Despite crashing and burning in a cloud of youthful excess at a point when they'd barely begun, Thomas Anselmi's first band of note, Slow, left an indelible mark on the Canadian music scene. The punk rock band are still considered to be one of Canada's all time greats, nearly a quarter century on from their all-to-brief heyday.
An infamous riot after a truncated gig at Vancouver's Expo '86 festival dealt the final blow to Slow. Anselmi regrouped with guitarist Christian Thorviston, forming alt rock band Copyright out of the carcass of Slow. For a while Copyright's future looking promising, but their much-vaunted six-figure deal with Geffen soon soured, and a subsequent sideways move to BMG failed to reinvigorate their fortunes.
After the demise of Copyright, Anselmi spent time in Berlin before settling in Los Angeles. Taking absolute control of his destiny this time, Anselmi self-funded his next project, Mirror. He spent three years assembling Mirror's self titled (and self-released) debut album, working in tandem on a multi-media live show to fully realize his vision for the project.
The album was produced by former Grapes of Wrath band member Vincent Jones, a fellow Canadian musician whose rsum as a hired gun includes albums by Dave Gahan, Sarah McLachlan and Morrisey. Anselmi was able to capitalize on Jones' impressive connections, securing a stunning performance from the Depeche Mode singer for Mirror's lead track. While such cameo appearances can often distract, Gahan's haunting performance on "Nostalgia" adds to, as opposed to detracting from, the whole -- Mirror's music being an atmospheric homage to a future now past.
Nicole PowersThis album is very different from the music you made in your punk rock days. How does one make the leap from what you were doing with Slow to Mirror? Musically there's quite a chasm there.
Thomas Anselmi: I guess just a few years ago I became a lot more interested in exploring music that was more familiar, and to create more of a dramatic, or a staging context, rather than it being a complete expression unto itself. I wanted to take music and use it more in quotations. I think that punk rock, and rock & roll in general, is very expressive, it's expressive of the person, it's sincere right? It's like a direct expression, and Mirror's not really that. These songs are more the soundtrack and part of an overall experience. They use familiar melodies in a way that manifests that experience -- to help that experience. It's really part of the whole show -- and that whole experience is a lot more punk rock.
NP: You talk about familiar, but in what way do you mean that? Do you mean there are melodic elements that can become familiar, or are you borrowing refrains from places that subliminally might be familiar?
TA: I think it's not so much that anything was consciously borrowed, or stolen, not so much that. It's just that specifically, as a songwriter, I've spent a lot of time in my music career trying to be innovative. And one thing that stuck me was watching the way [David] Lynch would use music in films; Rather than being innovative, the music was used in a way that was familiar. In other words, anything that sounded kind of challenging melodically, I got rid of. I made everything in a way like a lullaby.
NP: So in a way it's like the anti-punk record.
TA: In a certain way it's an anti-punk record, as such, but as part of the whole, the whole is not that. The whole is pretty taxing.
NP: It's a very expansive sounding album, a total soundscape which is orchestral in parts. You wrote the songs prior to creating the sound with producer Vincent Jones. What were you writing the songs on?
TA: I've written a lot of songs in the past where you write a part on piano or on guitar, most of this stuff came directly from the same melody, and was orchestrated around that. I would figure out what the chords were. I definitely wanted the album to sound very broken, like something far away, like almost the sound of something in the past, like the memory of a song you heard on the radio or something.
NP: Given that brief, how did Vincent fulfill that?
TA: He really understood it right away. Even before Dave [Gahan] sang "Nostalgia" we were talking about it, and I was trying to describe that feeling to him, and he said something like, "It's as if that future that we were promised around the Second World War, the dream of that future that never really happened." For instance something like synthesizers, you know, they sound so futuristic, but because of the way that, if you've been a music fan for a long time, synthesizers have also started to sound retro. They sound like the past as well. So it's this dream of the future that appeared in the past.
NP: How did the collaboration with Dave Gahan come about?
TA: Vincent played with Dave, and he sent Dave what we were doing and Dave really liked it, and we asked him to sing it. I really wanted something special for that song. I can sing that song, and it was kind of a natural song for me to sing, but, with me singing it, it didn't have that extra dimension that I was looking for. Of course Dave brought something I couldn't have been looking for. He has such an incredible style, but also there's the other part of it; it added something because of his history, and the fact that he is that to so many people, that a lot of people have so many memories that they attach to music that he's sung.
NP: That's the thing, it add a whole other ironic level. Did Dave appreciate the irony of it -- the Brits are big on irony.
TA: I never discussed that. But I think that the video made that a little bit clearer, that extra element to the song.
NP: The video is beautiful.
TA: Really? Thank you. I'm really proud of that. It took a hell of a lot of work. We really worked on that a long time.
NP: I heard that Dave was so cool, he even paid his own air fare to record the track.
