Darren Weiss of indie rock duo PAPA shares his key inspirations, alongside the premiere of a live version of the band's latest single Put Me To Work
Perhaps the biggest inspiration, ultimately for Weiss – and incidentally the duo’s namesake – is that of his grandfather. “My grandfather was a really interesting guy. His parents were immigrants from Romania who had to leave their country because their town was being slaughtered. Women were being raped, children were being murdered; there was terrible prejudice and violence happening. He was born in Chicago and grew up in the Al Capone, gangster era, in a time where America as we know it today was getting its identity. To me he was a classic American hero kind of guy. All my childhood we’d sit around and he’d tell us stories. He did a lot of things: he was in gangs in Chicago; he was an amateur boxer, a travelling salesman, a window washer. He was probably the toughest guy I’ve ever met, but because I was his grandson I got to see this other side of him that most of the world – and the people that knew him – didn’t get to see. That juxtaposition, and the kind of stories he raised me on gave me a sense of myself growing up, and a bit of my role as an American artist.
He’s been dead a couple of years now, and the band name was sort of a tribute to him when he started dying. The way he lived his life and the stories he told were really important to me as I was forming my own imagination, and my own perception of the world and the country that I lived in. We don’t have songs for him, we’re not a tribute band or anything like that, but just having him being such a big part of my life and his life being so big, it definitely helped shape my mind as I was coming into my creative self.”
Tender Madness is out now.
Text by Rhiannon Wastell
Despite only recently releasing their debut album Tender Madness – described by the pair as “visceral, sexual and soulful” – the band has already been compared to the likes of Bruce Springsteen and The Clash. They are not, however, taking the challenge to live up to the successes of their idols lightly. “It’s important to us to feel that we’ve done something on stage that was worthwhile, that is worth all the sleep we lose and the sacrifices we make as a travelling band. We work hard and aspire to achieve the kind of creative free honesty and freedom and strength and power that those artists have." Yet this creative output extends further than just the duo’s musical performances; their experimental videos have attracted them plenty of attention. From colourful fantasies of unwashed items of clothing escaping a launderette and falling in love, to Weiss himself donning a sugary pink suit for a day of bizarre errands around New York, they too draw on the band’s vast library of influences.
“We love all kinds of music but we definitely don’t limit our artistic and creative imaginations to those things," says Darren Weiss, lead singer and drummer in indie rock duo PAPA. "When we went to the studio to create this record we brought in a bunch of books for inspiration. There were books on people like Wharton Esherick and Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Literature is a big part of my life and has been for a long time. It’s a part of the way I write lyrics.”
A published writer, the former Girls drummer – and his musical other-half Danny Presant – draw their musical inspirations from all aspects of their lives. Based on the pair's firm boyhood friendship, that mostly involved “sneaking into other people’s back yards” and a steadfast agreement in musical tastes, the L.A. natives formed PAPA in 2008, whilst studying at university in New York.
