Tiga's Dance Now Pops

It's highly fitting that veteran Montreal DJ Tiga would name his new album Ciao!

The popular Italian phrase can be used either as an informal greeting or goodbye, and the globetrotting Tiga finds himself at his most traditionally danceable, all while further separating himself from his record-spinning peers.

On Ciao!, Tiga takes major strides in the ongoing transition from dancefloor general to pop songwriter, which started with 2007's Juno Award-winning Sexor. Or as the affable and humorous DJ would say, from "sex whiz of sonic parkour" to "storytella and funky fella."

CHARTattack caught up with Tiga during a rare visit to his hometown in between European jaunts.

CHARTattack: On Ciao!, you actually engaged in more songwriting than you had in the past.
Tiga: I came from dance music and not from any classical music training, so even the idea of "songs" was never part of my world. I never cared about choruses or verses or that conventional structure. It was always just about dance tracks: an intro, a groove and maybe a breakdown.

Then when I did the last album, I experimented with structure a little bit, like "You Gonna Want Me," and I thought it could be fun to work within a simple pop structure.

This time, we went further in that direction. The difference is when you're working on a track, you're working on getting a loop that's strong enough to carry on for four to five minutes — basically a bass drum and some sounds that don't get boring.

This time, we were mostly writing first, so the lyrics and the melodic structure came first. You're thinking, "How is this going to resolve as a song? If an idea is introduced, how will it play out in the second verse? Does the chorus jump out enough, and what about the transitions?"

The transitions in a song have to make sense in a way that transitions in a track don't. Transitions in a track are about energy. Transitions in a song are more about musical coherence.

Would you consider Ciao! to be dance music or pop music, then?
It's kind of a hybrid. I still feel like it's dance music because for more than half the songs, the genesis is still as a dance track. They wouldn't have existed without a groove at the foundation. "Mind Dimension" is a total dance track, "Overtime," and even something poppy like "Shoes."

It's still fundamentally dance music, but I've strayed pretty far from my own origins and pretty far from DJ culture. There's way too much going on for it to be pure club music.

One thing that Sexor was truly missing was a 10-minute long dance epic. For Ciao!, you included "Love Don't Dance Here Anymore." Considering it started out as a stand-alone single, was it difficult to find a way to include it in the record?
I had a bit of trouble with it because we did a version that ended up not working and I was nervous because it's not an easy song to make it work. It could easily end up sounding like shit. You're playing with fire with the long intro and that type of dramatic structure. But once we got it right, I knew it was going to be the last track on the album.

Originally, "Gentle Giant" was going to be the last track, but "Love Don't Dance" has an epic feel, and I'm really happy with it — possibly my favourite track. I really like the production, and the execution of the idea is really good. Some things are easy to make, and the impact is greater than the work involved, but not something like that.

The classic disco style is very difficult to make sound good. It's very easy to screw up. I don't know if I've ever gotten such good feedback on a track. It's not an easy record to DJ — it doesn't have an immediate impact — but I would say all the press I was doing in Europe unanimously thought it was my best track.

Ciao! also doesn't have covers.
Covers are something I genuinely loved doing for a couple of years. But the reason I did covers was because I had no idea how to write my own songs. When I look back on it now, it makes complete sense because the covers are very much like what any rock band does, learning with other people's material and then you gradually start doing your own.

It never came up for this album. I didn't even have the urge. At a certain point, even if your songs aren't as good as the songs you cover, you want to force yourself to write your own material and not fall back on the get-out-of-jail free card.

What about lyric writing? Were you more comfortable in that regard as well?
It's easy for me on a certain level. It's easy, but I haven't pushed the envelope.

Easy's not the right word. Sometimes nothing happens for a few days and sometimes it happens in one sitting. If I have a special skill, I don't think it's a way with words, it's my acceptance of them when they come out. I'm not uptight. A song like "Sex O'Clock" took me about 10 minutes to write. I never wrote the lyrics down and never redid the vocals. It's a snapshot of a feeling.

Especially with technology now and how music is made, it's so easy to get in a mindset of perfection. Especially with all things digital, it's easy to go back and fix everything. I find it can lose the spontaneity, the details that made it special in the first place.