TA: Yeah. Amazing! What a guy!
NP: I'm presuming the video was shot at a later date, how did that happen?
TA: Same way. We asked him, and, amazingly, he said yes. I just couldn't believe it -- that he said yes. I had an idea that I wanted to use in the show and in the video, because in the show we use a lot of video. I wanted to really make apparent that other element -- that we were just talking about with the song -- to lay bare the subtext of the song. Honestly, he just completely trusted us. We shot the whole thing green screen, my brother, Sean Starke, directed his performance.
NP: Where was that done?
TA: It was done in New York. And then I started just making video collages. Then we had the good fortune that a friend of a friend, Dane Smith, who is a producer of visual effects, his company worked on it, and they took those crude a approximations I was doing and keyed it in properly and made it look all beautiful.
NP: It is like a moving oil painting.
TA: That's very sweet. What you just said was exactly what I was trying to do with the collages, was to make it like an oil painting, so that's great.
NP: You talk about how the music grew out of a live show, but I understand you've only had about five performances. Are you going to be doing more live shows?
TA: Oh yeah. We're just putting together something right now. We're going to be in L.A. in the not too distant future, but we're just trying to figure that out. We've actually done quite a few more than five shows, but it's just that we do smaller things and bigger things. It's always this compromise between doing something that is either a small installation in an art gallery or a performance in a nightclub, verses taking a warehouse and decking it out, and making it what we'd really like to do, making it this immersive complete experience.
NP: You've been selling downloads of the album directly via your website, and I read in an interview that you made more in the first ten days of download sales than you did in your whole career with the major labels.
TA: But that doesn't account for what needs to be paid back, because you have to remember major labels paid for the whole record.
NP: But because you can self-finance records these days, because the production costs are so much cheaper, are the major labels almost an irrelevance now?
TA: I think that the game is changing, and that's very, very exciting. I think that you always need ideas, they're in very short supply, and I think that the fact that there's a lot more people putting stuff out there, in a way, it's become difficult to differentiate. Like what the hell is going on? There's so much stuff now.
I think major labels, obviously they missed a lot of stuff. In their twilight years they became very, very cautious and conservative. But I think there was a time, in the 70s and 80s perhaps and maybe even a little into the 90s but I don't think much, where major labels were actually nurturing artists -- it wasn't sink or swim immediately -- you had a bit of a window to develop.
NP: Did you ever feel nurtured by a major label?
TA: I never did you know. I was on Geffen and I was on BMG, and I was talking to this executive from Geffen, and he was just saying basically, when we were first signed to Geffen, we put out a couple of indie records before that, that was the shift, it was right at that point. And I guess a lot of other things happening that I wasn't even aware of, you know radio became owned by just a few companies, also the labels became a lot more conglomerate.
NP: Also, at the major labels, for all their corporate structure, it got to be more about the egos of a few key execs.
TA: [laughs]
NP: I know at Geffen you had some spats with David that were very personal.
TA: In a lot of ways Mirror was born out of this frustration. I've never really been able to accept, OK, I've just spent a year on this record, or two years or something, and now someone's just going to start creating visual accompaniments, and creating the marketing plan and all that. And I was thinking back to when I was getting into stuff that was before my time really, but stuff that I loved, like David Bowie, Lou Reed, that stuff, where the whole project seemed art directed from the beginning to the end. It didn't seem as though anything was tacked on by someone else. If you went to see David Bowie, the marketing, the record, and the show and his look, all of it was this one thrust, and that's exciting, and I think that's what people have an opportunity to do right now, to control all that. That's exciting because I think that it's been a long time since people really had that experience of someone with that vision trying to tackle all that stuff.
NP: Control is very important to an artist, and going back to the end of Slow, it was very much out of your control, and very traumatic. What were the most vivid memories of that time?
TA: Honestly, the last record that I made with Copyright, we were signed to BMG, and I remember we were starting to make this record. I thought it was going to be the best record we'd ever made, you know, and the label, all of sudden I could see very clearly because I was an adult now, really the fear that was going on, with people just wanting to keep their jobs and all of that. If we didn't make a record that was going to be played on modern rock radio, then that was going to be a danger to somebody's livelihood, and everyone was pushing for the same thing. I just started to realize, I don't want that. I don't want to be responsible for that. I don't want to be on modern rock radio. I don't care about any of that. It doesn't make any fucking difference to me. Then I could see that what I had suspected the whole time, that if you take that money, you have to be willing to see it through.
NP: Well you certainly seem to have successfully stepped outside of the machine, and made it work for you.
TA: Yeah, it's pretty exiting. I get up in the morning and I'm happy to do what I'm doing, and that's the best -- the best, you know.
Above: "Nostalgia" by Mirror feat. Dave Gahan.
