The mid-aughts were the halcyon days of indie rock, when seemingly no instrumental idea was considered too over-the-top: it was a time when fantastical harp suites, yelp-y post-punk, theatre-kid sea shanties and sprawling post-rock were all filed under the same genre tag, and some truly esoteric artists found commercial success.
Into that eclectic fray marched Owen Pallett and their violin looping project Final Fantasy. Pallett began playing solo shows with a loop pedal in 2004 and, after quickly finding an audience, hastily recorded the debut album Has a Good Home in order to have something to sell at the merch table.
The album came out on February 12, 2005, its curious mix of indie rock and baroque whimsy highlighting what Pallett calls their "most unabashedly pretty" work.
Speaking with Exclaim! about Has a Good Home, Pallett recalls the struggles of recording while on crutches in the winter, their embarrassment about (and renewed appreciation for) the album's shortcomings, the new material they're currently working on, and why it's a good thing that "now that literally everyone is a gay nerd."
What do you remember about making Has a Good Home?
I started playing solo looping shows in March/April 2004. I was inspired by Craig Dunsmuir's Guitarkestra shows, as well as Matt Smith's Nifty shows. I actually borrowed Matt's RC-20 for a couple weeks, and that's how the project was born.
The attendance to my shows had picked up by summer/fall 2004, and I needed to make an album — I had nothing at the merch table. Because the shows were all looped, I had no idea how I was going to make a recording. I didn't have a band, I didn't know how to record, and I had no money for studio time.
Justin Small of Do Make Say Think and Lullabye Arkestra suggested that we record the live set run through a series of amps. He had a lot of amps! We tried it out at his apartment. The results weren't working. My setup was so rudimentary — just a reverb pedal, a pitch shifter and a mono looper. The work we did was super useful, though, as it made it clear that I had to try something else. Justin's confidence in the material filled me with confidence, too. Thank you Justin!
Steve Kado suggested that I try recording with Leon Taheny. I had just turned 25, and Leon was 21. I'd known Leon for a few years; we actually met when Leon was only 16, when he came to visit some mutual friends in Toronto. I had heard his recording and production work with his own bands, and I thought it would be a good fit.
I really admired an album by Oliver Schroer, a solo violin album called O2. Oliver stated the album notes that the entire album was recorded with an AKG 414 microphone into a Joe Meek preamp. I rented both of those items from Long & McQuade. I went over to Leon's and we started by recording a cover of a Joanna Newsom song, "Peach Plum Pear." There was nothing on the track except my violin and my voice, and it sounded great. I was confident we could make an album together.
I had some tour dates coming up, and the only window of time we had to record was between Christmas and New Year's at the end of 2004. One week to make an album. I had about 11 songs written at that point, but five of them were already earmarked for He Poos Clouds, which I'd envisioned would be entirely D&D songs and would be performed by a string quartet. So, I had seven, maybe eight songs. I planned to write the rest of the album while we were recording.
It was a breakneck week. We slept in shifts: Leon was editing and mixing a completed song while I scribbled down the lyrics and melodies for the next one. We didn't leave his apartment for the entire time we recorded, except to eat. The neighbours were getting annoyed by the constant music-making, so by the end, I was tracking my vocals entirely wrapped up in a blanket burrito to muffle the sound of my voice. We recorded 17 songs, all told.
Al P — producer of DFA 1979 and later of MSTRKRFT — came over and helped mix the songs with drums. We mastered it in an afternoon. The entire process was the speediest and most reckless thing I've ever done.
Oh, also, I had broken my ankle at an AIDS Wolf show a few weeks prior to recording. So, I was in a cast and on crutches for the entire ordeal. The dead of winter sucks when you're on crutches. Note to Canadian city dwellers: shovel your sidewalks.
Listening back to Has a Good Home 20 years later, what stands out?
Has a Good Home was a fairly popular record for a tiny label with no publicist. People liked it. But fairly quickly after it was released, I felt embarrassed by its shortcomings, and could only hear the ways that the timeframe had impacted the quality of the material.
That said, I think its shortcomings are precisely what made the album appeal to people. It is a weird and hairy album. The musical choices, generally, were "first thought, best thought", and so none of the songs had a chance to become over-cooked or overwrought. I think, for this reason, it's my most unabashedly "pretty" album.
Were people immediately receptive to the idea of a violin-based album of indie rock, or did audiences take some convincing?
I think my homosexuality was, honestly, more of an obstacle for audiences to connect than the instrumentation. It was a different time in 2004–2005. I wouldn't say that people were more "homophobic," so much as it was more of a challenge for not-gays to connect with music made by gays. I felt this was a challenge for much of that decade; less so now, if at all.
