Loud and Quiet presents Midnight Chats.
Hey, good evening everybody, and thank you for downloading episode fifty two of the Loud and Quiet interview podcast Midnight Chats. It's midnight, it's Thursday, and here we are again with another episode. This is episode two of season six, or series six, as us Brits say. We've only just gone to the series model. We were just putting them all out, but we're on a series now. Episode one of this series was last week. If you missed that episode that
was with Interpol, Greg did that one? This week is my week. My name's Stuart Stubbs and I am the editor of Loud and Quiet magazine. Now, a lot of people that listen to the podcast might not know that Loud and Quite is also a music magazine. So and we're terrible at plugging it. We don't mention it enough, or at least we feel that we don't. So we're going to try to plug it a little bit. So if if you are unfamiliar with that side of what
we do, please do check it out. Loud and Quiet dot com is where you can order a copy of not just our latest issue, but old issues. There's one hundred and twenty four that we've done over the last fourteen years or so, so please do check it out. If you like the podcast, you may all like the magazine as well. It's pretty much a print version of what this podcast is. It features a lot of the same artists or similar artists. But seeing as we're here
for the podcast, now, let me introduce tonight's guest. Chile Gonzalez currently lives in Cologne in Germany, but he's original from Montreal in Canada. The story of Chile, or Gonzo as he likes to be called, and how he introduces himself to people, is he was a band guy essentially. He had a band called Son spelled Son, and they were doing pretty well. They signed a big record deal in nineteen ninety five, and as far as he was concerned, that was kind of that his future was mapped out.
But it didn't work out for him. It wasn't what he wanted it to be. So in nineteen ninety nine he became Chile Gonzales essentially, and he pretty much reverted back to his roots as a virtuoso piano player and also pursued his love of rap music. So since then he's pretty much straddled those two worlds. Sometimes he makes a record that is full of beautiful piano, and sometimes he makes a record that's like a rap record. And he's done loads of other things on top of this.
He writes songs for a lot of other people, including Feist, Peaches. He's written songs for Drake. He won a Grammy for his work on Random Access Memories by Daft Punk. He's been in a film He's what else has he done? He's broken a world record for the longest ever solo performance. These are all things that I probably should have spoken to him about, and we do touch on a couple of them, but as is the way with midnight chats, we kind of just drifted from one topic to the next.
I really enjoyed talking to Chile, and I wanted to meet him since I spoke to him on the phone. Last year. We did a cover feature with him and Jarvis Cocker about an album that they put out last year called Room twenty nine, which was a concept record they wrote at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, the hotel there, and I didn't get to meet Chilly at that point because he was back home in Cologne. I had to speak to him on the phone. I'm glad that we managed to get him. I managed to get
into a room with him and talk to him. He's he's an energizing guy, and I hope you get that from this. He's got a new record that came out two weeks ago called Solo Piano three. It's essentially what it says on the tin. It's the sound of a piano and it's the third record that he's done like that. It's the final one he says that he's going to do of just him and piano. It's a beautiful record. If if you're listening to Midnight Chats at midnight or late at night, then that is a great record to
play around this time. I will leave you now with myself and Chili Gonzales. We will be back next week. We have another great guest next week. I won't say who it is, but I think we've got some really good people coming up on season or series six of Midnight Chats. For now, though, thank you for listening to episode fifty two with Chili Gonzales.
And very different after dark, you know, and so you're gonna get a different side as opposed to a morning interview where it would be you know, a whole other ballgame, whole different You know, my guard is down. Yeah, the intimacy level has turned up. We're in front of a fireplace, We're on a bear skin rug.
Yeah, we've got pipes.
We've got pipes, and we're both wearing dressing gowns.
Of course, so this is gonna I'm not sure what number of the podcasters will be at this point in time. We've recorded fifty of these, but I think you are the first person we've had on who is a Guinness Book World record holder.
Well former, I'm sad it's been broken since. Yeah, I played for twenty seven hours and change back in two thousand and nine. Yeah, the records were broken pretty frequently, so I believe just a few years later I became aware of a I believe it was like a sitar player because I had the record for the longest solo concert. It wasn't the piano specific. Guinness determined that you can't have a separate record for every instrument, you know, so it was the longest solo concert that I had the
record for, and that was broken by a mile. I mean, this guitar player went like thirty eight hours plus or something.
WHOA, Okay, so it's kind of out of reach maybe for a while.
But don't you think a guitar player has an unfair advantage because it's like it's kind of trancel like music to begin with. You know, I play like miniatures, you know, I play like two and a half three minute long pop songs on the piano essentially. So I thought, well, he's probably used to just like you know, zoning out, zoning out and playing for hours and hours and hours.
