JM: Well, I had nowhere else to go, really, but to get more real, you know? I couldn't get any less genuine. And I don't know what it was. I think - I do know what it is now because I've spent so long breaking it down. Part of it was like this, like, seven-year itch in a relationship with doing what I do for a living. I must have gotten bored or something, I don't know. I mean, I—
GR: And so what did you do?
JM: Anything I wanted to, that's the problem. That's the problem. I did any- I think the salient problem was that I saw anything I wanted to do as a road worth taking, as if like I was this exception to every rule.
GR: Whether it was destructive or not.
JM: Yeah.
GR:And I guess I should clarify for people who don't know what you're talking about, these interviews you did with Playboy and Rolling Stone a few years ago where you made some sexually explicit - I'm certainly not going to go into details. It's not worth it.
JM: Yeah. I mean, I can actually talk about it now from the vantage point of, like, being out of it. I mean, I remember what it felt like. I'll never forget what it felt like. But I don't embody the feeling that much anymore because I just autopsied it so long, you know? And so for me, I remember going, like, well, I really want to do comedy. Well, should I be able to do comedy? Probably not. Like, if I had just been a dude off the street saying I want to do standup comedy, I don't think I would have been led on the stage, or not on whatever stage I went on. I would have had to be in Radisson or something, you know?
And so for me - and it took me two years of breaking down, breaking down, breaking down what this all was to realize, here's an opportunity that Rolling Stone or Playboy or whatever outlet is giving me to talk about my music, and I'm using this outlet to bomb at the Radisson. So I never would have been on the cover of Rolling Stone if someone had seen me do eight minutes on stage. But I was so confused as to why people were interested in what I had to say, why even some people - not even all people. I got those lines to crossed, and so when it came time to do these interviews where I had nothing to say, but I didn't want to be boring.
I got in the worst trouble ever over and over again in my life from the time I was 4 till two years ago because I didn't want to be boring. And I remember thinking to myself, well, this is Rolling Stone. We got to give a Rolling Stone interview. And that's the miscalculation, because all - the only thing you have to do is be honest. But I wasn't prepared to be honest, but I knew that I had to be open. When you're like just open because you think you need to be but not honest, then you start, sort of, free associating garbage, you know what I mean?
GR: I mean, it sounds like, in a sort of a weird way, what happened with those experiences was probably really important for you, like a wake-up call, that you needed...
JM: Yeah, it was.
GR: And you needed that.
JM: It's something that happens to control freaks. When you're a - when you think you're a mastermind and you think that you can correct your way out of anything, you will eventually learn that you cannot just correct your way out of everything. When you forget that the only reason people want to know your name is because of the music that you make that sometimes they want to hear. Some people don't like my music. What I was doing was thinking, like, if they don't like me, then there must be something they're missing. I'm going to do something for this guy so he says actually, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - turns out he's cool.
Well, the bottom line is you don't need to be interacting with that. But if you're a mastermind and a control freak, you say, I'm going to figure out a way to make that one guy say, he's not all that bad. And what ended up happening was I became so committed to the idea - which is not a reality - the idea of correction that I completely lost sight of what the original plan was, which is you make music for anybody who wants to hear it.
GR: It's becoming so much clearer where this record came from...
JM:Yes.
GR: Because this record is about you making that break from that part of your life.
JM: And it's a very difficult break to make. And, you know, maybe that's my greatest achievement is coming so close to having the last brain cell that remembered what it was I was here for disappearing.