dolly Parton said that. This was a point that was rammed home to Lurie while making the HBO series Painting with John in the Caribbean.
“We made it look lovely, but it wasn’t,” he begins. “We had termites, and they weren’t the worst thing. We had no water for two months. We had this spare tank that they would fill, but the water tasted like glue. And the bugs! I’m still traumatised by the bugs. I see a tiny speck from the corner of my eye and scream, ‘Not the bugs!’” From the outside, the series might look like a naturalist unspooling of unburdened art in an unspoiled utopia. That wasn’t the case.
“You always assume that the humans are winning. Actually, the bugs are winning,” he continues. “The termites won—the termites drove us out of that place. I remember at one point, we were shooting a segment where I was talking about how in awe I was of a Turkish watermelon vendor, and the whole time, my legs were just being devoured.” This memory understandably pisses him off and may never return to the island.
“They’ve even got a flying bug there that stings you, but only because it is mean,” he says. “Mosquitos do it to feed on you, or a bee stings you to protect itself. These bugs only sting you because they’re mean. So, there I am, trying to talk to the camera about perfect watermelons and act natural, but I’m physically in a lot of pain.” With this sore anecdote clearly causing Lurie post-traumatic distress, Newcastle’s rather wet but bug-less disposition doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.
He scratches around for a name for these evil creatures. “Bastard bugs,” I suggest. “Yeah, bastard bugs. The island might look nice, but everyone who lives there wants to leave because of these bastard bugs and the glue water.”
That’s the capricious equilibrium of the earth: you can either bask in delightful sunlight on your porch, feeling heaven’s glow amid a golden evening and be devoured by bugs during a restless night, or you can brave the slings and arrows of sleet and a vitamin D deficiency but retire to a warm and cosy bed at the close of day. You can’t have both. That’s the pact of life.
As it happens, gearing up to the release of his record, the capricious and cruel nature of the world has weighed heavy on Lurie. Of late, he has found that as he sits down to create, the whole enterprise is haunted by a sense of futility. “Am I doing anything meaningful?” he wonders. He continues to flesh out his point. In his own self-deprecating manner, he begins to bring me around to his tortured school of thought. With the dearest of appreciation and all due respect, even I begin to wonder: What use is John Lurie in 2024?
I’ve listened to the new 56-track record; it’s a masterpiece, but suddenly, he’s convinced me that’s a moot point. The last album John Lurie may ever produce is a triumph that amounts to nought in a world torn apart by tragedies that make everything else seem trivial by comparison. Before things get too gloomy, though, Lurie quickly dismisses the rumour that this may be his departing music work. He puts that fatalist rhetoric down to an overzealous press release.
“It always feels like it might be the last one. I guess that was just a dramatic thing, ‘John Lurie is going to die in the next five minutes, so you should listen to his music right now’. In truth, I’ve always done that,” he clarifies. “Going back even to my mid-20s, it was like, ‘This should be the line between life and death’, but I wasn’t excepting to fucking die! It’s just that it should hit that rarefied air, the space between life and death.”
In his 20s, that stance was a marker of artistic pride. It dared him to reach for what the Spanish call ‘duende’. As defined by Frederico Garcia Lorca, this mystic word relates an exalted emotion unearthed from within, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained. The roots that cling to the mire from which comes the very substance of art.” That’s what Lurie has been striving for over the course of a career that has involved music, painting, producing, fishing and, well, everything else under the remit art in the modern world. He’s always achieved it. This time, he wonders whether it’s enough.
“I had a hard time with all the suffering going on in the world,” he says. “I thought, ‘Shit, you’re going to be putting out this record and doing self-promotion while all this suffering is going on’. Because of that, I felt it had to have a certain purity. So, I edited brutally—things that were musically good were cut if they lacked soul. But at least I satisfied myself that its soul is intact, so it justifies itself being released right now.” When I suggest that this seems incredibly selfless, he replies, “Yeah, yeah, but I could just be virtue signalling.”
His thinking on the topic is fraught, and he summarises it as: “I go to paint, and I think, ‘Well, what fucking good does your painting do anybody’. I mean, it does me good. There’s a roof over my head and food in my refrigerator. But as an artist, I keep thinking, ‘How are you bettering the world when there’s all this suffering?’ and it feels selfish in a way to just follow your creative muse and not help more.” He follows that with a fair point: ”But that’s also ridiculous.”
