During soundcheck, before her show with Sea Wolf and The Album Leaf at Neumo's, Melophobe was privileged to sit down with Toby Campbell (aka Anomie Belle) for an in-depth interview to discuss the past, present and future of Anomie Belle, tango, social apathy of our generation, world experiences and details on some exciting, yet to be released collaborations.
melophobe: How do you define the name Anomie Belle? What does it mean to you?
Toby Campbell: Anomie is a French word that was used by the founder of Sociology, Durkheim, to talk about both social alienation and normlessness and social disorganization and the feeling of isolation and alienation in individual society. I thought it was a good word to use in my name because a lot of my music contains a lot of social critique especially about American culture and capitalism, consumerism. I feel like Anomie captures a little bit of my social critique of American culture.
Then Belle, obviously it’s a name for a woman, but also I think the two work together. This idea of beautiful alienation for me conjures up this picture of people who are captivated by advertising and media spectacles and yet kind of isolated from their communities. We’re all online choosing our own adventures and aren’t necessarily engaging in our communities or social changes all the time. I could go on a rant but that’s pretty much it.
melophobe: Who are your main musical influences?
TC: Is it kind of all over the place. There are so many talented artists out there. I love finding new music and kind of finding out what people do really well. Obviously there’s big standard artists like Radiohead and Bjork who there’s a lot to be learned from.
Then a lot of my peers I’ve been able to tour with and work with that I really admire. Last year I toured with Tricky and now I’m playing with The Album Leaf. I’ve worked with Kid Koala and Mr. Lif is an MC that I’m working with now who is really talented. I have this band, Azeda Booth, they’re from Canada, they did a remix for me for my next album. The Faunts are also from Canada. These are all up and coming artists that are doing work that I admire. It’s kind of all over the map. I’m always listening to new stuff, learning from artists who are doing well.
melophobe: I know in the past you’ve produced and performed in various cities around the world, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam and Madrid among others. What were some of your most memorable experiences?
TC: I think I took something kind of different from each experience, each location. When I lived in Argentina I lived with a family who owned a recording studio and just worked in the studio, helped with engineering. I recorded an EP of my own with a bunch of local musicians there. That experience musically was pretty amazing. The musicians were really great. It was right after the big economic crash in Argentina so there was a lot of resilience and human spirit and generosity from people that was really touching. It was fun to get to work with such awesome musicians in a remote and far away place.
I was exposed to tango, which I really admire as a musical form. Last year we toured with Bajofondo, the band of Gustavo Santaolalla who’s Argentinean. He’s a folk composer. He did the Motorcycle Diaries, Babel, Brokeback Mountain, all of those films over the last few years. He has a tango violinist in his group and I really love that.
Amsterdam, I credit Amsterdam with a lot of my electronic music and training because I was working with an electronic, experimental label there. There were a bunch of jazz musicians that got into live looping and so I started attending these live, electronic jam sessions there that really had an influence on me.
In Scotland I worked as a studio musician and I got to work with and meet a lot of random people. I worked with this producer there who produced The Breeders’ Last Splash record and he was friends with, I met the Proclaimers and Marianne Faithfull’s band and just random people that had been famous back in the day. So that was a whole other experience. Each place I kind of took something different from.
melophobe: How did these performances with the string section come about?
TC: Almost exactly a year ago I toured with The Album Leaf opening for them on the West Coast. Just before The Album Leaf recorded this record that they’re touring behind now. They came up and spent a couple of weeks recording at Bear Creek Studio in Seattle. We hung out with them during that time and actually Jimmy asked me to put a quartet together to perform on the record. Unfortunately, they ran out of their recording time at Bear Creek. He called me a few weeks ago, a month ago, and asked me if I’d pull the quartet together to play with them on this tour. I have a cellist who’s in my band and there’s a violinist and a violist who I’ve been talked to, so I gave them a call and they were all in town, so I was able to get everyone together for these shows.
melophobe: One of my favorite songs from your debut, Sleeping Patterns, is “Bedtime Stories.” What was the inspiration behind it?
TC: That song, I think, I was grappling a little bit with the political apathy of my generation, feeling like there’s just so many pressing problems and issues that we need to be coming together to figure out. From the environment to human rights to the economy and the sustainability of our lifestyle and feeling like we’re all just kind of complacent, being entertained.
Then looking at the generation that came before us, my parent’s generation, and thinking how on the one hand we’ve inherited this world from them that’s just rife with so many problems and difficulties and challenges and at the same time they were a model generation for activism and social movements. There’s a lot of inspiration there too. I don’t know, it’s an interesting song because for me I was kind of hanging out in this weird paradoxical space feeling like things aren’t black and white. I think my music, more than preaching some specific message to everyone, I’m more interested in starting conversation like “what’s this about?”
There’s all this shit going down and we as people are able to come together and work for social change and we’re also capable of creating systems of governing and control that are oppressive and not sustainable and buying into these things in our everyday lives. I’m just putting this stuff out there for people to discuss and talk about.
melophobe: Many of your songs are socially conscious and/or touch on problems of our time. In your opinion, what is the biggest problem/issue our generation is facing?
TC: Off the top of my head, I think that the power of corporations and capitalism unfettered and unrestricted by government control. The amount of power pharmaceutical and oil companies have in our own government is problematic. I think a lot of other problems stem from that. It affects the basic underlying structures that govern everything from international trade to our own U.S. Government and I think that makes it much more difficult to work for things that don’t result in profit. That’s just off the top of my head but I feel if we could overhaul that it would be some significant progress.
melophobe: I understand you’re collaborating with the Posies’ Jon Auer on your new album. Can you give some details on the collaboration?
TC: Jon’s great, I’m really excited about the song. I’m going to be playing it tonight. It’s called “Picture Perfect,” I think. That’s the working title at least. I had written a duet that was intended to be a male/female back and forth duet and I was trying to think of someone whose voice would be a good match, that I liked and I knew Jon kind of as an acquaintance and reached out to him. He said he was interested so we got together. He was a pleasure to work with. So anyway, it’ll be a duet kind of like the style where the male and female are talking back and forth. Kind of like that. It’s a little different style of music.
melophobe: I know you’ve written for and scored a number of films. Are there any film projects on the horizon?
TC: I’m not working on any scoring at the very moment, although I’ve done a number of things this past year that haven’t come out yet. I’m not sure of the status of all of them. There’s a Canadian documentary being narrated by Martin Sheen that just got picked up recently so I don’t know exactly what’s happening with that. I did the theme song for it. I actually just had a song licensed for an upcoming Xbox game I think will be coming out this year, so that’s kind of fun. Then I did some work for a film that came out recently funded by the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs here in Seattle about the history of racism and imperialism and the World’s Fair here in Seattle. It’s a really cool documentary by a local filmmaker Shawn Scott. I’ve also been doing work with Real Girls. It’s a local non-profit. I occasionally do scores for them. I did some stuff for the City of Seattle, public service stuff and all kinds of different projects. I really enjoy film scoring a lot. It’s definitely something I intend on continuing to do.
melophobe: What’s next for Anomie Belle?
TC: Like I said, I’m working on a few records right now. The next release of mine will be an album called The Crush. I’m working with Mr. Lif on some tracks and the Jon Auer collaboration will be included.
melophobe: Just a couple more quick questions. Currently, what’s your favorite album?
TC: In Rainbows by Radiohead.
melophobe: If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
TC: I would love to go on a European tour.
