Blur drummer Dave Rowntree has shared his debut solo single, ‘London Bridge’. Produced by Leo Abrahams, the track is set to appear on an album that’s due out later this year via Cooking Vinyl. Check it out below, alongside a video made with French design trio Cauboyz.
“When I lived in London things just started happening when I was near London Bridge, going over London Bridge on the bus, or on the tube going underneath London Bridge,” Rowntree explained in a press release. “I would just notice events occurring, or have life changing thoughts, make decisions and it was slightly unsettling. I had to confront my London Bridge demons.”
“I’m really excited to release my first single as a solo artist,” he added. “It’s from a body of work that I’ve been putting together over the last couple of years, and I’m humbled to be releasing it on the legendary Cooking Vinyl label.”
Born in England to a Brazilian father and a Greek mother, Naima Bock spent her early childhood in Sao Paolo before relocating to South London, where she formed the post-punk band Goat Girl, playing bass and touring the world alongside her friends from school. Following the release of their acclaimed self-titled album in 2018, Bock decided to part ways with the group to focus on other pursuits. In the years between leaving Goat Girl and her solo project, she worked as a gardener and started a degree in archaeology at University College London. Though she was still writing songs during that time – in addition to joining the folk collective Broadside Hacks – she wasn’t planning on assembling them into an album until she met Joel Burton, her close collaborator on Giant Palm, which was recorded in the studio of Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey and features over 30 musicians.
Released last Friday on Sub Pop, the 10-track LP is clearly an ambitious, richly arranged, and eclectic-sounding debut, thanks in no small part to the spirit of collaboration that brought the songs to life. But the elegant, often expansive arrangements on Giant Palm neither disguise nor distract from the bones of Bock’s stirring, idiosyncratic songwriting, only seeking to elevate its strange, conversational intimacy. As much as the album draws from Bock’s heritage and various influences passed on through generations – from bossa nova and British folk to jazz and classical – it consistently grounds itself in the present moment, so much so that it almost feels like a small miracle that her emotional reflections have been so carefully preserved over the past couple of years. In its current form, the weight of her voice evoking both exhaustion and understated power, the album easily serves as a source of comfort, an invitation to slow down and rise up. “Life’s giant palm lifts me to the sky,” she sings on the wondrous title track, “And for a while I forget that I cannot fly/ So I float high, high above it all.”
We caught up with Naima Bock for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her upbringing, the journey behind Giant Palm, freedom in solitude, and more.
You spent part of your early childhood in Brazil before you returned to England, where you were born. How do you look back on your upbringing and the music that you grew up around?
I was pretty young when we were in Brazil. I moved back when I was seven, because my parents split up and schooling was free here in England. There are free schools in Brazil as well, but my mom wanted me to go to an English school. I think musically, it was mostly just my dad playing records, but my Brazilian family, most of them are classical musicians. My grandma, before she got married, she was a concert pianist. She was really good, but she was obviously of the generation where as soon as you get married, you have to have kids and give everything up. And so she stopped at the age of 25. She’s 85 now and she still rips the piano. And then my auntie over there, she’s a cellist in an orchestra. So I grew up around both the Brazilian classics and also quite a lot of classical stuff as well that I found really boring. Now I’m a little bit older, I can appreciate classical music a lot more as well, and I think that’s actually seeped into the album quite a bit. But also, that’s partly thanks to Joel Burton, because while we were recording the album, he was doing his degree in classical music.
When did that shift happen, where you started appreciating both Brazilian music and classical music more?
For me, Brazilian music was always part of my life, and it was something that, when I listen to it, it brings about such strong emotion. It’s got that middle point of happy and sad. A lot of my mates from England and Europe absolutely love Brazilian music, loads of people do, but they can’t understand the lyrics, and the lyrics are such an essential part of it – so beautiful. They’re real poetry. So Brazilian music was always just there as the place that I’d go when I felt bad or I needed some kind of comfort or maybe a bit of nostalgia for going back there. Because I try and visit Brazil once a year until the pandemic, I was there in February this year, luckily.
