There’s a moment, somewhere between Coachella and WrestleMania, between Oxford and Brooklyn, between a Brooklyn library job and a stage in front of 80,000 people, where Mark Crozer will look up and think: How the hell did I get here?
He says it with a kind of gentle disbelief, the same way he talks about almost everything – from playing bass in The Jesus and Mary Chain to accidentally soundtracking one of WWE’s most iconic modern characters, to making the most honest record of his life in Homecoming.
“I still can’t really believe that’s what I do,” he admits of his life as a touring musician. “Just flying around the world… it sometimes seems ridiculous. You spend 22, 23 hours getting to somewhere like Singapore, you play for an hour, and then you leave. And even that hour is uncertain – it can be incredible, or it can be a total mess. But that’s the job.”
For a man who doesn’t consider himself a rock star – “I just work with people who are in that business,” he laughs – his story is stacked with the kind of moments most musicians secretly rehearse in their heads as teenagers. Only for Crozer, they didn’t arrive until his mid‑30s, when a certain cult Scottish shoegazing alt-rock band came calling.
Life with The Jesus and Mary Chain
When Crozer joined The Jesus and Mary Chain around 2007, he was already a music lifer – a musician who’d been grafting away for years in various projects, including his band The Rels. What the Mary Chain offered wasn’t just mileage and exposure, but a new way of thinking about songs.
“They’ve always kept it simple,” he explains. “You could never accuse them of writing an overly complicated song. It’s usually three or four chords, but it’s deceptive. You get these subtle variations on the same pattern, and as a bass player you’re sometimes thinking, Did I already play that bit? Which section are we on now?” That deceptive simplicity seeped into his own writing. Not in a derivative way, but in a kind of discipline: cut the fat, keep the feeling. The Mary Chain shows, meanwhile, became a crash course in confidence.
“It’s made me a lot more comfortable as a musician, and a lot more confident about playing in front of people,” he says. “I can stand on a stage and play in front of 50,000 people and feel completely relaxed. But if you asked me to pick up an acoustic guitar right now and play a song in front of a few people in a room, I’d be absolutely bricking it.” That contrast is fascinating: stadiums are easy; eye contact is hard. “When it’s just a sea of faces, you don’t really see individuals – it becomes abstract,” he explains. “But the second you can properly see people’s reactions, every little twitch, every nod or blank stare… that’s when it gets terrifying.”
Still, the scale of some of the Mary Chain’s moments isn’t lost on him. There’s a giddy list of surreal scenes he rattles off almost casually: playing Red Rocks in Colorado, meeting Johnny Marr backstage at an Australian festival and realising Marr knew who he was; watching Barack Obama’s 2008 victory speech with R.E.M. in Chile – Michael Stipe in tears, everyone crowded round a TV, history unfolding in real time. “At the time, it all just feels normal,” he says. “Then you get home a couple of weeks later and think, What just happened? Like, I’ve just been hanging out with R.E.M., and then I got in a lift with members of Judas Priest. It’s absurd.”
But nothing – not Red Rocks, not Coachella, not even those REM-and-Obama nights – quite matches the night he walked out in front of nearly 80,000 wrestling fans at WrestleMania.
Bray Wyatt, Broken Out In Love, and Accidental Immortality
If The Jesus and Mary Chain gave Crozer a passport to the world, WWE gave him something stranger: a legacy he never set out to build. The song in question – ‘Broken Out In Love’ (changed to ‘Live In Fear’ by WWE) – wasn’t written for wrestling. It wasn’t written for TV. It wasn’t written for any brief, character sheet, or corporate note. It was just a song. A good one. A personal one. “If you’d given me a list of 500 scenarios in which that song might be used,” he says, “wrestling would have been right at the bottom. If someone had said, ‘This is going to be a WWE theme’, I’d have thought they’d lost the plot.”
Yet, through the strange alchemy of music libraries and creative matchmaking, it became the entrance theme for Bray Wyatt – one of the most compelling, unsettling characters WWE produced in the last decade. That haunting, swamp‑gospel, psych‑folk lilt – “Catching flies, in his mouth…” – became inseparable from Bray’s firefly-lit entrance. It wasn’t just a theme; it was part of the character’s DNA.
