Spencer Krug

The Canadian songwriter, best known for his work with Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Moonface, released his new album, Same Fangs, on May 15 via his own label, Pronounced Kroog. The record's a welcome return to acoustic piano and voice for Krug, retooling songs first shared as monthly demos through his long-running Patreon.

Since January 2019, Krug has uploaded a new song every month to subscribers, and for the past several years, that monthly practice has doubled as the seedbed for his proper albums, including Same Fangs. He spoke with us about the discipline of writing without inspiration, the parameters that draw him back to piano and voice every decade, and why he's done with month-long van tours.

Analogue: How do you start to suss out which Patreon songs become an album? What was the through-line here?

Spencer: For Same Fangs, for example, it was that I wanted to return to acoustic piano and voice. Which is a setup that, kind of, every decade, I find, I really get back into and lean really hard into. I knew I wanted to do some solo piano touring, so I wanted it to be songs that I could represent on stage by myself, which is piano and voice.

So that was a big part of it. And really, it's just sort of, what are my favorites here? Which ones work as songs? And which ones are going to work or complement each other? There's a lot of songwriting about songwriting on this record. And songs about being in a band. There are a couple of nods to family life, nods to my life partner—love songs, for lack of a better term. But there is a lot of stuff that's just about this is what it's like to live and work in music. And there are songs about the record itself; it gets kind of meta, and it breaks the fourth wall at times.

I think that had something to do with the ones that I picked. There's a sort of group of songs that all kind of were interwoven and nodded to each other lyrically. And I wanted to include all of those on, to have that be one of the themes in the record. But the red thread through the whole thing is the instrumentation of me: piano and voice.

Like I said, it's something that I keep returning to. Throughout the decades, I've always come back to this idea that seems sort of magical to me. I'll have this revelation every decade. I'll be like, 'Oh my god, I can make songs with just my two hands and my voice. I don't even need the lights on. There doesn't even have to be power. I can just sit down at this box with strings in it and make a passable song.

I'm such a purist sometimes, and I love parameters to work within. So I really like that notion of, these are the rules. This is all I get is—what I can do with my body on this wooden box. It's fun. But then it's fun to bring in those other collaborators too when I re-recorded them to spice them up a bit.

Analogue: I love your use of the word 'parameters' there, because it seems like the minimal nature of things ups the ante on the songs as a whole. Does it feel that way?

Spencer: Yeah, I think in a good way. I've always liked working within a little box that I set up for myself. I do think, especially with piano and voice, you can't mumble your way through the lyrics. Every word has to be... you've got to cut all the fat out, basically. Every word has to have meaning and purpose, and has to be sung in a certain way. What I'm trying to say is you just can't hide. Every note has to hit, and every word has to make sense and have a reason to be there.

I find that incredibly challenging in a way that makes me want to keep doing it. Writing rock songs with a rock band is so fun, and getting loud and letting those mistakes happen that don't matter, and shouting and saying ooh and aah sometimes or whatever. It's totally got its place, not just in the world, but in my own career, my own life as well. I love it, and I'll always do that with Wolf Parade or whatever. But I do like this other side of it, this sort of quiet, more introspective, challenging in a different way.

I don't want to say it's more challenging, but it's challenging in a different way. And it's something I can do alone, which means a lot. I can just wander into my studio in the backyard and put on that songwriting hat. It's not unlike doing a crossword puzzle or something. You're just sort of putting pieces together. It's fun. And then once you have the music, and you learn—first it's your mind putting music together, but eventually your hands learn it, and you can stop thinking about it, and sort of your body is just doing it. There's something really therapeutic and cathartic about that. It's hard to do that with a band because things move faster with a band. You're in more of a time constraint.

Analogue: Some writer friends of mine talk about poetry that way, every word getting placed under a microscope to see whether it snags. Do you write poetry?

Spencer: No, I'm a terrible poet. I've tried. It's bad. I understand why people would, on the surface, be like, 'Lyrics and poetry, what's the difference, man?' But I think it's apples and oranges. I have at certain times in my life experimented with trying to write poetry and sounds that I'm lacking.

One of my favorite songwriters is Leonard Cohen. I love his lyrics and the way he delivers them, but I've looked at his books of poetry, and I think they're bad. I just don't think that because you're good at one, it means you're good at the other. There's something about singing out the words and the cadence. A song can rhyme. And sometimes rhyming is really fun. It really works. It helps the line land. It's got that timing and that cadence, syntax. Whereas if you're rhyming your poems, at least in the 21st century, they're probably not very good. [Laughs]

Analogue: How does it affect your relationship with putting these songs out toward a wider world, since Patreon subscribers already know them?

Spencer: I definitely don't feel too vulnerable about it. I think I'm more excited for a wider audience to hear these songs now that I've gotten them to a place where I think they're the best that I can get them right now. As I said, the people on Patreon already know them, and that's sort of a smaller, more insular conversation that I'm having with them already. So I know they're down for it and are going to be excited, and I know that they know the songs already.

So that whole thing of showing a song to the world for the first time, I've kind of already burst that bubble for myself with these through Patreon, but not in a bad way. I've just already gone through that emotional part of sharing it. And now I have this sort of confidence of having shared it once, and now I've pulled it back out, deconstructed it, rebuilt it, and 'made it better,' at least in my mind.

That's a really confident platform for me to be releasing from. I already test drove them, and now here they are, new and improved, and I think it's a good group of songs. I did my best at making them as good as they could be. So I feel okay about it. Sometimes it's a little weird to be putting out an album where some of these songs go back to early 2024, I think. There's already a little bit of emotional distance from who I was when I wrote them to now. But I also think that's true of most records that get put out. It's very rare that someone writes a whole record at once these days.

VISIT: Spencer Krug