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Music

Paul Cargnello Makes Music to Piss You Off

Outspoken Montrealer Paul Cargnello talks about releasing his tenth album, Charlie Hedbo shootings and the importance of intelligent lyrics.

“There’s a rush you get when you provoke a conversation, and I think I enjoy that,” says 35-year-old Paul Cargnello. On the phone from his native Montreal, Cargnello’s penchant for rousing debate goes back to his high school days. When the boys of his school would hurl derogatory comments at female classmates, Cargnello had no issue putting them in their place.

“It was fun confronting them. Shaking their world up and seeing the change happen,” says Cargnello. This desire to bring about social change has been a major part of Cargnello’s artistry. While largely focused on his two decade long career in the music industry, Cargnello’s latest album The Hardest Part Is You May Never Know, is also riddled with social commentary. Tracks like “Squeaky Wheel” and the lead single “Rebel Architects” mirror Cargnello’s mission to ignite revolution throughout the world. Influenced by everyone from Muddy Waters to Me Mom and Morgentaler, The Hardest Part Is You May Never Know is an eclectic mix of genres, stemming from the Chicago blues scene to the east coast vibes of Digable Planets.

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“For the first time the critics seem to be in agreement with the artist,” says Cargnello on the positive feedback he’s received on the album. Unapologetic, thundering and sharp, The Hardest Part Is You May Never Know is one man’s manifesto on locking horns with his oppressors, while simultaneously seeking to spark bravery and dialogue amongst his listeners.

Noisey: When did you realize that you wanted to be a musician?
Paul Cargnello: When I was a child people would ask me “what do you wanna do?” I would say a cowboy. The second thing I said was “I wanna be a rock star.” I haven’t achieved that yet, but I’m doing music. I knew I wanted to do music from a young age. I used to record albums. I was 10 years old, and I could never get to the second side of the tape. All my creative output would be filling up one side. In high school I was taking it very seriously. I’d already starting gigging and booking tours. I wasn’t even 18 yet. I already knew what a press kit was. I knew I needed to contact the media. I knew I needed to make posters. There was an entrepreneurship that kicked in very young for me.

Where do you think that entrepreneurship spirit came from?
I’ve got to give all the credit to my mom on that one. She used to organize the plays at my grade school. She kind of became a local celebrity where I grew up. I saw this idea of creating an event as golden. She found some niche, and she could really shake up the community and get everybody involved. I remember respecting her so much for her initiative. I think I just followed in her footsteps.

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When you were in your early teens you started up your first band, The Rubber Band. How did your parents feel about that?
They were really encouraging. One of the things I noticed with bands or artists that do well, it’s often because their family weren’t discouraging the crap out of them. Once they saw I was into it, they were encouraging me. My mom used to go and do research, this was before the internet. She used to tell me “artists need press kits. You need to get a phonebook together. You need to write down all the contacts that you have, and keep note of all the things you’re doing.” She was prepping me to make a career out of it. “Doing what you love” was a mantra at our house growing up. Both my brothers, Christopher and Julian, they’re artists. It’s been in the education and fabric of our household. We were very creative, and it was encouraged from the beginning. My parents are split up now. They still come to my shows. It’s charming to see them still supporting.

Obviously that support has paid off, because you just released your tenth solo album?
Honestly, not everybody gets to make a living doing this. I didn’t do it the big rock star way. I’m not always the easiest person to work with in terms of labels. I’ve been self-managed my entire career. I know how to book a tour. I know how to organize myself and get an album out. I also know it’s better to work in a team. Somebody once asked me “how does it feel to be so successful?” And I was like you know I’m not that successful. I’m not at Justin Bieber level. I’m not Bon Jovi. But at the same time I’m something and I’m surviving. My albums do well. I have a very dedicated fan base who trust that even if I change up my styles now and then, the lyrics are always gonna be intelligent. I’m never gonna put out something stupid. I’m never gonna put out something sexist. I’m never gonna do anything that compromises my political views, and I think people have caught on to that. I’m very lucky to have survived. This whole industry is constantly imploding.

