by Peter Clarke
It's like — “if the guy that built Salvation Mountain fronted Iggy & The Stooges.”
Sacramento-based musician Sam Eliot is known for his beautifully-crafted lyrics. He writes lines with the delicacy and insight of Leonard Cohen, the clever irony of Lou Reed. Here’s a typical Sam Eliot line, from his 2012 album, Monte Sereno:
“My love is as strong as the bars on the window
of a 24-hour liquor and lotto,
and I can let people in,
but it all depends on what exactly I’ve got
and what exactly you’re needin’.”
But this all changed with his latest project, a new band called Demon Wrangler.
“Demon Wrangler is not about songwriting at all,” he told me. “The songs are intended to be kind of stupid.”
This new project is such a departure from Sam’s previous work that you have to wonder if it’s a joke. It turns out, it is. But also, it’s not.
To get the full story behind the new band, I interviewed Sam via FaceTime as he walked around downtown Sacramento. The interview is below, lightly edited. But first, take a moment to enjoy Stupid Lucifer!
PETER CLARKE: The songs are all Christian. Is Demon Wrangler making fun of Christian music?
SAM ELIOT: That’s all in the eye of the observer. Even making it, there’s a part of me that’s like, this is fucking hysterical, and then there’s a part of me that is just dead serious about it. … This whole project just started vomiting out of me and I don’t really know what to make of it myself. I don’t know where the humor ends and the seriousness begins.
I grew up really religious, and it feels like a way to explore my own roots. … Outside of any Christian boundaries, the underlying thing behind a lot of the songs is a hyper contrast of forces—and championing the forces of light rather than the forces of dark.
What initially inspired it? Did it start as a song that grew into album? And was it a joke that then became more serious? Or the other way around?
I was at the studio working on a song for one of my solo records. I had Mike Farrell in there laying down some guitar on it. And he had to go to rehearse with his other band, Th’ Losin Streaks, so he left. I was starting to break everything down and pack up to go home. But we had gotten this really great guitar sound. So I was like, I’m going to spend the next hour trying to make a song really fast. Just as an exercise. And I did that. I just laid down this crazy-ass drum beat, laid down this crazy-ass guitar, and then I grabbed the vocal mic and pressed play. I didn’t have anything written. I just started screaming into the mic, like, nonsense. And that was Stupid Lucifer. I recorded Stupid Lucifer in twenty minutes—from top to bottom and mixed it.
I remembered I finished it and was like, “What is this? What the fuck is this?” And as I was sitting there, everything just started clicking in my head. And I was just like, it’s as if Iggy Pop got really into Jesus but still did heroin. It’s this whole clashing thing. Like, people that are religious are going to hate this. And people that aren’t religious are going to hate this. And I was just like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever made.”
For three days after that, I couldn’t sleep. I was having this manic awakening. I just started getting force fed everything I needed to do for this Demon Wrangler thing. I went into the studio the next day and recorded two more songs just like that.
It’s like the David Lynch thing: Creativity can be like fishing and you’re going for these big fish. And every once in a while you land a fish and you’re like, fuck, what kind of fish is this? It came out of you but it’s almost alien to you at the same time. That’s how the Demon Wrangler thing felt initially, where I’m getting a serious download from the universe.
So you played all the instruments and everything?
Yeah.
It’s funny because it doesn’t sound at all like you, but then again it’s like, this is definitely Sam. You haven’t tapped into this before, but it’s purely you.
It feels like I tapped into a deep unconscious part of the mind. And deep down you’re afraid of God; you’re afraid that all these wackado Christians are actually right and there are cosmic forces at play. And I believe that to a certain extent.
It’s definitely not a goof on people of faith of any kind. That’s definitely not my intention. More than anything my intention is to talk about taboo things. In our culture, religion is not fuckin’ Thanksgiving dinner conversation. It’s weird that at this point in history, you can talk about your pussy anywhere, but, dude, the punk rock boundary is talking about religion and faith and spirituality. … And religion undergirds our entire social fabric, so it’s like, gotta talk about this shit in a way that’s honest.
Your music has always done the Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan thing where you reference the Old Testament symbology. And this is almost like your New Testament symbology moment. Is that a fair observation?
I think it’s more explicitly about that… This whole first record, I’m trying to present some kind of cosmology that uses the language of religion in a broad sense but isn’t— I don’t know. I thought about shopping this whole thing as a kind of Christian rock band, but I felt that was kind of disingenuous.
Is Demon Wrangler now a band? Or is it a side project of Sam Eliot?
It’s as much a band as there can be a band in 2020, when you can’t play shows. … It is going to be something I’d like to do as a live band. … And at this point I don’t even know if Sam Eliot is a spinoff of Demon Wrangler. I don’t even know anymore.
The Demon Wrangler project almost begs for an explanation in the sense that… Your first instinct is to ask: What the fuck is this? Is this a Christian record? Is this a Satanic record? Is this a mistake like someone pulled a Tommy Wiseau? Like they tried to make the most perfect record of all time, but then it was so bad that it’s good? It’s hard to tell. But that’s the beauty of it.
Yeah, in my mind, when this all started hitting me, this was like—if the guy that built Salvation Mountain fronted Iggy & The Stooges. Or like, you know, the worship leader at your Christian megachurch decided to eat a strip of acid two hours before service.
Follow Demon Wrangler on Spotify and Bandcamp. You can also follow Sam’s other musical ventures, Sam Eliot and Duke Chevalier.
Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. He’s the author of the comic novels Politicians Are Superheroes and The Singularity Survival Guide. Follow him on Twitter @HeyPeterClarke.