Undefeated is your first solo album that you recorded and produced yourself. What went into that decision? What did you learn about yourself and your music during this process?

It’s important to say that it was the first time I was able to think about that as an option. It wasn’t like I’d been planning on doing that all along and then finally got my way or anything like that. When the pandemic kicked in, I needed a hobby and the hobby I settled on was learning how to engineer and record music. Production is a vague word, it can mean a lot of different things. I’ve always worked on the arrangements for my own songs and had a lot of input into the feel and style and all that kind of thing. When I learned to engineer music, my plan was to produce other bands and not myself. I wasn’t doing that with an eye to work on my own records. By the time I’d done three years of that and it rolled around again for me to make one of my own records, we were having a conversation about who we would give a truckload of money to to produce a record and I was like, “Maybe we could save that money and I could do it myself!” [laughs]

Sometimes when you make a record you’re still working out how the songs go while you’re in the studio and in that case, a producer plays a really important role as external referee or whatever. In this instance, me and my band had demoed the record three entire times by the time we got to the actual recording so we knew how the record went. It was very clear what the arrangements were. I’d done an awful lot of work on that myself, which I suppose is production of a kind, but essentially it was mostly a case of getting fair copies of stuff down rather than figuring it out as we go. I may work with producers again in the future, I’m not ruling that out. I enjoyed being in control and my band trusted me to be in control which was nice of them. [laughs] I didn’t mix it myself which I’m pleased about because I think my friend Tristan Ivemy, who also mixed England Keep My Bones, did a great job and I think it’s good to have an external pair of ears on the record at some point. I’m very proud of it. I think it sounds good.

It goes back to getting back to the more independent side of things too.

Yeah! I did a 5 album stint in the major label world which was what it was and had its pluses and minuses, he said being as diplomatic as possible. [laughs] But I’m very pleased to be back in this world, I’ll say that.

You’ve been doing this for a long time and this is your 10th solo record. How do you feel your songwriting process has evolved during your solo career?

I think that I would say that songwriting is both a craft and an art. I think I’ve got better at the craft side of it, or at least I would like to think so. [laughs] But the art side is more vague and more ephemeral. Finding subject matter to write about perhaps is harder to do because the low-hanging fruit has kind of been used and I’m trying to not repeat myself. I mean, other people can weigh in on whether or not I’ve succeeded in doing that but I don’t wanna rewrite songs that I’ve written before. It can take longer to find what I wanna talk about but once I do, it can be a quicker process to get to a finished song and pursue other ones.

It’s changed in that way but at the same time, there is a sense that my songwriting “process” is pretty vague anyway. I don’t really have a set methodology. I don’t do the same thing every time. A lot of the time songwriting is a bit like sleepwalking for me; I can remember when a song didn’t exist and I can remember when it was finished but I can’t really remember what happened between those two moments in time. I kind of want to keep it that way. I don’t wanna kill the patient by overanalyzing. I don’t wanna break the mechanism by spending too long getting too mechanistic about how I write songs. Some songs are quick and some songs are slow. Some songs take years to write and some songs take 45 minutes. There’s no set methodology to it.

You’re like a conduit for creativity.

I’m a firmly atheist, non-spiritual person, but there is a sense of kind of channeling sometimes. There is a sense sometimes that songs exist and you’re just looking for them. It’s a funny thing, sometimes when a song arrives fully formed you’re like, “Oh my god, this is incredible!” then you realize it’s because you’re rewriting another song that already exists by accident. That’s happened to me. It’s happened to everyone who writes songs and anyone who says it doesn’t happen is lying. [laughs] Hopefully you catch them before you put them down on tape and someone goes, “Umm, that’s something else”.

I literally had that the other day. I had this melody and I was like, “This melody is fucking amazing! I love this! I’m gonna use this” and then I realized that it was a song by a band called Armoured Man who are one of my favourite bands right now. I’d been listening to them a lot recently and it was just like, “That’s why that felt so obvious!” Everyone is haunted by the story of the song “Yesterday” that Paul McCartney just woke up with the melody in his head one day and couldn’t figure out where it came from and just wrote it down. It just came to him and you hope that you’re having a similar moment but more often than not you’re just stealing someone else’s shit. [laughs]

[laughs] It’s just paying tribute, that’s all.

Yeah, it means I like that song. It’s a powerful song. For those who haven’t listened to Armoured Man, they should listen to them. They are an incredible band. That song is called “Storms” and it’s very, very good.

Speaking of adding parts that call back to different songs, “Letters” has a drum fill inspired by Snapcase. How did that come about?

