We sat down with Andrew Whiteman, lead guitarist and core member of Broken Social Scene and founder/frontman of Apostle of Hustle, a few hours before BSS took the stage on the first night of the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival. We talked about his musical origins and influences, how his experience of making music has changed over the years and where he sees it going in the future, and the supreme importance of poetry. Read on for the full interview.

Inyourspeakers: I’m interested in how different it is to be in a collective band versus a traditional band which has a set number of members. They usually have fairly rigid ways that you can offer input, with only one or two people doing the bulk of it in most cases. In your case you’ve gone from being in what, as far as I can tell, was a more traditional band [Bourbon Tabernacle Choir] to being one of the core members of Broken Social Scene. Can you tell me about how that is a different experience? Or is it really that different at all?


Andrew Whiteman: Well, I’ve been in lots of bands. I think the one thing about Social Scene is that Kevin [Drew] is definitely the jefe of the band.  It’s not like an Emma Goldman anarchist perfection situation. If it’s a functioning entity, you need a jefe.



IYS: So it does revolve around a core.


AW: You need a jefe. Kevin’s the jefe. On the other hand, the way ideas are brought into the band… experiments are tried out, things either work or don’t  work. I suppose him or, to other degrees, Charles [Spearin] or Brendan [Canning] would have the final say in certain situations.



IYS: So it revolves around a center, but there might be more openness to bringing outside ideas in.


AW: There’s tons of openness to outside ideas. The way things happen with Kevin there’s an intense chemistry. From the first time I played with Kevin, Brendan, and Justin [Peroff], it was right away. That first show we played it was like, well, I guess this is now a happening thing, ‘cause it was unbelievable from moment one. Accidents and that type of aleatory combination is very...you know, the radars [making antennae gestures with his fingers on his forehead] were tweaking high for that, you know what I mean? There’s no utopian sort of thing, but it’s very different. I played with Andre Williams for a number of years, a sort of sleazeball-R&B cat, a wonderful, wonderful human being, and that’s where you do what your boss tells you to do. And that’s that. And you get paid or not at the end of the gig. It’s a very different thing, I guess.



IYS: And you’re frontman of your own band too, Apostle of Hustle. Can you tell us a bit about that?


AW: Well that’s on hold now, but that’s going great. The last thing we did last year, we opened for Gogol Bordello for six weeks, which was trippy, ‘cause we’re just a duo, and opening for fifteen hundred Gogol fans—they have super hardcore fans, so that was amazing. And then this year we went up to the Arctic and recorded records in a national park three hours north of the Arctic Circle with our friend Tanya Tagaq, who’s a throat singer, and we did improvisational sort of—I was calling it Ancestral Top 40s, that’s what we were playing up there. But right now it’s all Social Scene.



IYS: I’m interested in how exactly a person goes from playing with Tonka trucks in a sandbox to headlining tours and performing at festivals like Pitchfork. Can you tell me some of your really early musical experiences?


AW: The most formative early musical experience I had is when I went to a rich kid’s house for a birthday party and in the loot bag they gave everyone a transistor radio. This is in the very early seventies, when these things were super popular, and mine was purple and it became my best thing. I did the classic lie-in-bed thing—my mother was very strict and made me go to bed early even if it was still light out—and I would lie in bed listening to the radio and trying to, like… I remember my favorite song at the time was “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, and I kept trying to have telepathic communication with the radio to force them to play that song.



IYS: How’d that work out? Did you ever get it played?


AW: Every once in awhile they’d play it, yeah. I was just thrilled that they were actually playing it.



IYS: A lot of people listen to a lot of music, they’re big fans of music, they love music, but they don’t start making music. How did you make that transition?


AW: I think that was me, for a long time. I started more sort of performance-arty. The first few Bourbon Tabernacle Choir shows I didn’t play anything.



IYS: Well, with a name like that you’d kind of have to be performance-arty.


AW: Yeah. I dressed up like a priest and I would go into the audience and select people and bring them onto stage and make them kneel down and open up and I would pour straight bourbon into their mouths until they couldn’t take it.



IYS: Okay, important question: What kind of bourbon was it?


AW: [laughter] At that point it was Maker’s Mark.



IYS: Not too bad. That’s a decent label.


AW: We worked on it.



IYS: So from a music fan with a transistor radio practically grown into the side of your head you started getting into a performance art kind of thing back in high school,  and that grew into a band?


