Denée Segall

Ty Segall’s feeling free. The 30-year-old singer/songwriter/producer has just played his last run of gigs for 2017—two holiday charity shows to benefit the L.A. Kitchen and two to benefit the S.F. Coalition on Homelessness with fellow Los Angeles, by way of San Francisco, musician John Dwyer—and he’s driving home a little later to see The Last Jedi with his wife Denée.

Segall’s also feeling confident about his new album, the freest collection of music he’s ever put to tape—one that surges with life and the undiluted magic of ego death.

“Every issue in the modern world has to do with a fear of a type of freedom, or someone trying to enforce their perspective on someone else,” he says. “That can be taken a number of different ways by a number of different things, whether it’s hyper-political or abstract, very objective or very subjective.”

The word ‘freedom’ comes up often on Freedom’s Goblin, Segall’s 10th LP under his own name and the second he’s recorded with his current live group, The Freedom Band. Last year’s self-titled LP was his first with the outfit, featuring the songs “Freedom” and “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned.)” A sprawling, jam-slathered be-in of pop sounds from different decades and cultures, the 19 eclectic new songs on Freedom’s Goblin show Segall putting this word into practice while chewing on its meaning.

“In the past, I’ve held my ideas a bit closer to me, and I’d need to execute them precisely like they were in my head,” he says. “This record was the exact opposite: How can I make it different than I ever envisioned? Freedom from any self-imposed rules.”

Written at home and recorded off and on the road, Segall learned to work with whatever situation presented itself. Embracing each situation on its own meant cutting any song born from the sessions that felt con ned by a specific intention or motive. “If the past albums were kind of kept together by a general theme or concept or sound, then the only concept that ties it all together this time was the antithesis of rules,” he says.

Like his fellow DIY deity Dwyer, Segall has traveled the world pretty much nonstop over the last year, hopping between seemingly endless new projects that flex his well-won reputation for thick, heavy proto-rock, blistering thrash punk and psychoactive glam-dusted pop melodies. It’s a reputation he’s built in less than a decade.

The production quality on his albums has steadily improved, with last year’s record allowing for a nuance that finally displayed Segall’s wide range in one package—fuzzed-out California skater kid and balladeer, countrified renegade and glam dandy—all in under 40 minutes.

These old “ty-dentities” don’t disintegrate as much as fuse into the consciousness of a man going with the ow on Freedom’s Goblin. Segall’s flirted with T. Rex glam and a faux-British drawl many times before, but numbers like the pastoral freak-folk bliss of “My Lady’s on Fire” are more evolution than affectation. “The Last Waltz” sidesteps the trappings of a simple tribute to The Band and instead stomps with the good times of a literal waltz. Closer “And, Goodnight” repurposes the title track from his 2013 acoustic album, Sleeper, into a Neil Young-style slow jam that oscillates between a sustained “Down by the River” shuffle and mercurial, Anthem of the Sun-era psychedelia.

Kyle Thomas, the Brattleboro, Vt. garage-pop songwriter known as King Tu , who also played with Ty Segall and The Muggers, wrote the side four highlight “I’m Free.” It’s a gorgeous acoustic ditty that serves as the album’s de facto mission statement: “Have you ever thought you might not be what you believe?/ You might be someone different/ You might be free.”

Freedom’s Goblin takes the ears on a kaleidoscopic odyssey of pop that doesn’t just telegraph Segall’s new understanding of what freedom means, but is a fully realized dedication to not just churn out the same punk and psych sounds of lives past. “Fuck it—I’m gonna make some soul shit, I’m gonna make some funk grooves, I’m gonna put some different rhythms in there,” he says. “That’s been the most fun thing for me to add. I love the groove, man.”

That groove has always been present in Segall’s work, but his danceable melodies of the past are often buried under a pummeling sonic heaviness and loudness that has made the moshing at his live shows mandatory, whether or not you care to be swept into the pit.

Segall has dabbled in pure pop before, too; the more paisley moments of Hair, his collaboration with fellow West Coast psych alchemist White Fence, evoke similar vibes to some of the jams on Freedom’s Goblin. Yet, there still isn’t a precedent in Segall’s vast discography for the high-vibe potency of this fresh batch. Behold his cover of “Every 1’s a Winner” by soul/funk band Hot Chocolate (who first told us that they believe in miracles with “You Sexy Thing”), and see if you can make out Fred Armisen on percussion.

“No one wants to get battered down by heaviness all the time,” he says. “I love heavy shit—shit that’ll destroy you—but, in my life, at the moment, I can’t do it. It can’t be all sketch. There’s got to be a wink at the end.”

