“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.”
This is the kind of conversation you end up having about a record like this one, a sprawling psychedelic suite built from abrupt and disorienting detours and schizoid shifts of voice, its manic energy forever pulling the tablecloth out from under classic pop orchestration. One minute you’re squarely in the realm of biographical fact and a moment later you’re having a discussion about lucid dreaming and how Jones once punched up a dream set on a soccer field by willing himself to experience it from the POV of the ball. But maybe that’s just another story about grabbing the wheel of your own hallucination; maybe this pertains to the music after all.
What you can hear on this record are the marks left by conversion experiences, two in particular. First there’s Jones’ formative encounter with the Beatles’ White Album, the Fabs record most obviously composed by four Beatles rowing in different directions, and the beginning of what Jones calls “this British Invasion of my soul,” which is still ongoing. Second, there’s Syd Barrett, cracked vessel of Pink Floyd’s most intergalactic ambitions, and the “falling-down-the-stairs” quality of his solo work in particular. “I was dating a girl who was obsessed with him,” Jones remembers, “and the fact that I’d never heard him really pissed her off. So we went and got The Madcap Laughs and we listened to it and I could see why it pissed her off.”
A few more germane facts: The Mother Stone was recorded at Valentine Recording Studios, where everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa once logged time, refurbished to time-capsule retro standards in 2015 by studio manager and Mother Stone producer Nic Jodoin. Jones brought his collection of battered Yamahas and Casios up from the barn and played them alongside vintage equipment from Jodoin’s collection. Working in a real studio gave Jones a chance to slow his creative process down. They built the songs up from acoustic guitar, let them sit a while, circled back. Sometimes Jones and his girlfriend would decompress at the Shakey’s down the street, home to a range of acceptable video-arcade options. “They got that thing where you throw it in the clown’s mouth,” Jones says. “That’s fun. I like the look of those clowns.”
Maybe the clowns are the key. This isn’t a concept album, it’s a parade led by multiple unreliable narrators who rail against the universe and profess their love and vacate the stage before we can ask them a question. The circus comes to town, the circus leaves town. A young man from suburban Texas winds up and a clown opens its mouth as wide as the sky.
--Alex Pappademas