“Are you disappointed?” teases Segall with a laugh. “I don’t know if I can do it anymore, man, I’m running out of ideas! The crazy thing about it was that most of it was collaborations with other people. I didn’t write 30 songs – I wrote the 12 that are on Twins, and I wrote a couple that were on the Hair record. I wrote the rest of the material with the people I was collaborating with on that particular record. It felt like a sleight-of-hand sort of thing, where there appeared to be way more than there actually was. It wasn’t nearly as a crazy as people thought it was.”
Segall adds that it’s a route he would like to take more often when it comes to releasing albums. “When it’s a solo album, it really is just me and my thoughts – pretty much everything that you hear is done by me. I really like the idea of collaborating more – I’m actually hoping that my next projects can be a follow-up to the Slaughterhouse record and a follow-up to the Hair record. So we’ll see how that goes.”
Regardless of how many records one gets from Segall in a year, one can always anticipate top quality from each of them. Naturally, Manipulator – Segall’s eighth solo effort overall – is no exception. It’s another collection of hazy, wild-eyed rock’n’roll that’s sprung out of the garage and into the fire. Unlike many other acts who will have an army of musicians and producers behind them, a Ty Segall solo record is literally a solo record: what you hear is all from the mind, the mouth, the fingers, the hands and the feet of the man whose name is on the cover. With such liberal freedom in songwriting and creation, it’s an approach of ‘anything goes’ that gets things done in the world of the one-man-band.
“I don’t like repeating stuff,” says Segall on the creative process. “I do like improving on ideas I’ve already worked on previously, but I’m thinking a lot about seeing what I can do differently this time around. Sometimes I’ll just record a drumbeat and base a song around that; sometimes I’ll be playing the guitar and a melody will come to me. I might just mumble over a guitar part until I can find words to fit what I’ve written. Sometimes I’ll even write a song that just starts with bass. It’s really all over the place.”
Even prior to its release, Manipulator has been toured extensively throughout 2014. Segall and his band have racked up appearances at major festivals such as Primavera and Coachella, the latter of which featured an onstage cameo from Workaholics star Blake Anderson. It’s one of the funniest and most unexpectedly joyful moments of the entire weekend – and it stemmed from an unlikely friendship.
“The guys from Workaholics are big fans of what we do, which is totally crazy,” says Segall. “I’ve hung out with Blake a couple of times, and the idea just came up when we were at the festival. I was like, ‘Dude, do you want to come onstage and pretend to be Charles [Mootheart, lead guitarist]? Our guitarist and Blake have, like, the exact same hair. So we thought it would be funny to pull a fast one and have Charles come out and be, like, ‘What the fuck, man?’ It was pretty rad.”
As for other touring highlights from the year, Segall points to his European jaunt. “We played this afterparty at a club in Barcelona,” he says. “That was completely wild, it almost didn’t feel real. I also really enjoyed going to Greece. We had some time off there and it was just beautiful. Man, I like going anywhere. I like doing anything. It all feels like a highlight to me.”
The band will end the year with a long-overdue return to Australia for the first time in three-and-a-half years. Along with an appearance at Meredith Music Festival, Segall and co. will also be doing a run of headlining shows around the traps. It’s a hotly anticipated return, both from Segall’s fan base Down Under and from the man himself.
“I’m so excited, man.” he says. “Can’t even wait. I don’t know why it’s been so long. It should be really good fun. Last time was amazing, so we’re really looking forward to coming back. Charles was playing bass last time we were here, and we were touring as a three-piece. That was about two months before Mikal [Cronin] joined the band. So this will be his first time, and we’re all super-stoked.”
