Your vocals and ephemeral melodies remind me often of Saint Etienne’s work or Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser’s work with Massive Attack. Which artists have inspired Men I Trust?
Emma Proulx: My dream used to be to sing like Whitney Houston or Celine Dion and have a super powerful voice. And so for a long time I thought I couldn’t sing, because I had no voice compared to, like, my two sisters. So, I would play music and I started helping people do harmonies in high school because I had a notion I could do it. And people would say, 'Oh your voice is soft and very nice, it doesn’t sound like you when you’re speaking—it sounds like it’s coming out of a radio.'
Dragos Chiriac: Yeah, we always have to push the mic gain. During live shows we get a lot of feedback because [Emma] sings so quietly. There’s not that much power.
Emma Proulx: But folk artists, like Lisa Hannigan, who used to sing with Damien Rice—have a very grainy and small voice. She gave me confidence because I would hear her and it would sound exactly like my kind of voice. So, she gave me confidence.
I’d love for new fans and listeners to get a better sense of your scene in, and relationship to, Montreal, which is widely-recognized as an incubator of indie pop and rock. How have the city and the various players sustained and supported a band like Men I Trust to thrive?
Emma Proulx: Financially it’s doable, because it’s cheap.
Dragos Chiriac: It’s so cheap to live there. There are lots of bands obviously, there are lots of venues where you can play.
Emma Proulx: People are supportive of each other.
Dragos Chiriac: I’d say that too. We get to make lots of friends in bands so we can play together.
Emma Proulx: And although Montreal can look like a city, if you remove all the suburbs and focus on the places where people are actually hanging out, it feels like a small city. There’s an indie band crew. And I guess everyone kind of knows each other, and that’s kind of cool!
I want to talk about the evolution of your sound, and the role Emma has played in this. I’m specifically thinking about Headroom, and the electro-baroque tracks “Sad Organ," “Space is the Place," and the Rachmaninoff-inspired choral track “Offertorio." Then we arrive to singles like “Tailwhip," “Show Me How" and recently-released “Say, Can You Hear." How did you get from A to B?
Emma Proulx: So from the outside, [these songs] all look super different from each other, but for us it’s more about having fun while making music. For Jessy and Dragos, their capacity to make music is so large they don’t have a style they haven’t heard. The format of the album allows us to go deeper and to experience a lot.
Dragos Chiriac: That’s exactly what I wanted to say. The album format allows you to make lots of crazy things because you have time to put it in motion and play with it...you can have some songs that would never stand up by themselves, but in the context of an album they make total sense. The thing is, with singles, I wouldn’t release, as you said, a Russian-inspired choral song, that would be kind of weird.
Emma Proulx: In terms of mixing and mastering, the first [Men I Trust] album is so clear it almost hurts. You can hear everything, it’s so electronic, it’s separate. And I think over time, we’ve tended to become more organic. It’s not a conscious decision.
Dragos Chiriac: The past two singles, like, “Say, Can You Hear” are more guitar-driven than our past songs. But I wouldn’t say that the next album you have to expect exactly that. But then in the album, there are lots of playful songs that sound more electronic, and others that sound more organic, more acoustic. At the end of the day, all of the songs sound like a Men I Trust song. The process that we make the songs in, the instruments we use, the techniques we use, it sounds like a Men I Trust song.
There’s definitely a consistency one can trace. That brings me into my next question, which is your process when crafting a song. There’s a seamless marriage of electronic and pop, and even harpsichords! I understand Jessy has a background in jazz guitar, and Dragos a background in classical piano. In what ways do each of you contribute to a song’s composition?
Emma Proulx: We all contribute in separate ways. Somebody has to start, so, sometimes Jessy is playing bass and drums and basic chords. Then Dragos records the project and sends it to me, and I sing on top of it all. We prefer to focus on what’s good individually, and the song appears like that. We’re lucky enough to be in agreement most of the time. We work at a distance.
Dragos Chiriac: We have a big Dropbox folder! We work from a distance on everything. I wouldn’t write songs with three people together. I’d rather write something and then have someone check it and move thing through...Three people together jamming, for me at least, nothing productive will emerge from that. It’s hard enough to write the song structure and have a solid chorus, let alone having everyone contribute at the same time. That’s why we start a song and then everyone will work on it afterwards.
Emma Proulx: It’s really easy to start a song, but to make it from A to Z is really hard. Because everyone has really good ideas, how do you make a good story out of it?