GOTYE Interview!!!

As far as I'm concerned
if my songs can deliver what I want to express
even at the expense of ruining rhymes, that's all that matters.
I came to feel this way because of everyone's support.
I think it's alright.

--- In our casual conversation earlier you said you speak a little bit of Japanese. So that means you are not here for the first time？

GOTYE　 (In fluent Japanese) ‘I came to study here for 3 months when I was in high school, and last year, came here with another band.

--- Great... Perfect pronunciation as well.

GOTYE　（Again in fluent Japanese）　Thanks!

--- First of all most people in Japan are yet to know anything about an artist GOTYE. So I'd like to throw some general questions... Am I right to say GOTYE is a solo artist?

GOTYE　Yes.

--- I checked your live footage on youtube, where you were playing drums while the rest of the sound was covered by the sequencer, which totally amazed me.

GOTYE　 That was at a radio station. Live performance on the radio. JTV

--- From what I saw in the live footage - your drum techniques and all that - I presumed you started off your musical performance with drums.

GOTYE　That's right.

--- And all the Gotye music or tracks, you created on your own?

GOTYE　 Hm, well, I sample a lot of snippets from old recordings, and cut them up, rip or shift them and manipulate them, and collage them into new tunes, and I sometimes add live drum beats to them. So it's mainly a computer-based, home recording process, that's how I make my music.

--- I think you've raised the names of DJ Shadow and KLF as your influences. What part of their music do you think you've been influenced by?

GOTYE　 Sampling is an obvious one. And I think both of them transcend the method by which they make their music, to make something new and very unique.

--- I think because of that kind of background which is quite obvious in your music, some people in the media call you the second Beck. What do you feel about that?

GOTYE　 Well first of all I'm very flattered, but I don't know, I have a lot of respect towards Beck. I like his music a lot. He's produced amazing albums and he's very progressive and adventurous in his music-making. So I think I could only hope to express as much progressively as he has done in his music.

--- Though you are dubbed "a new Beck"your 2 nd album titled “Like Drawing Blood” seems to deliver you've got a lot of beautiful melodies on your tracks.

GOTYE　 Thank you. I'm really inspired by Beck's music, but sometimes I think there are other artists whose melodic sense I may be influenced by more than Beck. What I think about Beck is his coolness and progressiveness and production quality in his music overshadows the songs sometimes. Maybe on “Mutations” and “Sea Change” I think he chooses to focus more on the kind of essential song elements, melodies and chorus. So that's one of the things why he's definitely an artist whose quality of work I would aspire to because he can do things really differently from album to album.

--- Again I'm comparing you with Beck - I think he changes the colour of his work with every album he releases, but this 2nd album from GOTYE "Like Drawing Blood" is just as musically diverse as Beck's, full of colours in just one record. It is full of variety.

GOTYE　That's nice to hear, thanks.

--- Now we'd like to move on to the topic of your album tracks. When I heard "Puzzle With A Piece Missing" I felt in your music some influence from the band Police. And also, I think the way you sing reminds me of Sting.

GOTYE　 Yeah, a few people made a comparison with Sting. On “Puzzles With The Pieces Missing” some of the drum programme, yes in my head I was kind of hearing someone like Stewart Copeland playing some parts of it. But it's very downbeat and it's not his style of playing at all. More so on the hi-hat samples I used and kind of tried to cut together to try and emulate some of that kind of feel.. Stewart Copeland from the Police is big influence on my drumming, and on this album as a whole, I don't know, the cut-and-paste sampling approach is the biggest one, it's just a method.
In terms of songwriting and the sounds that are there, obviously a song like “Learnalilgivinanlovin” is a big homage to Motown Soul, so all the tracks Phil Spector produced in the 60's are directed on that tune. Or I should say that song is a direct homage to Phil Spector and Motown. And of course the rest of the record… I don't know, if I can draw direct lines on the influences but I probably hear a band like Depeche Mode having a stronger influence on the track like “The Only Thing I Know” as opposed to some of the other songs. So all the different things I'd kind of listen to. Did you hear the bonus track, that distinctive sound? That's very much a cut-and-paste hip hop. Probably again an homage to the likes of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, and cut-and-paste hip-hop artists like Massive Attack.

--- When you do the actual process of cut-and-paste for this album, did you have any particular rules?

GOTYE　 I had a self-imposed rudimental rule of not sampling really well-known material by really well-known artists. And I had a self-imposed rule of trying to use very small snippets of sound that I sample, so I don't sample more than one barrel of music, and if I had a barrel of music then I do try and cut it up, make it more of my own part, make it my own musical statement or phrase as opposed to relying on the original phrase as of taking or relying too much on other people's musical passages.

--- I think it sounds totally different from the kind of music that keeps using the same sort of phrases all the time. The way you rearrange all these phrases is purely amazing.

GOTYE　 Okay, but a lot of phrases that loop a lot (laughs). I think it's with lyrics and vocals, and with extra production elements after I've written lyrics and vocals that I try to create the interest in the songs so that they don't loop and loop and loop.

--- I think this is true of all of your songs. My impression is that you aspire to create music that's uplifting, something that people can get up to, eventually... although there certainly are some tracks on the album that have very melancholic, sad kind of feel to them.

GOTYE　 Yeah, more so, only here and there, admittedly. I like a lot of melancholic music, and I'm inclined to always write melancholic music. But on this record, a song like “Learnalilgivinanlovin” is entirely up, positive. And I like that a lot. I'd like to add more music like that. And I think there's other songs on “Like Drawing Blood” that, even though they may not be super-positive, they are not really melancholy, introspective, or depressive. I think some of the best music I like the most is quite melancholy, but can still be kind of uplifting. Kind of melancholy hope, balance between being uplifting, there's hope within being sad.

--- think what you've just talked about is quite prominent in your promotion video. It's full of artistic ideas and contains a lot of humour, and although melancholic, leaves you warm-hearted..

GOTYE　Yeah, I try not to make my videos merely melancholic, but something more.

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