Cary Judd

Cary Judd is a voice to be reckoned with, he is both honest and warm with enough little boy charm left to make me want to pass him a note during fifth period. When I sat down to interview him about his new Album, Goodnight Human, I had not spoken to Cary in almost fifteen years. Although I knew of his prolific career as a musician I had not had the opportunity to talk with him since our high school days.

At first, I fully anticipated Cary to bring the I’m-just-too-cool musician thing to the table. However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that no such egocentric drama was present. If anything Cary was uncomfortable making the subject about him. He has a reputation for consistently evading questions, especially the kind that try to pin him down as an artist (never mind a popular one). Being as self-reflecting as Cary’s lyrics seem to indicate one could surmise that he spends a majority of his time alone. He gets to the heart of the human experience and takes note of it. Having the ability to not only make observations about the human condition but the melody to match it, Cary makes highly personal music seem relatable. With songs on his new album like Apocalyptic Love Song, a quick paced non-traditional pop song with lyrics that are anything but noncommittal, Cary accomplishes the task of making intensely bold statements (even political) that are also fun to move to. While some of his lyrics may not be considered hopeful or even optimistic one couldn’t argue that he doesn’t do a good job of making cynicism sexy.

When he shot his first look at me I giggled like a child, awkward and uncontrolled. First thing, I begin. This is usually the part where people exchange hyper pleasantries but Cary smirks and glances calmly at me, remaining highly conservative with his gestures. He takes a drink from his water. Oh, this is going to be fun, I tell him as I adjust the microphone. 


“Well that probably means I won’t lie.”

That would be ideal. At this point I’m tempted to just spend the time allotted for our interview being childish, and teasing him with the same kind of immature banter that flavored our early friendship but there is something different about him—a maturity that I cannot overlook. I can tell by his steady posture and his almost affectless tone that he is used to all this, the notion of being in the spotlight. My childhood friend is now a professional. Cary sits focused and poised and with the crystal clearness of his blue eyes, he lets me know that he is polished and ready for whatever questioning comes his way.

First thing, I want to touch on a memory I have of you. Cary takes another sip from his water. We used to share a car ride to and from high school with our mutual friend Jason. Cary’s eyes widen for the first time as the memory expands in his mind. Jason would talk about the beach and how he saw the waves rising over Decker Canyon Road, and he would to say, " It looked like Heaven".

Cary begins chuckling loudly now. I watch the snowy peaks of his eyes begin to melt from laughter.

And I remember the analogy disturbed you, and you would go over it and over it and what it meant because it seemed so corny at the time. Cary laughs even harder now and turns away from the camera to conceal his blushing. Listening to your music and other interviews you have given, I see a common thread here. You seem to have a strong distaste for anything corny in your lyrics. Would you say that authenticity is a major motivating factor when you are sitting down to write?


“Yeah, I would say for the most part that is true. Someone called my song, Angel with a Cigarette cliché and it bothered me so much. I was really upset that someone would call it cliché. I just had to Google it and try and find out why or where they heard that. And I could not find it because it is not cliché. So I decided to write an email to the person who called it a cliché and I said, ‘Hey, some of the best writers even sound like their words are cliché, but they are original---you just forget that they are original because of how many times they are played and used by other people’.”

I recently came across some interesting words by Robert Smith from The Cure, as I know he is a big influence in your work and I found this quote. “I hardly ever listen to old stuff, once they are on vinyl, they become someone else’s entertainment not mine.” Is that the same sense of abandonment you experience with your music?

“Kind of.” Cary shrugging a bit, “I mean it’s not like I don’t care anymore. I think a song, like for instance the song you listen to on an album, is different than the live version because it has the opportunity to continue to evolve. So the songs, when I play them live are going to be different, because they have the ability to evolve differently.”

I’ve read other interviews where you say, “My songs are as trite as they sound, short snapshots of my life” what does that mean?

“Well, have you ever had that friend that keeps talking about a party weeks after the party? It just loses something when you do that. It’s like, just let the past fade into the past, you’re only as good as your last song anyway.”

Cary smiles simultaneously conveying both his distaste for redundancy and the pressure he must feel trying to remain prolific.

I kind of wanted to get back into our childhood a bit, we grew up in a wealthy area however the delineation between the haves and have-nots was pretty distinct, and both you and I were among the have- nots. Cary gives a curt sort of laugh with a dash of bitterness. How did that play a role in where you are now?