But then the shift to classical, I’m not like a fervent classical listener or anything, but I was actually trying to consciously listen to less straight-up indie music and less song-based structures. Having grown up in such a technological age, it’s quite easy to just listen to two to three-minutes songs – I think that listening to classical has helped expand my creative mind and my imagination a little bit more by just sitting with it even if I wasn’t immediately gripped by it. That’s kind of true for a lot of instrumental albums that I really love now. It was definitely more of a conscious decision and I’m really happy that I made it, because I think I needed it at that point in my life as well, and it offers some kind of respite from, I guess the personal agonies which can sometimes feel quite egocentric around pop music and indie music. I feel like there’s something a little bit more ethereal and heavenly about some classical and some jazz and instrumental music. A bit more spiritual, maybe.
You’ve talked about how you’ve been inspired by Brazilian bossa nova British folk music, but I was wondering if the Greek part of your heritage is something you’ve been curious to explore at all.
Yeah, that’s funny, actually. Bless her soul, my mom has always been trying to – we had quite a difficult relationship with my Greek family, because there was a lot of drama. There was a period during my childhood where my mom wasn’t talking to her parents. She was trying to teach me the language and trying to sort of keep the culture going with me, but because we were not visiting Greece very much, it didn’t really work. But I’ve actually gotten in touch with it a little bit more in the last year or so, I’ve listened to some more Greek music. Not before the album, so it hasn’t really played much of a part in it, but I have definitely gotten more in touch with it recently. And it’s just such such a fascinating history as well. I’m going on a marine archaeological dig in Cyprus later this year, which I’m really excited about. I guess I’m more interested in the history, but I feel like I’m yet to plunge into the musical history, which I will do properly one day. I’m kind of just dipping my toes in at the minute, but what I have found has been incredible and beautiful. Such a rich culture.
Is there a specific moment where you felt like songwriting and making music became an important part of your life?
Well, especially towards the end of my time in Goat Girl, my last band, I started to write songs but I had absolutely zero confidence with it. So there was never a serious thought in my mind that I would do it as a career or even in an ambitious way. I’d write songs in quite a relaxed manner – it would take me like six months to write one song, and then another one will pop up. I didn’t really try very hard, because I just wasn’t expecting it to go anywhere. But then, in the intervening years between Goat Girl and this project, I did a lot of gardening, I started a degree in archaeology as well. I really enjoyed doing all of those things, but I did sort of realise that music would be the only thing that I’d ever actually drop everything else for. I think that to do a lot of different things in life is very important, and especially with musicians, I really respect people that have like a tunnel vision with music and that’s the only thing that they could do, but without sounding too serious, I also can’t take the business as a very solid grounding for life. I didn’t come from a lot of money in my family, so it’s not like I can lean back on a bunch of money in case it doesn’t work out.
That’s why I started the degree, mostly because of my interest in history, but partly so I could have a bit of a solid footing. Something todo that I enjoyed and that would also make me a little bit of money, definitely more money than music. But I feel like songwriting, regardless of whether I do it as a career or not, is always gonna – it’s just so fun. Even writing bad songs is still fun. It’s the only real thing that actually gives me any mental peace, I think, which is what a lot of musicians have. Whatever context I’m doing it in doesn’t really matter too much to me, although at the moment, I’m very grateful to be able to do it more permanently. But I’m also aware that things don’t last forever.
It sounds like it was more the gap between Goat Girl and your solo project that led you to that realization. You left the band in order to focus on other parts of your life, not necessarily your solo career, which is maybe the more traditional story. But that made you realize how much you actually need music in your life.
That’s exactly it, really. I didn’t too much like the idea of leaving a band and going solo because I kind of associated that sometimes as a product of individualism and an inability to work with each other, or to be not the front of something. I say that, and then I went to do my own solo project, so I don’t really know if I can preach about that. [laughs] But in that gap, I was quite intent on that not being the trajectory. It was more just that it was something that, like you said, I kind of needed to do. I didn’t really feel like there was much of an option. But I struggle with a lot of confidence around music as well, so that’s another reason why I might not have been so driven or ambitious with it.
There’s so many people involved in the making of this album, so I’m curious how working with others in this context differed from being in a band for you. Was it a need, also, to work with others? Or maybe the songs needed it?
I don’t know if the songs needed it as such, but I think that they asked for it. And I was lucky enough to be introduced to so many good musicians that were also at the time very free. I kind of just thought I’d asked them and see if they wanted to, and they turned out to like the songs enough that they were up for doing it, which I was quite surprised about, actually. One of the best things for me about listening back to it is being able to hear all my friends in it. Each part can feel so personal to them. I much prefer listening back to it and hearing them than hearing myself in it. So, I think working with people always was going to be the case because music is enriched so much when it’s got a lot of different minds and talents and hearts put together. If it was a completely solitary voyage, I think it would be beautiful, but it wouldn’t be what it is.
