There's nothing like a winter deep-freeze to endear you to harsh, icy keyboards playing fractured 80s new wave songs with an orchestral bent, with a slightly goth-y emotive female voice over top. Weather effects my impressions of music to a large degree, and Katie Stelmanis does not make summer campfire music.
Her debut album Join Us came out recently on Blocks Recording Club, and it's far removed from either the work she does as part of the choir in Bruce Peninsula or that she did as one third of Galaxy, a short-lived post-riot-grrrl band she formed when she was still a teenager. She was born in the same year that Kate Bush unleashed her Hounds of Love and Depeche Mode hosted a Black Celebration, and her love of lo-fi keyboards and occasionally harsh textures recalls some of the wide-eyed, earnest innocence of that period--which, of course, was often coupled with grandiose pretensions that haven't held up well.
It's easy to understand how unsettling Stelmanis's music might be to many for a variety of reasons; her operatic vocals are divisive, and when they're put to use on an underdeveloped, repetitive song they come off as more of an affectation. But while she's still very young as a songwriter, tracks like "Broken," "Heavens," "You'll Fall" (which first appeared on Friends in Bellwoods) and the haunting "Steady" find her revelling in inverted arpeggios, distorted percussion and captivating vocals. The lyrics--well, even she's a bit baffled by those, as we see below.
Her Toronto CD release at the Silver Dollar on January 11 was a packed affair, marking the debut of her full live band--which hits the road in the next week with shows in Waterloo (January 27) and Guelph (January 31). Watch out for the Roy Orbison cover, which does not appear on Join Us, and the Carole King cover, which does. This interview was conducted for a piece in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record which will run this weekend.
Katie Stelmanis
January 13, 2008
Locale: Rustic Cosmo Café, Queen @ Dufferin
There are no lyrics included here. Why?
A lot of the time I don’t have real lyrics. On this record especially, a lot of the lyrics don’t make any sense. I didn’t want to commit to anything. I wanted people to interpret it themselves. When I was writing these sorts of songs, I didn’t really care about writing lyrics. I thought I wasn’t very good at it and that was okay; but now I’m working harder on it. This album is all older stuff, obviously. A song like “Steady” or “Harder Now” have lyrics that don’t make any sense at all. When I listen to them now, it’s sometimes frustrating.
Do you feel like that lyric in your new song, “I risk nothing?” Do you feel that in writing lyrics that don’t make sense that there’s less element of risk, or exposing yourself emotionally? Because the vocal delivery itself is very emotive.
That’s definitely a part of it. The way I do it now, I always record the vocal lines first and improvise that. And later on I’ll turn the words into sentences. But on most of these tracks I just kept the first take. Now I focus on fixing them.
Whenever I hear music like this where it sounds very emotive, I pay closer attention to the lyrics because I want to be drawn in even closer. And whenever I’m unable to do that, it’s not that different from listening to non-English-speaking music, where you’re forced to accept the music purely for what it is, latch on to the emotion in the music.
That’s what it is for me. Because I never listen to lyrics, and I don’t know any to any songs. When people started commenting on the fact that I don’t have lyrics, it surprised me that anyone would care. I have a strong background in opera; I listened to it all through high school. And I never knew what it meant.
I never saw Galaxy, but in everything I’ve read about them all the discussion centres around identity politics. Did you write lyrics in that band?
I wrote some lyrics, but mine didn’t make any sense. But the other singer in that band is a really political feminist and was into all that, and we all went along with it. I mean, I’m a feminist too, but it’s not the focus of my music per se—where it really was for her. So she would make a point of raising those issues in all our interviews. Which is fine; I’m proud to have been part of a group that did that.
People come to that kind of music with all kinds of preconceptions, on both side: either they’re attracted to it before they even hear the music, or they’re put off before they even hear the music.
That wasn’t a purpose that music was meant to serve for me, having a message about how you should live your life. The words on this album are supposed to be about a moment, a feeling.
What artists are you drawn to where you get that same thing from, where it’s more about delivery and sound rather than particular words?
All the artists I could mention are just the bigwigs of music: Bjork and Radiohead. That’s what I listened to all through high school. But Nina Simone is also a big one, as is Queen. Otherwise, I don’t listen to that much music now. I did in my late teens, but I haven’t bought a CD in a long time.
With the operatic background, I’m wondering if Diamanda Galas was an influence too, as someone with a very technical background who is very conscious about how she uses and abuses her vocals, how she flirts and fucks with it.
She’s amazing. I hadn’t heard of her until Blocks [Recording Club] wrote a one-sheet about me that mentioned her—and other people they were comparing me too that I hadn’t heard of. But when I heard her stuff, I was totally blown away and was totally flattered.
Was Galaxy your first band?
Yes, in 2004.
And both of them are in your current band?
No, just the drummer, Maya. The other guitarist in that band, Emma McKenna, opened the [CD release] show with her solo stuff.
With a band like that, are you all better off once you break up?
I think so. We all started really young. We were teenagers. It was good for us to learn how to be a band. We didn’t really figure that out until after we broke up. The ensemble that we had was only capable of going so far in making the kind of music we wanted to make. After a while, I personally got bored of it. There’s only so much you can do with two guitars and a drum kit. We were all less eager to play the same shows over and over and get bored.
What direction did Emma go in?
She plays electric guitar and sings, and it’s more singer/songwriter-y—though not folkie. It’s more like old Cat Power and early PJ Harvey. It’s amazing, and I’m a huge fan. They’re way better songs than Galaxy ever had! Galaxy songs were too all over the place. We just wanted to be good guitar players, so there were a million riffs thrown in there that didn’t make any sense.
Obviously piano is in your background.
Yes.
What struck me live was the texture of the keyboards, which was very abrasive. The tonality was really piercing—not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Why are you drawn to those?
Obviously the sound at the Silver Dollar isn’t the best thing, so it might have been particularly piercing. But I’m always drawn to things that aren’t very pretty. I like to keep people at the edge of their seats. Part of the reason for that is that it’s so easy for me to do the pretty thing: a pretty voice! A pretty piano! I’ve been singing classical music for years, so that’s old for me. I’m also a big fan of loud rock music, so when I first started playing with my MIDI samples, I’d throw distortion on everything. And I still do. When I distort it, it sounds better than a regular MIDI violin would, it sounds more full.
I imagine part of the reason you’re working with these sounds are related to personnel and finances; I’m guessing you made this by yourself and added members later.
Yes.
If you had full financial resource, would you orchestrate the music the same way?
It’s difficult to say. I definitely am partial to the “not real” sounds. But I could invest in better samples. I’d be interested in toying with the idea of how strings would sound, but the idea of bringing in a bassoon player and a French horn player is a huge thing. I have a bit of leeway in that I can make things sound real and passionate just with my singing voice. I have a well-trained voice so I know how to work that, and I don’t have to have real instruments to make it sound moving. I don’t like the way I sound in front of a real string quartet. It’s too easy for me.
The voice isn’t treated with many effects…
No, it’s pretty straight up.
And so the human warmth is very much there, creating a contrast with the icy background.
That’s why I was drawn to the distorted stuff. I never want to be a pretty voice on top of pretty instruments.
You sang in choirs before, but did you write vocal pieces before? Because there are some really interesting vocal arrangements here.
I didn’t start writing songs until I was 18, and that was just guitar stuff. When I got my computer I realized I could layer voices. But being in choirs puts that into your head naturally. It’s easy for me to orchestrate stuff, because I’m used to hearing where all the voices go. I also played viola for ten years, and played in orchestras and string ensembles, and so that helps too.
I’m curious about the contrast between your own music and your role in Bruce Peninsula, because on some level they seem like polar opposites. One is very personal and lots of synthesized sounds, and the other is very communal and more hands-in-the-earth. Is that what you enjoy about it?
Bruce Peninsula is really fun, and I love hanging out with everyone and belting it out on stage. We’ve had lots of great shows. I don’t have much creative input in that band. I just show up and sing. Most of the singers are like that, except Misha, who does some songwriting as well. My own stuff will always be a priority, obviously. And Bruce Peninsula is also different because there are so many people that touring just seems impossible. Thinking about it just blows our minds.
When I interviewed them back in August, they were saying that the band formed and grew, but now they were realizing that with all the talent in the band they were trying to figure out a way to better use everyone’s talents—they mentioned your keyboard skills specifically. Do you think that would work with everyone’s time commitments, or is the current division of labour ideal for that band?
Personally, I like that. With my backup band, I have all the parts either recorded or written out for them, they learn it on their own, and we get together and play. All my players are replaceable—though I don’t want to replace them, because I can’t imagine who else I would get. But I can tour under any circumstances. Whereas with Bruce Peninsula, you can’t assume everyone wants to drive for six days out to BC, play a few gigs and spend $300 in gas. It’s not something everybody wants to do. Instead of making it bigger, I think Bruce Peninsula should focus on making it feasible, making it something they can do. They have big ideas and big ambitions—which is awesome—but they have to think about how they can do that.
Last Friday was the first time I’d seen you perform your solo material. How do you approach it differently when it is just you and backing tracks? Is it more daunting or do you embrace it and run with it?
Having a band is a forward progression for me. I started off with the backing tracks, and then I started playing with Maya from Galaxy, doing glock stuff. Then I brought in Carmen Elle, who started doing electronic stuff. Then I realized that if I had another keyboard player, I’d be able to cover all the bases. That was the first show we’d all played together. It was terrifying, because I didn’t realize there would be such a big turnout.
Who is the other keyboard player?
Allie Hughes. She is into musical theatre, so she has a powerful singing voice. She teaches two days a week, and otherwise she’s totally committed to music—making her the ideal band member. It’s awesome. I’m very lucky to have her.
I was really struck by Maya’s drumming—even just the fact that she stands up, which I wish more drummers would do. I don’t know what she was like in Galaxy, but her orchestral background is very apparent in the way she approaches your material.
In Galaxy she played drum kit, which she loved doing. She also plays with Emm Gryner and toured with The Organ for a summer. I think my band is a nice combination between the two for her, and she’s challenged by it because she has to do so many things at once. She just got this new thing called a xylo-synth. It’s a digital marimba, with real wooden keys that are very sensitive, but you can program any sound into it. That will be great with the band, and being able to replicate the sounds from the CD. We were going to use it for the show, but we weren’t going to have it ready.
The Carole King cover here—“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman”—I’m assuming you learned that for the tribute to Tapestry at the Tranzac sometime last year?
Yep.
While the melody is faithful, your version doesn’t seem to have any of the same chords as the original. Is it remotely close?
Remotely, yeah. Carole King’s rendition of it is so classically 60s and 70s, the chords are all diminished and dominant sevenths. There aren’t any straight-up major or minor chords. I stripped everything down to the bare bones and made everything a bit more minor-y.
Considerably more minor-y, I’d say.
Yeah, basically.
Why that song? What appeals to you about that song? How important is Tapestry to you?
Tapestry is an album I’ve always listened to ever since I was in high school. I was never a die-hard fan of it, because I’m not really into that style of piano. My main draw to Carole King was her lyrics—which is weird for me to say. As a singer, they are the most fun songs in the world to sing. They’re so rewarding, everything about them. They’re so dramatic, and there’s so much you can do with it. I’ve been singing “Natural Woman” for so long, and when I heard about the tribute night, I claimed that song immediately.
The album is called Join Us. Join who?
I don’t know! I came up with that album title the day before it was printed. I like it because it’s funny that it’s just me by myself. And it just sounds nice, trying to draw people into it.
It will probably look great on posters, too. “Tonight, Katie Stelmanis…”
“Join us!”
-end-
Showing posts with label Blocks Recording Club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blocks Recording Club. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
The Blankket
Steve Kado is no stranger to this site, for his outspoken Torontopian theories as well as his role as midwife for Final Fantasy's surprise success.
The founder of the Blocks Recording Club--more about that next week--just put out his second solo EP as The Blankket, his covers project (get it?) which in this case focuses entirely on Bruce Springsteen. Suitably, it's titled Be Your Own Boss. I've been a fan of this idea ever since I first saw him perform it at the Brave New Waves anniversary show in March 2004, though why it's taken him three years to finish four songs is a minor mystery to me. The result, both live and on disc, has baffled both of Toronto's weeklies: here and here.
