The Strokes song Julian Casablancas wrote in a dream
The Strokes aren’t the most impressionistic of indie rock bands. They usually deal with reality, whether it’s relationships or growing up or New York City cops, but most of their subject material tends to stay out of the realm of fantasy. Occasionally, spaceships show up in songs like ‘Last Nite’ and cannonballs blast through walls in songs like ‘At the Door’, but if you want dream-like sequences in your rock music, go listen to a prog rock band.
Julian Casablancas might just have some prog rock lyrical writing in him yet. The only similarities between him and Alex Lifeson from Rush may be that dreams have played a significant role in the writing of their songs. For Casablancas, his journey through the other side of consciousness eventually birthed ‘Ask Me Anything’, the buzzy album cut from First Impressions of Earth.
In a 2014 interview with GQ Magazine, Casablancas admitted that the inspiration for the song came to him while he was snoozing. “It’s funny: This is one of those cheesy songwriter ‘I dreamt it’ stories, but I dreamt it was a Scissor Sisters song,” Casablancas shared. “And there was just a chorus where they kept saying, I’ve got nothing to say, and it was so hypnotic and weird and fucked with my head. I woke up thinking it was a real song. And then I realized: ‘Oh, wait, I made that up in a dream, so I can just do it and I’m not plagiarizing.'”
Although the track is lyrically open-ended enough for different interpretations to filter into it, drummer Fabrizio Moretti felt that the song was directly referencing the band’s attitude at the time. While sitting down with Clash Magazine in 2006, Moretti shared his thoughts on ‘Ask Me Anything’ actually being more autobiographical than most listeners may have assumed.
“That whole song is like where we confess that we’re just going to do our thing and we’re going to be a band and live by our own integrity and never compromise,” Moretti explained. “The music industry is like any other business. It’s about trade-offs. And very often when you don’t give what people are expecting of you – you know, the powers that be that decide how successful you’re going to be – they’ll fuck you in the ass. I’m not going to name any names but a lot of times we haven’t done things because we feel like we’d be embarrassed to do them and that’s cut off our road with certain people.”
Check out ‘Ask Me Anything’ down below.
