Well I wasn’t that old, in the scheme of life. I suppose if I’d started over at sixty-five it could’ve been a different story, but I was young. I wasn’t set in my ways. Still not. And it wasn’t much of a choice to leave, by the time I made the decision to go I felt I’d been run out. Every animal needs privacy, and I had none. I saw one magazine with a whole page dedicated to the coffee joints I’d been to, in the middle a big picture of me walking out of a shop with a latte or something. What the fuck is that? Who the fuck cares? I should probably watch what I say because I don’t want to piss off fans, but come on, the people who read those fucking tabloids have nothing to occupy them inward, they can only look out. If they had any sense of self they wouldn’t need to feed off the idiotic details of what clothes I wear or where I ate my breakfast.
It’s a compliment. It shows you’re special, so special that other people want to duplicate what you do to get close to where you are.
And where am I?
Living on an expansive estate outside London. So much money you don’t even know how much you have. Do you ever think about what the majority of people do every day?
He stopped walking and looked down at his feet, just for a second, before gazing off into the line of trees to our right. When he turned back to me his brow was furrowed.
I know most people work jobs from nine to five, live a mundane, regimented life that leaves little satisfaction. And much to desire. These things cross my mind. I’m not so distant from where they are, it’s just different for me. They say it’s lonely at the top and there’s reason for that. This isn’t a complaint, there’s nothing I want less than to be a cliché, but it’s an explanation.
Why don’t you think you get as much exposure here as you do in the United States? Why is England easier to live in? The argument could be made that this country is as equally as obsessed with celebrity as ours.
They are, I still have to be cautious about where I go. It’s not a lie that if I’d gone to a club last night I would’ve gotten my picture taken a few dozen times. But they only do it when you seek it out, they only try to capture you when you’re trying to be seen. We draw the things to us that we choose to attract. All these people who complain about the paparazzi really love it, for someone else who’s famous it’s fucking obvious. For months I could live my life comfortably, exactly how I’d like, and never show up in The Mirror or The Sun. It’s not difficult. But you get these people on the cover every other week and it’s clearly of their own choice. They love the attention and they put themselves in situations where they can get it. In the United States I’d have people waiting outside my gates, or taking photos of me at a restaurant. That happens here a fraction of the time, and I can avoid it if I’m careful. I tried grabbing for a normal life back home, this was a last resort. Here people don’t drive out to my house to take a picture of me in my backyard.
I’m surprised that’s the case, even after the scandal.
Well I went underground for so long. It’s been a year and a half of intentional isolation. It’s worn on me, but also been good. Creatively.
Why no musical releases, then?
The time wasn’t right. The musical landscape has been changing, rapidly, and I wasn’t sure where I fit in. I could sense the current way of business coming to an end and I didn’t want to jump in while the machine was on its last leg. I’m letting time pass to see what emerges, but I’ve been recording. The song I played you is the latest, but I’ve got fifty or sixty finished. Murphy and I have been ticking them off over the last year and I’m almost ready to release. I just don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it yet.
So I’m here for publicity? To put you back in people’s minds before the songs come out?
That’s one angle, sure. But don’t sell yourself short. There’s more to it than that.
I’m thinking a new release every six months. What I’ve noticed is attention spans have shortened, people find something, get obsessed, and then move on to the next thing that grabs their attention. I want to do three quick releases, one every six months, over the next year and a half. Let people hear the music, play it out, and then have a new one ready right as they’re ready to move on. There doesn’t seem to be the album anymore that holds people’s attention for twelve months, eighteen months.
What’s the last album you think did that?
Definitely something in the nineties, maybe Pearl Jam’s Ten. That seemed to stay popular forever, they slowly released single after single and it worked. It was a slow burner. A lot of those albums were. They picked up steam over time and stayed in the charts forever. I remember finally buying Ten and seeing the release date on the back, and I was blown away that it’d been released the previous year. And I had just then only heard the third single on the radio and thought, okay, I’ll give this a go. That doesn’t happen now. A third single coming out after an album has been on the market for a year?
We live with a different model now. Things evolved. What does your label think about the three-album plan?
They only have me for one more, so I really don’t care what they think. Hell, it’ll work to my advantage. Let them do all the publicity for the first one, and then I put out the other two myself.
That would be to your advantage.
Always. By design. I’m always thinking six moves ahead these days.
So you’ve got your comeback plotted out. Do you think people will care about your return? Do you ever fear that this cultural short attention span will mean you’ve been forgotten?
Not a chance. Most of the shit being put out now, and I do mean shit, doesn’t have an ounce of heart or soul to it. My music always has and it always will, and that’s why people buy my songs. And when mine don’t speak to people anymore, that’s when I’ll know I’m doing something wrong.
I was going through a lot of old interviews you’ve done, in preparation for this, and of course one that really stuck out to me was the Rolling Stone article you did a few years ago. I remember it coming out at the time and people commenting that you came across as both arrogant and paranoid, which struck people because those words never fit your persona. I guess the question is, do you recall that time of your life?
