Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson.
After 12 years in the global spotlight with Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Ruban Nielson has shed his wild rock image and morphed into a family man
With their dgaf vibe, big sound and reckless endangerment of one another and every room in which they played, The Mint Chicks exploded onto the Auckland rock scene in the early 2000s. They played hard and broke things — eventually including the band — and guitarist/principal songwriter Ruban Nielson moved to Portland, Oregon. There, he anonymously released a weird track under the name Unknown Mortal Orchestra, almost immediately attracted the attention and adulation of many of the music world’s leading musical tastemakers, and now — 12 years later — he and the band are one of this country’s biggest musical success stories.
They are five albums deep into a career where they have played the world’s biggest music festivals and have sold out venues worldwide, including on last year’s hugely successful tour of the United States. They’ve been feted globally and have a string of international hits to their name, including So Good at Being in Trouble, Hunnybee and Multi-Love, which between them have generated hundreds of millions of streams. Next month, they’ll be one of the headline acts at Auckland’s Laneway Festival.
None of this seemed very likely when Nielson left school and went to Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.
He thought he was going to become a visual artist, but, as he gained more experience in the art world, he says, “I realised how much of a rich person’s game it was, and I just didn’t feel very drawn to the part of it that was fancy and financialised and all of that stuff. Regardless of what you made, it would really come down to the opinions of, like, five people. And if you didn’t make it over with those five people, then you didn’t get to play. Or else you would spend your time in obscurity, and then everybody would make a bunch of money off your work after you died.”
He and his brother, Kody, started The Mint Chicks the year before he graduated from Elam and he was immediately intoxicated by the buzz of playing live, by the intensity and immediacy of the audience’s reaction to what he was doing.
“Once you’re able to interact with people that way,” he says, “it’s hard to go back to sitting around painting and trying to guess what people might think of it.”
He now thinks he was probably a bit wild in those days, although he didn’t think that at the time. He says Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, which he’d read as a kid, was a big influence on both him and The Mint Chicks.
But he says: “The thing that was missing from the movie is at the end of the book … he feels himself mellowing out, as if the book’s trying to explain that no matter how violent and wild your youth is, there is some point where you might find some peace. That had a big impact on me because I think I was looking forward to the idea that my brain would become more peaceful as I got older and I would become maybe a more useful member of society or something.”
I asked about his mental health. He said: “I’m not on any psychotropics. I’m not medicated professionally for any of the issues I have. And I think I’m also the typical guy who won’t go to therapy.
“I don’t know what my mind would be like if I didn’t have making music. I think making things is the thing that kind of keeps me this side of losing it. But I also think there’s a lot of reason for me to not lose it as well now: People that I care about enough that I can see the point of staying in control. And I’m also grateful that I have the option; it’s not like that choice has been taken away from me by my brain chemistry being a little too out of my control.
“I do feel like as long as I stick to the task, then I can keep myself stable. But, I mean, I am incredibly depressed. I do have these weird ideations about how pointless it is that I’m here and all of that stuff, but art seems to take me out of that, whether it’s making it or enjoying it, like listening to music and meeting other musicians and having conversations. There’s a weird kind of therapy community in that sense. Like when you talk to other musicians, you realise that they use music as part of their self-medication process. But yeah, I’m sure if I go and do a psych evaluation of some kind, I’m definitely going to get diagnosed with something.
“I just use my family as a gauge. If they’re happy, then that’s how much attention I give it. I suppose if I was making people miserable, then I would have to reassess that. Right now, I just feel like I’m getting through in that respect. But I’m also very lucky. My music career got way beyond my wildest dreams. That probably helps too.”
He’s not a rock star anymore, at least not in the stereotypical sense of the word. He doesn’t give a shit about all that stuff. He’s a family man, a dad rocker.
He said: “I remember reading this book about Prince and realising there’s a price to pay to be Prince. Prince paid this toll to be that guy. And the toll, I remember thinking, that’s just too high. He never had any children and didn’t really have a life. He spent his whole life in the studio. You forgo an actual life to get a Grammy, a lifetime achievement award or whatever. I think about the way that Iggy Pop’s son got dragged along on his rock-and-roll nightmare. It’s one thing to be there by yourself, but to take a kid with you? That’s just not what I want to do.”
His family, and particularly his two children, are the most important thing on Earth for him: “It sounds nuts to me now, but it really hadn’t occurred to me then: I thought my job — my actual duty on this Earth — was to create distractions for people.”
I asked if there was a moment when he felt that change taking place.
He said: “There are a lot of moments, a lot of big epiphanies. But I was in jail in Dublin. It was like waking up from this kind of situation where I’ve got myself in jail in Ireland and kind of realising that everything I was doing was sort of seemed to be in service of me thinking, ‘This is who I’m supposed to be’. And then following everything to its logical conclusion, because I thought ‘Oh, I’m supposed to be this guy. This is what I have to do. I have to follow every interesting pathway to its logical conclusion’.”
By which I assume he meant: “This is what it takes to be a rock star”.
“I think when you’re young, it’s like you get a chance to be the main character in life for a while.
“Both my kids are teenagers now. So I look at them and I think, ‘Well, clearly they’re the centre of this’. If it’s a movie, I’m just the dad now. They’re the main characters now. And I feel that way, and I don’t feel any sorrow around that.”
He describes music as his “religion”, but he isn’t especially interested in forcing anyone else to see it that way.
“I really just want to make something for you to listen to on the way to work or to put on while you’re at the gym or whatever.”
He doesn’t see art as anything grand or elevated. He says his brother, a builder, approaches his work with the same sort of care and passion he does.
“I think art’s just an everyday thing that we all can appreciate about the world around us all the time. It’s not necessarily some kind of big, fancy intellectual idea. It’s more just the fact that you’ve dedicated yourself to something so much and you care about it so much, and you’re doing it in order to make the world a better place. Like you want the world to be more interesting, and you can do that making coffee, or being a line cook.
“I sometimes wonder if one of the things that makes it hard to be creative in New Zealand is we haven’t made that leap yet into bringing art down to our level rather than thinking it’s elevated, or has nothing to do with the other stuff in our world, like rugby or building, or all these things that are the building blocks of what New Zealanders think of as everyday. Art is often elevated and pushed down at the same time, by pushing it into some other realm — ‘the artsy fartsy realm’ — where it’s like a treat you get if you’ve taken care of everything else.”
At the end of the day, music — even really good music — is maybe not so different from a hammer and a bag of nails; a means to an end, for both creator and receiver.
“I don’t know if it’s important. I just know that people live with it every day. They like this song and they listen to it, they put it on when they feel bad, and somehow it gives them some relief. And if the songs sort of are operating in that way for 10 years or more, then I can’t see how there’s anything more prestigious than that.”
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s fifth album, V, is due for release in March. The band play Auckland’s Laneway Festival on Waitangi Day, Tuesday, February 6. lanewayfestival.com
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