The Paranoid Style in American Rock
An Interview with the Singer and Songwriter Elizabeth Nelson
I was already a fan of The Paranoid Style before I heard a note of their music. Elizabeth Nelson, who formed the band with her guitarist husband Timothy Bracy (of the noted Athens, Ga. band The Mendoza Line) in 2012, confirmed via email or social media such as X Twitter that The Paranoid Style was named after the book that almost made me an American History major in college: Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The influential title essay (which can be downloaded for a dollar or two as an iBook) examined and defined the radical right-wing movement and players such as the John Birch Society that had gotten Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president in 1964.
"I think what strikes me about the portions of the American right that Hofstadter addresses is the aggressive strangeness of the core movement — that it has its own customs and indeed a particular style — a fashion aesthetic even, and how outrageously weird it tends to be," Nelson wrote in an email. "I was beginning the band at the time of the proto-MAGA “Tea Party Movement” where all these Obama-birther people were showing up at congressional town halls dressed up in Revolutionary War garb and shouting down their representatives, Democrats and Republicans, and just thinking: my god this is so nuts."
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain JFK's vice president and former Senate Majority Leader and Democrat of Texas (chew those words for a moment) trounced Goldwater in the 1964 election's Electoral College, 486-52. It appeared to usher in a liberal current in American life, pushing this right-wing extremism to the edges. Not quite. Assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the Black Power movement, all led to a political realignment. Goldwater had won his home state, Arizona, but also swept the once solidly Democratic Deep South states from Louisiana through South Carolina. Richard Nixon's 1968 Southern strategy was being born, the backlash against liberalism begun. As Nelson sings in "The Findings," the final track of the new Paranoid Style album, The Interrogator (Bar/None Records): "The youth movement always prevails/And then the youth movement always fails/They've got terrible timing."
Nelson sings her sometimes enigmatic but truth-packed lyrics like a blend of Patti Smith reciting poetry, and Debbie Harry out on the town. No frills. Not too loud, conversational, but with hop. The band, which now includes guitarist Peter Holsapple, has opened its tight fist a bit, but it still punches with ferocity. The Paranoid Style is a worthy successor of the artists that influence Nelson's words and music: The Clash, Elvis Costello, the Mekons, the Replacements, Warren Zevon. In Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide, the last three Paranoid Style albums have earned the grade of A, including A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life (2019) and For Executive Meeting (2022).
Nelson is also an esteemed music journalist and critic: She's one of the few who have been profiled by The New Yorker and written for the magazine. I think aside from essayist Amanda Petrusich, she's one of the great rock critics of her generation, with an uncanny ability to understand the sensibilities of rock before she was born, without adding the distorting, patronizing, P.C. lens. She sometimes practices this by doing her own Consumer Guide length X Twitter posts, like this one:
Dumbstruck by circumstances of their own device, the Stones' ‘Sticky Fingers’ navigates its forty-six minute run time with the narcotized moxie of a concussed boxer blindly flailing on. Dead flowers, hospitals nights and moonlight miles left to go. The best LP ever about fatigue.
For many years, Nelson worked for education non-profits in Washington, D.C., the perfect place for her to observe that original-to-her place where the Deep State meets the history of rock and roll. She also plays and writes about golf. The following interview was done by email. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why did you name your band The Paranoid Style?
It seemed to me a phrase that vibrates with a certain truth about who we are. It rattles around in your brain, makes you feel uncomfortable. It’s a great coinage: the disjunction of those words together. I could see it on a tee-shirt, done up in Yardbirds letters. Some people thought it was a dumb thing to call my band — that it wouldn’t fly in hip circles like “Arcade Fire” or something — and I guess in a sense that was true. But I don’t dissuade easily.
Do you consciously or unconsciously think you write songs from the point of view of "the paranoid style," instead of love songs, personal songs, or even "topical" terms. How does this view suit you as an artist?
I mean, I’m a normal person. I cry at the end of Defending Your Life. I was hoping Ross and Rachel would work it out. I don’t spend my free time reading policy papers. But I always thought the aesthetic posture of my songs in the Paranoid Style was sort of like Rick Blaine from Casablanca. The problems of two people amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world — that type of thing. You feel things deeply, but there must be a hierarchy of consequentiality. Joe Strummer is like this too. That curiosity about things other than yourself seemed to me a great inspiration and example. So, I have my love songs, but they are sort of governed around that idea. They're just songs, it’s not an x-ray of my soul or anything.
Are there any songs on "The Interrogator" about the workings of a secret state? There is literal paranoia involved. Or are they more about, or as much about, the state of rock and roll, rather than the state of our nation?
