If grade-school music teachers had brains, they would be playing Jukeboxer for their classes instead of fucking "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." That shit won't teach you anything. Jukeboxer, however, could teach children a lot. It can teach them self-motivation (Jukeboxer is essentially one man, Brooklyn musician Noah Wall); technical prowess (the dude records at home but it all sounds like it came out of Abbey Road); and music history (Jukeboxer mashes up the sounds of avant folk music and New Order-ish pop until it sounds like John Fahey joined My Bloody Valentine). What does "Row, Row, Row" teach you? How to be bored as shit?
VICE: Where did you go to school?
Noah: I went to a Montessori school early on, and then this weird place called Oakland for most of middle school. It's a boarding school for kids with learning disabilities on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia. I was mildly dyslexic and totally dumbfounded by math. There were kids there with bigger problems, though, like a guy who was compulsively obsessed with lightbulbs.
But you were a day student, right? Were there gang wars between residents and commuters?
There weren't really enough day students to form a separate entity. It's more like we were somewhat anonymous because of our day status. This gave us some strange freedoms. Like, I fully got away with telling my parents that I was dating a girl at school who I wasn't. I can't remember her name, but I really liked her and REALLY wished she was my girlfriend. She was a lot older than I was; I don't even think I'd hit puberty at that point.
That's pretty creepy. Why'd you do it?
I think I'd been getting asked a lot by people my parents' age if I had a girlfriend yet. I was getting fucking sick of it, but then I realized I could just pretend that I did. Who better to choose than the girl I actually had a crush on? I think I even had a picture of her I would show people.
Like a mini-stalker. Did they catch you?
At a certain point I broke down and told them it had all been bullshit. I was never a good liar, and the idea of having to pretend I was depressed because we broke up or something made me feel sick. When I told him, I think my dad's reaction was, "Yeah, we suspected that might be the case...."
CHUCKLES McDUCKLES
Jukeboxer's In the Food Chain is out now on Absolutely Kosher Records.
