Tuned-Out recently caught up with Gabriel René in his studio to talk about the album, the creative process, soul and the state of electronic music.
Interview by Jas
TO: How pleased are you with the pearl, and how it’s been received by the public and the industry?
GR: The reviews have been really amazing, and the people who get what I’m doing…I’m, you know, affected on a personal level, which is cool because, as a writer, that’s all I was really doing there. I’m very happy with the end result, creatively.
TO: Is there anything you’d really change with the way it was produced?
GR: Not as a piece of art. I mean, inevitably, what comes into play are marketing issues. So, yeah, if I was considering how it was going to be promoted in Europe, I would have done a more ‘new breaks’ sort of approach to the record. If I was concerned about it getting over into an urban AC ala Jill Scott market, I would have done more of a straight-forward, rhythmic, half-time approach. But I wouldn’t have changed the songs at all. So at the end of the day, what i was trying to do was sort of a hybrid of styles, with some rhythmic influences from classic 70’s soul music, coupled with some of the rhythmic advances that have taken place in the dawn of the programmed drum. The idea there for me wasn’t to get too progressive with the production, but really just add a hint of something new to something I considered classically good.
TO: Well, speaking of 70’s soul: when you read reviews or articles about the album or the aquanote sound, that’s a comparison people invoke a lot of the time. Do you bristle at that sort of thing, or do you embrace –
GR: No, I totally embrace it. In my opinion, something happened – really, a very amazing triumph for music in the 70’s, where you essentially had what had been, in my opinion, the best of both white and black culture. With the dawn of the soundtrack and post-60s, Phil Spector-sort of production, Leiber and Stoller as writers, you know things like ‘stand by me’ – in the 70’s what happened is suddenly the classic white, western, symphonic, orchestral sound that had been mozart, and beethoven, the foundations of western music, classical music, those instruments were now being used within the contemporary sound of soul music. So you have people like Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Barry White – you have all these people working together and creating what I think is a real non-biased approach to what at that time were the resources within American music. And so for me, it’s a particularly potent period that, in terms of song writing and production sensibility, I don’t think we’ve surpassed.
TO: Do you feel like you want to pursue that some more, or do you want to move completely away from that now?
GR: My goal now is to really start working with the artists who aren’t doing that thing on a big level, people like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, D’angelo. You know, even Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, the R&B singers, Alicia Keyes. My goal now is to take my skills and push them into more of a mainstream outlet. Take my tools as a songwriter and as a producer and try to expand that and work with talent that is just undeniably amazing – the people that history is making famous right now.
TO: When you were putting together the pearl, did you have a vision of the album in mind, or did you end up recording a lot of tracks with a lot of good people, and picking the best to put out?
GR: I very much had a decision to do a record that was going to be an album, not a collection of singles, not a collection of songs, but an idea that would get you a full journey from here to there and back again. In the process, there were songs that didn’t make it. There’s no way that I wrote them in any kind of consecutive order – I just knew that I would have… the first four or five tracks I just kind of – whatever was coming out of me. After that point, it’s like, “ok, what else needs to be on this record? I want something to slow down, I want something to speed up, I want something with more masculine energy…” Inevitably one of the creative restrictions with working with making music, it kind of has to play within the field of a love song. When you drift into anything too political, it just comes off as idealistic. If it gets…you know, it’s gotta be sexy, but it’s gotta be polite. Bruno and I, after the first few songs, started talking about how we could push those restrictions around. So that some of my rhythmic programming is /less/ polite. Some of the songwriting – ‘one wish’, for instance – is actually a political song that’s veiled within a love song. So, what I kept doing was I kept going back and listening to, say, ‘songs in the key of life’, saying, “ok, what’s going on here that makes this work?” and really, Stevie, on that record, you hear him just going wherever. It was much harder for me, because a) I’m not Stevie Wonder, but b) I’m working with a slew of different singers, so the only continuity is me. Whereas, with Stevie at least he’s singing everything. Whether it’s harp playing in the background or some funky moog thing. But vibe-wise, it was important for me to have a lot of variation, and really, really, not put out a house record – dance music on a cd. That’s something that didn’t make sense.
