Around the corner from Denver's Larimer Lounge (coincidentally the venue that's hosted the last three artists I've interviewed here), there's a funny little bench (hidden behind the van here, but I tried) that gives the impression of an old-school talk show set - it's really wide, but with two distinct seats that are slightly turned to face each other. It's there that I had the below chat with Meghan Remy, perhaps better known as the frontwoman of U.S. Girls. It was extremely pleasant in the exact way that her music is - a little bit kitsch, a little bit all over the place, and entirely too much to process in a single sitting. It's the first interview that I've enjoyed transcribing in some time, partially because the audio was quite clear but mostly because it was a treat to revisit.

I stuck around for the show afterwards (obviously), discovering in the process that U.S. Girls's touring personnel has somehow swelled to a nine-piece band covering every conceivable instrument. The songs ranged from relatively rote to nearly unrecognizable, sharing the common thread of being incredibly well-suited for a club environment and deserving of far more than the crowd of 50-odd people. Given the opportunity, I'd probably see them every night for a week straight.

Anyway, here's the requisite clip of Meg talking. I've realized that I almost have more unpublished interviews than I do weeks of The Hip Replacement remaining in which to publish them, so there'll be a bunch more of these over the next month or two.

Political art can take a couple of forms - protest, commiseration, etc. Do you think of your music as having a particular bent in that regard?

No, no so much - for me it’s just so personal. If it could reach anybody, that would be icing on top of the cake or whatever. For me, first and foremost, it’s for my own mental health… trying to sort through everything so that I can continue living on this planet [laughs]. And when you’re reading about something or starting to put pieces together about certain structures or situations, for me it’s impossible to not want to talk about it. It’s like having a secret that you’re dying to tell or something, really good gossip. And I feel like I don’t have any other choice at this point; with the way things are, I couldn’t imagine making work that wasn’t commenting on this stuff. And it’s not even that thought out as trying to be a protest or generate some movement from other people or something, it’s just that this is all I can do.

I guess it’s reasonable to say that any sort of personal expression is political by default at this point.

Sure. I do think that the personal is political. But I want it to go a step further, beyond just being a person looking in the mirror. We can’t just be islands - if you’ve seen Century of the Self, the Adam Curtis documentary series, it’s about the beginning of PR and how Freud’s nephew is the one who kind of invented PR and how it went on to be used to promote war and sell war and sell cigarettes and how that then created a century of selves. Which is kind of how we got where we are.

On the topic of releasing music for primarily personal benefit, I read that you’d shopped Half Freearound a bit before the 4AD deal came through last minute. Do you think there are tangible advantages to involving a label in the process?

I think the advantages are mostly just signal boost, which can then translate to more opportunities and more money to make more work. Or it allows for other artists to find out about you that you then get to collaborate with. But there are also huge disadvantages as well, which I wasn’t aware of at the time. I was definitely naive about how the music business works. And I think I thought that because I had pretty much gotten to 4AD’s doorstep by hard work and just playing a ton of shows that it would work differently for me. But nothing’s as it seems anywhere, and especially not with a label that’s part of a conglomerate that sells Adeles.

With all culture, we want to believe that it sprung up on its own, that it was simply discovered, but that’s rarely the case.

At least if you’re satisfied with the effect that making music has on yourself, you don’t have to feel like you’re selling out or something.

No, I don’t feel like that at all - I just feel like I’ve been schooled over the past two albums in terms of how things work on a larger scale. But I’ve tried to ignore that as well, and just continue doing my own thing, operating how I always have. But I think that’s how I was made aware of this, because my way of working isn’t what people who are looking to make money really want.

Do you think that you’re still able to release the albums that you want to?

Yeah, you know the label will make comments and things, but that too is really only a matter of how you greet those comments. I’ll listen to anyone’s comment, and if I find it valid then I’ll take it into consideration. But I’m still the boss at the end of the day. I would never do something specifically to please the label. I think they actually don’t respect that - even if they respect that you folded to them, I think deep down they’ll still see you as weak or something. And then make more suggestions. Whereas this time around on the new record they didn’t say anything, because I think they knew that… they trusted me.

