On second thought, maybe open-ended questions aren’t the way to begin a phone interview with Marilyn Manson. “Interesting that you brought that up,” says the hard-rock star and nihilistic ’90s icon, who was just reminded that he once told a reporter he’d had so many deja vu experiences that he began to wonder, “What is real and what isn’t?”
From his Los Angeles hotel, Manson, 46, spends half of a 20-minute conversation on rambling digressions both poignant and weirdly mystical. He begins by mentioning Robert Carranza, who mixed his new album, “The Pale Emperor,” whom he’d never met until they began to work together.
“I went to the studio and I didn’t know this guy and I was having a real motherf—– of a day, being that my mother had just died and I was having a lot of other stressful, internal issues,” he says. “I was like, ‘Can I just have the moment? I’m not having a good day.’ He said, ‘Can I talk to you for a moment? Do you believe in deja vus?’
“As a matter of fact,” Manson told him, “I’ve been having a lot of them of late.”
This led to a lengthy discussion between the two of them about alternate realities, time and space travel, messages from the future and whether some people have unconscious minds that move faster than conscious minds. Finally, Carranza showed Manson a frequency analysis of the singer’s voice plotted on the screen of an electronic device. The resulting bright green design formed a pentagram, or five-pointed star, which, to many, symbolizes evil. “This is really a satanic record!” Manson concludes. “That’s scientific proof.”
Eventually mixed by Carranza to Manson’s satisfaction, “The Pale Emperor” is one of Manson’s best albums — the emphasis is on heavy guitar power chords, recalling The Who or The Stooges, but the singer does more with his low, droning voice than ever before. He whispers conspiratorially, enunciates choruses a cappella after instruments fade out and commands the microphone so thoroughly that his lyrical shtick of mixing sex and Satan comes across like Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments.”
“It happened very immediate and very organically,” Manson says. “If I sold my soul to the devil … I’ve been negligent on my payments. I had to say to myself, ‘I’m not as good as I should be, or want to be, and here’s my payback, with interest — this record.’ I just felt very at home, or in the pocket. I’d reached the place I was supposed to be, always.”
Manson had met producer and movie composer Tyler Bates during a performance for Showtime’s “Californication” at the Greek Theatre. “His tack was to walk into the room and blow up the room as best he could — he dropped a few stories on us that were pretty unnerving,” Bates says, by phone from his LA studio. “I pretty much cut him off: ‘Can we just play a dope show and get on with it?’ He looked at me like, ‘OK, who’s this guy?'”
But they bonded, and Bates later invited Manson to his studio to “open your heart and inspire people, as opposed to wreck the room with an outburst of anger.” For the first time, Manson began to work on an album in a spontaneous way, writing songs and knocking them out in the first take rather than laboring over them with studio tricks.
“Normally, in the past, I’ve been put in a glass box, it’s almost like a coffin — the vocal booth,” Manson recalls. “We didn’t do it that way. … I didn’t realize the element of performance can also happen when you’re recording, if you don’t think about it.”
With his heavy-set eyes, long face and gothic makeup, the singer born Brian Warner moved from his Canton, Ohio, hometown in the late ’80s to Tampa Bay, Fla., where he concocted a shocking, subversive persona named after Charles Manson and Marilyn Monroe. Police arrested him in St. Petersburg, Fla., for indecent exposure during a performance; he destroyed the Book of Mormon during a show in Salt Lake City; the first line of his 1996 breakthrough “Antichrist Superstar” is, “I am so all-American, I’ll sell you suicide/ I am totalitarian, I’ve got abortions in my eyes.”
In recent years, Manson has turned into a bit of a cartoon — early producer and collaborator Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor called him a “dopey clown.” But he doesn’t sound like that on “The Pale Emperor.” “There were no duds, no leftover songs. Once we did the first song, I knew what the story was,” Manson says of the recording. “It was very churchlike, very f—— biblical, some might say. Ideal to use those two words together.”
The last song, “Odds of Even,” opens with what sounds like wild coyotes braying in the distance, an effect that fits the bleakness of the song, about angels dying in the arms of demons. This, unbelievably, was spontaneous. Bates lives in the LA hills, and Manson was working on lyrics in a room when he heard a group of coyotes on a kill outside his window. The singer recorded the distant sound on his iPhone, and Bates dropped it into the recording as the introduction to the song. “It just fit the vibe perfectly,” Bates says.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday
Where: Riviera, 4746 N. Racine Ave.
Tickets: $58; 773-275-6800 or jamusa.com/riviera-theatre/
