Mardi Gras in New Orleans puts every bachelor party in Vegas to shame. A cross between Halloween and SXSW, the sight is purple, gold, and green as revelers drape themselves over balconies in every street, throwing cheap necklaces to those dancing below who scream. One man's trash, another's treasure. The sound is of joy and jazz and the chinking of glasses large enough to hold a liquor cabinet. The smell is of stale ale. The touch is the feeling of crunching plastic beads beneath the feet, a better sensation than walking over broken glass. And the taste? Rain and sweat.
This is Parquet Courts' first Mardi Gras, but it's not their debut in New Orleans. The band hails from Texas, is associated with New York, and makes punk in a deeply DIY vein. Finding such everymen amid this insanity is a wild goose chase. They've been filming here all of yesterday, and tonight will finish at Café du Monde in the French Quarter. They are packing in two music videos to form a continuous story arc ("Us on a three-day bender" is lead singer Andrew Savage's CliffsNotes explanation), so their time is crammed from dawn to the wee hours. It climaxes tomorrow night at a dive bar in St. Claude, where they'll make their unannounced live return to an unsuspecting crowd.
Café du Monde is close to Savage's heart. It never closes, and there are only two things on the menu: coffee and beignets. "We're here!" comes a text from their minder. "Look for the four gentlemen in purple tuxes. Lol." There in the back of the café are four New York intellects dressed like matinee stars: Savage, guitarist Austin Brown, bassist Sean Yeaton, and drummer/younger Savage Max. They're followed by a small film crew who will be shooting the videos to new songs "Mardi Gras Beads" (hence their being here) and "Wide Awake" (hence the coffee). It's 10 P.M. and they've ordered enough coffee to wake a small village.
Upon meeting, Savage is friendlier and more engaged than the band's reputation as prickly interviewees suggests. He explains the "legend" of Café du Monde, how they put chicory in their café au lait. "New Orleans will awaken your imagination," he says with a scholarly tone. Brown, too, is super cordial, warning that there's beignet dust on my cheek. Last night, they watched a parade on Bourbon Street that blew their minds. Tonight they're keen to explore it again after wrapping. Bourbon Street is the place you go to remember that the heart in your chest is still beating. You won't forget the first time you walk down it. Personally, I wasn't prepared to be met with the grind of "Pony" by Ginuwine pumping out of a saloon bar.
"You know he's from here, right?" smiles Savage, referring to Ginuwine. "Come, let's check out this plaque!" He runs to every blue circle marking the buildings. "These houses are older than America itself," he marvels, his mind filled with history and local politics, and not in a way that's snobby. To someone less cultured, i.e. me, the buildings recall the French village at the start of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Savage lights up. "Bonjour! Bonjour!" he sings.
"Mardi Gras Beads," which will be a single from the band's forthcoming sixth album (also titled Wide Awake!), actually has its origins in a past acid trip. "We took some LSD," says Savage, without further explanation. It was while high that Brown was gifted these purple beads by a stranger. He's worn them since. "If I am ever feeling self-conscious about something I'm doing—even making this music video in a restaurant where everyone's looking at you doing something silly—the Mardi Gras beads are my totem," says Brown. "There's resolve in the fact that you can smile while you're wearing them. Yeah, there's big questions, there's hard times. But from the moment you put them on every day, you're committed to a freak life."
Savage asks if I have my own Mardi Gras beads yet. I don't. I tell him I don't understand the fuss. "Just wait until you catch your first beads…"
"Look, I'm not a diva or anything, but I want my pink wig," says Savage the following morning, making instructions for his stage wardrobe later. The wig is to Savage what the beads are to Brown. "Life doesn't feel real sometimes," he says, curiously, of being in a rock band. "So you find yourself gravitating towards these peculiar talismans. 'Oh, I wear this hat now.' Or, 'I wear a wig now!'" Missing wig aside, morale remains high despite the second-day hangover and the biblical rain during another full day of filming. The minibar—which lives in their minder's purse—is keeping them well oiled as they swig tequila and prepare to jump up and down before the camera while singing "Wide Awake!" Its beat is so Talking Heads–y it renders David Byrne's solo return redundant. "It's a tongue-in-cheek song about being awake, in the sense that people use the term 'woke' now," explains Savage.
