A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I’ve noticed something about the current cultural moment. Regrets is a bad word. Nobody has them anymore. Instead, the emotionally enlightened among us look back and see only “experiences and choices that made me who I am today.”

And I get that. We understand that obsessing over things we’ve done wrong in the past isn’t a particularly healthy thing to do. But I think we lose something when we don’t reckon with our bad choices. Somehow dismissing those things as just “part of my journey” feels like a cop out. There’s no accountability in that.

I talked about this with music producer Jack Antonoff. I told him that the biggest regret in my life was not being at my mom’s bedside when she died. At the time, I convinced myself that I could only be away from work so long — that my siblings could stay and I’d be the one to come back and be with my dad after she died.

Antonoff shared something similar. One of his biggest regrets was being gone on tour so much when his sister was dying of cancer. He felt like if he started turning opportunities down, they wouldn’t come back. We all justify the choices we make in the moment. It’s OK to regret those things. To wish we had made different choices. The key is to absorb the consequences of the choices and move beyond them.

Antonoff’s life is not defined by regret, but he told me that it is defined by grief. He didn’t say it in a sad way. Just as a matter of fact. It frames his songwriting, how he interacts with people and how he sees the world.

The grief, he says, makes things feel more precious. And he has much to feel grateful for. His band Bleachers released a new album earlier this year. He’s got a bunch of Grammy awards and has produced for some of the biggest names in pop music, including Taylor Swift. He also got married last year to actress Margaret Qualley. He’s made peace with any regrets he has and is taking nothing for granted.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What is something about your hometown you’ve come to appreciate over time?

Jack Antonoff: The slowness of my hometown. I grew up in New Milford, New Jersey. That’s where I was until I was like eight and I just stared at the walls.

All I wanted to do was break out, I wanted to go everywhere and do everything and tour the world and, you know, make my mark. And that slow, slow, slow boredom of where I grew up made my imagination run wild.

I can’t recreate it and I can’t change it and I never would. I’m just happy I got to have it. My life existed in cars waiting for my mom to do whatever she was doing.

Question 2: What is proof that somebody really knows you?

Antonoff: Proof that somebody really knows me is if they understand my rituals around feeling clean.

Martin: Oh, so many follow ups to ask here.

Antonoff: It’s not basic. It’s not like, “He’s a germaphobe.” It’s very specific of my definition of what is and isn’t clean.

Martin: OK. Tell me an example of what that looks like for you.

Antonoff: My only concern with cleanliness is around my face. I haven’t touched my eyes, nose, mouth, or ears with my hands, unwashed, in probably 20 years. So it’s very specific.

Martin: But how is that even possible? I realized as you were talking, I was rubbing underneath my eyes.

Antonoff: That’s how you get sick. That’s how germs spread. I go play in front of people, but I have no need to rub my eyes, my nose, my mouth and my hands if they’re not washed.

Question 3: How has grief shaped your life?

Antonoff: Entirely.

Martin: Entirely?

Antonoff: I almost see it as an emotional lens. It’s not like a thing that happened that you sometimes feel. It’s how you see things now. My sister died when I was 18, but she was sick since I was five. So it was a big part of my life.

Martin: So how does that manifest in how you see the world?

Antonoff: The thing about sick people, people who are unsure how long they’ll get to live, especially kids in that position, is the lack of cynicism. The obsession with creation, joy, love, family. When you might not have a lot of time on earth, you don’t define yourself by the things you hate, put very simply. And so that just lives in me.

I’m not really doing a bit, you know, I feel very sincere about the things I’m doing and saying. And I think a big part of that is just being confronted with time and fragility and that was always on the table.

Martin: How do you feel most connected to her?

Antonoff: Probably through my family. I think when you have a great loss, people either run or glue themselves to each other. We definitely did the glue method.

At high noon on a Saturday, the last aluminum pour of the day is about to commence at the Yucca Valley Material Lab.

Heidi Schwegler, founder of the Lab, has crawled up to the roof to get the best vantage point for a video. Schwegler has a hard stance on safety while still allowing for wild experimentation — it’s this attitude that makes the compound, with its art and recording studios, gallery, retrofitted campers and workshops like foundry and glass casting — a place of inspiration and community that pulls in people from all over the nation, but especially Angelenos looking for a reprieve from city life.

Jodie Cavalier, an interdisciplinary artist, pours molten aluminum into molds made earlier in the week.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

“This is the closest Derek and I could get to L.A. and afford it,” said Schwegler, referring to her partner, Derek Monypeny, who works with musicians. “And I think if you ask a lot of artists out here, they’ll say the same thing. It’s as close as you can get and be a really decent place to live and have a huge studio and still be within driving distance of an art center.”

