For a moment there Julian Casablancas was pretty clear on why he’d left New York, his childhood home and the place where his band, the Strokes, who were once synonymous with everything raw-edged and seductive about the city, first came of age. "I walk around New York now and get upset," he’d said. Too many juice bars, basically. Too few genuinely cool guys like, well—Julian Casablancas. But a day later he seems to be regretting even that small disclosure. "I wouldn’t say that the reason is I walk around and hate everyone who lives there. That’s just rude." He’d reluctantly told me the name of the town north of the city where he and his wife and son have moved. Now he seems to be reconsidering that, too. "Do you mind if you just call it ’upstate,’ just cuz…"
If you don’t hate everyone in New York, what made you leave?
"Um, we just found a cool place that we liked that we wanted to go, and also… I don’t know.… Sorry.…"
This is the way he talks. Like he’s constantly wondering what Julian Casablancas—whoever that is—might say, or should say. Across the table, through the gloom of the Mexican restaurant we’re sitting in somewhere in Los Angeles, where he’s come to rehearse with his new band, he already seems to be in real pain. We’ve been here for eighteen minutes.
"I’m not doing well all of a sudden, falling off the rails, so confused between what’s private and not.…"
He appears to have slightly more hair on the right side of his head than the left—it’s patchy and long and angelic in that familiar tattered way that is becoming increasingly spooky as he ages. He’s decided not to say much about himself—he’s never really said much about himself; he is infamously mumbly, awkward, sometimes confrontational—but he keeps slipping up.
He is surprisingly good at soccer.
"Do you sport, Zach?" he asks, ball at his feet, the sun setting over a studio parking lot in Burbank, his bandmates milling around. Casablancas, 36, has a new record out in September with these guys, the Voidz—five session musicians turned actual friends who all look like variations on Animal from the Muppets—and they’re practicing it out here in the Valley. This is how we all first meet, forming that universal configuration of bros lazily passing a spherical object back and forth.
The record’s called Tyranny, and that’s sort of what it’s about, Casablancas says: rapacious oil companies and a not-so-free press and environmental depredation. Money. Health care. Nightmares. The moon. "It’s not very sexy to talk about these things, especially in a place like America, where things are, like, the best. But it just feels like we’re inside that Versailles bubble, you know?"
Tyranny sounds neither like the Strokes nor like Casablancas’s first super-bright and borderline autobiographical 2009 solo record, Phrazes for the Young; in fact, it doesn’t really sound like anything else at all, except for maybe Black Flag in spots and space-age, fifth-dimension circus music in others. Casablancas nevertheless maintains that Tyranny has strong commercial potential, and who knows, maybe it does—I find myself listening to one song, "Nintendo Blood," over and over again, all tired and sweet nostalgia, like something from a John Hughes movie. Making people feel emotional and worn-out and sexy at the same time has always been what Casablancas is good at. It’s a quality no amount of ominous clown noises or psychedelic jungle music or thrash metal—to name some other sounds you hear on Tyranny—can drown out.
Why a guy who was supposed to save rock ’n’ roll for an entire generation is instead out in Los Angeles running through ten-minute ballads with names like "Human Sadness" is a different question. An existential one, maybe: about Casablancas’s past as a person who many, many people once cared deeply about, but also about his future and whether he’ll ever be that guy again. Whether he even ever wants to be.
It is almost hard to remember now what the Strokes were. Maybe the best way to explain it was that they very briefly made a bunch of rock ’n’ roll qualities that seemed gone from this earth—aggressively melodic, drunken, deadpan, dangerously blunt qualities—feel possible again. And Casablancas was the one in the band upon whom all this fell hardest—the guy anointed to resurrect a genre whose very name made him cringe. "When I think of rock ’n’ roll, I just think of, like…the ’60s…like, tassels…," Casablancas mutters, wincing. He says that being what NME once called, in its usual understated way, "the most exciting young rock group on Earth" wasn’t fun then, and living down the legacy of that has been even worse, mentally and physically, for everyone involved.
Suffice it to say, he is out here doing what he’s doing because it makes him happy.
He kicks the ball my way. I kick it back. And then we all pile into two cars to go eat chili and talk about movies and vegetarianism and "The Piña Colada Song"—anything besides his own music or Casablancas himself.
At the end of the meal, I buy. By way of response, Casablancas leads the Voidz in a spirited and deeply embarrassing serenade of "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow."
Just over a year ago, his dad died. He was complicated, John Casablancas. Founder of Elite Model Management, proto-fashion-world sexual libertine, and maybe not the nicest guy from a wife-and-child perspective. At lunch, I ask Julian about a 1988 New York magazine cover profile of his dad, who in the first couple of paragraphs tells a story about vacationing with his daughter, Julian’s half sister Cecile, in Ibiza when she was 17. A photographer, seeing Cecile in a bikini, asks if he can photograph her. The elder Casablancas hustles over, not to stop it but to name a price: $2,000.
