Well, I Guess We Can Talk About The Elephant In The Room Now... Yes, A Tour Is Coming Soon!
and a Rolling Stone feature about my so-called life!
I have been hesitant to speak too much about the events of April but here we are at a precise point in time when we are announcing plans going forward and talking about this last year, so…. here is a link to our upcoming tour plans and the interview I just did with Rolling Stone. The one-two punch. I will post a PDF as well, if you are having trouble with this link.
New tour dates for Spring 2026. Will Sheff (of Okkervil River) will be opening all of these shows.
Presale begins Wednesday, Nov 19 at 10am local. Onsale begins Friday, Nov 21 at 10am local. Sign up to get the presale code for your show via thenewpornographers.com. A portion of the proceeds from presale tickets will be donated to People’s Place.
We have been working on a new full-length record that will be coming out next year. More details to come.
Illustration by Michael Arthur
It should say “Like A Horror Movie Where You Can’t See The Monster”, the whole sentence and idea, but that’s a minor quibble. The writer did a good job and kept most of the things I felt needed to be said. Even all the ‘likes’. It captures the incoherent immediacy of my speech. The erudite slurring of my brain meeting the English language, born again new every day, every minute.
And my dog Banjo is in Rolling Stone! He made it!
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Tangent:
When I think of Rolling Stone, I cannot help but think of the Rolling Stone review of Mass Romantic in Feb 2001. I was having an after work beer with my co-workers at the Railway Club. It was on the second floor, on top of a 7-11. I ran down to buy the new issue, read the glowing review in the store, then went back upstairs to the bar. They were duly impressed. In Rolling Stone magazine. I felt validated. When you’ve been playing music for around a decade and you finally get that acknowledgment. My name in Rolling Stone. Life was changing in a really cool way.
When I was a kid, my older brother bought the ‘Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock And Roll’
I read this thing over and over. I tried to figure out who everyone was on the cover. The only one that stumped me was Eno, just to the right of Janis Joplin. I bring it up because I think of the Punk and New Wave chapter, with this picture of Jonathan Richman
Underneath the photo was a quote from JR that I will always remember. It meant nothing to me but I have thought about it now and then over the course of my career:
“We have to learn to play with nothing. Our guitars are broken and it’s raining”
It felt very relevant to me in the year 2025.
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Yeah… it throws you for a loop to find out that the drummer in your band is a pedophile. It really does….
The most disorienting memory is the psychic split that happened, mentioned in the article. The person splits into 2 people. There is the pedophile and then there is the person you knew, or thought you knew. One half of your brain wants the motherfucker to burn but the other half cannot break away from the other person. The other person is in prison. He’s soft, he’s gonna get killed. He is in Hell. I knew someone in Hell. He had destroyed his life, lost his wife and kids, become a hated despised man. He liked the attention of being in a popular band, more than any of us did, and now he was getting the worst kind of attention. The monkey’s paw. Careful what you wish for. It took days for my brain to combine the 2 people into 1 person. It’s not a comfortable feeling, to have to write a person off. Easier to hate people you don’t know. I think we are a group of empathetic people, sensitive artists. It takes some effort to get all the way to ‘burn, motherfucker, burn’. When I’m feeling too empathetic, I ask myself how I’d feel if he’d ever touched my kid. That will shut off the empathy very quickly. Are there people that do not deserve empathy? That’s a question for a philosophy class.
We learned too much about the world of child pornography and pedophiles. My wife’s cousin was incredibly helpful in sharing his experience working in LA family courts. It was a very helpful but upsetting view into the world of predators, online and off. The way predators look at photos of children. Photos that look innocent to us, a child in shorts. They can find those images everywhere. If you don’t want your child’s image to be used in this way, best to keep them off the internet.