Of course.
How do you remember it?
Well. I remember it well. That was funny to me because I didn’t read the interview right when it came out. Most interviews that I do, I don’t ever read. But I remember being at a party in the States, I was in New York catching up with some friends. We were hanging out at my touring drummer’s apartment, not a lot of people and I didn’t know everyone, but it was comfortable. I was happy to be in a full room and to have the familiar tones of an American accent around. I don’t know where he came from or who he was affiliated with, but there was this loud-mouthed jackass there who didn’t like me from the start. I could tell, I pick up on people’s moods pretty easily, and this guy was a dark cloud. Probably just having a bad day, but because he was the type of guy who needs to be the alpha male at the party, and because I was there so he wasn’t, he tried to bring me down. It’s not that I purposefully steal a spotlight, but when I’m somewhere there’s always a lot of attention on me. I deflect it as much as I can to make other people comfortable, and the few friends I do have I have because they can deal with me being in the room and not feel the need to compete. But this guy didn’t like me, and right in front of everyone he uses a pause in the conversation to ask me what I did to the Rolling Stone journalist. What the fuck is that? How do you make it to your mid-twenties and hold a job, any job at all, and still not have maturity? He then asks if I was all right. I told him yeah, of course I was. I probably asked how he was doing, at that point I didn’t know what the reference to the interview meant. He says he’s doing great, and I ask him what he’s getting on about and he refers to the article again. I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t, I knew there had to be something in there. Eventually I left to go find one of
those twenty-four hour newsstands; you live in New York, you know the kind with that one dingy light overhead. I read my copy on a street bench under a lamppost, fucking blew me away. That ignorant journalist had cut up all my words and put them back together to create a story. I guess I wasn’t interesting enough, or he wasn’t talented enough to work with what I’d given him, because he’d gone and written some fiction. I remember the interview well, too. We had dinner, it was about three hours long, and he asked mundane fucking questions. I suppose I may have gotten a little belligerent. Maybe that article was retribution for shitty dinner conversation and a lack of an easy story, I don’t know. I was at a point in my life where nothing had been happening, I was content, I was with Charly and we were happy and it was kind of our John and Yoko phase, where we were just in love and doing whatever we wanted and for the first time in my life I was putting music second. That’s a boring fucking story to go to press with, if it’s not what you expected going in, and you don’t know how to write it. I’m sure. I answered all of his questions honestly and told him anything he wanted to know, we talked about the few projects I had going, but there just wasn’t much to tell so he came up with something. Any mention of me liking the seclusion of my life in England, he latched onto and expanded upon. Painted me like Howard Hughes, a recluse with mental issues.
I’m curious why you agreed to the interview in the first place, if there wasn’t a specific story.
Because I hadn’t done one in a long time, and Murphy was contacted by Rolling Stone and he felt it would be good exposure. Murph has an incredible ear, he’s an artist, but he’s also a businessman, first and foremost. He knows the importance of an image and keeping it fresh in the minds of the fans. He understands that I broke into the industry once and lightning doesn’t strike twice, and that this phase I was going through might be a period of happiness for me but at the other end, when I came out of the tunnel, if I came out of the tunnel and ever wanted to make music again, I would still need to be in people’s minds. Staying in the public conscience, he said. I agreed, it’s not like I thought it was a dumbfuck idea. I went along with it because I agreed with him. What ended up happening, though, was the guy they originally wanted to do the piece was reassigned to another story, a brighter star at that particular moment in time, a shinier object, and some young piece-of-shit rookie took his place. And that fuck ruined my image. Why do you think I haven’t done one of these in so long? My music is my image, controlled by me. As soon as anything leaves my sphere and my overview, I open myself up to getting fucked.
Well I appreciate your trust.
You would take that as a compliment.
He laughed and I joined him, relieved by the fact Darin was gradually warming.
I don’t know why he took that bend, but I was not in the state of mind he made me out to be. And the worst part is that because of his article, some ass at a party needles me and I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I leave a party for an hour and come back pissed off and essentially confirm the state of mind this hack journalist had painted me in. A self-fulfilling prophecy. They say Darin Caldwell is out of his mind and paranoid about the press and life, and here he is, raging about the press at a party in Manhattan in front of people he doesn’t know. Fucking awful.
And you feel there wasn’t any truth to the article? Is it possible you were drunk, or on something, and he only got that one snapshot of you? Anyone can have an uncharacteristic three hours.
I don’t lose control when I interview. That’s the first thing. I know better than to show up stoned. And when I only have a few hours with someone I keep a clear head. It wasn’t the first time around the block for me, Chris, I’m not a fucking amateur. I’d gotten dicked by journalists before, just never so flagrantly. Thing is, when you’re doing fifty interviews a year you can come off a little crazy in one and fans will read you in another magazine and they’ll offset. You follow? That was the other mistake. There was so much importance placed on this one article because I hadn’t said anything in so long.
So let’s talk about why you hadn’t sat down and given an interview in a while. You say you and Charly were simply happy and you liken yourselves to John and Yoko. Can you elaborate?
