Cruising towards the Roxy and his sold-out show on the Sunset Strip, Patrick Stickles, driver and frontman of New Jersey punks Titus Andronicus, is rapping along to The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. Stickles celebrated his 29th birthday at Lauryn Hill’s show in New York.  “Hip-hop’s for when I wanna be a nasty motherfucker,” he says, adding that he’s as inspired by rap as he is by the DIY punk his band have been delivering for a decade. “Rock’n’roll is like comfort food for me: I put on Crass to chill out.” The band’s van, named Titus Vandronicus, is home to the fivesome for this relentless tour of the US and Europe. As it zips between lanes on LA’s freeways, Stickles drops rhymes by RZA and Kanye in response to interview questions. He professes that Lauryn Hill is probably his favourite MC (“She could have done anything and she did nothing. She could have been the president”).  Related: Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy review – sprawling, wearying punk concept album  On Stickles’s 30th birthday this year, he realised he could do anything, so he unveiled his band’s fourth record, The Most Lamentable Tragedy (TMLT). It’s a 93-minute, 29-song semi-autobiographical punk opera in five acts, each one representative of the stages of his own bipolar disorder. He was diagnosed at the age of four and hit rock bottom during the making of the band’s last album, in 2011-2012. That episode informed TMLT, Titus’s best album since 2010’s The Monitor. Stickles likens it to director Lars Von Trier’s autobiographical movie Melancholia. “It takes place in a fantastical high-end reality. The characters are nameless. The setting is vague. It’s timeless.”  Stickles is also keen to draw an analogy with Beauty Behind the Madness by the Weeknd, whom he’s obsessed with. “The Weeknd is the pop star the world asked for: a degenerate, drug addict, sex fiend. That’s a wild thing to make a point of when you wanna be Michael Jackson,” he says. “Our narratives are the same: a character is misanthropic, falls for somebody and starts to melt. But it doesn’t work out because he ain’t never gonna change.” Stickles has covered several Weeknd tracks, including The Hills, which contains the lyric “When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me”. It’s in complex rebels that he finds his antiheroes. When he was growing up, the Replacements, the Cure and Violent Femmes made him feel less of a “freak”. “They told me that I was normal and that people like me could be the awesome-est people around.”  Today, Stickles spends six hours dissecting his enlightenment after his health threatened the band’s continuity due to his most extreme episode of mania during 2011, which was followed by an all-time depressive low in 2012. TMLT is a staggering undertaking, subjecting the listener to an aural journey into his condition. Stickles wants to turn up the volume on the de-stigmatisation of mental illness. “There’s nothing new in rock’n’roll,” he says of a record that rehashes 70s punk and the dirge of Fucked Up’s 2011 album David Comes to Life. “But there are different ways to articulate things that aren’t being said enough.”  Earlier today, Stickles got away with a pretty loose midday store performance at Permanent Records in LA’s Highland Park. It was just Stickles on guitar and Elio DeLuca on keys. They took requests from fans in the aisles. Made up songs about LA traffic. Plugged Keith Richards’s new album instead of their own. All before ending on 2010 crowd pleaser, To Old Friends and New, which culminated in a call-and-response of the lyrics “It’s all right, the way that you live”. Stickles performed it outside the shop’s front, dragging the mic outdoors and confusing the yoga-goers of a neighbouring store called Namaste.  When we sit down afterwards, Stickles is very keen to use this exchange as a form of therapy. “These interviews are an opportunity to say out loud that just because you’re having a hard time, you can’t blaze a path of destruction throughout your entire life,” he says, a slight figure crouching just out of the sunlight at the back of the shop, fidgeting through empty cigarette packets. Stickles’s frame fails to fill a female-sized pink Titus Andronicus T-shirt. His concern for his own wellbeing seems lacking, to say the least. I later notice his harmonica – which spent a great deal of time during the instore pushed against his lips – lying on Vandronicus’s pigsty of a floor. The sound of a sparked lighter accompanies every conversation as he energetically shifts between conversation topics with an enviable eloquence.  He says that he smokes pot, that he’s had an eating disorder, things he previously kept “secret” from himself. He describes mania as burning the candle at both ends “because the candle is as long as my whole life” and depression as all the colour “leaking out of the universe, never to come back”. Stickles has backed himself into a vicious circle. So long as he strives to continue music-making, he can’t be medicated. “There’s a way to put a lid on me. I can go to my doctor and tell him to make me a zombie whenever.” He grows despondent about a time when he was medicated. “They turn you into an easy thing to deal with. I could have shuffled around, got fatter and fatter. Nothing against fat people. But I filled out. People said ‘You look really healthy!’ because I didn’t look like a fucking emaciated ghoul.” He points at himself. “I thought, ‘Ha! Weird. I’ve never felt shittier in my entire life!’”When he was prescribed drugs like Bupropion and Abilify, it put an end to creativity. “I couldn’t even make a doodle,” he says. “As a manic-depressive artist, you have to be disciplined.” Stickles is also terribly aware of the fleeting nature of his current productivity. “I got my dream job, my dream girl, the hottest band in the universe at my fingertips. But am I at peace? Absolutely not. My anxiety is worse than ever. I’ve never had so much to lose.”  Speaking of losses, thoughts turn to how the band get a handle on Stickles, when even he himself finds it so difficult. “We haven’t had someone quit in two years, so we’re overdue,” he says, accepting that having accumulated 14 former band members in only 10 years is unusual. Stickles insists he’s not a solo artist. He wants Titus Andronicus to be a collective of world-class musicians. “Elton John and Billy Joel were bands, not solo artists. Listen to the Bruce Springsteen albums without the E Street Band! Look at Mick Jagger! His own albums were garbage.” Stickles tells me that if I were to ask his bandmates (“the other motherfuckers”) what they think of him, they’d tell me he’s “a huge asshole”. “I’m a selfish megalomaniac, but they can’t quit. I have a ruthless agenda to execute.”  Related: CMJ 2015: New York's chaotic quest for indie music's next big thing  After the album’s release, Stickles got stoned and took to the website Genius to annotate TMLT’s lyrics, making 145 notes. The reason, he says, is to cover his back against misinterpretation by others. Really, he’s protecting himself from himself. The album’s promotional duties together with Stickles’s desire to be as open as possible to his fans means he can’t run away from the truths within, and the hardest reality to face is that even these duties might not keep his illness at bay.  On the home stretch to the Roxy, the band’s volatility becomes very real. Titus Vandronicus stalls on an incline towards Sunset Strip, buckling under the weight of eight passengers and a trailer towing 5,000lbs worth of equipment. We roll backwards. The battery goes flat. “Come on, girl!” shouts Stickles at the van. “She’s dying, y’all” he cries, terrified. With a deep breath, he becomes his own antihero again. “We’re gonna make it,” says Stickles, throwing himself behind the wheel, turning the vehicle downwards towards ignition and safety. He resumes rapping, smiling at a line in Lauryn Hill’s Doo Wop (That Thing). “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?” Patrick Stickles knows he won’t know his limit until he’s right on top of it.
Patrick Stickles’s band has burned through more than 10 members in 10 years and their last album was a 29-song meditation on his battles with depression. With his band due to play at CMJ, Stickles reflects on his enlightenment