The Polaris Prize nominees were announced on Tuesday, and amidst no small share of grumbling about inclusions or exclusions (Apostle of Hustle was robbed!), the one item that made me the happiest was the inclusion of Five Roses by Montreal's Miracle Fortress. Though I like several of the albums on the list, there are few that I love as a song cycle, a sustained mood, a real album--which is the whole point of Polaris in the first place.
This record snuck out quietly a little more than a month ago to zero expectations--especially among anyone unimpressed by Think About Life, the other project for the 23-year old Miracle Fortress mainman Graham Van Pelt. Yet Five Roses has quickly captured the attention and imagination of many with its delicate and dreamy pop songs set to a hazy soundscape of indeterminate origin, sounding like the ultimate 70s summit between Brians Wilson and Eno. I've been smitten from the first time I heard it--when it showed up unannounced on a multi-disc player on an early summer Scrabble evening with my beloved, who has since become its biggest and earliest champion.
Here, guest poster Helen Spitzer (the aforementioned beloved) talks to Van Pelt for this article in Eye Weekly about living and creating in Friendship Cove, the (soon-to-be-shuttered) loft/living/studio and performance space he shares with poster artist Jack Dylan and others in Griffintown, a historic English-speaking working class factory district in Montreal. He also explains how he's always been a solitary man since growing up in the Shakespearian small town of Stratford, Ontario, and how attached he is to the album format--something that is evident in everything that went into the minor masterpiece that is Five Roses.
Miracle Fortress, Graham Van Pelt
Interview by Helen Spitzer
June 13, 2007
Locale: phone interview from the Friendship Cove in Griffintown, Montreal
Helen Spitzer: What does your Miracle Fortress look like?
That’s privileged information. I don’t want to give that out on the phone. Especially to a journalist.
HS: Good point. But really, where does that name come from?
Actually the Miracle Fortress looks like a big pile of equipment that is arranged in a circle, that I used to get into and play onstage when I did solo shows. I climbed in behind this drum set and three amplifiers and a whole bunch of keyboards and samplers and tried to play everything at once. It was a glorified one-man band.
HS: You don’t do that anymore?
I’m still doing a little of that at the beginning of sets that I play, but now I’ve got a backing band that helps me [for the rest of the set].
HS: Who’s in the band?
Jordan Robson-Cramer plays in Sunset Rubdown and Magic Weapon, and Adam from Telefauna and Jessie from SS Cardiacs.
HS: To me, this seems to be a really joyful record.
Yeah, that’s weird. I guess it kind of is. It just kind of happened that way. Some of the lyrics are pretty personal and kind of dark. The songs that ended up being keepers were these really fluffy pop washes that I ended up really liking. It wasn’t something that I had planned on. There was no blueprint for it.
HS: I wasn’t suggesting it was unrelentingly happy or anything. For the most part, the lyrics seem to be an internal conversation and I’m curious what that’s about.
Well, a lot of it is private. Issues I’ve always dealt with, that I ended up writing lyrics about because I wanted to deal with. There are songs about the inability to express myself and songs about troubles with religion. And then songs about goofy relationships in the sun: sunshiny summertime flings or whatever.
HS: What are your issues with religion?
Not even religion, but just weird spiritual experiences that I’ve felt, or had growing up. Not really being able to interpret them and not really wanting to tag it as religion, or anything, but I don’t know what to do with it.
HS: What were those?
Oh, I dunno, a lot of pretty private stuff. But there were definitely moments when I … I don’t know how to go into this, but just like sort of confusing awakenings and stuff like that.
HS: Like being aware of a presence?
Yeah, stuff like that. It was more psychedelic experiences. I would be really bad at describing it here, though. That’s a tough question
HS: The record is also really sentimental. And I don’t mean that in a negative way at all; it’s something I connected with immediately.
I wanted to try something that was less ironic, and kind of grandiose, and try to do something that was a little more personal. If you abandon irony you end up with sentiment, and then you either try to mask it for the sake of your own decorum, or you just subtly deal with it. The sentimentality in the songs is scary or personal but I left them there instead of trying to hide or something.
HS: So what’s your motivation for abandoning irony?
At the time I had been doing a lot of really tongue in cheek music and doing things that were really intentionally over the top. And fans were acting over the top and ironic and I wasn’t really relating to it very much anymore. I guess I wanted to see if I could be one of these artists who could revive a bit of seriousness.
HS: Or just sincerity.
Yeah exactly. I don’t know if I was particularly successful, but I think I’d admired those artists most, the ones who could put themselves out there in an honest way. And there’s tons of great stuff that comes out of being silly and goofy.
HS: So how would you characterize Think About Life?
It’s changing a lot but it definitely started out as a joke band that became serious. And now we’re actually writing songs and treating it with some respect, instead of this recklessness that we used to approach it with.
HS: So you continue to be involved.
Oh yeah. We’re recording new stuff and have an EP coming out at the end of the summer. It’s in a transitional phase right now because it’s going away from being totally non-serious and almost like ironically sentimental or childish to [something else]. We’re trying to keep some of that childish awe but actually take the project seriously. Which is weird.
HS: My first impression of Five Roses was that it was the sound of someone falling in love.
I did write a lot of the songs in one of those sweeping, early periods of a relationship, so it was very exciting. That was where most of the songs came from. There was definitely that kind of sweetness that came from experiences coming from very early in a relationship.
HS: Alluding to what you were saying earlier about an internal monologue, you seem to be cautioning yourself to be careful with your heart.
It’s true. It’s clearly a biographical piece of work. And working solo in the studio for three months or whatever, not having any outside input, you spend your time with your inner demons. I was just talking to myself the whole time, singing to myself. It was weird putting this character into a record that was actually me. Sometimes it’s very awkward to listen to.
HS: Did cautioning yourself work, though? Was that good advice?
[Laughs] Like I said, it was stuff that was written in a very early phase of a relationship, and the relationship itself didn’t end up working out. But I can still treasure the instances and experiences that were happening.
HS: The real sentimentalist in me was really rooting for you. When I listened to the record, I thought, “This is the love of his life!”
