Chris Eaton is a man who likes his narratives like he likes his schemes for world domination: elaborate. Truth be told, as per my interview with the Toronto-based songwriter/novelist, I was unable to ascertain whether or not this jovial, bearded troubadour indeed had aspirations for any sort of global takeover (I assume not, but you never can tell), however, if he did, you can be certain that they would be so high-concept and sophisticated, they would put even the most shrewd Bond villain to shame. And as someone who, for those of you regulars, has a particularly spicy penchant for being more than a little bit over-the-top, I can say with some confidence that there are few people that can do elaborate with such class as Chris Eaton.
Speaking over the phone from New Brunswick (where he was visiting family on the weekend of his mother’s seventieth birthday – what a model son), Eaton discussed his band, Rock Plaza Central’s new album …At the Moment of Our Most Needing, Or if They Could Only Turn Around, They Would Know They Weren’t Alone (you see what I mean) as well as his upcoming third novel and how his music and his writing interrelate and compliment each other. Furthermore, one a more personal note, Eaton it seems was already familiar with our humble little ‘zine.
“I’m expecting really highbrow, egghead sort of questions,” he says.
Thanks Chris, that’s exactly what we’re going for!
The album, Rock Plaza Central’s fourth full-length, which was just released last month through Paper Bag records and is partially based on William Faulkner’s Light In August, represents and interesting shift in the five-piece (not including at least four “satellite members”) group’s already formidable catalog. Incorporating new curiosities such as oddly effective drum machines into their sprawling brand of indie-folk, Rock Plaza Central here completely shatter any previous conceptions regarding their sound.
“I don’t like being labeled at all, in anything,” Eaton says, “so when something starts going one way, I will try and push it in another direction. I’ll play an idea that I had to the rest of the band and someone might think it sounds like a sad song so they’ll start trying to fill in these textures that way and I’ll say ‘No, no, no, no, no; whatever you think it is, make it the opposite of what you think the song should be.’ I think that if the main melody is kind of sad, then the rest of it should be a little more upbeat.
“The drum machine [featured prominently in the track, ‘The World is Good Enough’] in particular was a happy accident. We had planned to put real drums over the whole thing… our drummer had to leave early that day and we were like ‘What do we do next?’ and I said ‘Well, we can do the rest of the song and Blake [Howard] can come in later and put the drums in; until then, we can just do it to a quick track.’ Instead of doing a quick track we thought we’d find a beat that had some mood to it. And obviously it’s one of the most primitive, crappy drum machine sounds on the planet.”
Recorded at the Gas Station on Toronto Island, …At the Moment of Our Most Needing, lies in stark contrast to Rock Plaza Central’s last album, 2006’s brilliant, triumphant concept album, Are We Not Horses? in a number of ways that are completely removed from the presence of a drum machine. However, like that record, Needing is very dense in both instrumentation and lyricism and explores similar themes throughout.
“All the songs on the album really, much like with Horses, fit together in a way that communicates exactly the feelings I want to convey, but it’s hard for me to express those feelings in sentences… it’s the interpretations that other people take away from it that I tend to find much more interesting and I hope that in both cases that we’ve left that open…
“But Horses is this weird sci-fi story and yet almost everything on there is acoustic and has a really folky, earthy feel and then all of a sudden we base something on a book that’s got more of a rootsy, old-timey story and the sounds are a lot more sci-fi. Sci-fi’s maybe taking it a little far, but there’s a lot more electric guitar, there’s that drum machine and a lot of things like that. And who knows, maybe the next album’s going to be a… blues standards record.”
Like I said, this is a man who loves a good concept album; the aforementioned Are We Not Horses? is a fist-pumping tale of mechanical six-legged horses that are under the impression that they aren’t robots but are nevertheless trapped in an epic battle between good and evil. The new record is not a whit less lofty:
“There were a lot of themes and images that kept coming up and I think it was Don [Murray] that brought that book [Light in August] into the van and read it and said how great it was. So I started reading it and realized that there are things in there that speak with what I was already seeing… I wouldn’t say that it’s a direct retelling of the novel or anything in fact, I think that there are twelve chapters to that book and every chapter follows a different person. I would say that two of the people in that book feature quite prominently in the CD.
“The novel starts off with this woman who is probably, I don’t think it’s ever actually said, but she’s probably fifteen or sixteen and she’s pregnant and her boyfriend, upon finding out that she’s pregnant says ‘I have to go and I don’t have a job, so I’m going to go to the next town, find a job and I’ll come back for you later,’ with no intention of ever coming back. But she believes him because she has this faith in love and at eight-and-a-half months pregnant is like ‘Whoa, well he hasn’t come back, so he probably sent a message but it didn’t make it and he’s waiting for me wherever he is.’ So she steals her brother’s shoes and goes off on foot to find him. That idea of sort of going off without and idea of what’s going on, but having this faith in humanity, this faith in something was very appealing.
"There’s another character in the book that she ends up running into while she’s looking for her boyfriend because his name is almost the same, so people send her to him. And he falls in love with her, but realizes that she’s in love with somebody else and he has this faith that somehow they’ll end up together.”
Apparently that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this album of only thirteen tracks, just a seething ball of blind faith this is. However, in addition to his duties as Rock Plaza Central’s frontman, Eaton is also the author of two novels by Insomniac press entitled The Inactivist and The Grammar Architect, the latter of which is a “literary cover” of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, the very premise of which only cements Eaton’s status as a fiercely innovative Canadian artist.
He spoke to me at some length about his upcoming book, which is to be titled Chris Eaton: A Biography and revolves around over twenty-five distinct characters that never meet or interact but all share the name Chris Eaton.
“I’m playing with a lot of themes, but just like in the records, one of the main themes is that of identity, this ‘who am I exactly?’ …I think a lot of that is our thinking, that we’re all terribly unique in our problems and by creating these stories about these people named Chris Eaton, we realize that in a lot of ways our lives are very similar. We have the same sorts of fears and dreams, though the specifics can be a bit different, but when it come down to it, we all fear and we all love.
“The thing that is really appealing is that I’m writing these twenty-five people that are completely different, who are male and female and young and old, so I can do a lot of crazy, insane, random research. I’ve got so much bizarre trivia in my head from this book. The last chapter that I’ve finished, a lot if it is the history of professional wrestling in Britain.
“This all came about four years ago when my first book came out and I was confused with another Chris Eaton on Amazon. So it said if you like my book, you will also like this book that he’s written and that book was a non-fiction work about short-term missionary work in South America and how to go about doing that… So I, as most people will do in their life, Googled my own name and discovered that there are thousands of Chris Eatons on the internet… It seemed like every single one of them had an aspect of my life in them, like I had been splintered into all of these different people.”
Through both his music and his writing, Chris Eaton has established himself as a major talent in Canada, a bold and ambitious wordsmith that does not shy away from the spectacular and the gigantic. His albums and his books are all wide in scope but all too human under the surface and overflowing with an unrelenting optimism that distinguishes him from the majority of writers that explore similar concepts such as the fracturing of the self. It is extremely rare to encounter someone who is equally as accomplished at more than one artistic field, but this modest New Brunswick native with his constant, booming laughter and big ideas has carved himself a niche that few could ever hope to recreate.
