Strange Fangs: The Creative Genius of Jim Glasgow
On the phone, Jim Glasgow comes off as a rather humble, unassuming kind of guy, enthusiastic about his work and where his current journey is heading. He has much to be enthusiastic about. The man is a creative dynamo with a passion for learning. Musician, songwriter, composer, producer, photographer - he is the genius behind Strange Fangs, his act, and Strange Fangs Song Factory, his composition and production company. With an ever-growing resume including work for the touring dance company Galumpha, Brooklyn’s Muse Circus, Binghamton University, Broome County Arts Council, and a number of films and commercials, his business is taking off.
His musical talents are equally diverse, running the gamut from classical to hip-hop, jazz and blues to electronica and rap, he moves easily from the dark and haunting to the soaring and serene. Perhaps the most multifaceted musician I have ever encountered, I learned more about Glasgow and his work on a recent Sunday morning.
Triple Cities Carousel: I’ve been checking out everything I can find online about your work, and have come to the conclusion that you are an incredibly multi-talented mad genius of sorts, living amongst us - and everyone needs to know about you. One thing that became immediately obvious is that you do a lot of things: you play a variety of instruments with mastery, are intimately familiar with the creation of electronic music, aren’t even remotely limited to one genre, are a skilled photographer, and enjoy gourmet food. It’s a lot to cover. Lets start with your background. Where did you come from and how did you go from there to where you are now?
Jim Glasgow: First, thank you for the compliments; I see you got the good websites. I’m a Binghamton native. I started playing cello, piano, and guitar from a young age and picked up saxophone along the way. And then, when I was 15 or 16, my dad, kind of on a whim – he’s a musician, not professionally, but he’s quite talented - he set up a little recording studio in our basement. And so I was immediately fascinated by this and I started manipulating sounds with electronic recordings and doing everything digitally and I fell in love with it. So I went to school for music composition and mathematics, and then I would just do kind-of-like composition projects for student films for friends, and friends of friends, but nothing I really took seriously for years.
And then last year, I guess November 2015, some traumatic life experiences happened. And I found myself divorced, without a home, lost the dog, you know, the whole classic… it’s like a country song kind of thing. And just said, “Well, there’s nothing for me here, just kind of a shell of a life.” So I took to traveling. For three months I went up and down the east coast. I got as far north as Montreal and as far south as South Carolina. And just kind of went back and forth, and recorded an album as kind of a music therapy for myself. And that’s where Strange Fangs started.
So, the name Strange Fangs was meant to kind of represent the bizarre and hurtful ways that people can latch onto each other. And then it’s kind of grown into the way that people can latch onto each other and substances and ideas. After doing the traveling for three months, I came back to Binghamton and decided I really wanted to focus on my music composition, as well as Strange Fangs the solo-electronic act. So I started Strange Fangs Song Factory, which is my official composition business, and now it’s amazingly flourished, and I’d say, like, eight months into what’s starting to be a successful business. I have several clients at any point in time. I just started a partnership with SouthSixty Creative House, and they do a lot of films around town.
Apart from that, Strange Fangs is the therapeutic solo project, which is electronic: electric cello and all that. Strange Fangs Song Factory is the composition business. And then, absolutely just for fun, I play bass for a band called If Madrid. It’s like a super-happy, fun, really loud, guitar-heavy, punk rock. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like I get to shed all responsibilities and all thoughts of ‘this is a business-kind-of-music-thing,’ or ‘this is a therapeutic-music-thing.’ It’s just loud. I love it.
TCC: I read that while you were traveling, you recorded with a backpack studio. What is a backpack studio?
JG: I’m glad you asked because I love it. It’s now morphed into a suitcase studio. Everything I would need to record, apart from instruments, I found I could fit. I just had an old crummy laptop that was barely hanging on to life; I had a USB microphone that recorded things okay, and I had a tiny little midi controller keyboard - it’s got like 24 piano keys on it - and so I threw that into my backpack along with a few pairs of pants. I was just couch surfing the whole time. So, if a friend had an instrument in their apartment - like the nylon-string guitar in “Joey Crane's Apartment,” or a piano somewhere along the way - that's what I used for the recordings. Most of the music was composed while I was actively traveling. For instance, [I would] put in digitally on a Greyhound for eight hours, and then I would get somewhere with an actual instrument and I would record – if it was like a piano or a cello or a guitar.
TCC: I saw something on your website, regarding your album, that says: “The album has been described as classical music, piano rock a la Andrew WK, and 8 bit dubstep having an orgy…” What’s an 8 bit dubstep?
