ANDY SHAUF
The Saskatchewan-raised singer/songwriter is quite happy being a one-man band in the studio, thank you very much
Some people just don’t play well with others. Maybe Andy Shauf is one of them.
By the Saskatchewan-raised singer/songwriter’s own admission, being a perpetual one-man band in the studio can make for long hours and an isolated existence. But he’s also learned from experience that he much prefers being in total control of his own vision.
“It gets a little lonely creating music on your own. It would be nice to start a band and, you know, do something fun,” deadpans Shauf, 29, over a beer at Parkdale’s Skyline diner, where he’s already become such a fixture since relocating from Regina to Toronto a few months ago that co-owner Maggie Ruhl confides “we get Pilsner in just for him.”
“For my albums, it’s really hard for me to work with other people. I don’t find it super easy to follow ideas with other people, I guess. I feel like I’m on the clock or something, wasting other people’s time.”
It’s not like he hasn’t tried to welcome others into the creative fold. His third album, this year’s internationally celebrated The Party, actually began life as a full-band recording, after Shauf landed a grant to record at a studio near Dresden, Germany.
He took three other musicians with him and spent three weeks struggling to come up with anything satisfactory, then returned to Regina armed with the knowledge that he’d just lived through “the moment that I learned it doesn’t work for me to work with other people.
“It was a nightmare,” he says frankly. “It sucked.”
The Party thus came into being, slowly and methodically, over the next year or so in the same manner that Shauf’s previous two albums were born: with him playing every single part heard on the record, from piano to guitar to clarinet, save some string arrangements supplied by Colin Nealis — also a trusted member of the three-piece touring band Shauf will bring to the Mod Club for two sold-out Toronto shows this Tuesday and Friday.
He did allow himself the luxury of working in a proper studio in an old CBC building in downtown Regina rather than the usual DIY setup in his parents’ basement, at least. But he still wound up re-recording the entire album. Probably a few times over.
“It’s not agonizing,” Shauf says of his patient recording modus operandi. “It’s something that I really enjoy. It’s a process that I really like to do. But I am super meticulous. Most of these songs probably had five different versions.
“It’s a lot of trial and error, trying to figure out how it’s gonna sit together. Sometimes it’s, like, play the drums for five hours straight and scrap the whole thing.”
All that extra effort wasn’t in vain. The Party — a sumptuously ’70sstyled soft-pop opus built around a set of sensitively drawn vignettes from the awkward end of a house party where no one, it seems, is having a good time and one guy actually keels over dead after swearing off cigarettes for life — arrived last May to rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and an eventual spot on the Polaris Music Prize short list.
And despite his confessed, initial uneasiness about handing over the musical reins to interpreters of his songs onstage, Shauf and his band are now returning to sold-out dates in many markets they’ve already visited in Canada, the States and Europe since The Party’s release on their first proper headlining tour. They’re already booked through the summer on both continents.
The laconic Shauf will merely, modestly, concede that all the attention is “cool.”
“I hope I’m in demand and not just booking too many shows,” he says dryly. “It’s good. It’s also, like, terrifying, though. I’ve been doing this for so long and it gets a little bit better and I’m like: ‘this is great, but it could go away. I’ve gotta make another good album. How do you make a good album?’”
So does that mean he is thinking about the next album already?
“I’m thinkin’. Thinkin’ too much,” he laughs. “I wanna make, like, a real concept record, something with an intentional narrative. This one, I just kind of fluked out and threw it all together and it was The Party. I want to do a little bit more intentional planning and stitching scenes together and stuff. But it’s hard because I don’t know how to do that.”
Surely he doesn’t mean he’s writing a rock opera.
“Hopefully those aren’t the words that come to mind when you hear it.”