Phil Canty finds his collaborative bliss

The name Phil Canty might ring a bell, but if you’ve heard of Canty, it’s probably because of the production work he has done under the name P. Morris. In this guise, he has worked with Kelela, Feist, Chilly Gonzales and Fat Tony. Canty lived in Lawrence for quite a while but is now in Los Angeles. This past July, Canty, with singer, songwriter and director Maal A Goomba, released the excellent album Good Morning, I Love You, via the Bear Club Music Group collective. Canty and Goomba started that label together, and it has released the majority of both of their work.

I spoke with Canty by Skype about the minimalist, genre-hopping Good Morning, and about the history of Bear Club.

The Pitch: When I first heard of Good Morning, I Love You, you referred to it as a culmination of everything you’d been up to.

Phil Canty: Yeah. That’s definitely true. I think I was referring specifically to a piece The Pitch had done about five years ago, when we were starting to gather some momentum. At the time, Lawrence was really dead. It was a quiet place, with only a few little things, and we’d managed to gather some steam there. Within those five years, though, we’d all scattered out, and done a lot of projects with people in Lawrence and out here [in California].

The Bear Club movement had just grown significantly, in our eyes, but there wasn’t anything that could properly elaborate on that. We’d been shooting these home movies — we shot this 30-, 40-minute thing that we put on YouTube that told the story and the momentum we were building on — but that forced people to sit through a movie. [laughs] It’s very self-indulgent. But this format seemed appropriate to mention that we had grown significantly since you last caught up with us.

It does seem that Bear Club has gone worldwide.

It feels that way in a certain sense, but it feels like we’re doing the same thing that we’ve always done. We’ve just maybe gotten slightly more clever about the positioning of those items. However, it does feel like maybe we’ve started to resonate past our backyard, which feels good.

The album seems to me so stripped-down that it almost becomes bluea. It has that spirit of the blues, while not necessarily being one guy with a guitar.

Maybe not in the form that everybody generally accepts as blues, but that’s what we were thinking when we sat down to make it. We wanted to make a blues song, or as close as to be satisfying the 21st-century modern ear, you know? Maybe not literally, but as much as we could carry across, yeah.

I see that the album was recorded in Los Angeles and Lawrence. Was this you and Maal working together in the same room, or was this a cross-country sort of thing?

In general, my approach as a producer is that I only work with a mobile set of tools that I can travel with, because I’m not really obsessed with the sonic qualities of a recording, like the attenuated mix guys. I’m more about capturing the performance. So I just have the bare bones of tools, and any time I wanted to work on music, the two of us would pair up. It wouldn’t be something where I would work on a beat and send it to him or anything like that. We would literally sit in the room with ourselves and try and get it across.

The bulk of the sessions actually took place in Lawrence. We probably did 45 to 50 percent of it there, between Maal’s bedroom and places he was hanging out with friends. We did a portion of it at Sound+Vision Studios in the public library — it’s so cool! Ed Rose is the coolest guy, and he gave us the full rein and scope of everything that they had there. From there, we thought we had an EP, and it felt really good right there, because we hadn’t made music closely together in three or four years. It had been a really long time, so we felt like we should be satisfied, having gotten four or five songs done.

But once I got those songs done and played them for some people, they were like, “This is the best work that you guys both have ever done — why not try to expand them into a long-player format?” After that, Maal came here for three, four weeks, and we just set up, like, camp — get up, smoke a lot of weed, he’d put his cool-guy sunglasses on, and we’d just vibe out to see what we could come up with.

Where did you go from there to end up with the album proper?

Just sort of to play off the blues riff: We started to take stock of the songs that we had recorded at that point, and see what else we needed. It was like, we needed a disco song. We needed a Prince-inspired electro-pop joint, so we did “Young and Gorgeous.” So we’d tackled five or six shades of what I considered to be canonical black genres. We did gospel when we did “Church,” so it was like, “Well, why don’t we do a blues song? It’s all we’re missing at this point! Let’s get our hands dirty down in the Delta.”

After that, we were like, “I think we might have it all done. This might be it.” 

P. Morris and Maal A Goomba

With Fat Tony 

Saturday, October 15, at Intelligent Sound Loft