Ahead of his Melbourne Recital Centre show, Grant talks synth influences, realism in music and the Trumpian world order.
It’s winter in Iceland, but John Grant likes the dark. From his first solo album, 2010’s Queen of Denmark, the synth balladeer has shown himself to be a storyteller who moves easily between shadow and light, finding beauty in the darkness. He’s known for his baritone confessionals of wit and wordplay, small sorrows and global concerns, earnest love and satire.
Raised in Michigan, he’s based in Reykjavik. Iceland’s a country where practically everyone is an artist or musician, which he says can be a bit annoying (“Nobody’s special”). He tends to lay low between tours, but he’s currently writing a show for the Royal Ballet in London: a production of A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. It’s a completely new collaboration for him, writing and singing in the production (“It’s almost like a libretto”). Soon he’ll be touring Australia off the back of his sixth album, The Art of the Lie, part social commentary and mistrust in the state of the world and part intimate introspection.
John Grant
- Melbourne Recital Centre
- 13 March
- Tickets here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
The art of the everyday
It’s easy to see how bigger politics have always impacted his interior life, growing up in a conservative Methodist household as he came into his gay identity. Shifting from internal and external states between tracks is his signature style, and The Art Of The Lie shuttles back and forth from political comment to vignettes of love and the fleeting minutiae of youthful memory.
“It feels very human and very real to me,” he said. “That’s what that’s what life is like, isn’t it? This constant zooming in and zooming out… You zoom way in for personal stuff and then you zoom out for the big picture… over the course of every day, many times.”
The album moves effortlessly between different musical states: electropop hooks, expansive soundscapes, sinuous sexy funk and thumping, bubbling synth themes akin to an 80s horror soundtrack. His lyricism and vocals sit somewhere between folk storytelling and dramatic, theatrical swells, with flourishes of camp humour. The alluring baritone makes for a captivating narration, and he “can’t get enough” of the vocoder and the way it slips between melancholy and funk. In his hands, synth also becomes a voice: choral and melodic, angelic and foreboding.
“I do think of these things as voices,” he said. “I get tired and bored of my own voice, which I think is quite normal… I’m glad I’m glad there’s a lot of other voices out there to listen to.”
“Sometimes I feel like just doing instrumental records now because I’m so tired of talking. I just feel like I want to never say anything ever again… it feels pointless.”
Broken state of the nation
The Art of the Lie has been in development since 2022, but feels terribly relevant to the present. Even the Americana cover art signals his concerns with the state of his homeland. He’s touched on the situation with Trump across previous albums, in songs like Smug C*nt and The Only Baby. Even in Iceland, the dread of America’s socio-political crisis weighs heavily.
“It feels like I’m right there in it. It’s horrifying,” he said. “It’s been coming for 10 years now… I was told many times, ‘Oh, you’re crazy. That’s ridiculous. That’s not possible here.’ It doesn’t seem like people are able to see that this is something completely different… It’s fucking pure evil and the only way they’re it’s going to be stopped now is mass protest, people going out onto the streets. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”
His skill is finding the levity and absurdity amidst the horror. The track Twistin Scriptures delivers satire of the Christian in-faux-mercial. Meek AF is funny as hell, a low, moaning funk narration aggressively framing the state of grace and meekness from a position of pro-Trump violence (“You’re meek as fuck, baby”).
“There was always this hypocrisy there, Christians identifying with Trump considering that they’re supposedly about the teachings of Jesus,” he said.
Old synth, new noise and sounds between
The Art of the Lie is indeed cinematic and fleshed-out, but not overwrought, with the expansiveness of a film score and his signature flair for the electronic-dramatic.
“I love synth sounds, especially the analog synths of the 70s and the 80s, like the CS-80,” he said. “I want everything to sound like a mixture of Blade Runner, Bauhaus and the Carpenters.”
Although this tour follows the album release, Grant will be performing from his wider catalogue at the Melbourne Recital Centre: more stripped down, with Grant singing and playing piano and one other person on electronics. More ballads, less dance. It touches on the kind of music he’s drawn to from other artists at the moment: the art of restraint.
“There’s a lot of ‘kitchen sink music’ out there with everything in it, all over the place,” he said. “It’s nice to have the juxtaposition of something that stays in one space, that’s pretty cool.”
Grant has a classical background, but also singles out DEVO, Cocteau Twins and Severed Heads as pivotal musical influences. He waxes lyrical about Grandmaster Flash funk basslines, the bubbling, brassy, descending synth line in ABBA’s Chiquitita (“It’s the most beautiful thing in the world”) and the opening to Eagle and the glissando synth that changed him forever.
Grant also maintains a constant curiosity about new music, delighted by anything that resists categorisation or operates in spaces where there are no rules.
“I don’t want to say that I’m totally set in my ways as far as what sounds move me,” he said. “I love new sounds… weird stuff, noise, experimental music. For my music, it’s a bit more straightforward and I’ve come to make peace with that.”
“I still feel like an infant in an ever expanding universe of music, there’s always more and I’m just trying to let it sink all in. I’m constantly looking for new stuff but also, I’m always going to be listening to Devo, you know what I mean?”
Find out more about John Grant’s show at the Melbourne Recital Centre here.
This article was made in partnership with Melbourne Recital Centre.
