August 04
The Riverside Th..
A.C. Newman Talks Upcoming New Pornographers Album,Together
Before the 2000s began, A.C. Newman wondered if he and the rest of his New Pornographers stood a chance in the music industry.
“I remember, we would take smoke breaks from practicing, and then I remember somebody playing Belle and Sebastian—If You’re Feeling Sinister orThe Boy with the Arab Strap—and thinking, God, these guys are so good, and we fucking suck,” Newman, the band’s principal songwriter, tells Paste. “I remember thinking it was so demoralizing, and I was like, Why do we even try?”
Of course, Newman kept trying. And thanks to his perseverance, spitting out albums every 18 months or so, he’s become one ofMatador‘s most dependable songwriters and the New Pornographers, one of the decade’s most prevailing examples of how a supergroup should exist. Together, out May 4, is the next step for the band.
Challengers, the band’s 2007 release, was also Newman’s most autobiographical, covering his then-recent move to New York and finding the woman he would soon marry. But in the tradition of the band’s older material, Together removes Newman a bit from his own life—even though he didn’t stray far from the band’s mainstay locations of Vancouver and Brooklyn, or even his new home in Woodstock, N.Y., to record.
For example, Newman penned “My Shepherd” specifically for Neko Case to sing after watching the 2007 documentary Crazy Love, which tells the story of a woman who returns to her husband years after he threw acid in her face. “It made me want to write a really dysfunctional torch song,” Newman says. “You know, that kind of Dusty Springfield-style torch song, but with kind of upsetting lyrics.”
At times over the years, Newman would find himself fixated on word combinations or even specific chords, simply because of how they sound. This time, however, he was initially inspired by a drum beat. “The first germ of an idea was that I wanted a song that started like ”‘New Day Rising’ by Hüsker Dü," he says of “Up in the Dark,” another Together song. “Just that pbt pbt, that big snare beat, to the extent that I even wanted to start the album like that for a while, just as a tribute to ‘New Day Rising’ and one of my favorite albums.”
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