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?
Yeah, totally. Different songs happened in different ways. I had demos and I had planned it, but none of that made it through to the final mix. Basically, it was people around one mic. I had a "skeleton" in my headphones, but they couldn't hear it. I had to have the key and the structure. They had no headphones at all and hadn't heard the music. We were getting the key on the piano and then I was conducting them to my Ampex 440 C [2-track tape deck], which is a whole other necessary part. Until I had that, I couldn't have done this. Because of the way dynamics operate over time, it enabled me to create enough of a narrative through the music that it's not just loops and editing. Also, it opened up the highs in a way that I just can't on the computer. That opened up space for me, emotionally. It's all about emotional space; space for empathy, and space for humanity. I started with that, and then I would put those chunks of tape into [Avid] Pro Tools. From there, it was back to being an electronic musician.
To build the tracks up instrumentally around the vocals?
Yeah, the last thing that went down was the drums. I kept trying to do the drums; it was sonically there, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. It was either too clean or too lo-fi. Finally, using the tape machine with the Ecoplate [plate reverb], I was getting close. I'd be A/B’ing music that I love, and trying to understand, "How does it function?" These days, we have so much bass and it's oppressive. But we live in a post, "When Doves Cry" Prince world. We don't necessarily need bass, even though it's sacrilege to say it. So, a lot of it revolved around not doing too much bass, keeping the bass in the higher range, and letting the kit be about the snare. You've just got to hear the backbeat; you don't really need to hear the kick as much as you need to know where the backbeat is. Pinning it between the vocal and backbeat was the final breakthrough. My friend, Lucky Paul [Paul Taylor], left a Brady [Drum Company] snare here when he went off on tour – this high-end Australian snare that I could never afford. It’s made out of a solid trunk of a tree.
Oh, carved out inside?
Yeah. I just use my kid's kit half the time. I finally thought, "Let me put that in," and it was like, "Bingo!" Now, every little roll, every little imprecise thing, you can hear it. It's got character and it's got the right sound. So much depends on the original sound. We always say that, but this was a case in point. I then rerecorded all the drums on the whole album in two hours. I just had the choir, so in a couple of cases I threw on a click. But for most of it, I didn't work with a click. I have a different sense of rhythm, so even when I record to click I end up having to edit it more. If I record off a click, I can edit it like a tape machine. I just move it around until it sounds good, and nobody has to tell me where it has to go.
Sometimes you'll play a great part, but then you can hear yourself pushing or pulling to get to the click a little bit.
Yeah, that feels wrong. For me, the click is the vocal. Whether it's working with Feist or Jamie Lidell, where I've had the opportunity to be on the kit while they're laying it down. It comes to a bar-by-bar decision. There's no right or wrong. It comes to the inflection of the voice or the inflection of the bass at that time. Then you've got to smack it right where it has to be. Not too early, not too late; and you have to predict it on a bar-to-bar basis. That's why playing along to a machine as a drummer pissed me off. The only machine I'll play to is the [Linn] LM-1 [Drum Computer]. It's like they took that into consideration because it was so early on. There's a certain chaos to it that, like they wheeled that thing in and attempted to replace Steve Gadd. I think it's doing what it needed to do to power the '80s.
For sure!
Other than that, I get annoyed when I have to play along to a machine. What I will always play along to is the melody. For me, a good singer's time is beyond reproach. If you can get to that level of kinetic interplay and be all together playing the song, then you're actually playing music. It's a time-based art form. That's the whole thing I love about music. It's like a time machine. Now, multitracking and working the way where I kind of play everything, basically I'm the band. To make that feel natural is what I feel I got closer to on this record than ever before, because it's not about looping. I have to play the whole song, from beginning to end. To do that, I usually play characters when I go to the instruments.
Oh, yeah. I'll think about different bass players. "I'm so-and-so right now."
