Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa: A different drum
Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa broke out of a groove and wowed the music world.
At 21, Stella Mozgawa made the decision to move from Sydney to the US to pursue a career in music, with the goal of somehow establishing herself as a drummer in one of the most crowded and competitive music scenes.
In 2006, she was in New York while playing with her band Mink at a small non-profit event for Axis of Justice — co-founded by System of a Down singer Serj Tankian and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello — when her life changed.
That night, a man named Michael Balzary got up on stage to play his bass guitar with her. The two shared an Australian heritage, but their musical trajectories were poles apart: she was a nobody, and he was better known as Flea, the bassist in Red Hot Chili Peppers, one of the most popular rock bands on the planet.
Despite that vast gap in notoriety, the two Australians clicked as musical peers. Afterwards, Flea invited her to jam with him; later, she lived in his Los Angeles guesthouse once the Chili Pepper had convinced her to switch coasts.
“That was the first psychedelic experience, in terms of what’s actually possible here,” Mozgawa tells The Australian via phone from Los Angeles.
“It sounds so ridiculous and at the time it felt even more ridiculous because nobody knew who I was. I wasn’t in a band that was well-known.
“I was a 21-year-old Australian chick who just found herself in this outrageous situation. I just remember thinking at the time that it all felt very unreal. And from that point on, that’s how I met my band.”
That band is Warpaint, a Los Angeles-based indie rock group that Mozgawa joined in 2009, five years after its formation.
With three albums to its name, including its most recent release in 2016’s Heads Up, the quartet — which is completed by bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg and guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, who share vocal duties — has attracted a significant following overseas, thanks to relentless touring and a seductive, bass-heavy sound that is entirely its own.
“Since then I’ve had a few trippy experiences where you work with someone that you listened to when you were a kid, “ she says.
“I made a record with Tom Jones (2012’s Spirit in the Room), which was the weirdest thing ever. (These are) strange things that you could never plan, but when they happen you’re glad that you practised in your bedroom when you were like 15 or 16 years old.
“When you’re a kid playing music — especially in Australia, where you can make a name for yourself but you don’t really have access to people who were superstars when you were a child — you never imagine that in reality you would actually have the opportunity to play with them or collaborate with them,” she says.
“It’s a really nice feeling when someone that you’ve respected, who has influenced you and inspired you to make music, somehow you end up in a room with them and you’re making music.”
In those situations, it doesn’t matter how much money each person has in their respective bank accounts, or the size of their public profile or the number of social media followers.
“All of that is absolute hogwash when you are making music with someone that you respect,” she says. “That’s the reason why you do it, and everyone’s there for the same reason: everyone was obsessed with music when they were teenagers, and they decided to do this ridiculous job and sometimes it just works out.”
That connection with Flea led to the bassist imparting a memorable phrase whose wisdom still rings in her ears today.
Never go for the fast nickel, he told her; always go for the long dime. With the benefit of some hindsight and life experience, was Flea’s advice right?
“A hundred per cent,” Mozgawa replies.
“I didn’t fully realise it at the time but if you’re unhappy in your job and you feel like you’re just getting by — paying the rent, covering your mortgage or feeding your kids, whatever it is — you feel strapped to your situation.
“It feels almost delusional to think that you can do something that you’re passionate about as a job or to make a huge life shift. And to approach something like music, which is so ephemeral sometimes; you don’t have the stability sometimes of a nine-to-five job.
“But the moment that I surrendered to that idea, that if you work really hard and you mean what you do, then things actually just do work out,” she says. “At least that’s been my experience. I can’t speak for everybody else, but that (advice) really has been really valid and manifested in so many different positive ways for me that I can’t really hold a candle to it.”
With three years since Warpaint’s last release, the band’s upcoming visit to Mozgawa’s former home occurs at a strange time for the group, which is plotting its fourth album between a recent US tour supporting indie pop act MGMT, and British indie rock act Foals on two Splendour in the Grass sideshows in Australia.
What seems likely to help its productivity henceforth is that the four members are setting up their own studio. Although they have worked with outsiders in recent months while beginning their next recordings, the benefits of inspiration and illumination from other ears can be offset by the costs of adapting their workflow and explaining the artistic shorthand they’ve developed together, which is now a decade in the making.
“It’s nice when it’s actually just the four of us, to be honest,” says the drummer. “We love control. We love doing things ourselves and starting there, at the very least, so we have a really strong idea of what needs to be done after we’ve done as much as we can, with the four of us.”
When asked how she and her bandmates have deepened their friendship since they met not long after that fateful jam with Flea, Mozgawa replies, “We really know each other very well at this point, and I think we’re all nicer people, just as a collective and also individually. We’ve all gone through so much, and I think the prevalent thread between us is that we all want to be the best version of ourselves.
“It’s interesting to see that with your friends, while you’re going through that process of being a nicer person and working hard and that manifests in so many different ways, it’s nice to see that reflected in the people that you work with,” she says.
“We all get along a lot better — not that we’ve ever not. It’s hard to be in a band but it’s also really satisfying. We all have such deep affection for each other.”
Warpaint performs in Melbourne on July 15 and Sydney July 17 while supporting Foals, then at Splendour in the Grass near Byron Bay on July 19.