I had to leave AA. And there were other things that I was trying to leave, too. Laughs I at least got rid of my cell phone for 9 months — or I lost it and decided not to get a new one I should say. And that was already very difficult. If you locate yourself in the right spot, it is possible. Berlin would be a great place to have no cell phone, I think.
Especially if you were able to live in a central location. It was literally on the corner of Hollywood and Sunset, where the two biggest streets in Hollywood meet. Do you feel like the music you make in Edward Sharpe is more true to yourself than before? This is much less reactive, so I think that means that this is necessarily much more me. Ima Robot was me reacting to things; this is me trying to be productive.
To sort of sound a bit hokey and put it into sort of new age terms, this is me trying to be involved in some sort of solution where the other was involved in some sort of destruction. It came more or less out of the same headspace. But pure Alexander Ebert stuff might have a bit more of the hip hop influence in it.
I had a little statue of him when I was a kid in my room and it was like my favorite dude. It never occurred to me that I was going to necessarily make anything remotely non-backbeat based. But then I did that, and I started to realize that all avenues are good avenues; all places that the Muse leaves you are good places. Slowly I started to think about embracing whatever happens; embracing inspiration, basically.
I always presumed that that was a weakness of mine, but then I started to understand that it was only a weakness in the context of branding and essentially, capitalism. Once I really understood that, and accepted that it was just within that context that it was a weakness, I suddenly was able to perceive it as a strength, and then I could own it. Ebert : laughs Yeah, that would give me strength! That gives me confidence.
And so I love that, and it gives me a certain amount of confidence to be able to take leaps, and just do the next thing and throw caution to the wind. In some ways, truth: Some form of truth has to be oozing out of the performer. And why is that?
So each person had brought in an animal — one was an elephant, one was a tiger — and they all just start roaring and crawling and screaming and crying and letting go. And what I immediately understood was, this was a relaxation session. Because relaxation, just like in meditation or anything else, relaxation is the gateway to truth: T letting the truth flow through you.
The instinct taking over — that truth of instinct. Because I was afraid it would look stupid. I give myself permission onstage — not only do I give myself permission, but everybody else gives me permission to be myself on stage. They give me permission to do whatever I want — to act out; to dance like a crazy person; to scream; to smile; to laugh at silly things.
And I guess for whatever reason, I decided that day that I needed to wear a straitjacket and express something that… Or maybe it was just a silly idea, an instinct I had to do that… I vaguely do remember that!
That was a one-off thing; it was like this weird thing that had all these places to hinge things up, yeah…. The only thing that I care about onstage is being relaxed enough to let the electricity of instinct guide me.
Ebert : Yeah, exactly. I can be an uptight, socially anxious misanthrope in life, but when I go onstage I have to let all that go. Ebert : laughs I love that! I never wanted to play an actual club; I never wanted to play an actual festival; I wanted to play parks and parking lots and houses, and just bring this fucking movement of un-professionalizing professionalism, getting back to the real root of why we all love music: Not the product.
The main inspiration for Edward Sharpe was my elementary school music class, where everyone was banging on stuff and everyone was playing, and it was a big old fancy mess. Edward Sharpe started off as this idea that I wanted to really bring this immense sort of freeform harmony to the people totally outside of the box.
Ebert : Well, for instance the Alexander album, I made and finished while on tour. It was like a whirlwind of infinite work. It was a really interesting, confusing question. I have the same questions with Edward Sharpe right now. While I was feeling in this really sort of worldly emo zone, where I needed to return to the music of my youth, do I drag Edward Sharpe into that?
Or do I just sort of embark on my thing? Because really, this was a personal moment for me. If I had eight arms, I would just be doing it all at once. Ebert : [laughs] Yeah, exactly! Jim, Jay, and Timmy have really lobbied for bringing it back, but I have the same quandary. I know that for Ima Robot, to do that, I would have to be charged in a similar way — because that energy was really distinct.
What I remember most about that era was how native the music I was making back then was to me. It was all beats and rapping and whatever. And I just was at this place where I needed to return to a free, blank canvas, and I had this choice before me, which was either to try and keep perpetuating this brand of Edward Sharpe, or to experience again… I felt really alone; I was in my emotions, and instead of running from that, I decided to just embrace it.
So I guess for me what this album really represents is, ironically, in some ways, the courage to not just be communally hopeful and communally personal, but to be emotional — to talk about the fact that my baby mama left me, and that it fucking hurts.
For a long time I almost looked down on them — I kept them away from myself — so I think to me, this is a return to myself: Me in a bubble. I wanted to just be me in a room, making shit up, having fun, expressing myself, not thinking about is this going to be something that the band would like; is this going to be something that my fans would like — in fact, thank you.
The information was bequeathed to me by the music. It was sonic and emotional. I tapped my dad on the shoulder and asked him if I was going to die and he said, 'Yeah.
A few years later, such knowledge would begin to take its toll. A love of hip-hop from the age of seven and a penchant for drugs as he hit his teens would lead to a breakdown in Alex's relationship with his father.
Isolated from k parental influence, his heroin addiction would begin in earnest. He was by this time making music in a band called Ima Robot and learning some important lessons about the music industry. Ebert went home "pissed off" and determined to prove himself. He started the step programme to get off drugs and then, "Out of spite I wrote two songs. Within a short time those two songs got us signed to a major record label and an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.
My instinct had always been loud, but I'd lost it. I'd got used to hearing voices and following them but all that had gone. I started feeling as if all the things I wanted to do were slipping away. To help, Ebert — at this point living on a blow-up mattress in a one-room apartment with no phone or internet — started writing a book involving a messianic figure called Edward Sharpe, who, in his words, "was sent down to earth to heal and save mankind but kept getting distracted by girls".
As Sharpe's story began to form in Ebert's head, he found himself distracted by Jade Castrinos, a girl he'd met outside a coffee shop. It was and the pair began to hang out, sing, write songs and fall in love.
Surrounding themselves with a motley crew of local musicians — some of whom Ebert had known since childhood — Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros started to take shape. Ebert, determined that his new musical collective should feel nothing like Ima Robot, bought a bus on the internet, painted it and fixed it up so that his band, which now numbered anything from 10 to 15 members, could live on it as they toured the US.
He was seeking the communal-living experience he had written poems about as a child. He was trying to get away from the Ima Robot model of downtime spent in anonymous hotels. If Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are known at all to mainstream America, it is largely thanks to a six-year-old girl named Alexa Narvaez.
When Alexa and her dad Jorge sat on a bed and recorded their version of the band's song "Home", little could they have known that their duet would get nine million hits on YouTube and see the pair invited on to popular daytime chat shows such as Ellen to talk about their cover version. Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a day free trial. Ebert has a practised-in-his-head answer to the question of how it feels to be upstaged by a kid.
If I say Dylan, you're gonna think I'm being conceited, so I'll say: like Dylan, not that I'm comparing myself to him. In the hands of a less-gifted songwriter, such comments might sound like the worst kind of rock-star posturing. But Ebert is slowly and surely building a catalogue of material to back his quiet confidence.
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