Tim Kasher is terminally awkward on the phone. Stuttering, fumbling, apologizing – he sounds every bit the self-effacing, xenophobic poet who’s narrated Cursive’s albums for the past 15 years.
The post-hardcore-turned-art rock band has plowed forth under the weight of colossal critical acclaim, with Kasher – armed with a wildman’s beard and the obscene howl to match – proclaimed as a Dylan for the hardcore set, his hyperliterate lyrics bristling in a bed of thorny guitars and a cacophonous rhythm section.
On Cursive’s newest album, 2009’s Mama, I’m Swollen, Kasher is at his paranoid best, whipping himself with his own poison tongue as his bandmates’ minor-chord thrashing ebbs and flows. Fly Magazine caught up with the 35-year-old frontman to talk about aging, rocking out and the mental wall separating the two.

Fly Magazine: Journalists have had all kinds of fun hypothesizing about what Mama, I’m Swollen is a reference to. But you’ve said it’s more about being swollen with thoughts, overcomplicated by ideas ...
Tim Kasher: … being just waylaid by everything. I tried to write this record in the position of being in my 30s. “Am I supposed to be figuring something greater out now? Is there a grand epiphany waiting in my 40s? Because it certainly hasn’t hit in my 30s.” I know it’s not gonna come. That’s kind of all part of what the record’s about, that there’s really no grand epiphany. The grand idea of how we grow up and we figure it all out – that’s about as silly a notion as the Hollywood notion of true love.

     FM: You talk a lot about Peter Pan Syndrome. Is that how you feel as a working musician, like you’re stuck in perpetual childhood?
TK: I think that turning up and playing loud, it’s really a young man’s game. I’m getting to be an older fella doing it. I don’t want 40 or 50-year-old rockers reading this and thinking, “What a little dick!” But when I was young, I thought that people who got older – like when you think about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it’s like, “Oh, throw in the towel! Give up! You’re so old! Act your age!” But it’s so much cooler that they don’t. I’m not going to suggest that that’s what I’ll be doing at 70, or however old they are. But I think that’s cool.

     FM: It seems like the pursuit of rock and roll, there’s something inherently irresponsible in that.
TK: You’re right. And I flip flop on that still. Sometimes I feel like an idiot screaming on stage. I’ve always been that way. It’s something I felt at 18.

     FM: You seem very down-on-Tim on this album.
TK: I like to think that that was just a period of ideas I was grappling with, struggling with. As in, I hope that I’ll be singing about something different 10 years later. I hope I’m not such a dolt that I can’t reflect on these ideas and come to a conclusion, and then move on. It’s that really old concept of universalism of writing, that what you’re going through, chances are, a lot of other people are too. So in trying to work out my own thoughts and experiences, I throw it out there and hope that that’s relatable to other people as well.

     FM: People love to scrutinize your lyrics. Do you ever wish you could just throw your music out to the world and be done with it?
TK: Yeah, I like the idea of putting it behind me. But you know, it’s how music is a different medium. You write something and you don’t actually leave it behind like you would a book or after you produce a film or something, and then it’s done. With music, it keeps on going. There’s music I wrote, goddamn, like, 12 years ago, and that’s still a part of who I am now. And I’m actually glad. I’m glad that it can still be relatable to me.

     FM: Cursive has been in this pocket of semi-fame for a long time. What’s your perspective on that?
TK: It’s really slippery. To be totally, bluntly honest about it, I believe that it’s good to keep your ego in check. Success is something I do want, because I want to keep doing this, but there’s definitely a part of me that wants to denounce it altogether. And there’s another part of me that wants to be on the cover of Spin every time I put a record out. So I try to keep that balance – don’t despise the aftermath of your writing, and also don’t gloat in it.

     FM: Now that we’re both old men in our 30s, I’m curious what you might say to young Tim in 1995 when he’s trying to get his band off the ground.