Joseph Shabason has built an impressive career by playing well with others. Heās the man behind the swooning sax in Destroyer, keyboard (and more) player in synthpop group DIANA, one-third of Shabason, Krgovich & Harris, a multi-instrumentalist sideman and even composer of the theme song of CBCās Front Burner podcast.
But heās also forged a parallel path through a series of increasingly personal ambient jazz solo albums. His latest, The Fellowship out at the end of April, explores his adolescence in a dual-faith home.
I had a chance to speak with Shabason about the new album and all his myriad projects ahead of his virtual performance with Nicholas Krgovich and Chris Harris for the Wavelength Winter Festival on Saturday, February 27.
So how are things going for you?
Surprisingly, work has been busier than it ever has in my entire life. Like, between scoring and session work, it's just kind of nuts. I feel very lucky in that way. But all of the fun parts of music are fucking gone. All the collaboration, all of the like being in a room together, making jokes, coming up with ideas, trying stuff out... it's fucking done. Everything's over the internet and it sucks. It's just so cumbersome and unenjoyable. I fucking hate it.
I'm sorry to hear that. It's a good segue though because, from an outside perspective, you do seem to have kept very busy over the last year.
My own album was 100% COVID. I started it in September of 2020. The Shabason, Krgovich and Harris stuff was recorded mostly right before the pandemic. It's actually funny - the pandemic has been terrible, don't get me wrong. But if it wasn't for the pandemic, I don't know if I'd be in the position that I'm in right now. It forced me to mix that Shabason, Krgovich and Harris record. It was the first album I've ever mixed. I was always way too scared to do it. Nick and Chris were kind of just like, "No, you can do it. We like your mixes." So I really worked at it and now I'm doing a ton of mixing work as well. It's sort of empowered me to believe in myself. Like, āI can do this. I don't need anybody else, I don't need a big studio, I can do it at home.ā The pandemic hit and that's what made me mix that album here because I wanted to finish it and get it out into the world. If I waited to hire somebody or go to the person who I usually went to it just would never have happened. Between that and scoring work it's been pretty, pretty full-on.
How did you meet Nick and Chris?
I've known Chris since Destroyer. He was the first bass player when I joined the band when Kaputt toured back in 2011 or 12. I'd seen Nick play years ago, like in 2007, when he was in a band called No Kids, and they were opening for the Dirty Projectors when the Dirty Projectors played Sneaky Dee's, and then I didn't really know about him very much. I heard a track or two here and there, but then Dan (Bejar) from Destroyer sent me his album, like two albums ago, and I was like, āHoly shit, this is amazing.ā So DIANA asked him to come on tour with us and he did and then right after that he opened for Destroyer for a North American and European tour. So I got to know him really well around 2018-ish. And we all just kind of kept in touch. Chris played with Nick back in his band P:ano.
So how did the record come about - was there a ringleader driving things?
Nick and I both love Japanese synth and ambient music. Haruomi Hosono, YMO, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Midori Takada, all those people, we talk about them on tour. And then Chris started posting these videos to his Instagram, these really beautiful minimal synth songs, and I feel like both Nick and I commented on them. We started some thread where we were like, "We should make a fucking new age album." We passed demos around for like a year and a half, just the beginnings of ideas. At a certain point, I kind of said, unless we get into a room together, we are not going to make this album so why don't you guys come to Toronto I have a studio. They just did it, they came for a weekend and that was it. One weekend of recording, and then they left Monday morning. There were a couple of overdubs after that, but it was all done really quickly.
I know that Nick has an expansive musical background, but I kind of think of him as more of an indie-pop kind of guy.
Totally. I think Nick is also used to sort of doing things himself. He's gotten less precious over the years, but he has in the past been quite meticulous. I mean, you listen to On Sunset, that is a thought-out record, you know? This one we all kind of just trusted each other. We all liked each other's tastes, everyone was zero ego about it. "Okay, everyone's idea is good. We're gonna try everything out and always make sure people feel heard." But it wasn't difficult to do that, because everyone was just so on the same page. It was really nice and rare. That does not happen very much.
Was there a theme behind what you were doing as you were writing together? What kept everything coherent?
I think it is a willingness to think about what is the least amount of shit the song needs. You're kind of drawing from maybe a specific synth palette, or maybe adding certain textures in the songs that are like, familiar from that world, but like, I wouldn't call this album necessarily a new age album. I think it has other influences, for sure. But I think what ties it into that world, for me anyway, is a focus on minimalism. We're doing a live show for wavelength. I got to do a bunch of mixing, I was looking at the tracks, again in ProTools and a lot of these songs have like, six tracks, very bare-bones. What is the least amount of ship that you need? The same goes with the editing afterward, we just trim and trim and trim and trim until it felt like that was as little as we could use without it being too sparse. So I think maybe that was a unifying principle, just minimalism.