For all we know, the audience might have zoned out, so he might have stopped for an hour.
They might have just thought, well, silence his music, as John Cage taught us. So yeah, you know, we start to get into very abstract territory.
It's early to go there.
There was a provision in the Guinness World Record kind of contract, and it was very hard to define, but it said something like you have to perform what can be considered universally as music. You know, there was because what they want to avoid is some like maybe conceptual artists just going ding ding ding ding ding ding ding for twenty eight hours and saying, oh no, that's music which counts and that's an argument. What is music is
a whole other question. So Guinness sort of had to put some provision in there to say, look, it has to be like what most people would consider to be music, otherwise we're not going to certify it.
So when you did, you did twenty seven hours. What was the record that you were beating? Can okay?
I only added an hour to it? I mean, you know it was it was more like, you know, it just felt good. Okay, there was twenty six, I'll do twenty seven, you know, inched over, inched over the finish line?
What made you want to do it? Can you remember? What was it that might you think?
Ego? Ego? I mean basically, at that point I was coming off of a bit of a botched album cycle, an album called Soft Power where I decided to sort of sing and sort of pay tribute to the sort of yacht rock, soft rock sensibility of my very very early years. At that point, I was really obsessed with you know, what music did you hear before you have
the self consciousness of taste? And for me that was you know, Beg's Billy Joel, the stuff that my sister liked, the stuff that when I was just you know, six or seven years old, just like seeing on the TV for the first time. Uh, And I was sort of like, let me get closer to that, let me get closer to the real DNA of my musical being pre taste, pre self image, pre you know, choosing the musical taste based on sort of defining yourself against your older brother
or whatever that moment. You're just an innocent, naive sponge. And what I was absorbing was this seventies soft rock, what I would call now, you know, music of the elite in a way, you know, long studio sessions lasting months and months and months, perfection orchestras, beautiful performances by session musicians, all that stuff. And unfortunately I didn't feel like I could just stand behind that album, and so I kind of, in retrospect, might have been self sabotaging
it a bit. And the way I presented the album in terms of promotion and being on stage was sort of working against maybe that naivete that I was looking for when I recorded the album. So it was a very weird mixed message, I think, and some people didn't know if it was literally a joke album or whether it just was sort of a misplaced sort of combination of presentation and content. But whatever the case, I was frustrated, and I felt like I had distanced myself from what
really makes me unique. And I was kind of looking for some gesture for myself that would sort of jolt
me awake in a strange sense. And I think I saw something about Guinness World Record, and I remembered how I loved those books when I was a kid, and seeing the guy with two hundred cigarettes in his mouth and all that stuff, the guy with long fingernails, all those famous Guinness World records, I thought, oh, this is kind of like brings back the sort of musical athlete part of what I do and a sort of surreal extreme performance that maybe only Chili Gonzalez really could do.
And so I just sort of put that show together and decided to go for it. And all the operation that I should have been doing I didn't really end up doing because I ended up doing promotion. But what keeps you going through twenty seven hours, it's ego. I just couldn't do it now because I don't feel the same need to press reset on my career. I feel like my expectations and the reality are in harmony. So right now I think, oh my godness, playing twenty seven hour.
I mean, you know, I played two and a half hour three hour concerts semi regularly, but to really go all the way and do something so so extreme it can only be a product of ego.
What are the actual rules of that record? Is it that you allowed a certain amount of intervals or did you literally just have to play? Is there like a limit on the gaps between the songs when a song stops and when you have to stop playing again? Is that all?
There is a limit on the gap, And I of course would play with that, you know, I would tell the people in the audience, or of course, you know, to make it a bit meta, I would say, you know, all right, guys, we have fifteen seconds. Nobody clap for fifteen seconds. That's to the limit, you know. Let me squeeze out as many seconds as I can. So it was fun to play with those with those limits. I also could take five minutes an hour or accumulate them.
So the way I worked it out is because I, as I said, three hour concert is fairly regular occurrence for me. In that sort of Springsteen esque approach to an all enveloping concert that begins usually in pure music and my piano repertoire, and then slowly cycles through some master classes and then ends up with the rap material, and then give some lessons, get some people to come on stage and give music lessons, and then bring out some of my other musicians, and then we take it
to a sort of rolling boil. And that three hour concert was basically the unit of the Guinness World Record Concert times nine, and I took a fifteen minute break between each of those three hour units. Okay, that was the way I conceived it. So after having done five of those, I was like, okay, five three hour concerts down, you know, and four to go.
