photo by Timothy Saccenti
This may be a tad premature—after all, it’s still the ass-end of April—but White Women, the latest from Canada’s funk ambassadors Chromeo, is going to be our album of the summer. The fourth record from Dave 1 and P Thug (available in store on May 12th) finds the pair reconnecting with the sweaty dancefloor electro of their early years and discovering a new sense of craftsmanship that elevates album to essential headphone listening. We caught up with singer guitarist Dave 1 in anticipation of their show tonight at House of Blues.
Did you approach writing White Women differently than say Business Casual?
Definitely. For one, we were together full time. P moved to New York and we set up a studio there. Instead of us doing bits in Montreal and bits in New York, we set up shop in Brooklyn and spent a whole year and half together, everyday. We also gave ourselves the objective of spending a lot more time on every aspect of this record.
For the first time I kept a notebooks with bucket lists of ideas and things I wanted to try to make sure got integrated into the record and almost all of it made it. When somebody else put out a record that I liked I would write down all shit they did that was cool that we could do better [laughs] or that I found really inspiring. I was very systematic about it.
What really impressed me was the precision and complexity in your vocal lines.
I really went in there with a chip on my shoulder. I felt like my vocals could be stronger and when I listen to my old stuff, I can’t hear my vocals. [We recorded the vocals] without ever tuning them, we don’t use pitch correction or tuning. We just decided to track them, spend a lot of time tracking them, we would do hundreds of takes for every song. It was a very intensive process. It would take me one week to do a song on this record.
I’m not a real singer; I’m sure someone like Pharrell could go in there and not take as long, but for me it takes longer. I mean I could do it really quick, if I did Autotune and stuff. But I don’t want to—all of your blue notes are in there, all of the nuances are there. You can hear that on “Over the Shoulder”, “Old 45s”, songs like that, where I was free to experiment with new cadences, new time signatures, and work on the lyrics.
There’s a lot of depth to the characters in the songs. Was that something you worked on?
That’s what we tried to do, I just hoped people would notices this time around. It’s a high brow/low brow thing. You have to have funky music you can dance to, but the lyrics have a lot of substance without sounding forced. It was result of our setting new challenges for ourselves.
Number one, sing better, write better. Number two, work with people when it is organic and when it is fun. The only thing I wanted to do was get back to the fun Fancy Footwork vibe and the electro of the Myspace days, but bring it back with all the substance and growth of the last album and just push it further.
CHROMEO W/ OLIVER. HOUSE OF BLUES 15 LANDSOWNE ST. BOSTON WED 4.30. 7 PM/$25-45. HOUSEOFBLUES.COM
