Alex Good was interviewed by Mark Kilfoil of CHSR FM on August 24th, 2018.
MK: Here’s a piece of music by Good Badger. This is the example of what he’ll describe as his “political music” as a composer, so stay tuned for the interview with Alex Good, otherwise known as Good Badger in this context. Here is “The Courage To Say Never.” < The Courage To Say Never by Good Badger plays> MK: It’s nice to meet you, Alex, here at the barracks. AG: Thanks Mark! MK: Explain to folks what you do and what you do here at the barracks this week. AG: Well I’m a composer. I’ve been invited to be one of the artists in residence from the Fredericton Arts Alliance, so I’m in one of the casemates here, and get to spend my time with a writer today and so he’ll be writing some of his travel works and I’ll be composing orchestral music. MK: So that’s an important thing to mention I think, because we’ve had all of the artists here, and when you say composer, you could be a composer of a painting or a composer of stories or artwork or structure or sculpture, but you’re a composer of music specifically. It’s been interesting to see the number of different musicians they’ve brought in; composers, creators… What was your thought about doing this sort of internship or work? Have you done this sort of thing before? AG: This is my first time with the Fredericton Arts Alliance, and so I was approached, and they mentioned the theme was going to be the Saint John River, and so I gave some thoughts about what I would like to do… MK: Don’t mind that folks, we’re outside. You can tell it’s a real interview in a real space. Screaming kids nearby. This is some of the stuff you have to deal with all day in the barracks, right? AG: Well yeah it’s pretty awesome, lots of different people coming though all the time. To get back to your question, my apologies, I took that request to use the theme of the Saint John River as a guide, and so I’ve been writing some orchestral music that I feel is representative of that river. MK: I think they’re doing work beside us as well. We’re not going to escape any of that noise, so folks at home please bear with us. So is it the visual element of the river that you decided was going to be what did it for you or listening to the river? The noise around (laughs)? I’m just kind of amazed; we were actually really quite quiet around three minutes ago, just before we sat down to start, and I’ve gotta wonder if this environment somehow makes it into your composition. AG: I’m sure that it does, yeah (laughs). To answer your question, I feel that the historical relevance of the river is the most important thing. There’s a new movement, as I’m sure that you know, to return the name of the river to its Indigenous name, and I fully support that; I think it’s a really great move to take. A really good step towards the resolution of conflict that is amongst or cultures right now, so I think that aspect has certainly come into it. All of my music has a certain element of politics in it; I always want it to be looking at our society and thinking “what do we need to change” or “what do we need to alter about those things?” MK: So what kind of background or elements did you include to get right mindset to do a composition like this? AG: I just completed an album that’s very electronic. It’s not dance music per se, but very much analog-synthesizer type sounds. And after a year of working on that album, I decided I wanted to do something completely different, so I brought in mostly orchestral sounds, and that’s been a great challenge and a great change back for me, in a sense. My background for me is a classical musician, I was trained as an opera singer, and after coming back to Fredericton, found composition and teaching was more my interest, so working with a virtual instrument, like the orchestra is my computer, I get all sorts of different opportunities that you normally wouldn’t find in a small room shared with another writer, so I don’t need to bring in an entire orchestra to do this kind of composition. MK: It’s interesting to me how good those virtual orchestras have become. At one point you could easily pick out a synthesized orchestra, but now it seems like it’s very close to the real thing. Do you intend this to be a production you create with that synthesized orchestra or one that you compose that you would bring to an orchestra and have it performed with them? AG: At this point it’s something that I would use on its own. I think if I got enough momentum behind it I would take it to one of the orchestras nearby in New Brunswick; the a great blessing of having two viable orchestras in the area. And like you said, the virtual instruments are getting much better. I don’t think that they’re perfect, and there is no way to make those perfect. At some level you will always be able to tell that some of the nuance is missing, so taking it to a true orchestra, albeit a very expensive procedure, is certainly going to be a better one. MK: I’ve got to imagine that, as a composer, there are certain… not limitations, but certain difficulties when it comes to actually seeing your work come to fruition, because if you’re a band, you’re usually composing for that size of a band, but a composer doesn’t think in terms of one or two people I would think; you’d think in terms of “I wanna have the equivalent of twenty strings here and ten brass over there, four drummers and an oboist somewhere.” How do you deal with that difficulty? Is it because you have these virtual instruments that you can just kind of manage it all yourself, really? Or is it always that difficulty of thinking in the big scale, but then having to scale it back? AG: I think the real challenge is to stay within a reasonable limit. With the world of virtual instruments, it’s very possible to go overboard and start including too much, and I think