So what did you do off the twenty seven? So you finished, you decide, You get to the end and you go right, I feel I've done enough. I think you went just over that's right.
I went eleven minutes past twenty seven, Yeah, exactly, and then my body gave out. I think it was like you make a deal with yourself in a way. Like I said, it's so much to do with ego and adrenaline. It's not really about what is the actual physical body capable of. It's more about what can the brain push the body to do that the brain needs. So when twenty seven hours came along, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm going, I'm going further. This is going to be
even more extreme, you know, I can't stop. Yeah. And then honestly, seven or eight minutes after, I was like, oh no, no, no, no, my body is really sending me them. Everything started to hurt. I start to cramp up. And it was because I had made a deal with myself for these twenty seven hours, and I wrapped it up three four minutes afterwards. I think it was twenty seven eleven finally, and so my secret wish to go like twenty eight maybe twenty nine and just just make me people,
Oh my god, you can't stop. It didn't quite manage it does the the contract was due.
Yeah, did you end in a kind of like really elaborate way or did you just kind of collapse on the keys?
Well, my team came out and were spreading confetti at twenty seven hours, and then they kind of stayed on stage for those eleven minutes, and I believe I finished with my piece Chilli and f Minor, which was the first piece on my first album, which felt like a nice way to sort of wrap it up. And I remember having sort of one arm in the air and just sort of playing some crazy cadenza with my left hand. But yeah, it was it was, it was all a blur at that.
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, obviously that's something in a really extreme example, but it does play into your approach to concerts anyway. I mean last year when we spoke on the phone for the magazine, we were talking about how you like to play with the perception of what is a what is a gig and what is a show, and kind of yes, with the parameters of a gig, you don't want to just play normal. You
don't play normal gigs anyway, do you. I guess the story that you told me that I found really funny is how you during your show you'll do a pop the pop master cast element of it where you kind of deconstruct a pop song, and you told me a story about how you would at a particular show you play You've got you had a string quartet and you
got them to play a section of eleanor Rigby. But you at the end of that you kind of said to the audience, well, you'll all know that song that was Elizabeth Ridley by the Rolling Stones, and then you carry on and explain about and deconstruct that song and just carry on and just carry.
I mean, I guess it's that's just pure trolling.
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, it's yes.
So in that moment, I guess I'm not content to quite let it go. The masterclass would already be quite entertaining for people, I think in that moment, because I'm sort of bringing the curtain back, you know, and I have the quartet there to make it to illustrate, like, listen to the rhythmic way that the strings are being used here. This is more using the string quartet as a rhythm section than as just some lovely chords and some you know, melancholy moods as strings are commonly used.
And it's true that, you know, Paul McCartney was kind of a visionary for being able to think, Okay, this is a pop song, but it's going to have a string quartet instead of drums based guitard. That's already kind of you know, I'm already ahead, so to speak. And it's true that I have this tendency to want to sort of just just change the frame one more time.
And that's yes, the source of sort of wanting to mislabel it and to almost in that moment when they think, Wow, this guy's a real expert of music, he's a real font of knowledge. He really must know his stuff, and in that moment they go, oh, come on, and some of course believe it. You know, I I probably told you on the phone. You know, I'll get messages on Facebook where people say, great show. But just so you know,
here's a YouTube video you did. Mislabel it And yeah, I guess I always feel like there's always this extra little frame you can change at the end. And that's maybe thinking a little bit more like a comedian does, where they sort of have a setup of a joke and the punchline often involves you sort of having to revise your feeling about that story right at the very end, And maybe that's what that is. The punchline isn't to
actually hear the quartet play eleanor Rigby. The punchline is the musical genius mislabeling it wrong.
I like the fact that it's that is kind of it's almost it's a joke for you. It's a joke for one, in a way, isn't it because you did that to kind of miss lady on it and and kind of just change the atmosphere in the room a little bit and just tweak it so that people think, oh, this guy, maybe this guy doesn't know absolutely everything or gives them, gives the audience like a little one upmanship on you. I knew, I know that song, that he's got that right.
I know he's wrong. And that's literally the definition of dramatic irony. So not in the Alanis Morris a sense of it's a day where you don't want it to rain and it rains. That's not truly ironic, as many people are often correcting their friends. Dramatic irony in the terms of you know, Aristotle and Greek drama is when essentially the audience knows more than the characters do, and in that moment, the character of Chili Gozalees knows less than they do because he's he thinks it's a rolling
stone song. And I love creating that true dramatic irony because it gets the antennas of the audience up and they'll listen to the next song in a different way. I've definitely gone too far and done things that are only too provocative, and they'll remember the show, but they might not remember the music. So I'm always trying to sort of toe that line.
