Jeremy Greenspan
Jeremy Greenspan got his start in Hamilton, Ontario, where in 1999 he founded Junior Boys with Johnny Dark, an electronic pop duo that took inspiration from the vastness of their surroundings, house and techno and the small moments of emotion in everyday life. The pair spent years working out of their bedroom studio, collaborating and making demos, but seemingly getting nowhere. It was after Dark had left the band in 2002 that their demo was eventually heard by KIN Records, and the Junior Boys officially debuted in 2003 as Greenspan and Matt Didemus, his engineer. An album followed in 2004, Last Exit, followed by releases on Domino Records, collaborations with Caribou and Fennesz and a shortlist nomination for the 2007 Polaris Music Prize. In 2015, the band released its fifth studio album and Greenspan continues a prolific solo career as producer and remixer.
In this lecture at the 2007 Red Bull Music Academy, the electro balladeer retraced his musical journey from the shores of Lake Ontario to Berlin’s Berghain, via a chance meeting with Kode9 and some early internet hype.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt It’s great that after a full week we finally have some more or less local talent to represent this tiny, tiny country... [with] just a bit of square miles to its name. Please welcome Mr. Jeremy Greenspan [applause]. The reason why he’s here is not only because he’s Canadian. That would be way too simple, there’s another forty mil... you know, how many? Yeah, so there must be other reasons. I guess it’s pretty fair to say that especially in remix format, there was not an entire... not a single packed dance floor in the last 12 months where your voice has not appeared. [inaudible], but he did original music as well before someone started to remix it. That is not the interesting fact in itself either, but I guess through your stories that you’re going to share and maybe some hands-on things with the lovely little piece of engineering over there, or pieces, rather. A lot in your stories will actually speak, ideally to a lot of people, because it’s not... I mean, Hamilton, Ontario is not exactly London’s West End. Jeremy Greenspan That’s right, yeah. [picking up microphone] I should probably use this thing, yeah [laughs]. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, that would be a helpful thing. You can really tell that he’s got stage experience. The name Junior Boys might be a bit of confusing to some, because just being a couple of sayings. We’ve got a lot of, “Ooh, ooh, ooh” here. I mean, it’s been the label that’s been hinting at that. I mean, it’s the Junior Boys and all that kind of thing. Are you doing LAD’s music? Jeremy Greenspan No. You know, I didn’t even think about that label until after we had released something and someone had mentioned it to me. I said, “Oh, yeah. That was kind of dumb.” [chuckles], but by then, the name had already kind of stuck. I’m hoping that we don’t get sued by Underworld or whoever runs that label, I can’t remember. Torsten Schmidt Terry Farley? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, yeah [laughs]. Torsten Schmidt When you finally released something, it’s probably interesting to know that you guys did not just appear out of thin air last year or the year before that. You’ve been, I mean, the name or the project itself existed for quite a bit before that, right? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, I think the first stuff that we ever did would have been a couple years ago now, I guess. Yeah, I suppose almost five or six years ago. First thing we ever released as Junior Boys was in 2003. Torsten Schmidt You actually started doing stuff in the old millennium, right? Jeremy Greenspan Oh, yeah, certainly, but nothing that would have been particularly interesting to anybody. You know, like lots of people I’ve making music and stuff since I was a kid. When we did the Junior Boys thing, it was kind of a deliberate, sort of idea as to… we wanted to do something very specific, I think. I suppose probably around 2000 is probably when we would have started our first couple of tracks, none of which were ever released. Even by the time we had released our first album, some of those songs on the first album were kind of our first album was kind of a collection of songs that we had written over the past year or two beforehand, so some of them are pretty old, yeah. Torsten Schmidt So luckily, we yesterday passed the lovely town of Hamilton twice on our way to the Niagara Falls. Jeremy Greenspan That must have been great for you guys. Torsten Schmidt It really was a shattering experience, but I guess there’s a little bit more to the town than those plants that you see that dominate the skyline, is there? Jeremy Greenspan No, that’s about it [laughs]. Musically speaking, Hamilton is a, I suppose it’s not particularly interesting. There’s been a couple of bands who have come out recently. One of whose shirts I’m wearing right now, Caribou. He used to be called Manitoba, now he’s called Caribou and he’s from Hamilton as well. Torsten Schmidt He’s just done one of the more interesting albums of this year. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, pick up that album. There’s a guy, I don’t know if you guys know there’s a label called Stones Throw and there’s a guy named Koushik who’s also from Hamilton, and he’s on that label. He’s about to be releasing his first album pretty soon, but he’s had a couple of EPs and did stuff with Percee P and stuff like that. Anyway, we all kind of grew up together and all friends. So kind of representing our hometown to some extent. Torsten Schmidt If I put my journalist hat on for a second, I’d be going like, “Hang on, Caribou, Koushik, Junior Boys.” There seems to be like a certain shared love for melody and classic pop and just empathy and pathos to a degree. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, I mean, it’s a fairly depressing city, I suppose. It’s got that sort of a Canadian version of Pittsburgh or something like that or maybe in England Sheffield or one these kind of very industrial sort of cities. Unusual, strange kind of people. I think what made... what makes it interesting for me and why I choose to still live there is the fact that there’s no particular pressure in the city to be a part of a particular scene or particular genre. When I first started making music, electronic music, dance music and stuff like that, the notion was that you’re going to try and make some music that kind of apes something that’s going on somewhere in a much more exciting place. You’re going to... Torsten Schmidt You mean like London 25 years ago? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, basically you sit there and try and make, I don’t know, make drum & bass records or you’re going to make Detroit techno records or something like that. It just doesn’t make any sense. You’re in this city where you have no context or contact to what’s going on in London or something like that, and try and make this music that’s kind of their music. In general, those kind of scenes tend to be extremely insular. They have their own crew of guys that make that kind of music. Generally speaking, outsiders don’t usually become involved all that much. I remember at the time, there was kind of a crew, in Toronto, there would be these sort of Toronto drum & bass producers or Toronto Detroit techno producers and the whole thing always seemed kind of pathetic to me [laughs]. These kind of people doing something that really wasn’t their own, it was someone else’s. I think what was good about being in a city like Hamilton is that there was no pressure for me to try and fit in to any kind of particular sound. I sort of feel as though we were able to make the kind of music where it doesn’t categorically fit anywhere in particular, which is, I think a positive thing. Torsten Schmidt I mean, it’s a definitely a different thing compared to, as we learned earlier, making music with people or for people, by their [inaudible] same kind of place. Definitely, there’s a bit of an influence, which is kind of obvious there as