MAJICAL CLOUDZ

Guest List for Pitchfork, interview by Jenn Pelly

I’m getting in the habit of re-posting press Matt or I do that I really like on this Tumblr — this was a really fun interview to do and it basically covers everything!

http://pitchfork.com/features/guest-lists/9111-majical-cloudz/

Two years ago, having just completed a degree in religious studies, Devon Welsh was living in the basement of his father’s Ontario home. Like so many transient college grads, he was wondering how long he’d be there. At Montreal’s McGill University, Welsh had found kindred spirits in the city’s blog-friendly underground music scene, releasing instrumentally explorative LPs as Majical Cloudz. But it was a dead end. “I completely lost focus and took no pleasure from it,” Welsh says, talking about his musical rebirth at Brooklyn’s Williamsburg waterfront in April. Struggling to find a language that felt vital, he set music aside, putting up barriers and falling into an extended rut of personal anguish and artistic frustration.

"As my personal emotional life was shutting down, I felt this need to make music based around expressing personal emotions clearly," he continues. "I can’t help but think that, for myself and probably a lot of other musicians, it’s a stand-in for doing that in your real life." Welsh references Elliott Smith, whose dejected confessionals have left a mark on his own writing. “I wonder whether he was actually a very emotionally closed-off person,” he says. “Sometimes music becomes a way to live out things you’re too afraid to do on your own.”

Majical Cloudz: “Turns Turns Turns” (via SoundCloud)

Realizing his own capacity to create word-driven, existential meta-pop— exceedingly direct in its message and humanity— he used an old synth and wrote songs to defeat fear. He called the first one “This Is Magic”, and it appears on his stunning, lyrical recent Matador debut, Impersonator. “When you’re trying to communicate and the phone is breaking up, you need to say it simple,” Welsh says, describing his music as well as the project’s hyper-minimal visual aesthetic, from streamlined album art to his daily uniform of black pants and a white T-shirt.

Majical Cloudz: “Bugs Don’t Buzz”

Last month Welsh was still in the basement. But this one was hidden under a sleek Bleecker St. bar in Manhattan, where rent costs about 10 times as much as the 24-year-old’s own windowless, $200/month crash pad in Montreal. Along with producer and live partner Matthew Otto, Welsh opened the private show with “This Is Magic”. That was before two girls near the front began to weep— an increasingly frequent occurence at Majical Cloudz’s shows. “Sometimes I have difficulty reacting, but I’m not scared of the fact that people are crying,” Welsh tells me, the next day. “When you play a show, you want people to feel something. It’s strange to have that power over someone’s emotions, but it’s much better to communicate something than for people to just be like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’”

Favorite Place to Sing

I probably got more confidence about my own singing voice from being in the car than from practicing or writing my own music. Once I was driving home from a job at a provincial park, singing along to Pixies and speeding. There were a bunch of cars lined up in the right lane as I approached a set of train tracks, and I just shrugged and passed them all. As I drove over the tracks I looked to my left and realized a train was a few meters away. Right as my back tires bumped over the tracks, the train shot past. It’s probably a good warning to not get too involved in singing while driving.

Favorite Songs of All Time

"Angeles" by Elliott Smith, "Arm Around You" by Arthur Russell, "Look Back & Laugh" byMinor Threat, "Dead Alive" by Kurt Vile, “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)” by Nico, and "Un-thinkable (I’m Ready)" by Alicia Keys. My favorite songs are the ones that are impressed with the most memory, that open a certain door in my head because of what they meant to me at a certain time and place. That’s the feeling that makes me love music.

My Tattoos

In 2009, I got an earth [outline, on his forearm]. I have really shaky hands, something called an essential tremor, so I can’t give myself tattoos. So all of them were done by my friendClaire. This one [crescent moon outline on opposite forearm] was from 2008, when we decided we wanted to figure out what stick-and-poke was. It took so long to do, like an hour, because she didn’t know what she was doing and was stabbing me so deep. [laughs] And this one [heart outline on shoulder] is super cheesy, we got the same tattoo when we were dating. After we broke up, for a minute I was like, “Damn, I’m covered in tattoos that this one person gave me, I’m a total fool.” Now I like it; we’re friends. I look back and these are all important moments in my life, these memories that I can look back on. I can wear my own experiences.  

Favorite Lyricist

Arthur Russell wrote some of the most loving and moving lyrics I know. They describe the little details of an emotional thought process so well.

