Pop CultureJune 30, 2017

‘It’s therapy for me’: Kane Strang on how writing sad songs helps him feel less miserable

Contributing writer

Hussein Moses talks to Kane Strang, whose album Two Hearts and No Brain is out today.

Kane Strang just got fired. Well, he thinks he might’ve. “I don’t even know if it was serious,” the Dunedin-based songwriter says. “But I work with my guitarist and he came home the other day and told me that my boss said I was fired because I gave them too short notice about going to Europe.”

Such is the life of a New Zealand musician on the brink of something much bigger. By the time you read this, Strang will have left behind his job in a Dunedin cafe and wrapped up playing a dozen or so shows across Europe and the UK. A couple of months prior to that, he took off on a 25+ date tour of the US to test out some of the heavy-hearted indie-pop songs from his new album Two Hearts and No Brain. It’s the polar opposite of what his music career was like for him just a few years ago; right now the opportunities feel endless. Not once did he think he’d ever have the chance to go to America, let alone be there on the strength of his records.

Two Hearts and No Brain is finally out and if the song titles are anything to go by – ‘My Smile Is Extinct’, ‘It’s Not That Bad’, ‘Oh So You’re Off I See’, ‘Don’t Follow Me (I’m Lost)’ – you might think Strang was being a little melodramatic, but the sound he creates doesn’t necessarily reflect who he is outside of his songs. In fact, a lot of the time, he’s pretty content with his life. He just didn’t notice how miserable he came off on record and on stage until more people began listening to his music. “I think the thing is that I just got into a habit of only writing songs when I’m feeling sad,” he says. “It’s because it’s therapy for me. It’s how I process things. Once that song is written, it’s like that’s it. I don’t feel like that anymore about that certain thing.”

That same darkness that inspires Strang’s own songs also informs much of the music he tends to gravitate towards himself as a listener. For him, there’s nothing better than walking around to a good chugging bassline in a gloomy minor key. During the recording of Two Hearts and No Brain, Strang rediscovered Elliott Smith, but the record that truly made him stop in his tracks was Puberty 2 by indie-rock rising star Mitski.

“I don’t know why, but [it was] as soon as I heard that ‘Your Best American Girl’ song. Maybe it was because she was on my label [Dead Oceans] as well, but I was just like ‘I need to do better; this shit’s amazing’. Not in a competitive way. It was just super powerful and it made me want to push myself and not keep doing the same thing. Not just pumping out the same album year after year. I didn’t want to make Blue Cheese 2.”

Blue Cheese, his first album, is what he describes as “very straight indie-rock music”. He wrote it in 2014 and by the time he came to start working on new material, he felt a need to push things forward. “I wanted to go back to the song, make something with a bit more meat, get a bit more songwriter-y again and really give people a bit more to digest,” he says.

Strang had once again retreated to his bedroom to work on Two Hearts and No Brain, which was where he wrote and recorded the entirety of Blue Cheese. The downside to that, he says, was that it took too long to actually get anywhere – he’d end up going in circles with no one there to tell him to move on from a song when he needed to. After about six months of recording, Strang realised he needed to get outside and collaborate with someone, so he hooked up with Dunedin producer and musician Steven Marr (who is a member of Doprah) and the pair finished the record at the now-defunct Dunedin venue Chick’s Hotel.

Two Hearts and No Brain is an album about relationships, which will be obvious to anyone who hears it. But they’re not always romantic connections, says Strang. “I wanted listeners to be able to mould these songs to fit their own lives and their own problems with family and friends or with themselves. A lot of it is quite introspective too. I’m almost talking to myself some of the time, you know what I mean? It’s based on conversations a lot of the time. There’s a lot of call and response, but you can’t really tell who’s saying what. It’s quite abstract in that way.”

His personal favourite track on the album is also the most personal. It’s called ‘Don’t Follow Me (I’m Lost)’ and it taps into the paranoia, angst and helplessness that you can hear at the heart of his music. The story behind the song came about after some friends of his had been at a gig by a young Dunedin band. They had come away sure that the band had been taking inspiration from Strang.

“They might’ve been wrong, but the idea of that just freaked me out because I feel like I still have so much to learn and there’s heaps out there that I’m not happy with,” Strang says now. “I guess it’s just about the idea that heaps of people are listening to my music, scaring the crap out of me, and just telling them straight up – it’s in the title – don’t follow me, I’m lost.”

Dunedin is still home for Strang and it’s a place he loves. But he does get the feeling he’ll wind up overseas at some point, if he can make a decision on where to go. It’s expensive to tour overseas when you’re so out of the way. Plus the lack of venues in New Zealand right now doesn’t help things.

But you don’t really realise the quality of New Zealand bands until you spend some time away, he says. “Of course America has heaps of great bands but I think you just can’t forget how crazy that such a small country like this has so many good bands. Everyone’s trying to do their own thing here. Whereas I found overseas, you can tell a lot of bands are trying to be something else or trying to sound like what’s popular. But here you don’t want to be told that you sound like your mate.”