[Laughs] That’s how it felt at the time, yeah.
HS: Tell me about when you came to Montreal. You moved directly from Stratford, Ontario?
Three years I’ve been here.
HS: Who were the first people you connected with musically in Montreal?
The first people I met were the AIDS Wolf guys and this band called Les Angles Morts. I went and saw Torngat the first weekend I was here. AIDS Wolf started practicing at the house I was living in, which was totally obscene and pretty terrible to have to endure as far as volume was concerned, but great. But they were big influences from the get-go, just being really gung-ho and putting on a great show. Eventually you meet everyone because it’s a pretty small little community.
HS: It’s just like a small town.
The English-speaking community is all concentrated into two neighbourhoods that aren’t really bigger than your average small southern Ontario town. Every second person is a musician or promoter or label guy.
HS: The longer I was in Montreal the more unrealistic perception I had of the rest of the world.
Yeah, totally. It’s kinda heaven.
HS: What do you think of Griffintown?
It’s okay. It kind of forces a certain lifestyle on you that you either adapt to or resent. It’s very, very boring and quiet here, as opposed to anywhere else in Montreal. You have to either immerse yourself in your work, or go completely crazy. It’s good if you have a project on the go or a deadline or something. But when you’re not really doing anything it can be a pretty big drag. I have to like vacation out to the Mile End and crash on everyone’s couches just to socialize,
HS: Really?! You’ll take a break from Griffintown and go sleep somewhere else?
Yeah, you have to. There’s nobody here and there’s nowhere to go and as far as business, there’s no street [life] here.
HS: I had a sense there had been people moving there recently.
Yeah, people are moving here but they just stay up in their condos on the 17th floor or get into their underground parking garages.
HS: So tell me about your sordid past in Stratford!
There wasn’t a lot going on there. I just was doing music on my own. It’s actually how I learned to do a lot of the studio stuff that I do.
HS: What were your musical beginnings?
My parents got me a guitar. I wasn’t into it initially, but after a while I started getting obsessive started reading a lot and really wanted to test myself, and try out every genre that I heard. And see if I could create the same genre I was hearing and listening to.
HS: I’m dying to know how you achieved the sound on this record. Certainly, there are elements that you can point to as being derivative, but at the same time that it’s so bright and sunny it also has this detached, icy feeling. It’s a very consistent sound, yet it evolves over the course of the record. It’s constantly surprising.
There’s no one trick or one piece of equipment that I ran everything through to achieve the effect that I was looking for. I was very into a lot of recordings from the 60s or early 70s, solo pop musicians that I was really admiring at the time: people like Harry Nilsson and John Cale and Brian Eno, especially early John Cale records. I was listening to the tone and the way the instruments used to sing back then, the carefulness with how engineers back then would record instruments.
I tried to impose the kind of restrictions that they would have had. Like if you want to get a reverb sound, don’t just record whatever and then throw a reverb plug-in or something. I wanted to really use the sound of a big room, and record things naturally. I was trying to find the subtlety that engineers used back then, as opposed to recording a bunch of instruments and then fixing it in mixing.
It was all about taking care to get the right tone out of the instrument you were using, or finding two or three instruments that blended really well together and then play them really carefully so that they all kind of sit with one another and form this kind of chorus. Brian Wilson did this on Pet Sounds, blending two or three different instruments very carefully in time so that what you get is this new instrument, like an accordion and a chime and a saxophone or something, coming together and creating this voice that’s totally new and different. Instead of EQing or compressing your sounds, try changing them by blending them in an interesting way.
HS: You were talking about going for natural reverb and using the space that you were recording in. Did you record everything at Friendship Cove?
Yeah. I have a big room that’s really dry and dead sounding, and a big room that’s totally drywall and concrete and really live. I use the “live” room just to get a lot of the big singing reverb and I use the “dead” room to give the keyboards some air without making them too washed out.
HS: Tell me about Friendship Cove.
I had my bed in one of the rooms and I’d roll out of bed in the morning and have it all there in front of me.
HS: How many people live there?
There are four of us that live here. And a few more bands use it as a practice space.
HS: I understand you spent a lot of time sequencing the album.
Definitely. We came up with a lot of sequences and finally arrived at one. During mastering I was moving all the songs around, dramatically. It feels like one piece of music to me now. Even if I’m not listening to it, I imagine it in the order that it got sequenced. I always do this to any album. I never listen on random. I never do anything like that.
HS: I hate random. It’s just wrong.
Oh, completely. It is an art form. Albums are arranged as pieces of music too. I mean, you wouldn’t put a song on random?! You wouldn’t like, hear the chorus first and then want to go to the breakdown and then hear the first verse or something.
HS: Well, unless you’re Venetian Snares. I am now wondering if they’re working on iPods that do exactly that.
So shuffle up a song in 10 second segments? (laughs)
HS: Do you think that the iPod’s kind of messed with how people listen to albums?
Not having first hand experience, I don’t really know. I’ve never been able to afford one. I get this certain joy out of holding a record and taking it out and putting it on, and looking at the artwork while it plays and reading the lyric sheet. I really notice it missing when I’m just throwing an MP3 on. And the fidelity, actually. I didn’t used to notice it but I really do now. I’ve really started to feel the high register missing. It messes with reverb and it messes with cymbals, and I find the bass gets mushy too.
HS: So you enjoy the entire tactical and visual experience of an album.
I guess because I was getting into music just before all the IPod and MP3 stuff started to happen, so I was trained on albums, and going into a CD store and flipping through everything.
HS: Were there other people who played on the record?
No, I played everything on the record, for better or for worse. It’s just easier if you can do it. I’m just too impatient to call up a drummer friend and schedule a day and have him over. Especially when you’re doing pop music where the playing is pretty basic. I do like playing with other musicians and I really like collaborating when I’m improvising, but on the recording end of things, if I’m writing a pop song and arranging it, it makes so much less sense to have to schedule around other people. I like to do things really fast.
HS: So you’re self-taught in all the other instruments you play, like drums?
No, I took about four or five drum lessons when I was in high school. Same thing with guitar. I did try. I should have stayed in them longer. I did all of my improvement during those lessons and it’s been kind of frozen since then.
