Back in 2006, when violin prodigy and pop experimentalist Owen Pallett won Canada’s first annual Polaris Prize, the out artist suddenly found himself in the spotlight. The Polaris is Canada’s response to the UK’s national Mercury Prize, and by picking Pallett the judges showed that they were not averse to taking risks.
Now Pallett has been nominated for a second Polaris for his new, critically lauded album Heartland. The album contains a dozen catchy tunes about Louis, a fictional character in a made-up world who talks to his own god named—Owen. Onstage, Pallett will recreate his rich, layered pop with the aid of only one other musician. Many songs require only the solitary Pallett, his violin, and pedal for looping the sounds.
Currently, Pallett is touring with indie fave The National. They will play Orlando’s House of Blues on Wednesday, Oct. 6.
WATERMARK: I’ve done my research, Owen. You once said that your sexuality informed your music, and I wondered what you meant by that.
OWEN PALLETT: That comment was from an interview I gave in 2005, and my opinion has changed. I was reacting to the fact that I get written about a lot as a gay artist, and yet my songs don’t contain a lot about butt sex. I was making the point that all gay people at some point consciously make a decision to reject a lot of things about heterosexual life. That anti-traditionalist process probably leaked through to my musical and artistic choices. At the time, I said that you could determine the sexuality of a guitar player by their tone. [Laughs] I’ve since changed my mind, because that suggests that heterosexual artists are more traditional, and I don’t believe that’s the case for any artist.
What changed your opinion?
Back when I gave that interview, I wasn’t being written about in the mainstream press. And now that I am, people like to say that I’m camp, and I’m not. I mean, I’ll kick an ass. [Laughs]
Does that kind of stereotyping bother you?
I guess I don’t understand why people would think that, especially based on my lyrical content. Okay, I may have a faggy voice, but there are tons and tons of heterosexual artists who sound more fey than I do. [Laughs] I just want to be able to put my music out there and have an honest critical response to it, whether that response is positive or negative, and that makes my sexuality irrelevant. To see so many people pigeonhole what I do in gay buzzwords, it kind of fucking sucks. [Laughs] But then the same thing’s been happening to women forever. And it’s happened to racial and other groups, too. What happens to female artists really gets me riled up.
Why is that?
It just seems that every single time a woman makes a record or a woman writes a book, the predominantly male critical response team focuses on her gender. There was a time back in the early 2000s—back before I was working regularly as a musician—when I would write a letter to every journalist or person who over-mentioned it. They’d say all these female singers sound like Cat Power. Nobody sounds like Cat Power!
You went under the band title ‘Final Fantasy’ for years. You make references to Dungeons and Dragons in your music, and you created a fictional landscape in your most recent album, Heartland. Any idea why you gravitate to the fictional and fantastical?
I haven’t been able to sit down and define it well. I try to let the works speak for themselves. And when I have talked about it, I sort of wanted to retract it because I felt like I said too much. [Laughs] It’s rooted in a desire to examine the relationship between who a person is—and where they are—compared to what they do and what they say. I think about it a lot. Whenever I listen to a record, there is so much information: not only they way it was produced or the way it was written, but also where it’s coming from—what the political implications are. Heartland is a lot about my actual voice—the one that is speaking to you now—and the fictional voice, which takes the form of Louis’ voice.
Did you create Louis’s biography before you created the songs about him?
Yes, and I actually made a map of the world he inhabits. I toured for two years, and unlike a lot of musicians I cannot compose music well on the road. So I used the time to just create and decide what I wanted this world to be. At first I wanted it be a version of Canada that existed without the genocide of First Nations people. I wanted it to be as if colonial Europeans arrived and there were no indigenous people, so it was sort of guiltless. But that was problematic and full of political landmines. [Laughs] So it became more and more of this composite for something else. In March, I booked a two-week writing retreat so that I could write lyrics. Mostly I wrote jokes, and then I wrote the songs around the jokes. I had to edit it down, but a lot of jokes ended up on my message board. I kept saying to my fans, “This is a really embarrassing joke that may end up in a song.” [Laughs]
And these jokes turned into your second Polaris nomination. Congratulations!
Thank you!
Your recent work—including your new EP A Swedish Love Story—uses a lot of different instruments. Do you ever think of touring with a band, or even an orchestra?
Yeah, that would be kind of awesome…and kind of not. [Laughs] I’ve done some concerts with an orchestra, and my feeling is that it’s a small perversion of the format. I think I’ve got a great fucking voice, but I don’t have the power to go up against a full orchestra. I tried it recently in New York, and it didn’t…. So I’ve been working hard to make my music sound best in a noisy bar. I’m actually creating something with an orchestra now, but Heartland is a more intimate show.
Does your process change with each album?
Yes, it’s always a learning process. Heartland is the album of which I am the most proud, because it’s the first album where I functioned as a producer. I was exploring conceptual and lyrical concepts, but I was also thinking about how best to get these things out to an audience. It’s a lot of work, but it’s my own fault for never sticking with any single collaborator for any length of time. [Laughs]
