Luke Jenner Wants to Be the Dad He Never Had
The frontman of The Rapture talks fatherhood, baseball, James Murphy, new projects, and reuniting with the quintessential New York dance-punk band.
Who doesn’t remember exactly where they were the first time they heard The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers”? The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs hogged much of the attention for New York’s early-aughts rock revival — but in retrospect, it’s their louder peers who deserve credit for reinvigorating that moribund scene.
Their career intertwined with DFA Records, The Rapture put out a trio of records — Echoes, Pieces of the People We Love, and the 2011 masterpiece In the Grace of Your Love — in an eight-year period, then faded into a hiatus from which they are only now emerging, with a few personnel changes. Easily recognizable for their frenetic basslines, heavy use of the cowbell, and up-tempo tracks, The Rapture is always going to be associated with vocalist Luke Jenner’s screamy falsetto.
We sat down with Jenner at CRSSD in San Diego in early March to talk about parenting, the Rapture’s future, his two other bands, what religion God is, and what it was like to sleep in James Murphy’s bed.
Music Festival Central: Ten years ago, when you guys were at the top, money’s good and your agent’s happy and everything like that, and they’re pressuring you to do all these different shows but for right now when you come back, you do this show and going — how is the pressure different?
Luke Jenner: There kind of isn’t pressure now. I feel pressure to play shows...because it’s different from going to the park or something. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it. Mostly, for me, it’s just who you work with. Do you work with people you like? Then it doesn't matter what you’re doing,
MFC: You’re back in San Diego. How does it feel? Is it the first time you’ve played here?
Yeah, it’s the first time we played. I mean, this festival sold out and it's a very niche festival, so probably most people who would want to see us at a standalone show wouldn’t come [to CRSSD]. But at the same time, it’s cool to pay in San Diego. I grew up in La Mesa. My dad was a business management professor at San Diego State.
MFC: Who was your favorite baseball player growing up?
I grew up in the era of Tony Gwynn and all the Padres teams. I was there when Steve Garvey hit that home run in 1984. I was with my dad. All that was pretty magical. I liked the Cardinals because they were sort of fast.
MFC: Did you play baseball in high school or college?
My dad used to teach at the University of Hawaii and I really thought it would be fun to play in college but I never — I got to the baseball team in high school and started not liking dudes on the baseball team. They were trying to talk about date-raping their girlfriends or just being like dicks, seriously normal jock bullshit. It just kind of bummed me out.
MFC: What position were you?
I was playing outfield. When I was a kid, every kid — when they’re the best kid when they’re 12 — plays shortstop and pitcher.
MFC: Is that when you started thinking about music?
There was a guy who used to take me to local shows in San Diego, at this all-ages club named Soma. It’s still around. I started going to other shows and started going to smaller and smaller shows. There were a lot of venues and at the time. It was the early ’90s, and San Diego was still like the next Seattle, so they were signing all these bands. These bands were all getting major-label deals.
MFC: What was the last band that came out of San Diego?
I could name you all the bands that ever came out of San Diego.
MFC: Who are your favorite three?
The drummer of Iron Butterfly is from San Diego. I was a big Rocket from the Crypt fan when I was a kid. I really liked Trumans Water a lot. It was very don’90s.
MFC: Is there going to be another Rapture record? You have a new addition to the band, cause you lost [Mattie] Safer?
Mattie quit before the last record so we made a record without him and then toured. He plays with Vito [Roccoforte] in Poolside. In the Grace of Your Love, Mattie’s not on that. I mean, I don't know, hopefully, we’ll make more music. It’s kind of up to Vito and Gabe [Andruzzo] how fast they want to go. I don’t — I think Vito being in Poolside and Gabe’s in school...if they want to do more stuff ... It’s all a little bit experimental, cause we’re just gonna play some shows and see what happens. I think the intention is to play together and make music.
Fuck yeah!
MFC: What clicked on that, that you were like “Let’s go back!” Do you feel comfortable?
My kid’s 13, and I wanted to be around when he was growing up. I just wasn’t a very good dad when I was younger. I just didn’t know how to do any of that stuff, or how to be married. I was trying my hardest, but I didn’t know what I was doing. So after getting to a place of feeling confident with that, it was like, OK, I can add other things.
