The first inklings of Call the Comet bubbled up in June 2016 following the “huge disappointment and disillusionment” Marr says he felt in the wake of Brexit. Then, later that year, on a promotion run for his autobiography Set the Boy Free, Marr found himself in NYC the day after the election of Donald Trump, amounting to a one-two punch to the proverbial gut that re-lit a fire beneath the 54-year-old musician.“When I met with my friends in America, I did say to a couple of them, ‘I get it, you feel heartbroken,’ because I’d been through it with my friends with Brexit," Marr says. "That heartbreak was not just because of the shock and worry about the new President, [but] because of the disappointment that you feel in a lot of your countrymen who put that figure there.”“I used the making of [Call the Comet] as the very driving need to escape—there’s no getting around that…I was aware that I needed to escape.”
Even now, with Call the Comet standing as his most politically forward project to date, Marr sees little efficacy in belaboring the obvious.“I kind of think that everything that is at the sharper end of the culture has some implicit knowing about politics in it,” he says. “I don’t think that art has to say something. I think it just has to be good, and it is implied that people at the sharper end are all on the same side, unless they say otherwise. The world being what it is, people who have reactionary tendencies just can’t stop themselves from mouthing off.”“Making the record was an emotional necessity for me. But this time out, I definitely needed to make tracks in the same way that I needed to make tracks when I was a frustrated and slightly alienated, switched-on youngster.”
It may not be the ultimate resolution we seek, but Marr is no one's savior; after all, it's not on him, or anyone, to save us from ourselves. He’s already done his part.“All I know is that I’m glad I have a life that involves art and ideas performance," Marr says. "I’ll work with that as best as I can, and hopefully it will be of some use somehow. If not, I’m fine with the job of guitar player and performer.”Call the Comet by Johnny Marr is out now on New Voodoo Records.John Ochoa is a Los Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. He’s also the saddest Morrissey fan in L.A. Follow him on Twitter .“I don’t think that art has to say something. I think it just has to be good, and it is implied that people at the sharper end are all on the same side, unless they say otherwise. The world being what it is, people who have reactionary tendencies just can’t stop themselves from mouthing off.”