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| by jana robert (brmc) | |
An edited version of this interview originally appeared in The Hub's
December 2, 2004, issue. Please visit www.thehubweekly.com for
more information on that publication.
A Conversation with Cameron McGill
By Jana Robert
Jana: Please give me a musical "biography" of some sort.
Cameron: Could I have David McCullough write my musical biography? He's probably busy though...and John Adams is much more important. I started playing solo right from the start. When I got an acoustic guitar at age 15 I just started thinking about writing and playing songs, not about putting a band together; that came a bit later...they were bad songs, but I was learning. I had been playing solo shows in Chicago before forming Morris Minors, but I really wanted a band at that time. Tried for some time to balance the two simultaneously with different songs, different bands, but it was difficult. I felt my real development was in the songs I was playing at my solo shows, and why fight that? Morris Minors had broken up in early 2003 after I had already started working on Stories of The Knife and The Back. I wanted to hear more instruments, varied arrangements, experiment more with production and the studio, than the minors ever had a chance to do. Though I wish we had made another record; I think there was a lost record of good songs with that band. The rest is to be written I guess.
J: What first moved you to make music yourself and in what direction would your life have gone without having the talent to make music?
C: My dad's records from the late 50s, and 60s up through early 70s(when I guess he stopped buying records, hehe) were the main impetus for my interest in songs. That and church hymns, some classical and some Italian opera. I fell in love with the dirges you hear on church organs, how it sounds like a whole orchestra is playing, but it's really one 80-year-old woman up there pumping and pressing away all the demons for the whole lot of us. I don't think I listened, in fact I know I didn't listen to any 80's music in the 80's, though now some of my favorites are from then; The Police, The Smiths, The Cure, etc.... I was immersed very early on in Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Bill Haley and The Comets, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, Neil Young, Elton John, etc. I felt those records immediately, some more than others, and on different levels, but I knew they were important, much more important than the top 5 at 9 playing "pour some sugar on me"?! It's hard to remember what I did first. I took piano lessons for a bit at age 10, but had a scary teacher as I recall, very unfriendly with a dark side pending, so I quit. Would later teach myself, but sorely missed the schooling in some areas...I think it would have been fun to play classical pieces on the piano. I started writing words and music kind of at the same time...maybe words first in a little notebook when I was 12 or 13. I found a few things awhile back when my parents moved out of the house I grew up in. Man, I was trying to be so serious at age 12, still am I guess. I have no idea in what direction my life would have gone without music; seems it's not worth much thinking about, cause it didn't happen. I'm not sure it would have had as much direction, though most likely something else would have taken its place, grabbed me by the shirt and shaken me like music did. Maybe painting? I would have to have had some creative outlet; I am amazed that some people don't or don't allow themselves to. Hell, even if it's painting plastic eggs or making vases out of toothpicks, there has to be that one thing that hit's every person...to want to make something of their own. Go out there and make the best damn toothpick vase you can.
J: How much influence does the recent development of this world have on your song writing?
C: I don't consider myself a political writer. I also don't consider myself a newscaster. I am interested in much more than that, than relaying stories of the front page. I want the people's lives and nothing less, and yes, sometimes they are political. To capture the zeitgeist, to be in it, I think is to remain relevant, but not date yourself. The fact remains that recent developments often mean, recent developments we've decided to focus on. There are many other "recent developments" that should have been kept in focus by our media and our people. Yes Bush won and we have to work within that context, and yes we are in a tough situation with a war in Iraq that is highly disputed. Our country is divided maybe more than it's ever been in my life, but we can't give up on it. I feel like it's 1958 again and in 1969 we will all have low numbers...and that holds influence, the importance of music is paramount in diffusing that. It's tangible; it's in the air everyone is breathing. And just saying Bush is bad, and Kerry is good, or vice versa doesn't mean a damn thing to me. It's so much more complicated than that. I am interested in capturing people at their best and at their worst; observing why they do the things they do, why they make the decisions they make and how they affect others. To me, people in general, and politicians in particular, don't realize that they are potential energy for good or evil. I really think that people don't place enough emphasis on the fact that what they do affects others; there are repercussions even from the smallest drum...that influences my songwriting.
