Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Canadian glam-pop artist Art d’Ecco encourages his listeners to question everything on his fourth album Serene Demon. In the fall of 2022, he left Vancouver for New York City to nourish his creative spirit. He walked the streets while listening to jazz and conjured visions of passersby. Inspired by existentialist literature and film noir, his ambitious record interrogates life’s purpose, free will, and human nature. The Alternative spoke with him about his NYC trip, his new LP, and trying to leave rock and roll behind.
What is your musical background and how did you get your start?
I started playing music when I was six or seven years old. I was born in Ottawa and we moved around a lot. By the time we settled on the west coast in Vancouver, the only records that my parents owned were all classical records. I was a precocious, curious little fella, so I would always put on these records—one of them was Beethoven—and I became obsessed with trying to learn Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata, and one thing led to another. We found this piano teacher named George Essihos who took me under his wing. Within a year or so, I was learning to play by ear. Then I got kind of bored with the piano, but I didn’t want to go into a proper conservatory.
Years went by and I started working part-time jobs as a teenager. One of the places I landed in was a kitchen. All the old, greasy line cooks would bring in their CD binders and classic rock was soup du jour. I got really obsessed with classic rock as a teenager, as a lot of kids do. That led me to learning guitar. By learning that musical language as a kid, I bridged the gap and fast tracked through the guitar world. By the time I was 20, I moved to Vancouver to play in indie rock bands. It’s been a long slog ever since.
What’s the scene like in Vancouver and how much does it interact with the Pacific Northwest music scene in the U.S.?
Vancouver, in the early aughts through 2012, definitely rode that indie sleaze wave. It was always a step or two behind. I do recall working in restaurants and bars and going to after parties. There was Vice magazine on every corner and everybody had skinny jeans and asymmetrical haircuts and every DJ was like playing vinyl and trying to do mashups and be the next Soulwax or The Rapture or LCD Soundsystem or The Strokes. My indie rock formative years were in my 20s. It felt like that was everywhere and Vancouver was definitely trying to carve out its own little space in that scene.
How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it before?
Each album doesn’t take massive leaps from one to the next, but things get drier, things get a little bit more pushed to the forefront, and the hooks get bigger. With this new album, Serene Demon, I was trying to do a cinematic, jazzier sort of thing. I wanted it to feel like a late night walk through a back alley in Manhattan with a trench coat on and a cigarette dangling from your lip. Maybe you’re off to a speakeasy to have some clandestine meeting with a nefarious character. But if you’re comparing this album to my earlier work, it definitely exists on an island. I get called glam rock a lot. And to be honest, I find it a pretty annoying label I’m trying to move away from. I used to wear makeup and wigs back in the day. Lately I’ve spent more time away from that aesthetic than I have existing within it.
With this album, I was less concerned about trying to write catchy, accessible rock radio tunes. I was not even thinking about rock and roll, to be honest. I was trying to do stuff that was appealing to me in the moment. This record’s already two years removed from the gestation period that it spawned from. I have to pause and go back so I can remember how I felt in fall of 2022.
You went to New York fall 2022 to walk around and observe and just find inspiration. What was so transformative and special about that month-long period?
I fetishize New York history maybe a little bit too much. I’ve read just about every book you can about New York, I’ve seen the documentaries, I worship the ground a lot of those musicians walked on. It’s my Graceland in a lot of ways. I wanted to experience culture and humanity, as if I was like this Alain Delon character. I didn’t know anybody, so I went for long walks and to shows. I wanted to be a bit of a drifter and see what song ideas I can create. It was more about writing like a film in my mind, as opposed to a bunch of songs. I related to a lone wolf type of character and needed to be in a setting where I could elicit those responses from myself.
We’ve all seen Timothee Chalamet kill it as Bob Dylan. Do we really need another album about a guy who goes to New York and tries to make it? That’s not what my story is. I was in my mid-thirties working on my fourth album. I’m not there to try and prove any grand statements to anyone. I was just trying to go there, be inspired, and exist in this role I created and see what sort of creativity I can shoehorn through that filter.
It took you two months to write the song “Serene Demon.” Is that standard for you?
No, and it was an everyday obsession for those two months. I lost weight. I didn’t eat very much. I was a manic obsessed monomaniacal psycho, Every day I’d get up to write and record in my apartment. Sonically, I was trying to write something that could be a FM ’70s multi-act, power glam opera ballad, something like Queen.
I wanted to flush my creativity through that sort of sonic architecture, but lyrically I was trying to tell an actual story with intention. I really wanted to have it flow as if it was a conversation between two people–a believer in God and an atheist or an existentialist, walking into a bar. I’d go to bed writing this script in my head.
I wanted to compose strings and write a horn section, but I’m not a sax player or a brass player, so I had to teach myself that composition. That got me thinking, what’s the meaning behind each of these sections? How do they all interact with each other? How are they going to segue and flow? It was a lot of work. It was a lot of obsessing over the story and the intent and every word and every phrase. This process ended up taking two months every single day, morning to sunset, no days off, no social life.
What did you watch, read, and listen to while working on your last album?
The Stranger by Albert Camus, which follows this character named Meursault who commits a pretty heinous crime in cold blood on a beach. A trial unfolds and it becomes this metaphor for the author’s existentialist philosophy that he was trying to bring to the mainstream. It’s loaded with all sorts of symbolism, but if you read it on face value, it’s still a pretty stunning book and it makes you think. That had a profound effect on me and then I went down the rabbit hole of his other work and all the existentialist philosophers of that day.
There’s a movie called Le Samourai directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, starring hunky heartthrob, Alain Delon, RIP, which follows a cold loner walking the streets of Paris. He’s an assassin. Beautiful cinematography. It’s got a really haunting and interesting score that, if you listen, you’ll hear all sorts of elements that are kind of sprinkled throughout the album.
I also watched a lot of film noir. There’s a lot of neo-noir sprinkled in throughout the music videos. There’s this one documentary on YouTube called Collateral & the Death of Neon, which is about street lighting in America from the 50s onward affected how Hollywood films were lit and how they appear. That documentary inspired me to go deeper into the genre, and it just fed into the creativity a lot more. I listened to a lot of jazz and soul–Curtis Mayfield, Miles Davis, and George Gershwin.
What do you want people to take away from this album?
It’s a cinematic, glammed up, jazzy art rock record with elements of soul and disco laundered through this overarching theme of existentialism. It doesn’t really answer the questions as much as it asks, what’s the purpose and meaning of all this?
If it holds a mirror up to yourself and has you asking your purpose and your meaning and your existence in this life, maybe that’s what I want you to think about when you listen to this record. It’s not gonna answer much or solve anything, but hopefully it inspires you to take a look at yourself.
Serene Demon is out now via Paper Bag Records.
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Giliann Karon | @lethalrejection
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