I’m not a betting man, but I’d wager my life savings that this will be the only piece celebrating the 20th anniversary of Bettie Serveert’s Private Suit. It came out the same year as the Weakerthans' Left and Leaving and PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City Stories from the Sea; its aesthetic is somewhere in between and, to me, it’s as strong as either of those records. It’s a record about which I became evangelical, playing it for anyone who entered my house or my car. I’m pretty sure I played a track from it every week for a year on my campus radio show.
Unlike a lot of records from 20 years ago, even ones I adore, I pull this out and play it at least three times a year—usually during a long drive alone. Carol van Dijk’s voice is as comforting as the face of an old, dear friend. Peter Visser is one of my favourite guitarists of all time: capable of subtlety and squall, generous in his textures and acutely melodic in his solos. The rhythm section is perfectly complementary, either playing it straight or weaving in and around the vocal and guitar melodies. But the songs: sweet Jesus, the songs. More on that later.
If this Dutch band—the greatest since Shocking Blue!—is known to North American audiences at all, it’s because of their 1993 debut Palomine, which came out on Matador and fit in perfectly beside records by Pavement and Yo La Tengo. (I first saw them tour with the latter, in 1997, on a bill in Toronto where the opening band featured a very young Leslie Feist on bass.) Two more records on Matador followed, their evolving brilliance in sadly inverse proportion to general interest. This was nerdcore indie rock for people who watched mediocre Hollywood films hoping that Janeane Garofalo would magically make them better.
I don’t even like Palomine; it’s fine, but it’s baby steps. I fell in love with 1995’s Lamprey, and not just because one song features a passage that sounds like it directly samples the Rheostatics’ “Self-Serve Gas Station”—not just the melody, but the entire recording. (It’s a really weird coincidence, as I’m pretty sure there’s no way they heard that record—despite van Dijk’s Canadian citizenship, because she left Vancouver Island at age 7. Listen to “Crutches” at the 2.25 mark, and compare it to the Rheos at 4.23). The next album, 1997’s Dust Bunnies, was straight-up brilliant, shedding a lot of the straight-up grunginess of the first two and focusing on songcraft. I became so obsessed with the melodies and chord progressions that I sat down and learned the entire record on the piano by ear—not a normal habit of mine.
But by that point, no one cared. People still cheered loudest for the songs from Palomine. They were dropped by Matador. The drummer split. Private Suit was released to no fanfare, was barely reviewed, and wasn’t easy to find in stores (though it did have distribution here). Hence my lonely evangelical crusade. They didn’t tour North America to promote it, outside of one show in New York City at the CMJ Festival. I drove 10 hours there to see it.
How’s this for an opening line: “I took a Tylenol and an hour’s drive / and somehow found a reason why I’m still alive.” The chorus to that song is, “It’s good to be unsound.” Yeeeeeeah—let’s just say I come back to that song often. Throughout, van Dijk’s lyrics slay me. “Callous on the sore where you hurt before / are you happy now that you don’t feel it anymore? / Placid are the skies when you dream at night / are you satisfied? … Tell me what are we looking for, if all we really want is each other?” “Auf Wiedersehen” is one of the greatest breakup songs I’ve heard, a nonchalant acknowledgment of frozen stares and lost passion. Every song here is just as great.
This is all set to van Dijk’s magical melodies and Visser’s glorious countermelodies, with bassist Herman Bunskoeke an essential part of the glue. Van Dijk is also underrated as a rhythm guitarist. This is the only Bettie Serveert album with drummer Reinier Veldman, but he fits perfectly—not surprising, as he played in a band called De Artsen with them in the late ’80s. He adds jazzy textures to the string-laden swinging 6/8 time of the title track. PJ Harvey sideman and producer John Parish is the producer here, at a time when he was starting to branch out and work with Goldfrapp, Giant Sand, Sparklehorse and others.
Private Suit has a definite Euro feel to it in ways that are hard to articulate, other than to say it’s definitely not from an English-speaking country. Yes, there are nods to the Velvet Underground (a comparison that the band embraces, having released a live album of VU covers, which was the first record I ever ordered online), but there is an outsiders’ lens on North American indie rock that’s refreshing; they spent a long time trying to ape it, and now they’d successfully moved on while retaining the best bits. Private Suit is also easy to like: it’s a pop record with a down-to-earth singer and an unusually great guitarist. “Recall” is the kind of song I kept hoping the Cardigans would one day evolve into writing but never did.
Most music fans have a record or a band like this in their lives: something intensely important to them that seems like a lost cause to the larger world. Sometimes it’s the artist who lives around the corner, sometimes it’s a band on the other side of the world. Bettie Serveert must do well enough in their native Netherlands, because they’re still together and have released six albums since Private Suit, some of which are better than others (the follow-up, 2003’s Log 22, might be the weakest). I saw them in Montreal in 2004, touring the solid release Attagirl; they were fantastic, unbelievably good. (Reviewed here.) I have a vague memory of seeing them at the Drake in Toronto in 2010, touring a just-okay new record and being bummed out that the crowd didn’t seem to be listening until they played Palomine’s “Kids Allright.”
I’m just as bad as that audience of disinterested douchebags, because I’ll be honest: I lost the plot and stopped paying attention over the years, perhaps because this one record burned so brightly for me. That just means I have more Bettie Serveert records to explore, now that I’m in this wormhole. Maybe I’ll even learn them on piano. I’ve got the time. Better late than never.
Also: happy belated birthday to my old friend James Rocchi, who in the '90s told me he once woke from a dream about living above an Amsterdam coffee shop where he would meet Carol Van Dijk and smoke cigarettes and talk philosophy. One can dream.
