Chad VanGaalen Making More Music Than He Can Handle

With Calgary's Chad VanGaalen, it's always about the next thing. He's constantly making music in his home studio and is in the midst of preparing records both under his own name and under his electronic Black Mold alter-ego.

But the real focus in his life right now is a major support tour for none other than Feist, which will take him from the west coast to Quebec. While Feist is also a Calgary native, VanGaalen's interaction with her has been more as a fan than a friend.

"We've met a couple times before, but we're not old buddies or anything," he says. "I used to go see her play in Placebo when I was a kid. And they were kind of like a heavier, rockin' band. Kieran, their guitarist, had this heavy guitar sound and I was like, 'That's crazy!'

"So now she's all 'Mushaboom'ed out, it's pretty mellow. Her agent told me that they didn't really want [me to play the] distorted stuff and I was like, 'Well, the distortion pedal kind of goes hand in hand with rock music, which is what I'll be playing. So unless you want me to smash a pile of dildos against a melted pile of Cabbage Patch Kids, maybe you should find somebody else.' I'm hoping they accept me as the person I am, which you probably should if you're asking someone to tour with you. 'Let's get AIDS Wolf! Could you guys play acoustic?' I'm sure they wouldn't."

To the best of ChartAttack's knowledge, VanGaalen hasn't been kicked off the tour for playing distorted guitars yet, so audiences will be treated to cuts from his Infiniheart debut and last year's excellent Skelliconnection follow-up.

It's possible, however, that you'll hear more of the former and likely a pile of new tracks. As for record number two? Well, let's just say that it's not on VanGaalen's top 10 albums of 2006 list (it was my #2 last year).

"I went through this crazy sort of circle of 'I don't care what I'm doing' to suddenly, 'People are gonna hear this and criticize it,'" he says with a sigh. "So I was kind of going a little bit crazy and I ended up overproducing stuff and underproducing stuff and never really nailed anything down on it.

"I was kind of preoccupied with fitting into what people had pinned me down as, like, as a folk singer or something. With Infiniheart, how it started out was I gave Ian Russell at Flemish Eye a bunch of instrumental stuff and people ended up liking the vocals. So ever since then I've kind of been resisting that. Like, I'm not really a folk singer.

"I come from a more experimental, like, stoner rock background. So I was trying to resist that. I mean, the pieces that work best on Skelliconnection, at least in my mind, are the piano pieces that are just interludes. That's more representative of what I'm doing. So when I'm composing stuff or imagine myself as a musician, maybe it was growing up in Calgary and not really being a part of any sort of scene, but I don't really see myself as anything."

While VanGaalen says he has enough material to release "a whole bunch of new albums," there's no specific timeline for his next proper release. So in the meantime, he's recording a song roughly every one or two days, and he's learning a new instrument that should make its way into future material. It's a tough one, and surprisingly — or unsurprisingly, if you consider VanGaalen's DIY ethics — he's teaching himself to play it.

"My partner got me a cello for Christmas, totally surprise attacked me," he reveals. "So I've been trying to figure out how to play that thing.

"It's a crazy beast. I'm on YouTube watching these eight-year-olds that are just going crazy and I'm just using it as this droney, painful-sounding thing. It's pretty easy for stuff like that. As soon as you get into rocking the bow across chords and stuff like that, that shit's kind of hard. But I have to get my cadence down, you know what I mean?"

VanGaalen plays on these Feist dates:

May 18 Edmonton, AB @ Winspear Theatre
May 19 Calgary @ Jubilee Auditorium
May 22 Regina, SK @ Conexus Arts Centre
May 23 Winnipeg @ Burton Cummings Theatre
May 29 Toronto, ON @ Tranzac (non-Feist show w/Jade McNelis)
May 31 Ottawa, ON @ Bronson Centre
June 1 Montreal, QC @ Olympia
June 2 Quebec City, QC @ Imperial