Last Great Film I Saw

Hoop Dreams

Favorite Actor

Christopher Walken

Favorite Color

I remember green intuitively being my favorite color as a little kid. When I think of that color, it’s comforting, while other colors have varying ranges of discomfort associated with them.

Pre-Show Ritual

I came into a routine of being utterly diligent about warming up my voice. We’ll do normal vocal warmups and then we’ll do this Gregorian chant thing, where one of us will hold a note and the other will do scales on top, and then switch. I also stretch. Then I take everything out of my pockets because my phone and wallet are reminders of who I am when I’m just living my life. When I go onstage, I don’t want anything to do with that.

Band That Changed My Life

At the risk of a cliché answer, probably Radiohead. Before I started listening to them, I listened to metal, screamo, or stuff like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The first album of theirs I had was Kid A, which I probably heard about from my friend’s sister— the only way I heard about music back then was through older people. I didn’t really use the internet for things like that, and I didn’t read any music magazines.

Near the end of high school, I was this weird, obsessed person, and listening to Radiohead opened me up to all kinds of different music that was more exploratory. I thought, “Oh, this is sophisticated and mature, it’s tasteful.” I still like their music a lot, but I recognize it more for its place in that context. In those days, it was as if I had found a new life.

Favorite Poet

I liked Robert Creeley for a long time. He wrote this poetry that’s minimal, and I really connected to it. I like how utterly simple every poem looks on the page, but how complicated it is when you unpack it and start to figure out what it means.

Favorite Montreal Venue

My friend Matthew Duffy’s apartment. Since last summer, it has become this late-night party/show space; all kinds of completely weird things have happened there. They use whatever home stereo speakers are around, and Duffy does his own spoken-word ranting and sells alcohol out of his own bar setup. He sleeps in a chair in another room, which is covered in gold wallpaper with all these little eyeballs. There’s a fridge that’s not been plugged in for months and is rotting. The entire place was designed as this B-movie horror set. There’s almost blood coming out of the walls. You’re playing in a tiny room, 20 people can fit, but people pack into the hallway. It’s in an apartment building, but, strangely enough, no one has ever complained about the noise.

A main part of why spaces like that are so important is that anybody can play there, and it isn’t premised on having some special status. That’s when people can actually feel like they’re sharing a moment with you, instead of like they’re coming to see a traveling attraction.

Weirdest Show I’ve Played

Last year for Pop Montreal, I organized a show at Duffy’s and by the time we played I was in a crazed, stressed-out headspace. I decided I would just take my clothes off because I wanted to get things going— make people feel something different. I was playing in my underwear. Then I was lying on the ground and a bunch of my friends laid down on top of me as I was singing in this tiny, garbage-filled room. It was weird but in a good way.

Last Record I Listened To

Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This girl I hung out with in high school was really into Smashing Pumpkins, but I always thought it was alien music. I never knew anything about them until a year ago— driving around, singing along. My favorite is either Mellon Collie or Adore.

First Record I Bought With My Own Money

The first music I was ever into was Sarah McLachlan and Mariah Carey, then I segued into boy bands and nu metal simultaneously, so it was either Backstreet’s Back or [Limp Bizkit]’s Significant Other.

Last Great Book I Read

Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds. It’s about the entire history of dance music, more or less, because it starts in Detroit and then focuses on the UK. I didn’t know anything about dance music and I like reading any music history.

Book That Changed My Life

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe is a book I first read when I was 13 and then read obsessively throughout high school. I had it by my bed and read it 20 or 30 times. It’s like a fantasy book. It’s a world of magic.

Favorite Swans Record

Filth

Favorite Clothing Store

Wherever fine white T-shirts are sold. [laughs] I used to wear different colored clothes. I used to have hair. I slowly transitioned into this outfit around November 2011. I could lie and say it was a conscious decision, but it’s mostly just because my wardrobe completely shrunk. I had black jeans and started getting less and less comfortable wearing anything else. I got a pack of white shirts because I wanted to wear something plain. I was retreating into myself. It’s easier to wear a uniform everyday. It’s more comfortable to wear something that indicates nothing.

How we made Impersonator

Matt and I wrote this for Dummy Mag but I thought I should also post this to Tumblr for any who are interested in reading about how we wrote and recorded our record!

