First, a quick career update, for anyone who might be curious: I’m still unemployed.
That should explain how I found the time to dash off an op-ed on the topic of artificial intelligence and writing. The idea for the piece came to me while I was cleaning the bathroom one day. Who knew scrubbing a toilet could be so intellectually stimulating?
I suppose writing this article might be part of an attempt to establish myself as a “thought leader”. Hey, I’ve been a professional writer for almost 30 years now. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?
If we collectively accept that an artificial intelligence can have thoughts and feelings of its own, we have effectively assigned a form of humanity to a non-organic entity. The concept of “corporate personhood” notwithstanding, this is not a threshold that even our technologically advanced society is prepared to cross. Yet.
The fact that ChatGPT is not capable of forming an original idea or expressing an opinion is good news for writers. Mostly. Will it prevent companies from looking at the bottom line and reasoning that there’s no reason to keep a writer on staff when AI can produce copy faster and cheaper? Nope.
If you were lucky enough to have been among the select few curious indie-rock fans at the Royal when Interpol made its Vancouver debut at that long-defunct Granville Street venue in 2002, you might very well have been instantly turned into a fan for life. That’s the effect it had on me, at any rate, and I have been lucky enough to interview each member of the band at various points over the years.
Sharp-dressed Antics: The Sartorially Stellar Interpol’s Latest Is A Portrait Of A Band Rising Above Cult Status (2004)
For an indication of how far Interpol has come in the past two years, consider that the New York rock quartet made its Vancouver debut at the Royal back in September of 2002. Those in attendance were mostly scenesters and in-the-know rock critics, and a few were probably just there to see the Organ. Some smack monkey made off with two of the band’s guitars and bassist Carlos D had to boot a cigarette-snatching loogan square in the arse, but the 300 or so people who witnessed Interpol’s edgy performance knew they were on the ground floor of something that could become very big indeed.
On Saturday (October 23), Interpol returns to our city for the first time since that now-legendary night. This time, the band is playing the Commodore, and the show sold out in less time than it takes to pawn a purloined Telecaster. Clearly, Interpol has become a hot commodity. SPIN magazine’s current issue pegs the ever-dapper Carlos D as the ninth coolest person in music, placing him above such luminaries as Julian Casablancas, Jack White, and Björk. Interpol’s frontman, singer-guitarist Paul Banks, was considered less cool than his bandmate, coming in at No. 29. Still, that’s not half-bad for a guy who, after the release of the group’s 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, was dismissed by some as an Ian Curtis clone. True, Interpol—which also includes guitarist Daniel Kessler and drummer Sam Fogarino—stakes out a dark patch of turf on the rock ‘n’ roll landscape, and Banks’s portentous delivery added to the calculated postpunk gloom of tracks such as “PDA” and “NYC”. Even so, the barrage of Joy Division comparisons didn’t quite hit the mark and soon grew tiresome.
“People always want to put some kind of category around music. But I feel like the longer that we exist as a band, the more people hear our music, the less we’ll get that kind of shit,” Banks says on the phone from a Toronto hotel room. “Before the first album came out, we’d never dealt with anything like that, so it was like, ‘Whoa, what the fuck? You think we sound like that? Weird.’ You know, I thought we just sounded like us. So it was a challenge to get used to those sorts of things. But I used to say back then, ‘I just can’t wait until we have a new record out, because then people will start talking about the second one versus the first, rather than our only album compared to other bands.’ In a way, you can’t blame anyone. If you only have one record, they can’t compare it to your other work.”
The new one is called Antics, and it’s a step forward for Interpol. The band’s taste for burning-from-the-inside guitar atmospherics and death-disco bass grooves remains intact, but these songs are leaner and tighter, unencumbered by the convoluted arrangements featured on Turn on the Bright Lights. A few of the new disc’s standout tracks, such as the droning, EBow-enriched “Take You on a Cruise” and the storming “Slow Hands” even boast honest-to-God sing-along refrains.
“We wrote in more traditional pop structure on a couple of songs on this album,” Banks says. “There’s more than one song either with no chorus or just one chorus–which you can’t even call a chorus, I guess, if there’s just one–on the first album. We did do a lot of kind of strange structures. And on this one I think we did kind of playfully want to indulge a little more of a pop format on a couple of songs.”
Banks’s voice, too, has undergone a transformation befitting the band’s newfound accessibility. As evidenced by his nuanced performances on “Not Even Jail” and the superbly titled “Public Pervert”, the singer has expanded his dynamic range considerably, a fact he attributes to the amount of time Interpol has spent on the road. “I think if you do anything every day for 16 months, you get better at it,” he offers. “I never really looked at myself as a singer. I was more like the guy with the lyrics in the band, so I would sing ’em. But I definitely became a better singer, just from playing so much. And there’s an awareness, when you’re a little better at something, of how you can use the improvements to broaden whatever it is that you do.”
Interpol’s audience has broadened a lot in recent months. The four-piece spent part of its summer touring with the Cure as part of the Curiosa festival, no doubt winning a few new black-clad followers at every stop. And in the month following the release of Antics, Interpol has garnered more press than most of its Matador Records label mates get in a year. Banks is grateful for the attention, but he says he isn’t quite certain why his band has struck such a resonant chord with rock fans.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I feel great about it, and I think it’s good, because we never compromised. We always did things that we found challenging and kind of compelling musically, and we’ve done the same with this album. I was committed to having shitty jobs for the rest of my life and staying in a band, because playing music is more like a function of your life rather than a legitimate career idea. So I feel very happy and privileged that we’ve had the success that we’ve had.”
Something tells me that Banks, who ended his employment at a café when Interpol started gathering steam, won’t find himself taking orders for low-fat soy lattes again anytime soon.
In + Out: Paul Banks sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know
On the fact that Internet music pirates were downloading and trading Antics months before its official release: “It was just unfortunate, because I like the tradition of release dates. There’s something to be said for keeping the integrity of a convention like a release date and the excitement that a kid might have, like, ‘I can’t wait till this day.’ But as far as people downloading it, how can you complain? It’s enthusiasm for the music at the bottom. I think everyone’s just got to figure out how to keep the industry afloat with downloading, and it will be figured out at some point. It didn’t bother me, because, as I say, it’s just people who want to hear the music, so how are you gonna get pissy about that?”
On not holding a grudge against Vancouver, where he and Daniel Kessler had guitars stolen two years ago: “It was one junkie. It wasn’t Vancouver that stole our shit. It was just a really unfortunate thing. But I got my guitar back weeks and weeks later. The unfortunate thing is Daniel, who had spent a lot of time finding his guitar, never got his back. It’s definitely not a great memory, but what are you gonna do?”
Backlash can happen to the nicest people. Case in point: Interpol’s most recent album, Our Love to Admire, is the New York band’s highest-charting and biggest-selling effort to date, but its release last July was given the cold shoulder by certain hipper-than-thou blogs and on-line arbiters of indie cool.
Stylus gave the record a grade of D, while Pitchfork’s review characterized the disc as bloated and self-indulgent. Reached at a tour stop in Barcelona, Spain, Interpol bassist Carlos Dengler laughs off the latter critique.
“They’ve always been on our side, as well,” he says with a gasp of mock-horror. “They defected! We were so hurt!”
The unerringly charming Dengler continues: “It is exceptionally elementary for me to filter out all that sort of noise. When you really try to do something from a place that is based on love and artistic integrity, these questions of whether this is good enough or not, of whether this meets this expectation or that—these questions become so shallow and so hollow.
“Because what you’re really connected to is something that those questions are not even tapping into, which is the expression of your artistic self, and the fact that that is being honestly portrayed.”
In any case, Our Love to Admire—Interpol’s Capitol Records debut after two albums and three EPs with Matador—speaks for itself. Where 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights burned with spare, edgy post-postpunk, and 2004’s Antics upped the ante with mammoth choruses and indelible hooks, the latest disc finds the group at its most lush.