For a while, I didn’t really like myself — and the band split, so I had to figure out how to do that. Also if you are really successful and you don’t like yourself, then it doesn't matter. People can offer you the nicest food, accommodations. Success makes you feel worse, because you feel like you don’t deserve it. The most lonely place you can ever be is to be surrounded by people who genuinely love you and still be lonely. That's worse than being by yourself.
MFC: Can I lay-up on that? How do you feel about fatherhood?
Being a father is more the goal for me than being in a band. I wanted to do both. I’m really bad at normal jobs. I’m always thinking and feeling a lot of stuff and it’s hard for me to stay focused unless I’m just focused on what I want to be focused on. Being a dad is the complete opposite of that, because your kid doesn’t care if you write songs. They just want to know if you’re going to pick them up from school or help them with their homework or listen to them if they want to talk to you.
MFC: I read that you were playing catch with your son and he was not good at it, but he kept wanting to play with you because he wanted to play with you.
When he was a kid, I thought I was going to be a baseball dad. That was my plan: be a baseball coach. But that didn’t happen. So it’s cool, that’s the gift of kids. They don’t care about any of your bullshit, and your job is to be into what they’re into. If you’re not supporting them, you’re doing a bad job. My kid opens up to me now if he needs to, but he’s also way more independent. We have a good relationship.
MFC: Your new record label, want to talk about that for a bit? Anything new coming up?
I put out a single last week, a solo record. There’s a record coming out in May and a bunch of other stuff this year, two other bands that I have. Hopefully, The Rapture will record again. I feel like I didn’t have a lot to say for a long time, because — I think the mistake a lot of people make when they get to a certain level is they just keep talking even if they don't know what to say. I think it’s really important to just stop. A lot of my heroes died. I grew up in the era of Nirvana. I read a lot of Nirvana books and I feel like if that guy had just stopped — ya’ know, if you read about the end of that guy’s life, he just kept saying, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ So that was the big lesson for me: to just don’t fucking do it. Just stop.
MFC: You felt like you had that same feeling as Kurt Cobain, right before?
Yeah, he just felt super-lonely. He had these really bad stomach aches and they had to wheelchair him on stage. Everybody was trying to convince him to just keep going and instead of standing up for himself, like ‘I know I’m going to bum everybody out,’ he just kept going and shot himself in the face. I didn’t think that was a good plan. My mom and my grandmother were both suicides, so that’s like a very real option for me and they were both artists. My grandmother was a piano player and my mom was an abstract oil painter, and they were really cool people but they couldn’t say no. So a really big lesson for me was that if you don’t say no, people will actually kill you. So now that I can say no confidently and feel good about saying yes sometimes…
MFC: It touched me, man. We’ve all been there, and listening to what you’ve dealt with and how you smashed it and now you’re back, it makes me feel like — which brings me to my next question, there's a lot of festivals out there that have self-help things, like L.I.B. I honestly think it would be awesome if you did something like that, because I’m sure a lot of people would love to hear about your story because it touched me, and I’m sure it would touch a lot of other people.
I think I’m going to do — with the record that I have coming out, it’s really all about this stuff — and it’s very personal, so I think I’m going to do some performances. I went to see Patti Smith and she put out a book, and she read some stuff from her book and took some questions and played a song. I think I’m going to do some smaller — I’m down to talk to whoever wants to talk to me, creating an environment where — at least for a start, where people could talk. I’m really interested in starting a nonprofit where families can — just like whatever I’m into, but that kind of an idea is really about getting the people together instead of trying to dictate ‘This is what I’m telling you.’ Just get the people together: ‘How can I help you?’ Or ‘What is it you’re interested in, and how can I support that?
MFC: While he does that, I have one question. In the Grace of Your Love, I talk about albums that I play beginning to end and I never skip a song, and In the Grace of Your Love was one of them. Brother, it really, really fucking — just all-time to me. It has a big part of my heart. I’m really curious because “It Takes Time to Be a Man” is such an epic closing song to such an epic album. If you want to share, how did that come together, the sax and the piano and then your vocals?
