“I’m writing a song about the idea of how I feel younger inside 1790613639 than when I was a kid,” Edie Brickell explains in her trademark candor. “I’ve found that if you can grow younger and more loving in your heart with every decade…you’ve liberated yourself.”
This discovery shouldn’t come as a total surprise to anyone who knows her work. Brickell is the same songwriter who, almost 40 years ago, also found religion in the “smile on a dog” and philosophy in the “talk on a cereal box.” This year, she’s reteamed with her New Bohemians cohort Matt Chamberlain to keep exploring those deep parts of “What I Am” and what we all are. And they’re feeling like kids again doing so.
Their new project is called World Famous Pets. Band members are split between Los Angeles, where Chamberlain, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and guitarist Mason Stoops live, and the Montauk/Connecticut area where Brickell resides with her husband Paul Simon. And,the band is named after one of the most revered childhood treasures of all: a box of sea monkeys.
“Coming up with a band name is hard enough. We went through I don’t even know how many names for months,” Chamberlain shares. “And then I was just looking at a box of sea monkeys, it said ‘world famous pets’ on it, and I liked it. … Even if they lied to us,” the drummer adds, like a kid disappointed after finding out Santa Claus isn’t real. “The artwork makes it look like they have little worlds and they’re all hanging out and doing all kinds of cool shit, but they’re just like larva or shrimp. It’s so disappointing. So, we’re here to redeem the sea monkeys!”
Brickell and Rastegar smile and nod on the video call. The only one missing in the conversation is Stoops, but there’s a sense he’d probably agree, considering how simpatico the four members truly are.
To start, they are in fact all pet people. Rastegar has a cat named Pickles; Chamberlain is a dog dad to two Chihuahua-terrier mutts named Mabel and Peanut that “look like they’re from ‘Fraggle Rock.’” Brickell’s dogs have since passed but her most recent was Fred the dog. And Stoops has a pooch too, though more details are not known in his absence. The other, more relevant symbiosis, is evident in the fact that they were all able to assemble in a studio and “make music on the spot,” says Chamberlain. In fact, in just six days, the quartet had the bulk of material for their self-titled debut, out September 25.
At this point, though, you might call this kind of improvisation and fluidity muscle memory for the very seasoned musicians. Just looking at the list of musicians that the ensemble has played with or for is pretty staggering.
For Chamberlain, that includes going behind the kit for David Bowie, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Tori Amos, Elton John, Brandi Carlile, and ’90s mainstays Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, of course in between each band’s spurts with Matt Cameron. “There’s so many [drummer] Matts from the ’90s,” he jokes, also adding in Smashing Pumpkins’ one-timer Matt Walker. “We should all start a band.”
For Rastegar, his CV includes various work with John Legend, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Travis Scott, Beck, Ringo Starr, Shania Twain, Bruno Mars, and De La Soul, among others. He’s also served as musical director for Sia and was a founding member of the quintet Kneebody.
Stoops is perhaps best known as Jackson Browne’s guitarist and has also performed with Mumford & Sons, James Taylor, Lizzy McAlpine, and Ryan Beatty. As well, he’s produced tracks for Role Model and added guitar to recorded works for Sarah McLachlan, the War on Drugs, Sombr, Sylvan Esso, and Miley Cyrus.
And for Brickell, beyond the New Bohemians and solo work, she also co-wrote the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Bright Star, with Steve Martin.
The idea for World Famous Pets was in fact birthed in one of these work horse/road dog situations, when Brickell and Chamberlain found themselves working together on Paul Simon’s A Quiet Celebration Tour in 2025. As they got to talking in the quiet moments between shows, they decided there was still some noise to make.
“When we were doing that tour, Edie and I were hanging out more than we ever had in, like, 30 years, and we just started talking about the old days and how great it would be to just get together and make something,” says Chamberlain, recalling the heyday of New Bohemians, which initially ended in 1991. “So, we just made it happen and invited Kaveh and Mason, and it turned into this thing that we didn’t expect.”
He and Brickell are both quick to clarify that World Famous Pets is no extension of the New Bohemians but rather a brand-new project. “This band is just completely different and its own entity, with three very distinctive players,” says Brickell. “They’re monster players, each with a really dialed in personality and an ability to be completely fluid in every genre and in the moment. They can listen to each other and make a song out of thin air, and playing in that present moment is really captured in this band.”
Chamberlain chimes in, explaining more about the winning formula they found in the studio. “We would just start on whatever it was, it could be some kind of weird little old-school rock groove or funk thing or something in seven-eight, but it would be genre-less depending on how much coffee we’d had or if we had a beer or two,” he jokes. “It’s pretty wide open because we weren’t really saying anything beforehand about what this was.”
That freebird spirit comes through on the record, which has a well-rounded, unscripted mix of free jazz and cabaret/beatnik flair on the opening track “Hadna Been for You.” That morphs into the blues breaker “Bleeding in the Dark” before the band comes in with the funky folk of “Happened So Fast” that devolves into a psychedelic slumber. “Let me slow down and enjoy it now,” Brickell sings over the atmospheric loops with a conviction in her voice that seems like it radiates from the innermost part of her soul. By the soft ballad “Truly,” Brickell effuses with affection for one of her true loves, a feeling that keeps evolving by the pensive dream pop album ender, “Never Wanna Leave You.”
