How To Dress A Diamond Wheel

43 minutes with Mikel Jollett of The Airborne Toxic Event

Idling in the Target parking lot, the world dissolved down to the knob on my stereo. A staccato, three-note synth melody threaded with another, then electric guitar tickled the high register before a punch of fat drums and cymbals opened into a sound that made me want to jump around on the pavement, the way I used to dance before I knew how. Then a voice came in, keen and gritty amid clapping, stomping and so much instrumental richness. My hands never left the wheel.

I didn’t know it yet, but I’d just had my first moment with The Airborne Toxic Event, a rock band (indie, alt, folk, post-punk—you name it) from LA’s Hollywood district that I managed to miss for almost three years. The juicy sound of hit song “Changing” was courtesy of bassist Noah Harmon, drummer Daren Taylor, guitarist Steven Chen and multi-threat Anna Bulbrook, who plays viola, keyboards and tambourine. The voice was Mikel Jollett, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking on a recent Monday about his Neil Diamond impression, the books his mom kept next to the government cheese and my dumb notions about the rules of emotional art.

“One of the things that our fans sense about the band is that it’s all a true story. And it is,” Jollett says. “That’s part of why they’re so devoted to us. They can sense our devotion to them.”

For those, like me, who are newer to TATE, the story goes something like this: Jollett had a really bad week in 2006 involving illness and heartbreak of the profoundest sort. Despite his considerable success as a freelance journalist and fiction writer with bylines in everything from the LA Times

Two critically acclaimed albums, a documentary film and a global horde of fans later he has finally surrendered to the music. In talking with him about it, I learned that Jollett is gracious and funny, scrappy, homesick, full of trivia and language you’d expect from someone who named his band after a section of a Don DeLillo novel.