Creed From ‘The Office’ Is Now an 81-Year-Old Rock God

Creed Bratton knows a thing or two about hanging on to hope, even when it feels like you shouldn’t.

The 81-year-old musician and actor spent half a lifetime in professional and creative limbo. In the late ’60s, his career in the arts was kickstarted with three years in the successful folk-rock outfit the Grass Roots, but by 1970, Bratton—born William Charles Snider—was out of the band and looking for his next big break. He spent decades floating from one obscure acting job to the next until 2005, when he was cast in The Office at age 62. Those years shaped Bratton into an expert in reckless resilience. He forced himself to believe he’d find his way back to the spotlight.

That relentless, borderline-delusional optimism is in abundant supply on Bratton’s 10th studio album, Tao Pop, which releases on Sept. 27. Lead single “Corner of the Universe,” cowritten with Vance DeGeneres (brother of Ellen), is an exercise in visioning: After reading a story about the ozone layer repairing itself, Bratton wrote the song imagining a future Earth free of the horrors of the climate crisis, where oceans are crystalline and it doesn’t hurt to breathe. It’s the sort of fantasy that’s fun to believe in, and Bratton, with his bright, airy conviction, almost convinces you it’s real.“When people hear that song, for just a moment, there’s a little hope, and they sing along with joy, and I sing it with joy,” Bratton tells the Daily Beast by phone this summer. “It’s a fun song to sing. You put it out there, and maybe there’s a paradigm shift in the consciousness of the world. It could happen.”

Those ideas might seem a little unrealistic, but Bratton’s life has proven out the idea that hope can take you a long way. He was hitchhiking across North Africa in the late ’60s when he says a premonition came to him: He saw himself on a stage, with lots of people alongside him, and a great crowd before them. He believed it meant something. “When people get those little visions, you can say, ‘OK, that’s just a fantasy or a pipedream,’ or you could go, ‘Well, that came from a real place, that’s not something I was fabricating,’” Bratton says. “I’m very lucky that I saw that vision.”

Bratton is the kind of guy who puts stock in visions. He’s like a kinder, less mysterious version of his Office character—more pot-smoking, peace-loving, yoga-practicing hippie than the occasionally cutthroat oddball he played. But Bratton gives the sense that in real life, he’s just as resourceful, clever, and determined as his semi-fictional counterpart.

He grew up in a musical household in small-town California, and knew from a young age that the arts was where he belonged. Through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Bratton never stopped auditioning for roles or writing and performing music. He picked up scattered parts in TV shows and films over those decades, and began releasing solo records in the early 2000s. Office heads have heard at least a few of Bratton’s compositions, even if they don’t realize it: He sang karaoke to his own song “Spinnin’ N Reelin’” in the season three Christmas episode, and his 2003 song “All The Faces” helped close out the show’s series finale.

Tao Pop is the result of Bratton’s commitment to the titular belief system: a theory of balance and harmony between all pieces of our lives. “Tao Pop, the middle way, Taoism, finding that path of least resistance, you know?” says Bratton. “There’s obviously the yin and the yang, positive, negative. There’s going to be ups and downs, but we try to find that place of calm and peace. That’s the whole idea.”

Bratton says the record is largely the product of an intense spiritual reckoning he’s embarked on in his slower post-Office life. “If I’m on tour, playing my stuff on stage, I’m as happy as I could be. If I’m working in front of a camera with my friends, it’s all great. But once that stops, then you start going through that soul-crushing, eleventh hour of the soul kind of thing where all the anxiety comes in,” he says. Once the show ended, he explains, “I had to come to grips with all this childhood trauma. I won’t go into it but I was in therapy. I realized that I really couldn’t do anything except let go, just absolutely let go.”

“On this album, at 81, I finally come to grips with all of that,” he continues. “I see it there, I accept it. I’m not going to get angry. I stopped getting angry. I’m just not that angry young man anymore. And so the music, it’s not punk, it’s like [album closer] ‘Always Dreaming of You,’ like ’30s, ’40s [jazz standards].”

Bratton, who will hit the road in early September with a pair of California show before heading to Europe for an international tour, found solace not just in the sounds and textures of pre-war American music, but in the ethos behind them. “They had that great American hope,” he says. “It was before the war, we were very comfortable, we had a lot of money. The thing was just walking and talking with your girl, and love, without all of the existential angst that we have now.”

This anachronistic cheer is part of Tao Pop’s charm. There are horns and strings, swanky bossa-nova bops and folk-pop singalongs, all buoyed by Bratton’s distinct, expressive vocals. It all carries a specific lightness, as if it came from a world where everything isn’t burning down. It’s tempting to read Bratton’s lyricism as detached from reality, but the truth is Bratton knows the critical importance of safeguarding hope in the face of defeat.

“We can’t give up!” Bratton exclaims. “Look at the people in the war and the stuff they got through. Look at people. There’s got to be some kind of a spirit vision in every human being to say, ‘Well, it’s bad, but I still see on the other side, it’s going to get good.’ That’s my career! That’s my life, all that time between the Grass Roots and The Office! I’m not saying that there weren’t a lot of times I doubted. I got discouraged a lot of times and wanted to give up. I’m getting sad now thinking about it. It was exhausting. But again, that little thing would show itself, and I go, ‘OK, well, I just have to continue.’”

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for fighting existential dread and curbing defeatism, but Bratton—a decades-long fighter against both of those enemies—thinks the smallest step is also the most important. “Find those kindred spirits to work with,” said Bratton. “That ‘when a couple of people gather in his name’ kind of thing, that’s the drill as far as I can see. You could go, ‘We’re going to hell in a handbasket,’ but we could also turn the corner of the universe, and find a healing situation for the planet. I’m gonna go with the latter.”