Scott Timberg Interviews Songwriter (and Writer) Brett Anderson

Scott Timberg interviews Brett Anderson, frontman of the band Suede and recent author of Coal Black Mornings, "a rock-star memoir about the years before he became a rock star." The book, writes Timberg, is "set mostly in the dreary West Sussex village where he grew up, part of an eccentric, borderline-poor family." From their conversation at Los Angeles Review of Books:

It sounds like you’re not the kind of songwriter who’s going to put out a collected volume of his lyrics the way Dylan or Leonard Cohen or people like that do.

Well, actually I think there has been one of mine, but it wasn’t something that I was — it was just something that was put out. Taking the words away from the music feels like taking them out of context; it doesn’t work for me, the sort of writer I am.

So, you’ve mentioned Nineteen Eighty-Four. That sort of grim dystopian book often appeals to a teenager; that tone always works if you’re a confused adolescent. Did you read a lot of books like that? What drew you and keeps you connected to that novel?

I think the love story, that’s the central core of it, for me. You know, the whole political world and obviously the contemporary echoes were fascinating. But it was always the love story, and that’s something I was quite aware of when I first started writing.

You know, I saw writing about the human consequences of things being the most important thing, and you can kind of use that to reveal the truths. People often say about Suede, “Is your music political?” Well, not in the sense that you mean it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t reveal truths about the world. I think the most political records always have a kind of emotional and a human dimension because that’s the point of art...

Read the full interview at LARB.