Beirut
Issue #34
For Zach Condon, isolation leads to daydreaming and musical brilliance
By Katy Henriksen
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
HOTTT LIST 2007
3rd place winner
Best Male Solo Artist of 2007
Beirut mastermind Zach Condon is only 21, but his distinct fusion of Balkan brass, Parisian pop, and three-part ukelele orchestrations have a decidedly Old World panache held together by one crucial element: his voice.
“I sing like a trumpet player,” says Condon of his vocals, which are at once world-weary, nostalgic, and hopeful. “The voice was a weird thing because I’ve played trumpet for a long time.” As he speaks, the elevated JMZ train rumbles in the background of Condon’s fourth-floor apartment in the South Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. As a teenager, he concocted elaborate recordings, performing all the parts himself. “I never thought I could sing, and then one day I just tried, and I just started singing songs because there was no one there to sing.”
That lack of other musicians turned out to be lucky. Condon had nothing to distract him from fine-tuning compositions that eventually led to the um-pa-pas of Beirut’s debut, Gulag Orkestar — which he recorded at his parents’ house after dropping out of college — and the squeezebox refrains of 2007’s The Flying Club Cup.
Condon explains that growing up in New Mexico, he felt isolated and often disappeared into his room, where he had all the time in the world to invent his distinct sound. “I kind of spent my life in daydreams,” he says. “Always have, always will. It’s weird, it’s almost like a faux nostalgia.”
“Like you see a Fellini film,” he continues. “You walk out of the theater, and all of a sudden life is a circus around you for the next hour or two until you just snap out of it. You write music in that state.”
Indeed, Beirut’s guitar-less blend of European folk sounds conjures up old mental postcards from a bygone era. Condon’s obsessions with antique and broken instruments play a key part in this effort. In recording The Flying Club Cup, he put down his rotary valve flugelhorn that he plays at shows. “I went down to the pawn shop and bought this $100 trumpet that looked like it’d been broken apart 10 times and then welded back together,” he says. “It sounded great on the recording.”
Whereas Gulag Orkestar was primarily a one-man recording, The Flying Club Cup utilizes an eight-member ensemble that came together while on tour for Orkestar. Condon also collaborated in the songwriting process for the first time on the sophomore effort. String arrangements from Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett add a lush patina. “I used to be afraid of collaboration,” Condon says. “I’d gotten so used to being by myself that I thought that was all I was capable of.”
Condon’s fans couldn’t disagree more. Pallett and Condon spent two weeks at the Arcade Fire studio, a Masonic temple in a small town 40 minutes from Montreal. “We went to Quebec and went insane in this church,” Condon says. “This is the first time I’ve actually just let someone go for it. I just kind of let [Pallett] do his thing. I think it was a good decision.”
Condon keeps fans wondering what his next musical fascination might be. “There’s things that I really want to do actually,” he says. “But I am going to have to wait. I need to finish something completely. Like it needs to be completely out of my head before the next thing.”
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continued from the winter 2007 issue of Venus Zine …
I keep reading that The Flying Club Cup is your French album. Tell me more about how it began and when this album was recorded.
We finished the last tour in winter 2006, and I went back to New Mexico because I was really kind of destroyed by the tour. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I really wanted to get back in the studio, so it was all recorded in Albuquerque, except for part of it, which was done with Owen Pallett in Quebec. But it was mostly recorded at the old Hawk and a Hacksaw space. They just gave it to me when they left for Budapest. Which is what kind of what inspired me to move to Europe myself after I wrote this album. The French thing is funny, like a point of contention almost. [Ba Da Bing! Records] was asking me what the reference point was, and I said I don’t know. I happened to be obsessively listening to Jaques Brel and these old European crooners and this archaic pop music and giving it a closer look. It always seemed like a novelty from our grandparents’ generation. There are some really amazing things there that we tend to ignore in modern pop music, like really beautiful and well thought-out pop orchestrations, such creative ways of keep doing a simple waltz and a couple of chords. I mentioned that and they were like, “Oh, so that’s your French album.” They like to have some selling point. You can’t just say it’s music.
You pick a photograph that seems to end up as integral to each of your projects. Is that a starting point?
Yeah, it’s funny you would say that. It’s almost like you write a soundtrack to these photos. Actually, this album did start this way. I try to have no preconceived ideas of what I’m getting into until I’m recording. For example, for the first album I found the photograph midway through, and that was really the turning point when it really just became something else entirely. This album, however, I was wandering around in my parents’ house. My little brother had just left for college. He’s the last great hope for the Condons, the only one that’s going to make it to school. He had this photo book that he left and I found this photo, which is what the album is named after, although that isn’t the picture on the cover.