Seems we learn over and over that politics is a nasty game with real-life implications, first-hand, not just paper and words, but life and death.... it's a nasty game with many pawns, but it can be tamed. It just takes longer than people want to admit. It's easy enough to pick up a guitar and write an overtly political song; it's been done a million times...but those aren't the ones that ever change my mind. You can't make up people's mind for them. They have to see the options out there and decide what camp most aligns with their beliefs; hopefully they do their homework, though sadly not always. Maybe songs can help them see the options? In that way, political songs are good at keeping issues on the table that are in danger of being swept off to fit in an infomercial for the newly minted half-dollar. To many people it was evident that there needed to be a political change, because that is good for countries. Unfortunately, it's also evident that we are terrible at learning from our mistakes. That influences my songwriting.
These days I think more people are making their judgments of others solely on the political part of their persona. I am not sure that is the right thing to do, but it is easy to do, so I think that's why people do it. You are either in camp 1 or camp 2. People wear it on their sleeves, but to me it's important to remember that no one person or one political party owns the idea of America. It's just parties claiming their interpretation is the correct one. For example, today I saw two cars in front of me...one with a Kerry/Edwards sticker and one with an American flag sticker. It hit me that I had never seen the two together on the same car. I feel like the American flag has been hijacked. These days people view an American flag bumper sticker (and I found myself doing this today) as the equivalent of a Bush/Cheney sticker. I am not a fan of bumper stickers, I think they are silly, but that seemed wrong to me. You can love your country, the idea of your country at its best, and be a liberal or an independent, or whatever you want to call yourself. This country gives you the right to do that. You can love the essence of it and disagree with the current management. They don't have to go hand in hand. The American flag does not belong to a political party, it belongs to the people. That influences my songwriting. That is why I vote, educate myself, and am involved in knowing what I believe and why; it was important to vote in this election and our generation didn't make it happen. I am not sure why. That is sad to me. We are fortunate enough in this country to have the right to free elections, to vote, but people can't be arsed to register and get out and punch the ballot in the face. As far as I am concerned, just as often as the system fails the people, the people fail the system.
J: I know you are a political person with liberal ideas. Now, not only a lot of artists, among them stars like Bruce Springsteen or R.E.M. fought hard to make a change and so did you. Yet, this country overwhelmingly voted republican and the whole world looks at this country and can't understand. How do you see the influence of this election on the world in general and on the musical world in specific?
C: I'm not sure you can separate the effects on the musical world and the world in general. Is that like separating Time and Rolling Stone? Makes no difference to me. I ain't gonna blame farmers, it's a matter of education, not occupation. Maybe the world will dislike America more, maybe foreign policy will be increasingly difficult to navigate, maybe Ashley Simpson will write a political song and sing it? I dunno. You can write fictional songs, but all that fiction and everything you learn from it exists in the world in general, not just the musical world. There are no vacuums. All your fiction has a truth. Like I said, I have little interest in being a political writer, though I think at times like these, writers in general become more political. I hesitate when you say that I am a political person with strong liberal ideas; rather I am a person in a political world trying to do the moral thing...if that's liberal, or independent, or middle of the road, so be it. Parties will play you like a hand of cards and you'll think their promises are worth more than they really are. When you feel strongly about something, you feel compelled to tell others. You can lead people to water and then stick an IV in them. I would rather play a song for a group of people, than talk politics. Tell a story in which the characters are jumping out of my mouth and hitting the men in the face and not holding the doors for the women, and pouring out the gates to the streets and getting hit by a car; for love, loss, fear of love, and fear of loss, really touching the core of human feeling in a way that makes people think they are happy or angry or depressed or a winner or a loser, and that is not a bad thing. People make the change, but I can affect it for sure. If I say vote for Kerry, what does that mean to you? Nothing if you don't know what he's about or more importantly what you're about. I'm sorry, what was the question?