AW: Well, I discovered very early on—often this happens to people, they’ve got to choose, are you going to do theater or are you going to do music or whatever—and I found that musicians were way funnier and had better parties.



IYS: That is important. You’ve got to love what you do, right?


AW: Yeah, so it was like alright, really, what are we gonna do here?



IYS: So you were with Bourbon Tabernacle Choir for awhile, you released a solo album, and then I hear you were introduced to Broken Social Scene through Leslie Feist. How did that happen?


AW: That’s not quite… well, it’s kinda true…



IYS: Alright, tell us the real story.


AW: I met Brendan much earlier, when he was in his grunge band, hHead, at this festival once and hung out with him for a few hours, and that was fun. When I was in the Bourbons I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the music. I felt that they were too backward looking. It had to be Curtis Mayfield or nothing, which... I love Curtis but I was starting to [wonder] what’s happening right now? So I had this friend that would make me tapes with Pavement and Superchunk and Jon Spencer and stuff, and he’d make me hip-hop tapes, telling me what was going on right now. And he was the guy who said “You know what? There’s a guy you really got to jam with. His name’s Kevin. He’s like a whiz kid, you’ve gotta meet this guy.” So I jammed with Kevin a couple times, and a few months later (me and Leslie were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, and she sang on Feel Good Lost) it was decided. They wanted to just put on a show. Kevin and Brendan were like, we want to put on a show, but they didn’t have a band or anything. So it was decided, oh, let’s just make up this band. It’s January, in Toronto, everything’s cold and miserable, let’s just do this. So me, Kevin, Brendan, Leslie, and Justin Peroff played a show. We had a bunch of our friends open the show, and that’s the show that I was telling you about earlier, that was like right way.



IYS: That’s when everything just clicked.


AW: Yeah, it was instant. It was very instant. That show I think we played about four Feist tunes, and we made up a few songs, which became our model: get together, play, and make up new songs every show. That’s kind of what we did for the first few years.



IYS: And you’re one of only four people that’s been with Broken Social Scene on every tour, is that right?


AW: No, no, I missed one in 2008, a Eurotour. I skipped it because my cat died and I had an ulcer and I was coming off an Apostle/Stars tour and these guys were going Istanbul-Portugal-Moscow-Finland, you know? That was a three week-er, and that’s the one I missed. But they also played their worst show ever on that tour. I don’t know what that’s saying, that somehow I wasn’t at the infamous “Poo Mountain,” as it was called.



IYS: That’s a nice name for it. [laughter]

IYS: I don’t know much about them, but I’ve heard about the Broken Social Scene Presents… series. So far you guys have two out, though the series is on hold now with the new Broken Social album out, but you guys are going to be doing some more, I understand. How different is the focus there?


AW: I think that’s a stupid idea.


IYS: Really?


AW: I think that Kevin had this solo record, which we all play on to various degrees, more or less, I mean Ohad [Benchetrit] and Charlie really produced it pretty well, but anyway, I think that was just his nerves. I think he felt, somehow, he couldn’t put out a record that said Kevin Drew’s Solo Record, it had to have this Broken Social Scene Presents…, and I think that’s a dumb idea, cause it’s, it’s just... why?, you know what I mean? I think it’s fear. No reason. And then when he toured Spirit If… in Europe he got in a little bit of hot water, not like trouble from anyone, but he had hassles because people were broadcasting that it was going to be Broken Social Scene, which it wasn’t, because Charlie wasn’t there, I wasn’t there--in fact me and Charlie were probably touring. Apostle and Do Make Say Think did a tour together that fall-- so, you know, they did a couple of Social Scene songs…



IYS: But it wasn’t a Broken Social Scene tour.


AW: No. I think he regrets Broken Social Scene Presents…. I mean, maybe they are going to do more or whatever, and try and make it seem like it was something.



IYS: Legitimize it a little.


AW: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s bullshit. There’s no need for it, really.



IYS: So you’re touring with Broken Social Scene right now. What are your plans for Apostle of Hustle? What’s coming up in the future for you? Where are you going after this?


