American Dreamer: A conversation with Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor is the Seattle born member and producer of American indie rock band Grizzly Bear. The obvious stand out in the group with his fair hair and ivory skin, he is also a solo artist, weathered jazz musician, vocalist and multi instrumentalist. Gastronome and Science buff, he recently published his own cookery book. We spoke to him on the phone, from his home in Los Angeles, about jazz, politics, outerspace, and the hit and miss consequences of social media.
Photographed for Verity by Daniel Au
Since you have a background in Jazz, we thought it would be interesting to have your opinion on the film La La Land ? I actually didn’t go and see it. I have an unavoidable aversion to musicals. I decided not to see it. I found it obnoxious even when they starting circulating the trailers and extracts. I’ll never see that movie.
What about the director’s former film Whiplash that deals with the complex relationship between a pupil and his music teacher? I haven’t actually seen that one either. However my own experience was very similar to what I know of the film. One of my best music teachers was particularly mean to me. I was the lead alto sax in our Jazz group. I had to drive 35 miles just to get to rehearsals every week. But I guess that was no real excuse. Once I was twenty minutes late and he tore me to shreds in front of everyone. It was a real tough love moment. I had such respect for that teacher. I wanted to cry. I felt like I had let him down. Now I am never late for any rehearsal. I think of my bandmates like family and I want them to feel that they are totally respected.
So even if you haven’t see the film, « Lala Land », do you agree with John Legend’s character when he tells Ryan Gosling that Jazz is dead and that it can no longer call itself experimental or new? I actually made a conscious decision to quit jazz because I thought the medium had an impossible time communicating with the audience. I had to beg my friends to come and watch my gigs. What kind of life is that for an artist, playing into a vacuum? I want to play music for people and communicate with them in a meaningful way. I had gotten to a very high level, and I had met a lot of my idols. They were all bummed with their own musical careers. So I quit. I practiced 4-6 hours a day, it was what I thought I was going to end up doing, but I quit because it was a dead end and that’s when I got into recording music and decided to study audio engineering in NYU. But I had already met Chris Bear and Dan Rossen from Grizzly Bear through the jazz scene. Chris and I were best friends, we both quit jazz at the same time and went into engineering together. I was 21 at that point.
Did you study anything else at university? A lot of Advanced Physics. Chemistry, science.
Like Brian May ! Musicians tend to be very good at maths and astrophysics. After you’ve done the calculative stuff, and you get to the theoretical stuff, Physics becomes magic. The equations help you see the elegance of all the systems.
Did you have a Good Will Hunting moment, would have liked to study in MIT? I wanted to go to Columbia University. But I didn’t get in. I think those Ivy league schools are the closest we’ve got to the European collegiate system. The majority of American colleges are just a business. A washing machine process, they take 100 thousand dollars from you, and spit you out and wish you well. I don’t even think they wish you well. I feel like the Ivy League schools attract people who want to actually learn something. My NYU experience was not ideal.
Why not ? I guess I might have impossibly high standards.
Did you live on campus ? Yeah, for two years, and then I moved to Brooklyn.
So we read somewhere that you were thinking of opening your own restaurant ? Yeah I’m really into cooking. I wrote a cookbook about two years ago called « Twenty dinners ». (You can find it on Amazon) I thought about opening a restaurant, but it didn’t really work out. It’s for the best perhaps, it’s on the backburner now.
Have you seen Cowspiracy and What the Health? What do you think of these films? Are you a vegan ?
I’ve seen them both and yeah I tend to eat vegan these days. It’s tough for me because I love cooking meat and I’d gotten really good at it. But the voice in my head became too loud to ignore, and thinking about the environmental impact, I just couldn’t stomach it anymore. Vegan means ruling out a lot of ingredients but it’s forcing me into a new way of cooking. My tastes are changing too. It’s a process, to a realign one’s diet.
So you were born and grew up in Seattle. Was the record label Sub Pop a well respected institution back then ? Did you like any of the bands it was producing or the hugely popular grunge scene ? I was in love with Nirvana, but I didn’t really like any of the other bands coming out (Pearl Jam, Soul Garden etc). I was 11 when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Just in time for my teen angst moment. Then there was Radiohead, one of the first bands that I …
We are interrupted by a very loud helicopter sound and some interference.
Is everything ok ? I live within walking distance from Downtown L.A. Car chases and all that. We are in a cellular hole. It’s probably better for my health. I actually love living here.
When did you move ? I moved here 2 and 1⁄2 years ago. It makes me a happier person. I surf, hike. The people are lovely. I’m actually fearing going on tour a little bit. I’m very attached to my outdoor hobbies.
What’s the difference between Seattle and LA ? Here we are living in a liberal bubble, we are surrounded by cultural consciousness. In Seattle the outdoors are amazing but it rains all the time. You understand this, you grew up in Ireland. And culturally, there’s not enough going on for me. The 90s was the golden age in Seattle but now it’s just become corporate. You have the headquarters of Amazon, Boeing, and Starbucks there, everything became too expensive ! So it drives out the artists. I guess it has suffered the same fate as San Francisco. I hated LA when I was a visitor, I found it impenetrably large. The transport (dependency on cars) situation means you are always asking logistical questions which is a turn-off when you are on holiday somewhere. It took me a while to get it. But it’s the surrounding areas of LA city that I enjoy the most. The sea, the mountains, the desert, the proximity to all these amazing places. It’s tough to navigate at the start, there was a break-in period for me.
