Cadence Weapon: Hometown Homebody
Wednesday May 07, 2008 @ 11:30 AM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By Noah Love

Most musicians tend to leave their hometowns as soon as bigger, better cities start calling their names. But not Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a. Cadence Weapon.

Pemberton is an Edmonton diehard. On the first track of his Breaking Kayfabe debut, "Oliver Square," he namechecked many of Champion City's landmarks, and on Afterparty Babies, he's still big-upping his hometown.

Much of the record deals with Pemberton's decision to stay in the Alberta's capital. ChartAttack talked to Cadence Weapon about his new record's themes during the dead of Edmonton's brutal winter.

Cadence Weapon

ChartAttack: Is it weird being in Edmonton while your friends are moving away for school and the like?
Cadence Weapon: Most of my friends are not in school. They're like hipsters who work at American Apparel or work at a bar. I call them retail celebrities. It's more with my older friends, people I'm not as close with anymore. My ex-girlfriend is still going to school and doing the traditional thing. But a lot of my friends who have degrees, they move away, and then they move back here. And they're still not doing anything with their degrees, so they just go back to school for another degree. I know tons of people like that. One of my roommates, for instance, he got a degree and he works at a clothing store. He has a degree in industrial design. He could be doing that.

There is a departure theme on the record that sort of deals with the people who are taking off.
It's put together that way specifically. "Do I Miss My Friends?" is more about me. Like, my reaction to other people. It's me laying the groundwork for the question of, "Where did my friends go?" The last one ["We Move Away"] is "Where are they?" and the first one is "Do I care?" And I guess the answer is, "Yeah." It's just like clockwork every year, 20 people move away from Edmonton and it's not because they're getting out of school at the same time or because of some connected trend. It's because people feel hopeless living here sometimes. Seriously. People feel like there's a palpable sense that nothing good will ever come out of Edmonton. And I don't know, maybe I'm being stubborn or just pushing my luck, but I'm trying to stay here as long as I can. I love it in Edmonton. There's a lot of hope and creativity here. It's just a matter of people who start doing well, like me, sticking around for a bit. I can understand how other musicians who are younger than me can feel hopeless when every musician who does anything good musically skips town as soon as Toronto is feeling them.

Do you feel the pull of other cities?
I honestly feel like everywhere is kind of the same. Like, if you have a certain amount of people in a city, it's different, but most people dress the same. I feel like everywhere is a microcosm of the same thing. I can go to London, I can go to New York, I can go to L.A., but everyone is playing Justice. They're all playing the same song — "Phantom Part II (Erroll Elkin Re-edit)." Every DJ is playing the same shit. All the kids are wearing the same clothes. At least it gets really cold here. That's something different.

When did work start and conclude on Afterparty Babies?
I finished in May 2007 and I started in April 2006. That was the recording. But the beats could be dated back as far as my first album. For example, "Limited Edition OJ Slammer" is the oldest beat on there. And I'm pretty sure I had that done in January 2006. And I've been playing some of these songs for years.

Originally the record was going to come out in October, but got delayed to early 2008. What happened?
It just made sense. I would hate people to think I only have one album when I've had an album for three years.

There are a lot of time-specific references on Afterparty Babies. Do you worry about dating yourself?
The way I'm thinking of it is like I'm purposefully trying to date it, because I want it to be a social marker for right now. I'm talking about text messaging and MySpace because this is a social condition of people my age right now. I'm specifically making an album about that. It's not going to be like that for everything I put out, but I specifically tried to make this like a time capsule for 2006 — like, the late 2000s. I've heard people who have heard the album say it's like a definitive Cancon youth record, and that's exactly what I was trying to do: Young Canadians, not young Americans. And it sucks because some of the references I'm talking about don't make sense anymore — like Edmonton Oilers stuff on "Messages Matter." I reference [Mike] Peca and [Chris] Pronger, both of whom aren't on the Oilers anymore. So it's like, "Great like, Roll." But I'm fine with that. I was trying to reference that time. There are some Bob Dylan records, the same way he was trying to talk about people around him, I'm trying to talk about people around me. Or like, Lou Reed. I'm a big Lou Reed fan, and he sings about New York hipsters, and I like that it's a document of a certain time. He really achieved his goal.

"True Story" refers to people talking about you behind your back in Edmonton while your reputation grew outside the city. The song is pretty old. Has the rumour-mongering died down much since you wrote it?
It's died down a lot because some of the people who would create the rumours have moved away, and I've been gone so much that some people are finding me less interesting.