“Do you want some food or some gummy bears or something?” I’m backstage with Kip Berman, front man of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, as he offers items off their deli trey. “No, thanks. I’ve eaten.” They arrived at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace at 8:00 p.m., quickly lugged their equipment into the venue and immediately began sound checking. Now, the band is eating their dinner (sandwiches, bananas, Gatorade) in the 2-minutes they have to spare until, 1. the interview begins, and 2. their show starts. “Then want a picture of me eating my sandwich?” Yes, I certainly do.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are incredibly welcoming and grateful. It is easy to see an innate chemistry in the band’s dynamic, both on and off the stage. We spoke about their fantastic debut album, life as a teenager and the recent anointment of “Best New Music” by Pitchfork.

Tripwire: First question: the POBPAH experience a full-band metamorphosis 5 minutes before taking the stage. You become a different band completely and acquire their personalities, songs, fans, etc. What band do you want to become?

Peggy: Sonic Youth!

[The rest of the band debates the logistics of the question]

Alex: [Possibly sarcastic] Uhm, The Killers?

Kip: Smashing Pumpkins … but do I have to be Billy Corgan? I’d want to be Exploding Hearts, but they’re dead.

Kurt: I don’t want to be in a different band.

“You have five years to make your first record” -– are the songs on the debut a product of five years?

Kip: Some of them are, some of the songs on the album we played at our very first show. But we’ve been together for two years, so some of them were really early songs — “This Love Is Fucking Right” and “Contender”. Stuff like “Stay Alive” and “Tenure Itch” came around a lot later and those are super interesting because they are much different than the others.

How long was the actual studio time?

Peggy: Two weekends.

[All laugh]

Kip: Probably four or five weekends. Mixing was a separate process. We knew all the songs really well so it was quick.

Alex: And we didn’t have that much money.

Kip: [Laughs] … that’s the reason.

Peggy: But we got “bro-deals.”

What’s a “bro-deal”?

Kip: It’s when your bro gives you a deal.

Who are the characters in these songs? Are they fictional or autobiographical? The album evokes feelings of being in a long-distance relationship, and it seems to mention the “asshole boyfriend” or “unappreciative girlfriend” a lot.

Kip: Well, they are autobiographical or about people in our immediate lives. Every song isn’t about a member of the band, but they are based on our experiences. “Come Saturday” is totally long-distance related: I have a long-distance relationship and my girlfriend visits me on Saturdays. [Laughs] And we usually don’t party, we just stay in. There’s a very simple explanation. I guess there are “asshole boyfriend” characters, like in “Tenure Itch”.

What is “Contender” about?

Kip: That’s about me being a loser. [Laughs] I was really into Exploding Hearts and my life totally sucked in comparison [to them], I’d see them and they were so awesome, and I felt like a total failure, working in a call center, and was really down. It’s about me looking at them and saying, “I wish I could be like that, but I’m not.”

My two favorite lyrics are “I’m a pretender, you never were a contender” and “if you shut out the sun/ the day will never come.” I saw those lyrics as conversing with one another – the first being a bit more down but the last finding a silver lining. It seems like a lot of these songs find silver linings.

Kip: Yeah, those are two non-exclusive feelings throughout the album, but there’s also a strong underlying positivity [on the album] and I don’t think the sum of it is sad at all. At the end of the day, I think it’s an uplifting album, not a “woe-is-me” album.

Do your seventeen year-old selves resurface in your writing? If so, what were you like? The album evokes a youthful sensibility throughout.

Alex: I was weird. I played varsity baseball, but had long hair. I was straight-edge and went to punk shows but wore Eddy Bauer sweaters. [Laughs] I didn’t fit in anywhere, I tried to but failed at that. I tried to go punk shows but couldn’t be punk. But I wasn’t hated either because I floated around. Basically, I listened to music all the time.

Kip: My experience is the same except for the varsity baseball and the long hair. It was the weird area where you’re definitely not cool but you’re in this other category — you go to punk shows but you study and do your homework; you don’t go all the way, you don’t smash your mom’s favorite things. It’s the weird dichotomy of wearing khakis at a punk show and drawing anarchy symbols on your desk.

So it’s teen angst without the anger?

Kip: It’s more like teen confusion.

Peggy: I was a weirdo. I wasn’t popular but I wish I had a clique and never did because … well, I went to high school in the south and no one was into the same things I was. I had a lot of pen-pals and people I’d trade mix-tapes with. Now, I feel like I’m still in high school but cool, [laughs] not that I am cool. But now I have friends, and friends that I really love. I have that sense of inclusion I always wanted.

Kurt: When I was seventeen, I was in a band and was friends with them, and I had a girlfriend who went to a different school. We would hang out, but I didn’t fit in with the cool kids or anything. I listened to Built to Spill and Supertramp.

What does the band name come from?

Kip: It’s based on an unpublished children’s story that a friend of mine in Portland wrote. I really liked the title and sentiment of the story, which was about experiencing life with your friends when you’re young, and appreciating that, and traveling and having adventures. And that sort of makes life worthwhile. That’s the short moral of the story. It never got published but once I heard the title I thought, “that’s it.”

How many months have you guys been doing constant interviews?

[The band looks collectively incredulous]

Alex: Uhm, one? [All laugh] Nothing that could be considered “constant.”

How have you found you’ve been stereotyped so far?

Peggy: People definitely throw around the same words — shoegaze, Twee, ’86 revival.

Kip: People are always going to find adjectives to describe music, and that’s what journalism is about; finding new hyphenated terms. We just think of ourselves as a pop band. Some people play up certain aspects of it, and it’s not for us to deny them. I’m not going to be like, “I only use three guitar pedals, I don’t even think I’ve listened to Slowdive all the way through.” I don’t want to tell people not to think that.

Kurt: It’s human nature for people to want to compartmentalize things. You have to deal with that. Whatever you think it is, that’s fine.

I think Peggy described it best as a band of “teen non-runaways.”

Kip: I think that’s a really apt way of describing the tensions of our lives growing up. I listened to that Ladyhawk song, the one that goes “I’m not a run away,” and I thought that was totally prescient. We wrote a song called “Run Away” about not being a run away and not having the courage to do it, I really like the idea she captures.

How’s the tour been?

Peggy: It’s draining but I love it. Playing a show every night does not get old, it’s an adrenaline rush.

Kip: If I could do this 365 days a year, I probably would. It’s worth driving from Chicago to Toronto because then you get to play a show. Sitting at home playing video games is … well it’s pretty fun, but it’s such a privilege and honor to play music. Whatever you can do to make it work is worthwhile.

Alex: It makes all the difference that we’re friends. If we’re in the middle of an 8-hour drive, I don’t have to sit there by myself with some dude I met on Craigslist looking for a band “that sounds like Franz Ferdinand.” I can do crosswords with Peggy or play Boggle or give Kurt wet-willies.

Kip: I think that’s the most overlooked factor — start playing with people you could be trapped in a car with for 9 hours in northern Michigan and still be totally happy. That’s the perfect band to be in.

Have things changed since Pitchfork awarded you the “Best New Music” title?

Alex: We went on the road the next day, so it’s hard to keep up. It’s always good to see good press. It sounds obvious, but we’d be lying to ourselves if we said ‘it doesn’t matter,’ it was really cool to see.

Peggy: People who completely forgot about me came out of the woodwork and were contacting me on Facebook. [Laughs] … It seems like a lot of people read it and came to see us play. So it definitely made a difference.

Kip: It’s wonderful that it exposes our music to a wider audience, but we still have to go out and do the work and play shows and do the work.

Are you willing to sell your music?

All: Yes.

What if the producer of Gossip Girl …

Peggy: [With extreme enthusiasm] Yes! To any MTV show, like The Hills …

Kip: Any teen drama.

What were you doing a year-ago today?

Peggy: In England, I was really sad.

Alex: It was all basement shows … it was a worthwhile trip.

Kip: We bought our own plane tickets, rented our own cars, carried around all our gear …

You’ve come along way.

Kip: Every successive thing has been super fun. I’ve never felt that there’s been a time when things haven’t been fun. Even when I drove to Chapel Hill and played a show for five people, then got into the car and immediately drove to Tallahassee and got lost … it was still fun. There’s nothing that can beat that. Playing music is so much more fun than what I’d normally be doing.

Any last words?

Peggy: I’ve been watching all of Degrassi Junior High.

Kip: There’s one show called Da Vinci Inquest that comes on at three in the morning on Sunday nights; it’s hard to find on TV and I get sucked into it. Every time I meet someone from Canada, I ask them about it, and they’re like “that show’s lame.”

I wanted my interview to be different. A Google search will return about a dozen interviews with Antony Hegarty of Antony And The Johnsons from this year alone; all peppered with facts and stories of his latest album The Crying Light. After reading a few, one can easily uncover meanings behind his songs and his sources of inspiration. I, however, wanted to go deeper.

“Now Antony,” I muse, roughly halfway through our conversation, “tell me how your romantic relationships have affected your songwriting.” There is a pause; then he simultaneously scoffs and laughs at my quasi-investigative journalism. “Well, I do a great cover of a Beyoncé song [“Crazy In Love”], I don’t know if you’ve heard it.” We both laugh. “That’s as confessional as you’re going to get out of me.”

So be it. I will not get to know Antony Hegarty over our 45 minute talk. He will speak eloquently and delicately, answering each question with a genuine desire to be thorough and interesting. But he will also be wildly abstract and constantly oblique. When he speaks of possibly being reincarnated as a tree, I will agree affably and say “I understand” when in reality, I do not.

“I don’t want to not make a gesture because I’m afraid that people will criticize me,” he says when I ask if he takes himself too seriously. After all, no other artist’s musicianship and presentation are quite as melodramatic. Even in conversation, his choice of words is always extreme: “tragic”, “beautiful”, “shocking”, “death”, “love”. But melodrama is where Antony thrives. “When you put forth something you care about, or feel sincere about, there is a risk involved. People can say all sorts of things about you, but there’s potential for a really rewarding dialogue with the world. And it’s in that spirit, I do the work that I do.”

The Crying Light is similarly theatrical to its predecessor, the Mercury Prize winning I Am A Bird Now, but feels less personally cathartic. On Bird, “every song had a big climax or transformation; the whole album is about transformation. And [The Crying Light] is a different landscape, it’s more contemplative. It’s just a reflection of where I’ve been in my creative process.” This is dead on. The anxiety of personal growth and gender identity is poignantly extreme on Bird. But the worldly and ecological concerns on Crying Light are calm, mature and significantly less intense (perhaps, less moving?).

“Yes, I was very aware I wasn’t putting forth the same sort of emotional catharsis [on Crying Light].I Am A Bird Now was written in the nineties… when I was much younger, but wasn’t put forward until 2005, so I had a lot of time to process them.” Fair enough, the inward focus of Bird is eschewed in favor of a broader outlook. “These songs also felt time-sensitive, in some of the things that were being addressed. The things I was exploring felt very much a part of our moment, and I just put it out there. My goal as an artist is to participate in a dialogue and the evolution forward.”

Album opener, “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground” was co-written with Antony’s brother over Christmas last year. He had trouble explaining the song’s meaning; as there are so many attached to it. “At first, I thought it was a song about… well, I think a lot of kids do this, when they’re worried their parents are going to die, the moment you realize that no one will last forever and you cry about it.” So, is it a song about familial mortality? Not necessarily. “Then I thought, maybe it’s my mother singing about her mother, because I’ve been really interested in this idea that I’m the endpoint of a line of life that stretches back to the beginning of creation.” He goes on to explain that he hopes to sing the spirit of all the people along his ancestry. At this point I truly have no idea what he’s talking about. According to Antony, “Her Eyes” encompasses one of the album’s central themes: “I’m a child of the earth, and the earth is my mother, or a mother-figure. So in a way, [the song is about] the theme of mourning and grieving of the way we’ve affected out ecology of our home and planet, and it’s a way of a child grieving for a mother.” After the interview is completed, I return to “Her Eyes”, hoping to extract meaning with this new insight. Soon, I realize it doesn’t matter what it’s about — Antony’s elusive explanation is almost perfectly fitting for such a starkly beautiful song.

Antony And The Johnsons – “Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground”

“It’s a narrative about a person who has seizures,” he explains when I ask what could have possibly inspired “Epilepsy Is Dancing.” The video interprets this narrative extremely literally. “I haven’t written many narrative songs, but this is a sort of story about that person. And she had this kind of wild experience where everything gets shiny and dancing — a vision almost — and when she comes to, she’s frightened and has a sense of brokenness as well. The song is about how she was engulfed in chaos but then stepping back from it, she starts to see the pattern, starts to see the choreography of it, which is why I set the song to a waltz.” Expectedly, the label wasn’t thrilled about this song as the album’s lead single, considering its uncomforting title and eccentric (and potentially offensive) music video. “I felt really strongly about it, and when I feel a little embarrassed by something, that’s probably a good sign. It’s how I felt with “For Today I Am a Boy”. People said, ‘You can’t say that,’ and I thought, ‘why not?’ I’ve never gotten anywhere trying to please someone.”

Antony And The Johnsons – “Epilepsy Is Dancing”

My favorite song on The Crying Light, bar none, is “Aeon”. I’m hoping it’s Antony’s too. It’s not. “My favorite song is “Everglade”, just because it feels like the most recent song I wrote, and it really describes how I feel today. It’s a song about me peering out and looking at the leaves, and the leaves have eyes in them, and they are looking back at me. Everything is more alive than ever and yet, I’m sitting with a very beautiful world, but I’m still aware of a brokenness in me. And it’s about sitting with these two things at the same time — brokenness and a beautiful world.”

The cover of The Crying Light features Kazuo Ohno, a famous Japanese dancer. I ask about the artwork’s significance. “My answer isn’t simple,” he admits. He tells a story (in extremely disconnected syntax that would be a nightmare to transcribe) of his love of Ohno’s art claiming he “traverses the space between light and darkness and life and death in a really poetic way.” By putting an “avant-garde dancer on the cover, I wanted to express his singing, express his movement, and express the human spirit. There is something so primary about [dancing], it’s so deep in our bones.” He describes dancing as “crying out with your body,” the convergence of the “feeling of being alive” with “creativity.” He even wanted to do a music video for the ten songs on the album, each featuring a unique dance routine.

We talk briefly about gender identity, but he (understandably) doesn’t have much more to say. Yes, he’s transgender and yes it has influenced his work. “I don’t claim to represent the interests or voice of all transgender people — a massively diverse group of people from a tan of socioeconomic groups.” He touches on the global solidarity of the transgender experience as an outsider, “I’ve often said I have more in common with a transgender person in Iraq than an American soldier, and that’s just because our experiences are so specific.”

My interview with Antony ends amicably as we bid one another adieu. More than any other artist, it seems Antony wants his music to speak for itself. He isn’t keen on divulging meaning on every aspect of his work or personal life. “At the end of the day, this is just blah blah blah because someone wants to talk to me.” Touché Antony.