Jeff Thorburn / killbeatmusic.com
Jeff Thorburn / killbeatmusic.comWe’re often told that success and happiness come from, amongst other things, being yourself. Calgary’s Chad VanGaalen has made a career of doing the exact opposite. The two-time Polaris Prize-nominated multi-instrumentalist is best known for his genre-bending song-based material. That he ended up labelled a singer-songwriter is a bigger surprise to no one more than himself.
“You kind of have to trick yourself into thinking that you are what people think you are,” he says. “I was doing just as much avant-garde, weirdo noise shit—probably more—at the time when [2004’s] Infiniheart came out, and nobody really gave a shit about that stuff.”
“The bulk of my material is still 20-minute long drone pieces, and that seems way more natural as far as, like, the sound evolving and what I hear around me.”
Whether he thinks so or not, VanGaalen is a talented songwriter. His previous three albums (Infiniheart, 2006’s Skelliconnection, 2008’s Soft Airplane) appealed to both the head and the heart, drawing as much from folk and rock as they did from glitchy electronica and avant-garde composers like John Cage.
His most recent offering, Diaper Island is still song-based, but it differs from his past releases in two ways: one, it’s the first of his albums to be recorded in his new home studio, Yoko Eno, where he also produced the latest Women record Public Strain. Two, the music is significantly more guitar-based, trading instrumental experimentation for a more focused sound. The two aren’t unrelated: VanGaalen credits Women’s technical proficiency as his inspiration to focus more on his own guitar playing, and he re-used many of the same guitar tones from the Public Strain sessions.
Diaper Island also features some of his strongest songs to date. “Replace Me” contemplates meaning of life questions amid driving drums and guitars, and “Freedom for a Policeman” chugs along as a punk rock tune until a psychadelic-inspired breakdown halfway through. As heavy an album as it is, both literally and figuratively, it’s the quieter, more introspective tracks that showcase VanGaalen’s depth as a songwriter. “Sara,” a touching love song for his girlfriend, succeeds solely on acoustic guitar and vocals. VanGaalen initially intended the song to remain just between the two of them, but was later convinced to put it on the record. He hasn’t yet figured out whether or not he feels strange performing such an intimate song on a nightly basis.
“It kind of goes back and forth,” he says. “I feel weird when Sara’s there. My friend Monty is singing back-up vocals with me too. I always feel weird making people sing love songs for my girlfriend.”
Album closer “Shave My Pussy” is another example of the strength of the album’s softer songs. As initially off-putting as its title may be, it’s as thoughtful and poignant a rumination on women and body image as you’re likely to find. Accompanied by fragile ukulele finger-picking, the lyrics take the perspective of a desperate woman hoping a superficial trimming will bring satisfaction to her man.
“It was sort of me being extra sensitive and feeling grumpy and depressed at the supermarket, just staring at all the weirdo advertisments and trying to put myself there as a woman,” explains VanGaalen, speaking of the glamour and gossip magazines at the cash register that inspired the song. “I’ve got two daughters now so I just feel extra sensitive towards that kind of posturing at this point. I wanted to represent it accurately and as weird as it is. It’s kind of jokey, but at the same time that’s the saddest thing about it.”
VanGaalen gets noticeably excited when the conversation shifts towards the records he is putting out on cassettes as a means of releasing just some of his enormous back catalogue, much of which wouldn’t fit on “conventional” albums. Along with two b-side albums for Diaper Island (titled Garbage Island 1 and 2 respectively), there are two drone records, two “modular beat-oriented” records, and an instrumental stoner-rock record that is “the best thing [he’s] ever done.” He’s been waiting to release tapes for some time now, but had to wait until he acquired good enough equipment to put out high fidelity recordings.
“I just didn’t want to be dubbing it on, like, your dad’s cassette deck,” he says. “I get a lot of tapes that I’m really stoked about and then I listen to them and then I’m like, ‘Fuck man, it sounds like garbage.’ And that’s the thing. Tapes have this bad rap of being lo-fi … [but] you listen to Black Sabbath Paranoid on tape and it sounds as good as it does on vinyl. It should be that, right? It’s actually [a] fairly hi-fi format if you want it to be. Now I’ve gotten the tapes to the level sonically that I wanted them to be at. I’m pretty proud of it.”
Taking into account that he’s already released an accompanying EP with each of his albums to date, not to mention an LP as his electronic alter ego Black Mold, you get the sense that VanGaalen likes to keep busy, even disregarding his output as a visual artist. A noted illustrator and animator, he designs all of his own album artwork and has created music videos for himself and other artists like J. Mascis and Holy Fuck. If he’s tricking himself musically by being a singer-songwriter, maybe he’s tricking himself professionally by being a musician at all.
“With visual art it’s just way more satisfying by a million times over,” he says. “I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. It’s the thing that I feel most confident at doing. I feel like I could pick up a pen and just draw something and it would satisfy my mind.”
It’s the simplicity and reliability of the medium that keeps him returning.
“My pen never refuses to turn on,” he says. “It just feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s a piece of paper and a fucking pen. There’s not much that can go wrong.”
Chad
