“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” - Willem de Kooning, 1968
Everybody deals with getting older in different ways. Some people get motorcycles, others opt for meditation retreats, but everyone faces it regardless. It is the constant struggle to age gracefully, and Aleks Martray and the members of Grandchildren are all dealing with very essential times of their lives. One of the results of the past few years is their new album Golden Age, out May 7th, which The Key is exploring for Unlocked series this week. Amidst the hustle and bustle of the daily routine we caught up with Aleks Martray to chat about the recording process, growing older, and defining the Golden Age.
The Key: What is the Golden Age?
Aleks Martray: It has sort of become a catchall. I tend to write a bunch of music and not really know thematically what I’m working with, or what the message is, it’s all music first. I work a lot more like a composer or an arranger. I have all of this material that I compile, and then I sit back and listen to it and create songs out of it. The lyrics, the words, the concepts, they all come at that last phase once the music has come together. I never really know what I am writing about until the end, and “Golden Age” happens to be the last song I wrote for the album. I think of it like how an author writes an entire book, and then they write an epilogue, and somehow, the epilogue becomes the arc of the story.
For me, that specific song (“Golden Age”) was about the feeling of getting older, and those moments where you feel a narrowing of the openness and possibility of anything happening in your life, and the excitement of it all. And it was about having an experience that was renewed, where you no longer have to see things that way, and things are still open and possible.
It was also about having gone through a lot of things the past few years with family and friends. The past couple years have been weddings and funeral and babies being born, so it is just that time in my life and my band members lives where there is this generational shift, and you are just in the middle trying to place yourself in it. As an adult, and as an artist, and when you are around your parents and grandparents shifting to old age and you have your friends shifting to other phases of life, what happens is everything comes to the surface. It is a sea change moment. “Golden Age” was really revolving around this idea, that everybody, no matter what age or generation, has this magical, golden reference point of the way things used to be, or aught to be, but that is always just a figment of ones imagination.
TK: There seems to be a relationship between the song “Everlasting” from your last album and the new album. Was the thought process that went into “Everlasting” a jumping off point for the new record?
AM: The song “Everlasting” was written, not only at the end of the first record, but a few months after the whole thing was finished. I was actually writing “Everlasting” to start a new record. I think it was the beginning of the process of starting a new record. Two things happened, stylistically I was going in a really different direction. I was a lot more interested in singing and putting the vocals up front, because I have never been a natural singer before, I have always been a songwriter and the singing just came as something I had to figure out. And then beats, being very beat oriented. Those are two things that came together just from writing that song “Everlasting,” and I think that definitely was the beginning of the new album. I see that song “Everlasting”, as a link or bridge between the two albums, and I think you can sort of hear that.
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