This week, we chat with singer-guitarist Carl Newman on writing, band democracies, and bad album covers. What is a Brill Bruiser?

I thought it described our album well. I can’t say exactly why but I just thought this album sounded like a bunch of Brill Bruisers. Kathryn [Calder] was saying that she liked the title because she thought it made it sound like we were a gang of thugs armed with pop songs. With several singers, how do you decide who gets to sing lead on which song?

Sometimes you just know. A song like “Marching Orders,” I thought, “Oh, this has got to be a Neko [Case] song.” Or “Another Drug Deal of the Heart” I thought, “This will be a great Kathryn song.”

On the ones that are less clear, do you just have everybody sing a version and then choose the best?

It’s such a haphazard thing. I often don’t know what I’m doing, you just find your way there. On this record, we got Neko to come and sing in three or four different sessions because I knew I wasn’t going to have it mapped out. From the beginning, I thought, “I need to make sure I have access to the band members throughout the making of the record,” because I knew it would change.

Do you and Dan [Bejar] trade demos as you write?No. There’s not a lot of using each other as a soundboard. Is it a democracy for deciding which songs end up on the record?

It’s not at all a democracy.

Photo by Chris Buck

It’s your decision?

Yes. And I don’t feel guilty about that in the slightest. It’s an interesting thing, the question of how much of a band should be a democracy. I don’t want to be a dictator but I think a band also needs to have a leader. The idea was for Dan and I to split [the writing] evenly but it just fell into this formula that we have. I think the first record Dan had four songs and on every record since then he’s had three. I feel like we just agreed on it.

You’ve talked about not wanting any ballads on Brill Bruisers but can you imagine a New Pornographers record that’s all ballads?

I don’t see myself doing an album of ballads. I think there’s too many people doing that and I don’t think that’s what people want me to do. I feel like this record has songs that are essentially ballads, they’re just more warped ballads. Like, “Champions of Red Wine” could have easily been a ballad. I could take Neko’s vocal and play a subdued acoustic guitar underneath it and people would go, “Oh, it’s the ballad.” So much of songs is arrangement. The album has a striking cover. How did it come to be?

Not being an artist, we went to an artist named Steven Wilson.

It was as simple as that?

Yeah, which I think is how things are supposed to happen. Well, sometimes a band has a concept in mind or a mood they want to convey. Those are bands with terrible album covers. Have you ever thought about how most album covers are just awful? There are very few good album covers. What’s your favorite New Pornographers album cover?

I think this one. As the years go on we’re getting more of a clue in terms of album covers, whereas Electric Version and Twin Cinema were like, “I don’t know, what’s our album cover going to be?”

Is it important to have a good album cover?Clearly not. Think of how many records Green Day’s Dookie sold, one of the all-time worst album covers ever made.

Playing with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The Showbox , 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents.com. 8p.m. $26.50 adv./$30 DOS. Sun., Oct. 5th & Mon., Oct. 6th.

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