by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
In the video for “Feign For Love,” the lead single from Scrutiny, Pascal Stevenson sits at a vanity, gradually removing her glasses, jewelry, and makeup, until finally you can see her red, dark-circled eyes staring back in the mirror, glamorous image stripped away from harsher reality. “I just wanted the visuals to be reflective of what the record is about,” says the LA singer-songwriter, who records solo as Fashion Club. “This kind of crumbling façade, and this mask that people put on to keep everyone from seeing who they really are.”
If you listen closely, you can hear the lavish post-punk instrumentals on Scrutiny fraying at the edges, layers of social falseness breaking down from signal to noise in real time. On “Reaction,” synth and guitar echoes flare out and fry while Stevenson decries the insincerity of playing devil’s advocate just to get a rise out of people. On “Phantom English,” where she laments feeling isolated and unknown even among the people who she’s close with, distorted snares hit like rocks crashing through windows. All of it was written and recorded before she came out as transgender, giving the project–her debut as a solo artist–a whole other layer of retroactive meaning. “There were many, many masks that were being worn–many illusions and façades that were being put up to keep people from seeing me,” she says.
In a literal sense, as a veteran touring musician with her band Moaning and as a sometimes-live-player with acts like Cherry Glazer and Girlpool, Stevenson is well-acquainted with performance and presentation. On Scrutiny, she draws on that musical experience to show its falseness as well as its potential to reveal deeper, darker truth. Before the album release, she spoke to Post-Trash about learning how to sing as the frontperson of her own project and discovering the simple power of a well-written song–no matter how you dress it up.
photo credit: Tonje Thilesen
Taylor Ruckle: I know from following you on Twitter that we're both late-in-life Florence + The Machine stans, so–
Pascal Stevenson: Oh my god, [laughs] literally I was like, "I have to ask Taylor about Florence + The Machine" because none of my friends will engage with me about it.
That's so sad!
I keep bringing it up, and they're all like, "I don't know anything about that." [laughs]
So Dance Fever--what do you think?
I love it. I think it's fantastic. You know, I think "Dog Days" was the only song by her I had ever heard, and I was kind of like, "This is fine, I guess." It was everywhere when that album was out, and I was just like, "I guess. Whatever." I never really gave it much of a chance, and then when "King" came out and people were talking about it, I was like, "Alright, I'll check this out." 'Cause since I graduated college, which is almost 10 years at this point, I've been trying to be more open to things that I maybe shut myself off to in the past, and just be like, "Oh, so-and-so says this is good. Let me go revisit it with a more open mind." At this point, I don't really have any hang-ups about music, and what I should like or whatever, so I went and listened to it, and I was just like, "This is amazing." That song in particular, it just hit me very hard.
That song is great. The whole record is such a combination of her most bombastic instincts, and then also this restraint in the instrumentals. It's so intentionally-paced, and vocally, she's so intentional and in-control.
Yes. I love when pop stars strip it back like that. You know that's such a conscious decision with a mainstream pop artist, because it's like, "Oh, if you're stripping back the instrumental this much, you must really be confident in the lyrics to this song." And then you listen to the lyrics of some of those songs, and you're like, "Yeah, I would be confident in these too, they're fucking amazing." [laughs]
I feel like the lyrical content is interesting for somebody as famous as she is. It's a lot more introspective than I would expect from somebody at that point in life, about things that I at least found relatable in a way that I typically don’t with–I don't know, an Adele or something. Like, Adele is fine. I have nothing against her. That introspection just feels so specific where she's like, "This is about a divorce," or something. I feel like that's usually how it goes with a pop star. It's about something so specific, not this existential dread of being an artist, and what that means, and like, the validity of it, growing older, and all of this stuff. That feels like something a less-famous artist would write about, because it's so not fun to think about.
It's not about being famous either! So many records like that would be about how hard it is being famous, and this record is on a whole other level. Anyway--we can't only talk about Dance Fever.
[laughs] I know, my interview is about Florence + The Machine.
The bio for Scrutiny says that you started working on this record, the instrumentals, while you were on tour with Moaning in Europe [in 2018]–working on your laptop in the van between shows. What do you remember about that time, and what it was like sitting down to work in that setting?
