Interview
Pitchfork
May 2009
Link
When the Canadian electronic duo Junior Boys began work on the music that would become Begone Dull Care, vocalist and co-producer Jeremy Greenspan analyzed his artistic process. While scrutinizing the methodology behind the intricately crafted and occasionally icy pop music he makes with Matt Didemus, he came upon an unlikely metaphor, the cartoons of Canadian artist Norman McLaren. Combining his interest in music and animation, McLaren’s films are a dazzling blend of color and sound, both painstakingly assembled and beautifully designed. Greenspan saw something in McLaren’s approach that resonated and named the album after one of his short films. Greenspan spoke about McLaren’s influence, harnessing electricity like Neil Young, and the advantages to padding your résumé with Brian Eno references.
Pitchfork: When you were a teenager, you smooth-talked your way into a studio job. How did that happen?
Jeremy Greenspan: When I was about 16, maybe 17, I lived in Birmingham, England. My sister was going to school there. She had some friends who worked at the snack store at a studio complex. I think I’d given them the impression I was into recording and music, so they told me there was an opening for a job. We put together a really phony resume. I figured they’re never going to call my contacts to find out all the Brian Eno records I said I produced [laughs]. And luckily, at the time, I looked a lot like I do now. I basically landed myself a job in this studio that made Muzak, literally music for elevators. I was the engineer for bands who would come off the street. You have 10 hours, you need to record and mix three songs and give them a demo at the end of the day. It was the cream of the crop. We had one band, I remember, that came in and wanted to do Eagles covers. It was a highly stressful job that I wasn’t prepared for, but luckily I had this assistant who was supposed to sort of work off me. I was supposed to be his mentor, because I had all this experience.
Pitchfork: So you played along.
JG: He was dumb enough that I could say, how would you do this? How would you set up these drums? I learned the basic elements of recording from this guy.
Pitchfork: This guy must have felt really good about himself because you agreed with him 99% of the time.
JG: Exactly. He was quite good, actually. He had no business being an underling to someone like me.
Pitchfork: I remember reading that you came out with an early single with Johnny Dark, an original member of Junior Boys, around 1995. It seemed like there was a big gap between that and Last Exit.
JG: Well, we didn’t release anything [as] Junior Boys in 1995. In the 90s, Matt and I released some bad drum’n’bass songs, bad house tracks, stuff like that. I was a teenager at that point, so the period between that and starting Junior Boys was general growing up stuff. I started Junior Boys while I was at university with John. That was just pissing around. We’d post stuff on MP3.com. It was kind of like MySpace back then. It was basically through my experience in England that we got everything cooking with Junior Boys. I lived with a guy who now runs the label Hyperdub, which puts out Burial. He goes by the name Kode9. We were roommates in England, and it was through him and a lot of his connections that we were able to release stuff and get heard. The first couple of songs the Junior Boys ever did in 2001 were posted on his Hyperdub website, which at that point wasn’t a label, just a website. That’s basically how journalists heard us at first. We didn’t really plan on being a band or playing music for a living.
Pitchfork: Those are some serious dubstep credentials.
JG: Yeah, right.
Pitchfork: In previous interviews, you’ve talked about influences from the electronic music world. Who are some of the pop songwriters you really admire?
JG: People talk about us referencing the 80s, a lot of John Foxx and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Prefab Sprout and bands like that. But on this record we were listening to a lot of MOR 1970s stuff like Carole King and Neil Young, stuff that doesn’t necessarily sound like us. Steely Dan is a big influence for me. I don’t think it’s particularly evident because we come from dance music. When we were teenagers in Hamilton, Ontario, the only shows we could get into were underground dance parties. That’s where you could go and be a weird teenager. Because of my city’s close proximity to Detroit and the scene in Windsor with Richie Hawtin, all these people would come up and play every weekend.
Pitchfork: What about the music of Steely Dan and Neil Young really influences you?
JG: Well, different things. What I like about Neil Young, especially his music with Crazy Horse, is the electricity, the actual sound of the electricity and the hums and all that stuff. Everything could fall apart and completely lose control at some point. I love that aspect of him. I think we go for that, in terms of using outboard, non-computer synthesizers. We use a lot of modular synthesizers, weird idiosyncratic instruments that can just veer out of control at any time.
