Zach Condon of Beirut: ‘Music is quite mysterious, really’

The 35-year-old American singer and songwriter has spent lockdown retracing his musical path, delving through his archives for what has become a double album of early songs and rarities entitled Artifacts.

Condon says his own “obsessiveness” inspired this project to expand from a modest vinyl reissue of his first EP, Lon Gisland, into a 26-song compendium charting the evolution of Beirut from home recordings he made as a 14-year-old to a full formed band whose records have embraced a wide span of world music.

“Just digging for a couple of songs ended up being like ‘well, what other B-sides do I have?’ Then I thought ‘would people be interested in the early works?’” he says. “I started to see this story, this progression, of me finding my sound. I stumbled into it. It was meant to be just one LP with maybe just a couple of songs on the back and I filled the whole thing up – and another record.”

Condon says he was “already primed” for a period of introspection, having ended “a pretty rough 2019” cancelling two tours. “The first one that I ended was hell, I had been on steroids and antibiotics the whole time just in order to stay up,” he says. “It was my body refusing to go on. What I had done was I cancelled the two hours and I had run away, I was really quite frightened by the whole scenario.

“I was up in Norway. I went to escape and relax and I ended up bringing all of my modular synth equipment, so I was writing songs and I was up there in the dark, going over everything, kind of re-observing my whole life anyway because you need to figure out why is my body telling me not to do this, why is my mind going crazy, why am I the way I am.

“So I was already in that state when the suggestion to re-release this thing came up and as I was doing it I found revisiting everything was quite intense, it was not just light and easy ‘Oh look at this, isn’t that interesting? Funny, I forgot when I learned to play that instrument’, it was much heavier in some ways too. I feel like I reframed my youth, to be honest, probably from 14 to when my first record came out.”

Condon’s earliest recordings began as a way of coping with childhood insomnia. “There’s always these images of the tortured artist, people have always associated the two together, and I always thought that was utterly ridiculous until I looked at my own life a little bit,” he says. “I saw that this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens for a reason, and that type of obsession at that young age, to the point where I ended up dropping out of my school, dropping out of my social circles quite a bit, isolating and disappearing into a world of fantasy, that’s not a healthy response to life. However it has a silver lining and I’ve reaped the benefits of it, which is amazing and incredible, I would not change it, but it was interesting to look back and see.

“For me the domino effect started with this really bad insomnia. When I was younger than 11 I had traits of insomnia already, I just wouldn’t have known to call it such, and it wasn’t as spectacular as it suddenly became when I was 11. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and when I was about three years old we moved to Virginia on the East Coast of the States, right on the water for about five years. I was a really young kid there and we were really outdoors-y. There was a lot of trouble in my family, there was a lot of struggles with depression and all sorts of issues. My family was always quite a cold and isolated place to begin with.

“We moved back to New Mexico and moved multiple times. I think I was in Fifth Grade and it was like a switch was flicked and I would find myself staring at the ceiling all night until the sun rose, and I could only fall asleep when the sun rose, and I suffered through that, that was hell, my whole family could tell you about it because there were nights when I would wake everyone up because I was out and about doing stuff. Eventually I had enough, I couldn’t deal with it, but the house was so small everyone could hear everything I did, everyone got dragged into it, unfortunately.

“We finally moved to a house with more space, we even had separate rooms for me and my brothers, and I picked the one furthest away from everyone, because I knew I’d be up all night, and that’s what ended up leading me to (music). At first it was listening to music all night then eventually my older brother left a (tape recorder). Him and some friends started making music, they started with hip-hop, doing beats on a sampler and rapping over them, then they got really obsessed with ambient, avant-garde music like Stars of the Lid and Explosions in the Sky, they wanted to do this really slow, drone-y music, but when my brother left for college he left a four-track and I think from the first song I wrote I was 100 per cent hooked and it became this all-consuming obsession that ate up my entire life by the time I was 19.”

