Solo 2.0

Musician Chad VanGaalen. (Wilcosz and Way/Flemish Eye Records)

For a musician to go it alone makes good sense. For one thing, you don’t have to battle aggrieved bandmates over royalties or songwriting credits. Nor do you have to share the M&Ms and Jagermeister you’ve requested in your backstage rider. And you don’t need to accommodate creative partners when they demand that the group’s earnings be donated to a religious cult.

Some of this year’s most remarkable albums are the handiwork of musicians working on their own. And not for them the spare sound of so many of yesterday’s singer-songwriters. Modern home-recording software and other technological advances allow musicians to do in their bedrooms what fabled studio wizards like Todd Rundgren and Stevie Wonder needed top-of-the-line equipment to accomplish in the ’70s.

An emphasis on self-sufficiency is what connects sounds and styles as diverse as the Russian Futurists’ retro-futurist pop tunes, Chad VanGaalen’s handmade indie psychedelia and Polmo Polpo’s heady guitar-based abstractions. That the inaugural winner of the Polaris Music Prize was principally created by a single individual — multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett, who records solo as Final Fantasy — suggests that it’s time to expand ideas about what the one-man band is capable of creating. (Lest this seem like a totally XY phenomenon, mention must be made of such one-woman bands as Imogen Heap, the Brit who became a surprise success after her dreamy pop songs were heard on The OC.)

For some musicians, there’s nothing unusual about working alone. Toronto-based Sandro Perri of Polmo Polpo says he began working on his own “mostly out of an inability to collaborate effectively with others.” Matthew Adam Hart of London, Ont., “never even thought of myself as someone who did music” before he did so under the Russian Futurists moniker. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a control freak or have very, very specific ideas,” he says, “but I feel like if there were more heads coming together, it might change the sound I’m looking for.” The words “control freak” also figure in Chad VanGaalen’s description of his methods. “When it comes down to it,” says the Calgary-based musician, “the most fun that I have is composing things and learning how to play instruments. I like being really playful about it.”

Our Thickness by the Russian Futurists. (Sonic Unyon Records)

That playfulness is evident in all of the artists’ music. Since 2000, Hart has created three discs of superlative, buoyant pop. On the Futurists’ latest album, Our Thickness (2005), he multi-tracks his boyish voice to create harmony parts which then float over cascading keyboards and clattery percussion tracks — the results recall both the “pocket symphonies” of the Beach Boys and the lowest-of-low-budget ’80s electronica. Hart’s Me, Myself & Rye (2006), a U.K.-only compilation, won plaudits from the British press, as did a string of sold-out shows there in August. “Sadly, Canada has never really been the No. 1 place for us as far as interest goes,” says Hart.

VanGaalen’s cachet in Canuck indie circles also rose when he earned attention outside the country. Stalwart Seattle label Sub Pop (in tandem with Calgary indie Flemish Eye) has released two albums’ worth of the hundreds of scrappy, surreal songs he’s recorded in his wildly painted house in Calgary over the last five years. Infiniheart (2004) and Skelliconnection (2006) contain a bounty of gleefully askew pop songs, sinister rockers and folkier numbers. Both albums reveal the influence of Beck, whose early discs created the template for the alt-rock one-man band.

Hart and VanGaalen obviously feel very comfortable in the idiosyncratic sound worlds they’ve created all by their lonesomes. It’s unsurprising it took time and energy to figure out how to bring such private music into a more public context. Hart says he was dragged into the Russian Futurists’ first live shows “kicking and screaming.” Unhappy with the prospect of presenting his music with “just me at a desk,” he gradually created a live version of the project, enlisting several friends to play keyboards alongside him.

“The live show is still changing and evolving monthly,” he says. “We’re getting it down now such that we can take it apart and know what parts people are going to play. But it took a long time to get to that point. It was more like, ‘Here’s a song that’s a big mess of sound — what are people gonna play and what can we represent live?’”

VanGaalen was better prepared, having made a living for a few years as a busker on the streets of Calgary. What’s more, he’d even become an old-school one-man band, playing guitar, harmonica and drums all at the same time. “You’re tapping your feet anyway so it’s easy if you’ve got some sense of rhythm,” he says. But when he started playing rock clubs, he had to overcome the cheeseball connotations of an act that’s been out of vogue since the death of vaudeville. “It’s shticky a lot of the time,” he says. “But it just depends on how you present it. When people hear it, they realize I am just trying to get the songs across — I’m not trying to present myself as a freak show.”

After the release of Infiniheart and the additional attention brought by Sub Pop’s endorsement, VanGaalen felt pressured to try a more conventional band setup. Worried that he’d turned into “a boring rock ’n’ roll act,” he’s gone back to a leaner approach for recent performances, playing half the sets solo and half with his drummer friend Eric Hamelin.

VanGaalen builds and modifies many of his own instruments. He’s also a visual artist: he illustrated the cover of Edmonton dance-rock mob Shout Out Out Out Out’s recent debut album and created animated videos for several of his own songs. For a multi-tasker who’s so productive at home, it’s easy to understand why the prospect of being out on the road playing the same songs night after night doesn’t hold that much appeal. “If you’ve got ideas, you have to let them fizzle out after a while,” he says. “That’s why I don’t really like touring.”

Musician Sandro Perri of Polmo Polpo. (Jen Parker/Polmo Polpo)

All that independence can create other issues, as Polmo Polpo’s Sandro Perri realized. “I’ve basically ruined pieces of music through obsessive tinkering,” says the composer and guitarist, “and some of them will never be restored to their original state of grace in my mind. The nice thing is that it reminds me that music is a living thing not always willing to be contained into the recording medium, like a glance or a conversation you have with somebody.”

Perri recently made the unusual move of recording a covers album — of his own songs. Released on Montreal’s Constellation label, Sandro Perri Plays Polmo Polpo revisits several songs that originally appeared on Polmo Polpo’s 2004 disc Like Hearts Swelling. On SPPPP, music that previously existed as fevered, densely layered soundscapes gains a strange effervescence with the addition of Perri’s hazy vocals and a brighter melodic sense. “The idea of the record is that there is more than one way for a person to say something,” Perri explains. “I’m doing it as an affront to style and personality, to try and break some illusion of character and methodology, if only for myself.”

Working unencumbered by other people’s egos and demands, it can be easier to make the radical changes and discoveries that are essential to artistic growth. Yet stylistic about-faces are not conducive to advancement in the music business, which rewards acts that create stable brands (think of the multinational corporation that is U2) rather than those who keep throwing audiences for a loop. Such potentially perplexing gestures may keep these artists out of chart contention. Yet they also illustrate ways to evade the restrictions placed on them by outside influences, be they ambitious bandmates or the conservative nature of the music industry. When it all goes right, the self-sufficiency of these acts can engender a greater willingness to experiment. It can also help when, as Hart notes, “there is nowhere else to put the blame.”

Jason Anderson is a writer in Toronto.

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