The Tea Party: Nothing Is Wrong With Us

01/30/09 5:19pm

by Karen Pace (CHARTattack)

"Let it be said that Jeff Martin is a very gracious host."

So sayeth the host himself, and indeed he is. A casual summer evening spent with Jeff Martin (singer/songwriter/guitarist) and Stuart Chatwood (bassist/keyboardist) of The Tea Party at Jeff's loft in Old Montreal generates insight into the raison d'etre as well as the place de creation of the band's fourth full-length album, Transmission. Following an independent release, two major-label albums that covered bluesy psychedelic rock territory (Splendor Solis) and traditional Eastern folk sounds (The Edges Of Twilight), plus an acoustic EP (Alhambra), Transmission takes a sharp turn towards electronic experimentation, with heavier songs and even darker lyrics than previous Tea Party offerings. Like a psychologist uncovering the creative process, a trip is prescribed, to the loft where Transmission was born. And like any good doctor would do, the patients are asked to start from the beginning, the very beginning; i.e., why Montreal?

"I spend most of my time here in the winter where the poetic existence is so fucking beautiful. All you hear is horses and carriages go by in the snow on a cobblestone street and I have to look at a digital clock to make sure I'm in 1997," enthuses Jeff, explaining that the city is more conducive to him thinking and writing than other, possibly more distracting cities.

"I moved here for the privacy, because it seems that the French have more of a..."

"...pride in themselves," Stuart interjects, "where you're just a regular person. They appreciate and respect what you do, but they're not fanatical about it."

Not only does Montreal bring the necessary anonymity that Martin and Chatwood desire, but shut the windows in Jeff's loft and you really close off the outside world — the walls are three-feet-thick soundproof stone, while warm hardwood floors and exposed beams are complemented by cozy decorations, natural candlelight and constant incense. One of the oldest buildings in North America, Jeff describes his interior decorating of it as "a hybrid of French Renaissance and Indian motifs." Instruments of bizarre pronunciations lean thoughtfully around the main living space, while Middle Eastern pillows sit on antique European-style couches. With studio equipment lodged in an upstairs, open area, it's actually a rather cramped space to set up a band to record.

"I did all the controlling here, but basically the floor beneath here is the same set-up as my apartment. We cleared out as much space as what my house is and we just put [drummer] Jeff Burrows' drums in the middle and set up the microphones around it and snaked the cables up the chimney into my bedroom and through the wall," explains album producer, Jeff, gesticulating the path of the cables.

And in keeping with the hospitable atmosphere of the loft itself, Jeff rises and returns with dishes of food. Vegetarian pate, tzatziki, cheese, crackers, grapes and marinated olives are served on plates that match the decor: rich, dark patterns with gold running through them. Like the loft, they also reflect Jeff's personality. As he drinks from a wine glass wrapped in pewter leaves, the penchant for the Medieval is as noticeable here as in the video for Transmission's first single, "Temptation." With Iranian folk music playing in the background, we discuss the seeds of Transmission and how it came to be recorded right in Jeff's living room.

After playing for a year to support The Edges Of Twilight album, The Tea Party found itself in the unenviable position of having to part ways with its manager. In the ensuing turmoil, the band was forced to re-evaluate its very existence.

"Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing." —Kahlil Gibran

Jeff takes a deep breath.

"It was a period of time where we weren't being represented in a way that we felt we could continue. We had to come off the road into this period where we just stopped. Totally left the scene. And we all converged here, in Montreal. All of a sudden we had this time on our hands. We could have gone crazy, indulged in our vices, broke up, but what we chose to do was use the time as an instrument, use our studio as an instrument. And maybe get closer to the idea of what we've always wanted to be as a band, not just because of the turn of events or what's happening right now in music, but what we always wanted to be. Out of the unsureness of what we went through, we didn't feel that we had to live up to anything because there might not have been anything to live up to, right?

"We felt absolutely free to go ahead and not necessarily reinvent ourselves, but evolve into whatever we wanted to be. We didn't know if we'd have a record deal. It was a tremendous time of introspection... just coming here and not dealing with anything, not picking up the phone. There was a lot of time to think and to go within, whereas maybe on anything else I'd done in the past, I'd been looking elsewhere, at other cultures to inspire us. This time there was no choice but to look in the mirror. It was just about making music. And, subconsciously, the music we started to make together at this point was a lot more aggressive and it was a lot more...the only way I can describe it is darker, than anything we've done in the past."