Hey, but don't worry about me, I'll be sitting by the seashore, Laughing at the lifeforms, Whistling down the breeze. So don't worry about me, 'Cause you can't please everyone. And I'm thinking to myself, And I'm not the only one, We all gotta learn To give some in return, Like little works of wonder.
The album is streaming everywhere. They're not on Bandcamp. I can't find video footage of any songs from Private Suit (lots of Palomine, though) other than some not-great ones of the title track. But, oh, look, here they are a couple of weeks ago, gorgeous and sounding great as always, Peter rocking a Chapel Hill T-shirt, playing a Cure song in a garden:
"Last Christmas I gave you my art / and the very next day you didn't press play / So this year I made a record for you / [long pause] holy shit, from a secular Jew!"
Yes, Jason "Chilly Gonzales" Beck, the Montreal- and Toronto-raised pianist who once declared himself a Jewish supervillain and president of the "Berlin Underground," has released a A Very Chilly Christmas, a solo piano album of minor-key Christmas carols along with covers of David Berman, Wham and Mariah Carey; it's accompanied by a considerably less sombre mixtape with Toddla T (the source of the above quote). But that's not all: the current resident of Köln has also written a book-length essay about a woman who once sang in Elvish.
Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures has been published in German, French, and in English by Rough Trade UK and Canada's Invisible Publishing as part of their Bibliophonic series. It's only partially about Enya; it's also about ego, namely Beck's, and about music as social function, like the lullabies that populate Enya's blockbuster albums and Gonzales's Solo Piano albums. It's a variation on Carl Wilson's game-changing Céline Dion book, Let's Talk About Love, though much more informal—and funny, though just as earnest. Both books aim to reclaim their subjects from punchline purgatory. For me, Enya seems to be an easier case to make: see also Jenn Pelly's excellent piece in Pitchfork this year.
2020 also marks 20 years since the debut Gonzales album, Uber Alles, which launched a series of events that enabled the success of his friends Peaches and Feist. We talked about that in a separate conversation, but you'll have to wait for my book to read that.
My 2008 conversation with Gonzales is one of my favourites; it can be found here.
This conversation took place last month, but because I don't want to think about Christmas until it's time for partridges in pear trees, I present it to you now, during Hanukkah.
Gonzales
November 6, 2020
Does the world needs Enya
more than ever now?
It seems so. When most
records come out, we’re constantly reminded of the personality of the artist
and their singular point of view, especially in rap songs. All the words we use
to describe music have so much to do with the artist’s POV. We forget that
music before that had no POV, it had a collective POV, and Enya is closer to
that than many other artists at their level. I love the idea of what folk music
is, a kind of music where you don’t hear the word “I”—and you don’t hear the
word “I” in Enya songs. Her melodies don’t have a lot of twists and turns and
signatures. I struggle with it, because my ego is so ever-present in my music
and I try to put it to good use. But I’m fascinated with music in which there
isn’t that, where the composer isn’t present—to paraphrase Marina Abramovich.
Solo Piano wasn’t intended
to be functional hipster dinner party music, but you’re often quoted as being
fine if it’s accepted as such. There is a letting go of your own work.
Background music serves a social purpose. In the same way Enya’s does.
Yeah, and it makes me think
of my background as a bar pianist, or a lingerie store pianist, or these more
humble background-music jobs I had.
Where was that? In Montreal,
or Toronto? Berlin?
A lot in Toronto. A bit in
Montreal. I did a lot of it when I graduated from McGill and moved back to
Toronto, before my band Son kicked off. That was a two- or three-year period of
constant jobbing, including at a Yorkville lingerie store called Andrew’s,
where I was the pianist. It was really interesting. The owner was like, ‘Hey, I
know it’s not Carnegie Hall here.’ Part of me was like, ‘Believe me, I know.’
But at the same time, it dawned on me that I didn’t need it to be
Carnegie Hall. For about two years in Berlin, before I could make a living as
Chilly Gonzales, from about 1998 to 2001, I had a job playing in a restaurant
around the corner from where I lived. It’s a great job to have when you don’t
speak the language in the country to which you’ve moved.
When some people might
approach me and say, ‘Hey, are you okay with your music being used as
background music?’ I speak of the moment when Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk
used Solo Piano to get his baby to sleep. I thought, not only is my music
useful, it’s useful to one of my heroes. That was a really nice moment. I do
think it’s possible to make music that works on all those different levels. And
a third level, which is playing sheet music. That is the most intimate way of
interacting with the composer, because the music is literally coming through you.
[In 2014, Gonzales published Re-Introduction Etudes, sheet music for lapsed pianists. It became a bestseller. I was just given a copy for Hanukkah, and I'm hard at work.]
Close headphone
listening, or listening while doing dishes, or as a sex soundtrack—there are so
many wonderful activities in which music can play a role. It’s quite humbling
to own up to that. Music that can only be appreciated when you listen closely
to it—I mean, who has that kind of time these days? I don’t. A lot of albums I
find interesting, like that last Fiona Apple album I thought was really
interesting, but I didn’t have any social use for it, personally. For my taste,
it’s too much, it demands too much of my attention, and nor is it the kind of
music I would put on when I need energy—that’s when I’ll use rap music and
listen very closely and get a vicarious energy through what the rapper is
saying, and the beat.
The balance of ego and
generosity: for any musician, unless you’re a prodigy and then become a
superstar, there’s an inherent humbling at every step of the way, whether it’s the
early humiliation of playing your original material to nobody, or serving a function,
whether it’s jobbing in a wedding band or teaching music to disinterested
children.
