REVELATIONS
JOHN DOE
The former X man on mining a chequered American past
D. JAMES GOODWIN, TODDV WOLFSON
“The isolation of the lastc ouple of years was certainly part of it,” John Doe says, considering why his new album, Fables In A Foreign Land, is set in the desolate, 1980s USA. This past doesn’t seem such a foreign country, anyway, to the America Doe began documenting in his LA punk band X in 1977, or to its current malaise. “Guilty Bystander”, in which slaves are whipped, was inspired by George Floyd’s murder. “It isn’t necessarily to do with a man whipping another person,” Doe explains. “It could be a man whipping a horse. Because at somepoint, people were treated like animals. And what the fuck, man?”
The album’s brisk country sound grew out of backyard jams at Doe’s Austin, Texas home, and the “immediacy and simplicity” of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. “I always keep an eye on, is it beautiful?” he says. The inspiration for ecoparable “After The Fall” is symptomatic of how he writes. “I had an image of someone hiding in the reeds, looking down and seeing his own blood in the water, and thinking, ‘Oh, fuck! The shit has hit the fan.’ I always try to have something real and cinematic. I’m always telling some kind of story.”