It was kind of early on that I wrote the song ‘Telephone’, and that gave me the idea for this character that could be what ties the record together. When I initially wrote this song, the lyrics were a little bit different, but there was still an eerie element to it. Was that aspect of the song present when you originally came up with it? With this song, you start to hear the sinister element of the story creeping in, even though the details are still unclear. Yeah, because I was trying to play with the idea of, there’s a divine “I” and a divine “My” or whatever, and the rest is just human. “My” is capitalised on ‘Wasted on You’ as well. I also noticed that in the lyrics themselves, you use the lowercase “i” for for all songs except those sung from the perspective of this omniscient narrator. I wanted to bring up the symbols that you’ve put next to each track title in the lyric sheet, which seem to mark the different narrative perspectives.
Vaporwave was a good reminder of that, and a good example of that. And I realized with this record I needed to get back to trying to use sounds to transport your mind to a different place – and not just the past, but kind of somewhere else. Like on The Party, I really wanted to go for this old, LA recording sound, and then it kept going further where I was trying to get, like, old sounds.
There’s a point with my recordings where I realized that all I was seeming to do is try to get this old kind of sound. What I love about recording is getting sounds, and the way that things are recorded can have such an impact on the way that you perceive that instrument, or you perceive the imagined space that you’re hearing. You can be walking down the street, but you’re also in an old shopping mall in the early 2000s. There was this realization that what I really loved about vaporwave is that it kind of changes the environment that you’re in. What was it like playing with that sound and bringing it into the universe of Norm? I also read that you were listening to vaporwave around the making of the album, and you can hear that in some of the dreamy synth tones on this track. It was kind of tricky thinking about how people could come to that conclusion of, “Oh, one of the narrators is God.” For some people who aren’t familiar with like a totally cartoon Christian god, or that concept of just a Christian god, it might still be a stretch, but I thought it was kind of the best way – God just singing about what what he’s created. Someone who sees everything, someone who knows everything about everyone. It was sort of a realization that I could use an omniscient narrator, and I thought it would actually be really useful in this story for a perspective to have the perspective of God in the story. I wanted to include it, so I was trying to figure out how I could make it work. When and why did ‘Wasted on You’ feel like a fitting introduction to that world? But as you revised and tinkered with them, they started to feel like they existed in the same world. I know that when you started working on the album, there wasn’t necessarily a clear link between the songs. Read our track-by-track interview and listen to Norm below. We caught up with Andy Shauf to talk about the story behind every song on his new album. But follow along and you’ll be rewarded with a sincere and haunting collection where each storyline ultimately comes together while still leaving things eerily open, like a dream. I can’t tell you exactly what it’s all about, and neither will he. On the surface, the songs are pleasant and hazy, but there’s something much darker lurking underneath. Some things are immediately obvious, others take time to sink in. Partly because of how the songs were conceived, however, and partly due to the influences that he was exposed to, Shauf also explored new and interesting ideas, both musically and conceptually. Shauf’s latest album, out today via ANTI-, ended up having a lot more in common with his previous albums, sketching out scenes for his characters to figure out how their feelings relate to one another. As he was working on new ones, Shauf originally thought they might not even be connected this time it would be a more conventional collection – normal, even – thus, Norm. However you choose to invest in them, the Canadian singer-songwriter writes intimate, affecting songs that carefully strike a balance between wistful beauty and humour. In the self-contained world of Andy Shauf’s records, things are rarely what they seem. Albums like 2016’s The Party and 2020’s The Neon Skyline are filled with small moments staged between a specific cast of characters, but listen closely and you might catch a detail that will change your perspective on the entire story.
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