Alden Penner was a charter member of The Unicorns, the Victoria-born, Montréal-based outfit who released one incredibly successful LP, 2003's Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, before their acrimonious break-up late in 2004. Half-a-decade on, and Penner has finally returned with Clues, a quintet he helms with one-time Arcade Fire member Brendan Reed. The debut self-titled Clues album was released on Montréal's Constellation Records, in 2009. Penner spoke prior to its release.
Interview: 11 April 2009
How did Clues come into being?
“It was actually the last time I was in Australia [on the final Unicorns tour]. I made that split seven-inch that had me on one side, and Brendan Reed on the other. Without knowing it, that was the nucleus of Clues. We sort of just put our songs together, and though we didn’t have a name for it, that’s what it was. That first seed is just coming to fruit right now.”
Did you take a leave of absence from rock’n’roll after the demise of The Unicorns?
“No, it was more trying to discover another way of existing in music. I don’t think anything as important as music should conform to a timeline that involves putting out albums every year or two under the one name, the one style. It requires care and time. I was still active, doing musical things, I just didn’t feel the desire to form a new band and go on tour. I was thinking, wondering, about different ways of being musical. I suppose, to people familiar to the music I’d made, that might feel like a reaction of sorts.”
So, that didn’t stem from feeling like The Unicorns had been put on-schedule?
“It was partly that, but I wouldn’t want to say that’s entirely it. It’s definitely about having a measure of self-control in how you go about presenting things, and I don’t know if that felt all that present with The Unicorns. It mostly had to do with how old I was, personally, at the time, and what experiences I’d just been through, and it being the first band I’d ever been in. We started out of high-school, and weren’t really expecting it to go into that measure of success. So, it was a surprise, but also a cause of reflection on how I wanted to be in a band, and who I wanted to do that with, I guess.”
What lessons did you learn from that time?
“That you don’t have to do things you don’t want to do. You really don’t need to do all that much touring. You really don’t have to put out an album every year. You can concentrate on other things in your life, take more time with being a band, be more local, establish connections to artists in more of a community network. Being in a band that was constantly on tour, it was very insular. Now, I’m at a point where I want to be more external, invite more people into things. I didn’t want to be in another gang, more an umbrella organization. That’s reflected more with Clues.”
What other ideals were important building-blocks, for you, with Clues?
“There aren’t really many huge, over-arching ideas with the band. It’s just what we’ve done so far: make a record and play some shows. I don’t think that we’re reinventing what it means to be in a band, or even that there’s anything particularly unique about this band for me to trumpet. It really just has more to do with friendship, with the playing of music, with enjoying it.”
If you’re just another band, how will your record get noticed? How will the outside world ‘see’ you?
“I have absolutely no idea, and I prefer not to even think about it. We’ve played a very limited amount of shows, and have not developed as a band that plays a lot, that has a clear membership to it. So, I’m mostly just concerned with what’s going on within the band. What perspective is coming from outside of the band about the band, that barely enters into my mind. How people will relate to us when the album comes out, it’s a mystery, at this point, but it’s certainly not one we’re speculating about. That’s more for yourself.”
The record reminds me of, well, the ’90s, in the way that the sound —not the songs but the recorded sound itself— is kind of thick and heavy and tangled. Is that just me? Or are those things you’ve thought of?
“Thick and heavy? I suppose those are words that can describe music that we really like as individuals. I think the rapidity of getting the album done, which really contributed a lot to the sound, came in recognition of our record label’s past. In some ways, I saw it as a collaboration between us and what Constellation represents. We were very aware of it almost being commissioned by them to be done that way. A lot of the music that is presented on this record has come from many years ago, as well, so music that may be literally closer to the ’90s than to 2010. But, I suppose you’re talking about a production decision, which was to, yeah, let’s really try and blend things in as much as possible, really create this mélange. In describing a band called Clues, we thought we’d provide a lot of layers that could be unpeeled over several layers, discover these hidden melodies and nice singing in there. But it’s incidental that this decision has lead the record to sounding like the ’90s. We certainly weren’t out to make a ’90s retro record.”
Has all that Arcade Fire-fed, Montréal Rock City hype gone away, these days?
“Yeah, thankfully. I don’t think there was anything all that hype-worthy, to me. It’s a nice thing to think about when you’re writing about music, but when you’re actually playing that music, existing within the community from which that music is coming, you have such a different perspective. You’re on the ground, you’re in and amongst it. It seems crazy that these bouts of intense attention would come and go with such frequency. Montréal has been a vibrant cultural city for many decades, so it seems funny when there’s such a bright spotlight shone on it for such a short amount of time, as if everything that came before and everything that came after is less important. There are always things going on, it’s just that not all of them have the luxury of being heavily promoted in the mass media.”