AW: This is at least another year of pretty intense stuff, but, yeah, I’d like to… Our last record, I feel, was very under-appreciated, or under-heard. Apostle of Hustle is now a duo, and we got into some freaky fresh shit when we were opening for Gogol in terms of percussion, and looping, and poetry, and I got more into playing the sampler live, and I had samples of William Burroughs and Ginsberg and I would play with that, just pushing it, you know what I mean? So when the next Apostle record comes out, late next year, or who knows, it might come out on cassette. I feel the more focus Social Scene gets the more I can afford to just let my freakiness go, and after going up to that national park with Tanya, I could easily work for three weeks with Dean and Tanya and get a record of that “Ancestral Top 40” music. No one’s going to want to put that record out, unless it’s, like, Thurston Moore, you know what I mean?



IYS: How important is it for the music to get out? You’ve achieved a degree of success with Broken Social Scene and, from what you said, that that affords you a lot of liberty when you’re doing more personal stuff—like you said, you can let your freak out—so how important is it for you to have the more personal, maybe more interesting, stuff get heard? Or is it important just to make it?


AW: It’s important. It’s important for it to get heard because... Social Scene is an ever transforming, mutating thing, and none of us... you know, we’re going to go hard on this record, and on the wave we’re on now, and that’ll go for the next year. But Kevin needs to make movies, you know what I mean? Champie [Brendan Canning, aka “The Champ”] needs to write the best jingle in the world. Charlie has another happiness project thing going. We all need our outlets.



IYS: So Broken Social Scene is kind of the middle of your Venn diagram, it’s the middle part of your collective talents, but it’s anybody’s whole world.


AW: Well said, man. It’s the Venn diagram. So, that’s what I mean. I need it to get out there because I wanna go do gigs, I love performing. And what I do in Apostle, what it evolved to by the end of last year started to touch on where I want it to be. I would get into theater, I would get into performance art, I’m interested in that.



IYS: Those were your roots, coming to music through performance art, and now you’re kind of returning to that borderland.


AW: I’m hoping to, yeah.



IYS: Well hopefully it’ll be a little more fun this time, getting closer to that theater side of the border than it was last time when you had to move over into music.


AW: Exactly, exactly.



IYS: So compared to back then, how are the parties now?


AW: [laughs] I don’t go to parties any more, that’s the funny thing, I go back to the hotel or the bus and I read books.



IYS: What are you reading right now?


AW: I’m reading a book about a philosopher named Alfred Korzybski who invented a system called general semantics. I caught his name, you know? William Burroughs name drops him, Ted Berrigan name drops him. I’m studying Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tarot method, he’s a great Chilean/Mexican theater artist and director. He made the cult movie El Topo in 1970. When Social Scene tours we’re going down to Raleigh and Asheville, in North Carolina, and I’m going to do a presentation there on the Black Mountain poetry tradition in North Carolina. I’ll be doing a thing about that, so I’m reading Black Mountain poetry: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov , Robert Duncan.



IYS: Do the things you read influence your music?


AW: Yeah, no hesitation at all. I’m a huge poetry fan, so that’s another thing. There’s worse money in poetry than there is in anything else, but that’s where the big passion is. Earlier this year I got to meet one of my idols, Anne Waldman, in New York. She started the Naropa school outside of Boulder. Poetry’s where it’s at, man.



IYS: Can you bring that into your guitar work?


AW: No. Guitar work is more... I just copy whoever I’m fascinated with at the time.



IYS: Who are you fascinated with these days?


AW: There’s a group called Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako, this like [seventies] African band. My brother-in-law gave me like a gigabyte of African guitar music, so, into that. I’m a big flamenco fan, huge flamenco fan, so I was listening to that. I forced my buddy Mike, the guitar player in Here We Go Magic… We were drunk in Hamburg last week, and they have an acoustic guitar, and I found out he used to live in Jerez [de la Frontera, Spain] and he studied flamenco, and I forced him to sit in a corner and play flamenco while I was singing shit. It was really fun. And Flying Lotus, I love Flying Lotus, from L.A., that hip-hop cat. I don’t like indie rock so much, although I like Kurt Vile.



IYS: Is that how you do it with any given album? Whatever you’re really fixated on at any given time, you bring that influence into the next tour and the next recording?


AW: Yeah. On one Social Scene song, when we were writing it I was trying to copy a buddy from The Walkmen. They’re probably my favorite rock band. I tried to copy his guitar sound. It didn’t end up going to tape that way, but when we were making up the song it was absolutely on my mind. I was obsessed.



IYS: That’s important, that you bring in the influence, but you don’t just ape it. You’ve got to bring it through yourself and it’s not going to come out sounding like it went in.


AW: It never will. You can’t escape your projection.