Beirut the band “happened overnight” while Condon was a student at the University of New Mexico. By that stage, he had already written most of his debut album Gulag Orkestar and played a concert with Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

“Jeremy heard my music and liked it and sent it to a record label and I got a phone call at school saying ‘We like your record, we want to put it out. Can you play a showcase at South By South West?’” he recalls. “The concerts I had played were just with a laptop because I had never had a band growing up, I never knew anyone in my town who had similar tastes, everyone was into punk, emo, hardcore. Then there was even the racial separation between the whites and the Hispanics, the Hispanics were into gangsta rap and stuff like that. No one was going on my path, so I quickly zeroed in on the College of Santa Fe where there were some students there who had asked me to play a concert once and afterwards this guy Paul (Collins) said, ‘My friend plays drums, I play bass if you ever think about making a real band’ and I essentially said, ‘Well, now I need one, I have no choice, it’s you or it’s nobody’ and they said ‘hell, yeah’. Overnight I pretty much assembled this ragtag team of people who had all played instruments but none of them were super experienced in any way with making music professionally. We were all just kids.”

Jazz was a key influence, along with the music of Italian cinema and Balkan folk – the latter also came from film. “I lived in this whole fantasy world that I had for myself so by the time that I dropped out of high school at 16 I would have been writing the music that you hear more on the third side of (Artifacts), I was working in this movie theatre. They were an arthouse cinema that only showed foreign films, they had these festivals – there was the French film noir festival that was a week of that stuff, then there was Italian, I was super into Fellini and the spaghetti western soundtracks even though I didn’t really watch those movies ironically. Now that I think about it I didn’t want to see the cowboy flicks because I grew up in cowboy country, my backyard was the set for those movies...there was nothing exotic about that to me, but the music was very exotic.

“What happened was I saw a Kusturica film, not even necessarily at the theatre, it might have been a recommendation from my older brother because he was a real cinephile. My brother was a strict teacher in some ways. I remember when I was about 12 coming home with something by Green Day or maybe The Offspring and he threw it out the window and was like, ‘you’re not listening to that garbage any more’. I remember he made me a mixtape and the first thing he put on it was Neutral Milk Hotel and I thought this I like, and then he would always push me. He would go much further than I did back then. At the age of 13 he was trying to get me into obscure German electronica like Alva Noto and the Clicks & Cuts compilations and Ryuichi Sakamoto. He was trying to get me to read Kiekegaard’s philosophy and he was educating me on these movies by Godard and Melville. I’m working at this theatre and I’m getting quite the education at home.

“As for the Balkan stuff, I was bored and frustrated with American and UK rock music at that point. All my friends listened to punk and it really felt quite oppressive. I had this secret love affair with synth pop as a young teenager and I eventually started listening to folk musics from around the world, first from these movies I was watching, and I was a trumpet player. I picked trumpet because I loved mariachi songs, as a kid we had these things in Santa Fe called fiestas, every end of August, early September the chilli harvest happens, we have all these local celebrations and mariachis play in the streets and on the bandstand in the plaza and it’s this really exciting time when Santa Fe feels like it’s more for the locals and less for the tourists, and I loved it.

“The mariachis to me were like rock stars, the trumpet players, all that stuff I thought was so incredible, but in New Mexico there was this tense racial divide, you don’t cross the line. I had a few Hispanic friends that I skateboarded with but outside of that the cultures didn’t mix. So I always considered myself more of a trumpet player than anything so when I heard brass music from the Balkans I thought it was like mariachi times ten, the intensity of it, the melody, the darkness, the drama, and as a teenager I was really drawn to that and blown away by it.”

Condon’s early songs were regularly named after towns and cities as a means of evoking places. While compiling Artifacts, he says he realised his penchant was a “flashback” to the country songs his parents played on road trips. “My parents couldn’t afford plane tickets so every year we would drive across the country once or twice, at least, and my parents were obsessed with country music,” he says. “My dad was also obsessed with The Beatles and Beach Boys, that was what I mainly grew up listening to, but whenever we were in the car we would listen to country music. We would drive through Oklahoma and my parents would put on the song You’re The Reason God Made Oklahoma. There would be a song about Tulsa and we rolled through Tulsa. I’ve Been Everywhere by Johnny Cash...every song was just place name after place name...That’s How I Got to Memphis, all these famous songs through just dropped city names and that evoked so much in people’s minds. I think that the truth is when I grew up I just put my own twist on that.

“I was listening to all this country music recently. I swore it off as a child because of my parents and teenage rebellion but I was up in Norway and I was blasting Arabic music and my partner was like, ‘Do you have anything mellower?’ I thought ‘I have jazz but I’ve been listening to that too much lately’ so I put on some country music, Hank Williams or something, and for the first time in my adult life I went ‘This is actually better than I thought, I’ve been avoiding it and I don’t know why’, but as the city names kept dropping by the end of the night I had this realisation and it was all coming back to me: that’s where it’s from, these country songs evoking a story simply by dropping a city name and writing a song around it. I thought it was funny that it came full circle like that.”

