Scott Helman plays La Sala Rossa on 8 December. The Toronto songwriter, now living in Los Angeles, has spent the last two or three years independent, teaching himself to shoot and edit the short videos that have put Mr. Record Label and Something About Julian on a lot of feeds. Annette Aghazarian spoke to him over Zoom about how that happened, what it changed about the way he writes, and the Wednesday ritual he calls one of the most beautiful experiences of his life.
Content as a way back in
Helman grew up in Toronto, lived in Montreal briefly, and his wife went to McGill. He now lives in LA, “but Toronto boy always.” The videos started, he says, out of necessity. “I found myself independent and I was like, okay, well how do I do this? I need to cut through and I need to find my people.” He spent about a year and a half posting with a small group of friends before anything connected. The first song to take off was Something About Julian; then came Mr. Record Label. “I had no expectations. I just filmed that video. I actually hated how the first one looked, but I got heat stroke making it. So I was like, I feel like I need to honour myself by posting it.” After the fifth video, Chance the Rapper was commenting.
When Something About Julian started moving, Helman was in Canada. He drove to Uxbridge, Ontario, where his friend and stylist Katie was staying at her mother’s house, and told her they had to film a hundred videos. She later helped create and direct the line-dancing music video for the song.
He had no film training. He went to Earl Haig, an arts high school in Toronto, as a painter, with friends who were film geeks. The camera came from tattooing, which is how he made money when nothing else was working. “I went to Vancouver and I did like a two-week stint of tattooing. I found myself with a little bit of money and I called my wife and I was like, I’m going to spend this on a really nice camera. And she was like, okay.” It was a Sony ZV-E1. He shoots in log and does all his own colour. “Short-form content, for better or for worse, is the way that most people are introduced to your music and consume your music. It was really important to me to feel like I was still being an artist with my content.”
Owning the masters, writing with no filter
Asked whether he would start his own label, Helman says he would love to. For now the change is simpler. “I own the masters of all my new music. I create, curate, edit, colour all my content. Everything you see is filmed by me.” That includes the recent video with actor James McAvoy, which he scripted himself and set up in McAvoy’s hotel. He also runs a playlist of independent artists. “The only identity marker that I care about as a person is that I’m an artist, and I want, in any possible way for the rest of my life, any power that I have, to use it to help prop up and support other artists.”
Aghazarian put it to him that the lyrics have become more provocative since he went independent. He resists the word. “The word controversial falls short. Just more immediate, I guess, would maybe be a better word to use.” The difference, he says, is the absence of a team telling him what will work at radio. “I look at art mostly as some kind of dialogue between you and a group of people. When I’m sitting down to make music now, I’m just going to say the thing that I feel and think to the people, because there’s no mesh that it has to go through.” The bathtub-scrubbing opening of the video for She’s the Breadwinner was deliberate, and the kind of thing he says he could not have done while signed to a label. “It’s not even that they were wrong. It’s just that my instinct is like, who cares?” He showed the edit to his wife in the car on the way back from an estate sale. She told him to post it.
Playing at the casino
Helman is blunt about the platforms he relies on. He wants them legislated, and he wants tech companies held responsible for what happened to young people’s mental health on Tumblr-era internet. “Most artists that I know feel that way about the internet. We think it’s addictive, we think it’s dangerous … but also it’s the only way we have to promote our music. So there is a very big catch-22.” His image for it: “Sometimes it feels like you spent all year writing the most important thing you’ll ever write and the only place you have to play it is at the casino.”
The other side of that is discovery. He names Remy Wolf, whose new album he says is “blowing my brain in half,” and smaller artists he has found through his playlist submissions. Every Wednesday he opens a spreadsheet and listens to what has come in. “Some of these artists have like five monthly listeners, and I will click the song and I will be like, this is some of the coolest, most innovative.” It leads him to a memory of being 15 in Toronto, too young to get into shows, cutting the band names out of the listings page at the back of NOW magazine and taping them to his wall to look up over the following week. He gets emotional telling it. “I feel like that’s lost in culture now, where we don’t have a core discovery, and there’s so many great bands that just don’t get heard.”
Aghazarian answers with her own version: a childhood spent at the library picking records by their covers, which is how she found Kate Bush‘s Hounds of Love with no idea who Kate Bush was. Helman’s conclusion is that the first encounter with a record should be between the listener and the artist, with no context. “I hold a deep reverence for that, because it was so important to me growing up.” She also pointed him toward a band she saw at POP Montreal, a trio from Lithuania, which is one of the moments to watch for in the video.
What comes next
Helman is releasing singles one at a time and has not settled on the shape of the next record. “It might be a little EP, I might throw up a couple more singles, but I have so much music, and a lot of it is ready. I just want to be a little strategic about how to roll it out.” He describes the new material as “deeper versions of what I’ve been doing lately,” written about his life and the world as he sees it, with no filter.
Watch the full interview:
The Montreal date is 8 December at La Sala Rossa.
