Interview: Ghostpoet

In honour of the release of Ghostpoet's already critically acclaimed, brilliant third record today, I thought I'd post the chat that I had with the brains behind it all a few days ago...

I read that one of your album titles came to you in a dream?

 

The album title didn’t come to me in a dream. Some of the lyrics did I believe, I can’t remember the lyrics.

Did you get any lyrics for “Shedding Skin” in a dream or was that just a one-time thing?

Just the one time! This time I’m very conscious.

You’ve said that you prefer to keep interpretation as open as possible and have thus provided pretty vague titles on Some Say I So I Say Light (SSISISL). However, on Shedding Skin you seem to have helped the listeners out a little bit more in terms of title relevance (e.g. “Sorry my love, it’s you not me”). Is there any reason for this change in openness?

I just decided it’s easier. It’s easier for my sanity and it saves time in interviews [laughs]. I put things out there to make it a bit more clear about what I’m trying to do ‘cause I can understand the frustration of journalists when you’re kind of like “Yeah, I’m keeping it vague and blah, blah, blah…” but I did that because I’m a bit bored of being labelled as being a particular way and I just wanted to keep it open and just let people decide whatever they want to decide. With this record, I’m conscious that it’s a clearly different direction from the stuff I’ve done previously and I want to make sure people know that by giving influences on the record and y’know, making it clearer in the titles what’s going on, to an extent. I still want people to make their own interpretations but there’s nothing wrong I guess with being a bit clearer.

With SSISISL you had the commentary available on Spotify. Can we expect a similar thing for Shedding Skin?

Probably not [laughs]. I had ideas about what I wanted to do and I don’t know, I mean we’ll see. I don’t know, it’s kind of a label thing and I’m not sure what’s going on there so maybe not, we’ll see.

As Shedding Skin was recorded with a full band, do you feel like it will be a bit harder to make 

live performances a completely different experience as the music may be easier to recreate?

Um, I’m not sure really because at the same time, I see what you mean but in a sense I can expand on things as, because it’s all live you can drag things out a bit more and extend bits. I’m quite happy with the end result of the record so I don’t mind playing it similar to how it is on the record, it’s not a problem so yeah, that’s my answer!

I heard that you don’t currently play any acoustic instruments yourself?

No. I made the demos on electric guitar and keys and programmed drums and stuff but I’m not a trained musician at all. I can’t play it to a standard where I can play it all myself and record it all myself; it’s not the case. That’s hence partly why I bring a band on board, because of that fact so yeah. I want to learn but I kind of just look at it like, I partly enjoy having the limitations of not being able to play because the chords that I come up with and the ideas that I come up with aren’t always technically right but they just sound right to me, you know what I mean? I think if I learn the technical aspect of an instrument that could affect how I make music, but at the same time, on the flipside, if I know the knowledge it could enhance my stuff. So I kind of do and I kind of don’t, if that makes sense?

Do you find that the more successful you become the harder it is to write about life as an “everyday man”?

Um, well I don’t really see myself as successful so; no I don’t find it hard. What is success? I don’t know what success is. I don’t feel successful, I feel normal. I guess that being able to make music full time is a success of sorts but other than that I just live a normal life [laughs] and when I say “normal life”, it’s just normal [laughs]. I’m not doing anything out of this world; I’m not smashing TVs and riding a jet-ski around The Thames or whatever. I just live a very normal existence involving walking my dog, doing my own shopping and cooking for myself. Normal shit! Because I strive to live a normal existence, I’m always out and about doing normal stuff, so I’m out on the tube, I’m out on the bus, I’m sitting outside a café now watching people in the rain – normal things – so I’m always trying to write from that perspective. It would be wrong of me to say “Yeah I’m an everyday man!” in the sense of the 9-to-5 person or the dustbin man or the man working on a building site. I’m not that kind of everyday person because of the career that I’ve chosen, but I think it’s my duty to write about things that as many people as possible can relate to. That’s important more than anything.