This time around, the band explores the use of loops, samples and backwards-played sounds that will obviously prompt the tag "electronic" or "industrial." And although Jeff and Stuart revert to using the term "electronic" at various points in the evening, Jeff would rather that people call it "intense."

"A lot of the sounds you hear on Transmission that you think are electronic sounds are actually me or Stuart with his keyboard, filtering natural sounds; electric guitars being filtered, twisted and distorted, basically squeezed or compressed to the point of non-recognition," Jeff says.

"A lot of our effects are based on flipping the tape over, [using] reverse sounds and stuff like that," clarifies Stuart. "We expanded on that front. We expanded on guitar sounds and keyboard sounds."

"On The Edges Of Twilight, it made sense intuitively to bring in instruments that are indigenous to the cultures that were influencing us at that period, but with the intention of the songs on Transmission, it didn't make sense to put those instruments on it," Jeff states. "It's about expressing ourselves and backing up the sentiments of the songs. To put those instruments on it would be like trying to do Edges Of Twilight Two."

"It is music's lofty mission to shed light on the depths of the human heart." —Robert Schumann

Read through the lyrics on Transmission and you sink into an abyss swirling with themes like: darkness, shadows, drowning, silence vs. screams, "can't cope"/"lost all control," a lack of faith vs. salvation, hurt, fear, death... need I go on? Jeff Martin, you don't seem like a very happy camper! Two small references point to a possible end to the despairing tone: "I'm trying to understand," Jeff sings in the title track, and "Glimpses of hope exist," he allows on the album's closer, "Aftermath."

"I could imagine a music whose rarest charm should consist in its complete divorce from the Good and Bad - an Art which should see fleeing toward it the hues of a perishing moral world become well nigh incomprehensible, and which should be hospitable and profound enough to harbour such belated fugitives." —Friedrich Nietzsche

For all that The Tea Party has explored the search for self on previous albums, Transmission evokes far more emotion. Time, maturity, travel and empiricism all contributed to this heightened emotional conveyance. As a teenager in Windsor, ON, reading philosopher's tomes and forming opinions of society, Jeff couldn't have predicted that the world travels afforded him by his future touring rock band would not only open wider the doors of perception, but synthesize his experiences so that a deeper understanding would take place.

"I can have Nietzsche coming out of my ass and I could have read Machiavelli and Baudelaire, but I never left Windsor when I was 19. I've been fortunate enough to experience cultures that I never would have experienced had we not played music. And now, out of all these things that I've read, it's starting to make sense. Transmission is the most honest musical account of this band's life that we've ever made," he postulates.

And for all the experience that making three previous albums has brought, Jeff's vocals on this new record are far more raw and urgent, which he attributes to his being the sole producer of the project.

"I felt it was imperative that The Tea Party establish its own unique voice. The only way the band could achieve that was to close off all parameters and just do it, especially with my singing. The music was so dynamic that I couldn't just stay in a very safe baritone register. It wasn't going to make any sense. So on songs like 'Alarum' or 'Transmission' I had to basically let myself go," confesses Jeff.

"In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly." —Kahlil Gibran

And for all the life experience that may have clarified Jeff's songwriting, the lyrics are more ambiguous on Transmission than the straight-forward style that characterized Splendor or Edges. Opposing themes cloud lines like "The sweet decay of ecstasy" or "Blind from the vision." The emotion, though, is definitely pinned down on every song.

"That's it," Jeff acknowledges. "It's ambiguous because the emotion is so much more true. You can hit every one of these songs with a tuning fork and it will resonate perfectly. The vibrations are there, but you can't quite figure it out. Hopefully, there's enough ambiguity that people will be able to develop their own idiosyncrasy with each song. Things should be purposely occulted [hidden] because people should find it for themselves. Words... language has become too powerful. It becomes a bit totalitarian, like, 'I am saying this, therefore it should be considered true.' Music is a more powerful vehicle to guide than words are."

And although the new music was created by the trio that is The Tea Party, Transmission began with a single man and a whack of recording equipment. Composed almost two years ago, the title track was made by knob-twiddling Jeff Martin, playing the parts that would eventually turn into the first song for this album. Originating with the sample used as the intro to the song, Jeff tells the story of its inclusion.

"It's basically this old acetate field recording of a shepherd done in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. In the Atlas Mountains with its many peaks, there [are] territories where berbers [indigenous nomadic herders] have their clan and their sheep. They're all asking for Allah's praises, and this competition goes on, where they're screaming at each other, these shepherds, right...'Aaaiiieeee!' [Jeff fakes a berber screaming in Arabic]. Basically, I think what the translation would be is [Jeff yells], 'My sheep are better than your sheep!'"

