Joseph Shabason is a Toronto-based saxophonist. His new record, Welcome To Hell, is out now via Western Vinyl.
Cici Arthur is the new project from Toronto-based artists Joseph Shabason, Thom Gill, and Chris A. Cummings; Dorothea Paas is a singer-songwriter also based in Toronto. Dorothea contributed vocals to Cici Arthur’s debut record, Way Through, which is out today on Western Vinyl. To celebrate, the four friends hopped on Zoom to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Joseph Shabason: So, Thom, we didn’t realize this but we just have to ask each other questions.
Dorothea Paas: We just have to talk.
Chris A. Cummings: It’s totally unmoderated. It’s like Andy Warhol’s Interview. I always loved that format. Just one famous person talking to another.
Dorothea: That’s so what this is. [Laughs.]
Thom Gill: Well, fame is just so relatable. It’s always the same twice.
Joseph: Well, I think we should ask: How have you been dealing with your fame these days?
Dorothea: I was going to say, do you guys like being famous? What’s it like for you?
Joseph: Wait, I have a real question for you guys. Would you want to be famous? Like, if you were given the opportunity and you could be famous for your music?
Dorothea: No.
Chris: Only at a certain level.
Joseph: What about Adrianne Lenker famous?
Dorothea: Straight up, no. Hard pass.
Joseph: Why?
Dorothea: I think it’s so scary. Even doing that Pitchfork thing last week [Dorothea did their “Perfect 10” series], which is just for Instagram, I was like, OK, I have to delete every social media presence I’ve had. No one can know me. I don’t want people to know who I am. And I also think it is like a curse — even if it seems appealing, I think it will probably be bad for you.
Joseph: So you’d straight up turn it down. Like, you could sell out a 3,000 person venue tour of the world — not super crazy, but pretty famous — you’d turn that down?
Dorothea: I think psychologically, it’s not a good idea. But if I could do it in a way that didn’t somehow didn’t impact my real life, maybe I would consider it. But I just don’t think psychologically it would fit my lifestyle.
Joseph: I love that for you.
Dorothea: Thank you. What about you guys?
Chris: I’m ready for prime time.
Joseph: I think you’re ready for prime time, too.
Dorothea: [Laughs.] Chris can definitely can sustain fame. He’s ready.
Chris: I want my own recording studio, and to be able to have a nice pied-a-terre in New York, Paris, LA. Wouldn’t that be great?
Dorothea: You deserve that.
Thom: When you put it that way, I want the trappings. The things that go alongside it.
Chris: Just to be able to go live somewhere for three months or whatever and not have to worry about it — that would be pretty sweet.
Thom: I wanna be big in Japan.
Joseph: Big in Japan would be so good.
Dorothea: The trappings without the actual curses would be, of course, alluring. But like anything in life, you gotta take the thorns with the rose.
Thom: That’s just called “rich person.”
Dorothea: Yeah, that’s just being rich. [Laughs.]
Thom: Which we know is totally an innocent occupation.
Joseph: I wouldn’t want to be front-facing famous. Like, Adrianne Lenker seems too scary for me. You still have to go out and play shows and tour. You don’t have to, I suppose. But there’s this audience-facing thing that’s kind of freaky, and the whole mechanism of touring and record labels… But if somehow I could be famous for movie scores or something like that, where you can make more money than I make, and then still have the sort of notoriety where you can make bigger moves and have access to orchestras and bigger budgets for records and shit like that — that is appealing. But the actual fame part of it, I think, would be hell on earth.
Dorothea: Yeah, it would be good to have a name that people knew, but that they could never draw up an image of your face even if they tried. That would be ideal.
Thom: What was your “Perfect 10”?
Dorothea: Betty Carter, Betty Carter.
Thom: Hell yeah.
Chris: I’ve never heard that record.
Dorothea: It’s a perfect 10, in my humble opinion.
Chris: What year is it from?
Dorothea: I think ‘76. Originally it was called just Betty Carter, and then it was reissued in the ‘80s as The Betty Carter Album.
Thom: On her own label, too, Bet-Car.
Dorothea: Yeah, she was one of the first women to have her own label.
Chris: Along with Blossom Dearie.
Dorothea: I was just thinking about Blossom Dearie today! This is a Blossom Dearie type day, because it’s really sunny and kind of cold. I was thinking, I want to listen to that while I drive, but then I didn’t. But they have really good radio in Rochester. They have real DJs. They had the Valentine’s Day special today and it was all old R&B from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Thom: I once got pulled over driving in Rochester.
