Music

The Lab Rat

A. C. Newman Can't Help Dissecting the New Pornographers

by Michaelangelo Matos

If you read enough about A. C. Newman—guitarist, vocalist, and chief songwriter of the New Pornographers—the cliché announces itself early and often: master craftsman, hook machine, one-man Brill Building. Neko Case may be the group's best known member thanks to a critically adored solo career, but the New Pornographers are largely seen as Newman's invention, despite the fact that each of the band's four albums features a few tunes apiece from Dan Bejar (who records on his own as Destroyer), and that there are eight members.

Still, the idea of Newman—a Toronto native who recently moved with his new wife to Brooklyn—as science-lab songwriter made me wonder how much he dissects his own work. Talking with Newman, I mention the episode of VH1's Classic Albums about Paul Simon's Graceland, in which Simon not only goes over the multitrack tapes to point out hidden overdubs and demonstrate mixing techniques, but provides a running commentary on his own lyrics. ("That's the one line I'd rewrite," he says at one point while playing the song "Graceland.") Does Newman go to those extremes?

"I can't help but do that," he says. "When it's done and you have no perspective, you begin to hear things that don't even exist. For the most part, I look at records as a snapshot of the time. Saying 'I should have done this' is nonsense because that's what I did. There are an infinite amount of things you can think of in a song. I envy bands like the White Stripes, who don't seem to worry about it that much."

Worrying about what you're going to do next is understandable when you've made records as good as those by the New Pornographers. On Mass Romantic (2000) and Electric Version (2003), the music was fairly easy to break down—the divisions are neater. The vocals from Newman, Case, and Bejar are distinct from one another; it was easy to tell which songs were written by Newman and which were Bejar's. That began to change on Twin Cinema (2005); the vocal lines were blurrier, and Newman's and Bejar's songwriting styles began to mesh together.

The new Challengers (Matador) sounds even more blended than Twin Cinema, a change Newman notes with pride. "We sound like a band, but I think Dan, Neko, and I sound more distinct," he says. "Maybe it's because New Pornographers songs sung by Neko sound more like Neko Case songs. We've always wanted to sound like a fairly focused band."

Still, there have been a few cases of mistaken vocal identity. "On this one, a lot of people have thought it was Neko singing 'Myriad Harbour,' which Dan sings," Newman says. "I don't even know what to say. But then I never used to be able to tell the Beatles apart, either."

"Myriad Harbour," along with "Adventures in Solitude" and "Unguided," are the songs Newman mentions as having shaped the album's general direction. All three will seem fairly anomalous for anyone expecting the supercharged pop-rock of the first two albums to repeat itself here; on Challengers, only "All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth" could be mistaken for an Electric Version outtake.

"Myriad Harbour," "Adventures in Solitude," and "Unguided" are all medium to slow tempo, and their emphasis is less on dynamic interaction between instruments, voices, and song parts: bridges, choruses, verses, Newman plays them off one another expertly to build explosions. "Myriad Harbour" resembles a drunken campfire tune, while "Unguided" unwinds over six and a half minutes like classic rock at its least hurried.

"When we made our first record, I was trying to make a record that people wouldn't expect, even though absolutely nobody was waiting for it," Newman says. "Twin Cinema was the first record that I decided that anything goes on a New Pornographers record. After the first two, people were expecting Neko to have the two big upbeat pop hits; so I gave her two of the quietest songs on the record. We've kind of extended that on [Challengers]. We've been known as this wall-of-sound band, which is cool, but you don't always want to be that. You become influenced by other music around you. I think that's how the good bands do it, you know?"