Ty Segall: New Frontier
photo credit: Denée Segall
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For how unabashedly bizarre his music can be, Ty Segall is an affable guy.
Settled on an outdoor couch, sipping from a Pacific Coast Highway mug, his measured cadence makes a real case for oceanside life’s tranquilizing effect. At times, that breezy tone is tough to square with his reputation for grinding rock’s cutting edge with a spree of fuzzed out monoliths. But experience has steadied his hand, and by now, he’s got more than enough of it to breathe easy with the throes of his passion.
“I’ve spent so much time on the road in the States, it’s all just turned into one drive, you know?” he reflects. “It’s weird to think about ‘cause you’re just kind of going and going and going, going, going, going.”
Through the almost two-decade blur since he broke into San Francisco’s garage rock upheaval, Segall has racked up 16 studio albums to his name. Figure in his work with bands like GØGGS, The C.I.A. and Fuzz, duos with Tim Presley, Corey Madden and Mikal Cronin and a heap of spare change, and that sum shoots past 30. In his case, even these staggering numbers are reductive. Slapping Segall with “prolific” neglects that each of his releases is a meticulous statement, often willfully opposed to his last. His no-repeats mentality is key to his ever-evolving, always-surprising sound.
Though every Segall project is its own beast, they’ve been united so far as warped expressions of his inner life—whether he’s in frame or he’s turned himself inside-out to reflect his audience. As he’s adopted a more patient approach on recent entries, like 2022’s candid acoustic set, “Hello, Hi,” his exploratory purges have become more earnest. Last year, this course culminated in Three Bells, a raw and raucous house of mirrors where he offered unequaled access to his thought process. It tracks, then, that his outpouring earned an equally radical backflow.
“The whole thing was very inward, specifically having to do with matters of the self,” Segall says, “which was fun, but I feel like I always fall into that subject matter—at least a lot of the time. So I really wanted to do something different. I was like, ‘I need to work with someone different. I want to do some story songs. I want to talk about other stuff and get other perspectives, and just kind of do something way, way different.’”
Possession, issued via Segall’s GOD? imprint with Drag City, is as different as they come. For his first full-length release since the end of the Freedom Band—his touring and recording quartet from 2016-2024—he eased back from full-throttle to offer his alchemical take on a classic sound. He composed the bulk of the songs on a “weird, honky-tonk, Western piano,” then performed, recorded and mixed them alone, save for the lush horn and string sextet arranged by his old friend Cronin.
Most significantly, Segall traded his “inward freak-outs” for an unprecedented set of narrative vignettes. He veered into this U-turn with longtime collaborator and first-time songwriter Matt Yoka, whose film background found a productively uneasy fit with Segall’s abstractive impulse and drove both from their creative comfort zones. Together, the duo spun out stories of the most unwieldy, polarizing and high-stakes subject imaginable: America.
“I’ve been through all the states, except for Alaska, so I need to get up there. It all informs me,” the musician says. “That’s the thing about America—it’s so huge and dense and deep. And then there’s space—so much space and emptiness. It’s a totally wild and bizarre and very complicated place.”
Segall’s latest is a near-fundamental overhaul of everything once stable in his music. That’s what he does. Sure, this is his starkest shift yet, but a glance back at the wreckage in his wake shows that the career subversive thrives on constant challenges—and he wants the same for his audience. The rocks and hard places that he plots across Possession encourage listeners not just to confront the blind spots in the pioneer spirit, but also to work out the point of it all for themselves. Though he’s deliberately distanced himself from the narrative, the constant grind he traces through it calls to mind his own dogged pursuit of new creative horizons. After so many revolutions, he makes it look easy.
“When I was younger, I was excited to do as much as I could ‘cause I was so psyched to have the opportunity. Then you get to the point where you just have these different goals, and you just don’t feel like you’re done,” he reflects. “At this point, I feel like I’ve done a lot of stuff and now I’m being way more methodical—it’s not just throw all the paint at the wall and put out a bunch of shit anymore, like when I was 25.”
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Back in 2011, Segall made his first big break from the San Francisco scene’s frenetic acid-rock with Goodbye Bread. Yoka got the call to introduce that shift with a video for the title track’s melodic comedown, and he answered with a fluro daze of quarter-speed party footage. A fruitful creative partnership was born.
Since then, the director has dreamed up surrealistic visual worlds for some of his friend’s most exacting offerings, like the desensitized crawl through Los Angeles’ underbelly that accompanies Emotional Mugger, Segall’s first record after moving back to the city. In 2020, Segall returned the favor with a reeling, atmospheric soundtrack for Yoka’s documentary Whirlybird. Though this proven track record set the stage for Possession, Yoka holds that they really cemented their instinctive understanding as teens at the University of San Francisco.
“We immediately hit it off because we were kind of two weirdos,” he recalls. “We’re just two like-minded weirdos who have never stopped exchanging stuff—whether it’s like, ‘Have you seen this movie or heard this album?’ Or it’s, you know, ‘What do you think about this in the world?’ Everything has really spawned from that.”
The duo’s foundation of trust let their first stab at co-writing unfold “just like buddies shooting the shit.” Instead of fixing their expression to a rigid initial concept, they opted to build up meaning track by track, freely trading half-finished ideas with faith in their complementary strengths.
“It was great because he went at it from a very cinematic place, and then I came at it from a songwriting place,” Segall shares. “So I’d be like, ‘Well, we should make these lines rhyme and this should be shorter. I have to sing these words,’ you know? It was those kinds of things at first, and then he got into the rhythm of it and it was cool because either I came up with the lyric of the hook, and then we fleshed it out together, or he came up with the idea of something, and then I would kind of tweak his lyrics. So we just had fun throwing the ball back and forth. It was like solving a puzzle.”