You might not be able to relate unless you’ve been simply content at some point in your life, and if you’ve never been utterly content, if you’ve never had long periods of happiness and not thought, Well this is fucking boring, you wouldn’t understand. It was months of unbroken happiness. Here’s a specific for you, I still remember it. Charly came to me one evening and asked if we could go out, have a nice dinner, maybe go dancing somewhere or see a movie. We never did things like that, we kept to ourselves and we ate at home and read books in the study, stretched on top of each other like cats, sharing a bottle of wine and reading passages to each other as they struck us. We digested so many books that way, hazily, days and nights and mornings receding away. We did not know time.
He coughed, cleared his throat, and swallowed hard.
Charly asked if we could go out, and of course I obliged, so we expanded on the idea and decided that if we were going out, we’d do it with style. I’d don a tuxedo, she an elegant evening dress, and we’d have Oscar drive us into London, we’d get slightly intoxicated on cocktails and wine and eat delicious food. We showered together, washed each other, something we did in those days because even spending a few minutes apart while the other showered was too complex a distance for us to manage. She tied my bowtie, and I zipped up the back of her dress. She was beautiful, she could give me pause with the way she did her eyes, the way her hair framed her face. It would pull me out of whatever I was doing and I’d take notice. I held her hand as we walked down the stairs. Oscar opened the front door for us, told us our reservation was waiting. We got in the back of the car, excited like kids, and when Oscar got in and started up the car we looked at each other and smiled, and both of us understood.
We both knew what we wanted from the evening, and sharing it with others wouldn’t be right. Before we were two miles down the street we asked Oscar to turn around and take us back. We sent him to pick up pizza and opened a bottle of wine and we ate and drank in our formal wear on the living room floor. That was Charly and me. We never wanted to share each other with anyone else, and it wasn’t a matter of possession, it was the understanding that everything we did together would suffer a loss if others were allowed to peer in. See, when I’m out with other women they get jealous of the attention I draw, and Charly naturally instilled jealousy in any man that was with her. She was that type of presence in a room, she drew attention, and most guys don’t want their women drawing attention. Those external pressures might put another couple in conflict with one another, but Charly and I were so close, we had fused so tightly, that any jealousy or attention was focused onto the both of us, not either of us individually. No one could wedge us apart. At the end of the night it was only important that the two of us were together, and the place didn’t matter. And anyone who says they’re bored with happiness I suppose I can understand, but this type of unbroken contentment never bored me. Now that I don’t have it anymore I sometimes wonder if I’ve romanticized it or if it was really like that, because now it’s hard to imagine, to recall it while I spend evenings and nights and mornings with rotating women. I don’t do relationships well. I’ve always had confidence, which has meant for me that I lack the vulnerability necessary to truly lose yourself to someone. You have to need another person, unless it’s a special type of person, to make them really feel loved and appreciated. Charly was a special kind of person.
Where’d your confidence come from?
From not feeling like I fit in, I guess, and therefore deciding not to give a fuck what anyone else thought. I did what I did and let go of the need to value anyone else’s opinion.
And how did you get through losing Charly? What did you do to readjust to life again, because it sounds like you hadn’t been an individual for a long time.
&nbs
p; I got drunk. All day. For many, many days. Oscar looked after me and made sure I didn’t die, for which he’ll always be taken care of.
He turned away from me and we stood in silence for a long time.
Track 7
I’d like to go back to the Rolling Stone article to clarify a few things. View it as a chance to rebut what was printed, your first chance to explain that episode.
What do you want to know?
The article mentioned you were anxious about how much you were appearing in magazines, despite having taken time off.
That’s true. I believe I did say that, though I don’t remember the context or what I was specifically thinking when I said it. Here’s what you have to realize. I hadn’t released any music in years, which is why I’m famous, as a musician, but me as a person was still getting press. I had this false expectation that I’d be left alone when I took a break from music, which wasn’t the case. It was an idiotic move on my part to talk to someone from a magazine about how much you despise people who work for magazines. A more mature man would’ve known I wasn’t really talking about people like him, but like I said, he was a rookie and he took it personally.
Who were you talking about, then?
The yellow press. Celebrity rags. They call them rags here because they sop up all the crap the real publications don’t bother covering. Think about the context again. At the time I only really had Charly and Oscar, everyone else disliked that I was taking a break. Though he never said it, even Murph didn’t like it. What I wanted at that moment was to talk to someone about my life, what it was like to be away from music and not mind it. In a way I thought that might appease people and keep the other publications from having to write about my favorite sushi rolls. It was like, here, I’m not doing anything musically but you’re still interested, so let me tell you about my life so you see it’s boring, and you can ignore me until I come back with a new album. See you then. But when I finally sat down with someone and we started to have a longer conversation, what came out was all these things I had been bottling up, things I didn’t have anyone else I could bullshit with or rattle off my anger to. I tried never to complain to Charly. It all came out to this guy. What was his name? I don’t remember.