I think it depends on your age and stuff too - if you’re a 21 year old kid or something and you’re working with 4AD, you’d be more inclined to try and please your label. Because you wouldn’t understand that without you there is no label, you know what I mean? I think that’s something that comes with age.

Especially if you’re picked up as a talent rather than an established artist. Going back to the idea of reading something that you want to repeat, I noticed a trend of auteurship over the last couple of albums. Rage of Plastics is a cover, and then you had the Gloria Ann Taylor sample on Window Shades. What moves you to want to cover something?

I mean with Rage of Plastics I just think that’s a perfect song. I’m jealous of that, I wish I had written it. It could be a film, it could be a novel, it could be a TV special. It’s really a perfect piece of work.

My inclination to sample something or cover just comes from my admiration for the original, and wanting to spread the word about the original. It’s that same thing, good gossip. Like holy shit, nobody knows about this Gloria Ann Taylor thing, everyone should hear it.

You’re not from Canada but you’ve lived there for a while, right?

Yeah, almost eight years now in Toronto.

What drew you there originally?

I fell in love with a Canadian, which is what got me there originally. I had been living in Philadelphia and thinking about moving to Belgium. I’d been working with a Belgian label at the time and touring in Europe quite a bit, and I really wanted to get out of the States. I’d had it. And then I meet a Canadian, who’s the guitar player in the band and has been on all these albums with me since 2010 - Max Turnbull. And that kind of sealed the deal! I met Max the same night I met one of his really close friends, Louis Percival. And meeting both of them, two people that were as obsessed and crazy about music as I was… I started going to visit them in Toronto, and then I went and stayed for - I was only supposed to stay for like a month or two or something, and ended up just staying indefinitely. It wasn’t even like I fell in love with the city, it was the people that I was meeting there that I fell in love with.

Toronto’s a huge place, the fourth or fifth largest city in America. There are so many different music pockets going on, and I’ve been able to dip into a lot of them for this new record in particular. It just became a no brainer as I became enmeshed in the music scene there and realized that if I went through the process of immigration I could get healthcare. I could get grants for doing music or art. Max and I got married in 2012, and I applied for permanent residency and got it a year and a half later. The first grant I applied for was a $4000 film grant to make a short film, which I got through the Toronto Arts Council. If you have a good idea and are willing to put in the work to prove that idea and how you’re going to execute it, you pretty much get the money. It’s unheard of down here.

The plot of Rage of Plastics reminded me of this book In the Skin of a Lion, the Michael Ondaatje book. It’s all industrial era Toronto, and between that and my one visit to Toronto involving a show at Hearn Generating Station -

I was at that! Did you see Sunn O)))?

Not that year, I think it was Tim Hecker and Ben Frost. It was the 2015 show.

That was crazy.

So all that’s given me the impression of Toronto as very post-industrial, not in the sense that it’s super advanced but more that you’re in essentially the grave of this big industrial zone.

Particularly where you were along the water, there’s a lot of that. Toronto is so new - they tore down all their history, and it’s all poorly-made condos now. That’s actually something that I miss about being in the States, seeing all the history of a city. But they erased it there, due to feeling like they’re in a race trying to compete with US cities. It’s really a shame, because the history there is - was - so rich. But I mean everywhere’s doing that. I don’t know if you’re really preserving the history if you’re keeping a building but turning the inside into whatever this stuff is around here. No one’s learning about what was in there before. I think it just signals a lack of curiosity.

I’ve always thought of music being catchy and being pop as one and the same, but I was reading a previous interview where you said that you were trying to write catchy songs for Half Free but didn’t consider it a poppy record.

I think a band like Suicide makes really catchy songs that get stuck in your head, but they’re not poppy per se. But they could be interchangeable. I just don’t think of pop as a flat term - it could be taken to mean commercial, it could be taken to mean catchy, it could be taken as what you think of as light or bubblegum-y. With this new record, we definitely went all the way pop. We were working in the pop form, really touching and over-producing the vocals so that they’re almost synthetic. I think with Gem we went halfway there, kind of glam pop but not really mainstream forms. I always wanted to do that, from loving Mariah Carey and r’n’b things. I don’t think this is a record that would be played on the radio per se, but we went as far as we could while maintaining integrity with our little budget.

