Jeff Tobias makes music that won’t let us off the hook. His second solo album, One Hundredfold Now in This Age, channels two decades of work as a saxophonist, bassist, and keyboardist into something that feels like both a personal reckoning and a call to community. The arrangements are meticulous, the politics are front and center, and the whole thing insists that solidarity might actually be possible if we’re willing to stay in it together.
Today, Foxy Digitalis is premiering the video for “This Is Everybody Not Talking About it,” directed by Orange Milk recording artist Matthew D. Gantt. It’s a wild, surreal trip through real-time simulation that matches the song’s intensity. Guitar progressions shred like a purification ritual running away from closing darkness. The imagery in the video pulls the song’s confrontational energy into a visual space where the refusal to look away becomes physical and inescapable. Tobias repeats the title like a dare, turning the track into a sonic purge that refuses to let collective silence stand. This is music that confronts the world as it is while holding onto the stubborn belief that things could be different.
One Hundredfold Now in This Age is OUT NOW and shouldn’t be missed.
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I’d love to hear about your earliest memory of sound that felt significant to you. Not necessarily music, but a sound that stayed with you, something you kept returning to in your mind. What was it about that particular sound?
Just the other day I was thinking about the combination of sound and light that defined my childhood: my room faced a street where cars would drive towards the house and then turn and I would watch the headlight beams move across my wall through the blinds and listen to the unrelated sound of the walls and floors creaking at different rates as the heating system would shift temperature and weight throughout our home. That was my introduction to polyrhythms.
When did you first pick up an instrument? Was there a specific moment when you realized you wanted to make music rather than just listen to it?
Impossible to pinpoint this moment: my mom was a music teacher, and so musical instruments were always around, and playing music was always a given. We had an upright piano in the basement and a few acoustic guitars, and I’m pretty sure I had exclusive early access to a recorder well before the rest of my friends in the third grade. I started playing saxophone in the fourth grade, but that doesn’t really feel like “the first time I picked up an instrument” in my memory; instruments were just there to be picked up, and I was playing music at school and at home a lot. I got my first bass guitar courtesy of my cousin, the respected bass luthier Michael Tobias, when I turned thirteen – that was where being in “a band” became a possibility, and I played “Fortunate Son” at the talent show soon thereafter.
Walking past that church sign in December 2024, seeing “One Hundredfold Now in This Age,” did something click immediately, or did you have to sit with it for a while before you realized it was this new album’s center?
This particular church has serious game where signs are concerned. Nothing too punny, nothing too preachy – whoever rearranges the letters each week just has really good taste. Independent of their strong sloganeering, sometimes my antenna is just extremely up when it comes to words, phrases, sentences, comments, quotes, lines. I saw it, I snapped a photo, I looked it up, I read the premise, and I knew it was right.
The passage from Mark promises community and extended family through fellowship. As a socialist and agnostic, what was it like finding such resonance in scripture? Did that surprise you?
Yeah, I mean, listen: I am a product of the “punk atheist to acid agnostic” pipeline. I have a shameful Christopher Hitchens phase in my past. I spent a lot of my life vilifying organized religion, and with good reason! As I got older and my politics became more materialist, I came to understand that the church, the synagogue, the mosque, is not something to be fought against but rather a reality to accept and engage with. Once I opened myself up to that possibility, I started to see more points of confluence between theology and political ideology, and not altogether negative ones. (It was Hitchens, I think, who pointed out that Marxism could be considered a messianic belief, subbing in the dictatorship of the proletariat for the second coming of our Lord.) Which is to say: my antenna was up and I took it as a literal sign. I think a lot about the gulf between faith or belief and the real fruits of struggle or strategy.
You write about the rewards of solidarity being available “now, today, in lived experience.” Can you talk about a specific moment in the making of this album where you felt that? Where the collaboration itself was the reward, not just the finished product?
The drums on the album were mostly played by Scott Smith, also known as the President of the Drums. I’ve been knowing this dude for like twenty years at this point, and it’s so exciting to have these kinds of ongoing musical friendships. I always say that the best band in the world is the Sun Ra Arkestra, and I say this in large part because they have real continuity: they’ve been going for like three-quarters of a century, always gaining and shedding players but with intra-musical connections acting as the binding agent. Being part of the American underground music community, the DIY touring circuit, you make and keep so many connections to people, you wind up knowing so many amazing people, and beyond the rewards of personal connection, the musical vocabulary that you can develop with another person can be so special and essential. Working on these songs with Scott was just really gratifying, and I feel like a real fortunate son to have him and these other musicians in my life.
I’m struck by how the album moves through darkness but always concludes in optimism. That’s a deliberate choice in a moment when optimism can feel naive or even irresponsible. How do you navigate that without slipping into false hope?
