I’ve recently reissued the WP’s earliest release, The Elements of Style, on the WP Bandcamp page.

When I got the tracks remastered (or, truthfully, actually mastered to begin with), I listened to them again for the first time in years. It was a funny experience. This may be hard to believe, but I never got why people thought the WP sound was so “weird” in the early days. Now I can see why very clearly! It also gives me a much clearer sense how much the sound has transformed over the years—again, that might seem obvious to someone else, but that kind of thing is harder to perceive from up close.

Dirty, messy, sloppy and out of tune as well as defiantly lo-fi, these tunes represent the WP in its rawest form. They take me back to the innocent days where it seemed like all I had to do was hang out and make music with my friends, such as Peaches and Taylor Savvy who are responsible for recording and mixing these tunes.

I could go on, but instead I’ll just point you over to the link and let you form your own thoughts. I’m also curious if there is any desire for this to be released in a physical form. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the role of physical vs. digital releases, and I’d be curious to see what WP fans think. So let me know… and in the meantime, hope you enjoy this blast from the WP past!

Caution: costume, facial hair not included in nostalgic package.
Photo by Gabe Kastner.

When Jon Cohen called me last year and asked me to play at his One Man Band Festival, I said no.

The WP was never really intended to be a solo act. It just happened that way. Back in 1999, I had the name The World Provider, I’d recorded a few songs (with other musicians) and I intended the project to be a full-on rock band.

Then I found out about a tribute to Devo being put on at the El Mocambo. I called the promoter and signed up as The World Provider. But then I couldn’t find any musicians who were free to play with me. (I have been known to put the cart before the horse.) I was complaining to Peaches and she said “Why don’t you just do it alone with your keyboard?”

That was the eureka moment that led to the WP being a solo project for the first five years. After that, I got tired of the limitations of performing alone and since then, it’s been a band with a rotating lineup, with the odd solo show happening from time to time.

The last time I played solo was opening for the Puppetmastaz on a tour of France in the spring of 2009. (Stacey joined me for the last two dates and our subsequent European shows). It was fun, but playing all the old songs by myself really didn’t feel like where I was at musically. Plus, when we got back my trusty old keyboard was in rough shape. It seemed like a sign that it was time to decisively put the past behind.

But when Jon invited me again this year, I decided to consider the offer.

The main reason is that I’ve been looking for an excuse to re-release the earliest WP album, The Elements of Style. I just realized that it hadn’t been available in any format for a while and that, even though it doesn’t really represent where the WP is now, it’s still part of my work and a fun document of that period.

So I’m going to be releasing the album on Bandcamp, possibly with some physical CDs (I’d like to know if there’s a demand for these—any feedback is welcome). And for this special show, I’m going to be performing old-school WP style, just me and my Yamaha PSR-12 through the ridiculously small, magnificently dirty GI-5 amp.

When I pulled out the keyboard to practice these tunes, it looked like a boxer’s teeth. I had to re-arrange some of the songs because certain keys just don’t work anymore. Aside from that challenge, it was fun to revisit these songs, some of which I haven’t played live for 10 years or more.

This isn’t going to be a strictly Elements of Style set—or, as my friend Mark Slutsky once called the phenomenon, the “play your one good album” set. I’ll be playing tunes from throughout the years, possibly even one or two new numbers if the spirit moves me.

I generally try to avoid nostalgia, but inevitably playing these old tunes has brought up some sentiment for the old days. That era of the WP was very innocent and carefree. Often I didn’t even use a set list—instead I’d have a list of all my songs, with the keyboard presets noted beside them, and I’d just play whatever I felt like. I think I’ll do something like that again. You know, for old times’ sake.

So if you want to hear a bunch of tunes that I perform very rarely, or if you like my old stuff better than my new stuff (no judgement—who doesn’t feel that way about certain artists?), this is the one WP show to attend this year.

The clincher for me when Jon made this offer was the rest of the lineup. The Lonesome Organist, who blew my mind when I saw him at the last one-man band fest I played in Chicago in 2001 (on my list of favourite WP shows ever); Laura Barrett, a fellow alumnus of Ta-Da Records and musical genius who I’ve always tremendously admired, and another artist I’m unfamiliar with named Delta Will. Should be a fun night. It all goes down at Casa del popolo (4873 St-Laurent), doors 8pm, $12. Hope to see you there!

Every Tuesday this April from 3-5 pm, I’ll be guest hosting Montreal Sessions on CKUT, one of Montreal’s fine campus/community radio stations.

