Spaceface’s Jake Ingalls
Photo courtesy of Girlie Action.
Jake Ingalls is an indelible part of the landscape of psychedelic music over the past decade. As a part of the Flaming Lips family and his own project, Spaceface, his obvious passion for crafting inviting musical worlds is evident on the latter group’s new opus Anemoia. Coincident with its release, Jake discusses the band’s last and only gig in Cleveland, Ohio, musical mixology, teaching a particle physicist to play “Everlong,” and why now was the right time to leave the Lips.
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I want to congratulate you on the new record. It’s terrific. It’s some of the most danceable psychedelia I’ve heard in the past year since King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s Butterfly 3000 or Pond’s completely different take on danceable psych with 9. I can imagine that the record wasn’t easy to sit on throughout the pandemic. How have you been doing? What has the experience of the past couple of years been like for you and the band?
You know, I think it’s really common for everyone to say to themselves and other people, “Well, you just gotta go with the flow and just take hits as you go and take it in stride.” I think you were really tested on if you really believed in these last couple years. I think there’s a good bit of that that I’ve eschewed from “you’ve just gotta take it in stride” to “you know what? It’s chaos.” Everything *laughs*
But, I’m good. We just had a really long practice last night because we’re gearing up for a tour and it’s going pretty well. Been cutting up visuals and stuff. It’s been a little hectic, but again, it’s like…
It’s chaotic. You said the perfect word to describe it. You pretty much leapfrogged a lot of my other questions with the mention of the live rehearsal because Spaceface, your band, has become pretty well known over the past several years for their live shows and spectacular DIY light shows, which I have yet to see. Hopefully they’ll be a Cleveland date or Cleveland-adjacent date.
We’ve come through Cleveland, I think, once. Is it Taj Mahal, or is it just Mahall’s?
Yeah, Mahall’s!
This is our first tour where we have a booking agent, which is a big deal for us. For these past seven or eight years… it feels nice to hand it off, but I’m still like constantly being like “Have you heard of this band that in Atlanta?” It’s hard for me to keep my fingers out of the pie.
I remember trying to book the big room and the overhead was such that they offered up, there’s that little kind of abandoned bowling alley in there, right?
So, the bowling alley operates, but they’ve got a locker room downstairs that they book.
We played the locker room. At first it seemed like no one was gonna be there, so we were fully ready to not play because there was nobody there.
Sure.
Our other singer Eric [Martin] was drinking White Russians, because we were at a bowling alley. I kinda got into them too. We were thinking “Okay, well nobody’s here, there’s no sound guy in the locker room, so we’re not really letting anybody down and we don’t need the practice. So, we’re about to not play and kinda getting a little sloshy, and then like five people with shirts they had ordered online come in and are like “We’re here for the show!”
I’m not proud of this, but it is the one time I can actually point to where I actually blacked out. Not in a bad way. Nobody said anything afterwards so I think the show went well, but I do remember count off for the first song and in my head thinking “That seems really fast…”
*Laughs*
Cut to me waking up in the van and I’m like “Oh god…” Everybody said it was okay.
Sweet.
And then I got texted a bunch of pictures of me with the four or five people that showed up. Seemed like it was a good time.
That does bring up intoxicants. I couldn’t help but notice on your Instagram feed and a lot of the press material surrounding the record that multiple songs are presented with a cocktail recipe.
Right.
And, in some cases, with Trimtab Brewing, for [one of] the last singles you guys dropped—“Rain Passing Through”— there’s a craft brew. What inspired that and who in the band makes the best cocktails?
Who in the band makes the best cocktails is kind of also what inspired it. Our other singer, Eric, is a fantastic bartender, and then “Big Red” [Daniel Quinlan], they’re both bartenders. “Big Red” was Eric’s apprentice and now he’s a great bartender in his own right. For a long time Eric had this dream of doing a guest cocktail menu where he could hop behind the bar and be making cocktails before the show. There’s that element of it and then there’s this element of a cult of nostalgia undertone message throughout.
Absolutely, tying into the album’s title.
