A conversation with: Particle Kid

I first met Micah Nelson in Pittsburgh PA, last fall. Micah and his band opened up for The Flaming lips at Stage AE. Their set was music that really stuck out to me, Particle Kid’s unique sound brings you to a place where you might have not been before. I was excited to see that they would be opening up, yet again for The Flaming Lips in Salt Lake City. I was eager to hear them perform songs from their newest record “Time Capsule”. This record has been decades in the making. I had the opportunity to sit down with Micah before the show to catch up, talk about his process, and discuss his latest record “Time Capsule”

Good to see you again! I saw you last November, in Pittsburgh. What have you been up to since then? 

Oh yeah. I love that town, we walked around down by the river there all day. It was November so the leaves were changing colors, yeah that was a great show. What have I been doing since then? Working on my house a lot. Working on videos, music videos mostly for Time Capsule, but some for some other people, other artists. Writing, I’m working on a couple of new records with different people. I’ve done some shows with my dad (Willie Nelson). My aunt Bobbie passed away, and she played piano with him forever. She was 91 and still spunky. 

She was still playing shows? 

Yes, the last September she did the whole tour and played great, she is an amazing spirit. I’ve just been trying to be there for him (Willie Nelson) playing guitar, and fill out his sound whenever I’m available to do it. I’ll probably be doing a lot of that this summer, and just getting ready for this run. I had this spontaneous inspiration randomly out of nowhere. I decided I needed to get one of those Felix the cat clocks, with the eyes and tail. I don’t know why but one day I’m like, “God I would love to have one of those”. So I found one in this galaxy blue Kit-Cat clock and hung it up. It just brought me so much joy and inspiration. I would stay up all night and draw with this tick… tick …tick of this cat clock, and I made a bunch of stream of consciousness drawings inspired by the just stream of consciousness. A lot of times I would start with this image of this cat and I ended up making a whole coloring book, so we have those for sale at our merch. It's only about 8 pages long, but the covers are hemp paper. Me and my wife Alex printed them out and hand sewed them so they are like zine style and that was something that just randomly came out over the last couple of months, since the Pittsburgh show. 

So you just released “Time Capsule” on the 22nd of April. How has the reaction been towards the new album?

So far so good. 

I listened to the album about three times. I’m the type of person that likes to sit down and listen to a record in full. It was an hour and forty-five minutes, I really felt transported to a different dimension, it was a trip. What inspires you to make that unique sound that takes a listener to a different place? 

Artist who’ve come before me. All music whether it's top forty or deep tracks if you let it, it can take you somewhere, so it really depends on where you want to go. I like to go to a lot of different places. Music is such a vessel of consciousness and transportation that can take you back. Maybe it's a memory you haven't had yet, you know it's probably the most abstract art form we have, and because it's this intangible thing it really has so much potential to kind of set these breadcrumbs for imagination. Our brains will automatically find patterns and fill in the blanks, even when there isn't a pattern, we’ll fill in the narrative that is only hinted at. It's really just about where you want to go and what you want to feel. It doesn't really matter how you get there but if this combination of sounds makes me feel something, it will probably make someone else feel something. I’m just doing what sounds cool to me, and what I like, oh I like the space this takes my consciousness when I listen to it. My favorite artists have always been great at making their music transporting, where they create mythology just out of sounds lyrics and melodies, and textures. I’m like you, I like to listen to albums in their entirety and immerse myself in that world, and sometimes it takes listening to a few times to really grok the feeling of that world. That’s it, that's all I’m doing. I like to explore different worlds and hopefully, I can share that through my songs and recordings and sequences, so I’m glad to hear that you felt something. To me its like, I try to not spend so much time describing things, that's what songs are for.  When words fail I paint a picture, and if the picture doesn’t do it, I’ll make an animation, if the animation isn’t quite enough I’ll make music, ill write a song and sometimes the combination of those things flushes out this ineffable feeling. I like it maybe you’ll like it too, let's go there together! 

You recorded and made a good amount of the record “Time Capsule”  during the peak of covid, I read you were hunkered down in your house and the studio. Was it stressful making music and surviving in this world where no one knows what's going on in this weird state of the world? 

