From its dreamy opening track, “Woozy,” JayWood’s new record Leo Negro prepares listeners for a dense and dizzying experience owing to its vast array of sounds and styles. The Montreal-via-Winnipeg songwriter and producer pays big attention to small details, a tendency which is evident even before one might get to the music, as each of his three full-length album covers are different degrees of elaborate, with the latest of them—a living room photograph featuring numerous iterations of JayWood—emphasizing the multitudes he contains.
Leo Negro is his most textured effort yet, a word that comes up quite a bit in our conversation in late August. When he was recording the album with engineer and collaborator Will Grierson at Grierson’s Collector Studio in Winnipeg, they put together a special station to add extra depth to the songs.
“Will set up a texture station,” JayWood aka Jeremy Haywood-Smith tells me over the phone from Montreal, where he’s walking his route as a mail carrier for Canada Post. “We had the 404, a DDJ, and a bunch of pedals, and the whole point of it was to give everything its own feel, texture, a little warp—a bit of a vintage sweep on top of everything. And the 404 was the most used thing throughout the record.”
The Roland SP404 is a creative sampler and effector. JayWood had seen bedroom pop artist HOMESHAKE use it live, but was practically introduced to it through another Winnipeg musician named Lev Snowe. He was already intrigued by rock bands using electronic elements, but when Snowe asked him to play bass on tour in 2019, the bass setup was coupled with a 404 armed with a bunch of bass samples, which meant he had to learn his way around it.
“Then when I realized this thing is really versatile, and you can get a lot of big sounds with it, and you can change it to make sense, I was like, ‘Oh, this thing is really, really cool,’” JayWood says. “Then I bought one during the pandemic and didn’t touch it for months because I was just terrified of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience—where there’s something new and exciting that you want to try really badly, but when you get the chance to do it, you’re almost so scared that you just don’t.”
He eventually faced his fears, however, and the 404 emerged as JayWood’s most turned-to creative tool. While the sampler has a major presence on Leo Negro, JayWood has currently been working on integrating the 404 into his live set as well, which comes with its own set of concerns. But all the risks have been worth it so far.
“It’s just one of those devices that has so much functionality and so much versatility within it,” JayWood says.
How has the Roland SP404 expanded your idea of what your own songs can be?
Honestly, it’s become more of a texture tool. One of the things I’m always trying to chase, that’s hard to achieve when you do bedroom recording like I do, is getting an actual lo-fi sound that is not just like a pristine DAW recording. I think by running music through the 404, you can give it just a texture change, it gives it a warmth and a cassette feel, or just like an actual lo-fi feel, because it’s music being processed through something else. So it’s really just changed how the songs can sound because the texture is not as polished as just running it through a computer.
Why is texture important to you?
Mk.gee put out that album Two Star & The Dream Police. And it blew up all over the indie circuit, and the one word that kept floating around when describing it was « textured. » « It’s so textured. » When you listen to it, that’s super true. But I think why texture is important is that it takes the music out of a space and puts it into a different space. I think texture really, actually allows for coherence. The texture of Leo Negro, despite all the songs being in different genres, different sounds, is one of the through-lines of the record. That’s a large part because the 404 is so prevalent. But I was also really intentional about the usage of the 404 and the overall fidelity of every song working under that roof of the texture. There’s the cassette plug-in, vinyl emulators, and also just running them through DDJs to give them all a cohesive feel. That was a big, big part of Leo Negro, because I think on my last record, I tried to do the whole mixed genre thing, but the one missing piece that I didn’t pay attention to was the cohesive through-line throughout the record. I just treated every song like its own thing. But with this one I wanted to be more intentional.
How has the 404 affected your live set?
Before I would just have backing tracks going, but now I really want to take the training wheels off and have performable samples rather than just having them happen behind us. Especially for a song like « Big Tings, » which is where I use it most prominently. I’m just using it to perform a lot of the sample chops on there, like Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs added a bunch of vocal chops on the record where I thought, « Oh, it would be cool to be able to perform some of these and give them a bit more intentionality rather than just having it be something that you know you can oversee while it’s being performed. » And I think as we get more and more comfortable with the newer songs, I want to start doing that with more songs, and eventually I would like to run my microphone through it as well, just to get some cool vocal effects on there too.
Is it complicated to think about using it like that live? It sounds like a complicated machine to me.
I thought it would be more complicated, but I kind of treat it like a keyboard in a way, where I’ve set it up so that, as soon as I hit a button, it makes the sound immediately. The buttons I use, I’ve mapped things out. So button number one is set for the first sample that happens in the song, number two is such and such and yada yada yada. It’s all just timing, and for me, it adds a level of risk to the performance, where it’s like, « Oh, now I have to perform this on this thing, which means I have to pay attention more, and I have to be more on the ball. If I mess up, it’s going to be heard, it’s going to be felt. If it’s overly complicated, I can’t use it and I don’t want to use it. So once I’ve learned how to actually put the sounds onto the thing and how to bypass a lot of it, I don’t really use a lot of the under-the-hood effects on it, because I just need the sound. That’s it. The texture stuff. When it comes to live, I just use it very tactically.
There are worse things than a tool that helps you stay locked in.
Big time. I know people that run with multiple laptops, and if those go it’s the whole thing. I’m just trying to free us up a little more and add a level of risk in performance. That’s what makes it an interesting performance, which is why I like seeing bands that throw their bodies around while playing complicated parts. There’s a chance that they fuck up, and that makes it really interesting, rather than everyone standing very still playing very clean music, every solo I know where it’s going, because, duh—that note obviously goes there. That’s kind of uninteresting. I just like that there’s a chance things can be imperfect. Things aren’t going to sound exactly like the record.
Can you tell me about songs with a big 404 presence on Leo Negro?
For « Doesn’t Really Matter, » I recorded the whole song on my laptop, just regularly—how I demo all my songs. Recorded that. But it was a much longer song, and I trimmed it down to just the meat and potatoes, like, « What does this need to be? » It just needs to be a minute long, kind of stupid, something just for joy, something for a teehee, if you can have one. So we took that one section, and then from that one section bounced it down, condensed all the recording into one .wav file, and then ran the whole thing through the 404, and recorded that into the laptop again, rerouting it. And what we were able to do was manipulate it as it was recording. So as it’s playing, maybe it’s losing its pitch, or it’s going higher or lower in pitch, which gave it this really wonky kind of, I call it like a ‘funhouse’ sounding song. It just feels weird. It feels like the song is melting and putting itself back together. On top of that, all the vocals were recorded directly into the 404, so as I’m recording I’m able to also manipulate my voice as I’m performing it. Then I just did a couple layers of that. That’s a more aggressive usage of the 404. A more subtle one would be on « Ask For Help, » where it’s super prominent but less wound up. There’s one section in the song that we’ve called the fireworks section, where there’s a loop happening and then all these little elements popping in and going in and out, and there are a lot of weird recordings and things are going backwards. It’s all little things chopped up and thrown through the 404 sprinkled in that section. And it just makes for a really interesting collage of sounds, while also putting it in this space where it’s like, « Alright—now the main lead vocal is out of the way, the song is on a loop. It’s a psych jam. »
