Entertainment

HEARTBREAK MAKES AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT ITUNES FAVE

Indie band the Airborne Toxic Event shocked the music industry when major LA radio stations began playing the song “Sometime Around Midnight,” which the band had hastily recorded and distributed via MP3. Now the song, which describes the heartbreak of running into an ex, has been named the top Alternative Song of 2008 by iTunes. We spoke to singer Mikel Jollett.

– Larry Getlen

The iTunes thing is nice, but . . . “Music is three or four minutes of art where you tell a story and have a melody. The idea of ranking it the way you would the NBA is a little silly. But it was really flattering.”

Events depicted in “Sometime Around Midnight” are true. “That whole thing happened. That was a few months after we had broken up. I got up the next morning, shook off the hangover, and started writing. I didn’t leave the house for three days. I just walked around in my boxers with the acoustic guitar, working out the arrangements, and I emerged with it three days later.

“Your blood boiling, your stomach in ropes” is not a clinical diagnosis. “There’s not a lot of metaphor going on there. That’s just what the night was.”

Everybody hurts. “It’s a fairly universal thing. There are love songs and breakup songs, but not a lot of songs about anxiety and jealousy. I get people from 14-year-old girls to 50-year-old men going, ‘Man, that song got to me.’ “

My success sandwich. “The next day [after radio stations started playing it], my phone started ringing at 9 a.m., and I didn’t get off the phone for three weeks. Every label, manager and p.r. person called. We were really, really broke, so we were just letting them take us to lunch. We’d ask if we could get an extra sandwich for the road, because my gas had been turned off for nine months at that point, and I had $12 in my bank account.”