Trying to get that one was an interesting story. I did actually battle to get that photo. Immediately I saw that photo and I said, “I want to write this album for this image.” It’s this weird image of hot air balloons rising over Paris, one of the first color photographs ever, which makes it really distorted and very surreal looking. So here you have kind of this romantic cliché mixed with dark grainy edges, and there’s something not quite right about it. Something doesn’t quite look natural, and that’s a great starting point. I fought to get the photograph. I even went to the French Society of Photography and talked to the leading export on Gimphead, the photographer, and they actually gave the rights to use the photograph. It’s classic, a classic piece of art. It’s a very big deal, so obviously the price was too much.
This is the booklet that goes inside of the album. [Condon flips through the CD insert.] These are all found photos. I was in Paris when the album was finished, and we actually found all of these photos. My friend had taken a trip to Vietnam, and this guy was selling this family photo album from Vietnam and from France as well. It’s funny. It’s just these people on the beach. It’s almost like they became the characters in the stories.
You picked up new instruments for The Flying Club Cup. There’s a lot of accordion —is this the first time you’ve played it?
I’ve actually played it before, but this is the first time I sat down and really tried to play the accordion. It’s a beast. I got my first accordion from my grandmother. She was an accordion player. She also played the bagpipes and sang really beautifully. So she gave me an accordion and I kind of doodled around with it for a while.
Nice. What kind was it?
It was called an Italo-something. It’s a collectors’ item. I took it to a guy to fix it and he was obsessed with it. This is such collector’s item, he said. It’s not the one we use now. I’m not going to get rid of it or anything, but it’s very old. It’s on its last legs. It’s definitely something to keep around the house. I went out to this shop in New Mexico and I bought this total mariachi accordion and that that’s what I recorded the album with. It’s bright red and it’s got all the designs on it. There’s that, and there’s a lot more organ recorded on this album, and the other thing I picked up was more brass. I’m just obsessed with brass. French horn is something I’ve always wanted to play and I finally got a French horn and a euphonium. Stuff like that. The full arranged brass, not just the trumpets. I’m obviously very obsessed with brass as you can see (he points to the two horn tattoos on his wrists). I’m like a kid in a candy store if I go into a brass shop. It’s like I just need to touch the instruments, just to hold them in your hands. Even just looking at something like this [Condon points to a basic metal lampshade], this light thing, reminds me nothing more of than the bells of instruments. Since I was a kid I had to get my hands on brass. That was my first instrument. It’s so funny to me, they look beautiful. But, if you think about it you’re playing plumbing. You’re spitting into this metal pipe. You’re vibrating your lips and singing through it. And that is what was so exciting about it.
I read that you wrote “Sunday Smile” using this old broken-down organ. Do your songs come from different instruments?
It’s funny that you say that because it’s very true. I haven’t been asked that before, but a new instrument comes into the house and comes into the studio and I’ll write an entire song for that instrument. When I was back in New Mexico … my parents live in Santa Fe now, so I went back to visit them, and in their house was this old organ there that I picked up a while ago. It was actually the song I wrote “Scenic World” and “After the Curtain” on, but I hadn’t touched it in quite a while. I’ve not been around it. The funny thing is that only the white keys and the F sharp keys work, nothing else. The leslie engine works if you get the button just right, like somewhere between on and off. You have to sit there and tape it. It’s like that kind of instrument. You turn it on and it’s like whzrrrrrrrrrrrrrr and then it works and then just the sound of it is so round and full and thick.
Just so beautiful and that’s just made the song and you’ve heard this song a million times, then all of a sudden on a different instrument it sounds like a completely different chord. The first time I bought a mandolin, I got a Mel Bay chord book and opened it to a minor chord page and tried out a G minor or something like that with another, and the moment I played the two of them together, I recorded “Brandenburg” on the spot. I was like, “Oh my god, I have to make a song out of this.”
Do you like performing?
Live shows have always been a very strange thing for me and that’s something I’m totally not totally comfortable with, and yet when you’re not touring, that’s something you tend to forget about. Recording will give you that real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Live shows will either leave you face down in the gutter or bring you to some high you’ve never felt before. It’s ridiculous. It’s almost too much on the system sometimes.
How did the collaboration with violinist Owen Pallet come about?
I’ve known his music for a long time and apparently he was a fan of mine, which is really funny because we share a booking agent in Canada, and the agent just wrote me and said, “I don’t know if you know Final Fantasy, but he’s a big fan of yours.” I said, “That’s amazing, wow.”
I called him and said, “I’m working on this album. It’s gonna be big, so to speak, as there’s a lot going on musically, and I think I could really use your help and your arrangements.” He said, “We’ll trade basically.” And he had traded string arrangements to Arcade Fire for their studio up in Quebec. He was going to do it just by himself. So he said, “Why don’t you come up and I can do strings for your album and you can help me with percussion and brass for my album.” It was a barter.
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