The Reverend Is In
Summer 2015 | by Kevin West
Photography by Ryan Jones
You almost don't need to do anything in order to interview Glen Pearson of The Reverend fame. The musician is so good at talking that if you point the sign posts in the right direction then he'll provide plenty of text. Our interview clocked in at almost five hours and was littered with bizarre tangents the likes of which any stoner or philosopher I know would be proud to call their own.
I meet him in the lobby of a Kansas City hotel where he is sipping herbal tea before heading to the venue for tonight's performance. In person he is tall, lean and handsome, dressed in his performing uniform of a rumpled slim cut suit and a rakishly unbuttoned shirt. His posture is relaxed, one foot hooked under him in the comfort of a cushy armchair. In some ways this is miles from what is expected of him, seeing as years of wild onstage antics and a well documented taste for psyclobins have earned him a reputation as indie rock's resident wild child. But in other ways he is nothing short of exactly what is expected, an opinionated and difficult interviewee who pulls no punches and won't put up with any bullshit.
While The Reverend is, all things considered, a recent project, Pearson has been hanging around the fringes of the scene for quite some time. From 2003 til 2010 he released upwards of seven solo albums under the name G. Pearson. All of them are quietly strummed insular affairs that often come across as deliberately difficult. His last album as G. Pearson, Singing Ax, ended with a tune called "A Seat At a Table" that seemed to perfectly outline what Pearson felt he had failed to earn himself. "No one came, and no one cared," he sings forlornly on the track.
"I've been pretty cruel about them in the past, but I do have some empathy for 20 year old me. I was addicted to the fucking archetype, you know? I had this idea of what a singer-songwriter was and I wanted to be it. I was waiting to be told I was the tortured genius I thought I was but I was also trying to push everyone away, it was so aggressively counterproductive. I think some part of me genuinely wanted to die and be discovered, that is about where I was at emotionally. But at the same time I can't relate to them anymore, those lyrics are so empty, devoid of anything that is unique or true to me. I listen and I look around like what did I even mean with this? It's such a joke."
In 2008, he found the success his solo endeavors were lacking when he joined Seattle's Holy Fool, a folk band that was gaining unprecedented attention. He was their drummer for the next two years, an experience which he describes as "unequivocally miserable." Don't believe him? Watch any live video of them performing, you'll have never seen a sadder bearded man this side of Brooklyn.
In 2010 he quit to drive down the West Coast with a van and a lot of drugs. In what has become legend for those who listen to him, Pearson found himself high in a tree having a spiritual epiphany. "People ask me a lot now if I am sick of telling that story, this reporter compared it to Vonnegut having to always talk about Dresden, he was like is that your Dresden? Kind of grandiose of him," Pearson laughs, "but the fact is I don't mind talking about it. That was such a singular, important moment in my life. I am here right now because I got weird with those hippies and that Canadian shaman. It was really truly the first time in my life I understood that I could make music as myself, as this sarcastic over-compensating asshole that I am."
That trip cracked his world wide open though and what emerged was The Reverend, and with him a patently unique voice in indie rock. He is a deranged lothario, a swaggering shaman in shambles, a self-described, self-styled satirist, provocateur, philosopher, and culture warrior - unafraid to casually reference Zizek, Kierkegaard, or Saint Francis of Assisi in conversation. He is also a ham-fisted, preternaturally gifted soul singer and equally self-aware sex symbol-some strange hybrid between Harry Nilsson, Tom Jones, and Will Oldham.
His 2012 debut as the Reverend, Fear Fun, found Pearson grappling with the “deep spiritual depression" at the heart of his rampant debauchery, and his subsequent performances saw him enacting it on stage in a way so openly unhinged that comments on early performance videos find viewers generally worried about his mental health. "I was brutally unhappy back then and it definitely showed in how I behaved on stage. That wannabe standup comedian schtick I do is directly related to how happy or unhappy I am. I find the unhappier I am, the funnier I am. Humor is one of my most deceptive and problematic antisocial behaviors. I use it to distance myself from people without them noticing."
But in 2012 Pearson met Anna Zlate, then a USC film school student and now a video director of note, in the parking lot of the Laurel Canyon Country Store. He asked her for a drink at the Chateau Marmont and what happened next is captured in excruciating detail in Pearson's new and critically acclaimed album, I Love You, Honeybear. The album finds him taking on the twin institutions of love and marriage with all the caustic wit and obscene detail fans have come to expect but also with at times an almost uncomfortable and definitely newfound degree of sincerity.
"For me it started as a really arrogant macho sort of thing, I was swaggering around claiming I was going to shit all over the institution of the love song, because in my experience love is rarely represented lyrically as the horrifying experience it sometimes is. It's exhilarating but it's painful and messy and terrifying. It's not just like the emotional equivalent of cute cat youtubes, you know? But somewhere along the way it just became a full on character assassination. I'd taken this abstract desire and I'd, in a typically me fashion, focused it with laser precision on all my inadequacies because in a way that is what love is about. I think loving someone else is the ultimate, most radical form of self-acceptance because you start deferring to this other person's perception of you. You are forced to give up your crutches, to take apart the mechanisms that kept you safe for all your years alone and just be. Which for a guy like me is terrifying in a deep existential panic sort of way. I lost my mind falling in love."
