A conversation with Efrim Menuck from 2008

The Godspeed You! Black Emperor/Thee Silver Mt. Zion guitarist talks about becoming a singer, embracing the RocK, and maintaining the willpower required to turn down lucrative TV-licensing cheques

Photo: Louise Michel Jackson

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!

THE OPENERS

• This week at Pitchfork, I wrote about the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, which despite the extremely grim context baked into its title, is actually kinda fun.

• In other Godspeed content news: Range magazine asked a bunch of fans—including Backxwash, Corridor, and yours truly—to share their most lasting memories of the band, and you can read our reflections here.

• For CBC Radio’s Commotion, I produced this segment on the new Tragically Hip docuseries, No Dress Rehearsal, with commentary from Hip biographer (and publisher of the essential That Night in Toronto newsletter) Michael Barclay, Kreative Kontrol podcaster Vish Khanna, and CBC Vancouver reporter Lisa Christiansen:

• Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:

  • Memorials, “Lamplighter”: Fans of the excellent 2000s-era UK indie-rock outfit Electrelane should know that singer/keyboardist Verity Sussman’s current band with Matthew Sims (of the latter-day Wire line-up) just released its first proper album, Memorial Waterslides, which powers its motorik moves with rays of ‘60s-pop sunshine. Bonus points for the adrenalizing instrumental breakdown toward the end where it sounds like Sonic Youth and Stereolab battling for custody over the song.

  • Chubby and the Gang, “The Bonnie Banks”: A hoarse-but-hooky arena-punk stomper for that small but resolute minority who believe The Clash’s greatest album was Give ‘Em Enough Rope. Bonus points for the liberal use of tambourine.

  • The Weather Station, “Neon Signs”: The lead single from Tamara Lindeman’s upcoming seventh album, Humanhood (out Jan. 17), reminds me a lot of how The War on Drugs will start a song in steady-as-she-goes roots-rock mode before adding subtle details that gradually transform the track into an exhilarating, heartland-bound rave-up. Bonus points for the flute solo.

  • Thine Retail Simps, “Barstool Blooze”: The Montreal garage-punk pranksters with the ever-changing definite article run roughshod over the Neil Young Zuma classic, by imagining what the song would sound like if it was performed by its barfly protagonist after his 20th round of shots. Bonus points for adding a chorus that wasn’t in the original.

  • The Hard Quartet, “Six Deaf Rats”: My personal highlight from the HQ’s self-titled debut finds Malkmus in lovably languorous “Heaven Is a Truck” mode, however, Jim White’s amorphous drum patterns add just the right amount of Wowee Zowee anarchy to the proceedings. Bonus points for the shout-out to my favourite Big Star song.

Click here for the Apple Music version.

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THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Efrim Menuck

The date: May 2008

Location: Phoner—I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto, Efrim was calling from “somewhere in the midwest”

Publication: Eye Weekly

Album being promoted: Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band’s 13 Blues for 13 Moons.

The context: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are best known for three things: epic orchestral-rock crescendos that leave you more emotionally drained than a 5K run spent listening to a true-crime podcast; the pointed political messaging embedded in their album art and song titles; and forsaking traditional music-press promotional interviews for group-written statements and/or conversations with puppets. However, when it comes to his myriad projects outside of Godspeed, guitarist Efrim Menuck is more than happy to chat. And that increased openness reflects the evolution that his primary extracurricular offshoot, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, underwent during its 1999-2014 lifespan.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion was originally formed by Menuck and fellow Godspeed members Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar as a more intimate, elegiac counterpoint to their main band’s surging symphonies. However, by the late-2000s, TSMZ had bulked up into an unapologetically aggressive art-punk armada, with Menuck’s piercing, Picciotto-esque voice serving as the head bayonet. And with 13 Moons, they upped the ante even more with some doom-metal muscle, while at their shows, Menuck embraced the role of master stage banterist. So with this interview for Eye Weekly, we chart Menuck’s journey from anonymous ensemble member to one of the most outspoken and acerbic voices in 21st-century indie rock.

It’s been 10 years since Godspeed’s first album, and back then it would’ve been difficult to imagine you becoming the de facto frontman for a pretty heavy rock band. Was the decision to sing an inevitability?

We had no deliberations over whether there was going to be singing in Mt. Zion or not; it happened slowly in our jam space, and more important than the idea of me singing it was the idea of all of us singing—doing a lot of choral stuff. Even though from the outside, it’s obviously a big formal distinction, for us it’s not such a big differentiation. 