J: Playing with Rachel Yamagata not only as her guitarist but also as
her opening act is a great chance. Yet, playing with her is playing
someone else's music. Comment please.
C: Rachael has been great to me. It was kind of she to ask me to open her last tour, and I appreciate that. Anyone who judged me for having played guitar for her can go to hell. That being said, this article is not about Rachael.
J: You're a "Singer/Songwriter", but most of all, you are a storyteller.
What is important about telling stories and where do you get your ideas for these?
C: I do feel like a storyteller, but there are fewer and fewer people who make time for them these days. I can't sell it to you in 30 seconds or less, or between commercials or while you're eating McDonalds or talking on your phone. I can only try to hold your ears open long enough for you to keep them open yourself. Stories are important because they are passed down, they are told from person to person, regardless of race, gender, age, religious affiliation, what have you. You can't stop a good story once it's let loose on the world. What I want to know is where have all the characters in songs gone? Who killed them? Who kidnapped them and is hiding them in a room marked "TRL old props"? Make no mistake about it; there has been for some time a war of attrition against imagination. Most people can't be bothered with it in their daily lives; its been sucked out like it's a venom. Hell, you can do something as simple as wear two different colored socks and people think you're insane, the craziest thing they've ever seen...man they're just socks. That's a tough sell to enlighten those folks, and yes that's what we do, we enlighten them. There's an old Woody Allen adage about this, and I'm paraphrasing... "You try to get things right in art, because it's so hard to do in life." That is pretty much it. You make art what you want to see or you make it what you don't want to see, but most importantly you just make it. The ideas are every second you are alive. Stories are my guns, my bullet-proof vests, my movies, love lives, my wellness, sickness, devotion, my indiscretions, my appreciation for and my disgust with, they are every good and bad intention I have ever had. They are as guilty and as innocent as mankind, and with that kind of spectrum, there is no end to the power of a story.
J: How much autobiographical influence do these stories have?
C: I have never heard a good answer from a "songwriter" about this, so I don't expect to figure it out here. I hear a lot of "well, you know, every song I write has a bit of me in it, my experiences, relationships, emotions, things I've gone through..." Wrong answer! Too obvious. Everything is a relationship with something else. If you write a song, it comes from the conflict in your heart, your mind, your conscience; of course it's got some of your views in it. Now invent a character that is not autobiographical and make him or her do all the things you don't or can't do; then kill them off the plot line and start again. I want everything pressing at the seams of everything else. Create a character that has a different persona than you for god's sake. I personally hate diary lyrics, they are worthless to me. Granted there are plenty of times where first person is the right thing to do, but I want 8th person, 9th person, that person's long lost love she thought was killed in Normandy but really has been living down the block unbeknownst to her for 40 years... I want some fucking drama, I want time zones, hemispheres, time periods, earth's axis slowing over millions of years, the Paleolithic Age, time travel, the 16th century, Catherine Parr and Henry VIII, emotional war, emotional gluttony and famine, rescuers, refugee camps full of lost love...these are songs of imminent regret, class IV rapids, eastern European gypsies, cities with chips on their shoulder, the greatest generation, veterans of domestic war, handwritten letters and handmade scarves, foreign wines and local girls, break-ups and breakdowns, post-war divorcees and country club casanovas, not supporting the war but supporting the soldier, scrapbooks that appear to have been put together by a blind man with a keen mind's eye, a big heart, and no short-term memory... I want songs to read like a carefully crafted history book or a dime store novel, but never like a blasted diary. Most people's autobiographies are boring, including mine at times. But luckily, I feel like I have a biographer who follows me around all the time, telling me these songs I write will get me in trouble. Then I fire him.
J: When you play live it becomes often pretty intense, it seems as if a lot of emotions are carried out - How hard do you find it to transfer this into a recording?
