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On a trip to Paris, France in 2005 (which I’m still paying for, no thanks to my credit cards), I spent a good portion of the trip sampling albums at the listening stations in different record stores. After hearing them many times over the loudspeakers, I ended up with the debut from a band I had never heard of before called The Servant. I didn’t hear much about them after returning to the states, and, over time, completely forgot about their record buried in my collection.

A few months ago, I come across a track with Kid Cudi called “Symphonies” by an English singer named Dan Black. The voice sounded very familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Turned out it was the same singer from the record I had randomly purchased in Paris years earlier. The point is, I was surprised – even more so by how incredible the track was. Black has recently entered the spotlight in the US thanks to that remix (including covering Billboard), and he took time yesterday out of his first official American tour to answer some questions about Paris, Launchpads, dirty fingers, and wonky pop.

Where are you calling from?
Lower East Side, New York.

What are you wearing?
::Laughs:: What kind of call is this?! I’m wearing a t-shirt with like metal holes in it – like, holes where they put rivets. jeans, and, what do you call them? Sneakers, I guess. Big Airwalk sneakers. And headphones! When I’m not talking, I’m trying to do some work.

I first heard of The Servant in early 2005 while I was in Paris. Where were you guys at during that time? Were you still happy in the band?
Wow. 2005. So, let me have a think…where were we at that time? That was 5 years ago, aye?

I think that was right after the self titled album came out.
Oh, yeah! So, yeah, at that point I was kind of…you know, it wasn’t all bad. Yeah, I was happy at that point. I think, in general. I was happy to tolerate the things that were annoying. The gains outweighed the losses at that point.

Was it a bad break-up?
It got bad, yeah. It got worse ::laughs::

What were your reasons for wanting to go solo?
When I began the band it was me on my own. Like what I’m doing now. It was me on my own with a computer. There were certain things I wanted to explore and do. Then the guys came in to help me play live, and I was very complicit and receptive to it. But we became a band, and it was much more like, “We want to play more instruments and we want to have more creative input.” And I was like “OK, let’s do that.” But it always felt, ultimately, like it was a continual compromise. Like, “What can we four live with,” as opposed to “What do we all four passionately think is brilliant?” It felt pointless. And, also, certain people were extremely negative, and I did the lion’s share of the work – in terms of production, I wrote everything, all the promotion…I was kind of doing most of it alone. They would basically turn up and play shows, yet they would make the creative process very difficult. I tired of spending two weeks on a song, coming in, starting to play and 30 seconds in someone saying, “I don’t like it, do something else.” I got bored of that.

It’s a compromise.
Yeah, and questioning things. Now I get to pursue what I think is good. It’s better for one person to say “I think it’s really good” then to have four people going “Pfft, it’s OK.”

Why did you move to Paris? Was that sort of a symbolic ‘going solo’ type of thing?
::Laughs:: I’m gonna go solo and go to Paris! No, it was more, well, obviously, The Servant spent most of the time touring outside of the UK. All of the places we kind of really kicked off, connected with people, were in other places…I was always away, I was never in my apartment in London. I was spending more and more time in Paris doing that, and I hadn’t been to London for months. It was more me basically accepting. “Hey, look at that, you live in Paris!”

Does a part of you wish you could have kept the Biggie lyrics on “Symphonies,” or are you happy with the lyrics that you wrote?
I particularly like the lyrics I wrote. I’m particularly proud of the process. The intention was to use “HYPNTZ” as a single, and it had gotten to the point where it had gone to radio, radio was about to start playing it, and it was the night before the video shoot when word came through from the Biggie estate saying, “You can’t use these lyrics.” It was a really massive nightmare. Lots of people freaking out.

It was pretty much the last second that they pulled those on you?
Yeah, exactly. The last possible moment. So, I said “Look, I’ll re-record it and write my own lyrics.” So, I wrote about the situation. The song kind of captures how the whole process of making the record was. It was a big black cloud, but the way the lyrics and…the way it turned out was kind of a silver lining. It was horrible at the time, but now I wouldn’t really change it. I prefer it, to be honest.

So, the Kid Cudi remix came about on the internet with you guys exchanging emails?
Yeah, exactly. It was very simple.

When did you guys actually meet for the first time?
When we shot the video. There was a video already for “Symphonies,” and we sort of re-shot parts of it to include him. And the day of the shoot was when I met him. We shot it in New York, came over, and he was free, so it was quite a last second thing. He’s a very cool guy.

I saw the Justintimberlake.com interview that you did recently, and you had mentioned that you were a bit nervous about collaborating with someone after working alone for so long on this record. Are you more open now to collaborating with more people?
Yeah. I haven’t really begun much for the second record, but I’m doing a lot of stuff – partly just production for people and writing for people. Like, when you called me, I was on my laptop finishing up something for a collaboration. So, at the moment, I’m sort of swamped at the other end of the spectrum. I mean, I still find it difficult, partly because I think I’m so scarred from all of the previous projects I was in. But you know, no man’s an island. When it works, it’s really exciting. Now that I’ve indulged me working totally on my own to an extreme, I feel more free to let other people come in and put their dirty fingers all over my stuff.

For the next record, do you have a dream list of people you’d like to work with?
I’m torn. I’m doing lots of collaborating now, but I might end up going to work on my record and going back to being totally selfish. I’m not sure yet. I haven’t really thought…well, I’ve thought a lot about the record, but I haven’t thought about whether I need to be on my own or not. The thing I want to do is to keep…I want to use an analogy of a palette. When I did the first album, I had a palette – like a painter’s palette – with many, many colors in it. There was no limit to what I was letting myself have access to and play with. I was like, “OK, any color I wanna use, I’m gonna let myself use.” Where as now, I’m trying to have fewer things to use to try and make a record work, a very narrow set of colors. Whatever those colors are, whether it’s that drum machine, this synth, and that’s it, to try and build songs within that frame work.

You’re on your first US tour right now, right?
Kind of, yeah.

Are there any differences you notice playing for an American audience?
Yes. Well, the thing that I’m always aware of is that you can’t really generalize countries. Like for example, you play two different venues in Paris, and they’re totally different shows. Totally different crowds come. We did two shows in LA. One at Cinespace, and one at Spaceland, and the shows were so different. And they were one day after the other, and they were like a 20 minute drive from each other. A 10 minute drive. Yet, the vibe and the crowd and the whole thing was so different. The more you get into it, the more you’re like, “Wow.” The things that are common are how much the audience makes the show. That’s true everywhere. If people come and they want it to be a cool show, they’re gonna have to get into it. You can’t just stand in the back with your arms folded and go, “Come on then, impress me.” You’ve gotta let go and get into it. And that’ true of me too. Sometimes it’s hard to get into that state, but yeah. The difference between two different venues in one city is quite big, so the difference between San Diego and…we just played a show in Albany…is really big.

I was watching live footage from SXSW, and was wondering what that piece of equipment is that you were using to start the loops for “Symphonies.”
Ah! It’s called a Launchpad by a company called Ableton. It’s a controller for their software, which is called Live. I brought two laptops with different bits and pieces in them, and these controllers, Launchpads, are just a different way of controlling it. So I can push buttons and it will launch a loop, or I can use a set of lights to control a filter or control an effect. I can drop a sample, loop it, chop it up. Basically it just gives you a way of performing the live electronic music that’s kind of connected for the audience. It’s something that makes it live, as opposed to coming from machines. There’s less randomness. Like, with a guitar, every time you hear it it’s gonna sound slightly different. You’d have to build a very complicated robot to try and reproduce it. With electronic music, there’s a point when you need to bring something random, and you need these controllers to make a connection with the audience. There’s nothing more boring than watching a guy, or guys, just hunched over laptops while music’s going on. The thing that’s wonderful about a live show, on a very basic level, is making a visual connection with what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing. Making a link between what these people are doing and going, “Wow, when that guy hits his guitar, it goes PLANG.” That’s something really deep and simple, and that’s a really satisfying thing to experience; to see it and hear it all at the same time. I try to bring some of that to electronic music using these controllers, because people can make a visual link with what they’re hearing and what I’m doing. That’s partly why live shows are fun.

How do you feel about this “Wonky Pop” category that you’re in?
No one talks about this genre of wonky pop. It’s a nightclub in London. I’ve played there a couple of times, and it’s called Wonky Pop. The artists that have played there are all quite different. It always annoys me to a certain degree when people try to come up with labels of what they are. That’s how humans are. To make sense of the random world around us, we like to put little boxes around stuff. This is shoegaze. And this is whatever…grind. I don’t mind the words “wonky” or “pop.” They don’t sound alien to me. There’s a certain wonky quality to me, and there’s definitely pop in what I do. But is there really a genre of wonky pop? I don’t think so.

What’s next for Dan Black?
On my calendar, lots of continuing collaborations, touring and touring, writing, a lot of exciting things I’m hoping will work out and be released, lots of interesting things with other artists, trying not to go crazy with these ridiculous schedules. But yeah, doing my best to enjoy it. These things can be fleeting, so I’m savoring the mouth fulls.