Juno’s last album, A Future Lived in Past Tense, is a long (70 minutes), sprawling effort full of peaks and valleys. It is both massive and intricate. The lyrics are at times funny and tragic, literary and punk. The phone interview I recently conducted with frontman Arlie Carstens ended up being a lot like the album. It was massive and intricate; he was funny and tragic, very well read and still, in his late twenties, punk as all hell.
Carstens is also very lucky to be alive. A former professional snowboarder, Carstens broke his neck and spine while attempting a frontside rodeo flip during a photo shoot in 1998. He landed the trick but was going too fast and crashed into the snow, his head impacting his chest. He was forced to wear a halo, a device that immobilizes your head and neck, held in place by screws twisted into the skull. Carstens though, is very excited about life. Doctors told him that, judging by the x-rays, he shouldn’t be alive.
Carstens spent much of the following two years laid up in the hospital.
"Since I was quite young I’ve had people that I care about very, very much, dying," he said. "When you’re in a situation like that you have a lot of time to think and try to sort through your life and think about all the people you’ve known and all the things that you’ve ever done. And for the first time in my life, I was actually really psyched to be alive and very appreciative of the fact that I had had time with any of these people. The people who are both alive and dead in my life."
This contemplation ended up influencing the lyrical content of the album a great deal. "I had a complete change of perception and I was glad that I had had that time with those people at all because I had just so recently gone through an experience where I was going to be dead or paralyzed. The album is not at all about, ‘Oh, I broke my neck,’ because that would be corny, that would be terrible."
What much of the album is about is the relationships people have with one another and the importance of these relationships even if they are full of tragedy. "The reason that you knew that person at all is that there was something binding the two of you together. "There was a love there, whether it was just two friends, or whether it was people who were genuinely romantically involved with each other. You fight with each other, you have a horrible time, you experience tragedy together because there’s something important in the association."
"Perhaps only years and years later, as you’re looking back on your life in its entirety, can you actually see the significance of your association with a specific person and realize like, this person was a cornerstone of my existence. That’s a really sad realization. That’s something, in its own way, that’s quite tragic, but if you didn’t have those kinds of people in your life, your life would be incredibly empty and you would be incredibly lonely and you would purchase products off of QVC."
Carstens said that because the album is about the more tragic and broken aspects of people’s lives, he isn’t all too comfortable discussing the lyrics. "You’re writing this very private music in a very public way and people are going to respond to it either positively or negatively," he said. "For the people that like the music that we make and get something and feel like it maybe helps them through a day or they’re inspired by it or foam at the mouth in a good way, to those people, I’m like, ‘Thank you.’ But the people who don’t like what we do, I can’t help those people."
Carstens said that it doesn’t bother him when people don’t like his band’s music. "It makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t. Music is entirely a subjective listening experience. There’s an unbelievable amount of music out there in the world that lots and lots of other people like and when I’m made to listen to it I’m like, ‘Nope, sorry, not interested.’ But I wouldn’t squander my time, or my talents, on writing about how much I don’t like it."
One of the things that critics squander their time on when writing about Juno is the band’s "overly long and pretentious song titles." The lead track on the album is titled, "A Thousand Motors Pressed Upon the Heart" and other titles include, "You are the Beautiful Conductor of this Orchestra" and "We Sleep in Quiet Rooms (The Old School Bush)." Carstens said that the titles are often working titles that start out as an in-joke.
"You see that somebody thinks that the title of the song is pretentious, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ because actually what it is, is just this dumb joke that I guess only we get, which means it’s not funny (laughs). If people don’t get the joke, of course they’re only going to be like, ‘Oh, they’re being very high brow and pretentious and I hate them.’
Of course not everyone hates Juno, they have fans in high places, including J. Robbins and Kim Coletta of Jawbox, whose record label, DeSoto, the band is on. Nick Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie and Nate Mendel of the Foo Fighters are also big Juno fans and the two shared bass duties on A Future Lived in Past Tense. The relationship with DeSoto, you could say, was fate. Carstens is longtime fan of Jawbox and their album Novelty is one of Carstens' favorites. He has known Robbins since meeting him at a show years ago. Coletta began hearing about Juno from friends who told her that she should record an album with the band. Juno played a show at Tramp’s in New York City and let Robbins’ band Burning Airlines borrow their equipment. Robbins was amazed by Juno and, according to Carstens, told Coletta, "Oh my god, we played with Juno and it was fantastic and you should really do a record with them."
So she did. The band’s first album, This is the Way it Goes and Goes and Goes, was released jointly by DeSoto and Pacifico Recordings.
Their most recent album was released solely by DeSoto and is an extremely ambitious effort. The band wanted to make an album that a listener could lose themselves in. "We want an album that a person can go home and even put it on their stereo or put in their headphones or put it in their car and it comes out of the speakers and takes over the space they’re in and you just get dropped into the record and it just swirls around you and just takes over your mind. I know that sounds totally nuts," Carstens said.
The band was inspired by other bands that have attempted to let the listener become immersed in the album. "Bands that when you put the record on you’re like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m having a listening experience!’" he said. "Even say, Johnny Cash. You put on a Johnny Cash record you’re paying attention to that man’s voice because the quality of his voice is mesmerizing; the stories that he tells are amazing. There’s something so true and in a real simple way so profound about what he’s doing that you just find yourself in a Johnny Cash record. And mind you, it’s a completely different kind of music than the music we make, but we want to make the kind of music where you put the record on and the listener is being taken on that kind of a journey."
The album is definitely a journey. It kicks off with a swelling instrumental, runs into a couple of rocking tracks, is a bit mellower in the middle and exits with a couple more hard rocking songs. The songs vary from an indie rock anthem; "Covered With Hair" to slower songs, like the stretching and hypnotic "The French Letter."
"Covered With Hair" has an almost live feel to it and is Juno’s anti-hipster, or rather, pro-square kid song. "It’s funny, you go to punk rock shows and there are the cool kids, who are like the cool punk rockers," he said. "They got it together, they know what bands are cool, they know what outfits to put on. And then there are those kids who are frumpy, they’re all miserable looking, they’re all sad as hell, those are the kids I’m worried about, because when I was a little kid, that’s the kid I was. I was fucked in the head."
In the song he rips on fashion-conscious hipsters who, "make those really freaked out kids feel like assholes: "All the hip kids wail in the cold / bluffing to dying sounds of indie rock’s dying soul."
The hipsters haven’t turned him into a pessimist about the state of rock. He said that punk rock is just as viable as ever. "It is this thing that helps kids who are victims of physical abuse or sexual abuse or just bad circumstances, bad economic circumstances," he said. "It is still a way for kids who are growing up in really hard situations to find themself and to find a community of people outside their home who can help them grow to be strong people."
And while a lot of the songs on the album are about tragic events, Carstens doesn’t want to be perceived as some sort of bitter, despondent rocker. "We might make really complicated music or I might write these really sort of dour, miserable, sad, weird lyrics, but we’re funny people," he said. "My band mates are a crackup. Nobody in our band is leaning over a sink, slitting our wrists just yet."