What was the first instrument you played ?
Clarinet. I was ten or eleven. I also played in the symphony orchestra. I actually wanted to play the saxophone but I was told I would have to learn the clarinet first if I even wanted to consider playing the sax well.
Did you have a friend, older brother or sister, parent who introduced you to all this ?
No not really. Where I grew up was so boring. By the time I was 13 I was obsessed with Charles Mingus and Stanley Kubrick. I was a very weird kid !
What did your parents think about this?
My parents thought it was weird and sweet. At least my Mom did, my Dad wasn’t really around.
What were you like as a school boy? Studious, dreamer, disciplined, slacker?
I was super disciplined. A perfect GPA. And I practiced my sax a lot. I missed my childhood. I was very serious. I was always trying to do better. My main goal was to escape Seattle to the East Coast, somewhere like New York that had some cultural vibrancy in my eyes.
Did you know Robyn, your fellow Seattle inhabitant, from the folk group the Fleetfoxes?
I knew a lot of Jazz players growing up, and was hanging out more with people in intercity Jazz music competitions than normal High school kids. Robyn and I moved in very different circles. When he was 18, he was singing acoustic Radiohead covers in a café. But now we have met, and we are good friends.
We don’t communicate or interact with one another. We hind behind our phones. An environment starved of human connections is perfect breeding ground for lost individuals ready to be brainwashed by fascism.
Anyone contemporary you really admire right now?
Christopher Thomas. Scott Walker and Jonny Greenwood. They are the ones who are innovating. They are actually communicating with the public the way classical music used to. They are re-inventing the way we interact with music.
Can you explain what social narrative led the American people to choose Trump as their president? In your understanding of it?
Wow. The question of the hour. How did it happen? This is what we are eating for breakfast lunch and dinner. How could I attempt to answer such a question. I’ll do my best. I think that Obama angered a lot of people. A group of lower middle class white people who felt marginalised. They didn’t get the revolution they were promised. They were glossed over, they didn’t have their moment of Progress, and then they came out to vote, maybe for the first time in their lives. And all of that coerced by the Russians. We are in the middle of those investigations right now. Who knows what more will be revealed in the coming months. I think that the American populace are too weak and too divided. Suffering. We are too large as a country to understand each other, separated by vast amounts of land. This is compounded by the age of Facebook. People are stuck in their holes, influenced by their own curated sphere. We don’t communicate or interact with another. We hide behind our phones. An environment starved of human connections is perfect breeding ground for lost individuals ready to be brainwashed by Fascism. It is this isolated existence and illusion of connection which is creating such extreme loneliness.
And the media are of no consolation?
The problem is, people have the attitude that everything should be free, whether it be the press or music or movies. Good media is suffering because people are not buying it. So they cannot reach people the way they used to.Music is experiencing the same fate. People need to start paying for quality content. But we’ve seen with the come-back of Vinyl, that the market is there.
Any other contemporary bands out there that help you raise your game? Like the Beatles were to the Beach Boys etc?
That landscape of music in the sixties was totally different. Now there’s the Internet. Too many songs come out every day for us to even think that way. There’s no point in us trying to be more like the other bands in our genre. Tame Impala or Beach House or whoever we are compared to. The best thing we can do is be as unique and us and Grizzly Bear as possible; I would give that advice to any musician. You borrow for a while, you have your references but then it’s time to go it alone. “The more me I can be” is the best approach. Oh I just had a real T-shirt moment there. Please don’t make me sound like an inspirational speaker in this interview!
Don’t worry ! If you had an opportunity to be an astronaut and go into outer-space would you take it?
I would love that. Who wouldn’t want to? It would be terrifying and amazing! I do like being on Earth for what it’s worth.
I often think that we are oblivious to the real signals coming from the rest of the universe, do you agree?
You have to consider the notion of proximity; “Love is proximity”; The distance of things from you contain a certain interaction. You can’t see outer-space when it’s sunny, so of course it pales in comparison to what you see on Earth. “We are a product of stardust” as Laurence Krauss tells us, It’s the great Jesus metaphor, a star gives its life away in order for us to exist. He said that, not me!
Do you think sexism has more to do with how women are viewed sexually as opposed to them being considered less capable or weaker than men and that the real equality will come, when women feel they are allowed to demand the same as men?
I don’t know how I would speculate on why men tend to treat women as they do. I am not like the average testosterone insensitive man that would have some clear opinions on this, I see women as equal or often more qualified than men in most respects. So I don’t know why society has taken to treating women as inferior.
What piece of art, book or film astounds you?
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I loved that book when I was 16 or maybe iI was 20. It’s a description of worlds, where the laws of realism can be upended and re-arranged at will. It’s very beautiful. I often think about that book.
Words collected by CB
To read the full interview , see Verity Magazine No.2