Or playing in a punk band!
Which is another functional thing I learned, when I joined the Shit [in 1995
with Peaches]. That was my introduction to “the hang” being most important, not
just between the band members themselves, but with the audience. If you go to a
great all-ages punk show, there is a huge amount of egoless solidarity. Or a
rave. I’m jealous of that yes-or-no success threshold for stand-up comedy,
because it’s so clear: if it works, people are laughing. My DJ friends, I’m
envious of them—even though I tease them by telling them they’re not
musicians—because through the playing of music they are also creating a social
function that mirrors what folk music did back in the day.
The only genre where that
isn’t the case is the one I’m in, which is personality-based, artist music,
where we’re all hoping to be taken seriously as these forward-thinking, free
artists. It’s a real trope, one I sometimes fall into, and one I make fun of by
calling myself a musical genius. I try to take the piss out of the whole idea
of what a genius is. When you’re a folk musician, I don’t think anyone thinks
in those terms. The [idea of the] musical genius was more or less invented in
Europe, somewhere between Beethoven and Liszt, and continues to this day to
Kanye West and “stable genius” ex-president Trump—it feels good to say that! I
think Enya is much closer to that. I highly doubt she thinks of herself as a
genius, or even wants to be called one.
But we’ll never know,
because she never speaks! I take issue with part of your thesis. I don’t know
that the guilty pleasure still exists. I feel that’s been chipped away for the
last 20 years. Do people still feel guilty?
I would say so. So much of my
book reflects the fact that my young musical adulthood was in the ’90s when
there was a divide. That’s why I’m talking about Pavement, which is almost
quaint to think about. I think there has been generational change. In my
anecdotal milieu, people talk about it in terms of TV shows, in terms of liking
bad TV. Or they say, ‘These are the novels I read when I’m on holiday, they’re
a guilty pleasure.’ Or with food. In a way, the concept is still there.
Maybe in music, through
whatever the poptimism movement was supposed to be, I’m not sure, which I think
involves not putting mainstream pop music in a different category. In a way,
that’s still playing into the same idea. It’s saying, ‘We’re not going to
exclude pop music from cool stuff anymore; we’ll include it.’ Which means there
is still stuff on the other side of that line—what, exactly, we don’t know. But
it has to do with only young pop people who dare to work with cool producers
get included in that. So a very mainstream pop person might be considered
cheezy, and they only get included in the cool club when they work with Ariel
Reichstad or whomever.
Perhaps the last uncool
thing is, for lack of a better term, white-trash stadium country music. There
are a bunch of class and racial reasons why that is.
I know a lot of people who
look down on David Guetta and that world, very mainstream dance anthems, which
tend to be more earnest. The less winking there is, you have to see if you pass
some kind of smell test for the gatekeepers. So yes, I agree that the guilty
pleasure is not as pronounced and obvious as the era in which I was struggling
with it. I’ve gotten over it, and I bet you have too. I quote Dev Hynes who,
when asked about his guilty pleasure, challenged the premise of the question.
He said, ‘I’ll say Cyndi Lauper, but it’s not guilt, it’s just pleasure.’
I don’t think I’m radical by
saying, ‘I’m enlightened! I can enjoy what I enjoy and never apologize for it
ever again!’ That’s not the point of my book. It’s more of a journey for me to
find out who I was. I had so many false stops along the way. First I got
hoodwinked by virtuosity, then I got hoodwinked by trying to be cool. I went
through all these phases. Some people have said I’m very hard on all the
musicians I used to like, and therefore I’m hard on myself by admitting to
being taken in by charlatans—and I don’t mean Charlatans the band. But now, I
can be sitting in the hotel bath after the concert, with a joint, and I’ll
think, ‘Ah, in the last three minutes of that one song I tried to somehow
impress people rather than connect with them.’ I still fall into that trap. I’m
by no means pure. I still fear the gods of music and their judgment more than
ever, because I know I can easily slip.
My first love was ABBA,
and I never turned my back on that. That went through years of not being cool
depending on what circles I was in, then they had a couple of revivals, but that music has
always given me intense pleasure, and it has my entire life. Did you read Carl
Wilson’s Céline Dion book?
I’m aware of the book, and I
read it after I finished mine. We actually went to McGill at the same time. He
wrote for the school paper. His gang was in a slight rivalry with my gang, in a
weird way. Since then, we’ve been writing each other on Twitter and I asked for
his address so I could send him a book. But yes, his book is wonderful. It’s a
different topic, in a way, but comes down to a lot of the same issues. When you
say you like something, where is that really coming from? Is that a deep-seeded
pre-taste mindset? Like, when you fell in love with ABBA, was that before you
knew what musical taste was?
I was 10.
Right. So there’s something
incredibly pure and innocent about your love for them. The fact you never
turned your back on them, means that you were probably a more secure person
than I was. Especially in my teens, I had a lot of issues of not being sure
about what I liked. Whereas [frequent collaborator of 25+ years] Mocky, when I
met him when he was 19 or 20, his taste was fully formed. It’s the same today.
His music evolves, he finds new music to love, but his criteria is solid. It
might have to do with personality.
There was something shape-shifty about my
personality back then. I was so desperate to be liked and to fit in, that it
took me a while. When I moved to Berlin [in 1999], it gave me that last push, where if I
was actually going to continue doing this, I had to have the balls to put all
these things together that, on paper, seem like they won’t work. Of course they
work, because they’re all me. I can put the sense of humour together with my
studious musicality. I don’t talk often about why I love rap has so much to do
with my dad, and his capitalist-revenge-fantasy mindset. Essentially, my father
has the attitude of a rapper. He grew up very, very poor and wanted to prove
that he could be upwardly mobile.