Pitchfork: You love the ability to tweak things and experiment.
JB: And let the gear do its thing. And then, on the other side of the spectrum, you have a band like Steely Dan that’s methodical and precise. Their arrangements are really complicated and complex, and I love that. The funny thing is they’re two extremes and they don’t gel together particularly well. That was a problem for us. How do you resolve those two competing things? I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve latched onto this filmmaker, Norman McLaren, because I think that was the critical problem he had in his own work. He wanted everything to be real stream of consciousness– Begone Dull Care– to not think about things and lose yourself in the process of working. But at the same time, all his stuff was crazy with detail, so meticulous and painstaking. One of the dilemmas in electronic music is how do you nurture the unpredictability of it and make it immediate? How can you do something that requires attention to detail but not over-analyze every decision?
Pitchfork: What was it like working with Morgan Geist on his Double Night Time album? Did that have any influence on the new album?
JG: Yeah, it did, in the sense that Morgan has very particular ideas as to how to work and how to do things. The process of working with him is much more rigorous than the way we work. We’re much sloppier than he is. It’s interesting to see how he works, and we have become close friends. And we have such respect for him as a producer and writer. He’s become a great person to throw ideas off of and get good, honest feedback. If Morgan likes what you’re doing it’s good, because he’s got good taste and he doesn’t like a lot of stuff.
Pitchfork: How is it sloppier?
JG: Morgan has a lot of ideas that translated well to what we did on this album. He’s into very dry sounds and dry production. He doesn’t rely on effects and will avoid them whenever he can. If you can do it in synthesis, that’s when to do it. If you want a modulation or delays or those kinds of things, then try and do it in the actual building of the sound. Try and get a good signal to begin with. A lot of electronic music these days, especially a lot of the indie stuff in North America, has so many effects. That has kind of a neat sound, running things through pedals, but Morgan is so far on the opposite of that. It’s like if you hear a little hint of reverb it just becomes so precise, as opposed to loops upon loops upon loops. That’s the problem with music and computers sometimes. Your processing capabilities aren’t limited, so your sound can be processed into extinction and it doesn’t matter what your source sound is anymore. All you’re listening to is an effect.
Pitchfork: Can you talk about how the lyrics on Begone Dull Care are a reflection on making art?
JG: This album has a grand sort of theme. Everyone said the third album is so important, and I thought maybe I should make it about the process of making the album, so every song, both lyrically and musically, is self-referential in a way.
Pitchfork: I can understand lyrically self-referential, but how is it self-referential musically?
JG: Well, that’s why the songs are so long and have these over-extended intros and outros. I wanted to say this is our process. This is us exploring some idea to the Nth degree. I was worried at one point that we made these songs too long, that we got lost in the loops trying to make them endlessly complex. I had to scale back a lot of the songs. I was probably listening to too many Steve Reich records. At the end of the day, I’m glad I made it the way I did, with the extended intros and outros, because the record is about laying things on the table and discovering where we’re at.
Pitchfork: I found it interesting that a song like “Animator”, considering it’s an album about McLaren, can be read as a tribute, but the lyrics also point to more of a romantic fixation.
JG: I’ve tried to do that in almost every song I’ve ever written. For example, “Like a Child”, from our second record, was a song about being in a hospital bed and dealing with that, but so many people read it as a love song. I always sort of did that on purpose. What I took from McLaren was that he did experimental film and music but was never alienating about it. He was part of the National Film Board in Canada, which was very much about children’s entertainment and stuff the whole family can appreciate, and I sort of live by that motto with my music. I never want to make anything that wouldn’t make sense to someone who wasn’t initiated into electronic music. The conceit of making everything to be read as a conventional love song reflects that.
Pitchfork: A lot of your lyrics seem to come from the receiving end of a breakup, sort of dark and jilted but ultimately still romantic.
