Interview #127 — James Gales
James Gales is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who writes pop music as Lighthouser, experimental music as Jim Nopédie, and has worked on acclaimed musicals Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit, Vanity Fair Enough, and Flat-Earthers: The Musical.
What inspired you to dream up your latest EP, A Kilo of Feathers?
I’ve been interested for a long time in the collision of emotional lightness and heaviness. I find that quality in all the songs I’d call my favourite on Earth—where troubled lyrics land as if they were candy-coloured and euphoric. And also as an aspiring optimist, I frequently find myself experiencing that collision in my own life—optimism is by necessity ‘despite’. I think that’s why bittersweet music to me feels like the truest expression of the world.
When I decided to call the record ‘A Kilo of Feathers’, I thought I was capturing this idea in a serious, emotional way, but later found out that a popular reference for the phrase is a goofy YouTube comedy sketch. It’s funny, in a way that’s thematically perfect.
You have this wonderful, fascinating relationship with the aquatic. What is it about bodies of water as subject, aesthetic, vibe that compels you?
I played a lot of Super Mario Sunshine at a formative time and I don’t know whether that game gave me the aquatic affinity, or if it only unlocked what was already dormant within. That’s the way-back origin story. I think what’s so appealing to me about bodies of water today, aesthetics aside, is how their presence inexplicably deepens the emotional intensity of whatever else is happening, which was partially the impetus behind my Facebook page Video Game Water Environments With Poignant Indie Lyrics (exactly what you think it is). Things just instantly become reflective and kind of mythic. And I find enjoyment in that both humorously and sincerely.
I feel like we’ve had a few conversations about creating and seeking art for the purposes of comfort. Who is the imagined person you’re writing for?
The way I wrote and recorded this record was a total solitary rabbit-hole, so immediately speaking it was me, because even though these songs orbit themes of comfort and self-care I wasn’t really that good at taking care of myself. I thought that if I was going to be spending so much time recording these songs, or playing them for decades if things go that way, I wanted them to have sentiments I wanted to tell myself over and over.
But I also write very much conscious of the comfort and understanding I’ve found in other records in the past. The idea that music saves people is cliche for good reason. Writing in such a solitary way, you hope that if you look inside yourself and speak authentically, what results will be something that touches other people. If these songs do that, that’s the biggest honour for this record I could think of.
When I decided to call the record ‘A Kilo of Feathers’, I thought I was capturing this idea in a serious, emotional way, but later found out that a popular reference for the phrase is a goofy YouTube comedy sketch. It’s funny, in a way that’s thematically perfect.
I was recently listening to your EP late at night, feeling a little lonely and isolated from the world—and I found it quite comforting. Your textures and palettes are just so evocative. What was your process for painting the world of each song and the EP as a whole?
Thank you. Over the years, I took note of the songs I liked way more than others by the same band, and gradually started to notice that lots of them actually share certain qualities. So when I started writing this record I looked at that catalogue and abstracted a set of rules that made up the world I wanted to write in—ways high instruments and low instruments should behave and that sort of thing. More loosely I always gravitated towards synth sounds that give me a reaction of ‘fun!’ or ‘beautiful’, or somewhere between the two. I love synths because they have such a strong impulse to make you visualise things other than someone playing an instrument—they function more metaphorically, they make you dream. While there were those rules, another creative mantra of mine is ‘everything most like itself’—in other words, commit to actualising the weird specific expression of whatever each song wants to be. So the EP ended up being like stained glass—each song is a different solid colour, but together they make a whole picture.
‘This Year’ approximates chiptune because there’s so much optimism inherent in that sound. ‘Blue Light’ breaks a lot of the rules I established—everything is blown out and large—but for a song about sleeping it somehow needed to be that way. ‘Dying To Change’ has this airy synth which I find very beautiful, except after designing that sound and recording the melody on it I forgot to save the synth settings, so this song is the only place I can listen to it. ‘Two Boats’ is a swirling cloud, the Ambient Moment on the EP, which I felt was appropriate because the lyrics are in a different, more fable-like version of reality than the other songs. ‘Heaven Is Other People’ is lyrically set indoors and so needed to sound bedroomy—cheap Casios and drums and a strange, interior beauty. ‘A Kilo of Feathers’ was genuinely partially inspired by the pristine sound world of Nintendo ‘system menu’ music—I find stuff like the 3DS system settings theme oddly moving.
In the few years that I’ve known you, I’ve had the privilege of seeing your identities and projects evolve. You’re Lighthouser, you’re Jim Nopédie, you’re James Gales—and within each one are other multitudes. What’s your relationship with the crafting of identities? Does your musical impulse inform the identity or do you dream up a version of yourself then follow it with the music?
What started each project was definitely the distinct sorts of music I wanted to write. There’s the Lighthouser EP and also a Jim Nopédie LP coming out in the first half of 2020, really close to each other, but they’re completely different. It’s another ‘everything most like itself’ thing. My most-played in my music library is a ridiculous mix of bubblegum pop and minimal ambient music, so it feels natural for me that each alias should go full-blast embracing its own direction.
