Spencer Krug: The Lost Interview

You should know Spencer Krug from his roster of influential indie rock bands Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, and Frog Eyes, to list them in order from most to least pop-accessible. Lately, indie rock’s most prolific Canadian — in his decade-long career spanning 2003 to 2014, Krug has 22 studio releases to his credit among 6 different bands — has narrowed it down to Moonface, a solo project for which he has released four studio albums including his latest work, Julia With Blue Jeans On.

Krug’s career as we know it began with Wolf Parade, which he spawned along with guitarist Dan Boeckner in the fertile environment of Montreal’s burgeoning mid-2000s music scene, out of Arcade Fire’s need for a band to join on their inaugural tour in support 2004’s Funeral. Since both Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, his longest-running projects, dissolved with little to no notice nor explanation to fans around the world, Krug has been somewhat reticent in the press.

Besides being remarkably prolific, Krug is plausibly one of the most talented songwriters of his generation. As much a poet as he is a musician, Krug makes a point of connecting lyrical themes and motifs across his different projects, often comedic poeticisms he brazenly calls out himself, exhibiting a casually transcendent self-awareness that would be impossible to get away with without having achieved a distinct lyrical mastery. On Julia alone, you’ll catch Krug joking about doing blow, or dropping a dry line like “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re a babe when you’re naked on the floor,” in otherwise grandiose ballads.

Watching Krug perform his solo piano material from Julia is remarkable for a number of reasons, but it will suffice to defer to the hilarity of his stage banter. Seated at a grand piano in profile to the audience, he immediately diffuses any pretense of self-importance. “You all get to enjoy a view of this,” he says, gesturing to his body. “I actually have a tiny torso. You can’t tell, because I wear long shirts.” He raises his hand to his chest, that cheshire grin betraying his seemingly shy demeanor: “My penis is actually all the way up here.” He then immediately goes on to floor the packed theater with an hour or so of devastatingly powerful music. Krug’s bizarre sense of humor is the ideal pairing for the weight and immediacy of these songs.

I got to have lunch with Spencer Krug on a terrace café in Montreal’s Mile End, where we discussed why Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown broke up, and what goes through the mind of an inimitable songwriter with a devout cult following (of which the author is a card-carrying member). You’ll find that Krug is not, in fact, so reluctant to talk — you just need to know what to ask him.

Natasha Young: So, why is it that you moved from Montreal to Helsinki?

Spencer Krug: A bunch of reasons. I was pretty bored of Canada, and everything I had going on here kind of ended — I mean, besides friendships — all the things that tied me to this city weirdly ended all within a year to eighteen months of one another.

NY: Like your other music projects?

SK: Well, namely, Sunset Rubdown, Wolf Parade, and then the relationship I was in, in that order. And then I wanted to start working with this band called Siinai. They were friends because they had a different band that came on tour with Wolf Parade, and we all got along, and they’re good musicians. I asked them if they wanted to do a record, they said yes, I went there and we recorded it, and then after a while it seemed like maybe I should just move there. Plus, there’s a girl there. So, you threw all that stuff together and it was like, yeah, fuck it, I’ll just move to Helsinki. It’s not permanent; I think I’ll be there another six months or something. And then, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to come back to Montreal, but I don’t know for sure.

NY: Do you mind — I’ve always been curious, and I don’t think it’s been talked about much publicly, but why did Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown come to an end?

SK: They both ended differently for different reasons. Wolf Parade ended really amicably, really mutually. Everyone in the band was just sort of getting restless, wanting to do other things. We weren’t making the best music together anymore.

NY: You don’t think so?

SK: No, I don’t. I sincerely believe if we made a fourth record, it would’ve been pretty bad. Peoples hearts were going all in different directions. Dan [Boeckner] and I are so different in the music we want to play, basically, and that was a compromise we both always had to make. Which, we did, happily. But after a while, it gets tiring to constantly be [compromising].

NY: Something I noticed about [Wolf Parade’s] Expo 86 that now I notice in this new Moonface record is, compared to previous Wolf Parade albums, it seemed your songwriting became less literary and more literal, straight-up, conversational.

SK: Yeah. There’s that, for sure.

NY: I wonder if that transition from literary, highly metaphorical lyrics to more direct lyrics is a sign of creative fatigue? Or if, on the contrary, it’s just that you have figured out the clearest way to say what you want to say.

SK: Obviously I would like to think it’s the latter, that I’m not creatively worn out just yet. I think it’s something that comes with age. It’s something I was also consciously doing, or at least consciously trying to embrace rather than fight. The most flowery the language ever got was in Sunset Rubdown. That band broke up in a different way, where we just sort of self-imploded. Relationships got too tense. We never even talked about it. We played our last show in Tokyo and when we got home from Japan, everyone just kind of knew we were never going to play again. It never got discussed. It’s kind of amazing. The relationships were repaired, but that band just needed to end, too. It’s the same thing: if we made another record, it would’ve been forced and not natural.