Springsteen is such a huge and complicated figure to tackle, and of all the recent acts garnering Springsteen comparisons, I think that only Arcade Fire really nail it with "(Antichrist Television Blues)," where Win Butler turns the working class escapist fantasy and gives it an evil twist: there, economic liberation and salvation are directly linked to sexual exploitation and messianic religious fervour.
Kado tackles four Springsteen songs: "Dancing in the Dark" is the sad, self-loathing lament that the lyrics always intended it to be; "Badlands" becomes a jaunty, earnest K Records love song; "Thunder Road" is, well a bit of a shambles; and "I'm on Fire" is a desolate, pulsing drone driven by howling, distorted vocals that appear as if Kado is taking the self-immolating lyrics quite literally... that edgy and dull knife sounds like it's ripping through his skull Pan's Labyrinth-style.
As you can see below, Kado takes this all deadly seriously, as he well should. But for all the talk, Be Your Own Boss is somewhat slight--there's so much more that could be done here. Plus, since I first saw Kado do "Dancing in the Dark" four years ago, both Chad VanGaalen and Ted Leo have also discovered that song's inherent darkness in their live sets.
This interview was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece about Blocks, that should be airing shortly, though none of this material is featured there. Some of it will run in the May 10 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, in advance of The Blankket's house show at 130 King St. N on May 18. The Blankket is also performing this weekend in Toronto at the Over the Top festival, Friday May 4 at Sneaky Dee's with Flosstradamus and Yah Mos Def.
If this post leaves you wanting to hear more of Kado's theories, there's a 2006 Wavelength interview here.
Considering my own passion for the subject of Springsteen, I feel like this conversation could have gone on for hours. Luckily, because I was there primarily to get soundbites about Blocks, it didn't. For the sake of my minidisc batteries, I tried to stay out of the cultural theory rants as much as I could--always difficult with Mr. Kado.
Steve Kado
January 31, 2007
locale: Blocks Recording Club office above the Tranzac
In a nutshell, what appeals to you about Springsteen songs?
There’s a sentimental attachment. It’s some of the first music I ever heard in my life. I do actually just like it, in a pretty uncomplicated way. There’s a lot in there that you can access, a lot about it that’s pretty interesting. They’re amazing songs, and they aren’t done the way other songs are done.
Comparing Bruce Springsteen to Neil Diamond, for example, I just like Neil Diamond too—I really enjoy his music, especially his American response to Beatlemania. He occupies an interesting place when everyone really got into British pop music, he did this weird kind of American pop music that wasn’t Beach Boys-y, it was Northeastern as opposed to Californian in orientation, and it co-exists at the same time as the Beatles. It’s very well done, very exciting to listen to. But if you were going to cover Neil Diamond, you don’t have too many angles available to you. You have sincerity or critical sarcasm, and those are the two poses I could see to cover something like “I’m a Believer.” Either you are a believer, or you think it’s stupid that anyone would be a believer. That’s not terribly interesting to me as material to cover. As much as I like it.
“Stepping Stone” has been done a number of times, mostly by punk bands.
But there’s only one angle there: it’s nasty! “You’re a terrible woman.” That’s the point. “You use people.” It’s a great song, but it only has one application. You can be sincere about it; you can’t really be insincere about it. Minor Threat were sincere about it.
With Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have this either/or about being sincere or non-sincere. You have a bunch of emotional categories that you either do or don’t identify with, but at the same time, the songs I especially don’t identify with are these tropes about the automotive and the way freedom is purchased in many of the songs.
Because there are different narrative layers in Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t think that’s necessarily authorial voice per se so much as it’s him creating these situations, or analyzing the existence of these situations and presenting them for you to consider. Is that just another thing that’s tragic about this situation? That any kind of success or escape is going to have to be mediated by capital? Which ultimately will produce the same effects it creates at the beginning? Inevitably, capital is the crux of the majority of the drama in these songs.
If it’s an interpersonal drama, it’s still a drama that exists because people are in situations that are desperate, and their relationships are created along these lines that are economically predetermined.
“You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.”
Yeah, and “Used Cars.” There are all these songs where the economic has a deep personal meaning, and it’s not just something so simple as, ‘I want money, lots of money.’ That’s been done anyway. The Flying Lizards, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, might even be my second-favourite band of all time, because I think David Cunningham is a genius. The Flying Lizards did an amazing cover of “Money,” but the song itself isn’t the winner with that, it’s the context it’s placed in. It’s on a record where the first song is a Bertolt Brecht cover. All the other things that go on in that Flying Lizards record frame this cover of “Money” that then gives it this whole metacritical…
But most people, including myself, only know that single.
True. It’s a shame. The single is still critical, but the larger critical angle is really subtle, nuanced and interesting. On the single itself, it’s very ‘ha-ha, get it?’ But that joke is the centerpieces of a larger thing. It’s like saying you know what Sartre is about but you only have the ‘hell is other people’ quote hanging around. It’s the good one-liner, but it’s not the (snaps fingers).
I think Bruce Springsteen is really an exemplary songwriter in terms of both personal drama—feeling emotional—but also how he’s framing people’s relationships to capital and the culture industry in his songs. There’s so much in there for people to do. All the Springsteen covers—there’s room to be bad, too, obviously—but there’s so much room to succeed.
He’s writing them for himself to sing, of course, but if you choose to sing them he throws you so many bones, makes a lot of things easy for you, and fun to do. There’s an opportunity for you to sing the song this way, which is completely a part of the way the song is, that will make this feeling happen. Then just by going up by one note, you can make it do this. Those opportunities are all there.
You can see him using them to great effect, when you separate him the writer from him the performer. He takes all these avenues himself, and I can take those avenues too and not have them come out the same way.
To me, so much of his performance is tied into having such an amazing band. Though conversely, no matter how well orchestrated, the songs are just as successful when stripped down to one person. They portray a different aspect of the grand drama in those songs.
I think it’s there to be done. Part of what’s in the songs is that it is able to be done by one person. Ensemble playing, especially on records like Born to Run—or even the first three albums, with songs like “Rosalita”—those songs offer some of the most amazing ensemble playing of the 70s on them. That is one of the things that’s attractive about Bruce Springsteen, is hearing his band slay. At the same time, it’s not what is THE attractive thing about Bruce Springsteen. If you were just in it to hear sax solos, you could be looking elsewhere.
It’s what he brings to them that makes them such an issue. You can tell by how poorly they’ve all fared as solo artists. It’s the material that really stands out above everything else, and the fact that he’s such an able interpreter of his own material makes it all the more amazing, all the more charismatic and exciting. But they are two separate issues.
Why do people not want to believe you’re being sincere?
A lot of people don’t want to believe certain things about Bruce Springsteen. And maybe they have certain ideas about what sort of things I’m interested in or what kind of person I am. They can tell based on how I look and what my concerns are or how I’m dressed, what kind of company I’m keeping and what context these things are happening in. I’m not a steelworker. I’m not some guy from Jersey. They assume that what’s in Springsteen is limited to Bob Seger terrain, but he was better looking and therefore more appealing and that’s why there’s more fuss about Springsteen.
People have certain stereotypes [about me], which are largely correct. ‘Here’s someone who is university educated, has enjoyed a fair amount of privilege in his life, has bizarre academic concerns as opposed to thrillingly visceral Americana Detroit car concerns. What’s this guy doing with this material? He’s obviously mocking it.’
The people who doubt my sincerity are the people who really don’t get it, or the people who are examining what it looks like the project is, rather than how it works. I was on tour recently in the American Midwest and Northeast, and in lots of these places—like in Detroit—the behaviour of capital has been brutal. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is what’s made Detroit a synonym for ‘terrifying.’ The people there all felt that it was really straightforward. They didn’t feel I was being weird with the Boss. In Detroit specifically, I got a great deal of positive feedback. In other places like Pittsburgh, an old steeltown, in places that are directly a part of these songs, as opposed to Toronto, which never figures at all into Springsteen type stuff. In places that are either like or actually are protagonists in some of these songs, people got it, I think. It was heartening, because I do feel so sincerely about it. I do really care so much about the songs.
Is the Blankket ever going to be more than this?
The Blankket was never meant to just be a covers thing. The covers were easiest. A really good way of figuring stuff out and how you want to do music, is to do a bunch of stuff that already exists. I have an original record that is mostly about Theodore Adorno, that I want to finish by this summer because I plan on touring in Europe. I have to attack that task. I might do another Springsteen record, actually, with only songs from Tunnel of Love. It would be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Brilliant Disguise” obviously, and “When You’re Alone.” I got into Tunnel of Love near the end of me finishing this project, and it would have really changed the whole thing had I still been working on it consistently. Maybe it will be a whole separate thing.
It says so much that when that record came out, he had just got married, and the celebrity press spun it as, “Oh, Tunnel of Love! He’s just written this romantic record about his wife! And here’s the first single, ‘Brilliant Disguise!’”
It’s terrifying, eh? He’s so dark on that record. It’s a divorce record to his wife, and if it weren’t for some of those more questionable 80s production choices, it would totally be Nebraska 2. And even better in a way, because it’s so much more personal and the terror is so much more real on lots of those songs. “Brilliant Disguise” is just a horrible patch of sentiment, it’s a terrible realm of doubt to even consider if you’re seeing anyone. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to think about at all. The whole record is like that, except “All That Heaven Will Allow” is a weirdly optimistic song, but the bookends on either side of it, lyrically, are about utter failure.
Can you describe the current state of the Blankket live show?
Ok, well, I cover my head with Vaseline and stick my head in a bag of rice and do mostly Bruce Springsteen songs in my set. That will probably change soon. I just finished a tour where I got really into the rice, but I also feel like I’ve pursued that direction. I want to do interesting performing stuff in general, and regularize it for touring purposes. It’s an interesting process, especially because it’s the kind of thing people do all the time: they rehearse to get things tight before a tour, and I feel like I have other needs. At some point I discovered shop towels and thought, ‘These solve so many of my problems!’ I just transpose what would be normal musician tasks into this surreal Vaseline world.
[Blankket shows in 2006 consisted of Kado inviting the audience to bring radios, which would transmit his backing tacks via an MP3 player, somewhat similar to the Flaming Lips’ earlier experiments with radio performance. Most of the shows were held in unconventional places, like the side of a highway in Brantford.] Are you still working with radios?
I’m not still working with radios because I feel it demanded too much of the audience. I wanted to have this relationship with the audience, but either it wasn’t honestly meaningful for the audience to be backing me, which is fair—they’re making a choice, and there’s more of them. I understand what that means. If it becomes meaningful to them, I’d consider doing it again, because I am very interested in working with that technology. There are some aspects of that, that I left unexplored, which I would explore if radio adoption was high. If people were really stoked, I could have done stuff that would be really, really interesting.
Were you using an iPod transmitter for backing tracks for those shows?
I was using an MP3 player that had two stereo outputs, so basically four channels out of it that I could send, and I was at one point broadcasting two parallel signals from car radio transmitters. They weren’t iPod transmitters, because those are expensive and work in a way that’s no fun to play with. These were very simple, purchased-in-Chinatown things that plug into your lighter in your car. I modified those to take batteries and bought a bunch of kits, radio hobby kits, that have little printed circuit boards, and I built a bunch of those. The radio transmitter thing was a hassle in a lot of respects. I’m not the best electronics guy. My sautering was not the finest. I was doing a house show at Kevin Parnell’s house, and I had to fix the transmitter when I got there. I showed up, plugged in the sautering iron, sautered it, and it sort of worked the whole time. The only person who really liked it was Sandro Perri, who thought it was amazing.
If it’s not working, there’s no shame in moving along. I can’t actually say: “None of you can come in without radios,” when I’m playing shows outside anyway. Part of the goal of playing with radios was that I didn’t want to play in bars; I wanted the freedom to explore areas with people and do fun things in interesting places with a group of people. I can’t really say, “It’s $2 cheaper if you bring a radio,” because I’m not taking money in for it anyway.
And people might spend $10 in batteries to bring their radio.
Potentially, yeah. If I said there was a cover charge for this event, people would decide whether or not they wanted to go, and if they go they’d pay me five bucks. Whereas, they could buy a radio instead, keep the radio afterwards, and see the show. One of the things that interesting to me, but harder for other people, is that radio is a vanishing technology. It’s in a strange liminal space where there’s this interesting technique of wireless broadcasting we’ve developed that we’re all moving away from, but for no reason—because it works! It does the trick!
