From a faraway land called Canada, comes a chilling and personal record that hits close to home. Chad VanGaalen opens up his Infiniheart

"I don't even know who I am yet." Chad VanGaalen is only half-joking when he discusses how few people in the United States know about him, let alone know where the hell Montgomery, Alberta is. For the record, Montgomery is a town just beyond the limits of Calgary, where in 2004, Chad released Infiniheart, a record that collects the best of several albums worth of his homemade recordings from the last five years or so. Aside from some critical buzz, the album, released by his friend Ian on the micro-indie Flemish Eye, flew under the national radar, but caught enough local ears to land VanGaalen a few important gigs, including an opening slot for the Pixies—an amazing treat for someone who learned how to make tape loops by splicing together his worn out copies of Doolittle.

Except for one drum track, VanGaalen played all the instruments (and invented a few, too) on Infiniheart, which meant performing his songs live was going to require a bit of help. "At that time I was listening to a lot of Sun Ra and playing free jazz with my friend Eric. So I asked him to bite the bullet and play these pop songs with me," VanGaalen explains. "You know, he's listening to Rashied Ali or whatever, playing however many beats per second and looking at me saying 'You want me to play dood, chk, dood for an hour?'"

Where once VanGaalen's music had been a well-kept secret, he was now getting calls from American labels like the ironically named Secretly Canadian and subpop icon Sub Pop. VanGaalen eventually signed with the latter, who are re-releasing Infiniheart to a wider audience. "That was a dream come true," VanGaalen gushes about the Seattle label. "I remember salivating over stuff like Sebadoh's Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock. I was like, man, how do bands get on a label like Sub Pop?" In this case, it was as simple as Sub Pop's A&R staff picking up on the Canadian blog buzz. A downloaded MP3 of "Clinically Dead," Infiniheart's lead track was the gateway to the deal.

What's clear from even one track is that, while it might be easy to lob a few comparisons at VanGaalen (his fragile voice triggers thoughts of classic Neil Young cut with indie-era Built To Spill), his often eerie, sometimes aggressive songs have their own identity. "As soon as I started releasing my songs, people started comparing me to Neil Young," says VanGaalen. "And I'm like, I fucking hate Neil Young! But I hadn't really listened to him at that point. I was thinking Neil Young is some old loser, then I started listening to the album Neil Young and was like holy shit, this guy's like a genius!"

Tucked away in his basement, VanGaalen might not have produced something that defines the "Calgary Sound," but with Infiniheart, he has certainly made something profound, even if his early musical inspirations were less than stellar. "I was listening to a lot of garbage as a kid," he confesses. "I think my first music crush was on Corey Hart or something. Around the time I was 13, I heard Sonic Youth and that sort of sparked something. I was like, man I think I can probably do that. They're only playing a couple of chords and that girl kinda sucks at singing," he laughs. "But it was sooo good and it was all making sense. Not to mention, Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts. Man, if I could rip that album off note for note and get away with it. I use that album as a muse fairly often."

VanGaalen's first attempts at music started quite humbly. "I found a classical guitar in my mom's basement that had five strings on it and I tuned that up the best I could and started writing. I had two ghetto blasters. I was recording a guitar track onto one and then bouncing it back and forth and then I'd record another track as the other was playing. Then I'd have this song that was so buried in tape hiss that it was almost unrecognizable." Eventually VanGaalen got a job and was able to pay for a workhorse Tascam 424 four-track. More recently, he's come into the 21st century with a laptop. Still, two of the tracks from Infiniheart come from those four-track days, tape hiss and all. Thankfully, VanGaalen didn't let any limitations, technical or otherwise, deter his efforts. "When I first started playing I thought, 'What's more of a nightmare than having to sing in front of people?' And also I sound like my grandma when I sing. I was vomiting and experiencing extreme stage fright before shows. So it's been a crazy mission to get over that," he says.