"She’s got a great little body," John Casablancas says, in summary.
I ask Julian if that’s a person he recognizes.
"I think he must have been kidding," Julian says reluctantly. "He was a very charming, funny guy, so I’m sure he said it as a joke if he did say it."
In the same article, Julian himself appears, not yet born. John Casablancas warns his then wife, Jeanette Christjansen, that he is not the type of man who would ever change diapers. "’You’ll see; once the baby comes, he’s cute,’" Christjansen recalls saying. "And he would tell me, ’Jeanette, don’t ever ask me that.’"
"That…that sounds probably true," Julian says, nervously laughing, after I read his mother’s words aloud.
He pauses.
"I think it’s just like an old-world thing. I don’t know, man. I wrestle with that stuff. He passed away like a year ago, pretty much exactly a year ago, so I can’t say anything but good things."
John Casablancas wasn’t around much when Julian was growing up—infamously, at 41 he had an affair with a then 16-year-old model (a fact that did not prevent his son, some years later, from placing a song called "Barely Legal" on the Strokes’ debut). Julian learned more about being a man from his stepfather, the painter Sam Adoquei, who would talk to him about art and ultimately gave him an inkling of how one might pursue a life of making things.
It is a not particularly well-kept secret that Casablancas wrote the first two Strokes records more or less by himself. Even now, talking about this is uncomfortable for him. "It’s a tricky thing, because I always like to create that illusion of this vague band thing," he says. They really were friends, at the beginning. They would get drunk and tongue-kiss one another and fight strangers and then drink some more. Casablancas would write the songs and then the band would play them.
But those circumstances turned out to be untenable: "It wasn’t so equal, but it was the illusion of equal, so I think it fucked with everything."
They went on an improbably long tour after their first record, Is This It, played "360 shows in a row," and collectively saw a ghost. "A band is a great way to destroy a friendship, and a tour’s a great way to destroy a band," Casablancas says now.
In 2005, he got married to Juliet Joslin, who was then the Strokes’ assistant manager. He also got sober. Casablancas was a famously volatile drinker; a 2003 Rolling Stone profile depicts him platonically kissing a male reporter on the neck seven times ("The night is still young," he says, winking, when I bring this up) and then wandering off into the night. He had been drinking heavily since he was a teenager, and by 26 he’d "reached a pretty intense health point," Casablancas tells me. "I either had to stop or it was not going well."
This was also the year—2005—that he and the rest of the Strokes staggered into the studio to make their third record, First Impressions of Earth, an inadvertent monument to self-hatred and weary contempt. Casablancas these days is honest, easygoing, good company. But he is also irredeemably, obliquely himself. There is a song on First Impressions, "Ask Me Anything," whose chorus is simply: I’ve got nothing to say, repeated over and over again—as forthright a declaration of creative exhaustion as ever recorded.
How did your bandmates react when you brought in that song with those lyrics?
"It’s funny: This is one of those cheesy songwriter ’I dreamt it’ stories, but I dreamt it was a Scissor Sisters song. And there was just a chorus where they kept saying, I’ve got nothing to say, and it was so hypnotic and weird and fucked with my head. I woke up thinking it was a real song. And then I realized: ’Oh, wait, I made that up in a dream, so I can just do it and I’m not plagiarizing.’"
Those were not your true feelings?
"No. I just think it’s interesting, because there’s something so vain about being in a band and being a singer. So to say ’I have nothing to say’ seemed like a cool, refreshing kind of concept."
In the same song you say, We could drag it out / but that’s for other bands to do.
"Mm, no. That’s just more referring to song length."
"I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon" is what he finally manages, by way of explaining why he left New York City. But mostly, though he doesn’t want to discuss it, the decision was about not raising his son there.
"I think you do grow up kind of fast in the city," Casablancas says ruefully.
He has made his peace with the turbulent, unbalanced, and frequently drunken way he himself came up in New York, though you sense that’s also why he’s seeking something calmer with the Voidz. He has a novel, even practical—if not particularly romantic—way of understanding what the Strokes are up to these days. "I think when bands break up, that’s another form of lameness. It’s like: ’Really? You need different private-jet sizes to get along?’ I can understand that as much as it’s my life and it might be a living hell for me—"
Here he pauses. "I’m not saying it is.
"But when you think of bands that you really like and then they broke up, it’s never a positive thing. It’s never cool."
He pauses again. "I haven’t felt that dramatic about it, I guess."
I ask if he’d ever heard from his parents about what they thought of the Strokes and what he’s accomplished, seemingly in spite of at least one of them.
"I think they’re proud. My mom, she’s funny: She plays the albums and sings along and stuff," Casablancas says, smiling a bit. "And a lot of my dad’s friends told me, afterwards, that he would tell them that he couldn’t believe all the the things I’d done."
Zach Baron (@xzachbaronx) _ is GQ’s staff writer._