Since July, Gregory Pepper has been writing and releasing a new song every week to subscribers of his “Song Of The Week Club” on Patreon and Bandcamp. We talked to Pepper about the opportunities and challenges of his new project.
Will Wellington: Where did the “Song Of The Week Club” come from?
Gregory Pepper: Around the time that I did my last proper studio album [2015’s Chorus! Chorus! Chorus!], I’d become more and more disenfranchised with the process: with the waiting, the hype, the cost, and the very short life span of the album. You spend a year working on something — by the time it comes out, I’m sick of the songs — and then the thing just disappears. And of course anyone who’s born after 1997 has never paid for music.
And I think it’s a dinosaur. It’s on its last legs. As much as I love records, I’m aware that they’re not going to be around for much longer. I’m trying to get a jump on the next thing. With all those things in mind, I thought about my specialty. I’m a prolific writer, and I’m able to play all the standard instruments well enough to form a coherent virtual band, and I know enough about recording that I can basically do the thing start to finish. And I thought I would [try this] as a challenge to myself and a variance to the standard release model.
[media-credit id=57 align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
WW: How has Patreon worked out for you so far?
GP: I’d never used it before. And I’ve always been really, really dubious of crowdsourcing. You don’t want to look like you’re asking for a handout. So I knew before I even chose the model that I wanted there to be a fair value for what I was offering subscribers.
People who sign up are essentially paying a dollar per song, which is the going rate for a digital download. The only difference is they don’t know what they’re going to get — it’s a bit of a risk on their part. I do long exposition about each song and I try to talk about what the influences are and what the production style is. And I do custom drawings for every song.
The Patreon model is working out okay. Some people have had some technical issues with it. And in terms of how much the format can be customized to suit my needs, it’s not perfect.
But I also set up a parallel account at Bandcamp. They have a subscription service as well. And that one is even less flexible. So while I think I might be ahead of the curve as a release model, I don’t know if technology has caught up.In a perfect world, I could’ve built a website from the ground up and have it work and operate and not have to pay a third-party fee for the platform, but I just write pop songs. I don’t know how to make a website.
[media-credit id=57 align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
WW: Has your songwriting changed in doing this process? Do you relate to these songs differently than the songs you would labour over say for a year?
GP: This was an unexpected byproduct, but I think I’ve become a bit more self-aware about the songs, because I know that there are 75 pairs of ears that will be hearing them. There’s a sense of obligation. There are times when I might have drawn back and been a bit more minimal with an arrangement, and then I got a lingering sense of guilt that I should maybe add more. But the advantage of having a weekly turnover is that I don’t really have that much time to second-guess myself.
I’d been thinking a lot about demos and raw studio recordings. Nebraska is a great example, the Bruce Springsteen album — or Lennon’s unreleased demo tapes. Things that were never meant to be heard often times have a vulnerability and a unique fingertip that polished studio recordings lack.It can be the same song, but there’s something more naive and personal about that initial version.
So I’m trying to keep that vulnerability and immediacy in these recordings, because I know when I make a proper studio album, by the time it’s finally done and mixed it’s been stripped of a lot of its humanity.
I can’t listen to my records after they come out. I just abhore them by the time they’re done. It’s like elevator music to me by the end. It has no personality. It has no identity. Sometimes I wish I could bonk myself in the head just hard enough to not remember one of my albums for about half an hour to see what I would really think about it.Churning out this many songs forces you to be as eclectic as possible so as not to repeat yourself. And it certainly has allowed me to try some new textural sound experiments that I wouldn’t have tried otherwise. And I write a lot but I don’t usually write quite that much. So it’s a heck of a challenge.
Maybe talk to me in another four months and see if I’ve put the piano in a sandbox. I might be batty by then…. WW: Is the new approach to writing songs coupled to a new approach to rehearsing and playing them? Part of prepping and promoting a conventional record is that it would be followed by a promotional tour, which would be very well rehearsed.
GP: I’m going to try playing a handful of the songs — but just as a man and his guitar. It’s funny, Brad [McInerney from Kazoo!] actually asked if I wanted to wrangle the power-pop band together to play with Partner around Halloween. And I love Partner, that’ll be a great show, but I’m kind of at the point where I want to play for a small group of people that I can make eye-contact with and talk to about the songs.
[media-credit id=57 align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
The narratives have been very vague in a lot of my past work, almost like loose associative thoughts. Or sometimes when you’re writing a song you have a dummy lyric, which is just something that has a nice cadence, but means nothing. And quite often that’ll end up being the lyric.
The approach here is to have songs that are cohesive little units that were deliberately structured and mean something and were based on an experience. I don’t usually write like that. It’s harder. So [these shows are] going to give me a platform to talk about where the song came from and maybe give some context. It’s boring watching a guy sing and play guitar. Man, the song’s got to be good, or there’s got to be some point of interest there. So it’s like shifting the spotlight to the song itself.
Photo by Will Wellington/The Ontarion.