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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  Thanks for agreeing to be our inaugural victim.  We thought we'd begin with a bookish question:  what are you reading right now, and what's in the queue?

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CHRIS EATON:  I usually read a lot of books at the same time. But lately I've been working a lot, and trying to write new songs, so I only have the one: William Vollmann's The Royal Family. He's arguably the best young writer in North America today, if part of your argument includes what young means. Sometimes he can go a bit long, but I'd rather him do that and keep pumping out 750-page novels every year than take more time to edit out the weak parts and only write half as much. I can edit for myself.

Next up? I don't often plan that far ahead. The last book I read, though, was Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, by George Monbiot. Cheery stuff, you can imagine. I think we've been working our way through it as a band, or books like it, and when we're on the road, we're often working on a proposal to save the world. Keep your eyes open for it.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  Vollmann's pushing 50, isn't he?  Think all his paid dates are keeping him young?

Your comment about editing for yourself is intriguing.  How do you feel about digital music distribution, which emphasizes the sale of single tracks?  As the author of a concept album, are you given pause by the way à la carte consumption allows music fans to edit for themselves?  And do you think the demise of the album format might ultimately affect the content of pop music?

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OLD FART (aka CHRIS EATON): Holy crap, you're right. He was young when I first started reading him, I guess. And time seems to move without me. According to friends I had when I was a child, I used to frequently say I hoped I would die before I was this age, because I didn't want to have to live in such pain and decrepitude.

And I guess that leads into the second answer. The album is something that is remnant of my youth. Something that is entirely a product of changing technology and distribution systems. And probably destined to be a blip on the timeline of music. I mean, you look at pre-Beatles-era music, and there was no real concept of an album back then, either. And now that everything is available digitally, it's reverting back to that time. I like albums more than songs, in the same way that I like novels more than short stories. With time, you can develop more ideas and connections. And I'll be sad to see the album go. But it's probably inevitable and as I said, just a product of my age. And hopefully, before I die, the way music is produced and presented goes back to classical music, where you also had several movements that were designed to create a larger, more complete symphony.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  So do you have a symphony in the works?

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CHRIS EATON:  No, not yet. Although we are collaborating with a Baroque Orchestra at the end of the summer, for a Canadian radio program called Fuse, where we play four of our songs and four of theirs, and Scott (our bass player), who has a large choral background, has already started writing out parts. It'll be interesting to see if they're any better at following them than we are.

Bittersweet Symphony? Symphony for the Devil?

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  All right, we have to ask:  whence the horses?

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CHRIS EATON:  Humanity created the horses. As forces. To defeat the angels. That's about all we know for sure. And since there were no more real horses, they had no reason not to believe us when we told them they were it.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  Sorry--we phrased that poorly.  We meant to ask more generally about the creative process behind your latest album.  Did you develop the overarching idea before setting out to write the songs?  Or develop the larger story by piecing together previously unrelated song fragments?  Or did the album perhaps grow out of a single song?  Or something else entirely?

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CHRIS EATON:  Yeah, I was just being a jerk. But the answer is all of the above. Except the first one. And not so much the second one. Yeah, pretty much the last one, I guess. We tend to create songs at shows. I'll have a chord progression and maybe a verse of a song figured out, and just launch into it. But since I often only have one verse, it means making some words up on the fly, too. Metallic imagery and horse imagery just seemed to come. Similarly, I had identity issues about what it meant to be a "real" band, as opposed to how friends or relatives might see what I was doing. Then, one night, I started off with a line I stole from a friend's book that read "I am on an excellent steel barque, headed for home, and I'm going to cross the line." And by the end of it, I was singing "I am an excellent steel horse" and something clicked. Then I was making up stories about these robot horses between songs, and thinking about them all the time, and the rest of the lyrics came pretty easily from that.

We haven't actually done this spontaneous creation in a while. Mostly because I don't really want to write more robot horse songs, but it's hard to get my mind out of it. But we're planning to do a string of shows in Toronto soon at some small place and start all over.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  How do you like living in Toronto?  How's the local music scene?  Places off the beaten path (pubs, dives, bookstores, etc.) you'd recommend?