It’s the original wi-fi!
It’s going to have to come back around to that anyway. But there was this shift to memory-based stuff, where you make all your choices in advance, and then nothing surprising happens, unless you planned to have a surprise somewhere along the line. It’s interesting. What’s going to be really cool about radio is that at some point the radio will be so depreciated, that it can become extremely local again. The CRTC will back off on regulating it because it will just be nothing to people.
At the same time, the technology is very easy to work with on a hobbyist level: you can build a radio quite easily, or radio transmission parts quite easily. I’m also interested to see what happens when peak oil makes it impossible to ship microcomponents around, or making the manufacturing of microcomponents difficult. The main ingredient in radio is coils, which are just wires that you coil and then it has different physical properties—which I find unbelievably weird, that the shape you put something in gives it a new physical property.
There’s so much that’s so amazing and mysterious about radio as a technology, that it’s so attractive to work of. It’s just whether I’m relying on the audience to work on it with me, or whether maybe at some point I just work with radios and present this crazy stuff to an audience, and say: ‘Come into my radio room, and look at all this stuff that’s happening without wires!’
-end-
note: Radio art enthusiasts near Toronto should know about the Deep Wireless festival, which kicks off this week and runs the entire month of May.
The founder of the Blocks Recording Club--more about that next week--just put out his second solo EP as The Blankket, his covers project (get it?) which in this case focuses entirely on Bruce Springsteen. Suitably, it's titled Be Your Own Boss. I've been a fan of this idea ever since I first saw him perform it at the Brave New Waves anniversary show in March 2004, though why it's taken him three years to finish four songs is a minor mystery to me. The result, both live and on disc, has baffled both of Toronto's weeklies: here and here.
Springsteen is such a huge and complicated figure to tackle, and of all the recent acts garnering Springsteen comparisons, I think that only Arcade Fire really nail it with "(Antichrist Television Blues)," where Win Butler turns the working class escapist fantasy and gives it an evil twist: there, economic liberation and salvation are directly linked to sexual exploitation and messianic religious fervour.
Kado tackles four Springsteen songs: "Dancing in the Dark" is the sad, self-loathing lament that the lyrics always intended it to be; "Badlands" becomes a jaunty, earnest K Records love song; "Thunder Road" is, well a bit of a shambles; and "I'm on Fire" is a desolate, pulsing drone driven by howling, distorted vocals that appear as if Kado is taking the self-immolating lyrics quite literally... that edgy and dull knife sounds like it's ripping through his skull Pan's Labyrinth-style.
As you can see below, Kado takes this all deadly seriously, as he well should. But for all the talk, Be Your Own Boss is somewhat slight--there's so much more that could be done here. Plus, since I first saw Kado do "Dancing in the Dark" four years ago, both Chad VanGaalen and Ted Leo have also discovered that song's inherent darkness in their live sets.
This interview was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece about Blocks, that should be airing shortly, though none of this material is featured there. Some of it will run in the May 10 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, in advance of The Blankket's house show at 130 King St. N on May 18. The Blankket is also performing this weekend in Toronto at the Over the Top festival, Friday May 4 at Sneaky Dee's with Flosstradamus and Yah Mos Def.
If this post leaves you wanting to hear more of Kado's theories, there's a 2006 Wavelength interview here.
Considering my own passion for the subject of Springsteen, I feel like this conversation could have gone on for hours. Luckily, because I was there primarily to get soundbites about Blocks, it didn't. For the sake of my minidisc batteries, I tried to stay out of the cultural theory rants as much as I could--always difficult with Mr. Kado.
Steve Kado
January 31, 2007
locale: Blocks Recording Club office above the Tranzac
In a nutshell, what appeals to you about Springsteen songs?
There’s a sentimental attachment. It’s some of the first music I ever heard in my life. I do actually just like it, in a pretty uncomplicated way. There’s a lot in there that you can access, a lot about it that’s pretty interesting. They’re amazing songs, and they aren’t done the way other songs are done.
Comparing Bruce Springsteen to Neil Diamond, for example, I just like Neil Diamond too—I really enjoy his music, especially his American response to Beatlemania. He occupies an interesting place when everyone really got into British pop music, he did this weird kind of American pop music that wasn’t Beach Boys-y, it was Northeastern as opposed to Californian in orientation, and it co-exists at the same time as the Beatles. It’s very well done, very exciting to listen to. But if you were going to cover Neil Diamond, you don’t have too many angles available to you. You have sincerity or critical sarcasm, and those are the two poses I could see to cover something like “I’m a Believer.” Either you are a believer, or you think it’s stupid that anyone would be a believer. That’s not terribly interesting to me as material to cover. As much as I like it.
“Stepping Stone” has been done a number of times, mostly by punk bands.
But there’s only one angle there: it’s nasty! “You’re a terrible woman.” That’s the point. “You use people.” It’s a great song, but it only has one application. You can be sincere about it; you can’t really be insincere about it. Minor Threat were sincere about it.
With Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have this either/or about being sincere or non-sincere. You have a bunch of emotional categories that you either do or don’t identify with, but at the same time, the songs I especially don’t identify with are these tropes about the automotive and the way freedom is purchased in many of the songs.
Because there are different narrative layers in Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t think that’s necessarily authorial voice per se so much as it’s him creating these situations, or analyzing the existence of these situations and presenting them for you to consider. Is that just another thing that’s tragic about this situation? That any kind of success or escape is going to have to be mediated by capital? Which ultimately will produce the same effects it creates at the beginning? Inevitably, capital is the crux of the majority of the drama in these songs.
If it’s an interpersonal drama, it’s still a drama that exists because people are in situations that are desperate, and their relationships are created along these lines that are economically predetermined.
“You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.”
Yeah, and “Used Cars.” There are all these songs where the economic has a deep personal meaning, and it’s not just something so simple as, ‘I want money, lots of money.’ That’s been done anyway. The Flying Lizards, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, might even be my second-favourite band of all time, because I think David Cunningham is a genius. The Flying Lizards did an amazing cover of “Money,” but the song itself isn’t the winner with that, it’s the context it’s placed in. It’s on a record where the first song is a Bertolt Brecht cover. All the other things that go on in that Flying Lizards record frame this cover of “Money” that then gives it this whole metacritical…
But most people, including myself, only know that single.
True. It’s a shame. The single is still critical, but the larger critical angle is really subtle, nuanced and interesting. On the single itself, it’s very ‘ha-ha, get it?’ But that joke is the centerpieces of a larger thing. It’s like saying you know what Sartre is about but you only have the ‘hell is other people’ quote hanging around. It’s the good one-liner, but it’s not the (snaps fingers).
I think Bruce Springsteen is really an exemplary songwriter in terms of both personal drama—feeling emotional—but also how he’s framing people’s relationships to capital and the culture industry in his songs. There’s so much in there for people to do. All the Springsteen covers—there’s room to be bad, too, obviously—but there’s so much room to succeed.
He’s writing them for himself to sing, of course, but if you choose to sing them he throws you so many bones, makes a lot of things easy for you, and fun to do. There’s an opportunity for you to sing the song this way, which is completely a part of the way the song is, that will make this feeling happen. Then just by going up by one note, you can make it do this. Those opportunities are all there.
You can see him using them to great effect, when you separate him the writer from him the performer. He takes all these avenues himself, and I can take those avenues too and not have them come out the same way.
To me, so much of his performance is tied into having such an amazing band. Though conversely, no matter how well orchestrated, the songs are just as successful when stripped down to one person. They portray a different aspect of the grand drama in those songs.
I think it’s there to be done. Part of what’s in the songs is that it is able to be done by one person. Ensemble playing, especially on records like Born to Run—or even the first three albums, with songs like “Rosalita”—those songs offer some of the most amazing ensemble playing of the 70s on them. That is one of the things that’s attractive about Bruce Springsteen, is hearing his band slay. At the same time, it’s not what is THE attractive thing about Bruce Springsteen. If you were just in it to hear sax solos, you could be looking elsewhere.
It’s what he brings to them that makes them such an issue. You can tell by how poorly they’ve all fared as solo artists. It’s the material that really stands out above everything else, and the fact that he’s such an able interpreter of his own material makes it all the more amazing, all the more charismatic and exciting. But they are two separate issues.
Why do people not want to believe you’re being sincere?
A lot of people don’t want to believe certain things about Bruce Springsteen. And maybe they have certain ideas about what sort of things I’m interested in or what kind of person I am. They can tell based on how I look and what my concerns are or how I’m dressed, what kind of company I’m keeping and what context these things are happening in. I’m not a steelworker. I’m not some guy from Jersey. They assume that what’s in Springsteen is limited to Bob Seger terrain, but he was better looking and therefore more appealing and that’s why there’s more fuss about Springsteen.
People have certain stereotypes [about me], which are largely correct. ‘Here’s someone who is university educated, has enjoyed a fair amount of privilege in his life, has bizarre academic concerns as opposed to thrillingly visceral Americana Detroit car concerns. What’s this guy doing with this material? He’s obviously mocking it.’
The people who doubt my sincerity are the people who really don’t get it, or the people who are examining what it looks like the project is, rather than how it works. I was on tour recently in the American Midwest and Northeast, and in lots of these places—like in Detroit—the behaviour of capital has been brutal. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is what’s made Detroit a synonym for ‘terrifying.’ The people there all felt that it was really straightforward. They didn’t feel I was being weird with the Boss. In Detroit specifically, I got a great deal of positive feedback. In other places like Pittsburgh, an old steeltown, in places that are directly a part of these songs, as opposed to Toronto, which never figures at all into Springsteen type stuff. In places that are either like or actually are protagonists in some of these songs, people got it, I think. It was heartening, because I do feel so sincerely about it. I do really care so much about the songs.
Is the Blankket ever going to be more than this?
The Blankket was never meant to just be a covers thing. The covers were easiest. A really good way of figuring stuff out and how you want to do music, is to do a bunch of stuff that already exists. I have an original record that is mostly about Theodore Adorno, that I want to finish by this summer because I plan on touring in Europe. I have to attack that task. I might do another Springsteen record, actually, with only songs from Tunnel of Love. It would be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Brilliant Disguise” obviously, and “When You’re Alone.” I got into Tunnel of Love near the end of me finishing this project, and it would have really changed the whole thing had I still been working on it consistently. Maybe it will be a whole separate thing.
It says so much that when that record came out, he had just got married, and the celebrity press spun it as, “Oh, Tunnel of Love! He’s just written this romantic record about his wife! And here’s the first single, ‘Brilliant Disguise!’”
It’s terrifying, eh? He’s so dark on that record. It’s a divorce record to his wife, and if it weren’t for some of those more questionable 80s production choices, it would totally be Nebraska 2. And even better in a way, because it’s so much more personal and the terror is so much more real on lots of those songs. “Brilliant Disguise” is just a horrible patch of sentiment, it’s a terrible realm of doubt to even consider if you’re seeing anyone. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to think about at all. The whole record is like that, except “All That Heaven Will Allow” is a weirdly optimistic song, but the bookends on either side of it, lyrically, are about utter failure.
Can you describe the current state of the Blankket live show?
Ok, well, I cover my head with Vaseline and stick my head in a bag of rice and do mostly Bruce Springsteen songs in my set. That will probably change soon. I just finished a tour where I got really into the rice, but I also feel like I’ve pursued that direction. I want to do interesting performing stuff in general, and regularize it for touring purposes. It’s an interesting process, especially because it’s the kind of thing people do all the time: they rehearse to get things tight before a tour, and I feel like I have other needs. At some point I discovered shop towels and thought, ‘These solve so many of my problems!’ I just transpose what would be normal musician tasks into this surreal Vaseline world.
[Blankket shows in 2006 consisted of Kado inviting the audience to bring radios, which would transmit his backing tacks via an MP3 player, somewhat similar to the Flaming Lips’ earlier experiments with radio performance. Most of the shows were held in unconventional places, like the side of a highway in Brantford.] Are you still working with radios?