TO: Well that’s something that people I’ve talked to about the album were really struck by – the way that it was produced and the cohesiveness of it. You made a good point a while ago – the concept of ‘an album’ as a whole concept, and not just a collection of songs, is something that I think is really important. I think it’s something that, to a great extent, has been lost in a lot of new music. that’s something you saw a lot more of 20 or 30 years ago.
GR: We’re a singles-driven society, and whether we want to talk about mainstream or underground, we’ve basically just reduced everything to (singles).
TO: Well, especially in the house music genre.
GR: Yeah, it’s singles-driven. As a result of my approach, inevitably the album will suffer a sales loss because some people have not cultivated the attention span to listen to a record – they need repetition, they need simple lyrics. You know what’s great about art is that if you’re open, and it challenges you, then you grow. If people aren’t open, then they can’t be challenged. I think the role of the artist in many ways is to attempt to define something rather simple, in a way that is both surprising, and yet confirms a very basic truth. Without people being open, they are not able to receive that. And so to them, it isn’t an art.
TO: When you listen to the album now, does it evoke any really strong feelings in you, or do you move on once it’s out the door?
GR: I talked to some people about that, because I recently had some folks approach me with some very intimate details about how they felt about the record. The thing is, I will never be able to get that. But, when I was making those songs, that’s exactly where I was, that’s exactly what I was thinking. So I can see the reflection in them, of my self and what I was feeling. The only difference is that, occasionally, if I have it on vinyl, and I’m DJing in a club, and it’s just the perfect point and I put it on and everybody gets it, then I’m overwhelmed by that feeling, and I really deeply connect with the songs. but as the creator of it…it’s not as if the feelings have some type of expiration date – I’ll be able to listen to these songs for years and say ‘yeah’. in many ways they’re open ended. A song like ‘nowhere’, it’s a song about heartbreak, it’s a song about investing in something that didn’t work – I think that’ll be a plot that‘ll probably take place again in my life, and that song will have new meaning for me. a song like ‘waiting’ – I’ve had a lot of guys come up to me and be like “you know man, that’s where I am right now, trying to cultivate my own sense of well-being, my own sense of identity, and integrity. The functions of having a house, a job, a car, and putting my life together. I wish I had someone with me, but I kind of feel like I’m not ready yet.” That’s the most important thing to me.
TO: Speaking of people’s reactions – do you ever find that they grasp on to things that you never would have expected them to? I know with tracks that I’ve produced, people will come up and comment on feelings they had, or elements that struck them that I would have never thought to be significant. Is this something that’s happened to you?
GR: It has happened with some stuff I’ve done. Let me think of a particular circumstance…well, sort of on the reverse, one thing that’s happened out of nowhere is some people have…well, didn’t get it, didn’t get the song, they thought it was this happy song. It literally sounds like… (sings) “I could tell you my love is going nowhere / without you,” like “yeah, I’m never leaving you!” And some people come up and approach me like that and I just go “oh.”
TO: Have you ever come across someone directly where the work that you’ve done has just inspired them to go out and produce anything of art, really – music, or visual, or anything like that?
GR: There’s a track that soulstice did called Lovely. When that song first came out, we got a bunch of really crazy emails. One of them, the most profound one, I think, was this guy heard the song, and he had this girl that was a good friend of his for about eight years. They were just kind of buddies, and about six months previous she had moved to Sweden. They were good friends since high school, and he was realizing that he was really missing her, and he was listening to the lyrics of the song. The email goes on to say that the song served as a catalyst for him to recognize that he really deeply loved her, on such a basic level that he was ignoring it. And so he bought a ticket, flew to Sweden, asked her to marry him, she said yes, and they flew back here, and it’s their song. I don’t know what to say about that – that’s just beyond. I think that the work that I’ve done here, as a songwriter, has a lot of value that’s yet to come back to me. It’s only been around four or five months – the stories start coming back right about now, so we’ll see.