C: A lot of emotions are carried out live because everything you are doing is being absorbed by the audience and thrown back at you. You feel their emotion or lack thereof and that becomes a part of the show; it makes you feel the songs in a new way each time. In a studio you don't have that. Thus far I have found it difficult. You can go into the studio trying to capture a certain vibe and end up with a completely different one that is equally interesting. I can let you know more about this after I record this new group of songs with Mark Rubel; I am going to record the exact opposite way in which I recorded "Stories...."
J: I described you once as getting lost in your music when playing live, does this come close to your feeling on stage?
C: I think so. I get lost in the delivery of the song; that is something I do not want to over think when performing. I have done all my over-thinking by then. I feel a bit possessed if it's going well...kind of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of thing. That is the moment of truth, that performances' one chance. I don't think I am ever oblivious to the audience and its reaction though.
J: You will be recording Dec. 2nd & 3rd, and you said, these songs 'all came like a storm at once'. How do you go about the songwriting process?
C: With this new group of songs, I wrote all the lyrics first. I wanted them to exist in their own world, to write their own melodies, and dictate to me what kind of song they should be. There was a coherent theme in the style of which they were written; longer, lyric-based folk songs. I will take a song however I can get it, usually it's a group of chords which lend themselves to a pretty melody or it's one line that needs a whole song of lines to support it. Either way, I spend a lot of time writing lyrics and more so these days, researching backstories to the songs they will become.
J: In how far will the new album/material be different from "Stories"?
C: The new album is gonna be stripped, very raw. I feel like anything more with these songs would be a detriment. They are long songs, I will forewarn you. It's gonna be done quickly, but with no less care or emotion; hell, hopefully with more emotion.
J: "Stories of the Knife..." is a beautiful pop album, but live you are much more edgy and you also don't play any of the album tracks – comment please.
C: Well, thanks...am glad you like it. I like delivering songs differently live, though I am not a big fan of changing the melodies a whole lot. I played the songs off of "Stories..." for a long time. I lived with those songs for years; played them for years. Yes, some of them are difficult to play solo, but that record came out over a year ago, was recorded almost two years ago; it's time to give the new children some attention.
We thank Cameron McGill for this conversation! Whenever you get a chance, go out and see him play. The next show is at Chicago's Abbey Pub Dec. 30th with the Beauty Shop. Also visit www.cameronmcgill.comfor further information.
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| by nellie waddell (farmernell) | |
Nellie Waddell: Talk a little about how and when the Arcade Fire got together.
The Arcade Fire: We were all in a production of Little Orphan Annie in Montreal. Regine was a great tap dancer, and had these strange contacts that made her look like she didn't have pupils.
NW: What bands did you listen to growing up and would you consider them your influences?
TAF: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Cure, Cindi Lauper, influences all.
NW: Who would you most like to tour with? (realistic or not)
TAF: This south African band regine saw while traveling in france, but we would have to open for them, because they would wipe us off the stage.
NW: How have things changed since your May 2004 signing with Merge Records?
TAF: We have a record out that people can buy, more interviews...we sold the school bus for 200 bucks, and the guy's check bounced.
NW: Is your touring mostly in the U.S. or Canada, or pretty evenly split?
TAF: Mostly the US but some in Canada too.
NW: Any cities not on your tour that you'd really like to play?
TAF: Burlington, Vermont
NW: What's the scene like in Montreal?
TAF: Cold, a lot of people feeding birds, and living in boxes...you mean the homless scene right?
NW: What are your favorite types of venue to play at?
TAF: Not bars, churches art spaces
NW: I saw that you played at the CMJ New Music Marathon in New York a few weeks ago. What was that like?
TAF: Strange...workin 10 AM to 4 AM what a way to make a living.
NW: I realize Funeral was released barely more than two months ago, but when do you foresee another album coming out?
TAF: Who knows...when we have some time I guess.
NW: Where'd the band's name come from?
TAF: If you rearrange the letters of "afraid the ceer" you get the arcade fire
NW: What do you do when you're not making music?
TAF: We think about music, and exercise.
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