Sun Araw on Parenthood, Bad Gigs, and Letting the Jams Run Free

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

OK! I'm back, pretty much...takes a minute to figure out how to type with a metal splint on your finger. Anyway. Cameron Stallones released another record of deep-fried dub guitar as Sun Araw last year, Lifetime; he hit me up a few months ago to put it on my radar in case I missed it, which was greatly appreciated as I've always enjoyed keeping up with what he does. We turned the check-in into a catch-up over the phone last month, and the career-spanning interview was a lot of fun—as I'm sure it will be to read! Check it out:

Where do you live these days?
In L.A., deep in the Valley.

How long have you been there for?
Just about a year. We were over on the east side for a really long time, but we had a very weird living situation that fell apart dramatically, so we ended up over here. We wouldn't have chosen to come here, but we love it. The food is absolutely insane, It's also kind of like the backstage of L.A.—the weirdest things you can imagine, going on at all hours everywhere. When we first got here, we were going to all of these independently owned furniture stores and witnessing stuff that I can't even describe—people milling around in ways that I was like, "Dude, there's a whole world going on here that I clearly am not aware of."

Most of our friends are still way across town, and we're always trying to pipe them over here. I came from a suburban part of central Texas, and I was always like, "Never again," and then we landed here and I'm like, "Oh man, this is so nice actually." It's very different than what I grew up in. There's a sense of place here, not a faceless sprawl.

You were born and raised in Texas, right?
Yeah, Austin. I was one of the lucky ones. Pretty good place in Texas to be from. My folks are from Houston, and my grandparents were always there, so I was there quite a bit. It's not a horrible place to escape from at a young age—it's pretty hot and flat, but it's obviously got some music history and a lot going on at all times.

Do you find yourself missing Austin at all?
I do. My folks bounced pretty quickly after I did like in the early 2000s, so I don't have a reason to go back. Most of my friends are gone. The last couple times I went was for South By, which is just a crime against humanity and music in every way. It was like getting to see your beloved ex in the worst possible circumstances. There's people running everywhere and some poor bartender is pretending to be a sound man, screaming at you that your set's already half over and you're still unrolling cables. It's a pretty sadistic concept.

We had CMJ in New York for a long time.
Oh yeah, does that not still happen anymore?

Nope. It was terrible—the worst week of my life every year. It does seem like there's no reason to go to South by Southwest at all at this point, which is interesting.
I don't want to get too philosophical or anything, but it is the American ideal of a music festival to the extreme—take everything that's good about it and get rid of it to optimize it for exploitation by other forces. The first time I went was maybe 2010 or something, and there was still a nice little window where there were a lot of parties—you'd play, like, four sets a day and zig-zag across town, there's a madcap fun to it. The local scene, and a lot of underground music in general in America, would show up for it—but there'd be a parallel fest where you'd play your one official gig and then there'd be all these other gigs you could play, and you see everyone from around the country. That was fun. There were a couple years where that was really happening and then that dwindled. I think they started cracking down on those parties, because obviously everyone realized you could go while not going to the festival proper and not pay $700 just to get a badge.

The last couple times I went, I remember telling myself that I wouldn't do it again—and then, of course, someone invites you and you're like, "Oh, maybe it'll be different," and every time you feel like, "Man, I'm just causing my own demise here." The main thing is, when you have that many venues next to each other, everything's on harsh limiters, so you'd be turning yourself up as much as you could until everything's distorting. Then you're telling the sound man to turn you up, and he's just pissed because he's been there since 8 a.m. and you're the 50th band. Everyone is set up to fail.

Yeah, I feel like if you're attending and you're not playing and you're like, "I really like this experience, I'm kind of like, "How much do you like music, exactly?"
Well, you go to some nice festivals that are relaxed, and you're like, "Oh yeah, the point of to relax, spread out, and take time." I mean, festivals in general, as a musician, are not the best place to play music. Outside, at least for what I do, is never a great experience. The sound's bad, and you don't really get a soundcheck. But that can all be made up for with a beautiful place full of nice people in a cool
country. When it's happening next to Silicon Valley, scheming to destroy the universe or whatever, it's not great. The charm disappears.