The guy who made that record with us, he died recently, and he was like a big part of that era. The record is warm compared to the first record, which is really sharp. You can tell I’m mad and you can tell I’m on some shit. House of Jealous Lovers, it’s like, ‘Fuck you, it’s sharp.’ And by the time you get to the next record and Grace of Your Love, the producer of that record is a really big influence on that record and that song. I felt like he was the first guy that I saw that combined his family, in a way. He would just have his kids come by, and his wife. Most professional music people are really like, ‘This is my girlfriend and this is’ — they have different personas. They’re not really the same. But I felt like this guy grew gracefully older, and he brought a lot of warmth and made it OK to be less of a nihilist. I felt like in a way, that song was a tribute to him, because I wanted to be more like him and kind of understanding that it was going to take a long time. Learning patience, in a way.
If you like that record, then you’ll like the next thing. It’s a continuation of that next song, “It Takes Time to be a Man.” It takes time to be, you know, the record. I think also, one of the reasons I walked away was I had this big platform and I knew a lot of people were listening and I didn't know what I wanted to tell them. It’s a very peculiar feeling to be like ‘There’s a lot of people listening to me, and I don’t know exactly what I want to say.’ I’m just going to wait until I know what I want to say. And I think it’s OK, I think when you get to a certain level — there’s always going to be ups and downs but it’s like a nice thing to do to feel like — for me, music’s really personal in the sense that it’s all about the goals I want to achieve, and I felt like we made this record that I really wanted to make.
We played everywhere a million times. We played Coachella five times. And we’ve done those things and been to every country, and I was like, ‘If I’m going to come back here, I have to bring a different me back here.’ It’s kind of the perfect segway, because “It Takes Time to Be a Man” is the last song on the record, and I felt like I walked away and I’m going to go try to learn how to be a man. As straightforward as that is, I didn’t know how to be a man in terms of how that song defines it, warm and listening. I feel like music is, as a writer you can write whatever you want, but when I wrote the first Rapture record, I was really angry and trying to push things away from me, but it’s like wearing a jacket you can’t take off and you become it. So I feel like it takes time to take root. A record is really like a seed. It becomes part of people’s lives and — people didn't like In the Grace of Your Love that much in the beginning. They like it now. But when it was first reviewed, people were like ‘Oh, you know, it’s cool, the Rapture's a good band, this record’s OK.” But when you talk to people now, they get it. It was such a departure from the previous — especially the vibe. We’re from New York and we’re sharp, and that record is a New York record but it’s different.
MFC: I’ll be real with you, when I think of New York, I shit you not, I think of you performing. My favorite New York bands are LCD Soundsystem and you. Eric, when we went to New York did we not play his album the whole time?
If you read Meet Me in the Bathroom, it’s this book that we’re both in, [James Murphy] is like for me the closest person I’ve ever been to as an artist, in the sense that — I mean, LCD started to open for our band, he was our sound guy. We used to sleep in his bed when he wasn't there. Musically and ideologically, we really set a tone for a certain era of New York. James, I mean he’s more family than a friend, in a sense. Our lives are really tied together. My life would be super-different without him and his life would be super-0differnet without me. James is older than me and in a way, him and this guy Philippe Siddhartha who produced In the Grace of Your Love, James was kind of like my dad in a way because he was taking care of me and producing the record.
He really believed in me, he was like, ‘I think your band is super-great and I want to make this record with you,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ But it was a really tumultuous relationship and we both felt really hurt by it, and we managed to kind of grow up. I was talking to him on the phone and I woke him up and he was super-hungover and got really annoyed at me, like, ‘I can’t be your dad.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I kind of get it now. And the dude who produced the other record kind of was a father for me. I’ve had this series of guys. My dad literally said out loud, ‘I can’t be your dad. If you want me to be your friend, I can be your friend. But I don’t do dad stuff.’ OK, well I need a dad. I was good at baseball, and if you’re good at baseball the coach loves you like he’s your dad — but it’s a scary proposition, because if you start not playing good then your dad doesn't love you anymore. I started to really resent that. It’s like the Bad News Bears, where he holds up the ball at the end of the game. That's how I felt, but I became my own dad and I’m able to be a dad to my kid.
And also the record label. I started teaching them how to play music. Two of them are in The Rapture right now, and they’re songwriters and then I’m putting in — I had this idea that you can’t teach people taste, but if people have taste then you can definitely teach them technique. So I took all these people who had good taste and I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to write some songs?’ I started with 20 of them and narrowed it down to three and started a band with them and play drums. That’s CD Films. Then I have another band Tandem Jump that’s opening at a show in L.A.
