Music

Meet August's X3 Artist of the Month: Junior Boys

by Nicole Villeneuve

Jeremy Greenspan may be camped out in a Zurich hotel room on the current Junior Boys tour, but his heart is in Hamilton.

“It’s my muse, basically,” he says of his hometown. “It’s my favourite city in Canada. There’s no one trying to be a mover and a shaker or a scenester in Hamilton…It’s where I always want to be.”

Having decided to stay even when Junior Boys bandmate Matt Didemus moved to Berlin, on latest album It’s All True, the duo continue to create music individually before bringing parts together in both locations. It’s a process that, though less convenient than trading MP3s, Greenspan says is necessary not only for quality control, but to the actual efficiency and enjoyment of the duo’s collaborations.

“I don’t want to make music that way,” he says bluntly. “And also we’re pretty lazy people. If we didn’t meet up with each other, it’d never get done. Doing it the way we do it now is frustrating enough. I think it would be intolerable if we did it in another way.”

Greenspan also traveled to China during the making of the album, embarking there for two months to finally take his sister up on her offer to visit. It turned into a working vacation when Greenspan realized two months was too many not to be working; with a few pieces of recording gear in tow, he captured some of the sounds on It’s All True in person rather than relying on a simpler sample library.

It’s a mindset that holds true with the Boys’ evolving sound—while the production quality increases, no warmth is sacrificed. Absorbing the precisely organized sounds on It’s All True takes some time, and while the overall sound edges on downright buoyant, Greenspan admits that, going into the album, he was feeling anything but. A combination of personal problems and an overall dissatisfaction with how the previous record (2009’s Begone Dull Care) was received resulted in a time of professional crisis for Greenspan.

“I [don’t] want to cry about it too much, but I did feel that a lot of criticism that I took, that I gave myself, were based on this idea that we didn’t know how to sell the record,” he says. “That’s when I started feeling all this pressure. I just wanted the music to be based on how it was musically, and not how exciting a release it was, or how exciting a statement it was about who we are.”

His resentment towards the image-based music industry was tempered by an unlikely source—Orson Welles (It’s All True is the name of an unfinished Welles film).

“I think a lot of the time people want honesty in a musician. They want them to talk about their love life, or personal life, or emotional life, or whatever. But rarely do they want them to talk about what they feel about their professional life,” he explains. “I thought, ‘I’m not supposed to do that,’ but then I saw this movie, and I thought, Orson Wells does it. The more I looked into him, the more I saw that he had this kind of agenda, or this narrative that he told over and over again, which is the sense that one has when they feel like they’re losing a struggle against time. I became more and more inspired by him.”

Armed with artistic validation in the face of disposable music culture, Greenspan buried himself in the album, eventually getting back to good. “All of that kind of stuff, although I believe in it, in the various pressures that musicians have to go through these days, that have less to do with the music, and more about trying to figure out ways to market their brand, I’m more optimistic about it, in a sense,” he muses. Though not sure what’s next for Junior Boys after they’re finished touring the album, Greenspan is excited, even inspired, by the possibilities the modern music realities have laid out before him.

“There’s actually something liberating about realizing that nobody buys records anymore. It makes you realize that you don’t even have to invest yourself in that model.”