Produced by Rich Costey (whose previous clients include Franz Ferdinand, Muse, and Mew), Our Love to Admire boasts a clean but layered sound, with songs such as the opening “Pioneer to the Falls” brimming with carefully orchestrated keyboard parts.
That would be Dengler’s doing. On tour, he leaves the keyboard duties to Frederic Blasco, but in the studio the bassist does it all himself. Usually, the addition of keyboards to an Interpol record is something of an afterthought, but this time around, Dengler’s compositional contributions were conceived as an integral part of the album’s sound.
“I guess I found myself exploring avenues that I didn’t really foresee myself exploring when I joined the group,” he says. “There was some apprehension on my part in terms of introducing these new influences, but they seemed to work really well right off the bat when I introduced them in the rehearsal space when writing the songs for Our Love to Admire. That was really reassuring to me, so I kept going with it and have not stopped since then.”
Dengler, who says he listens only to classical music and has been taking composition classes, sees a future for himself in creating film scores. He cites other rockers-turned-composers such as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and James Newton Howard as inspirations. On his website, the musician has posted some of his works to date, including an orchestral mix of “Pioneer to the Falls” and a short film called “Golgotha”, which he scored and created with director Daniel Ryan.
“It’s me in front of a computer,” Dengler says of his compositional setup. “Actually, I have a huge guilt complex about using orchestral samples as opposed to the real thing. Unfortunately, I’m in no position to request the usage of a full symphony orchestra.”
Well, not yet, anyway. That should give the man something to strive toward. In the immediate future, Interpol has a date with the Pemberton Festival, which will mark the official closure of the Our Love to Admire tour. Local fans heading up the Sea-to-Sky Highway for that will probably want an update about Dengler’s current look.
After all, the guy is known for always sporting a characteristic image. When Interpol first came to prominence, the bassist—then known as Carlos D.—often rocked a sleek gothic storm-trooper style, complete with Hitler bangs and a none-more-black wardrobe. Last year, he set off a newly grown mustache-and-soul-patch combo with a bolo tie, for an effect that was part classics prof and part Col. Sanders. In a cool way.
So what, pray tell, is Dengler’s look for the current tour? He’s surprisingly reticent to say. “For me to really answer that question would be, in a way, sort of validating the notion that I am planning these things in advance,” he says, cautiously. “And I’m not so comfortable with validating that notion.”
After a little prodding, the indie icon admits that he has given a lot of thought to his appearance and how it shapes the public’s perception of him as an artist.
“Just for the record, I realize that the pop genre specifically, with its preoccupation with celebrity-obsession culture and fame, and idolization of the hero on the stage that is supposed to be somehow all-powerful and communicate the musical message—this is obviously an addiction that is cultivated and fed by the industry, which itself is commodity-driven,” he says.
“It’s built into this genre that there is a style that needs to be expressed visually, and on your actual physical person. I’ve always known that and I’ve always exploited it. I feel that it is part of my artistic process, actually, to do that. And it’s also part of my artistic right, if you will, to fluctuate and do whatever I want with it whenever I want—and to not have to account for it ever.”
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t tell us what he’s going to be wearing, which is what enquiring minds want to know. Pretty please?
“Because you’re being so insistent,” Dengler says, “let’s just say that I think right now, especially since it’s the end of the tour and I’ve got my sights set on things that are happening after, a certain distinct or robustly communicable image is not exactly on the highest rung of the ladder of priorities.”
Rest assured, though, that the alt-rock sex symbol will look way cooler than you—even if he’s not trying.
Meg Wilhoite likes Interpol. That’s not unusual; after all, the New York–based band has developed a healthy following since releasing its first long-player, Turn On the Bright Lights, in 2002. Wilhoite’s interest in Interpol, however, borders on the obsessive. Since 2007, she has operated a blog called Music Theory & Interpol, on which she posts detailed analyses of the group’s songs. As of this writing, her latest upload is a nine-minute video dissecting “Always Malaise (The Man I Am)”. Wilhoite’s crowning achievement, however, is her in-depth essay on “NARC”, which is just over 1,500 words long and describes the track’s progression through the aeolian and phrygian modes.
According to Wilhoite, Interpol’s music is distinguished by its unorthodox use of polyphony and counterpoint, but what makes it truly addictive, she writes, is that it “influences a fusion of intellect and sensuality in us as listeners”.
The existence of Wilhoite’s WordPress page is news to Daniel Kessler, and it elicits a chuckle when the Straight reaches the Interpol guitarist in Milan, Italy, where he’s enjoying a short break from touring. “That’s pretty funny—and flattering, I would think—that somebody has a blog called Music Theory & Interpol,” he says. “It’s not surprising to me, based on how our band writes songs, that there are quite a few things that are a bit unconventional, just by the nature of who we are as individuals and the nature of how the songs come to be at times, and what we bring to each song and so forth.”
It’s Kessler himself who has always generated most of the band’s musical ideas, and last year’s eponymous Interpol was no exception. Often in collaboration with since-departed bassist Carlos Dengler, the guitarist came up with the songs’ basic templates, to which drummer Sam Fogarino and singer-guitarist-lyricist Paul Banks then added their contributions.
Carrying on in the vein of 2007’s Our Love to Admire, which took a step away from the spare postpunk of the quartet’s debut, Interpol is a sonically rich affair, brimming with harmonic layers and well-thought-out arrangements. Kessler says that in the past, things such as keyboards were afterthoughts, window-dressing added on after the songs were written. This time, though, they were conceived as integral parts of the compositions, and indeed it would be hard to imagine “Summer Well” or “Try It On” without the insistent piano parts that propel them. Kessler says this approach helped set the band on “a new trajectory”.
It doesn’t hurt that the songs are driven by one of the most accomplished rhythm sections in indie rock. “Success”, for example, opens the album with ferocious kick drum and bass guitar that sound telepathically linked, while “Memory Serves” lopes along to a stuttering, bottom-heavy shuffle that might well have turned disastrous in the hands of players less skilled than Dengler and Fogarino.
Kessler gives the drummer top marks for his eagerness to explore new ways of creating beats. “Even a song like ”’Summer Well’, I think his first instinct when we were writing that was to actually create a bit of a drum loop,” the guitarist notes. “He had that in place early on in the writing process of that song. That’s one of the songs Carlos and I got together with, and one of the first songs we started working on as a band. We did a demo of that song early on, so I think that helped give Sam a bit of time to think about it, but then by the first couple of rehearsals with all of us in the room, he brought forth this drum loop, and he played on top of it very much in the manner that it is on the record. I think that was sort of telling of where he was at as a musician, and also it was very much in sync with where I’m at as a musician. I just liked the fact that it was quite minimal, but then it was adding something quite different and really sticking out. And the way we mixed the record, those little rhythmic moments really pop out.”
Given the striking tightness of Interpol’s rhythm section, it came as a shock to fans when the band announced last May that its resident four-stringer and fashion icon Dengler had quit to pursue other interests, such as composing film scores and, one would guess, cultivating new and fascinating hairstyles. David Pajo, known for his work with the likes of Slint and Tortoise, is now taking care of bass duties as part of Interpol’s touring configuration (which also includes keyboardist Brandon Curtis)—but as for the future, who knows? Certainly not Kessler.
“In all honesty, we haven’t really spoken about a plan of what we’re going to do as far as how we’re going to go about writing once this campaign winds down,” he admits. “But that’s not really surprising to me, because we’ve never been a band that’s really made plans beyond the immediate future. During Our Love to Admire we never made a plan for how or when we were going to go about writing, and after Antics we never really made that plan either. We got off the road, got a bit of perspective, and then figured out when we were going to tend to the next album. So, to me, that’s just sort of par for the course.
“I know there’s probably a lot of questions and a lot of things to think about, but sometimes it feels quite healthy to live in the now, in the moment,” the guitarist concludes. “We have a lot of great things lined up, and we’re going to be pretty busy for the most part of this year, so I think we’ll figure that out in due time, like all things.”
Interpol confidently redefines its bottom line (2014)
Let’s go ahead and call it a comeback. Interpol never actually broke up, but the New York–based band did take a hiatus after the tour in support of its self-titled fourth album.
