Key Tracks: Jeremy Greenspan on Junior Boys’ “Like a Child”
As one-half of Junior Boys, Jeremy Greenspan has been producing uniquely emotional synth pop for more than a decade. While the music has always been heavily referential, it’s also highly original stuff: You can spot a Junior Boys tune a mile away. At the 2007 Red Bull Music Academy in Toronto, we invited Greenspan to our lecture couch to talk about his career. At the time of the interview, Junior Boys’ second album, So This Is Goodbye, had just been released. Here, he talks about the influence of Chicago house on the album, as well as the importance of imperfection.
Most people think “Like a Child” is a tender song about being held, but it’s actually about facing your own death in a hospital bed. Usually when I tell people that it kind of turns them off the song a bit. That used to be my friend’s favourite song, but once I told him what it was about he said, “I don’t want to listen to it anymore!”
The thing that excites me about early house music and early ’80s disco, is the way in which the music was in between genres.
Early house influenced a lot of what was happening on the album that “Like a Child” comes from. The thing that excites me about early house music and early ’80s disco, is the way in which the music was in between genres. There was a time when people were making house music, when they were making it for the Warehouse club in Chicago, or the Music Box or Paradise Garage, and there was no rules or set guidelines about what the music was supposed to be. It was called house music, because it was played at the Warehouse. But they just thought, I suppose, that they were making disco. So, what’s exciting for me about that time is that no genre had coalesced. There’s a total feeling of experimentation.
I think that’s the kind of moment I’d like to capture to some extent. I don’t think of Junior Boys as making retro music, I don’t ape those kind of songs verbatim. In order to do that I’d have to get a whole bunch of vintage equipment and set up the conditions the same way they did it. I tend to use new stuff and try to be forward thinking and try to make stuff that’s as contemporary as possible, but with the notion of the sense of freedom about it, the sense of total experimentation. It’s pop music that’s not alienating. It’s not particularly difficult for a dancefloor or a casual listener to understand.
When we started making music as Junior Boys, there were a lot of bands that came out of Brooklyn that were using a lot of ’80s aesthetics. This kind of electro and electroclash thing. I had an immediate distaste for it because I thought that they were trying to be ironic. There are certain types of ’80s music that I don’t have a particular affinity towards. That sort of very rigid electro music where they sing about being in sports cars and smoking cigarettes. The music I liked from the ’80s was pretty emotionally sophisticated, you know? Bands like Japan or Ultravox. And I didn’t particularly want to be lumped in with anybody I thought was making fun of the ’80s. That never really interested me.
I try and capture all the mistakes, because they’re probably more important than anything else.
For me, electronic music at its best is powerfully emotional. Kraftwerk, for example. You listen to “Neon Lights” by Kraftwerk, and you have Ralf Hütter, who always sings in this tender voice. His voice is always cracking, it’s imperfect. I didn’t want to do stuff with vocoders and robot voices. What’s nice is to have the imperfections of the synthesizers – which are intrinsically imperfect as anyone who’s ever used one knows – along with the imperfections of the human voice. So I almost religiously don’t touch my vocals. I don’t do any pitch correction or automation to make them precise and perfect. I try to maintain the imperfections of the voice, and the fragility of the singing. As a Canadian schooled in the Neil Young approach to recording vocals, I try and capture all the mistakes, because they're probably more important than anything else.
Finding the imperfections in your own voice, and finding the imperfections in the machines you use is the exciting part about making music. If you have a machine and you know it too well, and you know exactly how to use it, and you know exactly what it’s going to do when you turn this knob or that knob... It will make things extremely stale for you. And will probably lead you to make bad music. I think you should always have a sense of not knowing what you’re doing. And a sense of not knowing what the outcome is gonna be. The music you make, I think, should be surprising. When something happens with a machine that you didn’t expect it’s ten times better than anything you could have imagined.