Do you feel like that process of collaboration gave you more control?
I think that in some ways, it does give you more control. This one felt a lot more like a collaboration between me and Joel, who did the production, so it’s kind of the two of us that were making all the decisions. And then sometimes, we would have, like, the violinists come up with their own parts and sometimes the horns would come up with their parts, but on the whole, it was mostly us. I think in that way sometimes a creative idea can be more concise when one does have more control. And when there’s a conciseness to it, it makes it more personal in a sense, rather than it being diluted through a lot of ideas and slotted into something that everyone’s happy with. That’s maybe the difference between working or writing as a band that I couldn’t really get behind, because a lot of the music that I listen to isn’t too collaborative. It’s either one or two people making it. The control, in a way, is important so that a clear idea can be can be expressed without too much dilution. Because once you finish the song, everything that happens with that afterwards is diluted through so many layers different people saying, “You need to market it like this” or “We need a music video like this.” You kind of lose control, so if you have control over how it sounds, I think that’s important.
Tell me more about your relationship with Joel, how it evolved over time and whether it ended up shaping the songs in a way that you didn’t necessarily anticipate.
I met him because he was in the band Viewfinder – well, he was Viewfinder and then made a band around it. And he released a really beautiful album. Actually, the very first time I met him was at an open mic, I was 15 and he was playing. We didn’t actually meet, but I got massive crush on him, so I obviously went and pulled up his SoundCloud afterwards. And then we didn’t meet again until six years after that, and he was in the band Viewfinder. So Josh [Cohen], my manager now, put me in contact with him, and I supported him at a show. And then I asked him if he wants to help me with some songs, and he agreed. This was like four years ago. Basically, I had the songs that I’d made as demos, but most of them I’d written on bass because I obviously played bass in Goat Girl. I kind of fell out of practice with the guitar, so I was writing my songs on bass and then I had to relearn them on guitar and then showed them to him.
Over those two years, we played live together, and that period of time when we were playing live is sort of the formation of why the album sounds like it does now, I think. Because we just played little gigs, and it was just the two of us as well, so we sort of found out our voices went really well together and that we shared the same musical world. I don’t think either of us had had that with anyone else before, where we felt comfortable enough – because he shares a lot of his songs with me, and I did the vice versa. So we both felt comfortable enough around each other to tell each other when something was good, and more importantly, when it was not good. And then in the summer of 2020, we basically just went traveling. We went camping quite a lot that summer, and basically picked up those songs after having not played them live for a while and just decided to record them and shape them into something.
Also, we got gifted the studio so we didn’t have to pay for the studio, which was nice. That was a big incentive, and it was more of a kind of “Fuck it” thing, rather than like, “We’re gonna make an album.” But we ended up getting very serious with it as well. Two months prior to recording the album, we put in a lot of work. Like, pretty much every day we got together and went over the songs, went over what needed to be where, he’d make lots of arrangements and I would say yes or no. We got everything in its place, quite a lot before the actual recording of the album, so that when we got into the studio, we’d know exactly what we needed to do. Because neither of us really enjoyed going into a studio and just kind of winging it. We’d done that with our last bands. We didn’t want to get too serious with it, but we both agreed that it was a waste of time when you just go in and, like, jam it out. We’re both very organized people. It was very fun, but I think it was only fun because we were so well prepared. But that’s obviously not that rock and roll.
I don’t want to ask you about the meaning of the songs, but I am interested in how you relate to them at this point in time. Is there something that you feel ties them together in a way that wasn’t obvious before?
I don’t know if there’s something that ties them together. I haven’t gotten sick of them yet, which I kind of thought I would. They still bring me quite a lot of happiness to play them, and I do still feel quite connected to them. And I still feel like connected to the person that made them, even though she is quite different from who I am now. I still feel love and sympathy for the times that I was going through when I wrote them. Obviously, people change, but there’s also a thread through it all where people don’t change. And it’s kind of funny sometimes where I think I’ve outgrown the songs, but something will happen in my life that makes me realize I really haven’t grown up that much. Half the album was written in the summer before we recorded it, so they’re a little bit newer. And I think the longer you live with songs, you kind of have a choice to get sick of them and forget why you wrote them in the first place, or you have a choice to enjoy them and change them as you perform them and respect the recording for what it is.
