Where Seabirds Soar

I lean into the sharp twists and turns of Topanga Canyon until, at the end of a narrow worn-asphalt street, I’m parked in the driveway of what could very well be a wizard’s barn, where a yellowed Dewey Weber longboard is propped against the side fence. 

Ty Segall greets me at the front door. Eyes like blue ice. A cherubic face and sandy blond locks atop healthy stockiness. Barefoot in black jeans and a vintage T-shirt. There’s an alto sweetness to his voice when he says, “Come in.” 

Two chestnut-brown dachshunds, Fanny and Mr. Herman, bark, sniff, and scamper excitedly about our feet. Segall’s wife of seven years, longtime muse, and musical collaborator, Denée, offers strong coffee from the pour-over carafe and later brings down at her hip their bouncing 10-month-old baby girl, Penny. All blue eyes and blonde locks too. Segall briefly nuzzles into his young family with morning adoration. 

It’s an intimate moment—the softer, quieter realm of domesticity of such a Promethean musician. Because, mind you, it’s been a hard, fast, and heavy professional career, where the output has been nothing short of voracious. 

Segall, 37, has gone from Laguna Beach prodigy to full-on global fire-starter since the whole thing went lift-off nearly 20 years ago. Fifteen solo albums spanning the gamut of rock music’s deepest foundations. We’re talking garage-psych, punk, indie, metal, blues, synth, funk, folk. We’re talking more bands and collabs than you can count on two hands, production and multi-instrumentation, though he’ll tell you it’s a passion for the drums that holds top spot on his podium.

 When Segall was 2 years old, his biological father—himself a drummer—got him a drum set. Around that time, Segall’s parents split up, and he became the adoptee of a lawyer father and an artist mother. He was raised during the closing saga of hair metal and late-’80s MTV, with grunge’s wave building on the horizon, yet his overall familial turbulence was soothed by oldies radio and its focus on ’50s and ’60s doo-wop, soul, and Motown.

“It was a different world,” Segall notes of his early childhood. “That’s when I got into stuff that just sounded so cool. I remember being able to daydream, listening to those songs on the radio—just full-blown escapism as a kid. Looking back, I never wanted to make things like that. I wanted to be part of something. That was the main thing for me. It was like this magic trick, how you could get together with a group of people and make something. That was really interesting.”

Segall was born in Palo Alto and spent his boyhood shuffling around San Francisco’s South Bay, down to Glendale, and across to New York for a year. But he’s Laguna Beach bred and spread, right there at the end of Alta Laguna Boulevard on Old Top of the World, overlooking what’s inarguably the jewel of South Orange County. 

He dabbled with local musical theater, acting, and chorus as a schoolboy, but portraying characters in that mode didn’t suit him. At 10, feeling the inspirational currents of collaboration too strong (and too fun) to ignore, he became a true student of the drums. Then his voice grew, his guitar licks sharpened, his bass lines hit a groove. Early bands were built alongside other locals—prodigies in their own right—such as Mikal Cronin and Charles Moothart, both of whom continue to be key band members in Segall’s ongoing collaborative efforts. They’d cover Ramones songs and shift quickly to whatever was next. More songs. More bands. More experimentation. Shows and house parties in the hills. 

And as the music pumped, so too did the surf. Segall would longboard as a form of release, cruising the rollers at Doheny in Dana Point. He committed to Thalia Street reef wedges and competed on the Laguna Beach High School surf team. He pushed around on a skateboard with friends, all the while basking in the town’s charming glow and quirky beach lifestyle.

“Living in Laguna at that time in the early ’90s was my first introduction to surfing and skating,” Segall says. “Before moving there in the second grade, I was more into comic books and music. Looking back, what strikes me about Laguna was the kind of art-weirdo scene that was still there when I was growing up, which I didn’t quite pick up on because I was so young.” 

Was it idyllic? More so than not, but everywhere has its tensions.     

Before its current uber-monied era, Laguna was a mostly blue-collar beach community with a firm grip on the whip handle of counterculture’s long tail. It was weird (see mid-’60s hippies, LSD’s revolution, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love). It was an open, welcoming mecca (see the Greeter, gay pride, and Little Shrimp). It was the kind of locale that could fully nurture artistic bent while spurring exploration into the creative unknown. And Segall’s salad days in town were the last breaths of an all-time banger.

Do yourself a YouTube solid and cue up “Teeny Boppers (the REAL Laguna Beach)” by Epsilons, one of Segall’s early bands. Now recall the early aughts reality TV show that followed a group of impish, superficial upperclassmen at the local high school. The Epsilons’ video was skewering as much as it was satirical, while its plot, characters, and production value showcased a gobsmacking example of artistic intent by such a young crew of friends and musicians. 