"There's a kind of indignation that young people have: You're the old guard, I'm the new guard. Like any changing of hands, it can be at its best awkward, at its worst frightening," he says. "'Wide Awake!' is this moment of joy—an epiphany." They put so much into channeling its euphoria in their dance moves that Savage splits his pants in the crotch and runs back to the hotel to sew them together. This pink wig is not at the hotel. It's gone awry. It's a cheap piece of garbage, but he's placed value on it. His wig helps him understand who he is.
Savage is clear about the identity of Parquet Courts by now. In an Uber to the soundcheck for tonight's gig, he critiques the radio. "This is a 'whoa rock' station," he says, highlighting the limits of mainstream guitar music—light on lyrics, big on stadium calls-to-whoa. "Coldplay are the pioneers of 'whoa rock.' " The Lumineers inevitably come on next. "Now, The Lumineers are 'hey rock.' There's a difference." The album Wide Awake!, due in May, is neither "whoa rock" nor "hey rock." It's workmanlike rock; rock crafted from Savage's hardcore fandom; rock molded to make you shake and rattle and roll; rock to enhance or expel the rage and despair you feel about everything that exists outside your front door.
Since 2011, Parquet Courts have been putting out DIY records. Their third LP, Sunbathing Animal, put them on the map. At that time in 2013, the press imposed its own nostalgia upon them, dubbing them the "next Strokes" or the "next Pavement" instead of writing about the living, breathing New York scene they were a part of. "That stuff eats bands alive," says Savage. "When you hold on to this romantic vision of a time that you didn't experience, it blocks you from articulating the moment you're in. I wanna articulate the moment that Parquet Courts exist in. It's not going to have a long shelf life if you're going to say something that's already been said."
Wide Awake! is their most approachable album and feels even more galvanizing, landing at a time when Savage's acerbic lyricism is more necessary than ever. Despite everything going on in America, he searches for positivity, inspired by the communal cynicism he sees around him, searching for opportunity amid the pessimism. On the opener, "Total Football," he roars a manifesto for the ensuing songs: "Only through those who stay awake can an institution be dismantled," go the lyrics.
Over dinner and daiquiris, there's opportunity to get into Wide Awake! The album wasn't made in New York, or here. The foursome decamped to Tornillo, Texas. Now that three-quarters of them are in their thirties, there are distractions at home: wives, kids, rent. Texas was just different logistically. The creative difference, meanwhile, came from inviting an outsider into the fold for the first time: producer Danger Mouse (Gnarls Barkley, The Gorillaz, A$AP Rocky). Was Savage trepidatious? "Of course, yeah," he says. "He was a genuine fan and realized the band's capacity and agency. The record wouldn't be the same without him."
Before they worked together, they'd shoot the shit, listen to music, woo one another. "I made it clear that I wanted it to be a weird record," says Savage. "This wasn't Parquet Courts' effort to become a Top 40 band." Savage referenced San Francisco noise band Flipper, Afrobeat records, and Divine—the drag queen created by John Waters. "I wanted to make a punk record that you could put on at a party. Something that had anger and joy. It's difficult to express a comment on society without it being dramatically angry. I enjoy a belligerent expression of pure, immediate disgust, but I wanted something that was more constructive, something not nihilistic, something that could be applied thoughtfully in a way that other bands haven't really done."
Lyrically, Savage found himself unable to bite his tongue this time. On "Almost Had to Start a Fight," he clamors: "What if I've grown tired of being polite?" On the furious "Violence," he offers a brilliant, self-referential "Savage is my name because Savage is how I feel."