What was his profession?
He started as an engineer,
and he’s now a huge real estate business man in Canada. He’s retired now, but he was the CEO. It was a real
rags-to-riches, Get Rich Or Die Trying kind of story. That’s what I think makes
me love rap so much. The other side, I love the reassuring, feminine-style
music with maternal voices. I know now where those twin obsessions come from.
The Enya book is more about the mother’s side, but if you scan my lyrics there
are a lot of references to my dad, and his effect on my aesthetics and my
personality.
It took me a really long
time. I try to be gentle. I try to have some sympathy for who I was then, and
how I could allow myself to say, ‘I’m going to reinvent myself as someone who
likes Pavement.’ That was a conscious decision based on not being able to own
my own taste yet. I was a late bloomer. In [2002's] ‘Salieri Serenade,’ I have a lyric
that is key to my harshness, in which I say, “I’m going to persecute all
musical prostitutes / I know a ton of ’em / I used to be one of ’em / So now I
make fun of ’em.” That’s where I’m at. I’m telling my conversion story. Much
like you might read those books like, ‘I used to be a white supremacist and now
I’m out of jail and organizing in the inner-city.’ It’s one of those kind of
memoirs.
One of my favourite lines
in the book is that, ‘Art suffers if you like everything. Taste is what you
hate.’ Framing your taste in the negative.
That gives you power. When
you like everything, the power of those choices becomes diluted, because you’re
theoretically open to everything. It’s fundamentally coming from a position of
weakness: ‘Well, who am I to say?’ We all know people like that, who don’t want
you to say bad things about anyone. They think that to say anything bad is, in
itself, not constructive. But it can give you power. Enya’s refusal to have
drums is linked to her refusal to go on tour. My refusal to use electronics on
stage is akin to me refusing to go on a TV show and give a music lesson to a
cheezy host. That’s inspired by artists like Enya. You hear, in her music and
in the way she runs her career, that she’s built these fortified walls, and
everything inside her fortress is lovely and protected. The walls keep out
beats and pressure to go on tour.
And interest in her
personal life.
Exactly. I noticed it living
in France. Maybe because French music always focuses on the lyrics first,
they’re a very literary culture. That’s why there is not a lot of groovy French
music. Not a lot of exuberant, simple pop. Gainsbourg was such an anomaly
because of that, because he could just write a song where he says
“toot-toot-toot” over and over again. He had a feel for what sounds good.
Generally, the French are on the outside looking in at British and American
styles of music. I would meet these French musicians and they just loved
everything. They would be like, ‘Reggae! I can play that. Bossa nova! I can
play that.’ I was like, ‘Well, you must hate something. It doesn’t make sense
to love everything.’
I want to talk about
texture, because this is fascinating to me. I was Enya agnostic; I didn’t think
enough about her to hate her. You and I are roughly the same age. I liked
“Orinoco Flow” well enough at the time, and I, like you, had access in high
school to a Roland D-50 where that string sound is right there. As I got older,
the sound of the Roland D-50 became kryptonite to me, the DX-7 as well.
Textually, I just find them grating. I have friends who recoil at the sound of
a tabla, or the guy in your book who, like me, hates the vibraphone. Certain
textures prevent me from entering into the world of Milt Jackson or Enya,
aesthetic decisions that are independent from all the other issues you’re
talking about.
Also, I’ve always loved Julee Cruise, which might be some
bullshit hipster association with David Lynch, but after reading your book I
wondered: why do I love that Julee Cruise record [1989's Floating Into the Night, featuring the Twin Peaks' theme, 'Falling'] but I don’t care about Enya?
Is it just because there’s no Roland D-50?
I could have written a book
about that Julee Cruise album too, to be honest. Or Cocteau Twins or Beach
House or Lana Del Rey. There’s a lot of music that’s similar, but Enya just
felt right—even though I’m not that big a fan of her music compared to some of
those others. I probably listened to Julee Cruise more than Enya, when all is
said and done.
But it’s fascinating that a
piece of technology—whether it’s physical, like a vibraphone, or electronic,
like a DX-7—can carry these associations for us to the point where we can be
blocked [as a listener]. As a piano player, when you play covers on the piano,
you divorce them from all of that. Sometimes people get a clearer shot at what
the music is capable of when you remove those [production choices].
Case in point, I just did a
Christmas album and I do a version of ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham. As people start
to hear the album, people are really singling that out, saying, ‘I never knew
what a beautiful, bittersweet little lullaby “Last Christmas” is.’ Because
they’re picturing [Wham!’s] Christmas sweaters, they’re hearing the SPX90
that’s doing the reverb on George Michael’s voice—a very specific ’80s reverb
that everybody knows, consciously or unconsciously. I took away the drum
machine, the cheezy synths. People couldn’t get a clear shot of what the melody
and harmony was until they hear an instrument like the piano—which of course is
not an instrument of pure reduction, pure atomic musicality, not quite the
instrument that shows us the Platonic world of forms, but it’s the closest we
have. It divorces all reference to the real world, and you end up in this
abstract world and you get a different version of ‘Last Christmas,’ which is
the opposite of how it usually works with Christmas carols.
