With his scraggy, surfin’ Jesus beard and piercing stare, Alex Ebert looks like he should be leading a cult into an FBI shoot-out rather than fronting a feelgood rock band.

A lot of people seem to think he’s doing that anyway. Eleven strong, with a dress sense that might be politely described as ‘Waco-casual’, Ebert’s ensemble, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, have been attracting the ‘c’ word since breaking out with last year’s joyous, MGMT-on-uppers ‘Home’. People look at their robes and facial hair and the smiles that don’t come with dimmer switches and think: ker-azy! This isn’t news to him.
“It makes me chuckle,” says Ebert, kicking back at a recording studio outside San Francisco. “Am I insulted? No. To me those words are not pejorative. They are ‘ticklers’. It amuses me. I don’t take it seriously.”
He understands why punters would be suspicious of ESATMZ and their turbo-hippy positivity. Coming off his downbeat synth-pop project Ima Robot, Ebert appreciates that the Zeros might be a curve-ball too far. Some sceptics in the media actually think the whole thing is a cynical put-on, a guffaw at the audience’s expense. Ebert blames himself.
“I guess I opened a can of worms when I told the press I had come up with the name by writing a story about an imaginary character named ‘Edward Sharpe’. They took that and ran with it. I got all these questions about whether the band members were actually actors. It’s started to die down. Mostly, that whole thing feels like left-over sausage now.”
The ‘turn that smile upside down’ routine might come off as creepy until you understand the context. During his time fronting Ima Robot, Ebert flirted with druggy self-destruction. By his own admission his life was out of control, a slide downhill that culminated in a stint in rehab. He’s lucky to be alive.
“I didn’t know who I was anymore,” he says gravely. “It was a dark, dark time for me. I was trying to figure out what was going on.”
In the end he concluded that he needed to change everything, to step away from his old life – and his old band – and start anew.
“I sort of unshackled myself from a lot of institutions. I moved out of my old place and rented a really small apartment. I didn’t have a cell phone. I just biked around, liberated myself from a lot of the things that were binding me, dragging me down. I even dropped out of AA.”
At full tilt, Ebert speaks fluent tree-hugger. Post-rehab, he tells you his goal in life is to achieve a state of ‘elevated spirituality’.
“I want to get my physical life in line with my spiritual aspirations,” he says, seemingly oblivious to Hot Press’ flabbergasted silence. “I want to discard my inhibitions, and my social anxieties. To me, a lot of the things that make us unhappy as humans have to do with anxiety, fear of death... all this stuff that just breathes self-contempt into you.”
With ‘Home’ an über-hit, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros have stepped towards the big time. Their latest album Here debuted at number four in the American charts and they were one of the surprise smashes at last year’s Electric Picnic – such was the demand, they performed twice in a single evening. In the same position some artists would grow weary and resentful of reprising their break-out smash over and over. Ebert, though, exults in the love ‘Home’ is receiving.
“We adore doing that song,” he enthuses. “We offer to play it when we don’t necessarily have to. We did a TV show the other day and at the end we asked would they like to hear anything else. We decided we would sing ‘Home’, just ‘cos we wanted to. It means so much to people. It isn’t simply the ‘hit’. In the US, for a lot of people it’s the first dance at their weddings. It’s this miracle song that helps people. The public response to it has definitely affected how we look at it. ‘Home’ is a beautiful song about friendship.”