But Maclean, like the rest of what would become DFA's inner circle, didn't stumble onto that combination by accident. During a phone conversation that began about Maclean's new album, The Future Will Come, I learned about the lifetime of influences that go into his music, the evolution of those musical tastes and the international electro scene, among other things, and here's what happened...
So first off, this album. Have you been working on this since Less Than Human came out, or did you take some time off in between?
Basically that was in 2005, and for about two years after that the band was on tour. Not constantly, but coming and going, and it was only after that had died down that I really started working on it again. It took me about a year and a half probably, beginning to end, to finish it.
I've read that it's an album of good old-fashoined love songs.
It's a lot of back-and-forth duets between me and Nancy [Whang]. A lot in the vein of the Human League, when the girl joined that band. And a lot of it is, mostly...a lot of it is about relationships, but a lot of it is about relationships not working out too well.
And you two wrote the album together?
Well, there's a studio in upstate New York that we did all the basic tracking for the band at, and then a few months later Nancy and I went back up there alone, and that's where we wrote all the vocal parts, and recorded the vocal parts together.
Talking about Nancy, she's kind of become this vocalist to indie dance stars in the last few years. She's done tracks for you, Soulwax, and lots of stuff with LCD Soundsystem. I know you can't speak for those other guys, but what is it about her and/or her voice that appeals to you?
I think it's a combination of things. At DFA in general, people that end up being in the DFA inner circle of musicians or artists, are first primarily people that we all like and sort of share musical aesthetic values. But with Nancy, there are people around who are more technical singers than her, but there's something that resonates in her voice, something really likeable in her voice that people have responded to. It seems to capture this melancholic, sort of aching side to things, in her singing. Especially on this album, that's what it was. And like, with my last 12", "Happy House," I think that's really a huge part of that song, her voice riding that line of melancholy, operating in that terrain. Same with "Dance With Me," on my last album, that was a similar kind of thing.
As far as writing lyrics and stuff though, it seems like writing lyrics with someone must be a strange thing to do. I'd assume you guys are friends, but what was it like adjusting and getting the balance right from song to song?
I mean, it was really good. Nancy and I have known each other for a long time. We've been through a lot together, and it was really easy to sit there together, facing each other. We would literally write lines back and forth to each other.
Wow.
It was really intense. It felt like, a lot of the time, it was getting stuff out that we always wanted to say to each other but never got to. But it was definitely really a very intense period.
So it was an unexpected forum.
Yeah and both of us knowing so much about each other's personal lives and relationships and that kind of thing, it really made it so we felt like we could get deep into that territory.
You used to be in a Rhode Island band called Six Finger Satellite that was much, much noisier and more aggressive than your solo work. Does that post-punk/grunge-influenced sound still appeal to you, or are you kind of done with it?
Well, there's still lots of elements of Six Finger Satellite present in what I do now. Six Finger Satellite was a noisy aggressive band with a disco rhythm section. The thing I can't relate to now, or can't get on board with, is that aggression. I think aggression in music is the domain of really young people, and honestly I would feel kind of silly posturing in that way at this stage in my life. I feel like it's something you do when you've...
Got a lot of that hormonally-driven energy...?
I think there's an arrogance to it. It's a time of your life when you can afford to not care about anything else. You know, throw all concerns out the window and just really be aggressive about, y'know...
everything.
Yeah.
You've said that you think both DJs and bands need to have some kind of give and take with their audiences in order to be successful, but it seems like these days, a lot of DJs are more about assaulting their audiences than responding to them.
Well, a huge part of my DJ experience in the last couple years has been getting really irritated with DJs who basically have no concern for what's going on in the room or the dancefloor. It's like they have a pre-programmed set, and they're just gonna bash people over the head with it. I think part of it also is that a lot of that music is not really dance music, and not only do people not dance to it, so much as they shake their fists in the air to it. I guess it's not really meant to be danced to, so it really seems more like a heavy metal concert than a guy DJing in a club. But I do think that people are getting really tired of it, and that, all over the world, that sound has worn people out, in general.
With electro in particular, things have gotten to the point where the songs aren't really conveying anything, too. It's just become this pissing contest of who can make the heaviest thing possible.
I think that the way it got to that point has a lot to do with the technology of how the music is made. It's really a kind of music that almost anyone can make on their laptop, and I think it just became a really easy thing to do so the originators...
pauses
Like, for example, Justice. I always thought [they] were great, but I thought they got a bad rap because there were so many people that came after them that sounded like them, that it sort of wore people out. But I thought it was a very punk rock kind of thing to do, everything that Justice has done, which is something I admire. Y'know, going for it full on 100% all the time, forcing people to live in their world while you're experiencing their music. But I think it's more so what came after them. A lot like punk rock, actually, because it was so easy to make, that it became kind of a parody of itself. Of course, the easiest way to make something powerful is to just make everything loud and aggressive in that music, but after a while it doesn't sound like anything.
So I guess you're of mixed mind about how easy it is to make music these days.
