If you want a masterclass in understatement, ask J Mascis about his own work. The guy who’s made a career out of guitar solos that sound like meteor showers shrugs off his new solo album Elastic Days like it’s something he found in the glove compartment. “Yeah,” he says, “it’s pretty solo.” That’s Mascis-speak for: I played almost everything myself and barely noticed I was making a record.
To his credit, he does allow a few other humans into the room. Mark Mulcahy shows up on piano and vocals, and he’s quick to praise Mulcahy’s brilliance. “Somebody that should be a lot more recognized,” he tells me. They go back to the ’90s, when college radio was still a place where weirdos could find their tribe. Mascis says Mulcahy was simply “around,” which feels like the highest compliment in his universe of casual cosmic drift.
Drums, though—those are his secret romance. He lights up (Mascis style, meaning the corners of his voice shift maybe half a millimeter) when he talks about the new drum set that pushed its way onto Elastic Days. “I ended up playing it on all the songs,” he admits. Lack of an outlet, he says. Too humble a phrasing. This is a guy who watched a Terry Reid video, saw a drummer doing rimshots, and thought, Yeah, I should build a whole vibe around that. And he did.
Writing guitar solos isn’t much different: he doesn’t. “I don’t really know how to replicate a solo that I just played,” Mascis says. Of course he can’t. His solos have always sounded like they’re having an out-of-body experience—trying to recreate them would be like trying to rewrite a dream. On Elastic Days, he eventually had to abandon acoustic leads altogether because there was nothing left in the tank. “I couldn’t get any more out of it,” he shrugs. So he switched to electric. Mascis problem-solving is like a golden retriever wandering into a solution by accident.
And about that Big Muff case from the internet photos—the museum of fuzz-toned destruction that follows him everywhere. I float the idea that sticking with one signature sound must be freeing, like wearing the same outfit every day. Mascis politely wipes my theory off the table. “I just like the sound,” he says. It changes “incrementally,” he insists, which is an incredible way to describe the difference between a galaxy collapsing and a galaxy just chilling.
The lyric everyone’s latched onto—“I don’t peak too early, I don’t peak at all”—comes from thinking about the way people weaponize nostalgia. Mascis, who’s apparently unaware that he’s been a cult hero for decades, just tosses it off: “I don’t remember peaking.” Maybe that’s the magic trick—when you never believe in your own mythology, you don’t have to live inside it.
There’s talk of dinosaur-related matters too. A new Dinosaur Jr. track dropped earlier this year—even though Lou Barlow wasn’t on it—and Mascis mentions another is coming soon. Sometimes it’s a band; sometimes it’s him playing everything; sometimes The Simpsons call. “It’s past time,” he says about being Simpsonized. “I wish.”
Outside music, he bikes because it’s exercise that doesn’t bore him. He’s aware of the viral karaoke moment where someone filmed him singing Tom Petty's "Don't Do Me Like That" in a half empty bar and seems amused. I tell him he could lean into a Bill Murray phase—appear unannounced, sing a few bars, disappear into the night. He laughs in that “maybe I will, maybe I’ve already done it” way.
Mascis ends the conversation the way he does his solos—quietly, sideways, almost accidentally profound. You get the sense that peaking really isn’t on his schedule. He’ll just keep making records, rimshot obsessions and all, until the universe tells him to stop. And even then, he probably won’t hear it.
Listen to the interview above, then check out the video below.