If I ask you right now to
think of ‘Silent Night,’ you don’t think of one particular recording. You think
of some Platonic version that only exists in your mind, and you will now hear
all future and past versions that exist in the real world, whether it’s
carollers on your doorstep, or the version of it on my album. It’s always being
compared to this abstract, ur-text version of ‘Silent Night.’ With ‘Last Christmas,’
it’s the opposite: all we have in mind are the references. So I’ve taken that
all away and showing what was lurking beneath the whole time. It’s an
interesting reaction that surprised me, how much people are able to re-evaluate
a song like ‘Last Christmas’ when it’s played on the piano with very little
stylistic liberties taken. I play a lot of songs in a minor key, interpolating
them with other carols. But with those two—Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For
Christmas Is You’ being the other—I play them so straight, so respectfully,
because I wanted to make sure there was no chance people thought I was making
fun of them. On the contrary, I’m venerating them.
Is that not a common trope: to take an overproduced song, strip it down to acoustic guitar,
and now it’s so-called “real music”? Like Ryan Adams doing his Taylor Swift
thing, or any acoustic cover of a pop song going back to at least Frenté.
That’s different because
there are voices. The voices will always colour it. The voice is another
stylistic exercise. On the piano you get closer to the purity.
What I find more
interesting about your record is the seasonal affective disorder element of it, by making the
traditional carols minor. That completely changes the meaning of the song. I’ve
seen you do that exercise live before, where you take a well-known major-key
song and make it minor. It’s usually ‘Jingle Bells,’ isn’t it?
I do a few. ‘Happy Birthday,’
‘Frere Jacques.’ It can apply to any happy song.
In the context of this
record, I find it much more fascinating. This could be hold music for a suicide
hotline.
I recorded and planned the
release before the pandemic, but it turns out events are making it seem more
prescient.
The decision to do that to
the traditional songs is more illuminating than a straight-forward ‘Last
Christmas.’
The more well-known and
universal the song is, the more it has lived in the collective unconscious. The
more liberties I can take. Then there were exceptions. I wondered what trap I
could fall into by doing standards. How can I bring these more recent pop
songs, which do have the word I in them, and by playing them on piano I could
minimize the I. In my version, I try to make you not think about Mariah Carey
or George Michael, and let you hear the pure musical intentions. I don’t think
you get that with the trend you’re talking about, a trend I really don’t like,
of the bossa-nova versions by Nouvelle Vague, or when Richard Thompson did a
very earnest version of ‘Oops I Did It Again.’ I feel you’re just
replacing one trope with another by that point, because you’re framing the song
in a very personal style. That’s why I try to play those songs as impersonally
as possible, to avoid falling into that trap. I’m not trying to make it my own;
I’m trying to make it your own.
A bit off topic, have you
heard the Karen O and Willie Nelson version of ‘Under Pressure’ that just came
out?
No!
I think it’s one of the
best covers I’ve ever heard. It’s two acoustic guitars, and she sings most of
it and he sings the Bowie part. I’ve always loved that song but was too
distracted by the greatest male vocal duet in history to notice the lyrics. With this version, they’re both incredible singers for different reasons.
That’s a good example of
where with ‘Last Christmas,’ you’re distracted by the kitsch, in ‘Under
Pressure’ you were distracted by the voices. That song has an unusual
structure, instead of a typical A/B/A/B/bridge structure. I have played that on
piano many times; it was a commonly requested song when I was a bar pianist,
when I often faked my way through any request. As you’re playing songs, you’re
like, ‘Oh my goodness!’ When you play a Pet Shop Boys song on piano you realize
how complicated it is, how many key changes there are, and extra bars you
didn’t realize were there. The sophistication is so hidden and buried in music
like that, and ‘Under Pressure,’ when you sit down to play it, you think,
‘Where is this going?!’ There is very little repetitive scenery to anchor you.
You can permit yourself to do that when you have two of the greatest male
voices of your generation. I’m curious to hear how it sounds stripped down with
those two legends.
In the Enya book, you talk
about your friend the 4 Non-Blonde fan claiming that band’s hit song is ‘so bad
it’s good.’ I wonder if that concept still exists.
Reality TV occupies that
space for a lot of people.
Sure, but just talking
about music here. I once had to learn ‘We Built This City’ for a wedding band.
One of the most horrific recordings of all time, but having to learn how to
play it, I gained a lot of odd respect for it.
Have you heard the Diplomats
do that? They’re the last gasp of New York hip-hop in the early 2000s, led by
Cam’ron, and with my personal favourite rapper, Juels Santana. They didn’t have
that many hits, but in the rap world they’re untouchable, very ahead of their
time, stylistically, visually. Their music is quite epic, and they have an epic
version of ‘We Built This City.’ I’ll send it to you, as revenge for you
telling me about the Karen O and Willie Nelson cover.
Back to the evolution of
one’s taste, do you disown things you once loved? Can you listen to Chick Corea
today?
I will get a minimal
nostalgic thrill, but I don’t like it in the way I like music today, no. I do
hear that it displeases the gods of music. I feel strongly about that now. Of
course we all put our personality and our ego into the creative things we make;
that is the modern definition of the artist, since we’ve had a word for it.
People created stuff before, but they didn’t have a sense of ownership over the
things they made. There was a feeling of craftsmanship involved, of social
function.
Maybe it’s my age, or the
phase I’m in, or the year we’ve had, maybe it’s the pleasure I get from doing
projects like the Gonzervatory, that more and more I start to think I’m never
going to surgically remove my ego. It’s too late for that. But I can try to get
closer. I’m never going to be perfect, I’m too fundamentally selfish. But until
my dying day now, I’m going to try to push a bit closer to all these different
signposts, whether it’s what I see in Enya and how she runs her career and
protects her songs to the degree that makes me feel ashamed about how I sell my
songs in multiple different ways, and so it inspires me.
