Interview: The New Pornographers' Carl Newman Talks Trump Anxiety & Darker New Album

Jenny Jimenez

The New Pornographers have been responsible for some of the world's best power pop records over the last 17 years, starting with the effervescent fizziness of their debut Mass Romantic, through the sprawling epic Twin Cinema, to the autumnal chamber pop of Challengers and up to 2014's ABBA-and arpeggiator overdose of Brill Brusiers. Their latest album, Whiteout Conditions, is a very zesty continuation of songs from Brill Bruisers like "Dancehall Domine," "Backstairs" and "Champions Of Red Wine," doubling down on the synths and embracing what band leader Carl (née A.C.) Newman refers to as "bubblegum Krautrock."

The band will play Terminal 5 on April 26th with Waxahatchee—you can get tickets here. We caught up with Newman on the day the new album was released about the changes in the group's lineup, the darker tone of the new record, and how anxiety about Trump has started creeping into his music.

After last night [Donald Trump launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria the night before the interview], I was listening to the album and thinking about the song "High Ticket Attraction." You have said before that the song was written in the buildup to the election. I'm wondering how the expectations that you talk about in the tune are holding up versus the reality of the moment now. The thing about that song is there's a lot of anxiety there, but I think there's a certain confidence that it wasn't going to happen. I think in that song I'm painting a surreal picture of where I saw things heading if he did win.

Yeah, things are definitely not going well. Things like global warming or climate change, that was already happening, but now you look at it like...somebody put it well a few weeks ago: It's almost as if they're just doing it for fun. It's almost as if they're doing cruel things just to amuse themselves.

Gutting the EPA seems along those lines... You look at everything that's happening right now, so much of it seems political. There was the horrible gassing in Syria, and you think: somebody needs to do something. Then you look at it and it's like, God did he just do this as a political move? Did he think: I should do this thing that would appear to be good, because in that way maybe I could distract? The problem is that with everything that's happened, it makes you so cynical. And all the fake news, you really don't know what's going on. You don't know if America is being ruled by evil geniuses or just idiots. I see it, it's happening. All of the things that we were worried about are happening as we speak.

And a lot quicker than I think any us thought. It's true.

I've never thought of the Pornographers as an explicitly political band, but knowing you from Twitter, you are pretty outspoken and articulate about your beliefs. Do you feel at this point that there's any way of separating these two worlds anymore? Is there any way of not letting the political be reflected in your art? I think there is. A lot of these songs I don't think are political songs.

But I feel like you shouldn't shy away from it too. When you find yourself writing something that's political, you should feel free to say it. Just as in everyday life, like when you talk on Twitter, I think, how could you not address it. It's more difficult to address things in art because it's art. You want the art to be good. I'm not a person who'd just write some political essay and just like recite it over the top of some chords. For me, it's a song first.

Are you saying you're not Father John Misty? No, I wish I was Father John Misty, in some ways. But just in terms of being political, I think it's hard not to be. Sometimes people think like, 'Oh you're outspoken and political on Twitter?' And I think, how could you not be? If I wasn't outspoken on Twitter, it'd only be because I wasn't on Twitter. I would still be talking to my friends about it.

Do you find Twitter to be a good release there? Is it a positive environment for you? It can be. Something like Twitter, the best use of it is for people to just not feel as alone. If something is making you angry, it's good to go out there and know that there are people who share your beliefs, and it's also good if you follow smart people, like journalists. It's a good way to get news that you feel is less tainted. But obviously nobody likes to be insulted. When you go on Twitter the odds are, periodically, somebody is going to say something cruel. But that's their headache.

I remember when we spoke last time, you described your last album 'Brill Bruisers' as a celebration record. Listening to the new album, it feels a lot darker to me—it feels like a nighttime album. There's a lot of references to sleep, there are a lot of songs like "Colosseums" that are very internal. There's a certain anxiety that I think comes through very clearly. I think it definitely is a little darker. Like "Whiteout Conditions," the title track, is basically a song about anxiety, being taken over by anxiety.

A song like "Second Sleep" is essentially about insomnia. But it's also about the concept of second sleep, how before electricity we used to wake up in the middle of the night and just work for a few hours, or do something else, and then go back to sleep. The idea that maybe insomnia is a normal state and it's not an illness, that’s the kind of thing you think of in the middle of the night when you have insomnia. I think there's definitely something a little darker on this record. I don't know why that is exactly, it just felt right.

This album also seems like the fastest New Pornographers one yet—it feels like the tempo is set at 160 BPM the whole time. As a result, I'd say it's one of the most unified records you guys have made. When you were writing it, did you intend to make a faster album or did it just sort of come out naturally? I don't think it had much to do with the writing. The writing and the arranging and the recording, they all sort of meld together.

When we started making the record, the first song that came together was "Play Money" and I really liked the vibe of it and I thought: let's continue with this. I like the feel of this and let's use this a template going forward. I think John [Collins] and I probably spent a long time on tempos, asking ourselves what's too fast and what's too slow. Sometimes it involved going to bed and getting up in the morning and listening to it again, just to get a new perspective. I knew at the beginning making this record that I wanted to make a record that was a continuation of a direction we were going in with Brill Bruisers. It was a continuation of a song like "Champions of Red Wine." I wanted to have songs that move, that drone in a different way.

And really embracing the arpeggiators and the synths a little more than electric guitars this time. Yeah. Another different thing about this is that there's a lot more acoustic guitar. Some of the faster songs on the record, the electric guitar is very muted. The electric guitar is muted to the point where it's almost percussive. You can't really tell it apart from the bass, and the main rhythm guitar is an acoustic. And that felt like a good way of pulling back. When a song is really fast, having it be driven by an acoustic just gives it a different feel. When you're playing something at a tempo that could be metal, but when you're strumming it on an acoustic, it just creates a different vibe.

