Interview - Jason Collett

In this special guest post, Keith Nelson, who covers indie music via Chicago and Boston on his blog Under the Rotunda, recently sat down with Jason Collett to talk shop.

A few weeks ago, while he was in Boston playing at Great Scott, I had a chance to sit down with Jason Collett. Aside from performing with Broken Social Scene, Jason has also released several excellent albums as a solo artist. His latest, Here’s To Being Here, was released this past February. However, his involvement in Broken Social Scene has been instrumental to getting his name out as a solo artist, due to the enormous success that Broken Social Scene has had. “It’s fun being able to go out with Broken Social Scene and take a backseat as just a guitar player. For the most part, I don’t have to sweat the details. But then, I do that for a while and I really miss having the control. I think a lot of other people that are a part of that band go through the same process. There’s a lot of big egos involved—it’s a great exercise in checking your ego at the door. [Still,] we all need to be able to do our own things as well. It’s a real amazing opportunity to be able to do both and spin our solo work off the strength of the larger group.” Jason also talked about the songwriting differences between his work and Broken Social Scene’s, commenting that “Broken Social Scene has always been an exercise in sonic density and in turning songwriting on its head. For the most part, the lyrical element on those records was very spur of the moment and spontaneous. The voice is treated very much like another instrument. What gets captured is the immediate improvisation and the inspiration, right there in the studio. I’ve always really admired that about Kevin Drew, his ability to be spontaneous like that. But what I do on my own is steeped in a tradition, and I’m proud to be a part of that tradition. It’s great to have your foot in both worlds and draw from each experience. Drawing from either experience makes the other one richer, and there’s always things you can bring to either table.”

In a similar comparison of alternate worlds, Jason talked about the differences between playing in Canada and playing in the United States. “There’s a subtle difference in the crowds. In Canada, we’re very polite—it’s a hard audience to read. It can be a little unnerving to play to an audience that’s clapping after every song but not really physically expressing as much as Americans do. Americans tend to express whatever they feel. That might be ‘Hey, you stink, get off the stage!’ or ‘Hey man, you’re awesome!’. And I do appreciate that.”

“You hit the ceiling pretty quickly in Canada. But there’s a quality to having to bump your head up against that that makes you tougher. You have to really find it in yourself or a community of other artists that validate what you’re doing. And that’s very much the history, in a nutshell, of Broken Social Scene. A bunch of people that started creating music for each other and the joy of the experience—without any calculation of where it was going.”

“It’s kind of been like summer camp with your best friends, and it never really has to end, if you can imagine that,” he casually noted. “You know, it’s a built in party on the road. But, as a collective of artists, it’s no different than a collective of painters. There’s good reason to work that way—my peers in that group are my best critics, and we’re inspired by each other’s work. Inspired to work harder on our own individual things, to stretch further. And I feel like it’s been a real privilege to be a part of a community of artists that way. It’s made what I do that much better.” That being said, Here’s To Being Here features less guest artists from the collective than in the past. While 2005’s Idols Of Exile featured help from Emily Haines, Brendan Canning, Kevin Drew, Feist, Amy Millan, and many others, the new album is more of a simplified band effort. “I’d been touring for about three years, since the release of Idols Of Exile, with the band that I ended up using on the record. We just got real tight, and I loved what we were doing in our shows—there was a real chemistry between all the players. It was the more natural thing to get off the road and take it right into the studio while it was still relatively hot, to try and capture that live energy. It’s a more focused affair, as opposed to Idols Of Exile, which has a revolving door of twenty or so Broken Social Scene members coming and going. And that was a fun affair, but I really liked just focusing on the band for this one.” Here’s To Being Here was recorded in two short sessions in large studios to nail as much live as possible. The band then retired to Howie Beck’s studio to tie up all the loose ends. “There was not an hour of recording that was unproductive. [However,] because we recorded in a couple of places, some journalists have dropped some places in their reporting—and now it seems like we recorded it in four days in some barn. It wasn’t really like that. We needed to go a little deeper into some things.”

Currently, Jason is just getting started on touring in support of the finished album. “We’re going to be chugging on through the rest of the year. We took a year off as a band, so we’re all really happy to be back on the road playing together again. We’re really hitting our stride as a band, and it’s feeling good.” Agreed.

Jason Collett - Roll On Oblivion (from Here’s To Being Here)

Jason Collett - No Redemption Song (from Here’s To Being Here)

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