A lot of the album is indeed about the worst parts of him, he says the dramatic crux of the album is the complicated process of unmasking yourself, trusting someone with sides of yourself you can't help but hate. There is of course, The Ideal Husband, or "my match dot com profile" as Pearson calls it, a song that presents a laundry list of terrible traits from not calling when grandma died to driving drunk to binging on unearned attention. And he still registers obvious disgust at the version of him that narrates "Nothing Good Ever Happens At the God Damn Thirsty Crow," a song about jealousy as experienced at the titular Silver Lake bar where truly nothing good ever happens. "I was in such a way when I wrote that song. I was being eaten alive by this insecure neurotic jealousy and I was feeling and saying such disgusting things as a result. Comparing your wife to a blow up doll is an objectively terrible thing to do but I was such a sad impotent man at the time that that was the only sort of compliment I had to offer."
The pair were married a year after their fateful first meeting, and by all accounts, split up only a year after that in the midst of production on the album, and right before an early tour of the new material. Pearson says he never considered scrapping the album because of the split. "In a way, that seemed wrong. Despite what happened, what we had was revelatory for me and felt like at that time, there was no other album in me. I think I hoped, in the sort of naive way one hopes art can better the world while simultaneously realizing it can't and we are all fucked, that some sad fuck out of there was going to feel understood when he - or she, being a self destructive asshole knows no gender - heard the album."
While he speaks about the split, Pearson's body language changes considerably, his hands still and he stares at the table. The only other time he behaves like this is when asked about his evangelical upbringing in Virginia. Born to two devout Baptists (Pearson is an avowed atheist, and cops to a direct correlation between his upbringing in the faith and his current attitude towards it) did not speak with them for almost ten years after he dropped out of Christian college and fled to Seattle. One gets the sense that whatever their relationship is it is still not good. So it's not hard to guess given the parallel behavior that Pearson and his former Honeybear's relationship might not be so good either (as a footnote, his Record Store Day release was pointedly named "I Loved You, Honeybee.")
"I'm never going to write an album about the loss. For me, break up songs are too easy. I am already a mean, petty, contemptful bastard and I feel whatever I may produce would be too uncomplicated as a result. But more importantly, I have tried to be very careful about not letting the performance and promotion of this album become about the loss. It's hard to keep reality at bay on stage and in these interviews but I wanted to present the album as it was always meant to be, unmarred by the further-complicated realities of being a fucking human in this world," he adds finally making eye contact again, and offering a half hearted shrug.
For Pearson, that meant allowing things like the inside of the album being plastered with pictures of him and Anna in happier times, images often taken and presumably okay-ed by her, and even a reproduction of the note quoted in "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)", and it meant re-thinking the nature of his performance. "I think it became well, if I don't have this relationship, let's build a new one. So I go out on stage every night and try and make something complicated and exhilarating with the audience. The idea of viewing as an uncomplicated experience for either party is uninteresting to me, I kind of feel like I'm playing chicken with the audience. Watch me on youtube if you don't want to think."
He performs now under a flashing neon sign that reads no photography, that is at various points manipulated to read like a command: either no or photograph. It is a perfect encapsulation of what makes The Reverend such an of the times project. That innate understanding that he is baiting a plugged in audience, just take a look at his instagram or twitter for insight into his comical criticism of internet culture. "I go to shows sometimes now and the band will have posted nice notes asking you to put your phone anyway and to me that is sort of ridiculous. I don't really see the point in policing it that way. Instead, it's like lets call attention to those people while I'm performing. What does it mean if I participate in your documentation of me? What if I take that photo for you? How is that different from shooting me when I'm not looking? I find that less prescriptive, I'm not interested in being prescriptive, but I am interested in raising the question. You know, am I the asshole for getting in my audience members face or is my audience member the asshole for mediating their experience through a screen? My goal for this tour is that you leave the venue feeling like you've been riding the bus with a pervert."
I see Pearson perform that night, with his words echoing in my head. Prowling the lip of the stage in a black velvet blazer, Pearson takes on a leonine sensuality, his shoulders dropping and hips popping as he moves. Women shriek each time he falls to his knees or slowly runs his hand along the neck and waist of his mic stand. Couples of all ages slow-dance in the back of the room. Pearson wags his finger, puckers his lips, cracks jokes, and wipes the sweat from his palms across the foreheads of a few conflicted diehards in the front row. When someone yells "take off your clothes" he counters with sarcasm "but actually, has that ever worked for you?" before launching into a song about being metaphorically and physically naked with the love of your life, Honeybear's sweetly deviant "When You're Smiling and Astride Me."
You wonder if maybe Pearson isn't kidding, maybe being with him is as electric and as exhausting as watching him throw himself around the stage for an hour plus. Whether or not that is true, there is no doubt that there is no one tackling the complicated realities of modern romance with quite the same flair or honesty.
The Reverend's I Love You, Honeybear is out now on Subpop.