That arguably underrated 2010 release was the group’s least successful, but “success” is relative: despite suffering in comparison to what had come before it, Interpol still landed in the Billboard Top 10 and garnered some positive reviews.
Nonetheless, the band had a good reason for taking some time off: after completing work on Interpol, founding member Carlos Dengler packed up his black Fender Jazz Bass and his empty shoulder holster and took his leave. His erstwhile bandmates hit the road without him, and then went their separate ways. Singer-guitarist Paul Banks focused on his already-extant solo career; drummer Sam Fogarino picked up a six-string to front a new project called EmptyMansions, which also featured Interpol’s long-time touring keyboardist, Brandon Curtis. And guitarist Daniel Kessler? Well, it turns out he was working on new Interpol songs.
Speaking to the Straight from Athens, Georgia, which he has called home since 2008, Fogarino recalls that the three remaining members reconvened at the behest of Kessler, who, true to his nature, stopped short of explicitly suggesting the band make a new record.
“He’s always been the instigator of all things Interpol, in terms of the songs,” Fogarino says. “He’s so noncommittal, and keeps his cards close: ‘Maybe we should get together.’ There was a break. It was 2012, and Paul was doing his solo record [Banks]. I think it was just before it was going to be released. He had finished recording it, and there was a window of time just to play around with some ideas. It was totally Daniel just seeing what Paul was up to, and then he gave me a call and said, ‘You want to come up to New York for a week?’ ”
The three men tossed some ideas around, reignited their creative spark, and then started writing a new album in earnest at the start of 2013. As to the question of who would step into Dengler’s combat boots, well, it practically answered itself.
“Paul realized that, the way the band had worked, it was always with bass lines already written when he would approach the songs guitarwise or from a vocal standpoint,” Fogarino notes. “And he realized that he had to kind of take it upon himself.”
Banks ended up writing and playing all the bass parts for the just-released El Pintor. (The title is Spanish for “the painter”, but it’s also an anagram of the group’s name.) Fogarino says Banks turned out to be “a natural”, noting that the frontman lived up to the seemingly impossibly high standard set by Dengler, whose distinctive playing had been one of Interpol’s defining characteristics.
“You’ve got to face up to it: Carlos was an excellent bass player, and we can’t all of a sudden start playing root notes now because he’s gone,” the drummer says. “But Paul’s a very well-rounded musician and a really good songwriter, and I think that’s what we all relied on when it was the three of us, that we all kind of pull from our ability—or at least our passion for songwriting, and for songs.”
Banks proves his mettle early on El Pintor. After a few deceptively serene bars, the opening track, “All the Rage Back Home”, explodes into a pulse-quickening groove built around a gritty four-string line and one of Fogarino’s most propulsively demolishing beats. The song’s immediacy and its instant-earworm chorus stand in marked contrast to much of the material found on Interpol, which was emotionally stark and relied more on brooding, 2-in-the-morning ambiance than on hooks.
El Pintor is hardly devoid of such atmosphere; “Tidal Wave”, for example, has enough melodic melodrama to please the most discerning postpunk punters, especially when Banks intones the portentous lyric “There’s a flood coming soon.” The song is enlivened and carried along by Fogarino’s rolling-thunder beat, however, and that’s one of the keys to the success of the record, which has been hailed as a return to the form Interpol showed on its first two long-players, 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004’s Antics. The songs might explore cold, dark corners, but the band itself is clearly on fire.
“It seems like we were able to keep the tempo more upbeat while still being a little introspective—or moody, for lack of a better term—on this record,” Fogarino concurs, although he notes that he might have taken things into a wholly different realm, rhythmically speaking, had it not been for the encouragement of his bandmates. “There were a couple of points with some of the songs—‘Same Town, New Story’ and ‘Twice as Hard’—where I didn’t even want to put drums down. These melodies were just so rich and beautiful and cinematic, and it took me a minute to kind of feel that I was safe, that I wasn’t going to taint them with, like, a rock beat, you know? But as soon as you catch Daniel and/or Paul’s attention with something, they’re not gonna let it go. So as soon as I played something, it kind of took the song in a different direction. And I was still kind of like, ‘Oh, am I pissing on this?’ You know, ‘Does it need to do this?’ And they were like, ‘Yes.’ There was this underlying excitement to what was going on. I think sometimes you strike a balance, where you can have something a little more mature, but still kind of driving at the same time.”
Mind you, there was never any real danger that the endlessly inventive drummer would simply tap out a standard four-on-the-floor rock beat.
“I couldn’t if I tried,” he admits. “I just have this weird self-taught angle that I come from. Sometimes when I think I’m being really straight and to-the-point, people tell me otherwise. It can be frustrating sometimes—then again, I’d probably be bored just laying down a template.”
Debauchery behind it, Interpol still thriving as the band heads to vancouver (2019)
It’s a striking photograph: a long shot of a man in a suit seated alone at a table flanked by potted plants, an array of microphones in front of him and tape recorders on the floor. The image, which adorns the front cover of Interpol’s latest album, Marauder, is legendary photog Garry Winogrand’s shot of a press conference by former U.S. attorney general Elliot Richardson, who in October 1973 announced that he would resign from his post rather than obey President Richard Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
It’s a picture of a moment that resonates powerfully in the present day, when the United States can only hope for someone with Richardson’s resolve to stand up against a corrupt administration. When the Straight reaches Interpol’s Sam Fogarino at his home in rural Georgia, the drummer says that harking back to the Watergate era was, in part, a way of reflecting on contemporary America.
“It was, inadvertently,” he says. “Because we initially just saw it as an image. Of course, there’s no way that current events can’t resonate when you see that photograph. You don’t have to know anything about it, but something serious is going down. In this grand era of the apology, of coming forward, it seems as if this person has something really awful to reveal about himself. The beautiful thing is that he was the good guy. He was the one who said ‘Fuck this. I’m not going to be a criminal for you. I’m out.’ ”
No one would ever mistake Marauder for a Rage Against the Machine record, mind you. Winogrand’s photograph was no doubt chosen more for its evocative visual qualities than for its content; Interpol has always avoided making obvious political statements. The band’s sixth LP deals less with what’s happening in Washington than with what’s going on inside the mind of singer-lyricist Paul Banks. As usual, Banks’s songwriting is hard to parse, but his weary baritone implies regret at roads taken and wistful agonizing over those untrodden.
Musically, the record, which the band recorded with producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips) at his Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York, expands upon Interpol’s signature palette of early-’00s indie rock and jet-black postpunk. The focal point is the interplay between the guitars of Banks and the band’s main composer, Daniel Kessler, but on the rhythmic end of things, Fogarino peppers his solidly propulsive drumming with beats that swing in unexpected ways.
Since the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler in 2010, four-string duties in Interpol have been divided between Brad Truax, who holds down the bottom end on tour, and Banks, who does so in the studio. Fogarino says he and the frontman make such a potent rhythm section because “We just understand each other. The thing that really works—for my ego, to be blunt about it—is that he loves what I do behind a drum kit. He values my sensibilities and always tries to figure out what I’m doing and translate that on the bass. He’ll hear stuff I’m doing that I don’t hear and lock into it. It’s exciting, even at this point in the game, because he has an invigorated approach to nailing some bass lines.”
That Interpol is still going, let alone thriving, in 2019, is impressive in itself. Along with the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the band rose out of the fabled NYC music scene at the turn of the century, a milieu documented by Lizzy Goodman in her book Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011. Certain members of Interpol had a serious taste for debauchery in the group’s early years. When things got especially decadent around the time of Interpol’s second album, 2004’s Antics, Fogarino—a full decade older than Banks and reputedly the most mature member of the crew—almost reached his breaking point. Goodman quotes the drummer as saying “Mentally, I was quitting the band every week.”
Fogarino opted to stick with the group, although he did eventually pull up stakes and relocate to Athens, Georgia. He has since moved to nearby Winterville—a small town best known to alt-rock cognoscenti as the onetime home of the Butthole Surfers.
