Know The Score: Open Mike Eagle on Punch-Drunk Love

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s Bar­ry Egan finds it dif­fi­cult to express his true feel­ings. In order to fit in with soci­ety his frac­tured per­son­al­i­ty often takes on a dis­turbing­ly jovial form. Bar­ry does every­thing pos­si­ble to keep peo­ple at bay, even if that involves smash­ing up his clingy sister’s liv­ing room windows.

Chica­go rap­per, come­di­an, wrestler and pod­cast­er Open Mike Eagle (real name Michael Eagle) has also made an art out of mask­ing his emo­tions, using sub­ver­sive jokes to throw lis­ten­ers off the scent across colour­ful albums that intel­li­gent­ly poke holes in the notion of the human con­di­tion. In Sandler’s char­ac­ter, Eagle says he instant­ly recog­nised a kin­dred spir­it. ​“I just relat­ed to how Bar­ry seeks to keep peo­ple at a dis­tance,” he tells me after I remark that bars such as ​‘On that laugh to keep from cry­ing tip / no one seems to know when I’m jok­ing’ (from 2014’s diary-entry ​‘Dark Com­e­dy Morn­ing Show’) remind­ed me of Barry.

“Bar­ry points to how he’s feel­ing but doesn’t go into specifics,” Eagle con­tin­ues. ​“When peo­ple ask me how I’m feel­ing it makes me so uncom­fort­able. He has that in him, too. He doesn’t real­ly want any­one to know who he is. A big thrust of the movie is Bar­ry find­ing a woman he wants to get to know but hav­ing no idea what to do. He’s try­ing to con­trol his own nar­ra­tive, but dif­fer­ent forces con­spire to take that away from him. I can relate to that. The fact that Punch-Drunk Love trans­forms going to the super­mar­ket into this oth­er­world­ly event made a real impres­sion on me, because that’s what I try to do with my music. I try to find whim­sy in mun­dane, every­day stuff.”

It’s clear that the roman­tic nar­ra­tive of Punch-Drunk Love means a lot to Eagle. Yet it was the film’s ​“off-cen­tre” music – steered by com­pos­er Jon Brion, who impro­vised many of the songs live on set while Ander­son described the sounds in his head – that made the biggest impres­sion on the rap­per. The film begins with a har­mo­ni­um melody that’s clear­ly out of key and twitchy synths that seem to echo the dis­place­ment of Barry’s life – sounds that sig­ni­fy an outsider.

How­ev­er, as the char­ac­ter falls deep­er in love, becom­ing less and less insu­lar, the chords trade their dis­parate feel for the kind of doe-eyed opti­mism you might find in an old Dis­ney movie. This emo­tion­al meta­mor­pho­sis is com­plet­ed with Brion’s use of ​‘He Needs Me’ – a love song orig­i­nal­ly from Robert Altman’s Pop­eye – dur­ing a cli­mat­ic din­ner date in Hawaii.

“Bar­ry feels like a flat note in most of the scenes he’s in, and I love how the music reflects that,” says Mike, who remem­bers loop­ing the Sgt Pepper’s‑esque ​‘Over­ture’ into a beat he wrote lyrics to at col­lege. ​“Jon Brion has these same tem­plates he revis­its; he keeps on doing a slight­ly dif­fer­ent spin on the same musi­cal idea. It’s kind of like sam­pling, and there’s some­thing very hip hop about that. He shows how our inner mono­logue can evolve as we become sad­der or hap­pi­er. It’s exper­i­men­tal, sure, but the music also feels like these old bright show tunes. Some of it wouldn’t be out of place in Fantasia.”

In the same way Bar­ry becomes more hon­est with his emo­tions as the film pro­gress­es, it feels like Eagle has under­gone his own trans­for­ma­tion. His album ​‘Ani­mé, Trau­ma and Divorce’, released ear­li­er this year, finds Eagle try­ing to plot a new path while con­sid­er­ing his lim­i­ta­tions. The music was record­ed while he was going through a painful sep­a­ra­tion, yet he some­how makes hit­ting rock bot­tom feel ther­a­peu­tic. A chance to heal. The lyric ​“I need more fin­gers to pick up the pieces”, from funky album high­light ​‘Buc­cia­rati’, acts as both a win­dow to Eagle’s soul and an alle­go­ry for the over­whelm­ing hope­less­ness of 2020.

So, has the artist changed? And is he now less inter­est­ed in push­ing peo­ple away, or mask­ing his feel­ings with jokes? ​“I am def­i­nite­ly kind of a dark per­son,” he admits. ​“I spent a lot of my career try­ing not to acknowl­edge it and try­ing to talk around it. Usu­al­ly I would record a dark song for an album before going back and com­plete­ly chang­ing the lyrics. I real­ly need­ed to con­front some of that dark­ness and put it on this record. It’s an album about cycles of trauma.”

Although at times it sounds like Eagle is strug­gling to car­ry this weight, he also main­tains his trade­mark wit, whether that’s through pok­ing fun at yup­pies with ass­es for heads or reflect­ing on how life some­times feels like one big Black Mir­ror episode. There’s some­thing inspir­ing about hear­ing him crack jokes know­ing he was expe­ri­enc­ing one of the low­est points of his life. ​“I guess that’s proof I am still fight­ing, no mat­ter how heavy things get.”

Eagle says his next project will be a lot brighter than ​‘Ani­mé, Trau­ma and Divorce’. ​“It isn’t going to be as reflec­tive. Hon­est­ly, I am feel­ing like I real­ly need to flex my rap skills. I want to dou­ble down on rap as a craft and show that I’m one of the best. I sense that’s becom­ing valu­able again to hip hop cul­ture.” Might it include a song as inno­cent and ten­der as ​‘He Needs Me’? ​“Only if I can rap about lov­ing some­one so much that I want to chew their face and scoop out their eye­balls,” Eagle replies, gig­gling. ​“I like to use lan­guage like Bar­ry does!”

What­ev­er the future holds, Eagle says he can’t pic­ture a day where he won’t turn to Brion’s score for inspi­ra­tion. ​“If you are ever on a city bus and just want to go to anoth­er world then I’d say put the Punch-Drunk Love score on your head­phones. It’s a real­ly pret­ty thing with­out ever feel­ing too much. You could lis­ten to Brion’s arrange­ments 100 times and still pick up on some­thing new. There’s a lot of words on an Open Mike Eagle album – I try my best to make my music that way too.”