Hometown: Montreal, Quebec
Album: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
For Fans Of: TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, Laurie Anderson
Anyone who’s enjoyed indie rock in some capacity over the past decade is probably a Colin Stetson fan, despite having no idea who he is. The Montreal-based bass saxophonist has worked behind the scenes with many of the genre’s most influential artists over the past decade. His unique multi-phonic saxophone compositions have starkly colored the works of the Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver and many more.
Despite his numerous high-profile appearances, however, Stetson’s music sounds little like those he’s supported. It’s hard to even draw comparisons to his brazen, complex sophomore effort New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges. Paste recently spoke with Stetson about his latest release, lessons learned from Tom Waits and working with Justin Vernon on the forthcoming Bon Iver record.
Paste: I’m curious as to how you originally developed your current performance style. You’ve undoubtedly been playing saxophone for a long time, but how long have you been performing in this fashion?
Colin Stetson: I first started dealing with the kind of material that I’m doing now when I was 19. I’ve been playing since I was 10, but probably around 19 was when I first started seeing some of this stuff…By my twenties I would do solo shows every so often—it was definitely a focus of my music and something more improvisatory in the performance that I do. In its form now, I guess it’s only been the past six years.
Paste: How old are you now?
Stetson: 36.
Paste: So you’ve been doing the stuff you’re doing now since you were 30. Is that something you think you will keep on doing past these two albums or will you move onto another project?
Stetson: Well I’m almost done with the writing for the next record…it’s the third chapter. When I did the first one, I envisioned that this would be a trilogy of sorts. Unless something weird happens in the making of this one, I envision [the next record] being the last one of this storyline. I have a few other ideas about what’s going to happen after that. I don’t have any intention of ditching this particular medium that I’ve been exploring… just exploring it further and seeing what it can offer.
Paste: What’s the overarching theme behind the New History Warfare trilogy, and in particular the second part Judges?
Stetson: Basically what it’s dealing with predominantly is isolation. The overarching theme of it all is different facets and incarnations of the theme of isolation, particularly the notion of fear, the balance of fear and transcendence within the ideal of isolation. Those are the big pictures to Judges. In regard to specifics, it involves a more specific storyline in my mind.
Paste: On Judges, you recorded the album live and in single takes with no overdubs or looping. Why did you make the record in what seems like a difficult manner, as opposed to creating it in multiple takes?
Stetson: Well that’s the only way to do it. When I first started to play solo a long time ago… basically when I decided to do the first record, I realized that there was only one way to do it. If I was going to be true to the creation of the music—that you can’t all of the sudden go into the studio and change the way that it was made to make the record. You’re not representing the music in any way. So I had to figure out a way to represent the music in the medium of recording, which in my mind is completely different than the medium of performance.
The obvious route to me was… if you take out of the equation the performance aspect where you have people’s bodies in the physical space with you and the sounds being able to bounce off of the acoustic space that you’re in… all these things that are experiential circumstances—that’s taken out. So what you need to do is recreate a new one for the recording medium. I decided that if I was to get invasive with the micing and try to explore routes of capturing specific sounds individually of one another that were all happening at the same time—then I could reshuffle and recreate a new three-dimensional space for the recorded medium. In my mind then, the music would properly translate over to a record, because it wouldn’t be imitating life, it would be truly its own entity, but in no way compromising the original intention.
Paste: How did you come to work with Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond)?
Stetson: Laurie and I were both playing at a Pablo Neruda [show]. The two of us were performing separate pieces…she had heard me first doing my solo stuff and we had dinner and talked about music. We decided then that we were going to get together and play some music…I was writing Judges throughout that time working with her and known that I needed to have the human voice represented on the record. It just made too much sense that I was working with Laurie, and she is the best and what she does in the world.
Shara and I had been working together with the Dessner brothers on The Long Count, which is their song-cycle multimedia piece based on the Mayan creation myth. We had similarly been talking about doing something together, and I just took that and asked if she wanted to do something for the record. So we did—it was the same kind of thing where the two of them organically… throughout that year it just made sense that those voices created the human quality to that record. Two female voices really balances out what I think is the predominantly masculine [nature of the] music.
Paste: You’ve worked with an impressive list of artists, including the Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, David Byrne, TV on the Radio, The National and many others. When and how did the prominent guest appearances begin? What was that like going playing in smaller, jazz-rooted acts to becoming a collaborator with some of biggest today’s names in rock?
Stetson: I don’t identify as a jazz musician…when people see you play the saxophone, they tend to call you that. Throughout my career and upbringing, I started off as a classical player—that was really my foundation through high school and university. Also, [I moved into playing not only] a lot of avant-garde improvisation, but also a lot of folk and rock music.
The first bigger name I worked with was Tom Waits when I was 26 and did a few records with him. Over the past decade when we have seen the advent of the indie-rock scene… I think the indie-rock scene really just is the greater rock ‘n’ roll scene opening up an aspect of it [to] being open-minded and thirsty for other music, incorporating all these different things within the structures of rock.
People like Bryce Dessner from The National have huge classical and minimalist classical composer roots. He brings so much of that into his music. I know that Win [Butler] and Régine [Chassagne] bring this orchestral aspect to the music of The Arcade Fire. It’s across the board… Dave [Longstreth] in The Dirty Projectors is obviously working with a lot of different things. More and more people are really incorporating not just the avant-garde, but folk music from all around the world, classical music and different minimalist and electronica traditions…I’ve always just kind of been existing in a lot different worlds simultaneously, so the people I work with have seen that and realized that I can bring a lot to the table.
Paste: So I guess it’s not that far of a stretch then, at least the way you approach music.
Stetson: I don’t think anything is a stretch really, it’s just music. For me it would always be strange to be someone… I know there are players who are just a “this” player, that does “this thing” better than anybody. So if you get them to play on your rock song or play on your ambient piece, would just be playing the same exact thing on every song. My musical personality has never been that way.
The best lesson I’ve ever [received] was when I was working with Tom Waits… rather than approaching music through ego and being a personality… infusing the music you record on with your personality, you approach every song through its personality and support that particular scene or character and allow it to properly breathe. When you do that, there’s no music where you struggle to play within the style of it. Those are the kind of things that become obsolete.
Paste: One of your recent appearances came on Bon Iver’s recently announced record. What was your contribution to that like? Tell me about working with Justin Vernon and the new record.
Stetson: Justin and I met each other doing the Dark Was The Night show through the Dessner brothers at Radio City Music Hall—we played a couple of songs together then. Then we did another show where I opened up for him at MusicNow—Bryce’s festival in Cincinnati—in 2010. A few months later, Justin had been working on the record and writing the songs. He gave me a call and brought me in to lay down horns along with a few others—Michael Lewis who tours with Andrew Bird, Rob Moose who’s been with Antony for a long time and CJ Camerieri who plays a lot with Sufjan [Stevens].
The four of us came in and did a lot of arrangements and fleshed out these songs that he had. We spent about a week [working on], and this month I just received the finished product and it’s a really gorgeous thing that he’s made. I’m happy to be a part of it.
Paste: Moving forward, who are some musicians that are on your wish list to work with on future collaborations?
Stetson: I don’t know… I’ve always wanted to work with Radiohead [laughs]. Who doesn’t want to work with Radiohead? Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen—that’d be fun.