"There's a massive amount of violence going on," he explains. "All different types, all of it tragic. You never get used to it, but it does become harder to mourn it and react to it the more it happens." Savage's own sense of urgency came after a gig in Atlanta, when a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat made a show of himself and got kicked out. "I was so angry at him," he says. "I felt ashamed that he was into the music. I felt conflicted. That was my tipping point."
Coming in at less than 40 minutes in total, Wide Awake! is an economical listen. Despite the anguish in its messages, the infectious percussion and booming guitar twangs offer community, love, even dancing as an answer to the status quo. Considering the album ends on a track called "Tenderness," I put to them that perhaps they're saying the solution is that we all try a little of it. "Dancing is a tool for rage and protest," says Brown. "To use shared positive energy as a way of enacting change around you is a better way of enforcing a view." Savage nods. "It's important to not get so pessimistic and down in the dumps that you end up hating your own life." He adds that they're all singing together on this record, too. Leading by example. "Our voices [are] united as one."
Savage and Brown are the creative nucleus of Parquet Courts, at least where the overarching messages are concerned. (They met at a music society called Knights of the Round Turntable at the University of North Texas and bonded over Belle & Sebastian.) Yeaton and Max are an unlikely rhythm section. Despite being six years everyone's junior, Max is the most serious presence and remains mute in group chats. Yeaton adopts the role of zany comedian. He responds nervously to Savage's request for him to speak up. "We all think the same," says Yeaton of the album when prodded. "It feels like a genuine ascension to another level."
I ask if returning to Texas, the state where they were born, stirred feelings of guilt, questions of conflict. Brown becomes irked at the suggestion. The Southern friendliness fades. "I wanna make an important distinction," he says. "I don't agree with the idea of red state America. The political situation is so much deeper than Republican versus Democrats. I wouldn't lump all Republicans in a fascist category."
Savage steps in, more eloquently.
"In New York, I don't know anyone who voted for Trump, but in Texas I definitely would [know people]. The broad strokes got us in this situation," he says of Trump's election. "Red state, blue state, city, rural, left, right, that kind of binary thinking. People are people. A lot of people made a bad decision, but I can also understand what led them to that. To a degree, I can empathize. With people our age, there's this self-righteous us-or-them, black-and-white thing that lacks some important nuance. We all need to understand each other and communicate." He finishes his food. "Not to get all Pollyanna and shit."
Dinner is cleared. The pink wig has been located. It's making its way to the venue.
Inside a sweatbox, a sea of drunk youngsters crowd around the stage as four gents in purple tuxes tune their guitars while MGMT's "Kids" plays over the PA. "Control yourself, take only what you need from it…"
The performance that ensues is an exercise in control. While Savage spits and sputters, his voice rumbling, he leaves the worries he has for the future and has a furiously good time. His pink wig has flown within the opening numbers as the band debuts almost all of Wide Awake! and throws in a few classic Courts hits. The energy of the new tracks has the desired effect. A wave of sweaty bodies moshes, crashes, and surfs overhead. Savage is positively buoyant.
At dinner, he was recalling what he learned from doing a critically acclaimed solo record last year. "I find bands more interesting," he concluded. "I love Prince, Madonna, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Grace Jones… But bands are much more interesting because it's people who have to get along with each other. They have to make something together that's bigger than themselves." Whether conscious of it or not, Savage's realization that it's important to work through the friction of a dialogue rather than to separate himself speaks to the utilitarian ethos of Parquet Courts.
After goodbyes, I take a final walk along Bourbon Street. A kind-faced man smiles at me from a balcony and gestures with his arm. He throws a string of purple beads. They come hurtling through the air. I catch them in my fist, and I begin to understand it. Thinking back on Brown's testiness earlier, I empathize with his search for universality amid his fractured homeland. I put the beads around my neck—my talisman—and move onward into the uncertain night. Le freak, c'est chic.