I used to do occasional spots on CKCU, the campus station in Ottawa, when I was much younger. I’ve only experienced radio as a guest ever since, but I love the format. Much like print media, physical release forms for music, and so on, it seems to be part of the digital-age conventional wisdom that radio is “dead.” However, like those other formats, it stubbornly continues to exist.

When I went for a training session to relearn my extremely rusty DJ skills, it was fun to be surrounded by young people (as well as a few seasoned veterans) who were passionate about music and the radio format.

Anyway, I’ll be spinning music, interviewing a few special guests and occasionally rambling and ranting about subjects of interest. Montrealers can tune into 90.3 FM, or you can listen from anywhere at ckut.ca. As always, any requests or suggestions are welcome. As for specifically WP-related news, stay tuned for an exciting announcement pretty soon.

On Saturday, March 2, the WP band is honoured to participate in a Nuit Blanche performance doubling as the closing party for New Troglodytes, an installation by our longtime friend and collaborator Philippe Blanchard.

Philippe’s artworks and videos can be seen on his website; his work is known to WP fans as the designer of some of our early album covers. As you can surmise by the above image, the show is bound to be trippy.

The free show takes place at Arprim, room 426 in the Belgo building (372 Ste-Catherine W). Also on the bill are Drainolith and Hobo Cubes. The WP is scheduled to perform at 11. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been a huge fan of WFMU, the longstanding free-form radio station based in New Jersey, for years.

I first discovered the station when we were researching a documentary on Gordon Thomas, the now 96-year-old singer/songwriter from NYC. Irwin Chusid, a longtime WFMU DJ and fellow GT enthusiast, agreed to be interviewed for our doc, and the station was kind enough to let us film there.

Whenever we were in NYC for the shoot, we’d always listen to the station. Being the technologically challenged person I am, I only realized later that it also broadcasts online, and I could listen to it at home as well.

It’s characterized by a genuinely free-form musical mix, as well as by DJs who really know and care about the music they’re playing. Some of them have been hosting their shows for decades and specialize in rare and obscure music through the ages, although the station also stays current with interesting things going on today across all genres. The Cherry Blossom Clinic with Terre T, Gaylord Fields, Transpacific Sound Paradise and Irwin’s show are some of my favourites. Aside from music, they also have a lot of amazing talk-radio personalities, from Tom Scharpling’s venerable comic extravaganza The Best Show on WFMU to Dave Emory’s weekly hour of conspiracy theorizing. They even play host to Canada’s own beloved Nardwuar.

In the recent Sandy storm, WFMU’s transmittors were knocked out (the station continued to broadcast online, with DJs spinning from their homes, until they were repaired) and their annual record fair, a major source of income, had to be cancelled.

The station has had its own funding drive going on, but I banded together with some sympathetic Montrealers to put on a show to raise a few bucks to pitch in.

It goes down Friday, January 4 – giving you plenty of time to recover from New Year’s Eve shenanigans – at L’Escogriffe (4467 St-Denis, corner Mont-Royal). Confirmed so far are The Pouteens (featuring Bloodshot Bill), Baked Goods, Giselle Numba One, the WP (with secret surprise guest member) and very special guests No Negative (a Montreal noise-punk supergroup featuring members of Holy Cobras, Black Feelings, Thee Nodes, and Total Crush).

If you’re in town, I hope you come out – it’ll be a good show for a good cause, at the unbeatable rockonomic price of $5.

Onstage at the late night space opening for Peaches.

Loading up the WP letters.

I’m playing a show opening for Peaches, just like back in the day. I’ll be accompanied by my band, playing the WP’s “greatest hits” as requested by the public, as well as by an amazing light installation designed by Philippe Blanchard.

It’s Thursday September 20 at the Église Pop, at 5035 St-Dominique (the church basement you might recall from Expozine), at 11:30. More details on the event here.

I’ll also be participating in an event on Sunday the 23rd – a performance of “live song-poems,” following the screening of Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story, hosted by the amazing Robert Dayton (Canned Hamm, July Fourth Toilet, The Canadian Romantic).

Hope to see you there!

Upon the recent news of the Ween breakup, I was sad, but couldn’t deny the simple truth of Aaron Freeman’s quote: “It’s been a long time, 25 years. It was a good run.”

It was only upon listening to this playlist from Montreal’s tireless compiler DJ Luv that I had the occasion to truly reflect on the band’s greatness and what they meant to me over the years.

