Ian McCulloch), and it feels something like smoking a pack of
cigarettes on your porch the day before getting evicted (were
you to be in a strangely great mood about that).
“I wanted to write songs that were about characters that
were so focused on themselves that they couldn’t see the
sense of tragedy about them because of that flaw,” he says. “So
Jumping the Shark addresses that sense of self-pity and that
sense of feeling like you deserve more, and trying to overcome
that because I was too focused on myself.”
But who is the “self” that he’s referring to here? Who
exactly is Alex Cameron? On the cover of his album, he’s
depicted as an older man (face wrinkled or scarred, clunky
hearing aid in ear), firmly contrasting with the twentyeight-year-old’s more current persona—one in which he is
disturbingly nimble on social media and has a propensity for
dancing on top of Cadillacs. “It’s all very personal, and the
experiences I’m talking about are on a specific, individual
level,” he assures me, yet I’m not totally sure for most of the
interview whether I’m talking to Alex Cameron the musician
MOLLOY (LEFT) AND CAMERON
from Sydney or Alex Cameron the lounge singer from the
apocalypse. It’s only when I move the conversation away from
Cameron himself, however, and onto the specific characters of
his songs, that I realize how beside the point that distinction
really is anyway.
“I think tragedy has a lot to do with what the individual
That’s “writing,” and not simply “songwriting,”
is focused on,” he answers in response to the question of the
because what Cameron is focused on doing at this stage
fate of Ken DuPont, the suicidal TV star whose fictional story
is continuing to expand the scope of his operation.
is told in “The Comeback.” “When you read classic tragedy
Currently, there are essays and stories available on his
stories, it’s like, ‘If only this person could just look outside the
site (and his Facebook posts alone should probably be in
box for two seconds and see that there’s more going on—
the Smithsonian of Weird Internet), and still, he promises
that they don’t need to follow some course of action just to
much, much more in the future: “The [creative] world’s
reach the end of the story.’ That’s the tragedy, you know?”
just multiplying before our eyes,” he says, beaming
Like any short-story writer worth their weight, Cameron
about the prospect of working more closely with Molloy
has everything mapped out in incredibly precise detail
on new projects. “When you look back on Jumping the
beyond the surface of the words. For instance, the name
Shark, it’s gonna be the window into an entire galaxy of
“Ken DuPont” isn’t mentioned in the song itself—that kind
stories and characters.”
of info is only available if you do a bit of digging back to his
earliest press releases. And like any good writer, period, his
developing some kind of mysterious operation known
emphasis on tragedy isn’t drawn by some nihilistic beef with
as “The Crawfish” (what it does, exactly, isn’t totally
the universe, but rather by a desire to take a closer look at
clear—yet). “The business model is thriving,” he says,
what the nature of failure and tragedy is, and what’s to be
in what I believe is a playful shade of sarcasm, but I
learned and applied from it.
don’t really know. “We have big plans for what The
“It’s very dark, and I intended for it to be dark,” he says of
Crawfish is going to be eventually. It’s just we’re not
the record, “because I wanted to locate something specific and
in a rush.” Speaking of fish, though, Cameron has a
talk about it. That’s what I think is the most important thing in
couple of cats to feed, and it’s getting late. Failure on
my writing: it’s OK to talk about these things.”
that front is not an option.
He and Molloy are even in the early stages of
FLOOD
67