I’m not still working with radios because I feel it demanded too much of the audience. I wanted to have this relationship with the audience, but either it wasn’t honestly meaningful for the audience to be backing me, which is fair—they’re making a choice, and there’s more of them. I understand what that means. If it becomes meaningful to them, I’d consider doing it again, because I am very interested in working with that technology. There are some aspects of that, that I left unexplored, which I would explore if radio adoption was high. If people were really stoked, I could have done stuff that would be really, really interesting.
Were you using an iPod transmitter for backing tracks for those shows?
I was using an MP3 player that had two stereo outputs, so basically four channels out of it that I could send, and I was at one point broadcasting two parallel signals from car radio transmitters. They weren’t iPod transmitters, because those are expensive and work in a way that’s no fun to play with. These were very simple, purchased-in-Chinatown things that plug into your lighter in your car. I modified those to take batteries and bought a bunch of kits, radio hobby kits, that have little printed circuit boards, and I built a bunch of those. The radio transmitter thing was a hassle in a lot of respects. I’m not the best electronics guy. My sautering was not the finest. I was doing a house show at Kevin Parnell’s house, and I had to fix the transmitter when I got there. I showed up, plugged in the sautering iron, sautered it, and it sort of worked the whole time. The only person who really liked it was Sandro Perri, who thought it was amazing.
If it’s not working, there’s no shame in moving along. I can’t actually say: “None of you can come in without radios,” when I’m playing shows outside anyway. Part of the goal of playing with radios was that I didn’t want to play in bars; I wanted the freedom to explore areas with people and do fun things in interesting places with a group of people. I can’t really say, “It’s $2 cheaper if you bring a radio,” because I’m not taking money in for it anyway.
And people might spend $10 in batteries to bring their radio.
Potentially, yeah. If I said there was a cover charge for this event, people would decide whether or not they wanted to go, and if they go they’d pay me five bucks. Whereas, they could buy a radio instead, keep the radio afterwards, and see the show. One of the things that interesting to me, but harder for other people, is that radio is a vanishing technology. It’s in a strange liminal space where there’s this interesting technique of wireless broadcasting we’ve developed that we’re all moving away from, but for no reason—because it works! It does the trick!
It’s the original wi-fi!
It’s going to have to come back around to that anyway. But there was this shift to memory-based stuff, where you make all your choices in advance, and then nothing surprising happens, unless you planned to have a surprise somewhere along the line. It’s interesting. What’s going to be really cool about radio is that at some point the radio will be so depreciated, that it can become extremely local again. The CRTC will back off on regulating it because it will just be nothing to people.
At the same time, the technology is very easy to work with on a hobbyist level: you can build a radio quite easily, or radio transmission parts quite easily. I’m also interested to see what happens when peak oil makes it impossible to ship microcomponents around, or making the manufacturing of microcomponents difficult. The main ingredient in radio is coils, which are just wires that you coil and then it has different physical properties—which I find unbelievably weird, that the shape you put something in gives it a new physical property.
There’s so much that’s so amazing and mysterious about radio as a technology, that it’s so attractive to work of. It’s just whether I’m relying on the audience to work on it with me, or whether maybe at some point I just work with radios and present this crazy stuff to an audience, and say: ‘Come into my radio room, and look at all this stuff that’s happening without wires!’
-end-
note: Radio art enthusiasts near Toronto should know about the Deep Wireless festival, which kicks off this week and runs the entire month of May.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Final Fantasy: McLean, Parry, Kado
Further reading today from the Final Fantasy article in the June, 2006 issue of Exclaim.
Three short interviews here: Stuart McLean, Richard Reed Parry and Steve Kado.
Stuart McLean is the man behind the Vinyl Cafe, the most popular show on CBC Radio. Most weeks he reads original stories about a family where the father runs a record store, interspersed with folkie Canadiana music, the kind that doesn't dare rock any boats. He often takes his show on the road with musical guests, giving many Canadian artists major exposure and a built-in fanbase merely through the Vinyl Cafe connection. When I heard that Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, in case you haven't read the article or missed yesterday's post) got a job working there, I was slightly shocked: mostly I associated him with rock/pop/avant-garde artists on Queen St., not rural Ontario folk. And I never expected his band at that time, Les Mouches, to be played on the show. But Stuart McLean clearly fell in love with Owen and invited him to play on the Vinyl Cafe as Final Fantasy, which meant that many middle-brow cardigan-clad Canadians heard Final Fantasy well before the folks at Brave New Waves or CBC Radio 3 did. And, like everyone else, they fell in love with it. Stuart McLean is a big champion of new Canadian talent, but he's not the first guy I think of when I'm looking for a fresh, original sound. He surprises me.
Richard Reed Parry is the dashingly handsome red-haired multi-instrumentalist in Arcade Fire, and the bassist/co-founder of Bell Orchestre. Like Owen, he also possesses an extremely catholic passion for music that embraces pop and the experimental. Little wonder they're kindred spirits. The members of Arcade Fire first knew Owen through his work with Jim Guthrie; Arcade Fire's first Toronto show (January 2003) was opening for Jim's CD release for Now More Than Ever, which featured Owen in the band and responsible for the string arrangements. Richie tells the rest of the story in the interview below, which culminates in Final Fantasy landing the opening slot on the Arcade Fire's breakthrough American tour in the winter of 2005 and joining the band as an auxiliary member. Owen admits that the Arcade Fire gig gave him the money to make He Poos Clouds the way he wanted, as opposed to the six-day rush job that was Has a Good Home.
Steve Kado you've met before from our Torontopia files (scroll down to Oct 25; I can't figure out the direct link). He and Owen were roommates while the Blocks Recording Club started up; at one time they were both bandmates in the Hidden Cameras as well. Like Owen, Kado is a hyper-intelligent, charismatic, motivated and opinionated guy; little wonder they found each other. Here, he gives colourful insight into "the making of" Final Fantasy.
Three short interviews here: Stuart McLean, Richard Reed Parry and Steve Kado.
Stuart McLean is the man behind the Vinyl Cafe, the most popular show on CBC Radio. Most weeks he reads original stories about a family where the father runs a record store, interspersed with folkie Canadiana music, the kind that doesn't dare rock any boats. He often takes his show on the road with musical guests, giving many Canadian artists major exposure and a built-in fanbase merely through the Vinyl Cafe connection. When I heard that Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, in case you haven't read the article or missed yesterday's post) got a job working there, I was slightly shocked: mostly I associated him with rock/pop/avant-garde artists on Queen St., not rural Ontario folk. And I never expected his band at that time, Les Mouches, to be played on the show. But Stuart McLean clearly fell in love with Owen and invited him to play on the Vinyl Cafe as Final Fantasy, which meant that many middle-brow cardigan-clad Canadians heard Final Fantasy well before the folks at Brave New Waves or CBC Radio 3 did. And, like everyone else, they fell in love with it. Stuart McLean is a big champion of new Canadian talent, but he's not the first guy I think of when I'm looking for a fresh, original sound. He surprises me.
Richard Reed Parry is the dashingly handsome red-haired multi-instrumentalist in Arcade Fire, and the bassist/co-founder of Bell Orchestre. Like Owen, he also possesses an extremely catholic passion for music that embraces pop and the experimental. Little wonder they're kindred spirits. The members of Arcade Fire first knew Owen through his work with Jim Guthrie; Arcade Fire's first Toronto show (January 2003) was opening for Jim's CD release for Now More Than Ever, which featured Owen in the band and responsible for the string arrangements. Richie tells the rest of the story in the interview below, which culminates in Final Fantasy landing the opening slot on the Arcade Fire's breakthrough American tour in the winter of 2005 and joining the band as an auxiliary member. Owen admits that the Arcade Fire gig gave him the money to make He Poos Clouds the way he wanted, as opposed to the six-day rush job that was Has a Good Home.
Steve Kado you've met before from our Torontopia files (scroll down to Oct 25; I can't figure out the direct link). He and Owen were roommates while the Blocks Recording Club started up; at one time they were both bandmates in the Hidden Cameras as well. Like Owen, Kado is a hyper-intelligent, charismatic, motivated and opinionated guy; little wonder they found each other. Here, he gives colourful insight into "the making of" Final Fantasy.
Stuart McLean
May 11, 2006
locale: phone interview from his CBC office
How long did Owen work on the Vinyl Café?
He toured with us a number of times. I first heard him at Cinecycle—no that’s not true. I went to a thing that Harmony Trowbridge organised at C’est What. It may have been the first time he performed as Final Fantasy in public. I just thought, ‘this guy is something else, really special.’ I phoned him up and said we should talk, and he invited me to his next show, which was at Cinecycle. I was so enraptured by his work that I offered him a job on the spot. The only job I had at the time was to answer e-mail. Eventually he was choosing music for us as well, so he was a music producer for about a year, I think. For one season. Then he started coming out on tour with us. He did one in the north of British Columbia, and one in the Maritimes. There was another one through the bigger centres of Western Canada.
Did you notice him having the same effect on people that you had the first time you saw him?
People really liked his work. It’s very arresting. I think Owen is a musical genius. He’s a great talent.
Are you someone who throws around the world genius often?
No, no I’m not. I’m using the word advisedly when I’m talking to someone who’s going to write it down.
What do you think separates him in terms of writing or performance?
He has a sense of melody that is very special. He has a sense of harmony and composition. When he puts these layered pieces together, they’re uplifting. Sometimes when you hear a performer, there are moments of transcendence, when you are moved from where you are and you’re taken up with and over by the performance. It becomes a moment out of time. I stood in the wings watching Owen many nights on my show, and I have watched that happen and been a part of that happening. When the music fills up the space and takes over the space and we’re all whisked away to somewhere else.
Did you ever have a chance to see Les Mouches?
No, I didn’t.
No, I didn’t.
It was a very different animal. It was more melodically abstract, and more abrasive and even confrontational at times.
I think Owen is a true artist. A true artist is restless. A craftsman repeats him or herself over and over, trying to perfect the craft. But an artist shifts and moves and is restless. I think Owen has the restlessness of the true artist.
He told me that he made the first Final Fantasy record to please other people, and he made this one to please himself. How do you think Vinyl Café shaped that first record?
That would be for Owen to say, not for me. Though Owen might not know it as well as others. Sometimes an artist doesn’t recognize where things come from. I do know that I watched his comfort level as a performer grow on tour. That happens to all of us when you’re out there every night in front of audiences from 500 to 2000 people. His singing became stronger, and his sense of comfort, to put himself out there, certainly grew. That came because he received such a warm response that you can’t help but think, ‘Well, I am doing something right.’ Some nights you could just feel the audience erupting with joy; they had never seen anything like that, and it was one big collective ‘wow.’ If you have that, you can’t help but have your confidence and comfort grow when that happens to you again and again. It’s a confirmation. ‘You’re on the right track. We want more of this.’ Which can be both a liberating and a limiting thing at the same time.
Richard Reed Parry
May 12, 2006
locale: phone interview from the Arcade Fire’s church in the Eastern Townships
Have you heard He Poos Clouds?
Heard it? I adore it. It’s the most impressive amalgamation of the modern classical world and an art/pop music that actually reaches far on both sides of the equation. Other bands—ahem—dabble in things classical, but Owen’s new record is a real modern classical record.
In terms of arrangements or writing?
Both, and the recording and the overall realization of the whole thing. It’s not just a pop record that borrows technique and aesthetics from the classical world. It’s as much a modern classical record as it is a pop record. I don’t know anything else like that. Different people throughout pop history have borrowed from the classical traditions to various extents, and people have done elaborate things using orchestral instruments, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard something that is both.
How does it compare to the first one?
It was more of a basement record, I feel. Obviously it was just him and [engineer] Leon [Taheny]. I love the first record, but I didn’t think it was the best representation of everything he was doing. In a way, the new one isn’t either, but it’s an amazing achievement of its own thing. I’m still a giant fan of seeing him with his looping pedal and watching the whole thing unspool from one guy. Even the shows he’s done with a string quartet—I like that stuff fine, but the real magic for me is seeing him create it on the spot, with any little glitches just along for the ride.
Could you describe what happened on the first tour with him?