You call it Philadelphia after one of the tracks on the album. Is there a particular meaning behind that?
So I messaged Nick and Chris a few days before they came out and I was like, is it crazy for us to do a cover of "Philadelphia?ā Then Nick was like, āI actually played that song live when I would tour with Phil Elverum.ā So he's like, āI love itā and Chris also said āI love it.ā So we decided to kind of try to make this already bare-bones track, even sparser. And then when it came time to name the album Nick was like we should name it Philadelphia after the song, but also Philadelphia is the āCity of Brotherly Loveā and the album was like three grown men harmoniously making music together in a very brotherly way. So it felt right. So that was a reason.
I've really been digging it. It's very calming.
Thatās the point! I don't usually like to listen to my own albums after having recorded a record. Like, I'll rarely do that. But with this album, I think because it was a group effort, it wasn't such a singular effort, like Nick's lyrics, were what made it so calming and special to me. I love the way the songs sound, but when you add these songs, kind of about the most mundane details of everyday life, it just felt like, especially during the pandemic, even though was recorded beforehand it felt like mindfulness to me where it's like, lyrically, it was almost like focusing on your breath, or something where it's just like, you don't need to think big right now. Just focus on what's beautiful in front of you. I listen to that record all the time now, where I'm like, "This is beautiful." Nick really did something that felt special to me, that felt necessary and calming. I really credit him for that.
Turning to your upcoming solo record, The Fellowship, could you explain the concept behind it?
So it started off a lot bigger than what it turned out to be. I grew up in this really weird environment. My parents, who grew up in traditional Jewish households, embraced the teachings of this Sufi from Sri Lanka when they were in their 20s, and they kind of went all-in on spiritual Islam. They followed his teachings, which is like a combination of traditional Islam and kind of a more spiritual take on it. It was a strange environment. At a certain point, I realized that it kind of messed me up in a pretty big way - tons of feelings of guilt and divine judgment. Basically, from 21 until now, I've been trying to de-program myself from making decisions in a religious way. I was on a run and I was like, "Man, what would be amazing is, if I were to interview all of the parents who were part of this religious group,ā because it was all white boomers. There were French Canadians, white jazz musician boomers were all part of this group. I wanted to interview all the parents and see what their experience was, why they came to the group, what did they get from it, what their thoughts were raising their children in the group. Then I wanted to interview all the kids of these parents and see what their experience was because a lot of these kids rejected it or dealt with alcohol abuse, substance abuse, whatever. It was problematic for a lot of the children who grew up in it. I was gonna make a podcast to accompany the album, about the story of all these white boomers embracing Islam in the 70s. Anyway, no one would talk to me. No one. Like not one person. Everyone was so protective of it, and they just did not want to go there, which was really surprising, because these are people who I spent 20 years of my life seeing them every week at these religious meetings. That was sort of the big, grand idea. Once I realized that no one was going to talk to me about it I was kind of just like, "Alright well maybe I will switch to the one perspective that I have like ownership over, which is my own." I just decided to treat the record as a musical autobiography where I broke up my life into these phases. It starts with my parents growing up, and then I tried to tell a narrative through music. The way the songs feel corresponds to this oscillation between certainty and faith and the dissonance of knowing that something's very wrong, but still being too in it to really ever get out at that moment. You have to live with those two things of being like, I'm all in for this religion, but also I know that it's super fucked up.
What specifically was fucked up about it?
I should say, it wasn't any more fucked up than going to church, or going to synagogue or whatever. But for me, what I think was fucked up about it was from a very young age, you're presented with this this guy, Bawa (Muhaiyaddeen), who is the Sufi, and Bawa lives in Philly - he's from Sri Lanka. But he's given this mansion in Philly, where he lives and gives sermons, and he's taken care of. It's this big commune. He's presented as a prophet, like a divine being, preaching the Word of God to you. People said, "Oh, he can communicate with Mohammed, he can communicate with Moses, he's in contact with angels." He was given this power by his followers that was wild. When you grow up with it from the time that you're born, and the religion is basically just Islam, which is not a particularly progressive religion, everything has a divine consequence, every action in your life is being judged by God and going into some gigantic checks and balances book. At the end of it, you either get into heaven or you don't, and all these normal things that kids go through, like experimenting with sex, experimenting with drugs, experimenting with drinking, those are all things that were drilled into you, like how that's going to prevent you from reaching enlightenment. So you do it because you're a kid, and you're curious, but you're just wracked with guilt, the same way that Christians are, the same way that Jews are. It robbed me of autonomy for so long, where none of my decisions were really my own, because there was always this person judging me from up high. I think in that way, it was messed up. I didn't really start making my own decisions until I was much older and also, what decisions I was making were based on fear, which is such an awful calculus to make life decisions. But up until I was probably in my 30s, I was making those types of decisions and not really questioning them in a, particularly meaningful way.