“That show really kicked everything into hyperdrive and killed [the town],” Segall says. “You could just see it changing. A lot of the old, weird places just started closing down. It became a different place. And that’s fine, you know what I mean? Any beach town in California is going to turn into an affluent place where arty stuff is hard to survive in. I miss that, and it’s really crowded now. Still really beautiful, though—the most beautiful beaches, I think, in Southern California. And it’s still got its [music] heads for a small town. I still go into the record store there sometimes, and there’s a Blue Cheer section with, like, at least three copies of Vincebus Eruptum that people have unloaded from their vinyl collection. I don’t think you could find that in LA.”

Corey Brindley, who managed Thalia Surf Shop in Laguna Beach from 2004 to 2015 while also hosting a local radio show on KXFM during Segall’s formative years, recalls the excitement of that particular era.

“It was a really cool time with a super-DIY culture,” Brindley says. “You had these crews of kids that in any other town would be these troublemakers. But in Laguna they were these creative hubs with so much energy. Anything these kids could get their hands on they were experimenting with, and I think that’s what’s been the basis of Ty’s MO and creative headspace. Everything is there for the taking. Nothing’s off the table that you can’t touch, re-create, and make your own.”

Photos by Isaac Zoller.

After graduating from Laguna Beach High School in 2005, Segall enrolled at the University of San Francisco as a media studies major. Within that fast four years of undergraduate life, plus a hurried post-semester to wrap up a final 24 units at the nearby city college, playing music in the city’s scene ran parallel. He befriended others similar to him, such as John Dwyer of the rock band The Osees, who became an early mentor. Segall’s recording career ultimately sparked with his self-titled debut on Dwyer’s label, Castle Face Records, in 2008. 

He’ll tell you that music never was meant to be a full-time thing. The illusion of that oasis impossible. Segall’s early CV was a smattering of odds and ends, including briefly working as a grow-cabinet maker for a successful hydroponics company. Good pay. PTO. Sick leave. Benefits. The whole nine for a conflicted, budding nine-to-fiver. But he couldn’t cap that internal drive to make and play—and tour. No way. He committed, moving life and inspirations to LA. 

So much music followed in a short span—six studio albums total from 2008 to 2013. The subject matter ranged as the sound evolved. Segall started with a more rudimentary approach of artist as lens, taking in as much as he could and reflecting it all in a way that propelled his “get it done and can it” garage-rock, punk ethos. 

“Sonically, lyrically, thematically, it was all just throwing paint at the wall,” Segall says. “It was blown-out rock and roll. And eventually, over time, I kind of found the pathway to my style.”

Amid that tremendous output, different personas were assumed. Lyrics edged into the self-reflective. Production became more astute and nuanced while aiming to go somewhere different every time, way beyond the sounds of his heroes—Black Sabbath, David Bowie, the Beatles. Should you strap in for a full catalog listen, know this: The one thing you’ll never hear in his work is redundancy. Nothing ever sounds the same twice, record to record.

“That’s been the goal,” Segall says. “A lot of the bands that I love that are really prolific, there are two camps: All the records sound like their thing, and all the records are always going to sound like their thing, or all the records sound totally, drastically different. And I’ve always been, like, [the latter] is interesting. Because it’s an opportunity to try something different every time. I feel like maybe I’ve shot myself in the foot a little bit by not staying in some places and exploring them deeper, but it’s too boring for me and not as rewarding. I feel like everything I do is a reaction to the last thing that I do.” 

The slightly downcast, more measured ring of 2011’s Goodbye Bread was the California record that wasn’t your typical blissful affair. Recall when tech’s takeover was suddenly gray goo everywhere, and the first tides of outrageous rent hikes hit—especially in cities like San Francisco. The album explored the dichotomy of California as harsh reality versus its more paradisiacal imagery that many mistakenly think of. 

Fast-forward three albums to the supremely polished glam-psych sound of 2014’s Manipulator, whose 14-month process to final master and release was Segall’s longest at the time, and whose 17-song effect showed how astutely he could take a wide cross-section of musical influences and refashion them anew as a rollicking, booty-shaking sonic ride. Conversely, a lot of its lyrics are the silver-sparkle lipstick of a bygone era mouthing the missive that the digital world is a trap. (See the track “Susie’s Thumb” as an example.) 

Move toward the maximalist nastiness of 2016’s Emotional Mugger, when the ephemeral weed hit of the last decade was starting to wear thin. It is loud. Shattering. Your bones quaked at those shows. Watch the video of the title track, and the album becomes a thesis on how dull passivity and moral relevance ultimately churn you into human sludge. On tour, Segall wore a crude baby’s mask. The performance became an intense, confrontational, and experimental act of resistance to the fast-growing swell of societal bleakness that was quickly closing in. He’ll admit that he certainly skirted an edge. Some in the audience were begging to be the targets for his drool. 