Impersonator

Devon Welsh, Majical Cloudz: I wrote this song in the basement of my dad’s house, alone in the very early hours of the morning at some point in January. As the lyrics in the song suggest, this song was very much written as an attempt to not give up belief in my own creativity, and also in order to express the feeling of looking for who I was and not really finding it. My intuition at the time was to make music that was barely there, just a wisp of something floating along, not invading or proclaiming itself. I made a loop of a little vocal harmony and played two chords on a synthesizer, and then sang over it. When it was originally written and recorded the vocal was incredibly small and weak, almost whispered. By the time we recorded it for the album, the way I would sing it had evolved and was much more forceful.

As an illustration of what this song has meant to me: either the night I first wrote/recorded it or the night after, I posted the song on YouTube with an accompanying video loop of a wind-up monkey doll moving in a store window as reflections of passing people move across the glass. To me this meant: be completely unnoticed. Within a few days I took it off YouTube, at the time feeling like it was a mistake even to have gone so far as to post it.

Matthew Otto: I consider this first song to have a unique quality that tends to set it apart from the rest of the music. To me, there’s something about the musical and lyrical content of Impersonatorthat makes it feel a little bit like a prelude, with This is Magic serving as the proper first song. With this in mind, I wanted to craft a musical environment for this song that is relatively distinct from the music that follows it. We spent a lot of time trying to make this particular instrumental sound “alive” in an organic sort of way, and we went about doing that by ensuring that subtle changes to just about every sound can be heard as the song progresses. Waves of white noise, distant trumpet sounds, all kinds of strange little noises and automated effects were added to create this dreamy, ever-changing landscape in which the vocals seem to helplessly float around. This is very much unlike the rest of the album, which is produced to sound more direct and confrontational. In general, we purposefully avoided using too much ornamentation, but here the cluster of activity seemed to suit the song which I consider to be, in some ways, a little more elusive than the others.

This is Magic

Devon: This was also written in the same basement and around the same time of night. The song was impulsively written – I played some chords on a keyboard and ended up writing lyrics that echoed back to my perspective on my life at that moment. At the risk of making this song seem morbid, in retrospect it’s clear that I was writing as if I had died or was in the process of dying and giving a final explanation of myself. Sometimes the perspective of a song isn’t completely clear until it has existed for some time. “Who am I speaking to? What am I talking about?” With time I’ve begun to see this song as coming from an imagined afterlife.

When Matt and I recorded this song we changed and added very little. We re-recorded the organ chords and Matt added some static swells and a keyboard line. The vocal take that is on the record was recorded at Matt’s apartment after I drank a ton of coffee and in an agitated state suddenly needed to try singing this song.

“In retrospect it’s clear that I was writing as if I had died or was in the process of dying and giving a final explanation of myself.” – Devon Welsh

Matthew: When mixing this particular song, I thought about Leonard Cohen recordings and wanted to achieve a similar feeling, except with the use of synths and white noise instead of acoustic instrumentation. The voice here was purposefully mixed very loud and clear until it was nearly uncomfortable to listen to, or at least until it seemed to sort of jump out from the speakers. At the same time, the instrumental was kept distant and airy. The idea here was to make it clear that the lyrics are extremely important and making them impossible to ignore is a great way to communicate that. As with the rest of the album, I spent a lot of time working on the sound of the vocals and my efforts here became the framework for how they were treated everywhere else on the record. I ended up using a lot of subtle effects, but to be clear, it was not in an attempt to mask imperfections or make them blend into the mix. Instead I wanted to highlight the natural quality of Devon’s singing voice, which is very deep and commanding. I mostly made sure to accentuate the lower frequencies inherent in his voice and used analog echo and reverb to make them sound even bigger and heavier in a surreal sort of way. As a little side note, all the vocal tracks were recorded to analog tape in order to give them a warm, smooth, and ultimately seductive quality.

Childhood’s End

Devon: This was written in my apartment in Montreal during the day. The song started with a loop of notes that I made without a purpose. A week or so later I wrote the song around it. Like almost all the songs on this record, I didn’t go into the song trying to write about any specific thing – the subject of the song just kind of suggested itself. I then tried to be as clear as I could about that idea. I definitely felt a certain fear about following the train of thought, especially when it felt like it came completely unconsciously.

When I first made the song and when Matt and myself began playing it live, I didn’t really like it. There was something completely jarring to me about singing these very personal lyrics over this big kick drum; the vocals were strange to sing; it all felt kind of unwieldy and bizarre. The more we played it, the more I enjoyed it, and when we made a decent recording of it my perspective on it shifted a lot. When we shared the first versions of the recordings with friends they were particularly interested in this song, and that led me to see strengths in it that I wasn’t previously able to see.