“Around the Our Love to Admire period, I just decided that I wanted to get out of the city and have more space,” he recalls. “There was no real fear of losing the New York edge, because the band was still based there and ultimately I’d be travelling back and forth. Now I have a kind of duality. There’s Interpol life and there’s home in Winterville, which is definitely a contrast.”
As for those chaotic early days, he has no regrets. “That time was awesome,” he admits. “But would I want to be doing that now, at 50? I don’t think so. But you get to revisit that on tour. There’s ultimately moments where we’re all stuck together, and thankfully we still like each other. So everybody can make one another laugh at any given time—or really angry. So we still have that little gang mentality, if you will, like ‘The rest of the world does what they do, but we do this.’ That little bit of us-against-the-world, romantic rock-star notion.”
That mentality should serve Fogarino well in 2019. He’ll be spending much of it on the road in the company of Banks, Kessler, Truax, and longtime Interpol touring keyboardist Brandon Curtis. Fogarino confesses that he doesn’t always love touring, which is a life that can breed homesickness and exhaustion. What he does love, on the other hand, is playing his drums for an appreciative audience night after night.
“What’s never work is performing,” he says. “But there’s the downtime, away from home, that can sometimes make you go, ‘What am I doing? I’m in the middle of nowhere.’ And you don’t want to go to a museum or an art gallery, you just want to be at home. But then on the other side of it, you get to travel the world playing your music for people, and then you get a couple of years off. So it all balances out.”
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. Ghost released its latest album, Skeletá, just a couple of weeks ago, so it seemed timely to revisit my interview with one of the Nameless Ghouls from almost a decade ago.
Roughly six months after this article appeared, the hitherto unknown identity of Ghost frontman Tobias Forge became public knowledge when several former bandmates took him to court in a messy lawsuit. In October of 2016, however, the singer was known to the world only as Papa Emeritus III (and formerly as Papa Emeritus I and II, of course).
He may be just a Nameless Ghoul, but he’s got opinions. For example, the anonymous guitarist for the Swedish band Ghost figures the album as an art form went into decline when the compact disc became the dominant format. Faced with up to 74 minutes to fill (as opposed to the roughly 44 minutes that a vinyl LP can hold), artists felt compelled to pad their albums with filler. Now, in the digital music era, the long-player is further in decline. Why download a bunch of tracks you don’t want when you can go on iTunes and buy the one song you actually care about for 99 cents?
“So we’re back in the ’50s, in a way, where it’s just singles,” the Nameless Ghoul says when the Straight reaches him at a tour stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “But when you make a really good album, people like it. That’s why Adele’s record sells. That’s why Daft Punk’s record sells. But you need to put way, way, way more love into them, and you need to make them really good. If you want to have a really good-quality-sounding record, don’t believe that you can record it in your basement, unless you want to make a lo-fi record. And put a lot of time into every song. You have to treat them way differently. It’s been so callously done for the last 25 years, but I definitely think that there’s a future for bands who put love and devotion into their songwriting.”
Which, naturally, brings us to Ghost. The group has made some fine albums in its own right. The most recent of these, last year’s Meliora, won the award for best hard rock/metal album at the 2015 Grammis Awards, and the band picked up the best-metal-performance Grammy for its lead single, “Cirice”. More recently, the five-song release Popestar debuted in the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s rock-albums chart, making it the first EP to ever top that list.
This is all the more impressive when you consider that Ghost is a heavy-metal band from the small city of Linköping whose members’ identities are concealed behind masks, makeup, and silly names. Oh, and they also write songs about Satan.
Ghost can thrash with the best, banging the head that does not bang with killers like “Mummy Dust” and “Elizabeth”, but it’s the vocal theatrics of frontman Papa Emeritus (now on his third incarnation) and the band’s eagerness to experiment with its sound that truly set it apart from the black-T-shirted hordes. For evidence, check out the carnival-creepshow organ on “Secular Haze” or consider that Ghost has recorded its own versions of songs by a wildly eclectic assortment of artists including Daniel Johnston and the Eurythmics.
The sextet’s ascendance hasn’t pleased all metal fans, however. In fact, some wag started a Change.org petition to get Ghost to cease operations, arguing that the band’s success has harmed the reputation of “real metal”.
“Those are usually the puritans,” the Nameless Ghoul says of Ghost’s detractors. “This is the devil’s music. You shouldn’t be a puritan. But they are. I don’t really give a damn about what people want to call us. We are a rock band, hard rock, whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
In any case, having haters—especially ones so willing to foist their views on everyone else—has its upside, as the Ghoul explains. “It’s publicity. Anything that gets people talking is good. There are a lot of bands that don’t get spoken of at all, so you have to be happy that people are talking about you.”
As far as problems go, it’s a nice one to have, but the Killers do have a dilemma on their hands. The Las Vegas–based quartet is so stoked about its new album, Battle Born, that it’s having difficulty figuring out which songs not to play on its current tour. Frontman Brandon Flowers tells the Straight that he and his bandmates—guitarist Dave Keuning, bassist Mark Stoermer, and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr.—have had to resist the temptation to play Battle Born in its entirety.
“You know the songs—you wrote the songs—but when you’re rehearsing and you’re getting ready for the tour you kind of have to relearn everything,” Flowers says, reached in Birmingham, England, on All Saints’ Day. “We’ve never, as a band, I don’t think, had so much fun playing an album. And so we were like, ‘Let’s just play this thing.’ It’s proven to be difficult. People are there to hear songs that they’ve already grown attached to from the past, and we don’t want to withhold those from people, so we’ve just got to try to find a nice balance. And we’re still working that out. We’ve been playing 10 or 11 new songs a night, and I think we’re gonna knock it down to nine tonight; maybe eight or seven later on.”
At this point in their career, with three previous LPs under their collective belt, the Killers have no shortage of material from which to put together a suitably deadly set list. Long-time fans needn’t worry that Flowers and company will give short shrift to monster singles like “Somebody Told Me”, “Human”, and “When We Were Young”.
“We don’t mind doing that,” Flowers says of running through the obligatory hits. “It always baffles me when bands withhold those songs. But we’re proud of them. We’re thankful that people are there. Give ’em what they want.”
One of the things they want without fail, night after night, city after city, is to sing along to “Mr. Brightside”. Released in 2004, the dance-punk-tinged fist-pumper was the Killers’ recorded debut, and it remains one of the group’s most popular songs. Flowers can’t count the number of times he’s had to sing it, but he’s not complaining.
“We’ve never not played that one, so it’s been played a couple thousand times,” he says. “I don’t get tired of it, though. That one’s taken on such a life of its own now that I don’t even know that I’m needed. As soon as Dave starts that guitar line, it’s on its way. People are just going. It’s fun every night.”
Battle Born might not contain quite as many moments of cathartic, workday-obliterating indie-rock swagger as the Killers’ first album, 2004’s Hot Fuss, but those don’t seem to be the band’s raison d’être anymore. The new record is the work of a maturing act, whose youthful fire, while not quite quenched, is now tempered by the uncertainty and ambivalence that go along with growing up. The leadoff single, “Runaways”, is a rousing, Springsteen-esque anthem aimed at the cheap seats. Flowers sings from the perspective of a husband and father who desperately seeks contentment in domesticity but can’t silence the voice in his head that keeps telling him it’s all just a gilded cage: “At night I come home after they go to sleep/Like a stumbling ghost, I haunt these halls/There’s a picture of us on our wedding day/I recognize the girl but I can’t settle in these walls.”
“Runaways” is a devastating snapshot of a marriage held together by an ever-fraying thread, but Flowers says it seems as though many listeners don’t pick up on that. “People just say, ‘Oh, this is the guy who wrote “Somebody Told Me”, so this is just a sappy love song.’ The first line is ‘Blonde hair blowin’ in the summer wind,’ and they just zone out after that. Like I’m not allowed to grow up and express myself. But I did, and it’s happening whether people like it or not.