What have you done that's gone too far in your What things have you done that you can remember?
Well, just some some some conferent heat things, perhaps where I really sort of had an adversarial relationship with the audience or maybe one particular audience member who won't play along in some way, and I'll decide to sort of make an issue of it, and we say, drive into the skid when you're on the road and you're driving on ice, and I'd like to drive into the skids. So if there's a bit of a strange, awkward, ill dodgy energy in the room, I tend to run towards
it rather than try to ignore it. And if you run towards it, then you have the chance to sort of take it on for the audience, so to speak, and then maybe you can turn your show into something very positive by the end. However, when you drive into the skid, sometimes you never really get out of it, and there have been shows where it just ends on a dodgy, strange, ill unresolved mood where perhaps the audience truly is confused and maybe truly dislikes me in some way.
People ever got in touch.
You know what, when I do those shows, musicians in the audience tell me it's the best show they've seen in me. Really, yeah, I'll just do one of those shows. And then it's the musicians who will say, oh my god, I've seen you six times when you've come to Hamburg, but what you did last night I was you know, but that's maybe the insider thing of musicians who love to see sort of something that wouldn't normally happen at a concert. A truly uncomfortable, unresolved moment of confrontation is
pretty rare in a music concert. Sure, yeah, and so I guess that's why the musicians like it. And of course, you know, Hamburg, I had a very intense confrontation with a dude who just wouldn't get up on stage for his music lesson. And usually I have all these ways, you know, I can kind of get the audience to sort of clap for them, and then the pressure of the audience tends to get them up. Okay, that doesn't work.
I can go towards some other arguments or and at some point I start to sort of really antagonize the person, you know, in hopes that they'll finally I think they have to come on stage. Is the only way that this tension gets resolved. And Hamburg, at this jazz festival, like back in twenty thirteen, he just wouldn't come on stage. He just wouldn't. And I didn't let it go, and I stopped. You know, I was probably three quarters of
the way done through the concert. It must have gone off for twelve fifteen minutes, and there were people really standing up, and you know, there were Germans saying like, you know, we like your music, not your statements. Lady got up. And when I go to Hamburg now and do promo or do concerts, really at least a few people will mention. We'll mention and say, oh so no big confrontation tonight, huh. And I'm like, look, that's not
my first choice. And my first choice is peace and love with a few little ill moments, harmless ill moments sprinkled in, you know. But like I said, if the mood really goes there, then I'm going to go there too.
It's like a comedian, like there were certain comedians that kind of have that same approach of especially because I suppose especially because comedian culture in the UK at least has got there is like a Heckel culture, and there is part of that kind of back and forth with the audience, who is your what comedians or comedy generally like growing up who where does your kind of comedy? Loves?
Lie?
Well, I grew up watching you know, pretty mainstream television as a kid, and I guess the only comedians I really became aware of a little bit later as I really as I started to be on stage, I got more interested in. I became a big disciple of Andy Kaufman. Okay, and you know, he borders on, of course, performance art.
He just happened to sort of choose the world of comedy to be a performance artist, in much as today you might say the same about people like Nathan Fielder or Eric Andre to whom I dedicated one of the pieces on solo Piano three. Actually the piece of Chico is dedicated to him because I feel like he's a little bit the Chico marks of today. And yeah, I love it when you could just imagine, you know, and Eric do you Eric Andre's work, so if you go
online check out what he does. He has a show on a adults swim It's a very energetic, unhinged, intense show. For the first thirty seconds that I saw it, I thought, oh, hell no, I'm not going to make it through two minutes of this. It's way too aggressive. And then I got lulled into this hypnotic state and it sort of it weirdly. It relaxes me.
Really.
