Why Owen Pallett doesn't recommend becoming a professional musician

Q35:07Why Owen Pallett doesn't recommend becoming a professional musician

The Polaris Music Prize is now an industry standard seal of approval for Canadian music, but back in 2006, the very first prize was given out to a curiously named artist for a curiously named album: Final Fantasy's He Poos Clouds. 

"Nobody really knew what this award was or what we could expect of it," Final Fantasy mastermind Owen Pallett told Q's Tom Power. "All we knew about it was that Rogers was giving us $20,000, and that was definitely as dark as it was appealing.… Rogers was the company that I was on the phone to every couple of months screaming at them that I didn't care about the credit rating."

The win brought Pallett to the mainstream. Since 2006, the virtuosic performer, arranger and composer has charted a unique and challenging career, including collaborations with Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire and an Oscar nomination for their composition work on the 2013 film Her.

Every time I was working on music, I was crying.… It was just really hard because I had just had the pressure of, like, 'This is now how I pay my bills.'- Owen Pallett

Now, Pallett has remastered and reissued two of their early albums as Final Fantasy: Has A Good Home and He Poos Clouds. 

Yet Pallett's one piece of advice for prospective musicians is slightly unusual: don't try to turn making music into a living. 

"The number of people where I've been confronted with seeing what they do musically and I felt compelled to tell them 'you should do this for a living' has been limited to maybe one or two people in my entire life," they said. "Every time I was working on music, I was crying.… It was just really hard because I had just had the pressure of, like, 'This is now how I pay my bills.'"

Avant-garde

Despite this advice, Pallett still finds joy in making music. 

"I still love the creative moment of making music. I love coming up with something new, I love recording it, [and] I love sending it to whatever its purpose is," they said. 

And, despite mainstream success in the last two decades, Pallett's music remains uncompromising. By using a loop pedal, they are able to create dense textures of violins and synths. The result is beautiful and mesmerizing indie pop. 

"The thing that I think I like about it the most is that it's just over," Pallett said. "It feels like you've created something really beautiful, but then you just kill it and then it's gone."

They were classically trained in violin, but Pallett's musical instincts emerged from more visual mediums. 

"I had to spend six weeks in a wheelchair and my godfather … took pity on me and brought over the most exorbitant luxury that you could ever imagine in the mid-'80s, which was a VCR," Pallett recalled. "He brought over The Wizard of Oz and Time Bandits and 2001: A Space Odyssey.… That was like really year zero for my musical interest."

From these iconic movie soundtracks, they discovered the labyrinthine world of classical music. 

"I grew up with just a pile of records and I was really exposed mostly to classical music at a young age, you know, like I when I had my first Sony Walkman, I had Bartók on repeat in it and Bach, Double Violin Concerto," said Pallett. 

Ironically, for a musician whose early work was released under the name Final Fantasy, Pallett said they're not one of the legions of worldwide fans inspired by the fantasy game series. 

"I'm pretty below average in terms of my fandom of the series, but I have played them," they said.

Mainstream success

Despite their rigorous training on the instrument, Pallett decided against becoming a concert violinist. 

"I'm an extremely flawed violinist," they said. "I had a wonderful teacher for a long, long time and I was her star pupil, but because I was with the same teacher for the period of time, I developed certain technical deficiencies that she just wasn't correcting."

For Pallett, the cutthroat world of professional classical music wasn't appealing. 

"There were certain people who saw me [and thought] with some tutelage, some corrections, I could be a superstar player, and others who were just like, 'Get out of here and go back to Mississauga,'" Pallett remembered. 

The moment they found their step-father's old acoustic guitar in the attic changed their trajectory. 

"I was writing songs on it, and I was basically just doing all manner of stuff: I was playing in bands — the kind of bands that would play in bars," they said. 

Being broke

In 2004, they were playing in bands across Toronto and, like so many musicians, Pallett was broke. 

"I was having a really hard year because I had been working in the service industry and I was trying to do other things and I was trying to use that to pay the bills," they said. 

Then one night at the iconic Toronto venue Sneaky Dee's, Pallett played solo and their expressive violin sound was born. 

"My boyfriend at the time … came up and his eyes were wide and he just said, 'That is what you should be doing,'" said Pallett. 

Once Pallett found their sound, their fortunes rapidly improved. Becoming a member of Arcade Fire, and drawing cult acclaim for their solo output would secure Pallett a spot in the pantheon of Canadian musicians. And before all that, Stuart McClean recruited Pallett as a music producer on Vinyl Cafe. 

Through the process of rereleasing and remastering their early records, Pallett now looks back fondly on what was once a difficult time for them.

"It was just this experience of feeling like more of an adult, having the time and the kind of wherewithal to be able to sit and know what I was looking for as opposed to just kind of sitting there like feeling like somebody had just put me in the back of a car and was driving full speed ahead," said Pallett.

"It was incredible."

The full interview with Owen Pallett is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Owen Pallett produced by Mitch Pollock.