Owen Pallett Is a Man With a Mind: An Interview
Friday, April 30
The Mohawk (912 Red River)
$13 advance, $15 at door; doors at 8
[info] | [tickets]
Austinist is proud to present Owen Pallett at Mohawk tonight—see below for the giveaway entry form—as he's touring in support of the excellent Heartland, his first album under his own name (you may know him better as Final Fantasy), and undeniably his richest, most demanding and virtuosic release yet. In preparation for that batch of complex violin-looping and meta-commentating storylines (in the album, Lewis, an "ultraviolent farmer" from an imaginary world, contends with his God and creator, Owen Pallett), we had a little chat about the music industry, narrative, and, of course, Lady Gaga.
You’ve mentioned before that you make pop music. That comes across a little bit oddly to some people, so what makes your music pop, and if your music’s pop, then what isn’t?
Well, the reason why I say that I make pop music is to kind of sidestep the whole sort of pop classical crossover sort of wellspring that inevitably comes up, just because I feel like it could be an interesting topic but I think it’s one best left to trainspotters and journalists and academians rather than people who are actually trying to get the shit done. There have been many people historically who have tried to straddle that line from a very didactic perspective. I mean, Alfred Schnittke [ed. note: Russian composer, 1934-1998] springs to mind immediately. And I’m just not…I realize that I have classical tools at my disposal but I hate doing it, kind of like how I’m excluding classical music from my listening sphere as much as possible when I’m sitting down to write some songs. It’s just I’m interested in making pop music, you know, and I know more now about the way a compressor works than about Neapolitan seconds or, you know, like I don’t know…orchestration (laughs).
Sort of like the idea that with pop music your audience stands up?
It’s a problem that I thought about a lot when I started making records, that I want to make a record with a string quartet, but when you record a string quartet it doesn’t sound like a pop record, it sounds like a recording of something that would actually be better suited to a concert hall. Trying to figure out ways of writing, mic-ing up, treating the studio, you know, different ways of treating the string quartet, trying to turn it into something that could be played back to back with Blondie and (laughs) I don’t know, Phoenix.
Yeah Phoenix, right?
Yeah, sure. Phoenix!
Click "MORE" to read the rest of the interview
So about your latest album, it’s great and one thing that was notable about it was that it had an immediate attractiveness, but took a while to really get into, to really know the album due to all its strands of complexity. So I was wondering, do you feel in the future you’re going to feel more of a pull to simplify or to continue expanding in complexity and depth?
Well I definitely came reeling from the experience of making that album, and a little overwhelmed by the denseness of it, even just the process of—even while we were recording it, my engineer would get this sort of like hypnotized eye and would just be like “there’s too much going on,” you know, when we were recording, I don’t know, an oboe or something. So, I mean the whole editing process was so intense and so time-consuming that it made me definitely have the urge to aim for a more simplistic approach, which isn’t to say that the songs aren’t going to be as deep, it’s just going to be based more on the curation of single sounds as opposed to the overdubbing of multiple sounds. But, I don’t know. I’m saying that now, but the problem with recording, multitrack recording, is the opportunity to keep overdubbing and overdubbing is often too great.
It’s a hell of a lure.
Not only that, but often really pop records that you would never think of as being exceedingly dense are actually quite dense. Thinking of Phoenix, for one, they just—because they mix of drums and the voice up so high you don’t notice that there’s actually six or seven different synth parts happening all at the same time underneath.
Sort of related to that, in another interview you were talking about how you could just listen to a song and deconstruct it down to each of its individual parts. And in association with that, you said that you didn’t think that pure listening really existed. So I was wondering, how you would account for the listening experience of, say, a child, or a musically uneducated individual?
Well, I’m not really sure. It’s like, when it comes to a pure listening experience, I just feel like the majority of music critics now, and people who are in a position to form an opinion that people are going to pay attention to, they can’t have a pure listening experience. Most of the kids that I know really like Pachelbel Canon and Michael Jackson, you know, which speaks to some sort of, something unique about those, something inherent to the qualities of that music. I remember as a kid I didn’t even listen to piano music. Like I just found the piano to be a really harsh and aggravating instrument. Now I hear it as being extremely beautiful. So, I don’t know—you could talk about kids, but I think at that time, I was talking about, probably specifically about music writers.
Speaking of music writers, there’s this one word that I’ve seen thrown around, mostly in regards to the whole concept album and all that sort of stuff—what’s your response to the notion that your music is in some way post-modern?
I’m okay with that. I mean I, you know, happily say that I could happily describe my taste in literature as something favoring post-modern. So it doesn’t really bother me to hear that.
In regards to Heartland, there’s the dynamic between the creator and the character and all of that, so I was wondering whether it is necessarily possible for anybody to transcend the construct of his or her own being? I’m sorry if that’s sort of philosophically insane…does that make any sense?
Yeah. I mean I don’t think I’d really applied that sort of particular train of thought into the writing of it, but I mean it’d be interesting to approach it from that perspective. When I was making the record I was more loosely considering, you know, the “hows” and “whys” of why one would make a record, you know, and thinking about the position of a lot of narrators and a lot of narrative voices. I’ve always made an effort in everything that I do as a musician to defuse a sort of cult of personality because I see it goes along with a lot of other people. I just try and stay in shape, and shave my face and look good on stage (laughs) but other than that, I set up my own gear. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, it’s the whole package.
I don’t do any costume changes or anything like that, you know, because I’ve been a little, not allergic to, but just not interested in actually pursuing that sort of statement, like I’m not interested in isolating myself from the audience, basically. And this creates all sorts of moments of confusion from a creative perspective about how, you know, someone like Lady Gaga can be such an incredible and vital and amazing artist, one who is very valuable to me on a daily basis, but can do so without creating, you know, music that’s that mature…you know what I mean. Like, I can think of like 6 or 7 other pop musicians who are making far better music than Lady Gaga’s but that I’m just not as interested in, you know what I’m saying?
So just thinking about the difference, the different ways in approaching the narrative when you’re up there and you’re singing your song, people will just typically think that what Morrissey’s singing is actually Morrissey’s, Steven Patrick Morrissey’s, own opinion as opposed to Morrissey singing from the perspective of somebody who feels the way that this person is expressing, and the record is really meant to play with that, and also play with, you know, any sort of reasons that I might have for making the record in the first place, because when I was making it, even though it is a record that was kind of centered around this narrative, I was also kind of, I couldn’t help it, I feel like I had to touch on kind of my reasons for making the record in the first place and for having this narrative, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it definitely does.
And I mean, I think to see a pop star, like especially Gaga, quite obviously putting on this very specific sort of persona when she’s doing her interviews, kind of like—it didn’t throw me for a loop, but it does certainly make me wonder, “Wow, should I like start putting on makeup?” (laughs) You know, I mean I could be Madonna and just react incredibly negatively to it, like, “What do you want me to do, get my tits out!” but you know, it can be kind of shaking!
