Alexis Taylor on finding the balance between exploration and entertainment
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24.04.2018

Alexis Taylor on finding the balance between exploration and entertainment

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Words by Zachary Snowdon Smith

Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor knows that musical left-turns can be risky business. From Bob Dylan’s pivot away from folk to Lou Reed’s challenging – or perhaps just unlistenable – Metal Machine Music, audiences have been quick to punish artists who innovate too quickly.

In his upcoming indie-electronic album Beautiful Thing, Taylor finds a balance between exploration and entertainment, bringing listeners an experience as weird and yet as palatable as drinking a milkshake out of a ram’s horn. For Taylor, songwriting is like a kind of play.

“It’s important to have experimentation in making pop music,” he says. “In this record, I haven’t tried to make Metal Machine Music or something as avant-garde as that. I think it’s important to be playful and to surprise yourself in the studio, but I don’t find it hard to strike that balance, because I’m also really into melody and pop song structures.”

Taylor worked on Beautiful Thing throughout 2017, joined by influential behind-the-scenes man Tim Goldsworthy, founder of DFA Records and Mo’ Wax. Goldsworthy was also studying full-time while producing the album, which made scheduling tricky.

“It was challenging working where we could only share one day of solid work per week, at most,” says Taylor. “But it was ultimately quite good, because it was important for me to be able to work in a different way from what I was used to before. That was the whole point of working with a producer – to get out of my own routines and patterns, to challenge myself.”

The Björkish sonic flourishes of Beautiful Thing stand in contrast to 2016’s Piano, an ultra-sparse affair featuring Taylor on vocals and the eponymous instrument. It was a much-needed opportunity to work alone, he says.

“With the piano record, I knew that I wanted to perform the songs live at the piano and get a recording that sounded quite similar to how those songs sounded in the room,” says Taylor. “[Beautiful Thing] is completely different in that once I’d got the bare bones down, then there was a lot of building on that and transforming the songs and how they sound. It was the antithesis of that completely live way of recording that I’d explored on Piano.”

Taylor worked on his new album while touring with Piano, sometimes sensing a dissonance between the introspective compositions he was performing and the lush new material he had in his head. This was the first time he had kept back new album material while on tour, he says.

“When you’re working on something new, it can make the record you’ve just released, that you’re touring on, feel somehow distant,” says Taylor. “It was, at times, quite strange and a bit frustrating, because I would find myself becoming interested in the new album’s songs, but I wasn’t quite willing to bring them into the live piano shows. It meant I had to switch mindsets.”

Beautiful Thing ranges from the McCartney-esque sunshine of ‘Oh Baby’ to ‘Roll on Blank Tapes’, a track stitched together from ad slogans and catchphrases from Taylor’s youth. The song’s refrain, “Home taping is killing music,” calls back to a Reagan-era campaign against recording music off the radio. Think of it as the ‘80s equivalent of those ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ PSAs played before movies.

“The song is built on those stock phrases,” says Taylor. “It’s about singing when you have something to say and singing when you don’t have something to say. It’s about automatic singing, or celebrating the idea of song regardless of content. That’s a bit at odds with how I usually work, but I was being playful.”

After the solitude of Piano, Taylor was ready to jump back into collaborative work with Hot Chip, and the credits of Beautiful Thing are crowded with names from the band’s lineup. Taylor also confirms long-running speculation that Hot Chip are working on a new studio album, their first since 2015’s Why Make Sense?

“We’re not rushing it, because we’re enjoying making it,” says Taylor of Hot Chip’s next release. “It’s exciting for us to be back in the studio, because I’ve been quite busy and [vocalist/keyboardist] Joe [Goddard] has been quite busy. We’re getting recording time together as and when we can, but we’re making good progress with it.”

In the meantime, Taylor is making tracks with Beautiful Thing, stopping by cosy venues like the Empty Bottle club in Chicago as well as bigger stages at Lollapalooza Berlin and Electric Picnic.

“I do enjoy the closeness you get to an audience in small venues, and being able to perform very near to the crowd,” says Taylor. “At the same time, on festival stages, you can find a very exciting atmosphere. That can be really thrilling. I get to do a bit of both, because my solo stuff tends to be for a small room and the Hot Chip stuff tends to be for quite a big crowd. It’s medium-sized rooms that I don’t see very often.”

Taylor doesn’t keep track of how many records he sells, and says the surest indicator of musical health is the size of crowds at live events.

“I think Beautiful Thing is a more outward-looking record than the ones I’ve made before, so I’m hoping it will reach more people,” says Taylor. “I’d like people to want to listen to Beautiful Thing for years to come. That’s how I enjoy records: I want to listen to them again and again and get lost in them. I hope that people will get something out of it similar to my experience of the records I enjoy.”