“A lot of times, things would surface that were informed by the music,” Yoka echoes. “Each song was kind of a different version of a collaboration, but he would often send me a little riff that he’d recorded onto his phone and maybe mumbled a few words over, just to feel out how the song could take shape. Then, maybe, I’d just barely hear him saying one word and use that one word as the starting point for a whole story.”
With a few songs under their belts, Segall and Yoka’s conversational exchange became increasingly telepathic. They found an early breakthrough in the title track, an infectious vision of mass hysteria in the Salem witch trials, on which Segall resounds: “It’s those who point that dread the bells, and hell is what they’ve chosen/ That’s the power of possession.” The cut that helped focus their thematic lens came to them like a revelation—Segall calls it a “freebie.”
“That’s the only song that Matt wrote all the lyrics for, and that one was really crazy because he was like, ‘Hey, man, I wrote this song. I think it’s great; just check it out.’ And the way he wrote it, I picked up the guitar and I just kind of sang it. I just did it,” he reflects. “That’s the first time I’ve ever done that.”
To suit their stories, Segall composed with a focus on feeling over technical proficiency. “I just wanted to make a classic-sounding thing,” he says. “It’s my version of a pop record, I guess.”
Of course, what’s “classic” to Segall isn’t just rehashing the golden oldies. On Possession, he crafted his hazily nostalgic sound by hijacking diverse forebearers and stripping them for parts, like the weighty folk-rock poetry of Dylan and Young, the grounded, apprehensive grandeur of Love’s Forever Changes, “Kinks-ian” orchestral outbursts and a high-shine glam finish. “I can’t help but have a little bit of nasty guitar stuff in there, too,” he admits. “I think that’s just kind of hard not to do.”
The thrilling, spacious and addictively hooky songs take another layer of meaning from Cronin’s string and horn arrangements, which make the narratives viscerally immersive with scoring’s emotional sway. At their most engaging, as on the Donner Party inspired man-vs.-nature torrent “Alive,” explosions of fanfare seem to double as the thrust and consequences of ideology. “We’ve got a bit of a hive mind sometimes,” Segall says of his process with Cronin. “I think he knows what I’m into, and he knows that I like out shit, but that it has to be rooted in the song, too.”
“Ty and I have been making music together for something like 22 years,” Cronin writes. “I honestly don’t think our creative relationship has changed much. It’s remained remarkably open, flexible and relatively casual. It’s still mostly just fun. We’ve both grown much more ambitious creatively, and those goals and guidelines are constantly shifting with our respective tastes and projects—though we still share a vein of what we think is musically cool.”
Segall pushed back on latching to a concept too early in the process, but it wasn’t long before an imposing purpose in the songs became undeniable. Despite their settings in different times and places, each track shared some shade of the desires, anxieties, confusions and ghosts of the American condition, as summoned through their own experiences.
“I really felt like I had been mainlining America for like a decade,” Yoka reflects. “I think Ty has done that too… So in our own ways, we built up this huge reserve of American experience, both as Americans and as witnesses to America. We opened that up, and it just flowed out of us in different forms.”
“Obviously,” Segall asserts, “America is complicated and loaded and fucked up, but it’s beautiful. It’s a really interesting thing to dive into, and especially now, with America being completely fucked, you know? It’s a good time to sing about some shit.”
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Possession’s America is carpeted from sea to sea with hustlers, all eking out a living and chasing visions of grandeur. There’s a desire burning between the figures—from the “Shoplifter” just “trying to survive the drought” to the wanderers underneath the untouchable “Skirts of Heaven”—that holds them in a tattered but proud coherence—a people overwrought by the doctrine of progress.
But there’s no great, moralizing message here. Segall takes his audience on a joyride through these obscure scenes, then hands over the keys when it’s time for a takeaway. “You gotta work a little bit, too, when you listen to the songs, which has kind of always been my style,” he says. “It just kind of made sense to be like, ‘Well, what do we know?’ We’ve traveled here forever. The history of this country is insane. So it’s cool to take a weird, old thing and try to make it so people can reinterpret it in a modern way.”
Leaving loose ends to let the music “live on its own,” is a signature for Segall, but his push and pull with Yoka’s narrative clarity gave Possession a new cinematic quality. Yoka describes the interpretive space that opens from their abstractions as “mind movies;” listeners willing to engage the music’s ambiguity can project themselves into the stories and draw their own personally meaningful conclusions. “You wanna keep going back in,” he relates, “and as you go back in, it keeps opening itself up more and more.”
For his part, Yoka sees the wanton ambition that courses through the album as more nuanced than lamenting. “There’s something pleasurable about the struggle as well, and I think that was really articulated through the music,” he observes. “There’s a lot of heavy themes, but also, for me, just as a listener to it, there’s this celebratory aspect—it’s full of life and energy. That all started to feel so American to me, this kind of crazy swirl that is so unique to this country.”
“Another California Song,” Possession’s final destination, is a panorama of that dazzling insanity. On the coast still carved up for gold, desperation and glamor blur as the spirit coils restlessly around a chorus of 40 million, who harmonize: “Lost my mind, yeah there’s a cost/ But it’s a pretty nice place to be lost.” Segall says the starry-eyed view of unchecked American dreaming that closes the record is “a little bit of my kind of cheeky perspective.” It certainly seems to be working for him.
“I am a Californian,” he states from his South Pasadena porch, one day before hitting the road again. “I do have a really specific relationship to the California coast, and I do love that idea of where the ocean meets the hills. It’s an interesting thing, even in the history of why people wanted to move to California. But I just like the Pacific Ocean. I know it’s cold. People say it’s cold, but it’s good for you.”
