Late Blooming Virtuoso: Moonface’s Piano Forays, post-Wolf Parade
He’s been hailed as one of indie rock’s premier pianists. But fans may be surprised to learn that Spencer Krug was never a keyboard prodigy.
“I was not a good student… I was a teenager who wanted to do other things — skateboard, go to punk shows, learn the bass, and kiss girls,” the solo artist known as Moonface (now that his beloved Montreal troop Wolf Parade has disbanded) says in an interview with the Beijinger. He adds: “It wasn't until I went to music school years later, as a composition major, that I became a passable pianist.”
Ahead of his September 17 performance at Yugong Yishan, Krug tells us about the life of a late blooming virtuoso.
Your latest Moonface album, 2013’s Julia With Blue Jeans On only features your vocals and piano playing. Critics praised it more than your previous single instrument recordings, such as 2010's Dreamland EP: Marimba and Sh*t-Drums.
Marimba did get a little too heady. I had no deadline and was working completely alone in a small studio I'd set up in my house. The vocal delivery is too laid back, because part of me was worried about waking up my neighbors while I was recording.
Setbacks aside, your laser focus on those earlier projects must have still benefitted Julia With Blue Jeans On.
True. The results were mixed, but the processes were experiments that I needed to conduct.
How did those experiments push your limits?
One thing that comes to mind is how I tried to imitate the sound of a rainstorm using layers of marimba. I’d start with slow-paced hits and accelerate gradually into a drum roll… I tried to have all the single-note rhythms be out of time with one another at the beginning of the section, and then speed up and gel together… It was my attempt at musical rain, and it was a fun challenge.
How does this solo work fulfill you in ways that Wolf Parade couldn’t?
With a band … moving forward artistically with great leaps and bounds can create friction … For me, working solo lessens all these hindrances and makes for a faster machine.
Despite those hurdles, it must have been exciting to be part of the booming Montreal music scene a decade ago.
It was fun and easy. We all lived in Mile End, just steps away from the jam space we shared with Arcade Fire. We (Wolf Parade) would work on songs, sit on the stoop and have a beer, then bike up to the McGill campus to hop the fence and go swimming in their low-security outdoor pool. We paid a loose attention to the press and eventually realized we had become a real band, and that Mile End was becoming a cool place to live. After a while (bandmate) Hadji Bakara said: "We're gentrifying our own neighborhood.” It was funny, and possibly true at the time.
What’s next for Spencer Krug? What is inspiring your upcoming projects?
I have a few things on the Moonface back-burner: a sort of electronics and percussion pop album that I made a few years ago. There is also a lot of new piano material that I've written, or half-written, as well electronic music that I've been making on my laptop. So, who knows. I definitely anticipate more Moonface releases in the future, but can't say yet which of the above it will contain, or whether or not the material will feasibly be tour-able. But I'm working on it.
Moonface will perform at Yugong Yishan on September 17. Tickets are RMB 80 at the door, RMB 60 presale. For more information, visit Yugong Yishan's webpage here.
Photo: bewegungsmelder.ch