I use the word ‘balls’ a lot
in the book, but I hope I grow Enya-size balls in the coming years. Reflecting
on folk music of the past and reading about how music was made, and
understanding the role of craftsmanship, making sure my ego can find its proper
place in what I’m doing and not necessarily totally dominate.
Chilly’s cojones. That’s
what you’re looking for.
Yes.
Tangent: I was listening
to Nina Simone’s To Love Somebody today, for the first time. I’m a big fan, but
I’d never heard that entire album before. It struck me what a lost era it is,
when an artist of Simone’s stature would put out an album of covers featuring
total newbies like the Bee Gees or Leonard Cohen and entirely rewrite a Beatles
song released that same year. Or how people like Joni Mitchell had two or three
years of hits via covers before they put out their own music.
That’s what I was hoping to
do with Let It Die, which was to remove Feist’s songwriting ego and
focus on her being useful as a voice interpreting songs. That eventually led to
her being able to write her own songs again. But when she was blocked,
instinctually one of my solutions was to suggest to her that she’s putting the
songwriter-as-artist thing on a pedestal, and she was feeling she wasn’t living
up to it. So I said, ‘Maybe we’re attacking this the wrong way, and remove this
from the equation rather than trying to find a new way to scale that mountain.
Let’s bypass the mountain.’
As I think about this more,
and writing the Enya book came at an interesting time, when shooting for [2018]
Shut Up and Play the Piano documentary had wrapped, as a postscript to
everything that happens in the movie—the movie is about me getting away from
constantly seeking attention at all costs, to then discovering there is this
other side that people will appreciate through Solo Piano and then trying to
harmonize all that. Starting the Enya book, along with the entire story of the movie and where
I’m headed is: how can the ego find its proper place and not dominate, but be
in harmony with the gods of music? It’s not realistic for me to entirely excise
my ego from the equation, but if I can live in harmony with the gods of music,
that would be wonderful.
These records may or may not be "the best," art is not sports, I no longer have to review 250 new records a year (though I listen to at least that much), and so much of my listening this year was coloured by the state of the world. Make of all that what you will. This glorious music made 2020 somewhat bearable for me, hopefully for you as well: music of joy, pain, therapy, escape and beauty. Dancing, not so much.
If this is all TL;DR, here's a 38-song playlist of single tracks from my top 40 albums (two are Bandcamp exclusives)
1 Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (Matador). "Half of my whole life is gone" is the opening line here. It's not a lament. Not a regret. Mid-life crisis? No. Instead, it's a time of forgiveness—of the self, more than anything—and for moving toward a time when "shadows soften toward some tender light." Not that Perfume Genius's Mike Hadreas is a shiny, happy person peddling you some self-healing. This album, like all his work, mines a lot of pain, mixed with a romanticism and eroticism that's all the more powerful when it's clear how important—and difficult—it is for a lot of people to transcend mountains of negativity to achieve those idealized states.
All of that is evident only if you listen to his lyrics—which you obviously should—but his skill as a songwriter is that it also doesn't really matter. If you listen to the incredibly sensual "Jason" and all you hear is a seductive tale, that's fine; read closer and only then will you realize it's about a one-night stand with a straight man who leaves his boots on, and sneaking a $20 bill out of his wallet after he tells you to leave. Or how a seemingly simple pop song about longing with the chorus "It's been such a long, long time without you" is actually about body dysmorphia. Does it matter? They're both perfect pop songs with or without the lyrics. The melody, the vocal performance, the production, the players all offer plenty to distract you, if distraction is what you're after. And sometimes a hot and horny song of pent-up sexual release like "Nothing At All" is simply exactly that.
There are pop records I loved this year, experimental records I loved, sad music I loved, joyous music I loved. This is my No. 1 pick because it's all of those things. There are songs here that can easily appeal to anyone who loves Roy Orbison as much as Hadreas does. And there are songs here for people who love the "difficult" deep cuts on Peter Gabriel and Bjork albums. There's one song here, "Leave," that features what sounds like a pack of coyotes duetting with a gorgeous string arrangement. Several songs are incredibly sparse and haunting. There are five rousing anthems that should be played as loud as possible, at least one of which could be capable of creating the cinematic synergy that happened when his 2017 song "Slip Away" was used in Booksmart,in a scene that had me weeping with joy in the theatre last year.
Producer Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple, John Legend), who also helmed 2017's No Shape, deserves a lot of credit for how this record sounds, and his bass playing on "Jason" and "Just a Touch" manages to outshine even studio vet Pino Palladino, who plays on most of the rest of the album. Speaking of studio vets, heavyweight drummers Jim Keltner and Matt Chamberlain are also all over this, tasteful as ever. But it's what Mills does with Hadreas's longtime partner Alan Wyffels with the otherworldly synth textures here that provide each song with its own unique world to frame Hadreas's gorgeous melodies.
Hadreas breaks down each song for this feature in Pitchfork, and for these liner notes on Apple Music.
