The New Pornographers
Issue #25
We caught up with the band’s lead songwriter, A.C. Newman, and his long-lost niece, Kathryn Calder, about Twin Cinema, Bush girls, and why it’s embarrassing to be called a supergroup
By Caralyn Green
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 4:46pm
The New Pornographers blast out and shake down a full set in late June, crammed with enough tambourine jingles, boy-girl harmonies, and ravenous hooks to last even Lou Pearlman a year, but the Vancouver supergroup — a moniker readily disputed by the band’s lead singer-songwriter-guitarist — are offstage by 10 p.m. After all, there’s an 18-and-over “Pleasure Friday” dance party with DJ Freez and a recently opened tiki deck that has got to get underway.
The St. Lancaster, Pennsylvania Chameleon Club, with its unnerving underwater reptilian theme and miniscule square-footage, is not where I imagined encountering the band that Carl (aka A.C.) Newman describes as “a part of the burgeoning indie-rock middle class.” But here they are. Drummer Kurt Dahle is on the loading steps, possibly scoping out the burrito place across the street. Keyboardist Blaine Thurier pops in and out of the interview in the venue’s sofa-packed back room. And Newman is chilling to my left, smiling sardonically as he calls Thurier an “idiot” in a Napoleon Dynamite monotone. Meanwhile, perched on the couch, sipping a pale ale from a nearby microbrewery is Kathryn Calder, Newman’s long-lost niece, the group’s newest vocals-and-keys addition. Calder also is a member of Immaculate Machine, a Victoria, British Columbia, trio with its first Mint Records-released album, Ones and Zeros, out September 6.
There are more Pornographers, of course. Nine artists, including Dan Bejar (who, as always, shares writing and singing responsibilities with Newman), John Collins, Todd Fancey, Nora O’Connor, and alt-country’s first lady, Neko Case, are given credit on the band’s latest album, Twin Cinema (Matador). It’s the New Pornographer’s second release since 2000’s hyperbolically but justifiably admired Mass Romantic and a follow-up to 2003’s equally revered, amps-blazing Electric Version.
Twin Cinema is different from what fans might expect. It’s somehow more intricate, demented, and theatrical, but still as poppy as ever. If you’re carbon-based, you’ll chant along by the second chorus of the record’s 14 songs, ranging from the jagged strut of the album-opening title track to the Godspell-esque choral joy of “The Bleeding Heart Show.” But then again, Newman’s non-sequitur, metaphor-laden lyrics might have you stroking your nonexistent beard in deep contemplation until the cows — or maybe the tiki-happy 18-year-olds — come home. Pornography never sounded so good.
And in a too-hot room in the midst of Pennsylvania nowhere-land, Newman and Calder are sounding pretty good, too. Two months before the August 23-released Twin Cinema was liberated for mass consumption, the uncle and niece sit down over a few mercifully cold drinks to chat about all-female bands, singing other people’s songs, the Bush girls buying beer, and just how little the Fiery Furnaces really care.
Kathryn, any guesses how it’ll feel playing with Immaculate Machine as an opener for the New Pornographers on tour this fall?
Kathryn Calder: It won’t be that weird opening for myself, I guess.
Carl Newman: You could develop a split personality. One side of you will be really egotistical and hard to deal with, and the other one will be going, “Hey, how’s it going? She thinks she’s so hot.”
KC: I’ll talk to myself, have conversations with myself.
CN: You’ll like, take a beer and be like, “Hey those aren’t your beers.” “Yes they are.” “No they’re not.”
What was the goal for Twin Cinema’s sound?
Carl Newman: I didn’t want to sound like the Fiery Furnaces, but I was inspired by how messed-up their record was. I like the fact that they just don’t care. And that made me think it’s good to do whatever the hell you want because whenever you veer away from some style that everyone expects from you, you always think everybody’s going to hate the change, that people are going to go, “We want the same thing over and over again.” Yet they don’t. If you stay the same, they complain because you haven’t changed. So you really can’t win. So I appreciate that the Fiery Furnaces just don’t care. They’re pretty intense.
Y’all seem to get the “supergroup” business a lot. What’s all that about?
CN: It’s not justified at all. It’s kind of embarrassing ’cause at the beginning we’d get the kind of snide reviews, like, “the so-called Vancouver indie supergroup.” It’s like being the world’s tallest midget. How can you be a Vancouver indie supergroup? That’s such a small, tiny thing. Like … we rule Vancouver! Well, Independent Vancouver. We don’t even rule our own town. We just rule a subsection of our town. The thing about supergroups is that traditionally supergroups are less popular than the bands they came from. But we’ve even eclipsed Neko, which was the tough one. We eclipsed all our other projects a long time ago, but it took us a while to catch up with Neko.
The band keeps growing in numbers. Ever have trouble fitting on a stage?
