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Blame Canada: Æ Talks With Jeremy Greenspan of The Junior Boys
by Alexander Dimitropoulos AE: How did you come up with the name of the band? JG: I'm trying to remember. It was because of a yearbook we were going through. You know, like a school yearbook? AE: Right. JG: So we came across a junior boys volleyball team and thought that "junior boys" sounded funny kind of, thought it sounded like a boy band name, and I think we were kind of at the time sort of fairly amused by how pop-sounding the music we were making was. So we thought we'd give it a sort of a boy band name. AE: What kind of music were you listening to before you started recording? JG: Well I listened to all kinds of music. I suppose I mainly was listening to at the time a lot of new wave kind of stuff, a lot of sort of synth pop kind of stuff, but I mainly come from, like, listening to a lot of dance music. That's what I grew up listening to basically. AE: And what was Junior Boys like before the release of the 12" singles [that preceded the release of the first album]? JG: We only did a few songs that never got released. I guess it sounded a little bit more like straight-up garage... more traditionally dance music, I would say. OK. And how did you and Matt meet? JG: I've known Matt since I was like 13. We had always done music together. It was more strange that I was doing music with someone else to be honest. But Matt was involved even in the early days because when me and John would do tracks together, when we went to actually mix them, Matt was working at a studio, so we'd mix them there with Matt there. So he was kind of always involved. AE: What's the breakdown in instrumentation between the two of you in concert? JG: In concert? It usually works that I sing and I play guitar and bass, and Matt deals with the synthesizers and he has the electronics there. He has a computer that's runner sequences, and then we have a drummer. AE: I read in an interview that you regard yourselves as a "studio band." How do you translate the songs into the performance, and what is lost or gained in the transition? JG: We try our best, I guess. We're a studio band in the sense that we don't do a lot of writing onstage. We're not the kind of band that does a huge amount of improvising and stuff like that, especially because we're running the set sequences and stuff like that. You know, with the drummer it adds a lot of sort of live energy, stuff like that, and then I suppose we add more instrumentation. Instead of synths all the time, I use live bass and live guitar, and I sing lines. That's how we do it. We try as much as possible to be as faithful to the records as we can while still making it new for people and making it different but not trying to turn it into like a sort of bizarre rock concert version of what we are. AE: How is the tour going? I think you're on the leg of your tour in Canada right now. JG: We finished playing in Mexico and Florida last week and we're taking about a week off. And we start in Toronto on this North American tour, which brings us into Atlanta, anyway, at some point in April. AE: Let's talk about your second full-length, So This is Goodbye. Why did you bring the vocals to the forefront and what motivated that? Is that because of any changes in, um - JG: - Yeah, I mean, I just wasn't quite happy with the first record. I think I sang a little slightly too shy and I mixed the vocals slightly too shy. I just became slightly more confident as a singer. I'd never really thought of myself as a singer very much when we first started making music. It was just sort of by default we wanted vocals. I figured I'd do it. On the second album I became slightly more confident about it and wanted to sort of turn it into more of a pop record as much as possible, and that means centering the song around a vocal performance... AE: Tracks like "In the Morning," "First Time" and "So This is Goodbye," among others on the record, seem to focus on arrivals, departures and change. What were you trying to accomplish with the lyrics? JG: Well, I think that's right. I think that a lot of the record is about that, and I think the central theme to the record was sort of about nostalgia and nostalgia that goes along with sort of movement and with attaching yourself to moments, or to places, or to things and feeling a sort of strange, sweet, bittersweet sadness or happiness with all of those emotions that go along with sort of moving from place to place or from time to time. AE: Is it also a record about aging? JG: Not particularly. Yeah, I mean to some extent, I suppose that's true. Aging in the sense of losing your childhood, but not aging in the sense of going through all of life's stages. AE: Can you talk a little bit about the site sothisisgoodbye.com? JG: I would if I knew much about it. It was set up by the record label. AE: Oh, OK. JG: I think what they wanted to do is have sort of a message board. They hired some guy who's some kind of Web genius character [laughs], and they wanted to employ him to something creative so they did that in order to build the message board. I think you go on there and you write a message and it builds some little bubble that sort of looks like some of the shapes on the record cover. And it keeps growing exponentially. AE: The songs are incredibly catchy, with synth lines that seem to appear and align at just the right moments, as they do in "Double Shadow," without becoming overbearing. But the lyrical content of the catchy and sexy record sounds like it's structured entirely around the party. JG: Sorry, I didn't catch that? AE: It sounds like a party record if you look at the instrumentation, but in terms of the lyrics, it sounds like it's built around the party. JG: Oh right, yeah, I see what you mean. People ask me what I write the records for, do I write them for dance floor or something like that. I don't really think about that kind of thing and I think that usually I prefer to write a record where it seems odd wherever it's placed [laughs]. It's not quite a bedroom record because it's a little too anxious and nervous-y to kind of chill you out, so to speak. And it's not quite a dance floor record, either. The tempos are a little too slow and plodding and so forth like that. You know, I like to try to stay away from genres and away from definite ideas as to where a thing should be placed to keep it sounding somewhat fresh and unplaceable. AE: A lot of music reviews that I've read focus on how warm, cold, natural or unnatural electronic music sounds. What do you think are the limitations or possibilities that electronic music provides that other, I guess, styles don't? JG: I tend not to find electronic music cold or inhuman. I don't see much of a distinction between electric guitars and synthesizers, for kind of boring reasons, reasons that get kind of technical, but I mean I do sort of think they do both kind of