2 Shabaka and the Ancestors – We Are Sent Here By History (Impulse). Shabaka Hutchings has become a jazz crossover sensation through his work in Sons of Kemet and the Comet is Coming, both of which are thrilling, visceral and ecstatic; it's not hard to understand their appeal to non-jazz audiences. This more traditional group, with South African musicians, is more laid back. Though Hutchings's melodic style is unmistakable, this music is driven largely by upright bassist Ariel Zamonsky's Mingus-y lines, while drummer Tumi Mogorosi and percussionist Gontse Makhene lay down some Afro-Caribbean grooves underneath him. The poet Siyabonga Mthembu's gospel-esque Zulu vocals bring a lot to the table, but are never the focal point. He does, however, provide the the context for an album inspired by Extinction Rebellion and other crisis points: the songs were composed based on his titles, which include "They Who Must Die," "Run, the Darkness Will Pass," and "Beasts Too Spoke of Suffering." "We are here because history called," he sings. Hutchings says the music is "a reflection from the ruins ... Music is the seed from which new worlds must grow." In a year when it became more important than ever to reimagine a "new normal," this was a spiritual salve.
Great New York Times profile here, and one in the Guardian here.
3 Agnes Obel – Myopia (Deutsche Grammophon). Piano, cello, voice, and absolutely haunting minor-key melodies steeped in melancholy: perfect for lonely, uncertain times. Every song is a miniature sonic film, and titles like "Broken Sleep," "Island of Doom" and "Won't You Call Me" reinforce the mood. What makes it even better, however, is this Berlin-based-Belgian's approach to production: all the instruments are often pitched higher or lower, including her voice—like Fever Ray, she likes to harmonize with a "male" version of herself in a lower register. If that wasn't otherworldly enough, the drum sounds and overall use of reverb make this seem like it was made at the bottom of a frozen lake in the German Alps. Which seems like a nice enough spot to get myopic and shelter in place. I listened to this daily, almost obsessively, at the beginning of the lockdown. It's lost none of its magic and mystery since.The one concert ticket I had pinned to my wall when the pandemic hit was to see her open for—wait for it—Dead Can Dance.
This album should be to the next generation of Toronto what Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People was to indie rock in the early 2000s. Junia T steps to the forefront after being Jessie Reyez’s tour DJ for the last few years to craft this masterful collection of grooves built from the bottom up with live musicians and invite an array of mostly Toronto talent to shine in his stead. It functions not so much as a solo record but as a mixtape with all-stars like Reyez, Sean Leon, and River Tiber, but relatively unknown singers Storry and Faiza, as well as highly underrated Toronto vet Adam Bomb. Sometimes this much talent on one record means a lot of compromise and mush, but every single artist here brings their A-game. (Well, maybe not Nate Husser.) Jessie Reyez is the only big name here, but every guest here shows off big personalities while never overshadowing the brilliance of Junia T’s arrangements, which draw from vintage funk, neosoul, reggae, triphop, Brazilian beats and jazz. The beats are killer; the bass lines even better. The singers are all pitch perfect. Slakah the Beatchild is behind the boards, ensuring a rich, warm, vintage sound. This album was two years in the making, and it shows: there is a deep attention to detail and mood on every track.
An in-depth short doc about the artist:
5 Melt Yourself Down – 100% Yes (Universal). One of my all-time favourite jams is Pigbag's "Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag" (a.k.a. the theme from CITY-TV's The New Music), and so to discover a current London band mining a similar vibe is nothing short of glorious. But nothing else sounds like this, and if it does I need to find it: Killer grooves, heavy percussion (timbales, congas, darbuka), a raunchy two-saxophone attack (bari and tenor) run through distortion, and a compelling singer howling in Mauritian, English and made-up languages. There's no doubt this is a party band, but so were the Specials and Mano Negra and Asian Dub Foundation, and, like those bands, the lyrics here are rich with reactions to racism and recent British history (i.e. the indifference to the Grenfell highrise tragedy). There's been an explosion of creativity in British jazz lately, and it should be noted that this band—which is not jazz—dates back to 2014, after which two founding members left to form Sons of Kemet, among other projects (including Shabaka and the Ancestors; see above). Between that association and a jump to a major label, this band should be much better known than they are. This is perhaps the one 2020 record I regret most not being able to see live (this is kind of fun but doesn't really cut it); that said, it's a hot, sweaty mess even just coming out the headphones.
It’s safe to say that few people, if anyone, in North America has heard a band like this, which combines traditional Filipino percussion (kulintang) with modern R&B and pop. Producer Alaska B (Yamantaka//Sonic Titan) ensures everything sounds rich, thick and totally pro: deep Solange-ish grooves over which the Moondog-ish metallophones and other kulintang percussion sparkle with life. If this were just a novel and evocative instrumental record, it would already succeed, but these women are also great singers: check out the sultry soul ballad “Desire,” which absolutely could and should be a pop hit. The brooding pulse of “V V V” is a 2020 anthem (“They lie / they will never tell the truth”). “Heto Na” and “Taranta” have some serious ESG vibes, while obviously sounding nothing like them. I was thrilled when they made the Polaris shortlist, because this deserves to be heard around the world.
7 Kathleen Edwards – Total Freedom (Dualtone). Edwards is a master of economy: lean but lovely arrangements, great players, and 10 songs so good that her long hiatus has been entirely justified. But bring hankies—especially if you're forty-ish or over and living with a bunch of regret. For those rare moments when you're not, "Glenfern" might just be the greatest song ever written with affection for an ex, remembering the good times with gratitude and moving past the hurt. (After years of armchair trainspotters wondering who Edwards's songs were about, that one is quite explicitly about ex-husband Colin Cripps.) And though I'm not well versed on the canon of canine songs, I'd hazard a guess that "Who Rescued Who" is also near the top of that niche. As always, there's an ace band behind her: longtime friends and collaborators Jim Bryson (keys, guitar), guitarist Gord Tough (also heard on Sarah Harmer's record), drummer Peter Von Althen and bassist Darcy Yates. Extra points for the driving kosmische Canadiana of "Hard on Everyone." I have to admit that I took this record for granted: on many levels, it sounds like Another Kathleen Edwards Album—an extension of 2012's fantastic Voyageur and entirely predictable, for better or worse. But as the weight of the songs began to sink in, it was not only a reminder of what a great writer she is, but that she keeps getting better: the character portraits, the tiny lyrical details, the turns of phrase, the earworms. Take your time, Ms. Edwards. You've more than earned it.
