Wolf Parade at Brooklyn Steel
Spencer Krug with Wolf Parade at Brooklyn Steel in 2017 (more by Amanda Hatfield)

Spencer Krug launches Patreon with a new song each month, planning tour

Last fall, Spencer Krug revealed that he’d be retiring his Moonface moniker after one more album, This One’s For The Dancer & This One’s For The Dancer’s Bouquet (which came out in November via Jagjaguwar), and would be releasing all of his solo music under his own name from then on. Today, he launched a Patreon, where you can subscribe to receive one new Spencer Krug song a month (for $1 per song). The first song, “River River,” is out now. Here’s what Spencer says:

This is a simple page. If you subscribe, every month you’ll receive one new song, written and recorded by yours truly, previously unreleased, and completed just days if not hours before being posted. The cost is one dollar, or more if you choose, and you will only be charged when I post a song (so if I get caught up staring at the wall and miss a month, you won’t be charged.) And that’s it. There are no other tiers here. 1 song = 1 dollar. No song = no dollars.

Why am I doing this?

Over the past fifteen years I have made a lot of records (nineteen LPs and eight EPs according to wikipedia, wtf) with a number of projects; Wolf Parade, Moonface, Sunset Rubdown, and Swan Lake being the most relevant to me. And while I’m grateful for all that experience, I’ve always been frustrated by the huge and kind of pointless amount of time it takes for the music to get to your ears after it leaves my hands. By the time you’ve decided whether you love or hate a thing, I’ve stopped thinking about it almost entirely. This long gap is because the music industry likes to work, for better or for worse, in a particular way. The disconnect puts you the music fan, and me the songwriter, in different places when considering the same song, whereas I think it’d be better if we could hear things from more or less the same place. I love the idea of posting a new song, one that represents where I’m at artistically that very day, knowing that people will hear it instantly; I love the idea of touring material that’s as fresh to me as it is to the audience. So the above-mentioned time gap is one that I am trying to close here.

I’m not abandoning completely the idea of whole albums. I will continue to write and release LPs with Wolf Parade, or any other project / time wherein it makes the most sense to work that way. But right now the common paradigm of slowly compiling songs, recording them all at once, releasing them on a label six months later and then taking them on tour… well, it’s just a model that no longer makes sense for me, artistically or financially. The way that I want to engage with and represent my solo work has changed, so I am leaving old models behind. This is me trying a new kind of way.

What sort of music will I be posting?

In 2013, under the name Moonface, I put out a record called “Julia with Blue Jeans On,” and then a follow up EP called “City Wrecker” a year later. Both are mainly just piano and voice, and I like them for that reason. I like the simplicity of them; the challenge of writing songs with just my hands and voice, with little to no overdubs or electronics, felt good. And performing on acoustic pianos in intimate venues was unlike any other tour experience I’ve known. So I’ve wanted to return to the piano for a long while now, and it’s that style of music that I’ll be posting here each month, over the entirety of 2019. In a sense, I’m just making another piano album, but sharing it with you one song at a time, as I write them, in a sort of real-time process which includes the listener.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you decide to subscribe and help support this musical experiment, then thanks even more. As I explained above, I’ve decided to move my solo work away from record labels, so any money made here can now help with things like pressing vinyl, subsidizing tours, future recordings, and me continuing to exist as an artist in general. And of course I hope you like the songs! Made by me, they will be a little strange, but honest.

Sincerely,
Spencer Krug

You can become a member and get the new song here.

Spencer is also planning solo piano tours — his first ever as “Spencer Krug” — which are set to go down on the West Coast in early May, Europe in late May/early June, and the East Coast in late June. Dates are still TBA, so stay tuned.

Spencer has also been busy with the reunited Wolf Parade lately, but no word yet on 2019 plans for them.