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Dan Boeckner spills the beans about his post-Wolf Parade project.

If you haven't heard of Dan Boeckner, there's still a good chance you've heard him. In the last decade, Boeckner's bands have consisted of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits, and most recently Operators—a synth-driven project that seems to rise above the fluff with straightforward, impressive pop songs. The hype surrounding Operators isn't overnight buzz, but a frequency that's been meticulously shaped over several months as the band’s toured with big names like New Pornographers and Future Islands, all with only an EP under their belt. Two years later, their debut is out. Blue Wave avoids extremes—nothing too ambient or ethereal, nothing too glittery pop-perfect. Instead, it's sturdy beats and incredibly danceable.

Here are 10 things you should know about Operators and the man behind the band, Dan Boeckner.



Dan is a Workaholic

"When I came up record sales were sliding, and now 10 years later, they're potentially non-existent," Boeckner says. "If you wanna make a living off making what is basically non-commercial music, then you need to continue working, having bands and expressing yourself. I like being busy; I like to be able to be either working in the studio, writing, or on tour. All the time. Because I worked regular jobs for years and years before I could finally come to a point where I didn't have to do that anymore. I'm used to that work ethic, so it seems odd to just have one project and concentrate all your energy on recording, do a tour and have three months off. Those three months, I feel like I should be doing something, I feel like I should be writing more songs."



He'd Rather Explore a New Project Than Ruin a Successful One

"I'm a big believer of not running things into the ground," Boeckner says. "I grew up in this shitty little town in western Canada. Being a fan of music, that was my lifeline. I could dream my way out of having a mohawk and getting called a 'faggot' every 10 minutes for the entirety of my high school career. Having music was, it was an exit. I could escape into it and it gave me hope that I was gonna get out of that town and maybe I'd play for some people somewhere, some time. Being that much of a fan, it was always disappointing to me when a project or artist- you can tell when bands are out of ideas or were unhappy with each other. They put out bad records.

Wolf Parade's a good example—interpersonal stuff was getting to a point where if we had tried to make another record we wouldn't have been friends anymore, and that would've been a tragedy because I loved that band, everybody in that band loved being in Wolf Parade. We didn't want to stop loving being in Wolf Parade, so we took five years off. With Handsome Furs it was me and my wife, and we got divorced, our relationship totally melted down and it seemed disrespectful to do the band. I felt if I kept putting records out as Handsome Furs, it would've been a really crass move. Starting over again is good. It's difficult, but it's good. You're gonna go back to the venues you started at with your other projects and I think that keeps you on your toes."

 

 

 

Operators Toured For Two Years Without a Record

"It let the band become itself," Boeckner explains. "A lot of band's aesthetics emerge from live performance. I think if you're playing music and you have a batch of songs and record them, then take them on the road without actually testing them out in front of living human beings, you can kind of get locked into something that maybe isn't you. I think art in general, it needs to be performed in front of people and given space to develop; it's not just a physical product. When you're recording, you're writing in the studio, you're essentially working in a vacuum. You don't have anything to necessarily bounce off ideas from. In an audience, you can kind of read the crowd and see how they react to certain parts of the songs. You don't get that in a studio… it's virtual in a lot of ways."



Touring Gave Operators a Chance to Make ‘Blue Wave’ Right

"I'm not technophobic about putting the art into the world. We made the record and had time to shape it aesthetically in the way that I wanted it," Boeckner says. "I like the fact that people can listen to the album essentially for free in a lot of ways, then come to the shows and have an experience that resonates with them with a group of people. If somebody comes to the show and experiences it, they're interacting with those songs and emotion in a way surrounded by other people, it's more of a communal experience, and we can interact as a band more directly with them. That's always gonna be my favorite way."



The Inspiration for ‘Blue Wave’ Comes From Boeckner's Online World

"When I was putting a lot of the demos for this album together, doing the principle songwriting, [Devojka] and I had this long conversation about depression," Boeckner divulges. "I'd say 50 percent of my life is lived online. Maybe it was a curiosity news piece like five years ago, people were writing these alarmist sort of things about the sociological implications of communicating in a very specific way—on your phone—but now it's just reality, it doesn't even bare thinking about it too much. But I think what's happened is human emotion and the experience of communication and all the emotional stuff, we haven't caught up to the way we exist now with other people, our emotions haven't caught up, there's this sort of ambient depression that goes along with communicating with friends who are far away on Instagram or Twitter. I would talk to my friends in Hong Kong by Instagram, and it was so nice to be able to see their lives and have late night conversations with them, but there was something missing from that communication, this weird unquantifiable thing that's absent, and that created this weird ambient depression."

 

 

He Encounters More Than Friends in the Online World

"We were talking about the title for Blue Wave, that's another aspect of it: I do a lot of research for songs on the Internet. I'll go through Russia Today news feeds or the Guardian. There's this weird aspect of having to filter out all this horrible shit when you're just trying to enlighten yourself, or you're interested in something, you're poking around in the comments section. I think it's a new type of human psychology where you learn to ignore these awful things people are saying, not necessarily about you directly but whatever you're reading. Comments are dead now; a lot of sites are pulling comments."



His First Troll Experience Was on Myspace

"I remember being excited about curating [Handsome Furs'] Myspace page, and then all of the sudden it was a wall of PETA protesters being like 'I'm gonna come to your show and throw red paint on you.’ One guy said 'I'm gonna skin you alive' because the word 'fur' is in the title, and these people are not subtle in their thinking. It wasn't PETAs themselves—they were trolls, basically. As an artist, you have to have pretty thick skin if you're gonna put something up."



He's Learned How to Put the Good and Bad Aside

"The only thing I'm concerned about if I'm doing new project is if I think I did the best possible job I could do, that I'm being as honest to the original idea as I can," Boeckner explains. "Everybody has this imagined audience. The more you establish yourself as an artist, the more cohesive that idea becomes because you're actually looking at an audience. When you start out and you have no audience, it's just a phantom, but as you go on you can hear people's feedback. It is still an illusion. If you start pandering to what you imagine people want to hear or amplify certain elements of your art that you think people wanna listen to, or will make people buy the record or come to the shows, it's kind of a fool's game. You will inevitably fail. It's a really cynical approach to making music, an understandably cynical approach because you gotta pay the rent, right?"

 

 

Now That ‘Blue Wave’ is Out, People are Starting to Sing Along

"The last three shows that we played have been the first time I've felt it, I didn't really put together what it was that was different until last night," Boeckner admits. "When we played Vancouver we'd start up the song [and] people would start cheering. I just didn't put it together because we've been playing songs that no one has heard for so long. The last few years I've been essentially auditioning material no one's heard before, and that's scary. Last night, the way people were responding, I felt like I could start screwing with the arrangements a little more. I had leeway to push the structural boundaries of the songs."



When He's Not Playing or Writing, He's Listening

"I have a studio in Montreal, all the free time I have I'll go to the studio," Boeckner says. "Even if I don't feel inspired, I'll just go and play, just to stay sharp. Late at night after I'm done, I read The Quietus and listen to everything, obsessively. Like anybody else, one out of 10 things I'll be like, this is amazing, and that's kind of what keeps me going. Discovering stuff, it actually makes me excited to record. You can definitely get sucked in to your sort of glory days music and sort of get frozen in time and not listen to anything new. I think that's when you start sucking."

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