How do you feel like your relationship with your voice has changed since you made these songs?
That’s a really good question. I think that it’s really the thing that’s changed the most, because I never really related to my voice as an instrument. I always thought that it was just something you had and you had to make do with what you got. Ironically, after recording the vocals, which did take me quite a while because I was in a very fragile state at the time when I was meant to be recording them, and I just couldn’t do it – I was trying over and over again, different people, different places, different studios. I couldn’t get the right feel for it. I think a lot of musicians have that, especially with vocals. I ended up going into studio with Liam [Cooper of the band Mela], so I did half the vocals with him and half of them with my dad. And it kind of worked. I wasn’t 100% happy with it, but what I realized was that I was never going to be 100% happy with it.
I think, in terms of one’s relationship to their voice, it can be very complicated. I lost my voice a little bit during the making of the album and afterwards, because of emotional reasons. The only thing that kind of got it back to me was singing with different folk groups. That’s all made me project louder, and I learned to treat it more like an instrument and just accept that your voice is what it is and you can only push it so far. There’s no need to be the best of the best, because sometimes you just can’t do it. For me, singing is so much reliant on an internal confidence, and I can see that my voice can be awful some days, and most of the time that’s when I’m feeling not so good, and then really good other days when I’m feeling more confident or happy, a bit lighter. So it’s a bit of a journey. I did a couple of solo tours this year on my own this year, which was helpful for that, and it helped me understand the emotional connection and psychological reliance that singing can have. Maybe not for all people, but certainly for me.
Was that your first time singing with your dad in that way?
Not really. We did quite a few recordings when I was younger. It’s quite sweet actually, because when I started singing I was like 13 and he’s got a bunch of recordings from when I was singing and I just sound so young and sweet. So we were kind of used to each other. He’s also a music engineer, so he was really good at recording and I was quite used to singing around him. That made it quite easy. And also, he was the first person that ever taught me how to harmonise or taught me how to do anything. I kind of forget, sometimes, because obviously it’s your parents and I’m quite close to my family and I see them quite a lot, so it’s important not to take them for granted. He’s definitely the reason why I do music. There’s always one parent, you know what I mean? My mom’s tone-deaf, she’s got absolutely no relation to music, but I think she enjoys it.
Maybe you’ll discover more Greek music together, and that will be your thing.
Yeah, I think that would be good. I think she does want to, actually. She’s pretty good at dancing though.
One of my favorite lines from the LP is from ‘Campervan’: “When I can I’ll go alone/ In silence I will make my home.” Since writing that song, have you become more comfortable with the idea of aloneness?
I did the [Camino de Santiago] pilgrimage in northern Spain quite a few times, and that lyric was from – because I’ve always done it alone, and then one year I did it with a friend, and that was fine, but I think that it was important to me to realize the value of solitude. I think that walk taught me the value of solitude. I had maybe a slightly fearful relationship with solitude before doing those walks. And then suddenly realizing how much bigger the world can be when you go out into it on your own, how much fun it can be, all the possibilities and this beautiful freedom. I guess by not being around people that have stories about you already, you open up to making yourself like a new story, and you can let go of baggage maybe a little bit easier. I think I find growth in solitude more than anything. I also find a lot of growth in interpersonal relationships with my friends and families and romantic relationships, it all teaches us things. But I think the times that I felt most of myself has been when I’m on my own, and especially when I’m walking on my own and meeting strangers in this very sweet and sad way, where they come in and then they quickly go out of your life. Which is a lovely metaphor.
Can you share a recent moment where you were out in nature or walking or interacting with a stranger that inspired you?
I think the first one that pops to mind was from when I was on a walk, I think it was last winter up in the Lake District. There were a few different people walking, and there was this older Brazilian guy that just struck me as really grumpy the whole time. I just built up a bit of a vendetta against him, and I think he didn’t like me either. That continued for a few days because we were all walking the same way, so we kind of would cross paths every now and then. Finally we ended up talking, and as soon as he realized that I could speak Portuguese, he opened up a lot. Because I think he’d been feeling quite isolated there, and his English wasn’t amazing. He was this quite big guy, quite macho, and he worked in advertising in Rio. He looked like someone that had put up a lot of guards during his life. And he was walking the way because his father had passed away and it was something that his father had always wanted to do with him, and they never managed to do it together because he’d always been too busy working. As soon as he passed away, he booked his plane tickets and came and did the coast-to-coast walk up in the north of England. And he was just crying. It was really beautiful.
