Beirut

There was a respite of sorts during a visit to the Arcade Fire’s studio in Montreal, where Condon hunkered down with Owen Pallett, the gifted string arranger who performs as Final Fantasy. With some help from their friends, the pair recorded tracks both for Flying Club Cup and Pallett’s next album, amid frequent home-cooked vegan feasts and Condon’s occasional indulgence in poutine, the French-Canadian equivalent of “disco fries.”

“I wanted to work with Zach because of the way Beirut’s music has no real sense of location,” Pallett says, nailing both the appeal and the mystery of Condon’s creative instinct. “There are a lot of conflicting signifiers and the end result is entirely removed from any musical tradition. I’m working on some new recordings that contain narratives that take place in a fictional country. I figured that Beirut’s ‘mongrel’ take on world music would be an appropriate starting point.” Pallett pauses to amend himself. “‘Mongrel?’ Does that sound offensive? I mean, like a cockapoo.”

Condon might appreciate the reference to an exotic canine breed, though what he has in mind is pretty simple. So simple it’s sometimes hard to communicate. “I love the sound that comes out of a really good Studio One record,” he says, noting the seminal reggae label. “You have some really brilliant song that’s flawed in some really human way. It’s not the best it can be. It’s the best you can do. My band members have heard this a million times. I’m always telling them to play it drunk. Play it off. Falling apart around the edges.” The gypsy bands Condon valorizes, like Boban Markovic’s Orkestar and the Kocani Orkestar, are masters of a similarly slippery nuance, navigating odd, shifting meters and lurching polyphony with a sensitivity that verges on the uncanny. They have a name for it: snake time.

“It sounded like these people didn’t give a f— if they were missing notes and getting out of beat,” says Condon, who was adopted by the Kocani Orkestar during its Paris stint and drafted into playing some trumpet. “They were just going for it, putting everything they had into it. It sounded like they were super-drunk. I’ve come to realize that every single note and stylistic swirl is perfectly planned out. They’ve been playing that way for as long as they can imagine.”

The more Condon talks about how hard he’s worked to get everything just right, you realize how much more effort is necessary to get everything just wrong. If he had a motto inscribed somewhere on his flesh, perhaps in a 17th century hand, it might read: Imperfect Sound Forever. How many great albums are the result of happy accidents?

“There were major f—ups: The tape was running at a different speed and the bass was completely out of tune,” Condon says, not of his own sessions for Flying Club Cup, but of Miles Davis’ 1959 classic Kind of Blue. “However, think about it. There were really discerning critics, obsessive jazz fans, everybody thought it was a masterpiece. Never mind that there was something really wrong with it, according to a modern producer. Then they put it out again and fixed it and it didn’t sound any different! Miles was the guy I looked up to. He was the first guy who put his foot down once bebop got going. What he said was, ‘I can’t play high and fast and I’m not going to, but I can write a really pretty song.’”

Beirut’s songs are pretty, too. The best moments on Flying Club Cup have the effect of an old 78 spinning in a crumbling hotel in an imaginary Eastern European country not long after a war. The narrator, or balladeer, misses a lover—or a place or a time—and wants to convince the world, or just himself, that he can recapture what’s lost, even if it’s illusory now. It’s not so much words, which Condon says he has a hard time writing. He often prefers to just mumble out provisional phrases and fill in the blanks later, which also suits his vocal style, in which the end of a line tends to vanish into a humming consonant. It’s feeling. And for Condon, nobody did it better than Jacques Brel, whose vagabond spirit the singer may have been chasing down those Paris boulevards.

“This one Jacques Brel song really amazes me,” he begins. “In some sense the whole push and pull of it is what amazes me. I have no aim or vision for lyrics. But I heard this song and the lyrics are basically two-and-a-half minutes of him getting nastier and nastier about the bourgeois class, men with beers in their nose, and he just goes all out, and you realize he’s into a character. He’s no longer talking anything real. He’s a guy sitting at a bar telling a long rambling story about how much he hates all these people around him in this small town in France, these disgusting people with their fake marriages, and their fake sensibilities of culture, and ideas, and politics. And all of a sudden in the middle of the song this giant French horn swell comes out of the mess, out of this minimal, upright bass and piano playing [comes] this simple, almost jazz noise—boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom—and the whole time he’s sitting there, [Condon sings a brief lyric in French, sweeping a hand up] ‘I hate the bourgeois,’ and all of a sudden it explodes, and you realize this drunk, rambling guy is getting all sentimental about it, the whole situation he was just making fun of. He fell in love with a girl who’s from this town where all the people—he hates them all. He hates himself. And he fell in love with her and it’s the only worthwhile thing in the world. And it’s this huge explosion and the music gets so grandiose and gigantic and he’s screaming at this point—he’s wailing! And everything crashes to a halt and he says, But it will never happen and sir, I must tell you, I have to go home now. Just total … he took you on a ride! It’s insane how amazing he was at that. It’s too much.”

Condon takes a slug of his Brooklyn Lager, the pint glass slick with condensation. He’s grinning, and his eyes, once bleary, are bright and focused. “Those are big shoes to fill, and frankly I can’t and I’m not going to,” he says, “but it’s not wrong to love it.”