On two critically acclaimed albums and a new EP, the Hamilton, Ontario, based Junior Boys have proven themselves masters of the electro-croon. Now, they’re transferring their cool, studio-based textures to the sunburned fields of Indio at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this Sunday.
The group has just released the “Dead Horse” remix EP, featuring artists such as Hot Chip and Carl Craig, offering fresh spins on tracks from last year’s full-length “So This Is Goodbye.” With their own remix on Stars’ “Do You Trust Your Friends?” album, the electronic duo has also attached itself to the incestuous Toronto indie rock scene that also includes Broken Social Scene and Metric. The band is no stranger to the rock world, having received a 9.0 rating for “So This Is Goodbye” from indie-centric online publication Pitchfork Media. In an interview with the Daily Bruin, singer Jeremy Greenspan discussed the duo’s life on tour, the incongruity of their inclusion in the indie scene and their plans for album No. 4.
Daily Bruin: The last time you were in Southern California, you played the Troubadour. How does playing a smaller venue like that compare to a huge festival like Coachella?
Jeremy Greenspan: The Troubadour was definitely one of our favorite gigs. We’ve never really played at music festivals in the U.S. I tend to like slightly more intimate crowds. Once you start to play for over 1,000, it’s abstract and a little weird.
DB: You don’t play until Sunday. What will you be doing until then?
JG: Around the event, there’re all these things we’re invited to go to ““ interviews at parties sponsored by alcohol companies. But we have a couple friends who are playing at the festival so we’ll make it a point to go see them. You’re on the road so much that you don’t see other bands ““ by the time you get home, you’re so sick of nightclubs. So festivals are a good way to see other bands.
DB: You said in an interview with PopMatters in 2005 that you’ve “always considered (yourselves) a studio band.” Is that still true?
JG: I think it is true in that sense that we are, creatively speaking ““ we do all of our writing in the studio setting. Because we’re not like a real band in … the sense that we get together and jam songs out. Songs take their focus when we’re in a studio setting. But more and more we’re becoming fully realized as a live band. Now we’re much more confident.
DB: Having spent a while on tour after your first album, did that affect the writing and recording process for “So This Is Goodbye?”
JG: A little bit in the sense that when we did our first album, the whole album was done on a computer. When you’re doing stuff on a computer everything has that hunchback kind of feel to it. You’re sitting there hunched over your computer taking turns and that creates an atmosphere and a mood. For the second one, we used a real mixing console and all that sort of analogue-y stuff ““ it opens up the space a bit more.
DB: What were you aiming for with “So This Is Goodbye?”
JG: I wanted it to be part of some kind of pop music tradition. It wasn’t really about rock ‘n’ roll exactly, but a lineage of pop music that celebrates all sorts of things in music like space and that kind of effortless approach toward singing and arrangement that in modern rock music isn’t there. What’s celebrated is how loud you can make something or how densely you can fill a space. I wanted to make a record that was very empty.
DB: You’ve been friends with bandmate Matt Didemus since you were 13. Did you ever expect to go on world tours together?
JG: Actually we did when we were 13. That dream was quashed rather quickly. I didn’t really take making music seriously even until after I’d done the first album. I always made music but I didn’t think of it as being my career. And then it kind of snuck up on me. We’re a little spoiled in that we didn’t have to slave away like a lot of bands do.
DB: What made you decide to take the music more seriously?
JG: What happened was the amount of work started piling up. You’re doing your recording and you’re supposed to tour and once all those expectations grow, you don’t have time to do anything else. Either I make a commitment to this in a really big way or I just kind of do it as a hobby. I decided that this was a really good opportunity and I wasn’t going to squander it.
DB: How did you get involved with the new Stars remix album?
JG: We don’t do many remixes. They can be very unrewarding experiences, especially when you’re doing one where you have to deal with record label people who are somewhat administering your track. So that can be a really unpleasant experience. We often turn down remixes if they’re not somebody we like ““ musical or on a personal level. With the Stars one it was a very easy one for us to do because we had met the people from the band. They really liked us a lot and let us do whatever we wanted.
DB: As a fellow Ontario band, are you connected to the Toronto scene at all?
JG: We have absolutely no connection to it. Those other bands from Toronto ““ they’re pretty close-knit and they’re all in each other’s bands and they’re quite a bit older than us. It’s not the world of music that we come from. The world of indie rock ““ not that I have a problem with anything like that, but it’s not something I grew up listening to. I can feel at times like a real foreigner because there’re all these seminal bands that people go on about like the Pixies that I don’t know anything about. I come from a dance music background, that’s what I grew up on.
DB: Is it weird, getting so much support from indie fans and publications such as Pitchfork?
JG: I don’t discern between our fans ““ if people like us who happen to be into some kind of music that I don’t know anything about, it makes me feel sort of stupid because I don’t like having big holes in my musical education. There’s just no way of being able to figure out where we are in terms of a scene or anything like that.
DB: Is there any new material in works?
JG: At the moment, we have a number of songs that we’ve been working on. I have a few in particular that I’m quite happy with. I think all of the ideas that we’ve been talking about thus far have been relatively ambitious ““ bringing in other musicians and being really collaborative, trying to do something more ambitious. Then for album four, we’ll just throw one out.