Islands outtakes
"The Arm"
I interviewed Nick Thorburn of Islands the other day. I had previously said that Thorburn seems like a difficult guy to work with, given his many fights with different band members over the years. I still think that might be true, but I want to add that he is a lovely and earnest guy over the phone.
Of course, for my story, which will be in tomorrow's paper, not all the nuggets of deliciousness made it in. So I'm giving you some here.
(Just a quick refresher/context: Islands is a Canadian group that grew up from the remnants of PItchfork-annointed Unicorns, who were totally awesome. You should love them and everything they do. Thorburn (who had been calling himself Nick Diamons at the time) started the band with Unicorn Jamie Thompson (J'aime Tambeur) after they had split with the third Unicorn Alden Penner (Alden Ginger). After Islands' first album, "Return to the Sea" Thompson left Islands.)
EH: For your first Islands album, there were still a few Unicorns ideas hanging over. Is that correct?
NT: Yeah. Even on this record ["Arm's Way"], one of the songs is a Unicorns’ song, “Abominable Snow.” They weren’t fully formed, in that former life, but I still felt like they needed their moment in the sun.
EH: With each album, it does sound like it’s coming from the same band, but the styles are very different. Do you feel like you are searching for your style, or is it that you just like to experiment with different kinds of sounds?
NT: I guess we wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed into having one distinct sound, or have this genre-specific band. To me, there’s nothing more depressing, to be just classifiable. As a result of being someone who loves music, and who loves a wide variety of music, it ends up sounding a little more varied, I suppose. The band is so multi-instrumental. Our bass player comes from a tradition of African music, he’s from Ghana originally; the string players grew up solely on classical music, and the other two guys have different musical upbringings, too. When you throw that all together, that also adds to it. That’s the kind of the world we live in these days, where everyone’s taking pieces from everywhere else. It’s the postmodern existence.
EH: You and Jamie are still collaborating occasionally?
NT: We are, yeah. We had a tough spot that we got through. We’ve been through so much now that I don’t think that there’s anything that could keep us apart creatively for very long. We’ve been doing it for so long. I was very hurt when he initially announced his departure, and one of the songs on the record is about that.
EH: Did you ever get to a point where you were like, “This is enough. I don’t want to do this anymore”?
NT: I definitely felt like I was being pushed into that corner. When he left, I felt like it had been a series of trials and challenges that I wasn’t sure I was able to meet. What it did, I guess, was inevitably make me stronger and more capable of continuing and not being so reliant on other people, and being able to write songs without so much guidance; I felt that I really needed that before.
More after the jump ...
EH: A while back, there was all this hype about the Canadian scene, and all those bands are still around, but the hype has died down. Having lived through that, was that a noticeable thing, or did you just shrug it off and do your own thing?
NT: I think the hype was starting just as I was transitioning bands, just as my first band was breaking up, so I had a cynical approach to it because I wasn’t being swept up in the hype machine. In some ways I’m grateful for it, because those things tend to eat bands alive, when you don’t have the foundation behind it. I don’t ever feel too much pressure or influence from outside criticism; I don’t feel too beholden to anyone.
EH: Do you still feel like the scene is healthy where you are?
NT: It’s more just like a social scene at this point. There isn’t much in the way of collaboration; there was for a time, but everyone’s busy doing their own thing. A band like Islands, we don’t really fit in, we hardly fit in with each other, so there’s a real element of outsiderism, I guess; we’re a bit of a motley crew in the scene.
EH: Though it seems like you’re an outsider by choice.
NT: I guess. I wouldn’t turn down a spotlight, but I’m not motivated by it either. I don’t see it as ignoring anything, but if people wanted to start paying attention to what we’re doing, I wouldn’t stop them.
eh.www.amNY.com