HS: Do you have any difficulty translating this to a live show??
Plenty! [Laughs] For one thing, doing stuff with other musicians who have different playing styles, you have to get used to hearing what someone else’s guitar technique is gonna be compared to your guitar line. Which is often better than what you did, but it’s all different. Also doing stuff that electronic stuff in the studio and then trying to get a live act to do it, you have no control over the very subtle tone changes, for example, that you can do to a kick drum sample. Having the songs come to life can be a bit jarring at first.
HS: And you have to consider the live setting itself. As a member of the audience you’re not going to hear the subtlety, regardless.
I’m more just worried that they’re gonna be terribly bored if I’m playing these slow, cerebral songs with very particular and precious arrangements. I’d much rather turn it into some kind of rocking thing that people actually want to stand there and watch.
-end-
Showing posts with label Montreal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Montreal. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Arcade Fire 07: Win & Regine 2
The day before the Arcade Fire's first live show in 14 months, in January of this year, time was precious and an interview time was a luxury. Following up on our conversation the night before, their manager's assistant suggested that I stalk the band while they were fitted for their custom stage earplugs the next morning, squeezing in time with Win and Regine while they waited for their appointment.
Naturally, that didn't work out, but we did break for lunch at a nearby food court, where we walked through the Neon Bible track list to discuss lyrics as well as socio-political concerns, maintaining control of their career, the charities they're working with, encountering celebrity (both their own and others), and how the internet shaped with their quick ascendance. You know, the usual--along with some discussion of comparative religion.
Portions of this appeared in this AOL article.
Arcade Fire
Win & Regine
January 18, 2007
Locale: eating tikka chicken wraps in the Faubourg Food Court on Ste-Catherine
I thought today we could walk through the record a bit and talk about specific songs. Where did the image of “Black Mirror” come from?
W: I don’t know if I want to go too in depth. It’s an image of how so much of culture is how people want to see themselves in other things. A lot of TV and music is made to reflect how people are so that people relate to it. It was an image of something that’s the opposite of this reflection of yourself, an absence of the self. Wanting to see something that’s entirely not yourself. [long pause]
Is “Keep the Car Running” an older song? It sounds familiar.
W: We did play it after Funeral, though it wasn’t ever really a song.
R: I don’t think we ever played it outside of rehearsal.
Lyrically, this is one of the more oblique songs for me.
W: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had these recurring dreams of people coming to get me all the time. It’s a familiar emotion from my dreams, and then having that resonate in the real world is a strange feeling.
Were you a paranoid kid?
W: No, not at all, really. I just have these dreams where someone’s coming, I don’t know who it is, and I have to get away.
Do you still have that dream?
W: Yup.
Who’s coming to get you now?
W: I never quite know. It’s always someone who doesn’t have good intentions. There’s a lot of stuff here about names and naming things, but I’m not sure what it is.
We talked about “Neon Bible” last night, and since then it struck me that whenever I think of neon I think of the service industry: a cheap motel, fast food restaurants. The phrase “neon bible” then implies someone treating religion as a commodity, something consumerist.
W: There’s definitely an aspect of religion always combining with culture and becoming a third thing. Where it gets weird is when people mistake the culture for religion, and vice versa. These deeply held beliefs that are partially cultural artifacts. The idea that every line in the Bible is supposed to apply to some real thing in your life and you have to find some way to make it all apply.
As much of it is story as it is parable.
W: For me, it’s hard to relate to so many different stories. There’s a lot to chew on in the Bible, and [it’s impossible] to think of it as one coherent whole that’s telling you one specific thing, like it’s some kind of manual on how to live. I don’t see how you can read that and get that out of it. There is some advice in there, but that’s not the overall sense I get. It’s way more varied than that.
You studied interpretive religious texts in school, didn’t you?
W: Yep.
I’m thinking of how integral it is in Jewish culture to debate the Torah all the time, that’s what Talmudic scholars do every day. Nothing’s set in stone, it’s all up for debate. Whereas for so much of fundamentalist Christianity, the Bible is untouchable.
W: Even in the different Jewish denominations, the spirit of the Talmudic texts was about interpretations, and then it becomes: ‘These are the interpretations.’ Know what I mean? Then the weird interpretations all get set in stone and that’s what it is.
That’s like people who transcribe John Coltrane solos. Let’s talk about “Intervention.” This is one of the many songs here talking about fear.
W: I thought a lot about how in the Bible it talks about the fear of God as an idea, and what that means exactly. “Black Wave” is similar to this. There are certain kinds of fear that make you want to change, and kinds of fear that make you want to stay the same and protect yourself.
For me, the fear of God is the type of fear where you’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s a giant black wave underneath you, it’s something you can’t see and it’s natural to have a certain amount of fear that’s about your relationship to a world that you don’t understand and trying to find your place in it.
Then there’s the kind of fear that makes you into a fortress, saying, “I am right.” Your fear then is some sort of protective thing. It can be used as a justification, or a way to not change. In the same way, many people read the Bible and take from it exactly what they want to believe. I think everyone’s like that. They want to take from the world where they already are. ‘Oh, the world supports the way I already am. That’s convenient.’
That brings us back to “Black Mirror.” When I think of so much media in the States, you have Fox News catering to one side, and Air America caters—or catered, I suppose—to the other. Have you ever looked at the satellite radio channels? One provider explicitly bills two of their channels as “all-talk right wing radio” and “all-talk left wing radio.”
W: I really think that’s the way stuff is headed. People want to be able to choose things that reflect exactly the way they are. To me, that’s where the culture starts to get weird.
R: You don’t need to think anymore.