So, when that band ended, and I was already a little bit deep into Moonface, and the language was already leaning that way — my favorite songwriters and lyricists are usually pretty straightforward, but with a little touch of beauty and poeticism, but not so abstract that you can’t understand what they’re saying. It’s something I hadn’t been able to do previously, and then I felt it starting to come a little more naturally rather than fight it. Even though a lot of fans are kind of disappointed, or whatever.

NY: Your fans are disappointed that your lyrics are less… flowery?

SK: Yeah. I think so. I’m trying to embrace it. It’s actually more challenging [to write that way] and still have it have impact emotionally, and not just be boring. Do you know what I mean? It’s a little more vulnerable and honest. It puts yourself out there in a more honest way, which is what artists should be doing anyway.

NY: Another thing I’ve always noticed in your music, regarding the transition from flowery, as you put it, to more straightforward songwriting — you often reuse lyrical motifs across your different projects. Like that line, “All fires have to burn alive to live” (Swan Lake’s 2006 song “All Fires”), which in “Nightingale / December Song” (Sunset Rubdown, 2009) you revisit with, “Let me hammer this point home: I see us all as lonely fires who have burned alive as long as we remember.”

SK: Can I smoke out here? Thanks. …Yeah, I mean, it’s fun to be self-referential, you know? Especially if you, over the years, find yourself with a quote-unquote body of work. That makes it sound more grand than it really is, but it’s fun to whip out old ideas and put them in a new context. To be self-aware, to a point, that as a musician, what you’re doing with your life is making songs, and it’s a huge part of your thought processes and your daily life. So, that’s in there. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with referencing that, from time to time, I’ve chosen this sort of weird, kind of silly life path — or at least absurd. That’s all it is. It doesn’t bother me to nod back to my own self sometimes.

NY: Do you feel like having a sense of humor like that in your music, which can get really profound and intense and dark, is a useful way of engaging with the audience, letting them in on the joke and breaking down the fourth wall?

SK: I guess there is some part of me that’s aware of that as I’m writing songs. I can’t pretend that it’s just for me, that I’m not aware at this point that there’s a good chance that, if I release something, people are going to hear it. But I try to do it, first and foremost, for me. To have dark humor within songs is also a nice way to diffuse them a little bit, and to bring your own self-aggrandizing self back to reality. It’s like a little slap in the face to yourself or to the listener, to remind everyone involved that it’s just a song. It’s not going to change the world, probably.

NY: Another thing I’ve always noticed about your songwriting that I hear coming on strong in the new record, as well, is all these animal references. I know all of your lyrics. It’s really embarrassing. Just so you know what you’re getting into.

(Placatingly) Okay.

NY: There are old Sunset Rubdown songs where you reference riding animals, like in “The Men Are Called Horsemen There” (2006’s Shut Up I Am Dreaming) and “Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days” (2007’s Random Spirit Lover). Now, in “First Violin” on your new album, there’s this repeating of the line, “All the animals I’ve rode in life are sleeping.” When I heard it I thought, wow, he’s calling out his own extended metaphor across all these different older songs.

SK: That one lyric in “First Violin” is probably a reference to [the fact that] all the bands I was in are broken up. And also that different, older aspects of myself are gone — whether it be the mythological style of writing, or being really promiscuous — there’s a bunch of different ways you can look at it. That song is more about a declaration of monogamy or something. Not necessarily to a person, but to a new way of life. Does that make sense?

NY: That does make sense, yeah. Speaking of your mythological references, I don’t want to presume Julia With Blue Jeans On is just about one person, but do you have — or believe in the idea of having — a muse, or muses, who inform the recurring lyrical themes in your songs?

SK: Yes. I like for a song to be about something more than just myself. It’s a pretty vain pastime. More often than not, it is just about the songwriter, but through some circumstance of how he or she is affected by other people or places, but it’s about their feelings, right? So I like to think my songs are about something. Often times it’s people — friends, loved ones. Sometimes it’s places. And ultimately they’re about me, because it’s my observations about these things. A lot of these are, yeah, love songs. And they’re about different loves.

NY: It seems like you’re writing in different songs with your different bands about the same situation or same person, as far as the imagery you’re using and subject matter. Like on Dragonslayer and some older Sunset Rubdown songs, too, and even At Mount Zoomer (Wolf Parade, 2008), the songs often go back to themes of monogamy and things like that. Even though these songs are obviously not written at the same time.