It’s funny how many people I’ve heard say they basically always wanted to make a Mariah Carey album. Is there something in particular driving you in that direction? Your career’s been on a pretty consistent trajectory that way.

I mean I think I’m possibly emerging towards the end of my music era. I started at the bottom of an oil barrel, unlistenable experiments in sound and now it’s this very crisp thing because I think I’m getting ready to retire. I want to work in different mediums as a focus more so. But I think I had something to prove still, to myself and with my collaborators. Could we take it even farther out? Everything before still had a foot in the avant garde, or was geared towards a crate digger’s ears, but this is like would your mom be ok with this if you put it on in the car?

Regarding having something left to prove, do you have any particular sources of external validation? Or a response that you like to see people have?

Just the people whose work that I like, close friends and things. I like hearing their perspective on the work that I’ve made. It’s something that I take very seriously. And then doing these shows for the last two weeks, seeing people in the audience singing along is very validating. Just because I can picture myself in their position, all the times I’ve sung along at shows and couldn’t believe that I was seeing a song I like performed live.

It’s funny how as you’ve moved through scenes there’s also been a shift in the default mode of appreciation in a live environment.

Yeah, for sure. The shows I played when I first started out… noise shows are either an environment for hedonistic sort of expression or a more art gallery setting where there’s no reaction at all. You’d go up and do your thing, then you would step down [laughs]. These shows are definitely more fun.

How is that as a performer? The stoic black turtleneck crowds.

I’m into all of it, I’m into performing no matter what the setting is. Sometimes the more tough or rigid an audience is, the more compelled I am to fuck with them.

Your album art and the music video work you do always seems to have very specific inspirations or influences. Knowing nothing about film I can’t really call it out, but are you generally looking to reference or recreate specific things?

I do most of the videos, or edit them if I don’t direct them. It’s been that way since 2010 or something. And yeah, it’s new for me too in terms of my life - it wasn’t really until I moved to Toronto that I got into film. But I think the re-creation thing is spot on; I think through music, through my collage work, through everything I’ve ever done it’s always been some sort of re-creation. Re-creation through the filter of my perspective. It’s our experience of things that makes them new - we’re living in the post-post-post-whatever, where everything already exists and we’re stuck in a simulation or a loop or whatever else. That’s how you make new things - burying yourself in it fully and honestly.

Everything to come out of Half Free seemed to share a common visual thread, while with the new album all of the videos have been incredibly distinct - was that conscious in either case?

I think Half Free - it just had to do with me making all of the videos. A lot of them were shot on film, Super 8. A couple of them were made with me and my sister-in-law, which links them together.

Now that I think about it, I guess it’s not even a specific influence so much as them coming from the common headspace of wherever you were during that particular album cycle. Do you think of music videos as having a specific function besides the obvious practical/promotional stuff?

I think it’s because the content of the songs that I work on is dense, or that there’s a lot to digest, I see the music videos as a visual aid to kind of assist in helping people to understand or open their mind to what I’m trying to say. Almost like cue cards in a way, trying to get people interested in finding out what the lyrics are. But the internet runs the business, and the internet is a nasty, starving machine that constantly needs to be fed. It’d be one thing if you were someone really high status - Scott Walker doesn’t need to make fucking music videos, he’s established and can do whatever he wants. Me, working with 4AD, I have no choice. I think if I didn’t make them then someone else would, and that’s my biggest fear - having no control over the visual representation of my music. I don’t want to control how the songs are digested, but I wouldn’t want someone to take things in a totally wrong direction. I’m open to someone else’s idea of what the song is, but it can’t be what I really don’t think the song was.

I imagine it’s also cool to have a de facto outlet for releasing your film work.

Yeah, it’s another opportunity to make work. That’s how I learned how to use film cameras and edit, and what jumpstarted me thinking in that medium at all. I’m grateful for it.

