MUSICAL UPHEAVAL
Double disc from Patrick Krief
It’s been said that conflict can produce great art, and that contentment is its natural enemy.
Former Dears guitarist Patrick Krief seems convinced it’s not that simple.
For him, life’s upheavals — and he’s experienced a few in recent years — simply make it easier to focus on music. From that focus, he suggested, the best work comes.
Some personal changes, along with deaths among his friends and relatives, informed many of the 20 engaging and melodic songs that make up Automanic, Krief ’s ambitious new double disc, out Sept. 30.
But Krief, 37, said he’s not the kind of writer to channel raw emotion over tragedy and stress into a blunt cry for help. That’s what John Lennon did on his unfiltered, alarmingly personal, Plastic Ono Band album, recorded in 1970, when the ex-Beatle was undergoing primal-scream therapy.
“I love the Lennon record. I just don’t want to be that guy,” Krief said. His own therapy, he said, is sharing his experiences in a way that makes them more universal. “That’s the catharsis — turning it into something that isn’t just about me. It becomes a fantasy. Sometimes, I’m acting tougher than I am. It’s not real. It’s kind of like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. You know he doesn’t do that in real life, but that’s what he wants to do. This is how a version of myself would deal with this situation. It would be pretty boring if I just documented it as is, but it’s pretty close to reality.”
“Also, there’s been too much crying-in-your-beer music,” he said. “I don’t want to put another record like that out. I really wanted to offer something positive.”
Some of the positivity, he said, comes from taking personal responsibility for the negative factors in his life and cleaning out some relationships that exacerbate the problems. Physical fitness, in the form of rekindling a previous interest in jiu-jitsu, has also been part of the process.
“I had a lot of toxins around me,” he said. “You can’t control death, so I focused on what was worthy of controlling and let go of what I could not control.”
“I can’t change you / I don’t want to live that way anymore,” he sings on the acoustic ballad Heaven Into Rust.
The arrangement of that song is more delicate than its companions on the first half of Automanic, illustrating a textural difference between the two discs, which are colour-coded. The first one, Red, evokes fire, rage, blood and boldness, he said. Its music is fittingly dense and aggressive. The second, Blue, conjures up water, sky, calm and dreaminess, he said. Its sound is accordingly more understated and reflective.
“I have a sensitive connection between visuals and sound,” Krief said. “I always consider my music as a score to a memory or something.”
An avowed Beatles fan, Krief acknowledged that the previous use of those colours for two best-selling compilations released in 1973 (The Beatles 1962-1966 and The Beatles 1967-1970) probably came into play on a subconscious level. “Everything I do has Beatles in it,” he said. “I might be working on a guitar tone, and I’m like, ‘You know that sound on Old Brown Shoe? That’s what I’m looking for.’ ”
Krief played most of the instruments
on the new album, and also arranged and produced it. Production, it seems, is a lifelong vocation. At the age of 12, he said, he was already overdubbing with the use of two ghetto blasters. By the age of 14, he was blowing $1,600 — made from a job he made stuffing “thousands and thousands” of envelopes — on a 16-channel mixer and an eight-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.
“I was really into arranging stuff and trying to pile on as many things as possible. I don’t like any dead space — and if there is dead space, I want it to scare the s--t out of somebody,” he said, laughing.
In spite of the sonic adornment on the new album, Krief insisted that the viability of the song itself, played only on an acoustic guitar — what he calls the campfire test — is also crucial.
If one thing about Automanic might raise a few eyebrows in an era of musical ADD, it’s the sheer volume of material. But Krief said its 20 songs have been whittled down from a possible 50 or so. Nor was there a valid way to make the Blue songs co-exist with their Red counterparts on a composite version, he explained. “It didn’t make sense to have a song like The Mayan and All Is Lost on the same disc,” he said.
The process of selection started even before the release of Krief’s 2012 album Hundred Thousand Pieces. He was beginning to pile up voice memos, answering-machine messages and laptop loops containing snippets of songs in what he calls “organized chaos,” he said. New ideas for the next album are already surfacing in the same manner, he said.
“If there’s a mess in my room and somebody cleans it up, I’m screwed,” he said. “I’ll never find anything. But I can tell where everything is. I’m very organized in my own chaos.”
With more than 100 bits that might turn into Automanic songs, Krief began combing through the fragments. “Whatever snippet excited me, I’d go and work on the music,” he said. In his writing process, the lyrics always come last, and with some music in place, he simply hummed lines and tossed in key words that spilled out. At that point, those recent stressful events had started, and they informed the words.
“It was very easy to connect the dots with those key words when bad things started happening,” he said “But I wanted to make sure the album was positive. And it is. It touches on things that are really dark, but they’re all realities that everybody is going to have to experience. I think it’s more of a story of triumph in the face of all that stuff.”
Once his new label, Culvert Music, green-lighted a double disc, the sequencing was next. Krief, who spent three months working it out, admitted it’s an old-school concern for listeners who can’t even sit still for a full single album. “But it’s the only thing that makes me close to suicidal,” he said, laughing.
He even made a sacrifice on the vinyl version of Automanic to make sure Mississippi, with its shattering guitar solo over a riff reminiscent of the Beatles’ I Want You (She’s So Heavy), ended the first side, in spite of the groove-cramming that could result in a slight loss of fidelity.
The emotional struggle of that song’s lyrics are resolved in the album’s overall hopefulness.
“Any time you let go of something that’s just negative weight, things open up,” Krief said. “I’m not being bogged down. I’m able to open my eyes and let good things come in.”