Dorothea: For what?
Thom: I was mad at someone that I was with on this weird tour and I left this house show, and I was stoned and feeling really anxious, and I didn’t have my lights on at night because I wanted to turn the dash lights off but it actually turned off the lights of the car.
Dorothea: Which is truly confusing sometimes, I’m going to say.
Joseph: This is one of my of my greatest driving pet peeves with cars. I’m glad you brought this up, Thom. So, you’ve got your headlights — you have a setting where it’s on. Then you have one click down where every light is on except for your headlights. And then it’s off. In what scenario would you ever use the middle light, where it’s just your dash that’s illuminated but no headlights and no way of letting you know [that the headlights are off]? Whenever you see people driving around at night with no headlights, that’s what’s going on.
Dorothea: They don’t know, yeah.
Joseph: Why do it in the first place?
Dorothea: Furthermore, why don’t newer cars have automatic lights? Like, even cars that you would think should have automatic lights don’t have them. What is going on? Anyway, continue, Thom.
Thom: I got pulled over. The cop was a teen and was clearly, like, freaked out. He said, “You’re you’re driving like a shadow. You seem a little high.” To which I said, “I’m having a panic attack.”
Dorothea: [Laughs.] “You’re driving like a shadow.” What does that mean? That’s so beautiful.
Thom: He was like, “Let’s start by putting your lights back on.” So I put my lights on. He was like, “Oh, great, one of your headlights is out. I’m going to give you a ticket for that — which means you can’t legally leave the States until tomorrow. Go get it fixed at a sanctioned garage, and then go get it signed by a judge.” So I had this whole bureaucratic nightmare in Rochester before I could go back to Canada. I was late for everything. But at least he didn’t take me in for being high, which I didn’t admit to being.
Dorothea: “You seem a little high” is crazy. [Laughs.]
Joseph: Yeah, that could have been very, very bad.
Chris: Why aren’t the tones and the wattage of the headlamps standardized now?
Dorothea: Sometimes they’re crazy. I don’t even want to say, but you know who I blame.
Chris: Elon.
Dorothea: I wasn’t going to invoke his name, but yeah.
Joseph: It’s, like, cringe to even…
Dorothea: He doesn’t deserve our Talkhouse time.
Chris: Speaking of goblins…
Joseph: Go on.
Chris: He truly is a goblin.
Dorothea: Oh, I thought you were going to pivot to something else.
Thom: Let’s talk about something opposite.
Dorothea: Fairies.
Thom: Who’s a real life fairy that we adore?
Joseph: I’ve got one: Robin Dann.
Dorothea: Yes! And Felicity [Williams].
Joseph: They make you feel calmer and happier just for being around them. And that’s a magical power.
Dorothea: So true. You feel so special.
Joseph: Yeah. And also with Robin, too, I find that she is so accepting of so many things. Like, she can kind of take the piss, but also at the base of it, you just feel truly accepted by her. And that’s special.
Dorothea: That’s true.
Joseph: Any other contenders?
Thom: I just was remembering from the interview the other day how, Chris, when we were talking about how your music can be can be characterized as “lonely guy.” And later we were talking about Doro as maybe her music can also be called “lonely gal.”
Dorothea: Absolutely. I was going to say, I really relate to that. Speaking of lonely, it’s Valentine’s Day today, and this is my one year anniversary also, which is funny. Do you guys think that my Identity as a songwriter has to change?
Chris: No.
Dorothea: Because I have not written an album in this era. I’ve only written in my lonely era. For fun, I make these playlists that are “Secure Attachment Anthems,” “Anxious Attachment Anthems,” “Avoidant Attachment Anthems,” and I do think “Secure Attachment Anthems” are the most rare. Because it’s very rare for a musician to be secure. But when they are, I think it’s really beautiful. One of them is “Solid” by Ashford & Simpson — it’s a song that’s not just a fantasy song. It’s not just like, “I’m in love with you and you’re perfect.” It’s like, “We had some troubles, we worked it out, and now we’re solid.” I think writing a song like that is a little rare, so I think it’s a good challenge. I’d like to try to do that.
Chris: I think it’s the hardest type.
Dorothea: But I’d also like to get some lonely gal material off. I have to just mine for that within my memory, or maybe find the caverns of my current state.
Chris: That’s what I do. You know, I’ve been married for for 23 years, but I’m still mining material from, like, when I was 17.
