BOYBOY (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

Pop CultureApril 11, 2018

Boyboy interviewed by his mum(mum)

Guest writer

BOYBOY (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

Last week, New Zealand-born, LA-based songwriter Boyboy (aka Sam McCarthy, ex Goodnight Nurse, Kids Of 88) released his debut, self-titled album. For The Spinoff, his mum, Lyn McCarthy, asked him about his writing process, meditation, and what’s going on in that cover photo.

What’s your album called? All I can see is some funny logo up in the right-hand corner and a photo of you imitating a hippopotamus yawning.

(Laughs) The album is called BOYBOY. It’s self-titled. The logo in the top corner is two circles with a line through them that create two Bs, back-to-back.

What’s the photo all about?

The photo was an accident from a photoshoot I did with Chelsea [Jade]. I was doing a facial muscle stretch where you do vowels with your mouth as wide as you can, ‘A E I O U’, and she happened to catch me in the middle of ‘I’.

The photo is so detailed you can see everything and it’s got some whiskers, so you sort of think, ‘is this a BOYBOY that’s starting to get his whiskers?’

I didn’t realize I was having photos of me that day as the shoot was meant for Chelsea. I hadn’t shaved.

Some of your songs have backing vocals in a normal voice, and some with special fx on their voices, so on ‘None Of Your Love’ there’s a rappy voice.

I’d have to hear what you mean by the rappy one. Is it a low voice?

Yes it is.

(Imitates tuned down ‘LOVE’ vocal)

No – not that low, I wouldn’t have thought, or maybe it is. It just reminded me of a rappy voice. Then on ‘Gimme’ it sounds like the background vocals are in a squeezebox.

What’s a squeezebox?

The image I get of a squeezebox – is this voice going through this box, so there’s a big voice going in one end and ‘yeeeee’ coming out the other.

(Laughs) Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

When you’re making a song, you’ve got the words and the music, you’ve got a rappy effect and a squeezebox effect, how do you make them?

I sing pretty much all the backing vocals myself and then manipulate them to sound like other people. That way the songs can have voices that sound different but are still coming from one person.

BOYBOY (SAM MCCARTHY) AND HIS MUMMUM (LYN MCCARTHY) (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

So where do you get your ideas from and how do you expand that into a whole song?

This is where I say, ‘If I told you I’d have to kill you’.

(Laughs)

I still ask myself those questions. It generally comes from thinking about something I’m going through, and it becomes a song idea when a one-line statement comes into my mind that best describes that.

So they’re quite personal songs?

Yeah, I just find it easier to write that way. If I’m experiencing it, I have a visual narrative in my mind of what’s happening and I can write about that, but if I haven’t experienced something then I’m just trying to imagine and it’s not the same.

Have you noticed any set time frame that you write a song in?

Recently I’ve noticed that the songs I like the most are often written the fastest, sometimes within an hour or two. Of course not completely finished, although the thing that helps to make it fast is preparation.

What does that mean?

Like if I know I have a writing session, I’ll prepare by trying to think of that one line. Once I’ve got it I might come up with some chords so when I go into the session I can jump into writing the rest of the lyrics. Otherwise, there can be a lot of pressure to come up with something.

So do you feel that pressure at times?

Yeah, I think the reason why I prepare is that I hate that feeling of pressure, so it’s like a coping mechanism, but at the same time it works. I have to leave some things up to chance because if it’s all predetermined it might be boring. But a framework helps.

You used to have that little black book where you’d write down words or ideas, and draw pictures. Do you still do that?

Yeah, I do. I do a page of scribbling, like a stream of consciousness, in the morning, I might have been holding something in that might be really helpful, but maybe the difference now is that I only use it if it aligns with the topic I’m intending to write about, otherwise it can get blurry and I’m trying to write things as clear as possible so other people get exactly what I mean.

That ‘AM Walk’. I thought it was quite unusual for an album, but you have to listen really closely to hear the walking. I was wondering what you’d be hoping the listener would get from that? Couldn’t you turn up the volume of the recording?