My idea for the record was to examine what feels like the unscalable ethical challenges of our times, and how we are all in some way made to feel complicit with the cruelty and depravity of our systems. The way society is engineered, there doesn’t seem to be a sane way to disengage from the very factors that are causing war and pogroms, global water shortages, inconceivable wealth disparity and limitless human misery. You drive on the roads and you shop in the stores and you communicate through the same channels that are built and owned and operated by malign forces, and in some way, this implicates you in that same agenda. But what are you going to do? It’s an awful feeling. So, my idea for the record was to examine the nature of a tenable morality given the circumscribed context. What can you strive for that is achievable? That’s what a song like “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” is about, to me. Can you find anything worth preserving in your heart, or are you just going to give in to what feels like a world which has been condemned? It’s a gospel song, really.
When you write rock songs about or referring to economics, political figures, rather than love songs, or personal songs, are you trying to make points, to educate the listener, or is just the way you roll? I'm thinking about when you and musical storyteller par excellence Patterson Hood had a lovely discussion about songwriting, and you said, something to the effect of, your personal life wasn't as interesting to you as writing about [former Federal Reserve chairman] Alan Greenspan?
My only criteria for a song is if it’s something I find interesting. I don’t have any particular intention of educating anybody, though it is true that I learned a lot of my history through people like Woody Guthrie and the Clash. If someone takes an interest in something because of a song of mine, that’s a tremendous compliment. But it isn’t the intention I begin with. There are things I am personally passionate about — the history of the Irish struggle for independence, for instance — because that is my heritage. ["The Return of the Molly Maguires"]. My ancestors fought those fights, and they were brave men and women. I want the struggles of those who sacrificed themselves to be remembered, and it’s my way of remembering and honoring them. Someone like Alan Greenspan — I mean, that’s just an incredibly interesting person, who exerted a terrible influence for decades and decades. People don’t think of him as a pivotal person in the 20th century, but really he was. He was like the Kissinger of American economic policy. And he championed, basically, the unchecked will-to-power of wealth holders and the power elite. Everyone else is just there to be ground down into paste. I mean, what a legacy. So, yeah, that sort of thing is interesting to me.
Is it true that you submitted "Client States" in lyric form to Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs magazine, dedicated to the late Henry Kissinger, but they rejected it because they said they don't publish poetry? Is this a plausible inference to be drawn from the song?
Ha ha! Kissinger is back in the interview!! Totally plausible inference. My idea was about a song that addressed the ways in which personal relationships and relationships between allied nations often operate along the same lines. It’s pretty realpolitik. The K-man would approve.
You name drop other rock songs or lines. "I Love the Sound of Structured Class" itself is a play on Nick Lowe's "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass," which appears to be about a "back-bench"congressman with all the corrupt ruling class bona fides: "been to jail, been to Vail." It also includes references to "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere," "Sympathy for the Devil," and "Highway 61." Almost every other song does that to a degree. How did that become a signature of your songwriting, or why?
I don’t know, exactly. It’s not something I’m fully conscious of, and sometimes I’m not even aware of having done it at all — the song reference thing. People point it out to me later. I’m naturally a very shy person, and when I was younger I didn’t have a ton of friends, but I did have a ton of records, and I always felt like I was sort of in conversation with them. That might be part of it. To the extent that I am conscious of it, I will say that one of the records I listened to a lot while writing the songs on The Interrogator is Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft, which is just brimming with references to old folk and country and gospel songs, and I love the feeling that gives it. That sense of continuity and history, the sense that the music is haunted and enlivened by the past.
Does it have something to do with being both an esteemed critic yourself? Does your critic brain ever conflict with your music-making brain, esp. considering the deep and precise acuity you display as a critic.
No, I don’t particularly think it has anything to do with doing music criticism. I have been writing songs much longer than I have published criticism — since I was a teenager. I didn’t consider that I would become a cultural critic of any sort, although I always read critics like Ellen Willis and Pauline Kael, so I had a certain grasp of the vernacular. But I was surprised as anyone when writing opportunities started to come up. Someone wanted to pay me actual money to write about Charles Portis or Carole King or CCR?
In "That Drop is Steep" you sing, "something about rock and roll makes me nervous for the future...makes it difficult to sleep." Are you taking a broad view of rock's declining cultural eminence, as Pete Townsend might describe it in a conversation, or your personal ambivalence about "making it" as the great albums build up, and the Paranoid Style's possible emergence as a performing rock band, which has not been its reputation so far?
To me, “That Drop Is Steep” is all about hubris and physics: that which goes up must come down. I would say that holds true for anybody, any entity, no matter who you might be. There ain’t no going back when the foot of pride comes down. We did the song in the style to evoke the original Byrds in their sort of high psychedelic mode, I guess it was kind of a thematic response to “Eight Miles High,” but also “So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star.” The idea of the late ‘60s as a sort of highwater mark for rock ‘n’ roll Babylon that segues into the dislocation and weirdness of the ‘70s and the generally unraveling that follows from there has always been a source of fascination to me. Everything seemed to be cresting into a kind of Valhalla of American dominance in the economic and cultural sectors coming out of the post-WWII boom, and then all of sudden it turned sideways and crazy and self-cannibalizing. People started doing the wrong kinds of drugs and thinking they were gods. Greed and paranoia set in. And the drop from that moment has been precipitous, and scary. So, the song is sort of about that pivot point.