Perhaps the fear is in revealing songs that are quite personal. While it's not like anything on Infiniheart is overtly confessional, you can tell the songs come from someplace intense. The song "Blood Machine" came straight from a sci-fi dream he had, while "After The Afterlife" with its references to fathers and mothers, tugs at the subconscious in different ways. "You don't want to know what that one is about," he adds with a laugh. But in fact, he recently revealed that if anyone covered one of his songs, he'd like his father to cover that one because it's about him—even though he doesn't know it. "I was really embarrassed at first because a lot of the songs are like diary entries," he explains. "I never imagined anyone except a select number of friends or maybe like my mom would be listening to it. The old way that I was writing songs, knowing that no one would ever hear them, had a freedom to it. Now when I’m trying to write stuff, knowing that I'm on Sub Pop and all that stuff, I've got to force myself to get over the intimidation of people listening to it and dissecting it because it has more of an audience than I've had before. So now I'm like, 'What do people want to hear?' running though all these reasons, whereas before I would just go 'I have an idea.'"

If VanGaalen ever runs out of great ideas for music, he can always revert to the art form that's been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. VanGaalen's father is a landscape painter ("from the old school" he notes), so art as a creative outlet came well before music for young Chad. "My dad actually ditched out on me pretty quick, but I always had art in the back of my mind that I could do it. As a kid I thought I should draw more because I wanted to get my dad stoked on my drawings when he came back, and when he did come back we bonded. When I was 14 or 15, we started painting together." Compared to natural settings, Chad's recent illustrations have a more twisted reality to them, not unlike the psychedelic dreamscapes outlined in many of his songs. Still, when he needs to get away, he goes back to landscapes. "Two of my friends and I have traveled around Canada and done a lot of landscapes. That’s probably one of my favorite things to do in life is to sit in the bush for 12 or 13 hours and smoke a ton of dope and paint the mountains," he says. "We all thought that everyone was doing it because we thought it was the cool thing to do. But it turns out nobody else was."

When he's not painting or making music, Chad VanGaalen is teaching kids how to play and build instruments as well as paint (he leaves out the part about the dope-smoking, though). The voices of some of those children were cut and pasted into one of VanGaalen's electronic instrumental bits "J.C.'s Head On The Cross." He's also collaborating with the youngsters on a gallery show. "We do this thing where everybody's got a piece of paper and one person's got the 'switch' page so whenever they want to they say 'switch' and then everybody rotates the drawing and then they go round and round until there's these crazy gas-eating porcupine or something, just the craziest shit." He almost sounds more excited talking about the avalanche of drawings he gets from the kids than he does about his music, noting that he really wants to teach art or music more than anything else.

Part of what makes VanGaalen's music stand out is that he is not really a career musician, or a hipster, or part of an over-hyped scene from a metropolitan city. "Calgary? Metropolitan? Oh my god no," he chuckles. "Calgary is somewhat of an anomaly because there are a lot of Americans living here, and it's a huge oil town so we've managed to rip out all of the old buildings. It's a really strange place to live," he says, going on to detail the area's contradictions. "Where I live it's still really nice, it's in the river valley and the mountains are really close. It's why I could never see myself living anywhere else because the mountains are this sort of fortress of solitude. It's pretty amazing to be that close. Calgary's good for that because there's so many parks. You see no one. I can walk five minutes in any direction and be completely isolated and not see any houses, so it's like urban and rural mixed together pretty nicely."

"But as far as the people that live here, there's a pretty high contrast between rich oil people and blue collar. It's just white people here," he says rather disgustedly. "Everybody's white and they love being white, and as far as the provinces go, we're probably the richest province, but we're always the furthest behind socially. Our Premier is really right-wing. If there was a province who was going to back George W. Bush and all of his psychotic plans it would be Alberta," he argues. "There's a lot of animosity between the people who want to fight the power and this huge cloud of right-wing insanity hanging over us at the same time. So it's hard for a lot of the artists that live here. You'll see them moving to Montreal or Toronto because they can't stand it anymore. But at the same time, the nature is awesome. I never get sick of going to the mountains."

As more attention comes to VanGaalen through Sub Pop's new push for Infiniheart, he’ll have to learn to keep that balance of urban life and pastoral bliss. Calgary itself has had to deal with just this year as well. "It's in a weird stage right now where it's sorta going through its growing pains," he explains. "We just pushed over a million people this year. It's starting to smell and get a little stink under its armpits, which is good. Cities should be stinky."

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