The name Lennon brings up different images and sounds in each person’s head. It’s a label that Sean Lennon, the only offspring from the union of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, has gotten used to. It may bring along expectations or intense scrutiny of whatever he does, but, at age 35, he’s been able to move past that.
His latest project is one that he started with girlfriend/model Charlotte Kemp Muhl. The duo perform under the monicker, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and are currently on tour in support of their debut album, Acoustic Sessions. I recently spoke with Lennon and Kemp Muhl by phone from their New York home about their tour and their musical inspirations toward each other.
When you play here, you’ll be playing at a venue called The Evening Muse. It’s a great venue — sonically and all of that, but it’s also a small intimate venue. It’s great for your music, but it’s also surprising that you’d not play — not a large venue — but something bigger. Are you looking to play smaller places at this point?
Sean Lennon: Normally, we would play a megadome or whatever giant venue…
Charlotte Kemp Muhl: Yeah, we’re just being humble.
SL: We just want to bring it back to the people.
Well, I didn’t mean a “mega-dome” but maybe 500 or 1,000 people instead of around 100.
CKM: We were headlining places like that on our last tour, but honestly, we love playing places that — we’ll choose someplace that has a cool vibe over the size. We like places that are charming and crumbling with candles and deteriorating leather.
SL: Also, this is really an acoustic tour, so smaller venues work better for Charlotte and I playing acoustic guitar and accordion. We’re bringing a trumpet player, but it’s really mellow. It doesn’t really suit larger rooms unless people are really, really listening. The more people you get, if you’re playing quiet acoustic songs it’s hard to demand their attention unless you’re Dylan or something.
When the two of you first met, I don’t want to ask if you were aware of each other’s musical backgrounds, but was it meeting musically or was it meeting out of dating interest?
SL: It was totally dating interest. It wasn’t dating at first, but it was friendship and literature and philosophy. I had no idea she was a musician and she didn’t know I was a musician at all. I had to like force-feed her my music.
Sean, what has Charlotte done for your musical process. What has the collaboration changed either the creative process of writing or sonically?
SL: She’s changed it a lot. Not only has having a band fundamentally freed me to be more creative, and also having my own label … This period of my life has enabled me to explore and have fun creatively. She also has a real influence on me as far as her taste and her creative input.
CKM: We have similar tastes. We really love all the same kind of disonance and word play. We haven’t really changed each other’s aesthetics as much as reinforced it.
SL: I think that’s a nice way of putting it. The truth is that I’ve always wanted to make music like this anyway, but she was the catalyst for it. Or we were the catalysts for each other to finally do it.
I was going to ask if you had something like this in mind even before you met, of doing a duet …
SL: We never thought of doing duets as male-female, but we both had the same desire for words to sound a certain way and quotes to sound a certain way. We both write songs together in order to make the other one happy or satisfied. I’ll be coming up with chords that I think will turn her on and she’ll be coming up with chords that’ll turn me on. We’re kind of satisfying each other’s tastes as we write. The music is kind of a manifestation of what we dream, of what we dream music to be, or something …
Charlotte, can you give me a brief rundown of your musical background? Was it more of a private thing for you, were you a performer?
CKM: No. I had written a lot of folk songs though when I was as a young teenager on the road a lot. I was modeling and traveling alone so I would bring a guitar to sort of keep me company. I would write songs, but they were pretty basic folk songs. I had given up on the idea of doing music. I certainly didn’t think it was a viable job.
SL: And it really isn’t.
CKM: (laughs) When I met Sean, we were in love madly for a year and traveling and then we realized that we wanted to do everything together. I started doing music with him and he started posing in photo shoots with me. Then I really started developing my musical understanding at that point.
Was it also a process of getting a sense of performance?
CKM: I still haven’t. I’m still working on that. It’s weird in today’s age of technology and YouTube and everything like that. All of the first times that I’ve ever sung in front of someone or played an instrument in front of someone are all on YouTube. It’s kind of humiliating to have to develop in the public eye like that.
SL: I know. I’m always telling her that it’s so hard. When I used to tour when I was your age if we had a bad show, it was ‘oh well.’ The people that were there didn’t know you messed something up. Now, if you mess anything up, it’s all over YouTube that night and people will be forever analyzing and critiquing it.
Sean, I know that just having your name attached to anything brings immediate recognition and expectations …
SL: That’s true. And respect. Profound respect. (laughs) And awe. And nausea. And indigestion is the main thing.
CKM: (Laughs)
I get the impression from interviews that I’ve read, and I’m making an assumption, that you don’t let it bother you. At some point, you had to just say, ‘I’m writing my own music.’ You don’t necessarily want to be compared to either parent. You just want to be acknowledged for what you do and your own abilities.
SL: Yeah, but wanting to be acknowledged for my own abilities and not wanting to be compared to my parents would be like banging my head against the wall for an hour. There’s just no point. I’ll never get that, so I don’t hope for it at all.
Well, is it ever a conscious thing when you’re writing. Do you sit there and think, ‘I would do something like this for my mom’ or ‘This sounds like something my dad would have done’ or do you just blow both of those away …
SL: I think one of the things that has been really liberating about working with Charlotte is that she doesn’t have the same association with chords and stuff that I do. I feel like I’m able to rediscover different types of sound textures and chord changes that I might not have had the balls to use on my own. I don’t know. I’m able to re-ascertain or re-assess certain sounds and re-contextualize them because she doesn’t have the same associations that I do.
