Interview: Gonzales

Gonzales is a most interesting musician and character. You might have thought from listening to his early records, where he invented himself as a Jewish Supervillain MC and The Entertainist, that he was a slightly tedious musical prankster who would live and die in the cloaks of hipster sarcasm it looked like he was wearing, but he’s kept surviving – as a solo artist and a collaborator. His work with Berlin-based ex-pats, Peaches and Jamie Lidell, is well known and in recent years, he’s remixed Daft Punk and Björk, and become an insanely-in-demand producer. He’s the Grammy-nominated studio mastermind behind Feist’s rise to stardom and he’s twiddled knobs for Jane ‘Je T’Aime’ Birkin too. Next on the list: Kate Nash.

Born Jason Charles Beck in Canada, Gonzales was classically trained on the piano, studied music at McGill University, and had a (failed) major-label career back home as the leader of pop/rock band Son. He moved to Berlin in 1999, where he adopted his moniker and seemed to do everything he could to hide his prestigious and very traditional musical upbringing with his early electro/rap albums. He would deny that, but it was nonetheless a shock when he released Solo Piano in 2004 – an album of pure and gorgeous instrumentals that was a huge commercial and critical success. The one-time buffoon, now based in Paris and written off by so many as a deadly joke, suddenly found himself rightly accepted as a musician of immense mastery and versatility.

Gonzales was born unpredictable and he thrives on people not quite knowing whether he’s being serious. There is a line, though. He seeks validation and he admits to being worried about whether his superb new album – by far his grandest achievement as a solo artist – will bomb because his now-broad audience think it’s a stitch-up. Soft Power is an opulent and lush seventies mega-pop album – ‘guilty pleasure’ music as it’s been naffly categorised – and he claims here that it genuinely isn’t ironic. To him, it’s simply a reflection of both his past and present; of his affection for the songs of people like Billy Joel and 10cc that he heard before he was old enough to form his own taste, and his unexpected new reality working as a hired gun in some of the world’s most expensive recording studios.

Relentlessly intellectual and lucid, he makes a convincing case, but he understands too that the customer is always right. You suspect, ultimately, that that’s what he enjoys most about trying to sate his huge ambition through his raw talent for music.

Explain the differing release dates for Soft Power. It’s out in a lot of places but not in the UK for a while, right?
“It’s out in the most of the world, but in the UK… who knows what’s happening in those offices and what their logic is.”

You’re back on a major label after all these years.
“Yeah, I think the album kind of needed that for the kind of album it is and the spirit in which it was made. It was by far the most professional atmosphere I’ve ever had – I was not in my flat putting things together with machines. For better or worse, it was made in this elite way that records used to be made back in the seventies – songs were written well in advance, and I went into an expensive studio with a producer and live musicians. It was the first time I’ve sung in a traditional way too. So it was kind of a true reflection of what my reality has become.”

By that do you mean that you’ve got used to doing high-grade recording sessions with the acts that you’ve produced?
“That’s the thing – I’ve been in the studio with all these singers and I’ve seen how albums are made in this very top-down kind of way. It’s something I would have totally resisted when I started out, but I found myself in it and I thought, ‘Let’s explore what happens when something that is maybe inherently foreign to me is applied to my music.’ It really was just an experiment to see what would happen. Gonzales was so much about being the outsider for so long. This was about me admitting that I’ve become an insider.”

So you feel like an insider now, or an outsider in an insider’s environment?
“Well, you can take the boy out of Canada but you can’t take Canada out of the boy. It’s kind of similar – I think I’m fundamentally oppositional but, sure, when I’m in that kind of system maybe I feel like I have a few toes dipped into that pool. I’m definitely don’t think that I’m fully submerged, though, and listening to the album, people can still hear the outsiderness in what I’m doing. I’ve put on the cloak of the insider and I’m seeing how it fits, but I very much doubt I’ll keep it on for the rest of my life. This is just a phase I’ve found myself in having moved to Paris and having had the Feist album become such a massive hit, against anyone’s expectation. Everything fell into my lap without me looking for it – it was not my ambition to become a producer – so I’m working with those circumstances and trying to turn them into something funny and poetic and entertaining.”

