Owen Pallett, The Imperial Theatre, 319 Main St., Tuesday, Sept. 9, 9:30 p.m.
Owen Pallett has been moving back and forth between the macro worlds of superstardom and the micro perspective of a solo indie career for some time now.
Pallett has been an integral component in Arcade Fire's sound from the very beginning, adding his know-how and expertise to Funeral and everything they've done since. At the same time, when not on tour with Win Butler and Régine Chassagne's uberband he's done his own thing.
His second solo album, He Poos Clouds, released under the name Final Fantasy, won the 2006 Polaris Music Prize for Best Canadian Album.
He's also worked on several film scores including the soundtrack for Spike Jonze's Her which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Fresh off the Arcade Fire juggernaut (including a stop in Squamish last month) Pallett is performing songs from his new solo album, In Conflict, on tour including a show at The Imperial. He spoke to the North Shore News about his latest material and the road ahead.
North Shore News: Growing up and studying music who were some of your major influences?
Owen Pallett: It depends on what you're talking about. I was absorbing a lot of music. It depends on whether I was practising violin, or playing in bands or writing classical music.
North Shore News: Do you distinguish between those activities as separate things?
Owen Pallett: It's a tricky thing to talk about. I tend to have a very anti-essentialist, pseudo-populist view as I kind of think of them as being all equal to each other and also functionally they're all the same thing with me engaging in a mainly solitary writing environment.
I can break down on a year by year level (who influenced me). I was almost entirely into classical music as my primary thing until I was like 10 years old, classical music and synth pop and when I was 10 I got into rap and from then on your typical gay teenager (stuff) like Bjork and Tori Amos. I was exposed very early on to classical music as my father was an organist. My earliest memories are of listening to Purcell and Pachelbel and Bach and a lot of early baroque music. I think more than anything that's informed pretty much every decision that I've ever made. A preference towards high-content baroque sort of writing. I don't mean 'baroque' in the way that term has been wantonly applied to anything that could possible feature harpsichord but, you know, in sort of the denseness of the material.
Very early on baroque music inspired me the most and I think that informed the content of the music that I write from when I was a preteen to current day. When I was a teenager writing music it was more influenced by what I was interested in at the time which depends on the year. The most productive period when I was a teen was when I was preparing to enter into composition school so I was really trying to get a portfolio together and at the time I was interested in 20th century composers who were seeking to represent the infinite, either through atheistic ideas or theistic ideas, these being Ligeti, Ustvolskaya, Messaien, and on an electroacoustic level Paul Dolden and Gastr del Sol.
North Shore News: How do lyrics enter into the writing process?
Owen Pallett: Kind of like intruders. I write simultaneously but never at the same time. I'm always writing lyrics and I'm always writing music but the two of them don't intersect until the very end of the process. What the songs will be about is always informing the way the music is coming together but often times the melodies get new lyrics after I've recorded the vocals. I will go back and redo - it's always a hard part that adds two or three months extra to production finalizing the way the lyrics are going to sit.
North Shore News: You've worked with Arcade Fire from the beginning what's that experience been like?
Owen Pallett: It's been all sorts of things. Because the band has changed, because I have changed, I'd have a different answer for you at different times of day. In the initial outset working with them was very inspiring. Win was taking the sounds and tools of the music that he loved and putting it together into music that he wanted other people to love. That to me was inspiring. I've thought of these dichotomies as male and female, gay and straight and Canadian and American but ultimately it's breaking out of an introspective method of making music and turning into a more outgoing way of making music - and that was kind of what they did in the early days.
These days now that I'm out on tour with them I'm learning other new lessons. On some days it's a bit of a bummer to feel like a cog in a wheel I'm not an essential part of. And to be on stage singing a song I find to be incredibly beautiful like 'Tunnels' and also feel like I have no part in it and that I am an invisible person onstage singing a song I didn't write. What has come out of that is that I have started to value small business models locally-oriented music production. I look to my friends in Toronto like Alex Lukashevsky and Tom Gill and see their scene of making music for the same 50 to 100 people every weekend. I see how valuable that is and it makes me feel very secure and righteous in what I'm doing.
North Shore News: How much of your new album was done in Iceland?
Owen Pallett: We went to Iceland to record it because that's where I'd recorded Heartland. Heartland was awesome so let's go back to Iceland because I loved working at The Greenhouse but when we were there it was like a combination of two things: first the songs just weren't ready, we weren't ready as a band.
You have to understand this is the first record the three of us have made together in a room since 2003. Our entire sound world and all of our tastes have changed so we were dealing with a lot of performative stuff and production stuff and just trying to figure it out.
The studio is essentially a digital studio and works really great for classical stuff and it wasn't working for stuff like 'Riverbed' or 'Infernal Fantasy' which really kind of need a real drummer. So that's how it started. I still have those recordings we did in Iceland. They sound good, the sound world is really interesting but there's less of a feel of a performance in it.
On the plane ride back I was listening to Electrelane and it was a revelation: 'We've got to record this in a room and we've got to record it to tape and record it with no click, it has to be live and that's going to work well.' I don't know if you know my drummer Rob but he has a very loose human sort of feel to him. He's more like a heart than a metronome. In Iceland we were doing everything to click and we were doing everything separately and it wasn't really coming together. So then we recorded at Hotel2Tango and also at Arcade Fire HQ we kind of did two sessions back to back just to try them in one room and then in another room. We ended up using almost entirely Hotel2Tango stuff with a couple of things we did at Arcade Fire HQ because we kind of got it the first time this time.
North Shore News: So most of it is live off the floor?
Owen Pallett: All the band ones. The vocals I did afterwards and the strings and then Eno did some stuff after the fact.
North Shore News: Is this the first time you'e done it like that.
Owen Pallett: No, not exactly, but yes. He Poos Clouds was done off click. We did that entirely in the air and then Heartland and Spectrum and all that kind of stuff we all did to click but I was so dissatisfied and unhappy and my mind has just never got into it. I love music that is done to metronomes but it always just sounds so functional to me. Whenever I hear music that's sort of got a driving beat and that beat doesn't change then immediately I'm transported to the dance floor or I'm at the gym. I feel that music is physically accessorizing certain things and I don't make music for the dance floor or the gym.
Even when we started doing Swedish Love Story I was actually working with modified clicks. I started taking a lot of songs that had drums on them that I really vibed with, like a lot of Motown songs, and I took loops from them and broke down exactly where the beats fell over an eightbar period. I created these tempo templates and I gave them to Shahzad Ismaily, a New York drummer. He was playing along with these clicks and having no trouble doing it and eventually I just realized this was really stupid and I should just get a good drummer to play it like a human.