Joseph: How do you tap into it, though? This is a real question, because I actually thought about this when we were recording our record — how do you tap into that young, sort of angsty, lonely feeling, but not have it be corny or overly youthful? Because I think there’s a lot of bands who get older and still try to write relationship songs, but it always feels disingenuous and corny. But you don’t do that. It has matured with you.
Chris: You’re not hearing the corny ones because I don’t let anyone hear them.
Dorothea: You just have to be prolific.
Chris: Well, you know, I have to remove a lot of corn when I’m writing. I go off into into self-indulgent mode, and then you allow yourself to go deeply into that and then listen to it and say, “Nope, take that out. That’s gotta go. Leave that in, that’s good.” It’s a lot of that. But thank you, that’s really nice. I don’t know… I guess the teenage experience is just eternally with me. I feel like I’m always stuck in those years somehow in my mind, and it sort of stops at the age of 32 or so. Like, I still think of myself as being around 32. So it’s like, 32 year old looking back on being a 17 year old.
Dorothea: What happened at 32 that locked you in?
Chris: I got married. That’s basically it.
Dorothea: Really? So you were like, “Alright, done.”
Chris: “My life is complete now.” Yeah.
Dorothea: Wow. So this is what I’m going to say that relates to that: I think you are a big time romantic and a true dreamer. So it makes sense to me that you would find the love of your life and then settle in, but you never lose the romance that you carry with you in every day, because you have a very special connection to that — that filter, that lens that some people lose, of the romance of life.
Chris: Well, thank you.
Joseph: I have one more question. You were saying that you will let yourself go on a tangent and then you’ll edit. I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, I also do that and I’m able to just play and not be too in my head. But it’s saxophone, right? So it’s not nearly as embarrassing as super cringe lyrics. You know, I might hear a lick or whatever that I’m like, “Ah, too busy, too predictable.” But when you’re going into super corny lyrical territory, do you let yourself relax into it and not self-edit as it’s happening, just to get into a flow state? Or are you cringing and stopping yourself?
Chris: a bit of both. I find I have to just write it as badly as it needs to be and then start trying to make it good. But sometimes it’s not as multi-step of a process, and sometimes it just happens and it’s good. But a lot of the time, you do cringe looking back at it and go, “I’m striking that out right now.”
Joseph: Doro, do you do the same thing?
Dorothea: Yeah. Sometimes it just flows out, but I’m trying to develop better editing sensibilities too, and strive for timelessness for sure. For something I could stand behind.
Joseph: So you allow yourself to be cringe?
Dorothea: I do, yes. Because I also am a diaristic writer. A lot of times, I’m writing from my own diary literally — I’ll just look at my own journal entries and scan them and try to sing them over the song, and I’ll cut out every word that doesn’t fit and cut out and cut out until I get a really sparse version of it. Or sometimes I’ll use a source material, like quotes from a book that I love, and then I’ll apply that quote to my own life and pull out something diaristic that relates to the quote, and let it flow that way, so that I have a little bit of outside perspective. A really good writer who I think is really smart — I’ll take their perspective and then mutate it into my own. So I feel safer that I’m not as cringe. But I definitely do start from a cringe place, because it’s just my own expressions, and then I usually cross out so much.
I remember something I heard on a podcast — when you fear making something bad, you should just make the bad version of it so that you’ll know what that is and you can avoid making it. Rather than being like, what if my song sounds corny, you just make the corny version of the song so you can hear it and see it and be like, “Oh, there’s the corny version. So what do I actually like about that?” Maybe I actually like something about it, or maybe I change the parts that I don’t like. And now I’m not afraid that I’ve made this version, because it exists.
Chris: Yeah, that’s good advice. You said that you wrote “Maybe I’ll Fade” in one session — was that sort of like that? Like, you started with a lot of words and then crossed some out?
Dorothea: It was two separate things. Because I had written the music one night when I was just listening — I had been obsessed with [Hiroshi Yoshimura’s] Pier & Loft, and I was listening to it every day. I took an edible, which I don’t do that often, and I was like, I’m going to just play along, and then I’m going to extrapolate and I’m going to make my own melody. And then I kind of wrote this long synth melody, and then I would just listen to it repetitively and cut away any part that didn’t feel instinctually good until I felt like it was a flowing structure. And then lyrically, I wrote the whole thing. I wrote kind of just a reflection that contained all the lyrics to “Maybe I’ll Fade,” but it was a bit longer. And that was like magic. I don’t know how — I just sat down one night and put those lyrics over that piece, and it fit really well. So I didn’t have to cut out that much. Sometimes it just feels destined in that way. There were two separate days of work that fit together in that moment.
