Pitchfork
BY David Bevan
Before we eat, Ruban Nielson’s son, Moe, leads us in a blessing. “For trees so tall and skies so blue, for friends and food we thank you,” he sings, in angelic unison with his younger sister, Iris. It’s Moe’s sixth birthday, an occasion for which he’s requested only French fries from a drive-in near the family’s home just outside Portland, Oregon. To round out his dinner, his parents picked up cheeseburgers and cookies as well. “Six,” Nielson says, marveling at his son as he disassembles his food, layer by greasy layer. “I can’t believe it. I remember when I could hold you in my hand. Isn’t that crazy?”
Moe giggles. This disarmingly clear March day is spent as a family, with Nielson—the 35-year-old voice and mind behind Unknown Mortal Orchestra—helping his wife, Jenny, carefully piece together Moe’s gift, a small geodesic dome. As they watch it take shape in the backyard, the kids chase each other in the grass and hang from a tire swing sueded in moss. Iris picks dandelions and Moe sings to himself while banging on parts that have yet to be raised. It’s a scene and moment that Nielson—profoundly groggy in an oversized black sweatshirt and rumpled black pants—might normally miss.
“Ever since we’ve been together, he’s stayed up weird hours—dinner is more like Ruban’s lunch or breakfast,” says Jenny. “Usually it’s fine, but sometimes it’s hard if you want to do something with these guys,” she adds, running her hand through Iris’ brown hair. Yesterday, after working through the night in his home studio, Nielson woke up at five in the evening, long after the kids returned home from school. Today, he made it out of bed around noon. “They think I sit in my basement and play guitar all night by myself for a living,” he says of his kids. “But I’ve been more normal since finishing the album.”
While Multi-Love, UMO’s third full-length, marks a thrilling departure from the bedroom psychedelia that has earned Nielson an unexpected following, it’s also an album whose backstory speaks to the manner in which he views his art, his life, and the connection between the two—a leap of faith and a leap forward. It teems with lush synths and futurist textures, hallucinogenic funk and R&B, but emotionally and lyrically, Nielson needed a light. “I wanted my kids to be an influence again,” he says. “The way Moe made me feel—that optimism of having a kid—was a big part of my first record, but the next album was impacted by the guilt of wondering if I was going to be a good dad in the long-term. I needed something outside of myself.”
That something came, but in a surprising and complex form. After touring behind his first two albums for nearly three years, Nielson arranged to take a year off, so that he could write, record, and spend more time at home with his family. But as work on Multi-Love began in earnest last year, Nielson and his wife found themselves reconsidering the outlines of their relationship. As we eat and laugh at their tiny wooden dinner table, I’m sitting in a seat that, up until very recently, was occupied by someone else, someone whose absence is palpable and whose influence can be felt throughout the record she helped shape. “It’s not that this song is about her,” Nielson sings in the album’s hypnotic title cut. “Most songs are about her.”
“I’d never heard of polyamory before and I wasn’t interested in the idea of it,” Nielson tells me after dinner, during a long walk through his neighborhood. “I just wanted to pretend that no one had ever thought of it before, to stumble into it blindly.” He scratches nervously at his chest, over a tattoo of an open eye etched between his collarbones. “I feel like I’m gonna spend the rest of my life trying to live last year down. It was such a beautiful time.” …