The endless experimentation with different instruments from trumpets and accordions to Wurlitzer and ukulele symbolises Condon’s restless spirit as musician. “Certainly I have my obsessions and then they come and they go,” he says. “If I force anything it doesn’t work. I’ve been asked a few times to write film soundtracks and when they ask you to do that they say ‘this scene is very serious and maybe a bit ominous and we want it to be very heavy’ and if I sit down at a piano and try to write in that moment my brain freezes and nothing happens at all. I end up writing a pop song or something quite simple and happy all of a sudden. If I don’t just follow the flow nothing happens.

“With instruments and such, what happens is you play one so long and you’ve heard a million times a C chord on this instrument, your minds stops registering it, it stops knowing where to go with it because you’re just so used to it. If you pick up a new instrument, a weird new keyboard or an accordion, and you play the same chord and all of a sudden all of these possibilities pop up magically out of nowhere. That’s why I keep jumping instruments.”

As a teenager Condon saw lyrics as little more than decoration for his music. Today, his attitude has changed a little but ostensibly he holds to his original belief. “I think a lot of musicians try too hard with lyrics, a lot of people put way too much power on lyrics,” he says. “Still to this day when people say they love music for the lyrics secretly in my head I think ‘I bet you like the music and you don’t realise it because that’s hard to describe why’, whereas maybe the story resonates very clearly so it’s easy to say why you relate to it, it’s easy for you to understand why you like it, but music is quite mysterious, really. It makes no sense in some ways.”

After excavating his past, Condon is already thinking of where he would like Beirut to go next. “I have an album that’s close to done,” he says. “I just finished mixing it very recently. I was actually supposed to go to London last month but I couldn’t because of the crisis. I was going to travel by train from Berlin but it got quite tricky. I ended up doing it remotely, which took a lot longer, but it’s finished and I will probably master it sometime this spring. I don’t know when I’ll release it but it did lead the way.”

He had been working on it in Norway and had intended to ask the rest of his band to add their parts remotely, but then reconsidered. “I was listening to all this stuff and I remembered the spirit of self-reliance that I used to have back when I found myself in a situation where I had, for whatever reason, no peers that were similarly inclined with music, there was no-one else interested in the same styles, no-one else that I trusted with the musical elements to not kind of take it in the wrong direction and I remember being charged by that, that kind of sense of me versus the world – not in a super combative way but just like I’m the only one who understands, and I decided from that point on to finish the album myself. I don’t think I will do this every time but for whatever reason, this needed to be done that way for me personally.

“I think it was very much based on the fact that midway through this record I stopped and listened to my whole archives and thought ‘I sure have done a hell of a lot on my own’.”

What is off the agenda is touring, Condon says, because it was “killing” him. “I never wasn’t falling apart on tour, I don’t know how I managed 15 years,” he says. “I hope that in a couple of years I will feel strong enough and healed enough to maybe do some concerts but not tour, maybe multiple nights in Berlin, Paris, London, for example. But if I’m being honest I think I could really hurt myself on the road if I ever tried to do that, at least now the way I am. It was quite a reckoning, I was really pushing it. It’s crazy the timing of it because it was 2019 that I was on the road and I cancelled two tours because both times I was so sick I couldn’t sing. I came to the conclusion that my body found the only way it could really get me to listen to it was to take my voice away.

“When I was in my mid-twenties if I felt like s*** I would just drink more the next day and if I had a 6am flight it didn’t matter, nothing my body or my mind told me I would listen to even. I just thought ‘I’m a professional musician, this is what I do, it doesn’t matter’. My body quite intelligently determined that the only thing I would ever listen to was something like that, so it would give me these throat illnesses I couldn’t get around no matter what I did.

“The Covid thing, it’s strange it happened after I decided I was not going to go on the road, all these other musicians are not going on the road either, everyone was introspective all of a sudden, but I had already made that decision to do that. In a way I was thinking ‘what a horrible tragedy’ but simultaneously I was thinking ‘I wasn’t planning on going anywhere anyway, it doesn’t really change my plans’.”

Artifacts is out on Pompeii Records on Friday January 28. www.beirutband.com