TO: The songs on this album are really personal, but you worked with a lot other musicians in the studio – when you got in there, did you really direct the sessions, and say “ok, here’s what the melody is, and here’s what I want this feeling to be, and here’s how I want you to handle the lyric,” or did you give people a lot of free reign to riff around and discover that with you?
GR: I definitely don’t feel it’s fair to bring in session players and say “you play bass, right? Play a bass line.” I usually have a mock baseline in when they come in, and then we will work from that baseline. Sometimes once we get the tone up, and it’s different, we’ll say “hey, let’s shift it around.” I jump on the keyboard, he’s on the bass, and we start riffing. Inevitably every note has been something I either personally selected, or was been played, and I said “that’s great, keep that part or keep this part.” and then at the end, once I know I’ve gotten the core, inspirational idea that I had, then I always let them run around. and cool stuff always comes out of that, and it always goes into the track. With melody and lyrics, for a lot of the songs, it was completely developed by the time the singers came in. in other circumstances, we did it together – like the track that Naomi and I did, and the track that Lisa (Shaw) did. In some cases I had only a rough idea, and when the singer came in we kind of riffed through some more stuff. But I have a very “hands on” approach to the whole thing. The wonderful thing about working with other people is that they give you a whole new perspective on your own idea.
TO: You really feel that with a record like this too, as opposed to a lot of dance records and stuff like that, where it really is just one person in the studio, or maybe they bring in a token singer to lay down a vocal track. It’s a totally different feeling when you put out a record like this – that really comes across.
GR: Yeah – all the musicians and singers on the record are so talented. You’ve got, like, Mike D on bass on Truly, and it’s…it’s not like I took one line and looped it, he played the entire song.
TO: There’s a huge difference in that, and a lot of guys don’t realize it. a lot of producers, especially when they’re first coming out, they feel like once they get the loop they can just use that. and it’s the subtle variations and the little bit of swing that comes through when someone’s playing it live that makes all the difference.
GR: I mean, in reality it’s like the craftsmanship has been reduced so low, it’s all based on amateur skills. the most successful producers in the world – like neptune, timbaland, the hip-hop producers – you know four, five years they’ve been producing? you know, pop songwriters, if you want to consider mary j. blige pop, or busta rhymes or whatever – the knowledge and craft of writing has only been reduced to their own experience. Whereas if you actually look at the history of songwriting in American culture, it stems from broadway. it started from musicals – it was a combination of the musical, and blues. Today what we have is…only the blues. Only the most obvious, most basically-transmitted lines. The rhymes are very convenient and very obvious – it’s usually the first rhyme that comes to mind. You know – it’s the same shit! I’ve been working on some material lately and I realized that I’m overwriting everything – the bar is so low! and yet I don’t consider myself to be anywhere near a master, in fact it’s ridiculous to me that I’m even considered to be reasonably good. Because you look at – and again, I’ve got to reference the seventies – there’s just a whole slew of masters there. Because you have the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s leading up to it. and in the 60’s there’s all this wonderful folk music, and there’s really – there’s a lot of emphasis on singer songwriters. But I think that’s an element that’s really supremely lacking in electronic music, and pop music in general. And it’s indicative of the fast food approach that we have, and the high speed fucking one-line aspects of our lives. And then you see an artist like Nora Jones – do you know who she is? ravi shankar had a child in memphis, or texas or something – this girl basically just put out a record playing piano, with bass, guitar and her singing. It’s all just singer songwriter stuff. It’s, like, multi-multi-platinum. Totally basic, really simple recordings, no flash at all. just songs. And within a few months – no promotion, nothing – it just blew up. The artistry is shining through.
