Bang 2003 - Gonzales/Eels
Here are some extracts from features first published in Bang, summer 2003. Please email if you'd like to see any of these articles in full.Gonzales and the Canadian Content Collective
. . .Being interviewed at by Gonzales is simultaneously compelling and bamboozling – he seems to eagerly reveal things off the top of his head whilst running on auto-manifesto-pilot. Digging frantically for the implication in sentences which zoom overhead, it doesn’t take long to get buried. These are statements that don’t leave much room for questions. That’s what self-belief is; you politely annex yourself because other people’s rules aren’t relevant. It goes all the way into easy dismissal of genre.
“I’m pretty lucky,” he shrugs, “because I have nothing resembling the benchmarks of hip-hop culture in my upbringing. What I liked about rap when I first heard it was the illusion of being more realistic because it was based on talking. We don’t normally sing to each other in the street. It’s good to be able to sing sometimes and rap sometimes, depending on how intimate I want to feel.”
Gonzales makes stunning pop music that is unfettered by genre expectations – the joy of it comes from his toying with whatever he likes. Conversely, he chooses to burden himself in other ways; he is his own manager. Thank the ‘heavy confidence base’. “I do it all myself. Even if my hand is shaking after a few phone calls, I can go back to the piano and go OK, this is why I’m doing it. I’ll have good and bad days with the business shit, but it’s always a perfect day at the piano.”
I boggle at this ability to compartmentalise. He grins.
“I have very intense brain control. Heh!”
* * *
Eels
. . .I was booked to interview E about his fourth album ‘Souljacker’ on September 12, 2001. By the end of September 11 it had become impossible. It’s still on, said the PR, just don’t mention yesterday. All was lost in exploded context – how to not mention such a looming thing? How to discuss an album with that title? How to conduct anything so frivolous as a pop interview? I cancelled, bewildered. Today is the day after the fall of Baghdad, anarchy around the corner, and we’re drinking tea and munching biscuits. E’s indifference to conflict and anguish seems a sensible enough reaction to insanity. He’s endeared by the fact that Iraqis beat statues with their shoes to show their disgust. He’s into little things. His equilibrium is soothing.
How is he, then?
“It changes every coupla hours. One hour I’m like yeah, great and then it’s oh, shit. Heheh! You always hear about people who kill themselves and it’s like ‘God, I just talked to him yesterday, he seemed great!’ It’s amazing how quickly things can change. . .”
E has always been extraordinarily open about the deaths of his parents and the suicide of his sister within a few months. He dealt with it by writing the cheery, sepulchral ‘Electro-Shock Blues’, and by talking. Death hangs over every song he writes, but there’s more to him than that and I don’t intend to go over old ground. Yet within thirty seconds he’s gleefully riffing on doom. He’s not living up to a Death Dude persona; it seems it’s just what his mind tends towards. He rattles off sentences rapidly, punctuated with bubbles of laughter. I tell him about the September 11 thing. He shrugs.
“Doesn’t faze me, that kind of stuff. All these bands that cancel their tours, they’re a bunch of pussies. I was in London on the 11th, hosting a show on XFM called Hijack – hehuh! That was already awkward. There was a rumour at one point in the day that another plane was headed for the West End. So we were all like, this is it! We got a bunch of beer, hehuheh, and started thinking “so this is how it’s gonna end’. . .”
* * *
posted by lethalbuzzle @ 12:53 PM
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