well. It’s just that those people are rather... Jeremy Greenspan We definitely wear our influences on our sleeve, definitely. We sort of... there’s certain types of music that we grew up with. From record to record, actually, from our first record we had a sort particular sound and a very particular set of influences that we were interested in at the time. Then, when we did our second record, which is – we only have two records – our second record, we were sort of listening to different stuff, different material. I think that the record sounds different because of it, but hopefully, you just sort of become confident thinking, “Well, if I make it, it’s going to be me, it’s going to be us, it’s going to sound like us.” You don’t have to worry too much about whether or not you sound like yourself or not, because I was initially worried, thinking, “Gee, this second record doesn’t sound like the first record. I hope that the people who like the first record also like this one.” That would be a little bit stressful, but you sort of choose to ignore it after a while. Torsten Schmidt Should we maybe get a bit of an example of how that evolution went, so that it’s slightly less abstract for people who did not follow? Jeremy Greenspan Oh, I would, but I don’t even have any of my own music here [laughs]. Torsten Schmidt We might just have to get back to the humming state of things. Jeremy Greenspan Oh, sure. Torsten Schmidt You played earlier on, while we were at lunch, a couple of influences that, yeah, as you said, you’re wearing on your sleeve. Can you probably just give us a medley there and run through it? Jeremy Greenspan Sure. Let’s see. Well, when we first started making music, as Junior Boys... Torsten Schmidt Probably hang on for a second. You always talk about “we” and the lineup has changed slightly over the years. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, that’s right. When I started the band, it was myself and a friend of mine named John. Then, it was sort of a long story, how we got signed and all that kind of stuff, but... Torsten Schmidt I guess there’s something interesting in that story, because it wasn’t like you went up to your local record store and there was the guy who signed it. Jeremy Greenspan OK, yeah. Well, I could tell that story if you want [chuckles]. Torsten Schmidt I mean, that’s a situation where quite a few people will find themselves into. Jeremy Greenspan Sure, OK. Well, basically, I started the group with a friend of mine named John. I was at university at the time. We just made music as most people do, just for fun. With no real ambition to do it professionally or anything like that. Anyway, I have a friend who, at the time... Actually, you just had, the last speaker was on Tempa Records, right? Right, so my friend is a guy named Steve Goodman who runs a label called, which you might know, I don’t know. He goes by the name Kode9. Anyway, he used to run a website called hyperdub.com. I don’t even know if hyperdub.com even exists anymore. Anyway, it did for a time, and he would sort of run articles. I used to live in England when I was 17, and we lived together, so I met him when I was pretty young. Anyway, I had made this music, this stuff onto Junior Boys with my friend John. He asked if I would send him, I think, three songs, one of which called “Birthday” ended up on our first album and was actually the first song that we ever released. Anyway, we put it up on this website, and he put a little interview with me and so forth. What happened was a couple of journalists, British journalists mainly, started writing on their own blogs online. I think this was at a time when blogs were quite new. They started writing about our songs online and posting links to it and stuff like that. Unbeknownst to us, it started generating a little bit of very kind of minor press through these Internet sites, enough so that I started getting requests from journalists. I’d get these weird emails that would be like, “Hello, I write for such and such magazine. We’ve heard about you and we want a CD,” thinking that we had released something. I’d send them these CD-Rs with my little hand drawing or something like that and say, “Hey, go nuts.” It started getting reviews, which was the weirdest thing. Like, who gets a review for a CD-R that they send off in the mail? Eventually, I got an email from a guy named Nick Kilroy who was a completely manic guy who sort of said, “Listen, I work for Warp Records” – [to audience] you guys probably know Warp Records – “We’re going to do a whole bunch of 12 inches of unknown groups and we want you guys to be one of them.” I said, “Sure. That sounds great.” At this point, I had absolutely no thought that I was going to be doing music. I was applying to schools and all that kind of stuff. Anyway... Eventually, he started emailing me all the time, this guy Nick. Eventually, it came out that he said, “Well, listen. Warp isn’t going to do this, after all.” To this day, I kind of have the feeling that he made the whole thing up to begin with. Torsten Schmidt Why would people on the Internet ever do such a thing? Jeremy Greenspan He did definitely work for Warp, but I don’t know if he was ever really an A&R guy or... Torsten Schmidt Someone needs to take out the trash. Jeremy Greenspan Exactly. Anyway, he eventually quit his job at Warp Records in order to start his own record label, which he did. He started this record label, which he called KIN. The first thing that he released on it was an EP of ours, which was this song, “Birthday,” and a couple other songs. At that point, my friend, John, had gotten a very high-powered job in the video game industry where he still is. He laughed. At that point, I didn’t have any expectation to do anything else, but then Nick came to me and said, “Listen. Do you think you could do a whole album?” I said, “OK. I’ll give it a shot.” I, then, recorded the rest of what became our first album. At that point, I asked my friend, who I had done music with basically my whole life since I was a kid, his name is Matt Didemus, to help me finish this record. Since then, Matt became the other part of the band. We finished an album. It was called Last Exit and we released that through KIN, initially, in Europe. Very limited release. It was through that release that that album got picked up by a much bigger record label, Domino Records, who is our record label now. They initially were just a label that just licensed us through Nick. But then, Nick sadly passed away and then eventually we turned over to Domino Records. That’s how we ended up on that. Torsten Schmidt Can you probably explain a little bit more what’s the difference as an artist to be on a label and then be licensed for another label? That sounds a bit like human trafficking. Jeremy Greenspan [laughs] Basically, it’s just a music business thing. Sometimes people like to own all their material and then have the option to license their... Think about it like lending your music, so to speak, for a limited time to various record labels who operate in certain territories. For example, you might be a German musician, and you own all of your rights to your music, and you say, “I want this music to be released in Canada.” You find a Canadian record label, and you say, “I’m going to license this album to you, if you’d like it, for a certain fee. You have the right to release it exclusively or maybe not exclusively in your country for a limited amount of time.” It’s very attractive for, I would say, most people, but for people like me who don’t relish the idea of being involved in the music industry, so to speak, having to deal with those kinds of decisions all the time, because that’s what that requires, often a better option is to sign with a record label for the world. In those kinds of situations, you want to find a record label that you really, really like or who really, really likes you and that are filled with really nice people, and people that are excited about you and sign your life away. That’s what I did. Torsten Schmidt This whole territorial thing. To which degree does it make sense with a lot of the business swapping over to the internet as the main carrier? Jeremy Greenspan I suppose it depends on... Even on the internet, from what I understand, most internet sales happen through iTunes and iTunes still exists on a territorial basis. There’s iTunes Canada, iTunes U.S., and all of that licensing all works on that territorial basis. Actually, we’ve been very fortunate that we have a very large proportion of our record sales actually happen through iTunes. They’ve been very kind to us. Yeah, you have to license your stuff to iTunes on the basis of what country. I don’t think they even have a relationship... I’m sure they have relationships with each other, but it doesn’t works that if you’re on iTunes Canada, automatically you’re going to be on iTunes U.S. or iTunes Europe. Torsten Schmidt Without turning this into a commercial, when you said earlier you don’t have any of the music with you, can we probably get your computer because it’s set up to the internet, and use it as a means of playing some of the music? Jeremy Greenspan Of my music? Yeah, sure. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, because I think it’s easier if we just take one that’s set up. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. Torsten Schmidt It’s my dodgy way of seeing how the game’s running, but don’t worry. I’m unplugging this, so there might be a hum. Jeremy Greenspan Who’s winning? Who’s playing anyway? Torsten Schmidt It’s still 0-0. Jeremy Greenspan Is this German league? Is this two cities no one’s ever heard of, like, Freiburg versus Regensburg? Torsten Schmidt It’s even worse. It’s the bottom of the second division, so you don’t want to know. Yanik, if you see this, we’re going to whoop your ass. Because it’s his team against my team, and it’s the 81st minute, and it’s still 0-0. It sounds like an exciting game, eh? Oh, there we go. Jeremy Greenspan I don’t think there’s any music on our website. Our website is terrible. Torsten Schmidt There’s this other thing. What’s it like? The promotional thing? Jeremy Greenspan MySpace. Torsten Schmidt No, no, no, not that one. Jeremy Greenspan Oh. Torsten Schmidt Another promotional thing for the tour where you’re... Jeremy Greenspan At the video competition thing? Torsten Schmidt Yeah, that’s... Jeremy Greenspan Oh, the sothisisgoodbye.com, that thing? Torsten Schmidt Yeah, something like that. Jeremy Greenspan Basically what happens there is that we’re like guinea pigs, so Domino will hire some guy who’s really good at doing stuff on the internet, and they’re like, “Let’s make a Junior Boys website with this guy who can make bubbles that talk,” or something. Torsten Schmidt What’s it called? Because there’s lots of music on there. Jeremy Greenspan Is there? Torsten Schmidt Yeah. There’s also this other thing where there’s, like, two full live concerts as well. Jeremy Greenspan You know it all, better than I do. Oh, Fabchannel. That’s not a good one to use because I forgot all the lyrics of that concert. Torsten Schmidt Well, there’s two concerts. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, both of them are terrible, but... Torsten Schmidt Okay, it’s for concerts that are screened out of Amsterdam, maybe. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, at the Paradiso club, which is a beautiful club. Really, really, really old club. Torsten Schmidt What’s... Jeremy Greenspan sothisisgoodbye.com. Or, you can just go to our MySpace page, I suppose. I probably should have brought my own music instead of setting up all of these Orchestral Maneuver in the Dark tracks that probably nobody wants to listen to. Torsten Schmidt There’s nothing wrong with that. The only thing that I find quite interesting is when you say you were born in ’79, and listening to the thing, and the first thing that really pops up is Tora, Tora, Tora, and Vince Clarke. Did you have an older brother who listened to that kind of stuff? Jeremy Greenspan No, but I kind of got into that stuff through another guy. There was a guy, his name’s Mark Fisher. He runs a website called k-punk, which is a really good website. He taught me all this kind of stuff when I was about 16. I came to new wave and ’80s synth pop music through dance music because most people who make... Most people who I listened to who made dance music were... (music starts playing) There’s a stop button. Just make that go away. Most people who, traditionally, I listened to - Old Detroit and house producers, early house producers stuff like that - are all a generation older than me. Sometimes two generations older than me. Those are all people who would have grown up listening to Giorgio Moroder, or Vince Clarke, or whoever. It was through those kind of people. Sort of like that thing, you know. Hearing Japan samples and Goldie records, stuff like that, that got me interested. Torsten Schmidt So it’s actually the same way as people who would get into soul and funk music through listening to hip-hop. Jeremy Greenspan Exactly, yeah. That’s exactly right. Torsten Schmidt The one thing that at least from afar, for your sense of space and distance, cities like Detroit and Chicago are relatively close to where you grew up. How big was the interchange between those scenes here? Jeremy Greenspan It was really big for me. In Hamilton, there was a close proximity to Detroit. I’m assuming most of you guys probably know who Richie Hawtin is Richie Hawtin, John Acquaviva, and those people owned a record label called Plus 8, which is out of Windsor, Ontario, which is about two hours from Hamilton. There was a Hamilton label called Steel City Records, which was run through Plus 8 and Probe and all of those... Torsten Schmidt Can we get some more laptops in here? (laughs) Jeremy Greenspan All of those networks. Every Friday night at this one club, they would bring in another Detroit techno DJ up. Every Friday night, they would have another Detroit techno DJ guys like, lesser known guys, like Aux 88 and Dee-win, and those kind of people. Then, they would bring out... Derrick May would come or Jeff Mills would come, but often Richie Hawtin would come and play. I remember seeing Richie Hawtin playing. It was one of the first things I ever went to as a kid. I went probably in the early ’90s. I was probably 15 years old and went to see Richie Hawtin play at a little club in Hamilton where they had done everything. They would put plastic all over the walls and everybody was losing their minds on Red Bull. That was how I got indoctrinated into that world, so to speak. Torsten Schmidt Interestingly, because you mentioned Stones Throw earlier the same way as those guys are probably Koushik’s probably not a good example because stylistically, he’s slightly off their radar. In a similar way, as most of these guys are a lot closer to the original roots of funk and soul music, you are actually a lot closer to the roots of those DJs that you liked. You went to the same school as Richie, but there’s a lot more of that influence than let’s say the latest Minus release. Jeremy Greenspan It’s partly that’s just what I’ve immersed myself in more lately. On the last record for example, I listened to almost... The main impetus for the last record was sort of late disco and early house music. I suppose that kind of influence is what would have been the influence for early techno records as well. I just wasn’t making techno music. I was making my own music, but coming from a similar influential place, I suppose. Torsten Schmidt Should we probably unplug this again? I’ve been working as a waiter for long enough to do this. Don’t worry. So, which one to pick? Jeremy Greenspan These are all from my second record. Torsten Schmidt I mean, what do you expect? You turn up here and it looks like now you’re complaining. Jeremy Greenspan I know. Torsten Schmidt There’s even the remixes. Jeremy Greenspan Oh yeah, you even got the remixes. I don’t know. I guess, why don’t you play... Actually, you know what? I’m going to play something first. Torsten Schmidt Okay. Jeremy Greenspan I’m going to play something first and then... Torsten Schmidt Do we need to get some more computers first? Jeremy Greenspan