I think it was one of the most touching moments, because I was a 24-year-old girl with this 58-year-old man just crying his eyes out about his father passing away. There was such – it’s kind of difficult to describe – such connection and such tenderness between us, two strangers that never met each other before properly. And I think that that was only possible because of the many walls that get torn down by tiredness on a walk. It’s like a snake shedding its skin when you put yourself through that kind of exertion in a slow pace, in a non-competitive way. You can just see people and their souls come out, rather than all of the other bullshit that they’ve got in front of their face and in front of their selves.
I saw him the next day and he was still crying. And I was like, “This is great, you’re still crying!” [laughs] Because of his love for someone, he needed to just keep crying. My dad did the Camino on his own after I did it, and he said that he just cried for three days straight and he had no idea why. There was nothing in his mind, he was just crying and crying and crying. For someone to share that with me, and for me to share that with them, it’s probably one of the most intimate and beautiful moments of really connecting to another person’s heart, rather than just a mental exchange. And as soon as I return to London, I completely lose it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
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Mitski has shared a new remix of her Laurel Hell track ‘Love Me More’ by the British electronic musician Clark. Check it out below.
“Clark’s music, specifically his album Death Peak, was what opened my eyes to contemporary electronic music,” Mitski said in a statement. “It showed me how emotive it could be. So when I was asked to do a remix, he was the first and only person that came to mind for the job.”
Clark added: “Huge pleasure to be asked to do this, thank you. I love what Mitski does. I spent ages on the kick. Haven’t done that for a while, but it all comes flooding back.”
Ride’s Andy Bell has shared a cover of ‘Light Flight’ by the British folk-rock band Pentangle. It’s the B-side to ‘Lifeline’, the latest single from Bell’s double LP Flicker, which came out earlier this year. Give it a listen below.
Speaking about ‘Lifeline’, Bell said in a press release: “In my opinion it’s important to be there for people we love who have gone down rabbit holes, ready to accept them when they come back. I hope and want to believe that they will be back from the wilderness at some point.”
London-based artist bb sway has teamed up with French bassist Basile Petite for the new single ‘Your Type’, out now via sevenfoursevensix. “‘Your Type’ is a dreamy number… We wrote it as an anthem for the swooners, and as an ode to OutKast’s iconic song ‘Prototype’,” the duo said in a statement. Take a listen below.
‘Your Type’ follows bb sway’s 2021 EP, Pearl, as well as the recent tracks ‘My Love Is True’ and ‘Talk to You’. Her 2020 single ‘habits’ landed on our Best New Songs list.
London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Damsel Elysium has released a new single, ‘Echoes of Lalia’. It’s the third single from SA Recordings’ series The Hearing Experience. Listen to it below.
‘Echoes of Lalia’, which features original field recordings from Elysium’s day in the city, centers on their experience of being neurodivergent. “It can frequently be difficult to get through a day in the city,” Elysium said in a statement.
So far, Astrid Sonne and Lola de la Mata have contributed to The Hearing Experience series. A single by Tara Clerkin Trio, to be released on August 3, will complete the four-track EP. Elysium recently appeared on FKA twigs’ Tiny Desk session for NPR.
Following in the lineage of abstract landscape, the painter Lily Prince has rendered the American west—predominately the southwest, but with some inclusion of the verdant northwest—into a distinct body of work entitled, appropriately, American Beauty. She has also turned her attention to the complexities and subtleties of the sprawling Lake Como in Italy’s north, yielding a body of work titled Lago di Como. Together, American Beauty and Lago diComo–these two depictions of such intensive terrain–total BothSides Now, which has recently ended its run at the Carrie Chen Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Both Sides Now began with oil pastel drawings created en plein air, which means they were fashioned outside at various locations. The drawings were brought back to her studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, where they were used as inspiration and source material for Both Sides Now’s final form: acrylic on canvas, as well as watercolor and gouache on paper paintings. En plein air can connote a pastoral meditativeness, which is certainly abundant in Both Sides Now. But—crucially–Both Sides Now is also undergirded by a venturesome physical immersion into these natural landscapes.