It’s this passion and energy that pull artists east. Every workshop sells out, attracting hot-shot artists and retired high school teachers alike. “It’s really amazing to see my art and pedagogical practice come together outside of myself — in the form of a curved metal building plopped in the Mojave Desert,” Schwegler said. “Never would I have imagined this when we bought this property in 2018.”

The Lab has become a landing place for out-of-town artists and people looking for a way to plug into the desert scene. Many artists in Yucca Valley moved there on a whim after visiting for a weekend, much like Schwegler.

“I built this program because I was really afraid I would become a total recluse out here, because I didn’t think anybody was out here,” Schwegler said. “Come to find out, it’s just like that saying: ‘If you build it, they will come.’”

An artist and self-proclaimed materials junkie, Schwegler has pulled together funding from various sources, including AHA Projects, a nonprofit organization that supports creators, to cover residency and workshop costs, including airfare for teachers and housing for artists. Schwegler also often works with artists from the desert and Los Angeles for trade.

The Lab’s growing community has been cited as a reason why L.A. artists stay in the high desert — being able to see familiar faces at one or two cultural events a weekend is a balm after the smorgasbord and sprawl of the Southland.

The Yucca Valley Material Lab, as seen from above.

Haydeé Jiménez, an artist in residence at Yucca Valley Material Lab, wears a protective Kevlar apron during a bronze and aluminum workshop.

Students in the foundry casting in bronze and aluminum workshop pour molten aluminum into molds that were made earlier in the week.

Advertisement

In 2016, artists Ry Rocklen and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs realized that a mortgage in the desert would be cheaper than a storage unit in Los Angeles. “I had a bunch of my ‘Trophy Modern’ furniture in storage and realized we could decorate our house with it and have a place to visit on the weekends,” said Rocklen, of a series of sculptures he made for an exhibit.

After having a child in 2020 and spending more time in nearby Joshua Tree, they moved full-time and converted their garage into studio space. “It was such a strange time, with so many different things going on, adjusting was not really on my mind. It was kind of a blur between our new baby, the pandemic and the move,” said Rocklen, who runs the gallery space Quality Coins in Yucca Valley. “The landscape, however, was our saving grace, as we were able to go on walks through the beautiful rocky hills.”

Back at the metal workshop, the roaring sound of the kiln — which is used in the process of turning molten bronze and aluminum into objects — fills the quiet desert mesa with an ambient soundtrack.

During a metals workshop, students made molds and learned to pour bronze and aluminum at the foundry.

Haydeé Jiménez, a recent artist in residence who splits her time between Los Angeles and Tijuana, crouched outside the metals workshop observation window wearing headphones and sunglasses, with her microphone wind-screened by a cardboard box. Amid the Joshua trees and creosote bushes, she recorded the sounds of the makeshift foundry.

Jiménez, who describes her art practice as revolving around “sound, music and vibrational sound healing,” said she was excited to work with new materials.

“When I first got the invitation to join [the Lab] for a residency, I hoped to work with glass and create little resonant objects for the development of a sort of acoustic ASMR experience,” said Jiménez, referring to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which is when one is soothed by sounds like whispers and taps. Later in the weekend, she’d layer the foundry recording over sounds made using bronze objects from the workshop in a performance with gong-master Tatsuya Nakatani at the Firehouse, a Joshua Tree venue.

Any given weekend at the compound can be action-packed; that Saturday, Lazy Eye Gallery opened Michelle Ross’ “Before Pictures,” a show of sculptural paintings inside the nave of a water tower converted into a small funnel of a gallery space with a ladder to the roof that affords a view of the mesa.

But as the artists’ community grows, so has interest in real estate in Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms, once considered more affordable areas. Housing prices in Yucca Valley have grown 80% since 2019, according to Zillow, although the steep pandemic rush has since cooled.

Haydeé Jiménez, an artist in residence at Yucca Valley Material Lab, records sounds of students in the foundry pouring molten aluminum into molds. A view of the Lazy Eye gallery at the Yucca Valley Material Lab.

“The presence of Airbnbs is corrosive,” said Riggs, observing that interested buyers have grown beyond “Silver Lake hipsters with a getaway cabin.” Last year, Yucca Valley capped short-term rentals at 10% of its housing stock. According to Redfin, most people searching to buy Yucca Valley homes today are in San Francisco.

Between the expansive landscape, cheaper-than-L.A. studio space and the small-town feel, the desert offers the experience of slow time — which can help some artists tap into a flow state without the day-to-day distraction of city living. But all that free time and space can be intimidating.

Ceramic artist and designer Mansi Shah left Los Angeles in 2020 after another artist friend told her about a house for rent in Yucca Valley; she packed up and headed to the desert within a few weeks. “There was 500 feet of open desert between me and my nearest neighbor. I remember those first few months, I was terrified of everything. The wind, the quiet, the desert critters,” said Shah.