It was interesting. Normally, in the U.S., we would tour in a mini-van or something small like that, and we would kind of just rotate, but in Europe, we had a driver, and for some reason, we really just decided our seats are our seats. We had this big bench of a backseat that Andrew [Mackelvie] the drummer and I were sitting in, and it was so disconnected from the front. It was this weird void, and there was something about that.
We were driving so much. We were playing shows every day because our tour manager, who was our booker also, was like, "A day off, you're losing money," so it was very--like, those are my best friends, but it was very isolating being back there. We were in Europe three months back-to-back, pretty much, and it was like, "I have to do something." I tried reading. I would listen to music just on my own, separate from what was going on in the van, and at a certain point on one of those tours, I just had to bring an interface and my laptop and stuff. I was like, "If I don't do something productive while I'm out here in the car for nine hours every day, I'm gonna lose my mind."
I had been planning on trying to start writing a record forever. It's just always been in the back of my mind, and I had tried multiple times throughout my–I guess early 20's or whatever, to write a group of songs that could become something, and I always just ended up scrapping them 'cause they were bad. This was the first time where I at least got down instrumentals that I was happy enough with to be like, "Okay, let me actually commit to finishing these off and writing lyrics and stuff."
I don't know if it was reading a lot or if it was just feeling [laughs] really depressed or isolated, 'cause that was also pretty recently after I got sober, so I was just thinking a lot. You know, it's like you're finally using 100% of your brain or something. I don't know if it was just, "Oh, I finally feel like I have enough thoughts to write a record," [laughs] but I think once I was able to put lyrics to one of those instrumentals and be like, "Okay, this is a real song," then the rest of them, it was just dominos; the rest of them fell into place a little bit easier.
What was that first one that set off the chain?
I think it must have been "Pantomime." That's the oldest instrumental from the record, and it was probably the most finished, so that was probably the one I wrote lyrics for first.
That song sets up a lot of the themes of the lyrics of the rest of the record. Did you take that idea and run with it, or did you just happen to be in that headspace and it all fell into place?
I think part of it was just, that was the headspace I was in, and part of it was writing that song and realizing, "Oh, content-wise, this is working because this is really on my mind right now." 'Cause I had always had this opposition to just writing, and I think albums I had started working on in the past hadn't worked out because I would start writing them, and I would be like, "This isn't about anything. It's whiny. This is just sad for the sake of being sad, or it's about something I don't wholly relate to." I think this was the first time I'd written something where I was like, "I feel comfortable standing here and saying this," so I continued with that. I was like, "Oh, songs can be personal, but not about relationships or going through something acute." Like, "They can be about this bigger–whatever thing."
There can be a broadness to it. It can be personal, and yet...you know, there's not a lot of "I" statements on this record, I don't think. There's a lot of observation, a lot of looking around you.
Totally. There's probably some exceptions to this, but I would say most of the things that are a "you" statement are also an "I" statement. [laughs] I definitely never wanted it to feel accusatory in any way, so that's kind of always inward as well.
You mentioned that this is also a record influenced by sobriety, and I think "Dependency" touches on that. Can you tell me about that theme as it exists in the finished record?
Yeah, I mean, I would say that my sobriety was just a big part of being able to finish a record, but there's definitely themes of it throughout. That's the one song that is really specifically about it, and that one is kind of just about, like, that you are always wondering if the wrong that you feel that you did before you were sober is still a part of you, intrinsically. Can you escape the person that you were that you feel you needed to change? It's kind of about feeling like you'll always be a terrible person and any change you're doing is just pretending.
It ties into that overarching idea of what is authentic and what is performance.
Right, exactly.
That expresses itself in so many ways on this record. If I’m reading it right, "Reaction" brings it to this place of talking about reactionary politics as being performative also.
That one is specifically about people that play devil's advocate, and how futile that is, but I think that's an interesting thought about it, about reactionary politics. It's a similar thing, 'cause I guess reactionary politics can be on either side; there's lots of ways to be reactionary. But yeah, that one is for sure the most accusatory for me and the most frustrated, I would say. Keep in mind too that I was writing all of these songs in 2018, which is two years after the 2016 election, and the internet was really starting to become a miserable place. I mean, it's always been pretty bad.