“We knew that it was a little bit of dangerous territory to come out and have that be the face of the record,” the singer continues, “and it’s not your quintessential song that you hear on the radio. Even structurally it’s not. But we’re really proud of it, and I’m thankful for it every night, now that we’re playing it. It’s got a weight to it, but it’s also breezy at the same time.”
With its soaring melodies, “Runaways” showcases Flowers’s growing vocal prowess. From the way the 31-year-old powers through the choruses, it’s evident that the voice lessons he took before hitting the studio to record Battle Born were a worthwhile investment. It’s not just the frontman’s lead singing that stands out, however. The gorgeously layered backing vocals on “Flesh and Bone” and the title track might bring Queen to mind, but Flowers reveals that he drew inspiration from a more unlikely source: Eric Carmen. Not the tunesmith’s MOR ballads (“All By Myself”, “Make Me Lose Control”), mind you, but one particular song by his early ’70s power-pop outfit the Raspberries.
“Those vocals came sort of by accident,” Flowers notes. “We were finishing the record and we got a call from Tim Burton to do a cover for the end of Dark Shadows. The movie was done, and they were really needing some help. I don’t know why they didn’t just use the original. So we had to learn this song by the Raspberries called ‘Go All the Way’—I had never heard it before—and record it. We had about two days to do it. There are these amazing vocal arrangements in that song, and it’s an awesome song. The same guy [Carmen] wrote ‘Hungry Eyes’ in the ’80s, and he had a couple of huge ballads. If you listen to that song I guess you’ll see what I’m saying. It’s just got these amazing vocal arrangements. I was just finishing up that ‘Battle Born’ song and I tested out some of the new stuff I learned, I guess. And it worked out, so it’s a real highlight for the record. We’re worried, because it’s the last song on the record and, you know, people don’t buy albums anymore. So we’re hoping that, because it’s at least the title track, people will listen to that one.”
In spite of Flowers’s misgivings, Battle Born has indeed been selling. It did well enough when it was released in September to debut at number three on the Billboard album chart. It likewise debuted at number three in Canada, and at number one in the U.K. and Ireland. But the frontman makes a valid point. The Killers have been around for just over a decade, which is long enough to witness a fundamental change in the music business. When Hot Fuss came out, CD sales had yet to decline into the monumental slump of the past few years. For better or worse, up-and-coming new acts are having to find different ways of getting their sounds out to the world, and not many of them are getting rich doing so.
Could the Killers, then, be the last big mainstream band?
“I don’t know,” admits Flowers. “I hope not. There haven’t been many since we’ve come out that have done it. Well, Mumford & Sons seem like they’re on their way to doing it. They’re pretty much the only ones post-2004. It’s bound to happen, though. Somebody’s going to have talent, and love rock and melody, and write a good song. It’s going to happen. But it’s gonna be harder for them than it was for us. And it was harder for us than it was for bands in the ’90s or the ’80s.”
True enough. The Killers spent their share of time in the indie trenches; they initially signed to British label Lizard King Records, whose current roster includes no one you’ve ever heard of. They’ve also weathered the shifting tides of the industry while never finding much favour with snobbish critics. Reviewing the band’s 2008 LP Day & Age, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal suggested that Flowers was “a weirdo trying to please himself and his audience at the same time but constantly coming up a little short on at least half of that equation”. Flowers, a Mormon, has even had his rock ’n’ roll credentials called into question thanks to his abstinence from booze and drugs. And yet these four men constitute one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.
Battle born, indeed.
In + Out: Brandon Flowers sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know
On facing atheist Richard Dawkins on Swedish TV: “I had seen Dawkins’s spiel on Mormons before. He kind of says verbatim what he’s already said in other interviews when asked about Mormonism. So I do genuinely look shocked when he’s doing it, but it was so strange to be five feet from him while he was doing it.”
On arguing with Dawkins: “I’m not going to be the guy that’s going to change his mind, and he’s not going to change mine. It’s the debate that’s never going to end. Science is never going to turn over a rock and discover that there is no God. It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to disprove Him. There’s always going to be people that believe in Him, so I don’t see why they can’t go hand in hand.”
On whether the Killers will release a Christmas song in 2012: “Yes. We have never pushed it to the limit this far before, though. We’re really running late. We’re running behind, but we are going to have one. We have a song. The lyrics are almost finished, and we’re gonna make a video. It’s going to be number seven. I can’t believe it’s been seven years we’ve been doing these. We love them. We love doing it.”
the Killers soldier on to get hyper-personal and deep on Wonderful Wonderful (2018)
On the surface, there wouldn’t appear to be that much common ground between Brandon Flowers and Alice Cooper. In his ’70s heyday, shock-rock progenitor Cooper embodied all that was depraved and evil about rock ’n’ roll, singing tender paeans to necrophilia and decapitating baby dolls on-stage.
Flowers, on the other hand, has a sort of clean-cut nice-guy image seemingly at odds with his status as the frontman of one of this millennium’s biggest rock bands. Heck, in 2011 the guy made a video at the behest of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with the title “I’m Brandon Flowers and I’m a Mormon”.
When the Straight connects with Flowers via telephone, the 37-year-old musician is at home in Park City, Utah, enjoying some much-needed downtime in a summer that has been packed with tour dates. He reveals that he and the man born Vincent Furnier actually aren’t as different as they may seem—and not just because Flowers fronts a group called the Killers and Cooper’s fourth LP with his own band was titled Killer.
“We share a lot in common, actually,” says Flowers. “We were both raised in the desert, we both enjoy golf, we’ve both worn eyeliner—he’s worn more than me.”
Cooper famously spends as many as six days a week on the links at the Arizona Biltmore Golf Club in his hometown of Phoenix. Flowers is less active in that department—thanks in large part to an ongoing issue with his shoulders—but there was a time in his youth when he looked set to follow in the footsteps of his cousin, pro golfer Craig Barlow.
Then, as rock ’n’ roll legend would have it, Flowers’s career path was changed forever when someone stole his golf clubs and he turned to music instead.
That’s turned out pretty well for him. Since forming in Las Vegas in 2001, the Killers have released five well-received studio albums and have toured the world numerous times. The band first broke big in the U.K. and has arguably had its greatest success there, with all of its LPs hitting the top spot on the Official Albums Chart. The most recent one, Wonderful Wonderful, was the first to match that stateside by reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Flowers has said that the lyrics on Wonderful Wonderful are among the most personal he has ever written, with songs such as “Rut” and “Some Kind of Love” delving into the childhood trauma and ongoing struggle with PTSD faced by his wife, Tana. Elsewhere, Flowers uses the recurring motif of boxing (most notably on “Tyson vs Douglas” but also on “Run for Cover”, which namechecks legendary heavyweight champ Sonny Liston) to explore themes including endurance and disillusionment.
Wonderful Wonderful came out almost a year ago, but Flowers says he has no difficulty tapping into the emotions that shaped some of its most affecting songs, even after performing them on-stage night after night on tour. To keep things from getting too heavy, he says, the band has really been leaning into its more crowd-pleasing fare, in particular “The Man”. A strutting slab of bombast that neatly straddles glam rock and electro-fried disco, “The Man” is Flowers’s winking look back at the cocksure days of his youth.
“It’s inhabiting this person I was, or this concept of what I thought a man should be when I was 15, when I was ignorant,” he notes. “I’m still learning, and I’m still becoming that man that I want to be.
“It brought a lot of levity to the record and a whole new element to the live show,” the singer continues. “We usually pair it with the song ‘Somebody Told Me’, and the spirit of it sort of overflows into that song as well, and it’s a nice moment, instead of this earnestness for two hours.”
The version of the band that has been touring in support of Wonderful Wonderful could perhaps be called Killers 2.0. Of the core four-piece, only Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. have hit the road this time around. The official line is that guitarist Dave Keuning has taken a break to spend time with his family while bassist Mark Stoermer has gone back to college. The two are still considered members of the band, but their spots are currently being filled by long-time touring sidemen Ted Sablay (guitar) and Jake Blanton (bass).
Flowers insists that it no longer feels strange to look around the stage during a Killers concert and not see Keuning and Stoermer.
