New Pornographers Are Really Busy

11/28/08 6:21pm

by Brian Pascual (CHARTattack)

It's always good news to hear that Canada's favourite pop genius, Carl Newman, is busy. After the demise of his relatively unknown former band, Zumpano, in the '90s and sporadic and uncertain status of his current band The New Pornographers in the early part of this decade, Newman has definitely been making up for lost time and missed opportunities.

Since 2007 alone, the Pornos have released yet another indie pop masterpiece Challengers, Newman wrote and recorded his second solo album under the name A.C. Newman (Get Guilty, set to be released on Jan. 20), the Pornos staged a two-day summer festival at Vancouver's Stanley Park and Newman is planning the next Pornos record. Whew!

At the end of this past summer, CHARTattack talked to Newman about everything that's keeping him busy, the follies of the internet and (much to our Canadian pride's chagrin) Brooklyn, New York's greatness. Grrr.

ChartAttack: Now that your second solo album is done and ready to be released, what's next for you?
Carl Newman: Now that I've finished my record, the next thing on my mind is that I want to try and get another Pornographers album out by October of '09. Which means we would have to try to get the record done by June. Which is doable. What is that? Ten months from now? I can get a record done in 10 months.

You must be constantly writing songs. What is your process like? Do you write a new song everyday?
There're a lot of songs that nobody gets to hear. For me, it's not a compact thing. I don't sit down and write a song and then six hours later or a day later the song is done. A lot of the time, they just evolve over months and months. So over a period of a year, I might have written 16 songs or whatever, but I don't know how long each of them took or when I finished them or when I started them. There are songs I just don't know where they came from. Like, I honestly can't remember them at all. It's like I didn't even write them.

How do you differentiate between a song that will be a New Pornographers song and one that that will be an A.C. Newman song?
I don't really differentiate at all. When I made the first solo album, all the songs I put on it were songs I thought wouldn't work as New Pornographers songs, and there were a couple that I just put on there and didn't think either way about it.

And then after that, with Twin Cinema and Challengers and the solo record I just did, I didn't think about it at all. We just went into the studio and made this record and I didn't second guess what it should sound like or what people expect of it.

But now that I've just finished this solo album and I'm thinking of the next Pornographers record, I find myself really wanting to write a Pornographers record. For the first time I'm actually thinking, "What am I gonna do for the New Pornographers?"

Are you conscious of what is being said about your albums and how they are being reviewed?
I swore off the internet about a year ago. And when I say "I swore off the internet," I mean I swore off going online and looking up anything to do with the New Pornographers, because what purpose does it serve? I can figure out what's going on with us just by listening to my own thoughts. And really, no one's untouchable.

I appreciate that we've always been a well thought-of band. But in everything you do in life, there will always be some people that love you and some people that hate you.

I began to realize that it's too easy for people to Google themselves these days. I realized it becomes a weird kind of drug where you're reading about yourself on the internet and you need praise just to feel normal. It doesn't even make you feel good anymore, y'know? Whether someone says something good or bad about me, it really has no effect on my life or what I do. It doesn't make me better or worse or happier or sadder.

I think it's good not to be overly concerned with yourself. What do I need to know about myself? Nobody knows more about myself than me. I don't need to read other people's opinions. But of course some things you can't avoid, like what did Rolling Stone say? Or what did Spin say? Or what did Pitchfork say? Or something like that. But there are so many other things to be interested in. There are other things to Google.

Has your writing process changed since you've moved from Vancouver to Brooklyn?
I think I only really know how to do things one way. The process hasn't changed much. I'm always trying to get better. You're always trying to make a record that's better than the last one or different from your last one. Or just grow or expand in some way.

I don't know if that changes depending on where I am. A lot of great bands talk about how they got their sound just because of their seclusion. Like The Replacements in Minneapolis — they were like, "We had nothing else to do." But here it's kind of the opposite. Here in Brooklyn, it's kind of exciting.

It helps in the Pornographers just to have Dan Bejar as the other songwriter. I'm such a massive fan of his and think he's so awesome that it pushes me to try and be better because I think of this guy I have to keep up with in the band. And my songs can't be really, really weak compared to his. So yeah, that sort of thing helps.

So if your plan is to have a new New Pornos album out in late '09, then surely it means a proper tour will follow. The addition of Kathryn Calder to the band for the last few records seems to have solved all the touring issues that have been problematic since the band's early days. Do you no longer factor Neko Case's schedule into your scheduling for a New Pornos tour?
We definitely do factor in Neko's schedule into the band's schedule. It's so hard to fit the two — Neko and the Pornographers — together that when we plan a tour, we'll go to her and say, "Hey, can you do it?" and she'll go, "Yeah I can do it," or, "No, I can't," and we'll go, "Oh, OK." That's about how it goes. We don't plan a tour and then have to reschedule it when her schedule conflicts. Otherwise, you're just playing this weird kind of tag whose eventual result is that you don't ever play.

In 2004, we played two gigs. There were only two New Pornographers shows that year, and that's kind of absurd when you think about it. How many bands are there — except The Postal Service — who have put out a well-received album and then fell off the face of the earth? That's why in 2005 we thought, "We gotta find a way around this."

And getting Kathryn in the band has made it so that we can actually function as a real band [and] do things we could never do before. It made it so that we could go to Europe for the first time, so it's been great.