Insofar as the violin is concerned, I did make a conscious effort to try and limit the amount of guitar that appeared on these albums. There's guitar on "Adventure.exe," "The Sea (Tenderizer)" and "What Do You Think Will Happen Next?" but I think that's it. I only really brought back my beloved guitar in 2020, on Island. I think I just wanted to force myself to try other things rather than work with what was comfortable.
Starting out, what was your frame of reference and influence for creating a type of indie rock centred on violin?
There weren't many. The biggest influence was Warren Ellis of Dirty Three. The opening track on Whatever You Love, You Are is effectively a live looped song, and it was one of the first songs I taught myself to play with the loop pedal. Warren's influence on me is different than you'd expect, though. Warren is a showman and a storyteller. I am neither of these things, I am nebbish and nerdy and clinical in both my personality and my music-making. I consciously elected to lean in to what made me different from him, and allow my music to be less "hellfire" and more "lecture hall."
When I mentally scroll down the list of songs on Has a Good Home, I generally think my inspiration mostly came from what the loop process — and recording mechanism — afforded me. "The Chronicles of Sarnia" was like, "What if we track thirty tracks of just tremolo?" "—>" was like, "What if we track four tracks of bariolage?" "This Is The Dream" was like, "What does backward col legno sound like?" "The Sea" was like, "What if I play the violin out on the porch in a rainstorm and then sing something over top?" And so on. It felt, at the time, like my options were endless.
The album is full of references to other media — the Postal Service and Arcade Fire on "This Is the Dream of Win & Regine," Narnia on "The Chronicles of Sarnia," a Mario melody on "An Arrow in the Side of Final Fantasy," and of course Final Fantasy with the band name. What was your thematic approach to the project, and the universe you were building with your reference points?
I am now 45 years old, so I was a teenager in the '90s. The fact that I knew how to use a computer made me an anomaly. I was into DOS games and fantasy novels. Being a nerd, especially a gay nerd, was decidedly a fringe existence, as a teen and a young adult. As a songwriter, I embraced these sides of myself, because I thought they were interesting. I thought it was interesting to sing songs set in fantasy worlds, or referencing fantasy worlds. It feels less special now, 20 years later, now that literally everyone is a gay nerd. This is fine with me — I love being able to play Magic cards with my friends who also suck dick.
Are there any qualities of Has a Good Home that you wish you had carried forward to subsequent albums?
I must acknowledge that Has a Good Home contains my most unabashedly pretty melodies; I wasn't trying to subvert them or make them slanted. The new songs I've been working on, like, right now, they've actually been referencing this style. I'm leaning into the natural beauty of my musical language rather than trying to write a polytonal song or "throw some Ligeti-style arrangements overtop. On Has a Good Home, my guard was down, and that's the aspect of it that I think I enjoy the most.
This album came out at a huge time for Canadian indie rock. What do you remember about the local scene at the time, and your role within that community?
To be honest, I felt very disconnected from Canadian indie rock. The Hidden Cameras and Arcade Fire, when I was playing with both bands, felt oddly niche compared to most Canadian indie bands. I didn't know the Broken Social Scene guys, or Metric, or Stars, or the New Pornographers. I wouldn't meet and become friends with those people until years later.
My scene was more local. I was very involved with Three Gut Records, playing with Royal City, Jim Guthrie Quintet and Gentleman Reg. I was very involved with Blocks Recording Club. It was local, fun stuff. I loved those years.
I will say that one of my earliest and most profound influences on my own songwriting is Dan Bejar of Destroyer. Your Blues is the brightest guiding star, for me. "There is a monument / There is a place within it I have won / And there is victory at sea / And then there's… the sun!" is without question the No. 1 lyric that I wish I'd myself had the honour of having written.
What's next for you?
Well, I built a compact and complicated new looping rig back in 2017 that integrated a post-effects process, so I could allow my songs to deteriorate or evaporate and so on.
That said, only this past year have I actually sat down and really started writing with the rig. I integrated a couple of interesting devices — in particular, a modular pedal made by Empress out of Ottawa called a ZOIA — which allows me to create synth sounds and drum loops using only my violin. I've revised my entire catalog of live material and am writing new songs at a ferocious pace. I met my FOH engineer last week and played for him, he was giggling with a big goofy grin about it all. "Everything is ear candy!" he told me.
I have a plan to record a new album over the next year. I'm taking some time away from the arrangement and production and film scoring. Lyrics are coming slower than usual on this one, but I'm not sweating it, I'm just putting the time in every day and it'll be finished when it's finished. Definitely no sooner than 2026. I hope people come to hear the new songs as I'm writing them, though — they're shaping up extremely well!