This most recent record of yours is the first straight-up Sun Araw record you've put out in about four years.
Yeah, there were a couple other little things—dribs and drabs—but this is the first proper studio album since Rock Sutra, which was mostly due to COVID and a lot of other life stuff that happened. It just took a while to get to it, but I'm really pleased with how it came out. It always surprises me—I sit down with no goal, and by the time that something appears, I'm like, "Wow, okay. This is what it sounds like."

Tell me more about the aspect of sitting down with no goal, and what that entails when it comes to your creative process. Your music seems almost naturally occurring, to an extent.
Your guess is as good as mine. The records that really get me are the ones where I'm like, "What is going on?" That's what excites me. What I've learned about myself is that I'm not a good instrument-player, but I really enjoy playing instruments. So it always starts from just noodling.

Part of the long time between this one and the last one was that I recorded with a full band for the last one. That's something I've really avoided. Most of the Sun Araw records have been solo in the studio, and then we figure it out live later. But that last one was the opposite, and then this one was back to it. What I missed, obviously, is the interaction with people, so I'm always looking for ways to create that experience with myself. There's a lot of different ways to do that; messing with different software can create surprises for you.

I'm always looking for ways to play something I don't know how to play, since I'm a self-taught and limited musician. But this new one was kind of straightforward. I was surprised at the amount of "guitar god" stuff on this one. Not to give myself credit, but I think I was seeking the catharsis of live music that I'd been lacking for so long. For early Sun Araw, people think a lot about the wah guitar, but I moved away from that and was exploring a lot of different tones. This one felt like a return
to needing to shred a little bit.

Tell me more about not necessarily being "good" at playing instruments, and how discovery leads you along the way when being creative.
Discovery and surprise are definitely the things that I value the most. When you're jamming with people, it's the feeling of getting outside of yourself, to put it in really basic terms. I do believe in imagination with a capital "i," and that's what I really want to be accessing as an artist with as much clarity and purity as possible. You have to break the rational part of your mind off completely and move into this other state where you're able to access ideas, and that's way easier for me to do musically than with any other kind of art. I really try to let the vibes lead where they will and recognize what's going on with it later.

Tell me about some of your earliest experiences making music.
My dad had a guitar, so I'd noodle on that. I definitely got interested because he played a little bit—just strumming around and stuff. I'd play his guitar, and I took guitar lessons and got competent to some extent. But something that really captured me was a feeling of environment—when you sit down and create a space instead a melody. That came later, post-college—messing with looping pedals like everybody does. It was intoxicating to create an environment and, within that environment, be able to navigate it using instruments as wayfinders.

When it comes to sitting down with no plan, you usually have to create some sort of foundation, and then you want to dance on top of it. That's the fun part, right? But you have to do the work of finding your way into something that will allow for space for that—as well as something that will also support you while you do so. Obviously, when you play with others and improvise together, it's kind of immediate. But when you're doing it alone, I'm always surprised at the thing that becomes the bed on which you can start to put some nice pillows on.

Let's talk more about your full-band work. What have you learned about yourself from working with others?
What I get out of making music is an adventure, and what makes an adventure is that feeling of surprise—of not knowing what's around the corner. If you're improvising with others, that's an effort to open a part of the brain that's better at making gestures than the one that we walk around with most of the time. Once you can make those gestures, there's a separation that happens where you're able to describe something that you're feeling or perceiving in some deep way, and that allows you to find yourself outside of yourself. That happens in collaboration more quickly, and that's what's really exciting.

I've had the chance to collaborate with some pretty different types of people, and that's been super-educational. You both learn more about what you are, to some extent, but you also learn your own liquidity and flexibility—especially for me, not being someone who can sit down and play you a perfect flamenco solo or modulate to a specific genre, because I'm just not completely trained in any way. Having to learn how to fit your gesture within something that's radically different from something that you would've generated yourself is a really good exercise in general. It teaches you more about being a vapor instead of being a rock.