The strangest part? Crozer didn’t write it with Bray, or even wrestling, in mind at all. “It works because it wasn’t supposed to work,” he says. “It was magic, really. Pure chance. To actually sit down and write a song for a character? I don’t know if I could do that. You need to know their whole psychology and universe. With Bray, I didn’t know he existed when I wrote the song. Somehow, it just lined up.”
The numbers are one thing – millions of streams, endless YouTube uploads, countless fan tributes – but it’s the life the song has taken on that really hits him. “Every now and then I’ll go online and find a video of some band in small‑town America playing it at a Fourth of July party, with a street full of people singing along,” he says. “It’s surreal. There are bands all over the world covering it who I’ll never know about.”
He still remembers the initial rush too – waking up to see that the song, through its use in WWE, had hit a million plays. “There was a time when that was literally everything I’d dreamed of – a song of mine getting that kind of reach,” he says. “I think anyone who’s had one track connect like that probably secretly wonders if they can do it again. But I try not to chase it too much. It would be nice, of course. But that first time, that song, that character – that was lightning in a bottle.”
Bray Wyatt’s passing in 2023 added another emotional layer. “I only met him a handful of times,” Crozer recalls. “But every time he was so enthusiastic, so happy to be doing what he was doing. It just seems incredibly unfair that he never really got to step back and see the full impact he had, how much people loved him.” That connection endures – through archived matches, fan art, tributes from performers like Code Orange who built on his original theme, and through that song Bray loved enough to keep as the core of his musical identity, even as his character evolved.
Playing that song live at WrestleMania, in front of that many people, is one of the memories Crozer is certain will stay with him right until the end. “The stage itself was bigger than most venues I’ve ever played,” he laughs. “You walk out and you can’t really see the crowd – just a sea of lights. But you feel it. And everyone at WWE treated us so well. Triple H and Stephanie were both really kind and welcoming. That whole day… it’s absolutely one of the top three moments of my life.”
From Fiction to Truth: The Making of Homecoming
For all the surreal peaks of his career, Homecoming – Crozer’s new solo album – might be the first time he feels genuinely, quietly proud of his own work.
He’s not being falsely modest when he says he’s usually ambivalent about his records. Historically, he’d get to the end of a project and think: These songs are okay. This is as good as it’s going to get. Some of those releases were objectively strong – he still points to the album he made with The Rels as a highlight – but there was always a lingering distance. “This is the first time I’ve got to the end of recording something and thought, I actually really like this,” he says. “I’d listen to it even if it wasn’t me. Normally, if someone puts on my record, I’m like, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t play that.’ This time, I don’t feel that.”
A big part of that shift is emotional rather than purely musical. For most of his career, Crozer has seen himself as a melody‑first songwriter. Lyrics were often something to be fitted to a tune rather than a source of deep excavation. “A lot of the old songs were either lightly fictionalised versions of something, or just complete fiction,” he says. “Sometimes they were about nobody in particular – just words that happened to fit. That might be part of why I wasn’t fully satisfied with them.”
With Homecoming, that changed. Turning 55, losing close friends and family members, and returning to his hometown of Oxford after a long time away all combined to crack something open. He talks about walking familiar streets again – places he knew as a kid – and being struck by how much and how little had changed. The city was “spookily similar” in some ways, but filled with ghosts: his dad, his grandparents, extended family and friends who’d died or moved away. He didn’t sit down thinking, I’m going to write about grief and memory and mortality now. It just started to spill out. One song in particular became a turning point – a track looping around the idea that ‘Everything Must Change’. That was the moment he realised he was finally writing from a place of sincerity rather than camouflage.
“I thought, Maybe I should actually write something sincere and truthful for once,” he says. “Not shrouding everything in fiction and bullshit, or writing what I think people want to hear. There’s a real emotional heart to these songs – even the weird and stupid ones. They’re real emotions, not just something made up.”
That honesty carries through Homecoming’s opener, “Entertainment Is Dead”, and follows into the moody “Days of Song” – tracks that sink into dark‑wave, post‑punk textures while poking at nostalgia, nihilism, and the absurdity of modern entertainment. “Originally I thought I’d tuck the darker songs away at the end of the record, after people had gone through the sweeter ones,” he says. “Then I just thought, No, I want to start with a punch.”