Though on other songs like the groovy, topical track “Propaganda,” Brickell expands her worldview from her inner huddle to a larger global family. One of its strongest lyrics laments “preaching to the choir and the choir is in disbelief because we all saw you murdered in the street.” As Stoops’s guitar wail and Rastegar’s chunky bass converge to mimic the sound of a siren, Brickell questions the listener, “Who are you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”
When asking her about the song, Brickell’s energy shifts, like she’s uncomfortable talking about it, which she kind of is. “It was definitely a reaction to current events, but that’s a rare thing for me to feel so strongly about—about what’s going on in our culture and in our world enough to write about it,” she explains. “I have such a strong, peaceful internal world that I like to reflect on. And that usually is what sort of pours out when I decide to write something. But I was in such shock at everything that was going on that I just had to voice it somehow. I tried to walk around it a few times to see if there was a perspective from a different angle that would help me make sense of it. And there just wasn’t.”
She pauses and finds more words to fill the space. “Sometimes, I think it’s really important to not take everything so seriously that you take all the fun out of living. But there are serious matters that have to be dealt with in our hearts and in our minds,” she adds. “If there’s a threat that it can all go away because of the pain that some are inflicting on others, then you have to look at it. You have to say something. … But it’s hard when people take your fun-loving spirit away from you for a while.”
On the histrionic guitar spiral of “Connected,” Brickell finds her way back to that imaginative, childlike wonder again. Its inspiration comes from a fly on a windowsill that Brickell focused on and anthropomorphized to represent the idea that all living creatures matter. “Everything and everyone is made up of an energy that hopefully we can respect and understand the connection with,” says Brickell. “That’s always something that I feel as I’m living.”
Sort of like giving more respect to all the unconditional love and comfort our pets give to us, I ask the World Famous Pets. “Exactly,” she says. “I think animals teach us a lot.”
Like some of the music, the album artwork also pays homage to the animal world and our interconnectedness—the abstract piece offers a single line drawing that weaves in outlines of a panting dog, screeching cat, stoic bunny, and wise owl. Though Brickell studied fine arts in school before she launched a music career, the credit for this piece actually goes to Rastegar, who clearly has more talents than meets the ear.
“I love the cover,” says Brickell. “It’s classic and beautiful and we have Kaveh to thank for that. He’s done so much for our band. … He’s been more than just a bass player. He’s been a writer, a singer, an arranger, producer, and an artist. He’s a natural leader in the band. It’s such a cool band with so many leaders.”
Rastegar has a theory as for why that dynamic comes out so strongly. “We’ve all played on a lot of music and made a lot of music with many people. And I think one of the reasons is we are just great fans of music,” he says, which, as it turns out, may be rarer in the industry than we might think. “You actually encounter a lot of people that are really, really good at what they do, but they don’t particularly love music.”
“Yeah, you encounter people that are like, pissed off about music and they have to play it. It’s like, what’s wrong with you?” pipes in Chamberlain.
A lot of the Pets’s passion goes back to when each was a kid and how they first discovered their lifelong love of music.
“My dad was a drummer, and I remember being in diapers and walking into his rehearsal in the garage, and it was just the best. It was like walking into a parallel universe,” recalls Chamberlain. “And then, later, I remember watching the Saturday morning video countdown, in the ancient times before MTV, and Rush’s ‘Limelight’ came on and I was like, oh my God, that’s my life. I’m going to play drums.”
For Rastegar, there was a similar family intervention. In addition to voluminous records collections at both parents’ houses, his mom’s boyfriend is a musician who gave the bassist a front-row seat to the magic of live music. “He would open for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds when they’d come to town or Sonic Youth. And I remember being a kid and being at those shows. Getting to see him rehearsing and playing in a band and then writing music and going into recording sessions was always really cool,” he remembers. “Then, when I was like 11 or 12, the bass started jumping out on reggae music. I listened a lot of reggae and a lot of punk rock and noticed when the band would stop and you’d hear this cool bass part on a Suicidal Tendencies record or a Minor Threat record. I thought, that’s the coolest thing. How do you do that?” Rastegar started playing songs with some high school kids in Denver where he grew up, which is actually where he first met Chamberlain when he was fresh after graduation.
Brickell, too, has to credit her mother for the gift of music. “The radio or a record would be playing at our house all day, all night, every single morning when mom was getting ready for work. And she would do this thing where she wanted to hear one song over and over and over. I’d be trying to get ready for school, and she’d say, ‘Edie, put it back on!’ So I’d walk into her room and put the needle back on Al Green’s ‘Tired Of Being Alone.’ I know that Al Green’s greatest hits record by heart,” she says, laughing at the memory.
Her mom also was in a relationship with a musician at the time, which was pivotal for exposing Brickell’s young brain to the joy that music brought people. “We’d go over to the house, and the band would be set up in the living room. I was so young, about 6, and I thought, these are the happiest people I’ve ever seen. This house feels better than any house I’ve ever walked into. And that was it. I just knew I wanted to be a part of that feeling,” she explains. “Much later, I had the nerve to actually try it. And it’s so funny because when I broke through the fear, my dreams just came true. And I thought, is that what life is? If you break through one of your biggest fears, then magic happens for you over and over and over again? Since then, I’ve been drawn to that great love and that feeling.”