Where are you these days?
I'm in Montreal. But, not for long, I don't think.
Where are you thinking about going?
I'm thinking New York, because I have my band there. I used to be so stressed out and intimidated by the city, but now I feel very comfortable there.
I think it's a place everybody should spend some time, especially in the arts. It’s just such a non-stop, vibrant scene with a lot of like-minded people trying to get after the same thing.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve felt that way about every city that I've gone to, and that's emerging for me, that feeling out of New York.
Before we start talking about All Cylinders, what got you inspired about making music early on?
My parents are definitely the first frontier. They have been taking me to concerts since I was three months old. My dad goes to a concert a week, at least. So, there was a sense that this is the household I'm being brought into, where this is what we do from the jump. But the same feelings that animate me about music now, did so from [as far back as] I can remember. So, my mom would have been playing music in the womb, and I have memories from the womb, and anytime I tell people that, they say, “Oh, your brain doesn't actually have the development required for memory.” There’s so much mystery to life. It's like what we're going off of synapses. I remember the womb, and so I'm sure that that informed me, the music that was me. But I got sidetracked… the feelings that I had from music, from the time I can remember when I was three. The Guess Who might have been the first music that I was visibly excited about. And then the first music I got interested in was the Backstreet Boys, and then Green Day. It's all quite random, but it all made me feel animated. So, as abstract as that is, it's the same feelings.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Both the Backstreet Boys and Green Day are very different bands, but they're both very focused on melody, which I hear a ton in your music. When you say The Guess Who, there's a lot of that aesthetic on All Cylinders as well, which is interesting. We're just an input device, right? As long as your antenna is out, we're absorbing all of these things, and they manifest themselves in different ways.
Right. Yeah, it's funny how growing up you try to run away from so much of this stuff, and then it becomes the most comforting, for lack of a better word. It becomes such a center or a foundation of influence. I feel like there's a point after the teenage rebellion for everybody where they're listening to the music their parents listened to or had on, and there's a reckoning of the depth there, and how it affected their sensibilities. It’s always there.
I was talking to Regina Spektor [Tape Op #172], and we were having a conversation about the music that you're exposed to growing up. Whether you're actually actively listening to it or not, really ends up affecting you later. Were those the sorts of shows that your parents were taking you to? Were they into rock bands and those types of shows?
I don't think that I went to a proper rock show until quite a bit later, like seven or eight. I mean, they would have had me at festivals and things like this. My dad really likes jazz and world music. I remember going to see Mötley Crüe and Aerosmith when I was like eight or nine. It was a completely – that show was notable for its degeneracy. I remember they had hardcore porn on the Jumbotron. I was so young, my parents were like, “This is crazy,” but anyway…
Did you start playing music early on?
I think the earliest evidence of it is three, when I started playing guitar and piano, not in any technical way. I don't know what I would have been doing, It had to have been just like hand drums… I must have been just making a racket. I was also just naturally playing with my ear, like I would play what's on the radio or whatever. That was a good foothold before starting to take lessons when I was like five. I would just disregard everything the teacher said because I had already had this experience of matching things with my ear, so I was like, “I don't need any pen and paper. It's no fun.” Of course, it's another great foundation to have, and I think I have it now, but in most of my lessons I took from that point, from five years old on, it was in one ear out the other. I would just use my ear. It all comes full circle where it's like through making music in this capacity, it dovetails with all of this technical foundation that I might have disregarded at the time. Where I can like put the pieces together, in retrospect.
Were you recording in high school on a 4-track, or a were you using a DAW?
There was a big tape revival at the time, and in that scene in particular. When I was 13, I met this guy, Chris Dadge, who's an amazing drummer in Calgary who might have actually introduced me to your publication. He gave me a Fostex 4-track, and that's how I learned to record. I had used [Apple] GarageBand before, but learning to record on the 4-track is how I actually learned what music is. In elementary school, I remember making a CD. I actually got tomatoed doing a performance in my middle school because I made this horrible music, and I performed it at lunch. This was GarageBand music, and I had no sense of what music was. It was all just very superficial. I was just trying to make a very specific thing, and getting the 4-track enabled me to do the same process of like, “Oh, I hear a song I like. I want to figure out how to do that and recreate it.” It just broke down and made physical the process in a way that it just helped me wrap my head around what songwriting and production is. Not as a skill, but just as a concept. I feel like I'm just now learning some of the technical things that I neglected from all that time ago. But like I said, there's like the notion of songwriting, the concept of production…what is it? I really learned that using tape.
Do you think it is because of the limitations, or having to actually make some choices?
I guess the decision paralysis of using a DAW prompts a lot of bad decisions, especially when you're coming at it from where I was, like 9 or 10. But also, all of the potential of the DAW was limiting to me then. Where now I can approach a DAW with so much freedom. It feels like it's modular. Like, I can literally sculpt any sound I want with contention coming from this analog background. There are other ways to get there, but that was my journey for sure.
Do you feel like when you're recording now, you are approaching the DAW more like a tape machine and using it in that way?
Yeah.