Throughout my life as someone writing words and then singing them into microphones, I’ve always struggled to understand how anyone can ignore the world around them. Maybe for some people their elusion of the political is their own political gesture, whatever. But I mean, Sam Cooke did “Cupid,” but he also took the time to do “A Change is Gonna Come,” you know? So yeah, I feel deeply compelled to address the world as I see it, and this is genuinely how I see it: I feel a stubborn optimism in spite of all evidence. I navigate that by being as truthful to my perspective as I can, risking corniness and all the other embarrassing pratfalls that we risk while making art. I write this on the precipice of the election of a democratic socialist to the mayor’s office, so that’s points on the board for optimists!
“END IT” opens the album with a lyric you found yourself repeating as Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza began. When a phrase like that starts repeating in your head, what does it feel like? Is there relief in finally getting it out into a song, or does it just sharpen the urgency?
When you sing a lyric like the one on “END IT,” you’re planting an image in the head of the listener. I say the phrase six times, so that’s six hundred scorched American flags. Multiply that by the number of listeners and times listened, I think we’re looking at tens of thousands of burned flags. So that’s satisfying. I wouldn’t say there’s relief there— the lyric is meant to be over the top, because there is no limit to the shame of living through this atrocity, no limit to the hate I feel towards the perpetrators. There’s no amount of hugeness that could encapsulate those feelings, and so relief is impossible, but something approaching catharsis is the goal.
This album picks up where Recurring Dream left off in 2022. What changed in those two years, both in how you approach composition and in what you felt needed to be said?
You nailed it. I pretty much picked right up where RD left off and just kept trying to refine my approach with Hundredfold. John Cale is one of my all-time favorite musicians, and I love, fucking love the run of albums he did in the early 70s (Vintage Violence, Fear, Paris 1919), and I always thought it was so cool that he was just crushing it in that very particular stylistic vein and just kept on doing it. That was sort of the goal here; I was like, okay, can I prove to myself that I can keep doing this as many times as I want? In terms of the lyrical content, I started recording the music in January of 2024, and so the psychotic feelings I was coping with on Recurring Dream were shifting and I was shifting with them, and honestly, I don’t think there’s a single song on this new album that doesn’t in some way address Palestine.
I want to ask about “Anti-Imperialist Pop Composition Maximalism” – that phrase is so awesome and specific. Can you talk a little about what it means to you, and how you sort of arrived there? What does maximalism mean to you in this context, and how does it serve the anti-imperialist message rather than obscuring it?
There may have been a time in my life where I would’ve printed this phrase on a sandwich board and worn it seven days a week, but the truth is, that phrase was arrived at in a pretty flippant way, and it’s not an especially dogmatic descriptor for my music, I don’t think. I arrived at the pop maximalism part by engaging in the joyful process of real-time arranging – writing some bones for a song and then grabbing whatever instrument I had at the ready to write the next part, and not really caring about how to pull it off live. I know that one day I will make a 45-minute album with seven notes and twelve words, some fucking Wandelweiser shit, but it was fun to just go off on this one. My lyrics are arrived at in a similarly intuitive fashion, albeit with way more editing.
You called in an incredible roster of collaborators for this album. When you’re arranging these pieces, how much do you write for the specific person versus writing the part and trusting they’ll bring themselves to it?
I’d say it varies from song to song: when I knew I wanted “Letter to a Friend in Trouble” to be a sort of blown-out psych jam, I looked up Blown Out Psych Jams in the Yellow Pages and Kryssi from Mountain Movers was listed right there. Meanwhile, when I wrote the most annoying riff of all time on “This is Everybody Not Talking About It,” I thought, who loves learning to play incredibly complicated riffs, and the answer is my friend Matt Serra from Kayo Dot. And so on.
“Don’t Quit the Band” closes things out as a call to stick it out in the face of impossible odds. I love that the metaphor is specifically about a band, not just general perseverance. What is it about staying in a band that mirrors the larger work of building solidarity?
I think the honest answer is that I’ve learned how to be a person through my time being in bands. I’ve never not been in a band. Some of those bands, I’d spend more time with those people over the course of a few years than I might with my family or friends. These have been among the most defining relationships of my life, and as we all know, relationships require perseverance. So I guess “a band” is my default metaphor for “working together.” I hadn’t really thought of it that way until now. Beyond that, I just think about the ways I would feel when someone would abandon a project, and it hurt. When someone leaves the planet behind, that hurts, too. We need to hurt one another less if possible. I’m not complicated, and it’s embarrassing!
The album insists we can’t look away from the world, and that we have a fighting chance if we take it on together. When you’re exhausted, when looking away would be such a relief, what keeps you facing forward?
Man, I mean, I’m exhausted right now! I should say that I do not think we are obliged to remain glued to our feeds or any particular news source. That’s a liberal vibe right there, consuming information and feeling a certain way about it, and then calling it political engagement. Save your energy for actual practice (I’m not going to fucking say ‘praxis’), actual organizing, actual activism. That shit is genuinely exhausting. I would just say that there is no looking away, it’s everywhere, we are in it, it is pervasive, and when we’re playing music, going on dates with loved ones, sitting in the park with our friends, that’s not looking away, we’re still looking directly at it, but we’re looking at it together and maybe also looking at what lies beyond it, too.
And lastly, to close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I am a big fan of the mockingbird.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
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