On Laughing In The Face Of Rehab

"I am about as 'on the road' as you can get," Albert Hammond Jr explains. "We're in a van in the middle of nowhere. We played Portland last night and we're driving to Twin Falls, Idaho."   

Hammond Jr's stunning Momentary Masters set is dedicated to a late friend of his named Sarah Jones. "We just shared things for two weeks and then she died and I kept on goin'," Hammond Jr shares. Her memory also lives on through his lyrical content. "There's a line in that song Touché that's in quotes, it's from one of her poems: 'I forgave you long before I met you for the things that you were bound to do'.

"I dedicated the record wishing that I could've hung out with her and had a long conversation with her about it like we did before," he laments. Hammond Jr admits his friend's death made him "really pissed off" at the time. "When she died I was just like, 'You left me with all these assholes,'" he laughs. "I could really be myself around her, which is really nice." Hammond Jr then recites an inspirational quote: "I forget where I found it, but it said, 'One day whether you are 14, 28 or 65 you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest most awful truth that you will ever come to find is they are not always with whom we spend our lives,' and I was just like, 'Oh, yes, that's awesome,' haha, it's a key thing."  

He's been in and out of rehab and when told we're sorry to hear that, Hammond Jr reassures, "Oh no, it was great!"

"When she died I was just like, 'You left me with all these assholes.'" 

On his recovery timeline, Hammond Jr reveals, "I started at 25 and I went to, like, a little outpatients thing and then you sort of start and stop, but it's not a big deal. And then at 27 or something like that I stopped [for] another little bit 'cause just, like, I'd had enough. And then eventually you always get to the point where something happens and it gets you to stop for a bit, but then you go back. But it's like a broken record in your head, um, and, yeah! And then I guess that last time I'd really just gotten to the point where I wasn't even gettin' high so much as I was just destroying myself; I wasn't functioning or really doing anything.

"I mean, it was what I ended up needing. I obviously got to the point where I couldn't help myself without that extreme form, but it was all self-inflicted. Sometimes I laugh at the triumph of it, because, you know, ah, it's just funny...  As dark as those times were and how much emotion was felt, it really was fun to kinda have that time to do that. Maybe 'fun' is the wrong word."

His lyrical content feels deeply personal on this latest release and Hammond Jr certainly is a deep thinker. "When I try to figure stuff out, I think I got it and then it changes in my mind... Sometimes it feels silly when you say it out loud and it means so much inside your head."