“Entertainment Is Dead” began in an unlikely place: the old darts‑based TV game show Bullseye. “I grew up watching it,” he laughs. “It was very funny in that very British way. The prizes were so odd. Speedboats for people who lived nowhere near water. Crystal decanters. It was all so basic and cosy. And now we’ve gone from that to reality TV where everyone’s competing for a million dollars.” In the song, he lists actual prizes from the show, set against a sinister, Berlin‑era Bowie style electronic pulse. “It’s nostalgic, but it’s also about now,” he says. “That era’s gone. But it kind of sets the tone for the album: looking back and forward at the same time.”
‘Days of Song’, meanwhile, started as what he calls “a bit of a whinge” about not wanting to write anymore – What’s the point? No one’s going to hear this anyway. Ironically, it turned into one of the tracks he’s most proud of, full of dry humour and a kind of weary, self‑aware resignation: Don’t follow me, I’ve got nothing to say. “It almost feels like something out of Life of Brian: ‘I’m not the Messiah,’” he says, smiling.
Where earlier albums were often just 10 or 12 songs bundled together – “I’ve got enough songs, that’s an album” – Homecoming started to feel like a cohesive whole as he went along. Thematically, lyrically, and musically, it clicked into place. “I didn’t set out to make it sound a particular way,” he says. “But as it went along, a theme emerged. Suddenly it sounded like an album – not something I’d forced into shape, but something that had just happened. That was a really nice feeling.”
The response has been different too. People aren’t just being polite; they’re connecting. “I’ve had nice feedback on things before,” he says. “But this time, people are really connecting with it, in a way I’ve never experienced. That makes me feel like it was worth digging into this stuff, even when it was a bit uncomfortable.”
Success, Work, and the Beauty of Small Things
For all the big stages and cult moments, Crozer’s day‑to‑day reality is far from the old rock and roll fantasy. And he’s refreshingly open about that. He’s taught at School of Rock, worked part‑time at the Brooklyn Library after COVID, and still juggles multiple income streams like most working musicians.
“It’s a strange thing,” he says. “I’ll be playing these big shows where people talk to me like I’m ‘the guy from The Jesus and Mary Chain’, and then I’m back home shelving books or teaching kids guitar who have no idea and don’t particularly care. And that’s fine. It’s grounding. But it is weird.” Would he like more stability? Of course.
“I’d love to get to a point where I can just stop worrying about paying the bills,” he says plainly. “That, to me, would be success. Not yachts, not mansions – just not having to constantly juggle. You don’t really make money from records like people apparently did in the old days. To really live off touring, you basically have to be on the road constantly.” He mentions bands like The Psychedelic Furs, who seem to never stop touring. That’s the reality: constant movement, endless logistics, visas that cost a small fortune, and all the invisible labour behind a 60‑minute set.
What keeps him going isn’t the fantasy of a massive payout; it’s the feeling that, at this stage in his life, he’s finally making work that matters – to him and to other people. “Homecoming feels like a real success already,” he says. “Not in a charts way, but because the songs are honest and they’re reaching people. That’s… enough. More than enough, really.”
Away from the noise, his happiest moments are quietly domestic: baking, growing herbs and plants, spending time with his daughter and his girlfriend (who recently dragged him to an ultra‑low‑budget kaiju‑themed wrestling show in Brooklyn that he’s still processing). “They’re simple things,” he shrugs. “Planting a seed and then weeks later you’re eating something you grew… I know it sounds corny, but that makes me really happy.” There’s one more thing he’s adamant about highlighting: the label that helped bring Homecoming into the world.
“I honestly don’t think this record would exist without Dusty Mars (Dusty Mars Records),” he says. “They showed interest at a time when I wasn’t seriously thinking about releasing anything again. Their encouragement really pushed me to finish it. I’m incredibly grateful for that.”
In the end, Mark Crozer’s story isn’t just about sharing stages with legends or having millions of people walk to the ring to his song. It’s about longevity, humility, and the strange, beautiful tension between enormous moments and ordinary life. He’s played Red Rocks and WrestleMania; he’s stacked library shelves and taught power chords to kids who don’t care what he did last summer with the Mary Chain. He’s written songs that meant nothing to him beyond a hook, and now an album that feels like a quiet, deeply personal reckoning with who he is and where he’s from.
If Homecoming is about anything, it’s this: after all the flights, festivals, arenas and fireflies, maybe the real destination was always closer to home – in Oxford memories, in family ghosts, in small Brooklyn kitchens, in plants pushing through soil, in honest songs that finally sound like the person who wrote them.
Listen to the full chat here: