Matthew Good: The Vancouver Album Explained

10/06/09 3:09pm

by Sarah Kurchak (CHARTattack)

Having exorcised — or at least partially tamed — the demons explored on 2007's Hospital Music, Matthew Good has returned with a fresh, broader focus for his new album, Vancouver.

CHARTattack talked to the verbose rocker about this thematic shift, as well as all of the exploding amps, lyrical doppelgangers and political issues that went into putting it all on record.

CHARTAttack: Your blogs and tweets during the record process alluded to a lot of frustration. What was so stressful about it?
Matthew Good: I had amps blow up. What happened is that I have these vintage reissued Voxes. I think Bob Rock's got one, The Hip got two, so I have three and four. So they're kind of rare and they're designed like they were back in the early '60s, late '50s.

And one of the tubes, the pre-amp tube is encased in this bizarre, plastic kind of casing and it had melted and then the tube went and we couldn't get it fixed in time and everything that we tried, everything that was recommended to us to replace it with, the amp sounded completely different. So we were fucked.

We had to basically bypass it and run the amp under a different channel. Basically, we jimmied it together with duct tape kind of thing — a metaphor. So we did this and what happened was that during the process of doing the guitars and stuff, me and [guitarist] Stu Cameron were looking at each other and we were going, "Well, we're going back to this or we're going back to that and it's not matching up."

So then I found myself, at that point, going "Well, I've got to start singing here..." but we were still doing guitars. We had to go back to "Last Parade" twice and redo it because shit wasn't meshing up and it just became this massively stressful thing. I had to add a whole week of recording onto the process.

So yeah, I mean, it completely had to do with technicalities. Because we'd revisit tracks and then we'd be like, "It's not in sync, the sounds that I'm looking for weren't in sync," so I had to go back and deal with those issues.

Ultimately, that's the headache that ensued.

So there wasn't a creative or writing process issue at all. Everything was going great and then the gear screwed you.
Yeah, that was pretty much it. Everything was down beforehand. I played everything on the demos and then I gave it to the guys and I said, "Learn this." So it wasn't as if that was a problem. That was all easy.

It was the process of having to deal with these fucking issues while we were trying to do it. So, had that not happened it would have been a much smoother and stress-free experience.

Pete Yorn contributes vocals on the track "Vancouver National Anthem." How did that come about?
Me and Pete were just emailing back and forth, because when he was making Back & Fourth, he was emailing me lyrics and going "What do you think of this? What do you think of that?" and, which I was like, looking at, reading them, thinking, "What the fuck are you asking me for? This is fine." (laughs)

And a little before that, I'd sent him some demos and he came up and performed with me and then we got to talking about the "Vancouver National Anthem," because it's his favourite song.

And I just went, "Dude, you should come up and you know that two-part harmony I do in the middle? Well, why don't you take the high bit?"

And he was like, "Yeah, cool!"

I'm friends with his girlfriend as well, so he was like, "Why don't we make it a trip and we'll come up for a few days and we'll just hang out and get it done."

He came in, hung out and we bashed it out pretty quick and yeah, it was pretty simple.

We were kind of laughing our asses of, though, because we couldn't tell our voices apart! We were sitting there, and I was like, "Jesus Christ, Zack [Blackstone, engineer]! Who's who?"

And he's, like, "You're on the left, Pete's on the right," and me and Pete were looking at each other, like, "What?"

So it was kind of funny because when you listen to it, it's hard to tell who's who on there.

So in the future, if you ever feel like it, you can just claim you're singing on each other's tracks.
Yeah! Well, no, the funny thing about it is, if you listen to me by myself or Pete by himself, you would never imagine that, right? But you know, Pete's all over that track. The "stick to it" part when we yell, that's both me and Pete yelling that. He sings all throughout the whole middle section. He sings in the outro, so he's all over the place.

The subject matter of Vancouver is somewhat less intensely personal than Hospital Music. Did you consciously set out to do that when you were writing the album, or did it just organically come about?
No, it came about.

The thing about it was that while I address some issues that I have with regards to the city, most of it is primarily a reflection... there's introspection on there, but it's more, I guess, juxtaposed between my experiences living in the city and using the city somewhat as a metaphor or a backdrop for certain things.

I kind of talk about the prevalence of the indoctrination of militarism in the song "Army In The Trees." Where I grew up, that was very prevalent, but I used where I grew up as the backdrop for that.

So, yeah, I mean, I got to talk about personal issues on it, but having that outlet, to use the city itself as kind of the mechanism to do it, it wasn't as direct, you know? The last record had to be direct. It was the only way it could be. This one had latitude to it. And, as a writer, I think that you feel things out and certain things come out a certain way. You find your meter with it and you find certain imagery that you think is poignant, given what you're doing.

Would this album have been any different if the Olympics weren't coming to town next year, or are they only bringing more attention to the issues that were already there?
It would have been exactly the same. While the Olympics are a problem — I'm against them — that isn't going to change those certain socioeconomic problems that the city faces. They'd still be there if the Olympics weren't coming.

All the Olympics are going to do is heap billions of dollars of debt on everyone in the province and make it more difficult to dig ourselves out of the hole and make it more difficult to address those issues we should have addressed in the first place. And I'm by no means saying that throwing money at something is the way to address a problem.

Obviously, it has to be done intelligently and compassionately and it's not as simple as trying to find some kind of band-aid solution. There are uncomfortable choices that have to be made and selling those uncomfortable choices to the public is a very, very difficult thing and also political suicide in a lot of ways. And selling them the Olympics is easy.

Some people are accusing you of Vancouver-bashing with this album, but it seems to me that you have to care passionately about something to even bring up issues like these.
Yeah. I was born in the same hospital as my mom. People can accuse me of anything. I've lived there my whole life. My mother's lived there my whole life. My grandfather drove a horse-drawn milk carriage up and down Canada Way, for Christ's sake.

People can say what they want. I lived downtown for 16 years. I've watched that town change — and I don't think for the better — and I have every right to point that out.

I have the right to point out that we live in a province with the highest child poverty rate in the entire country. I have the right to point out that you can take a cab for five to seven minutes from the poorest urban neighbourhood in Canada to one of the wealthiest and that, 15 years ago, that neighbourhood, which is now one of the wealthiest, used to be full of places where bands would rehearse for $200 a month and they were rat infested and now they're five-star restaurants. That gentrification is now happening in the lower east side and we're pushing the problem somewhere else and if people want to get upset about that, they can go right ahead.

My question is: why aren't they more pissed off about it than me saying it? That's the problem. And I find that extremely ignorant. It's very easy to get upset at someone for pointing something out that is the truth, whether they like it or not. Certain artists don't do it. I do. And who am to have just written a sunny record about Vancouver? I wouldn't have done it. It wouldn't have been honest.

And really, if you're going to be objective about it, I don't really think that record is all about Vancouver, anyway. As a whole, you listen to it, and you go...

It's certainly not a miserable record.
I mean, it's got it's miserable qualities just because it's me. (laughs) You know! But beyond that, it is what it is.

Good or bad, are you sticking with Vancouver to they very end, or would you ever consider moving?
I don't know. That really depends on the future and family and the rest of it. I'm not sure. I don't live in Vancouver proper anymore. I live outside of Vancouver now and I've given some thought to maybe moving a little further away, still in B.C., but just for the sake of maybe some property.

I'm not going to say that I haven't flirted with the idea before of maybe moving to the west country in the U.K. My family's English and I've spent a lot of time there and I have a strong connection with it. But you're always from where you're from.

I think that a lot of people that get upset about the fact that I would talk about the town, or that I would call a record after it and that it could have suspect content on it with regards to it. I think a lot of them feel kind of like this whole fan betrayal thing where, "This was the town that made you and so how could you say..." and that's ridiculous, because it's like, "Am I personally attacking you? I'm talking about a town."

You're not even talking about the fans in the town.
No, of course not.

I can't imagine anyone having a completely love-filled relationship with their hometown, anyway. It has to be more complicated than that.
Oh, absolutely. It absolutely has to be more complicated than that. There's things you love and things you hate. Things you want to change. Things you want to see changed. But, within you, it doesn't strip you of that connection that you have to it, because it's where you're from.

You've made a free stream of Vancouver available to your fans for a month before the album's release. Why did you decide to do that?
I did it with the last record. People should be able to hear it, I think, make up their own minds about it before they buy it or not. Not only that, as an artist you're excited about it and you want people to fuckin' hear your work. I don't know. I just think it's a cool thing to do. Ever since Wilco did it with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I just think it's a brilliant idea.

Trust me, a lot of people talk about the whole Nine Inch Nails/Radiohead giveaway thing and one thing that gets lost in that conversation is that you're dealing with artists who have millions of dollars. Had I that kind of money in the bank, I'd be all for it. I'd use that model in a heartbeat.

Two years ago, I would have been doing what Radiohead's doing now. I'd record three tracks and I'd release them. Three tracks, release them. I'd go nuts, because I love that. I think it's cool that Radiohead's doing that.

Don't get me wrong, I kind of disagree with what Yorke said about the abandonment of the album, but that also could have to do with the fact that they're probably one of the best bands in the world, they've all got families now and commitments, and them getting together... I'm sure the pressure on that band is immense. "Oh, produce the next masterpiece."

They've been struggling with that for a while now and I think that's a shame and I think they feel like they're limited, too. But I think it's a great model to be able to have at your disposal. It's a great model to be able to say, "Here, take it for fuckin' free."

In my case, I'm on obviously a major record label and they gave me x amount of dollars to make a record and they need to recoup that money, so I still have to follow that kind of system of going about it, but had I had the kind of international success that a band like Radiohead or Trent Reznor's had, and I had security for my future and that kind of thing, I wouldn't be against it at all. I'd be right there with them. Absolutely.

Do you feel that the accessibility of the Internet has taken away from the mystery of music, though?
Yeah, yeah. It does. That's something that, when I first started really getting involved online, I struggled with very heavily.

I come from an era in which the mystery of music was 50 per cent of a band. You looked at Led Zeppelin II, you went, "Who are these guys? Why are they dressed up like a flight crew?" That was the great thing about it. Or you'd look at a picture of The Replacements, you'd look at a picture of The Pixies or The Police and you'd wonder. And that was awesome.

But unfortunately — and how I came to the decision was — we don't live in that time anymore. The reality is that most young people now, they sit down at their computer and they do four things at once. They have music playing in the background, they're doing something online, they're probably talking to someone at the same time and even though I don't come from that generation, you have to take that into consideration.

And also, I realized that there was major opportunity for me to use it as an outlet for talking about issues that I felt that should be talked about or that were important to me, so the combination of the two was ultimately what resulted in it.

It's not a bad tradeoff, really. You do have a very good online presence.
Yep. I mean, I spent a lot of time doing what I do. And I get a lot of shit from some people about not being more music-oriented with regards to my website and the rest of it, but you know.

You post a lot of content, though. How much music-related content could you possibly do?
Not a lot. Not really. I mean, "I did this today"... You're right, that would be very difficult.

For certain things, it would be a lie to say that it's not a promotional vehicle, but it would be foolish not to use it for other purposes. I use social networking for that. I probably wouldn't have a Twitter account if it wasn't a great way to get information out. Same with Facebook. I wouldn't have a Facebook account. Why? I mean, it's great for fans, but I don't use them, you know, personally.

Most people, they have a Facebook account, their mom's on there, their friends are on there and they all talk and it's about their lives and they keep up with each other, but I probably wouldn't have that. I don't have time for it. But because those social networks are part of what I do for a living, I do concentrate on them and I use them for those purposes.

Would are your feelings on the music and entertainment media these days? Have they softened somewhat?
I don't know. I think that, largely, throughout my career, in this country especially, during my kind of rise to notoriety in Canada, I was kind of an odd man out in that I spoke directly about a lot of things, and a lot of people didn't appreciate that. A lot of music journalists loved the whole "I'm happy to be here" line.

I've been exposed to media all over the world. I've done press junkets in New York, where the media's like, "you might as well kiss their ass, because without them you're nothing" kind of thing. And as a musician, you sit there and you look at them and you go, "You know what? Without me, you wouldn't have a job." What are you gonna write about?

And I guess when I was younger, I translated that attitude a little bit more, not openly by saying that, but I translated that attitude quite a bit and it made for great quotes. And because of that, it's something that the media over the years latched onto and what ultimately happened was, I'd give a completely normal, straight interview and they would find one contentious thing in that and it would become the focus of a 45 minute conversation in which I talked about a whole bunch of other stuff, but yet that's the way... Well, we've always portrayed him this way, so let's keep portraying him this way. And I think that's unfortunate. And it doesn't really, I don't think it really conveys any semblance of journalistic integrity whatsoever.

It's not just entertainment. It has to do with everything from foreign correspondence covering international events to domestic politics to everything. It happens with everybody. We live in a hypersensitive world with regards to the media, and with most of the mainstream media falling by the wayside now and their relevance becoming less significant, especially in print, they need to flower things up.