Are you still utilizing the benefits of audio manipulation and other things the DAW offers?
I think the benefit for me, what I do use of it, is the workflow. There's this modularity to it. I’ve always been so against the grid on a philosophical basis. I don't want to be on the grid, musically. Speeding up and slowing down… that’s my bread and butter. And I know that there are different camps on this. But now I'm at a place where the grid offers so much flexibility in that I can create this frame that I can now inject things that were made without that in mind, and just kind of swap them and try a bunch of different hats on, on a certain piece. One of my favorite things to do is to circumvent structure, or flip structure on its head. So, the ability to move things around in a DAW is the way that I've kind of adapted to the new framework. But, as for the actual recording process, I try my best to treat it as I would tape. When I started using DAWs, I was using Audacity. I made All Cylinders on Audacity. It's my only record that doesn't have any tape on it. It's all Audacity, like line in. The benefit of having used Audacity as a sequencer for my tape in the past was that I don't even think of it as a DAW. It’s nice to have the waveforms, and there are a whole other set of things with the waveforms. I love seeing the waveforms, but it also creates an unhealthy and unhelpful obsession with symmetry and having it be clean. It's like, who cares? And nevertheless, it's like, I see a waveform, I'm like, “Oh, that doesn't look good.” And it's like, “Who cares? It sounds good.” I have my hardware rig that I'm running through, and that's what I'm interacting with. I'm just stacking tracks in the DAW, and kind of just out of sight, out of mind. I don't use any plug-ins, and I should. I'll see these videos that are like, “Oh, this artist uses this plug-in.” I'm like, “What a marvel,” to be able to experiment with sounds. Another extension of that DAW flexibility is that, you could experiment with sounds without having to go and get the thing. You could just see how it sounds before you get the physical thing or whatever. Even just that, I haven't been able to get there because I don't have the processing power for it.
All Cylinders has a very classic sound. I think if I had just heard the record and didn't know how you had made it, I would have a very different idea of how and when it was made. It feels like it's from another time, and that's probably because you're not using technology that everyone's using in terms of plug-ins and all the stock sounds.
Right. I remember I had this epiphany when I was young that recording and the multitrack is a lifesaver, and not just as an artistic and spiritual practice. I was like, “Everybody should be doing multitrack recording.” I was convinced of this. And I still feel like it's the premiere art form. But at the time, ten years ago, I was telling myself, “Everybody sounds like Ableton [Live].” I was always telling myself, "I can hear Ableton. I can hear the DAW." But people have really mastered that medium to where I don't feel like that's a thing anymore. I don't hear DAWs anymore, really. I mean, sometimes you sing into somebody's chain and it sounds like Ableton, which is really not a sound I like, but people have really wrapped their heads around the format.
Yeah.
Rich, rich recordings with a laptop.
I'm almost surprised to hear that you made All Cylinders in Audacity. I would have not suspected that.
Yeah. It's funny because it's really just a workflow thing. It's not user friendly, but that's what I liked about it. There are no frills. Now, I'm using GarageBand because I want some of the frills and MIDI capability. I’m having fun with sounds in that world. But yeah, Audacity is like just stacking tracks. I'm just stacking tracks in there, just sequencing the tracks.
Let's talk a little bit about All Cylinders. This record feels like a modern take on the best of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it's not a retread or simply trying to copy that aesthetic. It's a really trippy record. It's quite psychedelic with tons of melodies. Why decide to make this a truly solo record where you played everything on it?
I figured out who I am through recording alone. Just my development as a person spiritually, altogether. Whenever I would be in a studio with somebody else… it's intimate, right? Any time I'd be in a studio, I would be blocked. I can't get where I need to be. I can't delegate properly in a production context. I feel like in a live band context, I'm always comfortable being like, “This has to sound like this,” but in a production context, it all kind of just flushes out to me. I'm kind of on autopilot and I'm also directionless, not in my passion or fervor for what the task at hand is, but just in my process. It's all free play. Whenever I step into a studio with somebody else, I'm like, “Well, how do I harness that?” Because this is work now. Not work in any traditional sense, but there needs to be some kind of direction. There needs to be some kind of discerning thing. It's all child's play. Until it gets to the 11th hour, it's all just sandbox play. It's hard to cultivate that in a studio with somebody else. I just found I was like, “The magic, the sauce, is gone” whenever I'm in the studio with the people I respect the most, or with the people that are the most talented. Obviously, that's just not where it's at for me, and I realized that young. I also realized I could work faster alone. People had technical hang-ups that I just didn't have. I was, again, just using my ear. It was like, “Oh, there's this standard thing that you guys all do. Well, in my basement, my recordings sound like the albums I'm listening to.” I would just circumvent all of that and it became this really strong conviction for me that I couldn't do what I wanted to do with other people in the studio. But then there's this other side of it that’s the financial. When I was 10 or 11, I started busking and I made my living that way. That was my first job. I started putting out CD-Rs and putting out tapes. I was always, for lack of a better word, monetizing my art. It became part of how I understood it. There's this whole starving artist thing and I just don't see things that way. It's actually easy to make an album and sell 50 to 100 copies, and live and pay your rent that way. That's always been the way it is for me. I think I just had the privilege of looking at it that way because I had cultivated my whole practice in rejecting [the idea] that I needed other people. I don't mean to be distasteful talking about this side of things, but that is honestly a thing that has kept me working alone for a lot of my adult life. But the former point is the real driver of that. I've been doing this for so long, so I'm more established. I'm more secure. So, I'm not concerned about people knowing that I did everything, or sharing that pie, which I, always was.
