THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS AND THE CASE OF NEKO

The New Pornographers on recording with Neko Case and touring without their female lead.

Vancouver’s indie-pop collective The New Pornographers’ latest album, Twin Cinema, has the critics and fans finding common, positive ground. The group is made up of members with various other musical endeavors, namely Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and alt-country songstress Neko Case. We asked vocalist/guitarist Carl Newman and Bassist John Collins how they deal with rotating members.

While touring, the band has to adapt to a Neko-less lineup, due to her touring her latest effort Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. We asked the band how they function without their female lead and what it’s like when everyone’s together.

“I mean ultimately, there’s people that, if they couldn’t make the time, they probably wouldn’t be on the record. There was a while there where we didn’t even know if Neko…Neko was so busy we didn’t even know if she was going to be able to sing on Twin Cinema. We were working on it and said, We wanted to come out with this by this date, which means we have to finish it by this date, which means you’ll have to do your singing by this date and you know, she came in and sang because she wanted to be on it.”

Bouncing from their recent gig at Lollapalooza, The New Pornographers are currently continuing their tour in support of Twin Cinema.

“We’ve become such a functioning unit without Neko, that when Neko can do a show we’re like “All right, this is going to be awesome” Sometimes we totally forget, “Yeah Neko’s in our band, she kicks ass.” When Dan was playing with us and there was like eight of us and essentially everybody that had ever contributed to the band was onstage, I just thought, yah know, it made us happy because we realized this is a rare occurence. This is happening right now and it might not happen again. but it’s cool that we have this, you know, you remember everybody that’s contributed to the band.”