One night last September, my partner and I drove from our home in West Hollywood out to Highway 1 and then up through the canyons of Topanga to the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where Ty Segall & Freedom Band were playing a two-night stand. The all-ages event had a warm, familial feel; we could’ve brought our one-year-old if it wasn’t after his bedtime.
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The set began with Segall, a Topanga-based singer-songwriter with more than a dozen solo albums, playing alone, then as half of a two-piece with his frequent collaborator Emmett Kelly, and finally with his five-person band, his high, powerful voice a ribbon of color in the cool night. His performance exuded the profound ease of deep practice, the result of two decades building a musical world with so many recurring collaborators and linked side projects that it could constitute a scene all his own—the Ty Segall Cinematic Universe, if you will.
“It’s always scary to play your hometown show, especially an intimate one,” Segall tells me later as he drives out of Topanga, where he lives with his wife and collaborator, Denée, and their infant daughter. “The band learned all the songs in an acoustic style. The whole name of the game was to be restrained, to play a little quieter. It was very hard but so worth it. It was fun.”
In January, Segall released his 14th solo LP, Three Bells, the prog- and funk-infused latest chapter of his career-long inquiry into the mystery of the self. Asked to interpret the album’s swirling layers of sound and surreal yet simple lyrics, Segall demurs. “There’s my intention and there’s my idea,” he tells me. “But I love the idea of someone taking a song and saying that it’s theirs too. That is the magical thing and a lucky thing: that people connect.”
Many of Segall’s frequent collaborators are friends he made at Laguna Beach High School; others date to his college years in San Francisco, where he lived for seven years before moving to Los Angeles in 2012. “One hundred percent, I am a Californian through and through,” Segall says. “I feel very inspired by Northern California, redwoods and fog and the lush green. But I always come back down to the warmer beaches [of Southern California]. I’m just a beach guy at heart. I would put my cards on the table and say that the beaches of Laguna Beach are the best beaches in California. So anybody wants to fight me on that? That’s cool.”
Throughout his long and prolific career, Segall’s work has drawn comparisons to artists like Neil Young, David Bowie, and Marc Bolan, the slightly frayed word psychedelic applied liberally to albums like Sleeper (2013), a meditation on death and dreaming, and Emotional Mugger (2016), a concept album about a baby seeking a mother. Other albums, like Goodbye Bread (2011) and Freedom’s Goblin (2019), feel like greatest-hits albums from another universe. Segall’s 2021 album Harmonizer (also the name of his home studio) brought a glistening darkness into his songs of daily life.
Three Bells highlights the songwriting of Denée, who has served as her husband’s photographer and cover designer, when not fronting her own band, the C.I.A., which features Segall and Kelly. She also cocreated the music videos for the album’s three singles. “Our voices together create this other—this weird, lyrical, unique hybrid,” Segall explains.
So, how does a musician famed for his prolificacy keep it fresh? “I like to write and record stuff in the morning, which is the complete opposite of how I was in my early 20s,” Segall says. “But I like writing songs at, like, 8 in the morning now.”
Becoming a parent will do that, I tell him, asking how having a child has affected his creativity.
“Parenthood makes everything better,” Segall says. “It just makes your life better in every way. It gives scope and depth to the world. You know?” He pauses, a world of thought in his silence. “The main thing for me is just to maintain balance in life. For me, it’s being outside, having some nature around, jumping in the ocean. I love swimming in cold water. If you’re lucky enough to have the time to try to achieve that balance, I feel like that’s the whole thing.”•
Lisa Locascio Nighthawk is the chair of the Antioch MFA and the executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times, and Electric Literature. Her first novel, Open Me, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. She writes a newsletter called Not Knowing How.