But if you imagine those shows, which are I think are ten to eleven minutes each episode, if you imagine those hanging on a screen in the Guggenheim, you could easily think of it as a document of very cutting edge performance art. I like that blurry line between conceptual performance art and comedy, and I like to bring that into the concert hall where I am and play with the conventions of a concert hall. I don't like playing in art galleries because everyone will say, oh, I know
what he's doing. But if you do it in a phil harmony in Germany, or if you do it at Cadogan Hall where people are used to understanding, oh, I come here for feel good Christmas, classical concerts and things like that, all of a sudden, you have a chance to really really mess with people's heads because you're in the real world. And I don't like art when it hangs in a gallery. I like art as it exists
in the real world. Yesterday I was in I think it's Hyde Park and I saw that giant thing from Christo. There's this like looks like a candy pyramid or something in the middle of in the middle of the water there, and you can take a boat and get really really close to it, and I loved it. I like to see art. I like to just turn a corner and be like Aliens, Hello, you know. I love that feeling much more so than like going to the Tate and
seeing that exact same pyramid in a giant room. I just wouldn't do it for me because the frame of a gallery, it's too obvious. We expect crazy things, we expect to sort of maybe be shocked or provoked, and we can always rationalize it while we're in an art gallery. But if that's happening in a concert hall, where you're used to seeing musicians be so respectful, and then there's a musician being so disrespectfu for sweating, spinning, sitting there,
you know, swearing slippers, bathrobe, the whole thing. Yeah, that has a chance of being mildly transgressive in twenty eighteen. To do the same thing if I was playing in the Tate Modern, it's just not going to be a subversive or transgressive in the least.
Do you know Stuart Lee at all? The British comedian.
No, but just the other day I was asking someone for their British comedy recommendations and he was on that list.
So yeah, I'm going to check him out very sea. He's like, I think you're you'd be into him. He's got a kind of I suppose he is like the he's kind of like the liberal elites comedian guy. Really, he's like anti T he doesn't do much TV. He's not like he's quite He's a snob. He's a total comedy snob. But he's got this, I suppose the way to describe him in a nutshell, although this isn't what
he's all about. He kind of has a thing where he repeats a joke and now quite abstract, that quite weird and abstract, but he will repeat it for like fifteen minutes, so it goes there's a point where he's repeating the same thing and it's so it's funny. Then you have to basically sit out a period where you're sick of it and it's not funny anymore until it comes round to being funny.
So it's like Philip Glass humor.
Yeah, it kind of inentually.
Because Philip Glass literally you know, when I talk about minimalist music, often the music is not as repetitive as it seems. Like Steve Raich, the music evolves quite a bit. Yeah, Terry Riley, it evolves. Philip Glass is a different bird. He actually repeats things and the change happens in the mind of the listener. So that's I guess.
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good comparison. I think you'd be intim did you watch the talking about Andy Kaufman? Did you see the Jim Carey Not not the film of Man in the Moon, but there's a documentary about the making of it.
I was not very convinced. I did not feel that Jim Carey really internalized what Andy Kauffman was really about, and he focused on some of the more superficial aspects of just the outward shocking nature of Andy Coffin was a very positive performance artist. To me, he created very positive energy through letting out his monster once in a while. But essentially, as I see myself as well, you're there
to create positive energy. Otherwise it doesn't really work. I mean, you know, not counting the occasional confrontation with his stoic german who refuses to get on stage. Fundamentally, I believe I'm there to create positive energy. It's what I strive to do. And I really think Andy Kaufman did that. Also.
I felt like from that Jim kit from the documentary, it did feel like Jim Kye was just using it as a really good excuse to really piss every one.
All exactly right. That's what I felt as well. He was sort of being a bit opportunistic what he thought the Andy Kaufman frame would let him do.
In previous interviews of yours that I've read and seen online and things. Is the debate between an entertainer and an artist. And you consider yourself an entertainer.
Yes, but I think entertainer includes artists. That's your thing. I think if you're an entertainer, you know they say that, like what do they say? A conservative is a liberal who got mugged or something. You know, so you're a liberal until you know someone robs you, and then all of a sudden you're like, get these criminals all in jail, you know, because it's finally touched you personally. In another way, I believe an entertainer is an artist who understood that
they don't exist without the audience. And the minute you sort of switch that in your mind and think, oh, everything I do on my own is just preparation and the actual thing I do only happens when there's an audience there, then I think you just instantly become an entertainer. Not in the sense of Pandora to people, lowest common denominator, this will work. I'll just say the name of the town I'm in and they're all going to cheer. That's
not what I mean by entertainment. Entertainment for me is essentially the strange seeming contradiction between being larger than life but very very intimate with the audience. And the way you do that, I think is by showing people your fantasies. That's what I observed David Bowie do. No one said David Bowie is inauthentic, Although if you really look at
how he was dressed as Ziggy Stardust. You're kind of like, Okay, how come we feel so connected to him despite that, Well, it's because he has this fantasy that he's sort of not of this earth. He feels like he doesn't belong. It's actually extremely poetic to sort of take on the role of an alien who's observing these humans and feeling
not at home. And that, to me was really touching, despite the fact that it seemed almost ridiculous, you know, superficially, and I feel that to incarnate the musical genius, it's a fantasy. I don't think I'm a musical genius. I would love to be one. In my fantasies, I have this impunity. And the impunity comes because will everyone will allow musical genius to do whatever he or she wants.