Obviously, a big collaboration that stands out in your career is the record you made with the Congos. Reflect on that experience for me.
Yeah, it's been more than 10 years, which is pretty psycho to think about. I took away a lot. We were really thrown full-in to the deep end of a culture and place that I really knew very little about in the first-person. So it was like a negotiation—feeling your way, putting forward gestures, seeing what comes back, and responding to it.

The distance was so great between the form of music that these guys are used to making and the form of music that we're used to making that there were times where everybody involved was like, "How is this gonna work?" But we really came to a deep understanding. I remember Shanti Roy came in and was listening to some of the tracks we were building, and he was like, "Oh, I get it—they're like chants." There's this rich tradition of Nyabinghi chanting, and those guys are extremely devout Rasta gentlemen—so there was this immediate form that allowed them a way in to understanding how to build verses and choruses into what we were doing.

It was really exciting when it happened, because we all saw it happen at the same time. Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then it became a really enjoyable experience—not that it wasn't, but we were definitely in there for a couple of days just poking around with different ideas: "Maybe we should actually bring in some other musicians and try to play something a bit more in a song idiom, because that's the music that these guys do." But they were really excited about the ability to do something more expansive, and that was exciting for us because that's where we're comfortable.

You're really glad when you see everything click. It happens in every collab. I did a record that I'm really proud of a couple years ago in Estonia with this really incredible musician Maarja Nuut. We had a couple of head-scratcher nights, and then there was a moment where we really saw each other, and then two things were leaning against each other very sturdily. You're so overwhelmingly thankful when that happens, and it's when you can really start running together.

Have there been instances where it doesn't work out, or does it always just come naturally?
I might take the fifth on that a little bit [Laughs] but, definitely, yeah. I've played music with people where it didn't work out. But I'm a pretty equal opportunity jammer—especially on tour, because you're just hanging out with people. There's definitely ones that you record and you're like, "Alright, well, that was whatever." But I really like to be liquid, and the moment that I get running in my personal musical practice is the same thing that maybe a painter feels. That first gesture is so hard, but once it's there, relative to that you begin to have an intuitive sense of what to do to balance everything out.

So, yeah, almost most of the time it works out—very few exceptions. Sometimes you get a buster in there, a hard-headed person who doesn't who doesn't know how to modulate, and there's no response if you're pushing against an immovable. What you can do with that really quickly gets exhausting.

Obviously, everything has changed so much since the early 2010s, but something that was really taken for granted at the time was that things could happen like your music receiving a write-up in the New York Times.
You're telling me, dude.

There was this brief span where you could make some really far-out shit and get on peoples' radar in a larger-than-usual way.
That was a weird moment. Every couple of decades, there'll be a moment like that, and some people capitalize that in one way, other people in another way. It definitely feels far away now. I don't know if that's just the fragmentation we all have heard about, but it's true that, as it's easier to have more specific media, there's less of everyone tuning in to Dick Clark or something and getting their mind blown by seeing something. There is something unique about the moments where people get access to that main line, even in some small way, and people seem ready to expand their ideas of music. But I've also had the experience that people are pretty open.

We make pretty weird music, and the live version is usually even more far-out than on record, so I've definitely disappointed a lot of people in my life with our live shows. But I'm also equally surprised by how much enthusiasm it gets, even if you're playing some big festival outside somewhere and there's people there who clearly are not fans of your music, but respond well to adventurous music. We were making jokes for a while that the live show sounds like going on a musical adventure, which sounds like Mr. Rogers— but people can feel that, you know? I'm surprised by peoples' ability to just enjoy energy when it's expressed gracefully. You can't lose that feeling. Blowing minds is a sacred duty of everyone you know in the world.

One of the things I perceive a bit of a lack of in contemporary times is the ability for someone that's truly never experienced anything experimental or avant-garde getting exposed to it in a setting that they didn't expect to, and having it totally open their awareness. I had that experience with Pärson Sound. My first experience hearing that stuff, as someone that was already listening to tons of weird music, cracked my universe and allowed me to become creative musically in a way that I always struggled to be while trying to follow more traditional structures.

We need the ability to have our minds regularly blown, and when everything is so hyper-specified that you have look so specifically for it, it's never quite as powerful as when you walk into a room not really knowing what to expect and then just get your head taken off.

