Weekly Neil: I'm The Ocean, With Del Paxton's Dylan England

A chat about Pearl Jam, War Of The Worlds, and the Buffalo band's great new album 'Auto Locator'

This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m happy have Dylan England from the great Buffalo band Del Paxton chatting about a song from Mirror Ball, Neil’s 1995 collaboration with Pearl Jam. It’s an era I hadn’t previously explored, but as ever, there are so many gems. “I’m The Ocean,” which Dylan picked, is stereotypically grungy and cosmic even as it rides the same four chords for seven minutes. Its lyrics are worthy of plenty of analysis, too, especially since Dylan found a lot of common ground in what he penned for the stellar new Del Paxton album, Auto Locator, which they released on October 6. All that, and more, is below.

In the second verse of “I’m The Ocean,” Neil sets scene familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a long night drive. The road lies ahead spread out but also wire-thin, and the land tells all its history as you cut through it. “On the long plain, see the rider in the night,” he sings over fuzzy chords. “See the chieftain, see the braves in cool moonlight.” The awesome Del Paxton song “100 Words For Snow,” which arrives late in their new album Auto Locator, sounds worlds away from Neil’s steady beat — it’s anxious and punctuated with snippets of a sci-fi radio broadcast. But the open road in all its wonder and danger remains.

When Dylan England sings about snow flurries on Interstate 90 en route to Rochester, my ears obviously perk up. (Ditto for the line about using your debit card as a windshield ice scraper.) The deeper connections make both songs hit in an almost gravitational way, especially when Neil eventually uses scenes of modern life to arrive at a grand philosophical stance. Though “I’m The Ocean” opens with an admission of fault — “I’m an accident” — it resolves in perfect harmony with the worlds both manmade and natural. He’s an Oldsmobile in the wrong lane. He’s a sleep aid. He’s an airplane. He’s the goddamn ocean.

On this song, he’s also the de facto frontperson of Pearl Jam, who are his backing band across all of Mirror Ball. (Eddie Vedder shows up but isn’t a main player.) That kind of music history means a lot to folks in mine and Dylan’s generation who came up on rock radio and wise elders. But apart from any of that, a relentless seven-minute heavy-guitar song that concludes with the kind of clarity typically only yielded through years of mindful meditation is always a great one to talk about. Dylan explains why.

Dylan England: Zack, who plays bass in Del Paxton, is huge Neil head. We both were like, it’s gotta be “Ambulance Blues.” It’s gotta be On The Beach. But you did that song. Jeff Rosenstock talked about it. We were like, that makes sense — the coolest dude talking about the coolest song. The record On The Beach stands out for a lot of people in the punk scene, which is kind of weird, just because it’s not very punk. But it’s such a great album. I have a friend here in Buffalo who ran a record label and plays in a bunch of bands. He always jokes, whenever he sees a copy of On The Beach, he just buys it. I’ve always loved that. I don’t care if it’s, like, fucking hit and destroyed. “Whenever I saw it, I would buy it and then either keep it or give it away.” I don’t really know what his logic was, but I started trying to do that with classic albums.

I did that with On The Beach and copies of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. I felt like you could find a really pristine copy for a lot of money, and you can find a really fucked up copy for, like, a couple bucks. So, we really want to [talk about] On The Beach, but then I was like, well, every song on that record is great, but I think the music that I’m really drawn to is the more rocking side of Neil — the Arc and Weld feedback-y live-type stuff. My dad had these old tapes, not concert boots or anything, but they were just tapes that someone made him of Weld and Live Rust and Arc. That was my introduction to that.

Photo by Sean Kader

Weekly Neil: “I’m The Ocean” has a lot of historical significance given that Neil recorded it with Pearl Jam.

Dylan: Finding Nirvana and then Pearl Jam, it was just a natural, like, holy shit, he played with them. But I was kind of too young to really understand the lyrics. One of the things that we were talking about in our new record was more lyrical content and imagery. So we had this thing with nature and machine, and without sounding too out there because it is just an emo record, I think Zack and I were really thinking about lyrics. We used to just write riffs, and then, alright, what do you got? But it’s our second LP, maybe we should just try to challenge ourselves a little more.

The ocean kept coming up. I think it’s because we live on a Great Lake, on Lake Erie. Not the ocean, but it’s really big, and it can kind of feel like that when you’re on the shore. I was looking at the album cover of On The Beach, and he’s staring at the ocean, and I had this thought of that song “I’m The Ocean” and tying it to On The Beach. But also, I love that song, and my old boss used to play it all the time, and I just thought it was a perfect, lyrically driving song. Not a lot is happening as far as chord changes, but I’m always surprised at how long a song it is and how short it feels. It’s really grand, so to try to tackle it or bring some sort of perspective to it, I’m a little afraid. There’s some really deep and very heavy themes going on, like the ocean in general, and, you know, the birth/death thing.

WN: The middle portion, where he talks about the need for distraction and Entertainment Tonight and expert witnesses, feels so quintessentially ‘90s to me. Media obsessions, the O.J. Simpson trial, true crime, all this stuff. Pearl Jam were obviously so ascendant in the early- and mid-‘90s.