Alas, his art does a lot of good for a lot of people, in fact. As I explain this to Lurie, he slowly regathers his self-worth. “Yeah, yeah, it is always nice when people reach out and say your music got me over the death of a friend, or your show helped me overcome my cancer diagnosis. That’s nice.” Moreover, the influence of Lurie is everywhere. It’s not just his own art that heals but shows like Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing that have clearly been inspired by his work, or the fact his rather pastoral pacing seems to have opened up HBO to host shows like How To with John Wilson and the leisurely comedy of Joe Pera.
This has been an influence he has battled to exude. All his life, he has come up against “pricks” who have questioned his projects and wondered “how to market them”, but he has muscled through these gatekeeping naysayers and illuminated a rather more footloose, free-flowing and unpackaged future for art and entertainment. In fact, as this notion dawns on him and he pulls away from the doomy oratory that he’s a useless spendthrift spunking ego onto a canvas and pissing amour propre into studio microphones amid a senseless slaughter, he realises he may have even influenced The Simpsons.
It recently came to his attention that one of the pre-orders for the limited-edition vinyl release was made by none other than Matt Groening. “How the fuck does Matt Groening know who I am?” Lurie humbly proclaims. “I mean, I’m not a huge Simpsons guy, but I… I appreciate The Simpsons,” he continues. So, Lurie even wrote to Groening to express his gratitude and maybe hint at his bewilderment, too. In later correspondence, it turns out Groening is a bit of a mega-fan, but the next thing to perplex Lurie was that, for some inexplicable reason, the Simpsons creator signs his name in parenthesis. He’s been thinking about this ever since.
By this stage of the conversation, Lurie has reaffirmed his influence and output to such an extent that he now seems almost confused about his legendary status. In many ways, this typifies his artistry in general. The new Painting with John soundtrack is an astounding piece of work, the latest of many in Lurie’s varied and storied life. Still, its brilliance is so natural that you barely even recognise the accomplished craft behind it—it simply unfurls like the vistas on a pleasant drive you’ve never taken before. The supreme naturalism and sense of primordial exultancy that Lurie extolls are like buds on a blossom tree bursting like party poppers upon the first kiss of spring. You just take that sort of thing in. You don’t really consider or appreciate the toil of the tree. Likewise, you’re subsumed by the record, and suddenly, you stop thinking of John entirely.
This is a characteristic of all his work. It mightn’t be great for getting his singular projects greenlit, but it’s his artistic triumph. It is also the reason that the notion of any project being his ‘last’ seems ludicrous. John Lurie is a man who can’t not create. “If I don’t do it,” he says, “I start to feel like that thing when you’ve had the flu. You’ve been lying in bed all week, but now the flu has gone but you still think you’re ill because you’ve been lying around for so long. That’s what it feels like if I don’t paint or write music. It cleanses me.”
It has always done that since he was two. In fact, he even had his own style solidified by the age of five, which is evidenced in a framed picture he shows me. “It is just a kid’s drawing that I did when I was in kindergarten, but it really looks like how my paintings look now. It’s the same style,” he says. It’s a style that simply exudes Lurie’s lived experience rather than any sort of direct influence. “I take influence from all over the place: the label of a soy bottle in Thailand, stuff in a Spanish museum, the bricks on the wall of a Bruegel painting, but also a flower van Gogh has done. Same with music too—it has always just been from everywhere.”
In this regard, although he might feel like an artist diminished by these dystopian days, he is, in fact, the perfect artist for the times. With the weight of the crooked world on his shoulders, bastard bugs biting gorges into his shins, diseases and diagnoses to deal with, Lurie glides on through like a G Major, exuding the fullness of having fun with Duende. This is exemplified by the new record, a culmination of sorts that plays fast and loose with the profundity that shaped it in these trying times and all the life, influences and creative inspiration that came before. “I just hope people fucking listen to it at least once through. I worked very hard to put this damn thing together. I’m very happy with it.” So, he should be—it hits that fabled rarefied air.