Majical Cloudz – Childhood’s End

Matthew: Our goal with this album was to make it sound like the best possible bedroom recording, which was a relatively natural process because it was almost entirely produced in my bedroom. At our disposal we had a rudimentary setup consisting of an old 20-channel mixing board, analog tape machines, analog and digital synthesizers, and bunch of guitar effects pedals. Nearly everything inChildhood’s End (and just about every other track) was processed or recorded through some type of analog machine, and as a result, most sounds have a dark, grey-ish quality. Also, through headphones, it’s easy to hear that there’s background noise all over the place. This isn’t a flaw in the production I’m admitting to, if we wanted to avoid those types of artifacts we could have rented higher quality equipment or made use of another studio, but we chose to stick with what we had because what is objectively referred to as ‘good sound quality’ was never something we were at all concerned with. What was important to us was getting the music across with the right mood and if certain sounds came out sounding dark, gloomy and full of tape hiss we would use them as long as they evoked the right feeling. Had we made an effort to clean up the recordings or worked out of a big budget studio I feel as though there would be something dishonest about it, or at least a certain essential rawness would be lacking. I can’t help but think of Arthur Russell recordings and how much less I would like them if they sounded totally polished.

“Had we made an effort to clean up the recordings or worked out of a big budget studio I feel as though there would be something dishonest about it, or at least a certain essential rawness would be lacking.” – Matthew Otto

I Do Sing For You

Devon: This song was written in Montreal in my room in the evening. The reverse guitar loop that opens the song is a piece of audio that I had been trying to write songs with for nearly a year before it clicked with this song. I sat down on the small floor space between my bed and desk and listened to the chords of the song on a loop for hours and thought about my friends. The song is a love letter about how separation and death are not obstacles. As in the other songs, writing a sentiment in lyrics is a step toward trying to make it real. In this case it’s feeling something very strongly and naively saying “no” to anything that could get in the way of that.

Matthew: I consider this song to posses the most of a certain ambient quality inherent in most of the other songs. Like nearly every song on ‘Impersonator’, the music is based on a skeleton of repetitive loops and so there’s little sense of the instrumental actually “going” anywhere, instead it tends to sit in place while layers of sound are added in and taken out in order to give the track a sense of expansion and contraction. We made use of a lot of mellotron samples to create this sort of synthetic choir which accentuates the climax of the song, but perhaps the most notable technique we used here was sending certain tracks through reverb effects with impossibly long decay times and fading in and out the resulting sounds when appropriate. This technique creates very rich consonant textures which perfectly serve the purpose of raising intensity by filling out the instrumental. Producing this song basically involved fading things in and out with wave-like gestures in an attempt keep the music dynamic and constantly evolving.

“I sat down on the small floor space between my bed and desk and listened to the chords of the song on a loop for hours and thought about my friends.” – Devon Welsh

Mister

Devon: I made this song around the same time as This Is Magic. This song is about overcoming cynicism and self-absorbed sadness. I recognize the cheesiness of that as the subject of a song, but it’s just what I wrote it about! Originally the recording was very rough and the vocals were quiet and uncertain. Of all the songs on the record, this one probably underwent the greatest transformation through Matt’s work. All the sounds in the song found their proper place, and he added the lead keyboard line, which completes the song. It went from being an admittedly very sad, defeated song to a song that feels much more about overcoming. When I play the song now I am largely singing the feelings of a past version of myself, but in a sense that conflict is always there.

Matthew: This song is easily the closest thing to a pop song on the album, and as such, we decided that it needed to be produced in its own unique way. Generally, the idea behind ‘Impersonator’ was to make use of negative space, keeping things as bare as possible, but here we exceptionally shot for a much fuller, glittery sound featuring vocal harmonies, bright keyboard melodies, drums, synth bass, and all kinds of white noise. It was a lot of fun to break the mostly gloomy production style which characterizes the rest of the album and one of the instruments we used to achieve that was this completely mangled Casio-like keyboard I borrowed from a friend. The original owner must have dropped it a bunch of times because a lot of the keys had fallen out and the remaining ones seemed randomly rearranged to the point where there was absolutely no respect to the traditional sequence of black and white keys. Aside from the inconvenience of not knowing which notes I was hitting, it had an irresistibly silly cartoonish sound that somehow fit the mood of the song (you can hear it playing the lead melody towards the start of the song and even on a few other songs). Generally, what was most interesting about putting Mister together was producing something with a similar approach to how one would mix a traditional pop/rock band, but with a collection of very strange, quirky sounds instead of actual instruments.

