Carl Newman (front and center) and The New Pornographers
By Craig Bechtel
“You’re trying to find new ways to ‘be you’ when you’ve been a band for a long time,” Carl Newman says about writing and recording his new album with The New Pornographers, “Whiteout Conditions.” It’s the septet’s seventh full-length since their 2000 debut and the first on their Collected Works imprint (part of the Concord Music Group).
Newman is the de facto leader of the group, which formed in Vancouver, British Columbia (taking their name from a Japanese film called “The Pornographers”), and he provides insights into his musical education—or lack thereof—and what distinguishes this release from the six previous albums in their discography.
Despite always being “a massive music fan,” he reveals he was a college dropout who didn’t pick up a guitar until he was eighteen, and didn’t start playing with people until his early twenties. He studied communications theory in college, “nothing you could use very much” (although he admits some of that may have snuck into his lyrics), “but I was not a very good student. I would look around me and think, ‘These people want to be here. Why am I here?’ I realized I’m just doomed to do what I do. I think there were points when I was a musician when I wanted to be something else. I wanted to be an upstanding member of society but after a while I realized, ‘Nope. You’re not an upstanding member of society; you know, you’re either going to be a hero or a zero.’”
After a high-school friend showed Newman how to play some simple chords, he could play “Gloria” by Them and R.E.M.’s “Superman” (originally by The Clique). He bought a Beatles guitar songbook and says, “That’s where I learned most of my chords from, ’cause they used all the chords… But I’ve never been much of a guitar player. I’ve never loved the idea of being really good at the guitar. I always thought of it as just a tool… from the minute I picked up the guitar I was trying to write things.” He was never trying to figure out how to play Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” he says by way of example, which features a legendarily deft guitar solo.
“Even though we use a lot of well-worn rock clichés in our music,” Newman continues, “wanky guitar solos” was one he never desired, “ ’cause a lot of guitar solos can sound really boring, and… I didn’t want to sound like [what] my idea of boring is. We’ve had guitar solos here and there, but when I play, you can tell the guitar solos that I played in the band, ’cause they’re very skronky.”
Newman, who will turn forty-nine this month, is appropriately introspective about his musical education. “When I look back at all the stuff I’ve done, a lot of it just seems like growing up in public… sort of fucking around…being in a band seemed like a fun thing to do. I was just a guy in a band before I ever thought I would start to take it seriously and learn how to write songs and learn the craft of it.”
Newman now admits that if he has any kind of “natural knack,” that “if there’s anything that comes easy to me in music, I feel like it’s always been harmony and melody,” and these complementary elements have always been key components of the sound of The New Pornographers. “Whiteout Conditions” is no exception, and it’s overflowing with the typical earworms, but there is a different sonic approach.
Although most of the usual suspects have returned for this outing, including Neko Case on vocals, John Collins on bass, Blaine Thurier on keyboards, Todd Fancey on guitar and Kathryn Calder (Newman’s niece) on vocals, keyboards and guitar, it’s their first record without Dan Bejar and their first with new drummer Joe Seiders as a full member. Newman says he used this personnel change as an opportunity for “a different drum attack.” He elaborates that, “I wanted it to have a good clip, to be speedy but in a sort of relaxed way,” which made him think of Krautrock. “This is the first record where we have a lot of loud drums but there’s also a lot of mechanical drums in there too, and that felt like something different and new for us, so that was fun.”
That “light Krautrock feel” led the band to “keep the chord structures very simple, because we wanted to use a lot of drones on the record. We wanted to experiment with having things droned through the whole song.” This approach is a stark difference from previous songs, known for their many parts and many chords. “To me that was very fun, just messing around with just three or four chords, so songs like ‘High Ticket Attractions’ or ‘The World of the Theater’ [the first two singles] might sound like they have four or five sections to them, but they’re all essentially the same chord… That, combined with the feel of the songs felt like, oh this is new. And I didn’t know if anybody else would think it sounded new who doesn’t know the story of how it was made, but to me it felt fresh… and it made the record fun to make.”
It would be a mistake to label the compositions on “Whiteout Conditions” as stripped down compared to their earlier albums, because, as Newman says, “in its way, it’s the lushest… It’s got the most going on… If you’ve got a lot of chord changes and weird time signatures, the music has to be a little bit more minimal, just because it would be cacophonous—there’s no room if there’s too much… On this record it was just trying to find how many places you could go within the chord structure.” He cites the chorus of “High Ticket Attractions” as an example, explaining that it “came after the fact… I didn’t know it was the chorus, I just started singing a new melody over the same chords. Then I went, ‘Oh, this is the chorus… and that was fun.’”
The New Pornographers perform two 18+ shows at Metro (3730 North Clark) on April 19 and 21; tickets $38. In between they’re doing an all-ages show at Pabst Theater (144 East Wells) in Milwaukee on April 20. Waxahatchee opens.
Craig Bechtel is a freelance writer and has also been a Senior Staff Writer for Pop’stache. He is also a DJ, volunteer and Assistant Music Director for CHIRP Radio, 107.1 FM, and contributes occasionally to the CHIRP blog. As DJ Craig Reptile, you can hear him play music on the FM dial or at www.chirpradio.org most Sunday nights from 6pm to 9pm. He previously worked in radio at KVOE AM and Fox 105 in Emporia, Kansas, and served as a DJ, music director and general manager for WVKC at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he also won the Davenport Prize for Poetry and earned a B.A. in English writing. Craig has been working in various capacities within the hotel and meetings industry for over twenty years, and presently works at a company that uses proprietary systems to develop proven data strategies that increase revenue, room nights and meeting attendance. In his spare time, he also fancies himself an armchair herpetologist, and thus in addition to a wife, son and cat, he has a day gecko and a veiled chameleon in his collection.
