LE CONCORDE
MEMBERS: Stephen Becker (vocals, guitars, variety of other instruments; Bio here)
ALBUM: "Universe and Villa"
LABEL: March/What Are Records?
RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 2005
PRODUCERS: Becker, Ellis Clark
GUESTS: Former Psychedelic Furs Mars Williams and John Aston, Kevin Tihist and Poi Dog Pondering's Carla Prathers
HEAR HERE: via iTunes
WEB SITE: www.leconcorde.org
PAUSE & PLAY: Your bio says Stephen Becker, Ph.D. ... a doctor of what? Love?
BECKER: Can we please not bring Gene Simmons into this? Ha ha... They may as well offer a doctorate in love, because the lengths they go to using reason to try to know the world sometimes seems totally incorrigible. Suffice it to say, my Ph.D. is in a field in the humanities that allowed me great flexibility. I mostly studied philosophy, cultural studies and architecture.
P&P: What was your manifesto for this album, a goal you wanted to achieve?
BECKER: That's a cool question and I'm definitely flattered that you'd listen to "Universe and Villa" and assume that it was informed by some overarching agenda. But the truest, most heartfelt thing I can say in reply is that there is no goal. I have no idea why I am doing this. None whatsoever. It's true that for most of the songs I had something in mind that I wanted to say to someone, but why set it to music? Not to make the message more powerful or more clear, although maybe that's what happens, but more to make something nonsensical, non-purposeful, playful, thrilling out of some thought or emotion that was obsessing me or hurting me or blissing me out.
P&P: Do these songs directly or indirectly deal with your divorce?
BECKER: I wouldn't say that the songs are capable of "dealing" with that circumstance or that I'm capable of dealing with that circumstance by composing songs. I just go move along my path with the humble aim of trying to be as fully alive and in the moment as possible and one symptom of living like that, for me, is that I make songs about what I love, hate, worry about, am concerned about ... I consider myself to be an observant person, and at one point in my life I tried writing observational pop songs in a Ray Davies vein, but I lost interest in doing that (which is to say I lost interest in living like that). So now, I like to write songs in which I'm not a detached observer but a participant.
P&P: With so much manufactured music out there, good pop music like your own (in the vein of your favorite bands - Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout, OMD, etc.) is so hard to find these days.
BECKER: Why are albums like these so hard to find? That's because they are so wonderful. You can only have a few of things that are completely wonderful if you have an overabundance of things that are wonderful they start to get a little bit commonplace. You might start to take them for granted.
P&P: How did you come up with the name Le Concorde?
BECKER: It does seem like a dubious choice, doesn't it? The failure of the engineering is to blame for almost 150 deaths, and the success of the engineering is to blame for Phil Collins playing twice at Live Aid. When my brother and I were little, we used to collect in-flight safety cards stolen from airplanes around the world by family friends. My brother and his wife are artists/designers out in San Francisco and the first Post Office album cover (my old band) was designed from one of these old cards in the '70s, depicting these two guys in leisure suits helping a very stylish girl evacuate a DC-10 with a sexy smile on her face. In our collection of airline safety cards, the Air France Concorde card was our prize possession. The ne plus ultra ...
P&P: Tell us about your past bands. Had you always wanted to do your own thing?
BECKER: I have always been a creative collaborator and Le Concorde's "Universe and Villa" wouldn't have happened without creative contributions from a great number of talented collaborators ... Ed Tinley and Ellis Clark among many others.
P&P: Out-of-left field question: Jennifer and Brad ... can those two crazy kids work it out? What advice would you give them?
BECKER: I don't know them so, anything I say would be guess work. Are they separated? My advice would be to try to understand each other as deeply as possible and be gentle with each other, which might mean detaching from their emotions a bit in order to step back and be mindful about their situation. Can they see each other for who they are? Do they know themselves as individuals?
P&P: What's the first record you ever bought?
BECKER: What brought me to my first album was a song about a girl's name. A girl I was crazy about. I was 9. I had a major crush on a girl in my third-grade class named Christine. Someone asked me if I'd ever heard the song "Christine Sixteen." I had not. And I had to have that record. It turned out that it was by some band named KISS. I didn't know who KISS was at all, but I took my mom to the record section at the store and found the album. I remember being vaguely disappointed and apologetic when I showed the album to my mom because of the cover. I said, "I don't care what the band looks like," and it was true. I thought it was embarrassing - I just wanted to hear this supposedly great song about a girl named Christine. I was like, "Sorry for the pictures on the cover, Mom, I swear just need to hear this one song." So my mom bought me KISS' "Love Gun." The "Christine" song kind of sucked, I thought, but I started getting into the album pretty heavily. The album came with this toy gun inside made of poster board that said "Love Gun" on it and I was 9 and it never even crossed my mind that that "Love Gun" could possibly be an innuendo for anything, but I thought the toy gun was so cool. So after a while I'd forgotten about Christine and was mostly into playing air guitar to Ace Frehley's hot licks in "Shock Me." Ages 9-11, I became the number one KISS fan. But what brought me to my first album was a song about a girl's name. By age 12, I branched out and was playing air guitar to many of the metal masters. How is it that KISS has come up twice in a short interview about an album that is influenced by Prefab Sprout? Koyannisquatsi ...
P&P: What's the first concert you ever went to?
BECKER: My first concert was Judas Priest in the Tacoma Dome in Seattle. It was on the "Defenders of the Faith" tour. I was 13 and went with the members of my rock band. Our drummer was taking drum lessons and his drum teacher had a business on the side making leather pants. So he got us a deal and we all wore leather pants to the show. My folks drove us and waited outside. The people who leave a Judas Priest show before it is over are generally people who are experiencing a high degree of chemically induced distress. My parents weren't used to seeing people in such states and inferred on the basis of a few of them that the entire stadium must be full of people out of their minds on PCP pulling out their own teeth with pliers and vomiting on themselves. My mom was actually trying to convince my dad to go into the stadium, find us among the 20,000 others and rescue us. But they sat it out while we were in there banging our heads to "Love Bites."
P&P: What's the worst job you've ever had?
BECKER: I was a message board moderator for a Web site for soap opera enthusiasts. As part of the job, I had to pose as a soap opera enthusiast and make message board posts that would stimulate lively discussions on a variety of different soap operas. So I had to become an informal expert on soap operas and all the characters. Who was in love with who's sister-in-law's brother? I couldn't keep track of ANY of them. This was extremely stressful. I had stacks of Soap Opera Digest on my desk and an Soap Opera encyclopedia of some kind. It was amusing for about a week and then it became truly a more pitiful situation than you can imagine. I was miserable.
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