Segall’s career has him winking a lot these days. Selling out venues across the world, he’s achieved a level of success and notoriety that now seems impossible for an artist to attain without succumbing to the corporate channels of promotion and industry that drive the 21st century’s digitized music economy. Segall admits he isn’t particularly keen on promoting himself in ones and zeros, preferring instead to let the excitement of his performances speak for themselves.

“I definitely come from ‘the school of play,’” he says. “Playing is most important—it’s about the song, about the record. For me, it’s more important to play and to make than to oversaturate in other ways.”

Consider 2016’s Emotional Mugger, which was announced by the mailing of cryptic VHS tapes to fans that contained a recording of the album as the soundtrack for a series of pixelated images. It was the lone time that he got out in front of a release with a gimmicky announcement, and it only made things weirder.

Denée Segall

While earning his degree in media studies from the University of San Francisco, Segall learned much about the allure of being withdrawn. But he’s always had a soft spot for the artists who don’t rely on a gratuitous parade of self-promotion and for a time when folks didn’t diminish the mystique around their work. Instead, he relied on the fans to infuse their songs with a collective meaning.

“I’m a huge fan of mystery, of the golden years of rock-and-roll and pop, and that era when you didn’t get to be so personal with the people making these things,” he says. “There was a huge degree of separation and, as a fan, I really enjoyed that because it gave me the liberty to create meanings and scenarios in my head when I listened to records. I’m also a fan of a little bit of distance between the things you make and an explanation for them. None of my idols spilled the beans. I liked that. I know that’s not a real thing anymore.”

However, Segall insists that not every song has a deep meaning or is worth talking about. They exist instead for other reasons, just as certain guttural tones or sounds have the power to conjure a specific feeling in the mind. Other times, like on Freedom’s Goblin, the project’s true power lies in the process of recording or the context through which the songs were realized.

By removing himself from digital discussions about his work, Segall’s vanishing act has an inverse effect on his presence. His decision to stay off social media, for example, has led to the emergence of several online fan communities that strive to keep up with his prolific stream of releases. Though he understands digital promotion as a useful tool, Segall still prefers to leave most discussion and conjecture up to the fans.

He returns to a scary experience he had online while in high school as the catalyst for his distrust in the digital water cooler. “It was a very weird thing—early message board shit—where someone made a joking death threat to another kid on it,” he remembers. “All these people got called in to be interrogated by the police.”

“I was just a person on that board. And it was such a traumatizing experience for me, so scary that it really shaped my opinion of those types of interactions. I immediately realized that I needed to root my life in a tangible world outside of that. I’m the guy that would still be using pay phones right now, full on.”

Segall’s approaches to largely staying silent on the meaning of his work, staying off social media and exercising control over each release all share a common theme: the power that comes from saying ‘no’ to outside influences that want some control over how his work is presented.

“That’s a very important point about making art, talking about art, promoting art,” he says. “It’s hard to refrain; it’s hard to say ‘no.’”

“For a while, I was obsessed with the word ‘no’ because everybody says, ‘yes.’ There’s a power to saying ‘no,’ just as a thought, just as an idea of what that means. You don’t have to do anything. I like to remind people about that when an opportunity they’re given that might not be exactly what they want—might cross some boundaries of their comfort level, how they wanna promote themselves or how they’re involved in the corporate thing.

“Man, how do I say ‘no?’ That word exists, and it’s very powerful. People pay attention when you say ‘no.’ I don’t think ‘yes’ is a very powerful word.”

Segall concedes that there’s power in the selective ‘yes,’ though, in not being a naysayer as much as one who only agrees to something that lines up with his values. That may be the greatest triumph of Freedom’s Goblin—it’s a ‘yes’ that comes after many years of ‘no,’ an open-ended excursion into the heart of groove on Segall’s own terms, which, in this case, means that there aren’t any terms at all.

By waving his figurative ‘freak flag’ around in a musical ecosystem battered by normalcy and staid, unadventurous conceptual retreads, Freedom’s Golbin presents us with what freedom might sound like in application.

Now in the wake of this ‘yes,’ Segall remains open. He’s down to play for the jamband kids as much as the crust punks, armed with a strong batch of new material that disintegrates any lingering preconceptions that your ears still might have about his heavy soul. Freedom’s Goblin is a crafted, curated work that nods to past psych and punk lives while living in a space beyond meaningless genre buckets of marketed identities.

“That’s how I feel about terminology—just descriptive words that have lost [their] meaning,” he says. “It’s about the person and what they believe in.”

“Hippie is punk, man,” he adds with a comic faux-surfer drawl. “Blue Cheer is the most punk shit of all time. Roky [Erickson] is a punk, The Monks are punk…The Kinks? Ray Davies is a punk. But the blanket generalist meanings of those words are pretty diluted at this point. It’s all about bringing the hippies and the punks together.”

This article originally appears in the March 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.