JG: 8 bit is… you know, like an old Super Nintendo, and you don’t have these full string scores, you’ve got these little bleeps and bloops and Super Mario sounds. That’s all 8 bit music. It’s limited to only those sounds that can come out of that little console. So, a lot of what I did on the album, just to kind of skew it to the more absurd… everything I was feeling from the music-therapy side was like a conflict of beautiful things and ugly things and simple clean melodies and things that were just bizarre. So, one of the things I did for the bizarre is throw in a lot of melodies that were played with sounds that you could only make out of a Super Nintendo. So that’s 8 bit. And dubstep is just a style of electronica with all the – more like club-style stuff.
TCC: The t-shirt graphics for the album show a woman leaning with her head buried in a plant arrangement. What’s the story behind that?
JG: I love that drawing. There was a young woman working at Muckles Ink, the t-shirt manufacturing group in town, and she and I got to be friends and she was showing me some of her art. And at the same time, I was releasing this album with a Kickstarter campaign. And I saw this piece of art and there was a girl who was crying into a potted plant and there are flowers growing out of her tears and it’s exactly how I felt about the entire album at it’s completion. So it just spoke to me.
TCC: You have amazing photographs online. Where did you learn photography?
JG: I picked up a nice camera, not entirely on a whim, last - probably December. Just a DSLR - it’s a Canon T5i Rebel. The main thing I wanted was to make my whole business and everything as streamlined as possible. And while it’s wonderful to be able to reach out to professional photographers, I found I was doing so much online and doing so much business so fast, that trying to find somebody quickly was really difficult. So I thought, “I like learning new things,” and so I got a camera and I started just teaching myself how to do photography at a kind of next-level type thing, rather than just a point and shoot with an iPhone.
So it started off I just wanted it to be more convenient for business, and it’s actually wound up bringing me a lot of joy in my life. When I’m not doing music I just kind of go for walks and… I have books on books on how to do different things, you know. Loving learning is something I’m really grateful for. So that’s how the photography came to be.
TCC: Your business is called Strange Fangs Song Factory, but looking at your website, it seems like there is an awful lot more involved than just composing music for commercials, films, and other projects. Can you talk a little bit about that: somebody comes to your business - what can they come to you for?
JG: So, the first thing I would sit down with someone and talk about is really what emotions and themes they want their audience to be aware of, or what they want their audience to feel. The thing I love most about music and where my particular talents within music lie, I think, is being able to kind of take an emotion, sit down at an instrument or a piece of paper, and then turn that into some sort of translation for music. If there’s a script or there’s a storyboard or there’s a whole movie for me to go by, fantastic, but usually we can come up with something just by saying, “What do you want someone else to feel?” And we can connect on that.
TCC: Do you also do the videography for certain projects, or do they always provide you with the visuals?
JG: Nine times out of ten I am provided the visuals, and I just do the music. Recently, with Strange Fangs Song Factory experiencing more success and me discovering the love of photography, I’ve been able to reach out to some people I know and say, “If you need a music video on top of this hip-hop song I’m producing,” or, “If you need press photography for this release we’re putting out together…” then I bundle that all into the business package.
TCC: You’ve done work with Ryan Meadows, the sound engineer from The Revenant. There’s a really nice quote from him on your website about you scoring one of his films. How did that come about?
JG: It started off just that Ryan was – well, he still is - a brother of one of my friends in college. And he was going to school in Rochester Institute of Technology and we were put in touch. And then we did one film together and then we did another film together and then we did all of our films together. And then he was doing some intern work for… something huge… and all of a sudden Ryan, he’s made it - he’s out there.
I’ve been so grateful that we’ve been able to stay in touch, because we got to be good friends. Finding someone [who] I can work creatively with so easily is not always the easiest thing. I can write a song for someone pretty simply - and that’s my job now - but writing a song with somebody is a whole different beast.
Working with Ryan is amazing, so we stayed in touch, stayed friends. And he mastered the Strange Fangs CD after I recorded it, you know, piecemeal. This whole hodge-podge of things on my hard drive after traveling for three months, I finally get it into an album and I say, “You know, I really want to do something with this.” And I was able to call Ryan; he was out in LA working on the new Power Rangers movie, of all things. And so, like, “Hey Ryan, I’ve got this project.” He’s like, “Send it to me.” And he looked and was nothing but supportive and mastered the whole thing, and he’s a wizard. So, that’s my interaction with Ryan Meadows.
TCC: There is a stark difference between the musical areas that you’re involved in - a chasm almost the size of the Grand Canyon. And yet you bridge that chasm in such a way that it seems natural. In your video for “What’s Left of You,” the character - as well as the dark black-and-white filming - is strongly reminiscent of the old Lon Chaney horror movies, with a very contemporary theme. “Joey Crane’s Apartment” is humorous. The music you composed for Sloth E-Sports is like minions on speed. And then, on the other hand, there is the serenity of the music you labeled: “looper improv goofing around with electric cell0” and “moody pretty little classical, blues, jazz, for your Sunday morning.” Are all of these different aspects of your personality, or just different areas of musical interest?
