(National Post)The impishly smiling mouse head that Joel Zimmerman wears when he performs has become a symbol for the triumph of electronic dance music. As deadmau5, the 31-year-old Niagara Falls, Ont.-born producer headlines festivals and plays gigs in stadiums; his new album, >>album title goes here<< (which is the actual title of the album), is set to debut in the Top 10 of the Billboard charts this week. So how does it feel to stand onstage atop a custom-built gleaming cube, flanked by huge video screens, playing your songs to tens of thousands of dancing fans?
“Uh, kinda lonesome,” admits Zimmerman, over Skype from Los Angeles. “But I’ve got the crowd there with me; they’ve got my back.” He has no band members to disagree with, but if something goes wrong, it’s his responsibility. “When it does, it’s not too disastrous. … It gives it a human element — technology is not infallible. As long as you’re able to give it your all, a 90% show with 300% effort is a beautiful thing.”
Deadmau5 is a complex cat. Although he’s known for being...
smart-alecky and even rude (having sparred via Twitter with other musicians, most famously Madonna), he has an earnest, well-meaning streak, too. He’s a savvy brand-builder who in July launched his own line of mouse-head-adorned clothing, but he’s also a compulsive music-maker who refers to his work as a passion. But as stars become less and less accessible as their renown increases, Zimmerman maintains a continuous dialogue with his fans on the Web.
So committed is he to transparency that he often streams his creation of tracks live. During one such session, when he was building an atmospheric instrumental calledThe Veldt, named after a Ray Bradbury short story, a fan asked him on Twitter to check out vocals he’d devised for the work-in-progress. Openly skeptical, Zimmerman nonetheless clicked the link and discovered a breathy, dreamy part that fit perfectly. He called up the singer, little-known Californian producer Chris James, offered him a deal for the track with publishing royalties, and within three days flew him to Miami, where he played a preliminary version of their collaboration live at a club.
The crowd’s reaction, James says, was “crazy. Everybody was following the story. They knew that I was coming to Miami — Joel was talking about it on his stream. There was magic in the air.”
When Zimmerman proposed to release the track with James’s vocals, he exclaimed, “I feel like Simon Cowell!” But both he and James insist their association, which resulted in the singer acquiring management and sparking a solo career, came about “organically.”
Zimmerman has proudly proclaimed his rejection of obvious, high-profile collaborations. Although >>album title goes here<<, his sixth studio effort, does feature a vocal by Gerard Way of popular emo-rockers My Chemical Romance, it also includes a burbling hip hop track with Insane in the Brain rappers Cypress Hill, as well as a gently quirky song with alt-chanteuse Imogen Heap. Deadmau5’s collaborations tend to be his most compelling, least predictable tracks. The Veldt is a bittersweet anthem, both hopeful and melancholic, on which James sings from the point of view of children who, in Bradbury’s story, become addicted to machine-driven creature comforts.
While Zimmerman is reluctant to interpret the story or the track (“I just thought it was a really cool story, bro … I’m not Oscar f–kin’ Wilde”), he allows that he’s preoccupied with technology screwing up. Fittingly, the camera feed of our Skype conversation is aborted because of a bandwidth problem, after a scant minute of Zimmerman on video, wearing a black baseball cap and sporting a new tattoo of a star beside his right eye (as drawn by his new girlfriend, L.A. Ink star Kat Von D). His album title is a joke about a printing error, and there’s an unintentional mistake on the album itself: the track Sleepless was meant to feature Zimmerman’s vocal debut, but he sent in an instrumental version instead.
“I totally f–ked up,” he says. “I was in such a hurry. ‘We’ve got to get an album out. Right click, left click, send, print album.’ People are going to think I’m such a dick for this, but I didn’t even listen to it … which is probably a good thing to do when you’re doing an album.” He laughs, and promises to put the right version online for free, along with “a massive apology note.”
‘Can I get a picture with you? I don’t even know who you are but I saw you on the cover of this thing and I just want to tweet back to my family back in f–kin’ Oregon that I was in L.A.’
He calls gambling his “personal escape. It’s pure adrenaline rush for me, going into crazy debt and then getting out of it. … I don’t like to talk about it too much, because it is, for a lot of people, a serious problem, where people would not play within their limits, and it gets ugly. It’s not a very responsible thing to do.”
Zimmerman has “deals with the casino that do not let me do certain things, just to keep myself in ‘safe land,’ but the social aspect of it — talking to dealers and meeting people at the table — is a fun, relaxing thing that can also just wind me right up, and [make me] experience a kind of emotion that I’m not used to, where I’m sweating over something. Truth be told, I haven’t had to worry about a f–kin’ bill in years, so I need that to bring me back down to earth, sometimes.”
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