The healing power of Popular Music

He's perched at a desk in the couple's shared studio space – a white-walled, busy room situated out the back of their house in Melbourne, Australia. “I moved here in October [so] it’s almost been a year now which is pretty wild,” he smiles. “I never would have expected to be here, but this is where life has taken me.”

It’s a stark departure from the city of Portland, which his previous project called home for the majority of the band’s active lifespan. Although he reflects on that era with fondness, there’s a palpable warmth and enthusiasm that’s hard to miss whenever the conversation turns back to the present and Popular Music. There’s no hiding that it’s been a difficult journey to get here – one filled with self-doubt and crippling writer’s block. Now, with the first album he’s penned in a decade and roots firmly planted on the other side of the world, Pennington has a fresh perspective on his past musical endeavours.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the previous obstacles he’s faced have played an integral role in the creation of new album Minor Works. It’s a record he adoringly refers to as “the best thing I’ve ever made,” but to fully delve into how he arrived at this point, the story of Popular Music needs to begin with an ending.

Parenthetical Girls called time in 2013, culminating their long-running stream of five EPs into what was to become the final offering – an album called Privilege. Self-described as the group’s creative director, Pennington led his cast of bandmates with a penchant for theatrics and orchestral melodies. Meticulously detailed in its lyricism, the release harboured an intimate, baroque-pop affair with lo-fi inflections, weaving sinister narratives from an array of nuanced, unpleasant characters.

“By the time we had finished the record, I felt like I didn't have anything else to say that needed to be under the banner of Parenthetical Girls,” the songwriter confesses. “It felt like Privilege was a natural conclusion in a way.” In the years since, he’s often mused that the writing of the band’s fourth and final album felt lovelorn, or like a goodbye to a romantic relationship at the time. It was only after its release that he reconsidered that period, realising that perhaps all along he’d really been writing a farewell to the band itself. “I just felt like it had a lot of baggage for me as well,” he remembers. “It was always a huge struggle to keep that band going because the people who played in the band, it was always just kind of an endless rotation… All those people were instrumental to making the thing work and were really great and did amazing work, but ultimately it always came down to me and I was always the most invested person in the thing.”

Following the dissolution, Pennington soon left Portland behind and moved a thousand miles south to Los Angeles. Unfortunately the formation of his next musical entity, a short-lived project by the name of Comedienne, was destined to befall a similar fate. Alongside Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier and old Parenthetical Girls’ bandmate and composer Jherek Bischoff, Pennington proudly announced the arrival of his new project with a grand statement, which he’s quick to admit was a sorely premature launch. “Ultimately, I don’t feel I was ready to actually make a new thing,” he offers by way of explanation. “There was also this challenge of trying to make something different, because I declared I was making something different… Everything felt too much like the previous [band], and so then it just became this impossible thing to overcome.”

This feeling underlined a long period of listless writer’s block, as he pained to characterise a fresh start that would feel distinctive. He ponders the creative intent of starting again, anecdotally adding "I have friends who have ended their band, and then the next record they put out under their new band sounds impossible to distinguish from the previous band and now there's confusion." As he muses on the self-imposed ceiling he had trapped himself beneath, he continues, “I feel like you create obstacles for yourself in order to get past things because it's those constraints that you put on yourself that are what allow you to finish things and, in my case, not finish things for a long time.” Although Comedienne’s short life ended before it had a chance to escape the confines of local, black box theatre shows and establish itself further afield, his fruitless battle to breathe life into the new project would ultimately send him down an entirely different path.

Prudence Rees-Lee became involved in an LA-based experimental theatre company that had visited her home of Melbourne. Ultimately following the group overseas to the City of Angels, she soon wound up at a now-defunct DIY venue in Downtown LA, a place that would later set the scene for Rees-Lee and Pennington to meet. Working to finish her own solo album at the time, the pair were initially avoidant of collaborating on a creative endeavour together Pennington explains. Still stuck in his many years of writer’s block, he observes, “she had her own deal and I was, you know, doing nothing. Then ultimately, as these things do, it just started to happen.” As they began working together, some of the prototype songs that would eventually land on Minor Works were finally starting to take shape, “but then we just didn’t think that we had it,” Pennington shrugs. “I couldn’t finish anything, and so then we pivoted to In Darkness.”

It would be easy to mistake the duo’s latest record for Popular Music’s debut – especially when Pennington repeatedly mentions the decade-long writer’s block – but Minor Works is actually their second album. “We were living in LA for a long time and then… right before the pandemic we moved to Upstate New York,” he reminsces. “I bought this weird converted barn and we moved there completely unprepared.” What followed was a period of isolation among the broad-leaved forest as America went into lockdown, and it was here that Popular Music truly began.

First album In Darkness was, by his own admission, “ill-fated,” in part due to the pandemic but also partly due to the pair’s unconventional approach to a debut. “It was destined to be,” Pennington laughs, looking back. “It's a covers album by a band no one’s ever heard of… we couldn't do anything with it, we couldn't play shows or anything.” This decision to launch their new project with a record of covers enabled the duo to figure out what the project should be and the direction it should take, he reflects. “It was an experiment to figure out sonically how we could do things differently, and while I was trying to get my shit together and learn how to write songs again.” It’s an approach he compares to physical therapy, continuing “the last record was like working the muscle… like I learned to use my wrist appropriately again after breaking it really badly.” Featuring a shortlist of twelve tracks originally written for films, the couple reimagined the songs like an escapist fantasy, reworking them as if alone together in the aching blackness of a movie theatre.

