Fuck Music, Let's Talk About Feelings: An Interview with Neon Indian
Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

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Fuck Music, Let's Talk About Feelings: An Interview with Neon Indian

For me, Neon Indian's music conjures momentous feelings, memories, fantasies of makeouts that did and didn't happen, a state of eternal longing, the transcendence of linear time.

I got to talk one on one with Neon Indian's Alan Palomo this summer when I covered FYF in LA . Initially I was scared to talk to him. For me, Neon Indian's music conjures momentous feelings, memories, fantasies of makeouts that did and didn't happen, a state of eternal longing, the transcendence of linear time. That's a lot of presh. Also, I don't really like talking about music. I'd rather listen to music and talk about feelings. But Palomo, whose third album, VEGA INTL. Night School , comes out tomorrow, was so emotionally open that I decided to make the interview its own column.

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When we spoke, he had just performed his set, which included a number of tracks from the new album. They were hot and synthy and expanded on the trippy, yearning, fantasy aesthetic that I love about his work. But where his previous albums could be the soundtrack for a mystic prom or a day down the rabbit hole in your last teen summer, this new album feels like it's of age now, barely legal, attending its first rave at an 80s club on the astral plane where Michael Jackson's ghost presides over the festivities.

So Sad Today: There is a dreamy, eternal summer, endless youth quality to your albums. Even VEGA INTL. Night School, which has more of a dance vibe, has that kaleidoscopic longing in tracks like " Annie," "Baby's Eyes," and the opener, "Hit Parade." I've always wanted to know if that's inspired by things you have felt or experienced, or if there is a wish in that.
Alan Palomo: Well to some extent, whenever you have control of a situation that represents yourself in some medium, it's kind of like playing the Sims. You try to create some idealized construct of what your life would be like if you had control of every absolute component. I think there's a nostalgia in a personal sense as far as revisting the situation and anecdotes that created the lyrics, that inspired the songs. Sometimes a song's a song. Sometimes you sit at a piano and it feels kind of contrived, but then you create meaning out of that experience too. But the songs that really have resonated with people were these really intentional songs, like Polish Girl or Deadbeat Summer, and there's a lot like that on the new record too. And even if it sounds kind of smiley and wispy, there is always this component where any good story is going to have a bit of devastation with the happiness.

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Right. If nothing else, it's devastating that a moment of happiness has to end.
I feel like happiness is a wonderful transient that you find from moment to moment, but in a much broader scheme, the point of life is to find those little moments and still accept that everything else is this ongoing wave and fluctuation.

Yeah, which is kind of annoying. I always want every beautiful moment to last forever, which, actually, I think is called addiction.
Me too. You ever have one of those friends who meditates and they really seem to have a Zen handle on their existence, and it's almost slightly annoying? It's like, oh I guess everything is just like c'est la vie, huh? That being said, I enjoy meditating. But part of the joy is that it's like in… what's it called… Zazen, where they call part of the practice mind weeds. The more that you have, it sort of enriches the practice. And that's totally a pretentious thing to say, but at the same time, part of the joy of something is that you have to take those ingredients that make life complicated to really value what it is. Otherwise, wouldn't happiness just be sort of like normalcy if you had no other frame of reference? And then you wouldn't have the callous to deal with when life just sort of decides it's not your turn and you gotta wait till the next time it comes back around.

Yes, it's easier to believe in meaning in the universe when it is your turn. It's way harder when it's not your turn. It's hard then to have the faith that it's ever going to be your turn again.
Sure. And like the smaller person in you would totally have some sort of vitriol, like, well why can't it just be my turn all the time? And to some extent I think it's totally healthy to be sort of chasing after the state of mind that you might never attain, but it was an honest day's work to try and take care of the weeds.