I was almost slapping my feet on the concrete to make them louder.

But it still didn’t make it very loud.

I mean, it’s something I made when I used to walk around Echo Park in the mornings. The different types of sounds that come in things I would hear on my walk, so it’s more to give you an idea of what’s in my mind when I’m walking around.

I didn’t hear anything else other than the footsteps.

There’s an AM radio that gets tuned in? There’s music and stuff? And then there’s someone talking?

I didn’t hear that bit. I’ll have to listen to that bit again.

(Laughs) (Sound of the family dog snoring)

So you know, one of the major impacts on your life is meditation. What influence do you think the meditation has had on your music or your approach to music?

It’s mostly affected the writing process. I don’t think my music sounds that different from what I made before. In the meditation you’re trying to develop concentration, there’s physical and mental involvement, it’s like problem-solving, and because I do it every morning, it sets up a kind of blueprint for the rest of the day, so I’m probably going to approach writing in a similar way. I guess that’s where the preparation comes from. I know that when I sit down on a cushion I’m going to try and focus on my breathing for an hour, but if I went to a writing session and said ‘let’s just see what happens’, it’d be the opposite. I want to know roughly what it is I’m trying to achieve.

So do you think the meditation is reflected in the sound of the music?

Nah (Laughs).

Why not?

Well, first of all, the sound of meditation is just silence, so I don’t think I’d be able to earn a living as a musician if I was just making silence (Laughs). Also, I don’t think the esoteric aspects of the religious practice are things I’m wanting people to relate to. But, maybe if I talk about having compassion for yourself or others, which the meditation deals with, it’s something most people experience and so there’s a bridge.

Also, I think there’s already a stereotype in music of generally white male musicians coming in touch with spirituality and kind of becoming ‘gurus’ and I think I’m trying to avoid that.

(Laughs) It’s probably a good idea. So the last question is what have you taken from Auckland that you keep alive in LA, is there anything that you’re able to hang on to?

I think politeness is something I was able to develop well from living in Auckland and find it’s something I don’t alter when I go to America. I think a lot of slang I seem to hold on to. Like just putting ‘as’ on the end of everything. People seem to pick up on that a lot.

Well, thank you, Sam!

Thank you, Mum!

That was a great interview!

A great interview! One of the best actually!

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Kylie Minogue’s new album finds her inauthentic for the first time in her career.

Pop CultureApril 10, 2018

Kylie Minogue’s new album is a rare disappointment

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

Kylie Minogue’s new album finds her inauthentic for the first time in her career.

On her new album, Kylie Minogue goes acoustic and courts a sub-Sheeran faux-country sound. It does not go well. Sam Brooks reviews.

Kylie Minogue is one of our most enduring and unique popstars. This is an objective fact. She’s been making pop music – honest-to-god mainstream pop music – since the 80s. She’s made one of the best pop songs of all-time. She’s a gay icon. Right at the moment when her chart successes were fading a bit, she pivoted to cool, doing an Anti-Tour of her all b-sides, performing on stage with the Scissor Sisters once, working with auteur directors and Nick Cave, and burying herself in weird little side projects. Throughout she’s continued to tour – and not just tour, but put on huge stadium spectacles. She’s remained a tremendously likeable (and constant) cultural presence, without attracting any of the intensely negative and sexist criticism that has been thrown at Madonna. She occupies a unique place in pop music, and she isn’t given half the credit she’s due.

So, I have a lot of faith in Kylie. Still, I was worried when I heard ‘Dancing’, the first single from her new album, Golden. It starts off with a clearly fake guitar (which Kylie plays even more fakely in the video for it). The handclaps come up at around forty seconds in, and my blood runs cold. Then the chorus, and the most insipid drum beats begins – all while Kylie Minogue is doing a goddamned hoedown. The only good part of the entire thing is her voice, which has only gotten better over the past thirty years. These days she uses her lower range in more creative ways; there’s a lived-in depth to her vocal performances now (which is what made her Abbey Road album from a few years ago such a triumph.)