Jim Nopédie has no vocals, and the songs don’t have song-form architecture. As per the name, it instead comes from the part of me that loves atmospheric, visually-focused piano music—Debussy’s ‘Footprints in the Snow’ or Ravel’s ‘A Boat on the Ocean’—but taken to a bizzaro-world deconstructive, experimental place. Because music without words can have a more obfuscated or nearly-absent sense of human presence, it’s better at expressing things like spaces, real-or-fantasy worlds, weather patterns. So when I want to evoke something like that, it’s a Jim Nopédie song. Lighthouser songs are maybe also highly visual, but they engage with the quite architected forms of popular music, and have lyrics, which in some ways allows for a much more direct, specific expression of everyday things. And ‘James Gales’ is when I have to be credited as a non-abstract real human being for commissions, haha.
So the EP ended up being like stained glass—each song is a different solid colour, but together they make a whole picture.
Not a question, just a comment on how much I love your title track, ‘A Kilo Of Feathers’. ‘Just need to take things lighter, just need to take things lighter…’ is such a gorgeous lyric. I am so moved by your voice and everything happening around it. I listen to it on repeat. Thank you.
Can we print a heart emoji in Liminal?
Eds. note: Yes.
I don’t play a lot of games myself but I love how much you love them. Does your passion for video games inform your creative practice? Do ideas of the nostalgic play a role at all?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because you’re right, video games hugely inform my practice. It might make people scoff, herald a record-scratch sound effect, everyone in the bar turns to look at me etc.—but for all the saturation of nostalgia in videogame culture and modern mass media in general, I don’t believe it’s a part of what I do. Obviously the digital, videogame-ish surface of my music comes from my drawing on culture that is old enough to be considered nostalgic, but for my part those sounds are never employed with the intention to make people think of ‘the good old days’, but as a prism through which to express the emotions and thoughts I feel now. Electronic music has an obsession with its timbres being futuristic, unique and new, which is valid and which continues to create hugely thrilling music and possibilities for finding identity and meaning. But it means that using sounds from even as close as ten years ago invites people to view that music as retro, and necessarily conceptually about the past, which doesn’t have to be the case. In writing a song for acoustic guitar and singing, the artistry people notice is the power of your words, the interest of the chords you play, your songcraft. My music operates on the same kinds of terms—but there’s a subtext there that the acoustic guitar idiom is well-worn, and the videogame-ish synthpop world I’m writing in is not; electronic music culture has just moved, as it does, very quickly onto the next thing. My music is not nostalgic—I have only chosen to further explore and develop a specific, existing lineage of music I love, instead of chasing a unique new thing.
Our paths first crossed through Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit by Jean Tong, where you were the composer and I was one of the performers. I then coaxed you into producing songs for my solo comedy show, Vanity Fair Enough, and most recently you and Lou Wall were co-composers on the bonkers Flat Earthers: The Musical (book also by Jean Tong). Clearly, your theatrical sensibilities are alive and kicking. Was this something you expected to be doing? What do you enjoy most about composing for theatre/comedy?
It’s been totally unexpected. I grew up watching a lot of musicals, which I owe to my parents, so when Jean messaged me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to compose for Romeo, I at least had a solid background inclination that made me enthused to say yes. But at the time, I was halfway through my Honours year writing quite academic, experimental music, and for the three years before that I’d been a classical piano major preparing recitals and things—really far away from musical theatre-style writing. Funnily enough I think Jean arrived at it from a similar ‘art-school’ place—she once mentioned the characters in her plays hadn’t ever been given names until Romeo. The fact that the show was both of us ‘going Pop’ so successfully remains weird and wonderful to me. And for me working on the show made conscious a love of pop music which had upon reflection been an undercurrent in my listening my whole life—which has obviously now burst forth into Lighthouser.
Jean and Lou and you, Margot(!), are artists with so much vision and thoughtfulness. Part of the enjoyment that’s kept me involved with scoring theatre is the three-dimensionality of the writing, like a big pool of emotional potential from which it feels really possible to create musical moments that are deeply tied to narrative and world. That’s obviously such a creatively satisfying thing, a totality of vision, where the genre the song is written in, and the specific way one section might escalate a certain emotion, and the lyric that occurs at that very moment, and even the long-form dramatic tension of the whole show up to that point—those things are all connected in intent, and it lands and hits you in the gut. I should mention at this juncture that all the shows we’ve worked on have also been extremely silly and to a degree taken the piss out of traditional musical theatre moments like this. But Jean, Lou and yourself really do pay holistic attention to your work. And I am an emotional boy with a high tolerance for being moved amongst jokes.
Obviously the digital, videogame-ish surface of my music comes from my drawing on culture that is old enough to be considered nostalgic, but for my part those sounds are never employed with the intention to make people think of ‘the good old days’, but as a prism through which to express the emotions and thoughts I feel now.
We both froth the pop genre and you make it so well. Whenever we talk about pop music I feel like we’re at a bangin’ wine tasting except I’m there to get drunk and you’re talking about, like, the tannins (while also getting drunk). What makes a good pop song?