MCF: It has that old Rapture sound a little bit. You lived in San Francisco for a little while, did that have any influence on it?
I grew up in San Diego so L.A. felt too close, and also San Francisco was the first taste of a real city. L.A.’s the nicest suburb in the world — but it’s a suburb. There’s no city, the way that Paris or New York or Tokyo — San Francisco is super East Coast and I didn’t have the guts to move straight to New York. My big power move in the industry was not moving to New York, because there was no New York at that time. It was moving to the Pacific Northwest, ilke Seattle had Sub-Pop and it was ‘We’re going to make it in the music business!’ But not like major-league. At the time, it was like Elliot Smith and Modest Mouse, and they were people that I knew — or at least I knew people that knew them — and they were breaking through. I was like ‘I don’t want to sound like this, but at least there's a path.’ And New York was just like — I’d just read this book called Please Kill Me, and I was like ‘I’m just going to move here.
MFC: Where did you live in S.F.?
I lived on 24th and Mission. It was called the Prince House and we had a poster of Prince naked in the shower in the front window. A lot of our bands played their first shows there. The first show we ever played was in a strip club called Club Colusa [sp.?] It was this weird dive bar South of Market. We wanted to play somewhere no one had ever played before, so we just found this really shitty bar that was a strip club, and we were like, ‘Can we play here on Tuesday night when no one’s here?’ We had a lot of friends so we knew we could bring like 60 people. The first show was really rad.
MFC: Do you enjoy that more than when you’re at Coachella? The intimate shows?
I started this other band called Tandem Jump, and our first show was in our friend’s kitchen. That was one of the best shows I've ever played and there were six people there, sitting on the floor in a kitchen. I think everything can be good. I was reading — I got a subscription to TKTK Athletic, and they had the 100 Best Baseball Players, and I was reading the Joe Morgan one last night and he was talking about how Pete Rose made Joe Morgan better and the reason was that most players play to win but Pete Rose played to play. He didn't care what the score was, he wasn’t like a stats guy. I was talking about this today. If you want to be successful in anything, you kind of have to play to play. It can’t be how many people are there, the external — it’s like how much fun do you want to have? If you want to have fun, play to play. If you want to play to win, it’s not going to be fun.
MFC: My best friend in L.A. is a huge Rapture fan and he wanted to ask you if you’re a religious band.
Vito and Gabe are not — I just got sober 11 years ago, and the first thing they said was, ‘You gotta learn how to pray and meditate.’ I have no fucking idea. I don’t know how to do that. I know I needed to do it every day and I can’t do it by myself. I’m a sports guy, I don’t exercise by myself. If there isn’t someone meeting me, then I don’t do it. The two options by my house were a Buddhist monastery that was way more in line with my sort of vibe and that had sitting meditation at like 6 a.m. like five miles from my house, and this Catholic church that was like half a mile from my house.
MFC: Was this in New York?
In New York, and it was like 9 a.m. I just went there and prayed with nuns every day for a year and a half. I got this old guy as a spiritual adviser. The reason I trusted him was cause he was just like, ‘You know, God’s not a Catholic.’ I was like, ‘OK, cool, we can talk.’ He was like, ‘You have no idea how many priests don’t believe in God.’ HE was this cool dude and I liked him. I’m sort of down to learn stuff from people if they have a sense of peace or they understand something or if they have a feeling that I don’t have that I want to learn about, I’ll listen to you.
I read a lot so there’s a book I read every year called Reaching Out. The subtitle is From Loneliness to Solitude. It’s an instruction manual for how to chill, basically, how to get to the point from hating yourself to being at peace. All we have to give anybody else is our own self-care, and I think there’s a lot of ways to take care of yourself. I think I had a lot of nice people spend a lot of time with me for free. Most of the people who healed me or helped me, they weren’t like ‘That’ll be 50 bucks.’ They were like OK, if you want to talk to me, I’ll give you some time. If you get something out of it, cool.’ They didn't take it personally. They weren’t like, mad at me because I didn’t want to do the same thing as they did. It was super-nice. I’ve literally had hundreds of people be like, ‘Yeah, I‘ll talk to you. I’ll spend time with you.’