I must have first heard of them through the punk rock media. That seems improbable now, but this was before the term, and concept, of “indie rock” had coalesced, and anyone vaguely DIY or underground could find themselves squeezed into the punk box. I do remember reading a great interview with Dean Ween in Flipside magazine. True to the punk-rock model of the time, it was a long, sprawling, seemingly unedited transcript of a conversation. One quote has always stuck with me, which I can’t find online so will paraphrase here: “You know, when you jam for three hours and then realize you’ve just written ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ Those are always the best songs, man.”

I bought Pure Guava on cassette. My initial reaction, typical for the time, was something along the lines of “Hey man, this isn’t punk rock.” But I gave it a few more tries. The absurd lyrics and skewed vocals roped me in, but it must have been the pop hooks that kept me listening. And there was something so evocative about the photo of them on the porch of their house, surrounded by local weirdos.

Then I bought The Pod, which a lot of people seem to think is for hardcore fans only, but which still remains my favourite to this day. There was just something about how they synthesized a catchy, melodic pop sensibility with a twisted, alienating, noisy attitude that I loved, and still do.

Detractors claimed that Ween’s stuff was the kind of thing that “anyone could do.” Some of my musician friends argued that their stylistic pastiches, inside jokes and vocal fuckery were no different than what every kid does with their first 4-track. But to me, this quality was an asset: maybe anyone could do it, but these guys were the only ones with the nerve to actually do it—to not only record, but release these damaged, homespun pop gems.

Shortly after Chocolate and Cheese came out, something funny happened. All of a sudden a bunch of “normal” people (i.e. not just stoners and nerds) were into the band, even though they hadn’t really cleaned up their approach much at all—the production was slicker, but the sense of humour was just as sick and the music was still all over the place. I couldn’t figure out how they’d broken through to the mainstream, but as my friend pointed out, “hot chicks like Ween,” so it was all good. This was at a time when genuinely weird, original and creative artists like the Melvins, Flaming Lips and Daniel Johnston were getting major-label deals in a post-Nirvana fervor for all things “alternative.”

Around this time I saw them live for the first time, at the Phoenix in Toronto. The show was sloppy to the point of chaos, yet somehow incredibly engaging. “If you only knew,” Dean proclaimed at one point, wild-eyed. “If you only knew about the last 24 hours!”

For the finale, they started off with one of their own songs—I believe it was “I Can’t Put My Finger On It”—then segued into a bout of jamming with Gene doing a kind of pseudo-Eastern chant  on top. This led into a more or less straight cover of “Dazed and Confused,” back into the chanting jam, back into their song. They turned on a drum machine and all left the stage except for bassist Andrew Weiss, who proceeded to perform a solo for about 10 minutes. Then the band came back on and did a cover of Prince’s “Shockadelica.” Between the announcement of the last song and the actual end, it must have been an hour.

It was a bit too close to a waking nightmare I used to have as a kid—lying in bed, I’d imagine a band or orchestra playing out their last note, but I couldn’t get the note to ever stop—so I skipped their next Toronto show, for the country album: a decision I’ve always regretted since my friend described their performance, supplemented with a pro Nashville piano player, fiddler and steel guitarist, as one of the best he’d ever seen.

Although I like it a lot now, the country album seemed a bit too jokey to me, and this marked the beginning of my moving away from heavy-duty fandom. I saw them live again a few years later, this time at the huge Warehouse. They had progressed into a tight ensemble, albeit one prone to incredibly long jams. But their audience was bigger than ever and they still seemed to be having fun. I left when it seemed like they were about to start an interminable jam, with warm feelings intact.

For the next few years, the band was like an old friend that you only check in with from time to time. I heard bits and pieces of their later albums—they had some good tunes and I was happy to hear them still doing their thing, but I didn’t feel any urge to buy the records or see them live. So when I heard about the breakup, I felt some sadness, but it was just another sign of the passing of time. It seemed like towards the end, their legendary appetite for debauchery had caught up with them, as it does for just about everyone.

But listening to the Luv playlist, there was so much to appreciate. The nasty, noisy early stuff; the pastiches of soft rock that approached pop perfection, then subverted it with a gleefully juvenile lyric; the songs so goofy that the band couldn’t even control their own laughter; the unexpectedly beautiful ballads, and the country songs, as ambitious as they are absurd: it was all so good. Like Guided by Voices, another one of my big 90s influences, they inspired with their audacity (wow, you could do that?), their progression from a lo-fi perversion of anthemic rock to the real deal; the fun they had onstage, and above all, their capacity for head-sticking hooks.

