Behind the Scenes with Canada’s The New Pornographers: Indie-pop Group Shares What Really Goes on Backstage at the Ellen DeGeneres Show
“When you’re waiting in the green room before the show, they have this TV that has all these live feeds of them recording other shows,” Newman explained. “So we were
watching some random stuff on those feeds, and then some woman came in and went, ‘You know what’s really amazing? The live feed of them filming Days of Our Lives.’ It’s really surreal.”
“Since then Days of Our Lives has been our favorite show we’ve ever encountered,” he beamed.
Equally amusing, if not somewhat more unnerving, was the feed from The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“Here’s the thing, before the show, they make the audience members dance for like an hour straight,” Newman said. “So there’s this pre-show warm up where there was a live feed of the Ellen audience, just dancing for an hour. I swear, these poor old people were being forced to dance when they looked like they just wanted to sit down.”
And so it is: The New Pornographers are now privy to television’s backstage secrets, certainly a sign they’ve hit the big time every bit as telling as record sales or critical praise.
When the band formed eight years ago, though, widespread success was the last thing on their mind. In fact, it looked like the Vancouver indie-rock collective might only be a one-time project.
“We were just trying to make a record,” Newman recalled. “We didn’t really have any idea what to do after that”
That record, Mass Romantic, was finally released in late 2000. With its power-pop hooks and unusually complex melodies, it quickly became a critical favorite, earning glowing write-ups in just about every music publication of note. The group began to consider upgrading this one-off project to something a bit more full-time.
“The Pornographers only put out a second record because we got popular, and that seemed like a pretty good reason to release a record,” Newman said. “We weren’t one of those bands that was going to go out on the road for six months and slog it out and try to get people to like us. We went out on the road because we realized that people already did like us.”
The Pornographers’ subsequent albums, 2003’s Electric Version and this summer’s Twin Cinema were every bit as well received as Mass Romantic commercially and critically, and the Pornographers’ success has opened up doors for the band members.
Neko Case’s country-themed solo career has flourished, Dan Bejar’s glam-rock, singer-songwriter alias Destroyer (which, conveniently, opens for the New Pornographers during their current tour) has found a much larger audience, and Newman was given the opportunity to release his first solo record in 2004, something that never would have happened had the Pornographers disbanded immediately after one album.
For Newman, the unexpected success seems to be part of a pattern.
“It’s funny, of the three bands I’ve ever played in, it seems like two of them have been accidental,” Newman said, referring to the Pornographers and his first band, a noisy metal-pop obscurity called Superconductor. “Superconductor was basically this joke band, with six people playing guitar. We only meant to play like one or two shows ever, but then we accidentally ended up putting out a couple singles and a couple albums.”
Of course, the New Pornographers have found a wider audience than Superconductor ever did, an audience that, judging from the group’s latest tour, keeps growing. It’s enough to make Newman give cities he had previously written off a second chance.
“Before, sometimes we’d do a tour, and one night we’d have a thousand people, and then the next only 200. Now it’s really steady, though,” Newman said. “So we can’t say Tucson and Portland are lame anymore. Now they’re really good.”