produce raw electricity in almost identical ways. I always find that what's interesting about synthesizers, particularly old, old ones, you know, what they call analog ones, are the ways in which they sort of make weird mistakes, and that's what people don't often realize about synthesizers is that they're not perfect, that they do all sorts of odd things. Like basically all technology, they have particularities, and sort of nurturing those mistakes and those particularities that make them kind of, to me, in a lot of ways, more human than a lot of other instruments, which a lot of instruments are so perfected, and the ways of playing them and the means of playing them are so perfected, that you're never surprised by them. AE: Bjork said in an issue of Spin, "They're [computers are] so much closer to the human thought process than a guitar." JG: I think that's probably true in the sense that I think that a lot of writing music is about nurturing mistakes or nurturing surprising moments, and I think I'm much more often surprised by electronic instruments than I am by traditional instruments or acoustic instruments and things like that. Maybe not acoustic instruments so much, but definitely traditional instruments like guitars, bass and drums because the ways of playing them are so heavily codified culturally speaking, it's hard to come up with new ideas. There are bands who do new things with guitars, and drums and bass, but I think it's a much more challenging thing to do than to do something interesting with electronic instruments. AE: 2006 had a lot of electronic artists on a lot of critics' best-of year-end lists like The Knife, Girl Talk, Hot Chip, Thom Yorke and Junior Boys. Do think that the reception of electronic music is changing? JG: I don't know. I mean it seemed like there was a time in the mid-'90s when... dance culture was taking off, and it seemed like it was a brave new day for electronic music, and that kind of fizzled out to some extent, and maybe now people are more open to it. I don't really know. For us, we try to make sort of pop music and so we hope that we get as good a response to it as we can. I tend to recognize that we'll always be sort of weird and sort of cult-y to some extent, and I think that's probably positive. I mean I think that's just the way it is. AE: In your experience do you think you're received differently in America from Canada? JG: Not particularly, no. I don't really pay attention to countries that much. I tend to notice the differences between cities, you know, especially in America, which is such a big country. We tend to do really well in certain cities as opposed to other cities. That's usually the measure of our success in terms of where we do well. AE: How did you get to remix Stars' "Sleep Tonight"? JG: They asked us to. We get asked to do several remixes, but the guy from Stars was so enthusiastic. I can't remember, I think Torquil or something... some unusual name. And he was so enthusiastic about us doing it that we just said, "Sure." AE: And how do you feel about other people remixing your music, like Hot Chip's remix of "In the Morning"? JG: Well, we're of course very particular about it, so we have personal choice over everyone who does it. So, therefore, if you hear a remix of us, you can be sure that we've personally chosen the people to do it. So obviously, we feel pretty confident about all the people we choose because it's our music. We're confident and we've never been let down, everybody who remixes us, that we've chosen, I think has done a terrific job. AE: What kind of music are you listening to right now? Or which artists? JG: ... the Lo-Fi-Fnk... which is a Swedish band. I listen to the Kelley Polar record that's going to be coming out that I have a little bit of music from. I'm listening to a lot of like, sort of 70s middle-of-the-roads kind of music at the moment. You know, call it "yacht rock," I think. I listen to a lot of that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's basically what I've been listening to. AE: Have you started writing or recording for the next album? Or EP? JG: Yeah, we started writing, and I think we're going to be inundated with... material. I think it's going to be difficult because I think a lot of the process is going to be trying to wheedle down all of the songs that we're writing. AE: What can you tell us about the album? JG: I'm not sure yet. You'll have to ask me in a little bit. AE: And I think you're playing April 15 at the Earl in Atlanta? JG: Yeah. AE: And I believe you performed there last year as well. JG: Yeah, we've played at the Earl before, we've played at the Earl and the Drunken Unicorn and another place in Atlanta I can't remember. AE: Do you remember anything about the audience, the venue or the performances? JG: I mean I've always liked playing in Atlanta quite a bit. There's always crazy audiences actually in Atlanta. There's always like some person dressed really outrageously, and stuff like that. We had a day off in Atlanta I remember last time we toured and we didn't know what to do so we ended up going to this, like, enormous aquarium, which is pretty wild actually. Yeah, I like playing Atlanta quite a bit actually. I've never been to Athens though, although our tour manager lived there for quite some time. AE: Is there any chance you might head down here in the future? JG: I'd love to play Athens. I mean she always keeps telling me, "Play Athens, play Athens." So I think we'll try and fit it in at some point, but this was going to be quite a short tour, so we knew that, you know, I think we just stuck to Atlanta because we've had some success there in the past. AE: And you have on your Web site, I think it's concluded now, the contest for best video of a Junior Boys song? JG: Yeah, yeah, we had a competition to make a video so, yeah. I think it just got announced the other day. AE: Did you and Matt personally go through all those videos? JG: Yeah, we did. We went through all of them and we submitted our favorite, and I think there was a whole host of people who voted, people from the record label and then people from the video channel that's sort of sponsoring the competition, and so we all had a vote, and then it was all tallied up, and they announced the winner. AE: OK, and then last thing I just wanted to ask you. You're at home now, right? JG: Yes. AE: I have this image of all electronic artists wearing starched shirts and playing neat board games. Is that accurate? JG: Playing what? AE: I don't know, being really organized and filing their records. JG: I won't even tell you what I'm wearing right now [laughs]. Yeah, no, I'm really disorganized. I think we do a pretty good job of not living up to any of those Kraftwerkian [laughs] kind of images. Comments [post a comment]Comments are closed |
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Thursday, February 09, 2012
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