Charles Spearin Hears Things Differently

When a musician takes a break from their band and produces a solo side project, it's usually a thinly veiled attempt to show off acoustic songs they've been secretly recording in their bedroom.

Charles Spearin isn't that sort of musician. Do Make Say Think — Spearin's primary gig — is anything but a conventional band, so it's not surprising his first solo album was borne out of a non-traditional concept.

The Happiness Project is an amalgamation of music and speech. Spearin invited friends and neighbours to his house to discuss the subject of happiness. He recorded those conversations and later studied his neighbours' voices in an attempt to find melody in the cadence and intonation of their vocalizations. He then chose instruments whose sounds he felt were best suited to each of the individuals' voices, and built songs around interview snippets in an attempt to mimic and complement those voices through music. (See the whole thing explained in this video.)

CHARTattack sat down with Spearin to discuss his artistic vision and process.

CHARTattack: How did this idea develop?
Charles Spearin: It has been a long time brewing, I guess.

I used to listen to my parents talk and I listened to the particular cadence of their voices. My dad had a very deep but gentle voice and my mom had a very sharp and stabbing voice. It just makes for an interesting back and forth when they're talking to each other. Also, my father — and this might have something to do with it — is blind, so I used to always imagine what it's like to be blind. I spent a lot more time focused on my ears, I think, than most people would.

The press release for the album suggests that your experience with Buddhism in some way inspired the project. How so?
I've been practicing Buddhism for a long time. My father is Buddhist as well. The practice of Buddhism involves a lot of silence and retreats, and quite regularly I do a meditation retreat in a monastery or a meditation centre or even a cabin in the woods. Coming back into the city and listening to people talk again makes you hear with fresh ears.

I think one of the things you learn from silent retreats is that, most of the time, people talk just to fill the air. There's a kind of anxiety behind the talking, like if they stop talking they're going to stop existing or something. When you stop talking for a month or so, you begin to look at speech as something special — not something that's done all the time — so you notice the cadence and you notice the inflection and the song quality of it a bit more.

Why did you decide on happiness, as opposed to anything else, as a theme for the discussions?
For one thing, it's easy to invite your neighbours over to your house to talk about happiness. You can't too easily invite your friends over to talk about death or politics or religion. They're inflammatory subjects.

In a way, it's kind of a friendly thing to do. And to be honest, the intention wasn't to talk about happiness. It was kind of steered in that direction and it became more about it as the project went on... And it actually worked out very well. My friends started calling it my happiness project.

When your neighbours were being interviewed, did they have some idea of what the recordings were going to be used for?
No, I didn't even know at that point. When I invited them over, I said I was working on a musical project and that was it. I think I even said I was doing a musical sketch of the neighbourhood, which is kind of true. So, no, they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.

Have all of the interviewees heard the finished product? What do they think of it?
Yeah, they all have. I think they all really enjoyed it. I think some understood better than others, but I think everybody is pretty happy with it.

Who do you see as the primary audience for this album?
It's really hard to say because I didn't have an audience in mind when I did it. It's not going to get a lot of radio play. It's not the sort of thing that gets played in the background of cafes. But my whole career has been making music that doesn't quite fit into standard playlists, so I don't worry about that kind of stuff too much. In a way, I think it's going to have a broad appeal because they're nice stories and it's an interesting application of music.