Absofacto Interview Transcript

C: So, to start out, to people who have not heard your music, what would you describe it as?

J: I would say it's in the vein of experimental pop, I guess. I just kind of do whatever I want, but it's always in a pop context.

C: You have the pay-what-you-want model for selling your songs, so is there always a hope that someone's going to pay some outrageous sum of money for one of your songs?

J: [laughs] Oh yes! To make up for the majority of people, that don't pay. Yes, there's always that hope. One time I flipped out because someone paid $50 for a song, but then it turned out she typed the decimal in the wrong place, so I ended up refunding all of it.

C: If that happened, which song do you think it would be?

J: Probably honestly, if it happened, it would be because someone was too lazy to buy all the songs individually, and they would just say "I'm going to pay a bunch of money for this one random song," and they would download the rest for free. That's my guess. I don't think there's a specific song, I can't predict it. There's people who, for each song, it's their favorite one.

C: Which one is your favorite?

J: I'm most proud of "No Power."

C: I agree.

J: It's all been downhill from there.

C: If someone did pay a huge amount of money, what would you do first with the profits?

J: Well, that's a kind of funny question, because I'm not really at the break-even point yet, so it would be to pay myself back, you know? But, uh...buy a better guitar. That would be the first thing. I bought the cheapest one I could find.

C: Well, it gets the job done, right?

J: Yeah, it does, it does. It's just very noisy. So it would be a big upgrade and I wouldn't have guitar noise all over the stuff.

C: So what are advantages or challenges of working by yourself versus working with a group of people?

J: Well, not having anyone to bounce things off of, you can't tell when you've gone off the deep end, I guess. I mean, every song I work on, there's a point where I feel like I'm just barking up the wrong tree entirely. And I don't think that'll ever change. I've started to kind of set up a small network of people close to me, though, whose feedback I trust. I'm trying to build that, so it's not just me in a vacuum, making music no one's going to understand or care about.

C: Relatedly, if you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be? I'm not going to say "living or dead." Let's say "living."

J: Right now,I'm pretty obsessed with Flying Lotus. He's kind of an instrumental hip-hop artist. I just don't have any concept of how he does what he does. It's just all on his laptop, but it's so full of life. I would just love to be a fly on the wall, even, while he was making something. He's kind of my current obsession.

C: So, you've said that Mason Proper is working on a new album. Are there any secrets you can tell us about that?

J: I don't know about secrets...All I can say is that when it gets done, it's taking a long time, but when it gets done, it's gonna be good, because we are taking our time. Olly Oxen Free we did in a month. And I like it, I'm completely proud of that album, but this time we're just taking it slow and there won't be anything where we look back and regret it.

C: Would you say it's tonally different than other stuff you've done?

J: It won't be as big a departure as it was from Moth to Olly Oxen Free.  That was a big change, I think. But it'll be more like Olly Oxen Free. I can't fully predict yet. I guess it's gonna be a little bit less minimal and a little bit more...I guess we're just filling in the cracks a little bit more, trying to find a middle ground between the over-density of our first album and the extreme sparseness, sometimes, of the second one.

C: You tend to just hear success stories about people who self-distribute online. How do they compare with the experience of being a struggling artist distributing stuff online?

J: Um...well, I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a struggling artist. [laughs]

C: Well, you haven't broken even.

J: Yeah, okay, fair enough. Yeah, that probably is the definition of "struggling artist."

C: You're not starving, I assume, so...

J: Well, you know, I've been living a certain way for so long that I don't even notice any sort of downside to it. It feels really good to know that if and when something good happens, that I'll benefit very fully from it. And that even small positive things happening mean a lot more. Literally the only thing that gets taken out is Paypal fees when someone buys some stuff, you know? So the same goes for if I ever get a placement or something like that. It would mean a lot of change, rather than if you're not doing the self-distributed thing. Say you get a song placed in a TV show, or something like that, by the time it trickles down through managers, labels, publishing companies, are a necessity to get into that world, bandmates, musicians that play with you, it's almost nothing. For how infrequently those things come along, it's like "Oh, cool," but if I get something placed, it'll be a big deal.

C: Because it'll go directly to you.

J: Yeah, it'll actually mean something.

C: So have you ever considered a more gimmicky, Jonathan Coulton-y approach, like, you know, song-a-week, or songs about certain things?

J: No. I learned a lot about that guy when I was getting set up to do this. I appreciate what he does and I understand why it's popular with a certain crowd and stuff. It's just not my interest to do that, I guess, in that exact way. But I have nothing but respect for the guy. You know, he definitely found his own way and it's very much an extension of who he is. It's just, that way wouldn't be an extension of who I am.

C: So I was just curious as to whether you'd have any insight into this--considering that most people in our demographic are moving out of Michigan, is that affecting the indie music scene at all?

J: I almost hate to say this, but I guess I'll be honest about it. I've kind of gone full introvert in the last little bit and I can't rightfully say that I'm much a part of any scene right now, so I don't know. It probably does. But at the same time, the more bleak and the more boring things get, the more people want to do things like start bands and have fun shows. Every week, I hear about a new band, just right in our city, that I haven't heard of before. So, it's never-ending, especially with multiple colleges right here. That's not going anywhere.

C: I don't really believe this, but there's rumors that Detroit's going to be, like, the next hipster paradise, that people are moving there now because it's so cheap.

