Chad VanGaalen
Oct. 17 (10 pm). McDougall United Church, 10025-101 St. Entry with WCMA Festival wristband or $10
at the door.

Being a starving artist has a certain mystique to it — the oft-romanticized image of a gaunt, chain-smoking genius in a filthy shoebox apartment springs to mind. (This fantasy usually takes place in Paris, for some reason.) But surely it’s healthier for everyone involved if artists doesn’t have to worry about things like malnutrition or having a place to live, and can instead spend their time honing and advancing their craft. After all, in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, poetry comes somewhere after not having to eat garbage.

By this logic, Calgary’s Chad VanGaalen has a life that verges on indie-rock utopia. He’s signed to the heavyweight Sub Pop label (and Flemish Eye here in Canada), where he’s released three albums in the past five years, the most recent of which, Soft Airplane, is being hailed by critics, as well as VanGaalen himself, as his most accomplished work yet. He also has some degree of artistic oversight, designing his own album art and doing all of the animations for his music videos.

Even better is VanGaalen’s studio, which is handily located in his basement and includes recording space, his animation desk, and a play area for his nine-month-old daughter Esme. He readily admits that it’s as chaotic a space as it sounds, casually mentioning homemade instruments, a smattering of art supplies, piles of old recording equipment, sticks, and week-old dog vomit, not to mention “piles and piles and suitcases full of bullshit.” But he resists the rumour, ever-crystallizing in the press, that he’s some kind of DIY, low-fidelity madman.

“I’m constantly searching for the highest fidelity, if you want to call it that,” he says. “Yeah, there might be a little tape hiss, and people aren’t really used to that, but it’s the most affordable way for me to track drums. It’s weird. People are like, ‘Lo-fi motherfuckin’ wizard!’ And I just think, ‘Come on, man, listen to this record.’ It’s not lo-fi — MP3s are lo-fi, man. What the fuck? This is just me keeping the mics on and not going in and trimming the shit out of it.”

It wasn’t always this way for VanGaalen, sitting in his personal recording studio, playing with his infant daughter, and creating beautifully jarring hybrids of folk, electronic, and straight-ahead guitar rock whenever he feels like it. He got his start as a solo artist in, if not the lowest rung of musicianship, then certainly the most brutally honest: busking.

“I was at this point where I was really frustrated — probably 21 or 22,” he says. “[I was] working at a pizza joint, watching this dude rip out John Cougar Mellencamp covers and making more money than I was making slinging pizza. So I said, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to make a one-man band.’ I basically just dominated [the other guy’s] space. It was right in front of the Wicked Wedge where I was making pizza. I knew everyone who worked there and I knew that I’d at least be able to get free pizza all night.

“You gain confidence, and people give you really honest feedback. I could play the same song five times in a row and no one would know, right? They stick around for one song and move on. It was a really good chance to practice. And I was paying my rent with it after the first couple nights — suddenly you’re bringing home $300 a night, and you think, ‘I’m definitely going back tomorrow.’”

By far the most distinctive part of VanGaalen’s music is his voice, which quivers and soars like a banshee singing a lullaby. It freezes you in your seat the way Janis Joplin’s voice did, with the imperfections only adding to its urgency and off-kilter elegance.

He says he’s largely gotten over the stage fright that kept him away from singing in the first place — though he did vomit in an airport last month en route to a big show in New York — and Soft Airplane features some of his most harrowing vocal performances yet.

The album’s two fixations are death and cities, as filtered through VanGaalen’s usual kaleidoscope of synthesizers, banjos, and electronic beeps and boops. “Willow Tree” and first single “Molten Light” spin pastoral tales of burial and resurrection, and “TMNT Mask” begins with a simple plea for solitude (“I think I’ll go sit by the river / Just to get away for a while”) before gradually morphing into the most unlikely danceable song of the year. Actually, “of the year” is a phrase that’s probably going to get linked quite a lot with Soft Airplane — particularly when critics start cranking out their best-of lists come December.

VanGaalen’s next big project is a full-length animation “loosely based” on The Owl in Daylight, an unfinished novel by science fiction icon Philip K. Dick. It’s a full-time commitment, and VanGaalen has to submit a finished product to the Canada Council, which is helping fund it, by early 2009 for final approval. That is, he says, assuming his funding isn’t cut off, as happened to his friends Holy Fuck in the wake of Prime Minister Harper’s drive against publicly funded lewd content.

But Dick is about as mainstream a genre writer as there is — so what is there to worry about in VanGaalen’s interpretation?

“There’s a lot of masturbation,” he says, “and people ejaculating pieces of marijuana. It’s turned into an abstract dreamscape — psychedelic insanity. I’m writing the dialogue, but I don’t think I’ll be delivering the dialogue. I’ll get some old British man to do it so it sounds all legit.”