As Andy Shauf started writing again, he kept coming back to the same character: a lonely man he named Norm. He dived in, fleshing out a world with a small cast of players, including a fickle omniscient being, for his eighth full-length album.Angela Lewis/Supplied
Andy Shauf planned to write a disco concept album. But after months of tinkering in his Toronto studio, it just wasn’t working.
So he scrapped the songs and his approach. Instead of another concept album – which he had become known for with The Party (2016) and The Neon Skyline (2020) – he set out to write a “normal” album featuring a collection of unrelated songs. To drive the point home, he’d call it Norm.
But stories have funny ways of revealing themselves. As he started writing again, he kept coming back to the same character: a lonely man he had named, yes, Norm. He dived in, fleshing out a world with a small cast of players, including a fickle omniscient being.
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On his eighth full-length, released earlier this month on Arts & Crafts, Shauf’s voice is forlorn and longing, lilting over carefully orchestrated melodies of acoustic guitar, meandering synths and lush strings. In Norm’s universe, songs that sound sweet on the surface reveal darker underbellies with a turn of phrase. A casual listener might miss these tiny moments. But the clues are there for those who search.
Shauf spoke to The Globe and Mail by Zoom about the necessary act of rewriting songs, Mulholland Drive and God as a caricature.
The Party and The Neon Skyline have tightly constructed narratives: One is a series of vignettes at a house party, the latter set at a dive bar, told through the perspective of a man pining after his ex. Why did you want to avoid another concept record?
On his new album, Shauf’s voice is forlorn and longing, lilting over carefully orchestrated melodies of acoustic guitar, meandering synths and lush strings.Angela Lewis/Supplied
For The Neon Skyline, I wanted to make something that was linear, that had a rising and falling and whatever plot things that I don’t know enough about. I gradually got characters as I wrote the songs, and when I would hit a dead end, I’d rewrite toward a new trajectory. At the end, I had a story that was relatable, but it had no space for interpretation. There’s some songs that are just too heavy-handed.
I started the disco record in exactly the same way, so I thought, I don’t know how to approach this. I need to be done with this idea for a little bit.
You’ve said you were captivated by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive while working on this album, a movie that definitely has space for interpretation. How did it inspire the record?
I watched it at a point in the writing where I wasn’t sure how to tie the story together. It came to this scene where there’s a key on a table. The shot looked like it was zooming in really slowly. I was watching for three minutes, then five minutes. And I was like, this must have been total mayhem in the theatre. Then my browser crashed. The movie was frozen. But during that time, I ascribed all this meaning to a scene that wasn’t in the movie.
It made me realize that so much of the things that we find in stories are happy accidents and the way we interact with something is going to be the most important thing to us. I didn’t need to show what happens at the end of the story. I could write it to a certain point and just let it drift off.
You worked with a story editor on the lyrics. I don’t think I’ve heard of another musician doing that.
In Norm’s universe on Shauf's latest album, songs that sound sweet on the surface reveal darker underbellies with a turn of phrase.Angela Lewis/Supplied
I spent so much time just working on the lyrics and rewriting things that I realized that most of it was only accessible to me. I needed to know if someone could figure out any of the things that I was trying to subtly hint toward, or even general details of the story. So I sent the lyrics to my friend Nicholas Olson, who is a writer, and said, without any explanation, “What can you pick up from this?”
He sent me back what he thought was happening in the story, and I then changed a few details because I could see the ways he was being misled. And then I sent it back and said, “What do you think now?” It was three or four times back and forth, until he interpreted it exactly how I wanted it to be.
That surprised me, because on your albums, you play all the instruments, record and produce. But with storytelling you’re comfortable bringing in someone else?
I think in figuring things out on my own, there is a certain amount of pride in not having help. That’s how I’ve always done it, and my process is mostly refining. If I refined someone else’s playing as much as I do my own, it would make them hate me. So the safest way is to do it on my own.
With the story, I realized you can self-edit to a certain point, but you can’t read your own writing objectively. You’re too close to it.
Some of these songs deal with faith and the afterlife, and I know that you grew up religious. How did your upbringing influence these songs?
I grew up in the church, and really religious. I think that upbringing has an effect on everything that I write, everything that I do, really. It’s in the back of my head, these things that I grew up with being truths. But with this narrative, I wanted to play more with a caricature idea of God and Jesus. I wanted to use that not to really question it seriously, or as some criticism of the way that certain people believe things to be true, because I think it’s a lot more complex. I wanted to use a God character on this record so that I could contradict the truths.
When you talk about the story I picture you in your studio staring at one of those cork boards with yarn connecting together a bunch of little scraps of paper.
I did have a lot of sticky notes on my piano.
This interview has been edited and condensed.