Les Claypool calls them “fleshy nuggets.” Sean Lennon prefers “bookended improvisations.” Whatever your vocabulary, The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s South of Reality is less about structured songwriting and more about careening across the fine line between jam and prog, sanity and space-madness, with a crooked grin and a bassline that could rupture your third eye.
“It’s real now,” Claypool says, only half-joking. “We’re in separate bedrooms this time.” The first Delirium album was the sound of a musical honeymoon—two iconoclasts sniffing around the perimeter of each other’s brains. South of Reality is what happens after they’ve moved in and started labeling the Tupperware.
Recorded after a wine-soaked retreat upstate, the record feels like the result of late-night jam sessions, casual conversations about the heat death of the universe, and just enough structured panic to keep it all from turning to mush. “The inspiration moves fast,” says Lennon. “So does the perspiration.”
This time around, they arrived more prepared. Lennon played drums on the first record as a whim. Now, he was ready for the ride—or as ready as you can be when your bandleader might signal a new section with a raised eyebrow or the swing of a metaphorical sword. “Les is good at saying, ‘Alright, now we’re gonna fly for a while,’” Lennon says. “But he always knows when to bring it back.”
Claypool doesn’t deny the control freak tendencies. “I’m that guy—I like to drive,” he admits. “Even when I’m not behind the wheel, I’m probably nudging the pedal.”
The collaboration thrives on this kind of chaotic trust fall. “Music is a conversation,” Claypool says. “Sometimes you’re leading, sometimes you’re listening, sometimes you’re lobbing flesh nuggets.”
And if that sounds like stoner nonsense, well, welcome to the point. South of Reality leans into its own surrealist tilt—their version of protest music is an eco-freakout track called “Fleas” about humans as parasites. “Mother Earth is the dog,” Claypool explains, “and we’re the fleas. She’s trying to shake us off.”
“It ends lighthearted,” Lennon adds. “Like, maybe the world is falling apart, but at least we’re having a party while it happens.”
That balance between freak-out and fun threads through the entire record. Even a lyric like “Gone are the days when your brand of genitalia determined where to piss” is more observation than provocation—though Claypool caught some flak from the chronically offended corners of the internet. “I’m not transphobic,” he says flatly. “It’s just an observation. Like saying ‘Gone are the days when skin color decided where you sat in a diner.’”
Still, for all the world-spinning commentary, South of Reality isn’t a thinkpiece. It’s a trip. Lennon may pull inspiration from Julian Assange and black hole theory, but he’ll also stop mid-answer to compare astrophysical imagery to Rush album covers and doughnuts.
“Imaging a black hole was more exciting than seeing it,” he says. “It just looked like what we thought it would. Like a Lay’s doughnut.”
There’s plenty of room in the Delirium universe for cosmic paranoia, awkwardly timed whistleblowing, and childhood trauma rendered as woozy psych-pop. And if Lennon’s still hesitant to dive headfirst into his father’s legacy, Claypool has no such hesitations on his behalf.
“I kept pushing him,” Les says. “‘Do a Beatles song. Let’s do Tomorrow Never Knows. It’s one chord—you’ll be fine.’” Lennon relented. “I still mess it up,” he laughs. “But it felt right.”
That tension—between lineage and liberation, density and looseness—is exactly what makes the project sing. Lennon calls it “danger music.” Claypool, for his part, calls it Bastard Jazz when he takes it on the road with a rotating crew. “I’m not a jazz guy,” he says, “I’m just the bastard part.”
And in the middle of it all, Lennon’s been quietly remastering and reissuing his mother Yoko Ono’s albums, including the Wedding Album, which required the kind of packaging gymnastics that make Record Store Day managers cry. “It was a Christmas present for her,” he says. “I didn’t know what else to get her, so I gave her a remastered box set of her own albums. She actually loved it.”
It all ties together, somehow. The psychedelic voyages. The science rants. The cautious stabs at family history. Even the mud-covered Primus set at Woodstock ‘94, which Les still calls “one of the best shows we’ve ever had.”
That night, Claypool was rusty. The band hadn’t played together in weeks. They stepped onstage and magic happened. “Sometimes,” he says, “you stand on the edge of disaster just to see what it feels like.”
With South of Reality, that’s more or less the mission statement. Unhinged, unfiltered, and just grounded enough to know when to pivot back from the brink.
“We’re not saving the planet,” Les says. “The planet will be just fine. It’s us that are fucked.”
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