A Conversation with Crash Test Dummies’ Brad Roberts – HuffPost 5.12.10

Mike Ragogna: I’m a Midwesterner for a while and I’m really digging it. Is that like being a Canadian?

Brad Roberts: I used to live in Winnipeg and that’s, indeed, part of the Midwest, north of the border. I know exactly what you mean.

MR: Brad, I’ve been a fan since “Superman’s Song.” For the purposes of someone coming in fresh with Crash Test Dummies, can you talk about that song?

BR: “Superman’s Song” is an attempt to use a cartoon character to tell a story that I thought would be poignant without being too corny. Not corny, corny is the wrong word, earnest I think. When people sit down and try and write serious lyrics, with the word serious in quotation marks, often they take themselves too seriously. I wanted to avoid that. I wanted to write “serious” songs, but I didn’t want to fall into that trap. Using a cartoon character seemed to make a great deal of sense because it automatically put it onto a level of popular culture.

MR: You do avoid clichés, all the while sporting a great sense of humor. I believe every CTD project is fully-loaded with intelligent and humorous perceptions.

BR: I’m so thankful that you feel that way, that’s a nice compliment.

MR: I think to be successful at that, it takes the mind of somebody who can combine creative concepts that don’t normally fit. Now, speaking of that, your new album Ooh La-La! blends your intelligent writing style with, as you phrase it, toy instruments. That’s an interesting combination.

BR: We did use several toy instruments. What I mean by toy instruments is amateur instruments. I don’t know how old you are, but you’ve probably seen in malls those sort of auto-organs, where you sort of press a button and you get chords that play along for you.

MR: I had one as a kid. Guess that kind of tells you how old I am.

BR: Well there’s this particular one called the optigan, and you put in different discs, each of which has a different style of band playing with it. You hit the G chord, C chord and the D chord buttons and you’re off. The interesting thing about the optigan is that it was made in the early ’70s, but the technology was really way ahead of its time. In a curious way it foreshadowed sampling. And what they did was to use optical technology that was part of film at that time and managed to create, I guess, what we would call “files,” but they got musicians to go in and play all the chord progressions together in whatever genre was desired. That’s what you heard being played back. Some of them sounded pretty sophisticated for a toy. But you also had this kind of creepy, long ago built into it. It’s so inspiring.

Once we started writing on these toys, particularly on the optigan, it just proved to be an enormous wealth of material because we could plug into all kinds of genres and press some buttons and then do overdubs on top of it, drag it out, and there you go. You’re in a place you never would have been before. You’re not relying on your old habits which everybody develops, say, for example, on the guitar. You’d have to write a certain way. It pulled me out of my habits, and put me into a different place where I couldn’t have otherwise gone.

MR: Watch when after this article gets posted, smarty artists like E and Thomas Dolby immediately incorporate optigans in their productions.

BR: (laughs) In the old days, you could only get them at garage sales and junk shops, whatever. And now you can get them on Ebay.

MR: A couple of these disks have interesting names. For instance, one is titled “Nashville.” What did that optigan file end up being used on?

BR: If you hear a banjo playing very intricately, then that is the toy. It’s one of the most amazing of the discs.

MR: Considering all your albums and the Christmas release, there seems to be this unique, alternate universe that Crash Test Dummies reside in, topically and musically. It’s like a place where things don’t necessarily have to be making sense at all as long as you’re having fun while communicating. How far off am I?

BR: Not far at all. I think all the elements of what I would consider a good Crash Test Dummies record are on this record. I’m fairly impressed that you even know about the Christmas record and the kind of instrumentation involved. The lyrics, I’m hoping, are smart and funny at the same time. I think the melodies and the chord changes are interesting. I like to write with some harmonic richness, lack of a better word. I think a lot of the material, if not all, is really good. If I recorded something that I thought this is not, you know, anything but really good, then it’s not going on.

MR: From your perspective, which songs were the most demanding to write?

BR: Wow, that’s a hard question.

MR: Okay, which ones were the real puzzles that, when completed, gave you that, “Oh, this is cool!” feeling?

BR: That happened all the time. I’m trying to think song by song…”You Said You’d Meet Me In California” was the first song that we wrote, and on that I came to realize what could be done with the optigon. It took a while to piece it together, to kind of get a working model of what could be done on toys. On that process of going through and learning that song, I wrote the lyrics, but I didn’t sit down and write them all at once. I wrote them partly out of the mood that the track suggested, and by “the track,” I mean the button I pushed. My own sort of poetic style. That’s a bad phrase because I don’t want to sound pretentious but the lyrics on this record, as you probably notice, are very clearly verses and choruses that have metaphors that are strung out throughout the words. Quite often, that will just descend upon me in one fell swoop. “You Said You’d Meet Me In California” was not that way. I think that once we had that song, and we were so excited about it even just as a demo with the toy, it sounded amazing.

MR: Did you end up rewriting songs based on using the optigan or after playing back what you thought was a final track?

