How did you get your start in music?
I grew up playing in bands. I was the thumper on the drums. I went from that to jazz bass as a jobber. I did a Berklee summer program, then University of Toronto, and then went on to piano and producing. I grew up doing funk, jazz, and indie – playing in bands and songwriting, and I was sort of the drummer who knew too much. When I was doing electronic music, it was almost a "fuck music" attitude. A lot of people feel that way after coming out of jazz school! [laughter] But I was always using that education in some way. I got to learn a hundred standards, so the melodies are in there. Coming out of the electronic music scene, there was a point where the most modern electronic thing I could do was to record a super high-fidelity sound and then fuck around with it. I had released all this electronic dance music with a bit of rapping and singing. One song of mine got stolen by an Austrian store that used a talking pig to sing my song for their bio product. I won a lawsuit, and for the first time I had money!
I've never heard this story!
Yeah, I sued a talking pig. [laughter] I went from having a thousand bucks on a good day to suddenly having $90,000, and I spent it all going to Studios Ferber in Paris and making this album, Saskamodie, where every sound was recorded by hand. The room was the big room [Le Studio A] in Ferber, where Nina Simone and Ray Charles had recorded with all the old gear. That was the record that saved my career. You can get stuck in a mode – doing the same thing over and over – when you should be of your own time and make timeless things. Sometimes, in order to make something modern, you have to go back to an old time and then plot a new way forward. For me, that's often 1974, which musically was a great year. I go back to the '70s and think, "What would have happened if it was dance-y but not all tight and multitracked? How would that sound?" Find a new way forward, still making something modern and part of that. So, I was doing electronic music, and I had to find a way out of that box. I could see that, at the end of the day, sounds themselves get dated but the actual songs don't.
You're in L.A. now, right?
Yeah. I've been lucky, for the most part. Most of the people that I've worked with have been friends and also nearby. I've been outside the industry, for the most part. There are people who are sort of in the inner sanctum. Even if there was no label or no record being made, I would just want to be with them and want to make something. That's where the real gold happens, in my view. I did come to L.A., but I've never assimilated. I mean that in all humility. I'm never really someone that gets hired in the professional capacity, in that way. It's more that things I do have a life, and I like it that way. The times when I get hired, often it inhibits the creativity. It's an interesting thing, especially related to this record, because this was really a labor of love. It’s about how to find new spaces, sonically and emotionally.
This record, Music Will Explain, is awesome. It reminds me of some of those '60s vocal group records.
Yeah, that was kind of what I was after, because there's this sense that humanity itself is getting pushed to the sidelines somehow. How can I bring that into a modern way? How can I get the sound of a human? I went through a second or third crazy Brazilian phase the last couple of years. There's something about the way those vocals carry. Also disco, like the Bee Gees' where it's not just one voice.
That's a great example.
Yeah, you still get a song out of it. Not just a hook, the vocals actually carry the song. That was something that was always on my mind, but I could never quite get the sound because it would be multitracked, or it was a bunch of people on handheld mics. I finally cracked it on this record for the first time, not that there aren't stones still unturned that I'm excited to try. It came down to having everybody singing around one mic. I had a lot of harmonies arranged, which I ended up scuttling. I could only get that many people in a room for a couple hours. Most of the record was done in eight hours, if it was added up. There was not a lot of rehearsing possible. The singers don't really read music – some can, but that's another world and not how this works. We need to twist and adapt it, and find the voice and the range. Generally, it was groups of six, but sometimes it would be as much as twelve. Having six to eight women was the basic. I did three two-hour sessions like that. Then two sessions with six guys. There were some particular breakthroughs in the making of this.
You started by gathering a group of people around one mic and getting the vocal parts?