“In the beginning it did, but we’ve already done 115 shows now,” he notes. “So, all those anxieties are kind of over now. The way I’ve always looked at it is that it’s my job to sing, whether they’re there or not. I still have a job to do, and of course in a perfect world they would be gung ho about touring and be up there, but they’re not. My dream still lives. My dream’s still alive, man.”
As for what the future holds, Flowers indicates that Keuning “is still figuring it all out” and points out that Stoermer remains very much an active presence within the band, his absence from the tour bus notwithstanding.
“Mark contributed a lot to the record and is more excited about being creative in the studio, and you can’t fault him for not loving touring, and so if that works out, where he can come in the studio, of course he’s welcome, and right now we’re planning on it,” the frontman says.
Mind you, Flowers admits that he’s not sure if there’s a Killers record on the immediate horizon or if he’ll revive his solo career. The singer has released two records under his own name—2010’s Flamingo and 2015’s The Desired Effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both have topped the U.K. album chart, which strongly suggests that there are indeed many people out there eagerly awaiting a new Brandon Flowers LP.
“I made those solo records so that people could have breaks in the band,” Flowers states, “and so with this new configuration and this new understanding, it seems like it’s created a world where we can put more Killers records out. But also I’m really proud and happy with my two solo records, and I miss performing those songs too, so I’m a little bit torn at the moment.”
If the music thing doesn’t work out, Flowers returning to the world of golf is probably out of the question, all things considered. If Alice Cooper happens to call, however…
“He’s asked me before,” Flowers says. “I’ve had shoulder problems and I haven’t been able to golf as much as I want to. But I would like to golf with Alice Cooper one day. I hope I can get my shoulders back to a place where I can play without pain, and I will take Alice on.”
When Mew’s third album, Frengers, landed on my desk in 2003, I was instantly hooked on the Danish act’s unique art-rock sound. In the years since, Mew has become one of my favourite bands of all time. With the band’s future uncertain—a run of “farewell” concerts has been announced, but there is talk afoot that Mew will actually continue without frontman Jonas Bjerre—it seemed like a good time to revisit some of the times I have had the opportunity to interview various members of the band over the years.
Perfect Frengers: Denmark’s Mew might just conquer North America with its alien but strangely uplifting sound (2007)
To much of the band’s newfound North American audience, Mew probably seems to have materialized out of nowhere. Certainly, the group’s sound is otherworldly, with its sweeping synths and angels-on-high harmonies grounded by a rock-solid, sometimes downright punishing rhythm section. The fact that most listeners in this part of the world heard Mew for the first time only when its most recent album, And the Glass Handed Kites, got its U.S. release last summer adds to the impression that the group beamed in from some parallel dimension with its breathtakingly original music fully formed.
The truth is that Mew came together in its native Denmark almost 12 years ago. Over the course of four albums, the Hellerup-spawned band has risen from indie-underdog status to the pinnacle of its home country’s music scene, scooping four prizes at last year’s Danish Music Awards. It must feel strange, then, to go from being the most popular rock act at home to being a cult act on foreign soil. Reached at a tour stop in Boston, drummer Silas Graae insists that his veteran group doesn’t mind having to build its overseas audience from the ground up. “I think that’s a more healthy way to do it, somehow: gradually and slowly,” he says. “We’re very privileged and lucky. It always seems to be growing, and that’s good for us.”
Speaking of luck, Mew’s Canadian fans have been slightly more blessed than its stateside ones: And the Glass Handed Kites was released here a full nine months before it came out in the U.S., and it was the second Mew disc we got to hear, the first being 2003’s Frengers. In fact, Frengers didn’t come out in the States until January of this year, after a nation of Pitchfork readers started drooling for it. This puts Mew in the unlikely position of having to tour behind an album that isn’t its most recent effort.
“We like that record as well,” Graae says matter-of-factly. “We don’t dislike that record or can’t stand playing its songs, so it’s great to come and support it.”
Frengers is indeed a worthy listen—certainly one of the top releases of ’03—but Glass Handed Kites is Mew’s masterpiece. Just about everything is perfect, from the anthemlike refrain and end-of-all-things guitar blitzkrieg of “Apocalypso” to the impossibly uplifting intertwined vocal harmonies that close “Zookeeper’s Boy”. Singer Jonas Bjerre possesses the voice of an androgynous alien, capable of the sort of heart-rending flights that leave sensitive types with tear-streaked faces. This is in marked contrast to the grainy croak of slacker-rock icon J. Mascis, who lends his voice to two tracks, “Why Are You Looking Grave?” and “An Envoy to the Open Fields”.
The latter selection makes it clear that this is a band with a taste for the grandiose; the song bursts to life in a Technicolor explosion of sky-splitting dream pop before settling back into a simple beat. Well, it seems simple, until you try tapping your foot to it and realize that the time signature keeps changing right when you think you’ve finally got it figured out.
It’s a testament to Graae’s skill and subtlety as a drummer that such touches, which are all over Mew’s songs, don’t smack of audacity or self-indulgence. “It shouldn’t take up too much attention to be making strange [time] signatures,” he says. “It’s much more about the whole thing than just one thing.”
Not that Mew is a wholly populist undertaking. A Scandinavian prog-pop act with a flair for the melodramatic and a girlie-voiced pixie for a frontman is perhaps not everyone’s cup of Tuborg. Mind you, the fact that all of Bjerre’s lyrics are in English at least leaves the door open—a mere crack, perhaps—to the possibility of a massive international following. Hey, it worked for Aqua, sort of.
“I think for Jonas, it comes more natural for him to sing in English, somehow,” Graae says. “Why, I don’t know. He just seems to be more comfortable in that language.” The global dominance of American television might have something to do with it, but perhaps not as much as the music that the members of Mew grew up with, such as My Bloody Valentine, the Pixies, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and the Afghan Whigs—English speakers all.
In any case, familiarity with the lyrics lets the front-row punters sing along when Mew is on the road. The band is currently touring North America as a headliner for the first time. (Vancouver fans still speak reverently of the group’s jaw-dropping but all-too-brief set a few months back, when it came town as Kasabian’s opening act.) After that, the conquering Danes will finally get a chance to work on something new.
“When we are not travelling and not playing shows, and we are at home, we write,” Graae notes. “We’ll go back to Denmark and start where we came from, with the new material. That’s the plan. And maybe we’ll come back and do a tour later, if someone wants us over here.”
Let’s get the full title of the latest Mew album out of the way right off the bat. It’s called No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories the World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away. It takes a while to say (and type), but that seems apt, since the music that the album contains is worthy of spending some quality time with. The Danish band’s fifth full-length release, No More Stories is rich in sonic detail, with the group reaching beyond its signature brand of epic art-rock to explore moody synthesizer-based pop (on “Tricks of the Trade”) and songs driven by insistent marimba motifs (“Hawaii” and “Vaccine”).
Reached in Washington, D.C., where Mew is preparing to open for the Pixies at DAR Constitution Hall, singer Jonas Bjerre says that he and his bandmates, guitarist Bo Madsen and drummer Silas Graae, took deliberate steps to open up their sound. For Bjerre, that meant largely relieving himself of six-string duties. “I always really just played rhythm guitar, or I did, like, inverted chords and stuff like that, but I never really had any virtuosity with my playing,” he admits. “And I thought it was better to leave room for Bo, because he’s a really unique guitarist, and he has completely his own style that he keeps developing. So there’s more room for that. And he doesn’t play as many power chords and stuff like that on this record. So I would say it’s more spacious. It has room for a lot of mallet instruments and percussion and things that we usually don’t use as much.”
Another major change is the absence of founding bassist Johan Wohlert, who left the band after the release of And the Glass Handed Kites, the 2005 album that brought Mew to the attention of North American music fans. Bjerre says Wohlert’s departure accounts for the new disc’s dearth of burly rockers, such as live favourites “Snow Brigade” and “Apocalypso”.