Did you start the new songs on the piano then build on them?
“They were finished at the piano, in the Billy Joel sense that I could sit at the piano and play all the songs through. There were no accidents involved when we went in to record. It’s not that kind of album. I have been in that zone for many albums – when you pick the time to look for magic accidents – but in this case it was pure precision.”

Comments like that will surprise Gonzales fans. You’ve said before that, even when you were young and doing high-school piano battles against kids who played with soulless exactitude, you would always try and bend the rules and find feeling and humour in the compositions. It seems to be in your nature.
“There’s always a psychological element. I think that what I learned from those weird music contests when I was a teenager was that, when you’re in front of an audience, precision is not the most important thing. I think you have to prepare with precision, but then perform in entertainer mode. When I was making this album I worked, not scientifically, but like a craftsman, and that came from having studied music for a long time, formally and informally. However, once you’re on television doing an interview or playing a show, you have to think of the psychological aspects of entertaining people, and that has a lot to do with comic timing and letting out a combination of beautiful bullshit and heavy reality, and combining those to keep people interested. That was something I realised when I played those piano contests – that finding the right time to play the high note in a strange way would make people laugh, sometimes uncomfortably, sometime effusively. It would help me win those contests much more than playing the scale more evenly or whatever the technical goal would be.

Solo Piano was a big record for you – not so much in Britain, but in mainland Europe and Canada. Is there a part of Soft Power that’s a fuck you to the people who liked you in that role?
“Not really a fuck you, but people were getting used to me being this piano man, which was great – there was a certain amount of musical respect that I was given that I’ve never been given before and I think I deserved – but I like the idea of surprising people. So I thought, ‘I can’t get too comfortable in this piano role – I have to take this respect I’ve been given and apply it to something that I think it needs to be applied to.’ That’s why it went in this direction of this seventies-style music. A lot of people call it a guilty pleasure, or kitsch, or bad taste, but for me that’s not the case. I like Billy Joel. That’s why I thought, ‘I’ll take this respect and force it on this idea of good taste and bad taste, because I don’t really see a separation there. They said the piano record was good taste.’ The point here is to ask whether good taste now includes this.”

What is it that you like about that music?
“It comes from before I bought my own records – before I had my own taste and had defined myself. It was just what was around on the radio and TV. I heard it and I had a physical reaction – the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I didn’t know why. That’s very different from how you are when you’re an adult and you’re over-thinking your taste. Things become less involuntary. I was thinking more and more of people I meet who are pining for some music that will give them an emotion or not, rather than, ‘Does this reflect who I am? Am I allowed to like this? Will it fit with my Facebook profile?’”

Bearing that in mind, and seeing as the record was a calculated and methodical exercise, do you think it’s a success?
“I believe the customer is always right, so its success has a lot to do with how people have reacted to the album and a lot of people have reacted and said, ‘Is this a joke?’ or, ‘It must be a joke, because we’ve heard his piano album and we know he’s capable of doing very pure music, so why would he do something so impure unless he was taking the piss?’ I can’t control that reaction and maybe it’s a hole I’ve dug for myself by having the personality out front. Whether I’ve achieved success, therefore, is more to do with each listener – I can’t really say. Luckily, though, I’ve had a lot of media and a lot of chances to explain myself and plead my case, though.”

Surely you can see why people would think that. A word that’s always followed you around, especially with the early records, is ‘irony’. Isn’t irony an interesting but dangerous thing to play with when you’re doing music?
“Not really – not irony in its true sense. I think when people say irony, they mean insincere, and I plead guilty to that – I’m an insincere performer, as are all performers. Irony itself – the dramatic concept that came from Greek theatre and is the moment when the audience knows more than the characters onstage – is different. That’s kind of the opposite of the Gonzales effect. In the Gonzales effect, I know more than the audience and the audience is trying to figure out at what level is this serious or not. And that’s how it is with the new album especially – it’s kind of my secret. Is that saxophone solo something that is serious or not? The audience can make up their own mind. Are they brave enough to just listen to that and hear it as something emotional, or are they gonna take that as a joke? Well, if they take that as a joke, it means their style of listening is a joke, and they’re probably looking for a joke. I like to put the ball in the audience’s court. In the same way that I stand for the judgement of the audience, I will never complain that I’m misunderstood.”