Turns Turns Turns

Devon: This song was written in my dad’s basement. I looped a small section of a song I had recorded on the guitar and it turned into this song. I don’t clearly remember the exact state of mind I was in when I wrote the lyrics to this song, but I was describing the process of finding the positives in total disorientation. In retrospect this song describes the state of mind I had during this whole period in my life.

This song also evolved significantly when Matt and I began to play it live. The introductory and concluding sections of “I know” did not exist until it was performed; it felt right to sing when we were rehearsing it for the first show. Matt’s harmonies and the single held note during the chorus both provided the song some structure and made it into something with dynamics that wasn’t just a musical backdrop for a lyric.

Matthew: Turns Turns Turns is entirely built over a single guitar loop that repeats throughout the entire song, and as there are essentially no chord changes anywhere, most of the work in producing the song went into making that basic guitar pattern feel less monotonous while creating two distinct levels of overall intensity to clearly differentiate the verses from the choruses. I started by adding a lot of white noise bursts to the chorus and even had myself making these crash-like sibilances with my mouth into the microphone. These added layers served to fulfill the function that acoustic drum cymbals occupy in brightening up certain parts of songs, giving the chorus its explosive quality. Beyond that, we further distinguished the chorus by taking this low droning synth note which was floating around in the verses and simply pitching it up an octave for the choruses, somehow opening that part up with much more intensity. What I am most proud of with this song is the fact that there is so little evolution in it’s basic harmonic structure and yet we still managed to create a significant contrast in moods between sections using very simple techniques.

Silver Rings

Devon: The original version of this song was written in 2009, also in my father’s basement, probably in the middle of the night. The original recording is very morose and subdued. Originally “silver rings” was a stand-in reference for a person who I was singing about. As time has gone on the personal meaning of the song has changed. Now it feels just as much about “silver rings” as a stand-in for everything and everyone, and the song is about mortality just as much as longing.

Matt and I started playing this song live because it was based on a short loop and it was very simple. The intensity of the song grew out of performing it; it felt natural to sing it in a higher register.

When we recorded it we added very little – the major addition was running the guitar loop through a tape machine and slowing the tape to half-speed, thus lowering the loop by an octave. That loop plays alongside the original one and adds a depth that wasn’t there before.

Matthew: This song is the one on the album that I was first involved with in any way. Back when we played our very first show together, Silver Rings was simply a guitar pattern that Devon would record into a loop pedal and sing over, and because I brought along this really heavy keyboard that was only good for making string sounds, I naturally used that sound to improvise a melody overtop in order to give the instrumental a sense of evolution. At first, and for a little while after that, I basically had no clear idea what I was doing. I just played thicker and thicker chords as the song progressed, giving the song a sense of relentless growth until Devon was forced to literally scream over the track to be heard. At our first few shows, people would sometimes start talking at the start of this song, but inevitably they would come around to giving us their full undivided attention once the song got louder and Devon was busy blowing his voice out. It was only until we decided to make the recording of the song (which was done live) that I finally settled on a single way of playing the keyboard part.

Illusion

Devon: I wrote this song at my father’s house on his electric piano. I wanted to write as simple a song as possible. The basic elements are: a three-note repeating melody and a single note droning throughout.

The lyrics to this song are the darkest on the album, but also the most opaque. I’ve just written a number of sentences trying to explain it but I just deleted them because it all sounds so cheesy. It’s basically about: what is behind things? What is the basis of things? It is the only song on the record that isn’t lyrically grounded in a specific personal experience or sentiment. Instead it describes a bizarrely detached mode of perception.

Matthew: While working on this song together, we hit a bit of a “eureka” moment that helped define the sound of the album. As with every track on ‘Impersonator’, most tracks in Illusion were recorded through a reel to reel tape machine in an attempt to colour them with a dark and gritty effect. After routinely recording the strings heard at the very start of the track to the tape machine, I mistakenly played it back at half-speed, pitching them an octave lower and giving them this dark, ominous vibe. We both immediately got really excited by the sombre quality of that specific sound and decided to transition between it and the original higher-pitched version at certain key moments, ultimately bringing the dark one in to back the part where Devon repeats the word “illusion”. This technique completely changed that section of the song making it much more impactful. After that we tried that technique on nearly every song, slowing stuff down one, two or even three times and mixing it in somewhere, you can hear it all over the place if you pay attention for it.