“A lot of the rock stuff that we used to have was based on Johan and Bo playing up against each other with bass and guitar, and the grooves came a lot from Johan and Silas playing together,” Bjerre notes. “And now, Silas and Bo are developing the rhythm sections, and it’s based around chord progressions, but not in the same way as it used to be. I think we really explored, because we were a little bit tired of doing things the same way. We definitely needed to expand our horizons in the department of writing songs, and methods of writing songs. We tried out a lot of different things, and the songs actually came together in lots of different ways on this record.”
When most bands talk of expanding their songwriting horizons, that might mean trying out some new effects pedals or experimenting with alternate guitar tunings. In Bjerre’s case, it meant creating a song in a way that no one else ever has. The appropriately titled “New Terrain”, which kicks off No More Stories, is actually two tracks in one; play it in reverse and it’s a separate song called “Nervous”, with its own set of lyrics.
“I wanted to make something that could be sort of a palindrome song,” Bjerre says. “We were kind of playing around with palindromes. And obviously it’s not a palindrome, because the lyrics are different, but I just wanted the lyrics to be somewhat audible in reverse as well as forward-playing. And so I was just playing around with these words and these melodies, and kept reversing it until I had something that worked on the piano, and melodically and lyrically worked. Then we took it into the practice space and added the beats, and Bo kind of developed the chord structure with a baritone guitar, so it kind of grew from that. But it was meant to be something that could be played backwards from the beginning.”
Lyrically, “Nervous” (which is available on the vinyl edition of No More Stories) seems to make more sense than “New Terrain”. The former is apparently about paranoia (“It seems everywhere you go/They’re out to get you”), but the latter is more opaque: “Like most, you snip soft sheets/What’s this about.” Indeed, what’s it about? Bjerre’s not telling.
“If you go to art academy or something like that, you’re taught to always be ready to explain yourself,” he says. “And to me, that’s not really that interesting, because I don’t work like that. I don’t have a ready answer to any question about any of my lyrics. I just like to go with things and see where they take me, because I’m not a very analytical person. I just like the experience of things, and feeling them and shaping them. I don’t necessarily like to talk about them at great length or write essays about them or anything like that, you know?”
Good idea. Save the essay-writing for the album titles.
There’s something to be said for making an artistically ambitious album. There’s also something to be said for actually being able to play your own songs on-stage. Danish art-rock outfit Mew discovered that these two things can be tricky to balance when it came time to hit the road in support of its loftily titled 2009 LP, No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories the World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away. (The album is, thank God, usually referred to as simply No More Stories by band and fans alike.)
Recording for the first time without the grounding influence of bassist Johan Wohlert, the group’s remaining members explored what singer Jonas Bjerre, reached at home in Copenhagen, calls “clouds of ideas that came together in a weird way”.
Bjerre says the resulting album is among his favourites in the Mew catalogue, but he also notes that the long-running act had no intention of ever making No More Stories II. To help avoid that, the band called on Michael Beinhorn, producer of 2005’s And the Glass-Handed Kites. His solution? Get Wohlert back onboard.
“We needed something to happen, and Michael was missing the feeling of the rhythm section with Silas [Graae, Mew’s drummer] and Johan,” Bjerre says. “The last record he’d done with us was the Kites record, which had Johan on it. So he said, ‘Why don’t you just give him a call and invite him in to do some writing sessions at first?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ We’d actually talked about that over the years, doing some writing together. Then when he came in, it was actually surprisingly fast. It felt like he’d never left. It felt like he’d only been gone for a couple of months instead of seven years. So that was really thrilling and gratifying to experience.”
The latest Mew record, the Beinhorn-produced + –, doesn’t tone down the group’s taste for the grandiose—check out the almost 11-minute dream-pop epic “Rows” for proof—but it does bring its more visceral, urgent elements to the forefront. “My Complications”, with its churning rock attack, is as close to “back to basics” as Mew will likely ever get.
“It sounds more like a band playing, to me, whereas No More Stories, a lot of it sounded like production things,” Bjerre admits. “Some of the songs on No More Stories, we haven’t even really played live, I think. Some of them only a few times, because they just didn’t really translate to the live setting that well. So that was one of the things Michael wanted as well on this one. He said, ‘You guys have to play the songs in the practice space, and they have to sound complete before we go in the studio. Before we start adding stuff to it, it should work just as songs you’re playing. That’s the greatest starting point you can have.’ So we worked really hard on that, and the songs translate really well to the live scene, I think.”
Local fans will get to judge that for themselves this week, but those counting on seeing Bo Madsen are in for a surprise. Apparently needing a break from the road, the guitarist has taken an indefinite hiatus from the band he helped form more than 20 years ago. For this tour, his parts will be played by Mads Wegner. And in the future? Will Bjerre himself end up playing more six-string to fill the void?
“We’ve been listening to some demos on the tour bus and enjoying talking about the future and what we’re gonna do, but it’s still a little unsure what’s going to happen, exactly, so we’ll have to wait and see,” the singer says. “But, yeah, I love playing guitar. But I’m more of a rhythm guitar player, I’m not like a lead guitar player. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I’m sure we’ll think of something!”
Danish band Mew makes the most of life as a trio (2017)
The art-rock gods giveth, and the art-rock gods taketh away. In 2015, veteran Danish band Mew gave fans several reasons to rejoice. The first was +-, its first album in six years. The second was the return of the quartet’s original lineup, with bassist Johan Wohlert rejoining after a nine-year hiatus.
Now comes the “taketh away” part: after completing work on +-, founding guitarist Bo Madsen announced that he was leaving. Once again, the mighty Copenhagen foursome became a trio. Mew’s latest LP, Visuals, is the first to feature none of Madsen’s signature six-string work, which has always been light on blazing solos but heavy on slippery rhythms and unexpected phrasing.
“The initial writing and recording was very much like we’ve always done it, pretty much, regardless of whether I was out of the band or Bo was out of the band or whatever,” says Wohlert when the Straight reaches him on a day off in Boston. “It felt very similar, but obviously with any group of people, if you remove one element it’s going to sound different. I think that’s one of the main reasons that we were able to take the band in yet another direction, or at least try out new things.”
Throughout a career spanning over two decades, Mew has forged a unique aesthetic based on Jonas Bjerre’s stratospheric vocals and the canny interplay between Madsen, Wohlert, and drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen. The group has flirted with everything from dreamy indie rock to the sort of mind-bending prog that other musicians love to geek out over.
Visuals isn’t a major departure for Mew, although Madsen’s absence is palpable on “85 Videos”, a shimmering modern-pop concoction that wouldn’t sound out of place on an M83 record. (A good M83 record, that is. Not necessarily Junk.)
There are guitars on Visuals, of course, notably the grunge-caked riff that opens “Candy Pieces All Smeared Out” and the quirky jangle of “Twist Quest”. According to Wohlert, many of the six-string sounds come courtesy of Mads Wegner, who has been Mew’s touring guitarist since Madsen’s departure.
“It was mostly Mads,” the bassist confirms. “We wanted him to do it because a fresh outside perspective is good, and technically he’s a way, way better guitar player than me and Jonas. Also, you invest a little more of yourself if you’re a part of the record-making process, and it reflects in your relationship with the material when you go out on the road afterwards.”
His contributions notwithstanding, Wegner is not officially a member of Mew. Nor, for that matter, is keyboardist-guitarist Nick Watts, who has been touring with Mew since 2001 and has played on several of the group’s LPs.
“With a band like us, you have to understand that we’ve been going at it for 20-something years,” Wohlert says. “The band was me, Jonas, Silas, and Bo. And whenever somebody leaves, that doesn’t mean that you can get somebody in to take their place. It just means that you get somebody in to play shows. That just feels natural, and that’s how we prefer it, to be honest. It’s just the three of us now, and that’s cool.”
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)
Cosmo Sheldrake gets in tune with nature
His music is as likely to include the sounds of endangered songbirds as it is woozy waltz rhythms or marching-band brass. His lyrics read like the free-association ramblings of a man well-versed in the work of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, to say nothing of Syd Barrett.