TO: You mentioned Erykah Badu before – I get the same feeling when I’m listening to her cut. Whatever the melody is, or whatever the lyrics. Some songs are stronger than others, but you always get this feeling of a consciousness there that just lacks in so much other stuff. she puts everything into her music.
GR: Yeah, I mean the second half of that album is just brilliant. you’ve got a song like “I’m an orange moon” – that song starts and night, and ends in the daytime, and she goes all through the night, and the relationship between her and the sun – I mean, no one can even do analogies any more in songs. it’s like the poetry is just gone. That song, I feel, is just a perfect track. I think Jill Scott, with her approach to songwriting, kind of raised the bar a bit. And you have a lot of rappers who have amazing lyrical skills; they just tend not to be the most popular ones.
TO: You come from a long line of musicians, don’t you?
GR: My grandfather was a turn of the century jazz man. his first record company out here on the west coast is where the birth of rhythm and blues really starts, 1942, 1943. They were the first label out here to ever put out an r&b song, he was the first person to put nat king cole on vinyl. My dad was a big jazz combo guy all through the 50’s and 60’s, and I just kind of come from this long line of songwriters. I’m lucky to have been in an environment that cultivates an interest in that, but more so, I’m lucky to have a family history so that it’s important enough for me to look back, and say “who did this really well?” people don’t know who cole porter is – you go back and listen to some of those early songs – really pre-1950’s – and you’ve got some of the best songwriting ever.
TO: When you listen to really early, say, thelonious monk tracks, where he’s just doing little, little tastes of chords, and they’re the most basic, simple tracks – there’s an element there where…pop music doesn’t approach that at all. to be able to push that much through with that little actual music and notes is pretty amazing.
GR: Doing it simply and well is the hardest thing in the world. It’s easy to put a thousand notes in there. but like miles used to say it’s not what I play, but what I don’t play – he used to say “I play silence.” that’s hard. I’ve always approached music from, say, a sculptor’s perspective – I start with a big ball of clay, and trim it down to the simplest thing. at the end of a song, I’m just muting whole tracks, to see if I should get rid of them. Certain songs, like all over you, were sort of a test for me in that way. Whereas leave is the exact opposite – lot of rhythm, etc. where all over you is literally the drums, the baseline, her voice, and…is that it? There’s only about four elements in that song, but the song works really well (although I would have added a rhythm guitar, now that I’ve I finished it.)
TO: Do you tend to spend a lot of time in the studio, kind of working stuff out, or do you spend a lot of time on your own working on melodies and lyrics, and take that all there, and just execute? What’s your way of working out tracks?
GR: I’ve never been one to get stuck into a formula – I’ve found several things that work. Some songs, songs like nowhere, truly, one wish – I wrote the whole song at home on a guitar – the whole song. I didn’t even step into the studio until I had the whole song down. Other songs…like Waiting, start from bits and pieces of lyrics. I have to say at this point what it’s come down to is, the writing process for me takes place, in general, takes place 100% outside the studio, with one instrument, usually piano, or guitar. I figure if I can’t make a cool song with one instrument, then it doesn’t really matter how much production I put around it. if I’m trying to write a song, I’m trying to share a song that needs to be about the idea, and not about the production – at the end of the day I could always take one word, and put a lot of production around it, and it would be cool. But I think it’s gotten to the point where we’ve almost infected ourselves with a lack of identity, and a lack of… our exploration of ourselves, in this generation, has been vague in many ways because the music that we choose to listen to leaves it so open to interpretation. and in some ways I think that’s a wonderful process, but in other ways I think we might have come out with something lacking, because we didn’t have the luxury of the great songwriters within our generation to really step up and say “hey, what about this, or what about that?” you find it in certain places – I think there’s talent, people like common, and people like mos def, who have been able to say some profound things. And certainly there’re tracks like finally, that come around every once in a blue moon that are just undeniable. But, in the 60’s and 70’s? That was every month.
