An Interview With Jason Collett

Heading to Australia for the Peats Ridge Festival over the New Year, Canada’s Jason Collett crossed time zones for a chat with Max Easton about songwriting, album making and the country set to host him at year’s end.

It’s fair to say that the name Jason Collett rings very few bells on our island home. Whisper his name in his Canadian birthplace though, and he’s that guy who, in front-man Kevin Drew’s words, was the Tom Petty to Broken Social Scene’s Travelling Wilburys; the stability amongst the loose edges. Since he left that collaborative tour de force, Collett’s gone on to call singer-songwriter soloism his own, pumping out three much-loved Canadian albums that never quite scratched the surface down here in Australia, perhaps stemming from the fact that he’s never actually been here before.

I call him via his Australian agent’s phone card service, laboring through a series of falsely dialled numbers until his characteristic East Canadian accent whispers hello through the ear-piece. He chalks the complicated system down to proof that we’re both presently incredibly far apart, to which I wonder what’s finally brought him to Australia after two decades of touring that somehow avoided us.

“There’s always a new market you know?” he drawls through the phone from his Toronto home, “I’ve wanted to go to Australia for a number of years now and I’m eager to get there. I always find that when you go somewhere you haven’t been there’s a kind of magical feeling to the place. You can feel it in everything you do…and I really like that.”

We talk about his latest album, Rat A Tat Tat, marketed as a departure from his maudlin country venturings which he disagrees with almost immediately. He very quickly presses to talk about the record, a record of which has seen the official formation of his backing band into a band in their own right by the name of Zeus.  

“I don’t really think it’s that much of a departure,” he starts, “there are a few key things which are different on this record and Zeus is a big part of that. My previous records were always made with a revolving door of guest musicians…and over the last few records, Zeus has become more of a part of the core of the making of the record. On Rat A Tat Tat, we had really synthesized this thing of them being a back-up band. They had really begun to hit their stride as a band on their own, which has been an evolution over the past few years…and Zeus became their own thing. They’re all multi-instrumentalists who became really good producers, and they produced a number of really good records in Canada the last few years. So that evolution was happening right under me and that prompted me to write the record with them in mind, which is an opportunity I never had before.”

There’s no denying that Jason Collett in part created Zeus (who are touring alongside Collett on his Australian tour, appearing at Peats Ridge and have just put out their own debut record, Say Us.) Nor can you deny that Collett’s latest album isn’t full of Zeus’ touch. But hey, chickens and eggs.

“We kind of grew into this together and I think that really shows,” he continues, setting the aside to rest, “I feel it’s ultimately more of a focused record, because rather than getting so many different musicians in, it’s really mostly me and them…and I think that gives it a little more impact. This is really the first time I’ve been able to write with certain personalities in mind, knowing what they were into instead of writing a bunch of songs and getting people to play on them.”

Not only was his approach to songwriting altered from working with Zeus, Collett strived to evolve by throwing sand in the gearbox of everything they’d been used to as far as writing an album was concerned.

“I did a few things differently. We didn’t do any pre-production, I didn’t show them the bulk of the songs before we started recording. They’re really fast on their feet and we went after that in the first few sessions, which is really cool ‘cause all those guys have real good instincts. So all those things became bits and pieces which made up this record.”

I mention that this seems to be a pretty effective formula that he’s stumbled across to make music, to which he carefully considers his double negatives as he corrects me.  “Ultimately, it’s an absence of an agenda; which is actually the only intention that I have these days. There’s so much potential for a happy accident when you do things that way. So the less of an agenda you have, the less intellectualised it is, the less fuckin’ smart ass crap is involved. You’re bound to discover shit. It was an exercise in randomness and spontonaeity…and when you work with people who are good musicians who’ve got some chemistry together, you’re away to the races.”

With Zeus developing underneath him and launching their own debut Say Us in Australia alongside Collett’s own record, I suggest to him that it must be a little like watching your kids leave home.

 “It’s a bit like that yeah. I’m really proud of them cos I watched it all happen, but I take so much from this relationship. When young artists are hitting their stride like that and are at the top of their game it’s a great environment for me to be around. Because it makes me hustle that much more, stretch that much further…just to keep up with them. So it proves to me how healthy it is to be in some kind of collective as an artist; whether you’re a painter or a musician or a writer…having close peers whose work you admire and whose work inspires you, who you also trust to criticize your own work…it’s a good environment to deal with you know?”

I quiz him about the large Canadian contingent making their way to Peats Ridge to which he muses about Joel Plaskett’s own role in Zeus’ upbringing via Plaskett’s quintessential Canadian band of the 90’s in Thrush Hermit. We then digress into the fact that he hasn’t seen the Peats line-up, how that will probably work in his favour, and then finally, his approach to playing to an Australian audience.

“It’s all still fairly fundamental,” he describes, dispelling the suggestion that any alteration in approach might take place when playing to a crowd that’s waiting to be impressed. “We’re gonna do what we always do which is just have a great time, and from what I’ve heard, people from Australia like that. So I think we’ll get along just fine.”

You can catch Jason Collet's eclectic brand of alt-everything genre-melding folk across the country for the Peats Ridge Festival and a series of dates as detailed here.