Mister Fusty

Leader of the pop parade that is The Simple Carnival, Jeff Boller, describes his recording project as “if the Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson collaborated on Sesame Street… Or if Burt Bacharach wrote songs for Electric Light Orchestra… Or if Billy Joel partied with Esquivel…” Add a dash of Ben Folds Five and I think he’s described his own brand of catchy classic pop perfectly.

Jeff, from Pennsylvania, USA, is a one man orchestra, eschewing samplers and gizmos, recording with real instruments – often built by himself. He has a new album out on October 1st, “Girls Aliens Food” and lovers of quirky, catchy pop music will love it. He takes all the influences he lists and adds his own twist. For a home-baked concoction this album is lovingly recorded with a timeless production style. I can guarantee you will have all these brilliant songs rattling around your brain for some time and that, for me, is what great pop music is all about.

Through the magic of the interweb I decided to probe Jeff about his music-making exploits…

So how did The Simple Carnival come about, and where did you get the name from?

I’d been writing and recording songs since junior high, but it wasn’t until after college did I get the idea to start The Simple Carnival. I couldn’t find anyone who was interested in collaborating on the kind of music I wanted to do, so I did it on my own.

About the name “The Simple Carnival”… I was throwing together words and that phrase seemed to say what I intended to do — which is, write simple pop songs and dress them up in an elaborate sort of way.

Since I couldn’t find any collaborators, over the years I acquired a bunch of instruments and learned how to play them well enough for the kind of parts I write.

It’s just what my imagination wants. If one day my imagination wants to hear auto-tuned vocals and sampled beats, I’ll get the tools to do that. But that hasn’t happened yet.

I’ve got nothing against “fake” instruments on recordings — in fact, there’s a lot of music I enjoy which uses those kinds of things. For example, I’m doing a remix contest for the song “Really Really Weird,” which is bringing in some very cool recordings with samplers and virtual instruments and things. But I’m not drawn to those sounds or techniques when it comes time to record my own music.

I build when I can’t afford to buy, as was the case with my marimba or the Neve preamp clone that I’ll be starting soon. I tend to do things out of necessity, like the extremely low-budget music video I made for “Really Really Weird.”

Some of the cheap gadgets, like circuit bent instruments and hacked up Walkmans, were made because it’s not possible to get those kinds of sounds from anything available at a music store.

I’ve had invitations to play shows, and it’s something that I want to do one day, but I’ve got no plans at the moment. I haven’t had the time to rehearse, as I’m always working towards putting together the next thing that’s new to me rather than looking back and re-learning what I’d written and recorded who knows how long ago.

And the more that I think about playing live, the more I think the songs would be better served if I could get an actual backing band together and do something which sounds somewhat like the album, rather than doing a stripped-down solo lounge pianist act.

One of the best things that’s happened to me in the past year is having made connections with many like-minded musicians on MySpace. But unfortunately, none of those musicians live near me. Putting together a live show still goes back to the problem of not knowing people nearby who are into the kind of music I do. I hope that will change eventually.

The Girls Aliens Food album, which will be out October 1st, has a certain flow that goes from being an irresponsible sort of party to something a bit more grown up by the end. So when the album is in the whimsical party phase, I’m using kazoos, Electro-Theremins, flutes, and marimbas; when it gets more serious, there’s acapella vocals, guitars, and ethereal sorts of noises. Of course, it’s not mechanically divided into these exact instrument combinations, but each song’s subject matter certainly affected which instruments were used and how.

Almost all of the songs are about one or a combination of those three things — girls, aliens, or food. Sometimes it’s literal, sometimes it’s not. But the themes of companionship, alienation, and the things a person perceives as being necessary to live pop up repeatedly through the album. If you’ve got the lyric sheet, you could go through each song and figure it out — “This song is a ‘girls and aliens’ song, that song is a ‘food’-only song,” etc.

I generally took things in stages. For example, I wrote most of the songs in the first stage, then I did all of the tracking in the second stage, then I did the mixing/mastering last.

There was some overlap, though. Some songs weren’t written until I had the tracking for the other songs done. I’d listen to a rough mix of the album and think, “What kind of song am I missing? What kind of song would fit at this point in the album?” Then I’d write it.

I’ve thought about doing a concept album, but I think that ground is pretty well-covered by other people — like Paul Steel (whose April & I album is brilliant). My current interest is a bit more to the side where songs are tied together in a certain way, like Girls Aliens Food is, and there are subtle thematic and sonic connections between things which aren’t immediately obvious.

As far as where I plan to take The Simple Carnival’s sound on the next album… that’s a bit of a secret. Because if I told you what my original idea for Girls Aliens Food was, and then you listened to what it finally turned out to be, you’d notice the original concept buried in there but things took a pleasant left turn somewhere along the way. I look forward to that — the moment where a project takes a left turn and it becomes more interesting than what you originally intended. So I know where I want to start for the next album, but I guarantee that’s not where it will end up.
What I will say, though, is that the album following Girls Aliens Food will feature other musicians in addition to myself.