Oh my god, it was so good. We did it for numerous reasons. We had done a full-scale U.S. tour, and had a hell of a time. I mean, it was a great, but it was a bit insane to have two local opening bands every night, and it was often lousy. We thought we should bring someone on tour with us who would make our lives easier, so we could have the local openers early and then have something exciting that connects with our show, not just some random rock music in a bar. We had played a couple of shows with Les Mouches. That stemmed from Bell Orchestre’s first show in Toronto, which was when he invited us to open for Les Mouches at their ‘white show’ [both band and audience were dressed all in white; plenty of projections were involved]. That was one of my favourite shows I’d ever seen—ever, of any band. Then Arcade Fire needed an opener for two shows in Toronto and Montreal, so we invited Les Mouches. He was talking then about his new solo project, and so we told him to come on tour with us and then he could play in the band as well. It would make our lives easier and make for a more interesting show. So we flew him out to the west coast to start the tour, and it was amazing from the get-go. It was the perfect combo act.
Oh my god, it was so good. We did it for numerous reasons. We had done a full-scale U.S. tour, and had a hell of a time. I mean, it was a great, but it was a bit insane to have two local opening bands every night, and it was often lousy. We thought we should bring someone on tour with us who would make our lives easier, so we could have the local openers early and then have something exciting that connects with our show, not just some random rock music in a bar. We had played a couple of shows with Les Mouches. That stemmed from Bell Orchestre’s first show in Toronto, which was when he invited us to open for Les Mouches at their ‘white show’ [both band and audience were dressed all in white; plenty of projections were involved]. That was one of my favourite shows I’d ever seen—ever, of any band. Then Arcade Fire needed an opener for two shows in Toronto and Montreal, so we invited Les Mouches. He was talking then about his new solo project, and so we told him to come on tour with us and then he could play in the band as well. It would make our lives easier and make for a more interesting show. So we flew him out to the west coast to start the tour, and it was amazing from the get-go. It was the perfect combo act.
Had you heard the songs before?
I don’t think so. Maybe some mp3s that he played me. But for most of us, the first time we heard it was that night he got on stage.
I don’t think so. Maybe some mp3s that he played me. But for most of us, the first time we heard it was that night he got on stage.
Where was that?
That started in San Francisco, we did three nights at the Great American Music Hall in January 05. For the first couple of weeks we also had this friend of Win’s who was living out in Santa Fe called Tycho B. He was playing acoustic guitar and singing songs. They’d switch up who went first. His act wasn’t as perfectly suited to what the Arcade Fire was doing and what the crowd wanted, I suppose. Whereas Owen’s solo act was the perfect thing and amazing to watch for so many reasons: so full, dramatic and beautiful with really interesting and unique songs. Watching someone alone up there and get the audience spellbound when nobody knew who he was, just him and his little violin, shrieking. I think I watched his whole set every single night of the tour. Then he would come and play in Arcade Fire, and the whole thing developed that much further, another thinking head in the band.
Does he use any looping stuff when he plays with you?
Not really, not in any significant way. Maybe a couple of times for textural stuff.
He was selling bucketloads of records too, wasn’t he?
Yeah. He’d go out there in Dallas, Texas or something, full of drunken Texas, and skinny, faggoty Owen doing his weird songs would have them eating out of the palm of his hand. Watching him do that every night was a real kick. ‘Oh yeah, there’s Owen out there, slaying ‘em! Now we can do whatever we want.’ I think people who don’t even listen to lyrics loved the beauty of it and virtuosity of it. It makes this kind of impact regardless of what kind of art you like or what the songs are about. A lot of it might be a little tricky to get a handle on for some people.
Did he ever run out of records on that tour?
Yeah, I remember a fiasco in New Orleans, when Steven Kado was supposed to ship a box down to them, and there was a lot of Owen and Leon driving around in a minivan trying to find these records that hadn’t shown up. It was a bit of a nightmare for them. I don’t even know how many they sold, it must have been thousands.
Why did he get hired to write stuff for Funeral?
I guess through Jim [Guthrie] is where we saw him a few times.
The first time I saw the Arcade Fire ever was opening for Jim’s CD release show in Toronto.
I didn’t play that show.
No, it was Tim [Kingsbury] and Dane [Mills] [and Win and Regine].
Yeah, that was the first Toronto show. Then Jim came to Montreal soon after that, so I saw him there. Then the two of us opened for the Constantines’ CD release at the Horseshoe in Toronto. By the time that we’d seen the Hidden Cameras repeatedly he had stopped playing with them. I think I saw them once with him. We’d seen Mike Olsen play repeatedly with the Hidden Camears, so we decided they should come up and do some string stuff on the record. They came up and we had a string quartet weekend. Pretty much all the strings on the record were done in one weekend, with all of us conducting in the living room. Regine had some specific ideas she wanted, Win had some ideas he wanted, and Sarah [Neufeld] and I had some string parts. But Owen really stepped up when we’d say, ‘Okay, what do we need here.’ Owen would usually have a strong idea that would nail it.
What was the band’s reaction to the “Win and Regine” song?
Nobody knew that’s what it was called until a few nights in. We said, ‘That one song is awesome, what’s it called?’ He smirked and said, ‘”This is the Dream of Win and Regine,” it’s about you guys.’ I don’t think there was further probing in the conversation. Win just smiled and said, ‘Huh!’
It was on the record already.
Yeah, but none of us had heard the record. He was playing every night and selling tons of records. He gave us copies once we were already on the road.
Steve Kado
May 12, 2006
locale: phone interview from his house
How far back do you two go?
I got him into the Hidden Cameras. I met Owen in university. He was in 2nd year and I was in 1st. He was roommates with Ian Robertson.
What did you bond over?
James [the band]. He moved to Darcy St. when I was living on Dundas, so we were in the same neighbourhood. We played various strategic board games one summer and I got him into Gastr del Sol. He had pretty typical closet case dude taste in music: Bjork, Kate Bush. He was doing a lot of Irish fiddling type stuff as well.
He credits you with introducing him to pop music with Barcelona Pavilion.
Yeah, that’s him lying. We both liked James, we thought it was hilarious music. They’re kind of the worst band, really bad, yet amazingly good. I didn’t have any classes with Owen ever, it was just social.
So Hidden Cameras was his first pop band?
Yes. Joel asked me if I knew any violin players. That led to his work with Jim Guthrie, and the rest is history.
You’re both interested in aesthetics of pop and starting something with a concept and then executing it.
I think you should always start with an idea. Even if it’s just to make a song with this sound in it or whatever. It’s impossible for me to consider starting from absolute nothing. I can’t even imagine what it takes to do something like that. Owen likes to retroactively fill in his concepts. He has such great facility with the material of music, that he could be dicking around with something for fun and then he’ll say, ‘Look, I’ll make the dicking around be about this.’ When we were roommates, his process was far less directed than he probably lets on.
Is that true of the new record?
Half of the idea of making the songs about magic—it acutally is about the schools of magic, but it’s also about normal people. His analogy for divination is the Freedom 55 ads. He thinks that’s divination right there, meeting yourself in the future. What yourself in the future says is ‘invest.’ That’s the level Owen is doing stuff on. It’s pretty funny. It’s interesting that people don’t find him that ironic a person. Because it’s such lush music and has all the signifiers of being emotional, they assume it’s about him or real human feelings. When actually it’s about really dumb and funny stuff, and perceiving normal things in funny ways. In that respect it’s much less of a serious thing than Barcelona Pavilion or Ninja High School or all these bands that are assumed to be jokes—all of whom sing about real factual things that are either important or at least interesting to the people involved. Owen seems to be more cerebral and removed from all that because it locks down the signifiers necessary for its reading as emotional music, people don’t question whether it is or not. Watching Final Fantasy unfold is a horrendous thought experiment. It’s like, ‘What can happen? How could this be received? Unreal! No way! Who are these people?’
Final Fantasy is much more conventional than Les Mouches, obviously.
It was definitely made with the idea of it being popular. Owen didn’t tell people, but it’s horribly manipulative and understood that way. He’s aiming for it that way, but he later defined it as ‘public service.’ It’s vain-sounding, but he was joking and defining it as ‘give them what they want.’
He told me that he made the first record for other people and that this is the record he wanted to make. Although I don’t think it’s drastically different.
It’s drastically different in some respects. The first record wasn’t very well thought out, and wasn’t written out in advance, and was definitely a seat-of-the-pants effort. This one benefits from him having thought it out. There’s a score for everything.
That doesn’t necessarily like it better. I like it just as much.
It doesn’t make it better that he wrote it out, but it’s better in that he spent time thinking about how they could be done, instead of doing it in whatever way. It was recorded just as efficiently, but with far more sense of direction and less sense of panic. The first one was done in the wake of him finding out he was going to be opening for the Arcade Fire. Suddenly, in six days, he made this record and in 11 days we got it manufactured. It was stupid.
Talking to Stuart Maclean, people were already falling in love with what he was doing and he knew he had to make a record sooner than later.
Yeah, he had about a year when he knew he had to make a record. It’s just that he spent a lot of time NOT making a record. It’s strange because some of the songs on He Poos Clouds are really, really old, first generation Final Fantasy. When he tells you that he wrote it between these dates in these places, he didn’t at all. It’s total lies.
I heard some of those songs at least a year and a half ago.
Totally. One of the songs on that record is the first Final Fantasy song ever. He was working on the divination thing at the time, shelved the whole thing to make an album quickly and left a bunch of awesome gems off of it, a lot of his live hits. He made up all this other stuff, like fake Gentleman Reg songs, and put those on instead. I’m not sure how I feel about some of that stuff. On this new record, I thought, ‘Ah, all Owen songs.’
What has his role been in Blocks since its inception?
When Blocks was based at 19 Major and we were living there, Owen did a lot of stuff. Owen made stuff, planned stuff and organised things. Lately, Owen’s been on tour a lot. When he’s back, he folds a lot of stuff. He can’t do too much day-to-day stuff. He does a lot of talking on behalf of Blocks, which considering that he’s traveling the most I consider to be totally valuable. He does a lot of ambassador work for us, and when he’s back he does a lot of folding, because it doesn’t require any long-term commitment. Owen quite conscientiously always pulls his weight, which is quite admirable, because he could just say, ‘I’m paying the bills. Shut up.’ Because he IS paying the bills—that’s the other thing he does at Blocks!
What has the success of Final Fantasy meant for Blocks?
It’s meant having to deal with a lot of awful stuff sooner than we were ready for. Distribution, manufacturing… I don’t think we were prepared to manufacture records on the scale we needed to when this raised its head. We weren’t prepared to do really successful stuff at all. The standard run at the time was 500 copies of anything. The idea that we would be scaling to 1000 copies of everything, all the time, was alienating and hard for our then-extant model to accommodate.
How many copies did Has a Good Home sell?
We manufactured about 10,000 of them, but how many we’ve actually sold I can’t verify because there is x number in stores. We’ve got at least a couple of thousand of those in the office. In terms of distributed and out-there numbers, probably seven or eight thousand.
It also brought us into contact with a lot of the douchebag elements of the music industry that we were fine with ignoring, and they were fine with ignoring us. Just miscellaneous assholes. Because Tomlab was involved early on, [licensing the record] is not really an issue. They handle it everywhere except Canada. That’s all sewn up—the record’s coming out through these channels, these places, this way. It’s more like guys who want to handle our advertising or PR, guys who say ‘we feed excellently to blogs’ and just horrible crap. The whole point of doing Blocks is to do things differently than the regular music industry does. Instead of whining about disliking the way things are, constructing an alternative. To a certain extent it has to interact with extant capitalism, but I would like to do things as differently as possible.
People who want to do things the worst way possible didn’t really bother with us until Owen became successful. Then they were hanging around aplenty. They’re not interested in anything else. They don’t say, ‘We really like what you guys are doing!’ They have a very single focus. They’re not acting like good guys, saying, ‘Yeah, your other stuff is pretty good too!’ They’re not even trying to gladhand too much. The most negative thing has been an increased amount of music industry douchebag shit to deal with, that really no one should have to deal with ever. These people are redundant, their jobs are useless. They should be removed from the equation entirely.
Could you describe what happened on the Arcade Fire tour?
It was ridiculous. We didn’t get the discs done until after they had played two dates. We had to ship an entire box of them. The initial run was 500, which he got rid of on tour. Then we had to make another 1000 really fast. It was total insanity. It was rushing to make the record done. There was no album art at all, no idea of what the album art would be, and Owen left right away. The album art was made up and sent off. I drew that mushroom duck thing and we just slapped it on there… (long story) It was utter madness.