I think part of recording with other people is that it sparks different ideas that you can chase down and ideas for breaking out of routines. I read that you use [Brian Eno’s Tape Op #85] Oblique Strategies cards, which sort of serves that purpose if you're utilizing these prompts.
I've always considered myself as somebody who’s an oblique strategist, but I've literally never even looked at the Oblique Strategies. I don't even know what they actually are. I read David Byrne’s [Tape Op #79], How Music Works, and I'm sure I've referenced Oblique Strategies before. That's definitely the approach. I'm just realizing this now, I'm putting this together. What's so beautiful for me is I haven't listened to Eno in a lot of my adult life. He was so, so big for me in high school that I just kind of had other interests until developing [other] interests. I've just come back to those rock records, those ‘70s albums, and realizing how foundational they are for my outlook on recording. I'm always trying to conceptualize the music as this "thing." This is an issue I've been having lately. I'm going to the studio with some people and they're revivalists. I'm rarely concerned with classical production, traditional production, or traditional songwriting. I'm interested in a post-modern, deconstructed version of that. That is the school of Eno that I envision myself having come from, where it's like, “Yeah, I've never looked at Oblique Strategies, but that's how I think music ought to be made in this day and age." I feel like we're in this postmodern age, where everything dovetails with each other. Everything is schizophrenic. There's an art sensibility that's called schizo affect. I don't think it's actually related to schizophrenia as the name would suggest. It's just this free association. I think a lot of my favorite art movements come from that notion. Like the Beats, let's say, where it's like you're working with this classical and traditional form and you're, you're musing on the canon, but with a freedom that pushes things squarely into literally the avant-garde. It's all very romantic and dramatic. I don't know if my music even actually does justice to that, because I also have this pop sensibility that drives a lot of what I do. But at least for my own purposes, like my own fulfillment, it's always a very experimental approach. It's never like, “Oh, I'm making a song and I need to record the song.” It's never that. All the respect to the people who work that way. I think it’s perfectly normal to arrange a track and then record that track, and I'm not trying to suggest that that's shallow. But what music is to me… it’s like an exploration into the abstract.
What is your process? How do you start?
I'll usually start with drums or bass. The drums or the bass are usually animating me melodically. The thing I love about the flexibility of starting with the drums is I'll lay a drum track down and I'll have a whole arrangement in my mind. Like a very specific chorus that will inform my rhythmic sensibility. That intentionality is like baked in on the foundation of the track, but then still I have this melodic flexibility where I can go anywhere. That'll have its ups and downs. I'm sure any process does. The opening track on All Cylinders, “With a Grain," took me a year of trying different things out on this one very specific drum part that opens the record. The part that has a structure to it, but no particular melody. That'll stump me sometimes, or it'll keep me stuck in a rut, and that was the case with “With a Grain.” But that song is the most rewarding one. Sometimes it's immediate, where I hear a drum part and it asserts a melody. That'll be easy. My process is usually starting with drums, but then if I take All Cylinders, maybe half of those songs were started as riffs, maybe a third of them are words or the title of the song. Then I'll reverse engineer the song. Here's a phenomenon that I want to express, and I'm going to work on that today, musically, not lyrically. And then, lyrically, that'll come together as an expression of the original thing, or it'll take a different turn lyrically. I struggle with lyrics like everybody. I think it's the least natural part for me. I'll try and record instrumentals until I have nothing left instrumentally to give to them [laughs], and then force myself to start writing lyrics. It's not because they aren't as important, if not more, but because it's just such an unfulfilled process and physically taxing. It's like, you're singing all day and doing punch-ins and everything, and some of the lyrics, some of the lines will be just the worst thing you've ever heard in your life. And then you have to work with that. That's never fun. It's never fun. Lyrics. Hmm.
Well, you do a fine job with them.
Thank you. I feel like something that I'm going to do on this new record differently is work on them with the music. I've already got like 15 instrumentals, but I want to start making that a part of the next work, because that's the benefit. Sometimes, it's just having that be embodied and having that be all wrapped up in a bow that just helps things move along with a posture and with a poise that the music only benefits from. If I pick up an acoustic guitar and sing while I'm playing, which I rarely do, that’ll bring about vocal cadences that are maybe easier to sing along to. Whereas vocals have been, at least in the production sense, just like another instrument for me to throw on there. Again, not to diminish the lyrical weight or whatever that I'll try and imbue, but it'll always just be another instrument.
Yeah, do you write every day?
Yeah, I work every day. I definitely subscribe to that, like, that Andy Warhol thing of just like, work, work, work, because the art is who you are.