I hear the last three songs as a suite: something happened at "The Formal"; maybe nothing too horrible, but it was necessary. Then "Print the Legend," a newspaper line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" that means, protect the guilty. Then you have "The Findings," in which you coin the memorable phrase: "The youth movement always prevails/then the youth movement always fails/They've got terrible timing." This is a truism. Explain?
You’re right, I did intend them as a kind of suite. They’re all songs about how hope and violence seem to run on parallel tracks and violence seems always to prevail. Sometimes I wonder if mercy really stands a chance. It’s the only thing we have to cling to — Leonard Cohen said “love’s the only engine of survival” — and I believe that is so. But there seems to be something innately cruel about the way nation-states and corporations behave in the world, a deep, tribal cruelty that threatens to extinguish all hope. That’s what I mean about the youth movement — you see these passionate movements emerge, and you see them make real headway, and then you see them wither and disappear or turn toxic in the face of entrenched powers which are essentially faceless and implacable. The anti-labor movements, the anti-democratic movements, the woman haters and racial demagogues, the weapons industries, the climate destroyers — they are seemingly unkillable, barely even woundable. And it is difficult, given all that, to forge ahead. It might be better just to give up. But I won’t give up.
When did you first pick up a golf club? First course played? Hardest course played? Do you ever use a golf club as an air guitar, or a guitar as an air golf club?
I probably swung a golf club when I was a child, not that it helped my game much. I grew up surrounded by working class munis in Northport, Long Island: Crab Meadow, Sunken Meadow, the course at the Veterans Administration, which my folks belonged to because my dad was in the Navy. My folks don’t live too far from Bethpage Black, so I’ve stepped on those grounds. Big mistake. As for using a golf club as an air guitar: you’re goddamn right! Any excuse at all!!
Is "The Ballad of Pertinent Information" about Jeffrey Epstein, or someone like him?
No, that wasn’t what I was thinking when I wrote it, but I’d be curious to hear that interpretation. I’m a firm believer that I learn a lot about my own songs from trusted listeners. What’s happening on the unconscious level can be as important as what is happening on the conscious level.
Do you think "Last night in "Chickentown" could be covered by Springsteen? Or Fiona Apple?
Oh god yes.
"Styles Make Fights" is "Rudie Can't Fail," I think, reggae, or at least the Bo Diddley beat that led to bluebeat and early ska filtered through the Clash. Are the Clash one of your pivotal bands?
In every way conceivable the Clash are my North Star.
Speaking of which, I know that Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy are faves of yours, and both "the boys are back in town" band and U2's "Unforgettable Fire(s)" get shout outs in the "Return of the Molly Maguires." For listeners not so familiar with Irish and Irish-American history, why have you invoked the Molly Maguire's return? How does what they did and their fate speak to today?
The Molly Maguires were a loosely affiliated gang of pro-labor Irishmen who fought back against exploitative landholders and mine bosses in England, Ireland and the Pennsylvania Valley in the 19th century. Their tactics could be extreme, even violent. But their context was violent as well — they were protecting workers from all kind of intimidation perpetrated by the landlord class: hired thugs, Pinkertons, withholding of wages, slave-like conditions. This is how the poor in Ireland and Irish immigrants fought back to protect their families. Eventually, six of them were hanged under government orders in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, which essentially culminated the movement. But it is said that their ghosts still linger in Liverpool and Dublin and the Carbon County jail, sending shivers up the spine of the landed gentry. After all, everything that dies someday comes back.
What was your government job, or is that above my pay grade and "need to know" classification? Could you give a general description?
I worked for a decade and a half in the field of education policy research, mostly at the New York based non-profit MDRC. My boss there, who is a big deal in that world, played bass on the last two records. William Corrin. It’s an exceedingly noble calling but a hard job. Basically, we would partner with the Department of Education and use grant funding to intervene at low-performing schools with programs to assist in literacy. Anyway, that was my thing. I spent a lot of years traveling to underserved school districts in America, as part of these interventions. That was a real eye-opener in terms of really understanding the ravages of income inequality, and the incredibly unlevel playing field the impoverished classes of our society are up against . . . Anyway, the burnout rate is pretty high in that field, and I burnt out. A few years ago I took a job writing copy for Fender guitars, which is what I do now. It’s a great American company, but I do feel guilt about leaving the nonprofit world, and suspect I will be back at some juncture. Service was a big thing that was drilled into me growing up, and I still have that ringing in my ears.