Since then, the sound continues its flight path across varied sonic territories—significant throughout his five-album sprint from 2018 to 2020—while that pulling inward reaches new fathoms. On 2021’s Harmonizer, recorded at his new, meticulously constructed bungalow-style professional home studio, Harmonizer Studios, he slavishly wove the album and studio’s namesake device—which raises or lowers pitch by a preset interval—into the arrangement on every song. Couple that with those lonely days and loathsome nights of the early COVID-19 pandemic, and you get a burner that melts you right into the rug. His Hello, Hi album, released in 2022, offered a more stripped-down acoustic focus that channeled his strengths in natural sound experimentation, with a pathos nod to Neil Young. On 2024’s Three Bells, there’s a further slip of release. Think ego death, the comforting, yet strangely walled mercies of life in the home, and an overall deeper mining into the mind. 

Aside from those disjointed indie circles, it can be seen as a good thing that there’s never quite been a huge crossover hit. The pop charts aren’t worthy. And how could Segall fit within those rote confines? So many of today’s vanilla stream of pop chart-toppers and artists lack the inertia of their forebears in content, originality, and arrangement. Where’s the substance? The real musicality? The honesty that doesn’t delve into manufactured tween or boy-tool drama, breathy overdubbed whispers, or trendy autotune? What’s torturous today is how the public craves that status quo and its billion-dollar pseudo-Stepford act. At one of Segall’s recent shows on the Three Bells tour, an energetic bald-headed punk in the audience with a penchant for VW bus restoration couldn’t help regaling me with hard facts: Seeing Segall live is like seeing the last bastion of pure, unbridled rock.  

“There’s going to be books written about his output,” said the late Steve Albini, musician and legendary audio engineer, who worked with Nirvana, Pixies, Bush, and Cheap Trick to name a short-listed few, and with whom Segall recorded his second self-titled album in 2017. Albini also served as a strategic resource to the build-out of Harmonizer Studios. His unexpected passing from a heart attack last May rocked the music world. He was 61. “[Ty] has impeccable taste as well,” he said. “It’s not like he chumps one out every now and again, either, you know? Every one of his records has something distinctive about it. Like some affectation or some central conceit that makes that record unique and different from the other ones. There’s always a purpose to it. I also deeply admire his commitment to his craft and skill set that has put him in the position of building, maintaining, and running a studio for his own use and for his friends’ use, such that it has now become a resource for all of those people that he keeps close to him. It’s a validation of the whole project.”

As a musician, you’re lucky if you can harness the fire to cut one record—anointed, really, if you can make three—and somehow have it all dissolve into memory that it was actually, successfully done. To make it like Segall in this age takes a never-ending supply of wood to burn—and an altogether different kind of makeup to do the work. Because it’s still work. All of it. The pen to paper. The relentless days and nights of arrangements and collaborations to get sound to tape. And have it be fucking good. Something new. Now mix in dad life and a duty to family. It certainly makes things a bit stickier, yet all the more rewarding. Segall’s grateful to be here.

It’s still work. The relentless days and nights of arrangements and collaborations to get sound to tape. To make it like Segall in this age takes a never-ending supply of wood to burn. 

“It just makes everything come into focus a bit more, and you kind of care about a lot of the bullshit less,” Segall says on being a new father. “And you just want to make everything great for your child as much as you can. You want to be present.”

And when resets are needed to continue the work, there’s always the dip waiting a quick flight down the hill. His home in Topanga Canyon is nearly the exact distance to the ocean—“like, as the bird flies,” Segall says—as his parents’ house was on Old Top of the World.

“Surfing’s a good mind break—a brain cleanse, a brain wipe, so that I can start anew,” he says. “My friend once called the ocean ‘The Big Blue Pill,’ which I really like. Because it’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re not feeling good? Go take a big blue pill, man, and then you’ll feel better.’ And whatever that is. Surf. Jump in. Sit there. Stare at it. One foot. Whatever.”

Leaving the canyon overlook of the rooftop’s small patio, Segall and I descend a short spiral staircase inside and settle into the living room. I’m enamored with the playful, semi-kitschy knickknacks and wall prints, friendly houseplants, and analog accouterments seemingly everywhere. He drops the needle on a vinyl record, and the turntable spins Satori, the second album by an obscure Japanese heavy metal group from the early ’70s, the Flower Travellin’ Band. Music fills the room from vintage wood-cabinet floor speakers. His nearby VHS collection could easily rival a video rental store that’s still holding out somewhere. Later, in the studio, he plays cuts of great songs on an old Wurlitzer electric piano. Bowie’s “Changes.” “After the Gold Rush” by Young. All too soon, it’s time to leave. 

The drive south toward home turns from sunshine to storm clouds almost instantly, Tuna Canyon Road leading to ruffled waters. Early spring onshore all over it. Sardine traffic on the 405. A sheer, ominous black gathering east. 

Hours later, I start my hook in from Ocean-side toward the homestead, and, wouldn’t you know it, some lone seagull with a sneer, breaking free from the rain, swoops above the hood, a breast of pure white heat flying fast on a line.

[Feature image: Photo by Isaac Zoller.]