No, no, no. This will be alright. I’m going to play you guys some early house music that influenced a lot of what was happening on our latest record. So maybe it will give you guys sense here. Nice. This is a totally classic house track that you probably all know anyway and I’m not going to play the whole thing because it’s like eight minutes. How does this work when you guys have eight minute songs? Do you just play two minutes of it or something like that? Torsten Schmidt Just give us a sense of it. Jeremy Greenspan OK. Alright. Well, this is Jamie Principle with Frankie Knuckles, “Your Love.” (music: Frankie Knuckles feat. Jamie Principle - “Your Love” / applause) OK, so I’ll just play you two seconds of... Here’s me patently ripping him off. (music: Junior Boys - “Like A Child” / applause) Torsten Schmidt There is also a bit of R&D involved, especially later on when you start singing. Jeremy Greenspan The thing about Jamie Principle and the thing that excites me about early house music and sort of late disco, early ’80s disco, is the way in which the music was sort of in between genres. There was a time at which people were making house music when they were making it for the Warehouse Club in Chicago or making it for The Music Box or making it for the Paradise Garage, or all of those kind of clubs, when there was no sort of rules and there was no sort of set guidelines for what the music was supposed to be. It was called house music because it was the music that was played at the house club and they just thought, I suppose, that they were making disco music. What’s exciting for me about that time is that no sort of genre had actually coalesced so there’s a total feeling of free experimentation. I think that’s the sort of moment that I’d like to try and capture to some extent. I don’t think of us as making retro music. I don’t try and ape, particularly, those kinds of songs verbatim. I think in order to do that I’d probably have to get a whole bunch of vintage equipment and do it and set the conditions up to do it the way they did it and stuff like that. I tend to like to use new stuff and to try and be forward thinking and think about making stuff that’s as contemporary as possible. With the notion that what I take from that moment is the sense of freedom about it and the sense of just kind of total experimentation. Yet, trying to make music that is pop music that’s not alienating, it’s not particularly difficult for a dance floor or for a casual listener to understand. Torsten Schmidt It’s a lot more about the general aesthetics rather than fetishizing about a certain piece of equipment or the actual sound? Jeremy Greenspan Exactly, exactly. I think when we started making music as the Junior Boys that came out five or six years ago, I think at the exact moment when we did our first release is when there were bands coming out, you know these sort of bands from Brooklyn or stuff, who kind of were doing a lot of sort of ’80s aesthetic music. This sort of electro-clash music and stuff like that, which I had an immediate sort of distaste towards because I thought that the whole thing was sort of trying to be ironic and trying to sort of... You know, that kind of ’80s aesthetic of... There’s certain types of ’80s music which I don’t have a particular affinity towards which is that sort of very rigid electro-music where they sort of sing about kind of being in sports cars and smoking cigarettes. That whole ’80s vibe which I had no particular interest in. For me, the music that I liked I thought was actually fairly emotionally sophisticated. Bands like Japan and Ultravox and stuff like that. I didn’t really particularly want to be lumped in with anybody who I thought was sort of making fun of the ’80s. That never interested me. Torsten Schmidt I guess it was kind of hard for you guys because obviously as the listener you’re like, “Oh no, here’s another one of those.” You have to overcome this kind of prejudgment of like, hang on, but there’s something different about these guys that sets them apart from the also ironic asymmetric haircuts. Jeremy Greenspan I think with us we managed to avoid most of that by the fact that, first of all when we came out we had such a sort of R&B influence... It was just the aesthetic of what we were doing was I think too rooted in what was happening. Basically it just was not faithful enough to the ’80s for people to particularly say we were an electro-clash group or something like that as opposed to some of the other bands where they have these sort of ... You know, it’s all 808 drum machines and... Torsten Schmidt You mean you actually liked something that was happening after 1986. Jeremy Greenspan Happened after 1986. Exactly. I think that because of that we managed to never actually be lumped into that. At the same time I’m kind of glad that that stuff seems to have waned in popularity somewhat. Torsten Schmidt Ideally, yeah. It doesn’t really take a doctors degree in psychology to figure out that there’s a great deal of melancholy involved in these kind of things as well. Now, again, from the outside looking in, Canada might strike you as a place where melancholy might hit you now and then. Jeremy Greenspan It has that kind of northern flavor. It’s funny that when we go abroad usually we seem to be most popular in other northern countries. For example, we’ve done really well in Sweden and in Norway and to some extent in Germany. Places where it’s conceivable that people could be quite depressed. Where it gets cold at night and so forth. I’m not particularly a depressive person. I get asked that quite a bit. I like to write songs I think that are somewhat emotionally honest. Most of the time when people write songs, often love songs or something like that, the tendency is to write very overwrought emotions. They’re about immense, enormous pain or overjoy, which to me doesn’t really speak to the reality of what day to day life is. Day to day life I think is usually some sort of assemblage of very small imperceptible emotions often and things that are usually somewhere between being overjoyed and sad. I guess the word melancholy, people use that word as a blanket almost for what actual, I think, day to day life actually is. For me writing the album, I was trying to sort of speak emotionally about things that are part of my daily life which is why so much of the record is about being on highways or being in sort of suburban zones and places like that because that’s where I’m from and that’s my routine so to speak. Those things sort of speak to me emotionally. People forget that people who grow up in places like Canada also have emotional lives too. Their emotional lives are usually dependent on all of the experiences that they have. I think if you live perhaps in a historical city, a city of great significance like New York City or something like that, then you have a lot of emotional attachment to things that for the whole world are iconic. You can sing a song about... Just take any kind of... Just sort of thinking, like any sort of Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen kind of song about being on whatever 42nd Avenue or a song about Broadway or something like, that the whole world can understand and relate to because they’re these iconic things. For the rest of us, we have our emotional lives that are attached to places that are sometimes neither here nor there. They’re the mall that you went to when you were a kid, or the highway that you drive every day, or something like that. To me, I thought making a kind of romantic album about those spaces was kind of more honest. It’s sort of about what I was talking about earlier, about trying to not pretend to be anyone that you’re not in your music. Torsten Schmidt How many people are living in the GTA? Jeremy Greenspan In the GTA, which Hamilton is not part of yet, the GTA would probably be, I would assume, around four million. Probably four or five million. Torsten Schmidt Montreal? Jeremy Greenspan Montreal is maybe a million or two. Torsten Schmidt Vancouver? Jeremy Greenspan Vancouver is probably about a million. I think Calgary has just overtaken... Calgary