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What are some of the changes you’ve seen in the industry from your teens till now?
Couple things. I’ve noticed labels are going through major, major compressions. People are realizing that we don’t need so many intermediaries. When I first started off, there were more people working in the label than in the band. Now it’s the other way around. You can see in the major label offices there’s five, three people working there and that’s it. There’s also this uglier side which is labels going “we’re not making any money on album sales. We have to make money. You don’t as an artist, but we do so we’re gonna take your publishing.” Suddenly, it becomes standard to have a label come in and say “we want 25 percent of the rights of the intellectual properties of what you created.” That’s insane. This is the one thing I make money at exclusively for me. My publishing is mine. And of course labels are clueing into that and getting quite cruel about it. It’s very cutthroat. That being said, there’s also a little bit of a recession. It’s harder to get people out to shows these days. It’s harder to get people to buy records. We’ll see how that changes.

On “(I Feel You) Jim Joe,” you say “he got reason when you rhyme.” What is it about his art that speaks to you?
This album is a love story to the metropolis. I love Montreal. I love the big cities. I love the feel that they have, and I love how everybody’s so blasé and hard edged. I think that’s why that Jim Joe imagery was so important to me. Taking a graffiti artist from [my hometown] and paying a little homage to him. People always think you see graffiti in some tunnel and it’s a dangerous place where gangs are, but it isn’t. It’s just kids expressing themselves and trying to be artistic and re-appropriating the free space. I think it represents that urban grittiness. This whole record talks about the music industry, and the ugly and beautiful side of a big city.

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I found “Rebel Architects” to be one of the most visually striking songs on the album. I was wondering if you could explain the inspiration behind it?
“Rebel Architects” was actually inspired by student protests in Montreal. It was called Printemps érable, the Maple Spring. It was kind of a play on the Arab spring. You had millions of people in the streets protesting. I don’t know how to translate it, but it’s a pots and pans protest. It wasn’t about getting yourself organized and calling the unions up. It was just bring a pot and a drumstick, and bang it in the streets. It was a fight for free education. I remember during that time all these little communities in Montreal were getting into it. You’d go into Parc-Ex or the east end of Montreal, and there’d be 15 or 20 people banging pots in the streets against austerity measures. I would see couples and families, and it was a really beautiful thing.

You can be a rebel, but without it being a loving movement it’s not gonna go anywhere. And yes anger can be power, but it’s not enough on its own. I think that my career is always been trying to fuse the personal with the political. Love and revolution are two very powerful themes throughout my career and song writing. In the past I’ve written some pretty revolutionary songs, but I think they were a little bit adolescent. I’ve written some love songs, but I think they were a little bit delusional. “Rebel Architects” is the mature bridge between the two.

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Speaking of loving movements, on Christmas Day you re-tweeted the Trans Lifeline. Where does that particular community stand for you?
I see it as the final frontier when you talk about the trans community. It ties into so many issues of misogyny and sexism and homophobia and sexual identity. We still have things going on in [America]. Certain states have not legalized gay marriage. That is just literally putting your toe into the water. There’s so many things we have not properly dealt with. Even for activists, I still hear them saying things and viewing the trans community as freaks, or not really knowing how to deal with it. I think we have to push these things with way more respect. I’m on the frontline of so many things, and when you are you realize it’s all a united cause. You end up on the frontline of everything pretty much, as long as it’s on the left. It’s important. Look I’m the most privileged in the world. I’m a fucking white man. I’m a loudmouth, white man with tons of luck and success on my side, and the privilege that I was raised and born with. We have to speak out. If we don’t the tide will never turn. So that’s my role within it.

Is it this role in your life that fuelled the passion behind “Squeaky Wheel?”
Oh yeah for sure. “Squeaky Wheel” is actually a tongue and cheek song. When I wrote it I was booking tours across Canada. It’s hard to book tours in Canada. Everything’s so spread out and it’s hard to line everything up properly. I remember being fed up and hanging up the phone and saying “I’m not gonna take no for an answer. I’m gonna keep fucking calling and bugging you. I need this gig.” I think it 100 percent translates into the idea that it doesn’t matter what we do when things are easy. It matters what we do when things are hard. I’m not trying to sell the American dream here, like “never give up and you’ll succeed.” That’s not the case. But I am 100 percent willing to be the squeaky wheel. If I see there’s something that I don’t agree with I will speak up. It’s our role as artists to shake the cage and get people thinking and moving. Every time there’s an artist that keeps releasing stuff about cars and doesn’t want to say anything, you’re abandoning our role as artists. You’re abandoning the creed that it is to be an artist. You’re turning your back on the history of what we are. We are people that sing about aspirations and how things should be, and that’s what music was. I’m just keeping that tradition going.