I had the enviable vantage point—as spouse, driver, unhelpful navigator– of witnessing the inception of Lago di Como and American Beauty. The physical distillation of American Beauty was a more participatory experience than that of Lago di Como. In Italy, much of my involvement was more removed, often spent while I was planted in a café.
The preliminaries of American Beauty, on the other hand, took the form of my perch in the driver’s seat of an oversized, comfortable rental car that often, ever-so-carefully, needed to be navigated off the busy southwestern highways into a semi-private, semi-sequestered painterly vantage point.
My particular vantage point was the air-conditioned interior as Lily visually translated, into plein air drawings, what she saw before her out in the desert’s intense heat—sometimes with the rush of fast-moving traffic a scant distance away.
What would be retained, transposed, combined? Both Sides Now is the fruition of these efforts.
The southwest—and specifically New Mexico, where we spent a good deal of time–is, to me, a place of hauntings. Los Alamos, such a touchstone in this country’s march into the age of nuclear madness, appears—so unassumingly as to be almost startling—as a locale on a utilitarian roadside sign. As does the town of Roswell, the word itself loaded with significance in the annals of UFO theorists and advocates. This country’s very strange psyche, to an extent, plays out amid the terrain of New Mexico. And to this painter who takes so much in the way of inspiration from the region’s land and sky, there was the visiting and drawing at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch—a pilgrimage in every sense.
American Beauty feels akin to an excavation. Lago di Como, on the other hand, feels like a winnowing out. Light reflected on water is never still.
Lake Como is in constant motion, the enormous body of water shifting in its colors, its rhythms, in the shadows it casts throughout the day and into the late evening.
What would be retained, transposed, combined?
In James Joyce’s “Araby,” the youthful narrator seeks to preserve a cherished, almost sacred, image—in this case, a girl; a magical girl—as he makes his way through the coarse cityscape. “I imagined,” he says, “that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.”
There is not, of course, that antagonistic dynamic in Both Sides Now. It is the opposite: This particular chalice is carried through a cascade of sensations: visual, aural, olfactory.
When I enter into Both Sides Now—and it is an act of entering, in the very real sense–I’m struck by the verdant expansiveness of American Beauty and Lago di Como. The viewer hovers above all these works. You are now privy to the uncommon vantage point of observing the observer.
The terrain, the skies, the musicality, all go on forever.
American Beauty’s southwestern vistas are not, on the whole, the pastoral expansiveness of greenery and fields and lakes. Those belong to Lago di Como, whose sweeping vistas need to be interpreted vertically, not horizontally.
The expansiveness of Lago di Como revolves, of course, around the imperial Lake Como. There is depth, both literal and metaphoric. Lake Como itself seems so gigantic as to be its own separate country—which, of course, is an impossibility, almost like an optical illusion. There is an element of operatic grandeur in Lago di Como, enhanced by the appearance of some emphatic, royal purple.
The locus of American Beauty is a harvest of pinks, purples, aqua, orange. The land is undulating, symmetrical, zigzaggy. The terrain is hospitable, but only to a point. It demands certain rules and strictures. The language of the southwest is unknown to me, which makes it more impenetrable. It is mysterious to me in a way that Lago di Como is not. There is also the overlay of tragedy in American Beauty, of the Native peoples who lived and thrived, but are no more. American Beauty rings with distant sounds and echoes, intertwined into the sun-drenched ground. The heat of the southwest bakes into the stillness, its crevices and mystery. Shadow on stone becomes a refuge.
A palimpsest can be defined as a parchment with successive layers of writing, or something having hidden aspects that are apparent beneath the surface. Both American Beauty and Lago di Como are a palimpsest: centuries and centuries of lived experience and art and beauty, each historical epoch inflecting the other. There is the strong sense of time in these works: the simultaneity of past and present.
Lago di Como is punctuated with the musicality of the Italian language. Listen to its very name and the surrounding towns: Cernobbio. Bellagio. Varenna. The musicality of Lago di Como, the place, is transposed into gestural paint passages.
American Beauty exists in broad daylight. There are no night scenes. A subtle, hidden current of anxiety hides just beyond view. Somewhere is the deeply rooted, primal fear that one could get very lost in this terrain and face potentially dire consequences.
There is also the lingering sense that, once lost, you would encounter some assistance, the flora and fauna serving as protector. The desert is full of watchful, hidden sentries, a lurking energy just out of view.