CKM: What he means to say is that I’m kind of clueless when it comes to a lot of the obvious musical references of The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix or whatever.
So, you’re offering a new perspective.
SL: Yeah. I’ll be playing something and she’ll be like, ‘Do that.’ I’m like, ‘Are you sure? I don’t know if I can do that.’ She’ll be like, ‘No, do it.’ And I’m like, ‘Alright.’ I definitely find myself being a lot more free to escape my own sort of insecurity and sort of censoring and second guessing of what people think I’m trying to do.
CKM: I think that the way that being related to the Beatles has influenced him is by trying to avoid it at all costs. If a chord change that I suggest sounds too much like ‘Strawberry Fields,’ he’ll be like, ‘No, we can’t do that. We can’t do that.’ I’ll say, ‘Why? It sounds like what?’
SL: Seriously. The other day, our keyboardist played the line from ‘Strawberry Fields.’ He didn’t mean to, but I was like, ‘Dude, you can’t play that. That’s the line…’ I showed him how it was exactly that line. I know — that music, I know every note. We were in soundcheck and Charlotte still didn’t know what I meant. I think I was stifled, not just by The Beatles, but I was sort of stifled by my music history in my head. Charlotte is liberated from that except from classical. She’s not inundated with the rock chord changes of the past. I’m bogged down by my own music knowledge in a way. I was such a nerd. I know the bass player from a Miles Davis record. I’m such a dork that way. I think it kind of kept me in a box. Charlotte came with a totally new ear. She grew up in a different generation and has helped me escape my own sort of cliches.
I get the impression that this musical union has worked so well for both of you and brought these sides out of you. It’s working so well, I wonder why it isn’t more prolific as far as getting music out?
SL: We’ve already put out two albums and we have a third one done. (Editor’s note: The band has only released one album, so Sean may be referring to the label and not the band here.) I don’t know how much more prolific we could be. We could actually put out the new album that we have, but we think it would be overkill. It was going to be released in the spring.
CKM: The truth is that this is the first year that we’ve actually been serious about the band. It’s been a honeymoon before that of writing a lot of songs but not putting them out or recording them seriously. We have hundreds of songs that we’ve written, but this is the first time that we’ve been recording or performing. He’s been focused on his mom’s new album that we put out and touring that.
SL: I also put out a solo album. Building Chimera the label took a year, at least. We do it in spells — one week here and one week there. The last two months is the longest that we’ve focused on the band, ever.
So, the band is becoming a priority at this point?
SL: We’re trying to make it that, but there are always things that are pulling us in different directions. Charlotte has a modeling job tomorrow. My mom is wanting me to organize another Plastic Ono Band show next year, which is great. We both have a lot of other work to do, so it’s hard to find time to do everything.
The album that you have finished, is that an electric album?
SL: Yeah, it’s an electric album. We are going to go back and re-open it up. It’s not really finished anymore. We just felt that the acoustic tour was so much fun, Charlotte and I felt like we wanted to do that more.
CKM: We just got off of an electric tour and you really don’t wrap your mind around your own music until you’ve played it live for audiences on tour. We have all of these new ideas for recording techniques and sounds and melodies. We were almost completely done with the electric record, but it’s like a can of worms. We have all these fresh ideas from the tour that we want to do with it. We’re going to take our time with it and craft it and maybe put it out in the summer or fall.
Do you plan to keep it going in both acoustic and electric formats as the band progresses forward or just see how it goes?
CKM: We can always dismantle and go on tour with just an accordion and a guitar or go with the real band. It depends how successful we are. We’re doing the acoustic tour because we haven’t worked our way up to be able to afford a full band. So, it’s kind of a luxury for us to have a keyboardist and a drummer. Maybe one day we’ll have a string player or something.
SL: Now we have a label, so we have lots of different bands and lots of different projects. We really need to make the most of every tour and everything we do. We just did an electric tour but we didn’t have any crew or techs. It’s been really one step at a time. Luckily we had more people coming out to our headlining shows than we expected. Hopefully by next year we’ll be able to upgrade a little bit.
Let me thank you both for your time. I look forward to the show. Sean, in closing I wanted to ask — and not to get too personal — but with the recent anniversary that passed on Dec. 8 (marking the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death), so many people were posting John Lennon videos and Beatles videos and all of these things all over Facebook and the Internet. I don’t want to ask what you did on that day, but wondered if you recognize what all of these fans do in recognition of your dad and what does it mean to you?
SL: It was actually really nice. I was playing a show in Orleans that night in France. I was very far from the Western world as far as I knew it. I just felt far from home. I called mom who was in Tokyo doing a concert to celebrate my dad and she had just walked in from finishing. I caught her just as she was walking in, the moment before Charlotte and I had to go on stage. I just managed to talk with her for a minute and see how the concert went. That’s essentially what I do every year. This was a bigger year though because I received thousands of letters on Twitter and I just Tweeted something saying thank you for remembering. That’s basically it. It was the same as usual except for this time I got to communicate with a broader audience because of — because more people were paying attention, but also because of the technology of Twitter and stuff. It was nice.
Again, thank you for your time. Happy holidays to you both.
SL: Thank you. Take care.
CKM: Thank you. You too!
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2011.