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A few weeks ago the art community suffered a devastating blow with the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris. What were your feelings on that?
I was one of the first people on social media saying “je ne suis pas Charlie.” I remember getting a lot of flack for it at first. Now things are kind of turning around. Nobody seems that mad at me like they were that first little stretch. I’ve done several tours in France, and I remember seeing Charlie Hebdo around and that stuff was really questionable. I know their history is really left wing, but they’re getting older and they’re hyper nationalistic. I didn’t really like the magazine that much already. That kind of intolerance was fucking annoying. It was all over Europe. Anti-Islamic sentiment was everywhere. All that said the intolerance of a bunch of radical religious people, who are willing to kill for absolutely nothing, pisses me off. It’s flabbergasting.I really hope France turns the other way, because national front is already picking up so much steam in France. Incidents like this, if we react the wrong way and feed into that George Bush kind of script, we repeat history over and over and that’s not good either. Somebody accused me of saying “Charlie Hebdo had it coming.” Not in any thing I've wrote did I say that. I never said that anybody had it coming. Nobody should die for their opinions. It’s troublesome on all fronts. There’s no way to look at this and go “at least something good is coming of it.” Nothing good is coming of this. It’s terrible.

Over the course of last year, a lot of significant social movements occurred. People looked to musicians to speak up about them. While many chose to stay silent, you seemed comfortable expressing your opinion. I’m curious to know where you get that from?
I think it’s just being an opinionated asshole. I met my wife when I was a teenager. We’ve been together a long time, and we thrive on debate and conversation. I’m always reading, trying to keep up. I think that’s where it comes from, just the love of the debate. I’m not just fortunate for having a little bit of success, and for being a survivor in this industry. I’m also very fortunate to have the platform itself. I’m fortunate to have a microphone and to be able to say what I want. The risk that I’ve always taken in my life is to be outspoken, but there’s always that risk of being preachy. I did fall on the preachy side with a lot of my music and that’s not good. The balance that I’ve had to find in my life is to be outspoken, and to be completely clear about how I feel about things, but not be preachy.

On “Les Montrealais” you switch between singing in both French and English. I’m curious to know what drove that creative decision?
Montreal is a completely bilingual culture. I have never met a Montrealer, a francophone or Anglophone, that doesn’t switch constantly in their conversations. The greater Quebec sometimes views that as a bad thing. I view it as a very charming thing. I think it reflects our very basic interculturalism between what was once two very separate cultures, the French and the English colonizing of Canada. In Montreal it’s been fused into this completely crazy melting pot. I realize that I alienate people every once an awhile. Somebody will be visiting from the states, and I’ll be talking and I don’t even realize that I’m switching into French. Everybody from Montreal of course understands, but nobody else does. I had to put a couple English lines in there or somebody from Quebec would feel offended.

What would you like your fans to take away from the album?
I’ve had people come up to me and say they don’t understand a lot of it. They don’t understand the content. I was like “it’s me talking about what I know.” It’s me talking about a gritty, dirty yet beautiful city and it’s me talking about the music industry. A lot of the songs are about the music business and my relationship with it. When you’re being properly emotive about what you’re doing, and you feel passionate about what you’re writing, [listeners] will feel that passion. It gets transferred onto them and they apply it to things in their own life. So I hope to provoke a little bit of thought. I hope to reinforce political views that may lay dormant in certain people, or political views that are there but not completely formulated yet. I hope to turn people on to what I’m doing. Every time you put out a record you’re trying to do 25 things, and I’m trying to do all of those things at once.

Aaron Morris still hasn't figured out if it's Montreal-er or Montrealer. Follow him @aarmor212