“Bow down to queen,” demands Ayo Leilani on her second album as Witch Prophet. As we should: DNA Activation is a completely captivating, entrancing journey through trippy soul with an Eritrean Erykah Badu bent. Jazzy vibes, deep grooves and synesthesiac textures abound, creating a sonic splendour in which it’s easy to get lost. Leilani’s vocals aren’t a focus as much as they are a centring guide, a soothing presence asking, “Where do we go from here, when the whole world is falling?” Karen Ng’s saxophone plays a key role on three of the 10 tracks, indebted to Ethio jazz. “Makda” comes off like a trippier Dan the Automator. Everything about DNA Activation is a huge step up from her promising debut; its only real drawback is that it’s incredibly brief: 10 songs in 24 minutes. This is hypnotic, healing music for humid days, during days when these lyrics strike deep: “Where do we go from here / When the whole world is falling / Through darkness / And we cannot see the light.” The woman known as Witch Prophet brings that light.
Words will always fail to describe Frazey Ford’s voice, probably because she fails to enunciate most of her words in the first place. Such is the magic and mystery that this soulful singer brings to everything she does, whether it was the folk revivalism of the Be Good Tanyas 20 years ago (!) or the soul music she immerses herself in here. This is not exactly retro R&B, but it is a solid live band with a Hammond organ (or imitation) hovering over the bass-heavy grooves and gospel-tinged backing vocals. She’s a devoted D’Angelo fan, and her last record used the same band Cat Power did on The Greatest; Ford brings her own hippie B.C. vibe to the genre. She’s not in this game to win; she can take or leave the music business, as she’s proved over the years while moving at her own pace. The music she makes is for healing, for uplift, for the spirit. Which is all well and good and inspiring, but the songs she brings to the table this time, and the players she gathered to perform it, that elevate this far beyond mere good intentions. The Aretha Franklin of the Kootenays?
10 U.S. Girls – Heavy Light (4AD / Royal Mountain)
This was recorded by humans in a room together at the same time. Crazy, right? Meg Remy and her circle are politically progressive but have decidedly old-school beliefs when it comes to musical chops: you should be able to play, you should be able to play well with other people, and no amount of multitracking can substitute for the sound of amazing singers surrounding a microphone in real time.
Heavy Light aims to be a What’s Going On of this generation: lyrics that address personal and systemic pain, enveloped in melodies, grooves and arrangements that seek to soothe rather than confront. “You gotta have boots, if you wanna lift those bootstraps,” goes the opening track, addressing historic economic inequality in the guise of a sweet soul song. “Overtime” is a first-person song about a widow discovering that her overworked husband drank their savings away. “Born to Lose” could be a Sarah Kendzior or Barbara Ehrenreich book about American decline in a torch-y song with a choral chorus, set to ’50s lounge exotica. A Latin excursion on “And Yet It Moves / Y Se Mueve” works surprisingly well—or, not so surprising at all, considering the calibre of musicians involved. The entire record is lush and expansive, and yet always in subtle ways; this is not a record that wants to show off, it wants to draw you in.
Remy has a lot of top-shelf help here: Basia Bulat, Arcade Fire’s Tim Kingsbury, partner Slim Twig, the band Ice Cream, future superstar James Baley, the E Street Band’s Jake Clemons, the underrated Geordie Gordon and Michael Rault, engineer Howard Bilerman, and vocal arranger Kitty Uranowski. It’d be hard to make a bad record with those people in the room. But with Remy at the helm, the result is an instant classic.
Everything about this exudes empathy and community, which is exactly what we need right now.
--
RECAP!
11-20:
11 Nihiloxica – Kawali 12 Lido Pimienta – Miss Colombia
13 Marlaena Moore – Pay Attention, Be Amazed!
14 The Dears – Lovers Rock 15 Wye Oak – Horizon EP 16 Deerhoof – LoveLore
17 Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
18 Nels Cline – Share the Wealth
19 Sault – (untitled) Rise
20 C. Diab – White Whale
Blurbs for those are here. Playlist for all top 20 albums is here. Shuffle it up:
--
21-40, in alphabetical order:
79ers Gang – Expect the Unexpected
Allie X – Cape God
Julianna Barwick – Healing is a Miracle
Bloto – Kwiatostan
Budos Band – Long in the Tooth
Caribou – Suddenly
Jennifer Castle – Monarch Season
Brandy Clark – Your Life is a Record
Alabaster DePlume – To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1
Honourable mention, about which I can't possibly be objective:
Gord Downie – Away is Mine. Wrote about it for Maclean's here.
--
My favourite singles and non-album tracks by artists not in the top 40: Magnetic Fields, Anderson Paak, Terrell Morris, Regina Gently, Destroyer, Sufjan Stevens, Will Butler, Buddy & Julie Miller, Serena Ryder, The Weather Station, Guiding Light, Eric Bachmann, The Ropes, Karen O & Willie Nelson, Beverly Glenn-Copeland
--
Reissue: Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Transmissions Runners-up: Prince – Sign O the Times Pylon – Box
