(Cord Magazine's questions are in blue. Artist responses are in grey.)


You’ve been getting play in Canada on MuchMoreMusic, whereas I’ve noticed that your music has a big appeal to young people too; a lot of my friends are big fans of yours. Do you have an idea in your mind of what your audience looks like?

I try to stay completely out of this field of trying to be strategic about the marketing and shit. I know a lot of really successful artists are very business oriented; I will not do it, because it saps my creativity, it preys upon my insecurity and my human flaws. I would rather be an unknown artist and make records that affect a few thousand rather than have to expend a lot of my creative energy on thinking about marketing, and how to be smart about business and money. It’s just not in my repertoire.

So you write your music more for yourself than for an audience?

I think if you write music for people’s ears and minds, you’re a fraud. You write music from your heart and about things that inspire you because that’s what you do, it’s part of your voice. If you do it for any other reason, then you should call a spade a spade and call yourself an entertainer, not an artist.

You did the artwork on your newest CD yourself, why is that? Is there something you wanted to add to the music, or that needed to be shown visually?

Oh, I’m going to have an art show one day, you have to come. I make pictures because my eyes and my ears are extremely loud, as senses. I consider my whole person to be a litmus paper; I’m very sensitive to all things. My eyes and ears, in particular, are always in tune and on fire. I love pictures because they are quiet pieces of space, whereas music is pieces of time, and it’s invisible. I love the way those two things collide; music makes me see things, in that other kind of sight, and art does the same thing – it makes you hear things, and know stories with those other planes of your mind.

Is there something you wanted to add to the music, or that needed to be shown visually?

No, I think that’s what happens when the book is better than the movie. I think music belongs to the invisible, and should stay that way. But the pictures that you see, it’s like when you’re reading a book, and you see pictures – it’s a different kind of image. It’s not one that you’re injecting into your eyes, but you’re making it. So that’s the beautiful part about music. But when you make a picture, and you start from that impetus, the things you hear, and the characters that you think you know, are all things that you have created in your mind.

I’ve read that you felt you weren’t in a very good place when you went to record this album, does that dark imagery of the CD booklet reflect that?

Yes, but I think that in all of those images, there’s a sort of Disney, fairytale angle on it. There’s an innocence and a whimsicality to it that saves it from being dark and despairing. That’s the only complaint that I would have about my favorite band in the world, Radiohead. It’s beautiful music, and what he’s saying (Thom Yorke) is beautiful and relevant, but I find that there’s no light, there’s no hope, it seems to me, and I can’t handle that sort of despair. With the dark image of my album, I wanted to put a little bit of fairytale inside of it, say that there’s hope still.

I had a question written down to ask about a juxtaposition I noticed between the really dark subject matter and some of the really upbeat rhythm. Is that what you were going for?

Exactly.

I would say your music takes more from Radiohead than more traditional singer/songwriter music. Would you agree?

I would say that too, that’s the way I definitely lean. A lot of people, a lot of fans have told me, “it should just be you and the piano!” – and those are my roots, and I love that, but the music that excites me is a totally different animal. The music that excites me on stage, and gets me fired up to change the world, is always bigger music, bigger than the intimate sort of love letter that a piano/vocal performance would be.

Are you going to change things up in the future? For instance, Radiohead went electronic with Kid A…

I never know, and I never want to predict. I have no grand plans for the future of music, I’m more concerned with what I say to the world, rather than the present box that it comes in.

Did you find the process of recording this album soothing; did it make you feel better again about the world?

It did not. This time around it positively inflamed them. I had located the bruises and the wounds, with all of my study in the woods, and all of my silence, and yearning to know; I had found the sore spots, and then when I went in to record, the process was torturous. I’ve done so much recording in my life, and this was absolutely the hardest. I think that what I was doing when I went to the cabin was not escaping anything, I was trying to go down to the bottom. I think that the recording was a continuation of that.

Is there a lot more that still needs to come out then?