is the largest growing city in the country. Torsten Schmidt So you got four cities which combine seven million and you got 40 in total and land mass that is what, four or five times the size of Europe? Jeremy Greenspan It’s remarkable. Torsten Greenspan What happens when the rest... Jeremy Greenspan I think there’s a particular thing... I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that most people in the room have not done a massive American road trip at any point in their life, but has anybody ever done that? You have? OK. The experience of driving in America is an interesting one because America is a big country. Not as big in land mass as Canada, but it’s a very large country. Torsten Schmidt Just [inaudible]. Jeremy Greenspan Just so everyone knows we’re bigger. Anyway, the interesting thing about being in America is that you can drive in any direction. You can take any highway you want and you’re going to end up somewhere. You’re going to end up maybe in California and Los Angeles. You’re going to end up in a city or a state or a place that you have some understanding of where it is. You know? With a community there. With a culture there. With a group of people that... You know, any direction you go you will end up somewhere. Canada is completely different. If you drive, for example, if you drive on any other highway aside from the one that goes to Toronto, you will end up in the middle of nowhere. It’s a kind of nowhere that your mind can only begin to understand. I urge any of you... You’re lucky that you’re actually in Canada for arguably the most beautiful time you could possibly be here. I’d be remiss I suppose if... I guess, am I the sole Canadian person? Torsten Schmidt No, there’s going to be more than one. Jeremy Greenspan OK, good. Torsten Schmidt You can fly the flag... Jeremy Greenspan I’ll fly the flag anyway. If you have the chance to go up north at some point and to go to something like Algonquin Park or something, or Temagami. When I was a kid I used to go with my parents to Temagami, which literally you can go to a lake and go camping and there’s not going to be another person for 200 miles or something. You can go to Algonquin Park. Algonquin Park is probably bigger than Germany. It’s nuts and it kind of... I remember a couple of months ago I was flying to Vancouver and you get out of the plane after your 6 hour flight and you instinctively look for your passport. Then you go, “Oh my gosh, I’m in the same country, I totally forgot.” Which I think Americans can understand that sense to some extent. I think Europeans have zero idea as to what that possibly means. Torsten Schmidt For us we’ve only got car wise, apart from Montreal and stuff, we only got 3 hours North so far and even there... Europe you would have passed about 82 different countries. Jeremy Greenspan Exactly. Torsten Schmidt I had to learn I don’t know how many different languages and dialects. And there you just see this road which just has to go through this really tough granite kind of stone where you can really see that it takes them ages and loads and loads of money to dynamite the road through this nature. All the cities are down here. What’s the psyche behind knowing that there is so much of what’s you and your heritage just... Jeremy Greenspan I think your notion of distance is much different. Especially European. I dated a girl who was from England and her grandparents lived in Manchester. Until they were 80 years old they had never been to London in their life. Which I thought was pretty incredible. For those who don’t know that’s maybe a three hour drive or something like that. I don’t know a three or four hour drive. To drive from here to Vancouver would take four or five days or something like that. I think the sense of distance is the central one but I think what for me I love about this country... The thing that interests me should I say, is that when you are here in this part of the country – and don’t forget that this is the most densely populated part of Canada, between here and Woodland, Windsor and the Golden Horseshoe as it’s known – is the fact that you have these cities that are very young cities. They have no real historical rooting in any of the sense that a European city would have or an Asian city would have. They are kind of seemingly carved out of the wilderness. You guys maybe, at some point might be going up CN Tower. I don’t know if the music academy gets quite that touristy but if you do go up the CN Tower, you’ll see the way in which the city is actually how green Toronto is and how it looks like it is carved out of a forest. Where I’m from, Hamilton, is much more so because it’s actually on the Niagara escarpment. All of the cities in the country are like that. You just need to go outside of the city for 10 minutes and look at a forest and realize that this empty space goes on for another 1000 miles or something like that. Gives you a funny perspective. People have commented that I make Canadian records and I sort of embrace that to the extent that I like to make records that have a lot of empty space in them. Torsten Schmidt In case you wondered what all the semi-esoteric hoopla was all about, in the same way as all that bit earlier wasn’t an iTunes commercial, this wasn’t sponsored by the Canadian tourist board. You can actually realize when listening to the music that there’s a lot of longing involved. To use another euphemism or metaphor for the melancholy bit. Longing always got to do something with distance and something that you need to bridge. Be it longing for, in soul music, that love that you lost or that love that you will never get. Even like lots of that ’80s music that you’re citing. It’s always like that distant thing that you’re never going to get through. You’ve got a lot of different aspects involved here, right? Jeremy Greenspan Car travel is a central theme in a lot of my music. Partly because I think it’s an interesting space. I think it’s also the fact that I don’t want to make music specifically for dance floors. I don’t work at that tempo particularly. But I also don’t really want to make down tempo music so I sort of sometimes imagine to myself that I make music for the purposes of being in a car. And also, because as a touring musician so much of your life is spent inside of a car that it becomes a central part of your life. Torsten Schmidt How do you avoid cliches there? It’s the usual thing especially with young, skinny looking English bands. The first record is all about the girl that works at the counter at the local supermarket and the second one is all about fights and booze and groupies on tour. So what’s next? There must be more topics. Jeremy Greenspan Usually by the third or fourth album that’s when you employ a boys’ choir or you make a... Or you get into vaguely esoteric world music. A Peruvian nose flautist or something like that. I’m sure my fourth album will be stinking it up pretty hard. Torsten Schmidt Probably getting back to the second one a little bit, just to give you a bit more of an idea for those of you that haven’t heard it. Probably we’ll just stick with the same song because then you just skipped before the voice was coming in. Jeremy Greenspan Well, you know what why don’t you play this one because I was just talking about car travel so much. Maybe play the one that’s sort of about car travel. Torsten Schmidt OK. Maybe do this first because it’s probably kind of interesting. Jeremy Greenspan Oh, you want to hear this one. Torsten Schmidt ...and when we talk about writing music as well. Jeremy Greenspan Sure. Torsten Schmidt How you go from that obvious kind of headnod to music that you like that uses space in a different sense. Jeremy Greenspan Sure. (music: Junior Boys - “Like a Child”) There are certain songs on the record that are kind of about youthful innocence. “In The Morning,” which was our single from the record, is about that, so to speak. Sort of youthful. There it is. Another kind of Jamie Principle rip off, to be honest. (music: Junior Boys - “In the Morning”) Nostalgia... I got it back. When you say what went wrong with the whole ’80s