Are there any gigs stand out from over the years that were particularly disastrous?
Too many to mention. I mean, you always have to be victorious or you don't, and I've definitely had my fair share of both. Incredibly poorly put-together bills can be a real one. We were playing a festival in Portugal and somehow fried through three different proper 30-channel mixing desks. Because it was a big professional festival, they had all these backups and no one could understand what was happening.

Early in the days of digital mixing desks, we had a really psychotic gig in Byron Bay
where it was an eight-hour sound check with a person who truly had no idea how to work this desk, struggling inch by inch to even have it make a sound, much less beginning to mix it—to the point that it became amusing. We moved through the tragedy into the comedy quite quickly. It was for a gig at some crazy backpacker spot, and on the patio there were literally hundreds of people milling about and hanging out. I don't know if this promoter had miscommunicated or something, but nobody was coming to the show—it was completely empty. We had struggles for eight hours, and then we literally got on stage, the dude hit a button and the thing reset to some factory settings. Everything that he had gotten to work had stopped working and become impossible for him to rediscover.

We were on tour with Prince Rama—good buddies, true homies—so we just did a collaborative jam onstage with amps. It was fine, because there was four people there. Some people came in, and they were very confused because they got a pure exhalation of 12 hours of frustration and proper DIY hell. It felt cathartic to us, and a good response to the situation. And then I had this dude come up so earnestly, and he was just so heartbroken that we didn't play any songs. I tried to explain the situation, but I was like, "I feel for you, dude." It just felt so terrible. I was so apologetic.

I'm sure things have gotten better for him since. You're a parent, too. How's that been like?
Oh dude, how long you got? It's so heavy—life, death, all of it. There's no way to talk about it without sounding like you're repeating every possible cliché, but you fall in love, you get afraid for your life, you get afraid for someone else's life, you don't sleep for six months or longer. It tests you to your absolute limits. But the joy you experience from minute to minute is like nothing else. It's totally insane, fascinating, mind-blowing, inspiring. It's life, and right in front of you it's happening.

Has your son listened to your music?
He has, yeah. He knows about it, and we'll jam a little bit too. He's got guitar game, he's got pretty sick keyboard game. I'll se up a thing with all the knobs so you can just turn knobs. He loves it.

I have to imagine that witnessing your child's creative discovery has to be really heavy stuff in general.
It's obvious to anyone that's ever been through this—the most relatable human experience—but you're watching a mind form, and it's so powerful. I had a panic attack moment when we were getting all this info all the time about when things should happen, and I was like, "When do they start speaking?" They were like, "They don't need to be taught," and I had this relief. It's crazy that we don't teach them how to talk. We don't! They figure it out, and it's very complex to watch them like navigate it.

My son is very interested in getting it right—he'll correct his grammar—but the minute that you're around them, you're dying for access to their internal world because you can see it. It's so bright and exciting. You're just like, "Dude, I cannot wait until you can tell me what you're thinking about." We're hitting that spot where you can really go into his imagination and use language in a new way. It's such a complicated thing that we do all day, every day, and don't think about. To watch someone who's barely been here figure that out, once it starts happening it's just like an avalanche. It's just this plant that's growing unstoppably.

You don't have to really do anything besides trying to stop them from hurting themselves—which, there's a long period where they're basically just, at least with my son, just trying to kill themselves, 24/7—running off stairs, picking up sharp things. You're just monitoring their minute-to-minute, and that part is psychotic. But once they get a few bumps, they figure it out.

To your point about being creative, it puts everything in perspective in the ultimate way. It makes you really small, but it also highlights the stuff that's important, and it's cool that music is one of those things. He had a really powerful relationship with the Andy Gibb record Shadow Dancing. I probably listened to that record 800 times. For a while, it was the only thing that would stop his crying—the heavenly harmonies. I grew a huge appreciation for that record, it's an absolute hit parade. Once they get into an "I want to hear it, I want to hear it" moment, you can get stuck on some bad stuff. We've been pretty lucky—he's obsessed with some very strange music.