Chris: Yeah, I’ll never forget hearing that for the first time at the Tranzac [in Toronto] in 2022, when you and Mara [Nesrallah] performed it. It was like, Oh, this is this is unusual. Because you put down your guitar and Mara started playing the piano, and then you started singing that and sort of blew everyone’s mind. And then for months afterwards, I was like, “There was this song that was pensive and beautiful,” and I didn’t know the name of it yet.
Dorothea: [Laughs.] I love when that happens. I had that with Jennifer Castle when I was in university, and I saw her playing in Kingston, and I was obsessed with a song that was yet to be recorded — which ended up being “Sailing Away,” which is funny. But I was obsessed with it, and I learned how to play it before it was released because I watched a video of her performing it on YouTube, and then when it came out, I was already a stan. I told her that when I sang with her — “Just so you know, I’m obsessed with you.”
Joseph: Did the recorded version live up to the version you saw live first?
Dorothea: Absolutely, I loved it.
Chris: And for the readers’ sake, say something more about Pier & Loft.
Dorothea: I don’t know why I became [obsessed]. I think I just was very much in the flow of the zeitgeist without knowing it, of having this sudden desire to learn more about Japanese ambient music, which was obviously impressed upon me because of the tides of current trends. But it felt unique to me. My friend who worked at Duplication — I was like, “Do you have any tapes of Japanese ambient music?” And he was like, “No, but I’ll make you one bootleg.” So he just bootlegged me that tape. And then I played it every day for so long.
Chris: And cassette was the original format of the record, right? Like, it was only released on cassette.
Dorothea: I don’t think it’s been reissued. Or, maybe it has — I’m not sure.
Joseph: I think most of his records have been, with the exception of one of his that I really want called Wetland.
Dorothea: Oh yeah, I just bought the pre-order of Flora. They’re reissuing that one now, so I’m going to get that on cassette — they’re doing LP and cassette, but I just feel like on principle, I don’t like spending too much money on anything. I’m like, This LP is going to cost me $60+ — not to be rude, but it shouldn’t be that way in my opinion.
Joseph: No, I agree. It’s funny, Thom and I were talking about this, people trying to get a record from Telephone Explosion to the states or Europe or whatever—
Dorothea: It’s so expensive.
Joseph: It’s, like, $50.
Dorothea: It just shouldn’t be that much. And we’re musicians — of course, we think music is valuable — but I think that things costing that much is insane.
Joseph: It’s insane. Especially because I do love records, but I also do so much listening on streamers, and it’s crazy to me and makes me sad that somebody who wants to buy my record would have to spend $50. Like, fuck that. I hate it.
Dorothea: Agreed. How do you do lyrics, Thom?
Thom: I mean, I feel like I haven’t written a song in a long time, but I did write some Christmas songs recently. Which has my always been my go-to point of inspiration — I consider myself a Christmas songwriter. It’s a very easy point of access for me to the muses. Santa Claus is my muse. Santa Claus and Jesus. There’s a lot there.
Dorothea: There is.
Thom: But I normally just keep notes at all times. It used to be by hand, and I still do by hand, but a lot of it’s now in my phone. It’s all in my own form of organization, it’s all kind of coded. There’s pinned notes that are thematically organized, basically. And then I can go in there and I either have a germ that I can work from, or kind of like what you say, you just collage and extract and redact from there.
Chris: There’s a lot of redacting, on my part.
Dorothea: The collage is helpful. I think it’s surprising and exciting as a writer to be like, how might this relate to this? And there usually is a connection, because they’re all flowing from your source. And I think my goal is to surprise myself, because I want to surprise the listener. So if I feel that there’s room for interpretation, or that I’m not over explicating everything, or that there’s kind of a fun little mystery to the connection of the lyrics, then I imagine that the listener will also feel that way.
Chris: I think you’ve achieved that.
Dorothea: Thank you. Your record is so incredible. You three did something extremely timeless, and from the heart. And speaking of Chris’s lyrics, I think you guys perfectly brought those lyrics into the musical world in a way that is very synthesized and holistic. It feels really amazing to be a part of it and to listen to it.
Joseph: Thanks, Doro.