The Mirror album is available via Mirror.fm
An infamous riot after a truncated gig at Vancouver's Expo '86 festival dealt the final blow to Slow. Anselmi regrouped with guitarist Christian Thorviston, forming alt rock band Copyright out of the carcass of Slow. For a while Copyright's future looking promising, but their much-vaunted six-figure deal with Geffen soon soured, and a subsequent sideways move to BMG failed to reinvigorate their fortunes.
After the demise of Copyright, Anselmi spent time in Berlin before settling in Los Angeles. Taking absolute control of his destiny this time, Anselmi self-funded his next project, Mirror. He spent three years assembling Mirror's self titled (and self-released) debut album, working in tandem on a multi-media live show to fully realize his vision for the project.
The album was produced by former Grapes of Wrath band member Vincent Jones, a fellow Canadian musician whose rsum as a hired gun includes albums by Dave Gahan, Sarah McLachlan and Morrisey. Anselmi was able to capitalize on Jones' impressive connections, securing a stunning performance from the Depeche Mode singer for Mirror's lead track. While such cameo appearances can often distract, Gahan's haunting performance on "Nostalgia" adds to, as opposed to detracting from, the whole -- Mirror's music being an atmospheric homage to a future now past.
Nicole PowersThis album is very different from the music you made in your punk rock days. How does one make the leap from what you were doing with Slow to Mirror? Musically there's quite a chasm there.
Thomas Anselmi: I guess just a few years ago I became a lot more interested in exploring music that was more familiar, and to create more of a dramatic, or a staging context, rather than it being a complete expression unto itself. I wanted to take music and use it more in quotations. I think that punk rock, and rock & roll in general, is very expressive, it's expressive of the person, it's sincere right? It's like a direct expression, and Mirror's not really that. These songs are more the soundtrack and part of an overall experience. They use familiar melodies in a way that manifests that experience -- to help that experience. It's really part of the whole show -- and that whole experience is a lot more punk rock.
NP: You talk about familiar, but in what way do you mean that? Do you mean there are melodic elements that can become familiar, or are you borrowing refrains from places that subliminally might be familiar?
TA: I think it's not so much that anything was consciously borrowed, or stolen, not so much that. It's just that specifically, as a songwriter, I've spent a lot of time in my music career trying to be innovative. And one thing that stuck me was watching the way [David] Lynch would use music in films; Rather than being innovative, the music was used in a way that was familiar. In other words, anything that sounded kind of challenging melodically, I got rid of. I made everything in a way like a lullaby.
NP: So in a way it's like the anti-punk record.
TA: In a certain way it's an anti-punk record, as such, but as part of the whole, the whole is not that. The whole is pretty taxing.
NP: It's a very expansive sounding album, a total soundscape which is orchestral in parts. You wrote the songs prior to creating the sound with producer Vincent Jones. What were you writing the songs on?
TA: I've written a lot of songs in the past where you write a part on piano or on guitar, most of this stuff came directly from the same melody, and was orchestrated around that. I would figure out what the chords were. I definitely wanted the album to sound very broken, like something far away, like almost the sound of something in the past, like the memory of a song you heard on the radio or something.
NP: Given that brief, how did Vincent fulfill that?
TA: He really understood it right away. Even before Dave [Gahan] sang "Nostalgia" we were talking about it, and I was trying to describe that feeling to him, and he said something like, "It's as if that future that we were promised around the Second World War, the dream of that future that never really happened." For instance something like synthesizers, you know, they sound so futuristic, but because of the way that, if you've been a music fan for a long time, synthesizers have also started to sound retro. They sound like the past as well. So it's this dream of the future that appeared in the past.
NP: How did the collaboration with Dave Gahan come about?
TA: Vincent played with Dave, and he sent Dave what we were doing and Dave really liked it, and we asked him to sing it. I really wanted something special for that song. I can sing that song, and it was kind of a natural song for me to sing, but, with me singing it, it didn't have that extra dimension that I was looking for. Of course Dave brought something I couldn't have been looking for. He has such an incredible style, but also there's the other part of it; it added something because of his history, and the fact that he is that to so many people, that a lot of people have so many memories that they attach to music that he's sung.
NP: That's the thing, it add a whole other ironic level. Did Dave appreciate the irony of it -- the Brits are big on irony.
TA: I never discussed that. But I think that the video made that a little bit clearer, that extra element to the song.
NP: The video is beautiful.
TA: Really? Thank you. I'm really proud of that. It took a hell of a lot of work. We really worked on that a long time.
NP: I heard that Dave was so cool, he even paid his own air fare to record the track.
TA: Yeah. Amazing! What a guy!
NP: I'm presuming the video was shot at a later date, how did that happen?
