Junior Boys - Uptown Magazine
After over a decade creating music as Junior Boys with partner Matt Didemus and with three successful albums under his belt, you’d think Canadian electronic producer Jeremy Greenspan would be confident about his career and its direction. JUNIOR BOYS
But, like many thirtysomethings, Greenspan struggles with questions about getting older and staying relevant — and grapples with the fear that his best days are already behind him.
Inspired by the life and work of Orson Welles, Greenspan took those feelings of doubt and his internal struggles with the fear of failure and channeled them into the duo’s fourth album, It’s All True, which was released in June via Domino Records.
“That’s what the whole record was kind of about. It was a lot to do with the last record (2009’s Begone Dull Care). I didn’t feel good about how it was received,” explains Greenspan over the phone from his home in Hamilton, Ont. “I didn’t feel good at where we were at when we were touring it. I was starting a new record from the perspective of someone who was embittered. I felt like I could make a record and ignore all those feelings and try to be positive. That felt false. I could make something up or I could talk about what I am obsessing over in my own life. Where do I go from here? Am I becoming old and irrelevant? All that kind of stuff.”
The questions and fears Greenspan is confronting on this album are incredibly relatable to many people of a certain age.
“In reality, I feel now that I make records for people my own age, in their 30s. Which is not always the best. To be honest, people that are younger are usually more enthusiastic about music,” jokes the normally serious producer.
Since their early days, Greenspan and Didemus have experimented with plenty of styles, from fragile, stripped-down arrangements to richly detailed grooves that reference ’80s new wave, Italian disco, electro, R&B, Krautrock, Detroit techno, broken beat, slow-burning house and U.K. garage. Greenspan’s lyrics have always had an emotional depth you don’t find that often in electronic music.
“If the records are different than the ones that came before, it’s mainly because we have grown as human beings and we are trying different things,” Greenspan says. “We don’t really make too many conscious decisions about how our record is going to be different than the last or how it’s going to fit in with what people are listening to at the moment or what they want — we just work on a kind of faith.”
Still, Greenspan says the duo isn’t interested in recreating what its done in the past.
“This record, in a lot of ways, was a completion of a certain type of idea,” he says. “From this point on, we’re not sure where we’re going to go.”
Sept. 12, 8 p.m., West End Cultural Centre
w/ Young Galaxy