Bugs Don’t Buzz

Devon: I wrote this song in 2008 on a piano very quickly and without much thought. This was at a time when I was learning how to write music – writing a lot of it, letting it disappear into the depths of my hard drive – and I all but forgot about this one (I think it may have ended up as track 13 of 18 or 19 on a CD-R that I gave out to a few friends). I’ve written about this song elsewhere so I won’t go into too much depth here, but when I decided to start playing it live with Matt the preparation consisted of making a short piano loop of the three chords. The noise swells and bass were added later by Matt and myself as we began working on the recording. We tinkered with this recording for most of the making of the record.

Matthew: The basics of this song came together remarkably quickly during a single practice session. It was a little over a year ago, just before our first decently sized show and also happened to be the day I made my first contributions to a number of other songs. Devon had already made a recording of the basic piano part and so the core of the track was already in place. What we needed to figure out was what to do with it in a live setting, which eventually led to the way it now sounds on the record. My contributions that day were limited to the heavy bass sound that comes in after every verse, and this incredibly jarring squealing sound that I can only describe as similar to the cries of a dying cat, which is actually just an echo effect pedal feeding back on itself (you can hear the dying-cat-sound solo in the last section of the song). We really didn’t have much time to figure it out before the show, and I have to mention that we were rehearsing in this repulsively dirty, freezing cold garage in Toronto, Devon was sick and his nose was running all over the place, so we just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. It was only once we actually played that song at the show through giant stacks of subwoofers that we realized how gripping those bass notes can be, especially when they’re unreasonably loud, so we stuck with it. I feel as though a big part of why that version of the song actually works so well is because of how little time we had to work on it, basically using the first ideas that came to mind and not leaving any room to over think any of it.

“My contributions that day were limited to the heavy bass sound that comes in after every verse, and this incredibly jarring squealing sound that I can only describe as similar to the cries of a dying cat” – Matthew Otto

Notebook

Devon: This was written a short time after This Is Magic andImpersonator. I remember it coming together very quickly. I was sleeping on the floor at my friend’s house at the time, and I showed it to him one night soon after I recorded the demo and he asked me to turn it off halfway through because it was too difficult to hear. I considered it too sad to do anything with for about half a year until I listened to it again and decided that I liked it.

The basic structure of the original recording consisted of the organ chords, the side-chained bass notes, and vocals. Not much was explicity changed for the final version other than re-recorded vocals (which is the case in all the songs) and some subtle layering that Matt describes below.

Matthew: Notebook is another example of a song that I hoped would sound a little like an electronic Leonard Cohen recording and so I kept the instrumental quiet and distant sounding relative to the vocal track. My main creative endeavour with this one was to craft an elegant sense of consistent growth out of something that is musically just 4 simple verses, and so I started by adding this glassy, flute-like synth part which gets thicker and thicker as the song progresses by adding multiple layers of it. Because there is no verse/chorus structure to speak of, we decided to keep things constantly moving forward simply by adding something new at every verse. One of those additions is a harmony I first sing on the words “what you said” where my voice seems to transform into a trumpet-like synth sound playing the same note, which is a neat little accident I can’t help but point out.

gauzepillars asked: Do the people whom the songs in "Impersonator" are written about know that they're written about them? That sounds kind of convoluted, but I hope you get what I mean.

Some people do, some people don’t. I have never been negatively confronted by anyone who I’ve written a song about, even if the song isn’t always 100% happy. I think most people who are close to me realize that the songs are always going to be my subjective reflections on the matter and not a tell-all that involves their personal details. For that reason I do not say anything about who the songs are about.

The songs on Impersonator never involve anyone in a negative way, so I’ve never been hesitant about putting them out into the world. Songs that I’m writing now are sometimes speaking to people in ways that are slightly more accusatory or angry. I’m currently unsure if it’s right to perform or release such music.
It’s an interesting problem that you bring up by asking. I was speaking with a friend of mine a few days ago about this very thing. She has known me for more than a few years and so has enough insight to speculate on the ‘audiences’ of the songs. She actually didn’t want to know who they were about. It’s almost as if to her the content of the songs is much more thinly-veiled, and the stakes of knowing what they are about are higher.

