Preview
YOUNG & SEXY
Tuesday, April 27
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
As often happens when Young and Sexy bandmates Paul Pittman and Lucy Brain sit together for an interview, the pair have drifted off into a personal, disconnected dialogue, as though they’ve begun interviewing each other.
"I think I’ve wanted to be in a band since I was, like, 17," says Pittman.
"You never wanted to be a singer-songwriter, on your own?" Brain asks.
"Not really, no. It’s just not as interesting. I like some acoustic albums, but they’re never… I dunno. I just don’t feel like you can really push that as far as you can with a band. Interesting music probably comes from a whole group of people who are creative."
"And also the songs are probably pushed beyond what you imagined that they could be."
"Hopefully."
This isn’t rudeness, this seeming obliviousness to the journalist sitting across from them. Pittman and Brain are unfailingly polite and soft-spoken. If anything, humility and mild press shyness means that they can simply process their thoughts better if they think of the questions being posed to them as just part of a casual conversation between dear friends.
Pittman and Brain were once more than friends, however. Their backstory – without which Young and Sexy never would have existed – has become a minor legend of Vancouver pop folklore. If and when the band achieves its deserved level of popularity, the likes of Spin and Magnet will milk its tragicomic value dry. Pittman was working at a takeout restaurant in 1993 when Brain, then an art student, stopped in for lunch. Minutes later, Brain had a sandwich to go and Pittman had her phone number. Their romance was short-lived, and Pittman was devastated in its immediate aftermath, but the two somehow salvaged a friendship that allowed them to begin making music together. They began performing in the late-’90s as a trio, with a wildly experimental – and arguably miscast – electric guitarist. He departed in 2000, and the duo tentatively expanded to a full band.
"I’d always sung, but I’d never done anything in a band form before," recalls Brain. "It was gradual, and that was probably a good thing – for me, anyway. Every time the idea came up of someone else joining the band, I was very sort of reticent: ‘I don’t know if I can handle that.’"
Brain is now married to Young and Sexy’s guitarist, André Lagacé, but the residue of intimacy between her and Pittman is key to the band’s understated but emotionally resonant songs.
Thanks partly to the encouragement of the New Pornographers’ Carl Newman, Mint Records signed Young & Sexy, releasing their debut album, Stand Up For Your Mother, in 2001. Despite being the product of a local music scene that has never forgiven itself for not being Seattle, Stand Up… is decidedly un-rock – a melodic, intricately detailed pop record, full of wry wit and gorgeous boy-girl harmonies (Pittman and Brain share vocal duties).
Its followup, Life Through One Speaker (released late last year), is the great leap forward that everyone hopes for from a second album – everything that its predecessor is, only more so. Recalling the stylistic diversity and aural sunniness of ’70s AM radio staples like Todd Rundgren and Fleetwood Mac, it should be sharing shelf space in the CD collection of every sensitive college student who nurses a broken heart to the sounds of Nick Drake and Belle & Sebastian. It’s a risky venture to make music this unashamedly sensitive, but Pittman is skilled enough to walk the highwire that is explicitly emotional songwriting without toppling headfirst into self-indulgent pathos.
"It’s like this fine line between trying to come up with something that’s really pure and nice, and then there’s this part of me that’s all ego, that wants something clever," says Pittman of his songwriting process. "It’s trying to balance that. It’s very difficult."
"It’s kind of like a battle with cynicism?" Brain asks him.
"And a battle with irony," he responds. "It’s funny – 20 years ago, playing loud, aggressive music was a form of rebellion. You might have gotten beat up if you were into the Sex Pistols. Nowadays, it’s exactly the opposite." |
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