In an attempt to match the epic scope of Neurosis’ music and cover their 20+ year history, I ended up asking Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till way more questions than I actually needed for the May 2007 cover story. I transcribed all their answers, so here are a few that didn’t make it into the finished article.
What were early Neurosis tours like?
Scott Kelly: When we first started booking the Pain of Mind tour, when it was even suggested that we should tour, it wasn’t even something that we honestly even realized was possible. You have to remember that when we started the band, I was 18, and I was the oldest member. Jason was 15. We were way inside of our own little trip, and we were living in this warehouse environment that was very self-sufficient. We had basically everything we needed there. When it was put to us that we should travel around the country and tour, we were like “Well, OK.” The first two tours that we did for Pain of Mind and The Word as Law, we booked them ourselves. We had a friend at home who sat on the phone and we would call her every few days to make sure all the shows were happening. But we would each take a region and book shows. There was somewhat of a route that had already been scratched out a little bit, but as far as the music we were playing, we played with basically anybody. Largely we’d be playing with whoever the local punk band is, but every once in a while you’d have some local reggae band opening for you or some shit. There were a lot of house parties, a lot of pizza parlors, hotel conference rooms…very few clubs. The first club that I actually remember playing was in Minneapolis, and that was the first gig that I remember when we got to Minneapolis there were 300 people there, they knew the album, and we were kinda blown away by the whole deal.
Neurosis has always been described as tribal, and there’s a side project called Tribes of Neurot. What does a tribe, or tribalism mean to you?
Kelly: It’s just primal. It’s just kind of a label or a catchphrase now. It probably means different things to different people. For us, we’re a tribe, we’re a family, however you want to say it. We take care of each other; we’ve always been there for each other. We have an undying loyalty to each other, to our children and our families. That’s the basis of the whole thing. It was like that at the beginning. We agreed to do this band and never quit, never let it stop, no matter what. That’s what it means to me. I don’t really think about that word so much. Tribes of Neurot, we’ve been doing that for 15 years…at some point, words just don’t have a lot of meaning anymore. It’s basically an identifying mark for something that we do.
Steve Von Till: I get mixed emotions on that, because there’s a part of that word that’s been so tainted by this image bullshit. To me the idea of a tribe is your people. Who are your people? Who are the people who have your back? Who are the people who you would go to the ends of the earth for and who are the people you would do that for? Basically family. Extended family. For us, Neurosis is tribal because we’re brothers, we’re family, and we’ve overcome a lot of adversity together. We’ve come across a very select few but dedicated people all around the world we can call our friends, who we can relate to, who understand where we’re coming from. And I’m not just talking about the music, I’m talking about as people. People who we consider our extended brotherhood and who know where we’re coming from. Starting with the family, and reaching out to the brothers, reaching out beyond that to our extended community. That’s what tribal is for us, an extended family and dedication to what we’re doing. To each other.
Both of you have released solo acoustic albums. What makes an idea something for you to do solo instead of something you do in Neurosis?
Kelly: I did one solo record just by myself. It was a record I needed to do. It was kinda marking a period in my life…kind of a tombstone, in a way, it was the end of a time for me and I felt like I needed to get it out of me. Then as I continued to write more acoustic stuff, that’s when that turned into Blood and Time. That’s what I’m doing now, and that’s with Noah [Landis] and Josh [Graham], so it’s still in the family. It’s just a different vibe, yet the same. It’s just quieter, and more reserved in some ways. It’s very open and naked, there’s nowhere to hide when you’re doing music like that. You can’t turn the amps up and have everything blur into one mass of sound, which is what Neurosis does. With Blood and Time, you can hear every word, every note. It’s kind of the opposite side of the same coin, dealing with a lot of the same ideas in terms of the way the sounds work together. It really kind happened in the van when we were touring, when Steve and I both started enjoying singing more, and realized that we could do it and that we wanted to do it. You basically can’t sing quietly over Neurosis. There’s moments, and we definitely use those moments, but Neurosis is like a driven force. It just kinda runs itself and we’re attached to it.