Anonymous asked: hi majical cloudz, i just listened to your album on pitchfork and just wanted to say i thought it was really beautiful. i've been really depressed recently and listening to the album totally cleared my mind and made me feel all warm and light and good inside. so yeah, thank you!

humbled, thank you

Our record “Impersonator” is out today. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO IT. I mean that in the sincerest way possible. When the songs were written, not in my wildest dreams did I think this many people would be interested in hearing it (at the time, even my own interest in hearing them was not always there). I wrote a couple of things down that Matt and I wanted to say about the record and about how we approach performing. I realize that it’s a bit long-winded, so tune out at anytime.

Why is the album called Impersonator?

When I was thinking about possible names for an album and I came across “impersonator”, the word immediately connected a lot of different things that were floating around in my head. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I feel like it does make sense to try to explain my thought process regarding that word.

The first song on the album, also called “Impersonator”, is about the idea that when you don’t believe in yourself, you also won’t really believe in the legitimacy of anything you do or anything you are. Someone might say, “She does this” or “he is accomplished at that” but unless you have confidence in your ability to do it, you will feel like a fraud.

In the case of the song, I am singing about being seen by a friend as someone who “makes music” while believing that I don’t deserve the title. At the time I wrote it I was lost as a person and because I didn’t know who I was, the self-identity that was given to me from people around me seemed fraudulent.

One of my closest friends once told me, “if you have lost all confidence in your ability to make music, you should write a song about that very problem,” so I did. That sounds cheesy, but doing so put me into visceral contact with the simple idea that making art feels good when the impulse to make it is to explain yourself and tell your own story.

So titling the album “impersonator” is a reference to the content of the music and the mentality that went into making it. I felt like a fraud, so I wrote about it. That led me to write songs about my fears, desires, and about things I wanted to say to people but didn’t know how. So in one sense “Impersonator” is a summing up of the lyrical content of the album.

In another sense, it references how central the notion of an engaging performance became as myself and Matt developed these songs and started to play them live. Even going into the first show, the priority of the band was always about creating something live that was more than just playing the songs. We wanted to create an atmosphere that could be at times contradictory and surprising but that would never alienate the audience.

I do not have a composed, calculated stage persona. I say embarrassing things and make strange decisions. Sometimes it feels very serious onstage, and other times I can’t help but laugh at myself for being there. If you think I look nervous, seem unpolished, seem uncomfortable, you wouldn’t be wrong. I love performing and it is an experience that I would never decline, but that I enjoy it does not mean I am always at ease with it.

When myself and Matt perform we want it to feel new every night — not in the musical sense of improvisation or variations on a theme, but in an emotional/performative sense. I don’t want to know what is going to come next. Sometimes I go confidently forward, other times I feel like the crowd could kill me with a false move.

The songs we play are serious and the lyrics very personal and often dark, but that doesn’t mean the atmosphere of a performance needs to be serious and dark. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes lots of people are laughing and I’m laughing. The point is, the atmosphere of the show should never be dictated — it should come spontaneously.

Although it might seem like an abstract connection, the word “impersonator” also contains that meaning for me. It refers to a whole range of people who perform for very different reasons — to generate laughter (in the case of Jimmy Fallon on SNL), to gain acceptance (in the case of Frédéric Bourdin), or to be a vehicle for nostalgia or celebration (in the case of an Elvis impersonator). “Impersonator” makes me think of all those impulses rolled into one. So for me the title is also a reference to all the possibilities of being up onstage with a microphone.

How were the songs/recordings on the album made?

I wrote the songs over the course of 2012. It’s probably unnecessary to go into detail on the personal reflections that went into the songs because I spoke about that earlier (above).

I made rough versions of the songs and then would show them to Matt more or less as they were written. We settled on a simple way of performing the music. We made samples and loops of the parts and loaded them into an MPC — Matt triggered those samples, played the lead keyboard parts overtop, and sang the vocal harmonies. I simply held a microphone and sang the lyrics so that I could give a focused performance.

After we had played a number of shows, we decided to make quick recordings of the songs. The original plan was to set everything up, run all the signals through Matt’s analog mixing desk, and then whatever came out would be the track. But as we played more we decided that we wanted to do the best we could with the recordings, so we gave them more time and put more thought into it. We would do a rough mix together, I would re-record vocals, we would add parts or change the sound of parts if we thought it could sound better, and then Matt would do a more meticulous final mix. That process happened at least once with all the songs but usually it happened twice because after playing a song a number of times live it would inevitably evolve, either musically or lyrically, and then the recording would also have to change.

