Whole Notes
New Pornographers prove the band is greater than the sum of its players
John Kendle



Nearly 10 years after Zumpano singer/guitarist Carl Newman started a side project he jokingly dubbed The New Pornographers, the Vancouver group is on the verge of becoming a ‘real’ rock band.

Yes, yes, we know the New Pornos have released three albums of shimmeringly resplendent, old-school pop music since 2000, and we are fully aware that the group has toured to support each offering.

But Newman says it’s only in the last year that the indie ‘supergroup’ has decided it will soldier on with or without singer/guitarist Dan Bejar and vocalist Neko Case.

Both musicians are charter members of the New Pornos project. They’ve contributed to all three of the band’s albums — Mass Romantic (2000), Electric Versions (2003) and Twin Cinema (2005) — but both are also successful solo artists.

Bejar is known as Destroyer and has actually toured only once with the Pornographers, last fall, when Destroyer was booked as opening act. Case is a revered alt-country performer whose third solo studio album is due out this spring, so her commitment to the NP project is determined by her busy schedule. She remains a part of the group but can’t make all the gigs, including the band’s upcoming Winnipeg show.

“These days we’ve basically been doing half and half, with Neko and without Neko,” Newman explains by phone from his girlfriend’s home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “We realized last year that the only way we could function as a band was to not cancel things because, say, Neko couldn’t do it, so last June we basically went on our first mini-tour without Neko.

“That was like going into uncharted waters, going ‘OK, let’s see what it’s like to be a band that plays regularly.’

“It was almost ironic, because we played maybe our biggest gig ever on that tour, a concert called Celebration in the Park, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. There were 10,000 people there and we headlined. It was weird because we were looking out over the crowd and thinking, ‘When’s Coldplay coming on?’ because we couldn’t quite believe it.”

That said, the Pornographers have been on a steady climb to prominence since Mass Romantic first caught critics’ ears at the turn of the century. Each of the group’s records has been hailed as its best, and Newman’s 2004 album, The Slow Wonder (released under the name A.C. Newman), hit dozens of Top 10 lists at the end of that year. He was even heralded by no less than the New York Times Magazine as a new hero of the pop song, a man whose songwriting takes cues from the likes of Ray Davies and Brian Wilson while remaining wholly contemporary.

Twin Cinema has enjoyed a similar reaction, so Newman and co. figure they’re on a bit of a roll. The band is about to embark on a major U.S. tour, opening for Scottish pop sensations Belle & Sebastian, and Newman is even talking about making a new Pornographers album within a year.

“I guess our career, or whatever you’d call it, is taking on a new trajectory,” he says. “Each record has done better and better, and it’s nice to come out with your third record and have people think it’s your best record.

“Things are going well for us at an interesting time because we’ve just become free agents. Now we’re like, ‘What are we going to do next?’

“It’s good to be at a point where you’re just sort of rising and getting more popular and you’re also in search of a record deal,” he chuckles.

Still, Newman, now 37, is quick to point out that the indie-label darlings, signed to Vancouver’s Mint Records and to the hefty indie Matador in the States, aren’t about to jump right in with the major-label music sharks.

“We’re relatively happy where we are,” he says. “What makes our position really good is we can talk to major labels, but unless they offer us something really good we can say, ‘You know, we’ve got a pretty good thing going right where we are.’

“Somebody would have to dangle a pretty huge carrot in front of our nose for us to be tempted away.”

Rather than handle label politics and negotiations themselves, the group has hired a New York-based lawyer to take care of things for the next six months. This way Newman and the others — singer/pianist Kathryn Calder, bassist/producer John Collins, drummer Kurt Dahle, guitarist Todd Fancey and keyboardist Blaine Thurier — can focus on performing live.

The Pornos’ current tour begins Feb. 18 in Vancouver, but they don’t hook up with Belle & Sebastian until Feb. 26 in Toronto. Essentially, they’re travelling across Canada to work the kinks out of their set (though not The Kinks, who remain a huge influence).

“We haven’t been playing all of Twin Cinema, so I think we’ll try and play all of the songs on this upcoming tour, just to shake things up a little bit,” Newman says.

“Some songs, like The Jessica Numbers, we’ve only done once live, at our New Year’s show. And on the fall tour a lot of people were requesting it live and we were like, ‘That one’s so hard — can’t we do another one?’

“All the ones with really bizarre time signatures are the ones where we said, ‘Let’s do that one later.’

“We do have some tried and true favourites that we play at almost every show, but now I think it’s getting to a point where people just like us for us, so we don’t need to try hard to please them that much, and we can do whatever damn songs we please,” he laughs.

With the business and existence of the Pornographers becoming more formalized, Newman allows that he probably won’t be putting out another solo album for a while.

“I kinda wanna do another Pornographers album quickly just to keep the momentum going,” he says. “I want to do another solo album but do it as a real side project.

“It was easy to tour my solo album (in 2004) because New Pornographers were pretty much lying dormant, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen again, so A.C. Newman albums will just kind of show up in between Pornographers records, and maybe I’ll just do a handful of shows. I think the next solo album will be one of those quiet records.

“They require less effort,” he says.