“You mean being a have-not in a world of haves?” Cary makes a long sigh. “You know I think the first time I really realized it was when someone said to me in high school, ‘Wow. That’s a really cool shirt--but you just wore it last week!’ And I was like, ‘Of course I wore it last week!’” Cary and I both simultaneously wince at the comment; sharing similar moments of growing up in an affluent area, it is easy to relate to the shame and shock when you first realize that you are among the kids who do not have a lot of money.

“And the other time we played with another band and we got there with my two hundred dollar guitar that I saved all summer for, and it was our first show, and we pull up, and I look at the other band, and their dad had bought them a nine hundred dollar brand new Fender Stratocaster.” Cary’s pulls his face into a shocked frown, “And I was like.” Cary pauses and his jaw drops. “I just kind of sank. I think just feeling like the underdog, or feeling like people think you don’t have the means to get there. It's always been a driving force for me, I feel like I have to make up for fancy things by playing the most bad ass show I can.”

Well, I see that you are a very prolific artist now. I know you have two hundred tour dates coming up this year alone, it’s not uncommon that the motivation comes from early childhood experiences.

“Yeah, my work ethic comes from not having, for sure.”

I want to talk a little bit about the old bands you were in, I know you have a lot of practice, fifteen years now, but were there some early bands? Can you tell me about them?

“We started a band with some of the guys that you know, Jason, Jake, and Greg, and we only played two shows. It collapsed. I was getting into The Cure and Jake wanted to do more straight edge. But the band that was more long lasting was a band called Moz Eizley, we had that band for about four years. But the drummer was sent to tour with The Dave Mathews Band, and I got tired of depending on other people. I wanted to transition to just depending on myself."

So what do think when you look back at the music from Moz Eizley? Is it cringe worthy? Or do you listen to it now and still enjoy it?

“Some of its cringe worthy. Moz Eizley was the band that I really was able to let go in, and it was cool because we didn’t know any better, and I go back now and think, wow, I should think about arranging my music more like that.”

Can you remember the first song you performed for an audience?

“Yeah.” Cary continues to nod as his cheeks begin to redden. “Yeah I can actually--it was Rust. It was very non-traditional but it was also pop. It was defining in the sense that it was terrifying, but also made me realize that I didn’t need anyone else—I don’t have to have anyone else.”

Cary has a reputation for wanting to remain private, and will (self admittedly) lie during interviews in order to keep the meaning of his lyrics a secret. What I notice is that there is a part of you that is out there in public, giving these concerts, but I suspect that there is an intensely private part of you, so much in fact that you don’t like to discuss your lyrics at all, would you say that is a fair statement?

“Yeah, that’s definitely fair.”

To what extent is the persona that you have on stage your real personality?

“The person on stage is the person that shows up to a party—oh gosh.” Cary looks over his shoulder behind him a large Christmas tree stands in his studio, he smiles, maybe even starts to laugh, one would never know. “I think maybe the guy at the party is the guy that has had a drink or two and lets his guard down a bit, but there is still so much off limits. It’s not off limits in the songs, but there’s definitely a guard up.”

So how do you reconcile the two? The public and the private image? There’s a part of you that is posing some deep and very introspective questions, which is clearly a solitary process, and then there is this side of you, giving an interview, performing, how do the two Cary’s co-exist?

“Maybe I’m bordering on a split personality.” Cary delivers this kind of statement with far more sincerity than sarcasm. “When I am at home, people would think I am boring, I don’t have drama. Every minute isn’t intense, it’s not like I walk around crying all day. I fry an egg just like everyone else.”

Could you explain the major stress demands required for writing versus performing?

“Sometimes I write thinking about the melody, and sometimes I have the lyrics and nothing else. But, the best feeling in the world is after I finish a really good song, and I just start thinking, how am I going to play this live?”

So the melody and lyrics play off each other?

“It’s usually just some music idea and then the melody just falls right out on top of it. Most of my songs that end up on albums usually took a half hour or less.”
Now that you have your own studio, China Mountain, have you been able to capture more or less of that sense of urgency that you seem so fond of? Has it enhanced your creative process or is it more that the pressure is off?

“It’s both of those things. The pressure is off. But when you record a song for the first time that to me is the most right in a lot of ways. But now, I can get in front of a good microphone and good amps, and I think with this album the urgency is more evident.”

