Synths, Stars, and True Colors, Continued

For the October ’07 issue of Keyboard, I infiltrated the True Colors Tour (playing the role of musical director and keyboardist for Debbie Harry), and talked shop with tour-mates Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls and Steve Gaboury of Cyndi Lauper’s band. Our roundtable discussion hit on topics ranging from playing in the festival setting to some good ol’ Keyboard-style gear-talk. With retro synths and sounds having been firmly re-established in today’s musical soundscape, it’s only fitting to hear from two of the tour’s biggest names, both of whom rose to prominence during synth-pop’s first generation.

Cyndi Lauper

While giving her band the room to breathe new life into her classic hits, Lauper still has an affinity for analog tone. “I prefer analog sounds,” she says. “I think that some of the digital stuff is a little brittle and it doesn’t really have that warmth. If you don’t have a real Sequential Circuits Prophet, go find a Roland Juno-60. I like the old keyboard sounds better.”

While onstage, Lauper interacts with her band nearly as much as with her audience. Gaboury’s piano background plays an important role for Lauper. “I worked with a lot of keyboard players, and he’s one of the best. Everyone has their own thing that they do extraordinarily well. He’s an extraordinary piano player. It’s very rare in rock ’n’ roll to meet someone who is a real piano player. It’s a different feel. He and I have a connection, and it’s the same with a lot of my band members. I don’t just sing.”

While some of the material in Lauper’s set is given updated arrangements (“She Bop” was transformed from the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” synth-pop hit into a slower, darker, more mysterious number), she encourages the band’s personality to come through, even when the song arrangements resemble the original recordings. “I hear a lot of different stuff,” she says, “so I always tell them, ‘I don’t want you to just play the part. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what you hear.’ With good music, I think that there’s an interior rhythm, and if you all play the same part every night, that goes away. But if one part slightly pushes, pulling the other parts, and the other parts are beating in between, they’re creating an interior rhythm. You can hear that stuff. And everyone listens to each other play.”

Such listening among the band members, combined with their play-for-the-song mentality, is a high priority when it comes to Lauper’s choice of musicians to work with. “This is an extraordinary group,” she says. “Usually bands just play, and I hate that. I call it ‘wanker playing.’ I don’t buy the wankers. I’m not interested in how great you think you are. I’m interested not just in your technical ability. I want your f*****g heart! I want your heart and soul because that’s what I’m giving. And I got your back, but I expect you to have mine. And I will heroically have your back more than other people I’ve seen. But I want a real band. To me, a real band is like an otherworldly experience. We have the privilege of making music, and when you make it, you can’t take it for granted. Steve and I, personally and through music, have been on many journeys together. I think the whole thing opened up when we did the At Last CD. It was extraordinary.”

Vince Clarke

Backstage in Berkeley, California, the penultimate stop of the ’07 True Colors tour, the time came for me to prepare for my set with Debbie Harry. Vince Clarke and the other members of the Erasure production had arrived at the venue shortly before I had to depart, and Keyboard’s Michael Gallant and Steve Fortner were there to chat with the soft-spoken but hugely influential Clarke.

MG: I was onstage a little bit earlier with Tom, looking at different people’s rigs, and yours was encased in a small box. Very mysterious.

VC: All I use is a [MacBook Pro], and an Oxygen 8 keyboard.

MG: Can you tell us what you have loaded up on the Mac? What’s the main software you’re running?

VG: Logic. The most recent records were done with Logic, using soft synthesizers as well. So basically, we’re doing exactly the same thing onstage as we do in the studio, with a little bit of a live element.

MG: Did you have the stage in mind when you were programming everything, or were you building it specifically for the studio recording?

VC: Well, you make it for the studio and then deal with the practicalities of bringing it out live. The last two tours we’ve done we started using a Mac. Prior to that, we’ve used every type of sequencer you could imagine, depending on what’s been practical and what’s been reliable. I just got into Logic because all my studio stuff is in the U.K. and I didn’t want to move it to the States. It’s still there, so I was forced to learn how to use Logic, and how to use software synthesizers. It’s all very practical.

MG: What advice could you offer to aspiring programmers and keyboardists who want to come up with something Erasure-like? What can help them wrap their heads around all the tools that are available right now?

VC: I think the soft synths that come with Logic [ES-1, ES-P, and ES-M] are already very similar to simple monophonic synthesizers that I was using when I started making music in the ’80s. They don’t really do a lot, but you can get your head around them quite quickly, producing interesting sounds. Then there are more complex synthesizers, like the ES-2, because of all the modulation variables that you have. You don’t necessarily need to go out and buy lots of external soft synthesizers to make a decent record. I think those Logic synthesizers do sound a little bit like and operate similarly to the early instruments I was using in the ’80s.

