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Back in 1964, Edmonton native, educator and philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” In the years following, musicians such as Bill Callahan, John Darnielle and the majority of the early K Records roster took the lesson to heart, adding to the emotional vulnerability of their songs by presenting them in bare-bones lo-fi fashion, stripped of the armour of polished studio production. Now in 2009, Calgary’s Matt Swann (a.k.a. Extra Happy Ghost!!!) has carried on the tradition with his aptly titled, heart-on-sleeve home-recorded debut How the Beach Boys Sound to Those with No Feelings.
“If I had recorded in a big studio, the engineer or producer would have known what they were doing, as opposed to myself, who was completely clueless,” Swann explains with a laugh. “Instead of fighting that, I just let it inform the esthetic. I’m a neurotic head-case and I almost feel embarrassed saying this, but I think the songs are surprisingly earnest. At points, there’s a lot of sadness and anxiety, but it’s also very hidden. They’re strangely non-ironic and I don’t know how cool that is.”
Though he’s assembled a crack band to perform his songs live (Laura Leif of The Consonant C and Secret Brothers, along with the members of Seizure Salad, Andrew Hume and Britt Proulx), Swann still describes Extra Happy Ghost!!! as “an outlet in the midst of my fun, rock stuff.” As the most recent member to join Calgary stalwarts Hot Little Rocket, he’s spent the past few years playing bass for the steadily touring four-piece, using any spare time to record the six songs of Beach Boys on a bottom-of-the-line 8-track. Overcoming irony may not be a primary lyrical theme, but the concept certainly comes across in Swann’s heartfelt tunes, despite the fact that their melodies are obscured under layers of fuzz.
“I think there’s a lot of irony in pop culture and hipster circles, so to speak, and in many cases it’s a mechanism of self-protection,” he says. “That’s something that I completely understand, because it can be difficult to share your feelings or be earnest, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. It can be cute to a point, but it’s weird that art has turned towards irony and away from expressing deeper thoughts, feelings and being a vehicle for introspection. That said, there’s almost a meta-irony to my album as well, just because of the ridiculous song titles that are completely unrelated to the music.”
Indeed, titles such as “Hot Times Sartre in the City,” “Sympathy for the Moron,” and “Mash-Up: Neither Being Nor Nothingness” may simply be high and low culture-referencing red herrings, but they also point to Swann’s background and continued interest in existentialism and Eastern religion. Still, he quickly points out how firmly his tongue was planted in cheek.
“When I was in university, my degree was in Indian philosophy and I primarily studied early Indian Buddhism, going on to do a master’s in French and German philosophy,” Swann explains. “Just to clarify, though, a lot of my references to that kind of thing are just jokes, because they’re the things I’m most familiar with. I’m not trying to write a treatise on existential philosophy or anything like that.”
One thing he’s definitely attempting to express is a wide range of emotions, from sad to extra happy, bittersweet to slyly funny. The best example of Swann’s sense of humour comes at the tail end of “These Are the Facts in an Endless Regress,” as he sings “We could watch 2001 2,001 times, we could watch 2001 2,002 times.” It’s played for laughs to be sure, but also inspires a final contemplation on expression.
“I’m a huge fan of the movie, just because of the minimalism taken to such an exaggerated degree,” says Swann. “Lots of people think it’s self-indulgent, which is a really loaded term. I think a lot of good art is self-indulgent, and it kind of has to be. There’s some truth to that line as well, because when I bought 2001 for the first time on DVD, I probably did watch it 25 times.”
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