interviews
Cullen Omori What you do when your high school band falls apart Photography: David Kasnic / writer: katie beswick
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ullen Omori is porcelain-doll pretty, with a long, oval face, full lips, flawless olive skin and peroxide hair, the dull yellow colour of overripe lemons. He is tired when we meet, his amber eyes squinting in the afternoon sun, shoulder-length hair poking out from the bottom of his beanie hat, like straw. He’s pensive, tired; he seems like a man with things on his mind, leaning against the blue-framed windows of his Chicago apartment, a little distracted, chain-smoking as he answers my questions at shot-gun speed. He speaks in fast, fractured halfsentences, driven by an internal logic that it takes me a while to understand. His thoughts float abstractedly to the surface, one idea interrupting another, as if they exert too much pressure inside his mind and he needs to get them out, as quickly as possible. Perhaps the world-on-hisshoulders demeanour is because it’s been a rough few days. Midway through his current tour Omori’s van gave out, and his stress is palpable; he pulls furiously on a cigarette as he recounts the details: “I was just on this tour that was supposed to go down the West Coast for another two weeks, and my van straight up died at the border crossing into Canada.” The next day all his belongings were taken. “I had a rental car with clothes in it and that got stolen.” He rubs his forehead and shrugs, like, what you gonna do? “So I’ve cancelled those dates and I’m having some time off to just re-group and figure out what my plan is.” Omori returned to Chicago the day before our interview and he has a lot to straighten out before he heads back on the road, with an imminent East Coast tour and European dates later in the spring. But there’s something else, a core of sadness, an unresolved pain that seems to run deeper than the petty
irritations of the daily grind. It’s like talking with someone who has been recently heartbroken. And in a way he has. The dissolution of the Smith Westerns, the band he had fronted since high school, has clearly affected him profoundly. He’s upfront about that. “I really try to, like, stay away from super-relationship words when I’m describing it,” he says, “but it is definitely that vibe, you know?” I do know. The breakup of the Smith Westerns is a life change it’s clear he’s still working through. And, like all the recently broken-hearted people I’ve ever met, Omori’s conversation is a little barbed, veering between remorse and bitterness as he details the end. “If I had known at the time that people were gonna be like, ‘oh that sucks’, I would have put more time into making it an official thing,” he explains, as he talks me through his decision to announce the band’s separation on Twitter. But then again, “Until I announced the Smith Westerns were done I thought we were an afterthought in people’s minds. But when anything ends, all of a sudden it gets this memorial status where it’s like: ‘That was really great. I wish I could have come to see the Smith Westerns’ – and its like: where was this support when no-one was coming to see the Smith Westerns’ shows towards the end? Or where was the support when our whole label situation imploded?” I get the sense, from the way he peppers his answers with stinging asides aimed at ex-band mates and hangers-on, that he wants to set the record straight before he moves on, but that he isn’t quite over it enough to let go. “I know there’s this thing of every single person who ever played in Smith Westerns calling themselves a ‘member’ or whatever,” he tells me at
one point, “but it was always just the three of us: Max, Cameron and I. We had different people sit in and play drums and shit, but it was always the three of us.” He shakes his head firmly when I ask whether they are still in touch, and then seems to change his mind. “I talk to Cameron because he’s my brother. I’ll talk to Max occasionally – I don’t talk to him as much. Him and all the other, like, satellite members went off and formed that other band [Whitney], doing some Dave-Grohltype-shit.” He exhales cigarette smoke in a long, deliberate streak and stares off into the middle-distance. “I don’t know; I wish ‘em well and whatever.” That’s not to say he regrets the band’s demise; it was obvious it was over, he says, and the siren call to work differently had been sounding for some time. “I think that for me when it wasn’t working it wasn’t working. It’s like being in a relationship with someone since high school until you’re 24 – seven years or something like that. Which is fine – it’s cool when you’re in Chicago and don’t have a ton of other options, it makes sense. But after doing the whole Smith Westerns thing and meeting all these different people and seeing other kinds of music and other ways to pursue music I think I was ready for it.” Omori’s first solo effort, ‘New Misery’, would certainly suggest he is ready for it. The album is a dizzying, genre-bending collection that is strange and beautiful, showcasing his encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music history and giving form to his off-beat, melancholy persona. It is an incredible album, and he switches from distractedly preoccupied to upbeat and animated when I ask about the writing process, outlining his working methods with forensic precision. “I always have the TV on
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