Momus |
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Sat. September 04.1999 3:04 AM EDT |
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Momus Pays Back His Patrons With Stars ForeverDouble album features 30 songs about fans, stores, labels and others that paid for them. by Staff Writer Christopher O'Connor |
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Momus took his name from the Greek god of criticism and mockery. (Matt Melucci) |
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Singer/songwriter Nick Currie invented Momus as a character to sing
about his sexual hang-ups and other aspects of his personality that
otherwise might never have come out. On his double album Stars Forever, which came out Tuesday,
"He very much made me realize what I was all about," said Karin Komoto (RealAudio excerpt of her song), a 25-year-old accountant who met Momus at a show in San Francisco three years ago. "He described me in a way no one else has ever described me. He ... said I was very androgynous. It just made me realize [it was] so." "I've always had this element of being kind of like a screenplay writer," Momus said from his London home last week, "writing scenarios for myself with what I can get away with as a thin man in his 30s with a British accent. "But now I've been given a lot of different characters to write plays around. So I kind of approached each song as ... an interesting screenplay around this person from the very brief descriptions they were giving me." Momus' subjects in this patronage exercise provided the songwriter with a 100-word description and maintained the right to approve their song, according to the artist, who took his stage name from the Greek god of criticism and mockery. Several asked Momus to change some specific words, but only one, Paolo Rumi, asked Momus to rewrite a song completely. The final version of "Paolo Rumi" describes its subject as a DJ who is "searching for the right to be different than everyone else." The $30,000 raised by the album will help Momus' U.S. label, Le Grand Magistery, pay legal bills it incurred last year after transsexual composer Wendy Carlos sued Momus over the song "Walter Carlos," from his album The Little Red Songbook (1998). Walter Carlos was her birth name and the name under which she first recorded. The label settled out of court with Carlos and removed the song from later pressings of the album. Label owner Matthew Jacobson said he is still working to pay off the debt. He credited Stars Forever with saving the label. Jacobson's 87-year-old grandfather, Milton Jacobson (RealAudio excerpt of his song), was one of the patrons. For his $1,000, the onetime vaudeville theater manager from Detroit got a song fit for a theatrical show, with a tapping cymbal and whirling piano. "He loved it," Matthew said. "That song is very Barnum, very vaudeville." "Obviously, it's not great art," said Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music (RealAudio excerpt of its song), a New York independent record store Momus immortalizes in a robotic tune. "It's more of a funny, goofy song. He's a pretty interesting individual who has his own take on things." "I like the record because it's taking me to a new place in my life," Momus, 39, said. "It's been addressing all sorts of things, like what it's like to be an old man, what it's like to have a 3-year-old kid — things I can't write about personally. Other people have lent me their lives and their costumes, and I'm dressing up in them" (RealAudio excerpt of interview). Momus works with several musical forms on Stars Forever — folk, electronica, 1980s synth-rock and a concoction he calls "analog baroque." Momus introduced that concept, in which synthesizers drive songs that mirror the short, melodically complex German lieder of the 1800s, on The Little Red Songbook (1998). "Steven Zeeland" (RealAudio excerpt), about a sailor, is among those short baroque compositions. Momus also uses Moog synthesizers on songs, such as "Minty Fresh," that he said were based on Elizabethan folk music. Using the spooky-sounding instrument on those songs was a challenge, he said. "In a sense, the whole movement into Moog-meets-classical music has been done by certain pioneers," he said. "What hasn't been done is the Moog-meets-folk-music thing ... so increasingly, that excites me" (RealAudio excerpt of interview). Momus places layers of synthesizers on "Minty Fresh," a song paid for by the Chicago independent label of the same name that has put out albums by the pop-rock group Veruca Salt and Japanese pop singer (and Momus collaborator) Kahimi Karie. It sounds as if it would not be out of place in King Arthur's court. Anthony Musiala, managing director of Minty Fresh, said the label appreciates the "blatant commercial" it earned for its money. "Hey, ho, the wind and the rain/ Let us play these discs again and again," Momus sings in it. "He captured our spirit pretty well," Musiala said. Stars Forever also includes eight songs from The Little Red Songbook sung by the winners of a karaoke contest Momus held last year; A 21-minute interview with Momus appears as well. |
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