A view of the work lab in a Quonset structure built by a student at the Yucca Valley Material Lab.

A Joshua tree frames students in the foundry.

“My introduction to life in America was the desert,” said Shah. She grew up in Palm Springs with her hotel manager father after her family emigrated from India. But later, she’d lived in Los Angeles, then New York and then returned to Los Angeles. “Now moving back here to the high desert, setting up my home and studio, it feels I’ve come back full circle.”

When she moved to L.A. in 2017, she realized that it had radically changed — most noticeably, the rent prices.

“But every exploding colorful sunset, every jackrabbit, every coyote sighting changed my brain chemistry,” said Shah. “I began to soften and ease into the different pace of life here. There’s a reverence for nature here that I hadn’t experienced before.”

In the summer months, the average temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “My studio schedule revolves around outside temperatures,” said Shah. “I tend to work early mornings and nights in the summer and run the kiln overnight.”

Workshops at the Lab are about to wind down for the summer, making the last bronze pour of the day bittersweet.

After pouring hot aluminum into one of her stick-shaped molds and letting it cool in a pile of dirt, a participant took a ball-peen hammer and cracked open the rough silicate mold, like a geode.

An aerial view of students in the foundry knocking plaster off molds with a ball-peen hammer.

Advertisement

The next day, participants buffed their objects and applied chemical solvents to create patinas and finishes before heading back to the city. After the last pour finished, the crucible was set aside to cool.

“That’s a wrap,” said Schwegler, while everyone clapped.

Breakups suck.

But breaking up can be even harder when you still have to work together.

That was the situation singer Maria Zardoya and producer Josh Conway found themselves in.

They’re a part of the psychedelic-soul band called The Marías.

They founded the group as a couple.

But the two have since broken up romantically. Musically, they are still writing songs and performing together. And they have a new album out: Submarine. 

“This is the first project that we write together where we’re not romantically together,” Zardoya told NPR’s A Martínez. “Honestly, it was probably the easiest project to write together.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

A Martínez: So is it fair to say that with Submarine, your break up led to a creative breakthrough?

Conway: Yeah, I think so. I think the album is pretty good. There are definitely creative breakthrough moments that I feel like we went through.

Zardoya: I think the creative breakthrough honestly came from, you know, now we’re individuals. We have our own individual lives. It’s not like this codependent sort of relationship that happens when you do so much together. And we got to know ourselves. And I think that ultimately led to, like, more creativity and to your point of creative breakthrough moments individually, within ourselves.

Martínez: So Gwen Stefani, the lead singer of No Doubt, was in a relationship with her bassist, Tony Kanal. He broke up with Gwen and then they started working on Tragic Kingdom, the mega incredible album from No Doubt. Gwen Stefani says that the breakup led to her being creatively just wide open.

Zardoya: Definitely. We were watching this No Doubt documentary the other day and there were so many parallels with what Gwen and Tony went through and kind of what Josh and I went through. I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ And then, the next segment would happen, we’d be like, ‘Wait, what?’ But the only thing that we know how to do as writers and artists is just create from that level of pain. Because I think that ultimately leads to discovering what it is that you’re feeling.

Martínez: Maria, you said that when you wrote “Run Your Mouth”, you were “conflict avoidant” at the time. I love that phrase. What does that mean? 

Zardoya: I just didn’t want conflict. I wanted everything to be okay all the time. And I realized that’s not the best way to go about life. And I think trying to avoid it almost makes it, like, even more present. I think this past year especially, I’ve just tried to train myself to be okay with discomfort. I’ve been doing cold plunges and saunas and acceptance therapy. All of these things, you know, to sort of be like, ‘okay, yes, life is uncomfortable and that’s okay.’

Conway: Also “Run Your Mouth” was written pretty shortly after we initially broke up. So it makes sense why being conflict avoidant during that time was where your head was at.

Martínez: Were you walking on eggshells around each other?

Conway: I wouldn’t say walking on eggshells. It was more just like…

Zardoya: Survival mode.

Conway: By the time we had broken up, it wasn’t it wasn’t a surprise to us at that moment. But we didn’t really get much time to experience life separately after breaking up. Yeah, it was a delicate time, for sure.

Martínez: So if this album Submarine becomes your Tragic Kingdom, how will you look back on how the breakup went and what happened after?

Conway: I don’t think the success or failure of the album will affect how the breakup felt. I don’t think either of us thought or knew how the breakup was going to go. Like, will we be able to do this? In the beginning, it didn’t seem like it. But once we learned who each other were as individuals, that made it very easy.

Zardoya: Yeah, definitely.

The broadcast version of this interview was edited by Barry Gordemer.