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I guess in some ways the weeds serve us. They give us something to do so that we don't float off the planet too soon. What would you say was one of your most otherworldly, perhaps teen, experiences?
Obviously there's always the mad dash running through sprinklers or cops busting up a party. There's, ugh, this is so hokey to say, making out in a backseat listening to " Lover's Spit" by Broken Social Scene and, like, you're on your girlfriend's lap and she's looking down at you and her hair is covering your face and it's kind of this obscure, beautiful amalgam of all the things that you romanticize about youth. Those things are like seconds, but what it echoes throughout, that totally defines you as a person, right?

I'm so glad you said that. I just knew you had that experience in you. It's palpable. What about your psychedelic experiences. Were any particularly memorable?
Well, if you've done psychedelics, you always wonder if they had some influence in the outcome of your brain chemistry.

Yes. For me it's like, I'm glad I opened those doors because it allowed me to see that there are other contexts, or null context, from which to look at the world. But sometimes I'm like, oh god, that is the root of like—
Oh, sure. I'm already kind of a space cadet as it is. It's not always fun to be Alan stepping into the fifth dimension and wrestling with this lack of context for anything and lack of cohesive perception. That shit's fucking terrifying. But you even garner something from that too. For some reason, as a teenager, I was never scared of psychedelics. It wasn't until having that same sensation in your lucid, waking moments, and just being like, I feel like I'm on something and yet I'm not. I remember getting way too high on something—I don't remember what it was, it might have been opium, I have no idea—and I was a sophomore in high school. I remember having this afternoon walking through a supermarket with my older brother's friends just trying to internalize all the stimuli I was being bombarded with. It was maybe the highest I've ever been. And then for a month after that I had sort of residual traces of that sensation and I remember having this weird feeling that the sky had a sort of ceiling to it. It was much more of a metaphorical than a literal feeling, but just the idea of being able to perceive something like that is totally fucking scary.

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It's definitely scary when you aren't on anything and your context shifts. My fear is always that, well, I'm a catastrophizer, so I always think everything is permanent. So I'm like, will I be stuck in this forever? Especially when there is nothing to which I can attribute a sudden shift in perception.
To some extent, the afterglow of psychedelics is really romantic. There's that thing where the initial high is sort of that terrifying experience of allowing the psychedelic experience to happen. But when you are able to think again cohesively, but still have some traces of that frame of mind, that's really productive, that's really fucking awesome, and those are the things that I garner a lot of formative experiences from. To some extent, I have to wonder, have I ever gotten out of that state of mind? Is this just the new reality? Is this what reality exists as from day to day from here on out? If that's the case then I can't remember what it was like to exist before that.

But at the same time, I would say that the initial experience of like, that's the highest I've ever been was a really formative, creative time, because that would be when you would have a visceral, creative response to some song. You'd realize, like, holy shit, " Dusk At Cubist Castle " by Olivia Tremor Control is really creeping me the fuck out.

Yeah. That moment when you are so engaged in a piece of art that it becomes your new reality, even when you are totally sober, is a fresh context. I just saw Spiritualized play, sort of accidentally, and I was like Holy shit, the lights, I just want to be killed by a laser right now. Can it all end here? Like can it just all end on this note ? I would have been OK to be eviscerated at that moment. But then the set ended. And I walked out.
And you were kinda glad in hindsight that you weren't completely immolated.

I don't know. It depends if there would have been consciousness afterward. And what that consciousness would feel like. But I can't know what that consciousness or lack of consciousness would be like.
Yeah. All I can perceive about what that would even mean—beyond the point of death or whatever you want to call that—well, it would be bullshit to say that I have some cohesive answer, because to some extent, I think even atheism requires a certain leap of faith where you have to draw some sort of conclusion. But the only thing that I can confirm is that I have no confirmation.

Yeah, it's kind of fucked up that we're just put on the planet with no confirmation or map. It's just like, Off you go! Best of luck!
Sometimes you wake up and feel like just this bag of flesh that's really just a vessel of instincts and memories and genetics. And you start acting based on that construct. But then other days, I don't know, you feel like there could be some sort of special surprise at the other end of what would be the most excruciating thing that's ever happened to you.

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