The music part wasn’t stressful, the making music part was an escape. There were a lot of stressful situations, that everyone experienced throughout different gradations of stress at various times depending on their situation. I just felt lucky really to have the outlet of music. I had the ability to realize musical ideas even if I didn’t have a studio at the time, it doesn’t matter. We’re recording on your phone right now, I record on my phone all the time to at least get the idea down. That might evolve later into something totally different but I really subscribe to the David lynch philosophy of writing down or capturing every good idea, or it will disappear forever. Immediately you have to capture it, it doesn’t matter how you do it, whether it's a phone or a laptop, or a four-track. I’ve lost so many ideas because I think that I’ll remember it tomorrow, as I’m falling asleep, and no man, it's gone forever. There’s one song on this record (Time Capsule) “The Whole Time” where it came to me, as I was about to fall asleep, and I was like “I really like that… Shit! I’m so tired, I can’t even move” I just sang it to myself over, and over again, having it imprinted in my head as I fell asleep. I woke up and said “Yes! I have it, it's still there!” I immediately sang it into my phone. That's the stuff that makes everything else tolerable. Music is the thing that keeps us sane. 

That’s good to hear that it was an escape. 

And also a way to connect with friends and family who were far away. Like “Hey wanna play on this song?” Nowadays you can just send tracks from your room. That was out of necessity.

As you said before, this record is 32 years in the making, some songs are decades old, and some are newer. What was it like going back to those old things you wrote and those feelings you were once feeling years ago, compared to now how you feel towards those songs or emotions now?  

It's all aged pretty well. I still like all the songs, I still feel like I’d sing and play them today. That's just how I’ve always operated. If you capture things as quickly as you can, sometimes that practice of being open to that, you’ll open the flood gates and start having more ideas all of the time. You’ll forget about the ones you recorded or drew last week and time will go by and you'll get hooked on this one and that one and then that thing and years later you'll look back through your voice memos or your laptop, or sketchbook and your like, oh that's kind of cool, I like that. I remember whenever I had that inspiration and it still holds up, and sometimes you’re like what was that?... that was no good. Even now I stumble on old voice memos where I’m just making it up and I have this little melody idea and now since all of this time has passed, I know how to finish it. If I tried really hard to finish it right then, maybe it would be good, maybe it would be different. It's the same with paintings, or drawings. There are drawings that I’ve started years ago that I find in my sketchbook, where I think “Oh wow that's a good start” and then I finish it years later because I now know how to finish it. I’ve lived through this human experience, and this informed full circle way of what it wanted to be, it kind of glimpsed and poked its head through, but it took time for the rest of it to come through. There's all of that all over this record. I would start a piece of a song, and sometimes I would use the original demo of the first time I was coming up with it because I was in a hotel room or wherever, I didn’t have a studio. I actually liked that version (The demos) it has a spirit to it where it wouldn’t feel the same if I recorded it in this big hi-fidelity with a band. It could be cool but it would have a different vibe, it wouldn’t have that feeling, and that's what we’re all trying to get. Music is what feelings sound like, it's almost not even about the cords you’re playing or whether the lyrics make sense, it's about how it make you feel. It could be the shittiest guitar tone, where it's all out of tune but it's something, I dig it. Don't try to figure it out or explain it, there it is. I think we all go through a period of overthinking things where it has to be this and it has to be “professional” sounding or whatever, and you actually do it and it's kind of lame now, so I guess we’ll go back to take one. There's a lot of “take ones” on this record, some of them were because when we were quarantined in the studio when covid first hit and we were thinking “what the hell is going on? What are we gonna do?” it became this sort of “We gotta get as much recorded as we can, super-fast”. There's more than a couple of songs on there where it was the first time we played it, and the last time. When we recorded “American Lyfe” I was basically teaching the song to the band, and we were recording, and that's the take that's on the take the record. “All in One Day” and “Shadow in the Sun” we maybe did 2 or 3 takes of that but that's live all the way through. My dad (Willie Nelson) sang and played all the way through, and Jim James but as far as me and Tony (Peluso) and Aryon (Day), we recorded and were like “Ok the next one, because you guys probably have to fly home tomorrow now because you might not be able to get home next week. I like the urgency and the immediacy of that, it kind of forces you not to overthink things too much. That’s how it happened and you’re lucky if you get some good stuff from that approach. Not every song we did there we used on the record, but I think “King of Ashes” we recorded there and it was ok but later we recorded it at Tony’s house, in the desert with laptops and stuff, I’m singing all out of tune, it's like completely live. It had the vibe where its got something, let's use that take. I actually realized after I sang the wrong lyrics in the second verse, but I had this other version that I made in my garage by myself and I thought maybe I could splice that version into this version and collaged it together and it somehow worked out. There's a lot going on in this record, it's pieces from different times and different memories just collaged together.

  If you could give a message to the world, what would it be? 

Life is weird, do what you love. Take care of each other and have another day. Let’s try to break free from the perpetual loop of self-fulfilling apocalyptic narratives. We’re not obligated to be the same person we were five minutes ago, at any point in time. 

Listen to Particle Kid’s newest release “Time Capsule” here

Particle Kid, April 26th at the Union