And the reason that sample had to be used over any other sample in the world is...

"It was an inspired moment," Jeff admits. "It just made sense intuitively to put it there."

"And so begat Transmission!" booms Stuart in a mock Star Trek narrator's voice.

The song ended up being pieced together from that sample, Jeff's programming and the words to a poem he had written in San Francisco after the band finished its last tour, when "things were looking really bleak." As more songs took shape, more universal themes came with them. "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."—Kahlil Gibran

"'Gyroscope' is basically the annihilation of the psyche, the ego, to try to find the divine within. That's whether you're Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, whatever. It's essentially what you're trying to do to get at the god, the godhead," Jeff explains.

"Psychopomp" is about death.

"Our generation is obsessed with death. Pain, the acceptance of pain...we're all of a sudden accepting pain as something relative, something worthwhile to experience, 'embracing the pleasures of pain' [from 'Transmission']."

"The essence of all art is having pleasure giving pleasure." —Mikhail Baryshnikov

A fan on the Tea Party email list-service (listproc@cc.umanitoba.ca) asked other fans what they thought of comparing The Tea Party to Rush: three guys, all accomplished players. Rather than pose that query to the band, I wanted to hear their thoughts on the Rush lyric: "Glittering prizes and endless compromises/Shatter the illusion of integrity." Discuss.

"What's that from again?" Stuart winks. "Just kidding. Well, as for compromises, I think our band makes the fewest out of anybody."

"We're probably the most independent band in this country," Jeff opines, "as far as artistic control. We do all the artwork, I produce the records, we don't let anyone else come into the songwriting. But because we're dancing with [EMI], we're going to get our music out to more people than any independent band can."

"So glittering prizes... I don't know. Self-satisfaction?" ponders Stuart.

"The glittering prize is to be able to put your record on and go, 'I am truly proud of this! I have not had to compromise my integrity one ounce to make my artistic statement,'" says Jeff. "Then, what makes it even more of a glittering prize is when people get off on it, react to it, to something you put your heart and soul into. Transmission has been a year and a half of my fucking life, and to see people react to it, to see people emotionally so into a song, there's no bigger reward."

Playing in Australia for two weeks this month will make for a more powerful live set when The Tea Party catches up with the Western Edgefest tour at the end of August, Jeff promises. A controlled, more melodic version of the few Transmission songs that were played on the Eastern Edgefest tour dates was a result of Jeff "just getting my wind. Now it's a case of learning how to sing these songs. Sometimes I think it would be so easy to just be a singer. I could destroy a microphone if I didn't have a 50-pound Les Paul strapped around my neck!" he warns.

Talking noticeably more to the audience than usual during the first three Edgefest dates, Jeff says, "Communicating the music is just as important as playing the music, especially with some of the themes that I'm trying to express. I don't want it to be too ambiguous, I want to make it clear sometimes. I also want to make sure the connection is constant with the audience. I don't want to hurt anyone, but I definitely want to invoke frenzy in an audience. I want them to lose it."

And in learning about inciting their fans to frenzy, evoking deep emotional reactions in their listeners and delving into heady questions of self; in all this time spent eating Jeff Martin's cheese and crackers, the one thing I had wanted to find out more than anything else becomes self-evident early on in our conversation. Does this band, which takes only the most brooding band photos ("Because it's about the eyes," says Jeff), which comes across in articles as serious and focused on the music to the point of tediousness... does this band, The Tea Party, have a goddamned sense of humour? Oui!

In a questionnaire printed in Chart's Edgefest Tour Guide, the band members were asked to list who they would have portray them in an autobiographical film. Jeff's answer was "Val Kilmer," who, as everyone knows, portrayed Jim Morrison in the movie The Doors.

"You mean our tongue-in-cheek answers?" asks Stuart, incredulous that I thought they were serious in the questionnaire.

"With everything that's been said about me in the press [comparing Jeff to Jim Morrison], that I would be stupid enough to go and [seriously] say, 'Val Kilmer?' Come on!" laughs Jeff.

"Hey!" Stuart chastises Jeff. "Stop smiling!" And in a German Gestapo commander's voice, Stuart barks, "Zat vasn't funny!"

This cover story originally appeared in Chart's August 1997 issue, which is now sold out.