The Interrogation: An Interview With the Paranoid Style (Part I)

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The Paranoid Style at the 9:30 Club opening for the fucking Hold Steady last month and I couldn’t make it augh (Photo by David LaMason)

The Paranoid Style have been an excellent, wound-up little rock band’s rock band led by our pithiest rock critic Elizabeth Nelson for over a decade now. But they’ve only just begun opening for the Hold Steady and Nelson’s only just begun writing the liner notes for 27-disc Bob Dylan box sets (to cite but two career milestones that aren’t discussed herein because they took place after this interview was taped). I was the second person ever to accept their gospel into my heart. Then, playing god, I tapped Nelson to sing on kind of a Spoon rip with some showtune in it that then melts into an EDM breakdown or something? Drunk on power yet again, I tripled down on my conflict of interest and inducted the band into this RNRHOF equivalent for ‘90s twerps. But I had nothing to do with Pitchfork finally giving them their due in 2024 and reviewing one of their best albums.

Paranoid Style songs are populated by the following: Trotsky, Doug Yule, P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Bissell of the Wrens, the Molly Maguires, the late great Mojo Nixon, in-house Stiff Records designer great Barney Bubbles, half a verse from “Ana Ng,” Steve Cropper, Pitchfork itself and “so many things” they got wrong, exactly one member of Rammstein, Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood on one indelible duet, and their new lead guitarist Peter Holsapple of the dB’s on everything for the forseeable future.

Just as the civilization-undermining politics skewered in tunes like “Slush Fund City” or “National Sunday Law” really do inhabit our increasingly satirical timeline, the history of rock and/or roll increasingly inhabits the Paranoid Style’s always verbally replete, always barnburning music. Now, to add to that great meta tradition, RIOTRIOT proudly presents the first part of a conversation between two writer-musicians on the insights and anxieties unique to this combination. These are the findings.