“Inever outgrow music that I like. If something hits a chord with me, it’s permanent,” says Johnny Jewel, one half of Portland disco-punk band Glass Candy.

Given the assumptions that have been made about Jewel’s musical references — he’s been labelled a hip-hop head, new-wave revivalist and Italo disco fanatic, amongst other things — combined with the fact that he doesn’t do many interviews, I’m curious to hear about his passions from the source.

“I grew up in Houston in the late ’70s, early ’80s, so I heard lots of freestyle, electro boogie, pre-house house, Gary Numan, New Order, Eric B and Rakim and lots of stuff,” Jewel says from his studio. “To me, it was all club music, all electronic music. I didn’t see a difference between Run-DMC and Ministry.”

Visuals have also been a touchstone for Jewel, who planned to become a painter until the works of artists he admired — Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol among them — led Jewel to the music of everyone from The Velvet Underground to Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Nirvana.

In ’91, Jewel “quit skateboarding and visual art” to make experimental music, recording five albums of Jandek-inspired noise under pseudonyms. He moved to Portland in the mid-’90s, met vocalist Ida No and soon started collaborating with her on the project that would become Glass Candy.

“Ida had amazing lyrics, but couldn’t sing at all and nobody would play music with her,” explains Jewel of the conception. “I learned how to play pop music because I really believed in her lyrics. Our early records are really fucked up — they’re basically just me trying to learn how to play normal music because all I’d ever done was experimental.”

This is evident in Glass Candy’s early singles for K Records as well as Troubleman Unlimited, who also released their first two discs — Love Love Love and Life After Sundown — in ’03 and ’04 respectively.

Much has been written about the evolution of Glass Candy’s sound, with the portrait generally painted as a movement from rough-around-the-edges, no-wave revisionism to a smoothed-out electronic disco. While No’s deliberately cold and distant vocals do lend themselves to either interpretation, he rejects that linear reading.

“When we made our first few 7-inches, we weren’t trying to make a disco-punk sound,” he continues. “We were trying to make a Bee Gees song and we just sucked so bad at the time that it ended up sounding like a punk song. The only reason that we sound smoother and more disco-ey now is because, over the years, I’ve slowly learned how to write music.”

This is evident both in the tunes from last year’s B/E/A/T/B/O/X album as well as in Jewel’s other main projects, The Chromatics and Farah. All three acts are on Italians Do It Better, a label Jewel started with New Jersey–raised DJ/producer and Troubleman founder Mike Simonetti. Though the name was a joke (“None of us listen to Italo at all”), Italians Do It Better is on the vanguard of the lo-fi disco sound.



Soon to come on the label, if we’re lucky: a limited pressing of Deep Gems, a collection of Glass Candy singles, B-sides and remixes recorded since ’06.

The collection, intended to tide people over until a new Glass Candy studio album is released next spring, will also be sold at their two Canadian dates. Jewel says that many new songs will be performed.

“Shit changes a lot from night to night,” he offers. “Ida and I don’t plan, choreograph or talk about outfits. We never talk about the live show. We just let it be what it is... if we fuck up, at least it’s real and live.”