Would you say that's influenced the way you're raising your own family?
Yeah, big time. I think there's a lot of beauty in religion. Underlying a lot of those messages are really beautiful lessons in morality, and questioning your behavior and doing good unto others. It's all great at its core. But I think the challenge for me will be to give my son a sense of his cultural Judaism, which is important to me, and also helping him understand God and religion and all of that and letting him know about the stories, but also trying to divorce divine judgment from those stories, and I don't know how to do that yet. I think there's a lot of good there. I just think as soon as you're making decisions based on fear, you've lost, or at least I feel like you lose a sense of self.
I also wanted to talk a bit about some of your other work. DIANA are done, correct?
More or less. I mean, I would never say never. But right now, I think we're all on pretty different paths. Carmen (Elle) is doing scoring work as well. Carmen is doing amazing music, but it's much more in a pop realm. I think the idea of writing lyrics for me, and for Kieran (Adams) these days is just the farthest thing from our minds. Writing pop music is just not really on our radar, or just not interesting. It's not what we want to do.
Are you still contributing to more pop-oriented projects and playing with Destroyer?
Yeah, I mean, I said no to the last tour, just because of my family and all that. But I'm still playing with Destroyer. I love playing in pop groups, but more as a supporting role. Like, how can I do what I'm good at, which to me is playing horns and doing arrangements or synthesizers or whatever, versus trying to write pop songs, which I don't think is a strength of mine.
So you first started playing with Destroyer with Kaputt which just turned 10. That was the record where the saxophone became a very prominent part of Destroyer's sound. How much input did you have in that? Did Dan (Bejar) have a pretty clear idea of what he wanted you to do?
So one of the biggest lessons I've learned as a bandleader is from Dan and the way he leads his bands, which is never to micromanage people. The way that you micromanage is in the curation of who you ask to play. But once you get those people, you need to make them feel valued and free to try and experiment. The micromanaging was such a brutal part of DIANA for all of us, we all did it. I think we were just learning how to be in bands but with Dan, he just says go do what you feel. So with Kaputt, that record was mostly done, and I just came in and did like, three hours of saxophone. He was like, "I'm gonna play these songs, just improvise to a few takes each" and that was it. Like, went for a beer - it was so in and out. Poison Season was much more involved horn arrangement-wise. But what was cool about Kaputt was I just felt like he wanted me there because of how I played, and he wasn't really going to try to steer me in one direction or another. That happened in the editing process after the fact. But in the moment, I felt very much supported and valued.
When working as a sideman, do you approach most projects that way?
I think some people will say "I love what you did in this song." They'll cite a particular song and say, "do this." Other people will say like, "I like what you do generally, what do you think this song needs?" and other people will say, "I want a horn solo here, I want pads here, I want this here." And then other people will be like, "I've written everything for you, I want you to perform it. It's a range. But because I do this so much, I won't hesitate to say, "I think this is what it needs. I'm going to try some things out. If you don't like it, just take it out." I think that as a side person is like, the biggest lesson is don't be precious about your shit, because it's not yours. It's ultimately serving someone else's vision. Record what you think is good. Let them go to town on the editing process, but like, I expect people to kind of edit me down.
Are you able to approach your own work the way, improvising and like letting yourself go? Can you do that on something like The Fellowship?
Yeah, for sure. It's something that I have to tell myself to do. I have to say "Stop. This sounds cool. Record it all the way through, you can always mute it later." But that need to have it sound right away, I think it often leads to missed opportunities. With my own stuff, I will often overplay and then whittle it down.
Do you think you would have been able to approach your own work that way without having had the experience as a sideman?
No. Especially with Destroyer, those guys are so much older than me and their bullshit tolerance is so much, much less.. When I first joined that band, I was so green and so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and they were just jaded in their way and I didn't listen to them. I made a lot of mistakes. Thinking about it now, I think I've really listened to the things that they've said and internalized them. Being a side person, being able to learn from other people has been huge. Now that I have, I think, just the age and the lack of ego I can actually hear it.
Shabason, Krgovich and Harris perform as part of the
Wavelength Winter Festival on Saturday, February 27
with Beveryl Glenn-Copeland and Witch Prophet.
The Fellowship is out April 30 on
Telephone Explosion
/Western Vinyl
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
I wrote a couple of record reviews for Exclaim!
Check out my reviews for Super Monster by Claud and Volume II by Small Sins.
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Ian GormelyĀ is a freelanceĀ musicĀ journalist based in Toronto.
Hit upĀ koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.comĀ for questions, criticisms and submissions.
This was a great one!