So you’re suggesting that you’re less of a musical anarchist, as many people think, and more of a musical traditionalist?
“Absolutely. Absolutely. Punk rock goes against what I hold dear in music. It goes against the idea of musical mastery, for example, and knowing your instrument and music theory, which I believe in. I also believe in spectacle – cheap spectacle, from the cheap laugh from the very intense moment – and I believe in entertainment. Basically punk rock was about, ‘We don’t need mastery and we don’t need entertainment – all we need is attitude.’ I don’t believe in attitude – I don’t have attitude. That’s maybe why I’ve also tapped into this seventies music, because it was the last moment before punk rock changed everything.”

Punk rock ideals still pervade, but you and your friends like Jamie Lidell and Mocky are rubbing against them and winning big audiences. Do you think people are missing musicianship?
“Well, we are who we are and I don’t think the audience is wrong to enjoy attitude. I just don’t have any, so I have to find other ways of getting across. I work with a lot of people who approach things in more of a punk rock style – I work with Peaches all the time and I don’t judge her. That’s just her way and I have mine too.”

You’ve said some pretty outrageous things in the past. Let me run a couple of them by you. “Music is like taking a shit.” Is that true?
“In the sense that I do it every day and I don’t think of it as a sacred ritual, yeah. I might also have said music is like sweating or eating breakfast. It’s not an outrageous thing to say – I just meant that I’m not waiting for inspiration. I’ll just do it and I’ll write a bad song if I have to, because it’s just an activity I do that’s very natural. Sometimes I write a song in a soundcheck, sometimes I write a song on a napkin, but I’m not lighting candles and setting an environment. You can’t confuse the process with the result.”

“President of The Berlin Underground”. Did you mean it?
“I meant it. I wanted the underground to get organised and I wanted them to admit that chaos and fear of success are not worth having in this day and age, and if we got organised and had a leader then maybe this wonderful, personal style we had in the underground could provide an alternative. It’s easy to say the mainstream sucks, but to actually test yourself against the mainstream is really tough, because you might come up short. I’ve come up short many, many times. It’s easy to say you’re not ambitious and you don’t want success and you just do what you do. To me that’s a reaction based on fear – fear of wondering if you can measure up.”

Isn’t it deceit too, based on wanting to be credible when drinking in a bar?
“Sure. It’s an excuse for someone not being in the position they really want to be in. So I figured we should say we’re ambitious – let’s admit it – otherwise why would you even start in this business? I went to music school, so I know there’s an alternative – to become an academic, make music for yourself, do lots of avant-garde shit, and earn a pay check by being a music teacher. I met those people and I knew I didn’t want to be that. I realised I’m an ambitious person. That doesn’t mean I wanna take over the world – it means I want to reach the maximum number of people I can, and give them my music, give them my personality. People always say, ‘You always talk about being ambitious, but then you do all these crazy sabotaging things – changing your style, and saying bad things about other musicians, and not playing the game. If you’re really ambitious, why don’t you do something more commercial?’ But being ambitious and being commercial are two different things – being ambitious is just reaching the maximum given what you’ve got. I have this strange oppositional musical personality and I have this lack of a musical soul that means I go from one style to another, but I’m still ambitious.”

You have a pretty huge ego, right?
“I don’t really know what an ego is, but I’d definitely say it’s needy. I like the idea of validation – of proving my existence – but does having a big ego mean that it needs to be fed a lot or does it mean that you think you’re great? I don’t think it’s as simple as, ‘I think I’m great.’ It’s probably more the opposite: people with big egos often think they’re shit. Does Robbie Williams have a big ego? I’d say yes. Does he think he’s shit? I’d say yes too. Maybe I have a big ego in the Robbie Williams sense. It’s certainly not like 50 Cent’s.”

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