In our amazing Five Questions with Kiwi Jr.’s Jeremy Gaudet, we teased Gaudet offering a behind-the-scenes look at the songs on the Toronto quartet’s outstanding new Blowin’ Up (K). We keep our promises at MAGNET, so here’s Gaudet’s talking about the tunes on the band’s fourth outing. As also noted in that viral piece, Blowin’ Up likely won’t be MAGNET’s album of the year, but it should be.
—Matt Hickey
1) “Photos Of The Reenactment”
“I love that this opens the record. That was our manager’s (longtime Guided By Voices and Yoko Ono manager David Newgarden) idea. I’m really into the opening harpsichord; I hear it and picture something like Barry Lyndon. That harpsichord tone was something that (guitarist) Brian (Murphy) added in the studio. The story of this song is about someone moving to a small town with her daughter to produce a podcast about an unsolved murder that happened there years before. But it’s hard for the kid to be there, and digging through the past of this small town can get heavy. It’s sort of an idea for a movie I had. Being young and stuck in a small town can feel like you’re so far away from anything that matters, and the title of the song reflects that. ‘Photos Of The Reenactment’ is like a copy of a copy of a copy—an imitation of an imitation, etc.”
2) “Blowin’ Up”
“(Drummer) Brohan (Moore) suggested this as the album title as soon as I sent the demo along. It was the first or second song written for the record. I wanted to sing like Lou Reed. There’s a little Warren Zevon, too, maybe more so in the lyrics. The original demo I made had no other parts; it was just the chromatic riff and the sing/talky vocals, so (bassist) Mike (Walker) and I sat down and put together the chords for the chorus much later. We recorded this song twice, first in Toronto and then in Detroit, and the final version that’s on the album is the Detroit version, except a cool thing we did was we brought in some instruments from the Toronto session, like the drums in those half-time sections, so that there’s two different drumkits playing at the same time. But the Toronto version was a much different tempo, so we had to manipulate it so that it lined up, and it sounds really unique, I think, as a result, taking these other tracks and really stretching them to fit.”
3) “Hard Drive, Ontario”
“We had to squeeze our brains to try and make the different time signatures work together. That’s something that’s new for us. The origins of this one are murky to me. I was walking down the street and the words “hard drive” and “Ontario” were suddenly floating in my head. I think maybe there were different delivery trucks parked next to each other that had these words on them, so it was like a found poem. I wrote it down thinking it could be a lyric or something. Then later I realized that ‘Hard Drive, Ontario’ should be the title and that the song should go like this. And then out of nothing, I just sang the lead guitar riff into my phone’s voice-notes app. We had to build it all out based on this confusing a capella voice memo I had made. There’s definitely some Pinkerton influence in the guitar arrangement between Brian and I. I was also listening to a lot of Frog at the time.”
4) “Pure Michigan”
“I love Brohan’s drumming on this one. I’d been working on this song for years trying to get it right. I had the title, then the lyrics, and then the music came last. Usually when I get the song title first, those songs are the strongest. That happened with ‘Blowin’ Up’ and ‘Hard Drive, Ontario,’ too. We recorded a long intro to this song, but we were convinced to cut it for the album so that the song snaps right in with the full band, and I think it’s the right idea. We still do the long intro live, though. I had Fred Thomas help me with a couple of the details in the lyrics. It was important for me to get at least one or two Michiganders to sign off on it. We tried to get as many Detroit features on the record as we could. It’s just such a good music town that we wanted to grab as much as we could, and hope that some of it rubbed off on us.”
5) “New Jade Rabbit”
“China had a lunar rover named the Jade Rabbit malfunction on the moon. It got stuck on its side between some rocks but was still doing its job taking pictures of the moon and sending them back to the scientists. Lots of people online were rooting for the Jade Rabbit, though there was no hope of it surviving. It eventually died, and they sent a second lunar rover up. I like to think the Jade Rabbit accepted its fate when it was stuck on the moon dying and wanted to keep doing its job and not be angry at the second lunar rover coming to replace it. The song is telling this story, but I’m telling it alongside a parallel and more personal/smaller story of a person getting kicked out of a rock band and learning to accept it, not be angry about it and their replacement. The two stories are the same, and I’m weaving them back and forth. This song is really hard for me to sing, it’s so high. There are parts of the song where we manipulated the tape speed so that I could hit the notes. It was a bit difficult to arrange. I had sent Mike a demo a couple years ago that was really minimal, and he really responded to it and pushed us to finish the arrangement and get this on the album.”
6) “Stage Names”
“We had the instrumental of this one before the lyrics, which is my least favorite situation to be in—just jamming a new song with the band and singing gibberish because I don’t have the words yet. It puts a lot of pressure on me because I like to bend the melodies to suit the words and not the other way around. There’s nothing worse for me than to sit thinking, ‘OK, now I need a word that rhymes with ___,’ and trying to write a song that way, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. It happened with this one, though, and in the end it turned out OK, I think, but the process is not fun for me at all—it’s like homework.”
7) “Caught In The Wild”
“Mike wrote a melody for what became the chorus of this song, but it was a bouncy, uptempo thing. We worked at it for a while like that, and it never felt right. We would throw out ideas like ‘Let’s play it in the style of the Constantines,’ to see what happened. I remember doing it like the Smashing Pumpkins, too. We just couldn’t crack it until one day we had the idea to do it like Neil Young, and we slowed it way down and switched Brian to slide guitar. At first it was kind of a joke because we don’t really ever do ‘slow songs,’ but we all really responded to it. I’m kind of proud of my guitar solo at the end—it was done live in the room with the rest of the band on my 12-string, and I was also going for a Neil Young thing there, too. Most of the album was done in the room and not a ton of overdubbing. That’s in the Neil spirit, too. There are different elements of this album that were inspired by listening to Neil Young.”
8) “Painting After Painting”
“It was the last song written for the album and came together a week or two before we went into the studio. We were just jamming over Mike’s bass riff in the verses, and that was going to be the whole song: like a no-chorus/VU-inspired kind of thing. Our manager David had been suggesting to us that we try to write one more song with a big chorus, so I tacked on a chorus at the last minute. I’m glad we did because this is a lot of people’s favorite song on the album. It’s a really positive song for us. Very optimistic. More nice slide guitar from Brian. We were going for a David Lindley tone.”
9) “World Like Polly”
“We met Polly Noonan through the Lemonheads. She’s an actor in Chicago, and she’s on the cover of It’s A Shame About Ray. The song is like a celebration of her. She has a lot of good stories; outside of the venue we played in Chicago, she pointed out where her dad witnessed an armed robbery on Christmas Day when she was a kid and how he called in the license plate of the getaway car and they caught the guy. This anecdote became the second verse. This was one of the first two songs written for the album. I was really pleased Margaux (Bouchaudon of En Attendant Ana) agreed to sing on it; she’s got a fantastic presence.”
10) “Landscape With Limousine”
“Like ‘Painting After Painting,’ this was also written really shortly before going into the studio. The ending used to be a lot longer with an extended guitar solo and a lot of feedback and skronk, but we thought trimming it down would be the unselfish move. Once we had the plan to record in Detroit, I wanted to write a song that had a lot of automobile imagery, and so there’s a few different car scenes in this song. Greg (Ahee) and Joe (Casey) from Protomartyr are on this track, and it would be incomplete without them, and probably left off the album if they hadn’t saved it. As soon as they put their parts down, it was like ‘Woah, there it is, that’s their sound.’ It instantly sounded 100 times cooler.”