As clichéd as it sounds, Strang says that at the end of the day, he just wants to make music that people can relate to. It seems to be working, even if he still finds it horrifying that more and more people are beginning to discover his records.

With the way things are going, it might just be time for him to get used to it.

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An unjust war in the Middle East is no excuse for this look.

Pop CultureJune 29, 2017

Throwback Thursday: How it felt to watch The L Word as a lesbian teen

Felix Desmarais

Contributing writer

An unjust war in the Middle East is no excuse for this look.

Felix Desmarais rewatches The L Word, one of the first mainstream TV shows to put queer voices on the small screen.

The year is 2005. In the dark – past midnight – in the lounge, I am lit by the glow of The L Word on TV and I am feeling things. They are very teenage things. Lorde could write a song about them, they are so teenaged. Homemade Hormones. Green Loins? Ew. Liabiloins. Perfect.. ah, well, Places.

It’s a delicious kind of irony that, as I write this, I’m one day on testosterone and 16 all over again. I’m watching The L Word while my hormones rage once more.

Hormones or none, returning to the slick and sparkly lesbian drama feels like visiting a former version of myself, one for whom this first show focussed entirely on ladies-who-like-ladies meant so much. It’s easy to write off its impact now, in the age of Transparent and Orange is the New Black, but The L Word laid an important foundation for queer characters on TV.

Remember when Will and Grace was controversial? The L Word helped take us beyond that. It also helped me confirm that I was gay. As hell.

As a hasbian, I can still talk about lesbians and have it not be too creepy. So let’s just ignore the fact I came out as transgender six months ago and hark right on back to my lesbo gay day. I’ll go with feminine pronouns for that past self, since she sure as hell didn’t know who the heck she was, anyway.

Hark we do, right on back to baby lesbian Felix, who got drunk on gin and cranberry juice and pashed her best gal pal in an elevator. The Felix who fumbled through clueless sort-of-sex, whispering juniper-berried breath into the night “I think I’m bisexual!” Because, of course, I did still have a boyfriend, but he was a jerk, so fuck him.

The next morning, I turned to kiss that same gal pal. “No,” she said, “I’m not…”

Not what?! She couldn’t even say it! Still, I was hopelessly in love with the idea of her and my new-found queer identity. I listened to Anika Moa’s Stolen Hill on repeat, crying at myself in the mirror, luxuriating in both my misery as well as looking like I was in a music video.

And I watched The L Word on DVD and, once more, felt things.

Years later, it’s kind of incredible to watch the show in 2017. If for nothing else, it’s just a great reminder that, once upon a time, these haircuts were really cool:

Looks like one of the dancing brooms from Fantasia.

It’s also incredible to remind our queer-ass selves what the show represented, and how far we’ve come with giving queer people voices on TV. It meant so much to see a reflection of myself being played out on (almost) mainstream TV. The L Word seemed a far cry from Ellen DeGeneres Yup-I’m-Gaying semi-apologetically out of a literal closet and crying on Oprah, even though it happened fewer than 10 years beforehand.

These were representations of lesbians and queer women where their sexuality was almost normalised, if still hyper-sexualised (but y’know, it was on Showtime after all). These were complex, rich characters.

And when I say rich: they were rich.

This is where The L Word shows its age. If The L Word were being made now, surely someone in production would have said “Isn’t it kind of weird how all of these lesbians are mostly white, rich, employed, able-bodied, conventionally attractive and thin?” Maybe someone did and that’s why they threw Pam Grier as Kit Porter in there.

Then again, maybe they threw Pam Grier in there because she’s Pam Grier and she’s amazing, I’m just speculating.

Despite being over 10 years old now, The L Word is still addictive and entertaining as hell. It’s pure lescapism, but it was and is groundbreaking. Plus, it’s the little things that make a revolution, like seeing an actual female gaze on TV:

Yeeeeh Jenny get it gurl. Heterosexuality is but a distant memory rn

It takes skill to make a truly likeable character, but the writers and Mia Kirschner went one better with Jenny bloody Schecter. She’s so deliciously hateable, but with just enough vulnerability to make you feel a little bad for her. I truly believe it’s one of the most underrated performances of the 2000s. She’s Piper Chapman 1.0.

It’s a shame the end of the series was undercooked (probably due to the writers’ strike that year), but the scope of The L Word in its prime was impressive – tackling breast cancer and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and featuring a transgender character and a deaf character (played by someone who was actually deaf!).

Even in 2017 I am still #emotion for Bette, Tina can fuck right off with her simpering lip-glossed face, and I’m horrified at the thought of how many other young lesbians may have modelled their behaviour on Shane’s. It wasn’t perfect but, along with Queer As Folk, it was the beginning of a new era for queer voices on the small screen.

Pass me the popcorn, I’m (muff)diving right back in.

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