Inside Titus Andronicus’ Triple-Album Punk Depression Opera
Titus Andronicus leader Patrick Stickles doesn’t think small. The band’s latest album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, is a triple-album rock opera telling a metaphysical story involving doppelgängers, ancestral memories and romance, weaving in covers of Daniel Johnston and the Pogues along the way. Since the band’s beginnings 10 years ago, Stickles has written songs that link up in odd ways, weaving in nods not only to the group’s back catalog but also to figures who loom large in its musical lineage. Tragedy takes the metafiction to a new emotional level: Stickles experienced cycles of depression during its writing and recording, and the themes are echoed in the album’s main character. We caught up with Stickles on the roof of Brooklyn D.I.Y. venue Shea Stadium to talk about what inspired this 93-minute opus.
You launched this album with a 15-minute music video featuring several new songs. What prompted the idea?
I’ll tell you. Folks, have you ever noticed that when rock operas get reported on nowadays . . . let’s take Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life, for instance. This was the quintessential example. What every review of the album said was — because I watch all of these sites and publications like a hawk, so that I can be a shark, not to mix animal metaphors. Every stupid review, and I read quite a few, said, “This is a rock opera; the story’s completely incomprehensible, so save yourself a lot of effort and don’t even bother trying to decipher or comprehend the story, and just appreciate it for what it is: a gift of 18 great songs by the great band Fucked Up.” And that’s what it was to a lot of people, and on those terms, it succeeds very well. But it’s really disrespectful to the artist.
Once it was decided that this would be a rock opera, I wanted to get out in front of the story and make it impossible for any writer, critic, journalist or whatever to be able to claim that the story was anything other than perfectly comprehensible. It’s an allegorical, fantastical, mythical sort of tale, but there’s a comprehensive emotional through-line, or at least there’s supposed to be. Fucked Up didn’t deserve to have that happen to them. I will learn, not from their mistakes, but from their misfortune, and their disrespect at the hands of the Internet music media. You’ve got to hold people by the hand and say there really is a story.
This is a much more sprawling album than 2012’s Local Business. Was it designed as a reaction to that record?
Our third record, when I look back at it now, is the beginning of a new chapter, a new phase of the band’s career. A New York phase. A more “no click track” phase. More of a real band phase. Not a rotating door around some suburban outsider idiot, a 22-year-old nincompoop. A real band that stays together for a long time.
People who are obsessed with this narrative, that I’m out in some suburban basement now with a four-track, calling up everyone that I know who I haven’t alienated, trying to get them to come on tour with me in two months. They think I’m on the phone with every drummer that I know, saying, “Can you learn 13 songs by September the 11th to play in Philadelphia?” That’s not how it is any more. We’re a real band, we live in New York City, we’ve had 80 percent of the same guys since we made the third album, that was such a departure.