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Final Fantasy

Posted By Robbie Hayward on November 9, 2009 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Owen Pallett is rushing down churros and chocolate next to a chair-o-plane whilst an excited little fanboy introduces himself. That would be me. Months after first making contact with Owen’s manager and boyfriend Patrick Borjal, I couldn’t believe that we were finally about to interview the man himself. As per instructions we meet him half an hour later and, as my excitement slowly calms from a frantic barrage of electric bolts to an insistent and gentle buzz, I am amazed to think that just a few hours before he was on stage performing to hundreds of rain-flecked checkered shirts.

*Musical god Owen Pallett (photo by David Waldman)*

By Owen’s standards (and as his gig at Union Chapel in June shows, those standards are extremely high) it was not the greatest of sets. ‘Typically, when a festival goes well, it’s the best feeling in the world’, he explains, but today he had problems with hearing himself on stage and he wryly laments to us that there was ‘no transcendence’. True. At Field Day, the music entertained the audience, but at Union Chapel the music transported the audience to some sort of higher place, it was an evening of untouchable perfection. As divine transcendence goes, his recent appearance at Hillside Festival must surely rank as a spectacular example - as the storms battered around the stage and torrential rain and lightning cut through the sky in dagger slashes, a windswept Owen Pallett played on through the weather and the technicians’ advice, commanding this apocalypse with the strains of ‘Lewis Takes Off His Shirt’.

Alas, Field Day was not so eschatological, but it is partly the nature of a festival that you are destined to have short sets and shit sound, and so it is no wonder that the show was a rather damper version of what we’ve seen at smaller Final Fantasy gigs. For one thing festivals don’t give Owen the chance to play one of his renowned covers, which have spanned from Mariah Carey to Bloc Party and which reached their pinnacle with Plays To Please, an EP devoted to covers of Toronto-based musician Alex Lukashevsky. ‘He’s the local hero’, Owen tells us, ‘even the dudes from Broken Social Scene are just in awe of him’.

Whilst tracking down Lukashevsky records in the UK is nigh on impossible, it seems that Toronto is in love with his music at least. As for the man, Owen says he is ‘cantankerous’, before correcting himself with a laugh and clarifying, ‘no, I wouldn’t say cantankerous. He keeps it real.’ Another laugh. Covers are destined to stay a part of Owen’s live gigs, and he mentions that he has been preparing some new ones for the future, before revealing that ‘they’re all secrets’. Of his vast cover repertoire, his favourite is the Simon Bookish song ‘Interview’, and he waxes that Bookish’s latest album Everything/Everything is ‘my favourite record ever’.

Of course it’s not all covers and gigs for the hardest working man in violindie - Owen has spent a lot of time in studios this year, seemingly working on everyone’s album but his own. His already impressive CV, featuring The Hidden Cameras (whose forthcoming album Origin:Orphan is ‘maybe even better than Smell Of Our Own’), Beirut, Grizzly Bear, Fucked Up (his personal tip for this year’s Polaris Prize) and Holy Fuck, has been expanded this year with credits for Mika, The Mountain Goats and pop legends the Pet Shop Boys. ‘I really love working with Mark Ronson [on The Rumble Strips’ album]’, Owen divulges, ‘I know he’s got a reputation, but he’s like the warmest, sweetest, most professional, talented producer that I’ve ever come across’.

In the midst of all his work arranging strings and orchestras for the good and the great of the music world, Owen has found a little time to work on his own music. He promises us that his next album, Heartland, will appear in ‘the very early days of 2010, like the first week or so’, but warns us that it will be a ‘really dense orchestral record’ that will be ‘pretty long, almost fifty minutes long’. Having waited patiently since May 2006 for a Final Fantasy album, the buzz surrounding the release of Heartland amongst Owen’s fans has reached dizzying heights, and the appearance of new material in his live shows has pushed this vertiginous excitement over the precipice into some sort of vast chasm of excitedness, some sort of feverish Final Fantasy fissure. Or at least that’s how I feel right now.

Owen explains that the album will continue with the themes laid out in Spectrum, 14th Century EP, in which he played the part of the god of a fantasy land named Spectrum. In Heartland the songs are ‘sung by myself, sung by Lewis [a fictional character in the Spectrum universe] and sung by somebody who’s kind of in between the two of us’. We ask him who the character of Lewis is based on and he admits that its ‘a few different people’ but won’t give us any further clue as to who, except that ‘they’re all frightfully good looking’.

*Owen worked on the score for Richard Kelly's latest film*

As if it wasn’t enough to tour, record your own album, and apply a lick or two of genius to everyone else’s, Owen has also been back with Arcade Fire band-mates Win Butler and Régine Chassagne to write the soundtrack for the forthcoming Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) movie The Box. He says that he enjoyed working with them again and expresses his hope to do more with Arcade Fire in the future - ‘they’re working hard and I’m working hard; hopefully we’ll be able to work hard together’ - but remains typically elusive when it comes down to any hard news - ‘it’s none of my business’, he sidesteps. In a phenomenally busy year I think we can excuse him for this though; adding an Arcade Fire album on top of all he’s done would probably drive the poor man to exhaustion.

Not that he seems exhausted. Owen looks as eager as ever to grace the world with his musical talent, and we are only too happy to hear what he has to offer and, as we say goodbye and leave Owen Pallett safe in Patrick’s capable hands, we are brimming and grinning with a manic ecstasy for what the future holds from this amazing man.

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Final Fantasy

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