Von Till: You just know what headspace you’re in when you’re making music. When I sit down to make music, I usually know if I’m songwriting like I would for solo stuff – which took a long time to develop. Initially, when I first came across the idea, I had a little home studio set up and I was recording a lot of things. Most of it ended up on Tribes of Neurot records, some of it ended up as riff ideas for Neurosis jams, and a bunch of it didn’t fit and solidified as its own thing, which became my first solo record. Looking back on it, it’s not my favorite record but it was a starting point, and then by the second one I was like ‘OK, I’ve carved this niche where I have the freedom to sit here and work on actual songwriting as opposed to epic composition of destructive sound with these other guys. It’s more of a personal, understated, private-space music, an expression of self. Of course, you can tell where we come from no matter what we do. [Laughs.] It’s all related by the spirit and the dedication to giving our whole self to the flow of the sound. I can usually tell, by this point, when I sit down I’m either in my improvisational Tribes of Neurot mode or I’m working on ideas that I plan on sending back out to the group for everyone to put their input in. It’s never somebody’s individual ideas that become what Neurosis is, it’s the filtering of the group through everybody’s ideas. Then other times I’m just rolling tape and doing Harvestman, psychedelic guitar stuff. It depends on the mood. And that’s the one benefit of that responsibility that I spoke of earlier, to the inspiration. As big an inspiration as Neurosis is in our lives, it fills you with this inspiration, the blessing and the curse, that once you ask for it you don’t get to get rid of it. It’s solid and it’s all the time and you’ve got to deal with it. When you get that flow of creativity, you have to find your outlets for it.
Why did you cut down so much on playing live?
Kelly: It came down to a couple of things. One was that we’re fathers, we have children. Being on the road all the time itself does not lend itself to doing what you need to do for your family. We also came to this realization…like I said before, we kinda take what’s in front of us, and we had done that for a long time. Doing tours, rolling forward, and it just hit us one day: Why are we doing this? Why are we here? There’s only one reason, and that’s to make music. We’re not here to tour, it’s all about the music, and when you get into that extended touring mode and you’re surrounded by people you don’t know all the time, it starts to take down your ability to really focus on your music. We just said fuck this, this is not why we’re a band. Touring is great, playing live is great, but it’s absolutely not the most important thing to us. It was a hard decision financially. We’ve never made money as a band, we still all work 40 a week, and it was just about getting re-centered. We made a commitment to do this thing forever, and if we were gonna do this thing forever then we had to make some decisions to get through that. I think if we had continued touring…self-destruct is always in full effect, there’s just no way to avoid it, at least for me. It was a wise decision. It enabled us to focus on when we do play, really making it something significant and special.
Neurosis uses a lot of epic language: blood, the sun, storms, grace. What in your life gives you that sense of epic scope?
Von Till: I guess it’s the ability to relate the small things to the big things. The ability to relate your own experiences with the trials and tribulations of the whole race. The microcosm and the macrocosm. You’ve got your own life, your own struggles, you’ve got the stuff in your immediate history. You’ve got the stuff that transcends the entire evolution of our species. Trying to reconcile that with being a thinking, feeling, kind of open, sensitive human being. Trying to be what you can, trying to self-realize, trying to grow, trying to evolve. Trying to deal with all this and move beyond it in a world so full of distraction and falsehood. Measuring all those thing automatically connects you artistically. Personally you feel connected with your ancestry and your responsibilities. Histories. Trying to put that in some sort of perspective when it would be really easy to write everything off as complete bullshit and go after what’s true with all your heart. For us, what’s true is our families and our music.
Kelly: It’s just the way we see things. We’re pretty much out in space. The words just kinda come. I rarely sit down and say I’m gonna write a song about whatever. The words just come through the music, so whatever the words turn out to be, that’s what we use. It’s not that we sit down and say we want to write epic things. It’s just the gravity of the music brings that to us. When we’re writing, we definitely have thought that we want this to be a mountain, or this is water. Those thoughts definitely come to us when we’re writing, but I don’t really have an explanation as to how we get to that point.
