When ALASDAIR DUNCAN caught up with JEREMY GREENSPAN of Canadian duo JUNIOR BOYS, he learned some surprising facts about the band – and revealed some fairly humiliating secrets of his own.

In the midst of a hideous break-up several years ago, Junior Boys’ So This Is Goodbye, with its minor key melodies and immaculately crafted techno beats, was the only album I would listen to for any period of time. I imagined the album’s creators, Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus, as a pair of lovelorn indie geeks, composing the songs from the depths of their own broken hearts as they sat, bathed in the light of their laptops. I mention this to Greenspan early in our interview, and while he takes it in stride, it quickly becomes clear that, in my conception of the band, I was pretty much dead wrong.

“When we were making that album,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “I was very keen on this idea of writing a song that sounded like it was about one thing, but in reality was about something else. I’ve done that quite a bit, so often times, people misinterpret a lyric that I write, but I kind of lead them to misinterpret.” Surely songs like the sad road trip ballad FM had to have elements of personal experience in them – right? “That record was more personal,” Greenspan says, as though talking to a slightly crazy person, “but there was a conceit to it, that it was about overwrought emotions, so I was trying to play with those emotional responses and manipulate them in some way.”

Trying to recover some dignity, I ask Greenspan whether other Junior Boys fans have responses similar to mine, and if he finds himself, after shows, surrounded by people wanting to tell him how this or that song helped them through their own personal crisis? “I certainly get my fair share of people talking about that kind of thing,” he says, “and I’m fine with it of course, I like it. I think sometimes people think of our music as overtly sexual, much more than I intend it to me – a lot of people talk to me about that, which sometimes makes me less comfortable.”

Junior Boys’ music, it turns out, is not inspired by broken hearts, but by electronic equipment, and the band’s ongoing experiments in the studio. In fact, Greenspan goes as far as to say that he and Didemus consider the synths and sequencers they use to be equal writing partners. “The equipment you use on a track makes choices for you all the time,” he tells me. “You might change a parameter, turn a knob or do something randomly, and it’s almost like divination – something appears from out of nowhere that you didn’t anticipate, and a song is born. Every some we’ve ever written has been born, in some way or another, from a chance encounter with a piece of equipment.”

Phrasing it this way, I point out, does make the process sound just a little bit sexual. Greenspan laughs – “I wouldn’t rate any of my equipment that good!” but concedes that maybe I have a point. “It is true that the role of equipment can’t be overstated. In the past, I think, people have been uncomfortable about admitting the degree to which songs are born out of duplication, replication, out of experimentation, out of randomness, out of tweaking, out of sampling, all of that stuff – the notion that musicians summon the songs from the recesses of their genius is pretty absurd.”

Each one of Junior Boys’ three albums has a strikingly different sound – from the lockstep beats and icy synths of their Debut Last Exit to the warm electro pop of So This Is Goodbye and the burbling, minimal disco of their latest release – and their studio experiments go a long way to determining the band’s direction. “We’ve changed our equipment, even our software and sequencers, on every album,” Greenspan says. “When we start work on an album, there’s always the notion that we don’t want it to be the same as it has, and this helps us ensure that things always sound new and fresh.”

Once a track is done, Greenspan will write lyrics to fit around it, and in fact, this very songwriting process inspired many of the lyrics on Junior Boys’ most recent effort, Begone Dull Care. “The album is actually themed around a Canadian filmmaker,” Greenspan tells me. “In a way I used him as a place holder for myself, as a sort of metaphorical figure in order to bounce ideas around about creativity and art and music. Because of that, there are a lot of references on the record to filmmaking – there are lyrics about film and photography and very visual things that, in my mind, are references to the process of making music.”

Fans will be pleased to know that Junior Boys have already started working on a fourth album, which promises to be radically different from everything that’s come before. “We want to use a lot of tuned percussion on the next record,” Greenspan says. “Matt got really into Latin percussion recently and started buying up all kinds of crazy things, then I got into them and started collecting a lot of wooden and mallet instruments, so I’ve been doing a lot of writing with glockenspiels and things like that. They can, at times, sound so ... inorganic. If you listen to Japan records they would have these combinations of synthesiser sounds with Asian blocks and stuff like that, and you couldn’t tell which part was the synth and which one wasn’t.”

Our interview is just about over, but I’m keen to push the point about love songs just a little further. I casually mention that, several months after the aforementioned break-up, I included High Come Down, an early Junior Boys track, on a mix tape for someone new – if Greenspan were to make a mix for a potential crush, I wonder, what kind of stuff would he include? “Gee,” he stammers, “I don’t know. I don’t know! I think ... err ... I don’t know. I think I’ve had too many mix tapes that have gone badly. I don’t think I believe in the mix tape as a practical tool for flirting with people. I would probably fill it with stuff I thought they would like. Bullshit stuff.” Aww. More, even, than listening to his songs, stuff like this just makes me want to give Greenspan a big hug.

BEGONE DULL CARE is out now through EMI. JUNIOR BOYS appear at Parklife in the City Botanic Gardens on Saturday Sep 26, tickets on sale this Thursday Jun 25 at midday from www.parklife.com.au. Check out www.juniorboys.net for more information.

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