Oh yes, several records! A lot of people say it takes pain to make great art, what would you say to that?

I do think great art takes time, but not in an individual sitting. I think you need to acquire life.

I know a part of the university process that people go through, which I said I’m going through, is when you start to question everything, and the world doesn’t seem to make any sense. Are these kinds of things you worry about?

It’s not to me worrying; I had an art teacher who said things like that – question everything. Believing is brilliant to a point, and then believing becomes laziness. He was all about that critical thinking that completely expanded my mind. But at the same time, it’s a double edged sword – you feel all of a sudden the pain of the world, you feel the senselessness of evil, you feel despair, you feel that moment where you’ve read too much existential philosophy, and you’re like “wait a minute”, and look at everything and it seems so hilariously meaningless. That’s a terrifying moment! It’s almost like you feel like you have to cure it with something, and so you do the North American thing and you stop every sense – I go see a movie, I go see a concert, I eat a good meal. You just try and close it off. But it won’t go away, so you have to have some way of digesting that information, or turning it around.

Are you a dreamer, or a romantic, in the sense that it’s easy to drift away from the mundane concerns of everyday life?

That’s a beautiful question. I think I’m a romantic that is also in love with the mundane. Nothing is small and meaningless. Entirely, the lesson of quantum physics is things change the way they look when the way you look at them changes. The behavior of an atom is affected by being observed. That blows my mind.

Sometimes the little things can bring the greatest joy. Have there been any random little things that you’ve seen lately that have made you smile?

I can absolutely give you the best example. I’m gonna cry thinking about it. I was in Worchester in England, feeling really worn down by the world, and having one of those cloudy moments. I was standing by the river and was thinking “I don’t know if I can do this, it’s too hard on my body and my heart and soul” and I felt this little tap on my elbow, right on this ancient medieval bridge over this gorgeous river, with tons of swans everywhere. I turned around, and there’s this little redhead girl, and she looks up at me and says “D’ you won’t some bread to feed the swons?” She gave me this sweaty hunk of bread, and we threw them at the swans, and I was just like “thank you God!”

Was there something bigger that came from the recording experience besides the new album?

I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel it fed something very significant and integral. I feel this sense of duty, and for me, life is always directing me towards making music, and I think that it’s my job here.

As far as process of making your last album goes, where you went off to the woods to write, do you think you’ll ever do it again, or will you try a new direction for recording?

People thing that I went to the woods to write; I did not go to the woods to write, I did not go into the woods to make an album. I went to the woods because I was completely lost in life, and considering quitting everything I’ve done, and going on a completely different path. I was considering becoming a monk; I needed something new, because it was a period of starvation that I was trying to fix. So when I went there and music came out (and it was funny that the one belonging that I made sure I brought with me was a one tonne, enormously cumbersome grand piano, that’s gotta tell me something) and I go there and music comes out, it’s like, there’s proof positive of your direction and what your heart does when it’s unfettered, and there aren’t people around telling you to do shit, and you’re not scared about money, and you’re not scared of what your friends think of you, and you’re just being who you are, the natural you comes out. For me, it was music and painting.

Do you know what comes next then?

None of us knows what comes next Ryan, none of us. It takes great faith to believe the sun will rise in the morning. But for me, I just want to keep making things, I want to make beautiful things, and I want to help the rest of the world make beautiful things, instead of being apathetic and angry and poisoning the planet.

I have a question here from a friend of mine for you. Do you have a favorite book or author?

I love that question! Favorite is such a cruel word, because there’s no possible way I could pick a favorite author. But I would have to say J.D. Salinger changed my life in a huge way. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, changed my life in a huge way. Leonard Cohen’s poetry, Al Purdy’s poetry, and one that I read just recently that I think should be required reading for every person on the face of the Earth is a short story called “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud” by Carson McCullers.

Elsewhere

By Ryan Ince
Photos : sarahslean.com
Published : March 2005.