J: Really?

C: I don't think it's true, but it could be.

J: You know, I wish Detroit the best. I have a conversation about this probably once a week. Not that I would be the one to implement it, but I would like to have just some conception of the way that the city could turn around, but I don't see it right now. I'd love to see it happen, but I just don't know what would be the catalyst. I know I wouldn't really want to live in Detroit, and maybe I'm in that demographic, so I imagine there's a lot of people like me.

C: That's pretty much all of the question-questions I have. What does the Daily have to say?

J: Yeah, I felt weird. That was just sitting there when I got here and I started reading it. I was like, "I gotta flip this over."

C: You won't offend me, don't worry.

J: You wanna hear a song?

C: Sure!

J: We'll see how long my battery lasts. This is the shortest-running battery of all time.

C: That's what tends to happen to laptops.

J: We'll see if it lasts long enough to play two songs. If it does, I'm gonna show you the one I'm going to release this week and the one I'm almost done with that I'm going to send to mastering soon. I doubt it'll make it through both. Maybe if I turn the brightness all the way down.

C: Mastering is something I looked up because I didn't really know what it means. I still don't quite know what it means.

J: Other than artwork, that's my one expense, basically. It's, uh, they make it louder and they make it sound better, basically.

C: That's what I read, and I couldn't figure out what exactly, quantifiably, that means.

J: It's like EQ and compression and literally just doing whatever they have to do to make it sound better, making sure it's technically up to snuff.

[C listens to new Absofacto track #1 -- "Synthesocietal"]

C: I really like it!

J: Thanks!

C: It's slightly more complex-sounding.

J: Yeah, it was supposed to be really simple. I picked it because I was like "Here's one that'll be easy to finish because it's so simple!" And then I went crazy and did way too much. 

This is the other one. This one's weirder. It's almost instrumental, but not. There's vocals. Well, you'll hear it. This one isn't mastered. That one was. And it's also maybe not final mix. I think it might be final mix. So you might need to turn it up more, possibly.

[C listens to new Absofacto track #2]

C: That was really interesting. I like it.

J: Yeah, I've had that around forever too. It was one of those things where it was like there was a good chance I'd never do it because it was so weird, just having no vocals, really. That's the beauty of solo stuff, is that you can just do it, and just see where it goes.

C: I feel like I should have some more questions...

J: You know what, actually, we'll see if it has enough juice. I'll show you a Mason Proper demo, if you are interested.

C: I am interested.

J: It's pretty rough, but, it'll give you the idea of one of the songs. I'm actually pretty excited about this particular song. It's the first one that we've started recording final tracks on. I don't have the version with the final tracks, but we'll see if it has enough juice.

C: Do you have an estimate as to when the next Mason Proper album's going to be out?

J: I've been--Well, okay, three months? That would be when we're done recording, but I've been saying that for a month. We'll see. Yeah, the three months didn't become two months after a month.

C: Is it different with Matt sort of out in the West?

J: It's different every time no matter what. It's definitely different with him far, far away. I dunno.

Nothing about this song is done, by any means, including the lyrics. I'm going to stop it before it's over because it gets weird at the end.

[C listens]

J: I think that's right about where it gets weird.

C: OK. Yeah, I really like that one, too. I've read before that your Absofacto stuff is just songs that you wrote for Mason Proper that for one reason or another didn't get made as Mason Proper...

J: Not always. Some of them are, some of them aren't. That last EP that I put out, that was all songs that were written for Mason Proper that, you know, never got done for different reasons. But all of the singles I've released have been written from scratch, just the month that I did them. The latest one, that was never meant for Mason Proper. That was just me messing around a year ago, having fun.

C: Do you think they're different in the way they sound than Mason Proper?

J: They're a little more scattershot, I guess. They're not that different all the time. It's not like way, way out there. But I make some choices that we probably wouldn't make with Mason Proper. Like, we probably wouldn't do one with as many synths as the one I'm about to release, or we wouldn't know how to do "The Breath and the Bell" live, really. That would be challenging. And especially with the ones I do on my own, I do a lot more layering of my voice and doing all these harmonies that as a band, we couldn't do. I just go all out with harmonies and layering.

C: Just because you can't perform them live...?

J: With the band I like to keep it in the ballpark of what we could possibly recreate live. And also with the band, I'm trying to do more of a cohesive mood. We didn't do that with Moth, but with Olly Oxen Free and the new album, consistency is more of a consideration. So it's more self-indulgent, I guess, when I do it on my own. But it's not so far off. "Gnat Years," with some changes, could have been a Mason Proper-type thing. I dunno, do you hear them as being really different or the same?

C: I don't know that they're really different. I mean, I feel like they do seem somewhat different. They're definitely the same kinds of songs.

J: Yeah, absolutely. And it's still the same guy making them, you know, at the end of the day. It's like, guy plus friends or guy without friends. I try to play to the taste of my bandmates when I write. I know, say, that Zach doesn't like techno-y-type electronic songs, so I don't bring the beeps and boops as much to the band, or things like that. We spend so much talking about what we like as a band, and what we agree on. I know that for Zach, if music is too happy or something, he doesn't really go for it, so I try not to bring songs that are really chipper to Mason Proper, either. I keep it neutral to dark. Trying to go more neutral this time. To me, they're different. And I know that the process is completely different, too.

C: I think it comes through.