Yes! I regard arrangement as a subsidiary process of songwriting. The chords used and the topline melodies is the songwriting stuff but stuff like, “How’s the bassline go? How’s this drum part go?” is a later stage of the process for me. This album is the first album that I’ve made with Callum on drums and he’s unbelievable. He’s just so fucking good. He’s like a fun toy, there’s nothing he can’t do. We were kind of messing around with starting that song in various different ways with the guitar part, with the four-count, with the vocal, whatever it might be. Then we were like, “We’ll start with the drum fill” and Callum threw a couple of bits and bobs around. I just had this thing in my head about the song “Caboose” which starts with this sick drum fill and I played it to Callum - who was not familiar, I have to say - and he came up with his own little spin on that drum fill. I was hanging out with the Snapcase guys the other night in Buffalo. I don’t know them well but they are lovely people.

Have they heard the song?

I didn’t actually mention it when we were hanging out the other day. [laughs] Maybe I should!

On the album you confront aging and talk about how anger is so important as you get older. What’s helped you retain that anger?

I would say it’s more a case of rediscovery in a way. When I was a kid, I was furious about everything. Everything was black and white and I knew the answer because I was 17 or whatever - that’s how most people are at that age. Like most people, I went through the process of understanding that life is more complicated than I thought it was as a kid and there are gradations of grey between the black and the white. The really important thing to do with your time and your energy is to try to see the world from other people’s points of view and to understand other perspectives and understand that you don’t know everything, in fact you know almost nothing at all. I do endorse all those things but I think it is possible to go a little far down that road and almost argue yourself out of having any opinion at all. [laughs]

I hope it’s clear to people that I’m not a fan of Donald Trump but I do think it’s important to try to understand why some people vote for Donald Trump and see their perspective and where they’re coming from, not least if you want to persuade them out of that opinion. Every now and then you have to slightly slap yourself on the side of the head and remind yourself that you’re talking about this failed game show host, semi-fascist dickhead. And it’s not just political. I’ve had a moment in recent years, and I think the pandemic helped with this, of cutting out some of the dead wood in my personal life a little bit. Kind of going, “Hey, fuck you. I don’t need your negative energy in my life” sort of thing. I’m retaining a little bit of sovereignty almost, the ability to defend yourself and defend your time and your energy and your emotions.

On the album, and especially the title track “Undefeated”, you work in quotes from psychotherapist Irvin Yalom. What does his work mean to you? How did it influence your writing?

I should say incidentally, there’s also some Gabriel García Márquez and some Clive James in that song as well. Every now and then I do a slightly more literary pastiche kind of song and that’s definitely one of them. Autumn of the Patriarch is a book by Gabriel García Márquez which is a phenomenal piece of writing. The line, “Grateful that you got this far” is a Clive James quote, so there’s a few nods in that one.

For Irvin Yalom specifically, he’s a legendary psychotherapist and so was his wife. His wife got sick and they started joint-writing a book about illness and she died and he finished the book. So for the first two-thirds of the book, it’s one chapter each and then at the end, it’s just him. It’s phenomenal and utterly heartbreaking. I just found that book to be very profound.

On a personal level, I have engaged with therapy in the last few years as a concept after having been very skeptical about it for the first 35 years of my life. I was raised in a stiff-upper-lip British family and then I got into Henry Rollins, so talking about my feelings was not on my to-do list. [laughs] But you reach that moment in time when you realize that listening to your favourite records again is perhaps necessary but not sufficient to care for your mental health.

In the book there’s a wonderful line, “Giving up on hope for a better past” which I think is such a beautiful thing. It’s so humbling to me. It’s like, “Stop spending your days and your energy and your time wishing that things that you can’t change would have been different because it’s a waste of energy”. I found that very, very comforting so it made it into the song. You can spend your waking hours trying not to make the same mistake a second time or something like that, of course, but you can’t change the past and you have to find your peace with it.

On “Somewhere Inbetween” you’re talking about imposter syndrome, alienation, and dissociation. What do you do when you feel those things rising up?

Sometimes I have panic attacks and sometimes I go for a long walk or talk to a friend or something. [laughs] There are better and worse coping strategies to deal with that stuff. The disassociation thing is a really big thing for me and I have spent many hours talking to therapists about this. I have a more than usual, more than healthy, disconnect with large chunks of my past. The song sort of talks about this with, “My memories seen through a window, like something I don't really own”. Huge chunks of my childhood really, really don’t feel like they happened to me in a way that instinctively feels quite unhealthy to me. I’ve been trying to square that circle and find more connection with it in order to make peace with it because - without wanting to be self-pitying or melodramatic - there’s vast chunks of my early years that were not happy, partly inflicted externally and partly self-inflicted. Trying to find accommodation and trying to find peace with that is something that occupies my waking hours. [laughs] I’m aware that this is all solipsistic shit to talk about.