Did it take you a while to get comfortable with your own voice?

Oh yeah, absolutely. It took me a long time to feel anything approaching confidence, and not feel self-conscious, but at this point we’ve toured so much that I’m used to it.

You have to drink your tea.

That’s absolutely true, all that shit: the mint tea before the show with the honey in it… I’ve tried vocal exercises. I take it seriously. So much of what we do is punk rock; the whole debate of what is a good voice and what’s a bad voice, it’s all a mystery to me. There’s a certain emotional quality to certain types of popular voices in music today that I find a bit manipulative, so I’m more or less happy with the sound that comes out of my mouth. And at the same time, I take it seriously—there are nights that I sing completely out of tune and I get angry with myself.

Last year, the band got to perform with Patti Smith and you’ve toured with Vic Chestnutt and Carla Bozulich. Is there something you’re looking for from these veteran artists that you don’t get from younger contemporaries?

No… I mean, people who’ve been doing it for a while know what they’re doing. That’s a good question that I don’t have an answer for… you feel touched and honoured that people who’ve been working their way through this racket for much longer than you have get excited about the idea of playing with you. You get the call, and you take it seriously and you do the best you can. You try to learn from it.

Does the use of blues terminology on the new record imply a back-to-basics intent on your part? Compared to Horses in the Sky, which was built on all these multi-layered harmonies and artful dissonance, this one sounds like you just plugged in and let ‘er rip.

There’s that aspect, and then also the aspect that most of the tunes on the record are straight-up laments about friends of ours who had been going through difficult times. For a lot of reasons, over the last few years, we’ve been more of a live band than a band who records stuff. We’ve played a lot of shows and somewhere along the way we started playing a lot louder. The new record is that tired old cliché: It was an attempt to capture our live sound. It’s also the first record we’ve made where the songs we recorded were played live a bunch of times previously. It was different in that way as well. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to write songs in the studio, we were able to focus on how to make the songs sound closer to… you know, like a certain pressure on the ear drum that happens in a live performance.

In retrospect, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns” almost sounds like a dry run for the new album.

When we recorded Horses in the Sky, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns” was the song that we’d been playing live already. Even before we recorded Horses in the Sky, there was this point where we got ready to do the first real touring ever. After the first record came out [in 2000], we did a European tour and played kind of quiet and it was a drag. So when we got back together again to try to tour again, we got a drummer, we started singing together and there was a conscious attempt to play louder and be the kind of band that could play in any bar in any city and win over at least a third of the room. So that process was well underway by the time we recorded Horses in the Sky, but we used that approach mostly for songs on our previous records—we rearranged a bunch of older songs and made them louder and stranger. It’s taken until now to have enough new songs written with that template in mind to make the record that ended up being 13 Blues.

If you go back and read your past press, the discussion around your music is often conceptual and theoretical. The music is not often described as pure rock music, with a physical quality to it.

Even going as far back as Godspeed, there were a healthy bunch of us in the band who were Southern Ontario-born and raised, and it’s all rock to me. It’s just that simple. When people ascribe these loftier goals and ideals, or judge us based on some sort of intentional experimentalism on our part, it’s like, maybe you have to broaden your ears a bit. For us, it’s rock: capital R, capital K.

With an “AW” in the middle?

No, no, no! That’s the worst kind of rock! I hate that one. That’s the ironic horn/moustache thing. Rock is a broad, super-encompassing quality you find in loud music. 

Lyrically, you tend to write songs that are topical but don’t name names—rather than just call out, say, George W. Bush, you prefer to identify people by their vocations, like the hangman and the bankers, much like how Dylan used to do. Do you find it difficult to write songs that have contemporary relevance, but without making references that might date them?

It’s pretty easy to do. Using Bush as an example—George Bush is not the problem, the quality of our leadership is a problem, in Canada as well. The killing machines are different now, but the dynamic is the same. A lot of it is trying to lift phrases from the old folk lexicon, and try to give it a broader feel. And then with the banker stuff: I left home when I was 17, I spent many years with pretty much nowhere to live, unable to get a bank account, having to cash cheques at Money Mart. I have a visceral and unreasonable amount of hatred toward the banking industry.

Do you keep your money rolled up under a mattress?

