E ven over the phone from Los Angeles, John Cale has a certain presence. It’s not just the still resonant Welsh lilt of his speaking voice or the way he takes his time to settle on the right words, more his tangential way of thinking – about music, songwriting, the world in general. This is someone, after all, whose 1999 biography was titled What’s Welsh for Zen? .
That phrase echoes in my head more than once during our transatlantic conversation, Cale having lived in Los Angeles for 10 years now after a long stint in New York. His answers, while always courteous and considered, sometimes tend towards the abstract and are marked by a reluctance to be pinned down about the subject matter of his songs. On his new album, POPtical Illusion , for instance, there is a track called Funkball the Brewster.
When I ask him where the title came from, he replies: “I made it. I made it like I make breakfast.” Like the song itself, which begins with the line “Tell me to go to hell” and ends with a barely audible scream, the answer is pure John Cale: intriguing, but hard to fathom.
“John’s creative gaze is diagonal rather than linear,” says his friend of more than 20 years, the author and journalist Ed Vulliamy. “That also applies to his whole way of looking at the world. He is as arcane, interesting and relentlessly curious as the music he makes.
” By way of illustration, Vulliamy recalls meeting with Cale in New York just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Everyone.
