Norman Wong

Cameras Obscuras | The future’s so bright that The Hidden Cameras have to wear black robes. Oh — and also shades.

THE HIDDEN CAMERAS
w/ Gentleman Reg. Avenue Theatre (9030-118 Ave). Fri, Nov 27 (8pm). Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.com).

Joel Gibb is yawning as he takes his tour manager’s cell phone.

Freshly roused from his bunk, where he was immersed in some heavy reading (Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry), the Hidden Cameras frontman is feeling just a tad out of sorts. His band has graduated from touring in vans to buses, and now he understands how many musicians can lose their sense of time and place on extended jaunts.

“I think we’re somewhere around Tucson,” he says. “The bus has kind of changed everything. In a van, you’re more aware of where you are and the distance you’ve traveled, but on the bus you just don’t know; you can sleep it all away.”

Such are the perks of indie stardom. Gibb and his ever-changing group of musicians have been diligently releasing critically acclaimed albums since 2001’s Ecce Homo, but for many people it was 2004’s Mississauga Goddam that really kicked the band into high gear. A perfect representation of what Gibb himself describes as “gay church folk music,” the album topped many a critic’s year-end list and had the band playing to larger audiences across North America and Europe.

Awoo followed in 2006, but aside from some soundtrack work (notably for John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus) the band has been quiet on the recording front. That’s because Gibb has been acting (2008’s The Lollipop Generation), recording solo work (contributing to an Arthur Russell tribute album), and working as an artist. That’s a heavy schedule to maintain, possibly doubly so because he divides his time between Toronto and Berlin; you have to wonder how he manages to get any songwriting in at all.

“Well, that’s the thing,” he notes. “I haven’t written that many songs lately, to be honest. The new record [Origin: Orphan] actually has songs that date back as much as seven years ago. I have a backlog of them, and it’s hard to be writing new ones when there are some from long ago that I think are great but just haven’t gotten around to showing the band. In a way, I’m just trying to get through songs that I wrote from my 20s.”

Gibb is now in his early 30s, so that backlog must be tremendous. Still, there’s little doubt that his creative powers at the time must have been considerable. The recently released Origin: Orphan is picking up plaudits from the usual sources, and songs like “Underage” show he hasn’t lost his taste for wittily tweaking the more conservative elements among us. If the new album is Gibb sorting out material from the past, it would be interesting to see how his songwriting is affected by his constant moving between two continents in the past few years.

“I get this question about Berlin from journalists a lot,” he acknowledges, “but I can’t say that it’s really that big a deal. It’s more, ‘How has my 30s affected my songwriting?’ See, I do write; I just don’t sit down with a plan to write. I think my best songs were the ones that came when I wasn’t trying, or even at the worst moments, like riding my bike or walking down the steps. That’s when I think of a hook for a song, or a great vocal melody. I’d never sit at a piano and allot myself two hours a day to write. That kind of cliché just does not apply to me. I’m sure it works for some, but not me.”

If Gibb has no interest in forcing his songwriting, he’s also less than interested in bowing to the pressures of the marketplace. That he’s been able to sustain a career aside from his film and art interests has come as a welcome surprise, but he has no intention of modifying the very gay themes that often permeate his songs. And why should he? That’s he’s able to capture a wider audience on his own terms suggests that he’s on the right track.

“I don’t think of an audience when I write a song,” he explains. “I think about myself. It’s a solitary, very self-fulfilling thing that I enjoy, processing my own experiences and emotions. How could I possibly change the way that I do it?”