Following a Failure reunion and a divorce, Greg Edwards returns with Autolux’s Pussy’s Dead
For Greg Edwards, time is relative. After his alterna-combo Failure disbanded in 1997, the guitarist/vocalist recruited bassist/ singer Eugene Goreshter and drummer Carla Azar in 2000 for more experimental trio Autolux, which issued its Future Perfect debut in 2004, its sophomore Transit Transit in 2010 and its third, the provocatively titled Pussy’s Dead, this spring. Why did it take him another six years to arrive at ethereal, prog-minded processionals like “Soft Scene,” “Junk For Codes” and “Listen To The Order”?
“For me, there’s just a lot of time that doesn’t seem very productive, but it actually is productive,” he says.
But Edwards hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs in the interim. He and his wife, Raveonettes anchor Sharin Foo, recently divorced, leading to one song on the latest album that he won’t specify. And in 2014, he reconvened—then released two albums and toured with—Failure. “Then Carla played with Jack White for a while, and she was in a movie called Frank with Michael Fassbender,” he says. “So there was a lot of stuff going on that took time, on top of the fact that we just take time. But we still spend an incredible amount of time in our studio, even when nothing seems to be getting done.”
Autolux has been championed over the years by Vincent Gallo, Trent Reznor, Thom Yorke and the team of T-Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers—who initially signed them to their DMZ imprint—yet Edwards the composer remains unsure of himself. “Trying to create something from nothing, there’s the confidence that you’ve done it in the past,” he says. “Combined with the knowledge that every time you come to the blank slate, there will be an utter personal holocaust and catastrophe, in terms of doing it again. So for me, there has to be a lot of time spent just thinking for anything good to happen.”
Lately, for instance, the man has been waking up every morning, putting on a pot of strong co ffee and purchasing—then quietly contemplating—every album from the David Bowie catalog that he didn’t already own, after the artist’s tragic passing. “I’m still in love with music, and chasing that elusive magic in writing it, and I’m much more open-minded and intelligent as a music listener now than when I was in my 20s,” he says. Then, he was obsessed with three crucial albums: Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Sonic Youth’s Sister and the Cure’s trailblazing Faith. They would become the template for Failure. Autolux reflects his hard-earned maturity.
Lost in thought, Edwards came up with cuts like the clackety, perambulating, nearly five-minute epic “Soft Scene,” and he’s still not sure how. It was conjured in what he terms his “breathing space,” a relaxing moment when a song simply channels itself through him. “And if I force myself to work, that’s when I end up hating what I write,” he says. “Which is a great justification for just being really lazy and wasting a lot of time.”
—Tom Lanham
