Airborne Toxic Event Frontman Avoids Ex-Girlfriend Backlash

Posted on Feb 4th 2010 2:00PM by Dan Reilly
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Mikel Jollett of the Airborne Toxic Event

Plenty of musicians have penned tunes about former lovers, but do those songwriters ever worry about how their lyrics will affect their ex-flame? That's a question Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett often gets asked, as the bulk of his band's 2008 self-titled debut album was written after a particularly difficult breakup.

"A lot of fans have asked about her because they know it's about one girl. I told her, 'All these people are responding to what happened with us and you're like this infamous figure,'" he tells Spinner. "She was really sweet. She said 'Actually, I think they're responding to the story. It's mostly just the way you tell the stories that kind of brings them to life for people."

To that end, Jollett is still confused as to why he often sees fans holding hands or kissing during 'Sometime Around Midnight,' a string-heavy, heart-wrenching song that recounts the time he ran into his ex at a bar only to see her leave with another man.

"I've seen that happen a few times," Jollett says of the oddly-timed intimacy. "I think they just feel like there's some hope in some of the songs. Most of these songs, they're sad but they're not bleak. 'Midnight,' it's not really a song about anger. It's a song about lost love and with lost love, you have to have love in the first place or losing it doesn't matter. Maybe people have gone through some kind of up and down in their relationships, listened to that song and made up from their fight or got back together, so they hear it and go 'Let's make out!' That's my theory. I might be wrong. Maybe they're making out because they just met at the bar."

Like with most music, Airborne's songs are subject to differing fan interpretations. "At one of our London shows, somebody yelled out 'Yeah, play 'Midnight.' F--- that bitch! Same thing happened to me,'" Jollett recalls. "I stopped the show and looked at the guy and I was like, 'Maybe she was right, buddy. Come on.'"

But with every negative interpretation, there's a somewhat positive one, even if it comes from an unlikely source. "This little girl came up to me once at a show -- she was like 11 years old -- and said 'I'm writing a story for my class about songs that tell stories. I think yours is a story about a guy who misses a girl because he still loves her so much.' I was like 'That's exactly right, little girl. There you go,'" Jollett says, overemphasizing the words as if he were doting on a puppy.

During shows, Jollett will often preface the upbeat rocker 'Gasoline' with the line, "This song is about high school sex," which got back to a different ex-girlfriend that inspired the track. "She was mad," Jollett says, laughing. "She was like 'Was it only sex? Is that all we had?' I just thought it was a funny thing to say, you know? It's hard to say into a mike, 'Here's a song about all the difficult choices that you make in your life so therefore you end up idealizing your first love because it was a simpler time.' I can get into that, but 'Here's a song about sex in high school' rolls off the tongue better."

After pondering why people respond to his odes to loves lost, Jollett cites a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'This Side of Paradise' where one character tells another that everyone goes through ups and downs in life and that everybody's life is dramatic to them -- the only difference is that artists leave a record of it. "In our case, that's probably true," he says. "I don't think that relationship was anything particularly different than anyone's had with someone who sort of got away or someone they were with for a long time. It's hard to break up with you love someone, you know? The only difference is trying to write it down and capture it in some way so that people might relate to it."

Aiborne Toxic Event performs 'Sometime Around Midnight' on Letterman