We were really gassing up the online discourse generators.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm also curious about the gear setup when you were sitting down to work on this record in earnest. What is your work setup like?
I had pretty much finished everything purely in the computer, just using drummer plugins and bass player plugins and stuff, 'cause I wanted to make a guitar record, and I had never really--I had made a ton of electronic music in my computer. Normally, if I would be at home, I would plug in my guitar, my bass, or something, but for some reason I decided to use these kind of bad-sounding instrument plugins [laughs] and I just wrote the entire thing out, so when I did finally get back and start replacing stuff with guitars, it was pretty much ready to go. I didn't have a ton of money, so I was like, "I'm gonna book two days in the studio and we're gonna do all of the drum tracking because that's the most important thing to do professionally, to me at least."
I got my friend Nik [Soelter] to play drums and we probably played the songs a couple of--I sent them to him, he pretty much learned them, we played them a couple of times together, just me playing guitar and him playing drums, and then we went into the studio and recorded. I think we had four days. I think it was two days of drums and then two days of doing as much of the other stuff as we could, so trying to do bass, doing guitar, then I had Sasami come in and do keyboards on a couple of things. Then whatever I couldn't get done at the studio, I did overdubs at home. I did all of the vocals at home because at that point, I was still too embarrassed to sing in front of another person.
Oh, yeah?
[laughs] Yeah, for sure! Now I don't care, but at that point--I mean, I think you can hear it on the record. I was still figuring out what my singing voice is like, because I had never sang in a band before. I think that was another big part of it, too; I had never written any song that I was happy with the way I was singing it, so this was the first time I was like, "Okay, this kind of works for me," [laughs] but even this record I still look back on, and I'm like, "I don't know if that was working for me. That's a little low."
By the time you get the finished record and you have a song like "Feign For Love," you're really digging into those chorus notes. It sounds like you're really committing to the vocals. How did you find that? What was the process?
It was locking myself in a practice space that I had at the time for hours and just, like, pressing record and running it over and over and over again until I figured out something that worked; doing a million awful different versions of it, but just being so determined to get something that was listenable and that satisfied me that I just did it over and over until I was, like, "Okay, it's working now."
Are you still satisfied with it listening back?
Yeah, I like it. It's been four years and when I listen to it, I'm still like, "This is a good record, I think." There's moments, mostly vocally, where I'm like, "I should have changed the key of this song,” which I think is just an experience thing. You sing enough and you learn, "Oh, I can't sing in this key, like, at all." I do think I've figured out where it's comfortable for me to sing, so on new stuff that I'm writing, it's much easier. I think "Failure" was the last song that I wrote for this record. It was way more recent than any of the other ones, and I think you can tell on that one that I'm starting to get there more as far as singing up a little bit higher and jumping around melodies more.
This is a total non-sequitur, but I love the guitar sound on the title track, "Scrutiny." It has this very muted, kind of–almost a very very early The Edge feel to it?
Thank you--you know, I think that actually came from listening to a lot of stuff that was using, like, weird sampled string plucks? I guess I was just like, "Let me try and imitate this on guitar." I was listening to a lot of late-period Wire when I was writing a lot of this stuff. Like, Wire that probably very few people like. [laughs] I mean, more people than I probably am expecting, but you know.
At the risk of losing my music journalism license, I think I only am really familiar with the first three Wire albums.
Yeah, so 154, starting to get there as far as weirdness, but the couple of records after that really go full into 80s cornball shit. Like, incorporating 80s cornball keyboard sounds and stuff, and I really like them.
What has it been like getting ready to play these songs out? Have you had any Fashion Club shows yet?
Yeah, you know, I've been playing a ton of shows in LA that are just solo. I played two or three before the pandemic, and then pretty much we locked down. After that, it just kind of fell apart, and as I started getting asked to play stuff, it was difficult to have people re-learn all the songs, arrange practices, and stuff like that, so I was just like, "You know what? I'll just play solo. I’ll maybe figure out a way to play some of the songs off this record, and I'll play a bunch of new songs." 'Cause now I'm constantly writing. It's become a thing where it's really easy for me to write music, and I was just like, "I guess I'll just play new songs," because the new songs I've been working on are less band-oriented, and they're less finished, so I can play around with the form of them. I've been doing these weird kind of half-ambient, half-backing track sets.
