"I have not thought lyrically since about the year 2000, 2001... I'm smart enough to not come back for the encore”: Henry Rollins on why he’s done with music

Henry Rollins has been talking about his long and varied career and why he’s done with making music.

The ex-Black Flag frontman was interviewed on the Loudwire Nights podcast about his next volume of his Stay Fanatic!!! series of books and conversation got round to an interview he gave last year to the Guardian in which he said he “wouldn’t go back on stage for anything”. Seems like that’s still the case.

"I have not thought lyrically since about the year 2000, 2001," Rollins insisted. "I'm smart enough to not come back for the encore. Hey, you missed me? I never asked that question. I just leave... I don't quiet quit. I don't fade. I just split after every obligation has been met."

It’s not the first time Rollins has mentioned his retirement from music. Back in 2016 he told The Skinny: “For me, music was a time and a place. I never really enjoyed being in a band. It was in me and it needed to come out, like a 25-year exorcism. One day, I woke up, and I didn't have any more lyrics. I just had nothing to contribute to the form, and I was done with band practice and travelling in groups."

Rollins has not released an album of new music since 2001’s Nice. But it’s not as if he’s been idle. Far from it. He’s become something of a punk rock renaissance man, what with his career in spoken word, acting – he has appeared in a long list in Hollywood films and provided the voice in a number of animated features, radio – he’s hosted a weekly show on Californian station KCRW since 2009 and (inevitably) podcasting.

But it’s writing that he’s been focused on of late. He’s just published his latest volume of the Stay Fanatic series, Stay Fanatic!!! 4 Lessons In Possession and Confessions of Obsession, but in the Loudwire Nights interview suggested it wasn’t something that came easy to him: “You play chess with your brain and, you know, I lose. It’s a very solitary task and no one can help you, right? 

"Or maybe they can, but I don’t collaborate really, so I sit alone and I work and I get my big break from writing and I go to the gym and I come back and I do some more writing until it’s time to read – and then I go to sleep.”

He also revealed that he is working on no fewer than two other books at present. “I’m always clacking away at something,” he said. “And that’s just what I’ve chosen to do, it’s the hill I’m going to die on.”