Les Claypool says making The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy — the third and latest album from the Claypool Lennon Delirium, his group with Sean Ono Lennon — was “the longest I’ve ever spent on an album.” And that’s saying something for a guy who has dozens of them to his credit, on his own and as part of Primus, Sausage, Oysterhead and a variety of other bands, along with a musical resume full of guest appearances, from Tom Waits to Metallica.
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But that’s just how Claypool and Lennon roll when they’re in their state of, well delirium.
“Our personalities complement each other, musically, I would say, and I think we have a really great dynamic,” Lennon tells Billboard from upstate New York during a joint Zoom conversation with Claypool, who’s in Miami. “We share so much of the same taste, and we love so much of the same things.” To which Claypool quips, “I just told him that it’s all about the chemistry; we just like to take our shirts off and spoon with each other…creative spooning.”
But seriously, folks….
“I think we have a different approach in recording and writing,” Lennon explains, “’cause Les has a very specific songwriting style that he essentially invented on his own with the bass and his lyrical style, writing stories that are about interesting characters. And I come at it from a more normal way, I guess. I tend to want to re-record things a lot and fix things, and Les is more spontaneous. I think that’s been a really good balance for us to meet in the middle and get the best of both worlds — his spontaneity and creativity and my, ‘Well, let’s just do it one more time.’ I think that’s turned out to be a good balance.”
The two started the Delirium during 2015 after Lennon’s The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger tour with Primus. The duo’s first album, Monolith of Phobos, came out during 2016, with South of Reality following in 2019. “We just had a chemistry right off the bat,” Claypool says, acknowledging that it’s been nevertheless tested.
“We tug at each other,” he says. “(Lennon) likes to, ‘Let’s add some glockenspiel. Let’s add 12 more layers of vocals…’ If it were up to him, the record probably still would not be done. But that’s what makes it a great partnership. He pushes me into things where I wouldn’t normally go, and I push him into things he wouldn’t normally go.”
Lennon adds that Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin who’s overseen many of the group’s recent archival projects, offered some interesting insight into the Delirium’s creative process.
“He was saying how my dad [John Lennon] would only do one or two takes, because that’s how he did it, and Paul [McCartney] would like to do 12 takes,” Lennon recalls. “They just had different approaches, just like me and Les. And Les plays so well, so it makes sense that he’s like, ‘OK, that was it,’ like my dad, and I’m the person who, to find the best part, I have to do it again and again to really get to a place where it’s interesting, which is more like Paul.”
Laying The Golden Egg
Adding to the ardors of making The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, out on Friday (May 1), was its concept. Two directions were considered — “We had a whole other story that was pretty cool, too,” Lennon notes — but the 14-track album on ATO Records was drawn from his studies of the paperclip problem, a philosophical and ethical AI issue, which explores the idea of “optimization without empathy” and the collision of technological advances and human values. Because of the album’s long gestation, however, it’s actually more prescient than present day.
“When we started this, the dangers of AI wasn’t a mainstream conversation,” Lennon says. “I had been looking into it a lot ’cause I’m kind of a nerd about technology and how it’s going to impact people. I like to think about that stuff, so it turned out to be good time that we happened to be putting this record out now, when almost everyone I know is freaked out about AI.”
The album is no mere academic treatise, however, making plenty of room for the absurdist, satiric characters and scenarios that are quintessential Claypool. “There were so many elements beyond that,” Lennon says, “and, honestly, most of that came from Les’ brain, like the half-parrot, half-ox, and the golden egg.” Claypool, meanwhile, recalls that, “I already had a song about ‘Mantra of the Mantee,’ and (Lennon) had ‘WAP (What a Predicament),’ and I had ‘Troll Bait,’ and we used those as the waypoints for this narrative.” A 24-page comic book by Rich Ragsdale accompanies vinyl editions of the album to flesh out the story, including chapters related to the individual songs.
Claypool and Lennon worked both together and in their respective studios, incorporating a range of psychedelic pop, prog, jazz and funk flavors, with plenty of atmospherics and effects layered into the production. “I’d say we have more of a shorthand now than we had in the early days,” Claypool says. At one point during the process, however, Lennon — whom Claypool has nicknamed Shiner — rerecorded his vocals for the entire record on the premise of working on just one track at his own studio.
“So that added a few more months to the project,” Claypool says with a laugh. “The great thing about (Lennon) doing that at home is I didn’t have to be there. It’ll be interesting to see how we do the next record, because Shiner’s got a taste for sending (files) back and forth now.”
The most complicated track, meanwhile, was the closing “It’s a Wrap,” a suite-like construction that shifts tempos and tenor over its 13 minutes. “(Lennon) brought it in, as a small piece, and then it developed into this giant thing which he hated for a long time. Every time I’d pull it up on the computer (Lennon) would say, ‘Oh God, not this song again…’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it; we’re gonna keep messing with it and massaging it, and it’s gonna be this epic thing,’ and that’s what we did.”
Lennon adds that, “I tend to ask that a lot of Les, to redo something, and most of the time he’s like, ‘No, it’s fine.’ So the few I get to redo I think always wind up being worth it.”
Summer Shenanigans
The Claypool Lennon Delirium has advanced The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy with the singles “WAP (What a Predicament)” and “Meat Machine.” They’ll be promoting the album on the upcoming Claypool Gold tour, a “megalomaniacal in all its glory” enterprise which will find him playing in Primus, the Delirium and Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, which kicks off May 20 in Reno, Nevada, with 30 dates before wrapping up July 4 in Napa, California. “Hopefully I’m gonna survive,” Claypool says, acknowledging that it will be a bit different from the 2024 Sessanta tour Primus did with A Perfect Circle and Puscifer to help celebrate Maynard James Keenan’s 60th birthday.
“This is something I’ve been talking about for a while,” Claypool says. “I’m not trying to rip off the Sessanta thing. I told Maynard, ‘Hey man, I hope I’m not stepping on your toes by doing this.’ It won’t be like Sessanta where it was a couple songs by one band, a couple songs by the next band…What we’re gonna do is we’ll start off with some Frog Brigade, then we’ll do Delirium, then we’ll do Primus…and there’ll be a huge grand finale of self-indulgence at the end of with everybody. It’s a very cool group of people, so we’re gonna have a sh-tload of fun.”
Claypool adds that there will be “some cross-pollinization” between the bands as well during the individual sets. “I just think it’s going to be really fun in terms of touring with cool people that I love and music that I love,” Lennon says. “It’s rare that three bands on a set are bands that I actually like the music, and I’m in two of them (Delirium and Frog Brigade), so I’m psyched from the technical perspective of who we’re touring with and where we’re going and the music we’re gonna play.”
Claypool and Lennon hope the Delirium will do more performances, too. “Obviously we’d love to play the record at some point,” Lennon acknowledges, as Claypool voices a vision for “some sort of stage production of the whole record…probably more of a residency type of thing.”
In Lennon’s mind, the accompanying comic book “almost looks like a preproduction for a bigger project. We’re not against the idea of turning it into an animation if we could do that, but obviously it’s really hard to do. It ain’t the ‘60s anymore; I don’t know if Ken Russell’s gonna come and make a movie with us. But you never know.”