So that's the fantasy I live out. And the strange thing is when you get on stage, people tend to play along in a way, and therefore it kind of reinforces it. So there are moments where you can start to believe your own fantasy. And that's of course where it can get I guess complicated for people like David Bowie. But for me. I guess the rappers were the ones who, in a more concrete way in the late nineties, served
as my main inspiration. I think that's why I decided to apply the rapper's playbook to being a piano player, essentially, which to say, show your monster. Don't believe that you have to only show the sides of you that will make you well liked or you know, don't think that by simultaneously sharing, you know, fairly conscious and positive thoughts along with very negative exhibits of self loathing, that only
creates more intimacy with the audience. And so to see a musician live out their fantasy is more intimate than just seeing them walk up on stage dressed as they would be in the daytime when they're not performing. There's just nothing intimate about that, even though they might think they're being authentic. I'm not interested in authenticity. Let's say I'm interested in intimacy. And what is more intimate than
knowing someone's fantasies. I mean, sometimes you're in a relationship for five years with someone before you find out what their particular fantasies are. It's really that's personal stuff. So to go up there and show this bitter and deluded and you know, self aggrandizing, whatever, all those adjectives you can apply to the persona. It's because I dream of being able to be that way, and being on stage allows me to be that way. People clap for it, and it's a very reinforcing process.
Like in terms of where where you're at now, as Chitty Gonzales, compared to when you're your first band's son, that the experience of being in that band and you released three albums and had a record deal and it was a thing. It wasn't like a high school band that didn't do anything. It was like the first stage of your career. I guess how much of that experience do you think has shaped you now?
And all of the that's like the origin story. That's like when lightning hit the laboratory. And you know, I was so traumatized by how that project was perceived because I sort of naively thought back then, the music is enough, Surely everything else will fall together, like I've gotten signed end of Journey. And of course I then you know, realized, oh, maybe it wasn't a good idea to just let them
choose the photographer. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to let them choose the stylist and I'll just wear whatever clothes because no matter what, the music is going to do the work for me. So I naively thought I was maybe above the work of storytelling around my music, and thought music is strong enough, it'll tell its own story and all that other stuff doesn't really matter. I quickly learned I should take control of the storytelling as well, because I won't like the story that sort of emerges,
you know, and there has to be a story. To think that music is enough in its own in a vacuum in a business sense, in terms of like trying to, you know, find your audience is naive if you want to be a pure artist. And I know some people like this and they just make music literally for themselves, that's a whole different ballgame. But I am an entertainer. I don't exist without an audience. There are artists who can't exist with an audience. I'm not one of them.
So therefore I'm responsible for the storytelling. And not only that, I've started to really enjoy the storytelling, so once I made it the goal of mine too. Okay, learn how to tell the story. See if this can become part of the artwork. See if this can be just as exciting as thinking of music walking down the street, think of what your next photo will be, Think of the next thing you're going to say in an interview, think
of the next theme you'd like to explore. Has become just as much of a sort of reflexive way of being creative as thinking of chord progressions or melodies.
Your genre is in one way because even though a lot of people might consider you a contemporary classical pianist, for example, there's kind of loads of different strings to your bow. Did you find that being in like an old rock band in your twenties was just too limiting?
Well, when I first started recording as Chili Gonzalez, there wasn't that the piano was pretty well hidden inside the music and on stage there wasn't physically a piano there because I was sort of, you know, trying to tour a on a shoe string budget at the very beginning, And essentially I was just fascinated by rap performance, and so I thought, well, as a as a it's acceptable in the rap world to just basically have playback and
to consider yourself the instrument. So that was good enough for me for those first few years, but that was a way of getting attention and testing out this combination of storytelling and persona and music. Once I sort of realized, okay, I'm onto something, there's a way that I can be myself, although quite exaggerated, and yet make a connection with people that was extremely encouraging. That was sort of the first test of the rappers ethos. Then there was a moment
where I thought, Okay, I've gotten people's attention. This is around two thousand and three and I'd put on three albums and you know, back in the day that was still pre Internet, but you know, I'd been on the cover of Jockey Slut. Anyone remember Jockeys?
I remember?
And the face?
Remember the face?
How about Slee's Nation? I mean deep cuts? Wow?
These are like these are?
