Jacco Gardner is an explorer of the human psyche. He recently released his second full-length album Hypnophobia, but even in that short span of time has made an indelible mark on the face of modern psychedelic pop/rock. The 27 year-old Dutch songwriter initially turned heads with his 2013 Cabinet of Curiosities, earning him comparisons to groundbreaking artists like Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson and Van Dykes Park.
On Hypnophobia (from the Greek: “Dread of sleep”), Gardner delves into the various states of consciousness, altered not necessarily by chemical means but rather from the entering into what he calls “the world in between reality and the dream world.” In this interview with Gardner, we discuss the challenges of capturing and describing the ethereal nature of the “dream world,” the sonic canvas that allows Gardner to paint such a dramatic landscape, and the influences that have shaped the singer/songwriter’s unique musical universe.
Can you describe in your own words the sound of Hypnophobia?
You know the first one Cabinet of Curiosities was very acoustic and I definitely wanted to try out more electric sounds, so I obtained some instruments that I wanted to use on this new album and I just started
experimenting.
You played all of the instruments on the album yourself except the drums. When you recorded your 2013 album, you used the same approach right?
It’s a similar approach, although that album took me, like, eight years of different versions of demos and they all feel like every song is a different chapter of my life. And now the new album seems like one chapter, one part of my life; it’s all been written and recorded in the same year. Other than that, I had a pretty similar approach working on the new one.
With Hypnophobia there is still very much a storytelling approach. Cabinet of Curiosities had that, is also a larger narrative to this album?
It’s not a conceptual album in the sense of it telling one story, from beginning to end. But when I cut the songs, when it was already finished, and I put them in order, it felt a lot more cinematic to me than I had
thought it would be. The song before the last song (“Make Me See”) feels pretty dramatic, and then the last song (“All Over”) feels a little like the credits, where in the cinema people would get up and walk away. It
feels a little bit like a movie.
Does the studio allow you to approach songwriting more comprehensively, or do you feel that the songs are able to grow in a live setting? What better reflects your songwriting style?*
I would say the studio versions are closer to my, you know, my fascinations, and the atmosphere that I’m going for, the things I’m trying to communicate and trying to investigate. After all of the touring that I had done for the first album, I wrote the new album with a lot of live situations in mind. Not necessarily like I had to worry about the arrangements or to make sure that they would be possible live – I didn’t care about that that much. But there is a lot of opportunity for freedom in some of the songs, where we can do a lot more with them live than I do on the record. I wanted to incorporate a little bit of that on the new album.
Do you have a steady group of musicians that can support the conceptualization of the album in a live setting?
The formation of the band kind of moved around a little bit. We started out as a four piece and now it’s a five piece. I’m actually playing acoustic guitar now, where I would be playing keys before. We have moved things around a little bit, but everybody in the band right now seems to really intuitively know what the songs need and how it will sound best live, even though they don’t necessarily have the same fascinations that I have when I write these songs, they know what it needs in order to be able to perform them live. I’m very lucky to have these musicians with me right now. I’m very happy with that.
But when you’re in the studio, you’re playing all of these meticulous arrangements – electric piano, guitar, harpsichord – yourself. Why do you choose that approach when you are writing and developing these songs?
It’s kind of personal. Especially writing the second album; there has been a lot of thought processes that are not necessarily things that I deal with in words. Things like the world in between reality and the dream world, or between being awake and being asleep. That’s very hard to describe in words, so a lot of that is just the music that I wrote trying to describe that feeling. It’s a different thing when we play live, but on the record it’s just easier when I’m on my own and surrounded by instruments that I like to use, and when I feel it, to be able to change that feeling into the music that I’m making. I have to work with other people that [share] the same feeling; I can only do that if they would have the same obsessions and fascinations that I have. And they [may be] fascinated by it, but they are not obsessive about it as I am, so it mostly works better on my own for the album.
Are there other writers, thinkers or authors who share some of the same literary or lyrical concepts that you present, like in the album’s single “Find Yourself”?
People like Syd Barrett and Donovan. It’s something that a lot of people in the ‘60s and ‘70s were interested in: the psyche, and mysteries that nobody has ever really solved – things like that were really big then. Even though nowadays they still have it in songs, just as mysterious as it was then, it seems like it was more common to write about things like that back then. People like Syd Barrett; Tim Buckley is a great lyricist. Duncan Browne is also a huge influence, as well.