JG: I’ve always thought the most important things when writing lyrics is being honest. I have a tendency to be a bit abstract at times, and I hate lyrics that are so abstract and obtuse that there’s no sense of what the thing is about at all. I think my philosophy has always been to write as honestly as possible. That’s what I love about Neil Young. He doesn’t really edit his lyrics, he just writes them and that’s it and it’s a completely honest process. The danger in lyric writing is cliché, and so one way to avoid it as much as possible is to be honest about things and be mature about them. If you’re going to write a love song, write about how you’ve experienced love, kind of alluring and revolting all at the same time. I never felt I wrote lyrics that were overly indulgent in a particular way, but I thought the mood of melancholy on the last album wasn’t a reflection of heartbreak and sadness. For me, it’s about a sort of bewilderment, a sort of fogginess, an unclarity about what you’re going though. That reflects what my relationship experience has always been. Maybe I’d rather be alone, maybe I’d rather not and I can’t deal with it.
Pitchfork: What led you to McLaren? Is he someone you’ve always been into or someone you recently discovered?
JG: I’d say I really got into him a couple of years ago. I remember seeing some McLaren films, like Neighbours, his most famous, and thinking it was excellent and that I had seen it as a kid. I became obsessive to the point where I researched him. I wanted to make this record that wasn’t too self-referential. It becomes absurd to a point. The song “Parallel Lines” is the most literal one, a song about writing lyrics. I didn’t want to do a whole album like that and needed something to center it, and at some point I thought it’s going to be McLaren. Everything came together around him so nicely. For me, he represents a kind of ideal artists in every way.
Pitchfork: Were there things in his biography that intrigued you?
JG: First of all, he’s Canadian, which is important to me in a weird way, and he defined Canadian art in a real way. He formed the National Film Board, which has a vibe to it, definitely. Boards of Canada based it off the vibe of the NFB. It resonates with Canadians of a certain generation, which means any Canadian under the age of 50.
His generation of experimental filmmakers at the NFB laid the groundwork for the special effects in 2001: a space odyssey, and they won the bulk of the animation Oscars year after year. It’s a part of Canadian cultural heritage that’s never really discussed. When we talking about Canadian culture, what’s usually evoked is this horrible pastiche of Celtic music, the most clichéd forms of environmental/nativism. What’s great about McLaren is it’s very Canadian and it’s really sort of polite Modernism, not this Italian sort of Futurism where it’s like burn all the cathedrals.
Pitchfork: Yeah, the cartoon Begone Dull Care has that great Oscar Peterson jazz score and wasn’t trying to freak you out. It was just a well-made piece of art.
JG: That’s what I love about that stuff. McLaren was also a musician and was an important innovator in electronic music. He had this catalog of cards, and every card would have a shape and every shape would correspond to a certain frequency and amplitude. He would take a snapshot of that card and embed it in film, and it would play back on the projector, because the projector could read the soundtrack portion of the film. You’re sort of hearing the drawings. He had this film called Synchronomy, which the visual is photographs of his little cards, the actual movie you’re seeing is what you’re hearing.
Pitchfork: It reminds me of Raymond Scott, animation and electronic music going hand in hand.
JG: A lot of that stuff all gelled for me, like Delia Derbyshire, working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Laurie Spiegal, a woman who worked at Bell Labs. Those were dream jobs for me. What I like about the NFB and McLaren is it’s never alienating, never trying to make music that people can’t understand. All of his music was inclusive, it was supposed to be for everyone. That’s always been our thing. We always think of ourselves as a pop band. On this album, we probably made songs that were a bit too long to be pop songs. But we come out of the tradition of disco pop music. Disco was highly experimental. You had people like Arthur Russell making hits.
Pitchfork: When you sing, do you see yourself as having that kind of romantic pop voice in any way?
JG: It might sound like I’m just saying this, but I really don’t put too much thought into my voice, both literally and sort of figuratively, like what is my angle, what am I going for. It’s just the way I sing. I started singing softly on the first album, probably because I was shy about doing it, and that voice kind of stuck. People said my shy, soft voice has this hilarious, Wham-esque quality to it, and I sort of play that up to some extent.
Pitchfork: I’m waiting for that “Last Christmas” cover.
JG: Yeah, every Christmas I kind of flirt with that.