I love the booklet though.
That was cooked up generations later. If we had started from the booklet, we would have had ample things to put on the CD, hilarious things to put on the cover. It doesn’t make any sense. The booklet was originally photocopied for the next 1000, and he spent a long time making it when he got back from the Arcade Fire tour, so I don’t think they were even ready when we started shipping the second thousand. Things got so insane. Then we had to do a quick fill-in run because we were going to change the entire packaging as a whole to something more like what it became, but in the interim we had to press another 500 CDs with some weird stopgap packaging. Then Owen retraced and redrew the entire album cover… (more long stories).
My brother bought the digipack at the big Toronto shows in April.
That’s another thing that was unsatisfactory to me about the jump in scale. We didn’t have an alternative to these fairly stock and unexciting packaging shapes. That made me upset. I would prefer to make things better, more ourselves. Us not having an idea how to do that on that scale yet is something that bothers me. I’d like to solve it for future huge sellers!
A year and a half ago, Owen had seven or eight things on the go, and you did as well. Now both of you are very focused, and you said you’re down to just Ninja High School.
Yeah, and the Blankett whenever I get around to it.
Has some of the original spirit gone, then? Or is it good that everyone’s focused?
I haven’t thought about it in a good/bad way. On a personal level, I got really sick and unable to do stuff—physically sick. I had to really narrow it down, just to spend more time being myself and taking care of myself. That’s one thing. That’s been really positive for me, because I don’t feel sick anymore. Owen’s involvement in multiple projects—it’s weird, because he did come back from tour and start a new band, played one show, and then went back on tour. I don’t think anything’s really changed other than people are losing the opportunities to do these things. I start a million bands a day, but I have less and less time to follow up on it or to spend on music in general. However, that seems to be changing. Having this new office means we can collaborate more. The goal of being a co-op and sharing work seems to be realising itself more. As opposed to having it in my house, where no matter what it’s still my personal space.
What was the band he started in between tours?
Boymagic. That was him, Sebastien Grainger and Leon. It was two keyboards and drums, and apparently it sounds like Rush. He can do that stuff. He has more spare time in between tours than I do. In between his tours I’m taking care of his stuff. When he’s on tour, I have more time to myself. The only reason I’m still in Ninja High School is because it doesn’t take much of my time. We don’t have band practices. I realised that I hate band practices so much. I felt like I was becoming more of a professional in many respects, but not in the sense that it pays any bills. I felt a bit pissed off about that. I’d rather have fun; if music is going to be a job, I’d like it to pay like a job. And I don’t want to make music into another job. I don’t want to have any jobs, ever. Period. I want no jobs in my life. One should create the best possible scenario and then do it. If I wanted no jobs at all, I should stick to the unjobs that pay the bills.
Boymagic. That was him, Sebastien Grainger and Leon. It was two keyboards and drums, and apparently it sounds like Rush. He can do that stuff. He has more spare time in between tours than I do. In between his tours I’m taking care of his stuff. When he’s on tour, I have more time to myself. The only reason I’m still in Ninja High School is because it doesn’t take much of my time. We don’t have band practices. I realised that I hate band practices so much. I felt like I was becoming more of a professional in many respects, but not in the sense that it pays any bills. I felt a bit pissed off about that. I’d rather have fun; if music is going to be a job, I’d like it to pay like a job. And I don’t want to make music into another job. I don’t want to have any jobs, ever. Period. I want no jobs in my life. One should create the best possible scenario and then do it. If I wanted no jobs at all, I should stick to the unjobs that pay the bills.
-end-
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy, aka the ridiculous world of Owen Pallett, plays in Montreal tonight with Bell Orchestre at the beautiful Le Theatre National. Dates in eastern Canada follow.
I was smitten with Final Fantasy from the first time I heard the debut Has a Good Home, which was on a beautiful, snowy and lazy January day with my lovely lady in Montreal in early 2005. I didn't seem him perform live as FF until he opened three nights for the Arcade Fire at Theatre Corona in Montreal, and needless to say, I was stunned--not only at how good it was, but by how he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. I haven't missed a show since.
I wrote a cover story for Exclaim on Final Fantasy when He Poos Clouds came out this spring. At that time, it seemed like a minor risk for the magazine to put Owen Pallett on their cover. They were worried that it was too much of a Toronto thing--a common concern at that national paper, considering the country's hate-on for its biggest city and the disproportionate amount of attention that Toronto acts get in the national media, due to media concentration here.
I lobbied for the cover because not only did I think Owen's record deserved it on so many levels, but I knew that everyone would soon be talking about this record. For starters, there's the Arcade Fire connection, but also Final Fantasy stands so far apart from anything else happening in so-called indie rock. It's little wonder that he slays audiences every night and has caught the ear of a scene that threatens to lower expectations every passing week. Finally, I knew that Owen was going to tour his ass off, and it was a matter of time before the rest of the world--and , of course, Canada later on--recognized his talent, not just the so-called clique of Torontopians.
Since then, of course, he nabbed the inaugural Polaris Prize, which seemed to shock most mainstream observers--even including the surprisingly conservative bunch at CBC Radio 3, who seemed downright appalled that an album without any guitars or drums could possibly win this prize (Grant Lawrence's later Damascene conversion notwithstanding). And, naturally, knee-jerk accusations of Torontocentrism were lobbed at (and within) the jury (6/10 of whom were from Toronto). But everyone in the room that night was rooting for him--he received the most rousing applause of any of the nominees who performed, and was namechecked by other nominees at the podium (even ones from Vancouver, Grant!). The room positively erupted when he was announced the winner.
Full disclosure part full of shameless namedropping: I've known Owen for years. I first saw him play with the Hidden Cameras in December 2001, when they opened for Royal City's CD release party. He then started playing with my friends in the Three Gut roster: Gentleman Reg, Jim Guthrie, Royal City and the Constantines, and we crossed paths many times. I remember he was big on cross-pollination; for a while he curated a night at a tiny College St. bar that brought people together to collaborate. The first one, I think, had himself, now-Broken Social Scene violinist Julie Penner, and Bry Webb of the Constantines. He once tried to put on a Prince tribute night at Rancho Relaxo and invited my band to play; we dutifully rehearsed but Owen cancelled the night at the absolute last minute (we'd already shown up at the club) because a couple of acts had dropped out. We were royally pissed, but I didn't hold it against him.
I once interviewed Royal City for a CBC Radio 3 session in Toronto; Owen (as well as Bob Wiseman) were sitting in. We all had lunch and listened while he waxed ecstatic about Joni Mitchell's late 70s albums and Jane Siberry.
In Montreal, he invited me to see Les Mouches, a band featuring his guitar playing, his own songs and a tension-filled backing duo of electric guitar and drums. It was their first show in Montreal, which I loved, even though the setting was too low-key for him and he lamented that they didn't play their shoutier, more abrasive songs that night. He made up for that the next time I saw that band play at Pop Montreal at a packed Casa del Popolo as part of a Blocks showcase (the recording co-operative he's a part of); he ended the set by standing on top of the bar and shrieking over the musical chaos his bandmates were unleashing on stage.
Owen is always a good talker--a mix of humility and arrogance, always funny, always thoughtful. He's also happy to talk about anything but music; the last extended conversation I had with him (other than this interview) involved culinary tips.
Bla bla bla, namedropping. Why run this post now? Well, in the wake of his Polaris win, the Exclaim cover story has resurfaced again--thanks to some snippy muckrakers on the Exclaim message board. Owen actually responded to them here, and it sounds like he's disavowing our conversation. Exclaim ran his response in their letters section this month, making the discussion more public. Knowing Owen, I found his response funny, even though other people are taking it seriously. Exclaim's publisher wanted me to enter the message board fray. I declined, because the bomb-lobbers there are little more than braying boobs. But I will say this for the record: Owen always wants to retract statements if he thinks they make him sound pompous, a descriptor often lobbed by his critics.
Case in point: When I worked at Brave New Waves, part of my job was to do pre-interviews for the host, Patti Schmidt, during which I'd determine what topics would be good button-presers (in a positive way, that is) and also tell the subject how the interview would run. We had a great pre-interview, and I was excited to hear how he would bounce off of Patti, who is a big fan. But I made the mistake of reminding Owen that it wasn't being aired live, and that we could edit any major fumbles or awkward silences before it went to air. He took full advantage of this and tried to retract nearly everything that came out of his mouth, much to Patti's chagrin. What should have been a great interview between an enthusiastic host and a fascinating talker instead fizzled out into a frustrating mess before our ears.
So if Owen wants to retract any statements he made in the original Exclaim story, that's fine. It's true that the interview was conducted in less-than-ideal circumstances, but it took place during a week before he left for a European tour, right before the record came out, when he literally didn't have a free hour unless he was in a van driving to a gig. But it's not like he wasn't as articulate and thoughtful as always. Would it have been different if we had been sitting in his kitchen? I doubt it. I still think he gives great quote, no matter the circumstance.
He Poos Clouds was very new to me when I did this interview; I didn't have much time with the lyrics and I felt underprepared to talk about it in depth. Knowing as much as I did about his history and aesthetic, I wasn't worried about it. I knew that everyone else would mostly be asking about "This Lamb Sells Condos" and the D&D connection; because I knew I had a larger word count, I wanted to dive into other matters. Plus, I haven't looked at a D&D book in 20 years (believe me, I looked at them at a lot back then). The Mishima material was a stab in the dark based on a conversation we had about a year beforehand, but it proved--to me, anyway--to be the best part of the conversation. And I knew that wouldn't pop up in any 500w piece somewhere else. I remain grateful to Exclaim for giving this story the prominence and the space it deserved.
Okay, I think that preamble might be longer than the story itself...
tomorrow: the auxiliary interviews that accompanied the original piece.
I was smitten with Final Fantasy from the first time I heard the debut Has a Good Home, which was on a beautiful, snowy and lazy January day with my lovely lady in Montreal in early 2005. I didn't seem him perform live as FF until he opened three nights for the Arcade Fire at Theatre Corona in Montreal, and needless to say, I was stunned--not only at how good it was, but by how he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. I haven't missed a show since.
I wrote a cover story for Exclaim on Final Fantasy when He Poos Clouds came out this spring. At that time, it seemed like a minor risk for the magazine to put Owen Pallett on their cover. They were worried that it was too much of a Toronto thing--a common concern at that national paper, considering the country's hate-on for its biggest city and the disproportionate amount of attention that Toronto acts get in the national media, due to media concentration here.
I lobbied for the cover because not only did I think Owen's record deserved it on so many levels, but I knew that everyone would soon be talking about this record. For starters, there's the Arcade Fire connection, but also Final Fantasy stands so far apart from anything else happening in so-called indie rock. It's little wonder that he slays audiences every night and has caught the ear of a scene that threatens to lower expectations every passing week. Finally, I knew that Owen was going to tour his ass off, and it was a matter of time before the rest of the world--and , of course, Canada later on--recognized his talent, not just the so-called clique of Torontopians.
Since then, of course, he nabbed the inaugural Polaris Prize, which seemed to shock most mainstream observers--even including the surprisingly conservative bunch at CBC Radio 3, who seemed downright appalled that an album without any guitars or drums could possibly win this prize (Grant Lawrence's later Damascene conversion notwithstanding). And, naturally, knee-jerk accusations of Torontocentrism were lobbed at (and within) the jury (6/10 of whom were from Toronto). But everyone in the room that night was rooting for him--he received the most rousing applause of any of the nominees who performed, and was namechecked by other nominees at the podium (even ones from Vancouver, Grant!). The room positively erupted when he was announced the winner.
Full disclosure part full of shameless namedropping: I've known Owen for years. I first saw him play with the Hidden Cameras in December 2001, when they opened for Royal City's CD release party. He then started playing with my friends in the Three Gut roster: Gentleman Reg, Jim Guthrie, Royal City and the Constantines, and we crossed paths many times. I remember he was big on cross-pollination; for a while he curated a night at a tiny College St. bar that brought people together to collaborate. The first one, I think, had himself, now-Broken Social Scene violinist Julie Penner, and Bry Webb of the Constantines. He once tried to put on a Prince tribute night at Rancho Relaxo and invited my band to play; we dutifully rehearsed but Owen cancelled the night at the absolute last minute (we'd already shown up at the club) because a couple of acts had dropped out. We were royally pissed, but I didn't hold it against him.
