PURITY RING INTERVIEW
By Alexander Laurence
Three years ago, Purity Ring released their first album
Shrines, and the internet blew up. This previously unknown Canandian duo of Megan James and Corin Roddick found
themselves on a two year world tour offering up their own brand of sugary pop,
witch house, and electronic goth.
A year has passed and we have seen a lot of Purity Ring
soundalikes and electronic duos popping up internationally. Purity Ring has
been hibernating in Edmonton and
creating a sequel album called Another Eternity, to remind us why we all fell
in love with them the first time.
Megan: It was backwards for us. We had tours planned when we
only had six songs written. That was how the internet was at the time. We grew
out of being posted on blogs rather than touring. The next step is to grow from
touring as well. There has been a shift in focus. As much as Purity Ring came
out of nowhere for you, it also came out of nowhere for us.
Megan: Corin was a drummer and a studio engineer. He had a recording
space in Edmonton . It was easy to
start Purity Ring, because we had the means in place. I was living in Halifax
and working at a lingerie shop. I would go back to Edmonton
in the summer and do some landscaping for my dad. I have always made clothes. I
have sewed thing and sell them at different places. I didn’t think I would be
doing music. I wouldn’t change things for the world. We are now touring the
world and playing shows with our friends.
Megan: We were planning the live show when we were writing
our second and third songs. We had an idea how we play it, and some of those
ideas we continue to do. You start with some ideas and it shifts and changes. It
was important that we didn’t have Corin standing behind a computer and me
singing. Corin is a drummer. So we had to think of a way for him to play live
drums and not just play the same thing on a keyboard. We built this midi
controller that would light up.
Megan: It’s the easiest iteration of a band, due to social
genderization and performative aspects of a female fronted band, because that
gets more attention, and a male producer. That is very natural to happen. Now
it’s suddenly changing. The musical landscape is very exciting right now.
Megan: People hear a lot of influences in our music and it’s
often bands that are newer than we are. Maybe they are bigger? It’s always
weird to see those comparisons. I don’t feel relative to other bands: I don’t
go into the studio and think “this is what we want to sound like.” It’s always
filtering out what we don’t want, rather than what we do. We want every musical
idea to be fully expressed. We want the world inside our heads to be fully
expressed.
Megan: We are never mentioned when journalists write about
them, but they are always mentioned in relation to us. I pay attention to music
in general, but I don’t pay attention to those specific bands. I am not
following a business model. It seems like whenever there is a female on the
vocals and a male on the production side, our band comes up. I am waiting for
that to change. I am involved with the production. There are a lot of women are
visually more involved with the production. We get slotted in with them. It’s
often how you appear and not what you sound like.
Megan: We have always done pop music. Shrines was our
iteration of pop music, and that is where we want to be as terms of writing. I
don’t think we are in the same boat as other indie bands. I feel insecure
sometimes because I don’t pay attention to most music. I don’t relate to most
music. There are so few records that inspire me. I want to do popular music and
I want to have a career.
Megan: There are a lot of poets and artists that I have a
huge affection for. I don’t know if I am inspired by them or if I relate to
them. My writing is so much inside my head. I am not thinking about other
things besides what is inside my head. I have an affinity for W. B. Yeats and a
lot of poets of that era. When I write, I am trying to write my own historical
record, not biography. I am writing about my own religion and my own scriptures
and beliefs. I was raised in a very religious world, and I felt like I never
really fit in with that, so my writing is a form of fitting in with my world.
Megan: People leave Edmonton ,
but it’s very vibrant city and changing all the time. I love Blues music. I
love Leadbelly and a lot of old songs. I have a tendency towards Blues
melodicism. I don’t know if that comes out on the records. I think that writing
is scriptural and testimonial. It’s a way of witnessing existence.
Megan: That is sweet. I love magic and the parables of
witches. Those are great images. There are some acceptable metaphors in those
stories for me. I can feel a lot in them. It’s not very far off from where I
am.
Megan: I feel fierce onstage. It is empowering because it is
what I am expressing. I have to be mean and cruel. It’s scary. I am expressing
emotions like anger and frustration.
Megan: No. I have nerves. It’s not how I act every day, but
it is a way that I feel natural onstage. It’s what happens when the show
starts. There is feistiness to it. I am in survival mode. It’s what my nerves
do to me.
Megan: I don’t see us playing with guitar bands. We have
played a number of different festivals. I think there are a lot of in-between
examples of those two examples. I would prefer a mixture of both because I
don’t think that we fit in with either of those. We have elements in our music
which would be adaptable to some festivals. I am never comfortable at a
festival because I don’t see how we fit in sometimes. But both of those suck.
We will only play at night. We played at Primavera Sound and after that we
realized that we should never play during the day. We have not played certain
festivals because they wanted us to play during the day.
Megan: Honestly we have never put any recipes on our rider,
but we have put ingredients on it to make guacamole. I feel bad for Jack White
since that happened. His rider is nowhere near as severe as some of the riders
out there. And it probably makes sense because he has a crew of twenty people. His
group are probably on tour and away from home for eight months of a year. They
look forward to having some good food backstage and in the green room. It keeps
them sane. Also I was shocked how low the guarantee was. It seems low for an
artist like Jack White who has been around a while.
Megan: There are so many unflattering pictures of me online.
Oh my god! I am very human. I like shitty pictures of me. I can’t prevent it. I
don’t want to make it everyone’s job to prevent that. I don’t think I am
particularly photogenic. Just showing the mistakes is part of our image. Looking
amazing all the time is not important to me.
Megan: That’s fun. I can do that that now. It took me a long
time to feel comfortable for someone else do my makeup and hair. It’s a
learning process. If I look like this, I have to say these things, or I will
look like everyone else in a magazine. I have an interest in the fashion world.
Not as a model, but making clothes.
AL: As far as being on the 4AD record label: do you like any
of the 1980s 4AD bands like Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, or do you follow
newer bands they have like Ariel Pink?
Megan: We had a lot of choices for labels. 4AD seemed like
the best fit. I had never listened to Cocteau Twins before, but God, do I love
that band now. They are so good. We liked the history of 4AD but we weren’t too
concerned about the sound. It was more important that we had a Canadian label
first.
Megan: I think there are really only two: Danny Brown and
Jon Hopkins. I didn’t do the Lady Gaga remix. That was all Corin. I sang on the
Jon Hopkins track, and Corin didn’t have much to do with that. But we label it
all as Purity Ring activity.
Megan: Maybe like a harpist. We are not too interested in
having any musicians onstage. We are not too interested in writing songs with
other people. On the first record, we did have the band Young Magic on the
track “Grandloves.” It made the song better. It’s all about making the best
thing, and the thing that is representative of you.
Megan: Yeah. That was our first time. It was terrifying. After
we finished I went backstage and started crying. People came to greet us and I
was bawling my eyes out. There was so much stress. That was exhilarating I
guess, and scary. It was a magical thing to do. We haven’t done any shows for a
year and a half. And the first thing we do is on fucking national television.
Megan: Not really. The thing that Corin was playing: we will
have that on tour, because we have just finished making that. But there will be
a bunch more things going on for the tour. There are so many rules for playing
on TV. Most bands don’t have their full set up for TV. We haven’t finished the
production side of our live show.
Megan: Yeah, there are weird vibes at festivals. There is a
different set of vulnerabilities. If someone does or says something sexist I
will stop the song and say “Okay, who was that?” We can stop a song a start
from the beginning. It is fine if I can call out someone for their bad
behavior. I can publicly shame someone who deserves it.
Megan: We will still play “Fineshrine” and Lofticries.” At
the end of the first album tour we were tired of playing the same songs. We had
done the same set for two or three years. At this point we are excited to be on
tour again. It won’t be hard to play old songs when we are playing a bunch of
new ones too.
Purity Ring plays the Fonda in Hollywood on Friday, May 8th 2015.
