Frank Ocean

PD: What new music are you into?

JM: Um, I had an M83 moment this summer, which was really cool. But I’m not plugged in like I used to be, you know. I love Frank [Ocean]’s stuff. Frank is such an interesting, deep, touched, wonderful guy. They don’t make a lot of other Frank Oceans, and the guy is looking for another. And the way that his mind works is craving the same frequency that he’s able to communicate on, and I think he’s just searching for that kind of depth that he has inside of himself in someone else. He’s fascinating to me. He’s so great.

PD: It’s pretty incredible how open he is about everything and how receptive people are.

Yeah. I think it has more to do with just being that expressive about anything in this day and age, and the depth of his writing. I think it’s as much about taking a stand against being fucking boring as it is about sexuality. It’s about standing up and going, “I know what you’re going to say about this, and I don’t care.” And I think that was the heroic part. I know there were parts that were heroic for other people. For me, it’s just the heroic self-expression. You don’t even need publicists anymore – people are just as scared for themselves as the publicists would be.

PD: Are we going to hear from you more?

JM: I try, you know, I try. My problem is that as soon as an idea of mine that’s in my head, in a very safe place, sort of hits the oxygen, I immediately begin criticizing it in the voice of other people. And I need to stop doing it. I’m nowhere near as brave as I was saying Frank is. With Frank, there’s a sincerity to it.  And I need to sort of get back – I haven’t really expressed any ideas. I’m dealing with expressing ideas to you for the first time, going, “Look, print it however you want to print it.” The difference here is that the things that I’m saying are true to how I feel.

People are trying to make records based off of one part of "Pyramids." "Pyramids" is a mothership that blacks out the sun in the sky. And people are making records just trying to take one piece—it's like a broken alien ship and people are trying to find technology from it. It's like, Oh we figured out time travel from this tiny little wire! Everybody wants to make "Pyramids." You can say "Pyramids" is like Coldplay "Clocks" was in the early 2000's where it spawns an entire generations of songwriters.

“Around 2011, the idea returns that being stingy with melody is what’s cool, and it was, because people had gone too extreme with being so melodic. Now we love asymmetrical song composition — as perfected by Frank Ocean. Post-’Pyramids,’ we go, ‘I could be melodic, but I choose not to. I’m not going to paint a face, I’m going to paint shapes.’ Then everyone spoofs that and you get people painting impressionistic shapes — and at a certain point, people go, ‘I really wanna see a face again!’ No offense to anyone doing triangles, but I wanna see humanity in the music, and for me, Sob Rock is this cautious return to how powerful it is to hear wide intervals played loudly on a synth. Cinematic, orchestral, operatic kind of things, used sparingly and cautiously — that’s the 8%.”