Anemoia. That sort of cult of nostalgia invites the idea of “Oh, you gotta drink the Kool-Aid.” That sort of turned into the idea of “what if we just sort of started to describe these songs as cocktails?” Honestly, because when you’re doing PR stuff, people always want you to write about what the song is. And, as a joke, we just described “Panoramic View” as a cocktail one time.
That sorta kinda went hand in hand with the beers because we’ve been lucky enough to play a lot of local breweries and we end up pretty tight with the people at TrimTab, with the people at Wiseacre, with the people at Nanodog in Columbus. They did that song “Happens All The Time,” but it was called Hoppins All The Time.' We were trying to do each single with one.
Hell yeah! That’s a perfect pandemic project, I’d imagine. When you’re not out touring, you can touch base with all these breweries. You have the time.
Yeah, exactly. And that’s how all the music videos happened too. It was really really tough to sit on the record for a while, but I’m naturally just kind of a restless person.
We structured this in a way that it is a long-form play that all ties together, and I love giving a nice universe for everything to live in.
The record is decidedly groovier and more disco influenced than your debut record Sun Kids. There’s been, certainly, five years in between both records, although I know some of these songs have been in the works since 2019—some of them, I think, have been finished for that long. You’ve got that gloriously groovy cut “Panoramic View.” “Long Time” is really wistful and has that great bass groove to it. It gets stuck in my head all the time. What spurred that change in sonic direction over that period of time? What was the process of writing the record like?
Well, we sort of talk a little bit before we go in about stuff like that. For Sun Kids, it seemed like at the time everything was crunchy and phase-y and kind of rigid, so we knew we wanted it to be organic and flowy, and like earth-tones feeling. I had been DJing a little bit to make money on the side and Eric and “Big Red” are bartending. One of these bars that Eric worked at had records, like vinyls, that they would encourage you to DJ with. That got us talking about [how] you start avoiding some records, and this is the way I buy vinyl too. I have a big vinyl collection, but there will be times that I look at it and I’ll take, nine times out of ten, the record that I maybe like a little less, but I know that I’ll play all the way through. Or maybe I know it less, but I know that I can play it front to back, versus “Wow, I really love this Sufjan Stevens record, but I’m never going to touch Side B.” You know?
With that in mind, we started saying “let’s get something that you can put on a playlist and just shamelessly front to back play at a bar.” With that, we were initially also talking about writing a concept record about joining a cult and leaving it, and that sort of ties back in with the drinks and stuff. It sort of came together with “Panoramic View” that we’re going to go with these reds and sepia tone feels and the idea—we couldn’t decide what the phrasing was—that we’re either a band from the future sent to the past to play a rooftop cocktail party, or, we’re a band from the late-’70s sent to like 2024 to play a swanky, rooftop cult cocktail party thing.
There’s time travel involved either way.
Either way, it’s sci-fi. That sort of set the template. Once we knew that we were scoring this situation and we have a record that you can play front to back in a situation like that. It put a lot of stuff on the chopping block, which actually make it kinda easier to start recording for this next one.
It’s exciting to be going out and playing it like this, but it’s even more exciting because we have this other batch of like more straightforward, really chill tunes. I’m excited about having this really eager sounding record and then having this nice, breezy after wave afterwards.
I love the sci-fi angle and you can definitely pick up on it. I read somewhere you used field recordings from particle beam dumps on some of these songs? Is that true?
Yeah! I didn’t take them. I was playing with the [Flaming] Lips in Switzerland—that’s where the Hadron Collider is. They have this whole team of scientists that all live there and stuff. They have this whole artist outreach program. They basically—whenever Pantera or Radiohead or Flaming Lips or whoever are in Geneva or whatever the adjacent French town is—have these scientists that they send out if you want and then give you these passes and you go and get this whole cool tour of it. We went and took pictures inside of the Collider and they were telling us all these funny stories about [how], one time, one of the German scientists accidentally left a beer in there and it messed everything up. They were also telling us that because they have an international coalition, the step one thing is to have no politics involved. They have trouble getting funding, which is why they try to reach out to artists and say “Please, tweet this, Instagram it.” At the end, we do the show— we’re partying with them and they have a little brewery on campus, it’s very cool—and at the very end, we come to find out the people that come and grab you are sort of selected because they are also musicians that have a cover band that plays on campus. They have a practice space and stuff—I saw all their gear—and I showed one of them how to play “Everlong.” He’s like a particle scientist person and he’s struggling with the idea of Drop D. They have a cover band called Piña Collider. I thought that was just so great. It started to get my head churning… what if you could go and have that experience and there was a special drink that you could have underground at the Hadron Collider that made you realize sort of realize the woo-y, woo-y, we-are-all-one sort of conversation.
