Interview: The Claypool Lennon Delirium
by Jade
June 15, 2016
Sean Lennon and Les Claypool — collectively known as The Lennon Claypool Delirium — are in town for a show Wednesday night at the Skyway Theatre. They stopped by our studio to chat with Jade ahead of their performance.
Listen to the full interview by clicking the audio link above.
On why the combination of Lennon and Claypool 'works':
Les: Does it work? That's the question we really need to answer.
Sean: It has to do with the right lubricants. And intoxicants. You gotta go easy on the lubricants, heavy on the intoxicants.
On how they got together:
L: Twitter.
S: Basically we met on Friendster. No wait, what's the new one?
L: FarmersOnly.com
S: He was on FarmersOnly.com, and he looked kinda cute there with his tractor and his overalls and I thought, 'Man, I wanna swipe right'. Is that what you do?
On how they created their album, Monolith of Phobos:
S: We went up to his magical fungi palace in California, and we basically whispered to the trees...
L: And they screamed back at us. It just fell together, we'd get together every semi-morning — Sean's not the earliest riser — we'd end up in the studio and start piddling away. It was probably the most equal collaboration I've ever done. It was truly a 50/50 experience.
S: Because I made him tie one arm behind his back.
On why they named the album Monolith of Phobos (after the geological shape of a moon of Mars):
S: Well it just seems kind of magical, doesn't it? And also Les wrote a really good song about it, which helped.
L: For me, it's more about Buzz [Aldrin], and his perspective on it, than it is about the actual monolith. But then it went on to become — I don't want to say it was the theme of the record, but it is sort of a roaming thread throughout the piece.