W: It’s like a fake diversity, where people don’t have to come into contact with anything that’s fundamentally different from the way they think. It’s almost like you’re shocked when people feel differently about something. You’re outraged that someone can have fundamental beliefs that are different than yours. It’s sad. People talk so much about, ‘Oh, we all have so much in common. Why can’t we all get along?’ Well, if we had so much in common, then we WOULD get along. Not everything is the same. People do believe different things. Islam and Christianity are different. That’s why they’re in conflict so much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
On the right wing, it’s all about “it’s different, so it’s evil.” And the left wing is all about “it’s all the same thing.” I think they’re both bullshit. No, shit’s fucking different, that’s why people are killing each other over this shit, because it’s actually different. It’s a superficial idea of understanding that doesn’t have anything to do with real life. If your parents get killed in a bombing, it takes a lot more than “Come on, we all share the same ideas” for people to actually forgive each other, for there actually to be understanding. The idea of forgiving someone who’s done something evil to you is a really terrifying idea. That’s why both sides ring hollow to me.
We’ll talk about forgiveness a bit more in a second. Were “Black Wave” and “Bad Vibrations” always meant to be one song, or two separate ones?
R: They were always together.
W: The first part is an escapist pop song, and the second part is “Woah, it’s coming for you!”
R: The first half is: “I can run away and it will be fine. You can make it if you try!”
W: There’s this Bruce Springsteen thing on Funeral that’s kind of like, [sings] “We’re gonna run away and we’re gonna make it, baby!” This time, it’s like, “You can run, but you can’t hide. It’s still gonna be there.” [laughs]
Keep the car running, because they’re coming for you. What about the line “eating in the ghetto on a hundred dollar plate”—where did that come from?
W: The Brazil thing we were talking about last night.
R: They both relate to Brazil.
W: Not directly, but the feeling.
“Ocean of Noise”? [long pause]
W: I’m really proud of that one. It was hard for us to play that soft and slow and to get the feel of it. I’m really happy with how it turned out. Lyrically, it’s a feeling I wanted to get off my chest.
[long pause] “The Well and the Lighthouse” is based on a fable by Fontaine, called “The Fox and the Wolf.” The basic plot is a fox who is really hungry and sees a piece of cheese at the bottom of a well, so he lowers himself down to get it. But it’s just a reflection of the moon. He thinks he’s going to die down there, but he hears a wolf coming. So he calls out, ‘Hey, Mr. Wolf, there’s this delicious cheese down here, do you want to come and get it?’ As the wolf is lowering himself down, he lets the fox get up. Basically, you always fall for what you desire. Fontaine always tells a story and then has a moral at the end, which is: don’t laugh at the wolf, because everyone is willing to believe what they desire or what they fear. Those two things make people blind. [Vocally in the duet,] Regine is the fox and I’m the wolf.
What is the image of the lighthouse, and how does that tie in?
R: If you draw a well, and you draw a lighthouse, they’re the complete opposite in every possible aspect. Darkness, light, everything.
The next song here [“Antichrist Television Blues”] is the epic.
W: My ribs hurt after singing this song. This song is the same idea we were talking about before. The creepiest lyric here encapsulates the whole thing: “wanna hold a mirror up to the world so they can see themselves inside my little girl.” It’s this idea of trying to make cultural art that reflects exactly the way people are, but it expresses the pornography of that idea at the same time. There are always these 45-year old men behind the whole thing, writing the lyrics and everything. It’s a sexual fantasy which is a normal part of the culture. That’s fine, I’m not a prude about it. It’s just depressing to hear girls talking as if they’re making their own choices when it’s so obvious that they’re not, when they’re slaves in a certain sense. The idea that they’re selling is not helping any girls out, that’s for sure.
You’ve talked about culture only reflecting what people are, which is fine to some degree, but personally I’ve always wanted culture to also be something that we aspire to, something that is more than what we are. The second you stand up and try and do something different or grandiose, the worst slur someone can throw at you is that you’re pretentious, and that’s somehow a negative thing. As opposed to supposedly acting like people in the street, who in fact are merely imitating those that purport to be reflecting people in the street. It’s a strange circle.
W: It’s cliché, but we really do live in a time that is very different from when we were kids, in terms of the amount of information that people distill. There’s even a generational gap between [younger brother] Will [Butler] and kids who are five years younger than him. This google generation or whatever, seeing the direct impact on the way people process information, it’s amazing.
Better? Worse? Both?
W: I don’t know. I think about my grandpa, who died when he was 96. Which means he was born in 1908, and was in New York when they were building the Empire State Building. He then drove out to California with plagues going across the desert and there was no highway. I’m acutely aware of living through a somewhat similar thing when I’ll tell someone, “Yeah, we were around before the internet.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?!”
We were talking last night about how people might respond to “Windowsill.” Have you given it any more thought?
W: I feel like this is a weird generation, where people think, “Oh, no, not another thing about war. Oh, c’mon.” I’m sure there will be a bit of: “Oh, c’mon already, haven’t we already talked about this?”
But we haven’t really. All things considered, there really hasn’t been that much music that addresses the past five years.
W: I feel the same way a bit when the Neil Young thing comes out, and it’s like, c’mon.
I felt like saying, “Thanks for finally showing up, Grandpa!”
W: All you can do is say what you feel inspired to say.
Is a song like this hard to write, considering how loaded it could be?
W: It was pretty to easy to write. It kind of wrote itself. It says exactly what I wanted it to say, so it doesn’t feel like a put-on. Take it or leave it. I feel like it’s talking about something in a way that isn’t just criticism. It’s not the same as Green Day’s “American Idiot” thing. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t feel that way.
Who was responsible for the commercial? [posted on YouTube in January]
W: All of us, basically. It’s Will’s voice, my body and Richard [Reed Parry]’s face. Richard did the editing. He had never used iMovie before; he learned that night.
R: I held the curtain. It was really spontaneous.
W: We used the built-in camera on the laptop, and a pair of headphones for the audio.
R: We had Jeremy [Gara] make a little soundtrack of samples from the album.
W: We knew we were going to put that up with the tracklisting. Then we realised it reminded us of those TV commercials for greatest hits records.
R: Then we realised, “Hey, doesn’t this laptop have a camera on it?”
When did you realise that Arcade Fire was becoming shorthand for a genre or a type of band?
W: I haven’t noticed that.
R: No.
W: What kind of band is that? Kind of theatrical?
Not really. Usually lots of group singing, usually a large band.
W: Uh-huh.