thing and drawing influences from it. What threw a lot of people off with the whole electric clash thing was this massive backlash of rockers. Everything that was bad about rock just brought back electronically amplified really. Now you have to go and perform this stuff in some sort of a live capacity because that’s essentially how people make money these days as musicians. Now, how do you stay away from these sort of rockers? Jeremy Greenspan I think that’s a difficult one. I tend to be a bit of a... I tend to be a little annoying about these sorts of things. I think... Often people ask me about the state of contemporary dance music and contemporary electronic music and I sort of had a feeling when I was first listening to this kind of music that it was sort of the antithesis to rock & roll. That was what was exciting about it. The guitars were over and that rock & roll as a paradigm for making contemporary music was not important anymore. We could start from a different place, you know. Maybe like a sort of disco place or something like that. Of course that didn’t turn out the way I thought it might. And I suppose the way I think a lot of people might of thought of that. And now, increasingly in dance music even there’s a lot of people making dance music these days where it’s becoming very popular. Where it’s very much kind of rock music made with in dance music format. Torsten Schmidt Without naming any names but... Jeremy Greenspan Without naming any French names. Torsten Schmidt Not any particular names with that I used in the English language as well, but yeah. There’s loads of the lowest common denominator stuff really. Jeremy Greenspan Some of it. Some of it’s very good and some of it’s not very good. Torsten Schmidt We’re not talking about people using stacks of Marshall amps that are not switched on, are we? Jeremy Greenspan For me, I think that when we do live shows it’s difficult and it’s difficult to try and make sure that you don’t do Junior Boys of the rock & roll show. At the same time, anybody who’s ever gone to a show and seen a guy standing behind a laptop knows how tedious that can be. If you’re going to do live music and if you want to be a working musician, you have to or else you’re not going to make any money. You have to try and come up with some kind of compromise whereby you’re doing something that you believe in and at the same time you’re not alienating people or boring them. I don’t know if we have the perfect balance but we increasingly are trying to. We’ve done, we toured the first record, and I don’t think we had such a great show on our first record. We were very eager to try and change what we had done. The idea was to make it much more live in terms of... With the first time ewe toured, there was an element to it, that there was a sort of karaoke element to it that I was never comfortable with, which is that there was a lot of backing tracks going and essentially playing keyboards a little bit and singing over top of that, which, for me, I didn’t think that was a satisfying live experience for either myself or for anybody. The second time, on the second album, we decided that we would first of all get a live drummer, which is quite a large decision to make, because we don’t use live drums at all on the record. I thought a live drummer provided for us a flexibility and also an element of fun and something to look at. With our drummer he certainly is something to look at. Then to use a soft... Torsten Schmidt Is [inaudible] drummer? Jeremy Greenspan No, no. He kind of looks like... You should go to MySpace. He’ll love this. He’ll love me plugging this. myspace.com/fostx – F-O-S-T-X – to get some great shots of him. He makes music as well. Extremely destructive industrial Gothic. I don’t know what it is. Names that are all in Latin and stuff like that. Anyway, we got him to drum for us. We wanted him in specific because he wasn’t a drummer. He was like an old techno DJ or an old techno producer. He did stuff on Plus-A Records and stuff. We thought that he would be coming from a place that could understand us somewhat. Then we just used the...Instead of doing backing tracks, we had the stuff going through a sequencer live, so that Matt, who does mostly electronics, had some flexibility to play around. Then of course I just sing and dance around and so forth. Torsten Schmidt You said if you want to make a living as a musician, you’ve got to be touring. A lot of this music actually does provide for some sort of an audio book kind of play, background. Background is probably too negatively connotated, but it’s more like a listening experience, maybe armchair, headphones, whatever. A comfort zone kind of listening thing. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. Torsten Schmidt All of a sudden you stand there with the stuff that you did in a comfort zone and you find yourself on a stage carrying some Fender product, a bass or guitars, Strat or whatnot? Jeremy Greenspan Rickenbacker. Torsten Schmidt Some classic rock iconic thing. Jeremy Greenspan A big Lemmy bass guitar, which is what I have. Torsten Schmidt You look into all these faces and they might enjoy it but you just stand there. Jeremy Greenspan We cater, we tend to choose our live set based on trying to make it as exciting a show as it can be. We don’t play many of our... We had a choice as a group. We could have done theater tours. We could have been one of those bands that does theater tours where you go and you play quieter music and people sit down in theaters. Or, we could have done basically rock venue tours. I think we as a band chose to do rock venue tours because I think they’re more exciting to play. We choose sets that are mainly more up tempo stuff and we tend to make it even more up temp when we play it live. Usually we can have a fairly ruckus crowd. I don’t think it matters particularly because we’ve toured with a lot of bands. People will dance to anything. Torsten Schmidt Do they actually dance or is more the friendly nodding type? Jeremy Greenspan No, no, no, no. We get a full dancing crowd. I remember fairly recently we toured in England with Hot Chip, I don’t know if you guys know Hot Chip. They’re a great band. I remember we were playing in Scotland and... Actually I should play you this. I’ll just give you this for a second. Anyway, I was playing this show with them in Scotland in Aberdeen. In my life I’ve never seen a crowd go as crazy in my life just like full on, people smashing their heads and losing their minds to Hot Chip. This is the song that they lost their minds to. (music: Hot Chip - unknown / applause) I just think it’s hilarious that people were moshing to this. People can mosh out to that, I suppose. Torsten Schmidt What’s it like when you play a festival, especially like last summer’s, and all of a sudden you’re backstage and you find yourself in the company of all those skinny bands and skinny jeans and stuff and you’re like... Jeremy Greenspan I think when we first started touring, we do a lot of press. You go into a town and people want to interview you and stuff. The single biggest question that I ever got and I still get it, but the question I always got when we first came out was, “Oh, I didn’t realize you look like that.” I think they expected I would look like a member of Interpol or something. Some sort of ashen, I don’t think they were expecting a tubby Canadian disheveled me. I think hopefully it’s endearing to people that we don’t look the part. Torsten Schmidt Did you ever feel the pressure to get a stylist or get a haircut and all these sort of things? Do some scag and go like... Jeremy Greenspan Every once in a while they do photo shoots for us. They’re always uncomfortable. We’ve done some really strange ones. They thought it’d be funny to go into Brooklyn and go into Junior’s restaurant, which is the most inner city Brooklyn restaurant you could possibly go to and we went in there with these white suits and were drinking milk and stuff like that in this photo. Everybody in that restaurant was just looking at us. It was one of those moments where you walk in and you hear a needle scratch and