LOS ANGELES, CA- Last year, I had the opportunity to watch Josh Klinghoffer perform before a massive crowd as part of Eddie Vedder’s Earthlings at Ohana Festival. It was a reminder of the unique space Klinghoffer has occupied throughout his career: a musician whose fingerprints can be found across some of modern rock’s most significant stages, yet whose own artistic voice often reveals itself most powerfully in quieter, more private moments.
With A Drop In The Ocean, the fourth album from his solo project Pluralone, Klinghoffer turns inward. Released via Org Music, the record strips much of the surrounding noise away, placing greater emphasis on acoustic guitar, intimate arrangements, and lyrics that seem less interested in providing answers than in asking difficult questions.
A Drop In The Ocean does not feel like a record designed to protect its author. It feels open, exposed, and strangely cleansing…. almost like an expungement of the past to make way for whatever comes next.
That was what struck me most when I first listened to the album. These songs are not vulnerable in some easy, confessional sense. They are more unsettled than that. Across tracks like “Peer Into Your Dreams,” “Feels Like I’ve Done Wrong,” “Too Much Time’s Gone By,” “I Hope You Knew,” and “Sadly,” Klinghoffer seems to wrestle with belief, time, grief, identity, responsibility, and the possibility that the stories we tell ourselves may be both necessary and unreliable.
After sitting with the album and its lyrics, I was excited to toss a few questions Josh’s way. His answers were thoughtful, candid, and at times quietly profound.
“Just being aware that your life can change simply by changing something embedded in your belief system should be a freeing and exhilarating thought.”
–Josh Klinghoffer
Blurred Culture: One of the things that struck me about “Peer Into Your Dreams” is that it feels like it’s operating in this strange space between reality and imagination. There is the last line, “Isn’t it freeing / A slight change in belief.” Can you explain that? It feels like you were questioning how much of our reality is shaped by what we choose to believe.
Josh Klinghoffer: Well our experience is shaped by what we believe, “who we are,” or who we believe ourselves to be. Just being aware that your life can change simply by changing something embedded in your belief system should be a freeing and exhilarating thought. It’s possible we don’t really have much control over anything we do, much choice. We are all just a collection of prior experience combined with our genetics. This creates an endless parade of thought that the “you” you experience “yourself” to be then reacts to. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we are the type of people open to the possibility of changing our beliefs and thought processes. I’m rambling.
Reality seems to be disappearing, at least anything resembling a shared reality. That’s a problem.
BC: Reading through the lyrics for “Feels Like I’ve Done Wrong,” I kept coming back to the line, “For once in your life allow the chance you might be wrong.” That’s a pretty brutal thing to say to yourself. Have you become more comfortable with uncertainty as you’ve gotten older?
JK: I’m not sure I’ve become more comfortable with uncertainty, but perhaps less solipsistic.
(Editors note: I had to look up “solipsistic” so I figured you’d need to look it up too. Solipsistic (adjective) describes the philosophical theory that only one’s own mind is sure to exist, rendering the external world and other minds unprovable. In everyday usage, it refers to extreme self-centeredness, where a person is so absorbed in their own needs and thoughts that they ignore others. [1, 2, 3, 4])
BC: “Too Much Time’s Gone By” reads like a song that’s wrestling with time itself. Not nostalgia exactly, but kind of the realization that life keeps moving whether we’re ready for it or not. Is that something that was on your mind while making this record?
JK: It could be an indictment of time, or the passage of time, but I think more, at least for me, it deals with the themes expressed in the first two answers.
BC: I really liked the lyrics to “Simple Action.” There’s a line, “Your mind’s a military,” which I thought was pretty thought provoking. Do you ever find songwriting becomes a way to quiet some of that internal noise/war?
JK: Absolutely. For me the process of putting words to music usually allows for words and the thoughts surrounding them to hit me in an atypical way or at different times. I’ll be listening to something I recorded 10 years ago and suddenly it’s as if I opened a portal. The words mean something else completely than they did originally. I guess I often write with a vagueness that allows for that. I write exhaustively and then begins the arduous task of pruning and trimming. The lyrics that make it into a song usually resonate the most and have the potential to teach me something or start a conversation
“Reality seems to be disappearing, at least anything resembling a shared reality. That’s a problem.”
