Banners Profile: Michael Nelson Interview

CULTURE

MUSICIAN BANNERS ON FINDING HIS SOUND, SINGING CHOIR, AND TORONTO’S INFLUENCE

The English musician, who recently made his move to Toronto, talks new songs and how he found his musical style.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEW

by TATIJANA SHOAN

When I met Michael Nelson, he was in New York for his sold-out show at Mercury Lounge. It was only a few months earlier when I came across his song, Holy Ground, and was immediately taken by its haunting sound, which inspired me to go on a YouTube search for anything I could find on this new artist known simply as Banners. A few days following the show, I caught up with him when he was back in Toronto, a city he now calls home. Below, he talks his early choir days, his move to Canada, musical influences, and where his unique sound and lyrics come from.

AS IF: You had a great show at Mercury Lounge recently.

Banners: It’s always nice when people sing my songs back to me. It helps me feel more confident, and makes talking to the audience easier because I can have a bit more fun with them. There’s times when you try to talk with an audience and nobody is interested (laughs)! It’s a two-way street—a good audience helps make your show better.

Do you like playing to a New York audience?

Playing in New York is different than other places, because I also have to entertain my record label, whereas, if you just turn out to play a gig in Phoenix, or someplace where you don’t know anybody, you can just do the gig and not worry about anything else. When I was a little kid in Liverpool, the idea of going to New York was really exciting. It was on the other side of the world. It’s amazing that I now get to play my music to people on the other side of the world!

Banners Portrait by Tatijana Shoan.

You’ve told me about your experiences as a child singing in the church choir in Liverpool. Can you tell me more about the influence your choir days have had on you?

I was in the Nativity play at school when I was six. All the kids got cast as sheep, angels, Kings, Mary and Joseph, and for some reason they needed a singing ox to do a solo (laughs)! I had never sung before, but I decided to go to the audition and I got the part! It was a school teacher who told my parents that I should audition for the cathedral choir. There’s two cathedrals in Liverpool, and they’re both really beautiful. The one I sang at is very big, and very ornate with gothic architecture, it’s one of the truly great gothic buildings in the country. It took nearly 100 years to construct. It survived two world wars. It’s so grand that it could easily fit 100,000 people. Whether or not I was singing for thousands, or just a handful of people, in my heart I was singing for the people who spent their lives building it. That’s something I try to think about when I’m performing music. I know there are a lot of people who have invested time in me as a singer, and I try to perform for them, for the people who are proud of me.

When did you leave the cathedral and Liverpool to go out on your own?

It turns out that when you sing in the kind of choir I did, it sets a very high standard, and the theatre becomes an addiction that you have to feed. The difficulty is in how to you make your career take shape. All the advice I can give is to try really hard, practice, and take opportunities when they arise. There will definitely be nights when you’re lying in bed thinking, “This isn’t going anywhere, I don’t know how to make this dream actually work.”

“I try to select my materials so that the paintings appear transformative; I’m conveying strength, beauty, power and vulnerability.”

Toronto has always had a great indie music scene, but you rarely hear about foreign emerging musical talent moving to Canada to pursue a career. What prompted this move?

I used to work as an assistant in a recording studio where I trained to be an engineer and producer, because that’s actually what I wanted to do. I kept in touch with a couple of Canadian musicians who were from Toronto, and when I recorded a demo, I sent the CD out across the Atlantic, including Toronto. A music producer in Toronto heard my demo and asked if I wanted to come to Toronto. So, I saved up all my pennies and bought a flight. After arriving, I signed with a label in Toronto, which led to my signing Island Records in America.

In 2015, you released your debut single, Ghosts, under the stage name Rains. And, in August of that year you returned with Shine a Light under your new moniker, Banners.

Coming up with a name is as difficult as coming up with a name for your kids, because I’m figuring out a name that will define me for decades. It’s a tough thing to do. It was a nightmare finding something that didn’t have connotations for people. Plus, whatever name I came up with was already taken. It seemed that nobody had used Rains, and I kind of liked the elemental literature connotation of the rain and the water. However, later on, I learned that Rains was being used in a smaller capacity, so I had to come up with another name. I ran Banners around my two record labels, my producer, and they both liked it. A banner can be treated like a blank slate, you can write whatever you want on it.

Your father had been in bands for years, and is now quite an accomplished music producer. Tell me about your father and his influence on your music.

My father was very supportive, as was mom who was very musical, and my step-dad and step-mom, but my dad specifically. He always played his guitar and listened to good music when I was growing up. He bought me my first album, which was Hunky Dory by David Bowie. When you’re surrounded by really good music it subconsciously gets into your bones. I used to hang out with my dad in the recording studio and I remember feeling like I belonged. He would show me on the soundboard how you could take the guitars in and out, or isolate certain sounds, and that blew me away. The thing that makes me most excited about music is creating it, it’s made from the fire in my bones. Making an album is like making a baby!

The first song I heard of yours was Holy Ground, an incredible, haunting, beautiful song. Describe your sound.

My sound is like looking out over the sea and wondering what’s on the other side. You know…when people say, “I can’t sing,” I’m often a bit wary of their conclusion. People often think that they’ve got a good voice or a bad voice, and that’s just not true. You develop a voice over time, you try things out and you change what you don’t like. For example, Chris Martin is one of my favorite singers, so I started off trying to model him. There’s a singer in England, Guy Garvey, who’s in a band called Elbow, and I added a bit of his sound to mine. And, I really love Jeff Buckley. I quite consciously took a lot of my influences to see if I could add them to the sound of my voice. In terms of what my music sounds like, a lot of that evolved when I came to Toronto to work with producer Stephen Kozmenyiuk, because we have a lot of the same influences. He loves a lot of English bands, is a really good guitar player, produces a lot of hip hop and pop, and working with me gave him an opportunity to try out some guitar sounds.

You write your own songs, which are very poetic. Where do your songs come from?

My song writing used to be a very personal thing, because the lyrics were like my diary. Showing my lyrics to people was like opening my diary, which is a very strange feeling. Now, I write with others in writing sessions because I like to bounce different ideas around, ask questions, and get out of my own headspace.

Tell me about your latest song, "Someone to You."

I wrote it in a writing session when I was in L.A. with a guy called Sam Hollander. The session with Sam was at the end of a very long month of writing sessions, so I was quite tired and out of ideas. I was walking to get to one of my last sessions, and I was listening to a podcast, and the idea came to me that we just want to be important to somebody. I mean, that’s all we really want. I think the desire for people to be famous or known for something is that they just want to be acknowledged; they want to mean something to somebody.