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?” 