What do you play live? What's the instrumentation?
It depends. I have a sampler that I run stuff off of, and that I will do effects mixing and stuff through, and then I'll either play guitar or keys, loop that, and build kind of a soundscape. It's just whatever I feel like bringing to the show, to be honest. [laughs] But I'm putting together a band to play these songs so that people can hear the record.
Given that this record deals so much with presentation and performance, what was it like visualizing it when you make a video like "Feign For Love?"
It's interesting 'cause obviously so much has changed since I wrote the record that it's almost opened a new level of honesty that wasn't there when I was actually writing it. With transitioning and stuff, it's changed a lot of the feelings that I have about the lyrics. It's kind of shifted some of them, and I feel like it's placed context on some of them that I wasn't aware of. So it was interesting visualizing it so much longer after I had written it, because I think if I had done all of the album art and music videos and things like that at the time that I wrote the record, I wouldn't be as happy with them now.
I think I just wanted the visuals to be reflective of what the record is about, so this kind of crumbling façade, and this mask that people put on to keep everyone from seeing who they really are that I guess I felt like I was wearing in a different way when I was writing the record, and now have realized [laughs] you know, it was deeper than that. There were many, many masks that were being worn–many illusions and façades that were being put up to keep people from seeing me.
When you have so much time to understand the different layers of it before you show it to the world, that's so interesting.
Yeah, 'cause you know, you take off a year from listening to a record because life just gets in the way or whatever, and then you come back to it, and you’re almost hearing it as a listener as opposed to the writer, and you're exploring it in a different way. It's nice. I don't hate the record, so I think that's great.
So what was that year off? Was that just, other things were happening, or--
It was more like two, actually, because I guess it was the end of touring the first Moaning record into making the second one, writing and being in the studio for a long time, and then the pandemic. [laughs] So it was two, almost three years of just sitting on this thing.
I saw somewhere that last fall, Moaning went out on the road with Bob Mould. What was that like?
It was really fun. It was bizarre, you know, because it was still kind of…[sigh] I feel like at this point, people are just touring, and if they get it, they get it. Nobody really cares, and you're just kind of risking it. But that was--you know, because Bob's older, it was really locked down. There was nobody in and out of the green room besides the bands. It was really, like, bubble style. You know, I'm a big Hüsker Dü fan. I have been since probably high school, so it was amazing to get to see that every night--like, hear him play some of those songs that I have been a fan of forever and hear him play new stuff. They were all really sweet, but the actual experience of being on tour at that moment in time was a little jarring.
Now that you've gone through this process of finding it in yourself to make a solo album, what's been your biggest takeaway ?
I think making this record, and all the subsequent music I've made since, has just made me realize how much I love songwriting. I think before, I was kind of hyper-focused on production and tonality and that kind of stuff, and creating the mood of a song, but not necessarily doing that through the songwriting. I think finishing this record and just writing a bunch of songs and being like, "Oh, I can actually do this," and just continuing to do it over and over again was like, "Oh, this is what I've been wanting to do the whole time." Like, "I love songwriting, and actually, none of the other stuff matters."
And production does really matter to me--I love producing. I think it does so much for songs, but there was something in me that just clicked and switched, and I was like, "Oh, instrumentation doesn't matter.” The difference between a guitar song and a song that is just piano or a song that is just, like, dense electronic--if the song is there, it really doesn't matter. Then it goes back to me playing these solo shows and being like, “I'll bring a guitar or a keyboard.” It's what I feel like carrying that day and what feels fun to play, but it doesn't really matter that much.
I'd been so against acoustic guitars for a while. I didn't want anything to do with it after having a deep acoustic guitar period in high school. By the time I hit college, I was like, "electric guitars all the way." And now I could not care less about electric guitars or any of that, really, but I bought an acoustic guitar a few years ago because I was just like, "This is the easiest way for me to sit down and write a song quickly and get out an idea that I have." I think that's been really nice because it's opened up this world that I did not think about as much before.