Ted Leo Lives More Than Most

03/14/07 2:00pm

Singer, songwriter, guitarist Ted Leo's new Living With The Living album is his fifth with his excellent backing band, The Pharmacists, but first for Chicago's Touch And Go label. The new LP, out March 20, was produced by Fugazi's Brendan Canty, and it ranks with 2003's Hearts Of Oak as the melodic punk rocker's best. Leo recently spoke to ChartAttack about his new label, new album and how he balances personal and political issues in both his life and his music.

This new album finds you on Touch And Go for the first time. What's behind that?
I had no choice but to find a new label. I wouldn't have left Lookout if I didn't have to, but they got into some financial trouble and needed to pause for a while and reorganize themselves. So they essentially had to stop putting out new records, which left me needing somewhere else to go. When I started looking, Touch And Go presented itself as an option. I looked at some other labels, and there were definitely a couple that I probably could also have gone with and been extremely happy today. But Touch And Go is a label and a place that I share so much history with. We barely even have to discuss things half the time. In one sense, it's an incredibly comfortable move for me because their entire M.O. just jibes so well with mine that it makes sense. In addition to that, it's also a label that I really kind of grew up with in a very real way and it's an honour to now be part of that legacy.

Tell me where the title Living With The Living came from, and is it associated with a theme that runs through the album?
I don't honestly really remember exactly when I came up with it. It's like two sides of a coin, with one being that I'm constantly inundated with and wrapped up in the abject horror of life and living and coming to a point where I was so fed up with this kind of culture that fetishizes death and uses it for somewhat selfish ends, whether that's the right planting fears of death or using the dead to create more dead on the planet, or whether it's the left essentially doing the same thing from a different point of view. To really understand why so much death is undesirable, one has to understand and do some work with the living and appreciate life itself. Beyond that, there's so much work to be done on this planet among the living. I was just kind of stewing and came up with this somewhat cracked idea that I should just reject this culture of death and actually work on living right. But the flip side of that coin is that people fucking suck and it's really hard to live.

Tell me about combining "Annunciation Day" and "Born On Christmas Day" and the parallels between them.
They both draw parallels between war and religion to some degree. Not like, "Religion leads to war," but within a culture, these things can be so deeply wound up together and central to a young person's worldview and outlook on life. "Born On Christmas Day" started out as an explicitly religious song that was stupidly specific. But I got this one verse out of it that was much more about the loss of faith in the face of death resulting from war. And I figured that I should leave it at that one verse. That's why I ended up combining the two songs.

Are there particular activist groups or organizations that you align yourself with?
Not particularly, to be honest with you. People contact me from a pretty broad spectrum of things about doing a benefit or setting up a table at a show, or I hear about this or that event going on and I'll attend it. But in terms of being explicitly aligned with a couple of specific groups, I'm actually not. I spend most of my life on the road playing shows.

"C.I.A." seems to offer an interesting mix of the personal and the political. Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, definitely. "C.I.A." is a pretty simplistic depiction of events to a certain degree. But that's also kind of the point. You can often boil things down to pretty simple things. As it says, most of us are just trying to live our lives with nothing to hide. At the same time, there's a very large community of people here who have quite a bit of power who need to operate in this covert way. If everyone knew what gets done covertly in their name, things might be quite different.

Are you as tireless as all of your touring, recording and blogging suggests?
Let me say this. I'm as busy as it looks, but not as tireless. I'm tired all the time. But that goes with the territory.

Here are Ted Leo And The Pharmacists' Canadian tour dates:
April 18 Vancouver, BC @ Richard's On Richards
May 2 Toronto, ON @ Mod Club
May 3 Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa