Chilly Gonzales

Emma Warren

We’re here this morning with a gentleman who has done far too much for us to be able to cover in an hour, so feel free to save your questions about your favorite Gonzales moments until the end, and in the meantime, a very big welcome, Chilly Gonzales.

Chilly Gonzales

Thank you, and... pleasure to be here.

Emma Warren

You studied music here at McGill University in Montréal, and I wondered what your view is on what any artist should try and get out of any school situation?

Chilly Gonzales

I have the feeling that whenever there’s anything institutional behind music, it serves a great purpose for musicians because it breathes conformity in general. So when I went to university, I had to fight against the conformity and I had to fight against people whose ideas I really didn’t agree with, musical purists who put musical information and styles really into clear categories. And if you’re someone who dreams of combining categories, for example, it’s good to look in the eyes of those people that are essentially your enemy and at the same time, be smart enough to take the good parts that you can get out of a school situation. I think here [at the Academy], there must also be, in its own way... Even though you’re a very diverse group of open-minded people, when groups get together and there’s institutions and structure, some people will start to conform, and even in this situation, it might be good for you to look into the eyes of someone you disagree with musically.

I think you have to have an oppositional personality when you go into a school situation, but not so much that you’re just being a systematic rebel. And picking and choosing the moments to say, “OK, I’m going to trust now that this Beethoven guy knows a little bit of something about music, and so I’m going to stick my nose in the score and figure out what it is that gives me the goose bumps.” If I heard a piece of music that I thought was too intellectual, or I didn’t feel anything, or cheesy, or unlistenable, then I could also understand why that is but feel free to reject going any deeper and just saying, “You know what? Screw this. I don’t like this, but this, this I love.” That’s what school is for.

Emma Warren

For you, is it partly about learning how to do it properly so you can do it wrong?

Chilly Gonzales

It depends what parts of your musical personality. I think, you would, like...

Emma Warren

For you, though?

Chilly Gonzales

In my case, I was very interested in how harmony works, so that was a place where I chose to be a good student essentially and to trust my teachers and let them lead me. There were other aesthetic things, like for example, when you study classical music, there’s a lot of pieces that have a very deep structure, pieces that might be 12 or 14 minutes long with very few repeating moments, for example. Because I was already in my mind pretty sure I wanted to make miniature songs, more like songs with the structure of pop music, so right away, there was a moment where I said, “I’m just going to reject this.” I gave it a chance, but I’m not interested in deep structure. I don’t even want to get good at recognizing deep structure. It’s not something I’m interested in. I started to wear it like a badge of honor, that I wanted to make the kind of music I wanted to make, which was music with classical colors and a jazz touch but fundamentally using the structure of pop music. That’s sort of the formula I got to, but something like harmony was something that I realized, you can’t really do harmony the way I wanted to do it without having some training. You can’t just bumble into the kind of harmony I wanted to do. I think with rhythm and melody you can be quite instinctive. You can trust your instincts. You can just be a natural, but with harmony, if you want to go into the deeper storytelling aspects of harmony, which is what I wanted to do, then I decided, “OK, for this subject, I’m just going to be a model student and take it really seriously.”

Emma Warren

Another school for you was a basement in Toronto with Peaches and Mocky. What kind of school was that?

Chilly Gonzales

That was a great reminder, I guess, that fun should be the first goal of music for the way I want to do it. I grew up playing music with my older brother, and we would just jam for hours and hours. That was already a great way to understand that music can be communication between people.

Emma Warren

What kind of musical communication went on between you and your brother, then?

Chilly Gonzales

He was older, so of course I admired him and looked up to him. He was a much better pianist than me at that point, so I was in various...

Emma Warren

At that point being the key phrase.

Chilly Gonzales

Yeah, I vanquished him at some point (laughs). I basically accompanied him. I would play drums, a lot of percussion instruments, or sometimes I would literally look over his shoulder. He would be on some synthesizer, like a Juno 60 or something, DX7 from that time, and he would literally be playing something into the 4-track and I would just get behind his shoulder and just add a note and annoy him. It was the best note. It was the best note for sure (laughs).

Emma Warren

Like a kitchen reload. You had this stuff at home?

Chilly Gonzales

Yeah. There was some very minimal... There was a 4-track and a couple of synthesizers and a piano, obviously most importantly, a couple of drums.

Emma Warren

The kit side of it, you had that at home because your brother was interested in that stuff and had it or because, was there something in your family about... This stuff was being used anyway?

Chilly Gonzales

My grandfather was the source of the music for my brother and I. He left Hungary in very extreme circumstances in the ’40s, coming from a Jewish family in Hungary. He was a bit angry that he had been forced to leave, and so he was kicking and screaming here in Montréal. He was very intent for his grandchildren to get the best of the European touch. From a very early age, around three years old, I was already being sat on the piano bench and being told about these wonderful straight, white male geniuses from that time and how they should be respected and all that. At the same time, I was watching MuchMusic. For those of you who aren’t Canadian, that’s the pathetic Canadian attempt at doing MTV.

I would be watching MuchMusic and dreaming of that. My grandfather, I’m grateful that he brought music into my life, but he really had some outdated ideas about European superiority. He actually had the opinion when he was seeing my brother and I watch MTV... I guess he really looked down on that. Again, you have to look into the eyes of your musical enemy, and my grandfather was the first of those. He motivated me. I wanted to prove him wrong. When he would say, “There will never be a black Mozart,” for example, I’m watching Lionel Richie and going, “That’s black Mozart.” I wanted to prove him wrong also.

Emma Warren

Did he or your...

Chilly Gonzales

Maybe not Lionel Richie. I can see you’re all like, “What? Lionel. OK.” (laughs) Somehow I didn’t get the... Prince? Right. Everyone loves... Prince is the black Mozart.

Emma Warren

Maybe let’s say that your grandfather didn’t have the kind of lived experience of diversity in his friends and family that may have allowed him to have a different view on things.

Chilly Gonzales

I gave him that view on things at some point, my brother as well, because we showed him that our passion for music wasn’t just limited to what he thought it should be limited to. I think in some way we were another example that proved it wrong.

Emma Warren

This basement where you met Peaches and Mocky, you’re in there, and you’re all playing instruments. You could play certain things, but you were playing other things. What’s this idea that you have about: just because you can play something doesn’t mean you should?

Chilly Gonzales

It’s not my idea. It’s all great musicians have that idea. A good musician never shows off, only uses virtuosity in the service of something important and emotional, hopefully. I’m pretty sure everyone here in this room, none of them are probably trying to become virtuosic, technically and physically at their various instruments. I think many people here are open-minded to electronic music. There are whole styles of music that have no place for virtuosity in a really positive way. Most electronic music, rap music. Right now it’s only in session musicians that you still find this masturbatory approach to music, which is clearly not something I think that anyone here would count. It’s not such a radical idea. It’s just it's the music… You just do what’s right for the music, obviously. I don’t think I have to tell any of you that.

Emma Warren

You just mentioned rap, and hip-hop’s been an important thread for you in terms of the music that you’ve loved, the music that you’ve made, and then also the music you’ve become involved in later on. I wondered, you had your sort of super villain MC, Chilly Gonzales, and I wondered if your teenage, hip-hop loving self would be impressed with the stripes...

Chilly Gonzales

There is no teenage hip-hop loving self. I only got into rap in my mid-20s.

Emma Warren

OK, so your mid-20s hip-hop loving self…

Chilly Gonzales

That’s right.

Emma Warren

Would that person be happy about the stripes that you now have by working with some of the biggest names in hip-hop?

Chilly Gonzales

I don’t think about my past selves in that way.

Emma Warren

If you were to cast your mind back.

Chilly Gonzales

I got interested in rap as a way of having a career. What got me interested in rap first… Because I had a lot of musical snobbery. I’ll admit it. It took me a while to learn some of these lessons that I now try to impart to other musicians, because I was caught up in the technicality and virtuosity of music. I was the musical masturbator for quite a while, and I was only interested in what was complex and maybe wanted to impress people, all the traps that trained musicians can fall into. Then, I started trying to make my own music, and people kept on telling me, “We can’t tell if you’re serious or not,” because I wanted to have the music be playful.

Emma Warren

This is when you were rapping under the Chili Gonzales name?

Chilly Gonzales

No, well before that. This is in my early 20s, when I was just struggling to get out of the musician-y approach to music and remember that that’s not how the rest of the world experiences music. They don’t care if I’m technically good, they just want to feel something. In that conversion period, when I started to make music, a lot of people seemed to imply that I should make a choice between being serious, or taken seriously, or that my music should have the hallmarks of being taken seriously, whatever that would mean, or there was also the playful quality, the sort of idea that music is a toy that you should be able to sort of pick apart as a child would. Not to respect it too much, actually. They felt this deep respect for the musical language, and at the same time they could feel that there was this other disrespectful side, and they kept on telling me to choose.

When rappers… For me in my early 20s, it was around the time of Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang Clan, that sort of golden late-’90s, mid-’90s golden age, and they were people who didn’t have to choose. I said, “How is it possible that they can be playful and childlike and negative, actually petty." They’re not trying to put across some image of themselves as good people or correct people, they’re fully-realized, three-dimensional and also larger-than-life with these crazy names: Busta Rhymes, Method Man, and all these… That was sort of the click. I was like, “They don’t have to choose.” I didn’t even think about rapping or making a beat, I just thought, “I’m going to take that approach and apply it to my music.” That was my first influence, was how to ignore that false choice.

Emma Warren

I think in your phrase, “keeping it real versus keeping it surreal.”

Chilly Gonzales

Maybe.

Emma Warren

Which, in itself…

Chilly Gonzales

Good try.

Emma Warren

When did you discover that Drake was a fan of your piano music?

Chilly Gonzales

You guys know who Drake is? Drake is a rapper from Toronto… You guys know where Toronto is? He used, without permission, a piece from my first solo piano album, it’s called “The Tourist.” It’s an instrumental piece of music on his mixtape, which was called So Far Gone, which was kind of his breakthrough mixtape before he did his first real album. About two-thirds of the way through, there’s an interlude, it’s called “Outro,” and there’s basically the sound of a champagne cork popping and then my piece plays in its entirety. It’s not even a sample, it’s… (laughs)

Emma Warren

It’s a do-what-you-like methodology.

Chilly Gonzales

He didn’t sample it and turn it into a song, he didn’t sing on top of it. His only aesthetic change was to add the champagne cork popping, and there was no credit. I really felt of two minds. Of course I was very flattered that this music had ended up there. I fantasized about rap, and always thought, “If someone listens to a lot of rap, will they hear that I listened to a lot of rap just through my piano playing?” When you play the piano, there’s no beat, there’s no rapper, so if you have a view of what rap should be as what instruments and what people are doing, then yes, it’s not rap, but in my mind there’s always the rap beat playing when I’m playing the piano, in my head, and I always wondered, “Would someone who is in that world recognize that?”

It was very flattering, but of course there’s the whole problem of then feeling like, well, no one knows, and it didn’t say “The Tourist,” he renamed it. When it was on YouTube at first, I went and looked at the comments, and I had a few defenders there like, “This is Chilly Gonzales!” And then someone else was like, “I didn’t know Drake could pay the piano!” (laughs)

Emma Warren

What happened then?

Chilly Gonzales

Then began a couple of years where I had to be very patient waiting for my chance to maybe work with him one day. We were sending music back and forth a little bit, but nothing really happened on his first album, and then I got a call to come play at the Junos. Now, if you don’t know what the Junos are, it’s Canada’s pathetic attempt to have the Grammys, and the Junos was being hosted by Drake that year, 2011, and for the opening sketch he wanted to do something where he’d be in a tux, almost like a lounge singer, and he asked me to come play piano for that sketch. So I did the opening sequence of the Junos with him, and that led to, very spontaneously, “Hey, do you want to come by the studio?” And then I went to the studio, “Hey, do you want to hear some new songs I’m working on?” And he played me a sort of halfway-finished version of “Marvin’s Room.” Maybe you know that song. I was… I think I was very emotional because I was kind of living my dream. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m in the studio with a rapper!” This is what I’d dreamed of for so long, so I was quite emotional when he played me the song and the lyrics and everything, and it really got to me. Honestly, my eyes became a little wet, just as I was hearing “Marvin’s Room.” It’s a very emotional song. I’m sure you’ve all cried to “Marvin’s Room” at some point, right? Then he said, “Hey, do you want to add some piano?” And I ended up playing an outro on a very… Just a synth that was sitting there, like an M1, like a really bad ’90s synth, and I thought I was just showing, “Well it could be something like this,” and in my mind I’m like, “Yeah, and then they’re going to rent me a grand piano the next day and I’m going to do it for real,” right?

I do the outro, no pedal. Those of you who play piano might know that without a pedal also to do something… I was kind of struggling, and I’m kind of like this [plays piano with hands], and they’re… Afterwards, they’re like, “WOAH!” (laughs) They’re like, “That’s it!” Obviously, and that was it. That’s the 90 seconds that you hear at the end of “Marvin’s Room,” it’s just me sort of like, unknowingly just transferring the wetness in my eyes to the keyboard and “making the song cry,” as Jay-Z would say.

Emma Warren

I wonder if now would be a nice moment for you to give us a little bit of musical explanation over here.

Chilly Gonzales

Sure. Should I go over to the piano? (applause)

Emma Warren

You can play rap on the piano?

Chilly Gonzales

Well, I don’t know about, “You can play rap on the piano,” but I think it’s, at least for me, an interesting what if? Kind of a thought experiment. What if you tried to translate… Sometimes I feel like the piano is kind of like… You guys have heard of Plato, the philosopher, and he had this idea of the… I’m no philosophy expert, but when I was a kid, I loved that he had this idea of the Platonic world of forms. Here, you see a bunch of rectangles onstage. The piano’s kind of a rectangle, the couch is a rectangle, there’s a bunch of rectangles, small and big.

Emma Warren

I’m the rectangle.

Chilly Gonzales

In the Platonic world of forms, which I always thought of as kind of an amusement park in a way, like, “The Platonic world of forms!” “Here is the rectangle!” And it’s like the rectangle you’ll never see, because it’s just an abstract idea, it’s the first and last and actually a nonexistent rectangle, and all other rectangles are somehow referring to this uber rectangle that’s at the amusement park of the Platonic world of forms. The piano, I feel like, is the Platonic instrument. Is there a way for me to play a Platonic world of forms version of rap? Just by certain attitudes and a certain rhythmic wave, because if you play a chord on a piano, there’s just so many different ways to play it. Let’s take this for example, this piece. [plays piano]

Beethoven, “Moonlight Sonata.” You hear a romantic pianist and they’re like… [changes playing mode] Extreme kind of… Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s soft, and then it gets faster, and then... [plays piano] I’m massacring it, but anyway, you get the idea. If you think like a rap producer, you sort of would grab just maybe one of these chords, right? [plays piano] You kind of listen. Let me do another example, actually, because this is more how a rap producer would think. Take the beginning bars of a Chopin, which is a waltz, I think... [plays piano] If you’re a rap producer, you’re listening to that as if you’re listening to a record, and there’ll be a moment where you’re like, “That’s it! I want to turn that now,” this thing that was just a passing couple of seconds in Chopin’s version, this is now going to become a real song. I am deciding that these two seconds are in a way more valuable than they were before, to me. I’m going to make a whole song. You kind of wait… [plays piano]. You have to think in terms of the fact that rap music is generally flattened. It’s based on one little moment that becomes an installation. In real time the music of rap isn’t really ebbing and flowing. It kind of just has a base line point. Not a musical bass line but a sort of horizon that is unchanging. It generally involves removing some of the give and take of dynamics and the give and take of tempo.

Emma Warren

When you were hearing piano though, were you always hearing it through the ears of someone who loved pop music? Or were you always hearing…

Chilly Gonzales

Well I like pop music and I hear it through my ears.

Emma Warren

The answer’s yes then. What I mean really is, obviously you hear music on two levels. More than, probably. You’re hearing it from the point of view of someone who’s classically trained, who understands technically what’s going on. You’re also hearing it in a way where it can easily be moved between different styles. As you’ve just shown us so nicely.

Chilly Gonzales

Yeah, but if I’m at home trying to compose a piece of music I’m not thinking of a technical aspect until maybe I hit a wall. Until maybe I’m like, okay something has to happen there, that has to be more elegant. Then I zoom in and think with my analytic head. What I’ve successfully learned to do is to bypass that. When I hear a song come on the radio I’m not calculating what the chords are, unless I have an emotional reaction. Then that song deserves to be zoomed in on. Like I said it’s a little like when I was in college. If I’m not interested, if I’m not feeling something, to me it’s garbage.

Emma Warren

Was there ever a period where you stopped playing?

Chilly Gonzales

A little bit. In my early Berlin days I loved the idea that you could just have a mini-disc. When I would be on tour with Peaches in the early 2000s. That electroclash, Berlin era. It was great because you could have a mini-disc with your instrumentals and be the personality, be the face of the energy you wanted to transmit. Also influenced by how easy it was to do a rap show in certain ways. It was refreshing to not have to always think, “Oh is there going to be a piano there? Do I have to carry a synthesizer with me?” It felt very liberating. For that time also because I lived in difficult circumstances, I didn’t have enough money to have a piano or gear with me in the early Berlin days either. Quite a few years went by when I would only play a piano when I was in a place that had one. Whether it was in a studio, or a friend’s house, or something. I definitely let it go for three or four years there.

Emma Warren

That quite naturally leads us to talk about the Re-Introduction Etudes, the score books that you made particularly for people who do want to pick something up again. I just want to stay in Berlin for a little minute. Can you paint us a picture of Berlin in this period of time? Because it was a period of great creativity. It was a period where people first started moving to Berlin in a wave, which continues 16 years on. What was the average week for you and Peaches and your pals around that time?

Chilly Gonzales

Well we were in a bubble with just the few of us that were there together. We shared apartments, and we’re on tour a lot. We’re kind of... We were realizing that our dreams were coming true. All the dreams and frustrations that we had while we were in Canada still struggling so much. Thinking, “Maybe we should go over there. Maybe it’s going to be better for us over there.” This weird instinct. When we were proven right, “Wow. OK.” Something about changing the frame, whether it was just us that were changed by the freedom of being somewhere new. Or whether there’s actually something different in people’s perception there, it’s hard to know. It was just an extremely positive fever dream for all of us.

Emma Warren

It was a pretty intense time wasn’t it…

Chilly Gonzales

Fever dream.

Emma Warren

… Musically in terms of the things you were doing, and pretty hardcore.

Chilly Gonzales

Yes.

Emma Warren

Give us a bit more (laughs). I want to know… You sometimes, you look at some of the images and the bits of very raw footage that were captured from that time, there was definitely a rawness and a freedom to the things you were doing. It’d be kind of, I don’t know.

Chilly Gonzales

Yeah but there’s so much conformity in every scene. I identified the weak spot. That’s what I do. I try to look for, “Where is there something I can add to with my skill set?” It’s all well and good, but like any scene you just see that there’s... “OK what is everybody doing that they don’t even realize they’re doing? What is the assumption that no one inside this scene will ever be able to really question?”

It was about facelessness. There was a pride taken in facelessness that I thought was ripe for challenging. Both Peaches and I, I think instinctively took our more Canadian, extroverted, musical theater background essentially. Something that’s cheesy to most people, especially in Germany where they’re fairly straight forward. They’re not a very expressive, extroverted people generally. Of course there’s exceptions. It is true there’s a certain dryness there. A certain intellectual distance that in Canada we were…

Emma Warren

Speaking very generally of course.

Chilly Gonzales

We were more goofy. We were just goofy Canadians. Peaches of course was a drama teacher. I’ve written musicals. We both really have that exuberance that comes with like, “Let’s put on a show!” That’s the energy that I’m going to try to do next week with six of you. I don’t know which ones of you because we haven’t met yet. Six of the people in this room are going to join me for a concert. It’ll just be using that energy that I know which is, “Let’s put on a show. Let’s get goofy. Let’s take risks. Let’s trust that enthusiasm and exuberance,” is all people want to feel anyway when they see a live show. Don’t over rehearse, plan, and understand that the plan will be ripped up the minute you get out there anyway.

Emma Warren

The plan is the plan right, not a thing.

Chilly Gonzales

That’s right. That’s the energy we brought to the Berlin techno scene. Do you guys know a guy know a guy named Alec Empire? Have you heard of him? He’s... When we moved to Berlin he was kind of the guy who was the ambassador for that Berlin sound. He had a very dark, he has a very Gothic, serious image. Always scowling, never smiling. A very valid, strong image. I really, truly admired the guy but I thought he was ripe to be a foil for me.

To make this point about facelessness and have fun doing it, I decided to say that I’m going to run for President of the Berlin underground. Of course no one in the Berlin underground wanted to be called the Berlin underground, right? It’s like, “Noooo don’t put us in a group.” I’m like, “No, no, no. I want to be president of all of you. Berlin undergrounders.” I challenged Alec Empire to be my opponent. He really hated me for it because I was bringing him in to a game that he didn’t want to play. It was slightly Trump-esque I would say, was my approach back then. I wanted to drag people down into a mud fight they didn’t want to have because I wanted to disturb their comfort. I’d always just sort of… Never questioning, “Is it such a good idea to be faceless? Is it really such a good idea to be anti-everything? Anti-planning? Anti-success? Anti-enthusiasm?” For some people, it really works, and for Alec Empire, he was the perfect foil. I respect anyone who finds the way to get their music across, and Alec Empire found that image, but it was also ripe to be a counter-foil to the message I wanted to send at the time.

Emma Warren

Aside from Presidential activities...

Chilly Gonzales

By the way, he didn’t accept to be my opponent. I didn’t want to win by acclimation, but I did do a press conference. We got ahold of the people who booked the place where they do the press conferences in Berlin. It’s called the Bundeshaus Press Conference, and we rented that and I was able to do my concession speech in that context.

Emma Warren

What’s the line through from the sort of performance aspect of what you were doing in Berlin to the performer that you are now on stage holding courts, playing music, interspersing what you’re playing with the repartee? What’s the through line? How did you get from one to the other?

Chilly Gonzales

Well, it evolved fairly naturally. When I started to finally have pianos at my shows and gradually realized there’s a way for me to bring this into my world. It just happened naturally, I think. Some of the really provocative attention getting stuff was great in those first few years to get me that attention, to get me the platform, and to get people intrigued, but I also realized that it should take its proper place among other elements after a while. I think if I was only doing that, only being a provocative person, it has it’s own way of getting quite old. There are musicians like that, right? Who are just a bit like, “Oh, come on.” “Yes, I appreciate that you’re out there pushing everyone’s buttons, but there’s also a time to maybe show other sides of yourself.” At least, that’s how it felt to me. That led to me doing a piano album. The reaction to that was so much more positive than I could have imagined. That it really changed the direction of how I wanted to be on stage. Always have access to a piano now.

Emma Warren

You kind of hung up your mic, didn’t you, in 2004, sort of officially retiring?

Chilly Gonzales

I called it a pre-tirement.

Emma Warren

Oh OK.

Chilly Gonzales

I did a tour with Peaches, Feist, and Mocky, and sort of all my musical family at the time, and we did a tour that was kind of like a roast. There was a table at the back, and everyone was... We would just take turns performing and playing a little bit with each other on certain songs. Then, doing some stuff together at the end, and that was the pre-tirement tour. That pre-tirement lasted around two years. Then, I came back with Solo Piano.

The concert I’m going to do next week with the Gonzervatory participants next week in Le Gesu is going to be, also, a little bit based on that. The idea that you will see individuals perform their own music, but you’ll have this crew behind that are always visible, always ready to jump up and maybe play a tambourine part or something, and have that goofy energy of let’s put on a show together. Regardless of whether everybody’s actually sitting there and playing and sweating the whole time. There’s ways to feel part of a musical tribe, part of a musical family that have more to do with gesture and creating energy than anything else.

Emma Warren

The pieces of music on Solo Piano, why are they themes? Piano themes, not songs? Is there a difference?

Chilly Gonzales

Because of the Platonic world of forms. Because you can reduce every musical style and find something on the piano, which is the instrument that just won’t die. I mean, you go into any studio of electronic music, there will be at least one little MIDI keyboard that has this map of these twelve notes. This thing has endured. Sometimes you go into your plug-in on your laptop, and then there’s like a little strip that’s in the shape of these twelve keys. This interface of how we think of music, at least in my case, music will always be on this particular map. To do piano albums means you’re playing everything. You’re playing rap. You’re playing orchestrally. You’re playing... You can dream as much as you want, because it’s the Platonic world of form’s best instrument.

Emma Warren

In a way, that was kind of a debut album for you, wasn’t it? Obviously, you’ve made tons and tons of music beforehand under a variety of names, but I wonder if, as often when people make their first record: they’ve had those songs, they’ve carried them around with them in some form or another for many years. I wondered, did the kind of songs which ended up on Solo Piano, were they things you generated then, or were they melodies and songs you’d had rotating around your head for a while?

Chilly Gonzales

A mix of both. A mix of both. There’s always so much ongoing composition with me, whether it’s stuff I just record on my phone at a sound check or something that just won’t leave me alone. I’m sure you’ve all felt those moments where there’s something akin to real inspiration, where somehow you’re like, “Woah. I’ve seemed to have made one of my best things in like 20 minutes.” Those are great moments, but sometimes you’ve just got to sweat it out, just get into the weeds of it, and at least finish it even if you’re going to throw it out later. Sometimes you forget how a song was made. Then, the reaction of the people sort of erases whatever trauma might have been involved in the making of that song, and all of a sudden you’re just feeling the light of communication, successful communication when someone goes like, “Woah. I really love that song.” It could be the one you sweated over for two weeks, and you’ll sort of forget that you sweated it out. You’ll start to think, “Oh, yeah. That’s just a song that has now a new life, because someone else has illuminated it.”

Sometimes the one you think was so inspired, because you did it in 20 minutes, doesn’t really connect. Then, you also forget that exciting feeling you had of writing it quickly, like “Oh, OK.” You can be wrong about how you feel when you make a piece of music. It’s only when it touches other people, when it confronts the listener, it’ll erase whatever origin story that song has. If it connects, it’s so intense when someone tells you they like your song, right? When you see it in their eyes or you’re playing them a series of four or five demos, and you just see when you play the third one that everyone’s like [nods head] or whatever. You’re like, “OK. I’ve got something here. I didn’t know it, but this third song this is the one that’s connecting. Cool. I’m just going to trust these reactions.”

For me, when I have a new album it’s usually pretty clear, so I focus group a lot, as much as I can, to try and find those moments, because I’m not sure enough. I can’t trust that if I feel good writing a song, that doesn’t mean it’s the one. Just because I maybe struggled with one, and it’s a total Frankenstein monster, like, “Oh, I used the bridge from that one 10 years ago and transplanted it here.” You don’t see those seams anymore. You don’t remember that trauma or that sweat when someone connects to it. That’s the beginning of the second life of any piece of music. It’s the look in the eyes of the person who’s hearing it.

Emma Warren

What’s the smallest amount of music you can use to convey intent, convey a feeling?

Chilly Gonzales

John Cage would argue zero notes. I think you can tell a lot from a single note. I’m talking about that MPC hit, when you’re sitting there and the sample’s playing, and you’ve got your bass drum pad loaded up, and your sample starts [mimics beat]. You’ve got to put everything into that [drum sound]. Sometimes, especially when you’re part of a band or something, you might just have a riff playing. I don’t know, like “Eye of the Tiger” or something. You might bring up someone who’s like, “I want to be a musician.” They’re just like, they don’t know. My friend Mocky always talks about drumming. He says, “Drumming is easy. It’s actually quite simple. You just have to know what to hit and how hard.” In a way that means that with one single note, or a single chord, you can really give off a lot of attitude. [plays piano] Same chord. Those are two very different emotions. What you put into it, I’m pretty sure if you do it right, the audience will know what that is. Even if they can’t put the name on it, they know that one was like gangsta and the other one was kind of like sad sad.

Emma Warren

Talking of knowing or not knowing, obviously with a lot of training you get to know. What if you don’t have the benefit of a lot of training? How can you connect to kind of the universal ways in which we respond to sound?

Chilly Gonzales

Well you have an advantage. The training will make it harder for you to learn that lesson. That’s why it took me ’til my late 20s to sort of understand what music actually is for most people, and that I wanted to be part of music for non-musicians and musicians alike. I didn’t want to think about impressing other musicians, and that took me longer. I think someone like Peaches, who didn’t have a lot of training but had a very systematic approach to learning how she made music, she had an advantage. When I met her, I was still looking for what was my voice and what did I really like. It seemed like I had too many options because I’d been trained so much. It was like, “OK, How do I really, where’s my taste? I can almost appreciate anything. Isn’t that weird? I should really decide what I liked and love.” When I met Peaches, even if you gave her a banjo, she would pick it up and it would sound like Peaches on a banjo in 10 seconds. Whereas I might pick up a banjo and be like, “How can I sound like a country banjo player?” or something.

People with no training have an advantage, but they need to have the attitude of a student in some way. They have to listen and be curious. When they love something, they should try to take it apart in some way. With classical music you can say, “I love those bars, let’s see what Brahms did. Yes, I can learn something.” Most of it is just listening and figuring out, “OK. Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel transported by this? Let me listen. OK, let me listen, there’s a lot of reverb on her voice. OK, what does that mean for me? Let me try a song where I put a lot of reverb on my voice. Am I getting that feeling of transporting someone like I had?” If not, “What am I doing different?” All that stuff. You need the attitude of a student at the very least.

Peaches has a system of music in her head. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen it at work. I happened to learn a system that was in books. That’s one way of doing it, but Peaches instinctively feels all those things. She just has maybe different words in her own mind for them, or just different associations. There is a textbook in her head, it’s just only her own at the moment.

Emma Warren

Talking of textbooks, what did you want people to get from the Re-Introduction Etudes? The school books, and the kind of stuff that came along with that?

Chilly Gonzales

That was for people who had a little bit of piano teaching in their past. You couldn’t enjoy that book if you hadn’t had at least maybe two years when you were a child, or young adolescent, or teenager. Then the book can be useful. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be useful because it’s based on that old way of representing music with the dots on the lines.

Emma Warren

Okay. For the picker-upperer’s, the people that are starting again, how do you pick something up when you’ve dropped it after a while? It’s quite a lot of stuff in the way isn’t it? Between starting again when you stopped?

Chilly Gonzales

I don’t know. I luckily learned discipline, and I learned that if I want to accomplish what I want to accomplish in music there’s going to be moments where I have to be very bored perhaps, or uncomfortable, to get a bigger payoff later but that’s not something... There’s people who just will never be able to do that and that’s, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.

Emma Warren

In your training you learned a lot about the kind of classical greats. You wrote a really nice essay, I don’t remember who for, where you kind of re-contextualized them for us. Maybe if you don’t know too much about classical music, all those composers just kind of sit in a band together. They’re just classical people. Can you do us a little breakdown of how we might understand some of those greats, who their modern comparators are?

Chilly Gonzales

Well my personal hero is Franz Liszt. Franz Liszt I think more or less had more to do with creating the musical world that we’re still in. He made it about the combination of personality and music. He invented a lot of things we take for granted in performance. He was the first to do a solo piano recital. One person, one piano for two hours. No one thought that the attention of the audience could be kept until Liszt did it.

Emma Warren

What did people think the piano was for then?

Chilly Gonzales

Playing songs in between. It was all a variety show kind of thing. It was about the music in a way, and Liszt was like, “No. It’s about me.” That’s the world we’re in now. He created celebrity culture around music. He created the idea that you should have a persona that is a fantasy. He wanted people to think he had made a deal with the devil to be able to become such a virtuoso. He sort of allowed that to spread without really confirming or denying it. [Without] much in the way. Without Liszt there would be no Kanye saying, “I am a god.” Or me saying, “I’m a musical genius.” These are fantasies that let us into someone’s... Liszt didn’t make the mistake that some musicians still make today in thinking, “There is no artifice in what I do, I’m just myself when I go up on stage.” That is impossible, that is literally impossible, it’s so artificial what’s happening right now. There’s no way for me to be myself right now nor is there a way for you to be yourself. Something changes, something overrides normal social interaction and something called the performance begins. Now, does that mean that this is bullshit? Not at all, because what you’re seeing is a fantasy of mine, a fantasy to be listened to with rapt attention by all these people is a great fantasy of mine that everyone cares what I have to say. That people see me with a certain respect or think I’m really good looking, obviously think that I’m a musical genius, that’s a fantasy that I’m living out up here right now.

It’s more revelatory. Look at David Bowie and Prince who we lost this year, two of the greatest legends. These are not musicians who said, “I’m just going to go up there and be myself.” No, they changed their names in both cases or shortened them or whatever. They created alternate versions of themselves and they lived out a fantasy. Yet we don’t say, “David Bowie’s full of shit.” No one would say that, no one would say that Prince was full of shit. You know who’s full of shit? Stupid singer-songwriters who say, “I’m just going to go up there and be myself.” They’re full of shit. (laughs)

Emma Warren

Whereas Liszt was not ...

Chilly Gonzales

Liszt, right, was the first I think to really get that and put that personality out there, the fantasy first.

Emma Warren

OK, so we get an idea of Liszt and what he was like, which maybe is over and above what we might get, you know if you’re not in the classical world, you might just hear it sometimes on the radio or something. Even necessarily...

Chilly Gonzales

Yeah but it’s funny because...

Emma Warren

What you’re doing is you’re bringing it back to life for us.

Chilly Gonzales

Liszt doesn’t have that many compositions, he’s a musical figure, he’s a transformative figure. If you look at the more famous composers, they have many more well-known songs. You don’t hear Liszt performed that often in modern day concerts but his shadow hangs over everything including rap, including any performance based music, any music that at all is meant… He really made it about communication. He made it about yes, there’s an audience, there’s a performer and there’s something magical that can happen which involves a lot of generosity on the part of the performer but also depends on the generosity of the audience. There’s a very delicate dance between performer and audience that I love to explore and I test the tension of that bond and see if it’ll break. Hopefully it doesn’t. All of that I think can be traced to Liszt who would make a show of breaking piano strings, gifting them to the hot women in the audience. He had a sense of that showmanship and he had a sense of not hiding parts of his personality that might be egomaniacal and megalomaniacal. Not trying to pretend he doesn’t have an ego but using that ego in service of something much more useful I think in the end.

I have a song called “The Grudge.” which is all about taking negative energy and not thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel that. I shouldn’t feel competitive with the musician who I’m jealous of.” I would say drive into the skid. You know, they say drive into the skid, right? If you’re about to skid into your car you don’t drive the other way, you go, “Shit, we’re going right, OK, we’re going right, we’re doing this.” That’s what we have to do. “I’m jealous, I’m competitive, OK, we’re doing this, fuck that guy,” you know? (laughs) Use that energy for positive things, you use it to motivate you as well as all the wonderful advice you get about be yourself, take risks, don’t compare yourself to other people. That’s not 100% realistic maybe, at least it wasn’t for me. I decided at some point, I don’t want that to eat me from inside, I’m going to put that into the songs, I’m going to put that on stage, I’m going to let people feel it. I’m pretty sure most people feel that way and so they’re going to identify.

I think up until Liszt, composers were also in this mode of just, “Oh it’s all about the music. Don’t get me involved in all that.” Liszt was like, “No, it’s OK to let people know that your fantasy is to be the lord of music,” or whatever he wanted to be. In my case, I dreamed of being a musical genius who was endlessly fascinating and that’s what I’m trying to play on stage. There’s a gap between reality and that fantasy and I hope that’s the source of the emotional core of when you see a concert by someone. It’s like, “Yeah, those guys aren’t robots.” Right? But interesting that they want to be thought of as robots and that they sing with such feeling in their robot form, I’m talking about Daft Punk guys, right? That’s the poetry. The fact that there’s David Jones and David Bowie, makes you wonder what’s in between. That makes you sit up and pay attention.

Emma Warren

Before we pass out to you guys, I wanted to ask you about how… Something fun that you did with your piano, “Piano Talks,” has turned into something else. That is a good example of something you talked about earlier, fun first, success later. What is Room 29?

Chilly Gonzales

Oh yeah, Room 29 is a project, an album I did with Jarvis Cocker, the singer of Pulp, who was a neighbor of mine in Paris back around 2006. We kept on running into each other, then a very natural slow burning friendship started to begin. Then we started to see about making music together, starting very easy. He had to do some song for a movie and I helped him with it. Kind of like dogs that were sniffing each other’s butts for a while, basically. Then at some point it turned into a real project around 2011, the album will finally come out. It’s really something that’s seven or eight years in the making that neither of us ever put on the front burner. I look for the chemistry to be there before you get in too deep. Just because, “Wow, it would be so cool to do an album with Jarvis Cocker.” Well, would it? What if it wasn’t a good fit? Then it wouldn’t be such a good thing to do an album with Jarvis Cocker.

I always wait and make sure I’m not the easiest person I work with. I want to make sure that my strength and my weakness will be understood before I really get in too deep for fear of getting into something where I’m uncomfortable or also making the other person uncomfortable. Maybe they’ve projected onto me that I’m much easier to work with than they think or something and they’re going to find out that I’m not a natural collaborator. I think someone like Jarvis who was a legitimate rock star in the ’90s comes from a different world than me. He also has his way of doing things. It really took that time for us to realize, “OK, we can do this. We know where the no-go zones are. We know where we can suspend the bad parts of our ego and where we can flex the good parts of our ego to make the product great.”

Emma Warren

Sometimes like Alice in Wonderland, you need to walk away from the red queen’s castle in order to get there.

Chilly Gonzales

Better.

Emma Warren

Or your other dog metaphor. OK, do we have some microphones, ready to pass around. Yes, got plenty of time, we’ve can take lots of questions. We have one here at the front to start with. If you hold on for a minute and we’ll pass you the microphone then off to anyone else.

Audience Member

I know your father was a huge opera fan, have those melancholic areas influenced your music?

Chilly Gonzales

Negatively (laughs). No, that’s a serious answer. Opera is loud, it’s bombastic. I don’t like music that’s loud and bombastic in general. I think you can create intensity in a smooshed frame dynamically. Opera sounds the way it sounded because there were no microphones back then so they had to project at the back of the hall. When microphones were invented, opera should have adapted and gone the direction of Frank Sinatra. One of the first great artists who understands, “This is a piece of technology that I have to use, this is the instrument now, not just this.” Frank Sinatra discovered how to use that and became such a trailblazer because he saw that technology cannot be ignored. Opera pretended that microphones never existed and therefore seems super archaic, that singing style is horrible for me.

I don’t like loud singing much these days either really. Like someone like Beyoncé on the songs where she’s singing loud, it just sets me off. I would much rather listen to Beach House or Lana Del Rey, someone who’s using the Frank Sinatra method of using this microphone as a whole world in itself. This very intimate thing happening between a person’s voice and the microphone. For me, that’s how I generally like vocals. The opera influence was in a good way for me a model of what I don’t like.

Emma Warren

OK, so we had some questions on this side?

Audience Member

I had a quick question.

Emma Warren

OK.

Audience Member

How are you doing?

Chilly Gonzales

Good.

Audience Member

I wondered if you could elaborate just to discuss a little your feelings on a musician’s relationship with finances, the corporate world, the private world, how you see an up and coming person fitting in with that, given the ever changing climate.

Chilly Gonzales

Well I would say that rap also showed me the way on how to think about that issue. At risk of understatement, rappers don’t seem very concerned with selling out. Capitalistic success is one of the main goals of rap music, and it’s a little bit like nursing a grudge. If you are so uncomfortable with how that might be, and you’re uncomfortable with, “Am I somehow owned by someone if they give me money?” There’s also government grants, which can also be problematic, but I always took the view that it’s a compliment if someone thinks they can make money off your music but that presupposes that you haven’t changed anything in the music itself to get that. That’s the key. You have to find your voice and trust that at some point, someone is going to say, “I want to make money off that,” and then you have a very pure, positive version of, I think, music capitalism.

I think it gets complicated with getting grants sometimes for music, because music is fairly cheap to make these days. I think if you’re in a dance troupe, or doing theatre, something that’s very labor-intensive with lots of people, I understand much more the idea of government grants, because you literally can’t put on a dance performance without a certain number of people and a certain amount of space, but you can make an album for no money now and that’s a wonderful liberating thing. You have the tools to find your voice slowly over some years, so that one day there’ll be a corporate entity or a person or a record company or a website or whoever it is, that’s like, “We want to be associated with this. This thing that you built on your own, that you’ve now nursed into an individual, clear thing…” I hesitate to use the word brand, but a musical brand, let’s call it. That, to me, is a symbol of music confronting the marketplace of ideas, and the financial marketplace at the same time, and having a positive result.

That, to me, is more positive than getting a government grant, which takes a really long time to get, you might not get it, especially if you fall between the cracks. Certain kinds of musicians get grants easier than others, and maybe if I had been the musician who had gotten a lot of grants when I first started to try, maybe I would be saying a different tune. Maybe I would have been comfortable sort of having a system of government grants supporting what I do. I don’t know, but because I felt a bit rejected, it leads to a certain kind of resentment, which, of course, can be a positive thing, because it motivates you, and it motivated me to do it without the government grants, and to do something more like Red Bull Music Academy, building something extremely positive using corporate money, building it slowly since the early 2000s, when Wulf [Torsten and Many] started it back in Cologne where I live.

He’s told me the story of how it started very small, but Red Bull thought it was in their interests, you know? Those evil, cigar-chomping Red Bull executives, if they exist, were like, “Yeah, this is a good thing for us! Let’s be greedy about Red Bull Music Academy.” That’s what you want. I want the person… I want Deutsche Grammophon, who’s going to release my album with Jarvis, for example, I want Deutsche Grammophon to be salivating at the thought of all the money they can make off me, because I’ve delivered a product with integrity that they didn’t interfere in, but nonetheless, they feel that, just on my own, I’ve taken it to a place that they want to make my… They probably won’t, by the way, but the fact that they’re salivating on it, to me, feels like a more honest transaction than government grants, but anyway, music is cheap to make, so you just keep making your shit until someone wants to pour money into it. It’ll happen at some point.

I still do private gigs here and there. I definitely will try to cash in, because I’m an ambitious person. I want to hire an orchestra for my next album, maybe. I’m an independent artist, for my own records, so if there’s an influx of cash from me playing 45 minutes at some party where there’s a few celebrities and some… Why not? It’s not what I do very often, I’ll do it once or twice a year, and it really helps me to maintain my integrity as an independent artist and choose my moments to have some cash come from somewhere. Does that answer your question?

Audience Member

Thank you so much. Absolutely.

Emma Warren

Where’s the mic going next? To the front.

Audience Member

Hi, first off, thank you so much for the lecture. I wanted to ask, I don’t want to undermine your own work, but did you possibly contribute to any other Drake work? Also, are there any rap artists currently that have you really excited?

Chilly Gonzales

That have me excited?

Audience Member

Yeah.

Chilly Gonzales

Sure. I love that new Danny Brown album, for example. That was kind of exciting to hear, but yeah, I worked with Drake also on Nothing Was The Same, and there were some songs that got made for his latest project that didn’t make it to the album, so there’s always kind of a… I send quite a few things from Cologne where I live. I’ll just do some music and email it over to them, and here and there I get some responses, but it’s mostly cryptic. There’s not a lot of normal interaction. It really feels, with Drake, that you’re kind of dealing with Barack Obama or someone, who’s got a very, very busy schedule, and you just don’t dare to think, “He didn’t write me back fast enough!” You have to accept a certain amount of cryptic communication. I didn’t know I was on Nothing Was The Same until the album came out, to be totally honest. I had to buy it and hear that I’m on there (laughs). I was credited, though, so that was a positive step.

Audience Member

Hi. I’m one of those songwriters who are full of shit and try to be themselves onstage. I was wondering, do you have some… What is your approach to writing your…

Chilly Gonzales

I didn’t mean to put all singer-songwriters in a category. That was just a convenient example of, sometimes I guess in my memory, when I was here or in Toronto, just because I don’t want to… Maybe I was a bit too harsh saying it that way. Any musician who thinks they don’t have to be conscious of the fact that there’s a transformation when they walk onto a stage. That’s who I was saying is full of shit. I believe if we look at the record, that might be what I said, “Full of shit,” but there are many singer-songwriters who, when they get up onstage, they transform themselves, of course. That problem isn’t limited to singer-songwriters. I didn’t want to give you that impression.

Audience Member

No, that’s OK. It was really… I was trying to think of how you approach writing lyrics, because for me, my approach is very personal, and I guess I am a songwriter who is just trying to put myself out there somehow.

Chilly Gonzales

Songwriting has to be 100% personal. It’s walking out onstage. It’s taking a photo, choosing an album title. All that you have to have in mind. It can’t be personal any more. It has to be fantastical, which is still personal. It’s the part of your personality that is a fantasy, that has to… That’s the part that carries the football into the end zone of the audience, but when you’re like, planning the music, of course it has to be one hundred percent personal. I never think about who’s listening when I’m composing. That moment is strictly reserved for you and yourself one hundred percent.

I would never say anyone is full of shit who’s taking the time to be honest. My rap lyrics are… To the point where years later, I look and I’m like, cringing at myself. They’re super honest and very, very personal, and, like I said, to a point where it’s almost too much for me sometimes, and instrumental music as well, but with lyrics, look at Danny Brown! Have you heard the lyrics on that Danny Brown album? That’s like, really hardcore personal, confessional stuff that really touches me on a very deep level, despite the craziness of the music. That’s what gets me first, is to hear him struggle with his demons, so that’s… Once the song is done, then you have to switch into a different gear. That’s what I would say, and that gear is a gear of fantasy, so that it can reach the people, because just the music itself, no matter how personal it is, especially these days, has less of a chance to be carried into the end zone, unless there’s a fantasy that kind of accompanies it and gets people interested.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

Cool. I was just… You were saying about not being a very collaborative person naturally, and I’m a massive fan of Feist’s The Reminder and you and Jamie Lidell’s involvement in that. I was wondering how you found that whole experience, and also, from a songwriting perspective, about taking it from the personal to the fantastical, which that album had kind of a really interesting blend of. I was just wondering in terms of how you approach the headspace of that collaborative environment, and how much a good experience it was, or not…

Chilly Gonzales

Well, she’s a very, very close friend of mine. She’s something like a little sister to me. I’ve known her for a super long time, and she was touring as this sort of Chilly Gonzales sidekick, basically, between like ’99 and 2003, then we started to work on her music together, and then that kind of took off and she really sort of took control of her own music, and then for the subsequent albums, she’s really taken full control and I’ve sort of had… I fit into where she needs me to fit into it, so it’s very… It’s like working with a family member, so of course there’s a lot of familiarity, but it has its own dangers, because when you’re that close with someone just on a friendship/familial level, of course you can have patterns that… In the end, I prefer to work with people I’m really close with. I’m not so great at just showing up to a songwriting session with someone. I don’t think I’m actually very good at that. I tried that for quite a while. It works when I know someone so well that I can really understand when do they need to be sort of reassured and agreed with, and, picking that moment, also maybe challenge them on a certain blind spot or little weakness they might have. That’s essentially what I would want when I ask someone to help me. I just sort of use that principle, and, generally now I collaborate with people that I’m very close with and have a long history with, where there is a lot of exchange of them helping me and me helping them, sometimes just advice on a phone call.

I had to play a show three days after the Paris attacks in Paris. I didn’t know if I should cancel it, if I should change my show, how to do it so that the evening would feel... I didn’t want it to be a tone deaf strange thing where somehow I made it worse or whatever, and so I was consulting with a few of my very close friends. Peaches turned out to be the person who gave me the best advice. She said, “Yeah. Maybe go out and make a speech at the beginning, like acknowledge it, but the speech should basically be saying ‘When I come back out here to play my concert, I’m just going to do the best concert I can do like it would have been on November 12th instead of 13th,’” and to sort of acknowledge it at the beginning but to trust that in my set there were all the right emotions there, anyway, and the people who wanted to be there will have already thought it through, they want to be there, and they just want to see a Chilly Gonzales concert. That was the best advice I heard. I had conflicting advice. Some people were like, “Ooh. Don’t do your raps. Just make it somber, like an elegy.” I was like, “Is that right? Isn’t that going to be sort of letting the terrorists win or whatever?” Your mind goes through all of these machinations of, “How do I pull off this moment?” That moment, I need the advice of the close collaborators and close friends. I rely on it.

Audience Member

Yeah. Watching your interview, I got this vibe of sort of Erik Satie meets The Marx Brothers in a sense. I was wondering if there are any musical comedians of the variety like Victor Borge or Danny Kaye.

Chilly Gonzales

Victor Borge is kind of... Some of your parents might know him. He was from the ’50s and ’60s. He was on American TV quite a bit. He was a Danish guy, and he did a kind of... He was a great musician, but he somehow couldn’t play the role of the polite concert pianist, so he did these theatrical shows where he would just play with the music, and he would do stupid things like pull out his score, and it would be upside down, and he wouldn’t know it. We would hear him play the song that you recognized upside down, and he’d play stuff backwards, or he would play “Happy Birthday” in the style of 10 different composers, just playing with music like it’s a toy. A lot of things I do on stage are influenced by him, a lot of his humor is very much dad humor on the surface, but, in each case, there is some sort of musical truth that needs to be unearthed in those kinds of jokes. That’s the best kind of comedy, anyway, right? Just stupid observational humor. It’s entertaining, but when you’re touched by a comedic routine, it’s not just because it’s funny, it’s because it’s unearthed some truth. Yeah. Comedy is a huge influence on me. I have enormous respect for stand-up comedians, comedic writers, and comedic actors.

Tiga

I have a question. Over here. I just want to say, first, thank you for the lecture.

Chilly Gonzales

Thank you, Tiga, superstar DJ.

Tiga

I know you’ve worked with a lot of talented people over the years, and humor seems to be quite important to you. I was wondering who is the funniest person you’ve ever worked with?

Chilly Gonzales

I can’t think of any electronic musicians from Montréal right now that I think are funny. I’m racking my brain. I feel like maybe the answer’s right in front of my nose, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. Drake’s pretty funny. You haven’t worked with him, right, Tiga? Because I have. (laughs)

Audience Member

You said that you’re not a natural collaborator, but, following your podcast and, actually just checking your credits, you’re actually the person who comes in and does a bit in a record. By a bit, I’m not just taking your work to make it little. It’s just that you come and do what you do best, and it’s really interesting for me, being sort of a music geek, too, listening to your podcast, breaking down songs to like a minimal, minimal level, and just trying to understand something that, from a theoretical point, I fully understand, but I guess I still haven’t found a voice myself. I feel like I literally can’t compose while still having all the tools for it. Everything you talk about harmony-wise and arrangement-wise is perfectly natural to me.

Chilly Gonzales

What’s your least favorite style of music. What do you hate?

Audience Member

Probably Reggaeton.

Chilly Gonzales

OK. Everyone hates Reggaeton. Come on. (laughs)

Audience Member

Oh. You know what? I...

Chilly Gonzales

No, what I mean is I think what you would have to maybe do is realize that you have to look deep, find out what really triggers you emotionally. Stop trying to listen with your brain, and be tickled by what someone’s doing. For me, there was a lot of time where I was like, “What’s that person doing? What’s that person doing? Oh that’s interesting.” That’s good for a while, but, at a certain point, you have to really say, “OK, what takes me away? What in my darkest moment is going to give me an epiphany?” And sort of focus on what it is you feel when you hear that particular style or that particular artist and understand that just because you’re tickled intellectually by a lot of music doesn’t mean you really like it. That’s the problem of having an analytical brain, in a way, is that you can forget the first job of music is to make you feel something. I had that problem a lot, and when I’m doing the masterclass breakdowns, I really try to make it clear to people I would never be interested unless I sort of felt something, to sort of figure out what it is. I did feel something when I heard that. It’s not a great piece of music or something, but it made me feel something, that Iggy Azalea song, and I was trying to figure out why. There’s so little in it, and it was such a massive song. I was amazed at how much of a mood it could create even though I’m listening going, “I only hear three things. There’s almost no drums. What’s going...” That made me curious to sort of go into it, I guess, but I think that’s a different process than if I throw on Beach House, and it just takes me away. I’m not really going to start to think about what the chords are doing, to be honest, because I’m just taken away. That just supersedes everything. It’s always a good lesson to remember. You don’t listen to music the same way when it hits you emotionally hard or when you’re listening as a musician who’s maybe secretly gathering ideas and testing yourself against what other musicians are doing. You have to choose your moments to feel like you’re part of something with all the other musicians, because that can give you a complex about originality and stuff like that, and it’s very difficult to know what is originality all about, because if I were in a vacuum and wasn’t aware of what any other musician ever did, I’m guessing I would still come up with music that is my own. If I wasn’t aware of what continuum I’m part of, does that make me original?

In a way, you have to stay in your bubble and trust that you are... Maybe think of when you fell in love with music, also. Think of when you were, I don’t know what age you might have been when you had a certain moment. Try to get closer to that way of listening to music, because all the training and analysis that you might have done since then has given you something, but it’s also made other muscles in your musical body, they’ve kind of atrophied. In my case, it was like that. I had to literally force myself to remember to not always analyze music and find some other part of my brain. Luckily, I remembered back to the moments when I felt emotionally connected to music, where it was like The Smiths, which, musically, are not a very virtuosic band. They’re not a musician-y band at all. It’s much more about Morrissey’s personality and the lyrics. That was important for me to remember. My brother, older brother, who was a bit more into musician-y music, when I was into The Smiths, he’d be like, “How can you listen to them? They don’t even have a keyboard player.” I was like, “OK, great. Yes. I am different from my brother. I feel something so strong when I hear those Smiths songs.” That is more valuable, despite the fact that there’s no way for me to steal from it in a direct way, because there’s no keyboard player, and they’re playing their instruments in a way that’s very natural and not about being musicians, in a way.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Emma Warren

Okay. Is there time for one more, or are we at a point... We are at a point where we’re just going to say Chilly Gonzales, thank you very much. (applause)

Chilly Gonzales

Thank you guys.