I think a song like "Coliseum" really brings that out. I love the texture of that song. That's an interesting song because we were listening to the Midnight Oil record 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And even though it doesn't sound like Midnight Oil from that record, that was the main reference point there. For whatever reason, the loud acoustic and then having the marimba and all that stuff, it felt to us like the classic '80s Midnight Oil. We just ran with it. But now I listen back and I'm like: no, this definitely doesn't sound like Midnight Oil. I hope it has its own weird vibe.

I felt like there are some references to some past Pornographers songs as well on this album. "Juke" felt to me like an update of "Failsafe," like if you took it a little further... Hmm, that's interesting. My wife said that when she listened to the record, that was the one song that sounded the most like a classic New Pornographers song, but that seemed weird to me.

Maybe it's the tremolo, I don't know, but it definitely immediately brought it up for me. Is there a tremolo? But it's a tremolo keyboard, right?

Haha, yeah, you would probably know better than me! It is slightly different, but it's very cool the way that song blends together similarly. That's an interesting song on the record. To me that felt like one of the weirdest songs on the record, and I liked it for that reason. That felt like the weird album track. You know there's the songs you like because they're the singles on the record, and the other songs you like because they're weird album tracks.

I'm assuming you're using the term "Juke" like in the soccer sense, right? You're faking somebody out? Is that what they call a fake-out in soccer?

Yeah, you juke someone out if you push the ball to the side very quickly and they miss, or you go through their legs. Nah, that's good. I'm going to use that. That's my new story for that title.

The other big thing about the album is that there’s been some major changes in the band, maybe the most major changes since the group was formed: you guys left Matador Records, Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer) doesn't have any songs on an album for the first time, and [former drummer] Kurt Dahle is gone too. How did all that affect making this album? Well, the label change didn't really affect anything. Not having Dan, I mean obviously he's a good friend and always been a massive fan, so he's missed for the obvious reasons.

But for me making the record, it wasn't any different. I would work on Dan's songs but he wouldn't work on my songs, so this album, for my part, wouldn't have been any different if Dan was working on the record. And then with Kurt, the new drummer [Joe Seiders] was in a lot of ways a very positive thing because it changed the dynamic of the band in a cool way. I felt like we could make a different kind of record. There were things like we weren't locked into—sometimes a member with a specific style just locks you into a certain feel, especially with a drummer. So with a new drummer it felt like we could branch out and try different sounds. I think that's probably the hugest different in the sound on this record.

If people think this album has a different vibe, it's because a lot of the percussion stuff we changed around. We messed around with more percussion from Casios, or we'd use a real drum set but mix it in with a drum machine kick playing 16th notes—just things like that that we never did before. So that part was very fun. I think when I realized that Dan wasn't going to be on the record, I felt like that it opened it up for us to do something different. There's a change that's been hoisted upon us whether we wanted it or not, so you might as well run with it.

Do you think he'll be back for the next record? I mean he could be. I don't know. I've obviously been talking about this with people, and the one thing I've been bringing up is that he basically left the band in 2000. About a month after Mass Romantic came out, he moved to Spain. So the idea of Dan not being in the band anymore goes back 16 years. He's been sort of in and out in different ways throughout the years, so it's weird that this is the first record that he's not on, but from the beginning there's always been the idea that he might not be on the next record. I was shocked that he was on Electric Version, so I don't know. Maybe he will be, but I've never wanted to speak for him. I feel like his deal with the band, it's never been a multi-album contract. It's always been like piecework from job to job.

Well, you keep coming back to each other, so that's always nice. We're friends. When we were rehearsing last month in Vancouver, we went out and had drinks with him and it wasn't like anything had changed at all. So, yeah he might be on the next record, but he might not. It's always been the nature of the band—it's amazing we've continued for so long because we never know what's going to happen next. I remember 2005, 2006 talking to a manager and saying, "Why would you want to manage us? I just don't know what's going to go on with us."

Do you know feel any more comfortable with the band's longevity now? Have you had enough consistency that you could at least say, "Yes, we're going to have another record, and another record after that, because we're goddamn great at this and I love doing this?" Yeaaa, well maybe not "we're goddamn great at this," but...

Hey, it's okay to be proud. I mean, I do think we're pretty good at what we do. I'll always want to make records, so I think I'll always want to keep the Pornographers going just because it's a way to put out music. It's a forum, a soapbox I can stand on and I can write songs, and if they're New Pornographers songs, odds are there are people who want to listen to them. So I'm very glad for that. I think I'd want to do it for as long as possible, so yeah it's possible that the band will keep going and maybe it'll change further. Who knows? I think I'll at least be doing it unless someone stops me.

Considering this album is almost all very uptempo, upbeat electric songs, do you have a stack of acoustic tunes or ballads in your back pocket? Are you planning on doing any more solo albums or anything? I'm not planning on doing any solo albums but I do have songs, most of them aren't finished.

I do have a lot of songs sitting around that I think: What am I going to do with this. Sometimes I think I should put together a different project to play these songs, and sometimes I think maybe I should just rewrite them. Like if they don't sound like Pornographers songs then maybe I should just rewrite them until they become Pornographers songs. There's always a lot of songs sitting around that I just need to finish and figure out what to do with them. It's always been like that, so we'll see. Right now, it's hard for me to see past this record, considering it's the day of release. I'm just going to try to ride this one for awhile.