That was my stomping piano. That was my stomping grounds, really and I think ID Magazine might be the only survikay anyway. And that was a moment where I thought, Okay, I've gotten people's attention. I've proven that to myself, but I need to get back to another part of myself
that I haven't really shown to people. That is important, and that's the side of me that is respectful of music, the side of me that was taught by my maternal grandfather, who, at three years old plunged me in front of the piano, and all of a sudden, I had access to this machine and this mood where time would just pass for hours and hours and hours, where I felt safe, could express things that were unexpressible in polite society. And it just became an escape and really positive escape, and also
earned me my place in society. I mean, it was so seductive and so addictive, and yet I hadn't really shown that side yet, because I'd been busy just trying to make a racket to get people to pay attention to me. So luckily, that first piano album, Solo Piano in two thousand and four was a way to sort of see, okay, let me go to this other extreme, see how many people can follow me. Let's see if this is of interest to the small curious audience that I've sort of built up now. And it ended up
opening up all kinds of avenues for me. I wasn't even sure if it would just be a little side project and a sort of you know, a little curio for certain people. Oh, this crazy guy actually knows how to play the piano. But that became sort of a whole thing all of a sudden. I was, you know, blown away by the level of attachment that people had through the music. I hadn't seen that over those first few years where I was just barking to get people
to pay attention. All of a sudden people were saying, yeah, I have this deep relationship with your album. This album helped me. Even things like that, and you think, oh, okay, this is a deeper reaction. I want more of this. Let me start chasing this a little bit more, and let me see how I can eventually try to integrate
the carnival barker and the respectful child musician essentially. And I think that's started to click, probably around two thousand and nine, twenty ten, post Guinness World Record, starting my own label, doing the Ivory Tower album, slowly leading to solo Piano two and up until now the sort of
modern era of what I do. I feel like I've managed to sort of reconcile those two be those two people simultaneously in my work, And of course, certain albums will always have a certain focus on one side or the other. I'd say the Solo Piano series tends to you know, it's a bit more idealistic in a way. In a way, maybe you can hear the musician who would wish that music would be enough when I do a solo piano record, and when I do a rap album, you hear much more the musician who wants to break
free of that and just only wants impunity. But I feel like every time I do a concert, you see those two things not only easily co exist, but need to coexist.
And now that you're at the end of the Solo Piano trilogy, how does that feel? Do you see this as the final of the who.
Wants to buy album called Solo Piano four? That just sounds weird.
Yeah, that's true.
The rule of threes really seems to apply. And I feel like the idea of making piano music that can be listened to passively and actively, which is sort of the point of the solo Piano records, is it works as background music. I love background music. I believe people deserve good background music absolutely, or people who want to
listen to it in a closer, more intimate way. That's the sort of test for me for these pieces, you know, do they work in those both of those listening modes, And if it passes that test, then it can sort of make it onto the album. And I may have stretched that as far as it can go with the solo Piano three, where I started to find myself wanting
to get close sort of how I play live. At the same time, I didn't want to make it so that it feels like a live album, which is the kind of album that frankly, if it's on the background and dinner and it starts to start to hit too hard and get too dense, someone's gonna get up and like turn down the volume. Yeah, that that means that
it doesn't work as a solo piano record. To me, I'm not sure in the future if I'm always going to want to make music that has that duel sort of listening capacity passive and active, remains to be seen. But I do believe I'll make music alone at the piano. It's great because as I started to do interviews in France to say alone at the piano is solo piano, and so I had this perfect little like advertising jingle style thing. I'm like, I'm still gonna make music solo piano,
but it won't be solo piano. I had, like you know, it's like a perfect little but you always find truth in those little those little turns of phrase anyhow, And it's true. I don't know that I really have something I can add to these three albums in terms of what the what the concept really was.
Yeah, it's kind of reached its natural end point.
It's delument to use another French word. However, Jay Z retired multiple times and like just put another album last week, So never say never.
No, that's true, you can always come out of retirement.
Maybe prequels. I suppose that would be solo Harpsichord, the prequel to solo Piano.
This year, you've also launched your first school program.
That's right, The Conservatory.
The Conservatory, great name.
Obviously, I thought about it for years and it was only when the name came to me that it became a realcit Sometimes it's the name. Now I have to do it.
No, I've got to do it because the name is just too good to pass this up. Has it happened already? This year? It was an eight day It's an eight day eight day.
Yes, an eight day very intensive program really based on performance rather than studio or songwriting. It's about how to create this connection on stage by letting go well at the same time preparing in a very disciplined way for that moment. So that's sort of strange, counterintuitive, you know, dance between being essentially a respectful musician and a disrespectful one and trying to pass that on to certain musicians who've mastered maybe one side of it but not the other.