SK: There would definitely be the same people recurring over the span of a couple years. If anything, what you’re saying, it just speaks to my own lack of imagination. Every love song I write is not about the same person, historically. I’m writing about all sorts of different people throughout the last decade. My life has changed a lot and gone through a lot of different phases over the last ten years. I just know that it’s not about the same stuff, so that just shows I’m sort of a one-trick pony.

NY: I don’t know about that.

SK: It’s fine. I’m working on it. I do what I do.

NY: It’s nice that you revisit those things, because in every new song that goes back to the same theme, you’ve found a clearer way of conveying it than the last time.

SK: Maybe. There’s definitely some feelings that I’ve been trying to clarify. Basically, feelings to do with general stuff that everyone goes through — just the human struggle and how it’s okay to be sad and be angry. Those are hard things to put into words, so they’re things I’ve revisited time and time again. The last record I wrote before this one, Heartbreaking Bravery, it was more of a breakup album than anything else. So, at least to me, the songs that I just wrote on this piano album are way different, emotionally, than the last record. But I imagine a lot of the same language reoccurs over and over again because… I don’t read enough, or something.

NY: So, the last time I saw you — at Littlefield, in Brooklyn — you were telling me that the benefit of having made an album of just voice and piano is that you can tour without any gear. Is that the main reason you wanted to do it that way, or is there something you thought this format would add to the material?

SK: There’s a lot of happy byproducts to playing solo piano music, but that’s all just a happy accident. I wanted the challenge of no effects, nothing plugs in, there’s nothing fancy on stage. It’s just me and a piano. My two hands and my voice, and what can I do with that? Can I make a whole record of music that’s just that, that you aren’t automatically going to turn off half-way through? Which, a lot of people are going to do anyway. But it’s okay. It’d been a long time since I had delved into the instrument in an engaging and challenging way. I wanted to try something completely different. That’s one of the overarching themes in Moonface — the rule is, there are no rules. I’m not restricted by any set perimeters or members that I have to work with. Each album can be different from the last. It doesn’t have to be, necessarily. It just allows me to make what I’m excited about making at the time, because in years of being in Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade, I saw how soul-crushing it is to have to work within perimeters because an audience or label expects the perimeters to stay the same.

NY: It is a very intimate format, but it’s effective. On the contrary, your first Moonface album, Dreamland EP — Marimba and Shit-drums, was very instrumentally experimental and the lyrics were very illustrative, as opposed to those on Julia. It seems to me that in all of your different bands, you start with the most complicated sound and lyrics and, over the course of a few albums, make things simpler and simpler.

SK: That’s my pattern?

NY: I think so. What do you think? Is it bad that I said that?

SK: No. If it’s true, I don’t think it’s good. But I think it could easily be true.

NY: I don’t think it’s a bad thing. But with Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, once you got from point A to point B — point A being most complicated and flowery, point B being most straightforward — those bands ended, and you began a new project.

SK: It might just be coincidence. Whatever it is, it’s not conscious. It’s not intentional. I always write just one record at a time and focus on what that record is, and what I’m trying to say with that particular album. The Dreamland EP was all about being trippy, basically. All the lyrics came from a dream journal that I kept, and my dreams are, I think, they’re really psychedelic and really weird, and so I wanted to make music that reflected those. Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped (2011) was the result of a long winter. Actually, so is the piano album. I have to stop making albums over the winter. Makes it a little too… dark. I’ve been criticized for it before.

NY: Well, it’s the perfect time to be writing. Everything’s intensified.

SK: Yeah. But it sometimes makes for lonely sentiments, or a little too much acceptance of sadness. People have told me before my music needs to be more joyful. I kind of agreed with this person. I was like, “You’re right, but that’s just not the music that I write.” And she was like, “Why don’t you try to actually do something good for the world? Something positive?”

NY: That’s harsh. To say that all the music you’ve put out, all the people who really love it, that it’s not doing anyone good? It makes people feel good to know people are writing about these complicated thoughts and turning it into a creative product. And this new album is almost confrontational about it, whereas the messages aren’t buried in metaphor.

SK: I get what you’re saying. It’s a little more in-your-face. ‘Think about this!’

NY: Take that, casual listener.

SK: ‘What’s next on iTunes?’

NY: What kinds of messages are you trying to convey with this new piano record?

SK: Oh, I don’t know. Pretty universal stuff. The songs are mostly about things that I was feeling over the last winter and still feel now: gratitude, and there’s an apologetic tone to a lot of it. There’s an idea of, “I’m sorry I’m me. But thank you so much for putting up with me and loving me anyway, and letting me love you, because if that love didn’t exist, I’d be way more fucked up right now than I already am, even though I’m still always going to be a little fucked up anyway.” It’s just this tone of, like, dude makin’ his way through the world, I guess. I see a lot of songs, too, as a nice way of apologizing to specific people or to the world in general. It’s a cathartic release of guilt. Everyone kind of hates themselves in some way or another, and if you can express some of that through song, and then you get to sing it out loud night after night, then there’s a catharsis in that. You have to write yourself your own therapy questions, and then answer them.