Imposter syndrome is something that I have a lot of and I spend most of my day waiting for the reality police to knock on my door and tell me there’s been a huge mistake and all of the privileges bestowed on me by my life were meant for somebody else. I find it quite surprising that a lot of the people I talk to after shows wouldn’t expect me to feel like that. I’m not quite sure how they would expect me to feel and I certainly hope they don’t think that I would swan around with my thumb up my ass thinking that I’m brilliant. [laughs] But people are surprised when I tell them that I’m really not sure what value, if any, what I do has. I do genuinely feel like that most of the time. I don’t claim any great importance for what I do, certainly. I do my best, but does it matter in the grand scheme of things? If I got run over by a truck tomorrow, would the world suffer enormously? I’m not sure. I would hope in my personal life that would have some impact on people, but the world would keep turning.

It’s pretty raw territory to get into emotionally, lyrically, psychologically, and all those kinds of things. I have this thing that I call the Wince. The Wince is when I write a couple of lyrics down while I’m writing a song and it makes me go, “Ahh! [winces]” Then I'm like, “Keep that in because you just provoked a reaction in your first potential audience”. I’ve always had a taste for those moments in music that are unretractable. Arab Strap are one of my favourite bands and so much of what Aidan Moffat says is just like, “Fucking hell, dude! Did you just say that out loud? Yikes!” I appreciate that, so I try to bring some of that into what I do.

Is there anything that helps you open up in your lyrics?

Ignoring the world. [laughs] Seriously, I think it can be quite paralyzing to spend so much time thinking about how what you write is going to be received. I think you have to be loyal to your own judgment and a lot of the time that means not thinking about what people will think of you while you’re writing. That, incidentally, is my theory as to why a lot of bands' early records are better than their later records. They get used to being assessed and judged. It’s a completely understandable human reaction to that to start hedging your bets a bit and maybe censoring yourself because you’re worried about what people are going to think about what you say. When you first start writing songs, you don’t think anyone is going to think anything because you don’t know if anyone is ever going to hear them and therefore it has this kind of nakedness to it. I’m aware that somebody somewhere can scoff at what I’m saying and say, “That’s exactly like you, man. I hate your early records” or whatever, and fine, I don’t care. I do think about this and I try and retain that sacrosanct space for songwriting where I don’t think about, “I’m going to play to 1, 000 people in Bozeman” and just be like, “How does this feel as a song?”

That’s really important because at the end of the day, it’s with you forever.

Yeah, exactly. I have to stand by the music I put out into the world. [laughs]

You’re [currently on] the Canadian leg of your tour and you’ll also be playing your first Canadian Lost Evenings festival in Toronto later this month. Do you have any Canadian touring rituals or traditions?

When I was growing up in the 90s in the UK, - and this might sound terribly fusty but this was pre-internet - I didn’t really make that much distinction between Canadian and American bands because in a lot of cases, there wasn’t really a way of me knowing if a band was Canadian rather than American. They were just “North American” or from “over there”. As time went by, I figured out that a surprisingly large chunk of my music taste was Canadian like Propagandhi and Weakerthans and Joel Plaskett, who I adore. I was obsessed with Constellation Records and the whole Montreal post-rock scene like Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In recent years I’ve been listening to stuff like PUP - who are one of my favourite bands. I don’t really know why but it was like, “I guess I’m pro-Canadian”! [laughs] I love Arkells, I love Neil Young, I love Joni Mitchell, and on and on we go.

I feel good in Canada. I feel comfortable there. I don’t have any specific routines and stuff. I have to be careful about this but poutine, goddamn. Put poutine in me. Don’t do it too close to showtime, otherwise there will be a disaster because I’ll just be lying on the ground kind of panting because I stuffed my face with poutine. Poutine is a remarkable thing. I’m very pro-poutine over here.

Talking about great Canadian bands, you have so many playing Lost Evenings including NOBRO, The OBGMs, Thunder Queens, and The Dirty Nil. How do you decide which bands to put on the bill?