The terrain in Lago di Como is certainly welcoming, but it will not go out of its way to make you feel at home. The understanding is that you are here to admire it: It takes the adulation as a matter of course. There is an element of noblesse oblige. Lake Como has merited inclusion in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. It has seen empires come and go. It is not unduly impressed with you.
The skies in both American Beauty and Lago di Como figure prominently. American Beauty’s skies absorb a myriad of elements, aqua shining amid the intense midday heat. The distance one can observe is miles and miles away, a display of entirely different weather patterns. These skies are also possessed of a supernatural reflective quality, abounding with the serpentine patterns one expects to find on land, not in the air. In Both Sides Now, these skies are ripe with motion, emphasized by surprising—yet not unnatural—moments of almost aural repetitions.
The skies of Lago di Como lack those fantastical elements of American Beauty, but not the complexity. Their observable distance is intensified by the compression of framing mountains: Thin, washy layers of hot, shimmering waves, a stormy palette of blues, layered and almost oozing.
American Beauty and Lago di Como are studies of the sky. And they are studies in patterns. Every culture in every time has had the visceral need to decorate—a visceral need that extends to some of our animal cousins as well. Humans have decorated and adorned in an unbroken chain that extends to this very artist’s grandfather and father, who produced embroidery. It is a nice comment on the universality of the pattern-making impulse: from the caves of Altamira to an embroidery shop in Hudson County, New Jersey.
Both American Beauty and Lago di Como are sensory experiences. The dimensions of both these works stretch far ahead and far behind.
In Lago di Como, one can ascertain those particular impressions that can only be gleaned around the water. Air feels, smells, and sounds different around large bodies of water. Peoples’ movements are slightly altered. What one eats and drinks are different near the sea and ocean.
At certain vantage points, looking at these works, I feel there is an element of role reversal. One can construe the American southwest as an almost austere locus, but the American Beauty series pulsates with its wide-ranging spectrum. There is a sprawling, untamed randomness.
And Lago diComo can appear almost well-regulated and ordered—not the usual descriptors one usually employs in regard to Italy. The work has a specific focal point—Lake Como–and its surrounding land, spread out with large measures of symmetry. The chaos of nature has been ordered through centuries and centuries of tilling the land; planting, sowing, reaping.
Both Sides Now abounds with a heightened sensory experience–akin, at times, to a hallucination. There is a mystical, spiritual overlay to the southwest and to Lake Como and this is very discernible in these paintings.
There are also, to me, strong hints of the living, breathing outside world. Beyond the vistas and skies of Lago di Como—beyond the confines of the borders of these paintings–are the little ferries that rumble and shake as they slice through the water, chugging back and forth to the various lake towns, each town possessed of its own distinctive characteristics. There are the enduring churches, the outdoor cafés, the steep climbs up and down the narrow, hilly thoroughfares. The small, Syrian-owned bakery. Gelato at every turn, in every hue and flavor imaginable. Cornetti, Italy’s answer to the French croissant. Fanta soda. The scent of wood-burning pizza ovens drifting into the warm air.
American Beauty does not directly reference the Navajo women selling jewelry, trinkets; the native chants that can be heard by simply flicking on the car radio. The unfamiliar brand names, gustatory combinations; the Spanish language. But they are here, absorbed into these works.
Nothing beats lighting a joint and settling on the couch to watch your favorite stoner flicks. They provide hours of laughter, and we often hear ourselves quoting the funniest movie weed quotes.
What are your favorites? Want to know ours?
Grab those juicy buds you grew from indica seeds for sale in the USA and roll a J. We’ve compiled the ultimate list of stoner quotes from the movies. By the time we’re through, you’ll be rolling on the floor laughing. Let’s go!
Friday
Chris Tucker plays Smokey in this 420 classic flick, and his famous words resonate with stoners everywhere when Friday rolls around:
“I know you don’t smoke weed, I know this; but I’m gonna get you high today, ’cause it’s Friday; you ain’t got no job… and you ain’t got shit to do.”
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
This cannabis cult favorite stars John Cho as Harold and Kal Penn as Kumar. The goofy pair get blazed and head to White Castle. The two most memorable bits of dialogue in the movie are:
Harold: “Dude, am I really high, or is this actually working?”
Kumar: “Both”.