I think there's starting to be, if not a backlash, I think people are starting to get tired of that. One way it's playing out is in the arena of live bands. I think people are starting to feel swindled in the last two years with artists billing themselves as live and then getting up there with a laptop and maybe a guitar,and when you start looking around, there aren't many really good live bands that can deliver. Also, I think that what was hailed as a revolution in music-making, where anyone can make music at home, has panned out as being more a watering down of music in general. And again, in the same way that if you have a great live sound, or you have great production and engineering skills, it's really easy to stand out, and I really believe that's why DFA has done so well over the last few years. Because if you're even gonna begin to imitate what DFA has done -
You really need to know what you're doing.
You need great players, engineering experience, all those kinds of things.
Do you think, because of this glut that the indie music world is experiencing, that people listen to music as closely in 2008 as they did even five years ago?
I'm inclined to say that when I was even 16 years old, I was spending hours in my room or with my friends listening to music, talking about music, analyzing artwork for albums and things like this, and every time I'm inclined to say it's not like that anymore, I just check myself with the notion that that's what every generation says about people a little bit younger than them. It's a really hard time to get a grasp on what people are doing. On the one hand, everyone has an iPod filled with 10,000 MP3s when you live in New York. And so, when you live in New York you get a really distorted view of what the rest of the world is doing. Cuz I travel around the world and see that in most places, people don't have iPods and are really into listening to albums and those kinds of things. I do think that people don't make really deep albums right now. I think there's a tendency to make LPs with one or two standout tracks, and the rest are filler. So in that sense, I can understand why people might just buy the one or two good songs from an album and put them on their iPod, and it becomes a much more disposable thing. In general though, I just don't know. It just seems so different everywhere you go, and with the Internet everything is so immediate and everyone's so overloaded with information...
Are you still living in New Hampshire, or did you move back to the city?
I'm actually in New Hampshire now. I spend a little bit of time here, it's mainly where I live, and I spend a lot of time in New York. But I travel so much, I'm away about 50% of the time.
Do you think that living in a place that's removed from a city has an impact on how you write music or respond to the music you listen to?
Oh for sure. I think it's had a profound impact on me. I do all of the writing at home in New Hampshire, and it really helps me to get into a space where I'm truly not caring what's going on in the rest of the world and really just using my aesthetic ideals and influences to write music. Otherwise, it's really easy to play head games with yourself, and every time you write something, think 'Well, so-and-so just did something like this,' or 'This isn't really popular right now, it went out a year ago,' or 'I need to go down this road because this is what people like right now,' and all those kinds of expectations, for me at least, make it so I can never do anything all that good. I think the only way to write really great music is to completely disregard what's going on around you in the moment, and not be afraid to just believe in your own influences and aesthetics 100%. Otherwise, anytime I think you're being influenced by what's going on right now, you can never be groundbreaking and never be that interesting. The only time you can really be revolutionary or creative is if you're willing to do something that people might perceive as stupid or out of touch or just weird, in general. Because otherwise you're just pandering to what people already know.
You need to be able to digest it a little.
Yeah exactly.
Where did your interest in house music come from?
Well, to really split hairs about it, it came by way of techno. It came when I was in Six Finger Satellite. We were heavily, heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, and so in the early 90s, at some point I read something about Detroit techno and how much people like Juan Atkins were influenced by Kraftwerk, and literally that's what made me discover that whole world...And that's when I got really into that stuff, and from there, the whole world of electronic music opened up in general.
Do you think of techno music and electro in particular, which in some sectors are being pushed really hard as a possible commercial thing, as something that Americans can really respond to and fall in love with, or is there some aspect to it that will keep it an outsider music here?
I think it has a lot to do with the role that music has played in terms of people's cultural identity in the United States and how that's different from other places. When you go to Europe or the UK, I've always found that there are people who are into rock music but at the same time will go to clubs and dance to house and techno music on the weekend, and it's never seemed weird to them or different. Whereas in the US, people really identify themselves by what kind of music they like. People who are into rap music are generally not hanging out with people who listen to indie rock. And so in that sense, the house scene has been really insular and it's only very recently that people have started combining elements of thse things. But I still find that when I'm DJing to an indie rock audience, when things get too house-y, it really turns them off, and they don't like it.
So you think there's still a stigma surrounding anything that's too mechanical?
I think that's what it is. It is kind of mechanical, it's a sequenced, four-on-the-floor kick drum, a sequenced bassline; when there's too much of that, indie rock kids start getting turned off. Whereas they've been able to relate to the electro thing
...because it has more of a rock heaviness?
Yeah exactly. It sort of evokes the aggression of rock music. And what's funny is there ends up being a great deal of irony involved, because the rock music that it's evocative of is the stuff that's sort of cheesy heavy metal, things they'd never like. So that's why you see people at Justice shows ironically wearing Metallica t-shirts.
Growing handlebar mustaches...
[Laughs] Yeah they've totally taken on the fashion of heavy metal, and it's something they'd never listen to or be a part of.
It's tough because I keep reading about how musically omnivorous people are now, but it does seem like there's an instinctive reaction in a lot of places, if music comes on that isn't immediately recognizable in some way, there's still that allergic reaction, even if a crowd's been dancing its ass off for an hour and a half.