Of varying quality. Sometimes it’s just a cheap descriptor, other times I can see a similarity but the band has their own interesting things going on. Other times it sounds like a bunch of macho guys who heard Funeral and decided to reinterpret it their own way.
W: Thankfully I’ve been shielded from anything that’s been influenced by us.
When you went on the road, you didn’t have a manager, and that first six months was very whirlwind. Were you holding out for something?
W: We didn’t really want a manager, because we felt they usually did more harm than good. But Scott [Rodger] and ourselves were kind of looking for each other, it turns out. We were curious who managed Bjork, because she seems to have done what she wants, whether it be stupid or not, and has managed to stay around and never really do the radio thing and still be able to do it. And he had heard our record and was coming to our show anyway. He came to France for a show, and ended up coming on the bus and sleeping on the bus. We just really hit it off.
R: Right away. Even without either of us working together, he was already starting to help us. It happened really naturally.
W: He’s really motivated by artistic stuff. It couldn’t work any other way.
I know you’ve always had very high standards about what you do, and not wanting to do things the same way other rock bands do them. In doing that, and in being quite stubborn about a lot of that, you’ve also attracted a lot of people to you that don’t want to play the regular game. Do you get accused of being difficult for putting your foot down? Because you were very self-contained for so long, too.
W: Probably we do, but I don’t hear about it. The thing that’s frustrating for us that probably comes across weird is in Montreal how we’ve always played smaller shows that people can’t actually get into. It’s not a hype thing. We just haven’t wanted to play bigger places as long as we can play a week’s worth of shows or whatever. Part of me feels bad because I really want people to be able to see us, and this summer we’ll probably do some big outdoor shows. But the idea of going into these shitty big clubs, it wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s a trade-off.
It’s a lot more work to find these smaller venues, however. My impression of the dates you’re doing in February is that they’re not traditional venues, many of them, or certainly not used to rock shows.
W: Everything is ten times the work for, like, half the return.
R: Everything! It would be so easy to say, “OK, jewel case, here’s the template, go for it.” But no, we have to use this colour and this and that.
W: I really wish we could let go of it more sometimes. But whatever. Vincent and Tracy are so great, and are even more detail-obsessive than we are. It’s a crazy combo. But it’s good, because you have to live with this shit for the rest of your life, so you might as well do it the best you fucking can. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s just landfill.
You had a lot of high profile endorsements from people I know you respected. Did they pass on any advice you took to heart?
W: It’s cool to see where people are later in their careers, and how they’ve done it. Not necessarily as a model. Very often you meet rock dudes who make rock music and they’re mentally retarded. So meeting people who have real lives and who are interesting…
R: And they’re connected to the world.
W: They’re not in la-la land. It’s good to see.
I know you were offered opening slots for everyone under the sun. Is U2 the only one you took?
W: Those were the only bigger shows we did.
R: Those were just in Montreal and Ottawa.
Why did you say yes to them, and not anyone else?
W: We thought it would be fun to play a couple of big hometown shows at the end.
R: We hadn’t played in Montreal that much, and we were about to stop. They were coming here, so it wasn’t like we had to leave to go somewhere else.
So you told them they had to come to you!
W: It was a fun opportunity. As weird as it is to play those big places, more people saw us that night than have ever seen play in Montreal, period. It was cool that people weren’t expecting to see us. It was a warm feeling, not a typical shitty opening slot where no one’s paying attention. Their stage set-up is pretty interesting: it’s very low, with no barriers.
R: Very close to the people.
W: Really well-designed. Not that I would want to do those kind of venues all the time, but it’s fun to do once in a while.
How would you describe your connection to Montreal audiences, seeing as how you haven’t played here much in the last three years? I’ve heard ridiculous scalper stories about the February shows. What do you want to do when you play your hometown?
W: It’s great to play at home. We had a period where one time would be great, one time would be weird. But the shows at the Corona were some of our best shows we’ve ever played, a really warm feeling. It didn’t feel like this petty Montreal thing. I love this city so much. I think it has so much to offer. It’s important for us to do stuff here, and we’re still trying to figure out how to do that.
How is your level of fame on the streets of Montreal?
R: It’s good. It’s perfect. I love it! Nobody recognizes us.
So much of what made this band successful was word of mouth and the live show, even before everyone started talking about it on the internet once the album came out. But since then, the internet has been both a boon and a bane to your career: on the one hand, it spread word even faster, on the other hand, it’s out of control when it comes to speculation and leaked tracks, etc.
W: It’s kind of a bummer to not be able to play more live without it being a big thing. There was a point when I was writing in my online journal quite a bit, until I realised that I was basically just writing for Pitchfork and NME. I might as well be doing that directly. There was a good six months that was frustrating, because it was coming across like I was trying to build up some hype for the album. I’d say, ‘We did this.’ And within minutes, those sites would be like, ‘They did this!’ Not that I’m perusing the internet all the time—I try not to think about it at all—but it bounces back at you.
I think our approach is definitely centered around the live show. I’m just excited to get these songs sounding good enough to play in front of people. I think that’s our strongest point. The rest takes care of itself. You can get away with being a shitty live band and still have people buy your records, but it’s much more inspiring to me to make the live thing really good and not to think about the radio too much.
“Intervention” was put up on iTunes with all proceeds going to Partners in Health. Why did you choose them?
W: The stuff we’re doing with them is really exciting. We’re going to do this thing where a dollar or a euro off of every concert ticket we sell this year will go directly to Partners in Health—the promoter can’t touch it, we can’t touch it, no one. I read this book by Paul Farmer, the guy who started this charity in Haiti, and felt really challenged by it. Here’s someone who’s devoted his life to this approach of giving people medicine and housing and food and how those are all inter-related. It’s all related to health. Having food and basic shelter is as important as anti-viral medication. Through Regine’s family, I feel really drawn to Haiti. From what I’ve seen, it seems the work he’s doing is really amazing. For me, the potential for raising money for them is the most exciting thing about this whole process. Because I know that we’ll see the work he does.
R: That’s the only thing that excites me about a lot of people knowing what we do, which is the possibility to do things like this.
Did you know Partners in Health before? Was your family involved in anything down there?
R: No.
