Picnicboy is Dave Rodgers' (Neck/Christiana, Mean Red Spiders) latest foray into pop brilliance. Picnicboy is named for the third song on The Residents' Commercial Album. The Blue Co-pilot sat down for a chat with Dave at Spiderhaus.

Pop
A good song is a good song. Many of the labels people have for certain kinds of music have a lot to do with the technology that's used. I think when it all comes down to it you have to take the song, pull it apart and really see its merit. The Residents and The Beach Boys and so many other exalted generators of great pop songs realized that when all's said and done it's the framework of the song that's important.

Seefeel
What I really liked about Seefeel was that (in the early '90s) few were really embracing the notion of marrying the kind of guitars they were using (sampling the guitars to create a whole new sound) with the dub basslines and the emphasis on rhythm and space. The influence of My Bloody Valentine was quite evident but Seefeel brought many more elements to it. They were definitely the most psychedelic and head-fucking of all the so-called shoegazer bands.

Song and Rhythm
I do tend to lean quite heavily on '70s art-rock, especially a lot of the German stuff (in spirit and also, some of those records have great sounds). Kraftwerk demonstrated that you could do a band totally electronically -- what a liberating notion that was! I named one of my songs “Morgenspaziergang” after the Kraftwerk song because it basically was about a morning walk. It doesn't sound as idyllic as Kraftwerk, but...

Picnicboy came out of having certain realizations about music and culture and certain particular fascinations with it. Things like: '70s art-rock is the greatest music ever (yes, it has its flaws). The marriage of that sort of ambition and virtuosity and the whole punk idea of reinventing yourself has resulted in what I consider to be the most exciting music of the last decade or so. Performance I don't know if it was a reaction against what I was doing in Christiana... I mean, I'm still interested in short songs, I'm still playing live, but I'm not too interested in standing there -- I'm not a showman and I know it. I can't just stand there and be a pop-idol kinda guy singing these pre-recorded songs. So I've learned how to play the guitar parts after the fact, so it's fun for me -- I get to learn the songs twice. I get to see the songs inside and out.

Content
There are certain ideas that keep popping up in my mind -- one is that a lot of music of the kind I'm describing (read: art-rock) is made by young people with lots of time on their hands. They're young and they're pretty and they have all these resources at their disposal to make their music with.

I write a lot of the lyrics on my lunch hour so it's very informed by the whole idea of work and having to work and being in a large city that you don't really enjoy being in a lot of the time. I noticed with the lyrics I was writing in Christiana that there was no sex, no violence and no humour... and I really wanted to bring those issues into play. Sex and violence are so important -- they embody the ideas of perpetuating the species and that sometimes violence is necessary in order to preserve yourself.

No matter how music is made (computer-generated or not) there still has to be a human heart, no matter how sad or twisted or tortured or unrepentantly happy it is at any given time.