To my mind the key is being formally, compositionally tight, while also having some element that’s completely weird and unexpected and exciting—which is, by virtue of itself, impossible to put formulaically. ‘Sleepyhead’ by Passion Pit is so great for illustrating this and I am absolutely about to talk about it in intense musical detail, because you don’t see that level of specificity enough in writing about music. Okay, so you get familiar with one chord progression at the start. Then the chipmunk voice starts leading a new chord progression—it sounds less stable, because the chords avoid the tonic and because the vocals and all of the instruments are very high. Then the big kick drum comes in—and there’s still this tension because the kick is very low and everything else is still very high, so there’s this big gap in the middle. It’s unstable, until the hook comes on the word ‘sleepyhead’, and at that moment the middle frequencies fill out with bass and vocal harmonies, and the vocal line finally acknowledges and starts following the melody of the chipmunk voice, and it’s total satisfaction. And what happens now that this new chord progression idea has played out to its natural conclusion? It goes back to the chord progression from the start, which in a different song would be kind of boringly satisfying just for returning to something we recognise, except suddenly there’s this ridiculous wiggly synth line shredding over the top. And that’s the kind of totally unexpected exciting thing I’m talking about. And everything else about that moment has been so compositionally justified that it’s allowed to do something weird and unexpected, and that means the weird thing lands and wholly engages you, and the effect is euphoric. I think ‘fun’ is a really important operative word here, and in all good pop songs.
When did you know you wanted to be a musician?
There’s some music in my family, but I’m without a fore-bearer in pursuing music so totally. The story goes I was four years old and out of nowhere asked my parents if I could start learning violin. I’ve always been good at playing things by ear which meant I found a lot of fun in it early on—in a very on-brand story, I arranged and performed a medley of game music I titled ‘Videogame MegaMix’ at my Year Six talent show. In another on-brand story, the first thing I ever recorded in music software was a MIDI arrangement of the swamp world music from Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. I’m obviously immensely grateful to my parents for supporting me and taking me to lessons growing up, and for setting up GarageBand because they thought I would like it and make Monkey Ball covers, and for remaining supportive of me trying to make a living from music now. It’s just never really stopped being a major presence in my life. And I think the young James that did those things would be proud of me.
And I am an emotional boy with a high tolerance for being moved amongst jokes.
Do you have any advice for emerging musicians?
Establish the terms of the thing. I think a big modern enemy for artists is too much choice—when you can switch from ‘drum machine’ to ‘string orchestra’ in two seconds, what do you write? Establish those terms based on things that you love—be specific about that. Find a small number of foundational sounds that really make you come alive, and just use those.
Who are you inspired by?
Artists who uncompromisingly honour their own taste and guilty pleasures, who risk embarrassment.
What are you listening to?
Lately lots of spooky dark ambient music, like Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill 2 soundtrack. I don’t know what it means but I’ve been finding a lot of beauty in sounds that are cavernous and frightening. It’s probably The Zeitgeist.
What are you working on right now?
I’ve got a first draft of Jim Nopédie LP2 which is the same kind of horror-ambient, actually.
What are you reading?
I finished Murakami’s Norwegian Wood recently. Any media about people vaguely my age navigating a relatable kind of milieu makes me feel very grounded.
How do you practice self-care?
My week runs on a freelance work schedule, so I contend with all the usual freelancer risks of murky work-life boundaries. I take Sunday off every week even if I feel like I haven’t done enough to deserve it, because it’s important to remember to be a human being who has worth in a non-productivity-based, non-capitalist way.
The Lighthouser EP is also obviously thematically about this in a big way. ‘Heaven Is Other People’ is a reminder when you feel bad not to isolate yourself (myself) until you feel better—to let people in. Ironically enough, like I mentioned I recorded this record almost entirely by myself, so evidently it’s something still worth singing about.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Being mixed, I think I grew up with a really foregrounded awareness of multiple codes and ways of seeing the world. As a kid I might’ve been fully immersed in the Chinese side of my heritage once a week, visiting my grandparents and them cooking a beautiful dinner—Mum’d kill me if I didn’t mention the first Chinese restaurant in Sydney was in our family—and then I’d go home to a fairly Anglo-Australian household. And it was all part of my world, my world was split. It’s easy for that to manifest as a kind of out-of-place feeling. That is of course absolutely valid. But I find the multitudinal identity thing can also manifest as a sense of possibility—like when I’m writing Lighthouser songs, I’m very aware I’m choosing a specific sound language that behaves a certain way, and that there are other ways of writing music I’m familiar with, and that they’re all expressions of myself. Obviously you have to have a relationship of respect and authenticity to the worlds you draw on, you’re not appropriating things willy-nilly. But my point is, mixed people have the multifaceted perspective and grace to do incredible things in the world.
I don’t know what it means but I’ve been finding a lot of beauty in sounds that are cavernous and frightening.
Interview by Margot Tanjutco
Photographs by Hashem McAdam