When his Denver band The Czars broke up acrimoniously, John Grant, who was struggling with addictions, had had enough of music. But he was coaxed to Texas to record his wonderful solo debut Queen of Denmark, a bitter-sweet (and very funny) collection of songs about love lost and growing up gay in a religious family. He tells JIM CARROLLabout his spectacular recovery
IT’S ONE of the most unlikely comeback stories of recent times. John Grant was the singer in The Czars, a group who were too unsuccessful to be even tagged a cult act. By the time The Czars called it a day in 2004, the band members hated each others’ guts and Grant found himself stymied by drugs, booze and dodgy relationships.
The singer eventually cleaned up his act, moved to New York and worked in hospitals and restaurants. He didn’t really intend to make any more music. He’d had enough of that.
Enter Midlake. The Texas folk-rock band were big fans of Grant and his music, and they decided it was time to get him back in the ring. It took them several attempts to persuade him of their bona fides, but he came round in the end.
He moved to their hometown of Denton, Texas, began to write new songs and recorded a solo album, with Midlake as his band. That album, Queen of Denmark, was released last year. and it's where a whole new volume in Grant's story begins.
Grant and Midlake turned out to be a perfect match. The singer's rich, emotive baritone and the band's stately shuffle through 1970s-hued soft rock imbued the fierce, forthright, bittersweet and occasionally funny songs with grace, poise and atmosphere. Queen of Denmarkturned out to be a triumph on several levels: it was better received than anything Grant had put his name to before, and it saw the singer coming to terms, in a way, with who he is.
“For me, making music is my way of dealing with the issues I have to deal with,” he says. “It’s survival, but I was very apprehensive to begin with. I’d gone away from music and I didn’t know if I wanted to move to a small town in Texas to record an album I didn’t have any material for yet, and live with people I didn’t know too well. But I had to do it. I had to be serious about my life for once.”
Grant also wanted to show people – perhaps himself too – that he could actually come up with a great record. “I had Midlake as my backing band, and we were working in their hometown, but I wrote the music and my lyrics are mine. I wanted to show what I could do.”
The positive reaction to Queen of Denmarkis cheerful news for anyone who has followed the long-term fortunes of The Czars. Granted, it's a small fan club, but it remains a mystery why the Denver band never made a connection with a wider audience. Grant, though, feels the internal problems, which were present from the first day they started playing, were the biggest drawback.
“We really shouldn’t have been in a band together. There were problems and those problems appeared in the records and live shows. I was going through my problems with alcohol and cocaine, and I tried to hide all that. When you’re not totally honest with the others in the band – in fact, when you’re not totally honest with yourself – it just doesn’t work. We fought all the time and we hated each other by the end.”
Scarred by that experience, Grant decided to turn his back on the music business after the band fell apart. He moved to New York.
“I studied to become a medical translator and passed the test and got a job in a hospital in the city. It was a pretty amazing experience, I have to say, and made me think about stuff I’d never thought about or had locked away for a long time.”
There were also some lingering self- esteem issues. Grant grew up in a small, conservative town in Michigan. From a young age he knew he was gay, but he also knew that his deeply religious family wouldn’t approve. When he did tell his family, in his early 20s, they didn’t welcome the news, and Grant’s cycle of destruction began. “There was drugs, there was booze, there was crazy orgies. It took me years to be happy with who I was and work out my self-confidence problems.”
You can understand his reticence, then, when Midlake came calling. He’d first met them at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in 2003 (“I was so jealous of them, because my band was falling apart”), and he encountered them again after he’d cleaned up his act.
“They’re fantastic people, really funny and likeable. They also got me as a person. They liked my dark humour and how I saw things, and I really liked that. They knew about how things hadn’t worked out for me in the music business, but they still tracked me down and made me this amazing offer. I thought there had to be some catch. I mean, ‘Come and live with us, make a record at our studio, we’ll be your backing band and it’s all free’.”
There was no catch. Instead, Midlake took Grant back to the 1970s sounds of his youth, and the songs came to the surface. “We went back to my roots, musically. I was able to connect for the first time with me as a kid listening to Abba, The Carpenters, Supertramp and Journey. I wasn’t trying to be someone else, I was just being me. And that was mind-blowing.”
Some of the songs, like I Wanna Go to Marz, took that process even further. Named after the sweetshop in his hometown, it lists the sweets that sent the young Grant on a sugar high.
“I went back to Buchanan and the shop was still there. It was the exact same as I remembered it as a kid, and the woman who served me as a kid was there. She gave me one of the original menus and that’s where the lyrics came from.”
It’s certainly a record Grant could never have made with his old band. “I needed the freedom to explore my own world and my own feelings, and I got that with Midlake. I felt safe in that studio and could be myself. With The Czars that would never have happened. I was buttoned-up and didn’t speak openly in that band.
“But making this record was still painful. When you’re working through things and talking about it openly, it’s always going to be hard.”
Queen of Denmarkis out now. John Grant plays Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny (May 1), Button Factory, Dublin (3), Cyprus Avenue, Cork (4), Róisín Dubh, Galway (5), Dolan's, Limerick (6) and Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Belfast (8)