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CHRIS EATON:  Are you coming to visit?

You know, coming from somewhere outside of Toronto, I was raised, as everyone in Canada who is not born in Toronto, to hate this place. And then I came here for grad school and immediately fell in love. Probably because I'm a workaholic. I'm either writing fiction, songs or something for money. Making things. Whatever things. But relaxing or taking it easy is not one of my strong suits. And so I'm usually up at all hours. In my home town of Sackville, I always felt like I was the only one up, and I would feel guilty that I was somehow keeping the rest of the town awake. In Toronto, someone is always awake. I've been here pretty much ever since.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  Do you have another novel in the works?

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CHRIS EATON:  I guess there's always one in the works. But I did start one a couple of summers ago when I was living in Panama, and as soon as I have a spare second (music pretty much took over my life last November), I'm going to launch back into it again. After my last novel came out, I realized that I was being confused quite often for two other people with my name: Chris Eaton the Christian Rock singer and Chris Eaton who's been writing books on how to do Christian missionary work. I had never thought of my name as being very common, you know, despite our country having a huge department store chain called Eaton. (Growing up, it was the Canadian Sears; now it's gone.) Suddenly, through the magic of google, I could peer into the lives of all these people who have my name. And strangely, no matter where they came from, or how old they were, or even what gender they were, they all seemed to have real connections with my life. Either in what they were doing or even in strange coincidences of numbers. Several of them shared my birthday, for example, or important things had happened to them on my birthday. So I started writing stories about them. And rather than have them tie together with a regular plot, the book relies on these coincidences to draw the reader along, just as they did to me when I was reading about them. So far, at least to myself, I've been referring to it as Chris Eaton: a Biography. And aside from being about people with my name who never meet, it's about time travel, and evolution, and pandemic flus, and terrorism, and drowning, and the American Revolution, and reptilians, and... The nice thing about having so many characters is that I can indulge all of my compulsive research needs.

When did I stop being funny in this interview? Or was that a misconception on my part that I was ever funny?
 
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CHEEZEBALL.NET:  Back around question four.  (We're just kidding.)  Thanks for your time and indulgence.  We've one final question, if we may.  While we are well aware that a wealth of worthwhile music has wended its way southward, we at cheezeball.net are dedicated to the eradication of all things cheezy, and thus, we'd like to offer you, Chris Eaton, the opportunity to act as guest arbiter of Canadian cheeze.  Using our five-cheezball scale (5 cheezeballs = unlistenable schlock, 3 cheezeballs = a difficult slog, 1 cheezeball = the odd forgivable misstep) please rate each of the following artists:  Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Michael Bublé, and Gordon Lightfoot.  Feel free to justify your responses.

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CHRIS EATON: Is Gordon Lightfoot in there as the black horse of the group? Is that the right metaphor? Guy has some awesome songs, on his own or covered by Nico and Dylan and Cash and the Rheostatics. I'm giving him a 1.

I've never heard Michael Bublé's music before, but I'm giving him a 5 because his name sounds made up (it isn't, apparently) and because of his connection with David Foster, which should be an automatic 5.

Céline Dion. 5.

Likewise Shania. But she had that one video that made fun of Robert Palmer that made me laugh, so I'll subtract a half ball for a 4.5.

And Bryan Adams certainly turned into a 5, with that song from Robin Hood and the duet with Sporty Spice and all that. But perhaps because I was young and impressionable when he first came out, and I can imagine possibly having made-out in high school to a song or two, I'm going to give him some leeway with a 3.5.

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FURTHER READING:

CHEEZEBALL.NET'S REVIEW OF ARE WE NOT HORSES
ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL'S DAYTROTTER SESSION
PITCHFORK'S REVIEW OF ARE WE NOT HORSES
ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL'S WEBSITE
ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL'S MYSPACE PAGE

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