I once interviewed Royal City for a CBC Radio 3 session in Toronto; Owen (as well as Bob Wiseman) were sitting in. We all had lunch and listened while he waxed ecstatic about Joni Mitchell's late 70s albums and Jane Siberry.
In Montreal, he invited me to see Les Mouches, a band featuring his guitar playing, his own songs and a tension-filled backing duo of electric guitar and drums. It was their first show in Montreal, which I loved, even though the setting was too low-key for him and he lamented that they didn't play their shoutier, more abrasive songs that night. He made up for that the next time I saw that band play at Pop Montreal at a packed Casa del Popolo as part of a Blocks showcase (the recording co-operative he's a part of); he ended the set by standing on top of the bar and shrieking over the musical chaos his bandmates were unleashing on stage.
Owen is always a good talker--a mix of humility and arrogance, always funny, always thoughtful. He's also happy to talk about anything but music; the last extended conversation I had with him (other than this interview) involved culinary tips.
Bla bla bla, namedropping. Why run this post now? Well, in the wake of his Polaris win, the Exclaim cover story has resurfaced again--thanks to some snippy muckrakers on the Exclaim message board. Owen actually responded to them here, and it sounds like he's disavowing our conversation. Exclaim ran his response in their letters section this month, making the discussion more public. Knowing Owen, I found his response funny, even though other people are taking it seriously. Exclaim's publisher wanted me to enter the message board fray. I declined, because the bomb-lobbers there are little more than braying boobs. But I will say this for the record: Owen always wants to retract statements if he thinks they make him sound pompous, a descriptor often lobbed by his critics.
Case in point: When I worked at Brave New Waves, part of my job was to do pre-interviews for the host, Patti Schmidt, during which I'd determine what topics would be good button-presers (in a positive way, that is) and also tell the subject how the interview would run. We had a great pre-interview, and I was excited to hear how he would bounce off of Patti, who is a big fan. But I made the mistake of reminding Owen that it wasn't being aired live, and that we could edit any major fumbles or awkward silences before it went to air. He took full advantage of this and tried to retract nearly everything that came out of his mouth, much to Patti's chagrin. What should have been a great interview between an enthusiastic host and a fascinating talker instead fizzled out into a frustrating mess before our ears.
So if Owen wants to retract any statements he made in the original Exclaim story, that's fine. It's true that the interview was conducted in less-than-ideal circumstances, but it took place during a week before he left for a European tour, right before the record came out, when he literally didn't have a free hour unless he was in a van driving to a gig. But it's not like he wasn't as articulate and thoughtful as always. Would it have been different if we had been sitting in his kitchen? I doubt it. I still think he gives great quote, no matter the circumstance.
He Poos Clouds was very new to me when I did this interview; I didn't have much time with the lyrics and I felt underprepared to talk about it in depth. Knowing as much as I did about his history and aesthetic, I wasn't worried about it. I knew that everyone else would mostly be asking about "This Lamb Sells Condos" and the D&D connection; because I knew I had a larger word count, I wanted to dive into other matters. Plus, I haven't looked at a D&D book in 20 years (believe me, I looked at them at a lot back then). The Mishima material was a stab in the dark based on a conversation we had about a year beforehand, but it proved--to me, anyway--to be the best part of the conversation. And I knew that wouldn't pop up in any 500w piece somewhere else. I remain grateful to Exclaim for giving this story the prominence and the space it deserved.
Okay, I think that preamble might be longer than the story itself...
Final Fantasy
April 18 2006
locale: phone interview, en route to a gig in Waterloo in the back of a van
I know you worked on He Poos Clouds for considerably longer than you did on Has a Good Home, which was done in six days. How did you approach this one?
It’s a shorter record, but it’s packed! The two records are kind of opposites. The first was made quickly and we were improvising as we went along. This one was very deliberate and every note is well chosen. To my ears, they don’t sound at all like the same band. I find that this record is less orchestrated than the first one. There are fewer instruments on it. There’s an organ, piano and harpsichord on it.
There’s a lyric here: “It’s a tearful day when a boy must learn his limitations.” Does that apply to you and deadlines and concepts?
No, no. Nothing as mundane as that! It’s a larger scale thing. I started to realise that anytime anybody volunteers you any information, you know that the information is actually false. It’s a total golden rule that if someone says to me in a bar or a social situation, ‘Oh, normally I’m a very calm person.’ I know that they are the least calm person. It’s not a mistrust thing. It’s that as soon as people feel the need to assert something, you know that it’s actually not true. When you think about beauty products and what they do, you know it’s actually not the case. Nobody’s ever actually satisfied with them. That song is about the process of change.
It seems like there is a lot less first person on this record. True?
Really? Well, there’s no love songs on the record, other than the title track. The first record was primarily love songs, and this one is a conceptual idea.
Let’s talk about “I’m Afraid of Japan.” I seem to remember you and I talking about Japanese literature and gay tragedy before. Does that play into those lyrics?
I wanted to close the book on it. I’ve been reading Yukio Mishima and he’s been sticking his ugly head into a lot of the stuff that I’ve been writing. He hangs like a spectre. Mishima and Morrissey, who in my head are these two figures who are tied together in some way, are these incredibly talented but malevolent forces. The actual function of both of their writing is something very negative and destructive. The question is whether it’s necessary or not. To my mind there’s no disputing that Mishima is the greatest author of the 20th century, and to me Morrissey is probably the most interesting figure in pop music of the last 30 years. There are so many different sides to what they’re writing about.
What’s the appeal of the tragedy in both those figures?
It’s like believing in a lie, basically. Life is not that tragic or dramatic. It would be wonderful if it was, but the way Mishima writes and the way people feel in his novels, he over-philosophizes and applies meaning to so many things that are inconsequential. His books are all about abstract notions that are convincing when you read it. You think it’s a neat idea. But it’s all the groundwork for fascism. He proved himself to be suicidal and had beliefs and views on the way life should be led and homosexuality that in the long run are negative. I think Mishima is both overappreciated and underappreciated. Underappeciated in that not enough people in the West read him, and overappreciated in that the most interesting aspect of him is that he was a murderer. He was responsible for the deaths of two men in the end, as well as his own life. He was a violent, awful guy, with a lot of misguided political ideas. His political ideas and his literary career go hand in hand.
How does all this manifest itself musically? The coda to that song is the most dissonant thing on the record.
I’m making fun of his concept of suicide and the idea of a glorious death. He died what he perceived to be an honorable death. He tried to launch a political coup, it failed, and his general beheaded him. In a way, I’m lampooning what’s going on in a suicidal person’s mind as they try to map it out. ‘If I do it with an icepick/ will I come back as a jock?/ If I fast until starvation/ will I be born again a Christian?”
Here is Mishima, who had this love/hate relationship with Buddhism all his life. His four-part epic The Sea of Fertility is an examination of this boy who is born again three times, so he lives four lives. He comes in contact with this one character who runs through all four books. The character meets him as a youth, then a young adult, and then as an old man, and each time the boy lives until he is 21 and then dies and is reborn. In the first book, the boy has an affair with a nun, and he ends up dying because she goes into a convent and he is hanging out outside and freezes to death. There’s a lot of talk of Buddhism and Mishima’s own beliefs, but then at the end of the fourth book, the climax has a reunion between the nun and the old man who’s been a friend of the boy. He tells her his story and says, ‘Oh, remember that boy who was infatuated with you? I’ve spent my entire life being there as he’s been reincarnated over and over again.’ Then she tells him that she remembers no such boy and that the boy was a figment of his imagination.
In a way, it’s a refutation of Buddhism, which the entire epic has been about. That final book was delievered to the publisher on the day that Mishima committed suicide. In a way it’s kind of hilarious that Mishima is going to commit suicide, which he wouldn’t be doing unless he believed in some kind of reincarnation.
I’m not 100 per-cent sure of the connection between seppuku and Buddhism, so I’m not sure what was going on in his mind at the time. He had just spent eight years of his life writing a testament to Buddhism and then at the end, he writes, ‘Actually, all of this is shit and I don’t believe it’ and then killed himself—it says to me that the thoughts going around in his head were hilarious. The fact that he wants to come back as a jock or a Christian is symbolic of his total craving for Western culture, as well as his fascination with perfection. I spent so much time on that song trying to work into every word the feelings I have for Mishima. I could probably talk about it for days and people would lose interest.
Let’s move on then. On “This Lamb Sells Condos,” are there three different narrative voices in it?
There’s my own voice, and then the voice of two condo developers. It was supposed to be the voice of Bryan J. Lamb, the condo realtor, and his wife, and the fights I would overhear them having in their apartment, which was above my boyfriend’s apartment.
Does he live there?
Yeah, but maybe you don’t have to make that connection public! [ed note: it has since become public, even appearing in the National Post.] The song was originally called ‘The Shroud of Bryan J. Lamb.’ It was changed because I didn’t want him to get really pissed off or anything. Most of the sentiment expressed between the two characters at the end of that song, are actually things that I heard people yelling through the walls. That song is kind of non-fiction.
How conscious are you about specifically Torontonian or Canadian references?
I honestly don’t really think about it. I’ve heard songs that are specifically written for the glorification of Canada, and I try and steer away from that.
What do you think when foreign writers play up those references in your songs and express curiosity about them?
I don’t have a good answer to that question. I haven’t actually experienced that myself. If people do consider the writing as being referential and view it as some kind of exotic thing, I would stress that they should listen to more Canadian-sounding musicians like Buffy Ste. Marie, who when you listen to them you get more a real sense of what traditional Canada is like. Toronto is so many different things to so many different people that I would never claim that anything I write would be indicative of that, not in the same way that Mike Skinner or the Arctic Monkeys are actually supposed to be writing about a Saturday night on the town [in Britain].
I read live reports from the first American tour by writers who thought you were playing up your Canadianisms on stage.
At the time, it was tax season and I have a song about paying taxes. I wasn’t playing up the difference between America and Canada so much as I was speaking about the difference between socialist countries and less socialist countries. Maggie MacDonald [Hidden Cameras, Republic of Safety] and I had this particular delight in discovering that a couple of people we talked to in Sweden thought that paying taxes was a delightful process. Instead of it being, ‘Omigod, I have to pay that much,’ it was more like, ‘Now I have to calculate exactly how much money I have to donate to the country that provides the roads I drive on and the sidewalks I walk on.’ Shortly after that, I was stressing about my own taxes and it was Stuart MacLean, of all people—who makes a tonne of money and probably has to pay a lot of tax every year, and who incidentally also benefits from CBC funding—he gave me this incredible speech about how important it was to pay tax. It was really inspiring!
In Washington, D.C. I got booed because I said, ‘Hey, do you ever get the idea that paying taxes is a wonderful feeling?’ This was at the same time that Sharon Jones recorded a song called ‘What If We All Stop Paying Taxes?’ to coincide with the re-election of George W. Bush.
I read your Wavelength interview [conducted in January 2005] with No Dynamics recently where they assailed the idea of community in the Toronto scene, arguing that it just meant that the same small group of people just went to see each other’s bands all the time and didn’t allow for growth or cross-pollination.
They said, “Everyone is so busy being cool, only supporting their friends and never noticing anything new. Every show becomes the same thing and you can’t convince people to like it or come to your shows, unless so-and-so is in the band. The community is based on nepotism, bands get popular because of all the friends they have, not because they make good music.
“Everyone is so busy being cool, only supporting their friends and never noticing anything new. Every show becomes the same thing and you can’t convince people to like it or come to your shows, unless so-and-so is in the band. The community is based on nepotism, bands get popular because of all the friends they have, not because they make good music.”
In light of those comments, what are pros and cons of the Toronto music scene for you? Is there any truth in that statement for you?
I have no other scene to compare it to. In Toronto, there is some backslapping going on. But every single time I go for coffee with somebody they end up griping about how someone’s really mad at them for no reason whatsoever. That was an interesting thing because the whole concept of Blocks is very community-oriented.
