“There’s no real tempering of the emotions in the Hot Chip records. I think they’re just as emotionally revealing as the songs I sing on the Piano record,” Taylor says ahead of his performances at Melbourne Festival this month.
“It’s just that they’re contextually a bit different because they feature dance music, disco, house – more energetic music around those lyrics. But if you look at the lyrics on the Hot Chip records, Joe [Goddard]’s emotionally open and so am I, and they’re very heartfelt songs.”
Piano’s tracklist is a mixture of new Taylor originals, covers, and reworked versions of songs from Hot Chip and his other project About Group. The lyrics cover such themes as facing loss and finding acceptance, placing value on past experiences and cherishing close relationships. Throughout, Taylor avoids sounding overly sentimental, establishing an intimately emotional yet ambiguous tone.
“What I like about the Hot Chip music is that sometimes what I’m singing or what Joe’s singing may be deeply personal, but it could actually be speaking about us as individuals in the band, our friendships or our music making, as much as it is speaking about love and loss or things to do with our personal feelings,” he says. “There’s often a nice ambiguity about who the song is for or who the protagonist is in the song.
“I’d hope that’s the case for my solo music as well. Nobody has to know what the genesis of the song was. Nobody else has gone through those specific things that the songwriter is singing about, but they can still speak to a lot of people.”
In contrast to Hot Chip, Piano isn’t the sort of album you’d put on before going out on a Friday or a Saturday night. Taylor also feels it’s a less communal sounding record, more suited to a solitary, reflective listening environment.
“What I tried to do was make something that felt for the listener like what it was like for me to make it, which was to sit down at the piano with no real plan and just play whatever comes out,” he says. “There are songs that I’d never really sung before or since and some other songs that I’ve sung with Hot Chip or with About Group or written on my own years ago and revisited. I wanted the mood I was in to be captured on record.
“There’s a really good Charlie Mingus record, Mingus Plays Piano, and even in that record you hear him say to the engineer how hard it is to get it to feel like what it feels like when he’s sat at home playing the piano without recording. I wanted to [get that natural feel] with this record but I also wanted it to sound really well recorded and not lo-fi. I felt like it needed to sustain that mood for 40 minutes.”
The vocals are at the forefront of Piano, which puts more focus and scrutiny on Taylor’s singing. Crucially, his delivery sounds natural and richly emotive, rather than overwrought or calculated.
“I just sang the vocals while I was playing the piano and I wanted them to be in tune and not be shit, but that was about as far as I went with it. I did need to get all of the sounds in the headphones right and focus on it, but at the same time we didn’t have that long so I didn’t have to pace around and get into the right frame of mind beforehand.
“I just believe in those songs. Of course it’s going to sound earnest, because it is. I don’t think I over-emote or have an angsty style of singing. It’s meant to sound pleasant. I want it to sound like a Chet Baker vocal or an Alex Chilton vocal.”
