Photo by Dominic Episcopo zoom
In between sips of iced coffee at the Last Drop coffee shop, Michael
Penn is talking archeology, theology and all things Fortean. Uh, Freudian? "No, Fortean. As in Charles Fort. The first guy to really document what we would
call today unexplained phenomena," says Penn. Wearing a vintage,
blue-flower print shirt, his wavy hair well-gelled, Penn leans
back on the window of the 13th Street coffee house. The singer/
songwriter lights a cigarette and inspects the scene around him:
a bearded slacker playing chess, a young girl has her head buried
in Thomas Hardy. Penn fits right in. "Fort's basic premise," he continues, "was that we don't know
what the fuck is going on. He spent his entire life, every single
day, in the New York Public Library going through the oldest periodicals
he could get a hold of dating back to 1500s. Newspapers, magazines,
log books. Whatever. He found these amazing patterns. He found
these stories where people, living 300 miles from the coast of
England, woke up one day to find frogs raining on their city.
Just everywhere. The scientists of the day said [the frogs] were
caught up in a whirlwind, as if the whirlwind would just selectively
take the frogs and not the water and the plants. Several days
later it happened again 100 miles south. And he tracked it around
the world." Penn had been tooling around in a van all morning, doing live
radio station gigs to promote his new album, Resigned. He seems a little groggy and, frankly, resigned about doing an interview. The 38-year-old musician doesn't care to talk much about his actor-littered
family (of course he's Sean and Christopher Penn's big brother
and both his parents were actors) or his significant other, songstress
Aimee Mann, but he will talk about raining frogs - and God. "I'm a fairly orthodox non-denominational Protestant. And the
emphasis is on the protest... I was raised secular - my father's
Jewish and my mother's Roman Catholic by birth. So I have to admit
to a certain bias. I was never an atheist. I always felt like
there was order." Questions about his own life and growing up in L.A. bore Penn.
He sighs and lights another cigarette. "There's nothing I find less interesting than talking about myself,"
says Penn, when asked if he likes doing interviews. "You would think that once I made the record, my work would be
done and the record company would take it upon themselves to promote
the thing. But I'm happy to tour and do some of this kind of promotional
stuff." If Penn sounds embittered about the record business he has a right
to be. After his 1989 debut, March (featuring the song "No Myth" that asked, "What If I was Romeo
in black jeans?"), which made it to No. 13 on the charts, the
crew that signed Penn to RCA left and he claims the new regime
wasn't interested in his career. "And they wouldn't let me out of my contract," he adds. "They
basically kept me imprisoned for three and a half years." After a second album in 1992, Free For All (that few even knew he recorded), Penn finally signed to Epic's
subsidiary label, 57 Records who released Resigned. Produced by Brendan O' Brien (Pearl Jam, Black Crowes, Matthew
Sweet), Resigned is an album of catchy singles - addictive choruses, jaunty rhythms
and perfect melodies. Penn brings his bag of musical tricks with
him, including strings, tambourine, choruses of harmony and a
Chamberlain - a Mellotron-like keyboard which activates taped
sounds of instruments like oboe and cello. As "pop" as this album appears, there's an eerie quality seeping
from its core. The song, "Figment" begins as a lonely dirge (distant
vocals and subterranean organ) to explode into a heartache-angry
power pop. "Selfish," a song of dark obsession, is sexy with disembodied
guitars and Penn's effected throaty croons. Penn's clever lyrics recall Paul McCartney (if McCartney weren't
so damned silly), and most of Penn's music is drenched in Beatleisms.
The lead-off single, "Try," is ripe with Penn's sly turns of phrase:
"Then watch me blink and overload/ what I undertake/ 'til I don't
try." A song like "Me Around" is perhaps too perfect an example of Fab Four pop construction with its rumbling
"Eight Days a Week" rhythms. There's also an overwhelming sadness to Resigned - from the low-key ballad "Out of My Hands" to the foreboding
"Like Egypt Was," which Penn says, is about the end of the millennium,
or "L.A. in the apocalypse." Like his pal Charles Fort, Penn based his song on a newspaper
article about an unexplained phenomenon: a woman found to have
toxic yellow crystals in her blood caused an entire emergency
room staff to collapse. "Within hours, the government was in there wearing space suits
and putting this woman's body into an airtight aluminum coffin,"
says Penn. "She subsequently died... The best [the researchers]
could come up with was mass hysteria. Nobody knows what happened."
In the song, Penn spins his yarn. "I'm on a three-day binge/ on the lunatic fringe/ From Riverside/
all the way to Livermore/ where the scent she makes/ will now
emanate/ until everyone in range/ collapses to the floor..." What kind of mood was he in when he made this album? "Oh, about 11 different moods," says Penn, glibly, admitting that
the songs might seem self-deprecating. "But," he chides, "that's self-deprecating to the protagonist,
which may or may not be me." As we finished up the interview (or rather, lesson in unexplained
phenomena) Penn was eager to go In Search Of another kind of mystery. Philly thrift stores. What does he shop for? "Interesting jackets. I'm always searching for interesting jackets."
Michael Penn