TO: It feels like that, at least now, when you look back at the catalog from that time. Sometimes, I wonder if I was growing up in that time if I would be struck by it as much as I am now, or if it’s just the fact that we’re in such a void, creatively.
GR: But they were into it more, that’s the weird thing – go look at Beatles footage. There was a general sense of…you know, people were more open to it. For us, it’s like, “well, prove it.” And that’s cool, because in many ways, we’re saying “ok cool, well, that raises the bar.” but, I think – let me just put it in a positive light: I look forward to seeing some of the writers and producers that are going to come out of the next ten years, when we actually step into the new millennium, and push ourselves forward. In many ways for me, this album was a throwback and a step forward at the same time. But frankly, I’m kind of tired, at least right now, of the retro worshiping aspect of electronic and hip-hop. In some ways, actually, hip-hop has become more progressive. Listen to a ludicrous record – go buy the record, and just put on the instrumental. it’s way more progressive than any of the deep house that’s coming out. The sounds are more futuristic, the rhythms are more intricate, or more brave in terms of their programming. go get that new missy elliot track and check out the instrumentals – there’s sort of a fresh approach within that that neptune’s basically spawned. he came in and in a way they saved pop by taking it back down to some basic, funky elements. So suddenly britney’s stuff wasn’t all these major chords and all this super gay stuff written by 40-year-old Swedish guys. Now it’s a multiethnic blend of stuff coming from the south, which is cool. but at the same time, the bar has been lowered to lo-fi casio-sounding production stuff run through million-dollar SSL boards. So we’re in a really interesting time now – I’m excited to see what the future gonna yield. In this country we certainly have not seen crossover of electronic music. There hasn’t been a nirvana of electronic music.
TO: Well, they tried a few years ago…
GR: But the talent wasn’t there.
TO: I agree with you – I remember at the time lamenting that. That was a time when aphex twin was coming out with really interesting stuff, and guys like squarepusher who I thought was blowing everybody’s doors off. And here, what’s held up is chemical brothers, and the prodigy, and really pop-oriented stuff like that. I can appreciate those guys in a certain context, [but I thought] “man, what a tragedy it is that these guys are getting held up as the poster boys for this genre that is just much richer than that.”
GR: Well, if you look at Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as Charlie Parker and Miles…you see these guys mastering the programming shit – they’re scary. And that’s the kind of stuff that parker was tripping on. Then you’ve got Pat Boone and all these guys re-appropriating jazz and r&b songs into the pop community. But, you don’t have an Elvis, and a Sinatra, so all we have is the virtuoso stuff – which will never crossover, never-ever-ever-ever – and then you have the watered-down, “un-profound” stuff. I remember Josh Wink got signed, Hard Kiss Brothers got signed, Solstice got signed – but even we were doing approximations of the bristol sound. So, I don’t think anyone had the talent or the perspective to really do something like that. if you look at the story – Sinatra upset Bing Crosby, Elvis took it away from Sinatra, and the Beatles took it away from Elvis. you know, a lot of people dog Elvis, a) without ever really listening to anything, but b) coming at it from sort of a racial perspective…I know a lot of brothers who like to be like “well, you know, that guy took ‘hound dog’ from Big Mama Thornton.” but here’s the funny thing – that was actually written by leiber and stoller, two jewish guys from New York! No one said that. Public enemy bitches all day long – it’s like, open a book! Elvis grew up in a predominately black community, shit-poor in Memphis. To call him racist is sort of silly. I’m not a big Elvis fan, but I can certainly understand what he did, and why it worked. I think the problem was that the infrastructure was racist. so people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard – who, arguably, were doing it just as hot, if not hotter – couldn’t get in. and Chuck Berry, if you look at it, he invented it. because, him and Richard, what they did was take the blues riff, and played it double time – rock and roll was basically the blues times two.