BR: That didn’t happen, although maybe it did but I’m not remembering because it sometimes does. Stuart Lerman, who writes none of the lyrics, every once in a while will say, “You know this line is not working,” and I just kind of have to respect that. I think it was only one line, a couple of words in some cases, like getting rid of them or adding them. He was right on the money, and it’s great to have people like that who are so in their head.

MR: And he knows you and your material, where you’re coming from.

BR: And these lyrics actually read well off of the page. I think, in a way, a lot of my earlier lyrics didn’t because there wasn’t enough attention paid to like where the syllables fall and so forth.

MR: Forgive me, I kind of disagree. I love reading the lyrics on your older songs, maybe because I’m a longtime fan.

BR: My thing with lyrics is that, when sung, they sound great, but when read on paper, they often don’t look that great. That’s partly because they’re not meant to be read, they’re meant to be sung. But having said that, I think some lyrics are readable, and I put Leonard Cohen into that class as being, by far, the king of it. He rules that world.

MR: Who is one of your major creative influences?

BR: Well, when I was a young man, XTC turned my head right around my neck. Andy Partridge–who really doesn’t know that much about theory–is always breaking the rules of theory in interesting ways by changing key signatures and doing it in such a way that doesn’t sound like the key signatures necessarily changed. He managed to make it sound fluid. And he goes all over the map in places that people don’t generally go. I kind of figured out that what he was doing on some of those records. I started doing it myself where the most extreme example would the last track on God Shuffled His Feet. It never occupies one key for very long or keeps its key signature. They’re changing within the lines of the verse and the key of the chorus. So, he’s a huge influence on me in that regard.

That influence didn’t show up on this new record because when we were working with the toys, one of the best things that we got out of the situation was the happenstance of hitting the wrong button and it being something you couldn’t have conceived of. So, I was vibing on that freshness, and I wasn’t thinking so much about how it makes sense harmonically.

MR: Are you going on tour with this record too?

BR: Yes. Where are you calling from again?

MR: Iowa.

BR: Oh yeah, so you really are out there.

MR: It’s okay, I just wish the nearest Best Buy wasn’t an hour away.

BR: I don’t know that we’ll be coming that close to the Midwest or not, but we’re playing a tour in May around the eastern seaboard. Places like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York. And then we’re doing another leg in June where we’ll do the southwest and places like…well, actually the West Coast. We’ll start in Seattle and go down through Portland, through Florida and California, make it down to L.A., pass through San Diego, and do all that. After that, we go on tour in Canada until the end of the year. Then we start on Europe.

MR: Don’t you love Europe?

BR: I do, yes.

MR: What does traveling to Europe do for your inspiration? Does it have an effect on your creativity?

BR: Yeah, it does. Sometimes, it surfaces in obvious ways where I’ll tell a story that happened to me on the road in the lyric. I can think of a couple that are that direct, just in terms of being familiar with the cultures I read all my life and actually being in those countries, and passing through those towns and seeing those landscapes. That is generally stimulating, but I don’t think I draw a correlation between it and writing well.

MR: What’s the Brad Roberts of “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” versus the Brad Roberts of now?

BR: I’m on medication! (laughs) I’m a far more mellow person. I grew up with…I’m diagnosed with a depressive disorder, and it has a lot to do with why I do what I do. And I’m happier older, I enjoy things much simpler. Back then, it was about whether or not I’d written that day, and if I didn’t, my self worth was zero. But now I sit down and I write lyrics and they just pour out of me, partly in forms that are stanzas or writing couplets or various other parameters for writing. Once you’ve worked the form often enough, like the AB/AB/CC/DD rhyme scheme, for example–when you’ve done that long enough, that’s just sort of a second nature thing. The words that are pouring through you come out in that form without it being consciously the case. You’re actually…I don’t want to say channeling because that’s so mystical sounding…but there’s definitely kind of unconscious flooding that spills out into the writing. It’s not just unconscious because it gets filtered by knowledge of poetic structure in stanzas and so forth.

MR: Anything else that the Brad Roberts of Oooh La-La! is doing that he’s proud of?

BR: The new Brad is baking bread. I’m going back to nature and becoming a f****n’ hippie, the very thing I always hated. It’s an obsession. I have to bake every f****n’ day or I’m in a bad mood. Each time you bake a loaf of bread, it’s one of these acquired feel skills.

MR: My friend, producer/arranger Terence P. Minogue also must bake bread every day. Might you share some advice on the process?

BREAD BAKING TIPS FROM BRAD ROBERTS

Basically, if you want to make any kind of bread, make sure there’s some white flour in it because all breads–whether they’re made from rye flour or whole grain flour or whatever type of flour you choose–have to have white flour in them to make the flour rise because bread dough doesn’t rise by itself. It needs white flour with it. Every single kind of bread has white flour in it. Here’s one more tip: If you want to have a crusty outside and not put it into a pan but actually make it, mold into a loaf shape and throw it in the oven. If you put a pan of water in the oven, it will recreate that kind of crusty outside because that’s basically how they do it. They create steam to make the outside of the bread crusty. You can do it. You don’t need a special steam oven like they have at bakeries. All you got to do is put a second pan with water in the bottom of your oven. It makes baking a completely different experience.