NY: Do you think playing in bands made it harder for you to achieve that kind of catharsis in songwriting because you have to make it work in the context of other musicians or other writers you’re playing with?

SK: Yes and no. I’ve never had to clear my lyrics with anyone. I’ve definitely had to look at raised eyebrows around the room while trying out a new song, and figuring out it’s not going to work, and you have to go through that process in front of your friends. It can be funny sometimes, or just embarrassing. But those collaborations, those were musically collaborative, but never lyrically. With Wolf Parade, Dan was never emailing me and asking, “is this okay with you?” When you’re in that sort of situation, the songwriters have to trust one another, and musicians just have to trust that the person singing isn’t going to embarrass them too badly. I probably have embarrassed band members in the past with certain songs, something that they thought was too over the top. But they’re grownups. They don’t have to be there if they don’t want to.

NY: On that note, would you — maybe not with Wolf Parade or Sunset Rubdown again, but — would you want to play in a full band again?

SK: Sure, yeah. I’m writing songs right now with Siinai. I don’t know to what end… but playing with a band is fun. It’s like being on a weird polyamorous relationship, or on a sports team, or something. You come up with a work that is the result of a few different minds, and that’s going to be more unique than anything I can do just on my own, just because there’s more randomness in the equation. Anyone can write a song by themselves. Working by yourself, conversely, is like extreme introspection, this rabbit hole you go into that you’re not going to find in the jam room with a bunch of people and some brews. It can be a darker experience, but maybe more rewarding for the soul. Less fun, but more therapeutic. I think both are important, which is why I like to do both.

NY: Since you’re quite established and doing the solo thing now, do you think there is a sort of persona or a meta-narrative in the press about who you are and what you do — the “self-indulgent prolific”? And, does having a reputation or something like that, that people go back to when hearing your new work, undermine being able to do something different?

SK: Yes. It does. But it’s completely understandable. People do it with their own friends — like when their friend does something weird, acts differently than they normally would, they’ll be like, “They wouldn’t normally do that, I don’t know why they’re acting like that.”

NY: People aren’t a set, fixed way, and music isn’t, either.

SK: It’s really frustrating if the audience, the world in general, gets too caught up in, “This isn’t what you did before, and we liked what you did before, so this sucks.” But what about, objectively, the thing on its own? What is it then? What if this was my first record? Would it still suck, or would it be better? Or would it be worse? It works both ways, right? I’ve probably made really shitty albums that maybe didn’t merit the amount of attention that they got, just based on the fact that I put out a few before that. Again, it’s unavoidable, and completely natural. It’s a pattern that writers fall into. I just got finished saying they might as well compare it to other music, so I guess it’s fair to compare it to the artist’s last record as well.

NY: For this Moonface project, your first few albums’ titles were descriptions of what instrument you were deciding to use, for example. And now people are saying, “Oh, he’s not doing that concept anymore.” It’s not called, like, Piano Music Not Synth Music Like I Normally Do, by Moonface. Which I say because I really love the title Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped (2011).

SK: You know, you get on a kick ’cause you think it’s fun. You start watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or something, and maybe you don’t finish the whole thing, and that’s okay. Maybe a couple of seasons in, you’re like, “Eh, I don’t wanna watch this anymore.” And it’s like, eh, I don’t want to name my records like that anymore. I don’t want it to become a gimmick.

NY: I think people are quick to see that as a gimmick rather than just letting it be its own thing every time you put something new out.

SK: People can think what they want. A lot of people are going to think I’m totally on this kick of everything has to be completely different than the last thing. And it’s not true. I just honestly created this structure within which I can work really freely, and I’ve talked about it with the label, and we have this understanding that I just make whatever I am excited about that year. And in that way, the music’s always going to be — whether it’s good or bad, at least I’m going to be excited about it. It won’t be tired music.

NY: Doesn’t that bring us back to your pattern of getting more literal and less literary pointing to your fatigue with that particular style of music?

SK: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s totally natural. People evolve. They change. They get older. It’s completely normal. If a painter painted the same way for their whole career, people would get tired, it would be unacceptable.

NY: Or it would be folk art.

SK: Yeah. But for some reason, with bands, people want them to stay the same. They’re like, “We like this. Just tweak this a little bit please. Don’t change too much, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I don’t want to have to reanalyze what you mean to me.”

NY: I guess that’s why it’s so interesting that the honesty of your songwriting hasn’t changed, but the delivery of it has.

SK: Maybe. I’m not sure anymore where it’s coming from.