I do a lot of that. I’ve got some grandfather values in me. I keep working toward the idea of having a safe in the basement. But not to be overly defensive, but our “politics”—with square quotes around it—is something that people use to frame us or characterize us as these didactic, preaching, lecturesome people, but we write songs about bankers for real personal reasons, and at the same time, it’s an experience that most people in the world understand. It’s not a political platform—it’s the way we see the world, and the way a lot of people see the world.

For all the political discourse surrounding your bands, I would say your lasting legacy is one of community-minded small business. Within your community, you have artist-run record labels, venues, and studios—you’re leading by example, and showing people how to run a business based on fair principles.

Again, we’re walking in other people’s footsteps as well. You don’t take anything for granted, you don’t strive so hard for the brass ring that you fall off the horse. It’s slow and steady, with modest goals, modest concerns. It’s so unromantic and unsexy, in an industry that so privileges the quick money and short career.

I wanted to ask you about the song “1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound”—I interpreted that as an admission that making music is a privilege in a world where a lot of people don’t have the luxury. 

That’s part of it. It’s basically a love song to musicians and a love song about music—it’s trying to outline in a very simple way that there’s a tradition of people playing music now that’s existed for centuries. And anything that’s popular at any given moment is just another link in that chain of heritage. There is no thing that isn’t indebted to what people did before. Even though musicians have come a long way—it’s no longer all degenerate peddlers sitting in the corner of some dusty town square—musicians for the most part die poor and die alone. That’s broadly what the song is about. And there’s a few other things in there, references to the current state of affairs: There’s a lot of media-savvy, self-confident, publicity-driven kids out there playing the game like it was a harp. There’s always been that aspect to music, but at this point, Pitchfork is basically what Rolling Stone magazine was when I was a kid, which is this outlet where, occasionally by fluke, they’ll like something that’s actually good, but for the most part, it’s like “what is all this stuff?”  

It seems like the idea of an indie-rock band licensing songs to commercials and TV shows raises far fewer eyebrows than it did 20 years ago. And given the economic challenges of being an independent band—the price of gas being just the latest—is it becoming harder to resist the lure of an easy licensing cheque to fund your more noble ambitions?

It becomes harder on the level that the offers get huger—for sure, there have been some things offered to us where it’s like “are you kidding me? That’s more than I earn in a year.”  That’s where it does feel like it’s the devil in a puff of smoke offering you a bag of gold. And it’s a drag—it’s shitty to have to turn that down. We’ve said “yes” to some things, but still, I couldn’t even begin to count how much we turn down every year, and it’s on these very basic terms: If we don’t like the thing, or if we have a problem with the way an entity does its business, we say “no.” That means we’ve said “no” except for one instance to everything having to do with television; we’ve said “no” to very many bad big Hollywood movies. My hunch is now we’re just going back to saying “no” to everything. This is supposed to be the new model of “indie rock”—again, with square quotes around it—that you’re supposed to earn your money through licensing deals because no one buys records anymore and it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you’re a young band that has a lot of hype behind you and you’re on a label that has its finances in order, then don’t do a tour-bus tour. There’s really basic stuff you can do. And if you’re doing that stuff and still not making money, then I have some sympathy. But if you’re trying to live large because you had some idea based on something you saw on TV when you were 12 years old that this is what it means to be a rock star, then you’re pissing money down the drain. We don’t get a lot of attention, but we still fill decent-sized rooms and we make an honest living. If you’re in a young band and you’ve got the wind at your back, I can’t think of many reasons why you should be licensing songs to Grey’s Anatomy. More and more, the term indie rock is becoming a hollow term—it’s not worth much as either an aesthetic description or a practical description. So for us, we’re just doing what bands have done forever: trying keep it low-key, trying to keep control of our finances, and not live extravagantly, in the name of being able to continue what it is that we’re doing without have to count on saying “yes” to stuff that we’re not comfortable saying “yes” to. 

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ENCORES

• Thee Silver Mt. Zion have fallen silent since 2014’s fantastic Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything (you can read my Pitchfork review of it here), but it seems not a day goes by without Menuck introducing some new project. Last year brought the debut of ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, his dronegaze duo with Broken Social Scene’s Ariel Engle…

• …while earlier this year, Menuck surfaced with the more abrasive WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN, a collaboration with Mat Ball of BIG|BRAVE and Jonathan Downs and Patch One of Ada that specializes in dramatic, static-soaked hymns about Michael Jackson’s more questionable parenting choices:

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!