TA: Same way. We asked him, and, amazingly, he said yes. I just couldn't believe it -- that he said yes. I had an idea that I wanted to use in the show and in the video, because in the show we use a lot of video. I wanted to really make apparent that other element -- that we were just talking about with the song -- to lay bare the subtext of the song. Honestly, he just completely trusted us. We shot the whole thing green screen, my brother, Sean Starke, directed his performance.
NP: Where was that done?
TA: It was done in New York. And then I started just making video collages. Then we had the good fortune that a friend of a friend, Dane Smith, who is a producer of visual effects, his company worked on it, and they took those crude a approximations I was doing and keyed it in properly and made it look all beautiful.
NP: It is like a moving oil painting.
TA: That's very sweet. What you just said was exactly what I was trying to do with the collages, was to make it like an oil painting, so that's great.
NP: You talk about how the music grew out of a live show, but I understand you've only had about five performances. Are you going to be doing more live shows?
TA: Oh yeah. We're just putting together something right now. We're going to be in L.A. in the not too distant future, but we're just trying to figure that out. We've actually done quite a few more than five shows, but it's just that we do smaller things and bigger things. It's always this compromise between doing something that is either a small installation in an art gallery or a performance in a nightclub, verses taking a warehouse and decking it out, and making it what we'd really like to do, making it this immersive complete experience.
NP: You've been selling downloads of the album directly via your website, and I read in an interview that you made more in the first ten days of download sales than you did in your whole career with the major labels.
TA: But that doesn't account for what needs to be paid back, because you have to remember major labels paid for the whole record.
NP: But because you can self-finance records these days, because the production costs are so much cheaper, are the major labels almost an irrelevance now?
TA: I think that the game is changing, and that's very, very exciting. I think that you always need ideas, they're in very short supply, and I think that the fact that there's a lot more people putting stuff out there, in a way, it's become difficult to differentiate. Like what the hell is going on? There's so much stuff now.
I think major labels, obviously they missed a lot of stuff. In their twilight years they became very, very cautious and conservative. But I think there was a time, in the 70s and 80s perhaps and maybe even a little into the 90s but I don't think much, where major labels were actually nurturing artists -- it wasn't sink or swim immediately -- you had a bit of a window to develop.
NP: Did you ever feel nurtured by a major label?
TA: I never did you know. I was on Geffen and I was on BMG, and I was talking to this executive from Geffen, and he was just saying basically, when we were first signed to Geffen, we put out a couple of indie records before that, that was the shift, it was right at that point. And I guess a lot of other things happening that I wasn't even aware of, you know radio became owned by just a few companies, also the labels became a lot more conglomerate.
NP: Also, at the major labels, for all their corporate structure, it got to be more about the egos of a few key execs.
TA: [laughs]
NP: I know at Geffen you had some spats with David that were very personal.
TA: In a lot of ways Mirror was born out of this frustration. I've never really been able to accept, OK, I've just spent a year on this record, or two years or something, and now someone's just going to start creating visual accompaniments, and creating the marketing plan and all that. And I was thinking back to when I was getting into stuff that was before my time really, but stuff that I loved, like David Bowie, Lou Reed, that stuff, where the whole project seemed art directed from the beginning to the end. It didn't seem as though anything was tacked on by someone else. If you went to see David Bowie, the marketing, the record, and the show and his look, all of it was this one thrust, and that's exciting, and I think that's what people have an opportunity to do right now, to control all that. That's exciting because I think that it's been a long time since people really had that experience of someone with that vision trying to tackle all that stuff.
NP: Control is very important to an artist, and going back to the end of Slow, it was very much out of your control, and very traumatic. What were the most vivid memories of that time?
TA: Honestly, the last record that I made with Copyright, we were signed to BMG, and I remember we were starting to make this record. I thought it was going to be the best record we'd ever made, you know, and the label, all of sudden I could see very clearly because I was an adult now, really the fear that was going on, with people just wanting to keep their jobs and all of that. If we didn't make a record that was going to be played on modern rock radio, then that was going to be a danger to somebody's livelihood, and everyone was pushing for the same thing. I just started to realize, I don't want that. I don't want to be responsible for that. I don't want to be on modern rock radio. I don't care about any of that. It doesn't make any fucking difference to me. Then I could see that what I had suspected the whole time, that if you take that money, you have to be willing to see it through.
NP: Well you certainly seem to have successfully stepped outside of the machine, and made it work for you.
TA: Yeah, it's pretty exiting. I get up in the morning and I'm happy to do what I'm doing, and that's the best -- the best, you know.
Above: "Nostalgia" by Mirror feat. Dave Gahan.
The Mirror album is available via Mirror.fm
nicole_powers:
Despite crashing and burning in a cloud of youthful excess at a point when they'd barely begun, Thomas Anselmi's first band of note, Slow, left an indelible mark on the Canadian music scene. The punk rock band are still considered to be one of Canada's all time greats, nearly a quarter century on from...