If that makes Cosmo Sheldrake sound like an unlikely pop star, well… He isn’t exactly a pop star. The 28-year-old London, England–based musician did, however, manage to have a viral hit with his song “Come Along”. Apple licensed the track—which, A.A. Milne fans will be delighted to learn, kicks off with the line “Come along, catch a Heffalump”—for an iPhone XR commercial last year, and that ad has since racked up more than 18 million plays on YouTube.
A further 5.3 million views have been garnered by a slick cover of the song by American a cappella superstars Pentatonix. Reached at a Los Angeles tour stop, Sheldrake admits that he had never heard of Pentatonix before the platinum-selling group recorded “Come Along”, but he says he likes what they did with it.
“It’s a very good arrangement,” Sheldrake tells the Straight. “They’re very technically amazing singers. They’ve made some different choices than what I would, obviously, but I’m definitely impressed. Yeah, it sounds cool.”
You could say Sheldrake comes by his musical talent honestly; his mother is the internationally renowned singer and voice teacher Jill Purce, who is perhaps best-known for her early-’70s work with German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. His father is notable in his own right. For decades, Rupert Sheldrake has been a thorn in the side of scientific orthodoxy, espousing ideas that include the notion that humans have telepathic connections with their canine companions.
Cosmo Sheldrake credits his father’s unique world-view with shaping his own.
“It has very much been a part of how I’ve grown up and think about the world,” he says. “I very much feel connected with his ideas and analysis and philosophies. It’s had a huge impact—I guess first and foremost, this idea of nature being very much alive and evolutionary. So I’ve definitely inherited this sense of a holistic understanding of nature, which is somewhat animistic in a way. That definitely had a big impact on the way I think, and it trickled through into the music, for sure.”
To that end, Sheldrake has created songs that incorporate his own field recordings of birds and aquatic animals made in various locales, including a few that will be familiar to attendees of the Squamish Constellation Festival, where he performs this weekend.
“I’ve spent time up on the islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland, in that amazing part with smatterings of islands all over the place,” he says. “I’ve spent basically every summer of my life up in those islands in Desolation Sound and that part of the world. It’s beautiful.”
The sense of hushed awe in Sheldrake’s voice when he talks about the wonders of the Sunshine Coast suggests that he’d rather be in forest or field, conversing with nightingales and Heffalumps, than tallying how many millions of views or Spotify streams his deeply quirky songs are getting.
If you follow me on LinkedIn or know me in real life, you may already be aware that I was recently laid off by my most recent employer after three years.
The good news is that this means I’m available—for freelance jobs, a full-time position, or contract work. I’m not as cheap as Chat-GPT, but I do have original thoughts, so that’s a plus.
What do I do? A slogan/motto I have adopted recently is “I work with words”, and that’s as succinct a summation of what I do as I could think of. A more expansive answer is that I am a writer and copy editor with a vast range of experience in journalism, public relations, thought leadership, and marketing.
How vast? Here’s a list of some of the work I have done, in no particular order:
Arts features
Music criticism
Interviews
Press releases and pitches
Social media posts
White papers and reports
Book reviews
Ghostwritten op-eds
Speeches and presentations
Artist bios for record labels and independent musicians
SEO-focused blog articles
Landing page copy
That’s a lot of different kinds of writing (and editing), but the one thing that connects them all is that I do them all to a very high standard. But don’t just take my word for it; take my words for it. You can find samples of my work in a few different categories:
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)
Whimsy And Horror: The Decemberists Explore Both In Equal Measure In Singer Colin Meloy’s Literate Songs
It’s a hell of a way to start a pop record. “Shanty for the Arethusa”, which kicks off Her Majesty the Decemberists, begins with the creaking and groaning of a mist-shrouded clipper in some forsaken Victorian outport, followed in short order by the sharp sound of a woman’s scream. “Tell your daughters do not walk the streets alone tonight,” Decemberists singer Colin Meloy warns in the first verse of the song, a weird lament about spectral sailors, ghost ships, and very real threats of bodily harm.
Reached at home in Portland, Oregon, Meloy says he knew right away that “Shanty for the Arethusa” would be the first track on Her Majesty, winning out over breezier pop confections such as the sweetly sardonic “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” and the giddily melancholic “Song for Myla Goldberg”. Meloy’s friends and colleagues, needless to say, thought him a lunatic. “They went, ‘No. No, no, no. Don’t. That’s the song everybody’s going to hear first, and it’s really off-putting. It’s scary and disturbing and weird. Put a pop song first,’ ” the singer recalls.
Meloy got his way. Placing the disc’s most morbid song before all the others, he says, was a way of weeding out those listeners who might not be ready for the Decemberists’ brand of whip-smart, bookish songcraft. “I think there is something in me that really wants to get it out at the very beginning. It’s like, ‘If you don’t like this, then you should stop listening now,’ ” he says.
Meloy’s refusal to pander to his audience might alienate a few potential listeners, but it has won his band a healthy cult following. The Decemberists are a particular favourite of music critics, who have championed the group both for its winning sound—a curious blend of Kurt Weill cabaret and ’60s folk-rock, all spinning organ and swelling accordion—and Meloy’s hyperliterate story-songs of soldiers, mariners, Gypsies, and other transient souls. (The singer-lyricist holds a degree in creative writing from the University of Montana, and is currently working on a book about the Replacements’ classic Let It Be LP for Continuum International.)
Her Majesty is the follow-up to Castaways and Cutouts, released in 2002 by the tiny company Hush but reissued more widely last year by the Decemberists’ current home, Kill Rock Stars. If the group seems a little out of place on the label that introduced the world to Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney, well, it’s hard to figure out just where the five-piece does fit in. Certainly not on commercial radio, which wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do with the band’s curious balance of whimsy and horror. And Meloy notes that the Decemberists are an uneasy fit on most college-station play lists as well. “Frankly, I don’t know how well we sit between Death Cab for Cutie and the Shins,” he says. “Their stuff is so much less geeky; so much cooler. I’ve never thought of us as being a very cool band.”
Well, those who appreciate Belle and Sebastian probably get it. And so, hopefully, will fans of the Walkmen, with whom the Decemberists play Richard’s on Richards on Wednesday (February 11). If the geeks, freaks, and bookworms who have already discovered Meloy and company have anything to say about it, the place should be packed to capacity.
“We’ve been enjoying a lot of word of mouth,” Meloy avers. “It’s been really nice. I think that there’s a lot of people recommending our album and passing it on to people. It’s a very grassroots sort of way of getting the word out. That’s really worked for us, for whatever reason. I think that people who do like it really like it. The people who appreciate the aesthetic, and appreciate the sense of humour and the approach that we take to music, typically are the sort of people that really grab onto something and hold onto it. And also try to shove it down their friends’ throats.”
It’s been a relatively quiet start to the New Year for the Starling Effect, but we’re gearing up for a couple of shows that I want to tell you about. Because it’s exciting. For me. (Your mileage may vary.)
On March 21, we return to our old stomping grounds, the Princeton Pub, for a gig with China Syndrome and Moonfoil. There’s no cover charge for this one.
Then, on April 18, we hit the stage at Green Auto for the very first time to support Abel Collective, who will be doing so for the last time. (It’s their farewell show.) Rounding out the bill is the Cold Lake, which features former members of long-time local faves Perfume Tree and Veloce.
Seriously, Perfume Tree is legendary. I was listening to their ground-breaking mix of dream-pop and trip-hop in high school, I kid you not!
Tickets for the Green Auto show are available via Eventbrite.
Both of these shows are happening in Vancouver, in case that’s not obvious.
Also: I recently answered some questions for Support the Scene, and I really hope I didn’t come off sounding too obnoxious, but you be the judge.
If it seems like I only ever use this blog to post updates about my band… guilty as charged. However, I just wanted to pop in and note that I have streamlined the rest of this site to make it more user-friendly. There are now only four main pages (apart from this one): About Me, Copywriting Portfolio, Thought Leadership & Blogs, and Arts & Music Journalism. These categories should speak for themselves. Check them out and let me know what you think!
Next up, another blog post about what my band is up to.
John Lucas 