Surely, I thought, the entire album couldn’t be like this? It’s Kylie Minogue. She can’t fill an album with nothing songs like this – nobody could, and nobody should! She’s not Jessica Simpson pivoting to country after The Dukes of Hazzard because nobody wanted music from Jessica Simpson by then. She’s not Jewel settling down into the country music her yodel was made for. She is gay icon, Nick Cave-befriending, Kylie Minogue.

For everything you can throw at Kylie, you can’t accuse her of following the most boring trends. When Madonna went rap, she went full 80s pop. When every pop singer had a b-rate rapper doing a guest verse, she was working with Stuart Price, the British electronic producer behind Madonna’s Confessions on a Dancefloor. When everybody had moved onto Esther Dean, she was working with Pharrell Williams. Kylie has never not been making good, vaguely off-trend pop music, and she’s always done that specific off-trend thing well.

Golden is not done well. This is Kylie Minogue following a trend, and it’s not even a good one. It’s not a collection of necessarily bad pop songs – 12 is not an awful length, but 15 for the deluxe version is, especially when the better songs are on that version – but it’s a collection of utterly anemic and ill-considered ones.

Why on earth would Kylie Minogue, in the year of our Lord 2018, pivot to the faux-acoustic, even-more-faux-country crap that led Ed Sheeran on his hunched-shoulder march to the top of the charts? There are no synths here, there’s hardly even any beats. There are acoustic guitars. There are handclaps. There are banjos, for god’s sake. Banjos! On a Kylie Minogue album.

You can tell what the songs sound like based on the titles alone:

‘Shelby ’68’. Mildly upbeat song about a lost love, with a catchy chorus and innocuous verses.

‘A Lifetime to Repair’. A mildly funny kiss-off to an ex, with fucking banjo.

‘Sincerely Yours’. Piano ballad which could have been on any Chantal Kreviazuk album from the nineties right through to today.

‘Raining Glitter’. Gay pandering, slightly drumbeat-y pop song.

The problem with this kind of country-pop is that it doesn’t sound like what country music sounds like now, or what country music has ever sounded like. Hell, Kacey Musgraves’ latest single, the Daft Punk-esque ‘High Horse’ sounds more like a Kylie Minogue single than any of the songs on this album do.

I love country music, I always have and I always will. This is not country music. This is what people who don’t listen to country music think country music sounds like: guitars, overmixed backup singers and trite metaphors. What makes country music great and special is the intense detail in the imagery, the vocal phrasing, a strong sense of place and even stronger point of view. There is absolutely none of that on Golden. I don’t need my pop music lyrics to be great, and I especially don’t need my Kylie Minogue songs to be Keats, but I absolutely need that from my country music. You don’t get to wrap yourself in the warm cardigan of a country song while holding onto the calorie-free sugar of pop music. It sounds fake, and worse than that, it sounds bad.

The best song on the entire thing is ‘Golden’ – although I will concede a little bit of love for ‘Lost Without You’, which is the only song that you could conceivably play in a club from this whole entire thing, because it’s the only one that sounds remotely inventive.

I’m harsh on this, because I’m a little bit harsh on acoustic music being read as automatically authentic – as if some dude sitting down on a stool and singing yet another cover of ‘Hallelujah’ is any more authentic than nine producers working hard as hell to create a pop masterpiece that makes millions of people feel something, feel anything at all. This might feel authentic to Kylie Minogue, and I hope for her as a person and an artist that she is tapping into something she feels authentic expressing. But it sounds more like the result of an A&R guy trying to make an artist a huge commercial success by rushing at what’s at the top of the charts – dishevelled men who can play three chords on an old guitar – and hoping for the best.

Kylie doesn’t need that. Kylie has an inbuilt fanbase who will follow her wherever she goes. I will continue to follow her, and if she tours this album here I’ll be first in line to buy tickets. But to see Kylie, or her handlers, chasing hits rather than standing to the side and doing her own thing is disappointing and sad.

Kylie Minogue is cool. You don’t need to make her cool – just let her be. And I just hope as hell for the rest of her career that this is not what Kylie Minogue just being sounds like.