Quite often my aim for Lost Evenings is to have a local-dominant bill. I was trying to get it this year so we’d have a 100% Canadian bill but there are two exceptions. One of which is Henry Rollins and the other one is Murder By Death who are old, old friends and I love them to pieces so that works too. The problem with what I just said is a lot of bands are bigger in their hometown than they are anywhere else in the world. For example, Arkells would probably open for me in the UK or in the USA but no fucking way are they going to open for me in Toronto. [laughs] So it can be a little bit of a poisoned chalice on that level.

I love putting the bill together. It’s mostly me but there are suggestions from friends and promoters and of course, it depends on who’s available, who wants to do it, who we can afford, and all that kind of thing. I don’t want to get too heavy-handed about this but I do think about diversity on the bill and trying to have female representation on the stage and all that stuff as well but again, that’s kind of constrained by who’s available and wants to play. There’s a million different directives going into it but I’m really proud of the bill this year.

NOBRO in particular are one of my fucking favourite bands in the world right now. I think they are absolutely sensational and I’m really, really stoked to see them again. I really love their record. We played a couple shows with them in March this year and I was blown away by them live. I think OBGMs are phenomenal. Dirty Nil I was not familiar with until my booking agent suggested them and I dove into their stuff. I was like, “Where the fuck has this band been hiding!?” Special shoutout for Northcote, Matt Goud, who is one of my fucking favourite songwriters ever and indeed, one of my favourite human beings. He’s a total sweetheart and we’ve toured with him before. Excited to have him on the bill as well. As you say, there’s loads of great bands.

You’ll also be playing 4 different sets over the course of the weekend. What goes into putting your setlists together for each show?

Well, it’s tough. Every year I write the setlist for Lost Evenings a good 3 or 4 months before the festival. The nights are themed and I tend to work backwards. There will be a few repeats across the nights but as few as possible. We have a first 5 albums set, a “punk rock” night, a solo night, and a "greatest hits" night. It’s challenging because you’ve gotta have a certain amount of “big hitters” to make any set work and manage the energy flow and all this stuff. I spend so much time thinking about this, it’s boring. [laughs]

The guys in the Sleeping Souls refer to Lost Evenings as the annual exam because we play so many fucking songs every year. I’ve got soundcheck in a few minutes and one of the things we’re doing at the moment on this tour is running old songs during soundcheck. This is how we prepare for Lost Evenings as we tour up to it, we do a shitload of soundcheck rehearsal. Once the actual festival is up and running, it’s really funny, because we get to the end of the first full band night and everybody is like, “Clear the decks for the short-term memory of those songs, they’ll come up again next year!” Then by the time you get to the last night, it’s easy.

What are you looking forward to the most about Lost Evenings in Toronto?

I’m really honoured that Henry Rollins is doing a set. That’s absolutely huge for me. When I was a kid I got a book called Get In The Van that Henry wrote about his touring years with Black Flag. I read that book over and over and over again like it was an instruction manual crossed with the Bible. It’s largely responsible for what I do with my life. The fact that he’s on the bill is a huge, huge honour for me.

I’m stoked for all of it. I’m particularly stoked for the NOBRO show. I think that’s gonna be really cool. If I’m allowed to blow my own trumpet for two seconds, it’s the biggest Lost Evenings yet. We’ve gone up a few hundred tickets and that’s really exciting for me. I love Toronto. I would live in Toronto in a heartbeat. I’m excited to be in town. I’ve got a load of old friends and it’s gonna be fun.

What do you love the most about Toronto?

This is going to annoy and upset so many people but I’m gonna say it anyway - Toronto is like a manageably-sized New York that isn’t full of assholes. It’s like imagine if New York was smaller and full of nice people, I’m sold! It helps that I have a lot of really old friends in town and places I can drink and hang out and that sort of thing. There’s so many great venues. It definitely feels homely for me.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

Excited for Lost Evenings in Toronto! Yes, I’m fucking aware that we’re not going east of Toronto on this run but we will! I’ve never been to Newfoundland and that’s on my hit list. We will get back to Quebec and Montreal and Halifax in good time, I promise.

Get the lobster rolls.

Exactly! I’ve gotta back back to New Brunswick because I have a New Brunswick tattoo.

Oh nice! What is it?

It’s just the province of New Brunswick. I was playing a show there and this guy in the front row was a tattoo artist. I was making a joke about getting a New Brunswick tattoo and he was like, “I’ve been tattooing here for 30 years and no one has ever got a New Brunswick tattoo”. I was like, “Fuck it! Where’s your shop?” and he was like, “Next door!” and I was like, “Let’s go!” So I have a New Brunswick tattoo.