You said that your process is at odds with the label’s… maybe not expectations, but their ideal signee. How would you explain your process?

I don’t know how I’d explain it. Again, it’s so connected to my mental health. For me, the more busy I am and the more projects I have going on the more level I am and not swinging around manically. To have a list of things to do is very grounding for me, and it keeps me focused on life and what matters, and time and how time doesn’t matter. It keeps it light for me. My process is not commerce-driven, which is where it’s at odds with the label. It’s hard to be making something with no concept of money and then have to sell it. It’s more work than if you were thinking about how it would be sold the entire time. It’s not ready-made at all.

Are there specific projects in new mediums that you feel like music is preventing you from working on currently?

I really want to write and put on a play. I’m really interested in that, and I think the music connects with that - a lot of the lyrics are dialogue, and the skits on some of the albums are kind of in that direction. Performing is very theatrical for me too, and in the past few years I’ve learned what a body can do on a stage and what your face can convey. Leaving a stage and coming back onto it, simple things. I want to explore that more, but you can only do so much of it in a musical setting. Unless you’re like a David Bowie or something, where you say I’m putting on a play now and everybody goes crazy. I can’t be at South by Southwest putting on my fucking play [laughs]. And you have to be in the same space every night, it’s not conducive to this kind of touring. I have to attempt to make enough money in music so that I have some time to take off and then do that. Or apply for a grant and do it that way. It’ll happen - I’ll be 33 in the summer, and I’ve done enough already that I’m not too worried.

That’s a tremendously broken system, that you have to get enough cachet in whichever medium happens to take off for you to be able to branch out into others that you might find more interesting.

Yeah, you can diversify the brand but you have to establish the brand first. It’s bullshit.

Is it hard to maintain any sort of performative consistency when you’re switching venues every night?

For me, what’s interesting about it is showing up each night to the space and seeing what the layout is - there’s this high platform up front that I can climb onto, or it has an exit through the front of the stage that I can take and then return from a back hallway. It’s interesting because something changes every night and makes it almost improvised, but that’s the only way. I’d love to do stuff where we were changing outfits between songs or a travelling setup for lights. We do the best with what we have, and mostly what we have is our body.

Do you have a sort of platonic ideal of a venue for the performance of particular albums or songs?

I don’t know, actually. Sometimes the room is shitty and you can’t hear anything, but the vibe is right - you walk off the stage and feel like you’ve achieved something even though everything was working against you. It’s the stars or something, I can’t even say. An ideal setting would be a place with a green room and a nice mirror and food. You can stay back there the whole time and remain mysterious, so when you come out you can put on a whole thing and leave without anyone seeing you again. They’re left with just your performance. Smaller clubs, you’re out in front being your regular old self in your pajamas or whatever and then you’ve got to go and get dressed and put on a show for the people that you’ve been sitting around with in the bar all night. It can be a mindfuck and it can be embarrassing, but then you’ve driven twelve hours and you have to get your ya-yas out, get on stage and just go crazy.

Do you prefer the idea of an artist’s persona being minimized beyond live performance and a recorded body of work?

I don’t know, I go back and forth on that all the time. A lot of times persona pisses me off, and I think it’s really fake. It can be perceived that the persona is better than the audience, that there’s some kind of hierarchy. I don’t like that element of it, and I don’t like calling meanness a persona either. But artfulness can be interesting. I’ve got a stage persona, but it’s still just me. Just an amplified version of myself that I can’t act like in day-to-day life.

Are you able to get as much from performing something night after night as you do from the process of creating and refining the track or performing it for the first time?

Yeah, I think performing it night after night is the best. It’s the best way to grow it, it’s a way to change it from how it was recorded, you’re gonna change the way you’re singing it. Nuances are gonna develop due to the live setting. Especially with as many musicians as we have on this tour, we’ve got shows through May and these songs will be different things by then. You can get so comfortable in a song that you begin to make yourself uncomfortable in it to make it exciting for yourself again. That’s when things get really fun. Things grow. It would just be boring for it to be the same. You made something on a record and that’s one period in time; that can’t really be reproduced.