So RIP, Ween. Thanks for the memories, the inspiration and the tunes. See you on the reunion circuit—we may all be geriatric, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work.

When I do go out, it’s usually to support a friend. A few people I know were involved in this bill, but more than anything there was something about the show that made me curious. As it turned out I was not alone in this; it was the kind of show where “everybody who’s  anybody” was in attendance.

The much-vaunted “Montreal music scene” is very driven by trends. No doubt that’s also true elsewhere, but it’s particularly acute here. With four universities and a very particular culture that isn’t for everyone, it’s a city with a lot of turnover. (For the purposes of this piece, I’m being diplomatic and not addressing the fickle tastes of the local hipsterati).

Clearly this particular night was very of the moment. Last time I checked (there’s a good probability that I missed one or more trends in between), the tendence du jour was towards excessive orchestration and spirited group singalongs. Today, the hot new thing is a kind of dark, lo-fi synth pop, ideally with a singer on a goth/Kate Bush tip, slathered in reverb.

A lot of people are cynical about trends. And that’s understandable. I sometimes feel the same way myself; it’s hard not to. But there’s something that fascinates me about them too. What is it that makes something so virally desirable at a given moment? Obviously if anyone knew, they’d bottle it and sell it—and so much lame and futile effort is put into trying to figure out that elusive formula and take it to the bank.

As I stood at the show, watching the bands doing their thing, I could already imagine the dismissive comments from several of my more cynical friends (and, sometimes, the voices in my own head). At the same time, everyone there was genuinely enjoying themselves. Musically, maybe there was a bit of a conformist impulse going on, but maybe people just found themselves doing a similar thing and joined forces.

I remember the feeling of just going along, doing my thing, then suddenly realizing that I was part of something bigger going on, that suddenly a bunch of people were paying attention—and having fun. Eventually people move on to other things and the moment passes. But when the moment is happening, it’s kind of beautiful.

A few years ago, some music critics on the “poptimist” tip advanced the notion that if certain songs or genres were only relevant to the moment, not destined for immortality, there was nothing wrong with that. At first I found this idea quite provocative and odd. Making art for the ages, not for the fleeting moment, is such an ingrained part of the artistic mentality. (Plus it’s a handy way to justify what you’re doing when you feel unappreciated in your own time).

But the idea has started to grow on me. After all, what is there but the present…

“These guys have [however many] top ten hits, blah blah blah. And… [pause for effect] they actually write their own songs.”

Oh, that’s sort of interesting, I’m thinking. I wonder who that might be? After all, writing your own songs is a symbol of seriousness and integrity, distinguishing a true artist from the mindless garbage of mainstream corporate entertainment.

“Please welcome, Nickelback!”

Years earlier, I’d been researching an article about the mysterious persistence of Eddie Vedder-influenced vocals. (The article was never published—although I did get paid for it twice, which I attribute to an act of contrition mixed with corporate sabotage on the part of the editor). During this research I had the mixed blessing of reading several interviews with Chad Kroeger, the lead singer (and songwriter!) of Nickelback. Aside from bragging about how he doesn’t read books, the quote that sticks out to me is (paraphrased from memory, I can’t be assed to re-research it):

“I like the business side of music just as much as the creative side. Maybe even a little more.”

I might also mention the mashup of two of their songs, revealing that their structure is precisely identical (another thing that Kroeger bragged about was his mastery of writing a hit, which he had down to an exact science—obviously, very exact).

(In fairness to Nickelback, I will say that I took their side during their beef with Matthew Good. Nickelback you can at least love to hate).

My point is this: why does it matter whether or not a performer writes their own songs?

I thought of this today when, during the flash riot of people falling all over themselves to outdo each other in deprecating Lana Del Rey, someone proclaimed: “She doesn’t even write her own songs!” as if that proved some kind of point.

Whatever the merits or demerits of Ms. Del Rey’s music may be, I think this criticism needs to be retired. It’s so obviously grounded in a post-Dylan/Beatles rockist mentality that’s just hopelessly retrograde by now. I like a good singer/songwriter as much as the next person, but being one is not a benchmark for quality. At all.

In a nutshell:

Elvis didn’t write his own songs.

Sinatra didn’t write his own songs.

Nickelback write their own songs.

Therefore, writing your own songs in and of itself is not all that.

REAL TALK!