everybody looks at you. We’ve done all these hilarious... I remember we did a photo shoot once where it was 15 people walking around us with hairsprays and stuff like that. Then they tell you to pose and when someone points a camera at me, my inclination is I’m supposed to smile and look at the camera. When your grandma takes a picture of you, that’s what you do. There’s like hundreds of pictures of us in all these hilarious settings of all this like fog machines and just me going like... I don’t think we’ve ever worked that way as style icons. I don’t think we’re anything that I’m sure the label would be much happier if...In fact, I shaved, I’m not very shaved at the moment. I had a fairly big beard for years. And I shaved it off one day. One of the guys form the label saw a picture of me and he says, “I can’t believe you changed your look.” I said, “My look? I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know I had to consult you on that.” Torsten Schmidt What’s the feeling when you're there at a photo shoot and you’re like oh, damn, am I going like, [inaudible] now? I have to recoup all these people. Everyone who’s getting me some water here, I have to pay them. I need to sell 10 more records for just this one person. I can go get water myself. Jeremy Greenspan I think somebody somewhere is under the delusion that we’re going to be massive stars one day. I think hopefully reality will cath up to them at some point and they’ll be satisfied with us being just puttering along and being a small little band which is what we like to be. Torsten Schmidt Until then, you just use them as a bank with really shitty interest rates. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Torsten Schmidt Another way of recouping some of that is obviously the remix game. You had some remixes early on, you mentioned your friend Kode9 earlier. You had a guy from [inaudible] as well. When you were talking about your Detroit influence, it’s not the worst thing in the world to get a Carl Craig remix is it? Jeremy Greenspan No, that was great. With the remixes, a lot of groups have remixes and remix packages and albums these days. I think what’s good for us and I think refreshing for the label was the fact that we chose all of the remixers. A lot of the bands that will get remixes done, for example, we’ve done some some remixes fairly recently for bands I’m sure who have no idea who we are. We were lucky enough that we were, we could go to the label and say “Listen, this is who we want.” Some of them are friends of ours and some of them are just people we think are great. Obviously Carl Craig is a no-brainer for getting a remix done. Torsten Schmidt Yeah. Probably for the no-brainer business. Let’s get our brain rinsed for a second, because it’s the same track that we used earlier. Just as an example, we could probably break down how that works, because obviously, ideally, most of the people in this room at some stage will get to the point at some stage where they’re going to ring up Carl and go, “Hey, Carl, what you doing?” Jeremy Greenspan C squared. Torsten Schmidt Yeah. C squared. Don’t be square. It’s this thing like until next month and be quicker than with the Tony Allen thing. Just like come on, give us the goods. How does this actually work then? Jeremy Greenspan These remixes, for this album we had I think about 8 remixes done. The majority of them were done by people we were friends with. There’s one by Kode9... Torsten Schmidt Now I’m not in the lucky position to have the... Jeremy Greenspan No, that’s what I was going to get to, basically, was for a couple of them, were people that we were just fans of. The Tensnake remix, I didn’t know him at all, but we really liked his, he had that track last year “Around The House,” which I thought was awesome. Marcin Joels, also, we just wanted to get someone in. Carl Craig, I mean Carl Craig was one of those situations where you’re just like you just put out a list of names of who would you like to get remixed by, and you say Carl Craig, and presumably someone at the label calls him up and says, “Do you want to do this?” He says, “How much?” Then it’s either yes or no. That’s how it’s worked with us. There are people that are very professional remixers and people who do a lot of them. We’ve done several remixes. I don’t like doing remixes, particularly. There’s very few remixes that I’ve done that I’m particularly proud of. For that reason, I’m very reluctant to do them unless they’re for someone that I think is good or unless... I think with Carl Craig, it’s sort of an art form with him. Torsten Schmidt How would you define it art from there? Jeremy Greenspan He’s someone who’s done a lot of remixes and he does them very well. He has a sort of signature to them. Of course, when I first heard Carl Craig, the stuff that... When I think of Carl Craig, I don’t... These days, he has this particular style track that he’s been making. With him I sort of associate him with that bass [inaudible], all the older pre-drum & bass sort of, I don’t know what it is. It’s that break-beaty, jazzy, techno stuff. Torsten Schmidt You mean all the records that everyone always claims that they have. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, exactly, and no one actually has them. Torsten Schmidt It’s like [inaudible] Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, yeah. [inaudible], all that kind of stuff. That’s the stuff I associate with him more. I think when people started talking to me about Carl Craig, I was like Carl Craig, really? Then they played, I think I heard a few things before he did the...H e did this remix I think of “Brazilian Girls” or something that was really incredible. Then he had done ... Shoot, I can’t remember. He did a couple of his own tracks, like two years ago or a year ago, that I thought were also incredible. That’s good, he’s one of the people ... He’s one of those sort of original Detroit guys who’s remained very relevant and sort of exciting. Torsten Schmidt What is it like when, let’s say, you may, in a very unlikely situation, that you may have had a drink. You’re somewhere in the world. It’s 4am, there’s a of couple hundred, maybe even thousands of people there, and you’re getting your swerve on, you might be looking at someone, going like, “[inaudible]” Starting to talk to that person, and all of a sudden, you hear... Jeremy Greenspan Are you asking me dating tips right now? I don’t know where we’re going with this. Torsten Schmidt You know, it’s a holistic experience. Then all of a sudden, you hear your own voice. Jeremy Greenspan Oh, yeah. That doesn’t happen all that often, because, first of all, I don’t go out all that often. That never happens to me in a club, that always happens to me at The Gap, or something like that. I’ll be like, “Fuck it, I’m going to The Gap today. I’m going to buy a scarf.” Or something. Something I don’t need. That’s when I’ll hear one of my songs. Yeah, I just exit very very quickly when that happens. Torsten Schmidt Let’s [inaudible] Gap there for a second and maybe go into this for a bit. (music: Junior Boys - “Like a Child (Carl Craig remix)”) Jeremy Greenspan We had gotten this remix, and we got it while we were on tour. I heard it on my earphones, maybe once or twice, and I sort of said to myself, “You know, I don’t think I get this thing. I don’t get it.” We played in... Who are the Germans in the room here? How many Germans are in the room here at the moment. I know there’s a couple. Torsten Schmidt One, two, three... There. Jeremy Greenspan We went to Panorama Bar, which, OK... Torsten Schmidt Is this where you first heard it? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. We’re in Panorama Bar we played... Torsten Schmidt The big room or upstairs? Jeremy Greenspan We played in the upstairs bit, which was... It was ridiculous. There was like seven hundred people crammed into this place. Torsten Schmidt Which is the small room. And the more conservative one. Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. We’re in the more conservative room where there’s just a massive photo of a vagina behind us... We play at like, I don’t know, five in the morning or something like that. An early set. Well, you can explain this club, probably better than I can. Have you been there many times? Torsten Schmidt Well, depends. I don’t know. It’s not that many times, but yeah, I think. It’s probably one of the more original club experiences that you can have these days. What’s the main room... Jeremy Greenspan I think it must be some kind of Soviet power bunker or something like that. It’s a former power station so it’s enormously huge. It opens probably at like two in the morning or something like that, and closes...I think it’s open one day a week. It closes at nine the next night, and there’s all sorts of levels. The levels of sexual debauchery that are going on in this club are unspeakable. I think our drummer dropped his jacket in the club and he’s convinced that his jacket has Hepatitis or something like that. Torsten Schmidt [inaudible] We got kicked out of there once. Jeremy Greenspan What’s that? Torsten Schmidt They still do keep order. Jeremy Greenspan Oh yeah, the guys who worked there are great. We were treated terrifically and it was really really great. We had a great show and it was a great time, but it was a very extreme club, to say the least. That was one time when this thing came on, in the main room, and Berghain, I think it’s called. What does that mean? Torsten Schmidt It’s like the home on the hill, but that’s like a name for a little town, really. In a way. Jeremy Greenspan OK. Anyway it was in that main room and this track came on, and when it came on with those massive... Their sound system is unbelievable. It came on and then I think me and Matt were like, “Yeah. Now we get it. Now we get it.” Torsten Schmidt OK, we’ll try to emulate that, so all the men in the room please get your shirts off, grow a mustache and... (music: Junior Boys - “Like a Child (Carl Craig Remix)” / applause) Jeremy Greenspan I think the thing that makes Carl Craig probably a much better remixer than me, for example, is when I do remixes, often what I’ll just do is I’ll just take a vocal from something and I’ll just write a song around it, whereas in that song he uses a lot from the original song. The arpeggio, the string sounds, all of those synth sounds are in the original song, and yet it doesn’t sound anything like the original. It’s kind of ingenious. Torsten Schmidt Is there a depressing element to it as well? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. Any time you get a remix, the depressing part is hearing someone do something way better than your song. That’s something you’ve just got to learn to live with. Torsten Schmidt When you said earlier you religiously don’t touch the vocals, is it you really need to get someone else to rape your voice and do something else with it that you necessarily wouldn’t do? Jeremy Greenspan It’s not a question of not touching the vocals in terms of not affecting them. I’ll affect them. In fact, we’ve done very bizarre things to my vocals over time. In one of the songs, in our song “Count Souvenirs,” we have my vocals running through a Minimoog actually. We do that kind of thing. What I don’t do is I don’t correct them so much. I don’t run them through something like Antares auto tune and make them sound perfectly in pitch and stuff like that. Torsten Schmidt Unlike other people with French names whose name we wouldn’t bring up here? Jeremy Greenspan To be honest, it’s more like that’s how everyone does vocals. People will ask us, “Don’t you think there’s something dishonest about electronic music?” Or something like that. I’ll say, “If you listen to the latest, I don’t know, Green Day record, who are I guess are a punk band, and then you listen to a record by King Crimson in like 1978, you’ll notice that in the King Crimson record, there’ll be a couple of flubs here and there. They’ll make a couple of mistakes. Whereas if you listen to the Green Day record, you’ll never hear a mistake of any kind. I can assure you it’s not because the guys from Green Day know how to play their instruments better than the guys from King Crimson. It’s because everything is going through a processor which can correct every single mistake.” I think that it’s funny that people will say these things about electronic music, whereas if you listen to the most rootsy alt-country record that was put out last year, I guarantee you it was done on Pro Tools and I guarantee you everything was corrected. I think that’s the sort of position that we’re trying to be an antithesis to, I suppose. Torsten Schmidt It’s kind of interesting that in 2007 you’re still dealing with these questions of authenticity and honesty in music to that degree, and that like, electronic music still has to justify itself, or... Jeremy Greenspan That’s the amazing thing, I think. That’s the thing about when people bring up the ’80s to me that I find the funniest, is when someone will say, “You use synthesizers and make pop music, isn’t that a bit ’80s?” I say, “Well, how come no one ever comes up to the new bands that play guitars and say, “You guys make rock music with guitars, isn’t that a bit 1955?” You know? They don’t have to deal with those kind of questions, I don’t see why I should. Torsten Schmidt Even though, as we learned last week, the most amazing bit is with Mr. Ware, just to fill you in... Temptation, like Human League? Jeremy Greenspan Right. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, that synth there in the back, what do you reckon that is? Jeremy Greenspan The synth in the back of... Torsten Schmidt Oh like the background noises? Jeremy Greenspan I have no idea. Torsten Schmidt Most bets were on either Synclavier or something like that, in the end it turned out to be 128 layers of 50 piece orchestra. I was like, “Oh, someone had budgets to blow.” Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, yeah, exactly. Torsten Schmidt Why is there this longing for getting this almost knightening? Is that what you say? Like when you get knighted by the Queen? But this...Knighting? Knightening? Jeremy Greenspan Knightening, yeah. Torsten Schmidt Yeah. Of like, “Oh, I am a real musician.” Jeremy Greenspan My cousin David is a great musician. Torsten Schmidt Why is everyone called John or David? Jeremy Greenspan Actually everyone I know is named Matt. But anyway, my cousin Dave, he’s a great musician. He’s played on both of our records, and he plays clarinet and he also plays saxophone and flute. I’ll use him on these records, and let me just play... Torsten Schmidt You use him? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah, I use him. Let’s see where... Torsten Schmidt That’s not a very human concept, to use someone. Jeremy Greenspan Well, I employ him, I should say. Here’s a song where he does this little bass clarinet bit. I’ll just play the little bass clarinet solo, wherever it is. (music: Junior Boys - unknown) Torsten Schmidt As we learned earlier this morning, is this more like a wobbler, or more like a weird doubler, or like all the millions of subgenres and using a wobbly bass sound? Jeremy Greenspan Yeah. Torsten Schmidt Where does this fall into? Jeremy Greenspan This one? Yeah, I don’t know. This is wobblestep. Sure. Anyway, he gets furious when he hears what I do with his...He’s like, “That doesn’t even sound like a clarinet anymore, you could have done that with a synth.” I was like, “Yeah, but I wanted to...” Now, I just do it to piss him off. You’re just talking about musicianship and stuff. The most talented musician I know, is a guy named Mike Kelley. He’s a viola player from Juilliard which is the best music school in the world, I guess. He makes this sort of disco music and plays strings on it and stuff like that and he does all these incredible sort of string arrangements and vocal arrangements. He apparently, so the story goes, he had to do a final presentation in Juilliard on the kind of music that he was doing, and came and played them his disco stuff, and apparently caused a near riot, so I’ll play a couple of seconds. His band is called Kelley Polar, and here’s just a couple of seconds. (music: Kelley Polar - unknown / applause)