W: Your dad saw Paul Farmer speak.
R: Yeah, but that’s it.
Are you going to go there at any point?
W: Definitely.
R: We have to. I want to. I’ve never been.
You’ve also done stuff for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti [all proceeds from the six shows in April 2005 in Montreal and Toronto] , Katrina relief [the Fashion Cares iTunes EP with David Bowie] and the Project Red campaign [licensing “Rebellion” for use in the commercial]. Are there others?
W: We’re going to do some Montreal stuff. The secret show on Saturday is for Mission Mile End.
R: I want to do stuff with Dans La Rue, but we haven’t organized it yet.
-end-
Naturally, that didn't work out, but we did break for lunch at a nearby food court, where we walked through the Neon Bible track list to discuss lyrics as well as socio-political concerns, maintaining control of their career, the charities they're working with, encountering celebrity (both their own and others), and how the internet shaped with their quick ascendance. You know, the usual--along with some discussion of comparative religion.
Portions of this appeared in this AOL article.
Arcade Fire
Win & Regine
January 18, 2007
Locale: eating tikka chicken wraps in the Faubourg Food Court on Ste-Catherine
I thought today we could walk through the record a bit and talk about specific songs. Where did the image of “Black Mirror” come from?
W: I don’t know if I want to go too in depth. It’s an image of how so much of culture is how people want to see themselves in other things. A lot of TV and music is made to reflect how people are so that people relate to it. It was an image of something that’s the opposite of this reflection of yourself, an absence of the self. Wanting to see something that’s entirely not yourself. [long pause]
Is “Keep the Car Running” an older song? It sounds familiar.
W: We did play it after Funeral, though it wasn’t ever really a song.
R: I don’t think we ever played it outside of rehearsal.
Lyrically, this is one of the more oblique songs for me.
W: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had these recurring dreams of people coming to get me all the time. It’s a familiar emotion from my dreams, and then having that resonate in the real world is a strange feeling.
Were you a paranoid kid?
W: No, not at all, really. I just have these dreams where someone’s coming, I don’t know who it is, and I have to get away.
Do you still have that dream?
W: Yup.
Who’s coming to get you now?
W: I never quite know. It’s always someone who doesn’t have good intentions. There’s a lot of stuff here about names and naming things, but I’m not sure what it is.
We talked about “Neon Bible” last night, and since then it struck me that whenever I think of neon I think of the service industry: a cheap motel, fast food restaurants. The phrase “neon bible” then implies someone treating religion as a commodity, something consumerist.
W: There’s definitely an aspect of religion always combining with culture and becoming a third thing. Where it gets weird is when people mistake the culture for religion, and vice versa. These deeply held beliefs that are partially cultural artifacts. The idea that every line in the Bible is supposed to apply to some real thing in your life and you have to find some way to make it all apply.
As much of it is story as it is parable.
W: For me, it’s hard to relate to so many different stories. There’s a lot to chew on in the Bible, and [it’s impossible] to think of it as one coherent whole that’s telling you one specific thing, like it’s some kind of manual on how to live. I don’t see how you can read that and get that out of it. There is some advice in there, but that’s not the overall sense I get. It’s way more varied than that.
You studied interpretive religious texts in school, didn’t you?
W: Yep.
I’m thinking of how integral it is in Jewish culture to debate the Torah all the time, that’s what Talmudic scholars do every day. Nothing’s set in stone, it’s all up for debate. Whereas for so much of fundamentalist Christianity, the Bible is untouchable.
W: Even in the different Jewish denominations, the spirit of the Talmudic texts was about interpretations, and then it becomes: ‘These are the interpretations.’ Know what I mean? Then the weird interpretations all get set in stone and that’s what it is.
That’s like people who transcribe John Coltrane solos. Let’s talk about “Intervention.” This is one of the many songs here talking about fear.
W: I thought a lot about how in the Bible it talks about the fear of God as an idea, and what that means exactly. “Black Wave” is similar to this. There are certain kinds of fear that make you want to change, and kinds of fear that make you want to stay the same and protect yourself.
For me, the fear of God is the type of fear where you’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s a giant black wave underneath you, it’s something you can’t see and it’s natural to have a certain amount of fear that’s about your relationship to a world that you don’t understand and trying to find your place in it.
Then there’s the kind of fear that makes you into a fortress, saying, “I am right.” Your fear then is some sort of protective thing. It can be used as a justification, or a way to not change. In the same way, many people read the Bible and take from it exactly what they want to believe. I think everyone’s like that. They want to take from the world where they already are. ‘Oh, the world supports the way I already am. That’s convenient.’
That brings us back to “Black Mirror.” When I think of so much media in the States, you have Fox News catering to one side, and Air America caters—or catered, I suppose—to the other. Have you ever looked at the satellite radio channels? One provider explicitly bills two of their channels as “all-talk right wing radio” and “all-talk left wing radio.”
W: I really think that’s the way stuff is headed. People want to be able to choose things that reflect exactly the way they are. To me, that’s where the culture starts to get weird.
R: You don’t need to think anymore.
W: It’s like a fake diversity, where people don’t have to come into contact with anything that’s fundamentally different from the way they think. It’s almost like you’re shocked when people feel differently about something. You’re outraged that someone can have fundamental beliefs that are different than yours. It’s sad. People talk so much about, ‘Oh, we all have so much in common. Why can’t we all get along?’ Well, if we had so much in common, then we WOULD get along. Not everything is the same. People do believe different things. Islam and Christianity are different. That’s why they’re in conflict so much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
On the right wing, it’s all about “it’s different, so it’s evil.” And the left wing is all about “it’s all the same thing.” I think they’re both bullshit. No, shit’s fucking different, that’s why people are killing each other over this shit, because it’s actually different. It’s a superficial idea of understanding that doesn’t have anything to do with real life. If your parents get killed in a bombing, it takes a lot more than “Come on, we all share the same ideas” for people to actually forgive each other, for there actually to be understanding. The idea of forgiving someone who’s done something evil to you is a really terrifying idea. That’s why both sides ring hollow to me.