That's an observation that I live regularly. I just opened for MSTRKRFT in Italy, and I was playing what was a very hard set for me, and then when they went on, it was like Abba opening for Metallica. And it's funny, because it was a packed show, like 1,000 people there, jam-packed, and I looked up and every single one of them was facing me at the stage, not dancing. And to me, as a DJ, it signals I'm doing something REALLY wrong, like this is going VERY badly, and I felt really bad about it, and then they came on, and it was still the same thing. I realized people weren't gonna dance, they were just gonna pump their fists in the air, like at a rock show or something.
I'm surprised to hear that happened in Italy, though.
I was very surprised too, but I think that with the MSTRKRFT draw there... 
It's all rock kids.
It's a lot of mustaches and heavy metal t-shirts and fitted baseball caps.
Good God.
Yeah, that's what I was saying too.
It's weird. It seems like there's this international homogeneity to the current electro scene. Do you think that this is the first culture to be incubated principally on the Internet as opposed to a local scene?
Well, I know I'm not alone in this, but it is starting to seem like electroclash. In a lot of ways, but primarily in terms of how monolithic it is and how monotonous it is, and also in terms of when the music falls out of favor, [it] falls VERY hard. To the point where people will be embarrassed to say they were fans of it. Like, when you walk around New York now, nobody was into electroclash, supposedly. And at the time, it was hailed as the greatest music revolution in decades. It was going to revolutionize music as we knew it. And then all of a sudden, people were embarrassed by it, wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
But electro does seem to be establishing footholds in other genres. Like Ed Banger has rappers on its new comp, and MSTRKRFT did that single with N.O.R.E.. I sometimes wonder if that's going help it slip into the pop mainstream in some form or other.
I seem to have this conversation everywhere I go. And I think just the fact that people are talking about it, is signaling something.
It does seem like it could go in a lot of different directions.
I only know that there are aspects of it that I see and notice [to be similar]. And one thing, like I said, when something like Justice comes along, where the main inspiration is to be really hard and aggressive, I think right off the bat it has a ceiling built into it. And it simply needs to spread out into something else, and it's funny because Justice have a lot of other different influences in their music. They have disco and stuff, and yet they get blamed for this ubiquitous hardness.
I do worry sometimes, though, about the production side of it infecting mainstream pop. I read something that Martin Gore from Depeche Mode wrote recently saying that the compression that's so ubiquitous in the low end and midrange of electro is going to destroy the nuances and dynamics that used to make older albums so great. Do you see that as being a possibility, or do you think that kind of sound will eventually fall out of favor, and in doing so, it's just going to take care of itself?
At the same time that I agree 100% with what he's saying, I do think it takes care of itself. I feel that the public has become tired of it, so when you do release an album that has a lot of depth and dynamics to it, it stands out quite a bit from that super-compressed, full-on sound. Even if the public doesn't understand what's going on sonically, if they don't understand compression or side veining or any of those things, they know intuitively what they want to hear, and what they'll listen to for periods of time...It's almost like when you have an incredibly conservative president for two terms, people become so tired of it that as soon as something comes along that's a little more interesting, they go crazy for it, y'know? The pendulum is always swinging.
Is that you're way of saying...Wait, i'm not going to talk about politics here.
[Laughs] Alright, but that is my way of saying that.
Quick practical stuff, then I'll let you go. When is The Future Will Come coming out?
Sometime this summer, DFA's just working out licensing labels right now. I was on EMI before but I opted out. I didn't want EMI to put out my album. People who know anything about EMI, it's pretty obvious why.
There are songs about them, I hear.
[Laughs] I think they've laid off almost 5,000 employees in the last year, and they've dropped like three quarters of their roster, so now it's choosing between the labels that are really vying for it. And we begin touring with the band in June, which should kick off about a year's worth of touring, and we start in Australia. Then we go in June and July to Europe and the UK for festivals, and then in the fall we come home to the states.
Wait, one more thing. What's your take on Australia? Cuz to me, that's become this crazy electronic music hotbed inthe last two years, out of nowhere.
Well, for such a big place geographically, the population's tiny. The cities are all mainly glued to the coast, and for a population that small, there's an amazing interest in electronic music. For example, Cut Copy just had the #1 album in Australia, and they were bumped off by the Presets. So two Modular bands had the #1 album in Australia for about a month. And in the United States the equivalent would be LCD Soundsystem having the #1 album and being bumped off by the Juan Maclean, which is preposterous, y'know?
I was talking a DJ who says he thinks they benefit from not having a historical scene to worry about the way England does with its punk history or America does with its rock n roll or France with electronic music. Do you think that's true?
I always find that, in places like that, the people seem intensely knowledgeable about music because it comes from far away. Everywhere I went there were huge DFA fans and y'know it's a place that's literally on the opposite end of the world, and so in terms of musical heritage or tradition or influence, there isn't going to be as much of one. But through the internet and whatnot, they're forced to go out and cannibalize other things. It's just made them huge fans of everything.
What kind of venues are you looking at for your tours?
I think the plan is to do 500 capacity venues the first time around, and then maybe double that the second. That's the general plan. Thank you so much for doing this!
For sure! |