You wrote the song “Dial Tones” with the feature artist Lucy Rose in mind. Are there any songs on Shedding Skin written in the same way?

Not with any particular singer in mind. With that one, I guess as well as with pretty much all of them I kind of write with particular voices in mind and that’s kind of the way I try to write. Then I try and ask and see if that particular type of voice – and that becomes obviously a person or artist I ask – would they mind being involved in a particular thing and I don’t know if it’s going to work or not until they come and record, it’s just kind of a gut feeling I have that this particular voice will work on this particular track. I don’t know it at all until we get down to it so it’s always a bit of a risk but, I like taking risks y’know! Why not?

Earlier this week you tweeted that “you have to keep pushing yourself otherwise, what’s the point?”

Yeah! Yeah definitely.

So how have you pushed yourself on this new record?

How have I pushed myself? Um, I’m just making something different! I just made a record that I feel is a different direction and that in itself is pushing myself, do you know what I mean? I could have easily made the same kind of record as the first record that got nominated for a Mercury (prize). I could have just made that kind of shit and just done that again on the second record and I probably would’ve gotten away with it! But I just feel that I’ll get bored, and I’ll start getting complacent and I’ll start resting on my laurels and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to ever do that. So, with this project I’m at quite a happy place with it now and I feel that if I do make more records, it will be along these kinds of lines. But I feel that I can easily pursue other creative things and creative projects and push them to the extreme to push myself so, yeah it’s something that I’m always striving for. If you’re not doing that, I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t, personally. For me I just have to keep doing that to keep sane.

You listen to a lot of music from Jazz to Industrial Rock. Do you have anything at the moment that you’d recommend to us?

At the moment I’m really liking a guy called Boxed In. He’s a great artist of sorts and he produces other people and he’s got records. I’ve been listening to ZUN ZUN EGUI’s new record – love that! Listening to Benjamin Clementine a lot – big fan of his. TV On The Radio’s new record is pretty cool. Gaz Coombes’ new record is pretty cool; that’s come out this year. Dutch Uncles new record that’s coming out pretty soon, yeah really like what they’ve done on this record so that’s pretty cool. There’s loads! Ghost Culture is another artist that I’ve discovered recently – really cool. There’s so much. Hookworms is another one! Yeah, I really like them. Oh yeah, Sleaford Mods! [laughs] I discovered them recently and I really like them, they’re really interesting. They’re a two-piece band from Nottingham and yeah, they’re not for everyone [laughs]. His language is very colourful (the vocalist) but I really like it, it’s quite funny – funny but interesting. There’s loads more stuff…

What language is being spoken in the beginning of “Off Peak Dreams”?

Japanese.

What does it mean?

Basically I watched this documentary called “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” and it’s a documentary on a sushi chef who’s based in Tokyo and he’s basically dedicated his life to the art of sushi. He’s got a little sushi restaurant in an underground station in Tokyo and for all his life he’s just pursued this particular endeavour and it just resonated with me so much! I love the idea of that; not being a sushi chef, but the idea of pursuing a dream and dedicating your life to it; being the best that you can be at it and it was a last minute thing where I was like “I wanna get some Japanese in the record!” I knew a lady who used to play with me live, who was half-Japanese and basically I wanted to say “The beginning of Shedding Skin”, “The middle of Shedding Skin” and “The end of Shedding Skin”. She basically translated it into Japanese but it’s much better than that, because if it was translated directly, she said that it would freak people from Japan out because it’s like, it would just be literally the peeling off of your skin, so she translated it to make it sound much more poetic in a sense and it had more of a transformation. It became the kind of letting go of not your skin but your past, your past problems or issues and so it was like “you’re in the beginning process of that, and the middle process of that and the end process of that” if that makes sense. So that’s kind of the translation.

You started off in a grime collective at university. Is any of the music from it still available to the public?

Oh no, there was never any music, it was just like a thing that lasted not longer than a year. It’s just old news! [laughs]

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