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The Music Interview: The Rapture

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The Rapture’s debut album, Echoes, is a caterwauling love lament that rips your heart open, then sutures it up while you’re dancing unawares. Ultimately ? and refreshingly ? it argues for the value of human connection.

The band has been around in some form or another for a decade, but it wasn’t until they took their pulsing New Wave goth punk to the dancefloor that they morphed into The New York Band of the Moment. With the assistance of club producers DFA (James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy), the group recorded "House of Jealous Lovers," a twitchy, orgiastic blast of punk funk that became an international hit.

Leading the San Diego-cum-San Francisco-cum-Seattle-cum-New York foursome is twenty-eight-year-old Luke Jenner (above, far left). Turns out he’s in love with being in love, and more forthcoming about his personal life than his music. ? Alison M. Rosen

You’ve been married for two years. How has the sex changed?
You experience sex in a different way. It’s not like you’re masturbating in somebody’s vagina. It’s different every time. I think sex has become a lot fuller since I’ve chosen to have one partner, because when you have sex with a lot of partners, you don’t really get to know them or their bodies or who they are. I think that becomes a very homogenous experience; it’s confusing. I used to be really hung up on sex, and I’ve actually worked through that with my wife, like being comfortable and not feeling threatened after having intercourse. That was a personal thing for me though; I don’t think everybody goes through that.

"I used to be really hung up on sex."

I guess that’s kind of a theme of your album — it’s an argument against being jaded.
There’s a definite sense of unironic love, but not all the songs are super-happy. They’re about trying to love but failing. There’s a sense of frustration.

Have you been through the wringer, love-wise?
I feel like I put myself through the wringer, definitely. I don’t feel like it was inflicted on me any more than I inflicted it on anybody else. I don’t think you can be super-open with just anybody. I think you can after you find the right person. And my relationship with my wife has definitely helped me be open to other people. I really wasn’t a very trusting person before I met my wife.

What made you untrusting?
I came from a broken family. My mom was probably the meanest person I know, and my dad wasn’t around. I just didn’t trust people. I thought if I loved someone, they were probably going to end up hurting me. If I said stuff, I expected it to be used against me in a negative way.

Do you have a relationship with your mom now?
No, I stopped having a relationship with her about a year ago. I just figured out that she really wasn’t going to change who she was —she’s in her fifties — and I couldn’t expect her to change. I was constantly throwing myself against the rocks on that one, and I just had to stop. She was abusing me, but I was also abusing myself by letting myself go into this fantasy mode. I thought I was going to wake up one day and call her and she was going to be a nice person.

That’s a hard realization.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Just saying, "Enough, that’s it," and feeling okay with not expecting to talk to her for the rest of my life. It’s hard to let go of that kind of dream. Everyone has a fundamental dream to have parents, to have that support. But if it’s not there, you can’t make it be there. You can only change yourself and all that stuff.

Yes.
I feel like we’re on Oprah.

Does being married make going on the road harder?
It makes it way easier. It used to be really weird — getting together with random people on the road, and feeling strange about it. I call home every day when I’m on tour. That’s one of the things that keeps me sane. I think being married evens things out in general.

Where did you meet your wife?
I met her at a party in Brooklyn. I just thought she was really hot, and I wanted to talk to her right away. I was really hoping that she didn’t give me the wrong phone number when I asked for it.

And she didn’t?
No, she didn’t, thank God! I think I would have cried.

And then what happened?
It was really fast. I was kind of a homeless dude at the time — I mean, not literally, but I didn’t have a place to live — and I used to sleep on people’s couches. Sometimes I would stay with my wife, and then I would stay somewhere else. At some point I said, "I’m going to get my own place," and she said, "I really don’t want you to get your own place, I want you to stay here with me." So that was it. About a year later, we got married.

How did you know she was the one for you?
Things were really super-upfront at first. There weren’t any games. If I wanted to express myself emotionally to her, I did. And vice versa. If I wanted to go to her house in the middle of the night, I did. There was no playing it cool or trying to dance around things.

"I don’t know what any of our songs are about, really."

What made you play it that way?
I don’t know. I think she smelled really good [laughs]. There’s just something about finding someone you can be friends with. You find yourself saying all this stuff in a totally sober way — talking to them openly and then realizing how open you’ve been later.

Your song "House of Jealous Lovers" was a huge hit in the international dance scene. Is that a scene you were into?
Yeah. That was something we wanted to do, to make a dance record, not in an indie-rock kind of way. We wanted to make club music.

What is "House of Jealous Lovers" about?
I don’t know. I don’t know what any of our songs are about, really.

Do you write the lyrics?
To the songs that I sing. Mattie Safer, the bass player, sings on four songs on the record.

But you sing on "House of Jealous Lovers."
It’s only like three words, though.

What is "Killing" about?
I think maybe a lot of the frustration on the album has to do with what we were talking about with regards to my mom. At the time, I was in the process of deciding whether to cut her off and feeling mixed up about it.

But the lyric from "Killing": "Killing with flange and with tape and with Hendrix"?
I just liked the way it sounded. Are you familiar with the band The Fall? I read something where the guy said he just liked to write lyrics that sounded interesting and it didn’t matter what the meaning was.

Are you working on new stuff?
We’re going to. We just played three shows at the Bowery Ballroom and we recorded them for a DVD and I feel that kind of puts a cap on things. It’s time to move on.

"Thurston Moore thought our band was the worst band ever."

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve heard about yourself or your band?
There was a writer for the Village Voice who said that [Sonic Youth’s] Thurston Moore really thought our band was the worst band ever or something like that [The actual quote, from Rob Tannenbaum’s "Sound of the City" Review reads, "Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who’s 44, recently said he was ?bumming out’ while listening to the Rapture"] and that really depressed me, because Moore’s been someone I’ve looked up to for a really long time. I met him a week earlier, and he was a really sweet guy and it made me feel validated. Then, reading that a week later, I couldn’t not feel bad. I felt it was really unnecessary on some level.

Have you run into him since?
No, I only met him that one time.

How long were you bummed out about it?
I’m still kind of bummed out about it. I wish it didn’t matter to me, but it does.

Do you do a ton of interviews?
Yeah. A lot.

You must get sick of it.
It’s okay. I use to be really defensive, but I discovered that if you just talk about what’s on your mind it usually goes better.

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