№ 4
Newman sticks to the format
The front man of the New Pornographers makes his solo debut and, not surprisingly, it sounds like the indie supergroup in miniature
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Carl Newman, in the early days, living in Vancouver’s West End, meets a writer for lunch at the Sylvia Hotel.
Carl Newman still seems puzzled by the never-ending duties of the next indie-rock sensation.
After sitting for five phone interviews in his West End apartment, the Vancouver singer-songwriter arrived for his first face-to-face meeting a little dazed and a little unkempt, dressed in shades of green: army pants, T‑shirt flopping out. He’d forgotten a photographer would be waiting.
“I feel like such an idiot when I’m getting my picture taken,” Newman says, looking out toward English Bay, cyclists and in-line skaters buzzing by. “Everyone must be thinking to themselves, ‘Who do you think you are? A model or something?’ ”
For those in the know, however, Newman is, indeed, someone to watch.
As the founder and frontman of the indie supergroup the New Pornographers, his catchy, cleverly crafted songs brought something upbeat and uncomplicated to the alternative scene.
It was pure pop concentrate. Neat hooks and ooh-ooh harmonies carried us from the Go-Go’s to Elvis Costello, while, visually, Newman’s look mirrored the music: clean-cut, collared shirt, all neat and tidy.
Now, in the middle of promoting his first solo album, The Slow Wonder (The Blue Curtain), Newman himself is the centre of attention. Back home after the first leg of a 26-city North American tour, he’s being smothered in praise: reviews in Rolling Stone and Billboard, a profile in The New York Times Magazine.
Still, if this is Canada’s next, great pop export, he seems slightly out of sync.
“It’s amazing when I study my own psychology,” he observes over a clubhouse sandwich and water at a hotel restaurant near his home.
“In the last few years I’ve just gotten so much of what I want. But then when you get there you just start looking for the next thing.… I’ve been doing okay, I’ve made a decent living for the last couple years. At the same time, you’ve got to think it’s kind of short-lived. Who knows.”
Success is something Newman, 36, ponders openly. Sometimes, he appears ambivalent, detached, lost in a kind of nasal-voiced spaciness. He’ll romanticize what a normal life might look like, then he’ll seem elated by the recognition.
Clearly, he’s fond of the details.
He’s up to date on album sales. He runs his own label. And he reads everything written about him. Yet his delivery is so unassuming, it’s hard to believe he’s been planning ahead.
Just ask where he got the idea for a solo album. Initially, he suggests it came out of the blue. Then, he explains. “I wanted to be busy,” he says, referring to last autumn after the Pornographers’ summer tour ended.
“I wanted to approach music with more of a work ethic than I ever had in the past.… Either I could get a job doing something else or I could try and continue making music and make that my job.”
Newman’s last day job — at a local guitar-maker — was jettisoned nearly three years ago after the Pornographers’ first disc, Mass Romantic, brought them heaps of attention.
There was a Juno, rave reviews and a now legendary appearance with Ray Davies of the Kinks at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex.
The group’s second disc, Electric Version, which came out last year, has sold nearly 80,000 units in North America.
Newman’s debut, not surprisingly, feels like the Pornographers in miniature: bright, fastidious pop, played straight by tight, four-to-eight-piece groups. That the disc’s 11 songs clock in at 33 minutes isn’t a coincidence. In Newman’s world, gravity pulls in three-minute intervals.
“Years ago I suddenly realized I didn’t feel the need to push any boundaries,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s like working in haikus or something. I know I’m working within a format. Maybe it’s just because I’m limited by my own abilities, but it’s also a format that I really like.”
That format might stretch from the Beatles to the Clash, from Love to Cheap Trick. While he admits he didn’t become a “music geek” until his mid-teens, he seems to carry reams of history in his head.
On tour recently, a member of his band brought along the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
“I realized how amazing that record is. I’ve always known that, but I hadn’t listened to it in a while. It just floors me. But it’s such a cliché to say you like the [Beatles’] White Album or Pet Sounds.… It’s like being a Christian and saying, ‘You know who’s great? Jesus.’ Nothing needs to be said.”
But if Newman’s music sometimes sounds wonderfully familiar, his offbeat lyrics often send you away to think.
Take Slow Wonder’s single, “Miracle Drug,” a story, seemingly, about a failed writer: “He was tied to the bed with a miracle drug in one hand, / In the other, a great lost novel, that I understand, was returned with a stamp / That said, ‘Thank you for your interest, young man.’ ”
Bubblegum it isn’t. And within the obscure scenes, there is often a real sense of melancholy, something people often passed over with the Pornographers.
On one level, “Drink to Me, Babe, Then,” for instance, is a simple breakup song; on another, it’s sophisticated, social commentary.
“Come to me, please, all these years fall through, / Through the cracks and now this perfect view, / On the upside, both sides win. / On the downside, we buy, we pull through / Through the pouring choices rich kids choose / On a landslide you ride in / Drink to me, babe, then.”
Newman admits there’s part of him here, “a sad, closed-off part,” and he thinks his next project might even examine this “solemn, mellower side.”
“I’ve done the boppy records that people love, but I might change it up.”
With Slow Wonder, changing it up actually meant changing his name: the disc is listed under A.C. Newman.
“I like the way it sounds,” he says of his initials. “A.C. Newman seems more exciting somehow. It’s a pseudonym, and it’s not.”
Recently, people have even started calling him by his new stage name.
“That makes me feel uncomfortable,” he says. “It makes me feel like an idiot. A.C.? Who goes by their initials?”
Perhaps, he should get used to it. The first leg of his tour, which kicked off in Edmonton and travelled to Calgary and Saskatoon, included a performance on McEnroe, the former tennis star’s new talk show.
“Sometimes it’s surreal when I think about the things that I’ve done,” he says, referring to his previous TV performance, on David Letterman’s show last year with the New Pornographers. “It’s something I just shrug at these days.”