CN: Luckily we’re playing bigger stages now, so now we have to worry about filling up the stage. Sometimes you move onto a bigger stage and you just feel totally dwarfed, like everyone’s really far away. With my solo thing [2004’s The Slow Wonder] I played with the Arcade Fire at this festival. I’d seen them at the Commodore [Ballroom] in Vancouver, which is a smaller place. Seeing them at this big outdoor festival, it just wasn’t as good. It wasn’t as powerful. They seemed like another band on the stage. I think that’s probably the tough part of getting so popular — all of the sudden you have to do stuff like that, like play at five in the afternoon to 20,000 people.
How do you go about meshing a pop accessibility with actually saying something, whatever that something might be?
CN: I don’t put that much thought into that. I totally love things that might be kind of unintentional, I guess ’cause I totally loved REM when I was a teenager. I couldn’t understand what the words were, but I didn’t really care. Sometimes I’d just pick out a few things here and there and be like, “That’s deep. That’s heavy. If what he said is what I think he said …” [trails off into bewildered expression of epiphany]. I’m always more concerned with the sound of the words, so sometimes I’ll just cut words in two. There will be one syllable and then a two-second break and then the second syllable, so people really can’t be following.
Is it right to construe that there’s something political about some New Pornographers’ songs?
CN: It’s kind of a vibe. I don’t know how political you can get in a pop song, though, because it kind of totally diminishes the message. Like a political nursery rhyme or something — it just doesn’t have a lot of power.
Kathryn Calder: And you can’t make political songs too preachy or else people will just back right away from them.
CN: Like one of our songs, “It’s Only Divine Right.” It’s basically a political song, but it’s also pretty much about the Bush girls trying to buy alcohol in Austin, Texas, which was in the news all the time a few years ago. So that was a springboard into the song, which has other metaphors in it and becomes kind of political. But, ultimately, it’s just a little imagistic snapshot. Just the whole idea of these two girls who are in Austin trying to buy beer and their dad was trying to dominate the world and invade Iraq. It seemed very decadent — like if Caesar’s children were out in ancient Rome trying to buy mead or whatever, driving their chariots drunk or something.
Kathryn, what’s it like coming into a band that’s already so well established?
KC: I came into the band, and I knew Carl and I knew John [Collins] because he produced my album with Immaculate Machine. But everyone else has just been really nice. I was a little freaked out about coming in and singing for Neko [for some shows over the summer tour], but the crowds have all been really great.
CN: I’m just waiting for the assholes.
KC: I was expecting tomatoes tossed at me, but none yet. Knock on wood.
CN: Or if anybody ever does have a problem, you can just go, “Well lucky for you, you don’t ever have to come again.”
KC: Also, Carl introduces me as his niece, so if anybody’s a fan of the band, they’re not really going to yell at him or get pissed. Like, “Fuck your niece!”
CN: It’s a very calculated move.
The whole long-lost niece thing begs for an explanation.
CN: My mom had her mom when she was really young and gave her up for adoption. And we just found out they existed seven or eight years ago.
KC: So when I was 14, yeah, my mom found his mom. I was kind of a musician at that point, but I was more, like, playing trumpet in junior-high band. And then at about 16, I started with piano and singing, and that’s when I started playing with my band.
What was it like bringing in two new female vocalists for Twin Cinema?
CN: Nora [O’Connor] actually sings on Electric Version, too. That’s what a lot of people don’t know. I was reading something on the Internet recently. Somebody was talking about, like, “I hear Neko’s not going to be on those [summer] shows,” and it’s like, “That’s too bad. It’s not going to be the same without Neko.” And then the guy goes on to say his favorite songs by us are “It’s Only Divine Right” and “Graceland,” which Neko doesn’t sing on. Both of them are Nora. Nora does all the female vocals on “Graceland,” “It’s Only Divine Right,” “July Jones,” “Ballad of a Comeback Kid,” and “Chump Change.” That’s Nora singing. Kathryn and Nora came in at the same time [for Twin Cinema] so they were singing together on it, which is cool because they could just work out stuff together.
Why include women singers in the band?
CN: It’s just like a different instrument. A male voice and a female voice, they sound very different. It’s like the difference between a bass guitar and an electric guitar; they complement each other. And if you’re singing harmonies, there’s something far more joyous about having a female voice in there, or else you sound like a barbershop quartet. Also, there’s something kind of, what’s the word for it? You have both sexes in there. It’s kind of more democratic.
KC: Egalitarian.
CN: Yeah, everybody’s included. Those are the bands I think are really cool. Like Stereolab, where it’s just like a bunch of guys and girls. I like that a lot better. People always talk about how amazing it is to be in an all-female band, and it’s cool, but it’s just as cool to be half female and half guys, or to have some combination, just to show that it really doesn’t matter. We’re all just a bunch of people playing music and our sex shouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with what we’re doing.
