Sometimes it pays to take a different tack. For the past 15 years, Alexis Taylor and Hot Chip have been associated with a sound that combines dance music’s various strains, pop’s more wonky shades, and indie rock’s alternative leanings. You knew where you were when a Hot Chip groove started to play.
Frontman Taylor's third solo album is a much different beast. Piano is as streamlined and pared-down as its title, an album where the singer swaps the good times and disco lights of Hot Chip for a piano, a microphone and simple, subtle, unadorned songs that hit the target time and again.
Piano draws you in, and Taylor has been "pleasantly surprised" that so many people have come along with him on this trip.
“Even though it’s a quiet listen,” he says, “it’s managed to reach way more people than I expected or that I got to with the other solo albums. I think the fact that you have to stop and listen is a reason, and it also has a conceptual purity to it, which people have got their head around in a way that I hadn’t really anticipated. It just came out that way; it wasn’t planned to be easy to digest. I think it stands apart from other things that I’ve done.”
Perhaps this is because the album comes from a genuine place. “Left to my own devices, this is the kind of music I listen to,” Taylor says. “It has this kind of feel to it, and it’s the kind of songwriting that I’m best at. But I wasn’t totally planning for it to be a quiet record. When I came to record and put it together, the song selection seemed to suggest itself and we ended up with the quiet mood.
“That’s in my nature as a musician to make something quiet and slow, even if what I do with Hot Chip is not like that at all.”
Piano came from Taylor's desire to try something different.
“I wanted to make something where I was not trying to deal with dance music or programming rhythms. I was trying to get away from the idea of production and do something which was against all of that, and more about performance and songwriting and intimate moods.”
It also came partly from adopting a different mindset regarding composition, he says.
“With Hot Chip, I don’t really tend to think of the songs as something which will remain just as piano songs. Often you’re writing songs with drum patterns in mind or with a drum machine as the starting point, whereas these songs operate in a different way.
“Sometimes you get Hot Chip songs which start out very skeletal and are transformed, but they’re a slightly different kind of song because I know there will be other people involved. This time, it was just me on my own in a studio control room tapping into a different set of moods.”
Quiet cool
Taylor says his head was in “a quiet and introspective mood” when he set to work on the record. “You could have made a piano album which was full of ragtime tunes and arrangements – I’ve started to explore some other sides to what I can do with the piano in some of the solo shows. But I was having these moments of quiet reflection, and that shows.”
He talks about the influence of records by Plush's Liam Hayes and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis. "That Mark Hollis record really does grab your attention because of how it sounds, and that can be very effective. I think Liam Hayes was planning a fully orchestrated, rich record for Plush's More You Becomes You, but it ended up very different.
“If I was trying to make a statement, it was more about moving away from a method of recording that I’d become used to over the last few years. I felt like doing something quite pure and avoiding some of the production techniques that I had been exploring a lot. I felt it would be good for me to force myself out of certain habits to do with drum machines and experimental synth parts and the like. It was also important for me to concentrate on getting just one or two things right in the studio rather than throwing the kitchen sink at it.”
Stage exposure
Taylor has been touring the album of late and is enjoying the experience.
“You have just one instrument and one sound, but you’ve actually a freedom to play any number of different songs and atmospheres. It’s quite nerve-racking to be that exposed on the stage but, at the same time, I’ve found it to be easy to sit there and respond to how the crowd respond to the material.
“It’s up to just you. You don’t have to rehearse with six other people like it would be with Hot Chip. We can’t readily respond to someone who might call out for a certain song because we’re restricted in what we have ready to play. These piano shows are obviously about playing what’s on the album, but I’ve also found myself playing covers and some spontaneous things depending on the room on that day.”
What requests have people been shouting for? "There have been requests for Hot Chip songs which I've written which lend themselves to the show, and for Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark, which Hot Chip have played.
“It’s interesting to hear what people shout out for – you often only hear the loudest person in the room – but a lot of people want to hear Hot Chip songs we’ve never played live that often. I really like it when people call for something from the new record because it shows they’re paying attention.”
- Alexis Taylor plays Dublin's Workman's Club on September 15th. Piano is out now on Moshi Moshi
