Greg Edwards on Failure’s latest, a space-rock meditation on modern times

When I called him last month, Greg Edwards was in his Los Angeles studio, toying with some synthesizers and “trying to get sound out of these speakers,” he told me. He was having some audio issues that were, thankfully, resolved just before he picked up the phone. (It was a faulty cable — always the last thing he suspects.)

Edwards’ band Failure released its fifth studio album, In The Future Your Body Will Be The Furthest From Your Mind, last year, its second after returning from a decade-and-a-half-long break. Released first as four separate EPs, and later stitched together into one album, In The Future… is a space-rock meditation on the impact of modern technology, and it brims with textural intricacies and thoughtful commentary. Many of these songs will be played when the band tours America with British shoegaze vets Swervedriver this spring — including a stop at Lawrence’s Liberty Hall on April 12.

The Pitch: From what I can tell, some lyrics on the new record tackle the topic of addiction, but others are more apocalyptic.

Greg Edwards: I can tell you that this may be the first record where there’s not one lyric where I was thinking about anything to do with addiction — or certainly not substance addiction or addiction to drugs. I think [it covers] addiction to this surrogate mental space that everybody lives in now, this tiny screen in your smartphone. 

The simplest example is phone numbers. It used to be that you had 20 or 30 phone numbers memorized. Everyone close to you, you knew those numbers. Sometimes even you’d memorize a doctor’s number or any number that you called with any frequency. And now, nobody memorizes a number because it’s right there in your phone, right in your pocket, and I think that extends out to almost everything now. You just upload from the phone into your brain and use that in the moment. You don’t keep as much in your brain; you don’t use that space.

So I thought it was just this idea that we’re pouring ourselves into this other space, and it’s sort of a little menacing and unknown what will happen to us there. Even as a species, you see it in the news cycle — I think the nature of how news stories take off is so different now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. It’s a completely different world. All discourse has been modulated, I’d say for the worse, by that.

The Pink Floyd influence on the band definitely creeps in on “Pennies” and one or two other songs on the album. What material of theirs do you end up revisiting the most?

Yeah, I’m completely guilty of that. I love Pink Floyd almost all the way through, from beginning to end. I’m one of these people who, I love Syd Barrett, love that early stuff, but I also love The Final Cut. I think there’s amazing stuff on that record, and I like the whole Pink Floyd universe, so that’s something that I think I’ve absorbed so completely when I was young that it comes out, for sure.

I know that “Pennies” on this album and “Petting The Carpet” and “I Can See Houses” on the last one were all older songs that you’d reworked or recorded for an album for the first time. Are there more tracks in the vault that may pop up on future records?

Those were just songs where we thought the basic idea was so strong that we wanted to see what we could do now — to turn it into a whole song, kinda fleshing the arrangement out completely. And I don’t really know off the top of my head if there’s another one like that from the old days that we’d give that treatment to.

How satisfied would you say you are with the EPs and the resulting album, considering that you set deadlines to have each section finished?

In terms of the creative process, I really enjoyed it. We worked so quickly. The actual songwriting was so spontaneous and quick. In fact, we’re going out on tour in less than a month, and I’m going back and learning parts and stuff, and a lot of these songs I just have no memory of writing — chord progressions or doing the overdubs or anything — because just literally, in a lot of cases, the songs, the foundations were written and recorded in a matter of three or four hours. In some cases the lyric and melody, too, was just done so quickly. And that was great. That part of the process I really enjoyed. 

In terms of releasing as EPs and putting them all together into a full record, I’m a little bit ambivalent about that. I’m not sure it’s something that I’d wanna do again. Since we were writing as we went, we were just locked into the sequence at the end of it, and I don’t know that the sequence that exists now on the record is the ultimate sequence for that group of songs. If we’d just released the record as all the songs at once we probably would’ve found a different order.

I like that you guys are bringing Swervedriver on tour with you, considering that you’re both bands that were doing really great work in the nineties that was overlooked by some people at the time, but are now getting attention with reunions. What led to them being on the tour?

That was an idea that Kelli had for a while, and some other people in our organization had floated that idea, and it just makes sense. There’s a lot of crossover between the fanbases of the two bands, and we’ll see how it goes, but I’m looking forward to it.

I remember I was a Swervedriver fan back probably right around the period where Ken [Edwards] and I were starting to write songs for Magnified where I remember specifically sitting down and listening to a Swervedriver record and really liking what they were doing.

Is there anything else on this tour that you think will really separate it from past tours?

Nothing immediately comes to mind, but just for us, we have a lot of songs now that we all feel very strongly about, so coming up with a setlist — we’re not playing for three or four hours, so you have to make painful decisions. You can’t play everything to make yourself happy, you’re certainly not gonna be able to play everything to make all the people in the audience happy, so it’s really just a question of coming up with a set that flows with the right dynamic of energy and intensity and space, and hopefully that experience as a whole make anyone forget about the songs they were hoping to hear that they might not hear.

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Failure will be at Liberty Hall (644 Massachusetts St., Lawrence, KS) with Swervedriver on April 12, 2019. Tickets are available here.