Over the course of recording we figured out a style that tied the songs together. Some of that can be chalked up to random ideas we had that we liked and so incorporated into multiple songs. For example, we ran specific parts that we had already recorded into a reel-to-reel tape machine, slowed the machine to half-speed, then recorded it back into the computer. This resulted in the part being pitched down an octave. We would then mix that with the original sound.

The record was recorded and produced sporadically over the summer and the fall, then finalized in the early winter. We settled on the 10 songs simply because we thought they were the best ones we had, and were also the ones that fit together the best.

Again, THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO THE RECORD AND FOR CARING ABOUT OUR BAND. We are so, so happy to be doing what we’re doing right now.

Devon

This is something Claire (Grimes) wrote that needs to be read. So much respect for these words —

I don’t want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living

i dont want my words to be taken out of context 

i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized  

i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction 

i dont want to live in a world where im gonna have to start employing body guards because this kind of behavior is so commonplace and accepted and I’m pissed that when I express concern over my own safety it’s often ignored until people see firsthand what happens and then they apologize for not taking me seriously after the fact… 

I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them.  or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology.  I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers 

I’m tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers (and I’m eternally grateful to the people who don’t do this)

im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things i enjoy somehow make me a lesser person 

im tired of being congratulated for being thin because i can more easily fit into sample sizes from the runway 

im tired of people i love betraying me so they can get credit or money

I’m sad that it’s uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues

I’m tired of creeps on message boards discussing whether or not they’d “fuck” me

I’m tired of people harassing my dancers and treating them like they aren’t human beings

I’m sad that my desire to be treated as an equal and as a human being is interpreted as hatred of men, rather than a request to be included and respected (I have four brothers and many male best friends and a dad and i promise i do not hate men at all, nor do i believe that all men are sexist or that all men behave in the ways described above) 

im tired of being referred to as ‘cute,’ as a ‘waif’ etc., even when the author, fan, friend, family member etc. is being positive 

(fyi)

waif |wāf|

noun

1 a homeless and helpless person, esp. a neglected or abandoned child: she is foster-mother to various waifs and strays .

• an abandoned pet animal.

cute |kyo͞ot|

adjective

1 attractive in a pretty or endearing way: a cute kitten.

• informal sexually attractive.

I’m tired of people assuming that just because something happens regularly it’s ok

——————————————————

i have so much love for everyone who has been cool and amazing.  I have the best job in the world but I’m done with being passive about any kind of status quo that allows anyone to suffer or to be disrespected

Grimes world tour is officially over, the visions album cycle is officially over, and I’m now taking the time to overhaul everything and make it better 

much love to every fan - stuff can be lame sometimes but its really cool to have this support <3 

These are all the shows where we are playing with Youth Lagoon!

We finish the tour on May 17th, and then our record comes out on May 21st in North America and May 27th everywhere else.

Okay cool! It’s going to be really fun.

4/24 Austin TX @ The Mohawk
4/25 Dallas TX @ The Loft
4/26 Houston TX @ Fitzgerald’s
4/27 New Orleans LA @ One Eyed Jacks
4/28 Birmingham AL @ Bottletree
4/30 Orlando FL @ The Social
5/1 Atlanta GA @ Terminal West
5/2 Nashville TN @ Mercy Lounge
5/3 Asheville NC @ Grey Eagle Tavern
5/4 Carrboro NC @ Cats Cradle
5/6 Hoboken NJ @ Maxwells
5/7 Northampton MA @ Pearl Street Nightclub
5/8 Hamden CT @ The Space
5/9 Brooklyn NY @ The Bell House
5/10 Philadelphia PA @ Union Transfer
5/13 Toronto ON @ The Great Hall
5/14 Columbus OH @ A&R Music Bar
5/15 Chicago IL  @ Metro
5/16 Madison WI @ Majestic Theatre
5/17 Minneapolis MN @ Fine Line Music Cafe

These are the dates we are playing in London and Paris really soon! Come and say hello!

16 Apr – London – 22:00 @ White Heat /Madame JoJos
17 Apr – London – 20:45 @ Electrowerkz w/ Autre Ne Veut
19 Apr – Paris – 22:00 @ Espace B
20 Apr – Paris – 12:00 @ Rough Trade agnès b. (Record Store Day)