We’ll talk about forgiveness a bit more in a second. Were “Black Wave” and “Bad Vibrations” always meant to be one song, or two separate ones?
R: They were always together.
W: The first part is an escapist pop song, and the second part is “Woah, it’s coming for you!”
R: The first half is: “I can run away and it will be fine. You can make it if you try!”
W: There’s this Bruce Springsteen thing on Funeral that’s kind of like, [sings] “We’re gonna run away and we’re gonna make it, baby!” This time, it’s like, “You can run, but you can’t hide. It’s still gonna be there.” [laughs]
Keep the car running, because they’re coming for you. What about the line “eating in the ghetto on a hundred dollar plate”—where did that come from?
W: The Brazil thing we were talking about last night.
R: They both relate to Brazil.
W: Not directly, but the feeling.
“Ocean of Noise”? [long pause]
W: I’m really proud of that one. It was hard for us to play that soft and slow and to get the feel of it. I’m really happy with how it turned out. Lyrically, it’s a feeling I wanted to get off my chest.
[long pause] “The Well and the Lighthouse” is based on a fable by Fontaine, called “The Fox and the Wolf.” The basic plot is a fox who is really hungry and sees a piece of cheese at the bottom of a well, so he lowers himself down to get it. But it’s just a reflection of the moon. He thinks he’s going to die down there, but he hears a wolf coming. So he calls out, ‘Hey, Mr. Wolf, there’s this delicious cheese down here, do you want to come and get it?’ As the wolf is lowering himself down, he lets the fox get up. Basically, you always fall for what you desire. Fontaine always tells a story and then has a moral at the end, which is: don’t laugh at the wolf, because everyone is willing to believe what they desire or what they fear. Those two things make people blind. [Vocally in the duet,] Regine is the fox and I’m the wolf.
What is the image of the lighthouse, and how does that tie in?
R: If you draw a well, and you draw a lighthouse, they’re the complete opposite in every possible aspect. Darkness, light, everything.
The next song here [“Antichrist Television Blues”] is the epic.
W: My ribs hurt after singing this song. This song is the same idea we were talking about before. The creepiest lyric here encapsulates the whole thing: “wanna hold a mirror up to the world so they can see themselves inside my little girl.” It’s this idea of trying to make cultural art that reflects exactly the way people are, but it expresses the pornography of that idea at the same time. There are always these 45-year old men behind the whole thing, writing the lyrics and everything. It’s a sexual fantasy which is a normal part of the culture. That’s fine, I’m not a prude about it. It’s just depressing to hear girls talking as if they’re making their own choices when it’s so obvious that they’re not, when they’re slaves in a certain sense. The idea that they’re selling is not helping any girls out, that’s for sure.
You’ve talked about culture only reflecting what people are, which is fine to some degree, but personally I’ve always wanted culture to also be something that we aspire to, something that is more than what we are. The second you stand up and try and do something different or grandiose, the worst slur someone can throw at you is that you’re pretentious, and that’s somehow a negative thing. As opposed to supposedly acting like people in the street, who in fact are merely imitating those that purport to be reflecting people in the street. It’s a strange circle.
W: It’s cliché, but we really do live in a time that is very different from when we were kids, in terms of the amount of information that people distill. There’s even a generational gap between [younger brother] Will [Butler] and kids who are five years younger than him. This google generation or whatever, seeing the direct impact on the way people process information, it’s amazing.
Better? Worse? Both?
W: I don’t know. I think about my grandpa, who died when he was 96. Which means he was born in 1908, and was in New York when they were building the Empire State Building. He then drove out to California with plagues going across the desert and there was no highway. I’m acutely aware of living through a somewhat similar thing when I’ll tell someone, “Yeah, we were around before the internet.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?!”
We were talking last night about how people might respond to “Windowsill.” Have you given it any more thought?
W: I feel like this is a weird generation, where people think, “Oh, no, not another thing about war. Oh, c’mon.” I’m sure there will be a bit of: “Oh, c’mon already, haven’t we already talked about this?”
But we haven’t really. All things considered, there really hasn’t been that much music that addresses the past five years.
W: I feel the same way a bit when the Neil Young thing comes out, and it’s like, c’mon.
I felt like saying, “Thanks for finally showing up, Grandpa!”
W: All you can do is say what you feel inspired to say.
Is a song like this hard to write, considering how loaded it could be?
W: It was pretty to easy to write. It kind of wrote itself. It says exactly what I wanted it to say, so it doesn’t feel like a put-on. Take it or leave it. I feel like it’s talking about something in a way that isn’t just criticism. It’s not the same as Green Day’s “American Idiot” thing. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t feel that way.
Who was responsible for the commercial? [posted on YouTube in January]
W: All of us, basically. It’s Will’s voice, my body and Richard [Reed Parry]’s face. Richard did the editing. He had never used iMovie before; he learned that night.
R: I held the curtain. It was really spontaneous.
W: We used the built-in camera on the laptop, and a pair of headphones for the audio.
R: We had Jeremy [Gara] make a little soundtrack of samples from the album.
W: We knew we were going to put that up with the tracklisting. Then we realised it reminded us of those TV commercials for greatest hits records.
R: Then we realised, “Hey, doesn’t this laptop have a camera on it?”
When did you realise that Arcade Fire was becoming shorthand for a genre or a type of band?
W: I haven’t noticed that.
R: No.
W: What kind of band is that? Kind of theatrical?
Not really. Usually lots of group singing, usually a large band.
W: Uh-huh.
Of varying quality. Sometimes it’s just a cheap descriptor, other times I can see a similarity but the band has their own interesting things going on. Other times it sounds like a bunch of macho guys who heard Funeral and decided to reinterpret it their own way.
W: Thankfully I’ve been shielded from anything that’s been influenced by us.
When you went on the road, you didn’t have a manager, and that first six months was very whirlwind. Were you holding out for something?
W: We didn’t really want a manager, because we felt they usually did more harm than good. But Scott [Rodger] and ourselves were kind of looking for each other, it turns out. We were curious who managed Bjork, because she seems to have done what she wants, whether it be stupid or not, and has managed to stay around and never really do the radio thing and still be able to do it. And he had heard our record and was coming to our show anyway. He came to France for a show, and ended up coming on the bus and sleeping on the bus. We just really hit it off.
