Chris Garneau: The Interview

As promised earlier, here's the Chris Garneau interview. The feature based on this goes to print this Tuesday in PartB of The Beaver, for any of you in London. Check out my official music blog project here.
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TM: You’re in the middle of your second European tour this year, touring with the same albums and hitting a lot of the same cities. What’s different this time around?

Chris Garneau: This time around I have a piano, which is one important difference for me. It makes my shows a bit easier to play. But you know, I am looking forward to putting out the next album. I am a little bit tired of touring this record. It’s been two years, but it seems longer than that because I was touring a bit before it came out too. And I’ve been actually playing in New York for years before it came out. So I’ve been really actually playing these songs for like, 4 to 5 years.

TM: What do you pack when you’re on the road? What’s essential?

CG: I’m getting better at packing. You know, I wish I had cool, funny things that are cute. I don’t, really. I have selected clothes and a computer. And a couple books that are in French, because I’m trying to relearn French again. And, you know, that’s about it. I try to keep it to a bare minimum.

TM: You started Music For Tourists when you were a teenager, and you’re now 25. Playing these old songs over and over again for years, do you feel like that’s locked you in the past? Particularly considering that these songs deal with some pretty heavy personal issues?

CG: It sort of just makes the anticipation for playing new material higher and higher. It’s not that I don’t still have attachments to a lot of these songs, but in a sense because the majority of them were written so long ago, I sort of see how my song writing has changed. And I just become very excited to play new material for people. So it’s not like dramatically keeping me in the past, but it just makes me anxious to play new material.

TM: Some of your songs - like Baby’s Romance, which deals with molestation - are pretty intense and personal. You’ve said it’s been really cathartic for you to write them, but does it become tortuous when you’re playing them over and over again, years later?

CG: No, it really doesn’t. There’s some times - and not very often - where a song will sort of make me personally emote, like to myself, where I realize that I’ve sort of gone through something again suddenly. But that’s pretty rare. Each of these songs are sort of in me, and they just come out and then they’re gone. I perform them - and they are just performances in a way. They’re pieces I’ve written, and they were cathartic to write then, and now they serve as art that I show to people.

TM: How is it for your family to listen to that kind of material, which is also personal to them?

CG: I think in the beginning, when they first heard these songs... it was quite challenging for them to hear. But it never was to the point where they felt like they wanted to be detached from me or from what I did. They still continued to support me very strongly.

TM: In your interviews you’ve been an open book. You’ve talked about your sexuality, your love life, child abuse, drug abuse. Is there anything that’s off limits or that’s too personal?

CG: I guess not. There’s nothing that I won’t really discuss specifically. I don’t really like delving into sexuality issues or child abuse issues. Besides being honest about the facts, I don’t really find there to be too much to discuss otherwise. And I find it to be distracting to what I’m trying to do in general, which is to play music. So when people overly examine the sexuality issue or the child abuse issue, I get sort of frustrated.

TM: You and your boyfriend Grant Worth just released a polaroid photography project? Can you tell us about it?

CG: Yeah, I’m glad you brought it up. We were working on photos at home for a couple years. He makes videos, but as far as photography and film, he just uses polaroid. So we’re always working on stuff, but we decided we should actually start an official project.

It started with doing a birthday set at home, so we baked a big ugly cake and made a whole birthday scene. And then after we shot that first one, we decided that it would be kind of cool to make a few different settings. And then that’s where we drew the inspiration from the Choose Your Own Adventure Series books. Luckily we had some summer travel plans, so we were in a few different interesting locations. We were in the redwood forest for a couple weeks, and we did another set there. It was really fun, and now we’re selling some of our favourite ones.

TM: You’ve talked a lot in the past about your love of animals. Playing music and playing with animals can both be very isolating. Do you not like people very much?

CG: I love to spend time with my friends. I don’t really like being around a lot of people, in the sense of cities and stuff. Like even in New York - it sounds weird cause I live in New York, but I do live in a smaller neighborhood in Brooklyn - my house is in a fairly quiet little area. And I don’t really ever have to go into Manhattan for anything special or important. So I kind of stay in the parameters of a few blocks for the most part. And end up doing not a whole lot besides either being at home or spending time with my friends. So it’s not that I don’t like being around people, I just don’t like being around chaos. So home ends up being the best place for me.

TM: Tell us about the new album.

CG: It’s coming out in the end of winter 2009, and I’m very anxious to put it out. I think it sort of has some strings attached to my first collection of songs, but it takes a bit of a different direction in the end. And as a whole, it’s a bit more of a conceptual record, and it’s more organized, and slightly less random. And there’s just a giant group effort on the whole record; there’s a lot of people that played on it. There’s percussion on most of it, which is sort of a big leap into the future for me. Lyrically speaking, it’s different in such a way that it’s a bit less of a self-focused record. There’s songs about other people besides myself, if you can imagine that.

TM: What’s your idea of success?

CG: [We] were driving in the car down to a show a couple days ago, and it started pouring like one of the craziest rains I think I’ve ever seen in my life. It was really kind of scary. We were in the mountains in southwest France, and heading towards the Alps, and leaves were blowing around, and it was just crazy, crazy weather. And I was just thinking that... a really comfortable place for me to be in my career, would be to be doing well enough to not have to be the one to drive through hurricanes and storms in the mountains. That would be kind of a nice place. I don’t need to have a big crazy Mariah Carey tour bus.

I wanna make sure that I’m able to still keep putting out records and writing. I have plans for the next record, and the record after that. And I wanna make sure that I can do that comfortably. And that’s all I really want. But you know, maybe to be able to have a little country house and city apartment. Just kind of... simple dreams, nothing too extravagant.