On the topic of dreams and wandering between worlds: have you ever read Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud?
I didn’t really read any literature by them but I have been reading about what their points of view are, and the way they viewed things are interesting. Definitely things that Jung describes as archetypes – these things featured even in dreams of very young people, like dragons – that even young children would dream that way, that’s definitely been a fascination. I have an encyclopedia of the dream world that talks about Jung’s theories. I’d like to get into it more.
It seems like Hypnophobia taps into that broad palette of ideas, especially the way you describe it exploring the universe in between the dream world and the waking. Something bigger than pop or rock.
Definitely. It gets to a more interesting point, it’s more of “the self” or the position that we have as human being in this world. I’m always very interested in mysteries, and for me my own identity is one of the biggest mysteries that I know of. There are some processes that I still can’t explain but I write about and am inspired by.
If you weren’t writing music, do you think you could see yourself in some other job being able to tackle the same themes and mysteries?
I love visual art. It’s so close to music. The way that the mind works with images is very close to what we can hear in music; they’re so connected toeach other. There was a point where I was done with school and I had to choose between either fine arts or music, and I went for music and my drawing abilities have been getting worse from that point, but my musical abilities have gotten better. Maybe it could have been the other way around if the past went differently.
Did you tour recently in the U.S.?
We did a week of South-by and a week of the West Coast: Santa Cruz, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego.
Did you feel a good reception there? There’s a very strong link to the counter-cultural world, especially in San Francisco.
Definitely. Every time we play there, it seems like people are really into it.
If you were to compare the way that your songs are perceived in Europe, say in London versus in New York or San Francisco, do you feel a different vibe?
It’s totally different, each place that we play in. Even in the same place I can be surprised by a totally different crowd than from another time I had played there, you know? We play this place in Cleveland, just a hot dog place, and every time we play there it’s awesome, people love it and can’t wait for us to come back. But then we will have a university show where there are five people watching a basketball game while we are playing. I think in general that the vibe on the East Coast and the West Coast is pretty different in the U.S. The audience is pretty different.
But even in Europe, the difference between people is even more evident. Spanish people are really passionate or really crazy; they don’t care if people point at their strange dancing. Then, the people in Portugal – which is very close – are very different. Or Germany and Spain, they are the complete opposite.
It must be very interesting to be able to present the same art and gauge the reactions.
Totally. In France, people love to get into the sort of intellectual side of it, and they understand the music like nobody else can, it seems. They really are very poetic. In Spain, they don’t really work with words, as much, but they show how passionate they are just by dancing. It’s a very different way of being, even though they are similarly passionate. It’s cool like that.
Both Cabinet of Curiosities and Hypnophobia are fairly cerebral works. Do you think that this album is more danceable?
I think so, yeah. Especially the songs “Hypnophobia” or “Before the Dawn.” I guess that I could dance to it – I would try it. They are a little more danceable than Cabinet was.
A lot of artists now approach the ‘60s sound as an influence, and some imitate it. Do you feel like when you are writing these songs, you need to do something that really differentiates the music from what others are doing, or even what the originators of the sound were doing? Do you feel like there are different tools at your disposal?
This time is completely different from that time. I’m not using [music] to get back to that time or anything; I’m using those elements of the past to communicate something in the present, which is was a very different thing than Pink Floyd or anyone else was doing at that time. They used it for a different reason.
Also, I’m not a very radical drug user; it’s not necessarily needed for the kind of music that I’m into. Most of the music that I’ve heard from the ‘60s and ‘70s is very drug-inspired or was made by people that used a lot of drugs. To me, it’s more the feeling that I had when I was dreaming, or not necessarily connected to any kind of drugs. I also got into [psychedelic music] when I was pretty young, like thirteen or fourteen. A little too young to be using drugs or anything. So it always felt more connected to my dreams than to any kind of drug, really.
I think possibly those individuals who were writing needed to be radical and use drugs in order to create a new scene. Everything was very straight around them; it wasn’t a very progressive time.
Nowadays it’s the opposite. You know, everywhere I go – I go to some psychedelic festival, there’s always people on drugs. And it doesn’t necessarily turn me off,or make me want to do it. Not that I don’t use drugs, by the way. I just don’t use it to make music with.