MG: Do you have a backup computer?

VC: There’s a backup computer. In fact, everybody has a backup computer.

MG: Has anything gone horribly wrong on this tour, or on recent tours?

VC: Well, not on this tour. We have had catastrophes or course. If the power goes, then the band stops playing, pretty much. Andy [Bell, Erasure lead vocalist] is a big personality, so we usually get through it somehow. He’ll sing or tell some terrible joke. I think the audience appreciates it, because it makes you look normal. And if you can laugh, and not take it too seriously, the people warm to you. Making mistakes is good.

SF: I’d like to ask about the soft synths running inside of Logic, and how that maybe juxtaposes with your quote in Keyboard magazine which our readers always remind me of, about how MIDI timing is crap.

VC: MIDI timing is crap, but with Logic, when we’re in the studio, and we record from MIDI to audio, we can see the waveform, and we can do exactly what we would do before with an analog sequencer, which is move everything back into time.

SF: When you’re composing in the studio these days, do you still find anything inspiring about using analog synth-based sequencers?

VC: On the last album and the album before that, we were using soft synths, but prior to that it was a mixture of both, really. I remember using a great step-analog sequencer.

MG: Do you see yourself changing your rig up any time in the future?

VC: For the studio, certainly. This year, I’m importing all my analog studio gear. Ideally, what I want to do is combine the two. I miss my stuff, and it’s stuff I’ve collected over the years. I don’t really want to go into analog controllers with digital synths. It seems a bit weird to me. I’ve got the analog synths anyway, so I might as well use them.

MG: I’d love to hear about your songwriting process.

VC: We always write the same way, either with the guitar or piano. So we spend some time in a room, either at my house or at Andy’s or somewhere else, with a guitar and a tape recorder. Or actually we’ll use a micro-cassette recorder, and I’ll sit around and play a formation of chords and work something out, and it inspires Andy. He’ll sing something to that. And then we record four- or eight-bar sections. We stop and we do another section of chords with another melody. It could be in a new key completely, and then we do four or five parts like that. We try to join the bits together. We say, “Okay, move this bit,” and, “that sounds like a chorus,” or, “that bit sounds like a verse.” This time around I would transfer the micro-cassette audio into Logic, and then I can take stuff, four bars from one section from the next verse, sort it all around, change the key, and change the tempo. If a song is lacking something, I try to find a bit from another song to fill the gap.

MG: So it’s kind of like cutting analog tape.

VC: Exactly. Before, we used to use two micro-cassette recorders. We’d have one micro-cassette playing one bit, and the demo we used to give the record company would be just that. And we’re going, “Can you hear it? Can you hear that melody?”

MG: And they would listen to you coming in with a micro-cassette recorder?

VC: We had a very nice record company.

MG: So what’s next after this tour?

VC: After this tour, we do our own tour, which will take us to Mexico, then we go to Europe. Then we’re talking about making a nursery rhymes record, a soundtrack. It’ll be like a Tim Burton record, something that’s kind of adult-oriented, a bit scary. I’ve been collecting dark music on the Internet and I’m trying to find out what scares me. There’s tons to think about!

Girls Just Want to . . . Connect

Keyboardists have a special role when working with vocalists in any style, and with a musical personality as strong as Cyndi Lauper’s, a special combination of playing, arranging, interaction, and communication skills is necessary on the bandstand. What did Cyndi and her keyboardist, Steve Gaboury, have to say about their musical connection?

SG: Playing with Cyndi is often about getting rid of stuff, getting rid of anything that’s extraneous and getting down to what is the essential.

CL: And what best tells your story. We’re storytellers. And what best captures the imagination of the listeners. I want to do something so damn scary! They don’t know what’s going to happen, and when you leave that door open, that’s when magical things can happen. And that’s what I always look for. I’m selfish. I want that every time. I’m greedy for that because it is otherworldly. But that’s why we make music.

SG: This is a heads-up gig. It really is 70 percent listening and 30 percent playing. And when it’s right, we’re five birds in a formation. And no show is the same. It keeps it fresh, and it keeps us fresh.

CL: But how can it be the same, anyway? And when it is the same, then you feel like you’re in a rut. Then you’re just doing it. So I try to throw things in that’ll change it. I purposely try to sing differently.

SG: Or a mistake will happen and she’ll run with it.

CL: Yeah, but mistakes are great! I came out one time and I forgot the first two verses of the song. It was the opener. And I had to tell myself “Janis Joplin always said, ‘Words don’t matter.’” Just sing! What are you singing about? And that’s what I sang. And it was the same verse again twice, and I said “So what?” And we found new things, and it was a different arrangement. Oh, that was a crazy night. But you know, it was also a great night, because there were new things all over the place.