R: Right away. Even without either of us working together, he was already starting to help us. It happened really naturally.
W: He’s really motivated by artistic stuff. It couldn’t work any other way.
I know you’ve always had very high standards about what you do, and not wanting to do things the same way other rock bands do them. In doing that, and in being quite stubborn about a lot of that, you’ve also attracted a lot of people to you that don’t want to play the regular game. Do you get accused of being difficult for putting your foot down? Because you were very self-contained for so long, too.
W: Probably we do, but I don’t hear about it. The thing that’s frustrating for us that probably comes across weird is in Montreal how we’ve always played smaller shows that people can’t actually get into. It’s not a hype thing. We just haven’t wanted to play bigger places as long as we can play a week’s worth of shows or whatever. Part of me feels bad because I really want people to be able to see us, and this summer we’ll probably do some big outdoor shows. But the idea of going into these shitty big clubs, it wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s a trade-off.
It’s a lot more work to find these smaller venues, however. My impression of the dates you’re doing in February is that they’re not traditional venues, many of them, or certainly not used to rock shows.
W: Everything is ten times the work for, like, half the return.
R: Everything! It would be so easy to say, “OK, jewel case, here’s the template, go for it.” But no, we have to use this colour and this and that.
W: I really wish we could let go of it more sometimes. But whatever. Vincent and Tracy are so great, and are even more detail-obsessive than we are. It’s a crazy combo. But it’s good, because you have to live with this shit for the rest of your life, so you might as well do it the best you fucking can. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s just landfill.
You had a lot of high profile endorsements from people I know you respected. Did they pass on any advice you took to heart?
W: It’s cool to see where people are later in their careers, and how they’ve done it. Not necessarily as a model. Very often you meet rock dudes who make rock music and they’re mentally retarded. So meeting people who have real lives and who are interesting…
R: And they’re connected to the world.
W: They’re not in la-la land. It’s good to see.
I know you were offered opening slots for everyone under the sun. Is U2 the only one you took?
W: Those were the only bigger shows we did.
R: Those were just in Montreal and Ottawa.
Why did you say yes to them, and not anyone else?
W: We thought it would be fun to play a couple of big hometown shows at the end.
R: We hadn’t played in Montreal that much, and we were about to stop. They were coming here, so it wasn’t like we had to leave to go somewhere else.
So you told them they had to come to you!
W: It was a fun opportunity. As weird as it is to play those big places, more people saw us that night than have ever seen play in Montreal, period. It was cool that people weren’t expecting to see us. It was a warm feeling, not a typical shitty opening slot where no one’s paying attention. Their stage set-up is pretty interesting: it’s very low, with no barriers.
R: Very close to the people.
W: Really well-designed. Not that I would want to do those kind of venues all the time, but it’s fun to do once in a while.
How would you describe your connection to Montreal audiences, seeing as how you haven’t played here much in the last three years? I’ve heard ridiculous scalper stories about the February shows. What do you want to do when you play your hometown?
W: It’s great to play at home. We had a period where one time would be great, one time would be weird. But the shows at the Corona were some of our best shows we’ve ever played, a really warm feeling. It didn’t feel like this petty Montreal thing. I love this city so much. I think it has so much to offer. It’s important for us to do stuff here, and we’re still trying to figure out how to do that.
How is your level of fame on the streets of Montreal?
R: It’s good. It’s perfect. I love it! Nobody recognizes us.
So much of what made this band successful was word of mouth and the live show, even before everyone started talking about it on the internet once the album came out. But since then, the internet has been both a boon and a bane to your career: on the one hand, it spread word even faster, on the other hand, it’s out of control when it comes to speculation and leaked tracks, etc.
W: It’s kind of a bummer to not be able to play more live without it being a big thing. There was a point when I was writing in my online journal quite a bit, until I realised that I was basically just writing for Pitchfork and NME. I might as well be doing that directly. There was a good six months that was frustrating, because it was coming across like I was trying to build up some hype for the album. I’d say, ‘We did this.’ And within minutes, those sites would be like, ‘They did this!’ Not that I’m perusing the internet all the time—I try not to think about it at all—but it bounces back at you.
I think our approach is definitely centered around the live show. I’m just excited to get these songs sounding good enough to play in front of people. I think that’s our strongest point. The rest takes care of itself. You can get away with being a shitty live band and still have people buy your records, but it’s much more inspiring to me to make the live thing really good and not to think about the radio too much.
“Intervention” was put up on iTunes with all proceeds going to Partners in Health. Why did you choose them?
W: The stuff we’re doing with them is really exciting. We’re going to do this thing where a dollar or a euro off of every concert ticket we sell this year will go directly to Partners in Health—the promoter can’t touch it, we can’t touch it, no one. I read this book by Paul Farmer, the guy who started this charity in Haiti, and felt really challenged by it. Here’s someone who’s devoted his life to this approach of giving people medicine and housing and food and how those are all inter-related. It’s all related to health. Having food and basic shelter is as important as anti-viral medication. Through Regine’s family, I feel really drawn to Haiti. From what I’ve seen, it seems the work he’s doing is really amazing. For me, the potential for raising money for them is the most exciting thing about this whole process. Because I know that we’ll see the work he does.
R: That’s the only thing that excites me about a lot of people knowing what we do, which is the possibility to do things like this.
Did you know Partners in Health before? Was your family involved in anything down there?
R: No.
W: Your dad saw Paul Farmer speak.
R: Yeah, but that’s it.
Are you going to go there at any point?
W: Definitely.
R: We have to. I want to. I’ve never been.
You’ve also done stuff for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti [all proceeds from the six shows in April 2005 in Montreal and Toronto] , Katrina relief [the Fashion Cares iTunes EP with David Bowie] and the Project Red campaign [licensing “Rebellion” for use in the commercial]. Are there others?
W: We’re going to do some Montreal stuff. The secret show on Saturday is for Mission Mile End.
R: I want to do stuff with Dans La Rue, but we haven’t organized it yet.
-end-
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