For the most part, the release flew under the radar but, as Pennington’s creative paralysis receded, so did the isolation of lockdown. The couple returned to LA soon after, before Rees-Lee realised an urgent desire to once again live closer to her family. Flying back to Melbourne, Pennington admits he wasn’t far behind, elaborating that “I followed because I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be I guess.”

Out of that liminal place, it seems Popular Music is exactly what Pennington needed to heal from his collapse of confidence and start writing original music once again. “I think the biggest thing is that it's the first time I've had a project where all of the people involved are mutually invested at the same level,” he shares with a grin. “It doesn’t feel like ‘my’ thing, it’s like a new thing, it’s a distinct thing.”

This concept of mutual investment is something the artist repeatedly returns to throughout the conversation. It’s also a notion that’s closely intertwined with how he chooses to describe his role in previous projects as well. He picks terms such as ‘band leader’ or ‘creative director’ when describing himself – never quite landing on ‘musician’. Though self-deprecating, it’s a conscious decision which he muses on aloud: “I always have to work with people who are actually very good at what they’re doing because… I don’t really know how to make music by myself. I circumnavigate writing a song and find a way to write it by working with other people who flesh it out and make it good.” This approach has fundamentally led to Pennington always becoming the sole driving force of his projects, exhausting them until he needs to call it quits. But when it comes to Popular Music, he summarises Rees-Lee’s involvement and talents succinctly and affectionately: “she's very good, she's very good, she's just very good!”

Immensely proud of the group’s second record as he ushers it out into the world, Pennington happily explains away the tongue-in-cheek, ungoogleable name they’ve comedically cursed it with. “We thought it was funny,” he laughs, “the idea that this thing that’s taken an obscene amount of time to make and like, a lot of money out of pocket… this big definitive statement is minor works.”

Filled with old Hollywood theatrics, from grandiose declarations to minimalist short quips, Pennington crushes a bitter taste into his delivery, oozing barbed remarks within honeyed crooning. “This album is bookended by these two apocalyptic songs that are more framing the space of the album,” he notes, nodding to tracks “Bad Actors” and “Stage Blood (Bad Actors Epilogue)”. Set within a contemporary version of Los Angeles which he succinctly calls apocalyptic, the 11-track offering explores the end of the world in what the lyricist describes as "a sort of metaphor for persona, devastation and loss."

Despite the passage of time and increased distance, it seems inevitable that Los Angeles still clings to the heels of Minor Works. For the duo, the city has created the perfect framework for their new album, which has finally allowed Pennington to break free from his creative stagnation. While on first listen the depiction might be negatively perceived, this is something that Pennington is quick to address. “I have a real affection for Los Angeles, [and] it is a place that is apocalyptic,” he muses. “I feel like there is a long, storied history of apocalyptic LA things I feel like I really respond to and find fascinating.”

As he contemplates the best words to summarise the feeling, he digresses to a short history of 60s LA rock band Love, eventually coming full circle to arrive at a specific track from their 1967 record Forever Changes. “The singer was this guy named Arthur Lee who’s a very troubled, interesting guy,” Pennington explains. “He talked about how he literally thought the world was ending and this was his definitive statement… There's this line on the record, like the most beautiful image from apocalyptic Los Angeles, where he says ‘sitting on the hillside, watching all the people die’ which is a perfect encapsulation of what LA feels like sometimes.”

Although Minor Works is seemingly a grand, theatrical performance within an alt-pop landscape, Pennington feels that many of the songs are hyper-autobiographical. “It’s in a way that I haven’t really written in a while, maybe since Safe as Houses time,” he suggests, referring to Parenthetical Girls’ second full-length released back in 2006. As he pauses to consider authenticity in pop songwriting, he remarks that “a lot of the songwriters that I really relate to oftentimes are just folk singers. Built into what they do is just 'this is me, this is an extension of me, it’s so bare, it’s me with an acoustic guitar or whatever,' and these are like indicators of authenticity, whether it's authentic or not.”

For a songwriter who spent his formative years conjuring up contemptuous narrators for Parenthetical Girls, his opinion on musical authenticity is pleasantly unexpected. “I do genuinely think that all songs are ultimately autobiographical whether you're writing as [yourself or] an antagonist to the person who you are. They're all kind of about you,” he states. “The Safe as Houses record was kind of the point where it all started to make sense to me. How to make a thing for the first time.”

For Pennington, using an interlocking series of characters in songs allowed him to write what he calls, “the same song over and over again,” but kept the interest for himself and hopefully others by changing the narrative’s point of view. Although utilising fictional narrators may have given life to his musical ideas at the time, it’s also a technique he can’t help but resent. “There’s this sort of cabaret thing that I don't want to be doing where I’m like a series of characters or series of personas or something. But essentially, I think I look at it as more like a way to have varying perspectives on similar ideas.”

Returning to the present day and newly arrived Minor Works, he points at “Chekhov’s Gun” and “Disbelief” with a sigh. “[They’re] songs that have been in the ether for like ten years. I have been chipping away at those songs for an embarrassingly long amount of time.” Comparatively, when he addresses “Sad Songs”, a track that feels a little too close to home, he gently calls it a “meta-reflection on writing songs,” noting how quickly he was able to write it. “It’s one of those things where you work on something for years and years, and then you sit down in a day and write something that just comes out… Some songs took a decade and some took an afternoon.”

As Pennington’s long-awaited return to the helm of a musical project begins again, Rees-Lee equally at his side, he muses on what makes Popular Music different from those previous projects. “I think of bands and projects as being temporal – they're about the moment and the context in which the things are being made,” he confesses with a smile. “Even if my voice sounds the same and the words sound kind of similar, it feels like [Popular Music] is a completely different entity just because it was built in a completely different time and place in life.”