Grand Ambitions

I recently contacted Jordaan Mason about doing an e-mail interview. This then turned into a phone performance, which then turned into a half hour long interview AND performance!  Enjoy!

___________________________

An interview and podcast with Jordaan Mason:

Grand Ambitions: Hello Jordaan. How you doing?
 

Jordaan Mason: I’m doing alright. my ears are a bit buzzy from going from a very loud show tonight.

GA: Where are you at right now?

JM: I’m sitting in my bedroom at 3:30am. I just finished re-reading part one of “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner.
 
GA: You recently released “Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head.” It seems like this has been a long long time in the making. What was it that took so much time to finally complete?

JM: ‘Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head’ took approximately three to three-and-a-half years to make, for a few reasons. Firstly: I write songs very slowly. So, writing the songs took up the major portion of almost two years. The album is really concept-heavy because basically the whole ‘story’ came to me all at one time and I wrote the whole record as one long song at first, and it took a while to figure out where things needed to really be, how to tell it as a story in individual songs. I wrote the words (as per usual) before touching an instrument. Then, a band started to form around the songs, we had to find a permanent drummer, more and more people kept getting involved…. a lot of the people in the band have very busy schedules and lives and are doing their own projects… and our friend, Bryar Gray, who recorded and engineered the whole thing was in his final year of university the whole time… etc etc etc. In the end I think the recording mostly took so long because it was difficult to organize everyone’s schedules.
 
GA: I’ve been listening to the new album a lot recently.  From what I’ve noticed it is very sexual. [from “Bird’s Nest”—“My mouth is filled with his ovaries.”]  Where does all this come from? What is your inspiration? (by the way, I love how you refer to a man’s testicle as a bird’s nest.)

JM: The album is a story based on real events in my life. I say “based on” because the songs are definitely fiction, but they borrow heavily from my own relationships. I tried to be careful not to exploit those people, though (time will tell on that one). However, one of those relationships was with a male-bodied person who, over the course of our relationship, came to terms with herself as female. The record, then, is essentially about the confusion of this process. Also, I had a lot of questions about sex that I wasn’t really sure I knew how to answer. I was (and maybe still am, to some degree, but I think less so now) very confused, mostly, about how a homosexual relationship should or could be structured versus the traditional structure of a heterosexual relationship, what are two people really supposed to feel for one another, what does it really mean to share your body with another person, especially when the body you’re in isn’t the body that you want or think you should have. I think in the end this is why the record might come off as confusing: essentially, that’s exactly the feeling of the songs. The songs are over-saturated with sex because that’s the language it felt necessary to use to talk about this confusion. The first line of ‘Bird’s Nest,’ however, is actually meant, then, to be almost exactly what it sounds: a boy cannot have ovaries. so what does a boy have instead? What am I supposed to have in my mouth if the boy is actually a girl but there are really no ovaries? There are a lot of question marks on this record, really.

GA: I seem to remember you saying that you are gay.  Does this is ever bring about negative feelings when you are in tour in certain areas?  

JM: I suppose I am gay, yes. I am attracted to primarily male-bodied people. For the most part, in terms of performing, it hasn’t necessarily been much of an issue, but there have definitely been shows where I have felt uncomfortable or I can tell that I am making the audience uncomfortable. Profanities (faggot, mostly) have been yelled at me while I’ve performed; this usually just makes me yell more.
 
GA: Do you ever have to scale back some of your songs that are very blatently homoerotic?

JM:  I have only really scaled back the songs twice. Once, while playing in Charleston, South Carolina, I asked the audience what they would prefer, since they were mostly younger and I didn’t really know anyone there - and the hosts parents were there. But everyone encouraged me to say what I had to say. and another time, in a very small town in New Brunswick, I played at a bar where I felt very uncomfortable, so I only sang covers.
GA: Let’s discuss touring.  Jordaan Mason and The Horse Museum is a 13 piece band. It seems like it would be impossible for the entire band to tour.  How do you handle tour? Who comes with you? Do you go it alone?

JM: The entire band has never toured. For a long time I played, wrote, and toured alone - that was pretty easy. I’ve also done some tours where friends have played with me but we weren’t necessarily ‘The Horse Museum.’ There have been two tours done by ‘The Horse Museum,’ where the band has been five to ten members depending, and they have been extremely short. As I said before, most of the band members have very busy lives - our drummer is in his master’s program, our accordion/piano player lives about an hour and a half away, several of our members live in New York state… and they have jobs, and other bands. So it’s hard to get away for too long right now, and also none of us owns a car. Mostly upcoming tours will be myself and the banjo player, Dee Addario, as a duo, and probably some more short five - eight piece tours randomly spaced out until it makes enough sense for everyone to go.
 
GA: What are your future tour plans? When you coming back to beautiful Southern California?

JM: Tour plans are pretty iffy right now. A lot of them are very hypothetical. I took a break from touring for almost a year (which I only broke once because the band had an opportunity to hit the road for about six days with our dear friends in the band Klessa, from New York state, who also make up part of The Horse Museum) and I’ve gotten equally comfortable with where I am and also restless for the road. So I don’t like to say things too definitely in case they change. But we are hoping to tour as a duo in the fall sometime and hit up most of the states, including California. Next year, we are hoping to leave the continent a bit and go to Australia, since a record label there is going to be re-releasing our album on vinyl there, and the guy who is helping us is really friendly. I’m not totally sure about that yet since it’s a lot of money. We also want to go to Europe. I would maybe like to see if we could make that a band thing.
 
GA: I read that you are a part of a side project. HUGS HONEY HEX.  What is the future for that project? Co-headlining tour with Jordaan Mason and the Horse Museum?

JM: HUGS HONEY HEX is a new project with four Horse Museum members: Jason McCrimmon, Kristina Born, Dan Scarfone, and myself. It’s a pretty new thing; we’re playing our first show in a few weeks. Essentially it’s a project where none of us is the ‘frontman,’ and we switch instruments and roles a lot. We’re all learning new instruments for the band, also. The four all had a lot of free time these days to practice and write songs so we did. It’s really fun. I’m not at all sure what our plans our considering it’s so new…. right now, I suppose it’s just to play at all. I’m playing clarinet, accordion, and drums in this band.
 
GA: Anything you’d like to add?

JM: I can’t think of much to add right now. It is 4am now and HUGS HONEY HEX has to practice tomorrow afternoon. So I think its time for bed. 

Questions from real life humans:
 
1. Were you breast fed?

JM: I think I was breast fed. I will say yes.
 
2. What inspired the album title Mantra Songs?

JM: The title ‘Mantra Songs’ is basically exactly what the songs are. Every song on that album has a repeated phrase or line, and each of those were things I would say to myself in my head a lot at the time.
 
3. Do you use Twitter?
 

JM: I do not use (or understand) Twitter.

4. Do you like Lady Gaga?
 

JM: I do not own a television or a radio, really, so my knowledge of popular culture, and thus also Lady Gaga, is basically limited to what I hear from friends and the internet. I don’t really have an opinion, pretty much all I know about her is she refers to a cock as a “disco stick.”

5. Are there more gay rights in Canada than the U.S.? How do you feel about gay marriage?

JM: Gay marriage is legal in Canada, so I suppose that means homosexuals have more rights in Canada than in America, currently. To be honest I don’t know as much about America’s current state in a government sense, right now. Gay marriage is a very complicated issue. I don’t really believe in marriage period so it’s not something I really care about, but I see the reasons why it should be a “right,” I guess - in that it means everybody has the same rights. I get that. But I think that the idea of gay marriage is damaging, though, to an extent, because I think it really re-enforces the traditional heterosexual narrative. I just don’t think that narrative works for everybody, and it definitely doesn’t work for me, so it’s not an issue I find necessary to fight for myself at this time.

_____________________

Remember you can check out Jordaan Mason at www.myspace.com/jordaanmason.  You can buy the new album on iTunes and Amazon. 

Don’t forget you can download the podcast at www.GrandAmbitions.mypodcast.com. Please Please Please download and subscribe!

Thanks for reading/listening.