less is almost always more with an orchestra. What is meant by less is still relative, but for instance, if you think it one moment “oh, it would be great to have this strange, esoteric instrument here for just that moment,” you’re probably making a mistake because you wanna have a consistent sound all the way through. MK: So how did you come to be a composer? You said that you had done classical music and you were an opera singer. What happens that transforms you from someone who’s performing music, typically, I presume, by somebody else, to somebody who says “no, I need to take control of this.” AG: I think the fact that I’m a pretty high introvert has been the biggest part of that formation. I love working with groups, I love singing other people’s material, and then at the end of the day, I love working on my own, and as a singer, it’s tough to do things on your own. So I had to branch out in all sorts of different directions, but composition is something that someone as squirrelly as me can sit in their little corner and do on their own. MK: Well you say that, and here you are composing in public. AG: Yeah, that’s true. MK: What’s that been like? AG: Oh it’s been fantastic. I love the public, I love chatting with the public, and they’re genuinely interested in what I’m doing so I get some of the music I’m working on playing as I wiggle along and they ask questions. Some of the kids that come through are fascinated, and I love that because I bet a lot of kids these days don’t get the opportunity to hear someone composing live. Back in the day, composing had no sound. People would be sitting, writing at paper, and now we have the benefit of being able to hear things in the moment that you put it together. MK: So composing for you, is it an experiential process or is it a <indistinct> process? Is it a matter of playing with the sound until it feels right and then documenting it, or documenting the sound and then seeing what it sounds like. AG: That’s a good question. I think I start out by deciding what it is that I want to get out there. Like I said, a lot of my music has a very strong political element, so my previous album, which is called “Sapiophobic,” which is the fear of intelligence or wisdom, in that album I took a lot of quotes or speeches from prominent people in the political realm and set that to music. So either to show the fallacy of their arguments or to help bring out or imbeauty the speech that’s being said. So that for me is the most important part, was the overall emotional impact or feel, and for me the most important message to put across is it is possible to change the society that we’re in right now, although it feels bleak. MK: So did you start with those quotes and then build songs around them or did you build songs and then use the quotes as instruments? AG: I think I collected the quotes first and then started to write music that I thought would fit well with that, and then I inserted the quotes into it. MK: So your compositions, obviously they’re music on their own, but I know you’re also interested in film scoring. What’s that been like for you? AG: Oh that’s been fantastic. That’s my greatest love is writing for film. So I had the great pleasure last year of being able to work with Kirk Pennell, who is a videographer here in Fredericton. He had created his own film called We Are Characters Inc., and he and I met in Characters Inc., for those of us old enough to remember what that was. That was an acting/singing group in Fredericton who gained national and worldwide notoriety, so we were in that, and that group touched so many lives that he decided to do a documentary about the lives of those people. And I had the great blessing of being able to write music for that, which was fantastic and terrifying all at the same time. The main audience of that would’ve been all of my peers from junior high school. MK: I could see where that would be exciting though, to be able to show all your peers what you’ve done, but also, they’re your peers. They might remember knowing you the best. AG: Yeah, it was a great challenge. MK: So what did you receive in terms of direction for that? Was it something in terms of “here’s the film, please put a score to it” or was it something where you’ve got some ideas, you’re running it through it, and it may even effect the writing of the movie? How does that work out? AG: Well, Kirk and I are lucky. We’ve known each other for a long time, we have the same kind of aesthetic, we like the same kind of movies, he had a very 1980s Breakfast Club kind of feel that he was looking for and I got that instantly. Like I said before, I love writing with synthesizers and all of the analog 80’s sounds, so he was a very flexible director to work with. I think I was very lucky to start working with him, because if I was working with a stranger, he might have very very different desires. The way that works is they give you a general idea or a temp track to work from, and then you write something and they say “we love it” or “we don’t love it, try again.” So there were a few “try again’s” in this process, but for the most part, we really got each other well, I feel. MK: That’s really cool; I love the creative process and love to see all of these artists in different directions coming together to produce these things. What sort of pursuits are you looking for in that direction? Is it something where you would want to score a television show or a movie or documentaries? Is there a target for you in terms of where you’d like to see that go? AG: Yeah absolutely. My favourite genre is science fiction, so if I got picked up to do work on a sci-fi TV show, I would be on Cloud Nine. But I’m also not the time of person to sit and wait around for someone else to bring me an opportunity, so I’ve started doing a little bit of film making myself, made my first music video for the launch of my recent album, and that was a terrific experience. MK: Who did you work with for the video? Or was it all yourself? AG: I designed and created the concept all myself, and I just put out a call for actors willing to take part, and to my great surprise, there was a lot of people who came out and said “hey, we think that your project is a cool one, let’s do it.” And yeah, so I strapped a GoPro on the heads of a couple of these people and did a first person account of a woman’s life from birth to death, so some of the actors are gonna see their hands, they’re gonna see their feet, but you might not see their faces in the final cut. MK: Was that weird explaining to the actor that they might not actually be seen? AG: It was weird for me, but it wasn't weird for them because they’ve been through this process so much more than I have. Everything was new for me, and I kept trying to describe things in musical terms, and it was like “nope, that doesn’t make any sense.” MK: Entirely different vocabulary? AG: Absolutely. MK: So do you think that making films is going to be your pursuit into scoring films as well? AG: Well for the time being, I’m gonna continue making videos and short films myself. And I hate the exposure word. For both filmmakers and musicians, the exposure word makes everyone feel a little bit awkward, but making your own film is great exposure on that sense, and I would prefer to do that than to sit around and come my way. But at a certain point, you move up to the next level and move on. MK: Do you consider yourself to be multiple artists? Because you’ve mentioned, for example, the synthesizer music, and then you mentioned the filmmaking now, and you’ve mentioned the composing. Do you see those as all part of a whole or are they different brands of Alex? AG: Well, they might be different brands, but I have to switch so quickly between them that it just becomes my day-to-day. I music direct out of United Church, so I’m either playing the guitar there, I’m singing, I’m playing piano, I’m directing the choir. Then I leave and I teach voice piano, ukulele, those sorts of things. And then I’m composing, so I’m constantly changing hats, which I love. I think I would get bored if I was just doing one of those things. MK: It seems appropriate that you also do all of the parts of the music. You’re sitting in every orchestra seat as well as the composer and the conductor seat as well. What instruments do you play? AG: Well, like I said, trained as a vocalist, so that’s my first thing. I play keyboards and piano, ukulele and acoustic guitar, and occasionally my band will let me bring out the harmonica. MK: So what’s it like then to be essentially creating a violinist with your keyboard or creating a cellist? Was it because of your previous experience with them, with actual cellists and brass and so forth, that informs you about how to make that sound proper? Or is it that you understand the structure of the music, and therefore it doesn’t matter the instrument in some way? AG: Well, it’s all a mysterious journey as I see it. I don’t consider myself an expert at using the orchestra; it would be foolish for anyone, I think, who’s not 90 years old to call themselves an expert of that. Every time I listen through what I’m doing, I get more hints, and I’m constantly listening to the greats, to what they’re trying to accomplish with their music. MK: And so far, while you’ve been working here, we spoke (this is the second attempt at the interview; we had some mechanical problems yesterday, but you mentioned you had completed six minutes of your latest composition. How long do you envision that composition to be? Is there a set sort of goal? Or is there a sense of acts or something like that in the pieces you’re writing? AG: There’s definitely sections to it. Right now I’ve done tow sections fo the work so far, I would say in general it’s going to be twenty to twenty-five minutes all up, and that’s pretty normal for a symphonic work. Like the river, I decided that instead of trying to map everything out I’m just gonna go along with it and see where it takes me, and I think for this time, that’s going to work really well. MK: So what’s it been like having different artists of different mediums around you, kind of working on the same basic theme, at least? AG: Well I’ve loved it. We can all kind of bounce ideas off of each other. Up until yesterday, Derek Davidson was in the casemate with me, he’s a painter. Working alongside him as he’s painting has been terrific. Today, Mark Jarman is in there, he’s a writer. He’s writing some travel writing, so it’s been great getting to know him as well. MK: And you just had the album release for Sapiophobic, which we should say the artist name on that is Good Badger, which is quite a delight to say as well. So do you expect to continue with that line of music for a while or is that on hold while you work on this composition? Or do you switch back and forth all the time? AG: I think I’ll keep switching back and forth. I don’t suspect if I were to approach, say, Symphony NB, to see if they wanted to perform my orchestral piece, I don’t think I would say it’s by Good Badger; I’ll say that for my analog synth-type music. But I love jumping back and forth, I love jumping on different hats and working in different genres all the time. MK: Sounds like fun. Where can more people find out about your music and follow what you’re doing? AG: Well my website is alexgoodmusic.com, you can find all of the info and all of the different links on there. The album itself is on Bandcamp, so if you go to my album, it’s right there on the homepage, you can take a look. MK: Sounds great Alex, thanks for joining me. AG: Thank you very much. Listen to the full interview here.
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