{"id":26116,"date":"2020-08-14T12:18:23","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T16:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/interviews-panm360\/beaver-sheppard-castor-bricoleur\/"},"modified":"2020-08-15T12:32:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T16:32:12","slug":"beaver-sheppard-castor-bricoleur","status":"publish","type":"interviews","link":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/en\/interviews-panm360\/beaver-sheppard-castor-bricoleur\/","title":{"rendered":"Beaver Sheppard : Do-it-yourself dambuilder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(Photo: Ben Jackson)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prolific would be an understatement to describe Montreal artist and chef Beaver Sheppard.<\/a> His body of work is impressive, so much so that it is almost impossible to count everything he has ever painted or composed and recorded. He himself would have a hard time telling you. An eccentric and erratic character well known to a certain Montreal wildlife \u2013 and elsewhere \u2013 Beaver\/Jonathan Sheppard is everywhere at once. When he\u2019s not behind the stove at his little restaurant Oke Poke, the chef turns into a painter whose canvases are worth thousands of dollars, or into an outstanding composer with a golden voice.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We managed to catch him at the end of a long day\u2019s work so that he could tell us about Downtown<\/em>, a frankly amazing record on which the St-John\u2019s native offers us a sound canvas on which he skillfully mixes colours. Whether it\u2019s the irresistible \u201cNo One Knows\u201d, a synthwave song with \u201980s tonalities that has everything to become a hit, the very nice folk ballad \u201cFull Moon\u201d, the strange title track that opens the album, or the groovy \u201cChameleon\u201d that concludes it, Downtown<\/em>, marked by the author\u2019s amazing voice, is not lacking for earworms.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Photo: Ben Jackson)<\/em><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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PAN M 360: <\/strong>You have an impressive array of releases of all kinds, as much under your own name as with CO\/NTRY, Drug Face, or the Germans Brandt Braueur Frick, not to mention all your numerous contributions to various bands or artists. A simple glance at your Bandcamp page reveals the full extent of your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beaver Sheppard:<\/strong> I wrote my first songs in Grade 7 and I think my first record dates back to 2006, on a Baltimore label. But I\u2019ve got a ton of stuff that I\u2019ve never released. Oh no, wait, my first record came out in 1997. We were playing on pots and pans and plastic containers. At that time I was into a lot of stuff like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. A guy sent it to me recently and it\u2019s pretty good, except for the lyrics… I think I\u2019ll release it! In fact, I should throw everything I have on the web. It\u2019s ridiculous, everything I\u2019ve got on tape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAN M 360:<\/strong> You cook a lot, you paint a lot, you make music all the time… how do you manage to stay so prolific and creative?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BS: <\/strong>Um, I don\u2019t know. I\u2019m not really thinking about what I\u2019m gonna do. I\u2019m just settling down and creating something. That\u2019s where the ideas come from. Especially for music, I\u2019m always coming up with stuff. I try not to get too lost in the lyrics. I work on them, but never too much. If it takes me more than a few days to come up with lyrics, I\u2019ll give up. It\u2019s all there, the melodies, the arrangements, everything… except the lyrics. I\u2019d say I\u2019ve got at least 200 of these, all on four-track tapes. And I\u2019ve got as many songs on tape as I\u2019ve got in the back of my head. It\u2019s kind of crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAN M 360: <\/strong>For your new album, you got an unexpected boost, didn’t you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BS: <\/strong>Yeah, there\u2019s this Warpaint girl, Stella [Mozgawa], who sort of allowed me to make this record. She liked my first albums and she offered me to record something like that. I thought she\u2019d like my recent stuff more, like what I did with CO\/NTRY, but she liked the messier side of my early albums. She wanted me to do something a little crazier. I told her okay, no problem, and I started digging through all my old recordings, and building on what I was inspired by in all those old tapes. I actually think the best things I\u2019ve done have often come from nothing, from something simple. As soon as you start thinking too much, working the thing too much, it becomes… predictable. I like it to be messy and a little crooked. There\u2019s a magic in that. I don\u2019t like these fucking studio musicians who know every note by heart, who play perfectly on the tempo, it sucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Photo: Ben Jackson)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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PAN M 360: <\/strong>What you’re saying here makes me think a bit of the work philosophy of Billy Childish, who, like you, paints and makes music. For him, a work of art doesn\u2019t have to take an interminable time to complete. It\u2019s a waste of time for creating something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BS: <\/strong>Yes, I know him! I opened for him in Montreal. Wow, that was wild. I was pretty buzzed that night, I was actually pretty high at the time. I was on acid, before I even went on stage, and then I went backstage where I had a long and intense discussion with this guy. He\u2019s got this kind of aura… I don\u2019t know what he was on, maybe nothing, but he had this natural buzzed vibe, you know? I didn\u2019t know him at all before. Then I learned he\u2019s kind of the guy who reinvented garage rock. I found out that he had made a lot of records and I asked him why he was making so much music, and he said, \u201cI have to, because if I didn\u2019t, I would be dead.\u201d That made a lot of sense to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAN M 360: <\/strong>Back to Downtown<\/em>, tell us a bit about how you built the album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BS: <\/strong>I had a month to complete everything. So I tinkered with old recordings, different ideas and old samples. Take the first song on the record, \u201cDowntown\u201d, it\u2019s from a jam I did with other musicians, 15 or 16 years ago. I thought there was something crazy and raunchy, with one of the guys playing the wrong note on a piano… I liked it, and I put it on a loop. Then I grabbed a saxophone and I improvised. Then I grabbed the microphone and started throwing out a stream of lyrics like that, spontaneously. I cut and pasted here and there, and added a couple of other things, and that was it. For \u201cI Only See You\u201d, I wrote the lyrics as fast as I could just so it wouldn\u2019t drag on, and I moved to something else. (laughs<\/em>). It turned out pretty nice in the end. I used a kind of Caribbean steel drum that I got at Christmas. I was a little bit inspired by Brian Eno\u2019s [and John Cale\u2019s] song \u201cSpinning Away\u201d for that track. There\u2019s something playful and fragile in this song. For \u201cChameleon\u201d, I used something we recorded with CO\/NTRY, a long, raw 13-minute jam. I sliced the whole thing up and built \u201cChameleon\u201d up with that! I think the guitar is sick on this track, it\u2019s like \u201cCotton Eyed Joe\u201d! (laughs<\/em>). For another song, it was a something I did with Drug Face, my project with Thomas Von Party… The whole album was cobbled together from songs or sketches I had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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