Hippie Student: “Here, that’s sixt—eighty bucks.”
Kumar: “Eighty bucks?”
Hippie Student: “Yeah, eighty bucks.”
Kumar: “Yo, this is worth forty tops bro!”
Hippie Student: “Bro? I’m not your bro, bro. ok, and that’s eighty bucks. You don’t feel like getting high tonight? If you don’t feel like getting high, that’s cool with me because there’s lots of people around here. See this guy? Hey, what’s up, George? I smoke buds with George all the time.”
Kumar: “What kind of a hippie are you?”
Hippie Student: “What kind of hippie am I? Man, I’m a business hippie, I understand the concept of supply and demand.”
Cheech and Chong – Up in Smoke
We couldn’t have a compilation of the best stoner movie quotes and not include one from the original smoking duo. There’s no doubt this pair knows the sativa and indica difference from their experience with the green herb.
How often have you heard this classic from Cheech Marin’s character Pedro De Pacas?
“Is that a joint man? That there looks like a quarter-pounder.”
Super Troopers
This cannabis classic is one of those that’s so bad it’s incredible! Add this to your must-watch list if you’re new to the 420 scene. One of our favorite stoner movie quotes from this hilarious flick is from a college boy played by Joey Kern, who stated:
“You must have eaten like 100 bucks worth of pot, and like 30 bucks worth of shrooms man. So I’m gonna need that 130 bucks, you know, whenever you get a chance.”
If that wasn’t funny enough for you, maybe this comment by Patrol Office Thorny will get you giggling:
“Littering and smoking the reefer. Now to teach you boys a lesson, me and officer Rabbit are going to stand here while you three smoke the whole bag.”
Pineapple Express
Seth Rogan is one of the most renowned celeb tokers, and his performance in this modern-day classic is pure genius. The movie packs plenty of memorable quotes in—the best has to be when Danny McBride’s character Red says:
“I’m trying to decide how stoned I am and just how on the verge of death am I right now. Like, am I seeing shit because I’m stoned or because I have no blood left in my body.”
A close second has to be when Seth Rogan’s character Dale comments:
“If marijuana is not legal within the next five years, I have no faith left in humanity.”
Grandma’s Boy
This stoner comedy is about a 36-year-old video game player who has to go live with his grandma. He tells his buds he’s moved in with hot babes. Peter Dante plays Dante, and one of his lines has become a 420 classic:
“I’ll smoke it with ya bro, we’ll go to the loony bin together. I don’t give a fuck.”
Things get even funnier when Dante and Alex (played by Allen Covert) have the following conversation:
Dante: “Does anyone want to try this weed? It’s called the Brown Bomber.”
Alex: “Why is it called that?”
Dante: “Because when you smoke it, you get so stoned you s**t your pants!”
Half Baked
Another old-school stoner favorite, Half Baked, includes a lot of memorable, funny dialogue. One of our favorite movie weed quotes has to be when Sir Smoke-a-lot shouts:
“I wanna talk to Samson! Fly me to the moon like that bitch Alice Kramden.”
There’s more—who can forget this classic blurted by Bob Saget?
“Marijuana is not a drug! I used to suck d**k for coke! You ever suck d**k for marijuana?”
Dazed and Confused
Matthew McConaughey plays high school stoner David in this flick and asks Wiley Wiggins’s character Mitch Kramer if he has a joint. When Mitch replies with a no, David says something we’re sure most tokers would agree with:
“It’d be a lot cooler if you did.”
Rory Cochrane’s character Slater also said one of the most memorable quotes from the movie:
“Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man.”
How High
This legendary movie is about two guys who smoke a magical substance to pass their college entrance exams. Soon, their stash runs out, which means trouble. The most famous stoner quote from How High is:
“If I study high, take the test high, I’ll get HIGH scores!”
Puff Puff Pass
We hope our collection of stoner quotes from some of the classics has you in fits of giggles. For the ultimate experience, cultivate your own cannabis. You’ll enjoy these hilarious lines even more when puffing on your fresh, home-grown bud.
Douglas Kester
Douglas Kester, a cannabis growing expert at I49 Seed Bank. He has been working in the weed industry for more than 10 years. During that period, he built up a vast experience and depth of expertise in this field. Douglas has a detailed understanding of every aspect of marijuana, from its cultivation and species to the effects it brings. He’s also up to date on all the cannabis-related legislation nuances.