With that in mind, got the template going, wrote some lyrics, and then I kept in touch with them. Julien, John and a few of them and asked them if they would sing on it. I got them on the tops signing “Everyday!” Then they took it a step further. They said “For posterity, we have field recordings that you can use in there” and they sent me this library that they had. It sounds crazy, but that’s a lot of it. We snuck in a moment there at the end [of the song] in the fade out where there’s a lot of crazy sounds going on. Those are from the Hadron Collider.
That’s amazing. Definitely some of the coolest sample source material I’ve heard in a long time.
It’s impossible to resist when you get handed some gold like that. How are you not going to find a way to put it in the song?
You’ve mentioned the Lips a couple of times. I know in August you made the decision to leave after almost a decade with the group. You started out as a volunteer and worked your way all the way up to playing with them.
That makes it sound like it was a plan. *laughs*
What made now the right time—now being August of 2021— to leave the group?
It had been something I’d been thinking about for a little bit. I knew there were other tours coming up while we were doing this. Going through, it was a lot of fun doing both at the same time, and especially when you’re younger—like 20, 21—and you’re like “Of course I’ll rough it in the van for four or five days, fly out to this Flaming Lips for three or four days and then fly back to the van and do this stuff over and over again.” But, at some point the conflict becomes a little too much cause the way the Lips do scheduling is different from how if you or I go on tour. There’s months and months in advance. I’m sure that happens with them and their booking agent too, but part of the Lips business model is “we’re ready to go, anytime, all the time, always, and if you’re not with us, then you’re not in.” And it’s not like a mean thing, it’s just like “Well, somebody else was here, now they’ve got the gig.”
So we’d schedule out Spaceface stuff months and months in advance and be like “Alright, we’ve got this cool tour, we’re opening for White Denim, it’s going to be great let’s go,” and like week one, two weeks before, suddenly it’s like “Actually, no, we’re headlining a festival in Glasgow that day, you’re going to have to cancel five days of this tour, just for one show.” We did it all the time and everybody in the band was a really good sport about it, but it just kinda seemed like, you know, a decade of time dedicating yourself to something that, at the end of the day, isn’t even really yours. It’s a family vibe, but, at some point, you’re going “What happens? What happens if Wayne [Coyne] just dies one day? I’ll just be some dude that isn’t in this band anymore.” *laughs* I certainly don’t think he’s going to die anytime soon.
I went in and I talked to them. I knew that there was stuff coming up and I had said that maybe I’d quite after New Year’s. The general vibe was, “Well, you’ve been with us a long, long time and, honestly, if you’re not happy, why torture yourself for this long? You might as well go now and we’ll figure it out. Don’t stay because you’re worried about us. But stay if you want.” I was there for practice and rehearsal, gearing up for tour and everything. When I made the decision, it was really, really, really hard. I wanted to stay. I love those guys and it’s a decade. It was really, really tough. I packed up my gear and there was a minute where someone asked me a question and I said “Dude, if I start talking, I will start crying, and then I won’t leave and I really think it’s time.”
Every once in a while I wake up and go, “Oh my god, what did I do?” But, more often than not, I’m feeling good about it because I wouldn’t have time to do interviews like this with you and the tour we have coming up, the New Year’s show for the Lips got cancelled and rescheduled for… drumroll…the very beginning of this tour.
Which begins when?
February 17th in San Diego, and then we do the Echo [in LA] on the 19th. We’re doing a short West Coast run starting February 16th with Reptaliens. We should be coming to you [in Cleveland] in August right now.