TO: Do you think better songwriting and more sophistication alone will bring electronic music into the mainstream in America? Or do you think it’s just a lost cause?
GR: You know what will bring electronic music into it? A really talented, pretty person.
TO: The Eminem of electronic music.
GR: Yeah. First of all we haven’t had our Run DMC. It’s either got to be a group, or a lead character that has the charisma, the songwriting, and the good programming. it’s gotta be just far enough ahead, and allowing for just enough elements of electronic music, without actually being trip hop, or house, or drum and bass, or new breaks, or any of these funny little genre specifications. It’s gotta be…like bjork. bjork is not any one kind of electronic niche, she’s just a brilliant, talented artist who uses electronic music as one of the aspects of her music. Bjork is pretty much our only star – she’s the only one that can perform. I mean, who’s really stepping out there with amazing vocal performances, and amazing energy – it’s all this shoe-gazing music. It’s almost a reluctance to be on stage. The reason Kurt Cobain worked, was because he’d be doing that stuff, but then he would freak the fuck out! All the great punk guys used to do that, too – at the right point in the song, they would just lose their minds and start frothing around the stage. But if there’s no dynamics, then you can’t do it. it’s not going to be someone like roni size and his jungle thing – it’s going to be something with a perspective like Bjork, were it’s really unclear what that song is. It’s got some elements of electro, and it’s got some house and some techno. It can’t be about all these independent labels, and limited six months runs of these labels – it has to be about profound mastery of artwork. And if it’s dumbed-down, or dressed up, it doesn’t matter – it just has to be done so well, that it’s undeniable. Undeniable by people who don’t know any better. Not by people who know better. And that’s inevitably the problem – we settle into this zone where we know all the aspects of programming, and people know all the aspects of producing –
TO: Well, it’s an elitist, academic viewpoint.
GR: Yes, and in Europe it’s ok, because the culture’s more accepting of that. but frankly, there’s nothing europe’s produced that I think is worthy of crossing over here.
TO: Have you ever spent much time in England? Did you feel the pervasiveness of electronic music there?
GR: Basically everywhere else you go, electronic music is part and parcel of the daily culture. The difference is that here, electronic music has blended into the background. One of the things I wanted to avoid when making this album was making another lounge music album – some thievery corp thing that just becomes something for people to eat salads and drink cosmopolitans to. It’s not profoundly affecting anyone, it just becomes sonic wallpaper. The only person in this country that’s made electronic music work on a big level is arguably one of the least-talented people in the entire genre – Moby. Frankly, the reason why Moby’s shit works – it’s exactly why the Dirty Vegas thing worked – is that it was used to sell just the right kinda thing. And the people who didn’t know any better latched onto it because it delivered a lifestyle, and they wanted to buy into it. And that’s a brilliant piece of marketing – to license 50 million dollars worth of advertising. And now I’m meeting with all the labels, and this is what they want to know: Who do we license this to? Toshiba? Datsun? And I want to strangle Moby for this! I can’t say if I was in that position I would turn down one of those, but his opportunism has corrupted electronic music. Because now, everything is held up to that bar – and all you’ve got is ad agencies saying “We need something that’s kind of a moby/dirty vegas/basement jaxx/chemical brothers beat, but different!” it’s just funny. It’s not like he came up and played some amazing performance, like nobody could play guitar like moby did. It’s that he sold it. He sold it to everything – that record didn’t sell shit for 9 months, it wasn’t until they started licensing it. It was all about the licensing. So now, that’s become the agenda – it’s like, why are we even talking about this before the album’s even done! But at the end of the day, can I fault him? No I can’t – I would have done the same thing. But here’s a guy who took a bunch of field recordings and put some pop production on it – I mean, all those field recordings are free. There’s a certain appropriation of all different types of cultures into our generation as a result of us trying to find our identity – an attempt to understand our global identity.
You can check out Aquanote’s profile at Naked Music or at Astralwerks.
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