The most confusing part is the fact that he was doing something so criminal, so creepy, so disgusting, out in public. In a fast food place. Did he want to get caught? This person who presented themselves to the world in such a controlled way, always concerned with their image, was doing something so profoundly wrong out in the open. I don’t ever want to talk to him but that is the question I’d ask him. What were you thinking? The rare non-rhetorical use of that question. I really want to know.
No, I probably don’t.
There was the psychic split and then there was my feeling of being a ‘dead man walking’. Many people were supportive and sometimes there was a feeling of ‘people are being TOO supportive’. Was this worse than I knew? Our booking agent, Ali Hedrick, called me to tell me that she was with us to the end. She offered to give us money if we needed it. I was grateful but also thought “Why would we need money? What does she know?’
Are we done? Am I done?
There was a zoom call with various people the next morning, one of them was Rachel, Neko’s manager. I told her she looked like she was going to cry, which started her crying. She talked about how bad she felt, how we didn’t deserve any of this. I was touched but I also thought “How bad is this?”
I still don’t know how bad it is. Here is the thing, though: I can’t control any of that. It serves no purpose to ruminate. So look out: dead man walking. No reason a dead man can’t go for a nice stroll.
I felt calm and collected overall. Like I talk about in the article, it felt “sobering”. Once, many years ago, I was a drunk passenger in a vehicle that was hit by a person running a stop sign. We were all okay, no one hurt, but I recall the feeling of being jolted into sobriety. Mark, the driver, talked about how odd it was that I went from happy go lucky drunkard to concerned serious friend in seconds. That is what these revelations felt like. I was jolted into focus. I was thinking straight. Tragedy will do that. It will remind you what matters.
Part of that focus was the realization that we should not place ourselves at the center of this story. Some kids in California woke up one day thinking it was just another day, not realizing that their lives would be up-ended, that they wouldn’t have a father anymore by end of day. That is just the saddest part of the story. My wife put it beautifully when we talked about it. She said “a child’s love has no caveats, it has no nuance”. To realize what was taken from those kids. The destruction of something so pure. That tears me up more than anything. Two sweet kids that we knew.
Connected to that is the story of a mom trying to keep her family together when fate has taken a sledge hammer to their life. The police came in and did what they often do, they turned the home upside down looking for evidence. The metaphor of a family destroyed maintained by the literal mess of their home. Their broken home. In the middle of all this horror, I do not think there is a higher love than a mom fighting to keep her home together, to keep her children safe. I don’t know what to compare it with, storming the beaches at Normandy? Facing down what seems like impossible odds but running is not an option. It’s pure bravery. Bravery and love.
They lived 3000 miles west of me, 1000 miles south of Vancouver, but I knew them. I saw them when we were in LA or San Diego. They seemed like the most normal family. He seemed like a dorky dad. Not the coolest guy, just a regular dude. When we were in southern California for my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday, we went to Disney with them. So the kid would have other kids to hang with, not just us. It was fun. The 3 kids running around Galaxy’s Edge together. It was sweet. I followed them around taking photos as they roamed free range in an immersive Star Wars world.
I bring it up because it ties in with something I feel strongly about: He does not get to take that from us. He was there but I cut him out of the memories like you’d cut an ex out of old photos. Those kids were happy and innocent and let them stay that way. We had fun. He doesn’t get to take the joy away.
This connects back to the band name. He doesn’t get to take that either. Everything we worked for. He can take it from you if you let him, that is your choice, but he can’t have OUR New Pornographers. That shit is mine. I know you don’t want to take it from us.
I’m sure there is more but that’s enough for now.
I always try to post some music with these things and this time I decided to post a stripped down version of our single from last year ‘Ballad Of the Last Payphone’. It was going to be solo acoustic but it ended up being a new arrangement of the song. I might strip the song away and use the arrangement later for something new. Always nice to have a sturdy carapace to work with. A little ragged and unfinished but that’;s part of the process. This Substack has been good for this. It’s a reason to work. Work for the love of working. It can keep you sane. My guitars aren’t broken but my amps are, and it’s been raining quite a bit.
Rock and roll.