Over the course of its existence it’s come under fire from a lot of different sources. The key source was a very weakly-worded argument—retardedly weak. It was Elizabeth Bromstein’s attack on a Blanket show [in NOW Magazine], when she looked at Steve Kado’s brilliant performance as the Blanket, which is meant to be taken very seriously and is an artistic project, but she only saw it as bad singing and unplugged electric bass. She saw what he was doing as lazy as opposed to actually a really great idea. After seeing that, she called into question the whole idea of opening the doors of the recorded medium to everybody, allowing everyone to make and release records. If everyone is doing it then nothing is special. Her bad argument was essentially Blocks’ heroic victory. Steve was upset about it, but it was the perfect distillation about what is so great about Blocks—which is that it will piss off a lot of people who all of the sudden become irrelevant, namely music critics, as a result of having an active community with dozens of albums all the time.
Daniel Vila of No Dynamics called into question the concept of community because—well, I’ll call a spade a spade and say that Wavelength kinda sucks these days. Through no fault of anyone’s—not the people who go there, nor the people who program it, nor the departure of Johnny Bunce. It’s just old; it’s been there for years. It’s something we should all support and keep doing because it could turn over, but it’s a very different scene.
Has it become predictable? Less sense of adventure?
It’s not better because it was underground before, but I seem to remember a lot better music and a better vibe. I spend most of my time in communication with people I don’t think are particularly sleazy, schmoozy or self-serving. At the same time, I’ve had friends of mine say that I’m a scenester and call into question my motives for communicating with people at all. At the time it was a shock, but it came from someone who doesn’t go to shows. he was like, ‘Why don’t people go to my shows?’ And I said, ‘Well, you don’t go to anyone else’s show, why would they come to yours?’ You can’t expect a band to succeed on music alone when there are so many bands out there.
From the outside, it would appear that the runaway success of Final Fantasy in 2005 put Blocks on hold and slowed down the release schedule. Is that true?
Yeah. When Has a Good Home was done, Steve and I were listening to it and I said, ‘This will sell lots of copies! Blocks will make money!’ To me, it was less of a pompous statement than it was a recognition that the Arcade Fire were going to blow up, because Steve and I knew that from day one. So we thought we might sell 2000 copies of the record instead of 200. But it went out of control, and Blocks wasn’t able to take of it. In some fashion they still aren’t, although things are way, way better and things are going smoothly. At that moment of transition between being a recording club and a fully functional label, and now it’s trying to get back to its recording club roots. There were times when I would come over to Steve’s place with a cheque, and he’d say, ‘Oh, man, you’re totally killing me.’ I’d say, ‘What are you talking about, I’m giving you money here!’ He’d say, ‘You’re ruining my life!’
I think it’s good in the long run, because there are certain bands on Blocks that can put out releases and have them as catalogue things and people will know about them for the history books. Then there’s also stuff like Deep Dark United or Hank that is so criminally underrated, where Blocks ought to have the capital to make a hard sell, old-school label effort to try and get these bands in the hands of a larger audience.
Seems to be a return to virtuosity in a lot of music these days, and not in a show-offy way either—people like Fiery Furnaces, Joanna Newsom, and Laura Barrett. Do you think rank amateurism is possibly played out now?
I don’t want to get into it too much, because I have a deep love for music made by non-musicians. Nine times out of ten it’s better than music made by musicians. It takes a bunch of art students to come along and say, ‘We don’t like your music with no ideas. Let’s have music with ideas!’ And now music students have risen up and said, ‘Well, we have ideas too and we can play our instruments!’ All it takes is an encounter with a guy like Steve Kado to take someone out of their funk band and into some band that involves wall-painting as a live performance practice, and then you have the best band in the world.
Most of the stuff that I was into before was academic new music, and of the pop music stuff I liked I was more into the mechanical aspects of it, and not really the greater intellectual things in it. It took a long time of hanging out with Steve Kado before I got it, and I think it wasn’t until he started Barcelona Pavilion that I did, because that illustrated it perfectly.
You wrote video game music when you were 13 for a game your brother designed. Why did you not do more?
The music was really crap. John, my brother, created a sequel to that game that was never released because of a contract issue with the people who were funding the project.
(bunch of midi talk)
Is that why you’re such a huge fan of [Destroyer’s] Your Blues?
I’m a fan of Your Blues for more than technical reasons. But the conceptual idea of combining the topics and delivery of Destroyer songs with Midi orchestration I find to be totally mind-blowing. People find it artifiical, but I find it far more honest. I don’t want to dis his band, who are a nice sort of band, but in comparison to Your Blues it just sounds like barroom rock.
There was a rumour floating around that me and Dan were going to work together. That came out of the fact that I talked to the guy from [Spanish record label] Acuarela while intoxicated. I said, ‘I want to tour with him and bring brass players and harpsichords and play Your Blues the way it’s meant to be played!’ That’s all that happened. I’ve never met Dan in my life, and I’d be shy to tell him this, because he doesn’t need a shit like me telling him how to make music.
Is there a melodic influence of video game music on any of this material?
“This Lamb Sells Condos” is actually a rip-off of John Fahey. I find it to be a wicked compositional basis, which is taking a song written on one instrument and learning it on another and finding out the interesting non-idiomatic things that come out of the instrument that way. If you play the guitar like it’s a piano, you have a new style. That song is just Scott Joplin ragtime really, but there’s nothing more ragtime than Super Mario Brothers.
You write on what instrument?
Most of it on the violin. I want to write more songs on paper at the piano.
I once saw you do a show with [Hidden Cameras’] Lex Vaughn on drums. Have you thought of expanding the live show?
I have, but I’m going to stick with looped violins. I might make some cosmetic additions to the technological set-up. There was a while when I wanted to stop and do something else, which is in my nature. But at this point I’d rather get really good at what I’m trying to do. I think the albums will sound less and less like looped violin, but the live shows will continue to be looped violin.
What about songs you can’t play live? I know you didn’t do “Please Please Please” until very recently.
I just bought another pedal that allowed me to drop stuff down an octave and give it a punch. Other than that, it was just a lot of practice. With that song, a sloppy rendition of it is the result of four months of incredibly steady practice. I have to play difficult lines with a lot of shifting and harmonics while singing. Even the vocal melody is difficult to sing.
For a while I remember you talking about recording several albums at once and staggering releases. What happened to that idea?
He Poos Clouds took five times the amount of time I thought it was going to take. I hope people don’t listen to the record thinking, ‘Wow, this took a lot of work.’ But frankly, it did. I’m pretty behind on the recording end of things. I’ve been trying to do a really good live show. There’s a seven-inch we were supposed to record two years ago, which is kind of annoying.
I understand that He Poos Clouds is based on the schools of magic from Dungeons and Dragons. There are 10 songs here, and eight schools of magic. How does that math work?
The last song is an epilogue. It’s an allusion to the last chapter of The Sea and Fertility that I told you about, and also to a book where a character in a book comes to life and sings about this stuff that… (cell phone signal crackles out).
So what are the eight schools of magic?
In order they are: abduration, illusion, conjuration, necromancy, encampment, evocation, divination, transmutation.
Where do they appear in the game?
That’s when you become a mage and you have to choose which school of magic you’re going to be. I’m looking at AD&D second edition books.
How heavily are/were you into the game?
I’ve only played two or three games of it in my life. But I have the books and I read them a lot. I find them really interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s a new system of belief that’s entirely fictional and yet so resolute in its ability to explain everything and simply the entire workings of the universe with use of statistics and roll of dice. If you were to consider that our lives as being ruled by the laws of Dungeons and Dragons, it’s not far off! It’s a rigorous adaptation of day-to-day phenomena into dice rolls and books. At the same time, it’s created strictly for entertainment purposes. My argument is—and this is the reason for the existence of this record—that though it was created for entertainment purposes, it does fill a mental need that a lot of people who do not have an actual system of beliefs require. I’m not trying to stereotype D&D players as godless atheists, but come on, D&D isn’t played by most youth groups.
To my mind, atheism is actually the most difficult of all the religions, the most taxing. Despite the fact that atheism does not require you to pray five times a day or anything like that, it’s actually the most strenuous one from a mental perspective. You have to develop your own moral ideas and a way of existing.
Yeah, but it can also be an easy way out. I don’t think a lot of people bother to do all that work.
They absolutely do. Everyone does. Otherwise they go crazy. You have to have some sort of a reason for living. You cannot tell me that for a music geek, music has not become its own form of religion. In what circumstances would you see the message board battles where music critics nastily debunk music they think is bad? Essentially it’s religious zealotry, because these people don’t have god in their lives. Which I think is a good thing, because it’s far better to have wars over stuff like music.
On this album you say there’s only one love song, yet you continually profess your love for emotionally manipulative music. What joy do you get from it? I’ve heard talk of you aspiring to make it yourself in various projects.
I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer for that.
What’s the status of King Tut and Tenderizer [side projects he first told me about here]?
Tenderizer is just waiting to happen. The songs are ready. I had to cut off my nails because I wasn’t playing guitar so much. It’s been put on hold, because frankly, the music is kinda crappy. It will be a fun record to make eventually, but at this point I’d rather schedule a week of relaxation than spend time making a Tenderizer record. It might be interesting to have these songs written but record them 20 years from now.
King Tut?
Alex [Snukal] and I talk about it a lot. Alex can’t even take care of his responsibility with Blocks and Animal Monster and his schoolwork. He’s a busy guy. So am I.
How many copies did you sell of Has a Good Home?
I have no idea. At least 10,000. More than J. Englishman’s Poor Little Rock Star. But not enough that if Warner had released it that they would have considered it successful. How’s that for an answer?
Are you still picking fights with that family?! [J. Englishman is the brother of Esthero; Owen played violin on a track on her long-delayed second album. He wasn’t paid for a long time and then complained about it on Stillepost, prompting a public smackdown there from Esthero, who blamed her management, and a subsequent apology from Owen. Ah, internet.)
Oh no, I have no beef with them. I publically apologized! I have nothing but respect and sadness for that J. Englishman situation. I heard he had to sell a house. I just think it’s hilarious that he was a serious musician who just wanted to make records, fell in with Warner Brothers, sold 6000 copies of his record that they considered a failure, and then they stopped returning his phone calls and he ended up in a heap of debt. That’s ridiculous, because if you make something and sell 6000 copies of it, that’s awesome! Fuck Warner.
That’s more than most best-selling books sell. Had Win or anyone else in Arcade Fire heard Final Fantasy before they booked you as opening act?
No.
That was entirely on trust.
Yes.
What has being inside and outside that operation taught you about the pop music biz?
Well. Um. I’ll be very happy if I never sell more than 10,000 copies of any record, I’ll just say that. I’d be very happy if I only sold 500 copies of every record I made for the rest of my life. Anything more than that is like a bell curve, and I don’t know where the magic number is but I definitely do not want to be expected to sell a million copies, which is the position they’re in now. They seem to be handling it pretty well. I saw Win last night, and he’s a new man. He cut his hair and he looks 21.
What’s next on the agenda?
This might sound arrogant or whatever, but I put a lot of work into the record and I’m really proud of the results. I’m waiting with baited breath to find out what people think of it, because I think it’s awesome. Some people are going to hate it, and I can’t wait to receive that hatred! But others are really going to like it.
What will the Vinyl Café crowd think of it? [Owen was a music producer on CBC Radio's most popular program, playing mostly folkie MOR material. Final Fantasy performed on the show many times when it was still a very new project for him.]
I haven’t thought of that. I hope the title will deter them from buying it. If anyone says they’re disappointed with the new record, they’ll casually get my middle finger. I made the first record for them to be happy about. This is the record I’m happy with.
How conscious was that with the first record?
Very conscious. It was a total placating manoeuvre! I don’t want it to sound like I’m calling Final Fantasy fans idiots or something, because I don’t feel that way. It’s just that my personal taste does not include Has a Good Home. I’m really happy that some people are into it, but it was written specifically with Vinyl Café in mind.
My biggest hope is that people who get into Final Fantasy will subsequently become fans of Deep Dark United and Hank and SS Cardiacs because I think Blocks has the best catalogue ever—of any label in the world! I’m serious! Three Gut had a very good roster with less than 20 releases, and Rough Trade had a good period in the 80s with maybe the best run of records ever. There’s lots of great labels around the world, but I think every band on Blocks is totally wonderful.
tomorrow: the auxiliary interviews that accompanied the original piece.
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