– Josh Klinghoffer
BC: “I Hope You Knew” hits pretty hard emotionally on a sonic and lyrical level. It feels like there’s a tremendous amount of love in it, but also a sense of helplessness. The line, “There is no blame to assign. But we let you fall behind,” feels incredibly honest. How difficult was that song to write? Is there a story behind it that you’d care to share?
JK: That one was actually one of the easier ones because the theme or subject was clear to me from the beginning. Usually a song suggests a title or some sounds, feelings, or loose words which I then sift through to discover a bit of purpose or meaning. This one is about the loss of Taylor Hawkins. That left such an enormous hole in the lives of so many people I know, not to mention his family and band. I suppose it was just my way of confronting that loss. Interacting with it. Working through it. The thinking behind that lyric specifically I’ll leave up to the listener to decipher.
BC: One thing I kept noticing throughout the lyrics was how often time shows up. I made note of “Too Much Time’s Gone By,” the lyrics of “I Don’t Want To Let You Go,” and thematic lyrics about looking or referencing the past. Also, in the press release, you state: “For the first time in my life, I no longer feel like I have all the time in the world.” That’s a pretty powerful statement, and it feels like it echoes throughout the record. Do you feel your relationship with time has changed over the last few years?
JK: Perhaps a bit, yes. I’m older now than ever before, as are we all, and for the first time, I’m nowhere near the youngest person in every situation I’m in. I am so used to being that. Now, there are two or three generations beyond the one I caught the tail end of. I’m not sure it’s a nostalgia I’m clinging to, but something feels incredibly off about the way the world is. It’s veered too far off course. Technology has truly separated us and atomised our experience making it extremely difficult to connect with others, all whilst we’re more connected than ever before and I can send a photo to someone in India in one second. This has been happening for a while, but for my entire life, I was, in my mind, part of a generation or movement trying to make the world better in some way. Not only has that project been a failure, but it no longer feels like it’s my mission. I’m past the halfway point. These are all somewhat new experiences for me. It’s been like this for a while, but it’s feeling more and more real these days.
BC: There are moments throughout the album where it feels like you’re taking inventory of your life. Not necessarily looking back with regret, but asking difficult questions about yourself. Is there some truth to that? Would you like to address that?
JK: Yes, for sure. I feel like that is a massive part of the writing I do. Questioning. Self-examination. Dialogue with myself or on behalf of others. Again, to do with the previous answer, it’s just more and more important as each day passes to make sure you’re living life well. This is the only life we have. Every day spent unexamined or confused is one less in the final tally. We mustn’t waste them.
BC: Some of these songs feel unusually vulnerable. Not in a confessional singer-songwriter way, but in the sense that they don’t seem interested in protecting the narrator from scrutiny. Did you ever hesitate before putting some of these thoughts out into the world?
JK: No, no hesitation. I always feel like I need to go further. Even if that’s not through specific inner revelations lyrically, just more vulnerability. That’s where the real stuff is.
“I always feel like I need to go further. Even if that’s not through specific inner revelations lyrically, just more vulnerability. That’s where the real stuff is.” – Josh Klinghoffer
BC: I wanted to end with “Sadly.” The closing line, “It’s a drop in the ocean,” hit me pretty hard. It reads almost helpless. Like the art, the healing, the personal growth, all of it can sometimes feel insignificant compared to the hurt people cause each other. Did you wrestle with that feeling while making the album? Or is there actually more hope in that song than I’m hearing?
JK: I think there is hope. It may be a drop, but for someone, it could be enough to mean something to them. Also, it’s a drop, but into a vast and powerful ocean. I’m sure most of the time I mean it as an insignificant blip in the enormous sea that is everything, but if I truly had no hope, I would just walk away from the hose. I wouldn’t ever drop something in the ocean. Once you put something out there, it becomes one with the ocean, if you will, one with everything.
A Drop In The Ocean by Pluralone is out now via Org Music.
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Pluralone's Josh Klinghoffer Discusses A Drop In The Ocean, Grief, Time & Vulnerability