Dylan: I had a boss who was a couple years older, who was great, and we got each other into a lot of music that I overlooked, and I got into toe from Topshelf and stuff. It was a good relationship where he was like, “You should really revisit Alice In Chains,” and, oh yeah, this shit rocks. He was really into Pearl Jam when they came out. As someone that grew up in Upstate New York, not Seattle, he just viewed them as his probably his favorite band. For him, that was that was like, “Holy shit, Neil Young and Pearl Jam together. I don’t need to listen to any other music,” you know? I don't know enough about Pearl Jam to be like, oh, this sounds like Pearl Jam.

WN: Are there images or lyrics in the song that you particularly like or are memorable or meaningful to you? It does cover a lot of ground, as you said.

Dylan: It's like a big epic. I almost was like, oh shit, this is just kind of — everything, which is why it was cool. It's kinda uncool. A big rock song that ends with him chanting, “I’m the ocean.” I guess I could go either way on that. But I think the thing that really drew me to it, talking about our latest record, Zack and I are really into geography, and traveling is always something we explore usually with highway. Area codes and driving are really important. I know that a lot of that comes up in Neil Young songs, not just with Harvest and the Ditch Trilogy. Also, we do have a lot of spaceship imagery on this album, too, and a lot of physical liminality and actually spiritual liminality, too. The kind of in between, or the journey, not the destination.

The spaceship thing, the War Of The Worlds thing [on “100 Words For Snow”], we borrowed from a Buffalo broadcast. We were kind of just stuck on literal vehicles and the motors or the things that don't really have a purpose. They just run. So starting [“I’m The Ocean”] with “I'm an accident” — I think you can read into that in a lot of different ways. I always took it as literal. I tried to think back to it the first time I heard that. I know he says like, “I was driving way too fast.” Him saying “I'm a Cutlass Supreme” later on, he's driving, so that always grabbed me. I'm not a car person or into car culture or anything like that, but I do think it's interesting: Neil, from the ‘70s, and the broader American car obsession, and trying to see that as cool.

WN: That song “Chevrolet” that he put out with Crazy Horse last year is also about 16 minutes long, and it's just about driving.

Dylan: In “I’m The Ocean,” when he's talking about “on the long plain” and “the rider in the night,” my brain just went literal there. I don't want to say literal is the default, but the imagery just stuck. And maybe it was just in tune with what we were working through when we were writing our second record.

WN: Not that this matters at all, but I don't hear a lot of Neil young influence in Del Paxton’s music. So it's really interesting to hear you say that there's a lot of thematic unity in a lot of other ways.

Dylan: We’re always trying to think about how to occuph a certain amount of sonic space. There’s the really austere, clean, folky Neil Young and then the feedback-y stuff that the punks like — but I don’t know, it's pretty varied what people reach for. I don't think it's a direct musical influence. Zack is a really spiritual person — he’d probably kill me if he heard me saying that, but he could read this song, and he probably should have done this [interview], is really what I'm saying [laughs]. He's always someone I can kind of connect with on a really different but mind-blowing take on something. Neil is just an artist that we both grew up listening to who has always resonated. It's always been a nostalgic thing, but also something you can still say, shit, this sounds so fresh and timeless.

WN: On “100 Words For Snow,” you come into the song, and you're in the middle of a scene. Snowy, highway, bleary-eyed, some mystery. I would imagine that it’s based on something that actually happened.

Dylan: One of the fun things we'd like to do whenever we had a late drive in this band was to listen to Coast to Coast AM, the weird Art Bell/George Noory alien show. It’s conspiracy theories, but not in the way people are probably thinking now. It’s a lot more playful, long-haul truckers, “West of the Rockies, you’re on!” “Yeah, you know, I was abducted back in…” And they’d have these topics: aliens or vampires, singularity to bottomless pits somewhere. Really ridiculous things that are entertaining at 3 a.m. I have this distinct memory of driving back to Buffalo trying to stay awake in bad weather conditions listening to Coast to Coast AM. We found an old broadcast from Buffalo talk radio where they reenacted War Of The Worlds on Halloween.

WN: I love what you said earlier about juxtaposing nature and machine. It’s right there in the title of the album, Auto Locator. The bio mentioned that you'd recorded it in a solar-powered barn, too. That’s very Neil.

Dylan: We recorded it in Trumansburg, New York, which is right outside Utica, with our friend Chris [Ploss]. We just knew that he was the person that would bring our vision to life. We just wanted a really honest recording of the three of us to tape, which I think anyone could do, but, like, he really did it. He's just a great engineer. He built this whole barn and furnished the studio. It’s an incredible space, man. A lot of that album and the things that we were thinking about were probably a result of just being in a really incredible space where that spirit was really alive — without sounding too cheesy.

Del Paxton’s new album, Auto Locator, is out now. It’s $10 on Bandcamp. They’re also playing at Rochester’s Bug Jar (where else?) this Thursday, October 12.

“I’m The Ocean,” written by Neil Young, from Mirror Ball (1995)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar, pump organ
Mike McCready: guitar
Stone Gossard: guitar
Jeff Ament: bass
Jack Irons: drums
Brendan O’Brien: piano