JG: Oh man, that’s a doozy of a question. I understand exactly what you’re asking. With the things that are on the album, those are all very much just as raw and honest as I think I’ve possibly ever been, especially with music. “What’s Left of You” was just the deepest, darkest - like, humor’s one of my coping mechanisms, and there was no humor in that song. That was the worst point and that was the worst song, emotionally.
And then “Joey Crane’s Apartment” just, again - it’s coming back to the absurd. It was a situation where I was staying at Joey Crane's. Things were very, very bad, and this apartment is absurd in its ugliness. But the last line of the song is, “This ugly man's at home [alone] in an ugly place to be.” The song comes back to my emptiness and rage at the time, but I was relying on that humor coping mechanism pretty hard there. So the Strange Fangs album is purely just my pure emotional outlet through music.
As far as the other compositions, the genres and instruments really depend on what the client needs conveyed in the piece. If we need soaring uplifting melodies, I hop on a cello. If there’s something that’s a little plucky or cutesy, it’s probably going to be on a guitar - and it’s going to be fingerpicked. If someone needs something that’s really epic and majestic, then I’ll probably start on a piano with rolling scales up and down. But as far as the actually melodies… I want to create something new, so I think: “What exactly do I want someone to feel? How would that be? In an ideal world, what would that sound like?” And then, “How do I put that on an instrument?” It’s kind of methodical.
TCC: You have some real hunger-inducing photos of gourmet food on your website. What is that about?
JG: I’m sure you can tell I have a hard time differentiating the professional business-Instagram sort of social media and the, “I like cooking things. Look at the things I cook.” But it’s good practice for the photography, too. I loved cooking when I was a kid. And then while I was going to school I kind of funded myself through that process by working as a cook: started as a dishwasher and worked at a bunch of different diners and restaurants, and then wound up learning so much. I’d end up kind of sidling up to the head chef at different places – like, the one guy who had the better cooking job than I did. I’d be like, “Dude, can you teach me what you’re doing?” Again, I like learning things. So, now I’m not cooking professionally… I thought I wanted to change things up and be a chef, but it’s a little bit too stressful for me, and I’m glad I’m siding with the music these days.
TCC: What are you working on now?
JG: Right now I have a bunch of projects going on. I’m completing something with the City of Binghamton, and what my heart is warmed by and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy - I just started working with something called the Memory Maker Project, and they’re amazing. I had kind of heard from a First Friday that they existed, and then I ran into the director of it a couple of days ago. And she proposed this thing to me, and we sat down and talked about it for an hour or so and we’re working together to create an art and music therapy type thing to help people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. It’s the coolest thing. For me, the purest form of my music is something where it’s just emotion into music. This is just so unadulterated… amazing, helping people. I’m so excited for it.
TCC: For those who aren’t aware, there is a lot of science behind the fact that while people with Alzheimer’s may not be able to remember the names of family members, when music is played it can bring back certain memories. It seems to open a passage that’s been closed.
JG: Absolutely. That was just illuminated for me and it’s so exciting. My grandfather is going through Alzheimer’s right now, and it’s incredible to be feeling like I can contribute in some way.
TCC: Are there any Strange Fangs performances in the works, and perhaps a new album?
JG: New album definitely in the works; it’s about halfway written. I plan on releasing maybe two or three songs at a time, or maybe doing another EP of half the album - early release. But that would be, I’m thinking, in the early summer. As far as live shows, I don’t have any booked at the moment. I find myself switching between the Strange Fangs Song Factory and, like, going, going, grinding, grinding, working - and then switch back to Strange Fangs and going, working, working, grinding, grinding. But I would anticipate a few shows, at least, this spring.
TCC: And if people are looking for If Madrid, where can they find you?
JG: We are actually playing a show at the Garage Taco Bar on February 25th. And if they look up If Madrid on bandcamp, I think all of the albums are up there currently: there’s one that was just finished, and there are a couple of others that I’m really happy with.
TCC: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you want our readers to know about you, your work, your life, or your future?
JG: I think we covered a lot of really good stuff. I think everything’s in a good place and I’m really excited for people to find out more about what I’m doing. I’m looking forward to sharing that with people.
You can find out more about Jim Glasgow, Strange Fangs, and Strange Fangs Song Factory, by exploring his website strangefangs.com, or looking up StrangeFangs on Facebook, Twitter, or Instragram. His album Defeat/Defy - released in October 2016 - is available on Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, and through his website and other social media outlets, both as a digital download and in disc form. To see Glasgow in action, check out If Madrid on February 25th at Garage.
