Sing It, See It

Cosmo Jarvis's new album, Think Bigger, seems to be about convictions – commitment to oneself and one's beliefs and aspirations, regardless of what they are. Not that it's a concept album, but there is a definite thread running through the 11 songs, as diverse, as always, as they are.

“Some of the songs are much newer than others,” Jarvis explains. “Tell Me Who To Be – I know it stands out; it's been the most scrutinised so far in the reviews, but that was written when I was, like, 12 years old. A lot of the other stuff's much newer, Train Downtown and stuff like that. But I guess the whole thing about an objective point of view of an idea is that it's very easy to be negative. It's like Einstein's Theory of Relativity; the same theory can apply to your intentions, I suppose. If what you're doing is good to you, then is it? It's just all questions. I'm not saying it is good or it is bad, but I just wanted to elaborate a bit on that, about the importance of sometimes doing what you need to do. Because so many things within society will tell people and let people know, especially younger people, they shouldn't be doing it, and the expectations of what people should be like can deter them very easily now. Expectations and advertising and Facebook, it's everywhere – it's impossible not to be affected by it. So I guess it was kind of part that, I suppose.”

While all that might seem a little nebulous, when it comes to translating into songs, or accompanying video clips for that matter, Jarvis has this innate wit and subversive sense of humour that allows the stories within those songs to still seem uplifting and fun, whether they're darkly commenting on some aspect of contemporary society's ability to damage the individual's sense of identity or whimsically eulogising his computer's hard-drive (in Lacie) for keeping the contents of his mind's imagination safe while he sleeps.

“To me, doing things that way makes it a little bit more [Jarvis pauses]. There are people who hear the kind of straight-up gimmicky side of things and will just accept it, and that's fine. Then there are other people that, if you have an initial idea for a song and then you also add into the song the question and make it obvious that you're not really sure about how serious you are about this, then it's kind of like having an opinion, but also being objective enough about your opinion for it to be not so solid that anybody could hold you accountable for it. And it's not like I don't want to be accountable for it; it's truly that I think everything at the same time, and… I don't really have an opinion on anything – it's an opinion in a moment, and doesn't mean that I have to represent that all the time. It's everybody's right to be in conflict with themselves.”

Which, in sum, is a very post-modern view of the world; there are no real answers, but there are always questions. “Yeah, and the idea of a question can say more about a time, I think, than an actual answer can. An answer's only relative for a very short amount of time. So the kind of way I think about stuff has always been like that. Sometimes people get in a shit about it, 'cause I do contradict myself quite a lot in the music, and socially I get shit for it as well.”

He might not go for the definitive answer in his songs, but Jarvis is nothing if not prolific, so there's quite a backlog of material – as he says of Tell Me Who To Be, songs from as far back as his early teens – and that's when he's not making video clips, both short or, just recently, his first feature film, The Naughty Room. So you might wonder about the selection process for Think Bigger.

“We went through a lot of arguments as to what was going to be on it,” Jarvis states. “There were about 30 tracks that could have been on it. They limited me to 11 songs, because after the stuff I was doing on the older albums [2009's Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch and last year's Is The World Strange Or Am I Strange?], it could have been perceived as being a little more self-indulgent, even though that's not what it was. It was just if I wanted to put an eight-minute solo in there, there was a reason for it. But they knew and I knew that the lowest common denominator of people that listen to mainstream radio are not so accommodating to those kinds of ideas.

“So we had to lower the risk in certain areas by having a slightly more consistent sound. Whereas on the other records there was hip hop and there was rap and a bit of everything, there's none on this one. It was up to me though that it had at least some of the diversity of the last album, because I didn't want to be in a genre, ever. It limits you so much.”

So there are mandolins here, big rock band sound there, a dash of folkabilly on a track like Sunshine and so on. Like The Beatles once they stopped being mop tops and started exploring the possibilities of their chosen craft, Jarvis takes it all song by song, following wherever the song chooses to take him; genre be damned. As a visual artist as well, however, he's also seeing the visuals that go with the story as it unfolds in his head. It's the wit as much as the contagious melodies that catch the listener, and then the way he transfers that wit into clips of, say, dancing pirates in his unlikely shanty, Gay Pirates, or the various characters that weave in and out of the clip for Love This, your man dressed as a devil. Both were cut as single continuous takes, exemplifying Jarvis' extraordinary ability to choreograph all the elements with split-second timing. It's obviously paid off too – Gay Pirates, 1.3 million YouTube views and counting and thank you Stephen Fry; Love This a quarter of a million, Sure As Hell Not Jesus on the way to 300,000.

“With [second single] Train Downtown, [that's] the next one that I'm going to make,” Jarvis explains. “When I was writing that song, it was like the treatment for the video was the song. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to make it quite as literal a representation of the song as I would have liked, I'll have to be a bit more abstract. But I'm going to pretty much do it, but just leave it open, so it could not be a 'bomb on the train' sort of thing.”

Cosmo Jarvis will be playing the following shows: