Music journalists love to tell you they know all the influences that has gone into a new album, but a lot of the time the artists responsible themselves are left baffled by these comparisons. We thought, why not go straight to the source?
Alexis Taylor is best known as the frontman of longstanding electro-pop favourites Hot Chip, whose new solo album Paris In The Spring blends cosmic country and leftfield pop via collaborations with The Avalanches, Green Gartside, Air’s Nicholas Godin and many more, and is released on 13 February via Night Time Stories. Here, in his own words, Taylor lets us know what the actual influences that shaped it are, from the soundtracks of Jan Hammer and Angelo Badalamenti to his late friend and collaborator Dan Dwayre, aka Black Lodge.
(And for Subscriber Plus tier members only, at the foot of the feature, there’s a handy 20 track playlist. Not a subscriber yet? You can become one here)
I wasn’t really consciously influenced by much music whilst making this record because I was more in a vacuum of music-making rather than studying other people’s records. However, I would think after I’d made certain songs, “Oh, that song that I’ve loved for years that I haven’t been listening to has seeped in as an influence on this,” rather than sitting with producers, saying, “Have you heard this song? It’s so great. Let’s make something like that.”
I remember somebody telling me that I reminded them of Paul McCartney’s solo music, and his voice even. I definitely hear that, I have listened to him a lot. His solo records like McCartney II, McCartney, and Ram were things that I really liked maybe 10 or 15 years ago and I can hear some inescapable influence from that kind of pop music. I think there’s also an influence from Peter Gabriel on the kinds of melodies and chords I might go to, but I don’t think that any of this is particularly overt – not the stuff you hear at the forefront of my music.
Sometimes a friend you’re spending time with is an influence without necessarily being a musical influence on you. After Dan [Dwayre, aka Black Lodge] died, I wrote a couple of things about him, one of which is at the end of the record [‘Black Lodge In The Sky’]. I’ve played every record he made in DJ sets over the last 10 years or so, so he’s been more of an influence in that way, as a friend of mine, rather than me listening to his music and trying to make music that sounds like him.
You can be influenced by something, love it, and not try to imitate it. The song ‘Wild Horses’ on my album, has something of a dubby rhythm to it. That’s the only thing I would say on the whole record where [Pierre Rousseau and I] talked about something before making it. I said how much I’d been enjoying Spectral Display’s ‘It Takes a Muscle To Fall In Love’ and how much I’d been enjoying all of the Rhythm And Sound records, and Pierre Rousseau said he loved them as well. I said it would be fun to try and make a cover of ‘Wild Horses’, which I know best from the Flying Burrito Brothers but is obviously a Rolling Stones song originally. We did say, “Let’s try and make a cover that takes some influence from those sound worlds.” And maybe if you listen back to ‘Wild Horses’ with that in mind, you can hear the dub, and the feel of that production on my song.
I am also a big David Lynch fan, and in the song ‘Out Of Phase’, there are quite explicit references to his films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and the noir mystery elements of those films. I wanted to mention how much of an influence the film Mulholland Drive and the film Lost Highway have been on me, seeing them a couple of times each in the cinema, and then revisiting them later and being absorbed by the atmospheres of those films. The Mulholland Drive theme, of all of Angelo Badalamenti’s music, is probably my favourite, and the most affecting. I’ve just listened to it so many times, and always feel like it’s incredibly impactful when it’s used in the film, but also if I just listen to it on its own.
Heat and Mulholland Drive weirdly share a lot of things atmospherically, even though they’re completely different types of film. Something like Miami Vice I watched in the 1980s as a child, and then have gone back to years later and watched again. I think that my track, ‘Fainting By Numbers’, is a little bit in that sound world of Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme. I wrote it as a ballad you could play on the piano, but in the production I was trying to get something of that Miami Vice atmosphere into it, or at least if not trying to get it, I just recognised it and related to it in my head in some way.
You absorb this music as you grow up. Some may not be very cool necessarily, but they’re records that mean a lot to you. They’re your foundation in a way. They are there as influences, but I think that the whole way that I make music is to do with the unconscious, and letting things come into your world unconsciously. That could sound vague, but it’s not vague to me. Music I listened to seeps into what I’m doing, it’s just not at the centre of my music, because what’s at the centre is my songwriting idea, the new thing I’m trying to get across.
Alexis Taylor’s new album Paris In The Spring is released on 13 March via Night Time Stories.
The full tracklist for his Quietus Guest Playlist is below, and available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz by clicking the ‘Subscriber Plus Exclusive Playlist’ button at the start of this article. On streaming services, one or two tracks may be unavailable depending on your chosen platform.
Stevie Wonder – ‘Maybe Your Baby’
Sly And The Family Stone – ‘Just Like a Baby’
John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band – ‘Mother’
Todd Rundgren – ‘Long Flowing Robe’
Palace Music – ‘You Have Cum In Your Hair And Your Dick Is Hanging Out’
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