Last year, on the album Lemons, Ty Segall developed a portal into the past sans flux capacitor and interpreted the speedy blues admired and emulated in early rock into Buddy Holly rebellion, post-apocalyptic beach-blanket-bingo, with each song sounding very distinct, albeit washed in a surf motif in which the rockabilly often crashes into a bizarre progression, twisting into tribulation, the delivery jittery and paranoid. The shriek at the end of the howl often gave my roommates nightmares. Fuzzed out, fuzzed out like a dying cat, like a haunted locomotive, like the soundtrack to some raucous surf film, the Cassavetes beatniks foot-stomping on the bar at some dive covered in sawdust.

REAX: You’ve been pretty busy this year. Are you tired?
Ty Segall: I was. I’m kinda back on track now. I was all tired. I did two U.S. tours back to back. That was kind of crazy. What really made me tired was school. But now I’m done with school.

R: You graduated?
TS: Yeah I just graduated so I’m all done now. It’s straight but it’s like I can’t actually do all the stuff I want to do and not be so tired now. Going out on tour is far easier for me than school.

R: Did you have to take a semester off to go tour?
TS: I just kind of went for it. Luckily I had professors that understood. I had to make up a couple of things. One of the times I went on tour, half of it was during spring break and the other half I had to miss two weeks of school. It was kind of iffy but my professors were really cool. I was a media studies major so I was out there making and they were like that’s cool you’re actually trying to make your media, do your thing, you should be able to go do that, and we should support you. So I got to do that while I was in school although it was really hard. I remember going on tour with Thee Oh Sees and having to do a ten page paper in the van with all of them. It was way late but my professor was totally cool with it.

R: So what sort of music were you listening to that got you into what you’re playing right now?
TS: It started when I was younger. I was super into oldies, Beach Boys and like “Louie Louie”, “Gloria”… that kind (of music), and then I started getting into the more obscure stuff, the garage stuff. And I was super into punk when I was younger. More recently I’ve been getting into psychedelic music. I’m really into Soft Machine right now.

R: Is each distortion you’re doing on a song deliberate? It’s not a random choice?
TS: No, no, it’s all deliberate, for sure.

R: Do you think you make music to listen to at the beach?
TS: I hope so, that would be awesome.

R: What do you think the best place to listen to your music is?
TS: If it’s the beach that’s the coolest thing ever. I don’t even know. I guess Lemons sounded like a summery record. I’d like to hope that you can listen to it on the beach or on top of a grassy hill. If people think it’s a beachy record that sounds awesome.

R: Because I always thought with the title Lemons that wasn’t sour, it was like the color, the shade.
TS: That’s cool I can see that. The reason why it’s called Lemons is because it’s a total random grouping of songs. It’s a bunch of songs that I couldn’t play as a one-man band and I needed other people on. Songs maybe spanning a two year time period, some of my favorite ones.

R: Do you think there’s something almost inherently filthy or grimy or skuzzy in the way surf and garage music is always described? If you think that pejorative is appropriate? Or do you think that people maybe mistake clarity for something that’s clean? Or they mistake raw for something that’s incomplete yet finished?
TS: I think it’s very relative to the performance, or the performer, whatever you’re listening to, because it’s just like people. Surfers, I’m a surfer, and I can tell you there definitely is totally grimy scummy surf culture out there. Not even in a sense of scummy as sleazy, but in the sense of wake up, go surfing, we don’t take showers, the ocean is our shower, we just surf all the time and that’s the best part of life, a job’s a job but not a real job, our job it to surf. And I totally appreciate that too because surfing is like a therapy session, it’s so wonderful for the soul. I think yeah skuzzy and grimy sometimes for me, because I grew up listening to surf music that was recorded in a grimy skuzzy way, that’s just kind of how I associate that surf music to me. Even The Ventures aren’t too clean. The Trashmen is certainly more my style of surf sounding stuff. So yeah I think it’s totally appropriate to say skuzzy, sludgy, dirtiness.

R: And that’s the texture you try to replicate?
TS: I think production is just as important as songwriting. I like stuff that’s grimy or not at the highest fidelity, I was listening to a lot of older back-from-the-grave kind of bands, garage bands, older stuff. We don’t have the money to make stuff sound like Neil Young. I love how home recordings sound, how older stuff sounds, so I definitely was trying to make it sound… have that old sound. I think it gives it more of a feeling. The song itself is one layer, and you can put another layer on top of that in how it’s recorded. Then you create the whole sound and use production as a tool, giving it a different meaning or look, style or texture.

R: You did some acoustic shows in December?
TS: It was cool, it was weird… it was amplified acoustic, so my guitar sounded more like a washboard. It was fun.

R: Do you still play as a one-man band? Or was the acoustic show a one-off thing?
TS: The acoustic show was actually the band but playing acoustic, real stripped down, it was really fun. But I don’t do the one-man band thing too much anymore, although I’m starting to get more interested in trying it out again. I used to only do that. But it’s totally fun to do that but I just got burnt out on it. But now I think I’m going to try it out again.

R: Are you going to do more acoustic shows like you did recently?
TS: Maybe, I don’t know, it was totally fun, and people liked it. We were playing a lot of cover songs. It wasn’t mellow or folk or anything, still kind of fast.

R: What covers would I hear if I saw you acoustic?
TS: We just did total party songs. We did “Kick Out The Jams”, “Gloria”, a couple Redd Kross songs, T Rex.

R: Why did you do that specific Captain Beefheart song, “Drop Out Boogie”, on Lemons?
TS: It’s just one of my favorite songs. I don’t know, it’s great, it just works, it kind of fit with some of the stuff on that. There’s no way any of my stuff can ever match his, I just thought it was a cool finisher. Bottom line I just love that song.

_R__: Are you recording now?
TS: I’m almost done with another record. It’s going to be out in May on Goner Records again. I think it’s going to be called Melted. I’m really excited about it. I’m kind of taking more time.

R: How long did Lemons take to record?
TS: It took about… the thing with Lemons is I went somewhere and I recorded a bunch of songs and I wasn’t too excited about my performance on those songs so we kind of scratched all those. I had a couple songs that I recorded at my house. But the bulk of the stuff was recorded by Matt Hartman (of the Sic Alps) and that only took like four or five days of recording.

R: How long have you been working on the new stuff?
TS: This stuff I’ve been recording since August, just kind of going in and doing songs and working on the songs, reworking the songs. I’ve thrown out maybe half the songs I’ve recorded, just trying to make it nothing but good stuff.

R: How many songs have you written for the album?
TS: I think I recorded something like 22 songs, but as of right now only 10 or 11 are making it. A couple I did on a 7” (called “My Sunshine” on Trouble In Mind Records) because I was stoked on them and I thought they were ready to go. That’s from the session of this new record. It’s a little cleaner and you can hear more of what’s going on. It’s cool, it’s fun. You know how the last record, Lemons, was cool because it had that feeling it had, that grimy-thing, but I’ve been listening to a lot of The Pretty Things, really, really great recordings of stuff from the early ‘70s and late ‘60s, and I think it’s really difficult to record a great sounding clean record. Neil Young, his recordings were so awesome that it’s so difficult to make drums sound as good as they sound on a Neil Young record, or Beatles drums. That’s what we’ve been trying to do and there’s no way we’re ever going to get stuff that sounds that good but we’re trying to get a little bit cleaner, a little bit higher fidelity, while still keeping in the same vein as Lemons and other stuff. I’m excited about getting something a little cleaner.

Recently Ty released an album with Mikal Cronin called Reverse Shark Attack on Kill Shaman Records. Go buy it.

For further information about Ty Segall visit http://www.myspace.com/tysegall.