So I had a really wide variety, again going for this musically humanist approach. So I had like a classical guitarist who was an African French woman. I had a rapper from Houston, singer songwriter from Argentina, a kind of freaky art performance artist, musician from Chile, a kind of slightly shy, introverted jazz saxophone player from the Ukraine. I mean, I really had all these different sort of types, and of course representing musicians that I'd known over the years
as well. You know Peaches, who was one of the guest teachers along with like Jarvis Cocker and a bunch of other people. Peach just said, it's funny you chose the students almost as if you were looking for stand ins for all the musicians who who sort of taught something along the way, And yeah, in a way, I recreated this strange journey of me essentially a shy person
who became good in performing. And so I sort of started to think, well, what if I can recreate those conditions that sort of happened to me by accident over fifteen years, if I can compress that into eight days, turn them into you know, a real sort of group of friends. Because when I had a group of friends to make music with, we never felt like we were working. So that was the first thing I was looking for, what's a group of seven who I think will become friends?
Not just who were the best seven people? It was like, what's the best group of seven? That's sort of what was in my mind when I watched over eight hundred videos to choose these seven musicians. And once I had that group and it felt like, Okay, I have a strong suspicion they'll they'll get along as friends. Then in a way, it was just about, yeah, teaching the lessons along the way that I learned.
Did they get on? Did they become friends?
One hundred percent? Successful? Yeah? Yeah, I mean maybe it
was a fluke. You know, I'm going to do it again every year, and we'll see next year if there's a sort of proof of concept that if my instincts were really so good that you know, they did get along and feel like a family after just three or four days a very intensive you know, living, working, playing, eating everything together, And we'll see if I can sort of recreate that, because if there had been some really bad sort of social feng shui in the group, I'm
not sure I could have gotten as far as we did in those eight days. You know, they play a concert at the end of the eight days for a thousand people live streamed, and the material of the concert is all stuff they wrote while at the conservatory.
They leave it all behind in eight days.
Yeah, and only eight days, yeah, because I have these techniques to get people to write music very very very quickly, and in groups of two and three, at some point they just build trust in every possible constellation of the seven of them, and that's what bonds them together. They've each had a little sperience with each one one on one, and they're playing sometimes together as a group of seven.
And everything they played at that final concert was something that they that they wrote under either time pressure or just a sort of improvising music game called songing, which is how I write music with my friends. Sometimes I mean Limit to Your Love, which I wrote with Feist and was covered by James Blake, was written using this technique of songing. Songing is essentially you have a list of titles. You just go, okay, let me write a list of titles that I could imagine could be songs.
You just go very quickly. You know, the walls are closing in my favorite hat, screw you. Whatever comes to your mind becomes a song title, and then you have this piece of paper in front of you and you just create this space where you say, Okay, we're gonna go. Now, I'm gonna put my fingers on the keys, you're gonna start to sing. And one of those little titles that Fist had come up with was called limit to Your Love. She didn't know in what way it was supposed to
be expounded upon. We just went for it. There's a limit to your Love. It was written in the amount of time it takes to.
Perform to hear it. There's so many great songs that that's the case isn't it the best?
We hear that exactly. How stupid do you have to be if you've had ten of those experiences? How stupid do you have to be to like labor over a song and think they should take you weeks when secretly you know that the best stuff you've done was when you didn't have time to filter it through your idea of like, is this good? Is this me? Is this what people expect to me? Will people like this? Why do I even do music? What is life? We're all
gonna die? You know. There's it's so existential. Whereas you know if someone says pointing it, he was saying, hey, man, do a song called screw you. You're just gonna come up with it. And if you do. At one point we did I think forty of them, right, I think, no, thirty five. It was like I asked the seven of them to each come up with five titles, and in two hours, just by pointing at them and telling them the title, we came up with thirty five. And I
was like, Kay, let's break for lunch. You know, and at some point they can't even remember all the songs they wrote when they're when they're working in this way, and then I had a computer where we recorded everything, and at the end of the day they can go listen and they can sort of go, oh, that's there's some truth in that in that song. It's only a minute long and it's not perfect, but the spark of it is something they can really trust as a product
of their true instinct. And then, of course you can take months to finish things. I mean, solo Piano three, I spent two years really finishing the songs. But every song in and of itself was born of a of a sort of random sound check moment where I just suddenly was like and I was like, that's something amazing, okay, and then I take a year and a half to actually finish it. But the spark of it, it has to be in a moment where you have zero self consciousness.
That's how you're gonna find something that really communicates something to people.
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