You have described having your own studio as giving you a more raw type of recording experience. How does having your own space for recording help you portray this “rawness” to your listeners?

“When you make an album, typically you have an engineer who is setting up microphones and getting sounds and a producer who is basically editing the band, and I have done away with both of those. Everything is pretty unedited, so what you hear on the recording is the closest thing to what actually is in my head than anything before. It makes me really excited about this album, it is exactly how I wanted it to be.”

What do you think about the human tendency to be violent? Do you feel there a place for violence in music?

“I think rock & roll is inherently violent, it’s generally young men pumping their excess testosterone through electric guitars and by pounding drums. I don’t think it’s violent in the way that war is violent. And I feel very un-original saying that I think the war that our country has been at for the last several years was completely motivated by economics, and masked as liberation.”

Apocolyptic Love Song also has the lines: The history books we read,are just the scripts for tomorrow, cause we plagiarize the past. What does that mean to you?

“I am fascinated by the ways that history has repeated itself. The incidents that brought us into World War II and Vietnam were similar situations. Before Pearl Harbor was bombed, a vast majority of Americans wouldn’t support the U.S. joining the war to help Europe. After Pearl Harbor thousands of young men showed up at the recruiting offices and shipped themselves out to war. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that points to Pearl Harbor being allowed to take place by the American Government. The Tonkin Gulf incident that was the gateway to Vietnam was the same. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it wouldn’t shock me at all to find out thirty years from now that the 9/11 attacks were in fact allowed by the U.S. government to occur. There’s plenty of evidence of that already. To put it into a shorter answer, I think there is never a reason to resort to violence unless you’re protecting your own life.”

Well, I think you are thinking the thoughts we are all thinking but you've turned them into music. Is it the unanswered questions that make the song writing process so compelling?

“I feel like those lyrics were written subconsciously, if it has been on my mind enough, it shows up in the lyrics. Actually, I wrote that song in a very uninhibited state. I think I was on Vicodin for back pain, and the lyrics just came out.”

Going on to A Time to Lie, another song from the new album. What does it mean when you write:
I don’t want my songs to always be my crutch,
Encrypted lines and words of what hurts me so much.
I just want to see the ways that I’ve convinced myself that you’ve changed.

Cary’s face suddenly less personable. An awkward laugh on my part fills up the silence.

After much pause he begins. “That song is probably the most personal on the album. I’m probably not going to give you a direct answer to that. But as far as music being a crutch I will say that as a kid, probably thirteen or fourteen years old, I was raiding the medicine cabinet, getting rushed to the hospital.” Cary has now turned in his chair so that all I see is his profile, his speech a bit fragmented. “You know, being diagnosed as manically depressed. I think music did the same thing for me---as much as the antidepressants could. To get certain things out in order to be able to cope, that is music to me. That line says a lot to me.”

I listened to Sarah, another song off your new album performed acoustically and it was really emotional, Cary. I think I watched it ten times yesterday. Again with the pills?

Cary laughs and turns in his chair, I’m relieved to see his entire face now.

“We’ll Sarah isn’t me. But it could be me and it could be you. And I think anyone that is living a real life has probably been Sarah or the person telling the story at some point. It’s gone through everyone’s head. What’s funny is I had written it meaning it for it to be a work of fiction, and then it came out, and it was about her, and it is a very touchy subject.”

But, if you didn’t feel so compelled to share it, you wouldn’t have performed it.

“Yeah, true, I played a show recently, and I played that song and I felt guilty because Sarah’s brother was at the show. So afterward I came up to him, and told him I wasn’t sure about the song, and he said, ‘You absolutely have to play it.’”

How would you say your music has changed over the years?

“You know I don’t think at the core it has. The voice, the lyrics, the melody, and at the very essence you will know, that those have remained pretty true to my style. You go from such an intimate process, writing music, to such a public situation, being on stage. It’s kind of confusing, actually. I think though the way I deal with it is I just remind myself that we are all born alone and we all die alone, and maybe in some way I am just getting to experience that cycle every time I perform.”

When the interview was done I felt sort of stuck, and I wanted more. I think Cary makes us all sort of feel like that? It’s his brand of honesty and vulnerability that make Cary engaging and if you can get him to fry an egg for you, I say go for it.

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