Is there a difference between singing your own songs and singing someone else’s?
KC: In [Immaculate Machine], all three of us are songwriters, so I’m used to coming in and not always singing my own songs. It’s funny how it works. A lot of times I actually like some of the other guys’ songs better than mine. It’s easier to be self-critical.
CN: Other people’s songs seem somehow magical because you don’t know where they came from. But your own songs sometimes just sound like a bunch of chords. I’m always thinking that, sometimes in the middle of a song. I’m thinking, “This song is just stupid. It’s just three chords. People are going to figure out this song has the same chords as the last one, and they’re going to find out that I’m a …” [trails off]. But it doesn’t matter. But that’s the stupid thing you’re thinking when they’re your songs.
Carl, how did you end up as the frontman for the New Pornographers?
CN: I think I’ve always been kind of spoiled in bands. I played in bands with people who didn’t really want to draw attention to themselves, and I just fell into the role of being the singer because sometimes people just don’t want to sing. I guess it’s scary. And I don’t know why I do it because I don’t have the hugest amount of confidence.
KC: That’s how I feel, too — not that I’m a lead singer. I’m extremely shy, but I guess I just started singing in this band in high school and it went on from there.
MTV seems fond of using New Pornographers tunes as background music to reality shows. What’s up with that?
CN: We don’t get paid for that, by the way. There are two songs that always show up: “The Laws Have Changed” and “All for Swinging You Around,” and it’s because we made videos for those songs and they were submitted to MTV. If you submit a video to MTV that gives them the right to use it for whatever they want. The first few times it happened it was really confusing. I was at my girlfriend’s place in San Francisco, and I was watching VH1, that show Driven, about how, you know, people became stars, and it’s the end of the Ashton Kutcher Driven, and the credits start rolling and “The Laws Have Changed” starts playing. It took about fives seconds to compute, because it was this montage of Ashton Kutcher’s life and our song was the soundtrack. And I was like, “What the hell?” It was like, “Will you turn off that stereo? I’m trying to watch Ashton Kutcher Driven!” Somebody said our song also showed up in Cribs. Maybe even Newlyweds. I don’t know if that makes [our music] commercially viable. It just means there’re some hipsters working at VH1.
KC: It’s kind of fun when it happens. That first time I heard an Immaculate Machine song on the radio, I was driving. It was just a college radio station, but they played it and it was like, “Whoa this is really freaky.”
CN: I remember years ago talking to one of the guys in the Posies about how weird it is when your record is in the store, and he was like, “Yeah, I know, it’s like you feel like your record’s not good enough to be there.”
Still get that feeling?
CN: Hmm ... Nah. I’ve gotten over that. I think we’re pretty good.
Kathryn, what’s it like spending your early-20s transition stage touring with a rock band rather than searching for that first “real job?
KC: You mean complete instability versus job prospects? It’s kind of weird, but it’s kind of fun. I’m still in university, sort of. I take a lot of time off, but I figured that if I was going to try and be a musician, I had to do it now or else I would never ever get around to it. You can always go back to university. I’m studying art history and Italian. I find those things interesting, but it’s also an extremely impractical field. Then I think, “There’s always being a teacher,” but both of my parents are teachers — so I’m trying to stay away. So, musician? Sure. Musician.
CN: The best part about being a musician is that no matter how successful you get, you still feel like a loser because you’re a musician. Try telling somebody you’re a musician [when you’re] crossing the border. “What do you do for a living?” Well, I’m a musician. “Yeah, but what do you do for a living?” I’m a musician?
Is there a difference, though, between being a musician and being a rock star?
CN: Well, we’re not rock stars. Ben Gibbard is an indie-rock superstar. And Conor Oberst. We’re just part of the burgeoning indie-rock middle class, you know? Making enough money that I could conceivable put a down payment on a house and live that kind of life.
KC: I made that mistake once to this guy. He was a jazz musician, and I was still just playing our own music in Immaculate Machine, and I was like, “So what do you do?” And of course it’s a completely different scene — you can actually be a jazz musician and play every night in a town and do that for a living and be totally fine. In our terms, though, original music doesn’t pay well up until a certain point. But he was a jazz musician, and he was kind of offended. And then I felt really dumb ’cause I was like, “Right, of course, you can actually make money as a musician if you want to play on cruise ships.”
CN: I was out in San Francisco a few months ago talking to this friend of a friend. She was a musician and plays in a band, and I’m like, “I’m a musician, too.” But then she asked me what my job was, which I thought was kind of weird. When I came back and said, “I make money making music,” it felt like I was coming across as kind of self-important or something. Like, “No, I’m a musician.” That just goes to show, you get it from non-musicians and you get it from musicians, because musicians know how hard it is to actually make a living. Which all comes back to the point that musicians are considered the lowest — below actors, but above poets.
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