Carl Newman (new Pornographers)

Photo by Jason Bergman

Though this interview, or shit-shooting session, lasted almost two hours and covered everything from Wal-Mart to text-messaging, festivals were discussed intermittently and Carl Newman could slaughter any smartass’s snarkiness with a friendly, funny, and razor-sharp optimism. The New Pornographers is just the gazillionth (partial) platform for his modernizing of classic power-pop, and he does solo albums, too!

Vice: So this is a guide to festivals. The Vice Guide to Festivals.

Carl:

Most festivals, I’ve been really into. They’re a gathering place for bands, so through the years, you play with all these bands and meet all these people, and they usually all collect at festivals. I rarely watch any bands—I just hang out with people backstage. And for the most part, I usually measure a festival by how much fun I had backstage. At Coachella they build this weird little backstage city. With picket fences. So you’re walking down this alleyway with picket fences, and there’s Roky Erikson, sitting at a picnic table outside of his trailer.

In terms of festivals, I guess South by Southwest has the worst backstage, because you’re still dealing with a normal club backstage.

South by Southwest doesn’t count. I don’t see it as a festival. It’s too big, too unfocused, there’s a million bands playing, and it’s tough to know when anything is happening.

How many times have you played it? Too many to count?

I played it a couple of times in the late 90s while I was in Neko’s band, then New Pornographers played it in 2000, and that was really weird, because I didn’t expect anything to come of it. We got a government grant to go down and play it. I told the band, “Don’t expect anything to come out of this, let’s just treat it as a fun weekend—we get to go to Austin and drink beer and eat good Mexican food.” Then we inadvertently became one of that year’s 10 or 12 festival buzz bands. We went back in 2006, but one year, 2004, I just went for the hell of it. I was going through a breakup and didn’t want to be at home, so I went for the whole week, but that was kind of boring.

But you were there in a different capacity.

You know, it was good in some ways, like with other festivals, I got to see a lot of friends I don’t normally see, but you can only take it so far.

So we’ve talked about what you like, but what generally irritates you about playing a festival? I’ve heard it’s good to get both sides.

One thing is, and this can work for you or against you, often you’re one of 100 bands, people are just stopping in. Plus we’re usually playing during the day, and I find myself missing playing in a theater full of people that came to see us. But it can be fun because you get to play rock star. We played Lollapalooza in 2006, and I have no idea how we got this slot. I think someone made a mistake. Common performed at the one end, then we came on, then back to the other stage for Kanye West.

Whoa.

So because of that, there were 25,000 people watching us, and I know we don’t draw 25,000 people. It was fun to pretend though. It should have made me really nervous, but it was so absurd that I had fun with it. But like I said, usually there’s just not the excitement you have when it’s just your show.

It’s a lot harder for the fan to connect with a band at a festival because of obvious reasons, and that works the other way, too, I’m guessing.

I feel like I’m doing the same thing, but the reasons are different. At one of our shows, people paid to see us, so I feel like I owe it to them to play my best, and at a festival, you’re trying to win people over, so I play the same way. I never try to connect with people during a show, I just play at them. I can’t even look people in the eye, it distracts me too much.