SPILL FEATURE: DISLOCATED THROUGH OUR SUFFERATION – A CONVERSATION WITH JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER

DISLOCATED THROUGH OUR SUFFERATION

A CONVERSATION WITH JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER

Julian Shah-Tayler has been making music for a long time. He has established himself with bands and, perhaps most importantly, a solo artist. In fact, he used the name The Singularity. He is now performing as Julian Shah-Tayler and his most recent album, Honne Tatemae is a personal and beautiful album. Shah-Tayler’s music could be described as dark electronica, but there is so much more going on. That description sells him and his music very short. I had the chance to speak to Julian Shah-Tayler recently via Zoom and asked the reason for making the switch from Singularity to his own name.

“My manager was a woman, Vicky Hamilton, she used to manage Guns N’ Roses way back, and she suggested, ‘look, nobody is really playing on this record, except you, unless you have special guests, so it would be silly to go under the name ‘Singularity’, especially when there are so many ‘Singularities’ out there, basically. No one is under my name.’”

And Shah-Tayler does have some very special, and extremely cool guests on his recent album, Honne Tatemae: David J (Bauhaus), Mike Garson (David Bowie), Carmine Rojas (David Bowie, Rod Stewart) and Robert Margouleff (Stevie Wonder).

“Carmine is a friend, and we have played together, and we just happened to connect. And he is a wonderful guy, one of the sweetest. David J and I have worked together on very many different things. I have done a bunch remixes for him, and he has done a few songs on backing tracks of things I worked on with him, and he has recorded some of his stuff with me, so it is kind of a reciprocal tit for tat thing, where he will play for me, and I will play for him. I really love David, and I don’t see him that often, to be honest because I am touring a lot. Mike, I just asked him to do it. I was working on something on a project with Dave Stewart and Mike is a part of that scene, and I asked him to play on two songs, and he agreed. One he really elevated was “Lights Out”. I asked him to do a cross between Bowie’s “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” and “Aladdin Sane”. He superseded my expectations by such a long way. He is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll pianist of all time. When I finished the final mix of that song and I sat back and listened to it and I realised who played on that record, my heart exploded. Mike Garson, David J, Carmine, who thought when you start off and listen to these records and they are actually playing on the record, it is insane.

“Robert Margouleff, I worked with a client on something with him and he researched me and asked to work with me. He’s described our stuff as “best thing he’s worked on since Stevie.”

Shah-Tayler’s most recent album, released in March of this year, has an interesting history. “The reason it is called Honne Tatemae is because in Japanese Honne means the honest face of who one really is. Tatemae is the representation one puts out in the world. You know, we have an Instagram persona, which does not reflect in any sense our real life and how we look, because there are filters and little snippets of the best bits. The way I write is I am very honest with a lot of things, and there are some things I will sort of veil in poetry or analogy, so it is kind of a description of how the album has been written.”

PURCHASE HONNE TATEMAE VIA BANDCAMP

And like a great artist, Shah-Tayler uses his life experiences to write brilliant songs. The music captures the emotion of the song, while the lyrics, quite often, spell it out clearly. “There are some very angry songs, like “Malicious Intent” which is about a friend who very badly betrayed me from Toronto, funnily enough. Whitby, specifically. Those songs are very honest, they come through with passion and disregard for hiding anything. Whereas a song like “Lights Out”, which is the final song on the record, featuring his special guests, that song is poetry. It doesn’t really say what it really means in a very overt way. There are lots of lyrical and sonic references in there which may be apparent to people who know my material or some of the words are close to what I am really saying but are not the actual words. It is like a little puzzle,” laughed Shah-Tayler.

And honesty is very important to Shah-Tayler. “For me, it is self-therapy, it is cathartic. And I learned more about being honest…I listened to a lot of John Lennon, one of my favourite writers, and one of the reasons he is so great is if he is talking about something, especially in the solo records, like The Plastic Ono Band, and I love that album, it is so self-eviscerating. And he is into Primal Scream. My album, Elysium was a hopeful record, and this is who I am, this what I am doing, and on this one, things were going a bit wrong. So, I had to write a bit more about it. If I can really say something specific about something current, then I can deal with it psychologically or proactively. Otherwise, it is just these veils of mystery as to what is going on. But a song like “Malicious Intent” gets through to me and helps me deal with that situation. I can go on stage and sing at the person I wrote it about, because if it was this fuzzy generic idea, it is not the same. If you wish to go through that Primal Scream process, like John Lennon went through, it needs to come out in an almighty primeval roar to dissipate the anger, otherwise it is still there in the core.”

Shah-Tayler likes to also challenge his listeners with the music he creates, both lyrically and musically. At the same time, the music should still be appealing. “When I am writing, I am always trying to subvert expectations melodically. That is important to me. With my music, I try really hard to listen front. I want people to think about the lyrics, I want them to dance to it. I want them to have one single chord change that makes them snap out of their expectations. I want the first time you hear it for you to go, I wasn’t expecting that.”

The album is very important to Shah-Tayler and he hopes people will understand that it is not as depressing as one might think it is, even though it does involve a great deal of sadness. “It seems like a very downbeat record, it starts off with the intro, and the reason the intro is there is to counterbalance the outro. The outro is me saying “we will be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” That is supposed to be optimistic. It is supposed to be ‘all of this stuff doesn’t matter, all of this stuff you get stuck in, the sadness you feel, feel it and observe but don’t get mired in it, because we will all get washed away at the end of the day.’ Then I realized I started off with “[Living for] Forever”, which is a beautiful optimistic song saying, ‘I love you’ and then ended with the outro. So, I thought ‘okay no’, so what I did was take the outro piano, by Mike, flipped it and reversed it, put it in the intro. It is designed to bookend the record, so you can start it as soon as you finish it. It finishes, fades out, and fades back in again the same tones. It is supposed to reflect the cyclical nature of relationships and life.

You have to sit and experience things in their entirety and then observe them and not get carried away with them. And I have difficulty with that, sometimes with the song “Malicious Intent”, I am really in that. This guy from Whitby taught me a very deep lesson in life, there are bigger things and more important things in life. And the reason my daughter is on the song is to make me understand that here is that important thing. She is the most important thing. And the reason she is finishing the song, saying “make it stop” is telling me to make the anger for this person stop, and that is why she finishes the song.

SPILL VIDEO PREMIERE: JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER – “SUFFERATION”

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